C-293, the Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Act, grants Public Health the power to govern Canadians under the guise of pandemic ‘prevention.’ The Act engages all levels of government and Indigenous communities. It grants omnipotent power to change land use, foods you can eat and even create a government-controlled economy to reduce any ‘risk,’ not further defined, of a Pandemic, not further defined. No term is defined within this Bill, handing dangerously overbroad powers to Public Health.
This Bill allows the World Health Organization (WHO) to make agreements with Public Health directly, attempting to eliminate jurisdiction of the courts and the constitution. It allows Public Health control over communications infrastructure, instituting interlinking surveillance.
Once enacted, C-293 imposes mandatory medical treatments, explicitly controls your personal autonomy, affecting your freedom of movement and privacy, can expropriate farms and other property and relocate rural and urban dwellers (to 15 minute cities), for absurd reasons like ‘deforestation increases the risk of pandemics.’ Even with the absurd grants of power C-293 still gives more powers ‘as appropriate,’ not further defined.
C-293 alters everything we now know about Canada. There is a serious concern that this Bill alone will change forever how Canada is governed. No other bill represents such a clear threat to Canada and the rule of law given the complete absence of definitions of terms coupled with its comprehensive overreach into every aspect of life.
This Bill is on the cusp of being enacted. It has been passed by the House and has had first reading in the Senate. To prevent this dangerous Bill from becoming Canadian law, please take the following actions.
Provincial MLAs and Premieres should have an immediate legal review of the broad jurisdictional assaults of this Federal Bill in order to preemptively go to Court to stop the operation of Bill C-293. They are not protecting our rights in our province when a Federal Bill has totalitarian reach into their Constitutional authority.
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I had not intended to write this essay. I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr. In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines. That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here. Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? – YouTube
Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr. Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.
Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years. The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship. This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation. This is heresy. Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.” This is not the case. If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused. This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary. If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father. The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies. Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas. Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century. Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.
The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ. The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father. Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son. Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it. The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth. It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial. MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century. He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001. The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship. This was not the case a couple of years ago. It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.
MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986. This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ. The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:
The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.
Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”
He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.
And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life.
Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?
There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages. This was emphasized in the early Church. The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us. This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes. There is nothing wrong with that. However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized.
Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating. The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering. Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves. The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9). The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15). It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering. Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned, the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7).
In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28). This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion. The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date. It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices. Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it. However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date. This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation. The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all. Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.
In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far. Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages. When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray. If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”
Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother. John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.” Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature. For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence.
Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity. If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time. This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant. Slaying of animal – Crucifixion. Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle. Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.
One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation. MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy. When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized. Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel. Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation. While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works. In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works. It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed. If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift. This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works. The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective. It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation. The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek. Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did. The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done. It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were. The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one. Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context. The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith.
In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian. How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?
One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988. This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism. MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume. It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however. Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney. MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency. He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.” A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith. Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot. No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.
In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning. Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage. A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives. It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else. MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143). This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not. In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.” However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur. A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence. Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange. Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul. Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140). Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience. It says that true faith is these things. Basic deductive reasoning here. If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z. Obedience and works are the same thing. If faith is obedience then faith is works. If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless. It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book. Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29). Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage.
Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1. True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse. However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.
The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book. When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth. It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth. A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement. That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had. Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8). If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us. Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him. MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it. They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it. Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.
Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism. With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40). This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism. That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium. It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed. Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction. There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith. Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace. Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.
If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome. “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23). This statement is true in what it denies. Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.” It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms. This is because assurance and faith are the same thing. It says so explicitly in the Bible. St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer. Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works. Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works. That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day. John Calvin taught the same thing. Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ. John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“ (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.
MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling. Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars. — Gerry T. Neal
Our society is so dumbed down and indoctrinated that anyone who is a critical thinker is labeled as a Conspiracy Theorist to avoid critical debates
Did you know: The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ was first coined and used by the CIA to ridicule anyone who opposed the gov’t narrative?
