Kenney Gets it Backwards Again

Jason Kenney, the former premier of Alberta who had been a Cabinet minister in the Dominion government during the premiership of Stephen Harper, has recently attracted attention again for his criticism of Candice Malcolm and her Juno News.  On Monday, 16 February, Malcolm hosted Daniel Tyrie, who at one time was the executive director of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party and who is currently the chairman of the Dominion Society of Canada which he co-founded last year, on her podcast, the Candice Malcolm Show.  The topic of the interview was immigration and national identity, unsurprisingly as this is the focus of the Dominion Society, and in the course of the interview creative solutions to the problems created by the aggressive promotion of mass immigration in recent decades were discussed. 

 

That Kenney objected to this is also not surprising.  While the Liberal government under its previous leader Captain Airhead highly publicized its aggressive promotion of mass immigration the actual policy was virtually identical during the Harper premiership in which Kenney was the minister responsible for this sort of thing.  The most significant difference is that Harper and Kenney did not peacock what they were doing to the extent that Captain Airhead later did.

 

Kenney responded to the interview on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.  He opened by accusing Tyrie of being a racist, then included a self-righteous mini-rant about the immorality of racism, then asked what “remigration” meant as if the term wasn’t self-explanatory and suggested an interpretation that presented the concept in the worst possible light.

 

Malcolm, defending the interview from this and similar criticism from progressive sources, correctly argued that her job as an interviewer wasn’t to agree or disagree with her interviewee and that the topic was an important one worthy of discussion.  Later that week in another tweet – or whatever you are supposed to call that now – Kenney stated “they are getting more attention from ostensibly sane right wing media.  We have to maintain hygiene within the conservative movement by calling this stuff out.”  The spirit of Bill Buckley lives on!

 

In my right opinion, Kenney has got things backwards.  He thinks that Malcolm has tainted her platform by allowing Tyrie to appear on it.  On the contrary, I think that a better case can be made that it is Tyrie who risked tainting himself and his organization by appearing on the Candice Malcolm Show.   Over the course of the past year Juno News has promoted all sorts of odious things such as the Alberta separatist movement.  If Malcolm can be charged with giving a platform to someone who ought not to be given one it should be over her interview with Diane Francis last year, right at the time when the American president was shooting his mouth off daily about making our country “the 51^st state”, over Francis’s repugnant vision of a business-merger type joining of Canada with her country of birth.  Juno’s continuing admiration for Krasnov the Orange despite his degeneration into a petty tyrant who completely disregards the constitutional limitations of his office or the fact that it does not come with jurisdiction over the entire world and of the MAGA movement despite its having turned into a cult for whom its leader can accomplish anything but can do wrong, is utterly disgusting.  This is a pity, because on many matters from  pretty much everything concerning the bat flu scare to the false narrative concerning the residential schools to the wave of arsons and other vandalism of church buildings, Malcolm and her organization have been far more reliable and trustworthy than the legacy or mainstream media. 

 

It was not entirely unexpected, however.  Malcolm and True North/Juno are neo-conservative which means that they consider the American conservative movement to be the measuring stick of conservatism.  The American conservative movement, however, unlike the classical Canadian Toryism expounded in John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, the essays of Stephen Leacock, and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s speeches collected and published as Those Things We Treasure, was never authentically conservative but was rather eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism resisting liberalism’s twentieth century convergence with socialism.  Long before last year, neo-conservative organizations like Malcom’s displayed an extremely unpatriotic preference for the country built on liberalism, the United States of America, over our own country with her genuinely conservative, Loyalist, foundation. 

 

Lest you think I am being unfair to the neo-conservatives allow me to point out two ways in which this preference has long been evident.  The first is the way in which negative attitudes towards the United States are treated as compared to negative attitudes towards Canada.  On Malcom’s Juno News, as on its predecessor True North and their sister organization, Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, anti-American attitudes are treated as being something akin to mental disease. (1)   This is rather ironic when you consider that authentic conservatism, in Canada and elsewhere, historically has been highly suspicious of and skeptical towards the United States.  Diefenbaker, the last authentic Canadian conservative to hold office as prime minister, responded to criticism from the left that he was too negative in his views towards the United States by saying “I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian.” The point, however, is that anti-Canadianism is not similarly treated as mental contagion by the neo-conservatives.  Some forms of it, like the attempts by progressives to “cancel” historical figures like Sir John A. Macdonald, they have rightly opposed, but other forms, such as that of the Alberta separatists get a free pass from them. 

