Thanks to the actions of J. Brandon Magoo, the bumbling nincompoop who is the nominal head of the American republic, and, with apologies to Ann Coulter, B. Hussein Obama, who almost certainly is the puppet master pulling Magoo’s strings, the world is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been. To be more precise, these are the two latest in a string of American presidents including the younger Bush and whichever Clinton was really calling the shots between 1993 to 2001 (most likely Hillary as Bill seemed to be caught with his pants down too often to be the one actually wearing them) who for whatever unfathomable reason, possibly having something to do with Russiophobic ethnics having too much influence in their administrations, made a point of poking the Russian bear with a stick by encouraging anti-Russian hostility on the part of her closest neighbours. In the cases of Bush and Obama, they went so far as to overthrow Russia-friendly governments in Ukraine and replace them with anti-Russian ones by sponsoring colour revolutions in 2004-2005 and 2014 respectively. Donald the Orange is the exception among the American presidents of the last quarter century which is one of the reasons the Bushes and Clintons and Obamas and Magoos all hate him so much. Instead of the business as usual of enriching themselves by minding the rest of the world’s business, promoting instability in one region and war in another, he took the position that the United States should mind her own business.
Vladimir Putin is the excuse that these bellicose warmongering rejects from both the Peace Academy and the School of Just War have pointed to in order to justify their ramping up anti-Russian rhetoric to levels that were not seen even in the Cold War in which that country was run by a regime committed to a cold-blooded, murderous, atheistic, totalitarian ideology. A former agent of the legendary secret police of that regime, Putin has led Russia in either the office of prime minister or president – he has alternated between the two – since 1999. If one were to take seriously what the Clinton/Bush/Obama/Magoo crowd say about him, one would think that he was the corpse of Adolf Hitler, re-animated and zombified by voodoo magic, and hell bent on the quest to conquer the world, seize its lebensraum, and eat its brains. But then if one were to take that crowd’s opinion seriously, one would have to think that the other Vlad, Zelenskyy that is, the president of Ukraine who jumped into that role after starring in a cheap Ukrainian comic television series in which he played a high school teacher who, well, jumped into the role of president of Ukraine, is a champion of freedom and Western values. Considering that most countries in Western civilization are currently celebrating every form of sexual perversion imaginable in the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins it is possible that Zelensky actually is a champion of “Western values.” He is certainly not a champion of freedom but rather the same sort of autocrat that they, rightly or wrongly, have accused Putin of being ever since he first took office.
There would neither be a president of Russia nor a president of Ukraine had an earlier revolution not driven the legitimate claimant to the allegiance of both Russia and Ukraine from his throne then brutally murdered him and his family. I recently reminded a friend that contrary to all the false ideas of the Zeitgeist of the Modern Age government legitimacy does not come from elections, from the “consent of the governed.” Quite the contrary. People, not having legitimate governing authority over each other, cannot delegate such to their representatives. All a government can obtain from the support of its people is power, the ability to compel through the force of numbers. Authority, the legitimate right to lead, can only be passed on from those who had it before. Moreover, legitimate governing authority on earth should be representative in form of the government of the universe in heaven. (1) God is the King of His Creation. Legitimate earthly government is the government of kings, who receive their authority by inheritance from those who went before them and pass it on to those who come after them. The opposite of the Modern “consent of the governed” theory of legitimacy is actually the case. Take my country, for example, the Dominion of Canada. We are a Commonwealth Realm, over which King Charles III reigns, Parliament in Ottawa legislates, and a cabinet of ministers of the Crown chosen by Parliament governs. Parliament is a democratic institution, obviously, but democracy is not the source of its legitimate authority. It is the other way around. Democracy derives whatever legitimacy it has, in our Parliament, the other Commonwealth Parliaments, and the Mother Parliament in the UK, from the king who authorizes Parliament. Yes, most people don’t think about it this way, but most people are wrong. Parliament’s value consists not in the fact that it is democratic, but in the fact that its worth has been proven over a very long period of time, and that worth consists of this, that it takes the power represented by popular support, the potentially dangerous and destructive power that in the wrong hands is what we call “mob rule” and enlists it in the service of law and order by tying it institutionally to legitimate authority. (2)
