Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

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