 

The second way in which the neo-conservative anti-patriotism has long been evident is itself a form of anti-Canadianism.  Neo-conservatives have long seemed incapable of criticizing the Liberals when they, the Liberals, are in government, without framing it as an attack on Canada and her institutions.  During the previous premiership, instead of “the Grits are incompetent, Captain Airhead is an ass, and this party and its leader should not be entrusted to look after a broom closet let alone govern our country” what we kept getting from the neo-conservatives was “Canada is broken.” 

Ironically, of course, in their anti-patriotism, the neo-conservatives do not resemble the American conservatives they admire so much but rather the Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to leave their country whenever they lose an election.

 

Let Sir Walter Scott’s timeless judgement be the final word on those of this ilk:

 

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

This sort of aggressively pro-American anti-patriotism is something that Tyrie and his organization can ill-afford to be associated with.  While the Dominion Society was only founded last year and I cannot pretend to have followed everything it has said and done, I am familiar enough with it to be confident in saying that it is best described as an advocacy organization dedicated to a single issue, that issue being the preservation and restoration of historical Canada from the deleterious effects of mass immigration.  There are two reasons why activists for this cause cannot afford to be associated with neo-conservatism.  The first is what we have already discussed about the nature of neo-conservatism.  A movement that has long wanted Canada to be more like the United States can be no friend to the cause of preserving and restoring historical Canada.  If the Dominion Society and its founders don’t understand why this is the case they would do well to read the works of the dean of Canadian history, Donald Creighton and learn to distinguish Canada’s true story from the Liberal Version shared by the neo-conservatives.

 

The second reason is that the neo-conservatives continue to admire the current American president who has been poisoning the public mind against the correction of the excesses of mass immigration through association with himself.  I have come to suspect that this is deliberate on his part.  A little under twenty years ago a crack opened up in the wall that had kept criticism of mass immigration and the deliberate and rapid increase in diversity outside the Overton Window.  This was about the time that Harvard University professor and political scientists Robert Putnam made public the findings of a five-year research project that showed that, in the short term at least, increasing ethnic diversity within a community reduced its social capital so that people had less trust, not merely in the other but in members of their own group.  Putnam did not intend this as criticism of immigration or diversity and, indeed, delayed publishing his research because he did not want it used as such, but it opened a crack which grew wider and wider until it appeared that the wall would imminently collapse and sane and open discussion of this topic would enter the sphere of public and polite discussion from which it had been excluded for decades.  Then Krasnov the Orange, the real estate developer turned public entertainer, made another career change and entered politics.  Claiming to be a political outsider, he ran for president of the United States on the issue of immigration.  In actuality, his position on immigration was not significantly different from that of the mainstream Republicans.  He did not promise to undo fifty years of a failed experiment in social engineering by means of mass immigration.  He merely promised to enforce the United States’ immigration laws and keep people from entering illegally.  Nevertheless, his supporters and opponents alike mistook him to be taking a much stronger stand on immigration than he was, and in other Western countries experiencing the consequences of the aforementioned failed social experiment immigration reformers were emboldened and inspired by him.  Then came his second term in office.  Perhaps something snapped in his brain forming the thought “they keep calling me Hitler, I’ll give them Hitler.” (2)  Perhaps, and more likely in my opinion, it had been the intention of his controllers in the international Communist movement all along to use him to discredit the growing opposition to their mass immigration social experiment.  Either way, his actions upon his return to office have put any idea or cause associated with him in the public mind, no matter how good or necessary it may be on its own merits, in danger of being set back for decades to come.

 

No, Tyrie and his society would do well, if they wish to go anywhere with their cause, to avoid any association with either the anti-patriotic neo-conservatives in Canada or the American MAGA cult.

 

I would recommend that they look to Enoch Powell.  Powell was a British classical scholar turned World War II military intelligence officer turned Tory statesman.  Although in some ways, primarily monetarism and free market economics, he was a forerunner to Margaret Thatcher, his was a more authentic Toryism.  He did not admire the United States the way Thatcher did, but referred to her as “our terrible enemy” in a letter written during World War II and in his subsequent career always distrusted her and opposed her efforts to flex her muscle around the world.  In one well-known incident, he showed Thatcher what true Tory patriotism looks like when he told her “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a Communist government.”  

 

Powell is most remembered, however, perhaps unfortunately considering his long list of achievements, for a speech he gave in 1968 in which he condemned the way the Labour government of Harold Wilson was needlessly importing American-style racial strife into the United Kingdom by bringing in immigrants in numbers far in excess of what British communities could absorb without friction and by trying to force harmony on everyone with heavy-handed legislation in imitation of the US Civil Rights Act something which anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together would recognize as doomed to accomplish the opposite of what was intended.  Powell, like all sane men of his and all previous generations who grew up without being brainwashed into the cult of diversity, knew instinctually what it took Putnam five years of research to discover.  The speech instantly made Powell the most popular man in the UK, but it was immediately condemned as incitement of racial hatred by progressives in the media and the Labour Party and its orator was labelled by the same a “racialist.”  In reality, of course, it was Wilson’s policies which were generating racial strife and so by opposing them, Powell was doing the exact opposite of inciting racial hatred. 