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IMPORTANT
It is important to come out on Saturdays to oppose all Gov’t corruption and support others.
Next rally is:
Saturday
October 26, 2024
Are you concerned about the increasing threat of foreign interference and Canada being a hotbed for extremism? If so, then you will not want to miss the upcoming Empower Hour with special guest Tom Quiggin who is a court-qualified expert on terrorism. Tom joins Tanya Gaw to talk about his new book, “The Assassin’s Mace, How Canada Became China’s Weapon to Conquer America”. This is not just a book; it is a wake-up call. To quote from the cover:
In an era where the clash of civilizations is seen through a military lens, an insidious Chinese strategy has emerged. The book explores China’s grand strategy to infiltrate and dominate the West using Canada as an entry point. The Chinese government is smarter while the West, especially Canada, is extremely vulnerable to outside pressures…
Mr. Quiggin has 30 years plus in the Intelligence Service and is an Intelligence Analyst, Security & Operational Risk Manager, and a Research Analyst Expert.
Next Empower Hour: Oct. 23, 2024 with Tom Quiggin: The Art of War
for final hearing on my SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) application to strike the City’s Petition against us. (See the B.C. Protection of Public Participation Act)
CCF files materials in appeal of decision that found use of Emergencies Act against truckers unlawful In case you missed it, the Canadian Constitution Foundation filed its materials recently in the appeal of the Federal Court decision that declared that the Trudeau government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act in February 2022 was unlawful. In a decision released on January 23, 2024, Justice Mosley sided with the Canadian Constitution Foundation and other public interest litigants when he found that the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act was illegal and unconstitutional. It remains just as important now as it did in 2022 to uphold this victory at every level of court the government wants to fight us in. A strong precedent needs to be upheld for when it is and isn’t appropriate to invoke the Act due to how much power this extraordinary law gives governments to sidestep rights and important democratic checks and balances. THANK YOU again to all those who donated in support of this next stage of this case. Your support means this case continues with strong backing from Canadians. We raised over $65,000 on top of the $40,000 matching offer provided by a generous CCF donor. We expect the government to do everything in their power to stop us, and that may include tactics to increase costs and to delay the case, so this amazing support will directly ensure we win again at this higher level of court. Thank you so much. You can find our filed materials for this appeal here, and read our full press release here.
UPDATE! The Emergencies Act Appeal is heading to court!
CCF Litigation Director Christine Van Geyn also released a new YouTube video covering the upcoming appeal described above
Another Legion Branch Caves to LGBTQ Protest & Cancels Free Speech
Victoria Free Speech activist Gordon Watson reports: “Attached is a letter from Meghan Murphy concerning the outrageous way the Canadian Legion grovelled to the weirdos after her very successful event in Victoria Sept 14th. Miss Murphy had rented the room at the Legion in Victoria. where she was telling the truth about how the mental illness of “gender dysphoria” harms children and women. What wonderful irony — the Legion, ostensibly representing people who’d gone to war to defend “core values” … coming down hard AGAINST freedom of speech !
