Elon Musk says Justin Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada
Elon Musk’s statement came in response to a journalist’s tweet on the Canadian government having “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes”.
By CNBCTV18.com Oct 2, 2023 10:10:31 AM IST (Updated)
2 Min Read
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of “crushing free speech” in the country. Musk’s statement came in response to a journalist’s tweet on the Canadian government having “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes”.Remaining Time -10:58https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.593.1_en.html#goog_604699895
“The Canadian government, armed with one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes, announces that all “online streaming services that offer podcasts” must formally register with the government to permit regulatory controls,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted on October 1.Retweeted Greenwald’s post, Musk said, “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada. Shameful.His remark came in the wake of tense diplmatic ties between India and Canada. The Canadian PM created an uproar after he alleged India’s role in the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey in July this year.India has denied the claims, calling it ‘absurd’ and ‘motivated’, while Canada has yet to provide any public evidence to support the claim about Nijjar’s killing.This is not the first time the Trudeau government has been accused of acting against free speech.News agency ANI reported that in February 2022, Trudeau had invoked emergency powers – for the first time in the country’s history – to arm his government with more power to respond to the trucker protests, who were opposing the vaccine mandates at that time.(Edited by : Akriti Anand)
The Church is the society of faith that Jesus Christ founded through His Apostles on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost, the successor to Succoth the Jewish Pentecost) when in accordance with His promise given on the eve of the events through which He established the New Covenant that would become the basis of that society, the Father sent down the Holy Ghost upon His disciples, uniting them into one body, with Christ as the head. Into this one organic body, was joined the Old Testament Church, the Congregation of the Lord within national Israel, whose faith looked forward to the coming of Jesus Christ and who were taken by Him, from Hades, the Kingdom of Death, in His Triumphant descent there after His Crucifixion, and brought by Him into Heaven when He ascended back there after His Resurrection. The Church does many things when she meets as a community but first and foremost among them she worships her God. In this, the Church on earth, or the Church Militant as she is called, unites with the Church in Heaven, also known as the Church Triumphant.
Throughout her history those who have led, organized, and structured her corporate worship have been guided by the principle that our worship on Earth should resemble than in Heaven. It is a Scriptural principle. The Book of Hebrews discusses at length how the elaborate religious system given to national Israel in the Mosaic Covenant was patterned on Heavenly worship, the Earthly Tabernacle (the tent that was the antecedent of the Temple in the days when Israel was wandering in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land), for example, was patterned on the Heavenly Tabernacle. Indeed, Hebrews uses language strongly suggestive of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to describe the relationship between the Earthly Tabernacle and the Heavenly Tabernacle. Since Hebrews also uses this kind of language to describe the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New the only reasonable conclusion is that if the worship of the Old Testament Church was to be patterned after worship in Heaven, how much more ought the worship of the New Testament Church to be patterned after the same. Now the Bible gives us a few glimpses of worship in Heaven. These are generally found in visions in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature. The sixth chapter of Isaiah is the classic Old Testament example. The vision of St. John in the fourth and fifth chapters of Revelation is the classic New Testament example. In these chapters we find a lot of praying, a lot of singing, a lot of incense, an altar and a lot of kneeling. The Scriptural depiction of worship, in other words, is quite “High Church”. Indeed, since the book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus, in His role of High Priest, entered the Heavenly Holy of Holies with His blood, which unlike that of the Old Testament bulls and goats effectively purges of sin and the New Testament elsewhere tells us that Jesus on the eve of His Crucifixion commissioned the Lord’s Supper to be celebrated in His Church until His Second Coming, which was practiced daily in the first Church in Jerusalem and which is Sacramentally united with Jesus’ offering of Himself, the way the pre-Reformation Churches – not just the Roman, but the Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Assyrian and other ancient Churches as well – made this the central focus of their corporate worship is also very Scriptural.
In the Reformation, Rome’s abuses with regards to the Sacrament and her neglect of the preaching ministry, led many of the Reformers to de-emphasize the Sacrament and make the sermon the central focus of their corporate worship. The more extreme wing of the Reformation confused the New Testament ideas of a preaching ministry in the Church, which is a didactic ministry, teaching the faithful, with that of evangelistic preaching, which is the Church’s external ministry of proclaiming the Gospel to the world, and worse, developed unhealthy ideas about the preaching ministry, such as that the Word is inert and lifeless unless it is explained in a sermon, which are susceptible to the same charges of idolatry that the Reformers themselves made against Rome’s late Medieval views of the Sacrament. More to my point, however, the glimpses the Scriptures provide us of worship in Heaven do not mention a Heavenly pulpit, and, indeed, the closest thing to a sermon in Heaven I can think of in the Bible, is the reference to the everlasting Gospel in Revelation 14:6. The same verse, however, specifies that while the angel carrying it is flying in the midst of Heaven, it is to be preached “unto them that dwell on the earth”. Curiously, the Bible does make mention of a sermon that was preached to an otherworldly congregation. St. Peter, in the nineteenth verse of the third chapter of his first Catholic Epistle, talks about how Jesus “went and preached unto the spirits in prison”. There is, of course, a lot of debate about what St. Peter meant by this. Did he mean that Jesus preached the liberty He had just purchased them to the Old Testament saints when He descended into Hades? Or that He preached to those who would be left in the Kingdom of Death when He took His saints with Him to Heaven? If the latter, as the verses following might suggest, to what end? We cannot answer these questions dogmatically, interesting though the long-standing discussion of them be. My point, with regards to sermon-centric worship, is best expressed in another question. Whoever thought that worship on Earth as it is in Hell was a good idea?
The State?
I prefer the term Tory to the term conservative as a description of my political views, even if that always requires an explanation that I do not mean “big-C party Conservative” by the term, but Tory as Dr. Johnson defined it in his Dictionary, a pre-Burke conservative if you will. Today, the word conservative in its small-c sense, is mostly understood in its American sense, which is basically the older, nineteenth-century kind of liberal. I don’t disassociate myself from this out of a preference for the newer, twentieth and twenty-first century types of liberalism over the older. Quite the contrary, the older type of liberalism is far to be preferred over the newer. I disassociate myself from it because the older type of conservatism, the British Toryism in which Canada’s original conservatism has its roots, is to be preferred over either type of liberalism.
Some explain the difference between a Tory and an American type conservative by saying that the Tory has a high view of the state, the American conservative a low view of the state. While this is not entirely wrong – Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary mentioned earlier defines a Tory as “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a whig” – it can be very misleading, because “the state” has several different connotations.
The basic error of liberalism – classical liberalism – pertains to human freedom. Classical liberalism was the theory that man’s natural condition is to be an individual, autonomous with no social connections to others, that this natural condition is what it means to be free, that society and the state were organized by individuals on a voluntary contractual basis in order to mutually protect their individual freedom, and that when society and the state fail to do this individuals have the right and responsibility to replace them with ones that do. Liberalism was wrong about each and every one of these points, failing to see that man’s natural is social not individual – an individual outside of society is not a human being in his natural condition – that society and the state are extensions of the family, the basic natural social unit, rather than extensions of the marketplace based on the model of a commercial enterprise, and that attempts to replace old states and societies with new ones, almost always result in tyranny rather than greater freedom.
Nor did the liberals understand how their view of things depersonalizes people. “The individual” is not Bob or Joe or Mary or Sam or Sally or Anne or Herschel or Marcus or George or Bill or Leroy or Susie, each a person on his own earthly pilgrimage, distinct but not disconnected from others, but a faceless, nameless, carbon copy of everyone else, identifiable only by the rights and freedoms that he shares equally with each other individual, in other words, a number. When our primary term for speaking about government is the abstract notion of “the state” this tends to depersonalize government in the same way liberal autonomous individualism depersonalizes people. In twentieth century liberalism, which envisioned a larger role for government than the earlier classical liberalism, and in that offshoot of liberalism that has gone by the name “the Left” or “progressivism”, “the state” is very impersonal, a faceless bureaucracy which views those it governs as numbers rather than people, a collective but a collective of autonomous individuals rather than an organic society/community. I would say that the traditional Tory view of “the state” in this sense of the word is even lower than that of an American style, classical liberal, neoconservative.
What the Tory does have a high view of is government in the sense of traditional, time-proven, concrete governing institutions, particularly the monarchy and Parliament. Note that Dr. Johnson spoke not of “One who adheres to the state” but “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state”. What monarchy and Parliament, which complement each other, have in common, is that they are both very personal ways of thinking about government. The king reigns as father/patriarch over his kingdom(s), an extension of his family, as his governing office is an extension of the family as the model of society and state. Parliament is the where the representatives of the governed meet to have their say in the laws under which they live and how their taxes are spent. The conversation between these two personal governing institutions has contributed greatly to the most worthy accomplishments of our civilization, and both have long proven their worth, so it is of these that I prefer to say that I as a Tory have a high view, rather than the impersonal state. I have a higher view of the monarchy than of Parliament, and not merely because those who currently occupy the seats of Parliament leave much to be desired, but for the very Tory reason that if the Church should be worshipping on Earth as in Heaven, government ought to be modelled after the Heavenly pattern as well. God is the King of Kings, and governs the universe without the aid of elected representatives. Monarchy is the essential form of government. Parliament accommodates the model to our human condition.
Capitalism or Socialism?
There is a popular notion that unless one has no opinion on economics at all one must be either a capitalist or a socialist. Those who have studied economic theory will point out that that this is a little like the dilemma posed in the question “Did you walk to work or take a bagged lunch?” – a capitalist, in the terms of economic theory, is someone who owns and lives off of capital, whereas a socialist is someone who believes in the idea of socialism. Since, however, for most people, the term capitalist now means “someone who believes in capitalism” we will move on. A more nuanced version of the popular nation postulates a spectrum with capitalism, in the sense of pure laissez-faire with no government involvement in the market whatsoever as the right pole, and pure socialism, where the government not only controls but owns everything, as the left pole, with most people falling somewhere between and being identified as capitalists or socialists depending upon the pole to which they are the closest. The terms “left” and “right” in popular North American usage have been strongly shaped by this concept even though their original usage in Europe was quite different – the “left” were the supporters of the French Revolution, which, although it was the template of all subsequent Communist revolutions, was not a socialist undertaking per se, and the “right” were the Roman Catholic royalists, the continental equivalent of the English Tories. To complicate matters there is the expression “far right” which is usually used to suggest the idea of Nazism, which makes no sense with either the old continental European or the new North American usage, although the less commonly used “far left” for Communists makes sense with both.
The conservatives who think civilization began with the dawn of Modern liberalism and have little interest in conserving anything other than classical liberalism tend to accept this idea of a socialist-capitalist, left-right, economic spectrum and to identify as capitalists. This makes sense because it is liberalism they are trying to conserve and the Adam Smith-David Ricardo-Frédéric Bastiat theory of laissez-faire that we commonly identify as capitalism is more properly called economic liberalism.
