Hoist with His Own Petard

On July 28, 1794, the guillotine claimed the life of Maximilien de Robespierre. As a leader of the Jacobin Club, he had helped orchestrate the French Revolution, been one of the most vocal supporters of the murders of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, had been the chief architect of the Reign of Terror. The poetic justice with which he fell victim to the same gruesome fate he had decreed for others is best captured in the words that William Shakespeare famously put in the mouth of his Danish prince Hamlet in reference to his plan to turn the order for his execution which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were bearing from Claudius into their own death warrant, which words I have made the title of this piece. (1)

The same phrase can also be fittingly applied to what Justin “Peoplekind” Trudeau is now undergoing. Justin Trudeau, ever since he used his last name and looks to easily defeat the four women, each far more qualified for the job than himself, who ran against him in the 2013 leadership race for the Liberal Party of Canada, has marketed himself as a male feminist. He has certainly shown himself to have the feminist aptitude for totalitarian thought control. A year before the 2015 Dominion election that put the Liberals back in power he whipped his party, good and hard, declaring that the debate on abortion was over and that from now on the Liberals would accept no new candidates with pro-life views, and that sitting Liberal pro-lifers would be made to vote against their consciences. In power, he has declared pro-life views to be against Canadian values and has cut off access to government funding of summer jobs for students to employers unwilling to attest their agreement with the pro-abortion position. An endless display of feminist posturing has characterized the second Trudeau premiership from the day he announced his gender-balanced Cabinet. Needless to say, when the #Me Too Movement sprung up like a poisonous toadstool from the putrid manure that was all that was left of the reputation of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, Trudeau was in seventh heaven over the opportunities it afforded him to signal to his crowd of adoring, empty-headed, left-wing sycophants his feminist virtues. He took every chance he could get to remind us of his government’s zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual misconduct and to lecture Canadians, and indeed, the entire world, on how we should be following his holy example. Sexual harassment is a serious matter, he insisted, and allegations need to be investigated no matter how long after the fact they happen to be made. “When women speak up”, he said, “it is our duty to listen to them and believe them.”

Then an eighteen year old editorial from a B.C. newspaper called the Creston Valley Advance resurfaced It appears that while Trudeau was in British Columbia in 2000, raising funds for his winter sports safety campaign in honour of the younger brother he had lost in an avalanche two years previously, he attended a beer and music festival got wasted, and groped a female reporter to whom, the next day when he had presumably sobered up, he offered the interesting apology of “I’m sorry, if I had known you were reporting for a national newspaper I never would have been so forward.”

As the flock of groupies in the progressive press that only a short time ago would swoon at the very mention of his name transformed overnight into a pack of wolves howling for his blood with fangs bared, it has been highly entertaining, to say the least, watching Trudeau try to squirm his way out of the hole he has dug himself into. Everything he has said, from his non-acknowledgement of any “negative interaction” to his bizarrely worded recollection of giving the “apology in the moment” has only made things worse for him, especially as it becomes obvious that he will not be holding himself to the same merciless standard that he has held other members of his party, despite his repeated assurances that he would do so if allegations were ever made against him.

Most recently, the Prime Minister in a desperate attempt to shift the focus off of himself, has tried to turn the scandal into a teaching moment for the rest of us about some supposed “awakening that we’re having as a society.” As it so happens, I agree that there is a lesson for us in all of this, but it is not the lesson that Trudeau wants to teach.

Decades ago, before the revived feminist movement of the post-World War II era poisoned all interaction between the sexes, men would occasionally make unwelcome passes at women. At the time it was called “getting fresh” and women were quite capable of dealing with it without hiring a lawyer, running to the courts, and making a federal case out of it. Depending upon the woman the method might involve a slap or a drink to the face, a bonk on the head with a handbag, umbrella or whatever accessory happened to be convenient, or one of many other variations on this theme. This worked because, at the time, society operated on the principle of acknowledging and respecting the differences between the sexes rather than that of the unattainable ideal of sexual equality. The rules, therefore, which forbade men to ever hit women, allowed women this particular show of force which was quite effective at deterring and correcting inappropriate behaviour and also at sifting out those who could be so deterred and corrected from the much smaller number of genuinely criminal sexual predators who could not.

Feminism, which insisted that society reorganize itself in accordance with the ideal of sexual equality, demanded that all spaces from which the fairer sex had traditionally been excluded, from private clubs to men’s locker rooms, but especially workplaces, be thrown open to women. Beginning with the United States in 1964, foolish Western governments began to pass draconian laws which placed the onus of proof upon employers, landlords, and businesses accused of the crimethink of discrimination. It was the father of the alleged Kokanee Groper, a man who never met a Communist tyrant that he did not admire and adulate, who introduced ours in 1977. Faced with the threat of crippling lawsuits in which all the cards are stacked against them, most employers opted for a gender-balanced workplace.

