Canada's "Conservatives", Put Your Sabres Away and Give Your Heads a Shake

When Erin O’Toole was ousted as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and Candice Bergen – not the Murphy Brown actress, the Member of Parliament for Portage-Lisgar – was made interim leader, it began to look, much to my surprise, like there might be some hope for the party after all.   While the Freedom Convoy protest was underway in Ottawa, the Conservatives led by Bergen actually did their job as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for the first time since Captain Airhead became Prime Minister.   They dug in and stood on principle, calling him, the Prime Mister that is, to account for his inflammatory and entirely inappropriate response to the protest, and for his dangerous and illegal invoking of the Emergency Measures Act to crush the protest.   Then, as Captain Airhead’s tyrannical power grab was eclipsed by a crisis on the international stage, they did something so stupid that it completely erased the credit they had earned over the previous weeks.    They supported the government in its move to hinder Canadians from accessing information about the crisis other than that spun from an anti-Russia perspective and urged the government to expel the Russian ambassador.   By doing the former, they adopted the same condescending attitude towards Canadians that we have come to expect from Captain Airhead’s Grits and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s anti-working class socialists, i.e., the attitude of “you cannot be trusted to examine all the information available and come to an intelligent decision for yourselves so we will control what you can see and hear and tell you what to think”.   By doing the latter, they were essentially asking the Prime Minister to declare war on Russia.

 

Captain Airhead does not need this sort of crazy advice from Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   He gets enough of it from his deputy prime minister.   The only reason, other than the Lord’s command to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” for not wanting the ground to immediately open up underneath Captain Airhead and drop him screaming into the abyss, is the very practical reason that should that occur Chrystia Freeland would take his place.   Of all the ministers of the Cabinet, yes, including Captain Airhead himself, she is by far the worst.     Since that Cabinet includes such creeps as Bill Blair, Jean-Yves Duclos, Steven Guilbeault, Patty Hajdu, David Lametti and Marco Mendicino that is saying a lot. Moreover she is herself at her absolute worst when it comes to anything having to do with Russia, Ukraine and geopolitics in general., although she is almost as abysmal with regards to her actual current portfolio which is finance.

 

By offering the Prime Minister this advice and taking the stance they are taking the Conservatives are acting as if Stephen Harper were still their leader.   Presumably, they would not object to this characterization and regard it as a compliment.   It is not intended as such.   Stephen Harper was the best Prime Minister the Dominion has had since 1963 but this is not saying much.   The entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers have been terrible.   Harper was merely the least vile of them.  Even so he was bad enough that this writer vowed never to vote Conservative again as long as he led the party, intending, since the other options at the time were much worse, to follow the advice of the late, great, P. J. O’Rourke, i.e., “don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards”.    Harper had his good qualities, and his bad qualities.   What can be seen of Harper on display in the present hawkish attitude of the Conservatives towards Russia is one of his worst traits.

 

Harper liked to boss other countries around and self-righteously lecture them about their internal affairs and their relationships with their neighbours.   This is a trait he shared with Captain Airhead.   Granted, there are a couple of big differences in the manner in which they did this.   Harper, for the most part, only lectured other countries on serious matters.   Captain Airhead lectures other governments for not being “woke” enough, that is to say, not conforming with the latest ridiculous and self-righteous form of identity politics promoted by the Cultural Maoists who dominate academe and the media, both news and entertainment.   Harper’s style was also radically different from Captain Airhead’s.   Harper came across as someone who was trying to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice “talk softly and carry a big stick” but miscalculating the softness of his tone while hoping that nobody would notice that he didn't have the big stick.   Captain Airhead’s style is much more clownish than this.   It summons up the image of a scrappy little chihuahua running up to a much bigger dog that could easily bite his head off and obnoxiously yipping in its face before running to hide behind a big bruiser of a bulldog, with the bulldog representing either the “international community” acting in concert, or the United States.   It is not a good image for a leader of our country.

 

If even a tenth of what we have been fed by the newsmedia about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reliable – and that is a big if, because while all lies must contain some truth in order to be believable, a tenth is a much larger percentage than what we can usually expect from the media and that percentage goes down the more univocal the media is in its take on any given event – the Ukrainians are, of course, much to be pitied.   Having sympathy, however, for people who are suffering under an invasion and all its attendant woes, is not the same thing as having the ability to do anything about it.   Pretending that they are the same is both dangerous and stupid.   Especially in this situation.

 

Even the United States would be insane to go to war with Russia over Ukraine.    While my reason for saying this rests upon different factors that I will briefly explain later, let me add that the invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided entirely had the United States behaved differently and better over the last few decades.   Although  Russia's president Vladimir Putin is clearly guilty of invading another country, the explanation for his actions is not, as most politicians and media, both liberal and conservative, are claiming, his own imperialist ambition.   It is the response of the leader of a country that has been backed into a corner by American-NATO expansionism.  It is the response of a bear that has been poked one too many times.     

 

In a pact with the devil made in order to defeat the Third Reich, the Western Allies agreed to hand Eastern Europe over to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.   Almost immediately after this the Cold War began.   This conflict between the American and Soviet superpowers was necessarily “cold” because the nuclear arms possessed by both made a “hot” war unthinkable.   In the Cold War nuclear arms race, each side tried to get the better of the other by obtaining a first strike advantage – the ability to obliterate the other side's capacity to retaliate.   Both sides had to settle, however, for the deterrent that was appropriately named MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.   The Cold War only came to an end when both sides, having entered into negotiations under American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to step back from the arms race.     

