Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much.   Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities.    In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces.  In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.

 

I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in the following lines of verse:

 

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

 

That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu bug.   On Dominion Day an angry, lawless, mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg.   The mob was not angrily demanding the restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social lives.   They were mad, in both senses of the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner.    The mob vandalized and tore down the large statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant Governor’s residence.   Since Queen Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country, Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada herself.

 

Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a press conference the following Wednesday.   At the latter he said that the statues would be restored.   He also said, with regards to the early settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to build, they came to build better and build they did.   They built farms and they built businesses, they built communities and churches too.   They built these things for themselves and one another and they built them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to building yet again”.  This is what his enemies wish to crucify him for saying.  Much to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.

 

In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than devils.   This is what the far left finds so unforgiveable.  The fundamental essence of the political left, its sine qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and destroy.    They have to think of the builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they themselves are such.

 

The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic terms.   What is implied, or in some cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian, settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and offensive to Native Indian Canadians.   We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame, that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the Indian Residential Schools.   Should there be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult, such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to themselves.   It also suggests that they are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for its own interests.  The attack on the symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism, whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants – could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)

 

I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came across was on the local CBC.    The segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my opinion, as a historian.   Both men are notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian family names.   The following day both the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever, but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on this anti-Pallister campaign.

 

That ball has been picking up speed ever since.   Helping it along have been a number of defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations.   The portfolio was then given to Alan Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk.  Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”.   This is, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”.   Obviously, a great many Canadians today are of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing.   Ordinarily, when people in one era do something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions.   In this case, however, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven, backlash.     Needless to say, matters have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious blood libel against our country and her churches.   Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed.     My personal opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above.  Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while thinking the way he does.

 

Since then, there have been more resignations, more condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the progressive media for Pallister to step down.

 

If only all of this were in response to what he has done wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person social interaction which is both bonum in se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime, destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders, by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined forces with the left.

 

(1)   English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans.  It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic.  The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made.   All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens.  Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them.    To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.

Old Toby and the Battle Against the Bat Virus

One of the most interesting and amusing aspects of the pandemic is the growing amount of data that suggests that tobacco smoking may under certain circumstances actually help fight the disease. It is an odd piece of information in that it so counter-intuitive. Other conditions for which nicotine is believed to have at least palliative and in some cases, perhaps, preventative effects, are generally chronic conditions of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The Wuhan Flu or, if you prefer, COVID-19, on the other hand, is a respiratory disease. In its ordinary, moderate, form it is not noticeably different from the seasonal flu. In its more severe and potentially fatal form, it develops into the intensive kind of pneumonia that was labelled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS when the first coronavirus of this type appeared almost twenty years ago. This is exactly the sort of disease to which one would expect smoking to make one particularly vulnerable. It is most dangerous to the elderly, those with other complicating factors, and especially the combination of the two. Foremost among the other complicating factors are chronic conditions that compromise the immune and respiratory systems. Tobacco has been increasingly demonized since 1965 precisely on the basis of its being a leading cause of such respiratory diseases as emphysema and lung cancer.

Initially, the evidence seemed to point to what one would logically expect, namely that tobacco smoking increased the risk of death from this disease. The countries that were hit the first and the hardest were countries where smoking is still as common today as it was in North America about fifty years ago – China and Italy. When the virus arrived in North America, the city that was hit the hardest was New York City the reputation of which as a city of chain-smokers persists to this day. All of this is consistent with the expectation that the habit of tobacco smoking increases vulnerability to the coronavirus.

That this logical expectation is in fact the truth is the position taken by the World Health Organization and by public health authorities around the globe. Within the past seventy-two hours - it was forty-eight at the time I commenced writing this - a large number of these have issued statements to that effect, warning the public against the idea that cigarettes might protect them from COVID-19. Many of these statements are poorly written and they give every impression of having been issued in haste as if in an effort to try and put out a fire that had sprung up where somebody had flicked cigarette ash onto an official narrative.

Rumours that even though the virus was taking its worst tolls in populations with a high percentage of smokers, the smokers themselves were surprisingly underrepresented among its victims, had been growing for weeks. Then they were followed by something that was substantially more than rumour. Late in April, a study done in France found that in China, France, and the United States, smokers were a disproportionately low percentage of those who required hospitalization for COVID-19. The Economist reported on this study early in May. Then, late last week the preliminary research of a study done in England on various risk factors associated with fatal cases of COVID-19, pointed in the same, surprising, direction with regards to smoking.