Now that every workplace was going co-ed, the feminists decided that with this exponential increase in the opportunities for men to “get fresh” with the ladies, a new set of rules for the workplace was in order. Judging from the rules themselves, it seems as if a committee consisting of hatchet-faced harpies jealous of women who actually get hit on, stuck up knockouts who get offended at even the most politely worded attention from men who are not in their league, man-hating lesbians who consider all heterosexual relations to be rape, and various and sundry other stripes of sex-hating, neo-Puritan, control freaks was patched together to draw them up. What the rules basically amounted to was “no getting fresh”, except that “getting fresh” was replaced with the colder, more sterile, technical phrase “sexual harassment.” The new phrase, while for the most part used to mean the same thing as the old, is much broader in scope. Any acknowledgement of having noticed a woman’s sex that is not welcomed by the woman herself could potentially fall under the umbrella of “sexual harassment.” (2) Indeed, even if the woman does welcome the acknowledgement of her sex it could potentially be considered “sexual harassment” since the rules allow for third-party accusations. With the new terminology came an upgrade in the seriousness of the offence. No longer was the old slap in the face sufficient – the offender had to be charged, dragged before a human rights court, re-educated with sensitivity training – a far more cruel and inhumane punishment than a blow to the face – and perhaps face the complete and utter loss of career, reputation, and family. Feminism’s new rules quickly spread from the workplace to the campus and throughout all of society.

As if this were not already bad enough, more recently feminists, including, as we have seen, Trudeau himself, have been insisting that women who make accusations of inappropriate sexual behaviour have a right to be believed. Such a right cannot be squared with the legal right of those accused of offences to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The latter right is fundamental to our system of justice. The supposed right of women to be believed is not. It is also nonsense. Nobody has a right to be believed, people establish their credibility by proving themselves to be honest, reliable and trustworthy. That a sizable percentage of rape accusations prove, upon investigation, to be false is a well-established fact (3) and it is highly unlikely that this percentage decreases when all allegations of sexual misconduct are taken into consideration. Here, as with a woman’s supposed right to have an abortion, “women’s rights” does not mean the guaranteeing to women of the same basic civil rights as men, but the granting to them of special, exclusive rights, that take away from more basic, established rights that have long been the property of all – the right to life, the right of presumption of innocence. Far from being the social “justice” its advocates claim it to be, feminism is a form of injustice that is irreconcilably hostile to the most basic rights and freedoms of our country, that is to say, the Common Law rights and freedoms that were part of the Canadian heritage long before the Charter of which the Trudeau Liberals are so undeservingly proud was ever inked.

The lesson, to be learned from all of this, is that women were quite capable of dealing with fresh men long before feminism made sexual harassment into a political issue, that the old way of dealing with it was far superior to the Stalinist-lite method preferred by feminists, that we as a society ought to have run as fast as we could in the opposite direction when a movement with “the personal is the political” as its slogan arose, and that we should repudiate the legacy of the sixties and go back to allowing women to be women, and men to be men.

It is highly unlikely, of course, that Justin Trudeau will ever learn that lesson. If, however, the young lady reporter eighteen years ago, had thrown a beer in his face, slapped him silly, or whacked him with her tape recorder, rather than written him up in an editorial, he would not be in the mess he is in today. Heck, he would probably be a better person today for it.

(1) In contemporary English it could be alliteratively and more or less literally rendered as “blown up by his own bomb.” This just doesn’t have the same ring as the Bard’s original wording, however.

(2) Technically, the rules are supposed to apply to both sexes, but in practice they have been enforced primarily against men.

(3) See KC Johnston and Stuart Taylor Jr., The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, (New York: Encounter Books, 2017).

O Tempora, O Mores!

In this, which will be my last posting for 2017, I would like to begin on a positive note by announcing the publication of The Other North America: Traditions and Identities. Edited by D. H. Graham, and published by the American Anglican Press, this book is an anthology of essays by North American writers, some of the past, others of the present, but who are all Anglican Christians who dissent in their political thinking from the vision of the revolutionaries of 1776 and who draw upon traditions older than the liberalism that inspired that revolution. Some of these, such as Michael Cushman and V. Francis Knight, speak for the cultural tradition of the antebellum South, which the Yankees went to war to extirpate in 1861. Others, such as Professor Ron Dart, the Rev. Canon Kenneth W. Gunn-Walberg, and myself, speak for the monarchist, Tory tradition of Loyalist Canada. I am very grateful to Mr. Graham for the honour of being included in such distinguished company in this book.

