Signs of the Times – Veganism and Vegetarianism

I noticed recently that across the street from the Tim Horton’s coffee franchise that I frequent somebody has put up a large, garish, billboard with the message “if eating animals is a choice, why choose to be cruel?” It is the only one of its kind that I have seen so far, although I suspect that many others can be found around our city significantly reducing her aesthetic value.

My first thought, upon reading the banal message upon this hideous sign was to wonder how those who are promoting this message plan to get it across to that vast body of meat eaters who cannot read signs in English or any other human language, that is to say, carnivorous animals. If eating animals is cruelty, then surely it is no less cruel when done by a lion, a tiger, or a bear than by a human being.

Perhaps vegetarians and vegans live in a fantasy world where Tennyson’s memorable description of nature as “red in tooth and claw” does not apply and animals all live in harmony with one another. A world even more out of touch with reality than the one portrayed in Disney cartoons.

My second thought was to wonder whether or not those who decry the cruelty of eating meat are for or against abortion. Pro-abortionists, as we all know, describe themselves as pro-choice, and if any choice deserves to be described as cruel surely it is abortion.

I think it would be a safe wager to say that the people behind that sign are “pro-choice”. Trendy causes like pro-abortion and veganism always seem to draw the same crowd of supporters regardless of how incompatible and contradictory the arguments for the causes may be. Veganism itself may make people susceptible to the influence of other silly ideas simply because the brain, starved of nutrients, cannot be expected to work right. Auberon Waugh hit the nail on the head when he said “too much salad can drive people mad, especially young women.”

One young woman driven mad by her vegan diet and the lack of any real discipline in her home country is the notorious Greta Thunberg. This infamous Swedish rabble-rousing juvenile delinquent combines her veganism with her other cause célèbre, her fight against the bogeyman of anthropogenic climate change. When she is not attacking the oil industry she turns her wrath upon the raising of livestock for the production of meat. Raising livestock, you see, has a huge carbon footprint due to all the greenhouse gasses that the animals emit.

Do you see the extremely ironic self-contradiction in her position?

It is a very dark sort of irony. On the one hand veganism condemns the eating of meat because it is cruel, because animals lose their lives in order that we may eat. On the other hand, Thunberg’s version of veganism condemns the raising of animals for meat because of all the greenhouse gasses that they emit. When this latter reasoning is taken to its logical extreme it becomes an argument, not for veganism, but for eliminating animals altogether. Which, of course, completely contradicts veganism’s primary position.

We can only expect more of this sort of fuzzyheaded irrationality as more and more people starve their brains of essential nutrients by going vegan.

The percentage of the population that is either vegan or vegetarian seems to have significantly increased in recent years. I have not bothered to look up the statistics, assuming they are there to be looked up, but the fact that almost every major restaurant franchise has been adding vegan options to its menu speaks for itself. That these options usually take the form of plant-based imitations of meat products is itself testimony against the vegan claim for the superiority of their diet. It is a strange sort of superiority where that which is regarded as superior has to be disguised as that which is regarded as inferior.

This brings to mind what Fran Lebowitz once wrote, that “Vegetables are interesting but they lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.”

When you cut through all of the cant and posturing of the anti-meat movement you find that there is very little to be found underneath. It is perhaps the most shallow of fashionable, trendy, movements and there is no substance whatsoever to its claims of moral and intellectual superiority.

Vegetarian and vegan claims that their diet is intrinsically healthier have gradually been eroded by the accumulation of evidence. While it is not absolutely impossible to get all your essential nutrients from a vegan diet, it is much more difficult to get your daily recommended intake of Vitamin B12 and protein with all essential amino acids. Decades ago, when dietitians were obsessed with cholesterol or animal fat as a cause of obesity and related health problems, this lent support to the vegan/vegetarian cause but it has long since been discovered that sugar, which comes from plants, and not dietary cholesterol, is the culprit in the obesity epidemic. The studies that at one time indicated that vegans and vegetarians live longer than ordinary people, when corrected to take into account other lifestyle factors show no such thing.

Those who argue for vegetarianism or veganism on the grounds of efficiency – that growing plants, feeding them to animals, and then eating the animals introduces an unnecessary step when you can just eat the plants themselves – insult the intelligence of those they seek to persuade. Grazing livestock, such as cattle, feed off of grass, which the human stomach is incapable of digesting. Poultry, at least the kind that are raised free range rather than being fed grain, subsist on a diet that few human beings, except perhaps those in some Third World jungle, would find palatable. As for the stuff that is typically fed to swine it is hardly fit for human consumption. Since the animals raised for meat do not ordinarily eat food which we would otherwise feed to humans it is nonsense to suggest that we can make food production more efficient and cut out an unnecessary middle step by going vegan.

These arguments against meat speak volumes about the vegans and vegetarians who make them, namely that they are silly city slickers who don’t have the faintest notion about the realities of food production.

If someone wants to personally refrain from eating meat that is, of course, his choice. As Sir Winston Churchill said to John G. Diefenbaker when the latter declined a drink on the grounds that he was a teetotaler and after he had explained the difference between this term and prohibitionist “Ah, so you are only hurting yourself.”

My beef, if you will pardon the expression, is with the vegans and vegetarians who condemn the eating of meat, regard their peculiar diet as a sign of their enlightenment and moral superiority, and see the conversion of the world to their lifestyle as their sacred mission and a step in progress towards a better world.

