The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, December 8, 2016

More Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- Sovereignty in its purest and most absolute sense belongs to God alone. To royal monarchs he has delegated a limited earthly sovereignty. The usurpation of sovereignty is the source of all tyranny. The first to attempt to seize sovereignty for himself was Lucifer. The notions of individual and popular sovereignty, which lie at the heart of liberalism and modern democracy respectively, are merely two more recent attempts.

- Anyone who claims to care about the poor yet who supports a carbon tax is either a moron or a liar.

- It is only those who claim a monopoly on hate for themselves who support laws against hate.

- Culture today is a complete fraud. Traditionally, high culture feeds the mind and soul, while popular culture unites the community. Most modern and post-modern “high” culture, however, poisons the mind and soul, while the “pop culture” manufactured for consumption by the masses in the studios of Los Angeles alienates individuals and atomizes communities.

- The most effective instrument of Cultural Marxism has always been corporate capitalism.

- To say that Communism is bad is not to say that capitalism is good. Communism is bad because it is subversive, egalitarian, revolutionary, atheistic, anti-royalist, anti-aristocratic, materialistic and tyrannical. Many of these things can also be said of capitalism.

- Vegetarianism kills brain cells.

- Reading the history of how regimes like the Soviet Union and the Third Reich sought to suppress dissent and control thought through secret police, charges against which there was no real defence, and the atmosphere of terror and distrust generated by the justifiable suspicion that anyone, even a close friend or family member, might be a state informer, is like reading the blueprint for everything that liberals have done in the name of “human rights” and “protecting vulnerable minorities.”

- The same people who ridicule evangelical Christians for advocating “conversion therapy” for people attracted to their own sex think that physical mutilation is a perfectly proper treatment for people who think that they belong to the other sex.

- We live in a day in which doctors routinely prescribe mood-and-behaviour-altering drugs to children, usually after diagnosing the ordinary rambunctious behaviour of boys as some sort of phony-baloney pathology, and then we wonder why so many kids are now shooting up schools and killing themselves.

- The same people who think that it is “cool” to smoke marijuana – the long term use of which turns the mind to mush, makes people into babbling idiots, and can induce paranoia and schizophrenia – and are demanding its legalization, demonize tobacco, which has been linked, like everything else on the planet, to cancer, but which has a beneficial effect on the mind.

- If all the hawks in the so-called “war on drugs” really wanted to do something about the plague of substance abuse and addiction, they would start by going after the pharmaceutical companies and their physician accomplices who push pills as the answer to all of life’s problems.

- Economists keep coming up with plans such as free trade and socialism, that on paper are supposed to increase human happiness but all they deliver when put into practice is an increase in misery.

- It is those who insist that race does not matter for whom race matters the most.

- Environmentalism is perfectly sane and sound when it insists that we ought to look after our world and conserve our natural resources and the beauty of our surroundings for the sake of future generations but it crosses over into total madness when it demands that we worship the earth and tells us that our burning of fossil fuels is altering the earth’s climate and threatens our survival.

- There is no such thing as progressive Christianity. To the extent that something is progressive it is not Christian and to the extent that it is Christian it is not progressive.

- Christianity is a universal faith in that the Gospel is a message of salvation for all people, anyone can be baptized into the Church of Christ, and the redeemed that shall gather before the throne of the Lamb will be taken from “every kindred and tongue and people and nation.” This does not mean that Christians should look in favour upon the mass immigration that is eroding the national identities of Western countries and bringing about White Genocide. On the contrary, the Christian who supports this is guilty of the sin of impiety and is, in the words of St. Paul, “worse than an infidel.”

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Much Ado About the Alt-Right

There has been much talk about the alt-right recently, most of it utter nonsense. The Communist propaganda machine that is otherwise known as the Canadian media has been full of stories this past week about how “shocked” and “horrified” the residents of Hogtown, aka Toronto, have been at “racist” posters that appeared on telephone poles urging white people to join the alt-right. According to the CBC the police have said “they have yet to determine if the posters will be investigated as a hate crime.” Here is my advice to the boys in blue: why don’t you try sticking to your actual job of maintaining Her Majesty’s peace and investigating real crimes – murder, arson, rape, vandalism, robbery and the like – for once, instead of wasting the taxpayer’s money on people who have done nothing except hurt the feelings of spoiled rotten left-wing and liberal kooks and crybabies.

There appears to have been several versions of the poster but the one that I have seen most often in these stories has the heading “Hey, White Person” followed by several point form questions such as “Tired of political correctness?”, “Wondering why only white countries have to become multicultural?” and “Figured out that diversity only means ‘less white people’?”

The reason why so many people are putting on a big show of wringing their hands and wailing “woe is me” while condemning this poster as racist is that this allows them to avoid thinking about the questions raised by the poster. For these are questions that expose the contradictions in the doublethink so loved by the liberal left on matters of race and ethnicity.

Rush Limbaugh had the courage to point out that contradiction on his talk-show recently. In response to CNN’s Van Jones who had condemned Donald Trump’s victory in the recent US Presidential election as a “whitelash” Limbaugh asked why liberal Democrats, who encourage every other group in the United States to vote their self-interest and to do so monolithically as a block condemn white people for doing the same thing. Answering his own question he said:

I'll tell you what it is. What they are saying, what they are implying is that when white people vote their interests, it's racism. When any other group does, it's not racism, it's not sexism, there's no bigotry at all, but when white people do it, it's bigotry. Otherwise why have a problem with it? … It's in their minds, is my point, in the minds of the left, white people voting their self-interest is voting for racism. And that just offends the hell out of me.

Another way of saying this is that for the liberal left white people are the only group not allowed to have legitimate self-interests.

Unfortunately, far too many conservatives appear to think the same thing. It is for this reason that the alt-right was born. “Alt-right” is short, obviously, for “alternative right.” This was originally the name of a website that started up about six years ago, founded and edited by Richard Spencer, formerly the editor of Taki Theodoracopulos’ eponymous paleoconservative/libertarian e-zine and by Colin Liddell who co-edits the present incarnation of the website with Andy Nowicki. The idea behind the title was that there was a need for an alternative to the mainstream right, i.e., conservatism, that would speak truths about race and sex that conservatism was too afraid to speak and would not just be a mild echo of the left on these matters. The short version of the title caught on as the name of an online movement that utilizes various social media platforms to convey its message.

The alt-right received a great deal of media attention during the presidential campaign thanks to a speech Hillary Clinton gave in which she warned of the dangerous alt-right movement behind Donald Trump. It was clear from her speech that she didn’t have a clue what she was talking about but her attempts to foment fear over the alt-right generated some of the election’s unintentionally hilarious moments, such as when her campaign posted warnings about Pepe, the cartoon frog that for some reason unknown to me had been co-opted by the alt-right as a sort of mascot.

The connection between Donald Trump and the alt-right has been largely exaggerated, I suspect, although the two have the same set of enemies, and the sort of people freaking out about the alt-right are generally the same people freaking out about Trump’s victory. Sadly, this includes some traditionalist conservatives with whom I would more often than not agree. With some of what they have to say about the alt-right I would agree. The alt-right is populist and nationalist – and I have written at least five essays against populism and several others on why nationalism is a dangerous ideological substitute for true patriotism. Both are variations of Rousseau’s concept of the sovereignty of the people. This notion is the well from which every form of leftism from anarchism to Communism sprang, and those of us who are truly rightist, and believe in divine and royal sovereignty instead, look upon it with scorn. There are strong pagan and Nietzschean components of the alt-right and its message sometimes comes wrapped up in a great deal of crudity, vileness, and incivility. That having been said, my message to those conservatives dismayed at the rise of the alt-right and the Trump victory is a simple one:

If the mainstream right had been doing its job right there would never have been an alt-right.

Peter Hitchens, wrote a wonderful “I-told-you-so-column” for the Mail on Sunday the weekend after the election, directed at the liberal elites who ploughed on. He wrote:

With their mass immigration, their diversity and equality, their contempt for lifelong stable marriage, their refusal to punish crime, their mad, idealistic foreign wars, their indulgence of drugs, their scorn for patriotism, their schools and universities, turning out graduates with certificates that can barely read…their destruction of real jobs, promising a new globalised prosperity that never came.

As a result, Hitchens added, “millions have just had too much of this.”

As much as the liberal-left deserves Hitchens’ rebuke, so does the mainstream right. Indeed, they are far more worthy of this rebuke because, while we expect liberals to be liberals, conservatives are supposed to provide us with right-headed alternatives to the wrong-headed ideas of liberalism.

In our day and age, working and middle class white people have suffered economically and politically from the attempts to integrate the countries of the world into a global economy in which borders do not impede the movement of either capital or labour. They have seen good jobs disappear – exported to parts of the world where labour is much cheaper – with little to replace them except much lower paying service sector jobs. These jobs, however, are being taken by the large numbers of low-skilled, third world, immigrants who are being imported thanks to the same globalist forces. Worse, those who have achieved elite status in the globalist era – politicians and bureaucrats, academics, journalists, celebrities, etc. – have heaped insult upon injury, by treating these people with contempt – especially those who live in rural areas – and by dismissing and denouncing their every expression of dissatisfaction as “racism.”

