From the editor’s desk
As we were ready to go to press, Norman Podhoretz died. He was one of the three most important conservative intellectuals of the American conservative movement of the second half of the 20th century alongside William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, with whom Podhoretz is a founding godfather of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism has come into bad odor for a certain type of conservative in 2025 due to their perceived influence in the George W. Bush administration and role in the war in Iraq, but without neoconservatives populating the Reagan administration in the 1980s, the end of the Cold War might have looked very different. They gave intellectual ballast to prioritizing the fight against communism globally and for democracy and human rights abroad. Neoconservatism, properly understood, was the movement of mostly Jewish former liberals who saw the wreckage that the Left had imposed on American society through the Welfare State and Sexual Revolution, and dangers that détente with the Evil Empire presented to the American project, and therefore freedom around the world.
I owe Podhoretz, a literary critic turned long-time editor of Commentary magazine, a Jewish conservative monthly magazine, an unpayable debt of gratitude for helping me become the conservative I am today. It was in the pages of Commentary that social scientists like James Q. Wilson and foreign policy theorists like Jeanne Kirkpatrick gave shape to moral understandings of domestic and foreign policy. Podhoretz himself was more concerned about literary matters and foreign policy, but did not shy away from cultural issues. In a 1988 Los Angeles Times column, he said he tended to side with pro-lifers in opposing abortion because science was inevitably leading to abortion being practiced for eugenic reasons, a prediction that has come all too true when it comes to preborn babies diagnosed in utero with Down syndrome. In 1996, Podhoretz wrote an analytical piece for Commentary, “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won,” in which he describes homosexuality as a self-evident perversion that deserved a place in the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. He expressed compassion for homosexuals “because the life they live is not as good as the life available to men who make their beds with women.” He announced his “withholding my assent” from the normalization of the homosexuality. In his memoirs, he recounted his battles with notable figures of middle brow literature – Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman – and the lesson I learned from those books and his other commentary was that pugnaciousness against untruth is a virtue. Not always content to be an observer and commentator about the world around him, he was also a participant in the political battles of the day, for example ghost-writing ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous speech at the United Nations equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Norman Podhoretz is dead at the age of 95. May his memory be a blessing.
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In his essay “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won,” Podhoretz made an observation about the courts that seems to me to be, for the most part, correct: “Thanks to their umbilical connection to the universities through the law schools, as well as their relative insulation from the pressures of majority sentiment, the courts … were less a part of the polity than a part of the culture.” That is although courts are a branch of government, they operate more as part of the culture, both as a shaper of it and mirror. That observation presents challenges to conservatives and speaks to the importance of the Federalist Society, in the U.S., and Runnymede Society here in Canada, in supporting a conservative legal mindset.
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Just before American Thanksgiving, U.S Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy released a video encouraging greater civility at the airport and when flying. The pro-civility campaign, called, “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” seeks to, in the words of the Department of Transportation website, “jumpstart a nationwide conversation around how we can all restore courtesy and class to air travel.” Duffy says in the video, “Let’s bring civility and manners back. Ask yourself — are you helping a pregnant woman put her bag in an overhead bin? Are you dressing with respect? Are you keeping control of your children? Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants and your pilots? Are you saying please and thank you in general?” To be honest, if the Barack Obama administration released this sort of video, conservatives would criticize it as hectoring. Yet who could argue with any of these suggestions? Many did, including the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, who wondered what dressing with respect might actually mean? The video juxtaposes images of passengers of a bygone era wearing suits, ties, and dresses boarding a plane with modern day louts in bare feet, pajamas, t-shirts, and ball caps. Freidman complained that, “The implication, presumably, is that clothes help make the mental state, and sloppy dress leads to sloppy behavior.” How one presents him- or herself in public at least suggests an attitude towards the people one meets in public and it is hardly a stretch to think that this attitude might bleed into one’s behaviour. In other words, dressing as one might at home out in public might lead one to believe that not only is a person’s home their castle, but so is everywhere else. We feel entitled in our own houses – it is our property to use as we wish, there is a justified sense of entitlement within its walls. When we dress as casually in public as we do at home – in sweatpants, crocs, pjs, whatever – it is hardly surprising that the attitudes and behaviour we practice in the privacy our homes come out in public, all too often boarishly. Three cheers for Secretary Duffy’s campaign for greater civility as we interact with strangers in airports and on airplanes, and his understanding that clothes do make the gentleman, and the lady.
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In Japan, Shinto children go through a rite of passage at their local shrine called Shichi-Go-San, or seven-five-three, as kids turn those milestone ages. The New York Times reports that “Now, dogs are being honored, too” and that “At some Shinto shrines, pets even outnumber children.” This is a sign of both the on-going assault on human exceptionalism – the idea that mankind is not merely another animal – and the country’s precipitously low fertility rate. The Times reports that one shrine in Tokyo carried out Shichi-Go-San ceremonies for 350 pets annually but only 50 for children.