I began by talking about a sign and I will close by quoting another one. Several times a year I head out of town to visit my family in the country and when I return to Winnipeg, I often like to stop at Nick’s Inn in Headingley. Among the signs that adorn their walls, there is one which expresses perfectly what I think ought to be the final word on the matter.

“Either you like bacon or you’re wrong.”

Captain Airhead and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

Last week, Captain Airhead, or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as those who are less acquainted with his true character call him, gave Canadian neoconservatives among others something new over which to be furious. The government he leads voted for a UN General Assembly resolution the description of which varies depending upon how the commentator views it. Those who agree with the resolution would call it a resolution in favour of Palestinian self-determination or a Palestinian state. Those who disagree would call it a resolution that condemns or bashes Israel.

This resolution, whether interpreted as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel, with or without Canada’s support, in no way affects either the security and stability of the state of Israel on the one hand or the future of the Palestinians on the other. In this it is no different than the numerous other resolutions on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that are perennially raised in the UN General Assembly, all of which receive the support of a large majority of the member nations, all of which are voted against by the United States. It is because of the last mentioned fact that none of these resolutions has ever had any real effect on the conflict.

In this can be seen one of the few aspects of the United Nations that I would consider to be worthy of – moderate – praise. Don’t get me wrong. I despise the United Nations with all my heart and see it as being generally a force for evil rather than a force for good. I wish that Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth, including the mother country, would withdraw from it. However, I must begrudgingly say that it was a stroke of genius on the part of those who set up the United Nations, that resolutions by the General Assembly go absolutely nowhere when opposed by the Security Council – or even just one of its veto-holding, permanent members, such as the United States. Therefore the General Assembly, in which all the military dictatorships, Third world kleptocracies, and other failed states on the planet form a majority, serves as a sounding board, allowing the representatives of these worthless governments to vent their inanities in toothless resolution after toothless resolution, while all meaningful international business is conducted by the grown ups in the Security Council.

Although it would be undoubtedly wiser to say nothing about this at all I feel compelled to comment on the fact that no other controversial geopolitical issue has the ability to generate as much irrational thinking, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy on both sides as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Both sides see the conflict as a zero-sum game, both sides think the media is hopelessly biased against them and in favour of the other side, both sides rely upon a highly selective and revisionist history of the conflict to support their claims. In the Western countries to which both sides appeal for support on the international stage, Israeli supporters and Palestinian supporters alike find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the two sides in the Middle Eastern struggle for territory and power and the host of domestic issues that, however irrelevant, have become intertwined with these causes through the bonds of race and religion.

When two opposing sides have a “winner take all” approach to their conflict, their claims are mutually exclusive and it is not rational to say that both sides are right. It is perfectly reasonable, by contrast, to argue that both sides are wrong. Liberals prefer to take the “both sides are right” position, despite its irrationality, which is why they are usually wrong about everything, but in this case they have never been inclined to be on both sides at the same time. Seventy-one years ago, when Israel declared her independence, they were mostly on Israel’s side. Today, they are mostly on the side of the Palestinians.

Their arguments in favour of the Palestinians are the same arguments, derived from their abstract doctrine of human rights, that they used fifty to sixty years ago to support every nationalist movement in the Third world against European imperialism, and thirty to fifty years ago to support the Communist-backed terrorist movements against the Rhodesians and the South Africans. To this day they insist that they were right to support these causes, even though in each case the triumph of the cause they supported brought about the collapse of civilization in the country in question. Liberals maintain that the immense problems these countries have faced ever since are the legacy of “imperialism” and “colonialism” even though it is glaringly obvious that it was the removal of these things that caused the collapse of civilization. There is no good reason to believe that these arguments, which have produced such horrendous results in the past, will work out any better in application to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Conservative views have also changed. At the time of Israel’s independence, conservatives were either very skeptical of the project or mildly supportive of the new nation. They were rarely enthusiastic Zionists. Today, a much stronger Zionism has become the norm among conservatives. It would be one thing if this were because of all the things mentioned in the preceding paragraph, if they were taking the position “look, it is thanks to your moronic bleeding heart foolishness in the past that Rhodesia, South Africa, and every other country in the Third World has gone to pot, we are not going to let you destroy yet another civilized country in your idolatrous worship of human rights.” They are not. Their reasons for supporting the Israelis are almost as stupid as the reasons the liberals support the Palestinians.

There are basically two segments of the right today which are militantly Zionist – the neoconservatives and the Christian Zionists. The neoconservatives maintain that we ought to support Israel because she is a “liberal democracy”, the only one in the Middle East, and because she is a loyal ally. With regards to the first point, while it is not entirely false, there are many things about Israel that the neoconservatives would find intolerable in any other “liberal democracy.” The last point, however, is laughable in the extreme. No one has supported her as faithfully as the Americans have since the Lyndon Johnson administration, and no other country has she stabbed in the back and betrayed the way she has the United States. Her attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, her sale of American secrets to the Soviets in the 1980s and to the Red Chinese in the 1990s and much more recently are but three examples. Many more could be given.