In this globalist era, the liberal-left has built a support base for itself by forming a coalition of non-white racial and ethnic groups, non-Christian religious groups, feminists, and those of alternative sexuality and gender identity. The liberal-left tries to appeal to the self-interests of each of these groups, as mutually exclusive and contradictory as these often are are. It holds this fragile and volatile coalition of groups that often hate each other together with a narrative that tells them that what they have in common is that they have all been historically oppressed by white, Christian, heterosexual, males.

The mainstream right ought to have looked to the example of Benjamin Disraeli, the First Earl of Beaconsfield, who led the Conservative Party and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the reign of Queen Victoria. Disraeli, observing the harsh effects that the enclosure of the medieval commons, industrialization, and the rise of Manchester liberalism had had on the poor and working classes, promoted programs aimed at alleviating their misery. Disraeli saw that the party which stood for the established church and the royal authority of the crown, and for long established tradition, law, and constitutional order needed to make the interests of the working classes its own in order to prevent them from becoming the forces of revolution, levelling, socialism, and anarchy. During this era of globalist liberalism, the traditionalist right should have similarly made itself the champion of the middle and working classes adversely affected by globalism and especially of the white, Christian, heterosexual males scapegoated by the left in a manner reminiscent of the way a particular ethnic group was scapegoated by the leftist who was dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. (1)


There have been those, such as Steve Sailer, Kevin Michael Grace here in Canada, and the late Sam Francis, who have advised the right to do just that, to translate the wisdom of Disraeli’s “one nation conservatism” into what has been dubbed the “Sailer Strategy”. Instead of heeding this advice, however, mainstream conservatives, whether of the Conservative Party in Canada and the UK, or the Republican Party in the United States, have denounced the advice as racist, lumped it together with the left’s appeal to their own support base as “identity politics”, and attempted to woo supporters away from the liberal-left coalition groups with rational arguments for low taxes, less government regulations, stricter law enforcement against violent crime, national security, and the superiority of private enterprise over capitalism. These efforts have seen little to no success.


This is why there is an alt-right.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is that if, like myself, you are a traditional rightist who dislikes and distrusts populism and nationalism, then you should not make it so that the victims of liberalism have no other means than populist nationalism to find redress for their grievances.

If, like many Christian traditionalists I have read, you are distressed that a vulgar man of low moral character has been catapulted into the most powerful position in the world by appealing to the interests of the white working and middle classes, then perhaps you should have spoken up for their interests yourselves.

If you find the crude but effective term that the alt-right has coined for pro-immigration, pro-free trade “conservatives” who condemn anti-immigration, anti-free trade whites as “racists” to be disgusting than you ought to do something about the treacherous impiety the term designates. If you do not like the signifier, do something about what it signifies.

At the risk of blowing my own horn, I can say that my own conscience is clear on these matters, at least. For as long as I have been writing, my essays have concentrated on arguing for the Tory principles that I have believed in all of my life – royalism and monarchy, Canada, her Loyalist history and heritage, the Westminster parliamentary system of government, institutional religion, our Common Law rights and freedoms – and against the moral, social, and cultural decline and decay of our society. At the same time, I have written in opposition to the kind of mass immigration that is radically changing the makeup of our country, against the antiracism that is merely a cloak for antiwhite bigotry, and against every kind of political correctness. Far too much is at stake with the latter set of issues – alt-right issues if you will – to allow them to become exclusively the property of radicals who may or may not care about the former set of principles.

(1) That’s right, Hitler was a leftist, not a leader of the “far right” as we often hear. He was a revolutionary who hated everything the right believed in and stood for – royalty, aristocracy, and the church. There was no liberalism in his leftism, but the movement he headed was a synthesis of two nineteenth century leftist movements – nationalism and socialism – and his animosity towards the Bolsheviks was that of a twin rival, not of a polar opposite.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Canada's Donald

Political correctness in America suffered a tremendous blow last Tuesday with the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the blow was fatal, only time will tell, but it is not one from which political correctness will be recovering any time soon. There is great cause for rejoicing in its defeat.

Political correctness is the term we use for that obnoxious and toxic form of totalitarian group think that on the one hand tells us that we must never say anything derogatory about non-white racial groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, those with various and sundry sorts of alternative sexual practices and gender identities and on the other hand encourages contempt for working and middle class whites, males, Christians, heterosexuals, and especially those who belong to all of these categories. To criticize the protected groups, no matter how legitimately, to speak truths, no matter how substantiated by evidence, that portrays them in a less than positive light, is considered forbidden derogatory speech. Yet scapegoating, pejorative nicknames, and even outright expressions of violent hostility towards the despised groups is winked at.

These ridiculous standards were imposed by those who wish to limit the public conversation by dictating what terminology is and is not acceptable. Defenders of political correctness maintain that this was done for the sake of the protection of people who were “marginalized”, “disenfranchised” and “vulnerable.” In reality, however, the political agenda it protects targets whites, seeking to reduce their numbers and replace them, targets Christians by trying to drive their faith out of an increasingly secular public sector, and targets men by treating any and all masculine behaviour women object to as a form of sexual assault, by giving women a right to be believed in whatever accusations they chose to make against men and by obscenely giving women the power of life and death over the next generation.

This entire crazy system was shaken to its foundations when Donald Trump, who brazenly defied all the rules of political correctness and openly courted the votes of the targets of political correctness by championing their causes, won the presidency of the United States.

Ordinarily, I would not recommend that my country follow the lead of the United States. Canada is in the mess she is in today largely because the Liberal governments led by Mackenzie King, Pearson, and the two Trudeaus sought to imitate the policies of FDR, JFK, LBJ and Barack Obama. Indeed, as I pointed out in my last essay, the divisiveness of this year’s presidential election points to one of the many advantages of our form of government, the older Westminster model of parliamentary monarchy, over the American republican system.

Our country, however, desperately needs to break the chains of political correctness. It is a problem that is relatively newer in Canada than it is in the United States but which has been taken much further. The Liberal Party, since the days of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, has sought to make itself the permanent government of Canada by contemptuously dissolving the old Canadian people and electing a new one through mass third world immigration. During the premiership of Pierre Trudeau CSIS created a fake Canadian Nazi movement in order to generate a public scare in response to which the Liberals passed draconian speech laws like Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Now, under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals are bringing in thousands of poorly vetted “refugees” from the Middle East and the motion the Liberal-dominated Parliament just passed to condemn “Islamophobia” is a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate Canadians who express disagreement with this and who have legitimate concerns about the possible connections of some of the asylum-seekers to jihadist terror groups. The Liberals have also introduced Bill C-16 which would add “gender identity or expression” to the grounds of prohibited discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and to the “hate propaganda” section of the Criminal Code. This could potentially make it illegal to say that someone with an XY set of chromosomes and who was born with a male body but who thinks and says he is a woman is actually a man with a delusion. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto, recently posted a series of videos on Youtube demonstrating the slide towards totalitarianism that such laws represent and the response he has received from social justice warriors determined to shut him up indicates the direction we are headed unless this political correctness is stopped firm in its tracks.

Canada, therefore, needs someone to break the stranglehold of political correctness the way Donald Trump has done in the United States. It will have to be done in a different way. In Canada, we do not vote for either our head of state or our head of government in a winner-take-all plebiscite. Our head of state comes to her position by royal inheritance and we vote to elect the House of Commons. The head of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa is the person who has the largest amount of support in the House of Commons. The person who breaks political correctness in Canada, therefore, will have be the leader of a party and not a lone-gunman. He will have to be like Trump in some ways, but different in others.

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who is seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party, is one person who appears to want to usher in a Canadian version of the Trumpening. After the American election she told her supporters that Trump’s victory was “an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well.” I agree, and if she is capable of accomplishing the task, she has my support. As I explained in a previous essay, it took just the right set of circumstances and qualifications to produce a Trump victory, however, and it is fair to say that the same would have to be true for a Conservative leader who finally deals the death blow to political correctness in Canada. Does Dr. Leitch have those qualifications? Perhaps. It remains to be seen.

What would I look for in a Conservative leader? The next Conservative leader must, at the very least, be a firm royalist and a patriotic Canadian. If we are looking to re-create the Trump effect, however, it would help if this person were also a celebrity, as Trump is, especially considering that he will be contending against Justin Trudeau. A reputation for making offensive, politically incorrect remarks, is also a must. You cannot defeat political correctness by being politically correct.

Do I have anyone in particular in mind?

As it so happens, I can think of one Canadian who meets all the criteria I would be looking for. He is a staunch monarchist, a Prayer Book Society Anglican, and is known for his patriotic love of our country. He is as right-of-centre as they come in Canada, an outspoken supporter of our military and police, and has a long record of speaking his mind and making controversial statements. He is also an extremely famous super-celebrity whose name is virtually synonymous with our national sport.

Why, he even shares the same first name as America’s new president-elect.