 

Before the Communist regime in Russia fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Ukraine became independent of Russia, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush and the other leaders of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in the Cold War to protect Western Europe against Soviet invasion – promised Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not seek to expand its membership further than the re-unified Germany.   Whether Bush was sincere in this promise or not is debatable.   The following year, the year in which the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, saw Operation Desert Storm, in which an American-led coalition went to war with Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.  In connection with this action Bush declared his vision for a “new world order” in which a coalition of free, democratic, countries, led by the United States, would be the world’s police, acting against countries that aggressed against their neighbours in the way Iraq had.   As the implications of this unfolded in the two terms each of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, NATO was transformed from the defensive alliance it had been in the Cold War into the muscle enforcing America’s new, liberal international, world order.   In the process of accomplishing this the United States replaced both the anti-Communism of the Cold War era which opposed a totalitarian ideology and system rather than a nation and the diplomacy backed by strength of the Reagan-Bush era, with an arrogant and foolish anti-Russian attitude.   This manifested itself early in Clinton’s presidency when he decided to meddle in the conflicts in the Balkans that were tearing apart what from the First World War to the end of the Cold War had been Yugoslavia.   Ethnic hostility fueled these conflicts and invariably Clinton sided with Muslim groups, like those in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo against Christian groups, especially the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the group with the closest and deepest ties to Russia.   At the end of his presidency Clinton committed the war crime of ordering NATO to conduct an indiscriminate bombing campaign against Serbia.   At the same time he brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO in violation both of the letter as well as the spirit of American and NATO assurances to Russia.

 

After Bill Clinton finished serving out his wife’s two terms as president – contrary to all of the rot one hears blaming the horrors of war on masculinity and patriarchy the military misbehavior of the Clinton administration, whose Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell “what’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it”, like that of the Obama administration, the current American administration, and even Captain Airhead’s Cabinet which can do nothing but posture, are all the clear consequence of estrogen poisoning and toxic femininity – he was followed by George H. W. Bush’s morally retarded son, who began his presidency by giving the digitis impudicus to Russia in the form of  withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and placing missiles in Poland.   He brought seven countries that had either been Soviet republics or Warsaw Pact members into NATO and in the last year of  his presidency declared Ukraine and Georgia eligible for NATO membership.  Russia could hardly have failed to notice that his and Clinton's actions were moving America's military reach closer and closer to their own borders.

 

The Obama administration with Hillary Clinton as its Secretary of State was even worse.   In 2014 they sponsored the second of two colour revolutions against Russia-sympathetic, elected Ukrainian governments – George W. Bush had sponsored the first.   In what was absurdly called the Revolution of Dignity that grew out of the Euromaiden protests, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was driven from office in a coup carried out by groups like Svoboda, the party re-organized from the Social-National Party (yes, it was exactly what that sounds like) and the various groups of the so-called Right Sector coalition (the Banderite group Trident, the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense, Social-National Assembly, Patriot of Ukraine, and a few others, all of which were self-identified Nazi groups) with the backing and support of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.   While it would be going too far to say that the coup established a Nazi-style Reich regime in Ukraine – the new government was more of a US-NATO puppet regime - later in that year the Azov Regiment, which wears its neo-Nazism on its sleeve, quite literally, (1) was organized and incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.   The Ukrainian government has employed this unit in its harassment of the ethnic Russian population of the Donbass region of south-eastern Ukraine.   The Russian separatists in Donbass sought to join the Russian Federation in 2015 and were turned down by Putin.   After eight years of harassment by the Ukrainian government and its Nazi army their independence was recognized by Putin just before Russia launched her  invasion of Ukraine.   This came a matter of months after the present American administration renewed its efforts to bring |Ukraine into NATO with the clear intention of arming its border with Russia.

 

Had the United States not behaved in this way, had she not replaced her justified opposition to the evil ideology of Communism with an ugly, stupid and bigoted Russophobia and done everything in her power to drive the Russian bear into a corner and start poking at it with Ukraine being her most recent proxy, the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine could have easily been avoided entirely.

While this does not necessarily mean that Putin's actions are justified, nor does it make the sufferings of the Ukrainians any less horrible, it does mean that neither the United States nor her allies have any moral ground to stand upon in condemning these actions.

In 2001, the United States and a coalition of her allies, including Canada, invaded Afghanistan with the intention of toppling the Taliban government there.   In 2003, the United States and a smaller coalition, invaded Iraq for the purposes of regime change.    Were these actions justified?

While this writer would answer no, at least with regards to the second war, most of those who saw both of these invasions as justified are among the loudest condemning Putin today.    The burden therefore is upon them to explain why the United States is allowed to invade countries and topple governments it doesn't like while Russia is not allowed to invade a country that had belonged to her until 1991 to prevent the Americans from turning it into a military base with which to threaten her on her very doorstep.    One could take the ethical position that it is always wrong for one country to invade another, a position that is  commendable for its internal consistency, even though this writer does not believe it to be correct.   This position is not available to those who regard the invasions of Afghanistan and/or Iraq as justified.    Some might argue that it is wrong for one country to invade another, but it is alright for coalitions of countries under the supervision of some international agency to do so.   This would presumably be close to the answer that liberal Democrats in the United States and Liberals here in Canada would give.   Internationalists are prone to this sort of thinking.   It is obviously wrong, however.   If it is wrong for one country to do something, it does not become right when two or more agree to do it.   Indeed, it is arguably much worse.   It compounds the wrongness of each country invading on its own by involving the others and ganging up on the victim.   Others would try to argue to the effect that it is okay for "good guy" countries to invade "bad guy" countries but that it is not okay for "bad guy" countries to invade "good guy" countries.   This sort of thinking is puerile, a Modern version of the heresy of Mani, the result of reading too many superhero comic books and watching too many Hollywood action movies.   Sadly, it is all too ubiquitous among the post-Cold War generation of neoconservatives who unfortunately have been the most influential group when it comes to geopolitics in both the American Republican Party and the Canadian Conservative Party for the last thirty years. (2)

The ethical side of this conflict is not remotely as easily resolved as all of those jumping on the anti-Russia bandwagon - some going to absurd lengths, such as suggesting a ban on the works of Dostoevsky - think, although Edward Feser had made a strong case that neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor a military response from the United States and allies can be justified by the terms of Just War.    Ultimately, however, it is the pragmatic side of the matter that dictates that the sort of response that many are calling for is utterly insane.