The neoconservative arguments are, however lame, better than those of the Christian Zionists which rely upon abysmally bad theology. By Christian Zionist, I mean something more specific than just someone who is both a Christian and a supporter of Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I mean someone who holds to a theology that says that God requires him as a Christian to be a supporter of Israel. The foundation of this theology is the idea that God irrevocably gave the land of Canaan to the nation that grew out of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Old Testament and that therefore it belongs to the Jews by divine right today. The following will demonstrate what is wrong with this kind of argument. While the term Jew originally designated a member of the tribe of Judah, and later, by the end of the intertestamental period, all of national Israel, by the end of the first century AD it had come to refer to an adherent of the religion Judaism and it has held this meaning ever since. Although the adherents of Judaism are for a large part drawn from the ethnic stock of ancient Israel, Judaism has always admitted converts even though it has never made seeking them the high priority that Christianity and Islam have. Post-Second Temple Rabbinic Judaism explicitly rejects Jesus of Nazareth’s claim to be the Christ or Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Somebody who converts to this religion is a Jew even if he has no Hebrew blood. For Christian Zionism to be true, it would have to be true that everyone without a drop of Abraham’s blood in him who converts to this religion that explicitly rejects Jesus’ claim to be the Christ, the Son of God, thereby gains a God-given right to an inheritance in the land of Canaan/Palestine/Israel. Do I really need to explain further why from the perspective of Christian orthodoxy this is rank and utter heresy?

Of course, the theology of those who argue that Christians need to support the Palestinian cause because “social justice, blah, blah, blah” is no better.

While I see no good reason for civilized Western countries to be drawn in to this Middle Eastern tribal blood vendetta and plenty of good reasons for us not to touch it with a ten-foot pole, if we absolutely must stick our noses in where they don’t belong it seems to me that the most rational position is to support – in a very moderate way - Israel. I would base this on everything that I said five paragraphs previously although the fact that Captain Airhead is now supporting the Palestinians is also a pretty good argument for the Israeli side.

Israel’s supporters, however, need not be worried that Canada’s reversal on this UN resolution is going to harm that country in any way. Captain Airhead knows as well as I do that UN General Assembly resolutions are toothless when opposed by a permanent member of the Security Council and the United States is not likely to change its position any time soon. Like everything else Captain Airhead does, this is all for show. In this case, Airhead wishes to dazzle all the Third world countries who hate Israel into supporting his bid for a temporary seat on the Security Council. With any luck, not only will he fail to obtain this goal which would serve only his own vanity and not any real need of Canada’s, but he will also alienate the large segment of the Canadian Jewish community which have historically been faithful supporters of the Liberal Party and do irreparable damage to that party’s interests.

Thoughts on Conservatism and Capitalism in the Wake of L’Affair Chic-fil-A

On Monday came the announcement that Chic-fil-A, a fast-food franchise that specializes in a sandwich with fried chicken as the filler and which can be found mainly in the United States, would no longer be making donations to the Salvation Army, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. For several years now the restaurant chain has been under severe pressure from the Homintern to do just this. The alphabet soup gang’s complaint is that these organizations don’t agree with same-sex marriage. In this, these Christian charities are in agreement with Chic-fil-A’s founder, the late S. Truett Cathy, who was a devout, church-going, Southern Baptist, who taught Sunday School and insisted that his restaurants close on Sundays. Daniel Cathy, the son of the founder and the current chair and CEO, has also been an outspoken critic of the gay agenda.

Needless to say, Chic-fil-A’s announcement has generated a lot of discussion this week among those who would consider themselves to be conservative or right-of-centre. Some have focused on condemning the gay lobby’s strong arm, gestapo, tactics and its apparent goal of brutally silencing all who will not give it the affirmation it demands. Lloyd Billingsley’s The Menace of LGBTQ Bigots at FrontPageMag is a good example of this approach. More often, the criticism has been of Chic-fil-A itself for caving in. At least one commentator, Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media, has taken Chic-fil-A’s denial that its decision was a capitulation to the demands of gay activists at face value and argued for giving them the benefit of the doubt. Dalrock, in response, has called this a case of “conservative militant cluelessness” which he defines as a “bizarre conservative impulse to not only deny reality, but to actively work in the service of SJWs to ensure that others do as well.” All I really have to add to that is that about a decade ago, when the gay mafia first made Chic-fil-A a target, they were making fairly large donations to pro-family organizations that were engaged in active opposition to the LGBTQ agenda. That they long ago ceased to do so weakens Mr. Kruiser’s arguments since it appears that this latest corporate decision is simply the most recent in a series of capitulations to demands that have, as the demands of bullies tend to do, increased with each capitulation.

Of all the commentary on this news that I have read so far the most interesting has been that of engineer and novelist Francis W. Porretto at his blog Liberty’s Torch. Porretto approaches the subject from a fresh new angle, that of the question of whether or not businesses should make charitable contributions. He makes an ethical argument that corporate charity is immoral if the company’s stock is publicly traded and that if the company is privately owned, its executives’ private charity should be just that, private, both in the sense that it should come out of their own pockets rather than company funds and in the sense that they should follow the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and not trumpet their giving. This he argues, would make companies immune to the attacks of woke activists.

Porretto makes a strong case, although the protection his proposal would undoubtedly give corporations from attacks like the one on Chic-fil-A would not help some of the other businesses targeted by gay activists. Take an example that Porretto mentioned himself, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, the cake bakery in Oregon that was subjected to an anti-discrimination lawsuit in 2013 for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding, and fined a crippling amount in 2015. While the refusal of the bakery’s owners, Aaron and Melissa Klein, to bake the lesbian cake undoubtedly falls under the category of “the prioritization of irrelevancies – social, political, or otherwise – in the operation of a business” which Porretto decries in his first paragraph, it is also a fundamental matter of conscience, the refusal to participate in something one deems to be wrong.