With us Tories it is a bit more complicated and this has led, in my country, the Dominion of Canada, to the idea held by some that classical conservatives or Tories, unlike American neoconservatives, are closer to socialism than to capitalism. To come to this conclusion, however, one must accept the American notion of a socialist-capitalist economic spectrum and the idea contained within it that any move away from laissez-faire is a move in the direction of socialism. That idea is nonsense and does tremendous violence to the historical meaning of the word socialism. Historically, several different socialist movements, popped up at about the same time. What they all had in common was a) the idea that the private ownership of property, meaning capital, any form of wealth that generates an income for its owner by producing something that can be sold in the market is the source of all social evils because it divides society into classes, some of which own property, others of which must sell their labour to the propertied classes in order to make a living, and b) the idea that the remedy is some sort of collective ownership of property. In the Marxist version of socialism, this collective ownership was conceived of as by the state, after it had been seized in violent revolution by the proletariat (factory workers). In other versions of socialism, such as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the state was viewed as unnecessary – Proudhon, as well as being a socialist, was the first anarchist – and collective ownership was conceived of more in terms of workers’ co-operatives. Socialism, in both its diagnosis of the cause of social ills and in its proposed remedy, is fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity, which tells us that sin, the condition of the human heart as the result of the Fall of Man is the cause of social ills, and that the only remedy for sin is the grace of God, obtained for mankind by Jesus Christ through His Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, and brought to mankind by His Church in its two-fold Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament. From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, socialism, therefore, is an attempt to bypass the Cross and to regain Paradise through human political and social endeavours. Even worse than that it is Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, made to wear the mask of Charity, the highest of the Theological Virtues, and institutionalized. It is therefore utterly condemned by orthodox Christianity and Toryism, the political expression of orthodox Christianity, in its rejection of laissez-faire liberalism does not step in the direction of socialism. Even when Toryism supports state social programs for the relief of poverty, unemployment, and the like, as it did under Disraeli in the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and as it historically did in Canada, it was not for socialist reasons, not because it believed that inequality was the cause of all social ills and wealth redistribution society’s panacea, but for counter-socialism reasons, because it did not want poverty, unemployment, etc. to because the opportunity for recruitment to the cause of socialism which it correctly saw as a destructive force that unchained leads to greater misery, especially for those whom it claims to want to help.
The main way in which Toryism has historically envisioned a larger economic role for government than laissez-faire liberalism has been that the Tory recognizes the genuine economic interests of the entire realm, such as the need for domestic production of essential goods so as to not be dependent upon external supplies that may be cut off in an emergency, along with the economic interests of local communities, families, and individuals. Adam Smith argued that individuals are the most competent people to look out for their own economic interests rather than governments, especially distant ones, and Toryism doesn’t dispute this as a general principle – obviously there are exceptions. Rather it agrees with this principle and adds that families are the most competent at looking out for their interests as families, and communities for their interests at communities – this is what the idea of subsidiarity, rooted in Christian social theory, is all about. Toryism doesn’t accept Smith’s claim that individuals looking out for their own interests will automatically result in these other interests taking care of themselves, much less those of the entire realm. The government, although incompetent at making economic decisions for individuals qua individuals, or families qua families, communities qua communities, for that matter, is generally as an institution, the best suited for making economic decisions for the realm.
This is compromised, of course, if the person selected to lead His Majesty’s government as Prime Minister is an incompetent dolt, imbecile, and moron. The government of Sir John A. Macdonald, protecting fledgling Canadian industries with tariffs while investing heavily in the production of the railroad that would facilitate east-west commerce, uniting Canada and preventing her from being swallowed up piecemeal by her neighbor to the south is an example of government making the best sort of economic decisions for the realm. Unfortunately, His Majesty’s government is currently led by the classic example of the other kind of Prime Minister.
Which Branch of the Modern Tree?
Not so long ago, when the fashionable, progressive, forward-thinking, and up-to-date began to tell us that boys or men who thought they were girls or women and girls or women who thought they were boys or men should be treated as if they were what they thought and said they were instead of what they actually were in reality, rather than indulge this nonsense we ought instead to have treated those making this absurd suggestion the way we had hitherto treated those who thought they were something other than what they were, that is to say, called those fellows in the white uniforms with the butterfly nets to come and take them away that they might have a nice long rest in a place where they would be no harm to themselves or others. Instead we left them among the general populace where they proceeded to wreak maximum harm.
It had seemed, at one time, that this madness had peaked when people started introducing themselves by their “preferred pronouns” rather than their names but, as is usual when one makes the mistake of thinking things can’t get any worse, they did. The past few years have seen a major backlash finally starting to take shape against the aggressive promotion of this gender craziness in the schools, and no, I don’t mean the post-secondary institutions that have long been home to every wacky fad under the sun, I am talking about elementary schools. It seems that teachers, with the backing of school board administrators, have taken to treating every instance in which a boy says that he is a girl, or a girl says that she is a boy, as a serious case of gender dysphoria rather than the passing phase it would otherwise be in most cases and responded with “gender affirmation” which is a euphemism for indulging and encouraging gender confusion – and forcing everyone else in the classroom to go along with it. To top it off, they have been keeping all of this secret from the parents.
The state of California in the United States has just taken this to the next level, as a bill has passed in its legislative assembly that would essentially make “gender affirmation” a requirement for parents to retain custody of their children. It is worth bringing up at this point that there is a very similar and closely related euphemism to “gender affirmation” and that is “gender affirming care”, which refers to using hormones and surgery to make someone who thinks they are of the other sex physically resemble that sex. The same lunatics that I have been talking about, think it appropriate to offer this “care” to prepubescent children. In every single instance where this is done – every single instance – it is a case of child abuse. Period!
It is this aggressive war on the sexual innocence of childhood and the rights and authority of parents that has sparked the backlash on the part of parents who have had enough and are fighting back. Some jurisdictions, like the state of Florida in the United States, and the provinces of New Brunswick and Saskatchewan here in Canada, have responded by requiring schools to notify parents when this sort of thing is going on. The government in my own province of Manitoba has promised to do this if they are re-elected next month. That, I would say, is the very least they ought to do. I think that teachers that twist the minds of young kids in this way ought to be severely punished – a case can be made for bringing back the stocks and/or public flogging to do this.
The progressives, including both Captain Airhead, Prime Minister of Canada, and J. Brandon Magoo, President of the United States, have denounced the policy of informing parents as if it were placing kids in mortal danger. Progressive spin-doctors have even coined a new expression “forced outing” with which to vilify the sensible idea that teachers should not be allowed to continue to get away with this ultra-creepy business of sexualizing little kids and encouraging them to keep it a secret from their parents.
Those whose conservatism seeks primarily or solely to conserve the older stage of the Modern liberal tradition tend to view this sort of progressive cultural extremism as a form of Marxism or Communism. There is truth in this perspective in that sort of thinking among progressives in academe that leads them to embrace such nonsense can be traced back to academic Marxism’s post-World War I reinvention of itself along cultural rather than economic lines, albeit through the detour of a few prominent post-World War II thinkers who were heirs of Marx only in the sense of following in his footsteps as intellectual revolutionaries rather than that of having derived their ideas from his in any substantial way. The phenomenon itself – the idea that one has the right to self-identify as a “gender” other than one’s biological sex, to expect or even demand that others acknowledge this self-identification and affirm it to be true, and even to force reality itself in the form of one’s biological sex to bend to this self-identification – does not come from Marx, and those countries that had the misfortune of having been taken over by regimes dedicated to his evil ideas seem to have been partly compensated for this by being inoculated against this sort of thing. This is the autonomous individual of Locke, Mill, and the other classical liberals taken to the nth degree and it is the countries where liberalism has had the most influence that have proven the most vulnerable to this gender insanity. — Gerry T. Neal
Jordan Peterson: Trudeau and the equity tyrants must be stopped
We’re at the edge of the terrible transformation that is occurring everywhere in the free world Author of the article: Jordan Peterson Published Sep 11, 2023 • Last updated 2 days ago • 9 minute read 1664 Comments
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in a press conference during a stopover visit to Singapore on September 8, 2023. (Photo by Roslan RAHMAN / AFP)
Some of those reading this column will know that I have been ordered by the Ontario College of Psychologists to undergo “social media re-training” of indeterminate length, as a consequence of expressing my opinions publicly, with the specified outcome of my comprehensive compliance, as judged by my re-educators.
The charges levied against me include re-tweeting a tweet by the Leader of the Official Opposition in Canada (are you listening, “conservatives”?), criticizing Justin Trudeau and a diverse number of his minions, and expressing skepticism about the doom-saying fear-mongering tyranny-promoting chicken-little prognostications of the eco-fascists.
Why should Canadians care? If you’re a miner, and the canary caged next to you asphyxiates, you don’t blame the bird for being there. You notice that the air has become toxic, and you make tracks for the surface. Regulated professionals, subject to the petty tyranny of their overseeing agencies, are now starting to gasp and choke. Them first — you, next.
It’s already true in Canada that lawyers cannot have the reasonable certainty they once had with regard to the outcome of the cases they are pursuing, relying as they once did on precedent and the common or even civil law. Instead, they have to be prepared to be subjected to the opinions of an increasingly activist court, whose members have taken it upon themselves to put forward what is essentially a radical leftist (“progressive”) agenda. It’s true that physicians and teachers are so afraid to say what they think that even the reasonable among them no longer dare to tell the truth to the patients and children they serve. How do I know this? Because they tell me so. And how well do Canadians presume that the professionals they need will serve them, when they have all been cowed into, at best, liars of silence?
And why should Canadians believe in the existence and operation of such an agenda, rather than (comfortingly) passing such suggestions off as the ranting of demented, conspiratorially-minded right wingers, such as myself?
Here are a couple of facts (remember those?) simultaneously indisputable and unpleasant: Our “Minister of the Environment and Climate Change,” Steven Guilbeault, was not only a radical leftist activist, in his previous incarnation, but is now simultaneously savaging the economy of Western Canada, upon whose revenue his home province of Quebec shamefully, ungratefully and resentfully depends upon, while he works directly with the Chinese Communist Party, rulers of a country building more coal plants every year (two a week) than the rest of the world combined; six times more, to be precise.
He is doing that while rumours of CCP influence over the Canadian electoral process abound (!), under the supervision of a prime minister who has explicitly expressed admiration for the efficiency of communist tyranny, who was a friend to the demented tyrant who ran Cuba as his private fiefdom for decades. That would be Fidel Castro, bosom buddy as well as to Trudeau senior, and the same man who told former president Jimmy Carter that he would have sacrificed his whole island paradise to nuclear annihilation by our American allies just to move the Soviet agenda forward.
He is doing that under the rainbow-festooned banner of a “Liberal” party that has moved so far to the left that the hapless socialist NDP has nothing whatsoever left to offer (particularly labouring as they do under Jagmeet Singh, the most hypocritical politician Canada has ever coughed onto dry land. He is an empty suit of designer clothes too incompetent even to have bargained for the cabinet seat that is the going price, on the world market, for a politician’s soul).
He is doing that as part of an administration that is an express supporter of the deadly doctrine of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity, the mask that the wolves of compassion wear while they open the throats of the idiot sheep who think they are supporting all that is good and true. Equity: there’s a basket of snakes. What does equity mean? The useful idiots of the moderate left insist that it’s just a synonym for “equality of opportunity.” Why the new word, then, thinkers on the liberal side?