Even before the United States developed the first nuclear weapons and became the first and to this date only country to use them it was generally agreed that about the stupidest military move anyone could make was to attack Russia.   Two notorious conquerors, Napoleon Bonaparte in the nineteenth century and Adolf Hitler in the twentieth, successfully overran Europe before going to their doom by making precisely this mistake.   The advent of nuclear weapons, of which the Russians have their own formidable stockpile has not made attacking Russia any less of a suicidal thing to do. 

Unless the United States and other Western countries are willing to risk escalating the conflict into nuclear Armageddon there is not much they can do to back up their angry rhetoric against Russia which makes that rhetoric only so much empty posturing.

Such posturing is bad enough coming from the United States, a nuclear superpower.      It is simply clownish for Canadian politicians to engage in this kind of sabre rattling.    While clownish behaviour is about all we can expect from Captain Airhead and his horrid deputy,  we ought to be able to expect Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition to, well, oppose the government when it is doing something this stupid instead of egging it on to take it to the next, far worse, level.

(1) Contrary to the lies of professional anti-hate "experts", individuals and groups still crazy enough to align themselves with National Socialism today do so proudly and advertise the fact.   Most of the Ukrainian groups mentioned, including the Azov Regiment, for example, use or have used, the Wolfsangel and the swastika as symbols.   The Ukrainian groups are the real deal.   Groups like this in Canada and the United States are smaller, powerless, and generally, much like the World Council of Anarchists in G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, consist almost entirely of government agents.   The two most publicized such groups in relatively recent Canadian history, for example, the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1960s and 1970s and the Heritage Front of the 1990s, were creations of the Canadian government, in the case of the former the Liberal government working in conjunction with the Canadian Jewish Congress, in the latter case CSIS acting on the orders of Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government.   The intent in both cases was to generate a Nazi-scare among the public.   In the earlier instance this was to gain public support for government measures taken ostensibly to suppress such groups but in reality to expand government surveillance and curtail certain civil liberties  and basic freedoms.   In the latter instance it would seem the motive was to discredit the right-of-centre Canadians primarily from the West who were exiting the Progressive Conservatives in dissatisfaction to form an alternative prairie populist party by smearing them through guilt-by-association with the Heritage Front which popped up right around the same time.  Professional anti-hate "experts" demonstrate the fraudulent nature of their profession in the way they do not focus their attention on real, self-identified, neo-Nazi groups like those in Ukraine but instead try to smear Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, populists, immigration reformers and basically anyone who disagrees with the left-liberal agenda as being closet neo-Nazis.    The same anti-hate "experts" who spent decades trying to get elderly Ukrainian Canadians stripped of their citizenship and kicked out of the country because they served the SS, usually as translators, often under duress, in the Second World War, despite no evidence that these men were guilty of war crimes, seem to have less of a problem with the present Liberal government's providing funds and training for the Azov Regiment.   They provided the media with a condemnatory statement but did not pursue the matter with the vehemence with which they have persecuted the elderly Ukrainian fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers of Canadians.   Nor have they shown much interest in the Azov Regiment's biggest cheerleader in Canada, the deputy prime minister, who has twice been denied entry to Russia or the Soviet Union as it was the first time this happened over her involvement with the Euromaiden seditionists and their predecessors.   It is true that accusing ethnic Ukrainians living in the West of Nazism is a KGB disinformation tactic going back to the Cold War - John Demjanjuk , the American equivalent of the elderly Ukrainian Canadians mentioned above, was a famous victim of just such a disinformation campaign, but in the case of the deputy prime minister, who cries disinformation every time her unsavoury connections in Ukraine are brought up the boy crying Wolfsangel happens to be right and her cries of disinformation have long ago been debunked by every researcher willing to dig into the matter.   Note that the anti-hate "experts" alluded to are heavily funded by the  Canadian Liberal government.

(2) I am using "neoconservative" in its American rather than Canadian sense here.   From the perspective of those, such as this writer,  who hold to traditional British-Canadian Toryism, all of American conservatism is neoconservative, being a form of liberal republicanism.  In the  context of American conservatism, neo-conservatives were originally Cold War liberals who moved to the right in the last decades of the Cold War when the New Left was in  its ascendancy in American left-liberalism.   While these were notably hawkish in comparison with some other elements of the American right, such as the libertarians, their hawkishness was nothing in comparison with the next generation of American neoconservatives who emerged in the post-Cold War era preaching American unipolarity, a vision that resembled George H. W. Bush's new, liberal internationalist, world order, except that in it the United States is even more prominently at the top of the order, the sole global hegemon.     This is the sort of thinking that has been too influential in the American Republican Party and Canadian Conservative Party in recent decades.   George Grant warned that the world was heading towards just such an unipolar American hegemony in his Lament for a Nation (1965), reminding us that in the wisdom of the ancients a "universal and homogenous state" would be the ultimate tyranny.

From Dubya to Dhaliwal

 I am a Tory rather than a true libertarian.   Actual libertarians would say that government is either a necessary evil or an unnecessary one, depending upon whether the libertarian is one who believes in the “nightwatchman state” model or one who believes that the state is a criminal plot against the rights of the individual.   I hold to the classical view that laws are necessary and that government is a good thing in the sense that it is an institution that was established and exists to serve the good of the public.   The degree to which any specific government in any specific time and place can be said to be either good or bad depends upon the degree to which it actually accomplishes this purpose.   Having said all of that, I am the kind of Tory who, like the novelist Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon, has a great deal of sympathy for the minimal government type of libertarian.   As the elder Waugh once put it “I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.”     It is from this perspective that I make the following observations. 

 

Whenever government declares “war” against something other than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, poverty, whatever, it is for the purpose of expanding its own powers.    This expansion of government is never necessary and it always involves the diminishing of the civil rights and freedoms of the governed.   It is very difficult to contract the powers of government after they have been expanded and to restore rights and freedoms after they have been diminished.   Any time, therefore, that the government starts talking about wars against abstract enemies we should take this as an alarm bell telling us to stand up for our rights and liberties before we lose them.