The pinkos, liberals, and the rest of the politically correct crowd have been howling for him to retire for years, but I think that at eighty-two years young, perhaps the time has come for Don Cherry to take the next step in his career, lead the Tory Party to victory over Justin Trudeau in the next election, end political correctness, make Canada great again, and build a wall to keep out all those Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to come here every time they lose an election down south.

He is the ideal choice. If someone like George Soros were to hire thugs to stir up fights in his rallies a hockey game would just break out.

Heck, if he doesn’t put in his bid for the leadership himself the party ought to draft him.

Grapes, your country needs you! Don’t let us down.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Westminster System is Better Than Republicanism


That the Westminster parliamentary system of government is a superior form of government to any republicanism has been a lifelong conviction of mine. This will come as a surprise to none of my long-time readers, I am sure.

There are many reasons for this conviction. On one level it is simple patriotism. True patriotism - as opposed to nationalism, which is the ideological devotion to an ideal vision of one's nation - is love, affection and loyalty for one's country because it is one's own. It is by nature the same thing as the love one ordinarily feels for one's family and home, just on a larger scale. The Westminster parliamentary system of government is the traditional form of government of my country, the Dominion of Canada, which inherited it from the United Kingdom where it originally developed. We share this form of government with the UK and several other countries in the British Commonwealth, or, as I often call it, the British family of nations.

There is a theoretical foundation for the conviction, however. Two and a half millennia ago, Plato, of whom A. N. Whitehead wrote that all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes, wrote his most important dialogue, the Politeia. The title is usually translated "The Republic" from the Latin De Republica, which means "about the affairs of the public" but this is misleading because of the connotations the word "republic" now has. In the dialogue, Plato has Socrates debate the nature of justice , first with Thrasymachus, who maintains that injustice is superior to justice, and then with Glaucon (Plato's brother) who asks, in response to Socrates' answer to Thrasymachus, why justice itself is to be preferred over the mere appearance of justice. Socrates proposes that they found a hypothetical city-state and look at justice as it would be in that state on the theory that by seeing it viewed on a large scale there, they would be better able to understand the nature of justice in the individual.

The hypothetical ideal city-state is ruled by kings who are also philosophers, men who through higher thought have been able to catch a glimpse of goodness, truth, and beauty as they are in themselves, and not merely their worldly imitations. The constitution of this city-state is dubbed royal/aristocratic by Plato through Socrates, and is contrasted with actual constitutions of which four are identified. States, according to Plato, have the tendency to shift from one of these to the next as extremes beget their opposites and so states go from timocracy - the closest to the ideal, the rule of honour-seeking aristocrats, identified with the government of Sparta at the time, to oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy few, to democracy, which ultimately begets tyranny. This is a progression, in Plato's view, from best to worst.

Aristotle, Plato's student, modified his teacher's political theories by proposing that there were three simple constitutions - the rule of the one, the few, and the many which have good and bad forms depending upon whether the one, the few, or the many govern for themselves at the expense of the common good or for the sake of the common good. Like Plato, Aristotle saw states as going through these constitutions in cyclical fashion, but theorized that the cycle could be broken and a lasting, stable, constitution produced, by mixing monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, checking the worst tendencies of each and bringing out the best of all.

The Westminster parliamentary system is the living embodiment of this mixed constitution. The Americans also had Aristotle's ideal in mind when they drew up their republican constitution, but the Westminster system, forged over centuries of history, has the greater weight of prescriptive tradition behind it.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, in devising their republic, saw the importance of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government. They were heavily influenced by the theories of Montesquieu who in turn looked to the Westminster system as the already-existing model of this separation. In the Westminster system these powers are both united and separated at the same time, with no contradiction, because the uniting factor is the Sovereign Crown. In Canada we speak of the distinction between "the Queen-in-council" (the executive branch, consisting of the Queen, usually represented by the Governor General, and privy council, the day-to-day business of which is carried out by the Prime Minister and Cabinet), "the Queen-in-Parliament" (the legislative branch, consisting of the House of Commons, Senate and again the Queen, usually through vice regal representation), and "the Queen-on-the-bench"(the judicial branch, the courts). The Westminster system makes this harmonious separation-in-unity of the powers possible, by distinguishing between the ownership of the powers of government, which belongs in each case to the Monarch, and the exercise of the powers which are carried out in her name by different groups of people. There is a slight overlap, in that the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers are also members of Parliament, but this is supposed to make the Cabinet, responsible for the everyday decisions of the executive branch of government, dually accountable, both to the Sovereign above in whose name they act and to the Parliament below.

There are many reasons for preferring this to the republican system. As I have discussed in many previous essays, history shows us that when government is thought of as the property of "the people" and leaders see themselves as the champions of "the people", traditional limitations on the use of government power break down. A government that acts in the name of the people can justify whatever it does to the people. Hitler saw himself as one of the common people, the first among equal brothers, empowered to act as the voice of the people in carrying out his tyrannical murderous evil deeds. The same was true of Stalin and every other totalitarian despot. By contrast, when the ownership of government power belongs to a Royal Sovereign, who stands in a paternal or maternal relationship to the people, the people who exercise the powers of government are in the position of being servants - which is what the word minister means - to their Royal master. This is a humbling position, and if the exercise of government power is to be carried out by politicians - people who by definition are power-seekers and therefore the most likely to be corrupted by actual power - it is all the more important that they be placed in a position of humility rather than one that promotes arrogance.

When a king or queen reigns over your country it adds a touch of class that is simply not present in a republic.

The events that we have seen in the republic south of our border this week testify to another strength of our system. No, I am not referring to the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, which event I welcome for reasons explained elsewhere, but rather to the response to it. Protests have broken out all over America, ranging from the juvenile but fairly innocuous antics of Stefani Germanotta outside the Trump Tower in New York to the violent riots such as have been taking place in Portland, Oregon. Unsurprisingly, many of the protests appear to have been organized by the George Soros funded MoveOn, but the sentiment shared by all, organized or spontaneous, peaceful or violent, is expressed in the words "not my president."

Had the election gone the other way, the same sentiment would have been expressed by the other side. Whether it would have gotten this violent or not is difficult to say. The liberal media certainly feared it would, but that means very little as their powers of prediction have not been particularly great as of late. There was certainly potential for a violent uprising, however. The men and women who turned out in droves to vote for Trump included many white, middle and working class Americans who have been scapegoated by the American political, cultural, economic, and academic establishment for decades, seeing their jobs being exported and their replacements imported and their objections to all of this answered with vile accusations of bigotry, prejudice, ignorance and hatred. To these, the forgotten Americans whom the president-elect vowed in his victory speech would never be forgotten again, and whom Hillary Clinton had dismissed as "a basketful of deplorables", Trump had offered a glimmer of hope for the first time in years and, as Pat Buchanan pointed out in September, this election was really their last chance.

This was the most polarizing election the American republic has seen since 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln that year, incidentally, makes nonsense out of the claim that we heard from many pundits last month in feigned shock over Trump’s unwillingness to invite fraud by making a preliminary concession to Clinton, that the United States has experienced 227 years of uninterrupted peaceful transfer of power. That election split the country in two and brought about a four year internecine war that saw over 600, 000 casualties. Hardly what one could call a peaceful transition of power. At any rate, the election this year has revealed a division between Americans that rivals that of 1860 in its extent and intensity. It is a division that is unlikely to be healed any time soon, since the liberal left continues to reject the validity of the complaints of white, middle and working class Americans against their agenda and to accuse these Americans of being “hateful” and “bigoted” while scarcely bothering to conceal their own hatred of the same beneath the thin veneer of their positive-sounding but empty platitudes such as “love trumps hate.”

The weakness of the republican system revealed in all of this is that the president, who is head of state of the republic, is supposed to be the person who represents the country as a collective whole – as opposed to the members of the House of Representative, who represent their own districts, and the Senators who represent their own States. The president, however, is chosen by election, making it possible for those who voted against him to plausibly claim that he is “not my president.”

In the Westminster system, the head of state is the monarch, who is not elected. Since her position is hereditary, she is above the divisive and polarizing, political process, and is therefore a better symbol of the unity of the country than an elected president. Indeed, since she is the descendent of previous monarchs and ancestor of future monarchs, she is a symbol not just of the present unity of the country, but of the unity of the country across past, present, and future generations as well, and of our country's enduring link to other countries in the British family of nations. The party which wins a majority or a plurality in the House of Commons forms Her Majesty’s government and its leader becomes Prime Minister but the second largest party in the House has a role as well as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Opposition’s role is to challenge the policies and practices of the government, to hold it accountable to Parliament, and to be the Parliamentary voice of those who did not win the last election. The unifying factor, to which government and Opposition alike are supposed to be loyal, is the Royal Sovereign. No matter which party wins the election, even if the Prime Minister is a mindless, smug, smarmy, contemptable, little waste of space who never sold his soul to the devil only because he never possessed one to sell in the first place, like the present Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, all Canadians can look to our head of state and say “God Save the Queen!”

That is something for which, in light of the riots and uproar our republican neighbours are experiencing, we can be truly thankful.

God Save the Queen!

