I puzzle over how Catholics can remain Catholics while dealing with politics.

I discuss the recent signing ceremony for the “Respect for Marriage” Act.

What is natural and what is rational in social life? I discuss in Catholic World Report.

Writing in Catholic World Report I discuss what to do with Catholic social teaching in a time in which divisions are so deep and there is so little solid to work with.

People complained about my column on integralism, so I wrote another one.

The “Great Reset” comes out of very long-term trends in thought and social organization. On the intellectual side these trends are obvious at least since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, on the institutional side since the rise of the modern state and later the industrial revolution. Their roots of course go much deeper.

I discuss the effect of technocracy on relations between the sexes at Catholic World Report.

Here’s another Roman Forum talk, this one from the 2019 Summer Symposium, held in Gardone, Italy, on July 8-19, 2019. It’s about the political, social, and moral black hole we seem to have fallen into:

Here’s the text of my talk at the 2021 Roman Forum Summer Symposium-in-Exile, delivered in Huntington, Long Island, on July 5, 2021:

Trads and Normies

James Kalb

1 Introduction

Today I will talk about what the traditionalist movement looks like to other Catholics. What would make people interested in it? What would horrify them?

So what social position would the Church ideally hold? I reflect on integralist claims at Catholic World Report.

Why has the emphasis on science, expertise, objective evidence and so led to utter madness? I discuss the question at Catholic World Report.

Is someone who opposes abortion but doesn’t support a comprehensive government welfare system prol-life? I discuss the issues at Catholic World Report.

I talk about how to stand by the Good, Beautiful, and True in a basically totalitarian age of lies.

I’ve complained about “expertise” as an institution. But what kind of education should we have?

The idea behind fanatical transgenderism is that reality is socially constructed, so denying Bruce Jenner is a woman is the same as annihilating the woman Caitlyn Jenner. It’s equivalent to murder, and implicitly to genocide.

But why do respectable people repeat this stuff, which you’d think they know is insane?

For some it has a bit of a potlatch quality. Reckless extravagance proves invulnerable status.

Progressives can simply look evil, because they’re so crazed. But there’s a whole theory of the world behind their views. Otherwise they wouldn’t be developing so uniformly or be so strong among formally educated people.

They believe in truth and righteousness. But it’s the “larger truth” that reflects necessary context: how bad and utterly disqualifying it is to stand in the way of obvious justice. It follows that whatever they do to you is justified.

“Left” means social justice, which means that social attitudes and connections are supervised and controlled by the guys at the top. The CEO of Goldman Sachs is a guy at the top.

I suppose someone could say “social justice” also means equality, but the left says all concepts are social constructions, so why wouldn’t the Goldman Sachs guy use his social power to construct “equality” as “I get everything”?

The thought behind the progressive claim that speech is violence is that reality is socially constructed, so denying Bruce Jenner is a woman is the same as annihilating the woman Caitlyn Jenner. It’s equivalent to murder, in principle to genocide. The claim is word magic, possibly primitive, certainly insane.

What happens to ethnic distinctions in an age of global capitalism and bureaucracy, and of electronic and physical means of communication that destroy distance? What happens to Christianity under such circumstances?

It’s not clear what exactly “whiteness” means but it’s a broad term. Documents used in official settings have declared merit and objectivity aspects of whiteness. And it’s not clear there’s a distinction between “whiteness” and “Western civilization.” Or between either and “white supremacy.”