 

You are perhaps thinking at this point that I am about to apply this to the militaristic language our governments have been using while announcing totalitarian restrictions as their response to the spread of the bat flu.   While that is certainly a valid application, I will let you make it for yourselves.   Instead, I wish to consider another example from twenty years ago, the ramifications of which are now becoming most evident.

 

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaida, an Islamic terrorist organization that had evolved out of the CIA-trained mujahideen that the United States had employed against the Soviet Union following the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan decades earlier, attacked its former sponsor by hijacking planes and flying them into the towers that symbolized American and international commerce in Lower Manhattan.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, shortly thereafter declared a “Global War on Terror” and gave the rest of the world an ultimatum to either stand with the United States in this battle or be counted on the side of the enemy.

 

By declaring war on the abstraction of terrorism in general rather than merely the specific, concrete, terrorist organization al-Qaida that had attacked America, Bush signaled that he had a far more ambitious project than merely settling the score and punishing the perpetrators of 9/11.   While terrorism is notoriously difficult to define due to a lack of consensus with regards to certain of the particulars there is a general understanding that it occupies the space where the kind of violence that law enforcement deals with and the kind that requires a military response overlap each other.   This makes it a particularly bad choice for an enemy in an abstract war.   In addition to the problem common to all wars against abstract enemies, that they can never be won and brought to a decisive end because abstract enemies cannot surrender or be toppled or killed, a war against terrorism is an invitation to merge the law enforcement and military functions of government in a way that threatens the privacy, rights, and freedoms of the governed.

 

This is precisely what happened with the Bush administration’s War on Terror.    In the first month of the War on Terror the Office of Homeland Security was established which about a year later would be expanded into the Department of Homeland Security, a creepy body, like something out of a totalitarian dystopia, in which the line between law enforcement and the military is all but eliminated.   In less than two months after 9/11 the Bush administration had drafted and pushed through Congress the draconian Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, which stripped Americans of anything but nominal constitutional protection of their privacy rights and turned the American republic into an Orwellian surveillance state. 

 

I knew full well at the time that this was a power grab aimed at expanding the powers of the American government at the expense of the privacy, rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans.   I knew this because this is precisely what the men who were rushing to do this in September of 2001 had been saying about similar efforts on the part of the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

 

In the spring of 1995 I was finishing my freshman year as a theology student.   At the very end of the semester a terrorist attack in the United States was all over the news.   A truck loaded with a homemade bomb had been detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.   Bill Clinton immediately began pointing to this event as demonstrating the need for the Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill that his Attorney General Janet Reno's Department had drafted and that had been introduced in the US Senate a couple of months earlier by none other than the present occupant of the White House who at the time was Senator for Delaware (Chuck Schumer was the sponsor of the Bill in the House of Representatives).   The bill met with strenuous opposition from civil libertarians of the left and right and consequently it was only a very emaciated version that was signed into law by Bill Clinton on Hitler's birthday the following year.  When, barely a week after 9/11, Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft had the draft of the PATRIOT Act available - a bill so long that few who voted on it had been able to read the entire thing - this was because he had basically recycled Clinton's Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill, adding a few bells and whistles here and there.   Ashcroft is said to have called up Joe Biden to tell him that it was essentially the same bill that he, that is Biden, had introduced seven years earlier.   Now, although Clinton had failed to get the surveillance state he sought in 1995-1996, he did not let up in his efforts to enhance government powers in the name of fighting terrorism.   Indeed, he brought the matter up with increasing frequency as his many indiscretions began to surface and his administration became enmired in scandal.     Around 1997, for example, he wanted the FBI to be given the power to intercept and read all internet communications.   An excellent article was penned in opposition to this by the said John Ashcroft, who at the time was Senator for Missouri.   The article was entitled "Keep Big Brother's Hands Off the Internet" and included such wise observations as the following:

 

"The Clinton administration would like the Federal government to have the capability to read any international or domestic computer communications...The proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans' privacy...There is a concern that the internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity.  However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps.   Why then, should we grant government the Orwellian capacity to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?...The administrations interest in all e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping.   Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions.   Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications".

 

Indeed.   It appears that some time between 1997 and 2001 one of the pod people from Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers had replaced Ashcroft with a look alike who instead of the above sound reasoning espoused rhetoric about how those raising concerns about the PATRIOT Act's impact on civil liberties were aiding and abetting the terrorists.   He was hardly the only one.  The same could be said of a great many of the most prominent figures in American conservatism who had talked like Ashcroft about the Clinton administration's threat to American liberties in the 1990s, only to turn around and support the PATRIOT Act in 2001.   It was at this point that I lost all respect for American conservatives - other than those like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Charley Reese who were manifestly the same people, espousing the same principles, regardless of whether a Clinton or a Bush was in power.

 

 

It was a couple of years later, when Bush and Ashcroft were again talking about expanding their powers to fight terrorism – they had drafted the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, nicknamed “PATRIOT II”, but it was never presented to Congress – that the late Sam Francis wrote an article explaining the case against all legislation of the type, in what was the single best response to the annoying “it’s okay when our side does it" attitude among the Bush “conservatives” that I ever read.   He wrote:

 

But the larger point is not what this administration does or doesn't do with the new powers.

The point is that the powers are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn't use could still be used by future ones.

 

That, of course, is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all.

 

Instilling in citizens the notion that the power to seize library records is something the state needs is an excellent way to assist that erosion.

 

Most libertarians, of the left or the right, will tell you how we have been eroding those habits and that mentality for several decades now.  – Samuel Francis, “Bush Writing Last Chapters in Story of American Liberty”, September 25, 2003, Creators Syndicate.

 

The truth of Sam Francis' words is now glaringly obvious.   

 

The White House is now occupied by the decrepit swamp troll who had introduced the first draft of what would eventually become the PATRIOT Act back in 1995 and he is calling for even more anti-terrorism legislation.   He has also openly turned the War on Terror against those whom the Clinton administration had in mind when they attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch their own War on Terror that year - American citizens who stand up for their rights and freedoms, especially Christians who are serious about their faith, white people who object to being vilified for the colour of their skin and turned into scapegoats, and gun owners.   