Equity means something very particular, good Canadians. It means that all economic and social systems that do not produce precise equality of outcomes across all possible measures of human difference (race, ethnicity, sex, “gender,” age, health status, ability, you name it) are to be regarded as “systemically prejudiced” and utterly re-tooled, in a revolutionary manner. What’s wrong with that, you ask, thinking of the excluded and the “marginalized,” in that manner so sympathetic endlessly and conveniently deserving of praise; considering yourself, despite your lack of actual effort on their behalf, a friend of the poor.
Let me ask you a straightforward question: do you own anything? A cell phone, perhaps; maybe a car; possibly even an apartment or house (although that is increasingly unlikely, particularly for young people, in Trudeau’s socialist paradise). Does that not mean that other people (the same marginalized; the same poor) don’t own that phone, that car, that house? Are you not therefore excluding them? The answer to that question, by the way, is “yes.” Of course you’re bloody well excluding them — oppressing them, marginalizing them, with your exclusive access to what you have hypothetically worked to earn.
“Property is theft”: no shortage of barely successful peasants such as yourself have died as a consequence of that cliché. How did societies get themselves to that point? By adopting the doctrine of equity, which is now deemed a mandatory belief by the professional organizations that regulate lawyers, physicians, psychologists, accountants, engineer and teachers (and that is not nearly all) in Canada.
Equity is no different than communism, boys and girls. Wait: let me clarify, as that is an error, but not in the direction you think. It’s far worse than mere communism. Marx had nothing on the post-modernists, who now occupy the universities, and have dramatically expanded upon his dread and murderous vision. Marx viewed oppression as essentially one-dimensional: the proletariat (that’s the poor for those of you who went through Canada’s “education” system and still don’t know even that) were exploited by the “bourgeoisie” (that turns out to be “anyone who owns anything at all”). That has happened forever; that’s all you really need to know about history and human social relationships in general; and it has to stop. By any means necessary.
Hence the hundred million or so deaths at the hands of the compassionate progressives in the 20th century. Of course, that wasn’t real communism.
You can tell, because some people were accidentally left standing.
For the postmodernists whose theories now dominate the academy and, increasingly, the western world, the bitter resentment of Marx was just the beginning. The concept of oppression is now limitlessly multi-dimensional. Everyone has become a victim, because of their height, their weight, their lack of attractiveness or athletic ability, their country of origin, their religious belief, the status of their ancestors.
What’s the problem with that? After all, life is hard, and much is distributed unfairly. Well, when everyone is a victim, everyone also becomes, perforce, an oppressor — and the punishment for that is severe. Maybe you’re a bit fat (victim, victim), but you’re white, or the tan that we now call brown that could become white in a flash. Presto! You’re a perpetrator. Maybe you don’t own a house (victim, victim). But you own a rusty old wreck from the 90s. Compared to those who can only afford a bicycle (perhaps because they’re useless layabouts) you are definitely an oppressor. Perhaps you’re genuinely poor (victim victim), but you’re young. You can be certain that you are then at least afflicted by implicit ageism, and your very youth a mark of at least your unconscious bias and general shameful reprehensibility.
Are you beginning to understand the game? I doubt it. It’s much easier for Canadians to keep their sheep/ostrich-heads firmly in the sand, and assume that anyone pointing out not so much what’s going on but what’s already happened is an extremist, a bigot, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, a Confederate sympathizer (in Canada (!)), a MAGA Republican, hell-bent for God only knows what possible reason on overthrowing Canadian democracy.
As if they bloody well care.
As if they even know where Canada is.
Why am I fighting the college? Probably because I’m stupid, or at least, as a Canadian journalist so famously put it, “the stupid person’s smart person.” Touché. Seriously (although all educators are, perforce, the stupid people’s smart person). But I have plenty of money, and a wife I love, and a family that supports me, and friends that do as well, and the opportunity to live anywhere I want to in the world, and have been informed by those who run other political jurisdictions that they would restore my licence in a heart-beat if the low-level schemers in eternally good-thinking Ontario manage to purloin it, as they probably will. I really don’t need the hassle, to say nothing of the literally tens of thousands of dollars it costs per month to keep the vipers at bay.
The process is the punishment, as those who have successfully weaponized many such deep-state bureaucracies know full well.
I am doing it to bring to the attention of Canadians — and, if not Canadians, whose smug self-complacency is perhaps unparalleled in the world (except maybe in comparison to the Kiwis or the liberal Californians) — then to people elsewhere in the West, increasingly inclined as they are to see what is happening in Canada, just as intelligent miners see their canaries.
We’re at the edge of the terrible transformation that is occurring everywhere in the free world. As Canada goes, so hope the progressives, the world goes. Thus, the good fight might as well be fought here. I have a son, a daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in this benighted country. My parents live here. My daughter departed for freer lands, and I won’t forgive the current administration for that. Her example is tempting, and I’ve lived in the United States before — but the same problem exists among our neighbours to the south, despite their more extensive commitment to the freedom that has vanished with amazing rapidity in the Great White North.
It is not that freedom of speech is threatened in Canada, by the way, good people. It’s that it’s already pretty much gone — although, God willing, not permanently. The same can be said for freedom of conscience and association. We gave up freedom of mobility under Trudeau, which was the only freedom he could directly threaten, in his attempt to (successfully) divide Canadians, and therefore promptly did.
We still have the freedom to pretend that everything is just as it was 20 or even 10 years ago. But it’s not. The fact that I am being persecuted for criticizing the prime minister, for passing on the opinions of Pierre Poilievre, and for doubting the opinions of that veritable traitor, Steven Guilbeault, is a primary indication of that. My case would not be attracting the international attention that it is — as is the prosecution of the Trucker Convoy leaders, whose protest was widely admired outside this country — if that was not the case.
Why should you care? It’s not about me, folks. I have options.
Jordan Peterson: Canada is trampling on my God-given right to free speech
Canada’s idiotic pandering and cowardly insistence on group rights set us up for dominance by the meta-Marxists Author of the article: Jordan Peterson, The Telegraph Published Sep 02, 2023 • Last updated 4 days ago • 10 minute read 1538 Comments
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Photo by The Canadian Press
As a professional, practicing clinical psychologist, I never thought I would fall foul of Canada’s increasingly censorial state. Yet, like so many others — including teachers, nurses, and other professionals — that is precisely what has happened. In my case, a court has upheld an order from the College of Psychologists of Ontario that I undergo social media training or lose my licence to practice a profession I have served for most of my adult life.
Their reason? Because of a handful of tweets on my social media, apparently. Yes: I am at risk of losing my licence to practice as a mental health professional because of the complaints of a tiny number of people about the utterly unproven “harm” done by my political opinions.
These complainers — most of whom did not even live in Canada, none of whom were my clients or even knew any of them, nor had any contact whatsoever with the persons hypothetically harmed by my views — submitted complaints to the College of Psychologists of Ontario about what I had said using a handy online form. That supposedly august body had the option not to pursue these complaints, but seemingly decided some months ago that my behaviour did not meet with their approval. I had to agree to their demands to undergo training with one of their self-declared “social media experts” — sessions of indeterminate length, cost and content — and it seems that if I did not I would be dragged in front of a formal disciplinary hearing and, if it concurred in the judgment of wrongdoing, stripped of my licence.
The right of the College to do so has now been upheld by a provincial court, despite their apparent admission that it could infringe on my fundamental rights.
My transgressions? Two tweets criticising Justin Trudeau; one criticising his former chief of staff, who resigned in the aftermath of scandal some years ago; one ironically commenting on the identity of a city councillor in Ottawa, who in my view acted in a particularly unforgivable manner during the famous trucker convoy protest; and one objecting to the actions of the physicians performing mastectomies on perfectly healthy women — often minors — alongside a criticism of a famous actress who received such “treatment” and then advertised its benefits to her unwitting fans. In conjunction, the entire transcript of a podcast I did with Joe Rogan where I expressed doubts, fully justified in my view, about the validity of the idiotic models that economists stack carelessly upon the doom-mongering climate predictions used by eco-zealots and wannabe tyrants to justify extreme policies which will harm millions. Finally, there was a tweet that apparently hurt the feelings of a plus-sized model (according to complainants she did not know) parading herself on the cover of a magazine hypothetically devoted to the celebration of athleticism and health.
Every single opinion was a political or psychological statement; every one devoid of genuinely documentable “harm” — except perhaps to the tender sensibility of certain Canadian moralists in whose mouths butter wouldn’t melt, in a country of fatal niceness and complacency.
Politicization of regulated professions
For context, there are many “regulated professions” in Western countries, including Canada; professions whose conduct is held to be crucial to the public interest, and whose practitioners must therefore uphold certain standards to protect the public. That idea worked for years. In Canada, as elsewhere, these professional colleges, with authority delegated from the government, limited their actions to situations of obvious professional misconduct.
In the last few years, however, such bodies – with their wide and untrammeled potential regulatory and punitive ability – have been weaponised by the same ideological radicals of the Left that have infiltrated and undermined higher education, media, judiciary, law, science and government. Any radical anywhere can submit the kind of complaint that can bring a professional’s life to a halt, and can increasingly rely on these captured colleges and other professional regulatory bodies to uphold and pursue their vexatious, vengeful, petty, spiteful and ideological motivated “complaints.” And this is regardless of how much good the target of their complaint has done — independent of the training, reputation or standing of the target, and accompanied by the deep pockets and infinite amount of time available for the accusers and adversaries, abetted by the resources of the government itself.
Suffice it to say: I appealed the decision of my professional college. But the court has rejected my appeal, ruling that although I had my Charter rights — my constitutional right to freedom of speech — the professional regulatory body essentially has indefinite sway over the determination of what limits they felt fit to impose in their professional context, in whatever retroactive manner they felt fit to impose them. This is a court, by the way, headed by appointees from the very administration I was criticising (and which has been criticised very recently and independently from me for the inappropriate relationships it has established with the judiciary).
Canadians now need to wake up to the fact that the right to freedom of speech in Canada is subject to limitations placed by any level of government, for any reason.
I know perfectly well that many professionals in Canada are cowed to the point where they are forced to lie; they tell me so repeatedly in private. And when professionals have to lie, they can no longer do their job properly, and the public suffers. I know, too, that this is increasingly true across the West. Hence the increasing international interest in the dangerous social experiment taking place in Canada, as we ride the forefront of the wave of woke lunacy threatening to swamp the entire Western world.
The decline and fall of Canada
Why does the situation appear particularly grim, here in Maple Leaf Country? We were, for most of my country’s history, miraculously and thankfully dull: our constitution, ensconced safely under British authority until 1982, enshrined “peace, order and good government” as the most basic principles of our dominion. This was not the clarion call ringing out to rally our good friends south of the border, who aimed at the much more dramatic and libertarian “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was good enough, however, to produce a reliable, safe, secure and free state, conservative in the classic small-c sense, with institutions both predictable and honest, and an economy both productive and generous.