Gordon Watson
Open letter to The Royal Canadian Legion regarding their coerced response to hosting Vancouver Island Speaks We will not accept being libeled, censored, and bullied at every turn, simply for defending the rights of women and kids MEGHAN MURPHY OCT 14
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Disappointingly but predictably, following last month’s Vancouver Island Speaks event in Victoria, local activists launched a harassment campaign against our venue, The Royal Canadian Legion (Trafalgar/Pro Patria Legion Branch 292). The pattern of capitulation is unacceptable, and functions to silence free and fair speech in Canada. We will never stop fighting, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to host events in Canada when venues cave to the bullying and libel of a small but loud minority of activists. Please consider supporting our fight and speech by signing onto our open letter to the Legion. To sign your name to this letter, go to: www.vancouverislandspeaks.org/about ~~~ The Royal Canadian Legion National Headquarters 86 Aird Place
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Ottawa, ON K2L 0A1 October 3rd, 2024 To whom it may concern, On Saturday, September 14, 2024, Vancouver Island Speaks! (VIS) hosted their fifth event in B.C., discussing the debate and issues surrounding gender identity ideology, women’s rights, free speech, and kids’ safety. These events aim to bring a much suppressed, misrepresented, and censored conversation out into the open, and allow Canadians of all stripes to learn more, hear from other community members, and share their views and concerns. All five events have been well-attended, peaceful, and inspiring. In this case, after having lost our first venue, the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 292 in Victoria hosted us. The women who speak on these panels draw from their experiences growing up female in this world, as well as from research, data, and news reports. Most of us never expected to have to fight for our rights and spaces in 2024, as women, nor our right to free expression, as Canadians. We never anticipated having to stand up publicly and insist men not be given access to women’s sports, prisons, shelters and change rooms. We certainly never imagined being protested, vilified, harassed, censored, libelled, and threatened for doing so, painted as criminals by our own “feminist” governments, but here we are. Holding these events has always been a challenge. In every single case, the venues who agree to host us are subject to harassment campaigns, threatened and bullied into cancelling and denouncing our group and message, often without any real understanding of what our message is, and why these small but loud groups demand we be cancelled. While our September 14th event went off without any issue, a small group of local activists sought to pressure the Legion into denouncing us, using fear-mongering and manipulative language, aimed at instilling fear by painting us as “hateful” and dangerous. A sample letter offered by an individual going by the name Lin Robinson-Young as a template for activists read: To the Royal Canadian Legion, its Members, and its Leadership: I am writing to you as a member and/or ally of the 2SLGBTQI+ community. I was deeply hurt to hear that on Saturday, September 14th, 2024, the Victoria branch of the Royal Canadian Legion hosted a panel focused on perpetuating hateful
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anti-transgender rhetoric at an event hosted by “Vancouver Island Speaks” called “Surgeries, Sports & Speech in Tranada”. This panel represented yet another attack on the rights of our transgender community members, and the Legion’s decision to host this event fails to align with your June 3rd, 2019 commitment to not affiliate with groups that promote hatred or violence toward protected groups including on the basis of gender, or your website’s core values, which include being “supportive, inclusive, courteous and fair to all”. The allowance of the Legion for this panel to be hosted at the Legion’s Victoria Branch betrays the trust of 2SLGBTQI+ people in Victoria and in Canada overall. How are we meant to trust an organization that is willing to host a panel promoting hate speech against our transgender siblings, parents, and children? Transgender people remain a deeply vulnerable population – even in Canada, transgender people experience more physical and sexual violence and report worse mental health statuses than cisgender people (Statistics Canada 2018). Even the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warned us in February of this year that “extremists could “inspire and encourage” serious violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community” (Tunney 2024). The featured panelists at the hateful event hosted at the Victoria Legion building included Meghan Murphy, a transphobic internet personality who was banned from X for violating rules prohibiting hate speech against trans people; Mia Hughes, founder of “caWsbar”, an “advocacy group” which is “focused on one issue: denying trans people rights” (McArdle 2023); Linda Blade, who says that trans athletes “harm […] female athletes” and pose an “almost existential threat” to cisgender athletes (2021); Bryony Dixon, who “publicly stated transitioning threatens queer youth, specifically gay children, and that medically prescribed hormone blockers to ease gender dysphoria “castrates” children” (Morton, 2023); and Magdalena Huston, who is associated with Murphy and characterizes transgender people’s self-realizations as “social contagion” (Huston 2024). Our 2SLGBTQI+ community must assume that by hosting this event, these fair-right, anti-transgender viewpoints must align with that of the Royal Canadian Legion unless
