Around the Traps III

Helen's writing elsewhere

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A large number of new subscribers (260 in January according to the substack elves, and more since) have signed up, so I thought I’d best do one of my periodic “authors elsewhere” posts.

I have long written for conventional media—going right back to 1993. That’s when I first had a piece published in The Australian. Lorenzo has also written elsewhere, but more sporadically so than me.

Even though I tweet them, share them on other social media etc, my pieces do get missed. I also now appreciate that many people have signed up to various substacks (not just mine) because they don’t actually like social media. I’ve had half-a-dozen emails to my substack email address from people to the effect that, “now all my favourite writers are on substack, I can bin Twitter/Facebook/etc”.

With that in mind, here are links to a selection of pieces I’ve written for other outlets, and for the US think-tank where I work part-time. When Lorenzo has pieces published elsewhere, I’ll also promote them in one of these posts.

1. Goodbye, Mrs Queen (Online Library of Liberty).

   A genuine example of an idea I first took out and road-tested on substack, and later worked into a piece on the relationship between constitutional monarchy, civil liberties, and democracy.
   
   The British Commonwealth and its widespread “peace, order, and good government” perplexes Americans, so Liberty Matters (owned, ultimately, by Liberty Fund) asked four non-Americans to write about it. In addition to mine, I also recommend Steve Davies’s essay.
   
   There are more pieces coming out next week (including one from me), so you may wish to bookmark the link.
   

2. Hate Speech Laws: Communism's Poisoned Gift and Human Rights Are Not Universal: They’re Peculiar, Parochial, and Western, both for Carl Benjamin’s media & tech startup Lotus Eaters, are short discussions of legal history with a light dusting of my personal views.
   
   Many people are simply unaware that hate speech laws (all of them, without exception) were Marxist in origin and inserted into international treaties at the USSR’s behest during the Cold War. Similarly, many people are also unaware of the extent to which supposedly “universal” human rights are byproducts of Christianity and a minority form of Islam.
   
   These realities have implications, which are discussed in the two pieces.
   

3. Section 35: where the culture war crashes into Britain’s ‘NQF’ constitution (CapX). Many of you will have read this already—it did rocket around the internet rather a couple of weeks ago—but I like it (it’s a proper legal explainer of a sort one has to do for clients during trial prep), so in it goes.
   
   I am working on another piece for my Law & Liberty February feature that covers both the constitutional and gender recognition aspects of this particular Scots law/devolution/queer theory contretemps, so the CapX piece isn’t my last word on the subject.
   

4. From Witchcraft to Wokecraft and To See Ourselves as Others See Us (Law & Liberty). Both pieces are book reviews written in partial fulfilment of my role at Liberty Fund (which owns the magazine).
   
   The first concerns Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans (which I think is a good book, despite disagreeing with bits of it pretty strongly, as you’ll see in the review) and the second Konstantin Kisin’s An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West.