That all started to change in the 1980s. Our dashing prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau — father of the current Prime Minister, our current clown prince — was searching desperately for a legacy and for a solution to the chronic problem posed by the Quebec separatists, who were genuinely threatening the integrity of the country. Quebec was the last feudal country in the West: extremely traditional and dominated by a very small, tight, essentially hereditary elite right until the end of the 1950s. Quebec dumped all that in a few short years in a fit of 1960s freedom, also dropping its birth and marriage rate with exceptional rapidity (both are now among the lowest in the world) and abandoning the Catholic church in favour of a crude nationalism and a more-or-less socialist utopia favoured by those who pushed to also tear apart the country.
Trudeau senior, constitutionally displeased with the fundamental derivation of Canada from Britain, seized upon this opportunity to make his mark in history, and began to agitate to “bring the constitution home.” He did so, rewriting our primary legal agreement, and appending to it his much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms, paraded before Canadians as the ultimate guarantee of the freedoms we had enjoyed anyway under the much more reliable aegis of British Common Law. But Quebec put up its middle finger, refusing to become a signatory to the new agreement – even after Trudeau’s government abandoned both its spine and its principles to include a poison pill in the very Charter that hypothetically protected our citizens: the clause in Section 33 of that document, indicating that those very constitutional rights can be abridged more or less at will by any government in Canada, federal or provincial, if inclined to do so.
The Canadian government, in its own documentation, notes with unconsciously ironic understatement that “Section 33 is unique among the constitutions of countries with constitutional democracies.” It is unique because it essentially guts the Charter – and it was designed to do so, to appease the very Quebec that it never did appease and which has never in the 40 years subsequent to the “repatriation” formally signed on to the agreement.
And that is not all. Canada was a very early adopter of the idea of “group rights.” The Quebecois, again, began to obsess about the potential threat posed by English Canada (really, the English West, led by the culturally-dominant Americans) to the language and culture of their province. They had some reason for this: the ascendant US was and is a cultural force to be reckoned with, and even English Canadians were uneasy about the elephant to the south, capable of rolling over at any time, careless of its much smaller northern neighbour, and simultaneously much noisier and more effectively theatrical. To keep the country together, Canada began to prioritise the rights of its so-called founding peoples (the British, the French and the original inhabitants of this land, the native Canadians) and to insist that the groups they composed had rights equivalent to or superseding those of individual citizens. This was a very bad idea then, and it has become a worse idea in the subsequent decades. Canada parades itself as a “multicultural” society, pretending that a brainless tolerance — really, a spineless niceness — constitutes the way forward to peace and tranquility, forgetting entirely that too much multiculturalism often stokes unrest.
This bad situation is made worse by the naïve virtue-signalling of, ironically enough, Pierre Trudeau’s son: an unqualified part-time drama teacher who in a recent poll was found to be the country’s least-popular prime minister of the past 55 years. It was that same Justin Trudeau who famously proclaimed that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” in 2015, insisting that the country has little uniting it except its embrace of cultural diversity and its putative values of openness and respect.
But what is a country without a central identity? Aimless, and therefore both anxious and hopeless; worse, prone to domination by the fractionated ideas that will fight necessarily for central place in the absence of the centre that must by one means or another be established. That is the shadow-side of the naïve “multiculturalism” that has doomed the world to continuous fractionalism and all its accompanying horrors.
Canada’s idiotic pandering and cowardly insistence on group rights set us up for dominance by the meta-Marxists who insist that the collective take priority over the individual. Canada’s inclusion of the notwithstanding clause to unsuccessfully satisfy separatists gutted the protection of the rights that might otherwise have protected the individual against group-think. Justin Trudeau’s insistence that Canada has no central identity has allowed the ideologically-possessed fools who know nothing of the great British Common Law tradition and who have contempt for the Western tradition to make their postmodern ideas the central axis around which this once-reliable country now by law is required to rotate.
In principle, Canadians enjoy the right to free speech, but the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is severely and fatally limited by the notwithstanding clause, and leaves our rights endangered.
I have been expressing my Charter Rights — though really I view them as God-given, and rooted more in British Common Law — by writing, lecturing, and using social media. Consequently, I have run afoul of the petty authorities in Canada, including at my former place of employment, the University of Toronto, where my opposition to an infamous bill, C-16, made it impossible for me, eventually, to continue as a professor at that cowardly institution, though it also brought my opinions and work to broad public attention. Since then, I have continued to voice my opposition to the current administration in Ottawa, and the destructive ideological idiocy that is threatening my country and the West itself.
As such, I will fight this idiocy all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. I have instructed my lawyers, in the aftermath of the rejection of my appeal, to inform the College that I will not comply with their forced re-education mandate, and to proceed with the disciplinary hearing they have promised will occur. In the past, such hearings have been videotaped and made public. I doubt the College will have the stomach to do the same in my case, although I will make every effort, reasonable and unreasonable, to ensure that every element of these proceedings is open to widespread international scrutiny. I have already posted the relevant documents online, as I am perfectly happy to have everything that I have done assessed in full.
But I know few people are in a position to conduct such a fight: I have the resources necessary to wage a multi-year court battle, ruinously expensive (tens of thousands of dollars a month) though it is. I also have the means of communication at hand to publicise exactly what is going on. I do so on the behalf of those who are unable to do so.
Regardless of the outcome, I have made arrangements with other jurisdictions — Canadian and elsewhere — to re-establish my licence, in a heartbeat, if the authorities in Ontario succeed in purloining it from me.
I’ll leave it to readers to think through what that would mean for free speech in Canada – and, for that matter, in the rest of the increasingly benighted Western world.
Captain Airhead Opens His Mouth and Something Stupid Comes Out
Captain Airhead has stuck his foot in his mouth again. Or, to put it another way, he opened his mouth again. He is incapable of opening his mouth without sticking his foot in it. Captain Airhead, for those of you fortunate enough not to be familiar with him, is the man who has been Prime Minister of His Majesty’s federal government here in my country, Canada, since the Dominion election of 2015. In that time, not a year has passed without him being embroiled in at least one major scandal that would have ended the political career of anyone else, including scandals concerning him behaving in ways that had someone else been caught so doing he would have been the first to demand that such be utterly depersoned and driven from public life and polite society. That he has managed to remain in office so long is a bit of a mystery although I assume that it has something to do with a deal signed with blood at the stroke of midnight in some unhallowed place. This is a most reasonable assumption. Since he clearly has no soul now he must have traded it away at some point. The only real argument against it is that it would be beneath the dignity of the other party to strike such a deal with him. Those who wish to be unkind often refer to him by the epithet “Justin Trudeau”.
So what has Captain Airhead said this time?
Earlier this month he showed up in Calgary, Alberta for a photo-op at the Stampede. While there someone caught him on film talking with a Muslim father in the Baitun Nur Mosque, which is the largest mosque in the country and was the host of several events during this year’s Calgary Stampede. The father expressed his concerns that his children were being exposed to indoctrination that was attacking their religion particularly on alphabet soup gang issues in the public schools. Captain Airhead replied by basically telling him that he had swallowed “misinformation” peddled by the “American far right”, that the provincial curricula did not include “what is being said out there about aggressive teaching or conversion of kids to being LGBT” and that those who were saying that this was going on were people who “have consistently stood against Muslim rights and the Muslim community.” The video of this was uploaded to social media and has generated a ton of negative feedback although not near as much as it deserves.
It is important to realize that the questions the Muslim father was putting to Captain Airhead were unavoidable evidence that the unstable coalition that is the foundation of his particular brand of left-wing politics is finally starting to unravel. He made an attempt to save it by asserting that both Muslims and the alphabet soup gang were facing “increasing levels of violence and hatred” and that “one thing we don’t need right now is for communities that are facing hatred to start turning on each other”. This was an interesting thing for him to say in the context of a conversation in which he himself was trying to turn Muslims against Christians over an issue on which they are historically and traditionally in agreement, at least in terms of the basic moral principles at stake. It ought to be noted here that two years ago 68 church buildings in Canada were burned, otherwise vandalized, or desecrated in a string of Christophobic hate crimes whipped up by the media. Captain Airhead, after giving a weak and anemic condemnation of the Christophobic hate spree, described the hate behind it as “fully understandable”.
This was not the first time that Captain Airhead had dismissed the type of parental concerns expressed by the Muslim father as “far right”. A look at the previous occasion on which he used this language and the circumstances surrounding it is quite revealing with regards to the credibility of his attempt to assuage parental fears. In the province of New Brunswick, Policy 713 was enacted by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development three years ago. It required schools to maintain gender-neutral bathrooms, use the pronouns and names students chose for themselves, and to basically make the schools as alphabet souper friendly as possible. Earlier this year, in May, the policy was placed under review following complaints from parents and the following month Blaine Higgs, Premier of New Brunswick announced that it was being revised. The most relevant revision was that schools in that province would no longer be allowed to facilitate kids living double lives in which they assume new names and gender identities without their parents’ knowledge and consent. Captain Airhead blew a gasket, threw a hissy fit, and denounced Higgs in a grandstanding manner in which he said such things as “Far-right political actors are trying to outdo themselves with the types of cruelty and isolation they can inflict on these already vulnerable people.” Note that whenever Captain Airhead – or any other progressive, left-winger or liberal for that matter – speaks of “vulnerable people” he should be understood as meaning “people I am empowering to act as bullies to others with total impunity”. This was the month that has been renamed after the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins or, to use its deadname, June, and Captain Airhead was addressing something called the Rainbow Railroad Freedom Party which, as I understand it, is an organization that helps alphabet people escape from actual persecution. One would think that such an organization would know well the difference between being in danger of one’s life on the one hand and of your teacher’s not being allowed to keep secrets from your parents on the other and would have broke out into loud booing when Captain Airhead conflated the two, much like the Indians did when he walked onto the stage to give a speech at the opening of the North American Indigenous Games in Halifax last weekend. To be fair, there was a little bit of applause later on when he finally shut his mouth, but it seemed like the type featured in the Statler and Waldorf segment on the Muppet Show where the one starts loudly clapping and the other says something to the effect of “it wasn’t that good” getting a response along the lines of “I’m not clapping because I liked it, I’m clapping because it’s over!”
Someone who one month equates the New Brunswick premier’s standing up for parents and no longer allowing schools to hide their under-16 children’s life-altering choices from them with inflicting cruelty is clearly not speaking in bona fide when the next month he tries to assure a father that the schools are not trying to convert his children to alternate sexual and gender identities.
“Far right”, of course, as Captain Airhead uses it is merely an empty pejorative with no real meaning. Anyone who opposes him and his ideas if they can properly be called that is “far right” to Captain Airhead. Of course the expression “far right” is rather silly even when used with a precise meaning. It is often understood to mean “Nazi” even though the historical Nazis thought of themselves as leftists, opposed everything the original, traditional, and historical right stood for and embraced urban industrialism, rapid technological advancement, and basically everything the term progress conveyed in the first half of the twentieth century. Even the one part of their program that was ostensibly right-wing, their fierce opposition to Communism, was not right-wing anti-communism, i.e., anti-communism based on a loathing of what Communism stood for – militant atheism, destructive revolutionary violence, egalitarian levelling, and blind faith in materialistic science – but the anti-communism of a rival that was as close to Communism as possible without being Communist, a fact evident both in the Nazis’ use of “socialist” in the name of their movement and in the remarkable similarities between the apparatus of totalitarian state oppression both systems established in their respective regimes. The Nazis, therefore, were not right-wing at all in any traditional sense of the word, much less “far” or “extremely” right-wing. The use of “far right” as an epithet, whether used with a precise meaning or simply as an empty slur, reveals the user of the term to be an idiot.