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Last June, Interim editorial board member Margaret Mountain sent me a story that I somehow had missed. It was an Associated Press article about “hyper-realistic baby dolls” that are cared for by young women (mostly), sparking both an online community of “reborn” dolls and, in the words of the AP, “spark(ing) … political debate in Brazil, with lawmakers even bringing the lifelike dolls into legislatures.” Photographs and videos show that these dolls can pass as real newborns. Influencers with reborn dolls stage birth simulations and meeting other reborn doll mamas in the park. Some malls cater to services for the lifelike dolls, including bathing them with the same care that parents would show an actual newborn. The city council of Rio de Janeiro passed a motion honouring the dolls’ creators. But this is not always harmless fun. Some women take their dolls to get medical checkups. Joao Luiz, a state lawmaker from Amazonas, has proposed a ban on the state-run public health care system from providing medical care to the dolls, although the AP reports there have been no billing records for such services. Advocates of the dolls say they can be used for grief therapy or for new parents to practice caretaking. But stories in The Guardian, New York Times, and People attest to a subculture in which young women not only collect these dolls but care for them full-time as their own children. In Brazil, the dolls sell for 700 reais ($175) to nearly 10,000 reais ($2500). In the U.S., high-end dolls made of silicon, which apparently feels like a real baby’s skin, can cost $5000. I do not want to commit to too much sociology, but one cannot help but wonder about the connection between low fertility rates (1.6 children per woman of childbearing age, well below the replacement level of 2.1) and real-life women choosing life-like dolls over the real thing. Part of my thesis about cratering fertility rates is the decline of a caregiving ethos among women, but this niche subculture speaks to a natural inclination for caregiving even among those women who eschew children. People magazine and Asian media report that reborn dolls are used in therapy but even without medical oversight, they provide relief to a generation of young adults suffering from loneliness and detachment. But is the company of a doll really the cure for those psychological pains? I would suggest they are not.
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New Zealand’s Ministry of Health released the Abortion Services NZ Annual Report 2025, providing abortions statistics for 2024 and Right to Life New Zealand said the situation is “even worse than we imagined.” The number of abortions increased nearly 10 per cent compared to 2023, with 17,785 abortions compared to 16,277 the previous year. Fully two-thirds of abortions are committed by the abortion pill in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. There were 389 same-day complications. However, the report has less data than previous editions, with statistics on repeat abortions, percentage of midwives involved in providing abortion, and information on contraceptive use at the time of the abortion not included in the 2025 report. This is in line with international norms in which abortion increasingly operates in the shadows with a lack of transparency that restricts the ability of researchers to understand abortion culture and robs policymakers of data that could help guide the creation of regulations and laws governing their abortion regimes.
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From Tom Whitwell’s “52 things I learned in 2025” comes this good news: “Global deaths from air pollution are falling fast. Between 2013 and 2023 deaths per 100,000 fell 21 per cent. Tens of millions of people are alive today who’d have died if pollution controls hadn’t worked.” This is a point made in the book After the Spike that I reviewed last month that I did not get to in the review: that improving overall human well-being, including environmentally, is compatible with a growing population.
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In 1950, when Europe had a population of 550 million, there were 12.17 million births on the continent according to Our World in Data. Today, it has a population of 745 million but in 2023, the most recent year for which there is comprehensive data, it had just 6.43 million births. That is the population is about 40 per cent larger but there are half as many births. Meanwhile, Nigeria, with a population of 230 million, had a million more births than did all of Europe (7.51 million) in 2023.
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Jeff Gunnarson, national president of Campaign Life Coalition, in his December fundraising letter accompanying the CLC National News writes: “What I love about Christmas is that it centres on a baby, the most special baby ever born … We in the pro-life movement are also focused on babies, especially those for whom no one has room in the inn of their hearts. That is why Christmas holds a special place in the heart of every pro-life advocate, and why we strive to keep the spirit of Christmas—welcoming the gift of new life—alive all year long.”
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On Dec. 9, the Carney government tabled Bill C-16, An Act to amend certain Acts in relation to criminal and correctional matters (child protection, gender-based violence, delays and other measures), which the government refers to in its literature about the bill as the Protecting Victims Act. If passed C-16 would “update” the Criminal Code, in the words of the government, “to protect victims and survivors of sexual violence, gender-based violence, and intimate partner violence, and to keep our kids safe from predators.” Among the changes would be the addition of femicide, “murders that occur in situations involving control, hate, sexual violence, or exploitation … when the victim is a woman,” which henceforth would be treated as first-degree murder. Legal experts have a lot to unpack in the proposed legislation but my thoughts turned to gendercide abortions, the deliberate targeting of female preborn babies precisely because they are baby girls: will those victims of lethal gender-based violence have recourse to justice under Bill C-16? More broadly, if the bill hopes to “keep our kids safe from predators,” would all preborn children be safe from the predation of abortionists?
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When people are being honoured and say they are humbled to be the recipient of such recognition, I have always doubted the sincerity of the statement, regardless of who says it. Invariably I thought it was false modesty; I did not comprehend how being recognized for some achievement or set of achievements could induce any semblance of humility. Donald DeMarco in his dedication to his new book, The Rough Road to Recovery writes: “This book is humbly dedicated to Paul Tuns, an indefatigable laborer for the pro-life cause.” I now understand the humility that can come with being honoured, partly the feeling of being unworthy of such praise. I thank Donald DeMarco for his kind words and dedication.
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I would be remiss if I did not encourage you to buy and read The Rough Road to Recovery, what the English call an “easy read” – which is not to say it is insubstantial. The book focuses on educating the moral imagination of the reader through literature, philosophy, and theology. It imparts timeless and timely lessons on forgotten or poorly cultivated virtues. One bit of wisdom from the many wise words that flow from DeMarco’s pen (or word processor): “Patience transmits love to a person who is fretful, hope to one who is discouraged, and compassion to one who is suffering.”
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