There is a different form of “the prioritization of irrelevancies – social, political, or otherwise – in the operation of a business” that warrants consideration. I refer to what has come to be known as “woke capitalism.” Woke capitalism is the mirror image of the Chic-fil-A controversy. In woke capitalism, it is the corporate managers who are the social justice warriors imposing their agenda of feminism, anti-whiteness, anti-Christianity and alphabet soup gang demands upon their companies, employees and customers/clients. It seems to be most prevalent in the large corporations of the entertainment and information industries, the reason why being fairly obvious – progressives would find control of these companies the most useful for disseminating their ideas – but it is by no means limited to them.

The rise of woke capitalism gives those of us who would consider ourselves to be traditionalist, conservative, reactionary, or otherwise right-of-centre, to reconsider the assumption that businessmen qua businessmen are our natural allies or, to put it another way, that our interests and business interests coincide. It also, of course, is reason for our progressive foes to reconsider their assumption that businessmen are their natural enemies.

These assumptions go back to the nineteenth century when the Left, which is to say the ongoing Modern revolution against Christian civilization, its kings, and its Church, began to identify itself with socialism. Socialism was the name given to a number of different theories and movements which arose, more or less simultaneously in the nineteenth century, which claimed to speak on behalf of those who had to rely on the sale of their manual labour to make a living and which placed the blame for their woes, and the woes of human society in general, on the private ownership of property. In socialism, the Right, which is to say the defenders of Christian civilization, its kings, and its Church, and capitalists or businessmen, both of which saw private property as a fundamental good and a basic element of civilization rather than the evil which socialism made it out to be, had a common enemy. Through the reasoning that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, this led to the assumption that capitalists were the natural allies of the Right.

There was always plenty of good reasons to reject this assumption, however. In the centuries prior to the birth of socialism the Modern revolt against Christendom, its kings, and its Church was primarily the work of merchants, traders, and financiers, in short, the capitalists. Indeed, capitalism, or more properly liberalism, which should not be confused with business itself but is rather the re-organization of state and society according to the principle that business interests should come first, itself an anti-Christian principle, began with the rejection, in Calvinistic thought, of Christianity’s traditional strictures against usury and the loosening of legal restrictions on such in states influenced by this theology. Furthermore, even after the Left embraced socialism, there were no lack of capitalists to be found to fund and finance socialism, even in its most extreme Bolshevist form. A number of perceptive traditional Tories such as George Grant and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne noted, in the second half of the twentieth century, that capitalism was a far more effective engine for producing the kind of radical social and cultural changes that conservatives loathe than socialism.

The Left has now moved beyond socialism to identify itself with an ever-growing consortium of fringe activist movements, each wackier than the one before it. Big Business, by jumping on board this bandwagon racing down the road to hell has produced the monstrous menace of woke capitalism. This might mean that the business class has collectively lost its marbles. Or, perhaps, they are finally, openly, wearing their true colours, debunking once and for all the notion that there is any natural affinity between their interests and those of the Right.

In which case, it is time for us on the Right to abandon an unnatural alliance and open up on Big Business full blast over how they through their Avaricious worship of Mammon have decimated small towns and the family farm, turned every community in the Western world into a clone of the next – same stores, same restaurant franchises, etc., completely destroyed the aesthetics of the landscape – which the Green movement, if it were genuine, which it is not, would focus on instead of their loony Apocalyptic nonsense about climate change – and turned everything into a commodity thus reshaping the world into the image of Oscar Wilde’s cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Heaven knows they abundantly deserve it.

Thanks, But No Thanks, Mr. Moriarty!

Michael Moriarty, the award-winning actor who portrayed Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Stone on Law and Order in the early 1990s, has responded to Don Cherry’s firing last week by proposing that Canada join the United States of America. It is surely a rather unusual way of showing support for a patriot who was unjustly fired for displaying his patriotism, to suggest that his country be swallowed up by its neighbour.

The proposal that Canada abandon its Loyalist history, give up on the Confederation project, and join the United States is not a new one. Goldwin Smith, the nineteenth century arch-liberal journalist, made just this proposal in 1891 in a book entitled Canada and the Canada Question. This was the same year in which Sir Wilfred Laurier, leader of the Liberal Party and the author of the phrase “sunny ways” which the present ultra-woke, progressive, Prime Minister of Canada adapted as a motto of sorts four years ago, campaigned on a platform of reciprocity – free trade – with the United States. The Tories, led by Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation, in the last election campaign of his career, denounced this as “veiled treason”, an attempt to lure Canadians from their “ancient loyalties.” The economic integration of the two countries, Sir John warned, would lead to Canada being swallowed up by the United States, first economically, then culturally, and finally politically.

The Liberals were defeated that year and Sir John won his last Dominion election campaigning with the slogan “the old flag, the old policy, the old leader.”

Historically, the call to draw Canada closer to the United States, make her more American, and in extreme cases to make her part of the United States, came from the centre-left party, the Liberals, and was opposed by the centre-right party, the party of Confederation, the Conservatives.