When people use epithets in this loose manner they eventually lose their force. It has been several years since everyone realized that when a liberal calls someone a racist this doesn’t mean much more than “I disagree with you” or “I dislike you”. This is why liberals have taken to using stronger insults like “white supremacist” or “far right”. Since, however, these words have a much narrower meaning than “racist” their lifespan as effective liberal insults is much shorter. Mercifully, the more liberally and loosely people like Captain Airhead throw these insults around, the shorter that lifespan will be. I suspect that most parents who see the now viral video of Captain Airhead sticking his foot in his mouth and understand the context will think something along the lines of “if it is far right for us to want our pre-pubescent children protected from those who would rob them of the innocence of childhood by exposing them to non-traditional ideas about sex and gender way too early then count us as far right”. I, for one, am willing to own the label “far right” if Captain Airhead insists on using it in this manner. Since I am right wing in an ad fontes manner, i.e., still holding to and emphasizing the things the original continental “right” and the pre-conservative Tories stood for, i.e., pre-Modern traditions and institutions such as royal monarchy, orthodox Christianity, the Church and its Apostolic hierarchy, the code of chivalry, rural agrarianism, technoskepticism and our civilization’s entire heritage from ancient times and Christendom, “far right” is a less absurd label in my case than it is in those of most of the people to whom liberals apply it. Since, in Canada, the equally absurd habit of referring to those who are “conservative” in the traditional, orthodox Christian, monarchist sense of the word as opposed to “neoconservatives” who are “conservative” in the American sense of being classical liberals as “Red Tories”, let us compound the absurdity by saying that I am a far right Red Tory.
The distinction just mentioned between the traditional and American senses of the word “conservative” brings me around to my final point about Captain Airhead’s remarks. His use of the word “American” before “far right” is clearly intended to convey the idea that the parental concerns he was addressing is rooted in a form of thinking that is American and foreign to Canada. This is extremely rich coming someone who not only leads the Liberal Party, which from Confederation to this day has been the party of Americanization in Canada, but who personally gives off the impression that he never wipes his own arse without permission from the White House to do so. I have made the point several times in the past that the Canadian left has never had an idea that it did not borrow from the American left. The progressive income tax, central banking, the welfare state in both its New Deal introduction in the 1930s and its Great/Just Society expansion in the 1960s, anti-discrimination laws, liberal immigration, judicial activism that banned the Bible and prayer from public schools, abortion-on-demand, and no-fault divorce are among the liberal innovations that were introduced in the United States first with Canadian liberals later following their example. More recently, critical race theory inspired movements of national self-loathing, race riots masquerading as protests, and Year Zero monument toppling began with Black Lives Matter in the United States which was followed by Every Child Matters in Canada. The exceptions that prove the rule are single-payer healthcare and same-sex marriage.
In the very matter which we have been discussing Captain Airhead by demonizing parental opposition to teachers indoctrinating their kids with ideas that conflict with their fundamental values is himself following an American example. In the fall of 2021 several American school boards were facing heavy criticism from parents over what their children were being taught. In this case the teaching of critical race theory was the pivotal issue but the conflict between educators who thought they had the right to propagandize children however they saw fit and parents who correctly insisted that they ought to have the final say over the educators was essentially the same. In late September, the National School Board Association published a letter they had sent to J. Brandon Magoo, or, as he will undoubtedly be known now following the discovery of a white substance resembling sugar in appearance as well as the properties of being highly addictive and eliciting similar responses in the euphoric centres of the brain in his residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, Joe Blow. In the letter they asked Magoo to look into using the PATRIOT ACT, the piece of tyrannical totalitarian legislation passed in 2001 that allows the American government to circumvent the limits the American constitution placed on its powers in order to protect the civil rights and liberties of its citizens in the name of fighting the bogeyman of terrorism, against those parents who had the nerve to think that they had a say in what their own kids were to be taught, characterizing the parents who were showing up at school board meetings to loudly voice their complaints as hate groups, extremists, and domestic terrorists. A few days later Magoo’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, sent a memo to FBI director Christopher Wray telling him that the Department of Justice would be announcing measures to address “the rise in criminal conduct directed towards school personnel” and instructing him to reach out to the United States Attorneys and local law enforcement within thirty days of the memo to coordinate their efforts in implementing the new measures. Among the measures Garland’s DOJ took were the establishment of a task force in which counterterrorism agencies were represented and of a FBI snitch line to facilitate the tagging of outspoken parents as potential threats. All of this was quickly leaked after which the school boards of almost half of the American states dropped their affiliation with the National School Board Association. The humiliated NSBA apologized for the language they had used and withdrew the letter from publication. It was later revealed that Magoo’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, had asked the NSBA to write the letter and provided assistance with its drafting. Garland, subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, maintained that parents voicing their viewpoints at schoolboard meetings were not the issue, merely actual crimes like threats, violence, intimidation, and harassment. Unfortunately for him, the only evidence that any such things were taking place on a scale out of the ordinary was the assertions of the withdrawn latter. Those who made such assertions seem to have been engaging in the same sleight of hand employed by Captain Airhead in his assertion about “increasing levels of violence and hatred” against Muslims and alphabet people, a sleight of hand very common on the left today. It involves the redefinition of “violence” to include words – and not just words of the “I’m going to *fill in violent act here* you” sort, but words deemed to be violent because someone who is offended by them no longer “feels safe”. Indeed, the people who think that words can amount to “violence” in this way have even taken it as a step further and identified certain types of the absence of words as violence. Remember how in the BLM hysteria of three years ago the inane slogan “silence is violence” was rolled out? The idea behind this was that you need to jump on board the BLM bandwagon, affirm everything they told you to affirm, and start spouting the same drivel as them, and that to fail to do so was itself a form of aggression against those on whose behalf they purported to speak and so a form of “violence”. People crazy enough to think this way and to think that educational professionals and experts have the right to decide what to indoctrinate kids with without the input or approval of the kids’ parents would obviously interpret outspoken and angry opposition to what they were doing as violence. Indeed, this is exactly what can be found in the NSBA letter, which supported its assertions by referencing a number of incidents, nearly all of which merely involved angry speech rather than violence or the literal threat thereof.
In all of this, the Magoo administration proved even more adamant and inflexible in its support of the position that professional educators and educational experts should have control of pedagogy without having to answer to parents than the National School Board Association. Indeed, considering that Magoo officials requested the NSBA letter and coached the association in the writing of it, it is clear that the impetus for labelling parents who disagree, parents who think that the job of raising their children belongs to them and that part of that job is protecting their children from those, including teachers, who want to poison their minds with critical race theory, gender ideology and other such excrement, parents who voice their views, as the equivalent of terrorists came from the Magoo White House. The Magoo administration has shown a strong disposition ever since it took power to treating serious political opponents as a national threat.
Captain Airhead, who scratches every time Magoo gets an itch, shares this disposition. This was evident in his tyrannical invoking of the Emergencies Act to crush a non-violent protest against his unjust and evil vaccine mandates in February of last year. It is evident today in his arrogant attitude towards parents who do not want their kids’ heads filled with garbage about sex and gender identity in school. Such parental concern is not an American import as he suggests. It would be better described as being universal, arising as it does out of the natural and good instinct of parents to protect their children. If anything is an unwanted American import here, it is his own bad attitude.
He really ought to learn to keep his mouth shut. You would think he would be sick of the taste of his own feet by now. — Gerry T. Neal
Isn’t it Canada Day, you might ask? Well, as part of the social re-engineering of our country, Parliament did proclaim July 1 – Canada’s national founding date – as Canada Day. This was part of Pierre Trudeau’s revolutionary mischief as his immigration and multiculturalism policies sought to remake the European country of our founding into a Third World mix-up. He set in place policies – loyally followed by Tory Brian Mulroney and Liberals Jean Chretien, and Paul , and worst of all, Mr. 500,000 mostly Third World immigrants, Mr. Canada has no dominant culture Justin Trudeau– which will bring about the replacement and gradual ethnic cleansing of the European founder-settler people of this country.
Dominion Day, first proclaimed a holiday in 1879 by Governor General Lord Monck highlighted a term in Canada’s motto “a mari usque ad mare” – a line from the Psalms 72:8: “Dominion from sea unto sea.”
The sentiment is enthusiastic and positive, suggesting the coming of age and sovereignty of a new nation. The European founder/settlers – the British, the French, the Germans, the UELs from the U.S., the Russians, the Icelanders, the Ukrainians, the Italians and others – were developing, expanding and claiming this land, taking Dominion (power and control) from sea to sea.
This is a dynamic vision of Canada, one we shall not abandon. This is OUR Canada, the real Canada.
.
Paul Fromm
Director
Canada First
Happy Dominion Day!
The Gazette
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Iceland celebrates Proclamation of the Republic Day on June 17. Ireland has St. Patrick’s Day three months earlier. Germany has Unity Day on Oct. 3. Our American friends, of course, have Independence Day July 4. Several monarchies celebrate their sovereigns’ birthdays. All these national holidays, and many more, have some flavour of the national experience, the national past, the national origins.
So, too, did Canada’s Dominion Day holiday each July 1. But in 1982 the Trudeau Liberals, in a wanton act of historical vandalism, changed the name – which had been good enough from 1867 until then – to the vapid Canada Day, a name more reminiscent of Bay Days than of anything in Canadian history.
“The provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada,” said the British North America Act of 1867.
A “dominion” was self-governing, but for some residual lawyers’ technicalities. Until about 1950, the term “the Dominions” referred respectfully to self-governing Commonwealth countries that drew their institutions from British models.
Trudeau never explained the change of name; perhaps he felt his own changes to the constitution eclipsed the original accomplishment of 1867.
“Dominion” is not a French word but the term “Fete de la Confederation” was perfectly suitable.
The old name, in both languages, could even be a modest teaching tool to help young people, immigrants and those who never learned it in school, understand that Canada is the way it is today in large part because of decisions made in the past.
It’s time for Ottawa to reverse the pointless and damaging decision to abandon “Dominion Day.” It’s time to get back to our roots. Happy Dominion Day!
Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)
A couple of decades ago the degradation of our culture and civilization had only proceeded so far as to devote a parade once a year to honouring the worst of all sins, the sin that brought the judgement of fire and brimstone down upon the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis. The parade became a day, the day became a week, and now the entire sixth month of the year is dedicated to the celebration of this sin. This year Captain Airhead, the dolt who for eight years has disgraced the office of Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, somehow clinging to power despite scandal after scandal each of which should have been career destroying, and who never opens his mouth without sticking his foot in it, informally extended the period to a “season”.