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otherwise indicated. In fact, one of our Victoria community members called the Victoria branch yesterday while the panel was taking place and had a conversation that seemingly endorses this: “The guy on the phone says he was a bartender. I told them that they are hosting a hate group. Guy said ‘no, we are renting out a room – whatever they do up there is not our business.’ I asked ‘Would you rent out to Nazis?’ and he said ‘Sure, if they were paying.’” In these times where Canada’s social progress is threatening to reverse itself, we as allies and members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community look to organizations such as yourselves to not only refuse to aid and abet hateful rhetoric against our community, but to actively include us and fight for our right to exist, just as our veterans fought for. I therefore urge you not only to denounce the Sept 14 event and its organizers and to formally apologize to the 2SLGBTQI+ community for hosting a group that promoted hate toward us, but to make and announce a public donation to the Victoria Pride Society as a gesture of support and good will. Sincerely, [Name] Sources: www.them.us/story/megan-murphy-terf-twitter-lawsuit www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/never-give-up-never-surrender www.transgendermap.com/issues/topics/media/mia-hughes/ www.maelys.bio/2023/06/anti-trans-mob-in-ottawa/ https://thediscourse.ca/nanaimo/nanaimo-fringe-festival-director-steps-down www.threads.net/@magdalenahuston/post/C-s-cLSSvuw www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article/00009-eng.htm www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-lgbtq-warning-violence-1.7114801 https://web.archive.org/web/20240323014905/https://legion.ca/news/2019/06/03/legi on-r eleases-hate-group-policy https://web.archive.org/web/20240829103013/https://rcl292.ca/our-branch/about- page.php?id=32
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www.facebook.com/JodieGastel/postspfbid028FZFyJYLWStqQNqmRTM2Fx6 This letter, and others like it, including one from an activist named Tressa Brotsky, asked the Trafalgar/Pro Patria Legion to apologize for having hosted our event in order to “show compassion to and for trans people and their families and communities.” In her letter, Brotsky claimed that the aim of VIS is to “limit the rights and health of vulnerable people, and specifically to try to stop access to life-saving healthcare for children and youth of all sexes and genders.” This is a wildly defamatory statement. In truth, we aim to protect the health of children and vulnerable people and aim to raise the alarm about the wide-ranging harms of so-called “gender medicine” and surgeries on minors who are not able to consent to such life-altering decisions, nor are they fully informed of the irreversible consequences of these treatments. Brodsky cites previous unwarranted cancellations of our bookings at other venues as justification for the Legion to cancel this one and to reject future bookings, writing: A number of business [sic] have cancelled their booking with Vancouver Island Speaks once they discovered that the charisma and half-disclosures of Meghan Murphy and organizers mask their fundamental belief that trans people should not be allowed equal healthcare or to exist in Canada. Not only are the letters and public statements made about our group, directed at the Legion and other venues, defamatory, but they are chock-full of medical misinformation; ideologically driven, with no basis in fact or science; and hyperbolic, inserting motivations that only exist in the imaginations of the authors. The aim of these activists is to frighten people into compliance by implying we aim to harm rather than help (and to simply have open, honest debate), bullying organizations into cancelling our events, denouncing our group, and refusing future bookings. This behaviour is authoritarian, undemocratic, and insulting to our veterans and the aim of the Royal Legion of Canada. The truth is that no venue has cancelled VIS events because they disagree with our views or beliefs. Venues have cancelled or denounced us because they have been terrorized, threatened, harassed, bullied, and, in the words of our last venue managers, “abused” by these activists and their supporters. Venues and staff are confused and reasonably frightened. In response to Brotsky’s letter, the Branch Manager of the Trafalgar/ProPatria Legion, Lorrie Weston, wrote via email :