The last legitimate king to reign over Russia which at the time included, as it historically had, Ukraine, was Tsar Nicholas II of the House of Romanov. He abdicated early in 1917 when the first wave of revolution broke out in Russia but the incompetence of the government that was set up in his place meant that the problems, other than World War I, that had produced the discontent exploited by the first wave of revolutionaries persisted and in the follow up revolution of October 1917 the Bolsheviks, an evil gang of terrorists that was committed to the atheist, socialist, ideology of Karl Marx, and which consisted mostly of members of minority groups that had ethnic and religious grudges against the Russians, the Russian Orthodox Church, and their emperor seized power. The largest such minority group represented was Jews, a fact that people who have more zeal against anti-Semitism than brains don’t like being pointed out because they think that nobody is capable of recognizing that neither “all Jews are Bolsheviks” nor “all Bolsheviks are Jews” logically follows from it (unfortunately, since all the schools seem to be teaching people today is gender confusion, sexual perversion, and racism against white people, rather than the old trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they may have a point). They then fought a five and a half year civil war to keep and consolidate that power after which they transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. Early in the civil war, in the summer of 1918, agents of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, murdered Tsar Nicholas, his wife Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children, and their attendants in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where they had been held captive. Their bodies were taken to the nearby Koptyaki forest and disposed of in such a way that the burial site was not discovered for decades.
In 1981, a few years after the discovery of the burial site, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia recognized the murdered Imperial Family as martyrs and in 2000 they were formally canonized as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. This was most appropriate. Ivan III Vasilyevich took the throne as Grand Prince or Duke of Moscow in1462 and ten years later married Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of Constantine III Palaiologos, the last Byzantine Emperor who died defending his capital Constantinople against the forces of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. Upon this marriage Ivan took the title Tsar, a Russianized form of “Caesar” the title of the Roman Emperor (the Byzantine Empire was the eastern Roman Empire), and while it would be nonsense to claim that he was Constantine’s heir through marriage as there were others in line before Sophia the Tsars did indeed take over from the Byzantine Emperors the role of royal protector of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Tsar Nicholas II, therefore, was in the same position of royal protector with regards to the Russian Orthodox Church when murdered by her enemies that King Charles I had been in with regards to the Church of England when murdered by her enemies in 1649. King Charles I was canonized by the Anglican Church when the provinces of York and Canterbury met in Convocation for the first time after his death when King Charles II was enthroned in the Restoration of 1660. (3)
The Romanov heir, who for obvious reasons would not be a descendent of Nicholas II but the closest other kin, has not yet been restored to the empty throne of the Tsar. Almost a quarter of a century after the canonization of Nicholas II and family it is about time that this be done. Then the illegitimate offices of the presidents of Russia and Ukraine could be done away with as both countries swear allegiance to their legitimate ruler bringing the conflict to an end. Putin could be given a minister’s office in the legitimate government of Russia. Zelensky could go back to his true calling as a television clown. Then Magoo, Obama, and our idiot prime minister Captain Airhead would have to either mind their own business or find somebody else’s business to mind that is less likely to result in mushroom clouds appearing everywhere.
(1) This is extraneous to the subject of this essay, which is why I am putting it here in a note, but the Church’s worship on earth is supposed to be patterned on worship in heaven too. See Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) for the case for this and an account of what that looks like.
(2) Stephen Leacock put it this way “This is a problem that we have solved, joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of democracy; this, too, by the simplest of political necromancy, the trick of which we now ex pound in our schools, as the very alphabet of political wisdom.” – “Greater Canada: An Appeal” which can be found in TheSocial Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays edited by Alan Bowker (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1973).