 

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a bulletin that implies that those who are unsatisfied that the outcome of last year's election was legitimate, are opposed to the lockdown measures that trample all over their rights and freedoms ("frustrated with the exercise of government authority" is how the memo words this), or both, are potential violent threats to the United States.    A government that regards around half of the people it governs as threats is no longer a constitutional government that respects limits on its own power for the protection of its citizens and their rights and freedoms.  It is more like a government that fears and has declared war on its own people.   The progressive media that during the last administration defended its monolithically hyper-adversarial stance with slogans like "democracy dies in darkness" has been calling for Republican senators such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and in some cases the entire Republican Party to be designated "domestic terrorists".  The United States is a two-party country.   If you criminalize one of the two parties you are left, of course, with a one-party state.   Otherwise known as a totalitarian dictatorship.   The kind of state that the United States, the capital city of which is now under military occupation by its own army, is giving every impression of becoming.

 

From up north in the Dominion of Canada it is appalling to watch our southern neighbour turn itself into the world's largest banana republic, both because of what it means for our American friends and because bad ideas and trends down there have a nasty habit of migrating up here.

 

Think back to 2001 once again.   Our Prime Minister at the time was Jean Chretien, who was in my opinion a creepy, sleazy, low-life scumbag, to list only his better qualities. While Bush, Ashcroft, et al, were making a big noise about the PATRIOT Act and all the other things they were going to do in fighting their War on Terror, Chretien, relatively quietly had Anne McLellan introduce Bill C-36, an anti-terrorism bill of his own into Parliament.  It quickly passed the House and Senate and received Royal Assent in December of that year.   It consisted of amendments to several different pieces of existing legislation, such as the Criminal Code and the Official Secrets Act.   Some of its provisions, at the suggestion of Bill Blaikie who at the time was the Member representing Winnipeg-Transcona in the House of Commons, were given sunset clauses which caused them to automatically expire in five years. Other provisions remain to this day.      

 

I will provide an illustration of how this led to the shameful abuse of government power twenty years ago before returning to the present.

 

One the pieces of legislation amended was the Canadian Security Intelligence Services Act, which created CSIS in 1984.   The amendment replaced "threats to the security of Canada" with the much broader wording "activities within or related to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state".   CSIS, when it took over the RCMP's intelligence functions, also took over the issuing of security certificates, a provision of the 1978 Immigration Act which allowed for those who were not Canadian citizens to be declared a threat to national security and deported in a streamlined manner.

 

In December of 2001, just as Bill C-36 was going into effect, American immigration officials arrested Ernst Zündel, who had left Canada in 2000 vowing never to return, rather understandably as he had on three separate occasions been persecuted by our government for his unpopular political-historical views.  He had married an American citizen, the Russian-German Mennonite novelist Ingrid Rimland and, had he been anybody else, would have been on track for American citizenship himself.    Interestingly enough, in February of that year the men’s magazine Esquire had published an essay by journalist and war correspondent John Sack in which Zündel featured   The essay was entitled “Inside the Bunker” and recounted the writer’s experiences at the previous year’s conference of the Institute for Historical Review where he met holocaust revisionists such as Zündel.   The essay, which was later selected for inclusion in the anthology, The Best American Essays 2002, edited by Stephen Jay Gould, was more-or-less the opposite of every other article which had ever appeared about holocaust revisionists in the mainstream press.  Sack treated them respectfully, pointed out a few places where they were demonstrably right, and gave reasons for rejecting their conclusions that were based on evidence rather than abuse, for he presented them all in general, and Zündel in particular, in a sympathetic light as basically ordinary people, who were more hated than guilty of hatred and whose views arose defensively, in response to post-World War II German bashing, rather than out of anti-Semitic bigotry.  Evidently, the essay had no impact on the American and Canadian authorities.   The Americans charged him with overstaying his visa and sent him back to us.   CSIS issued a security certificate against Zündel, which it would not have been able to do prior to Chretien’s anti-terrorism bill becoming law because he was by no means a threat to the security of Canada having been a peaceful and non-violent man for all of the decades he had lived here.   Under the Anti-terrorism Act, however, they were able to stretch the very flexible new wording of their mandate to include him on the basis of people he had associated with.

 

He was detained and held in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for over a year while he was tried in his absence before a prejudiced judge on the grounds of evidence to which neither he nor his lawyer, Doug Christie, were given full access, and ultimately was deported to Germany where he was arrested over things he said or written in North America, charged, and sentenced to five years in prison.

 

To summarize, the greater flexibility that had been given to our “intelligence” agency on the grounds that it was needed to protect our country from the threat of terrorist violence was used pretty much immediately after it had passed into law, to once again persecute a man whom our government had been persecuting for his political-historical opinions since 1984, this time denying him the protection of due process that had been available to him previously and which had ultimately prevailed in those cases when the Supreme Court struck the laws under which he had been convicted down.

 

This was a most disgraceful episode and one that clearly demonstrates that governments that seek to expand their own powers and flexibility in order to combat foes like “terrorism” cannot be trusted to confine the use of those powers to that purpose.

 

Parliament did take greater precautions than the US Congress in passing the Anti-terrorism Act.   I have already mentioned that certain provisions came with sunset clauses that would cause them to expire in five years unless the House and the Senate agreed to an extension.   The Act also required that the House and Senate appoint committees to conduct a comprehensive review of the Act within its first three years, which would be a necessary preliminary step towards any extension.   While a short extension was agreed upon after the first review, ultimately these provisions were allowed to expire in 2007.   By this time Stephen Harper had become Prime Minister, but the expiration of the provisions should not be attributed to any great concern for the privacy, rights, freedoms, and due process of Canadians on his part.   In his final year as Prime Minister he introduced a new Anti-terrorism Act, Bill C-51, which was more like the USA PATRIOT Act than Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act had been, and which greatly expanded the powers and mandate of CSIS.   Readers might recall that this loathsome piece of legislation was the reason I vowed never to vote for the Conservatives again as long as Stephen Harper led the party.   The Conservatives were defeated in the election that fall, which I would like to think was in retaliation to Bill C-51, except that they were replaced in government by the only party in Parliament that had supported them in passing it.