 

Kenney’s accusations against Tyrie are the same as those that were made against Powell after his 1968 Birmingham speech.  They ought not to be taken seriously.  In the 1960s, all the countries in the civilization formerly known as Christendom embraced the insane and absurd idea that increasing ethnic diversity as much as possible and as fast as possible can have only beneficial and no deleterious results.  They did this because the United States had emerged from the two World Wars as the dominant power in that civilization and everyone else thought they had to imitate her even though she at the time was obviously in the midst of a pendulum swing from one form of toxic racial politics into an equally toxic opposite form.  This idea, which is the basis of the social experiment to which the former Christendom has been subjected ever since, is so obviously wrong that it could not withstand even the slightest of scrutiny and so it has been protected ever since by ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares express dissent, attacks designed to prevent people from considering what the dissident has to say by imputing to him irrational prejudice and hatred, subscription to some odious racial ideology or another, or both and while irrational prejudices and hatreds undoubtedly exist as do odious racial ideologies, rarely do these accusations have any basis in fact.  The interesting thing about the word “racist” which Kenney called Tyrie is that it seems to have actually been coined to be used in this way and so has never been a word that admits of good faith usage but could actually be called an anti-word because it exists, not as the means of conveying information and ideas, but as the means of stopping discussion and debate.  Kenney professes to be a Roman Catholic Christian.  Perhaps he ought to think long and hard about whether using this word is an automatic violation of the eighth commandment by his Church’s method of numbering. (3)

 

I very much doubt, however, that Kenney lies awake at night worrying about whether he is bearing false witness against his neighbour or not.  I have long observed that those who consider themselves to be on a moral crusade against racism think truth to be an acceptable sacrifice in the name of carrying out this endeavor and that the more committed they are to this crusade, or at least the more prominently it is featured in their own self-promotion, the less compunctions they have about telling falsehoods about those they consider to be racists.  Twice in Canadian history, people who wanted the government to aggressively clamp down on racism, assisted some stooge in founding a neo-nazi organization that in reality resembled the World Council of Anarchists from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (it consisted entirely of undercover policemen rather than actual anarchists) in order to generate public fear of a threat that was obviously non-existent if it required such measures in order to create the scare.

 

The ethical reasoning that seems to justify this sort of deception to those who perpetrate it, although it may not always be consciously formulated as such in their own minds, is something like this: a) the world is divided into good people and evil people, b) racists are evil people, therefore c) anything done in the name of fighting racists is justified.   While that conclusion would not follow even if both premises were completely true because that does not even come close to being a valid syllogism the thinking that underlies at least the first premise is not sound by the standards of orthodox Christian moral theology and, indeed, in it can be recognized a form of the dualism of the third century Persian false prophet Mani, against whose heresy St. Augustine wrote extensively having been drawn to it himself prior to his conversion. (4) 

 

Many, probably most, of those who joined Kenney in decrying Tyrie’s appearance on the Candice Malcolm Show relied upon a single authority for their idea of what the Dominion Society and its founders are all about.  That authority is the Canadian Anti-Hate Group.   With this group, as with all others of its kind, nothing they say should be believed unless they can prove it, down to the minutest detail, with evidence that would meet the standard of proof in a court of criminal law, that is, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt. This group, founded early in the premiership of Captain Airhead who heavily subsidized it, was based on the model of a similar organization in the United States that funded its founding.  The parent organization, once the go to when American media needed an “expert” to pontificate on racism, has been largely discredited in the last ten years as the organization lost a number of defamation suits, its founder was ousted after being accused of, among other things, racism, law enforcement agencies began to disassociate themselves from it, and the public came increasingly to see it as a racket that was more about using the fear of racial hatred to raise funds rather than raising funds to combat racial hatred.  I have seen no evidence that would suggest that CAHN is any better and everything that I have seen suggests the exact opposite of that.  Its founding chairman, in his previous role with the new defunct Canadian Jewish Congress (5), first came to my attention when he was lobbying the government to strip several Ukrainian and German refugees from Communism of their citizenship in their old age and have them deported to stand trial for war crimes.  The men in question, had been captured by the Nazis when they overran their countries (the Germans were ethnic Germans who lived in countries other than Germany) during World War II and forced to serve by means such as holding their families captive and threatening harm to them if they did not comply.  To sane people, like the late Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, these men were clearly victims of the Third Reich.  To Bernie Farber, however, the fact that they served under duress and the fact that they served mostly in roles such as translator, meant nothing, he considered them to be collaborators, culpable in the crimes of the regime that forced them to serve at gunpoint, literal and metaphorical. 