As can be seen in the Scriptural passage that I have used as the epigraph for this essay there are several sins for which God’s judgement fell on Sodom. Until a few generations ago, however, reference to the sin of Sodom in the singular would not likely have caused confusion because the name of the city was associated with a single sin of a sexual nature, the sin highlighted by St. Jude in his reference to the judgement on the cities in his epistle and which appears in the list in the Ezekiel passage as the last item referenced. While this sin is, obviously, a huge part of what is being celebrated this month, it is not this sin that I am talking about but the first sin in Ezekiel’s list, the sin after which the celebration has been named.
I have often made the observation that when the name of this celebration was reduced to Pride, they abandoned the lesser of two sins – sins of a sexual nature fall under the heading of the least of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust – and kept the worst of all, Pride.
Pride is the worst sin of all. The concept of the Seven Deadly Sins goes back to the fourth century of Christianity. St. Evagrius Ponticus was a disciple of the Cappadocian Fathers, first of St. Basil the Great then of St. Gregory Nazianzus whom he followed to Constantinople on the eve of the Second Ecumenical Council before withdrawing first to Jerusalem then later to Egypt, to live a monastic life. In Egypt, he encountered the teachings of the Alexandrian Neoplatonist monks who, dividing the human being into body, soul, and mind, identified for each a trio of λογισμοί – literally, this is the plural of “calculation”, but is probably better rendered “thoughts” in this context – that influenced the components in bad ways. This made for nine in total, which were arranged in a hierarchy proceeding from those which afflicted the body to those which afflicted the mind, with the ones affecting the body being the lowest and least, the ones affecting the mind being the worst. St. Evagrius reduced this to a list of eight sins or rather vices if we distinguish between sins as acts and vices as behavioural patterns or habits. St. John Cassian, who brought the monastic movement out of the deserts of Egypt by founding a monastery in Gaul or France as it is today, popularized St. Evagrius’ list in his writings. It was further revised around 590 AD by St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, in his commentary on Job entitled The Book of Morals. Technically, St. Gregory retained a list of eight sins because he separated Pride from what he called the “seven principal sins”, declaring Pride to be the source from which these seven flow. The seven were Vainglory, Envy, Wrath, Melancholy, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. This was later revised so that Vainglory was folded up into Pride and Melancholy was replaced with Sloth, producing the list that found its way into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the seven levels of Purgatory correspond to the seven. This is the list that we know as the Seven Deadly Sins to this day. The order represents their ranking. In The Book of Morals they are listed in descending order from worst to least, in the later revised version they would be listed in ascending order. Although his criteria for determining the hierarchy of sin differed from that of the Neoplatonists the result was largely the same. Subsequent lists of the Seven Deadly Sins have varied the order. Sometimes they are listed in ascending order, sometimes in descending, other times whether in ascending or descending order there are slight changes in the ranking reflecting differences of opinion as to what is worse than what. Consistently, however, from the Neoplatonists and St. Evagrius to St. Gregory the Great to Dante to us today, Pride has been considered the worst of all.
While the Seven Deadly Sins are a later theological construct and so are not listed as such in the Bible it is difficult to argue with the contention that the ranking of Pride as the worst of all sins is Biblical. A search of the Bible for a use of the word that is positive or even neutral yields little in the way of fruit. The first occurrence of the word and the only occurrence in the Pentateuch is found in Leviticus 26:19 in which the LORD, telling the Israelites what He will do to them if they do not obey His commandments, says that “I will break the pride of your power”. In the historical books, David’s brother claims to know David’s Pride (1 Sam. 17:28) in what is clearly not intended as a compliment and Pride is what King Hezekiah has to repent and humble himself from (2 Chron. 32:26) . In the Psalms Pride is consistently the characteristic of the wicked (10:2,4; 36:11; 59:12). In Proverbs Pride is hated by the LORD and those who fear Him (8:13), brings with it shame (11:2), contention (13:10), destruction and a fall (16:18), is in the mouth of the foolish (14:3) and will bring him low (29:23). In the Prophets Pride is something that brings the judgement of God upon a people whether it be Israel (Is. 28:1, 3 – Ephraim, from which tribe the ruling dynasty of the Northern Kingdom came, is used here as it often is to signify the schismatic Kingdom as a whole), Moab (Is. 16:6), or Judah (Jer. 13:9). In the book of Daniel it is what brings judgement on Nebuchadnezzar (5:20). There is only one verse in the Old Testament in which the word Pride could possibly be taken in a sense less negative than those we have already looked at. We shall consider it after looking at the New Testament references which are few. In the New Testament, Pride is absolutely, unambiguously evil. In Mark 7:22 it is one of the evil things that come from within a man and defile him. In 1 John 2:16 the “pride of life” is one of the three things that make up “the world” in the sense of the system organized against God. In 1 Tim. 3:6 St. Paul warns St. Timothy against the ordination of a novice “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil”. Here the Apostle associates Pride with the devil, a traditional association which is the reason why the one verse in the Old Testament that could possibly be taken as neutral probably should not be so taken. The verse is Job 41:15 which begins with “his scales are his pride”. His in this passage refers to Leviathan. Leviathan was the name of a creature conceived of as a sea serpent or sea dragon. When the Old Testament speaks of him it is invariably speaking about Satan. The enemy of God makes his first appearance as a serpent in Genesis. In Revelation the Dragon is identified as that serpent of old, the devil and Satan. In Isaiah 27:1 Leviathan the sea serpent is clearly Satan. There is no reason to think that the Leviathan of Job is any different, especially when the chapter goes on to describe him as “king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:34), and the structure of the book as a whole rather demands that a reference to Satan be made precisely at this point. The reference to his Pride in verse 15, therefore, cannot be taken as an exception to the rule that Pride is always a bad thing in the Bible.
The verses we looked at in the previous paragraph are verses that use words rendered “Pride” in our Authorized Bible. The related adjective “proud” is used slightly more often than the noun. The noun can be found in 46 verses, the adjective in 47, but these support the picture of Pride that one gets from the verses that use the noun. Several of them, for example, use the adjective as a substantive, “the proud”, who might as well be called “the wicked” as they are always referred to as people whom God “resisteth” or hath otherwise set Himself against. Needless to say verses that use synonyms that are translated “haughty”, “arrogant”, and the like, provide additional support.
Now it might be argued that all of this merely proves that Pride is bad, not that it is the worst of evils. The traditional view that it is the worst of sins was derived in a number of ways. To the Neoplatonists it was the worst because it was the ultimate sin of the mind, the sins of the mind being worse than the sins of the soul, which in turn are worse than the sins of the body, because the mind is higher than the soul which is higher than the body. For St. Gregory the Great it was the worst because it offended the most against Love. One can only image what St. Gregory would have thought if he could have looked ahead in time to the day when multitudes would march under the banner of Pride chanting the tautological mantra “love is love”. Scripturally, Pride’s being the worst of sins is derived from it literally being the Original Sin, the source of all others. There are two ways in which this is the case. The one, clearly found in the Bible, is that Pride led to the Fall of Man. The serpent’s temptation of Eve in the Garden was temptation to Pride. “Ye shall be as gods”, i.e., like God Himself. That the serpent – the serpent of old who is the Devil and Satan – would tempt man with Pride, provides support for the traditional view that Pride is what was behind his own Fall. In the traditional view, the devil started out as Lucifer, a high ranking angel in heaven, who became the first liberal, or Whig to use Dr. Johnson’s parlance, urging his fellow angels to support him in his rebellious bid to overthrow the Sovereign King of the universe, God, and establish a cosmic democratic republic with him as its head. His rebellion failed but the Cosmic Cromwell became the cruel tyrant of all who followed him in rejecting the King of the universe, setting the pattern for all subsequent human liberal democratic republicanism. There is no explicit account of the origin of Satan in the Old Testament as there is of the Fall of Man but it is inferred from passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel where human rulers are spoken to in such a way as to suggest that the supernatural evil behind them is who is truly being addressed. The explicit account is found in the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation. The point is that Pride is believed to have been what motivated the rebellion. This is based on St. Paul’s words to St. Timothy and what can be inferred from Isaiah 14.
In the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek made by seventy Jewish scholars for Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt and which became the Christian Old Testament, the Wisdom of Solomon says that “through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it” (Wis. 2:24). This is not discussing the cause of Satan’s Fall but his motivation in tempting man. Envy, however, is closely related to Pride. It refers to hating someone else for having something you don’t or being something you aren’t so much that you seek to destroy that person. In the standard list of the Seven Deadly Sins it stands next to Pride. On the one end of the list are the vices which are classic Aristotelian vices – ordinary human appetites indulged in to excess. Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth fall into this category. On the other end of the list are the vices that are Satanic in nature. Pride and Envy fall into this category. Wrath either belongs with Pride and Envy or is the middle ground between the two categories. Some have produced lists in which Avarice rather than Envy stands next to Pride. I suspect this to be the result of crackpot left-wing ideas infiltrating theological circles. Avarice is the vice associated with capitalism. Envy is the vice associated with socialism. One can be a businessman, or at least one used to be able to be a businessman in the days before globalism, multi-national corporations, tech giants and media conglomerates, without succumbing to Avarice. One cannot be a socialist without embracing Envy for Envy is the essence of socialism, its sine qua non, the spirit that moves it and motivates it.
Many would say that there is a good Pride and a bad Pride and that everything said above pertains to the bad Pride. This is an Aristotelian concept, at least if we regard Pride as a proper translation of μεγαλοψυχία from book four of his Nicomachean Ethics. That this is a proper translation is rather doubtful. Liddell and Scott give as their first definition of it “greatness of soul, highmindedness, lordliness” and even “generosity”. “Greatness of soul” is what you get when you split the word into its components and literally translate each of them. Unfortunately, what you get when you transliterate the word is megalopsychia, which sounds like it describes a mental condition that will get you locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane. This is not the word translated Pride in the New Testament. In Mark 7:22 the word is ὑπερηφανία, in 1 John 2:12 it is ἀλαζονεία, in 1 Timothy 3:6 the phrase in which it occurs is in Greek the single word τυφωθείς. ὑπερηφανία, a compound formed from the word for “over” and the word for “shine”, basically means self-promoting arrogance. This is the word that is used for Pride in the early Greek versions of what would become the Seven Deadly Sins. Its adjectival form occurs five times in the New Testament, in three instances being used substantively to mean “the proud” and in the other two used as “proud” in lists of attributive adjectives, all of which are negative. The primary meaning of ἀλαζονεία is “false pretension, imposture” from which the meaning of “boastfulness” is derived, which is its meaning in the Scriptural text. Τυφωθείς, rendered “being lifted up with pride” in the Authorized Bible, is a passive aorist participle form of the verb τυφόω which in the active voice means to “delude”, but when it is used in the passive voice indicates that the subject of the verb is “crazy, demented”. Liddell and Scott give as more specific versions of the passive meaning “demented, rendered vain” and “filled with insane arrogance”. Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία does not appear in the New Testament and it would be difficult to take the word as he uses and describes it as a synonym for any of the New Testament words for Pride, although it would also be difficult to argue that it is consistent with humility, which both Testaments stress is something God insists upon among the faithful. Liddell and Scott do give a second definition, noting that the word can be used in a bad sense, in which case they render it “arrogance”, which of course, would be a synonym for the New Testament words for Pride. Those today who would distinguish between a good Pride and a bad Pride seldom have anything like what Aristotle meant by μεγαλοψυχία in mind. What they think of good Pride is something along the lines of “an honest and non-inflated sense of achievement or accomplishment” or “thinking well, but not too highly, of oneself”.