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

The Triumph of the Donald

Eight years ago, Dr. Thomas Fleming, then editor of Chronicles Magazine, wrote that no matter who won that year’s presidential election the outcome was known – the victor would be the worst president in American history. This was an understandable prediction. The candidates that year were John McCain for the Republicans and Barack Obama for the Democrats. The former was a warmongering hawk who was likely to have started a World War. The latter was a man who had an agenda of racial division and strife that he tried to hide behind a façade of substance-free, positive sounding tripe about hope and change.

This year the Democratic Party put forward as their candidate someone who was a combination of the worst elements of both John McCain and Barack Obama – Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mercifully, it is Donald John Trump and not her, who has just been elected the next president of the United States.

The media, which has treated Trump’s campaign as a joke from day one, and has predicted his failure every step of the way up until this last evening when it became evident that he would win the required number of electoral college votes is now trying to figure out how they could have been so wrong and how to explain Trump’s victory.

They need look no further than the writings of a late colleague of the aforementioned Dr. Fleming, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, one-time award winning editorial columnist with the Washington Times and political editor of Chronicles. A traditional Southern conservative and a sworn foe of political correctness, Sam Francis was also a brilliant student of Realpolitik and the Machiavellian elite theory of power politics as articulated by ex-Trotskyist-turned-Cold Warrior James Burnham. Accepting Burnham’s thesis in The Managerial Revolution, that the paths of socialism and capitalism had converged and a new type of society that was neither and both had emerged led by a new elite of technocratic managers and bureaucrats, Francis attributed the problems he saw in late twentieth century America to this new elite. He brilliantly diagnosed the combination of the breakdown of law and order and border security with the tyranny of political correctness, bureaucratic overregulation, and the surveillance state as anarcho-tyranny – a synthesis of anarchism and tyranny. In the theories of liberal sociologists Donald Warren about MARs – Middle American Radicals – Francis believed he had found the solution to the problem. The exportation of their jobs through free trade, the importation of their replacements through mass immigration, and their being heavily taxed to pay for a welfare state while being targeted by anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and political correctness in general, had potentially radicalized middle class white Americans. A populist nationalist could tap into this potential to fight against the new order. Francis’ friend Patrick J. Buchanan, columnist and former speech writer for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, attempted to do this three times in 1993, 1996 and as a third party candidate in 2000.

Buchanan, unfortunately, came nowhere near the White House and so Sam Francis, who passed away eleven years ago, did not live to see his arguments bear fruit.

The reason why the same populist, nativist, platform that failed to produce a Buchanan presidency has carried the Trump train all the way to the White House is evident in this year’s presidential race. To win, Trump had to first fight off all the other contenders – each preferred by the Republican Party’s own establishment over himself – for the Republican nomination. Then in the general election he had to fight the Democratic Party, a united mass media, the powerful financial interests behind Clinton, and more often than not the establishment of his own party. To do this required a particular combination of credentials which only Donald Trump possessed.

First, as a very successful businessman he was extremely wealthy – enough so that he did not have to rely upon the financiers to whom he would otherwise be indentured and no different from any other politician. The same could be said of Ross Perot – but Perot chose to run as an independent and third party candidate, paths that lead to nowhere.

Second, as the host of the popular reality/game show The Apprentice, Trump was a world famous celebrity and therefore not someone who could simply be silenced or ignored.

Finally, Trump had the combination of sincere patriotism, sheer egotism, and unrelenting determination sufficient to weather everything that his powerful enemies threw at him.

It was only someone with this particular combination who could capitalize on Francis’s MARs strategy and carry it through to victory.

I cannot recall a time when the outcome of an election pleased me more than this one. That may seem odd, coming from someone who is neither an American nor a republican, but is rather a Canadian Tory who can only tolerate popular democracy when it is mixed, as it is in our parliamentary system, with hereditary monarchy. For that matter I have long been of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s opinion that the ideology which is nationalism is a dangerous substitute for the virtuous sentiment that is true patriotism. Donald Trump does not strike me as being an ideologue, however – it was amusing to hear a representative of the Democratic Party interviewed on CBC after the third presidential debate talk about Trump’s ideology, as if he had one – and on practical matters such as immigration and free trade the difference between patriotism and nationalism is somewhat moot. There is a certain amount of schadenfreude in this, I confess – I have long loathed Hillary Clinton, everything she stands for, and the type of people who have been backing her. It is very satisfying, however, to see someone who has his country’s good at heart, on matters like trade and immigration, win out over the forces of globalism and political correctness that have seemed undefeatable for decades.

On November 8th, 2016 the American voting public sent a very clear message – to both Hillary Clinton and the politically correct, corporate globalist elites. That message, put simply, was “you’re fired!”

Now that Donald Trump has been elected president the question will be whether he will do all the things he has promised to do. There are many that say that he won’t – but they also said through this entire race that he would never be able to win this primary or that one, that he would never be able to secure the Republican nomination, that he would never be able to defeat Hillary Clinton – and he proved them wrong at every turn. Hillary Clinton, with her combination of all the bad traits of both John McCain and Barack Obama, had she won, would have been the worst American president in all of history. Donald Trump, if he accomplishes even a fraction of what he has set out to do, may very well go down in history as their greatest and best president ever.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Weighing Evils

Since the birth of the internet there have been certain memes which recur online once every four years when the Americans have their presidential election. Of these, one of my favourites is the “Cthulhu for President” meme. Cthulhu is an entity from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth century writer of gothic horror and science fiction. An ancient space demon, described as a giant humanoid with a head like an octopus, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu lies sleeping in the city of R’lyeh somewhere at the bottom of the ocean awaiting the cosmic re-alignment in which he will awaken and plunge the world into madness, chaos and destruction. The slogan for his perennial mock presidential candidacy is “why settle for the lesser evil?”

This slogan and, indeed, the entire Cthulhu for president meme, pokes fun at the idea of voting for the lesser of two evils which is sure to be put forward by the supporters of at least one of the two actual candidates. The idea is that you ought to vote for candidate X, not because of the merits of candidate X, but because candidate Y is so much worse. It is indicative of just how bad the quality of politicians has become when you find this argument being invoked in every election by both parties.

This has been the case for at least two decades, if not longer, now. To be fair, it is the Republicans who have usually fallen back on the lesser of two evils theme for such less-than-spectacular candidates as Dole, Romney, and McCain. The Democrats tend to prefer their own variation of the theme which is to compare the Republican candidate to Hitler.

This year’s election has probably set a record for most uses and abuses of both of these themes. What is somewhat odd this time around is that the same person is the target of both. It has been no surprise to see the Democrats, and the left in general, try to portray the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. What has been more unusual is that the same establishment Republicans who trotted out the lesser of two evils argument for George W. Bush twice, have been using it this year against their party’s own candidate on the behalf of the candidate of the other party. A recent example of this can be found in the article “The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton” which recently appeared on the website of The Atlantic. The author is David Frum, son of legendary CBC interviewer Barbra Frum, brother of Canadian Senator Linda Frum, son-in-law of the late, great, Peter Worthington, founding editor of the Toronto Sun, and speechwriter/biographer of former US President George W. Bush. The title can only be regarded as something of a sick joke. Frum, whose emigration to the United States I have often said is our country’s gain and America’s loss, has been a thorn in the side of conservatives on both sides of the 49th parallel for almost three decades now. In Canada, he was not a traditional Tory, i.e., a defender of our British institutions and heritage against American political, economic and cultural imperialism. Nor was he a genuine right-wing populist of the mold of the original Reform Party and was constantly calling upon that party to abandon the social and moral conservatism that were its most genuinely conservative positions and adopt a blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. In the United States he is neither a Burkean traditionalist of the Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet variety, nor a true libertarian. His idea of a “conservative” would appear to be a corporate, internationalist, free-trader who believes in a global Pax Americana. Thirteen years ago, he had the gall to write a despicable article for National Review – which had the poor taste to actually publish it – accusing American conservatives like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Charley Reese, and Bob Novak of being “unpatriotic” for having the prescience to see that the Bush administration’s plans for invading Iraq were foolhardy and would prove disastrous. Now, in an article that maintains that to “vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe” Frum says of Hillary Clinton - the same Hillary Clinton who told an audience of Brazilian bankers that her dream “is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders” - that she “is a patriot” and that she “will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States.” Someone ought to buy this man a dictionary because it is apparent that he does not know the meanings of the words he uses.

How anybody could look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and say that the former is the lesser of two evils is beyond me.

Compare the personality flaws of the two. Donald Trump is boisterous, vulgar, hotheaded, crude, and emotional. Hillary Clinton is cold, calculating, manipulative, and ruthless. Trump’s failings are those of a human being – Clinton’s are those of a robot programmed to act out Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Now consider the past misdeeds of the two. Everyone is familiar with the accusations against Trump because – despite Frum’s feeble attempt to deny the overwhelming pro-Clinton bias of the media – they have been in the headlines and aired around the clock on all the major news networks for a month. One of these – claiming business losses against one’s income taxes – is hardly a misdeed, but something every rational person does, the alternative being to unnecessarily fork over to the government large amounts of your income. When the Clinton campaign and its disinformation arm, also known as the mainstream media, focus on matters like this it is not people’s moral outrage to which they are making an appeal but their envy. As for the far more serious accusation of being a sexual predator, while his behaviour can certainly be described as sleazy the attempts to spin it as worse than that bear all the marks of media fabrication.