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I am Deeply ashamed and distraught over the group that was in attendance on Saturday, September 14th, 2024. I understood this group to be a non-profit focusing on current woman’s issue. There is in NO Way that the Legion supports the beliefs of this group. We have been and always will be here to support all military and all those who serve or have served. There are not enough words to convey our deep sadness over this and apologize profusely to those who were hurt by this. Activists took this private email and began sharing it as a “public statement” from the Legion about the “anti-trans event held at their venue.” When one of our organizers called the legion to ask for clarification on the statement, she was told that the branch manager “had repercussions from the Navy base, as well as from our head, BC Yukon command and Ottawa.” Weston told us she had been ordered to “issue an apology that if we’ve hurt anybody’s feelings as a result, like, that I am completely distraught and ashamed that people would think that of our Legion.” The immediate capitulation of the Legion to the activists’ J’accuse! is emblematic of these activist tactics, which have been used to assail us for years — to censor our speech, libel us, and to ensure that the Canadian public does not hear our concerns, or is misled and misinformed about our just, fair, and reasonable concerns and views. We support and advocate for the rights and protections of women and girls in Canada and across the globe. We are Canadians committed to human rights and the values of a liberal democracy. We support free speech, child safeguarding, and ethical, evidence-based, approaches to health care. We advocate for compassionate, ethical treatment of all Canadians, especially of minors who struggle with body image, mental health issues, and the natural and often distressing experience of puberty. We are grateful to the Royal Canadian Legion for hosting our event. Every member of our volunteer security team are veterans. Holding our event at a Legion has profound significance to them. They fought for the rights we now enjoy in liberal democracies and know all too well what happens to women and girls in places that do not enjoy those rights. Our security team — again, veterans — supports our work by protecting us from activists like those who
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contacted you, as they seek to cause us harm. Not emotional harm — real, physical harm. Meghan Murphy, for example, has been threatened with violence for nearly a decade for speaking out in defense of women’s sex-based rights. She has received death threats, been stalked, and has been attacked in public. She requires bodyguards, security, and a police presence almost every time she speaks in public as a result. This is not an uncommon experience for those of us who are critical of gender identity ideology and its harms. It is the norm and it is shameful. Tactics employed by these activists include: intimidation, threats of violence, threats of sexual assault and rape, targeting employment, actual physical attacks, and criminalization. They target women in particular, knowing we are vulnerable. Women and girls remain a deeply vulnerable population globally — even in Canada. Women experience physical and sexual violence at disproportionate rates (Statistics Canada 2018). Female inmates are particularly vulnerable, often with histories of trauma, poverty, addiction, mental health issues; they come from marginalized communities and harsh backgrounds, yet are now being incarcerated with violent male sex offenders, with no way to advocate for themselves. The letter template used by some of the activists who contacted you cites a statement published on June 3rd, 2019, with regard to “hate groups.” The letter argues that “your decision to host this event fails to align with your June 3rd, 2019 commitment to not affiliate with groups that promote hatred or violence toward protected groups including on the basis of gender, or your website’s core values, which include being ‘supportive, inclusive, courteous and fair to all.’” Surely, women and girls fall under the category of “all.” Surely we deserve to be treated fairly and with the same rules and respect as any other group. Surely the Legion stands for women’s rights, and wouldn’t cave to pressure from bullies who threaten our rights, safety, and wellbeing. Surely, the Legion supports women and community members in their efforts to gather and discuss their concerns about the impact of something as controversial as gender identity ideology on women and kids — the most vulnerable among us. VIS events are inclusive — everyone is welcome, provided they don’t endanger or disrupt. Ironically, we are accused of being exclusive, while being excluded ourselves.