The Pride that our civilization has decided in its apostasy and decadence to celebrate every June, however, bears no resemblance to either these more modest redefinitions of Pride or to Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία. Observe the way in which those who celebrate Pride now demand that everyone else do so as well. Public figures, even if they do not actively speak against Pride but merely do not speak in favour of it, do not march in its parades, do not wave its flag perverted from the sign God gave the world as a token of His Covenant never to send a world-destroying Flood again in defiance of Him and ignorance of its full implications (1), and are basically deemed insufficiently supportive, find themselves in a position eerily similar to the person in the Soviet Union who was the first to stop clapping after one of Stalin’s boring harangues. This “you must support us or be destroyed” attitude is hardly consistent with either a modest rather than inflated positive feeling about yourself and your accomplishments or Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία which can be translated “generosity” or “magnitude”, i.e., the opposite of the attitude in question. It is, however, very consistent with another Greek word that is often associated with Aristotle, albeit with his writings on rhetoric and Greek tragedy more than his Ethics. This is the word ὕβρις. Transliterated as hubris this word continues to be used in English today.
The primary meaning of ὕβρις provided by Liddell and Scott is “wanton violence, insolence”. They provide an explanation of this definition in which they clarify that the violence arises out of the Pride of strength or of passion. Think of someone who thinks that because he is strong he can walk all over those who are weaker – a bully would be a good example – and you have a pretty good picture of what is meant by it. Aristotle identified it as foremost example of a character flaw – interestingly he used a word that has the basic meaning of “failure, fault” that in the New Testament is the primary word for sin – that in tragedy, brings about the fall of the hero. ὕβρις is not used often in the New Testament. It occurs three times and in our Authorized Bible is translated “hurt”, “harm” and “reproaches”, i.e., designating the acts that spring from the attitude rather than the attitude itself. In the LXX, however, it is frequently used for Pride. It is used alongside ὑπερηφανία in Leviticus 26:19 when the LORD says that He will break the “pride of your power”. Rather fittingly considering its association with a fall in Aristotle and popular ancient Greek thought it is also used in the LXX of Proverbs 16:18 and is the Pride those who fear the Lord are enjoined to hate in Proverbs 8:13.
This word so appropriately describes the attitude that is on display in the celebrations of Pride that I humbly suggest it be used instead to clarify more precisely what is being celebrated.
(1) The “bow” in “rainbow” is not the bow you tie around your neck or in the strings of your shoes but the “bow” that an archer uses. The Latin word for bow is arcus, from which the words archer, arch, and arc are derived. Arch is an architectural device that shares the shape of the weapon which is also the shape of the sign that appears in the sky after it rains. An arc is a curve in geometry. The kind of artificial rainbow that is sometimes produced by passing light through a prism is often called an arc. Welding arcs and electrical arcs are also so-named for their curved, bow-like, shape. When Genesis records the LORD’s covenant with Noah and His placing His “bow” in the sky as His promise never to destroy the world in a Flood again, the word for “bow” is קֶשֶׁת which denotes the weapon and which like its English equivalents is derived from a verb meaning “bend”. The significance of this sign is that LORD was hanging up His bow, i.e., putting it away never to use it again. Also implied, however, in the use of the image of a weapon as the sign, is a warning not to behave in the way that brought the judgement of the Deluge in the first place. — Gerry T. Neal : Aristotle, Dante Alighieri, Dr. Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Neoplatonism, Pride, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Basil, St. Evagrius Ponticus, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas
Indian Lobbyist Wants to Make Questioning Residential School Claims A Criminal Offence & Justice Lametti Seems to Agree
In this age, victimhood is a prize commodity.. With it, a group can induce guilt into tenderhearted Europeans and with guilt comes entitlement and money. The organized Jewish lobby from the 1970s on, used the story of their sufferings in World War II — the so-called holocaust — to pry immense sums of money from Germany. (Germany just allocated another $1.5-billion to survivors. It’s been 78 years since the end of WW II!)
Guilt, though is a useful tool. The press is immensely sympathetic to Jewish interests. Canadians are meant to feel guilty about the so-called holocaust even though it didn’t happen here, it didn’t happen to Canadians, and Canada didn’t do it. Indeed, Canada fought against those who caused Jewish suffering.
Nevertheless, we have Holocaust Remembrance Day and Month and a Holocaust Monument. So powerful has this guilt tripping been that the holocaust has become almost a religion imposed by Western elites that sneer at Christianity.
However, there were soon pesky questions challenging the numbers and many other claims of the victim narrative from some former detention camp inmates (Rassinier), from scientists (Leuchter, Butz, Faurrison, Luftl, Rudolf) and historians (Irving) The power of the guilt message depends on emotionalism. Rational questions are disruptive.
So, the victim group demands that any questioning of its victim narrative be silenced or criminalized. Questioning the Hollywood version of World War II can get you five years in prison in Germany and many other European countries.Last year, Trudeau, he who smashed the peaceful Truckers’ Freedom Convoy with the Emergencies Act and who is no friend of free speech, snuck amendments into the budget criminalizing holocaust denial. No Member of Parliament opposed this gutting of free speech. The holocaust is now an imposed state religion in Canada. It is beyond historical or scientific discussion or skepticism. It must be believed, if one is doubtful, the skeptic must keep silent.
Well, now a spokesman for another entitled group, native Indians, is demanding that questioners of that group’s guilt narrative be silenced.
The guilt narrative suggests that Europeans abused and dispossessed the native people. oF COURSE, there certainly were frictions in the relations between the European founding/settler people of Canada and Native Indians.
The residential schools set up to educate Indian children — to help move them from the Stone Age to the edge of the Modern Age in one generation — were really attempts at genocide, oh, well, not real genocide, but cultural genocide, according to former Chief Justice Beverley McLaughlin. The Harper Government apologized and shovelled out billions of dollars in compensation. The the guilt just keeps on giving. Trudeau has flung more money under various guises to Indians. Then, two years ago a propaganda bonanza occurred. The Kamloops band said that ground penetrating radar had found what might have been 216 graves near a former residential school. The press was is full guilt-mongering propaganda mode. The finding was dubbed “mass graves”, suggesting an undignified one-time burial, perhaps even extermination. Two years later, no further investigation has occurred. Are there even graves there; if so, who is in those graves and how, if it can be determined, did they die?
The irrational guiltmongering allowed the wrecking crew who hate Old Stock Canadians et quebecois de souche to tear down statues including of Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, to rename buildings and even institutions. Ryerson University, named after the father of education in Ontario, was renamed Metropolitan University and a statue of Egerton Ryerson was vandalized and beheaded. The head was later found on the Six Nations Reservation near Brantford. No charges were laid. Over 50 Christian churches were vandalized or destroyed or damaged by arson. Belatedly, Justin Trudeau said he did not condone the arson but said he understood.; Almost no charges have been laid in these attacks one of which destroyed a Coptic Christian church in Vancouver. The Copts came to Canada from Egypt AFTER the last residential school closed.
Our history needs rational discussion. If individual Indians were abused or assaulted by all means charge the perpetrators, if still alive.
However, as with the holocaust, discussion and questioning is not what is wanted. It would interrupt and dampen the very profitable guilt narrative. Thus, “Canada should give “urgent consideration” to legal mechanisms as a way to combat residential school denialism, said a Friday report from [Kimberly Murray] the independent special interlocutor on unmarked graves.
Justice Minister David Lametti said he is open to such a solution. …
In her interim report, Murray raised concerns about increasing attacks from “denialists” who challenge communities when they announce the discovery of possible unmarked graves.
‘This violence is prolific,”’ the report said. ‘And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations’.” (Canadian Press, June 16, 2023)
Notice that e-mail comments, post on social media and op eds are now labelled as “violence.”
No discussion or criticism is to be allowed: Just hang your head in guilt and shame and pay up! — Paul Fromm
These are reasonable questions.
Canada should consider legal solution to fight residential school denialism: special interlocutor
Kimberly Murray wants to see tougher action on residential school denialism
Kimberly Murray, Special Interlocuter at the first meeting for the National Gathering for Unmarked Burials
Canada should give “urgent consideration” to legal mechanisms as a way to combat residential school denialism, said a Friday report from the independent special interlocutor on unmarked graves.
Justice Minister David Lametti said he is open to such a solution.
Kimberly Murray made the call in her newly released interim report, just over a year after she was appointed to an advisory role focused on how Ottawa can help indigenous communities search for children who died and disappeared from residential schools.
Her final report is due next year and is expected to contain recommendations.
The former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada spent much of the past year travelling the country and hearing from different communities, experts and survivors.
The Liberal government created her role as it looked for ways to respond to First Nations from across Western Canada and in parts of Ontario using ground-penetrating radar to search former residential school sites for possible unmarked graves.
In her interim report, Murray raised concerns about increasing attacks from “denialists” who challenge communities when they announce the discovery of possible unmarked graves.
“This violence is prolific,” the report said. “And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations.”
Murray listed several examples, including after the May 2021 announcement by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation that ground-penetrating radar had discovered what are believed to be 215 unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The findings garnered international media attention and triggered an outpouring of grief, shock and anger from across the country, both in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.
Murray said in her report that on top of dealing with an onslaught of media attention, the First Nation in British Columbia had to deal with individuals entering the site itself.
“Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there. Denialists also attacked the community on social media.”
Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir of Tk’emlups te Secwepemc said she no longer uses social media without heavy filters because of the intensity of the “hate and racism” she experienced, according to the report, and believes the issue needs more attention…
Murray said Canada has a role to play to combat this sentiment and that “urgent consideration” should be given to what legal tools exist to address the problem, including both civil and criminal sanctions.
Lametti, who appointed Murray to her role, said that he is open to all possibilities to fighting residential-school denialism.
He said that includes “a legal solution and outlawing it,” adding some countries have criminalized denial of the Holocaust during the Second World War.
The federal government followed suit last year, amending the Criminal Code to say someone could be found guilty if they wilfully promote antisemitism “by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”
The measure does not apply to private conversations.
NDP MP Leah Gazan has also called for Parliament to legislate residential school denialism as hate speech.
“I recognize the damage denialism does,” Lametti said Friday as he joined the event in Cowessess First Nation by video conference.”
The Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III is set for this Saturday, the sixth of May. As this event, the peak of the ceremony surrounding the accession of our new Sovereign, has grown nearer, the woodworks have released a fairly predictable swarm of vermin intent on spoiling things as much as they can. Liberal Party bureaucrats circumventing proper procedure to quietly commission changes to our royal symbols to make them less evocative of tradition. Special interest groups trying to make what should be a solemn yet celebratory occasion embodying unity, stability, and continuity for each of His Majesty’s realms and for the whole Commonwealth, as was the Coronation of His Majesty’s late mother, all about them. Left-wing journalists calling our institution of monarchy “outdated” and “archaic”, which it, being timeless, can never be, suggesting that we “severe our ties” to it as if it were something external and not integral to our constitution, and defaming both the monarchy and our country as a whole by insisting that our history be read through the distorting lens of BIPOC racial grievance politics. Sadly, these latter have found a strange bedfellow in the person of Maxime Bernier, the leader of what they would absurdly describe as the “far right” People’s Party of Canada. For me, this last means that come the next Dominion election I will have one less option to vote for. While on most things, perhaps everything except this, where Bernier’s views differ from those of the present leadership of the Conservative Party I agree with Bernier, this is a deal breaker. No small-r republican will ever have my support, no matter how right he is on other things.
