Various and Sundry Links

And some updates on The Dominion

Apologies to those longtime subscribers who I am sure furiously click refresh every waking minute to see if a new Dominion newsletter has arrived in their inbox. But in all seriousness, I do apologize for not sending out a newsletter recently.

I will get into some reasons for the accidental Dominion hiatus, and my current thinking on the future of The Dominion below, but first I wanted to provide an assortment of my writing in recent months that some of you will have already seen:

• Facing Reality Under the Chemtrails (Law & Liberty) - This is easily one of my personal favourite pieces I’ve ever written. It’s a longish essay about one of my obsessions, Lana Del Rey. It’s a review of her most recent album Chemtrails Over the Country Club that is a broader reflection on the themes and motifs in her music that make her a kind of secret traditionalist icon.

• Canadian Men’s Soccer is Finally Coming of Age (The Hub) - Another recent piece where I got to write about one of my “normie” obsessions, this time writing about football (soccer for most of you). Football is my first love, and this piece is about the growing maturity and reasons for optimism about Canadian men’s football. I try to support Canadian football especially and do my part to help grow the game here, and would love to find excuses and reasons to write more about football in the future.

• Burning Down Places of Worship Must be Condemned (National Post) - A column I shouldn’t have ever had to write, and one that should never have been but unfortunately was controversial. If you follow me on Twitter you’ll have noticed I’ve been particularly incensed about this and the reaction to it from our political and media elites, and I’ve been much more aggressive than I normally am in calling out this reaction and I make no apologies for that. I was stunned that a good chunk of our political and media class think this kind of stuff is “understandable” and it has seriously made me reevaluate some things both in my future and my opinions of certain people I used to hold in some esteem.

• Doug Ford’s Reasonable Use of the Notwithstanding Clause (National Post) - This column, written with my good friend Professor Geoffrey Sigalet, defends the recent use of the notwithstanding clause in Ontario as a reasonable and legitimate use of Sec. 33 and not some sort of democratic outrage that is going to lead to democratic backsliding like so much of the tired commentary on the notwithstanding clause always suggests.

• Canada needs to solve the problem of its own geography (The Hub) - This column muses on the geographic challenges and obstacles Canada faces as a unified country that at times doesn’t make much sense, and why internal transportation infrastructure is vital, and why the departure of Greyhound from Canada and our ludicrously expensive domestic air travel costs pose a serious political challenge to us as a unified country.

• Homeowners Will Soon be our New Aristocracy (The Hub) - Canada’s housing affordability and accessibility crisis is something that, for both personal and political reasons, I spend a lot of time thinking about these days. This column was a write up of something I’ve spent a lot of time ranting about online, and specifically why the deeply unequal ways housing and home ownership is shifting in Canada poses a serious challenge for conservatives especially.

Now briefly onto some other things. Since launching the newsletter last summer there’s been a bit of an unexpected change in demand for my writing and thinking from other outlets. Most of the writing I’ve been doing publicly in the last little while has been things I’ve been asked for or commissioned to do, and you can expect to see columns and pieces of mine in the National Post and The Hub regularly going forward.

But because of this somewhat unexpected development, and because of the demands of my academic work, dissertation, and teaching obligations I find myself with much less time to devote to the newsletter than I had when I launched The Dominion. The growth of The Dominion has been nothing short of incredible, and far beyond my wildest expectations. I have enough of a base now that I’m told by the newsletter experts that if I were to do what lots of full time newsletter people do and start putting regular newsletters behind a paywall I’d be able to build a decent income off the people who would subscribe. But I don’t want to do that and have no plans to. But this has left me wondering what the future of The Dominion should be.

What I’ve sort of settled on, for now at least, is that I’m going to keep the newsletter going and keep it publicly available, with donations/subscriptions purely voluntary for those who want to support my writing and work. What The Dominion has evolved into is longer and more thoughtful essays, and from the feedback I got from you all this is the kind of content people actually enjoyed.

But longer essays are exhausting and time consuming, and it’s not possible to put out consistently good writing like this unless I have something interesting to say first. And so what I’ve decided to try for a while is a sort of irregular schedule where I will keep The Dominion alongside the regular and shorter writing you’ll be seeing elsewhere, but reserve newsletter for the longer pieces that require more time and words.

This is basically what it has already become, but in the interest of being transparent with you all I wanted to put this in writing. I welcome your feedback on this, and feedback in general at thedominion@substack.com. This may all change again at some point, but for now I think this is the best use of The Dominion because I want to keep it alive but also want to make it a valuable contribution to public discourse.

Lastly, I’m getting married this coming weekend and will be taking at least a week or two afterwards off from any writing to give myself a bit of a break and adjust to married life. But you’ll be hearing from me again before too long.