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What we do is dangerous, but we continue to fight, at our own risk, with no institutional, corporate, or government support, in the face of constant threats, harassment, and censorship, because preserving women’s rights and protecting kids, as well as defending free speech in Canada is of pivotal importance. More important than our jobs, safety, comfort, or income. The defamation in these letters and social media posts collapse in the face of VIS’s demonstrated value of reality-based analysis, direct communication, and transparency. We invite The Royal Canadian Legion, your members and allies, as well as all interested and concerned Canadians to see for themselves what we have to say, openly, proudly and clearly. We are not ashamed of our words. We urge you to review the footage of our Vancouver Island Speaks events, and determine for yourself whether or not they constitute “hate” and should be cancelled and censored. Sincerely, Meghan Murphy, VIS Organizer, Writer and Podcaster, Founder of Feminist Current
Bryony Dixon, VIS Organizer, Director of Development and Events at Civilization Works
Niki Fortier, VIS Organizer and Royal Canadian Legion member
Linda Blade, PhD Kinesiology, Co-founder of the International Consortium on Female Sport (ICFS) and Board Member of Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar)
Mia Hughes, Director of Genspect Canada and Director of Gender at Civilization Works
Michelle Mackness, Vice Director of Genspect Canada
April Hutchinson, Canadian powerlifter, founder of Keep Female Sports Female XX
Janayh Wright, VIS speaker and businesswoman
Magdalena Huston, VIS speaker
Kim Zander, Women’s Space Vancouver
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Matthew Foxcroft, Business Owner Christopher Shaw, UBC Stuart Parker, Los Altos Institute Kim Goldberg, Author/Poet John Thompson, C.D. Canadian Forces Decoration Kevan Hudson Ingrid Berg, Attendee Scott Geiler, LGB Alliance supporter Sarah Rean Syed Abbas Eric Kaufmann, University of Buckingham Elizabeth Ely, Retired Musician Melanie Bennet Rose Forte Leslie MacMillan Wilma Lawrence, Supporter of free speech Harald Hewett, Attendee Donna Schurman, Concerned citizen Shawn Shirazi, Gays Against Groomers Felicia Rembrandt, Lesbian Suzanne Baril, Freedom Pamela Buffone, Canadian Gender Report Stella O’Malley, Genspect Brian Driscoll Gale Tyler, retired BC teacher Margaret Sherlock Karin Litzcke Dr. Joan Russell, UELAC. RDB self-identified. Michele Kofod Savanah Wright Lorraine Hepting Linda Batten, Retired educator Kate Macdonald, Duncan Businesses owner
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Paul ORorke Ruth Waddell, BScN Bryant Kashmere Jenniffer Millington K Houtby Frank Pluta, Freedom of Speech believer Steven Lay, local business owner Toni Vonk, Gender Dissent Brenda Brooks, Descendant of WW1 and WW2 veterans/Writer Sandra Currie, Women’s Space Vancouver Kristine Anderson, Vancouver Island resident Kelly Constabaris, Adult Human Female Ian Glass, Friend Linda Stone Jacqueline Carstensen
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Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Presidential rival Donald Trump, on the other hand, thinks that people who criticize judges should be jailed, along with anyone who burns an American flag. Photo by The Associated Press
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The U.S. political system is peculiar. While it’s wandered far from its origins, it’s a government based on the principle that people who seek power can’t be trusted, and it’s a democracy rooted in the belief that majorities can be as tyrannical as dictators. Not everybody agrees, of course, including members of the political class who propose to “save the republic” from rivals while rejecting restraints on power.
Last month, former Secretary of State and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry complained that the competing voices of social media make it difficult “in terms of building consensus around any issue” because “people self-select where they go for their news or for their information.”
He fretted that if people prefer a news source that “is sick and has an agenda … our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.” His hope was to overcome this impediment by “winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
The same month, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Americans are spreading what she calls “Kremlin propaganda” and should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged” for their speech. Last week she complained “we lose total control” if online discussions aren’t heavily regulated.
Current presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Harris is vice-president in an administration that tried just that through back channels, leading Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to tell Congress “senior officials from the Biden administration … repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor” discussions about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, wrongly claims ”there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” Robert Reich, the Clinton-era secretary of labour, wants Elon Musk arrested “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) threatened “to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets” after Amazon slapped back at her over tax policy.
This flurry of threats to speech protected by the First Amendment comes from a rogues’ gallery of Democrats who will respond that Donald Trump did it first and that they need to save democracy from his threat. They’re right the GOP presidential hopeful also has a taste for abusing power, though who started it is a judgment call, as is the question of who poses the greatest threat to the republic.