(3) There is a direct connection between these martyrdoms in that the Puritan revolution and murder of King Charles I in the seventeenth century was the inspiration of the Jacobin revolution and murder of King Louis XVI in France in the eighteenth century which in turn inspired the Bolshevik revolution and the murder of Nicholas II in the twentieth century. King Louis XVI would be another royal martyr although it would have been the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna at the time whose role in relation to the Roman Catholic Church would have more closely approximated that of Charles I to the Anglican Church and Nicholas II to the Orthodox Church. — Gerry T. Neal
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
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
A former official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who joined social media company Twitter has been terminated following the discovery of his attempt to block files set for release by Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
James Baker, deputy general counsel for Twitter and former FBI general counsel, was shown the door on Dec. 6. Musk himself confirmed the counsel’s firing in a tweet, writing: “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter.”
Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported the initial “Twitter Files” release on Dec. 2, revealed that Baker was “vetting” the internal documents. He also divulged that the former FBI counsel was delaying the release of a second batch of files to him and fellow investigative journalist Bari Weiss.
“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter Files’ surprised everyone involved, to say the least,” Taibbi wrote on Dec. 6. “Reporters resumed searchers through Twitter Files material – a lot of it – today,” he added. Taibbi reassured that the “next installment” of Musk’s revelations will appear in the near future.
The files released by Musk document Twitter’s censorship of evidence exposing the corruption of the Biden crime family, specifically President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Central to this evidence is a story of the New York Post, which revealed the multi-million-dollar deals Hunter inked with Eastern European oligarchs and Chinese entrepreneurs with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) earlier recounted a sequence of events that led to Twitter hiring Baker.
Prior to joining Twitter in June 2020, Baker had been the alleged source of the story that revealed the existence of the now-debunked Steele dossier that maligned former President Donald Trump.
According to a December 2017 story by POLITICO, Baker “communicated with Mother Jones reporter David Corn in the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election.” The report added that Corn was the first to report the existence of the dossier on Oct. 31, and that the report was compiled by a former high-level Western spy.
The reporter for the leftist publication referenced “a senior U.S. government official not involved with the case, but familiar with the former spy.” That official vouched for Christopher Steele, the author of the eponymous dossier, describing the former MI6 agent as “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U.S. government.”
Corn quickly denied that the FBI general counsel was his source for the story.
“I’m not going to discuss my sources,” he told POLITICO in a statement at the time. “But in order to prevent the dissemination of inaccurate information, I will say that James Baker was not my source for this story.”
According to Taibbi’s report on the Twitter Files, Baker may have directly coordinated with executives of the social media site to suppress the Post‘s compromising story on Hunter Biden. He mentioned that then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was left out of the loop in the decision to censor the Post.
Taibbi further revealed that Vijaya Gadde – former Twitter head of legal, policy and trust – spearheaded the effort to censor the Post‘s stories. She had also been previously responsible for decisions to permanently ban conservatives from the platform and had opposed Musk’s takeover of the website.
Musk fired Gadde as soon as he assumed leadership of the Big Tech company. She was not the only executive to suffer that fate, as Musk also fired Dorsey’s successor Parag Agrawal.
CENSORSHIP — KEEPING THE PUBLIC IGNORANT: Facebook Scrubs Shooting Suspect Ahmad Al Issa’s Profile, Previously Revealed He’s Devout Moslem
Within a day of this mass shooting Joe Biden, CNN and MSNBC were bleating about the need for gun control. Ted Cruz said he knew they would do this the moment he heard about the shooting. The shooter is only 21 years old and in one of these photos he appears to be 21. However the other photo of a balding man with a big tummy looks much older.
Facebook Scrubs Shooting Suspect CENSORSHIP — KEEPING THE PUBLIC IGNORANT: Facebook Scrubs Shooting Suspect Ahmad Al Issa’s Profile, Previously Revealed He’s Devout MoslemProfile, Previously Revealed He’s Devout Muslim
Facebook has removed all access to the Facebook profile believed to belong to Ahmad Al Issa, the person identified by police as the King Shoppers shooting suspect who killed 10 in the Boulder, Colorado shooting. Screen shots of the Facebook page taken by Twitter users reveal that Al Issa was a devout Muslim who believed in conspiracy theories.