Jerusalem

Imagine if Germany were to declare that it was offensive to her that France considers Paris to be her capital city and tried to blackmail the rest of the world into moving their embassies in France to Marseilles with threats that they would otherwise renew the armed hostilities of almost a century ago. Would any government anywhere in the world regard this demand as anything other than hubris taken to a degree that is both absurd and insane? Of course not. At the risk therefore, of sounding Zionist, might I suggest that everybody can their faux outrage over US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be recognizing Israel’s choice of its own capital and moving their embassy there from Tel Aviv. Spare me the nonsense about this derailing the peace process. There is no process that will ever lead to a lasting peace in this region unless someone finally persuades all of the Arab and Muslim countries to recognize Israel’s existence as an established fact which, they do not have to like, but which they are bloody well going to have to put up with and live with.

Hollywood


When l’affaire Weinstein broke a couple of months ago, I was initially skeptical. My skepticism was due to a case of mistaken identity. Having heard the name Harvey Weinstein, my mind for some reason processed it as Harvey Fierstein, and since the latter’s erotic proclivities are well-known to be directed elsewhere than towards the ladies, multiple charges of sexual harassment against him by the fairer sex seemed rather implausible. When I realized my mistake, and who the actual subject of the accusations was, my skepticism evaporated – at least, until the accusations were elevated from offering stardom in exchange for sex and generally being a sleazebag to include rape.

Rape, as the term was defined prior to 1975 (the year that saw the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Wills), is, of course, a heinous crime, worthy of castration, or perhaps even capital punishment. It is precisely because of the heinous nature of the crime, and the severity of the punishment it deserves, that all accusations of such must be regarded with a healthy skepticism until such time as their truth is established by overwhelming evidence. This attitude is one upon which the “Me Too” crowd looks aghast and indeed, regards as worse than the crime itself. Their position is that victims of rape or sexual assault have a “right” to be both heard and believed and that to doubt or question their accounts is to “victimize” them a second time. They rationalize their position with the argument that victims of rape and sexual assault are reluctant to speak out and that those who question and doubt their testimony by so doing add to this reluctance.

This argument is a rationalization rather than sound reasoning. It ignores the distinction between a victim – someone against whom a crime has actually been perpetrated – and an accuser – someone who says that a crime has been perpetrated against her. An accuser is only a victim if her claim is true – if it is not, then she is not a victim but a victimizer. There is no way to give victims a right to be believed without giving this same right to all accusers, both the true and the false. To give accusers the right to be believed, is to throw away the long-established rights of the accused to a fair trial, to confront and cross-examine their accusers, and to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Those who claim a “right” to be believed for rape accusers are well aware of this for they do not make their arguments in bona fide. What the so-called “right to be believed” is really all about is giving one sex a weapon – the career-reputation-and-life-destroying false accusation – to use against the other, at the expense of sacrificing an ancient right that protects both sexes.

None of this is written in defence of Weinstein who, whether or not he is guilty of crimes like rape and sexual assault, certainly seems to be a major sleazebag. This goes with the territory, him being a major Hollywood producer at all. Hollywood has been full of enough sleaze to make Las Vegas look like the most virtuous city in North America by comparison since the day its first movie studio opened. Indeed, show business was a notoriously sleazy business long before the motion picture was invented. At the risk of further outraging those who would find my comments in the last two paragraphs offensive, might I follow Ilana Mercer in making the suggestion that blame for the resemblance between the inner workings of show business and that of a bordello, does not rest upon the shoulders of lecherous managers, agents, and producers alone, but has as much to do with the ambitious young actresses and divas who are more than willing to sleep their way to fame and fortune?

Hypocrisy Anyone?

It appears that for all those left-liberals, determined to crucify Weinstein and other big name Hollywood types – who are generally all long-time supporters of progressive causes, including feminism, the Democrat Party, and Hillary Clinton – there is an exception to a woman’s right to refuse. The other week the news broke that a young actress – to use the term extremely loosely – who went by the stage name of August Ames, had been driven to commit suicide, not by the extreme emptiness that accompanies the kind of ephemeral stardom achieved through allowing oneself to be filmed in the most private of acts for mass voyeuristic consumption, but because those exemplary models of letting other people be, the LGBTTQ et alia ad infinitum gang, launched a social media blitzkrieg against her after she withdrew from a shoot in which she was cast opposite a co-star who has primarily appeared in films of a same-sex nature. Apart from illustrating the well-known fact that it is those who talk the most about tolerance and letting others be who are the least likely to practice these things, this demonstrates the truth of a remark I made last summer about how “We are fast approaching the time where social and legal pressure to conform to the new culture of “tolerance” will be the instruments of a raptum omnium ab omnibus.”