 

Now let us return to the present.   One of the provisions of Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act that remains in effect was the creation of a list of groups officially designated as terrorists.   It is odd, actually, that this was allowed to stand, because it is one of the worst provisions in the Act.   It essentially functions like a decree of outlaw, depersoning everyone in the groups placed on the list, stripping them of all constitutional protections.

 

One might think that the New Democrat Party, Canada’s officially socialist party (as opposed to all the unofficial ones), with its long history of human rights rhetoric, would have a problem with this.   Back in 2015, when they were led by Thomas Mulcair, they were on the right side, the opposing side, of the Bill C-51 debate.   In 2021, however, they are led by Jagmeet Singh.   One might think that Singh, considering his open support for the cause of separating Punjab from India and Pakistan and turning it into the Sikh state of Khalistan, a cause that has frequently been supported by acts of terrorism, including one of the most notorious – if not the most notorious – to take place on, well, not on Canadian soil, but in Canadian airspace, the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, would have even more cause than other NDPers to oppose the official terror list.   At the very least one would expect him not to be throwing stones from within this particular glass house.   One would be very, very, wrong in all of this.

 

Not long after a number of unarmed and oddly dressed supporters of Donald the Orange temporarily delayed the Congressional certification of the Electoral College vote by entering the Capitol in Washington DC causing everyone to break out into histrionics screaming “coup” “insurgency” and the like, Singh tweeted that the event was an “act of domestic terrorism” and stated that “the Proud Boys helped execute it”, “Their founder is Canadian”, “They operate in Canada, right now” and that he was “calling for them to be designated as a terrorist organization, immediately”.

 

What is this “Proud Boys” that Singh thinks deserve the terrorist designation more than the mass murderers of Hindus?

 

It is not, as its title would seem to suggest, an organization devoted to advancing the alphabet soup cause.   It is a group that has attained notoriety over the last five years mostly for its confrontations and clashes with antifa.   Antifa are those groups of masked thugs that go to events organized by right-of-centre groups and lectures featuring speakers with views that leftists believe ought not to be heard and try to disrupt and shut down these events and lectures through intimidation and bullying.  I don’t know if this was the original intent when the Proud Boys was founded but it quickly gained a reputation as a group that was eager and willing to fight back.

 

The media, which has tacitly and sometimes explicitly, supported antifa for years, has attached all sorts of labels to the Proud Boys that seem to completely disregard the group’s account of itself.   It is frequently called “white nationalist”, for example, despite the fact that it has always been multiracial, that its founder, the Canadian born “godfather of hipsterdom” and co-founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes, is a civil nationalist who explicitly rejected racial nationalism, and its current leader, the one who has been charged with regards to the incident on Capitol Hill, is an Afro-Cuban.   McInnes described the group as “Western Chauvinist” but he explained this quite clearly in terms of the values of Western Civilization, which anyone from any race can adhere to and which, in an irony totally lost on his progressive critics, are entirely liberal – in the sense of classical liberal – values.  

 

Since the facts obviously conflict with the claim that the Proud Boys are white nationalists, why do the media and the self-appointed anti-hate watchdog groups continue to so designate them?

 

Obviously it is because they are not using the term to convey any meaningful information about who and what the group is but as a weapon to demonize, discredit, and destroy it.

 

The exact same thing can be said about Jagmeet Singh Dhaliwal’s call to designate the group a “terrorist organization”.   There is little if anything in the facts that would support this designation in any meaning-conveying sense.   The violence perpetrated by antifa which exists solely for the purpose of using violence or the threat of violence to suppress opinions with which the left disagrees and silence those who hold such opinions far more closely fits the meaning of the word terrorism than pushing or punching back against said violence, whatever else one might think about this sort of responding in kind.   The designation is not intended to be meaningful, it is intended to destroy a group that Singh opposes for political reasons.

 

This is a terrible misuse of a law that seems like it was written to be terribly misused.

 

Singh followed up on his tweet by raising the matter in Parliament and bringing it to a vote.   The House unanimously voted for a motion recommending that the government add the Proud Boys to the terrorist list.   There was not a single dissenting vote.   Anybody in the Conservative Party who might have thought that antifa and BLM deserved to be on that list much more than the Proud Boys kept that thought to himself.   Anybody in the NDP or Green parties who might have objected to the terrorist list even existing on the grounds that it is a threat to human rights, kept that thought to himself.   This unanimous vote to declare the group a terrorist organization for entirely political reasons, depersoning its members and stripping them of their constitutional protections, speaks extremely poorly about the politicians we have sent to Parliament, and bodes very ill for our country’s future.

 

The motion in Parliament had no binding force on the government.   Bill Blair, the ex-cop who is Public Safety Minister – a title from the French Reign of Terror which ought not to exist in a free Commonwealth realm, back to Solicitor General, please – told the CBC that the decision would be based on “intelligence and evidence collected by our national security agencies” and that “Terrorist designations are not political exercises”.     On February 3^rd he declared that the Proud Boys, along with a bunch of obscure groups that few have ever heard of before, had been added to the list.    

 

Jagmeet Singh was elated, although it was reiterated on the occasion that his motion was not a motivating factor in the decision (yeah right), and he called upon the government to go even further in eliminating groups that disagree with him.  He was quoted by the CBC as saying:

 

We need to build a country where everyone feels like they belong. Those hateful groups have no place in our country.

 

Clearly all anti-terrorism legislation needs to be repealed immediately.   Anything that gives such a man, who is so completely stupid that he cannot see the glaring contradiction between these two sentences, this kind of power to destroy those he doesn’t like is a far greater threat to our country than terrorism itself.

Scandals

In May of 1973, as the Watergate scandal that would eventually bring down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon was in the early stages of unfolding in the press, our former Prime Minister, the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, addressing the House of Commons said “Honourable members know what has happened recently in the United States. Even making observations about it causes me very deep pain. The President has been a friend of mine for years. I wonder how many people in Canada who were going to abolish the monarchy are having second thoughts now about asking for a president?”