Ahmad Al Issa’s profile was abruptly removed from the website, internet archive websites including the Archive.is and the Wayback machine, and Google’s cache nearly simultaneously.
On March 16, 2019, Al Issa shared a conspiracy theory that there was more than one shooter involved in the horrific Christchurch Mosque Shooting that occurred in New Zealand.
Similarly, Al Issa believed he was under attack from “racist Islamophobic people” who were “hacking” his smartphone. “Yeah if these racist islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could,” wrote Al Issa on June 5, 2019.
Around the same time, on June 1, 2019, Al Issa also shared a post from PBS with the caption “Why refugees and immigrants are good for America.”
Ahmad Al Issa posted this on Facebook in 2019. Not that all refugees and immigrants are bad. It’s just something that, clearly, should be carefully conducted and tightly controlled. pic.twitter.com/oxvsa2iENW— Heartland Populist (@HRTLNDpopulist) March 23, 2021
While authorities did not release information about Al Issa’s country of origin, but claimed he lived “most of his life in the United States,” one user says they learned from his Facebook that he was born in Syria. (CNN initially reported his Syrian origins before 2012 or 2014 but didn’t do so March 23, 2021.)
Al Issa also disliked President Donald Trump according to screen shots taken before his Facebook page was terminated.
“Trumps [sic] such a dick,” he wrote on September 18, 2018, sharing an article from The Washington Post. Later on the same day, he shared another article, this time from The Intercept, and wrote, “[Trump] inherited a growing economy and the unemployment rate was low the economy was on an upward spiral he won because of racism.” In one homophobic post, Al Issa wrote, “If straight people go to prison straight and come out gay doesn’t that mean that being gay is a choice.”
Banning President Donald Trump from social media while silencing his supporters who dare to object is simply not enough to stop “violence and hate” from spreading on the internet, according to Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser.
In an announcement, Mozilla expressed urgent plans to start filtering out “disinformation” at the browser level before it even has the chance to show up in an internet search or on a website.
Rehashing the same scripted lies about the “siege” and “take-over” in Washington, D.C., that resulted in a handful of people gaining access to the Capitol building on Jan. 6, Mozilla says every tool in the arsenal needs to be deployed to prevent “white supremacy” from being “reinforce[d]” online.
“… as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality,” wrote Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker.
“Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.”
Describing those who challenge fraudulent elections as engaging in “dangerous dynamics,” Baker says there is an urgent need to do “more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms.”
Mozilla, Firefox want to control everything you’re allowed to access and share online
In order to prevent conservatives from ever again having the opportunity to make their voices heard about anything, Mozilla wants to uncover who is paying for advertisements on non-left websites, as well as how much they are paying.
Figuring out who is being “targeted” with these ads is also important, Mozilla says, as they, too, need to be silenced and prevented from accessing anything other than mainstream media content and information from “approved” politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Mozilla is further taking aim at platform algorithms to ensure that only politically correct content is “amplified,” especially to the people who need to be indoctrinated the most.
By default, all of the latest Firefox updates will also include “tools” that are designed to “amplify factual voices over disinformation.” These “factual voices” include fake news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Finally, Mozilla wants to collaborate with “independent researchers” for the purpose of conducting “in-depth studies” into the ways that Facebook and Twitter impact people throughout society. This, the company says, will help in determining “what we can do to improve things.”
“These are actions the platforms can and should commit to today,” Baker concludes.
“The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that.”
Similar in nature to Microsoft’s NewsGuard plug-in, which tags all mainstream news outlets as “verified” and everything else as “fake,” Mozilla wants Firefox to become yet another information gatekeeper in the web of deep state control over the world.
Needless to say, it is probably a good time to uninstall Firefox and never look back. The browser used to be somewhat trustworthy, but now it is just another cog in the wheel of new world order control over speech, not to mention an affront to the First Amendment to the Constitution.
“Brave is better by every metric,” wrote one Twitter commenter, referring to the popular Brave browser.
More of the latest news about Big Tech censorship can be found at Censorship.news.
