ISSN 2817-7363 A Tonic for the Age The Ironist is an open forum to encourage discussion and reflection upon the written word and the world around us to promote critical analysis.  Irony, “the recognition of incongruities” (Cleanth Brooks), is a tool that permits...

It is a supreme irony that the Ontario public school system, at least in its Peel District school board, should fall victim to wokeist activists of the ‘cancel culture’ persuasion, militants unrepresentative of Canadian majority opinion. Recent news reports of a...

Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, (John Murray, 2021) Kenneth Baker, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word, (Unicorn, 2016) The aim of those vandals who burn books in an open forum is arguably to...

If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it makes Jill pretty boring, too. If truth be told, those workaholics Mr. and Mrs. Jack are tedious company, as well. So obsessed has our society become with work, usually paid work, that its antithesis, play, has become...

The Russian writer, dissident, and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1917-2008) was an outspoken critic of communism in what was then called the Soviet Union, and was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag for eight years for critical comments he...

We have the great Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “the highest law in the land” we are told. Ask Jordan Peterson and Tamara Lich if we have rights and freedoms.

Stopping the Creeping Cancer under Wokeism. Henry Goulburn, PC, one of the British negotiators at the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 (which ended America’s illegal attempt to seize Canada), remarked: “I had no idea of the fixed determination which there is in the heart of every American…”

"It’s as clear as mud.” Since mud is not clear, the speaker cannot mean what he says. (Let us assume he is male). In fact, he means that what he has heard or read is unclear. Very unclear. He says the opposite of what he means to emphasize his difficulty in...

The modern world has suffered in the past century, and into the present one, from the tyranny of monomaniacs, from murdering monsters of depravity like Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao, to cultural purists infected with the arrogance of privilege, like Trump and...