Contrast that with Clinton’s long record of large scale wickedness. Hillary Clinton is the godmother of a family that makes the Gambinos, Lucianos and Massinos look like third-rate amateurs in comparison. All of this controversy over her private server e-mails is not just a matter of careless negligence with state secrets. The post-subpoena deletion of thousands of her e-mails, much like the disappearance of all those Rose Law Firm files pertaining to the Whitewater deal after the “suicide” of Vincent Foster twenty three years ago, was felonious tampering with evidence when the Clinton family was under investigation. Skipping over the details of Whitewater, which dates back to when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, as Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is accused of selling public office for personal profit. Under her secretariat the State Department made massive arms deals with governments that were known to be sponsors of the very jihadi terrorists the United States was ostensibly at war with – governments which happened to have made large donations to the Clinton Foundation – and awarded government contracts, in, for example, the rebuilding of post-earthquake Haiti, to friends of the Clintons who were also large private donors to the Clinton Foundation. For decades every time a Clinton has held public office – be it Senator or Secretary of State in the case of Hillary or President or diplomat in the case of Bill – their actions have served the interests of Wall Street financiers and corporate globalists, who have paid them back with six digit fees for speeches the transcripts of which have been kept from the public until – against the Clintons’ wishes – they were brought to light by whistleblowers recently.

Which leads us to the policies and platform of the two candidates. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy involved the destabilization of regimes deemed insufficiently democratic, like those in Libya, Egypt, and Syria, and the support of rebel groups even if they happened to be Islamic jihadists such as the ones who established the Islamic State. The most hawkish member of the Obama administration, her belligerent confrontational attitude towards Russia – and her insane proposal of a no-fly zone over Syria – is likely to bring about the very head-to-head Russian-American confrontation that every American president from Truman through Reagan sought to avoid during the years of the arms race and MAD. Trump, by contrast, says that it would be a good thing if America got along with the Russian and Syrian governments, and concentrated on fighting their mutual foe in ISIS. Trump’s foreign policy is sensible – Clinton’s is sheer madness. Then consider that Clinton wants to bring into the United States record numbers of “refugees” from the parts of the world she bombed as Secretary of State and will continue to bomb as President. Any sane person can see that “invade the world, invite the world” is a recipe for disaster and, from her past record we know that she will attempt to deal with the terrorist violence that this imbecilic combination is sure to bring upon her country by increasing domestic surveillance, thus threatening the civil liberties of all Americans.

Add to this the facts that she believes that the ongoing slaughter of the unborn is a sacred right that must be protected, is certain to continue Obama’s policy of inciting anti-white, anti-cop racial violence of the sort that took place in Charlotte, North Carolina this summer, and will step up the Obama administration’s heavy-handed attempts to force traditional religious believers to conform to the dictates of progressive ideology, and there is only one conclusion to which any person capable of rationally weighing the evidence can come to. Those voting for Hillary Clinton will be choosing the greater evil. They might as well write in Cthulhu on their ballots.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

The Witches' Sabbat

The hour of midnight was quickly approaching on the eve of the day set aside in the liturgical calendar of Western Christendom for the remembrance of all the saints. On the gloomy peak of a craggy mountain a bonfire crackled and blazed, awaiting the arrival of a congregation that would shortly be gathering around it with somewhat less holy intentions than those who on the morrow would flock to their parishes to partake in the sacrament on that high feast day. The black draped altar, visible in the light of the flames, bore testimony to the fact that a mass of a very different nature would be taking place there that night.

One by one, flying on broomsticks through the dark skies, propelled by the power for which they had long ago traded their souls, they arrived – the sisters of the night. When all were present and accounted for, the high priestess addressed the coven:

“Dear sisters I bid you welcome, on this, the most sacred of our sabbat nights. As I am sure you are all aware, this year’s Samhain is a particularly important one. That for which we have long dreamed and planned is about to take place. Four hundred years ago, the settlers of New England hanged and burned our predecessors. Now, in a week’s time, one of our own is set to be elected to the highest position in the country that grew out of New England, the most powerful position in all the world.”

The eyes of all present turned from the speaker to look upon the crone in question, who stood there rubbing her hands and cackling with sinister glee.

“The master himself will explain more about the significance of this event. The witching hour has arrived and the time is now come to summon him.”

The hags stepped into a large circle containing a chalked inverted pentagram and joining hands chanted the incantation that would call their diabolical overlord into their midst. Behind the black altar, the air split and sulfurous flames burst forth from a portal to Tartarus that had opened up. Out of this door stepped a sinister, horned, fiend. The sisters of the night began to applaud and to chant his name.

“Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!”

“Thank you, thank you everyone,” Lucy (1) said.

“Ladies, our moment has finally arrived. Two thousand years ago the Son of our enemy entered this world and altered history. Now it is our turn. This year will witness the rise of my daughter who will usher in a thousand years of darkness. Step forward daughter.”

The presidential candidate stepped forward and knelt before the devil.

“You have been the most faithful of all my servants. I made Mick and Keith famous, but they forgot all about me. Even Ozzie has not always been there for me when I needed him. But you, my dear, you have never let me down.”

“Millennia ago, such ancient peoples as the Ammonites, Hittites, and Carthaginians worshipped me under various names – Moloch, Kronos, Baal – and sacrificed their children to me. Your sisterhood, driven underground during the era named after the Son of our enemy, has kept this sacred practice alive all these years, practicing it in secret. Now, with the help of my friends in the judiciary it is openly, freely and publicly practiced again. No more need for gingerbread houses and other such ruses. It is legally protected now, in the name of women’s health and rights. Hah hah. As if the women who sacrifice their children to me in this way had not sold their womanhood to me along with their souls. Hah hah.”

The sisterhood cackled with mirth at this.

“You, my dear, are the avowed champion of this, our sacred rite, and for this you will be greatly rewarded. With the help of the corporate media, which has long done my bidding, you will soon be ruler of the new empire that has arisen to take the place of my Babylon of old. With the help of your military-industrial complex cronies you will lead this empire into the battle with Gog and Magog that was prophesied in the book of our enemy so long ago. We, however, will emerge triumphant from that conflict and you will rule the world in my name.”

The assembly of witches cheered and the meeting moved on from being a political rally to an orgy of wild revelry in which they were joined by demons, monsters, ghouls, and all the foul creatures of darkness that haunt the nightmares of men and roam the earth on the eve of All Hallows.

These proceedings had not gone by unobserved. From a hiding place behind a cloud above the mountain, two visitors from the celestial sphere had seen and heard everything without being detected themselves.

With a troubled look on his visage, St. Gabriel asked St. Michael what he thought of all of this.

“It is the same old Lucy”, St. Michael answered. “He has made these promises to many other ambitious would-be world conquerors in the past.”

“He seems confident that he will be able to put that horrible witch into office and win the battle of Armageddon.”

“His pride has always been his undoing. He was confident that he would be able to win that insurrection he stirred up in heaven too.”

“What is going to happen?”

“I don’t know any more than you do. If Lucy manages to get his daughter into power and if she starts the battle of Armageddon, the outcome will not be what Lucy has promised his followers, for the Lord has said that when that conflict finally does come, He will return to earth and defeat the forces of Lucy’s champion personally. He has not confided in me – or anyone else for that matter – whether this is that time or not.”

“Do you think Lucy will succeed in giving her the power she craves?”

“It is difficult to say. The path that he has set her on to power is that of popular election and so the outcome depends upon the free will of a large number of people. Those people have been given a trump card to play against Lucy if they so choose.”

“Mortal free will has often seemed to serve Lucy’s purposes more than ours.”

“It seems that way, yes, but don’t forget that it was a gift of divine grace given to them just as it was to us. Without the assistance of further grace it has served Lucy’s purposes in the past but only so far as the Lord allows. The Lord is merciful and frequently extends that further grace.”

“Will He do so this time? I hope for the sake of the mortals that He does.”
“I don’t know. As with the day and hour of His Second Coming He is not revealing anything until the time arrives. He has assigned to us, as He has to the mortals, the role of having faith.”

“I know. Things are looking pretty dark though.”

“I agree,” said St. Michael “but there is an old saying of the mortals which, slightly modified, may provide a little bit of comfort and hope.”

“What is that?”

St. Michael smiled and said:

“The night is always darkest before the Donald”.




(1) Lucy, short for Lucifer, has previously appeared in Lucy’s Day in Court and Justice for Minnie.

Friday, October 21, 2016

The Existential Crisis of the West

“To be, or not to be.” “That,” as Shakespeare’s Danish Prince famously soliloquized, “is the question.” Was he seriously weighing the pros of taking his own life – “to die, to sleep” – against the cons – “to sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub”? Or, since he was feigning madness at the time, was this merely part of the act?