“Burning the American flag, I want to get a law passed … you burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year,” Trump harrumphed in August. It wasn’t the first time he’s called for jailing protesters who use flags as fiery props. He made the same call in July and floated the idea when he was in the White House, even though flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment.
Trump also thinks people who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices “should be put in jail,” as he commented last month (he might want to be careful about that, given his own criticism of the bench).
Also worthy of legal attention, says the former and potential future president, are “lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, & corrupt election officials” involved in what Trump, who claims the 2020 presidential contest was stolen, considers unscrupulous election-related behaviour. They “will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our country.”
Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, wants to ban pornography, though it generally enjoys constitutional protection. Vance’s instincts extend to political opponents. In 2021, Vance asked interviewer Tucker Carlson, “why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation” and other non-profits that pursue left-wing policies on hot-button issues. The veep nominee also wants to “seize the administrative state for our purposes,” replace existing bureaucrats with “our people” and defy the courts if they object.
Florida’s Republican Governor and recent presidential contender, Ron DeSantis, and his party’s lawmakers pushed the Stop WOKE Act to ban controversial racial training adopted by private companies. It was blocked on First Amendment grounds.
If you seek evidence that candidates for public office and political partisans disdain restraints on power when that power is in their hands, and want to punish opponents, there’s plenty of evidence on both sides of the aisle. This would come as no surprise to the founders. During debates over adopting the constitution, James Madison wrote about the balance necessary in designing a government. “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
Madison feared letting majorities run roughshod. “In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign, as in a state of nature where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger,” he warned.
The imperfect result was a constitution that limited government with checks and balances, and a Bill of Rights that forbade officials from interfering with many freedoms. The intent was to let people do and say a good many things that officials don’t like but are powerless to prevent or punish. It goes without saying that the U.S. government is now much larger than intended, and exercises far more authority than was contemplated by the founders. But that’s still not enough for some critics.
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Writing last month in The New Yorker, Louis Menand noted a new crop of scholars who are dissatisfied with the constitution. In their ranks is Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California–Berkeley, who hopes to strip anti-majoritarian elements from the system. Others want to completely scrap the document and start over with something that would deliver their preferred results.
But these scholars are playing catch-up with a political class intent on simply ignoring First Amendment protections for speech and constitutional restraints on their power. Ironically, efforts to abuse the power of office to hurt opponents is precisely what the founders intended to prevent with the constitution.
That authoritarian politicians justify their actions as responses to opponents who they allege are the real danger to the republic is also no surprise. Those who think coercive government is a solution to problems will inevitably try to apply it to opponents they see as problems.
The American Constitution was intended to thwart the kind of people who now make up pretty much the entire political class. We’ll see if it’s up to the challenge.
Leading political journalist calls banning the AfD an “authoritarian measure” that is “overdue,” insists that political repression is perfectly fine when it is exercised by a “constitutional state”
This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD are accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
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A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talkshow tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “right wing extremism,” all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would’ve long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by political editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue.” The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Eva Ricarda Lautsch has psycho girlfriend eyes.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky,” “too soon” and “simply undemocratic,” and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising.”
The problem … is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove … that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order.” This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within.” Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for their malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that they have “already collected extensive material … which in itself could be used to justify a ban.” Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. Otherwise, none of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD are an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course they use parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute their speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because they’re good at TikTok?
It gets even stranger:
The AfD also has cultivated its own idea of the law itself. The idea is that there is a kind of natural, true law that precedes the actual law. In the words of AfD senior member Treutler in the Thuringian state parliament: “There is not only the law, there is also the spirit of the law.” This is the AfD’s most dangerous idea to date, because it can be used to bend the law, which was once set by democratically elected parliamentarians, in any direction. The true will of the people, the true party of the constitution, the true law. We cannot continue to stand by and watch this party co-opt democracy until there is nothing left of it.