Bernier has allowed his objections to Charles the person blind him with regards to monarchy the institution. His objections to Charles have to do with the king’s views on certain controversial points. Our prime minister, Justin Trudeau is far further removed from Bernier’s views on these same points – and many others as well – than is our king. Imagine if Bernier had tweeted that because of his objections to Trudeau we should replace parliament with something else. This would be recognized instantly as a terrible suggestion. Yet the same bad reasoning – get rid of the institution because of objections to the person – is worse in the case of what Bernier actually said. The monarchy is a non-political – in the sense of party politics – office. It is therefore much worse to attack the institution because of objections to the officeholder based on partisan political views in the case of the monarchy than in the case of parliament and the prime minister.
It is because he approaches monarchy from the standpoint of Modern democratic assumptions – yes, populist nationalist assumptions, comically labelled right-wing by those seemingly unaware that the original right was anything but populist and nationalist, are Modern democratic assumptions, well within the boundaries of historical liberalism – that Bernier makes the basic blunder of failing to recognize that it is because the monarchy is non-democratic that it is non-political and that it is because it is non-political that it can both stand above partisan politics as a beacon of unity and serve as an anchor of stability for parliamentary government in the turbulent sea of Modern democratic politics, an institution far more important and valuable even than its ancient democratic complement of parliament, which only the basest of fools would want to mess with.. This mistake can be categorized with others common to those who have so imbibed the basic assumptions of the Modern Age that they simply cannot think outside that box and find it painful to even try. These mistakes all involve prioritizing that which, important as it may be to the moment, is fleeting and ephemeral, over that which is fixed, stable, permanent, and lasting. This is the consequence of turning our backs on the consensus of the wisdom of all of human tradition until yesterday and deciding that the marketplace is a better model for the whole of society than the family.
When we speak of stability and permanence with regards to human institutions, of course, we are referring to these qualities to the extent that they can be possessed by anything in our earthly, mortal, existence. Monarchy is the state institution that has demonstrated the largest capacity for such. Family is the most permanent social institution. While I am referring to family in the general sense of “the family”, the oldest and most universal social institution, specific families also have much longer lifespans than the individuals who belong to them in any generation. We are born into families that have been around a lot longer than us and, until very recently at any rate, those families raised us to behave in ways that would ensure they would be around long after we are gone, i.e., grow up, get married, have kids, raise those kids to do the same. Like living under the reign of a king whose Sovereignty has passed down to him from those who reigned over generations of our forebears this reminds us that we are not each our own individual selves the centre of the universe around which all else revolves and to whose wills reality must bend the knee. This is a reminder we are in constant need of now more than ever since we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us otherwise.
The recognition that everything is not about us, that we are part of things bigger, more important, and longer lived than ourselves, is, paradoxically, absolutely essential to our growth as individuals, not physical growth of course, but our development into our best possible selves, the selves we are supposed to be, the kind of growth that perfection in the original root meaning of the word points to and which in the language of the ancient thinkers consists of finding and accomplishing to the best of our ability our good, that is to say, our end, our purpose, the reason we are here on this earth. For we cannot find and serve our own small-g good, if we are solipsistic prisoners of our own selves. Our individual small-g goods are not, pace Nietzsche, goods we make for ourselves out of our own wills, but are that within us which answers to big G Goodness. We do not have to be able to conceive of Goodness in philosophical terms, but none of us will ever come near being the best version of ourselves possible without acknowledging Goodness as something that is what it is regardless of what we think, say, or do about it and something to which our will must bend rather than vice versa.
Goodness is often spoken of in connection with Beauty and Truth, both of which like Goodness are what they are regardless of us and to which our wills must bend. These are stable and permanent in the absolute sense. In philosophy and theology they are called the Transcendentals, which term means “the properties of being, i.e., that which is to existence itself what “red” is to “apple”, but as has already been stated, a philosophical understanding of these things is hardly necessary. The important thing to understand is that we don’t have a say in what Goodness, Truth and Beauty are and that we are to conform ourselves to these rather than to try to force them to conform to our will.
We live in a time when we are suffering the consequences of having done the exact opposite on a massive scale. Take Beauty for an example. Our cities look as one would expect them to after a century or so of architects and city engineers designing buildings and streets with the idea that Beauty must take backseat to utility. Our countrysides, while not affected as badly as our cities, show the scarring one would expect when those responsible for projects that affect the countryside share the same priorities as the aforementioned architects and city engineers. Is it any wonder, with such disregard for Beauty being shown by the engineers responsible for city and country alike, that so many others add to the problem by strewing garbage all over both? We have art and music that looks and sounds like what one would expect from a century or so of sculptors, painters, and composers who no longer saw the primary purpose of their vocation as being to create works of Beauty but to “express themselves” and “reach the people” even if that meant shocking them with ugliness. Bernier’s objections to Charles the person are based on His Majesty’s life-long outspoken environmentalism which, in the minds of Bernier and many who think like him, make His Majesty into someone like Bill Gates or Al Gore. Even if His Majesty was that type it would still be utter folly to wish to abolish the office of the monarchy because of such a quirk in the present officeholder, but it is also an ill-informed misjudgment of His Majesty. His environmentalism began as countryside conservationism rooted in his love of the Beauty of the countryside. His love for Beauty has manifested itself in a similar outspokenness with regards to the other things discussed in this paragraph. It would be difficult to read his defense of older buildings and architectural styles and his biting criticism of modernism and functionalism as anything other than a deep traditionalism. Similarly, if you consider everything he has said and done with regards to environmentalism instead of focusing in only on climate-related matters, it is quite evident that he is more of a Wendell Berry than a Bill Gates.
Late last week a bill cleared parliament, the first of several planned by the current Liberal government, that will have the effect of severely limiting Canadians access to Truth by giving the government the same, or even stronger, control over alternative sources of information online that they already exercise over the traditional media. This is not, of course, how the prime minister and his cult of followers talk about what they are doing. They say that this first bill is intended to protect “Canadian content” on online streaming services. They say with regards to their internet legislation as a whole that they are trying to protect Canadians from “online harms” such as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “hate”. If one were to make the mistake of taking this language literally and seriously one could be fooled into thinking that it is the opposite of Truth that the government is trying to keep from Canadians for “misinformation” and “disinformation” as these words are properly used mean information that is false. The Liberals, however, use these words to mean information that disagrees with whatever narrative they happen to be promoting at that moment and since that narrative is almost inevitably false it is Truth that ends up being censored as “misinformation” or “disinformation”. A Ministry of Truth never promotes Truth, it only suppresses it. It is always a bad idea, but especially so when coming from someone like our prime minister who never tells the Truth when a lie will suffice. Only a few days before the Online Streaming Act passed he told an audience that he never forced anyone to get a vaccination. This was a rather audacious lie considering there were not many world leaders worse than him when it came to imposing vaccines on millions by preventing anyone without one from having any sort of a normal existence. Many opposed this bill and will continue to fight it, in the courts if need be, and to his credit Bernier is a leading example of these. This was done, however, in the name of freedom of speech, and freedom of speech was championed, not because of its necessity to Truth (without freedom of speech, including the freedom to speak that which is false, we do not have the freedom to speak Truth, the parallel to the classical theological argument that without Free Will, including the ability to choose evil, we do not have the ability to choose the Good) but because it violated our individual rights. I don’t deny that individual rights are important, but they are a liberal value, and like all liberal values their importance is greatly exaggerated in this age. Truth is more important. Sir Roger Scruton wrote “beauty is an ultimate value – something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations”. (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011) Imagine how different the fight against the Liberal Party’s plans to seize control of what we can say or see online would be if those fighting fought first and foremost in the name of Truth, the permanent and lasting value, and framed their arguments accordingly.
My hope and prayer for Max Bernier is that his eyes will be opened and that he will come to see that as important as all the things he has been fighting for are, what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”, both the truly permanent ultimate values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and the relatively permanent concrete human institutions such as the family and in the political sphere parliament and especially the monarchy which point us to those ultimate values, are more important and that he will repent of having allowed his minor objections to Charles the person to attack the monarchy and espouse small-r republicanism. Until such time, he will have to do what he does without my support.
On Family Day, a celebration called Family Fringy Day took place on a private farm somewhere between Hamilton and Cambridge, Ont.
The guest of honour: Christine Anderson, the German MEP, who is a quite the celebrity in some circles in Canada given her on-going criticism of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Given the freedom fighters in attendance, Anderson was unsurprisingly given a hero’s welcome at the farm when she arrived as a passenger in a big rig. She was greeted with cheers and was quite moved by the display of both Canadian and German flags.
This primary purpose of the event was meant to commemorate last year’s Ottawa Freedom Convoy. At first blush, it seemed odd that this gathering took place on a private farm closer to Steeltown than our capital city. But then again, we’ve seen how the Trudeau Liberals react to peaceful protests that run contrary to their censorious agenda.
Which is to say, this government has no problem fining, arresting, and freezing the bank accounts of Canadians in order to shut down demonstrations that they dislike. Alas, it would appear that freedom of expression in Canada is on the endangered species list; many Liberals, no doubt, would like to see it extinct.
While we would like to report that a good time was had by all, when it comes to those on the left who look upon freedom as the new “f-word”, such celebrations are… triggering.
Case in point: check out the jaw-dropping story in Cambridge Today headlined, “Cambridge MP condemns ‘Fringy’ Family Day as dangerous.”
Dangerous? What in the world qualifies a peaceful gathering as “dangerous” in the weird mind of Liberal MP Bryan May?
Nevertheless, May questioned the “true intent” of Family Fringy Day and what it was trying to achieve.
May said:
From the very beginning, the Ottawa occupation and blockades were about anti-government sentiment, more specifically anti-Liberal and anti-Trudeau.
Gracious! Anti-government and anti-Liberal and anti-Trudeau sentiment? Yes, that was the very point of the protest.
It should come as no surprise that May, a loyal Trudeau trained seal, is so tone-deaf. During the outrageous response to the pandemic these past few years, people lost their homes and their jobs and their businesses and were also coerced into taking an experimental vaccine. And May wonders why demonstrators were “anti-Liberal” and “anti-Trudeau”? Give us a break.
No surprise that MP May not only condemned Family Fringy Day but also took a pot-shot at Anderson in his Cambridge Today interview. May stated that Anderson’s “ideology runs contrary to Canadian values.”
Really? Like what?
Luckily, we were able to conduct an interview with Anderson in order to receive a rebuttal to May’s nonsense. She also had plenty to say about the Canadian freedom movement.
Check out our exclusive interview with this German politician who has the courage to call out corruption and chicanery.
