Rev. Ben Johnson (@therightswriter) is an Eastern Orthodox priest and served as Executive Editor of the Acton Institute (2016-2021), editing Religion & Liberty, the Powerblog, and its transatlantic website. He has extensively researched the Alt-Right. Previously, he worked for LifeSiteNews and FrontPageMag.com, where he wrote three books including Party of Defeat (with David Horowitz, 2008). His work has appeared at DailyWire.com, National Review, The American Spectator, The Guardian, Daily Caller, National Catholic Register, Spectator USA, FEE Online, RealClear Policy, The Blaze, The Stream, American Greatness, Aleteia, Providence Magazine, Charisma, Jewish World Review, Human Events, Intellectual Takeout, CatholicVote.org, Issues & Insights, The Conservative, Rare.us, and The American Orthodox Institute. His personal websites are therightswriter.com and RevBenJohnson.com. His views are his own.
Posts by Rev. Ben Johnson
May 08, 2018
Everyone “knows” that big businesses collude in order to raise consumer prices – and the larger the business, the more it can demand. In that case, what is everyone to do with the merger of two UK supermarket titans, Sainsbury’s and Asda, which is forecast to lower food prices for British families?
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May 07, 2018
On the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, his hometown unveiled a new statue donated by the Chinese government. The event drew praise from EU and German politicians, as well as outrage from pro-liberty thought leaders across Europe and around the world – especially those who had lived under Communist regimes.
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May 03, 2018
John Elliott and his friends at Diogenes Games created Socialism: The Game as a free-market lampoon of the board game Monopoly. The rules of the interminable Parker Brothers/Hasbro favorite teach children a distorted version of the free market (and its length gives adults a foretaste of Purgatory).
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April 26, 2018
For one fleeting moment in Emmanuel Macron’s speech to Congress, it seemed as though he would connect the transatlantic alliance on the firm basis of its common values.
“The strength of our bonds is the source of our shared ideals,” he told lawmakers.
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April 24, 2018
As this is being written, Alfie Evans is clinging to life, more than 18 hours after medical personnel disconnected life support and left the 23-month-old child to his fate.
“For nine hours, Alfie’s been breathing,” wrote his father, Tom Evans, this morning, following an unbroken succession of “horrendous, scary, heartbreaking hours.”
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April 19, 2018
Psychologists and philosophers speculate that religion developed out of primitive man’s fear of the unknown. Being surrounded by a multitude of hostile predators and unknown forces, he dreamed of a cosmic protector to deliver him.
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April 18, 2018
It happens every day: The news tells us of some new government scandal. The executive branch uses dubious powers to circumvent the constitutional strictures of oversight. The judicial branch, in turn, creates law out of whole cloth and styles its invention the “law of the land.”
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April 13, 2018
Faithlessness is so ingrained in French culture that the president’s mere consultation with the nation’s Christian leaders apparently verges on a constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron appealed to the nation’s clergy to bring their faith’s insights to bear on national issues, specifically economic stagnation and human dignity.
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April 11, 2018
The lure of socialism lies in its promise of “equality,” a hazily defined concept that educational and political leaders transform into an even more ambiguous social goal. The word itself triggers the innate sense of fairness and equity cherished by everyone raised under the influence of Western culture.
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April 05, 2018
Some 4.5 million French have been immobilized by a national rail strike over what might be termed the most thoroughly French of all labor demands: the right to retire with full benefits at age 52.
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