Colby Cosh reported on all of this in an article that appeared in the National Post on Monday. What the studies seem to be indicating is that if age and sex are the only other factors considered, smokers are at greater risk than non-smokers, but if people have chronic respiratory conditions or an “inferior socioeconomic status” they are at less risk if they are current smokers than if they are ex-smokers or just non-smokers. Cosh in his report included the caveat “No one, including me, will advise a non-smoker to start smoking to ward off the novel coronavirus” to which he adds, amusingly “But, uh…if I had pre-existing plans to quit I might personally have delayed them.”

Cosh followed up on this with a second article on Wednesday. In his first article he had observed that the studies in question offered no explanation for why this would be the case. Whether it was the nicotine in the cigarettes, the tar or added chemicals, or even merely the habit of frequent coughing associated with smoking that made the difference, was a matter that would have to be inquired into separately. After his first article he had been contacted, however, by a Greek doctor named Konstantinos Farsalinos who had written about this oddity back in April. Farsalinos had offered two suggestions as to an explanation. The first is that nicotine might hinder the coronavirus’ ability to generate a “cytokine storm” and thus turn a person’s own immune system against him. Nicotine is believed to inhibit precisely those cytokines that have an inflammatory effect and which cause so much damage when driven into overdrive by the virus. The second suggestion was that nicotine might affect the production of the ACE2 enzyme which is the virus's main entry point into cells in a way that causes its protective function to kick into high gear and work against the virus. Cosh notes that these explanations are not mutually exclusive, nor are they the only possibilities.

Since the thought that tobacco smoking might convey even the slightest of health benefits runs completely contrary to health fascism’s oldest and most sacred narrative it is no wonder that that the public health authorities have been issuing panicky statements, full of misspelled words, grammatical errors, and logical fallacies in their haste to condemn the aforementioned studies and assure the public that demon tobacco is still sporting its horns and cloven hoofs. Amusingly, they have attacked the French study on the grounds of alleged ties between its lead author and the tobacco industry. What makes this so funny is that it comes from people funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Among the things this industry is noted for are its aggressive attempts to stamp out any alternative forms of treatment to their expensive, patented, medicines, its advertising strategy of brainwashing people into thinking the solution to all their problems is to be found in a pill bottle and thus instilling in them a psychological predisposition towards substance abuse and addiction, and its unethical and inhumane experiments and tests, generally carried out in countries that don’t have strict laws against these things. If any industry makes the tobacco industry look squeaky clean by comparison it is the pharmaceutical industry and that industry owns the World Health Organization, the public health authorities, and most of the medical profession, lock stock and barrel.

Their corrupt influence has certainly been on prominent display throughout this pandemic. That the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, also commonly used for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is highly effective in treating coronaviruses of precisely this type has been known since the first SARS outbreak. By the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March, studies in Europe and elsewhere were already showing that this was true of this virus as well. More recently, the extremely high success rate of those physicians who have used this drug to treat COVID-19, especially in combination with zinc and the antibiotic azithromycin, has pretty much conclusively demonstrated that it works and it works well. There has been a thoroughly dishonest campaign of media disinformation that claims otherwise. The drug's known side effects have been greatly exaggerated. There was that outright deception involving people who self-administered a form of chloroquine that is used as a cleaning product with disastrous consequences. A test in which it was administered after the severe form of the disease had already progressed to the point where the patients were put on ventilators, a point at which the chances of any treatment – including the ventilators – working drops to next to nothing, was touted as "disproving" the drug's effectiveness. Against the ever-growing body of success stories from physicians using this drug in the field, the media has trotted out the "experts" who insist that its efficacy can only be demonstrated by a particular kind of clinical trial. While this is impressive to those who reflexively genuflect before scientific authority, others, who are more familiar with their methodology, will recognize that the kind of trials they are talking about are tests where all the variables are completely under the control of the "researcher" thereby granting him control of the outcome. This entire smokescreen can be partly explained by the fact that the drug was promoted by Donald the Orange. The media would go out of their way to contradict him no matter what he said. If he were to say "the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds are singing in the trees" they would say "the sky is black, it is a dark and stormy night and that is the howl of the timber wolf you hear" and then dig up some expert somewhere who would back them up against the evidence of their own eyes and ears. There is more to the explanation than this, however. The anti-malaria drug has been around for almost a century and is cheap to produce. Treating COVID patients with it would be far less profitable for the pharmaceutical industry than forcing everybody to take some expensive, patented, vaccine.

It is people on the payroll of the corrupt industry described above who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to stomp out the fire set by these interesting studies about tobacco. This is perhaps stronger evidence than anything in the studies themselves that there is something to this.

Whether or not that is the case, of course, is something that must await further studies before it can be determined. As I pointed out at the start of this essay, it certainly seems to be counter-intuitive. It would certainly tickle my fancy, however, as someone who despises the public health authorities, the pharmaceutical industry, the mainstream mass media, and the anti-smoking nuts alike, if something like this, sure to stick in the craw of all four, were to be confirmed.