Abraham's Journey
By Charlie Johnston I have been struggling to get a handle on this business, writing a long, fairly complex piece. It finally dawned on me this morning that I would do well to divide it into at least three small pieces, covering different aspects. Also, I have been overwhelmed with email traffic and ‘messenger’ requests. […]
Read More Notes From the Plague Journal – What is Truth?By Charlie Johnston Late in the colorful baseball career of pitcher Dizzy Dean, a reporter remarked that he wasn’t throwing as hard as he did when he was younger. Dean indignantly responded that he was throwing as hard as he ever did; it just wasn’t getting there as fast. In normal times, I’m pretty good […]
Read More Dizzying DevelopmentsBy Charlie Johnston Appeasement is provocative to dictators. It merely encourages them to push harder and intimidate more. Ronald Reagan insisted that we would attain “peace through strength.” When he did so, the left and the media all accused him of being a warmonger – and shrieked that we were “all going to die.” Any […]
Read More Opening SkirmishesBy Charlie Johnston “Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this son of York” -Richard III, William Shakespeare This Advent Season is pregnant both with expectation of the birth of Christ and with the fearful expectation of great dysfunctions to come. In almost every major area, we have had greater and […]
Read More The Season BeginsBy Charlie Johnston When something unexpected comes out of left field that utterly confounds conventional analysis, it is called a “Black Swan Event.” In unstable times of great tumult, black swan events become more frequent. Our last two election cycles were marked by significant black swan events. In 2016, for the first time in American […]
Read More A Bevy of Black SwansBy Charlie Johnston Elite sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in jail over the weekend, reportedly of suicide. That it was possible for him to commit suicide at all strains credulity, given the prominence of his case and the supposed close watch he was supposed to be under. Since the unsealing last week of previous court […]
Read More Out of the Pot and Into the…(I first published this post two years ago today. While some of the details are dated, it seems as fresh to me as when I first wrote it. It is well worth a re-read, I think. I am in the heart of New England right now, in a spot in New Hampshire that you can’t […]
Read More The Big PictureBy Charlie Johnston I have been working on an important, but complicated piece. Between wrestling with a virus and an increasingly spotty internet…there you go. The modem started getting hinky last Friday and finally just died. I think it was a Catholic modem. The news of the last week so mortified it, it just gave […]
Read More How Long, O Lord, How Long? – Short TakesBy Charlie Johnston Adolf Hitler is a monster unique to modern history. He largely is the answer to the theoretical question of what would happen if a psychotic serial killer gained pre-eminent power over a great nation. Thus, it is often truly said that the first person who brings up Hitler in a political argument […]
Read More Short Takes – Deceptions, Both Malignant and Ignorant; Christmas Movies and…Puppy SlippersBy Charlie Johnston It was in late June of 1973 when I became, overnight, a Republican. The Watergate scandal was raging and picking up steam that summer. I had just finished my junior year in high school and was attending the National Association of Student Council’s Conference in Colorado Springs. When I arrived at the […]
Read More Watergate and the Deep State
A Sign of Hope 