We don’t know and never will but what we do know, alas, is that Hamlet’s dilemma is precisely the one currently faced by Western Civilization.

It was novelist Jean Raspail who peered into the future and saw the form in which this dilemma would come upon the West in his Le Camp des Saints which was first published in French in 1973, followed by an English edition in 1975. The novel made the bestseller lists when it first appeared – and it returned to them about five years ago when the predicted scenario began to loom large on the horizon of the immediate future – but it met with much hostility from the fashionable elites of the liberal intelligentsia. Its author, a traditional Roman Catholic who longs for the restoration of the French monarchy, was treated by the bien-pensants as a racist rabble-rouser.

The novel tells the story of a fleet of a hundred rusting old cargo liners that set out from Calcutta en route to France laden with a million of the poorest of the poor. Long before the armada arrives in the Mediterranean where it will embark upon the French Riviera on Easter Sunday the world becomes aware of its destination and the French discuss among themselves how they will respond. Those in power are aware that what is at stake is the continued existence of France as they know it, that these refugees from abject poverty are attracted by the wealth of the West and not because they love French culture and civilization and wish to participate in it. They are invaders, but invaders armed not with guns and swords, but with their own wretchedness and the liberalism of the French. While a few of France’s leaders, including her president, privately do not wish France to succumb to this invasion, publicly they are afraid to express this sentiment and in the end lack the heart to act on it. Most of the intellectuals, clergy, journalists, and politicians welcome the coming of the invaders of which they speak in messianic, salvific, terms and embrace the death of their own way of life. The world waits to see what France will do and when she fails to conjure up the will to survive no other Western country dares to do so.

This doom, so vividly forecast by Raspail forty years ago, has gradually come to materialize until now it is dangling over Western countries like the sword that Syracusan ruler Dionysius the Younger hung by a hair over the head of his flatterer Damocles.

In the 1960s most Western governments radically liberalized their policies on immigration both in regards to who is allowed in and how many causing a massive upsurge in immigration from the Third World. This, predictably, generated a great deal of cultural and ethnic tension. The governments that had orchestrated this new wave of untraditional immigration – or at least passed the laws that made it possible – dealt with this tension in a number of ways. What these methods all had in common was that they involved the government siding with the newcomers against those who were already members of the societies they governed. Often these countries declared themselves to be multicultural, which was more than just a recognition that a plurality of cultures could be found within their borders, but a decision that their country would adapt to the immigrants rather than expect the immigrants to adapt to them. Several of them passed laws which forbade discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, and country of origin which, while worded neutrally, were clearly designed to be applied in one direction only. Sometimes, as was the case with the Canadian Human Rights Act passed in 1977, these laws included provisions aimed at the suppression of public disagreement with these new policies. Throughout the West dissent was further discouraged by means of accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia and other such words that suggested that liberal immigration was an obvious good, which nobody could rationally and legitimately disagree with, so that all disapproval was an irrational prejudice based in fear and hatred.

Then the illegal immigration problem began. Illegal immigration is when people move to a country without applying to immigrate through the proper channels. Some countries have more of a problem with this than others depending upon how easy they are to access from countries where large numbers of people need to flee. The United States has had a huge illegal immigration problem over its southern border with Mexico for decades, a problem that has been exacerbated by the refusal of their government to enforce its own immigration laws. Politicians of both the Republican and Democrat parties have preferred to amnesty illegal aliens, i.e., to pardon them for breaking into the country and grant them legal immigrant status. There are a number of reasons for this preference – it keeps the cost of labour low for unscrupulous companies and is considered to be the humanitarian response to people who are fleeing poverty looking for a better life – but without a secure border, it is a solution that only encourages more of the problem.

It is events that have transpired since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, however, that has made Raspail’s scenario loom so ominously on the horizon. Protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria that began in the “Arab Spring” of that year grew into armed rebellion, backed by the American government of Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As the fighting escalated Islamic jihadists operating in both Syria and Iraq seized control of territory in these two countries and formed the Islamic State (ISIS) declaring it to be the revival of the ancient caliphate. With the United States backing the so-called moderate rebels, Russia and then later Iran backing the Assad government, and ISIS waging a terrorist war on all fronts with plenty of funding from oil-rich governments in the Middle East millions of people were driven from their homes and ended up refugees in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and other neighbouring countries.

Then in late 2014 a wave of migration started as masses of people began crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe. This wave developed into a tsunami in 2015 and by the fall of that year 8000 were crossing over on a daily basis. Although the migrants claimed to be seeking asylum from the Syrian Civil War, statistics gathered by the United Nations show that less than half of them are actually from Syria, with large numbers coming from Afghanistan, Iraq and even African countries such as Eritrea, Nigeria and Somalia. UN statistics also showed that the majority of these migrants were men rather than women and children. Beneath the outward trappings of a refugee crisis this wave of migration looked suspiciously like an invasion.

The other players immediately began acting out the script Raspail had written for them decades ago. The pope, a heretic from Latin America who has difficulty distinguishing between the teachings of Karl Marx and those of Jesus Christ, told Europe that it was their Christian duty to take in all of these migrants and countless other clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, sang the same tune. The news media bombasted us with heart wrenching stories and images depicting about the plight of the refugees.

Meanwhile our politicians did not waste the opportunity this crisis afforded to show off their humanity at the expense of those they govern. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany had a “selfie” taken with a migrant and declared that Germany would place no limits on the number of asylum seekers they took in. Unsurprisingly, over a million took advantage of this generous offer. Realizing that this was too many, but not wanting to lose her reputation for being charitable and humanitarian, she asked other European countries to bail her out and take more of the refugees. When they proved reluctant to do so she attempted to bully them into doing so through EU-imposed quotas. All of a sudden right-wing, anti-EU, nationalist parties began to do well in the polls throughout Europe and in the UK the yes side won on the Brexxit referendum on leaving the EU.

In Canada, the new Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who never met a photo op that he didn’t like, pledged to bring 25, 000 Syrian refugees into the country by the end of last year. It actually took him until the end of February to do so but he then set a new target of resettling 50, 000 in Canada by the end of 2016. The thought of whether this would be good or bad for Canada and Canadians never crossed his mind. He got to show off how kind and compassionate and generous he was by bringing them over, getting his picture taken, and then dumping them on the country and forgetting about them.

All of the elements of Raspail’s haunting scenario are now present. We have the liberalism, hiding a death wish for our own culture and civilization behind a mask of concern for the other. We have the intellectual, political, religious and media elites obsessed with projecting an image of kindness and compassion at the expense of their own people. Finally, we have the teeming hordes flooding into the West with little interest in learning our ways, obeying our laws, and becoming part of our civilization. While they cannot be blamed for wishing to flee poverty, war, and other unpleasant conditions, they comprise, in effect if not in intention, an invasion force, armed with our own liberalism and aided and abetted by our own political and intellectual classes. Thus we find ourselves faced with the question of whether we allow this to continue and throw away the civilization our ancestors built, handed down to us, and entrusted us to pass on to their descendants or do we summon up the will to do what is necessary to preserve that patrimony as a sacred trust. Will Western civilization be or not be?

There is a major difference between what Raspail wrote and the reality unfolding around us today, however. It is not France that the eyes of the world are upon, but the United States of America. In this fall’s presidential race, one of the candidates, Hillary Clinton is pledged to raising the number of Middle Eastern migrants claiming to be refugees from the Syrian Civil War, taken in by the United States to 10 to 65 000, the high end of which would represent an increase of over 500%. In reality, the number if she is elected, is likely to be much higher. There will certainly be more people fleeing the region because as President she will pursue the same failed policies she pursued as Secretary of State. These policies are a large part of the reason there is a humanitarian crisis in Syria to flee from in the first place and as ought to be obvious from her belligerent sabre rattling against Syria, Iran, and Russia, she would only escalate the conflict as the American President. The other candidate, Donald J. Trump, is not only opposed to increasing the number of refugees brought in but insists upon better vetting for those who are brought in and has built his entire campaign on a platform of regaining control of America’s borders with regards to both trade and immigration. Furthermore, his foreign policy ideas of concentrating on fighting the real enemy, ISIS, and getting along with other countries like Syria, Iran, and Russia that are fighting the same enemy would be far less likely to exponentially increase the number of people needing to seek asylum.

What will be the decision on November 8th? Will the United States choose to preserve their own existence by electing Donald Trump or will they choose to dissolve America into the globalist new world order of George Soros and his puppet Hillary Clinton? If the Americans choose the latter, will any other Western country be able to find in herself the will to survive?

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

A Toxic Narrative

Lydia McGrew, a regular contributor to the website What’s Wrong With the World, in a recent post on her personal blog Extra Thoughts, took umbrage with those who have been sharing a particular meme in response to the controversy over the tape of Donald Trump’s lewd boasting of about a decade ago. She described the meme as toxic because it “represents the intrusion of vicious, misogynistic, manospherian attitudes into something more like mainstream culture.” The meme in question goes “If American women are so outraged at Trump's use of naughty words, who in the hell bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Grey.” Among the reasons Mrs. McGrew gives for condemning this meme, the first was that it downplays what Trump said, making it out to be about “naughty words” rather than “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it.”

