Mother’s Day traces its modern origins to a daughter’s devotion. In 1908, Anna Jarvis held a memorial service for her mother, Ann Jarvis, who had passed three years earlier in 1905. Ann Jarvis was no ordinary woman. She had tended to the wounded soldiers of both sides during the American Civil War and founded “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to advocate for public health improvements and better conditions for families and communities.

Anna intended Mother’s Day to be a deeply personal tribute—an individual’s heartfelt recognition of their own mother’s sacrifices and love. Yet by 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, saw political opportunity and proclaimed it a national holiday. Anna Jarvis would later spend years denouncing the growing commercialism that turned the day into a festival of flowers, cards, and gifts, far removed from its sincere beginnings.

Despite these distortions, the essence remains: it is incumbent upon us, as a society, to make things good for mothers and families. We must not give up on hope.

At present, there are numerous obstacles to childbearing and raising families—economic pressures, career demands, and cultural shifts. It doesn’t have to be this way. Every family negotiates sacrifices at many points so that the family unit can thrive and grow. One much-discussed issue is women in the workplace and demands for perfect “equal pay” outcomes. This is something of a furphy. There will always be trade-offs and sacrifices in life; the focus should be on what is best for families as a whole, not rigid ideological score-keeping.

This truth was recognised by former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, whose pro-family policies, including the baby bonus, famously contributed to a baby boom during his tenure. Families responded positively to incentives that made raising children more viable.

In a public sense, the best gift we can give mothers this Mother’s Day—and every day—is prosperity and affluence for the broader community. That means policies aimed at improving workforce participation and outcomes, lowering public debt, reducing regulatory burdens, and allowing businesses to profit and grow. Strong economies support strong families.

To put our own challenges into stark perspective, consider the horrifying image above: a Sudanese woman subjected to the barbaric practice of “tyre necklace” burning—doused in fuel and set alight after a tire was forced around her—allegedly for being unfaithful. This is the face of true, visceral misogyny and brutality against women in parts of the world.

Do the Trump haters, so quick to decry perceived slights in the West, see this misogyny? Real oppression exists far beyond the borders of our comfortable debates. As we honour our mothers, let us commit to building societies where families can flourish, and never lose hope in the enduring power of motherhood and human resilience.

For many who stand outside the Christian faith—or who are still weighing its claims—the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can feel like a late addition, a theological footnote invented by the early church or imposed by councils centuries after the events of the Gospels. They see the fiery descent at Pentecost, the dramatic language of the Book of Acts, and the elaborate Trinitarian formulas of later creeds, and assume the Spirit is a New Testament invention. This misunderstanding is understandable. The debate has indeed been contentious since the earliest decades of Christianity, flaring up in ancient heresies and medieval controversies alike. Yet a careful reading of the full biblical text reveals something far more profound: the Holy Spirit is present and active from the very first verses of Genesis through the last pages of Revelation. The evidence is textual, consistent, and clear.

The contention is ancient. In the fourth century, groups known as Pneumatomachians (“Spirit-fighters”) denied the full deity of the Holy Spirit, prompting the Council of Constantinople in 381 to affirm the Spirit’s equality within the Godhead. Centuries later, in the twelfth century, the humanist philosopher Peter Abelard subjected Trinitarian dogma—including the Spirit’s personhood—to rigorous rational scrutiny. A brilliant dialectician and precursor to later humanist thought, Abelard applied logic and philosophy to sacred mysteries. He associated the Father with Power, the Son with Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit with Goodness or Love, insisting that faith must be pursued through inquiry and understanding. “By doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth,” he famously declared. Church authorities, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, condemned his works on the Trinity at councils in 1121 and 1141, viewing his rational approach as undermining traditional dogma. Abelard was no atheist; he remained a committed Christian. But his insistence that reason could illuminate even the deepest doctrines made him a lightning rod—proof that questions about the Spirit’s identity have long tested the boundaries between faith and intellect.

Yet the Bible itself does not wait for later theologians to introduce the Spirit. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew term ruach—meaning breath, wind, or spirit—appears repeatedly as the active presence of God himself. At creation, “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), bringing order out of chaos. The same Spirit empowers leaders: judges like Othniel and Gideon, kings like David, prophets who declare God’s word, and even craftsmen like Bezalel, filled with divine wisdom for the Tabernacle. The Spirit convicts of sin (Genesis 6:3), grieves over rebellion (Isaiah 63:10), and is personally addressed in prayer—“Do not take your Holy Spirit from me,” David pleads (Psalm 51:11). The phrase “Holy Spirit” itself appears explicitly in the Old Testament, though less frequently than in the New: in Psalm 51 and Isaiah 63, for instance, where the people’s resistance is said to have grieved God’s Holy Spirit. God even speaks in plural terms—“Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26)—right in the context of the Spirit’s creative work, hinting at a complexity within the one God that later revelation would clarify.

The New Testament does not invent the Spirit; it fulfills and names what was already there. Jesus promises the coming of the Paraclete—the Advocate, Comforter, the Spirit of truth—who will dwell within believers (John 14–16). At His baptism, the Spirit descends like a dove while the Father speaks from heaven, presenting a Trinitarian moment. On the day of Pentecost, the same Spirit who hovered at creation now fills the church with power, enabling bold proclamation and the birth of a new covenant people. Paul later describes the Spirit’s ongoing work: producing fruit in character (Galatians 5:22–23), distributing gifts for the common good (1 Corinthians 12), and sealing believers for redemption (Ephesians 1:13–14). The terminology becomes more precise—“the Holy Spirit”—but the reality is the same divine Person who has been active all along.

