State of the Dominion – 2025

Seven years ago I entitled my annual essay for our country’s birthday “State of the Dominion – 2018.”  This was during the premiership of Captain Airhead, towards the end of his first term, and I noted that we were in the midst of a third “revolution within the form.”  The first had taken place in the early twentieth century in the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King and the second from the mid-1960s to 1982 in the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.  Captain Airhead is finally out of office, although the Liberal Party – the party that each of these men had led – remains in power, under the new leadership of Blofeld.  So it is time to revisit the matter of the state of the Dominion.

 

The first thing to be observed is that as we emerge from the Airhead premiership Canada is in a far less worse condition than we could have anticipated going into that premiership after the 2015 Dominion Election.  This does not mean that we are emerging unscathed, far from it. 

 

On the social/moral front alone, the progressive agenda has been horribly advanced.  In 2023 a bill banning “conversion therapy” passed Parliament with unanimous support.  While the expression “conversion therapy” tends to conjure up the image of something similar to the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, the bill banning it was worded so broadly that it essentially forbids the offering of counseling to anyone seeking help in conforming their “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” to the reality of their biological sex.  Meanwhile, the progressive forces that demanded this ban have insisted that the opposite sort of conversion therapy be provided at the taxpayers’ expense to minors without their parents’ consent.  The opposite sort of conversion therapy is hormone therapy and surgery intended to conform biological sex, at least in appearance, to “gender identity.”

 

Nor is this the worst example of the advancement of the progressive social/moral agenda in the Airhead years.  That dishonour goes to the aggressive promotion of the culture of death by Captain Airhead.  There was little he could do in the way of making abortion more available in Canada since the status quo going into his premiership was the absence of any legal restrictions due to the failure of Parliament to pass any after the Morgentaler ruling in 1988 struck down the previous laws on the matter.  He could and did waste tax dollars on promoting abortion outside of Canada.  It was the euthanasia side of the culture of death, however, that will be remembered as the darkest part of his legacy.  Captain Airhead became prime minister later in the year that the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code’s prohibition against euthanasia and in the first year of his premiership a bill that outright legalized it passed Parliament.  In the near-decade since, further legislation, policy decisions and court rulings have expanded the assisted suicide program dubbed MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) and like abortion, marketed by those in favour of it as a “health care” choice, extending it far beyond the terminally ill.  In 2021 they got Parliament to pass a bill making it much easier to obtain approval for MAID and extending it to those whom sane people would say are most in need of being protected from it, that is, the mentally ill, although this provision was delayed from coming into effect until the year after next.  In the meantime government agencies that process requests for financial aid from, most notably, military veterans, have recommended MAID as an alternative.

 

So no, Canada did not emerge from the Airhead era unscathed, and wounds on other fronts than the social/moral could be provided to further illustrate this.  My point, however, is that Captain Airhead did not do all the damage it looked like he was about to do at the beginning of his premiership.  This was not for lack of intent or trying on his part.  It is partly due to the fact that he and his entire circle of associates were grossly incompetent, an affliction not shared by previous revolutionaries such as his own father or William Lyon Mackenzie King.  It is partly due to the fact that the Canada which the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us with her ancient Imperial/Commonwealth heritage of parliamentary monarchy and Common Law rights and freedoms, while weakened by these Liberal “revolutions within the form” was still resilient enough to prevent Captain Airhead from doing his worst.  It is partly due to the fact that most Canadians have simply not succumbed to the brain rot that in its most recent form has been dubbed “wokeness” to the extent that Captain Airhead and the progressive commentariat all assumed they had.

 

The first of these three factors needs nothing in the way of further commentary.   

 

The second factor may be disputed by neoconservatives (people who call themselves conservatives even though they wish to replace our constitution, traditions, and heritage with those of the United States or something more closely resembling them) who over the last several years have chosen to express their frustration with the Airhead Liberals by taking it out on the country with the claim that “Canada is broken” but these are wrong.  The Fathers of Confederation built a far more resilient country than could be ultimately broken by the likes of Captain Airhead.  I attribute the neoconservative error in about equal parts to their misguided preference for the American system and to the sort of infantile thinking that sees every court ruling, election, or other such public occurrence that does not go one’s way as showing the entire system to be damaged beyond repair, which sort of thinking is by no means limited to neoconservatives.

