The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

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.