The question of whether or not that meme is “toxic” is not of interest to me here. There is a narrative, however, one that is prevalent in institutions of higher learning today, that most definitely is toxic. Many of the responses that I have seen in social media over the last week to memes like the one Mrs. McGrew was discussing draw heavily upon this narrative and there is a hint of it in Mrs. McGrew’s own analysis even though it is not a narrative with which she is likely to have much sympathy given her stated views on a number of issues. The narrative I refer to is the feminist narrative of “rape culture.”

People who have shared memes similar to the one mentioned above have been accused of defending “rape culture” by those who accept Mrs. McGrew’s interpretation of Trump’s comments as “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it” rather than bragging that one of the benefits of his celebrity is that women are willing to let him do certain things which is the more natural interpretation of his words.

What is this “rape culture” to which they are referring?

Is rape culture the culture that we find when we drop the e off of rape and get rap? It would make sense to equate the two because rape and sexual aggression in general are frequently glorified in the lyrics of the noise which tries to pass itself off as music under that name. This is not, however, what is meant by rape culture and it is worthy of noting, in passing, that another recent meme has drawn attention to the fact that Michelle Obama, who claimed that the Trump tape “has shaken me to the core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted” and, like Mrs. McGrew, interpreted the comments on the tape as bragging about “sexually assaulting women” is herself a fan of rap music. The Obamas have hosted Common, Jay Z, and Rick Ross at the White House, noted misogynists, all of whose lyrics glorify violence in one form or another, including, in the case of Ross, drugging and date raping a girl.

Alright, if rap culture is not included in rape culture, how about a culture which encourages male family members to kill female family members who have been victims of rape in order to save the honour of the family? Last year, on New Year’s Eve, members of one such culture, Islamic culture, who had been foolishly admitted as refugees by female Chancellor Angela Merkel, ganged up on women in major cities all over Germany and sexually assaulted them. Is this the rape culture that everyone is talking about? Unlikely, given that it is Hillary Clinton who wishes to repeat Merkel’s mistake in the United States, and who has condemned as bigotry Mr. Trump’s call for members of this culture to be banned from entry into the United States until they could be strictly vetted.

No, what is meant by “rape culture” is nothing more or less than our culture, twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture, as seen through the lens of a narrative drawn up by the radical wing of the second wave of feminism. These radical feminists have been given an inordinate amount of influence in the halls of academia. The “women’s studies” and “gender studies” classrooms which have been established in major universities over the last fifty years serve little to no real academic purpose but exist solely to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with the message of feminism. The idea of rape culture is central to that message.

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller, a journalist who had been involved in several left-wing causes in the 1960s, including the more radical version of Second Wave feminism of which she would later write a history, had a book published entitled Against Our Will: Men, Women & Rape, which contained all of the main elements of the rape culture narrative: that rape is about power not sex, it is an instrument by which men as a class intimidate and oppress women as a class so as to keep power in the hands of men, and that Western culture normalizes and legitimizes rape in order to perpetuate the male power structure. The same ideas were put forward in other feminist writings at the same time but Brownmiller’s was by far the most influential.

The narrative, which relies heavily upon presuppositions drawn from Marxist theories that were long ago debunked, is itself utter nonsense. Western culture has condemned rape from time immemorial. One of the legends of Ancient Rome was that of the rape of Lucretia, the daughter of a Roman nobleman, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin Superbus the last king of Rome. Lucretia, after exposing the crime to her father which led to the revolution in which the Senate drove the Tarquins out and formed the Republic, plunged a dagger into her heart. Lucretia’s final act was honoured by the Romans as the ultimate evidence of her chastity but St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo presented a very different view of the matter in his De Civitate Dei. Having argued that the guilt of rape is imputable only to those who commit it, leaving the chastity of the souls and bodies of its victims intact, he argued that suicide is a completely inappropriate response to rape for it imposes the ultimate penalty upon the innocent party (Book I: Chapters 17-19, the last of which specifically addresses the case of Lucretia).

St. Augustine’s view, which could not be further removed from that of the cultures which think that a victim of rape should be killed to save the family’s honour, was informed by the Holy Scriptures, for the Book of Deuteronomy prescribes the death penalty for the man who commits rape, adding that “unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death.” Writing in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by the Goths, his ideas became foundational to Western Christendom.

Western civilization has changed a lot since the days in which it could be credibly called Christendom but the changes, while many of them are lamentable in my eyes, have mostly been ones of which feminists like Brownmiller would approve – women have been given the vote, access to higher education, recognized rights to own property in their own name, and access to careers outside of the home. Furthermore, all of this took place long before Brownmiller penned her tome. Yet it was the Western, and specifically North American, culture of the late twentieth century that the feminists indicted as rape culture.

Anybody who had two brain cells to rub together would not take this narrative seriously for a second, which is perhaps the reason it is so ubiquitous among academic intellectuals. It has only survived this long because feminists, by interweaving their ridiculous accusations against Western culture with the testimonies of actual rape victims have welded the two together in such a way as to make opposition to the narrative's interpretive grid seem like an attack on the personal experiences of rape victims ensuring that those indoctrinated with the narrative will undergo a negative emotional response to any criticism of it The narrative is passed on in an environment in which it is isolated from opposing viewpoints, ostensibly to create a “safe space” for victims, but more realistically to shield the narrative from criticism. It is completely toxic in its effects. It is used to transfer the guilt of a crime traditionally regarded as a capital offence off of its specific perpetrators and onto the entire male sex while condemning as encouraging rape the culture which is arguably the least condoning of it that the world has ever known. Feminists use this evil narrative to justify their insistence that those who make accusations of sexual assault have a “right to be believed” – to call their claims into question is supposedly a part of rape culture – an insistence that contradicts and undermines the fundamental Western right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those who have been evoking this toxic feminist narrative ought to be ashamed of themselves for doing so.




Monday, October 17, 2016

The Female of the Species is More Randy than the Male!

To point out the hard truth about women qua women as I am about to do in this essay goes against many of my deeply cherished convictions. As a Canadian Tory, which is something different from a right-liberal which is what most American conservatives are, I do not believe that everything worth defending in Western Civilization came about in the Modern Age as the result of the Enlightenment but insist rather, that there is much that is worth fighting and dying for to be found in the tradition that antedates modernity. That includes the concept of chivalry, which arose out of the code of honour of the knightly orders of the Middle Ages. One aspect of the attitude and behaviour towards women prescribed by chivalry, that of pretending that they are as pure as the driven snow, could be described as the maintenance of what Plato called a “noble lie.” It was based on the recognition of a greater truth, which was that men and women are different and not equal and that the natural inequality is such as warrants protective behaviour on the part of men towards women, even to the point of publicly holding such an illusion about them.

Unfortunately chivalry is dead having been murdered by the monstrous beast that is feminism. By insisting, contrary to reality that men and women are equals, and contrary to the superior morality of pre-liberal tradition that they must be regarded and treated as equals, feminism has so altered the relationship between the sexes as to remove any justification for the noble lie. That might not, in itself, be a good reason to say something unchivalrous, but female hypocrisy has never been more on display than it has for the last week and so the time has come to speak the ignoble truth.

In ancient Greek mythology there was a prophet by the name of Tiresias. He was an unusually long-lived man who lived in the city of Thebes. If you are familiar with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex you will recall that he is the man who reluctantly, and only after the provocation of an unjust accusation of conspiracy, revealed to Oedipus that he was the man who had killed King Laius and in doing so, unwittingly murdered his own father. Another well-known story about Tiresias is how he received the world’s first gender-reassignment surgery. One day he came across two snakes mating and whacked them with his staff, offending Hera, the notoriously psychopathic wife of Zeus, who turned him into a woman. Having undergone this apogynosis, she changed her name to Caitlyn, got her picture on the cover of all of Thebes’ popular entertainment magazines, was offered her own show at the amphitheatre, and became a star until, seven years later, she came across another pair of snakes going at it, and was changed back.

Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with all of this.

Tiresias was, as is quite unusual in a seer, blind. The stories vary as to how this came about, but one version says that he was called upon to judge, on the basis of his ahead-of-the-times transgendered experience, in a dispute between Zeus and Hera over which sex enjoyed copulation more. Zeus claimed that women got more out of it, Hera insisted that the pleasure mostly belonged to men. Tiresias, unwisely, answered truthfully and said that men get only one tenth of the pleasure that women do, thus pissing off the vengeful Hera yet again, and was struck blind as punishment.

Ancient stories of this sort are usually ways of telling truths and this is no exception. The truth contained in this story is that the female of the species is not only, as Rudyard Kipling famously noted, more deadly than the male, but she is also hornier and more randy as well.

As difficult as this is for most people to accept, having had it drilled into our heads most of our lives that the male is dominated by his libido, a violent and powerful force from which the female must be protected, it is also quite evidently true. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that a scientific comparison of the conversation men have among themselves, with that women have among themselves, would reveal that the former spend more of their time talking about women than the latter do about men? If so, such a person needs to get a grasp on reality.