 

Of all Captain Airhead’s bad acts, the worst was when he invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022 to crush the Freedom Convoy Protest.  Unlike the types of protests he routinely supported, the Freedom Convey did not involve the destruction or defacement of property, public or private, violence, or riotous behaviour in general but was a true peaceful demonstration.  The trucker-protestors converged on Ottawa, parked in the neighbourhood around the government buildings, and basically threw a long, loud, party in the streets.  The protest was entirely justified.  It was in response to the Liberal government’s having introduced new restrictions by removing the exemption to vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers at the time when restrictions were generally being rolled back, showing the government’s determination to milk the absurd bat flu paranoia for as long as they could at the expense of the rights, freedoms, and livelihoods of Canadians.  There was no call for bringing out the biggest weapon the government had at its disposal against the protestors, the brutality with which the government broke up the protest was the sort of thing one would expect from the Chinese or North Korean regimes, and the ongoing legal persecution of the protest organizers is disgusting, to say the least.  Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse, and all the evidence indicates that Airhead and his cronies intended to go much further.  They were forced to rescind the Emergencies Act, however, because the Senate was about to vote against confirming their having invoked it, which would have made their position much more difficult going into the mandatory inquiry that followed.  As for the inquiry itself, while Justice Rouleau’s finding that the government had met the threshold required for invoking the Act was absurd, Captain Airhead failed in his efforts to turn the inquiry into a trial of the protesters’ actions rather than his own, and when the Federal Court ruled on the same question a year later, they found against the government.

 

That is what the system working looks like.  It could have and should have worked better.  Ultimately, however, it worked.

 

That Canadians do not share Captain Airhead’s “woke” views to the extent he always assumed is a large part of the reason why he is no longer prime minister and why the Liberal Party under Blofeld has taken several steps back from aggressive promotion of the “woke” agenda..  Whether this will be permanent or is only temporary while the forces of progressive insanity regroup remains to be seen, but for now at least, the Liberal government is focusing on matters that appeal to a wider base among Canadians than the far left fringe.  That something like this would happen sooner or later was inevitable because an ideological agenda based on maximizing every type of diversity except diversity of thought is unsustainable.  Towards the end of the Airhead premiership, the left’s efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of sex and gender were undermined by its simultaneous efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of culture and race.  That this would happen was entirely predictable because the only way to maximize diversity of culture and race in a Western society is by increasing the number of people whose culture has not been so transformed by Modern liberalism as to make it supportive of maximizing sex/gender diversity.  Eventually the foreseeable clash occurred and a sizeable portion of Canadians realized that Captain Airhead was pushing diversity too far in both of these areas.

 

For the immediately foreseeable future, it is likely that immigration levels will remain higher than they ought to be but will cease to resemble overt efforts to make Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints into a reality.  Promotion of the alphabet soup agenda will probably continue but it will be much lower key than under Captain Airhead.  That this is the case is evident in the fact that the abuse of the sign of God’s covenant with Noah was a lot less conspicuous last month than in the “month formerly known as June” in previous years.  The same will be more or less true in other areas where Captain Airhead pushed his agenda far beyond what the general public was willing to support him in.

 

In conclusion, while Canada should be in a much better condition than she actually is, she is far better off after a decade of Captain Airhead than could possibly have been anticipated. 

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

A Red(neck) Tory

 The Kalends of January  is upon us once again.  Kalends, from which our word calendar is derived, was the day of the new moon and hence the first day of the month, for the ancient Romans like the ancient Hebrews followed a calendar in which the months lined up with the lunar cycles they represent.  We have gotten off that so the first of the calendar month no longer always lines up with the beginning of the lunar cycle.  The Kalends of January is a significant day in the Church Kalendar because as Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century, our Saviour was born eight days before.  Yes, the 25th of December was the acknowledged birthday of our Lord from far earlier in Church history than Modern gainsayers would have you believe and can in fact be deduced from St. Luke's Gospel.  The eighth day after the birth of an ancient Israelite male was, in accordance with the Abrahamic Covenant, the day he was circumcised and so the Kalends of January has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.  Far more recently it became New Year's Day on the civil calendar.

This is the day each year when, in accordance with a custom I picked up from Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, I write about myself and where I stand.  I very much miss Reese's column, and for those who are unfamiliar with him, archives of his last few years can be found on Lew Rockwell's website.  If you are interested in his earlier columns and can get your hands on copies at least two collections were published as books, Great Gods of the Potomac and Common Sense for the Eighties.

Lets start with the basics.  I am a Canadian.  I was born a Canadian and I will die a Canadian.  Donald the Orange can take his obnoxious rhetoric about the "51st state" and insert it into a place that is proverbially bereft of sunshine.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada all my life.  I am a loyal subject of King Charles III as I was a loyal subject of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory before him.  I grew up in rural southwestern Manitoba, on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, did my first five years of higher education at what is now Providence University College in Otterbourne, about a half hour south of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, to which I then moved where I have lived and worked for a quarter of a century since.  