This historical alignment is the natural one. When in the present day, we hear the historical call of Canadian liberalism echoed in the voices of those, such as Mr. Moriarty, who are considered to be centre-right, it has a most unnatural ring to it.

Consider Mr. Moriarty’s own arguments. He writes:

Canada has become, within the scandal of Don Cherry’s firing by CBC, a docile and obedient member of The New World Order.
The case against Don Cherry basically reveals that he is more American than Canadian!
More Donald Trump than Justin Trudeau.
Cherry’s cry for all Canadians to wear the Poppy, the symbol honoring the Allied veterans and dead from both World War I and World War II?!
It is actually a cry from the deepest guts of the Holy Bible and the Judeo-Christian Civilization!
The grandest child of which is, indeed, the United States of America!
The “Nation Under God”!
Meanwhile, the creator of dreams for “The New World Order”?
The United Nations!

Don Cherry, of course, was fired by Sportsnet, a subsidiary of Rogers Media, which is privately owned, at least to the extent that this description has any meaning when applied to large, corporate, conglomerates like Rogers, and not by the public broadcaster the CBC, which lost the rights to Hockey Night in Canada to Sportsnet six years ago.

That is a fairly minor error compared to the major ones in the remainder of the above quoted remarks.

For one thing, the reason the Canadian Left hates Don Cherry so much is not because he is “more American than Canadian” but because he is more Canadian than they are and thus a perpetual reminder that their claim to be the natural rulers of Canada is false and that despite the “revolution within the form” perpetrated during the first Trudeau premiership, the real Canada is far more Don Cherry than it is Justin Trudeau.

More importantly, however, while I certainly agree with Mr. Moriarty that we ought to choose Christian civilization over the New World Order, I find it hard to believe that he is unaware that the words Novus Ordo Seclorum are a motto that has been inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States of America since 1782 and printed on its dollar bill for almost a century. Or that this is a lot longer than the phrase “under God” has been part of the American Pledge of Allegiance, having been added in the 1950s.

Now, he might argue that as a motto of the United States, Novus Ordo Seclorum – “New Order of the Ages” or “New World Order” – does not have the negative connotations which the Right frequently attaches to it, i.e., the replacement of Christian civilization with secular liberalism and the swallowing up of all countries into a single, global, order. This is not an easy position to maintain, however, given that a) the United States was the first Western country to take a major step towards modern secularism with the non-establishment clause of its First Amendment and b) the United Nations was the brainchild of two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The New World Order of the present day is the result of a series of revolutions against the Old Order of Christendom. The Christian civilization of this Old Order was based upon the idea that Church and State both derived their authority from the same source, God, and were neither blended, as in a theocracy, nor separate, as in later, secular, liberalism, but had their own distinct roles, functions, and authority which complemented each other. To the civil state, headed by the king or queen, who upon coronation swore an oath to serve God and defend His Church, was given the ministry of the Law in which the sword was wielded in the administration of justice, the settlement of disputes, the punishment of crime, and the maintaining of the peace. To the Church, Whose head is Christ, Whose earthly deputies are those to whom the Apostles bequeathed their ministry, is given the ministry of the Gospel by Word and Sacrament, and a number of supporting ministries of charity, compassion, and good works. It is this Order, and the God it honours, against which progressivism has revolted, seeking to replace it with a New World Order of secularism, whether soft, like that of the original liberalism of the United States, or hard, like that of Communism.

The most important of the revolutions against Christendom were the Puritan revolts against the orthodox Church of England and the Royal House of Stuart in the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century, and the Russian Revolution, especially its Bolshevist phase, in the twentieth century. The last mentioned, which spawned imitation Communist revolutions all over the globe in the century that followed, took place in the first phase of the World War that reduced most of what was left of the Old Christian Order to rubble. In both phases of this War the United States was led by liberal Democrats who were determined that the war would result in a new world order. So it was that at the end of World War I, at Woodrow Wilson’s insistence, the Allies forced Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Karl I off of their thrones, with disastrous consequences, and created the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations. While it was a set of most unfortunate circumstances that forced us to ally ourselves with the greater of two evils, Stalin and his Soviet Union, to defeat the lesser of two evils, Hitler and his Third Reich, in the Second World War, it was the influence of FDR, after he successfully maneuvered the Empire of Japan into attacking his own country bringing him into the war that he so desperately wanted to enter in order to carry out his megalomaniacal messianic fantasies, that ensured that eastern Europe fell under Communist domination, that the Allies handed several million people who had fled Soviet repression back over to the Red Army, and the United Nations as we know it today was created. American re-education, imposed upon the defeated Germans by force and on the European Allies by bribery, became one of the largest, if not the single largest, contributing factors to the spread of the Cultural Marxim and political correctness that has in more recent decades been imported back to North America from Europe.

The United States, far from being the leader of the resistance to the New World Order, has been the most active and effective agent in engineering its construction.

In the Dominion of Canada, following the Second World War, the party of Americanization, the Liberal Party, gained a stranglehold on power in Ottawa just at the time that its own leadership had been captured by the hard left. They then proceeded to impose a far left transformation upon our country in which imitation of the United States was the means by which most of the changes were accomplished.

The two biggest examples of this took place during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.