Skeptics may still object that the Old Testament never spells out a fully developed doctrine of three co-equal Persons. Fair enough. Scripture unfolds progressively, as a story rather than a systematic textbook. The Old Testament lays the foundation; the New Testament brings the full light of Christ. Yet the textual thread is unbroken: the same God who breathed life into Adam is the same Spirit who breathes new life into the church. The actions attributed to the Spirit—creating, empowering, grieving, guiding, convicting—consistently portray a personal, divine presence, not an impersonal force.

Those still exploring faith need not fear that the doctrine was manufactured by councils or medieval scholars. The Bible itself testifies to the Spirit’s presence across both Testaments. Abelard was right in one respect: honest inquiry does not destroy faith; it can lead us deeper into it. Open the pages. Read Genesis 1 alongside John 3 and Acts 2. The wind that moved over the waters at the beginning is the same wind that still moves hearts today. The evidence has always been there—clear, compelling, and inviting anyone willing to look.

In the autumn of 1901, a self-taught anarchist named Leon Czolgosz stepped up to President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and fired two shots into his abdomen. Czolgosz and Emma Goldman had never met. They exchanged no letters, plotted no conspiracy, and shared no secret handshake. Yet Goldman’s fiery lectures and essays—denouncing government, capitalism, and the “rulers” who oppressed the working class—had lodged in Czolgosz’s mind like shrapnel. He attended one of her speeches, absorbed the anarchist literature she championed, and later told interrogators her words helped convince him that McKinley represented the enemy. Goldman, arrested and questioned, refused to condemn the assassin outright. In her essay “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” she framed Czolgosz not as a monster but as a symptom of a diseased society.

Neither knew the other personally. Together, they helped inspire a generation of radicals to view political violence as a legitimate reply to perceived injustice. The Haymarket Affair of 1886—where four anarchists were hanged after a bombing at a labor rally Goldman saw as a travesty—had already radicalized her. Her rhetoric, in turn, radicalized others. The result was not revolution but a backlash: stricter immigration laws, expanded secret policing, and a cultural association of anarchism with terror. Rational policy—gradual reform, democratic debate, constitutional order—became the enemy.

More than a century later, the pattern repeats with eerie familiarity. We now live amid “batteries” of activist journalists and commentators whose output functions less as reporting than as ideological accelerant. Their work does not directly order violence, any more than Goldman ordered Czolgosz to shoot. Yet it cultivates a worldview in which political opponents are not mistaken but evil, not wrong but existential threats deserving whatever fate befalls them. The targets today are different, but the mechanism is the same: lone actors, marinated in grievance, acting on a steady drip of dehumanizing rhetoric.

Consider the recent record. Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts during his 2024 campaign—one in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a bullet grazed his ear, and another weeks later in Florida. Then, in September 2025, Charlie Kirk—co-founder of Turning Point USA and a vocal conservative voice—was assassinated by sniper fire while speaking at Utah Valley University. The shooter, 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, left a note expressing his intent and acted alone. Investigators found no grand conspiracy, just a young man steeped in the online and media ecosystem that had framed Kirk and Trump as avatars of oppression, fascism, or whatever the current vocabulary of outrage demands. These were not spontaneous crimes. They were downstream of a cultural current that treats conservative figures as legitimate prey.

Who today plays Emma Goldman’s role? The archetype is no longer a single immigrant orator lecturing in union halls. It is the networked activist-journalist—podcasters, Substackers, cable commentators, and social-media influencers—who command far larger audiences than Goldman ever dreamed of. They do not call themselves anarchists; many cloak their work in the language of “social justice,” “accountability,” or “resistance.” Their output is slicker, algorithmic, and endlessly amplified. The common thread is the same moral certainty Goldman possessed: the system is irredeemable, the other side is irredeemable, and therefore any blow struck against it is, if not praiseworthy, at least understandable. They do not pull triggers, but they load the cultural magazine.

The more uncomfortable question is whether intelligence agencies—particularly the CIA and its successors—have had any hand in “mass producing” such figures. History offers precedents for skepticism. Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War-era program in which the Agency cultivated relationships with journalists to shape domestic and foreign narratives, is well-documented. The CIA has admitted to using media assets for propaganda and has never fully foresworn the practice. Yet the leap from “the Agency influenced reporters to push anti-communist stories in the 1950s” to “the Agency today engineers radical left-wing journalists to provoke right-wing assassinations” is enormous and unsupported by credible evidence. Conspiracy theorists have long filled that gap with claims of MKUltra-style mind control or “deep state” social engineering, but those narratives collapse under scrutiny. Lone actors have always existed; the internet simply supercharges their grievances faster than any government handler could. Blaming a shadowy cabal risks the same intellectual shortcut the anarchists once took: if the world is too complex and ugly to explain through ordinary human folly, malice, and ideology, then there must be a hidden director pulling strings.

Still, the lesson from Goldman and Czolgosz endures. Ideas have consequences. When journalism abandons the pursuit of truth for the manufacture of righteous fury, it does not merely “oppose rational policy”—it corrodes the very possibility of rational policy. It tells impressionable minds that debate is futile and violence is expressive. The proper response is not censorship or conspiracy-mongering. It is relentless insistence on evidence, proportion, and the distinction between disagreement and demonization. Until journalists—on every side—relearn that distinction, we should expect more Czolgoszes: isolated, radicalized, and convinced that the next shot will finally make the oppressors listen.

The tragedy is not that Goldman and Czolgosz never met. It is that their example still meets new disciples every day.