Robert Charles Sproul, Requiescat in Pace

One of the first books of serious theology – or what passes for serious theology in contemporary evangelicalism - that I ever read was R. C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God, which my pastor lent me when I was still in high school. While I have not read all of the approximately 100 books that Sproul wrote during his ministry, of the several that I have read, I still consider this to be the best. I have not always agreed with everything he wrote – and indeed, have charged him with serious heresy – but, as Dame Joan Collins’ Alexis Carrington Colby had a habit of saying in Aaron Spelling’s Dynasty to those whom she had previously stabbed in the back, but wished to use in the present, “that’s all in the past” and the sacred and ancient principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est is now in play, as Dr. Sproul, who had suffered from chronic pulmonary obstructive disease for several years, passed away this week from respiratory complications brought on by the flu. I offer my condolences to his loved ones. May he rest in peace.

The Stalinism that is Strangling the Dominion of Canada to Death

On Friday December 8th, Mary Wagner was dragged out of something that euphemistically refers to itself as the “Women’s Care Clinic” in downtown Toronto and tossed in the clink. Her crime? Passing out red roses, to which models of unborn babies, and cards with contact information for the Sisters of Life and the message “You can choose life for your baby. Love will find a way” in an effort to dissuade young women from having their babies murdered. It used to be illegal, in the Dominion of Canada, for women to murder their babies. Trudeau pere changed that, by legalizing abortion in certain circumstances in 1969, and by corrupting our constitution with the addition of the diabolical Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, which the Supreme Court of Canada then used as the basis for striking down all our remaining laws against abortion in 1988. Now, under Trudeau fils, it is attempting to prevent abortion, by gentle persuasion, that is treated as a crime.

Last month, at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, 22 year old teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd was censured by the University administration. Her offence? In a class entitled “Canadian Communication in Context”, she showed a brief clip of a televised debate between University of Toronto Professors Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte on the subject of gender-neutral pronouns, in which the former took the con side and the latter the pro. To those who censured her, the acknowledgement of the existence of any other than the pro side on this issue, constituted a hate crime, a promotion of “transphobia.” Shepherd had the foresight to record the interview in which she was censured in abusive terms by a professor who absurdly compared Peterson to Hitler. The university, faced with a backlash of negative public opinion after the recording was released, backed down and apologized to the TA. One wonders how many students, teacher’s assistants, and staff and faculty members, in universities across the Dominion – or across North America for that matter as universities in the United States are no better – have faced similar censure, from administrations that tolerate no dissent from the increasingly radical, Marxist agenda on cultural and social issues, that they have been ramming down everyone’s throats?

Around the same time that the Lindsay Shepherd story was breaking there was an incident here in Winnipeg that further demonstrates the chilling atmosphere of Stalinism that has fallen upon our Dominion now that a Trudeau is once again the Prime Minister’s Office. Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression, had scheduled a talk in his hotel room at the Hilton Suites for November 15th, on the subject of “Charlottesville Changes Everything.” The day before the scheduled talk, the left-liberal Winnipeg Free Press ran a front-page editorial, about how a “white nationalist” had planned an “event” in Winnipeg. The mendacity of this wording cannot be understated. The word “event” was intended to obscure the nature of what was planned by implying that it might be a public rally or demonstration rather than a closed door meeting, in which Mr. Fromm in suit-and-tie, would give a non-incendiary, informative talk, to those interested in hearing him. The words “white nationalist”, to the writers and readership of the Winnipeg Free Press, have only one connotation, and that is neo-Nazi, which, to anyone who actually knows Paul Fromm, is an absurd description of a man who has been fighting against the kind of soft-totalitarian thought control that the Grits introduced to our country during the first Trudeau premiership for almost as long as I have been alive. To left-liberals, who applaud and lionize every other sort of racial and ethnic identity group, anyone who tries to speak for white people and their rights and interests is the equivalent of Hitler. By this ridiculously pathetic excuse for reasoning Sir Winston Churchill, portrayed by Gary Oldham in the upcoming war drama Darkest Hour, was the equivalent of the tyrant he defeated in war in 1945, because ten years later he tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce immigration restrictions, suggesting to his Cabinet that they adopt the slogan “Keep England White.”

The Winnipeg Free Press’s activism-disguised-as-journalism had its intended effect. The Hilton Suites cancelled Mr. Fromm’s reservation. When he relocated to the Main Stay Suites, black clad, masked “antifa”, whom the sympathetic media call “protestors” but in my opinion would be better described as “terrorists” descended upon the premises. Again Mr. Fromm’s reservation was cancelled and he soon discovered that he had been blacklisted – “whitelisted?” – by every hotel in town.

Now, if you have the courage and honesty to do so, think about this story and ask yourself who bears the closest resemblance to Adolf Hitler – Paul Fromm or those who went to such great lengths to prevent him from giving a talk to those who wanted to hear him?

The Trudeau Liberals have made known to MPs what they will publically announce next week – that to receive grant money from the government for summer jobs for students, employers will need attest that:

both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.

In other words, anyone who disagrees with Trudeau’s Marxist agenda, need not apply.

One Last Thing

If there is anybody that I have not offended, with any of my preceding remarks, allow me to make up for this oversight by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!