In 1964, almost ten years after the Supreme Court decision that struck down segregation, the United States government, giving in to demands from a Communist-affiliated, heretical preacher who began his career as a civil rights activist only after the aforementioned Supreme Court decision, passed a bill which replaced the injustice of de jure segregation with the injustice of de jure integration. Pierre Trudeau decided that Canada needed to follow the United States’ example and in 1977 passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, which established thought police and a thought crime tribunal. By imitating the United States, Trudeau made us more like the USSR.

Closer to the end of his premiership, Trudeau decided that since the United States has its lauded Bill of Rights, we needed an equivalent, and gave us one in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. Not only did this actually weaken our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms by giving both Parliament and the provincial legislatures the right to ignore them, it also saddled us with an autocratic Supreme Court, just like the American one, which then proceeded to wage war on our Christian traditions, customs, morality and heritage as SCUSA had been doing in the United States for decades prior to this. Six years later, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down all our abortion laws in R. v. Morgentaler. This was fifteen years after the equivalent American decision of Roe v. Wade and would not have been possible in Canada prior to 1982.

All attempts to move Canada closer to the United States have had the effect of shifting the country leftward. Consider the fact that our military, whose faithful service to God, King, Country, and Empire we rightly honour every November 11th, now serves as part of an international police force that serves the United Nations. An example of how this has led to our forces being woefully misused took place in the final decade of the last century when, with the blessing of then Prime Minister Jean Chretien, our troops participated in the ungodly UN/NATO campaign against the Orthodox Serbs on behalf of the Bosnian and Kosovan Muslims instigated by the Clinton administration in the United States. The placing of our troops in the service of the United Nations was initially due to the efforts of Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his actions, in itself a good indicator that they are worthy of opprobrium. These same actions led to the defeat of the St. Laurent government in which Pearson served because the Canadian public correctly perceived them to be a betrayal of Canada’s traditional loyalties. Pearson had taken the side of the Eisenhower administration against the British – and, for that matter, the French and Israelis – in the Suez Crisis.

Given everything I have observed above, and the fact that Mr. Moriarty himself acknowledges that the American Left and such elements of the Republican Party as the Bush family are open supporters of the New World Order, it makes zero sense for him to argue that for Canada to join the United States would be some sort of triumph of Christian civilization over the New World Order.

Indeed, Loyalism and Confederation, the foundations of Canada, were efforts to resist the New World Order in its earliest stages. While liberalism had already permeated much of the United Kingdom by the middle of the eighteenth century when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, Great Britain retained, and still retains to this day, the outward form of the Old Christian Order. As a result, British civilization was a mixture of the old Christian civilization and the new liberal civilization in which the old institutions of Christendom exerted a restraining influence on the excesses of liberalism. Sadly, that influence has waned as liberalism has gained the ascendency. In the American Republic, liberalism was wholeheartedly embraced and the outward form of the Christian Order was rejected. The decision of the Loyalists and later the Fathers of Confederation to remain a part of British civilization and resist the pull of the American Republic was a decision to choose a weakened form of Christian civilization over a soft form of the New World Order.

For all these reasons, we must say thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Moriarty, for your kind offer to join the United States. As admirable as the current American President’s stand may be, on many issues, he is far from typical. Indeed, he is the exception to a norm represented by the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas.

God Save the Queen!

Lorne Gunter and the Pod People

I think that perhaps one of the pod people from Don Siegel’s 1956 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has replaced Sun Media’s Lorne Gunter. That is the only way I can make sense out of his November 12th column, arguing that Sportsnet was right to fire Don Cherry.

“As much as it pains me to say”, Gunter wrote, “I think Sportsnet was right to dump the long-time namesake of Coach’s Corner on Hockey Night in Canada.” Nota bene, Gunter did not say “had the right to” but “was right to.” Gunter is not merely defending Sportsnet’s right as an employer to terminate their contract with Cherry but their actual decision to do so.

This is the opposite of my own position, articulated here, and therefore obviously misguided, dunderheaded and just plain wrong.

How does Gunter or his pod person doppelganger justify this expression of mental flatulence?

By saying that this time Cherry “went too far.”

How did he do that?

By excoriating “’you people’ – meaning immigrants – for not wearing poppies to honour Canada’s veterans on Remembrance Day.”

Gunter went on to talk at length about the distinction between what Cherry said to Joe Warmington in his post-firing interview on Monday, i.e., that everyone in Canada should wear a poppy and what he said on Saturday night. Yes, the two statements are very different, and yes, saying that everyone should wear a poppy would have been a lot less controversial than singling out immigrants for criticism. Just because the latter is more controversial, however, does not necessarily make it wrong, much less an offense worthy of losing one’s position.

Gunter maintains that by identifying the group he was talking about as immigrants Cherry was “criticizing them for their national origin.” This is palpable nonsense. Cherry may have been criticizing immigrants, but he was not criticizing immigrants qua immigrants, id est, for being immigrants. He was criticizing them for not wearing poppies. This negates what Gunter then had to say about the words “you people.”

Gunter wrote:

But “you people” is a lumping term. It lumps together all people with a specific characteristic and blames them equally, whether or not as individuals they deserve a particular accusation.

That is pure drivel. In hermeneutics – the discipline of Scriptural interpretation – class, we were taught to distinguish between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is when you take your interpretation from out of the text of Scripture itself. Eisegesis is when you read your interpretation into a text. That is exactly what Gunter is doing here. “You people” in the context of Cherry’s Saturday night harangue, clearly does not mean “all immigrants” but only the ones who don’t wear poppies.