I, who very much share the Chief’s monarchist sentiments and preference for our own system of parliamentary government, cannot count the number of times since the current American presidential race began that I have been thankful that we are fortunate enough in Canada, to have a head of state who is above the political process and whose position is filled by good old-fashioned hereditary right of succession. No matter how loathsome our politicians are – and the present governing batch led by mindless media-whore Justin Trudeau are about as loathsome as they get – we can always look to our Sovereign and say God Save the Queen!

The Watergate scandal cost the United States the leadership of the statesman who was, in my opinion, the best president they had in the last century and a half. What Nixon was forced to resign over was less than what one of the present candidates has already done while serving in the administration of the outgoing president as Secretary of State. Nixon, having inherited a quagmire in the Vietnam War in which thousands of American lives had been wasted through the incompetence of the previous administration, brought America’s involvement in this conflict to an end in a way that minimized the damage to her national honour. By contrast, the former Secretary of State now running for president, through her ill-conceived support for Islamic rebel movements throughout the Middle East, helped created ISIS which is presently engaged in a jihadist war of terror against the rest of the world and, blaming the problems of the region on the Russian, Syrian, and Iranian governments actively fighting ISIS, proposes to solve the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria that she helped generate, by pursuing the same failed policies in a way that could lead to the kind of direct US-Russia confrontation that statesmen spent the entire Cold War trying to avoid.

Late last week, as Wikileaks released documents showing that this candidate said one thing to audiences of Wall Street financiers and another to the general public – and advocated the practice of the same duplicity – the Washington Post, the liberal newspaper that had broken the Watergate story and which supports the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton attempted to generate a Watergate sized scandal for her opponent Donald J. Trump. They released a videotape from 2005, in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush, prior to an appearance by Trump on NBC's Access Hollywood which Bush was co-anchoring at the time, could be heard on a bus having a rather crude and vulgar chat about women.

That Donald Trump had engaged in such a crass conversation probably came as a genuine shock to no one. There was much feigned shock over it, with nobody expressing more faux outrage than Hillary Clinton, who is no stranger to gutter talk herself. Trump apologized for the remarks which he described as “locker room” talk an expression which has long been around for the kind of unguarded and often lewd conversation which often takes place between men in informal settings in which women are not present. Clinton, deliberately parsing the expression in an overly literal way, cited coaches and athletes who tweeted that they never heard talk like that in their locker rooms. Her cheerleaders in the mainstream media, including the contemptible Anderson Cooper of CNN who co-moderated the second presidential debate at Washington University, St. Louis, two days after the tape was released, attempted to twist Trump’s words into something worse than boasting and obscenity. It is apparent to anybody who is both honest and in possession of a brain that Trump’s boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything”, while utterly distasteful, was not a declaration of entitlement to commit sexual assault but a statement of the fact that the fame and wealth that come with celebrity attract women.

Other than distracting people from the Wikileaks revelations about Clinton, the heirs of Woodward and Bernstein clearly had two objectives in publishing this story. Evident in the timing of the story was their hope to rattle Trump just prior to the second debate. This objective failed. When the matter came up at the beginning of the debate Trump apologized, repeated that it was just locker room talk, and pointed out that while they were condemning him for his words, Bill Clinton had been accused by a number of women of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape. He had arranged a pre-debate press conference with several of these women. Also present – and more relevant – was Kathy Shelton, a woman who had been raped as a twelve year old. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer who defended her rapist by attacking her character and sanity and who in a taped interview laughed and gloated over her victory in the case even though she was aware her client was guilty. Trump was able to prevent the scandal from dominating a debate in which he was able to get his message across – the need to concentrate on fighting ISIS rather than the other governments fighting her, the failure of Obamacare, the need for “extreme vetting” of refugees, etc. – while hammering away at Clinton over her emails, foreign policy failures, and mendacity.

The other objective, and probably the main goal of the scandalmongers, was to divide the Republican Party. In this they were more successful. Indeed, as Paul Ryan, John McCain, and other establishment Republican figures were quick to distance themselves from the Trump campaign and condemn their party’s candidate it became difficult to tell which group displayed the greater hypocrisy. Was it the Clinton Democrats, who for years have promoted sex instruction classes and contraceptive handouts in schools, who more lately have taken to insisting that boys and girls be allowed to use each other’s bathrooms and showers, who have basically done everything they can to undermine traditional Christian morality, and whose numbers include some of the most dirty-minded and foul-mouthed comedians, actors, singers and other celebrities imaginable, but who are now all of a sudden discovering their inner Mrs. Grundys? Or was it the mainstream Republicans who, having had the opportunity in 1992 and again in 1996 to nominate a man of high moral calibre with all the patriotic policies on trade and immigration that have been attracting supporters to Trump, rejected him and now, finding the policies that their grassroots voters have demanded being championed by a reality television and beauty pageant host are pretending to be surprised to find that his private conversation resembles that of a popular entertainer rather than that of a monk?

It was Republican politicians, of course, like Ryan and McCain who danced to the tune the media played. We await the outcome of November 8th to discover whether the religious conservatives in the Republican Party’s voting base find Trump’s off colour conversation of a decade ago so offensive that they would be willing to allow Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States. While one’s words do indicate one’s character, and character is an important consideration in evaluating a would-be leader, it is to be hoped that America’s conservatives – and her voters in general – have enough sense to weigh the shortcomings in character revealed by Trump’s raunchy talk against the shortcomings revealed by Clinton’s lying about her mishandling of classified information, her shedding crocodile tears over the humanitarian crisis she helped create in Syria while attempting to pin the blame on Russia, her making billions of dollars worth of arms deals with governments that happen to be big donors to the Clinton Foundation despite being aware that they are sponsors of terrorism, and countless other such corrupt abuses of office that could be pointed to and realise that not only do Clinton’s shortcomings outweigh Trump’s, they also are more directly relevant to the question of what kind of a president she would be. This is to be hoped because Western civilization is presently facing the existential crisis Jean Raspail predicted in The Camp of the Saints and to meet that crisis needs a Donald Trump at the helm of the United States and not a Hillary Clinton.