The “spirit of the law” is a very old idea; it is generally raised in contrast to the “letter of the law”. The AfD did not invent this problem in legal philosophy. All laws require interpretation that accounts for their spirit and their letter, and anyway Jürgen Treutler is a minor AfD politician who does not speak for the whole party and who was not proposing a new legal approach either. He was merely trying to defend the traditional right of the strongest party – in this case, the AfD – to name the president of the Thuringian parliament.
Lautsch acknowledges that “banning a party with around 50,000 members and millions of voters” presents considerable risks. Among these is that supporting such a ban looks tremendously “undemocratic” and also that “AfD supporters could become more radicalised.”
Interestingly, these fears primarily concern the sensitivities of AfD supporters. But what about the fear of millions of Germans with a history of migration who are afraid of the xenophobia unleashed by the AfD? And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets against it last winter?
That’s right, it would be positively undemocratic to ignore the “fears of millions of Germans” who don’t like the AfD by not banning the party. That’s just how democracy works: whenever the right people get afraid of the right party, you have to ban it. When the wrong people get afraid of the wrong party, however, bans are absolutely not in order. I and millions of other Germans are absolutely terrified of the Greens but that doesn’t count, because the Greens are a democratic party and we’re undemocratic for being worried about them.
At this point Lautsch comes to the awkward problem of authoritarianism. She assures us that we needn’t worry too much about this. As long as authoritarian actions are decided by democratically elected bodies and approved by courts, they’re totally fine:
It is true that a party ban is an authoritarian measure, but it is an authoritarian measure of a constitutional state. The Federal Constitutional Court only imposes it if the strict legal requirements are met. And the decision to initiate a party ban proceedings is taken democratically – in the Bundestag, in the Federal Council or by the democratically elected federal government.
Upon contemplating the likely consequences of banning the AfD, Lautsch becomes positively ecstatic:
And as a weapon of the constitutional state, a party ban is extremely effective. It is not for nothing that the AfD is doing everything it can to escape this fate. A ban by the Federal Constitutional Court would result in the party being dissolved, its infrastructure destroyed and its assets seized. Establishing replacement organisations would also be prohibited. AfD representatives would immediately lose their mandates. Of course, this would not get rid of the AfD members. But the party would be eradicated from the public sphere – and from the political competition. In any case, the two parties that have been banned in the Federal Republic of Germany so far – the KPD [i.e., the Communist Party of Germany] and the Nazi-successor SRP [i.e., Socialist Reich Party] – dissolved into insignificance when they were banned in the 1950s.
The SRP and the KPD were banned in 1952 and 1956, within a decade of the founding of the Federal Republic, as West Germany emerged from wartime occupation and faced down the Communist threat in the East. We were still being folded into the liberal West back then, with all the awkward (and overtly illiberal) political engineering that entailed. I find it pretty shocking that Lautsch thinks these are reasonable precedents, but she runs with them, concluding that “there are democracies that manage without banning parties, but Germany is not one of them.”
Rather, it is part of the core of German self-understanding as a “defensive democracy” to be able to defend itself against the enemies of democracy with the authority of the constitutional state if necessary. You can criticise this tendency to call on extra-parliamentary authorities such as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Constitutional Court, but to turn away from them at the moment of greatest threat to this democracy would be fatal.
Yes, a ban can fail. But those who are not prepared to protect democracy with all the means at the disposal of a constitutional state ultimately surrender it to its enemies. That is the greatest danger.
Germany is the only self-described “defensive democracy” in the entire liberal West. We have our ridiculous constitutional protectors and our other political enforcement mechanisms, because ours is a provisional state thrown together in haste in 1949. We were allowed democracy only within specific boundaries, to prevent the people from voting their way back into Nazism or into the Soviet bloc. That time is past. Fascism is gone and the Berlin wall came down when I was a child, but our rulers just won’t let the postwar era go away. It is always and forever 1933 or 1938 or 1952 or 1956 here in the best Germany of all time, where our rulers govern not to solve present problems, but to beat back the phantom past, and they are going to keep us mired in this dark and hopeless political timewarp until we are all ruined or they are cast out of power, or (more probably) both.