In my last remarks on this matter I made reference to the 2000 comedy by the Farrelly Brothers, Me, Myself and Irene. In the introductory scenes to that movie, Jim Carrey’s character, Rhode Island state trooper Charley Baileygates has just married his first wife and brought her home. As he prepares to tip the limousine driver, portrayed by Tony Cox, he asks if “you people” take cheques. By “you people” he obviously means the limo company, but Cox’s character takes it to mean “black people” and gets combative. Baileygates’ wife intervenes – on behalf of the limo driver – and excoriates her new husband for his racist talk, and when he denies having said anything racist, the driver switches gears and re-interprets “you people” as a reference to his diminutive stature.

What Peter and Bobby Farrelly saw as a hilarious joke nineteen years ago, has become the sad, sober reality of the present day.

Having disposed of the ridiculous assertion that the words “you people” turned Cherry’s remarks into a swipe at all immigrants regardless of their personal behaviour, the question becomes one of whether or not it was justifiable to specify them as a group in addressing the problem of neglect of poppies on Remembrance Day. Gunter’s colleague Tarek Fatah, who similarly reads volumes into Cherry’s words, but disagreed with Gunter’s conclusion that the firing was justified, answered this question in his column.

If there was any doubt about Cherry’s assertion, it was removed the next evening by Mississauga-based-Pakistani-Canadian broadcaster Tahir Gora. He tweeted: “I attended 2 events Nov 10th evening organized by two diaspora groups in which I couldn’t find a single person wearing poppy – I can’t name those diaspora groups otherwise I would be called a ‘racist’ by politically correct media and politicians. But Don Cherry makes a point.

Fatah then went on to describe his own observations on Monday, in downtown Toronto, of how few people were wearing poppies.

Cherry did not say that immigrants were the only ones not wearing poppies nor did he say that all immigrants were not wearing poppies. It would seem, however, that neglect of the poppy is a problem in certain immigrant communities, and this more than justifies Grapes’ mention of them in his commentary.

Unless, of course, we believe that immigrants are a sacred class, above criticism and reproach. This appears to be Justin Trudeau’s belief, but I never took Lorne Gunter to be in Captain Airhead’s camp before.

While I have disagreed with things that Gunter has written several times in the past, those disagreements were all of the type that naturally occur between an old-fashioned Tory and a neo-conservative. He is a republican, I am a royalist and a monarchist. He thinks of the heritage of Western civilization in the modern terms of classical liberalism, whereas I would emphasize more our heritage from classical antiquity and Christendom. He is an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism and the free market, I merely dislike these things less than I loathe socialism. It is very rare, however, that I have disagreed with him on matters pertaining to the politically correct suppression of words and ideas that offend and the crusade of the woke to destroy the lives and careers of all who disagree with him. Indeed, this is the first such instance of which I can think.

Which is why I am leaning towards the hypothesis that he has been replaced by a space alien look alike. What other theory could possibly explain his having become someone who thinks like a woke social justice warrior overnight?

Grapes, You are an Inspiration to us All!

It was greatly to my disgust that I learned, yesterday, that Sportsnet had fired the legendary Canadian institution, Don Cherry, over remarks he made on Coach's Corner this past weekend. Here is what he said on Saturday:

“You know, I was talking to a veteran. I said ‘I’m not going to run the poppy thing anymore because what’s the sense? I live in Mississauga, nobody wears — very few people wear a poppy. Downtown Toronto, forget it! Downtown Toronto, nobody wears a poppy.’

He says, ‘Wait a minute, how about running it for the people that buy them?’

Now you go to the small cities, the rows on rows.

You people love — that come here, whatever it is — you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey. At least you could pay a couple of bucks for a poppy. These guys paid for your way of life, the life you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price.

Anyhow, I’m going to run it again for you great people and good Canadians that bought a poppy.”

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it needed to be said, and kudos to Grapes for saying it.

Of course, the lily-livered whiners, the woke snowflake mob, got all triggered by the words "you people" and started throwing conniptions. (See the opening scenes of the 2000 Farrelly Brothers film Me, Myself and Irene staring Jim Carrey and Renee Zellweger for a hilarious satire of those who read all sorts of ridiculous things into just this phrase).

For a day and a half these modern day Salomes were all over the social media demanding that Don Cherry's head be given them on a platter. Corrupt mainstream media outlets, such as the CBC which for decades carried Hockey Night in Canada in which Coach's Corner was featured, provided them an additional platform to make these demands. Finally, on Remembrance Day, the sniveling scoundrels at Sportsnet, issued a statement about how Cherry's patriotic call to respect and honour our veterans was "divisive remarks that do not represent our values or what we stand for" and so he would no longer be appearing on their program.

In an interview with Joe Warmington, Cherry said that this was not a problem and that "I know what I said and I meant it. Everybody in Canada should wear a poppy to honour our fallen soldiers."

Amen.

This is exactly how everybody ought to respond when some politically correct mob takes offence at his words and calls them "racist", "sexist" or some other of the growing list of -ists and -phobics. If there were more of these refusals to grovel and apologize, there would be a lot less of these politically correct mobs.

Don Cherry is an inspiration to all of us who are sick and tired of wokeness, political correctness, cancel culture and all the rest of that nonsense. Let us follow his example.