 

This blindness and/or indifference to the difference between the actual historical Nazis and people they forced to serve them is more than sufficient to justify dismissing claims to expertise on such matters from this source and completely disregarding what he and his ilk have to say about contemporary individuals and groups like Tyrie and the Dominion Society.

 

So no, Candice Malcom was not tainting her platform by allowing Tyrie to speak for the Dominion Society on it.  Challenging the idea behind the experiment in social engineering through mass immigration that has been ongoing from the ‘60’s to the present that the more you increase ethnic diversity and the faster the better, an idea that has far too long been protected from scrutiny, is more like a breath of fresh air than a contagion. (6)  If anything, the contagion went in the other direction, the contagion that is, of Americanist neo-conservatism.

 

.

 (1)   Indeed, the only country negative attitudes towards which are more quickly condemned by the neo-conservatives than those towards the United States, is Israel, the tail that has wagged the American dog since the Lyndon Johnson administration.

(2)   When the left likens Krasnov to Hitler, as they have been doing since before his first term, it is because in their fevered brains his immigration policies resemble Hitler’s racial ideology.  The two are nothing alike.  In Hitler’s thinking, the races were involved in a Darwinian struggle against each other that was a winner-take all zero-sum game.  Krasnov’s is a civil, not a racial, nationalism.  This remains true in his second term.  Where he has begun to resemble Hitler is in the following areas: a) disregard for constitutional limits on the powers of his office, b) threatening other countries and making territorial demands, c) the optics of his crackdown on illegal immigration.  With regards to the last mentioned, illegal immigration has been a problem demanding a crackdown for decades, but the way it is being done seems to be deliberately evoking images of Nazi or Soviet secret police – faceless, unaccountable, demanding to see one’s papers.

(3)   My own Church, the Anglican, like the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and all other Protestants except the Lutherans, consider it as the ninth commandment.

(4)   Mani’s dualism erred by reifying evil which in orthodox Christian theology “exists” not as a thing but in the way the hole left in a wall after you accidentally drive your car through it might be said to “exist” in the wall.  God created everything good, evil is a defect in goodness not a created “thing”, it possesses neither form nor substance.  The idea of an eternal struggle between an equally or almost equally matched good and evil, light and darkness, while a popular theme in Hollywood, is false.  There is a conflict in the spiritual realm, but this conflict is not eternal, it had a beginning and it will end in the total defeat of the evil side, the two sides are nowhere near being evenly matched, and evil, even in the being that initiated the conflict by rebelling against God, is a self-imposed defect in the goodness with which he was created.  The idea that the world is divided into good and evil people is ultimately derived from Manichean dualism.  In orthodox Christian theology, such a division is the result of the Final Judgement at the end of time, not a description of the state of affairs in time.  Note that St. Augustine was not merely the great opponent of Manichaeism but of Pelagianism as well and in opposing Pelagianism he upheld the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, that in Adam all fell so that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, from which condition the Son of God entered human history in order to rescue and redeem us.  When the final division into the “righteous” and “wicked” takes place at the end of time, the latter will be those who rendered their sinful condition incurable by finally rejecting redeeming grace.  A system that divides people into good and evil in time and demands repentance from those it considers to be evil while offering them nothing in the way of redemption, forgiveness, and cleansing is fundamentally Manichean and must be recognized and condemned as such by all orthodox Christians. 

(5)   This organization features in the first of the Man Who Was Thursday incidents.  Farber was not involved, of course, since it took place in 1965, almost two decades before he started working for the CJC and while he was still a teenager. In this year a man named John Beattie started a “Canadian Nazi Party” which the CJC hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to infiltrate.  There was not much more to this group than the two of them.  When Ezra Levant wrote about the incident in his 2009 book Shakedown the CJC denied that their purpose had been to facilitate the passing of hate speech legislation.  They had long been lobbying for such legislation, however, and 1965 had begun with Lester Pearson appointing the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada to look into the matter.  This committee, called the “Cohen Committee” after its chairman Maxwell Cohen of McGill University included among its members Saul Hayes, then executive vice president of the CJC and Pierre Trudeau who would succeed Pearson and Liberal leader and prime minister and who early in his premiership would act upon the committee’s report and pass the first hate propaganda legislation.  Given this historical context, does the CJC’s denial decades later seem at all credible?

(6)   It should go without saying that the challenging ideas should not just be accepted uncritically either but should be weighed and allowed to stand or fall on their own merits.