Several years ago in a Bible study class at church the subject of pornography was addressed. It was put forward that this is a sinful addiction to which men are more prone than women. I made the objection that if we do not limit our concept of pornography to merely visual depictions of sex but include verbal descriptions as well, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, by that broader definition, a case can be made that the vast majority of fiction written for primarily female consumption constitutes smut, plain and simple.

Consider popular music for a further example. The most highly sexualized lyrics and performances on the pop music scene today are to be found among female recording artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga. Let us grant that these are women with a very strong business sense who are providing a supply to meet a market demand. Is that demand coming from heterosexual males? You would find little evidence of that by looking at the fan bases of these stars. Their audiences are composed mainly of females.

Women do not like to acknowledge this truth and understandably so. It greatly weakens their bargaining power when it comes to negotiating their relationships with men. So they would prefer that society continue to maintain the fiction that the larger portion of lust has been allotted to men. The hypocrisy in this has been magnified to the nth degree by the feminist movement which purports to speak for women. Feminism demands that the expression of female sexuality be free from the constraints of traditional morality. It complains that traditional morality held a double standard which condemned promiscuity more severely in women than in men and interprets this as an attempt to maintain a male monopoly on power by controlling female sexuality. This ignores the far more realistic explanation that women get pregnant and men do not, a fact which means that the natural consequences of sexual activity are visible in women and place a heavy burden upon them, so that the rules of traditional morality actually serve women’s own self-interest far more than they do that of men.

While feminism has rejected the constraints of traditional morality on female sexuality the natural consequences that explain the existence of what feminism wrongly perceived as a double standard still exist. Feminism’s solution to these is a monstrous one, to assert for women a right to terminate the lives of their unborn children while developing in the womb. Meanwhile, it has replaced the old morality with a new one of its own mold and manufacture replete with a double standard of its own. It is masculine sexuality the new morality seeks to constrain, not with simple and straightforward rules like “thou shalt not commit adultery” as in the old morality, but with loosely defined jargon that is malleable and expansive enough to allow feminists to read virtually any expression of masculine sexuality that they don’t like as a form of sexual aggression. If that was not bad enough, the feminists insist that women who accuse men of sexually aggressive offenses have a “right to be believed” which, as I pointed out in my last essay, is completely incompatible with the right of the accused – male or female – to be considered innocent until proven guilty which is fundamental to our civilization’s concept of justice.

All of this feminist hypocrisy has been on prominent display for a week now as women of both sexes have been waging a blitzkrieg on Donald Trump in their determination to see a woman who makes Queen Jezebel look like the Blessed Virgin in comparison become the next President of the United States simply because she is a woman. In the face of such hypocrisy, the time has come for all of us, distasteful as it may be, to leave chivalry aside and call a spade a spade where women are concerned. The fact of the matter is that women, the raunchier of the two sexes, say things publicly all the time that are far worse than what they have been condemning Donald Trump for saying privately. Their hypocrisy is so great they could offer lessons in it to the scribes and Pharisees.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Feminism is the Enemy of Freedom and Justice

The most insightful commentary that I have run across on the recent media attempt to torpedo the campaign of Donald Trump with crude and lewd remarks he was recorded having made ten years ago is by Dr. Stephen Baskerville the Professor of Government and Director of the International Politics and Policy Program at Patrick Henry College. His article, entitled “The Sexual Revolution Triumphant”, which was posted at the Daily Caller on the Monday after the second presidential debate, makes the observation that both candidates are “not only products but pioneers of the Sexual Revolution, and together they personify its political dynamic.” Trump, Dr. Baskerville goes on to explain, represents the hedonism of the earlier stage of the Revolution. The later, political side of the Revolution eventually morphed into “the more aggressive and authoritarian feminism.”

The feminists were at first allies of the hedonists, Dr. Baskerville points out, but they “replaced the old sexual morality, defined by religion and enforced by social disapproval, with new political definitions of sin, defined by state functionaries and enforced by gendarmes” eventually creating a “political dynamic that both encouraged unrestrained sex and then punished men for engaging in it.” The success of the political side of the Sexual Revolution can be seen in the fact that in response to the Trump tape scandal, the outrage even of conservatives has not been expressed in terms of traditional morality but rather those of “the political ideology that has replaced it: ‘sexism,’ ‘misogyny,’ ‘sexual harassment,’ and other new political jargon that no one fully understands because it can be expanded to mean anything.”

What the liberal reporters who broke the story about the Trump tape hoped to accomplish, as I pointed out in my last essay, was to divide the Republican Party and, more specifically, to turn moral and religious conservatives against Trump. What Dr. Baskerville’s insightful observation about how conservatives have been using the jargon of feminist ideology rather than of traditional morality to condemn Trump’s remarks means is that to the extent that the liberal attack on Trump has succeeded in achieving its ends it has also succeeded in enlisting the champions of traditional morality and sexuality on the side of their mortal enemy feminism.

That feminism is the mortal enemy of more than just traditional morality can be seen in the follow up to the tape scandal. After the second presidential debate, in which Trump wiped the floor with Clinton, the media began publishing allegations of groping and other sexual misconduct against Trump. The allegations, by contrast with those made against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, are of exceedingly low credibility. The accused is an exceedingly wealthy, high profile businessman and celebrity, and thus a goldmine for anyone who could credibly bring a lawsuit against him over something like this, yet the accusations pertain to events that supposedly happened as far back as thirty years. One of the accusers seems to have lifted her accusation verbatim from a Velvet Underground song. The question of Trump’s guilt or innocence, however, is not what concerns me here, but rather how liberals and feminists responded to those who questioned the credibility of these accusations.

Let us use George Takei, the actor, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series and other versions of the franchise, as an example. Takei has a large social media following and is outspoken in his progressive opinions. On Friday, October 14th, at 7:22 am, Takei tweeted the following:

“If you ever wonder why sexual assault victims don’t come forward, just look what’s happening now to those who do.”

Let us now parse this interesting remark of Mr. Sulu’s and see what we can discover. Implicit in these snide and snarky words is the idea that we ought never to question the credibility of claims of sexual assault. If we question the credibility of those who make accusations of sexual assault, victims of sexual assault won’t come forward, therefore by questioning the credibility of accusers, we are preventing victims from obtaining justice. Shame on us.

Do you see where this kind of reasoning leads? To say that it is wrong to question the credibility of an accuser is to say that an accuser has the right to be presumed to be telling the truth. If that seems reasonable to you, then you need to recognize that giving accusers the right of presumption of truth is incompatible with another right long regarded as a bedrock principle of justice in Western Civilization and especially the English speaking world. That is the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

This principle, which goes back as far as the jurisprudence of the Roman Empire - ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (1) – has been fundamental to English Common Law for centuries. It is closely related to the principle that Sir William Blackstone, writing in the eighteenth century, formulated as “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” a principle that also has ancient roots. Socrates, in Plato’s Gorgias, famously declared that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one. In the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, Abraham pled with the Lord not to destroy the wicked cities if ten righteous men could be found therein and He agreed. In the event, not finding even that many, He sent His angels to rescue Lot and his family, before the fire and brimstone fell.

These ancient and traditional principles are fundamental to our entire way of doing justice which, whatever its flaws may be, for all earthly justice is flawed, is superior to any system that has ever operated on the opposite concept of a presumption of guilt. These principles are far too important to sacrifice to the idols of feminist ideology.

Yet that is exactly what feminism expects us to do. George Takei did not just beam his sentiments out of thin air. The idea that those who accuse others of sexual harassment, assault and rape have a right to be believed, because questioning their veracity discourages victims from coming forward, is part of what feminists have been brainwashing their victims into thinking in gender studies classrooms for years. The result, naturally, of teaching a particular kind of accuser that she has the right to be believed, has been an avalanche of false accusations which have ruined the education, careers, and lives of many. Just ask the Duke University lacrosse team or the poor sap that Mattress Girl got her five minutes in the spotlight for defaming. These are the sort of things that come from allowing an ideological movement, whose leading personalities in the 1970s and 1980s made the absurd claims that all heterosexual intercourse is rape and that rape is an instrument whereby men as a class oppress women as a class thereby making all men culpable to have this much influence over the minds of youth.

Dr. Baskerville, in the article that I referenced at the beginning of this essay, argues that the success of the Sexual Revolution in replacing the clear language of traditional morality with the malleable and expansive ideological jargon of feminism, so that even supposedly conservative politicians feel compelled to use the latter rather than the former when condemning Trump’s locker room talk, is ominous because it is the nature of the new terminology to create a rationalization for a power grab on the part of the kind of radicals who find their champion in Hillary Clinton. This, along with what I have pointed out above about how feminism’s insistence upon a right of presumption of truth for accusers in sexual harassment/assault and rape cases would mean the abandonment of the basic principle of the right of presumption of innocence for the accused, demonstrates how feminist ideology is a threat to the principles of freedom and justice that have been essential elements of the tradition of Western civilized societies for centuries.

(1) The burden is on he who asserts, not he who denies.