No, Andrew Scheer’s “Social Conservatism” Did Not Lose the Election

In light of the public discussion that has taken place since the Dominion Election on October 21st, a point that I made in my reflections on the outcome of that election deserves reiteration. The views which Andrew Scheer, Conservative leader, was said to hold on abortion and same-sex marriage, are not the reason the Conservatives failed to win the election, nor are they even a significant contributing factor to the loss. The evasive, wishy-washy, manner in which Mr. Scheer handled these matters when they were raised during the campaign may have been a contributing factor, but the right-wing views attributed to him were not.

The vast majority of commentators in the mainstream media, being overwhelmingly progressive, maintain otherwise, of course, but in this, as in most things, they are completely wrong. Indeed, on some level they know that they are wrong, which is the very reason they insist so strongly and so frequently on their mistaken notion that social conservatism cannot be sold to the Canadian public. They want it to be true and believe that if they tell Canadians it is true often and loudly enough that will make it true. The principle they are operating upon is one famously spelled out by an infamous, Austrian psychopath in the tenth chapter of his memoirs, ninety-four years ago.

Andrew Scheer in an interview with the Canadian Press shortly after the election said that he believed it was possible for someone with conservative views on abortion and same-sex marriage to be Prime Minister of Canada. He was right, but it would have been better if he had been saying this firmly, strongly, and consistently prior to the election. A few days later, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh responded by saying “You cannot have Mr. Scheer’s beliefs and be the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s pretty clear.” One wonders if he was able to say this with a straight face. Of all the electable parties in Canada, Mr. Singh’s takes the position furthest to the left on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and they were the biggest losers in the election, dropping from third to fourth place in total number of seats, and going down four percentage points in the popular vote. Mr. Scheer’s party, by contrast, increased their number of seats and their percentage of the popular vote. If the election results say anything about social conservatism, and it does not, it is not what Mr. Singh thinks.

Let me put it to you plainly. Some people claim to believe that it is every woman’s right to terminate the lives of her children, at least prior to their births. Of these lunatics, the number that would have voted Conservative had someone other than Andrew Scheer been leading the party is miniscule. It is probably not enough to make the difference between the win or the loss of a single seat.

Conversely, there are sane people in our country, a lot more than the mainstream media would like you to think, who rightly consider it to be morally outrageous that in Canada women are legally able to obtain abortions right up to the moment of birth. This includes people with a wide range of differing opinion as to what legal limitations there ought to be on abortion. Some would like to see it prohibited only in the third trimester, others would like to see it restricted to the first, and others still would ban it altogether. There are those who would make an exception in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape, while others would say that to do so is to punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. Some maintain that abortion should be permissible when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mothers, others would say that while saving the life of the mother is certainly a priority, termination of the pregnancy is permissible only as an unintended consequence, never as the intended outcome. There are also differences of opinion as to who bears the burden of criminal guilt over abortion – the doctor, the mother, or both – and what the penalty ought to be. Those of us who take the most hardline anti-abortion position possible and would ban any and all abortions from the moment of conception with no exceptions but with strict penalties for all involved are, sadly, a minority but those who think that there should be legal restrictions of some sort are much larger in number, almost certainly the vast majority.

Let us make two unwarranted and absurd assumptions about such people. The first is that these are all aware of the difference between their own position and the post-1988 status quo and therefore of the fact that Parliamentary legislation would be necessary to arrive at the place in which they want the country to be. The second is that they view everything other than abortion through the lens of ceteris paribus and so choose whom to vote for based solely on this one issue. How, given these assumptions, would Scheer’s campaign have appealed to such people in the last election?

The answer is that while Scheer’s pro-life and socially conservative background would not have driven them away, like it would all the hard-line pro-choicers who would never vote Conservative anyway, his insistence, in response to progressive badgering, that he would not re-open the issue, would have given them no incentive to vote Conservative. What Scheer was saying was that the Conservatives, under his leadership, would in practice, act no differently than the Grits or the Socialists. In which case there was no reason whatsoever for pro-life, socially conservative, people to vote for the party that has long taken their votes for granted, while doing nothing to deserve them.

The conclusion is inevitable – while Scheer’s stated views in the past on abortion and same-sex marriage were not a significant contributing factor to the Conservative loss his waffling on these same issues during the campaign was. The weasely, mealy-mouthed, evasive manner in which he conducted this waffling, did not help things much either.

For decades progressive politicians and pundits have been telling the Conservatives that they need to limit their platform to fiscal conservatism because social conservatism loses elections. For far too long, the leadership of the Conservative Party has been listening to them. The exact opposite is the case. How many people practice rigid, self-denying, austerity in their private lives? Of these, how many make it their political priority that the government do the same? Fiscal conservatism is rational, sensible, and responsible, but it appeals only to economic eggheads and not the public. For most people, the immediate benefit to themselves of government spending programs will always outweigh their portion of the collective cost of government. This is the obvious political application, perhaps even more valid than the original ecological application, of Garrett Hardin’s famous parable of the “tragedy of the commons.” Nobody has ever won an election on fiscal conservatism alone. It has to be packaged with other, more appealing, policies. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were no exceptions to this rule.

This is the lesson that Andrew Scheer and the Conservative leadership ought to learn from our last Dominion election.

What are the odds that they will learn it?