Whatever happens, it is undeniable that the level of American politics has been brought to a new low by this election. In reality, of course, politics has always been dominated by the pursuit of sex, wealth, and power and those who in the tradition of lofty philosophical discourse on politics that began with Plato two and a half millennia ago envision a political society organized towards the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful must look elsewhere than to the popularity contests we know as democratic elections. For which reason I will close with the thought on which I began – thankfulness, that here in Canada we still have a Head of State who is above this degrading process, and of whom we can say, no matter how horrible our politicians are, God Save the Queen!

Hillary: An Historic Campaign?

As a Canadian High Tory I do not approve of republics and presidents, much preferring our own parliamentary monarchy system in which the head of state, the representative of the country as a whole including past and future generations not merely those who cast votes in the present, is above the political process, having come to her position through a constitutional, hereditary, line of succession through which the sovereignty she possesses, exercised, for better or for worse, in her name by the elected government, is hers by prescriptive and divine right.

That having been said, this year’s Presidential election in the republic to our south is certainly an interesting and entertaining one, far more so than any other than I can remember in my life time. The primary season is now over, and the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties have been chosen. I have written about the Republican candidate, Donald Trump previously, and will likely do so again in the future. Today I would like to talk about the Democratic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The news media has declared Clinton’s campaign to be an historic one, because she is the first woman to be the nominee of a major political party. The Hillary-sympathetic media will be attempting to get as much mileage out of this fact as they can, just as they got as much mileage as they could out of Barack Obama’s being the first black President, and if Americans fall for this trick twice it will demonstrate just how debased, degraded, and inane their system has become.

There are other better reasons for describing Hillary Clinton’s campaign as historic than her sex. There is, for example, the fact that she sought the nomination of her party while under investigation by the FBI for misdoings while Secretary of State. Has that ever happened before?

Actually, perhaps even this is not particularly history making. You might recall the word “Whitewater” being tossed around quite a bit when Clinton’s husband, Bill, was seeking the Democratic nomination in 1992. Whitewater was the name of a real-estate development company founded by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their friends Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s. The purpose of the company was to buy up land to develop into vacation estates – which it sold, repossessed, and resold, fleecing people out of their money in an underhanded, but apparently legal, manner. The scheme eventually failed, and McDougal, who had been trying to keep it afloat with funds misappropriated from a bank he managed called Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, came under investigation just before the bank collapsed in the big S & L crisis. Bill Clinton was accused of using his influence as Governor of Arkansas to benefit Madison Guaranty. Hillary Clinton, as an attorney with the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, represented Madison Guaranty for much of this time. During the federal investigation of this scandal early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, many of the relevant legal documents mysteriously disappeared, eventually being discovered in the White House with the fingerprints of Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster Jr. all over them.

You remember Vince Foster don’t you? The colleague of Hillary’s from Rose Law, rumoured to have been her lover, who became Deputy White House Counsel only to turn up dead in Fort Macy Park six months into Bill Clinton’s presidency. After the body was discovered, and before the office was sealed, Hillary’s staff removed several boxes of documents. The death was ruled a suicide, but there is a reason that the term “Arkancide” was coined to describe a murder disguised as a suicide.

Whatever really happened to Vince Foster there is much blood on Hillary’s hands. In March of 1999, Hillary called up her husband from Africa and urged him to bomb Serbia. Bill did so – without the approval of the American Congress but with the support of other NATO leaders such as the UK’s Tony Blair and our own creepy Prime Minister at the time, Jean Chretien. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get”, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright declared. Albright was appointed, like so many other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, at Hillary’s choice. The excuse for the bombing was the accusation – later proven to be false – that the Serbian government was ethnically cleansing the Albanians in Kosovo. The bombing benefited the Albanian Islamic terrorist organization the KLA at the expense of Orthodox Serbia, which saw its infrastructure devastated and thousands of its civilians murdered by NATO bombs.

Speaking of American military interventions that should never have taken place and which had disastrous consequences, Hillary Clinton, as Senator for New York State, voted in favour of the Iraq War in 2002.

Then along came 2011. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State in the administration of Barack Obama, urged a “humanitarian intervention” in Libya. She got her way, an Obama led NATO bombed Libya, and Colonel Qaddafi was ousted and killed, and jihadists gained control of Libya. The following year those jihadists attacked the American embassy in Benghazi, killing the American ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and ten others. The consulate had requested that their security be beefed up, but the request had been denied by the State Department headed by You Know Who.

“Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?” Hillary Clinton asked in the speech she gave to the Democratic National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination, but it is a question that might properly be asked of her, considering her track record as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State and the bellicose language she uses when speaking of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the same speech, Hillary Clinton called the foreign policy ideas of her opponent “dangerously incoherent”, but her own could be described as “dangerously coherent.” They are the same failed ideas that have guided American foreign policy since the Presidency of George H. W. Bush. In the last two and a half decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forces of Islamic jihad have emerged as the biggest external threat to Western civilization. During that time, each American administration has thought that the appropriate way to handle this threat was to introduce more democracy into the countries that produce and support jihadists – unless their governments regularly do business with the administration and its friends – and to bomb the hell out of these countries. At the same time they have encouraged large scale immigration from all over the world, including Islamic countries. This policy would continue under a President Hillary Clinton. It is a policy that might serve the interests of the new, internationalist, globalist order, that every President since the first Bush has believed in, but from the perspective of anyone concerned about the safety and security of the United States, or the larger Western world for that matter, it is clearly a recipe for disaster, for converting an external threat into a much more dangerous internal one.

This, ultimately, is what this year’s election will be all about. If Americans want more of the same – more bombing countries overseas and more potential jihadists being allowed in – then they have Hillary Clinton to choose. If they want the opposite of this, then they had better consider voting for her opponent, for he is the first candidate of a major party in decades to offer anything different. That is the true historic first in this election.