I often use T. S. Eliot's famous description of himself as a "royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature" to summarize my own political-religious convictions and what I mean when I call myself a Tory. Tory is usually used to indicate a Conservative Party supporter.  I don't apply it to myself in this partisan sense and seldom use the word conservative even in the small-c sense anymore as that term has been co-opted for people whose political ideals of democracy and capitalism come from nineteenth century liberalism, although twisted beyond what an actual nineteenth century liberal would recognize as his own, and whose main political thought seems to be that the United States should be imposing democracy and capitalism in their evolving meanings on the world with bullets and bombs and boots on the grounds.  When I say I am a Tory, I don't mean anything like that, but rather that my convictions are those of Eliot's triad.

Before saying a bit more about these things, I should explain the adjective in the title.  In Canada, traditional Tories like the economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, the philosopher George Grant, and the historian Donald Creighton,  basically the people who Charles Taylor wrote about in Radical Tories, have sometimes been called "Red" due to their criticisms of capitalism having been perceived as indicating a sympathy with socialism.  This perception is based on a false dichotomy, that capitalism and socialism are each the only option to the other.  In Grant's case he sometimes said things that suggested he accepted this dichotomy. I don't.  Nor do I have any sympathy for socialism which I utterly detest.  I have said before and will say again, that socialism is essentially the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, practiced under the pretense of the greatest of the Theological Virtues, Charity or Christian Love.  I put  "Red" in the title of this essay to indicate that it is Leacock, Grant, Creighton, Eugene Forsey et al., who represent the tradition of Toryism that I claim as my own rather than the neoconservatives who think that this tradition  should be replaced by what is called "conservatism" in the United States (see previous paragraph).  The "neck" is added to indicate that I don't have any sympathy with socialism  nor with anything else that could be called progressive and leftist, but rather hold the anti-progressive attitude often associated with the word "redneck."  Think of the lyrics to Charlie Daniel's "Simple Man" for a picture of what that means.

As a Tory I am no republican big or little r but a "royalist in politics" as Eliot put it.  The entire universe is the kingdom of its Creator, God, the King of Kings.  The most basic unit of social organization, the family, traditionally reflects the order of the universe.  The husband-father is king, wife-mother is queen, and the children are subjects.  That is the way the family works best, despite all attempts by "experts" in the social pseudosciences, the progressive brainwashers who have taken over the schools, and the seditious anti-family revolutionaries who dominate the entertainment media to depict this model as dysfunctional and fascist and to try and sell us on alternative models.  The state traditionally reflected the order of the universe as well, and like the family, it functions best when it continues to do so, under the reign of a king.  The totalitarian movements of the last century hated kings.  Every Communist country was a republic and so was Nazi Germany.  By contrast, "Freedom", as the title of a Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing that I would like to see back in print and in the hands of all my countrymen says "Wears a Crown".  I respect Parliament, precisely because it is an ancient institution that is a traditional part of a king's government and not because it conforms to the Modern ideal or idol of democracy.

Turning to  "Anglo-Catholic in religion," the first thing I should say is that while Anglo-Catholicism does accurately denote what my theology has matured into, it does not mean that I think that the English Reformation was a mistake that should be forgotten or undone.  I think that the things which the Anglican Church shares with not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Eastern Orthodox and all the ancient Churches, especially the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, but also the episcopal polity, the priestly ministry, and Sacramental worship are more important than the things that identify us with the Lutherans, Reformed, and other Protestants.   This does not mean that I think the latter to be unimportant, quite the contrary.  When it comes to the two most important things the Reformers fought for, the supremacy of the Scriptures and the freeness of the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel, I am firmly a Protestant.  I have come to see, however, the importance of qualifying these with Catholic truths.  We must indeed hold the Scriptures supreme as the infallible written Word of God (with the Authorized Bible as published in 1611 with the deuterocanon included between the Testaments as the definitive English Bible) but as Hans Boersma and Ron Dart have frequently reminded us the way to listen to them is at the feet of the Church Fathers.  The Gospel does indeed proclaim a salvation that is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who receive it by faith, but the Gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, His death for us and His Resurrection, confessed in faith in each of the ancient Creeds and not the doctrine of justification which, important as it is, is a doctrine about the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself, and while faith is the appointed means whereby we receive the saving grace of God, the ordinary means by which that saving grace is brought to us that we may so receive it is the Church's two-fold Gospel ministry of proclaimed Word and administered Sacrament.  I can very much do without most other things associated with Protestantism, especially the iconoclasm and the inclination to write off the Church prior to the Reformation.

I was raised culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I was made acquainted with the stories of the Bible if not their theological significance.  My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my father's family had been affiliated with the Anglican Church in Bradwardine which closed around the time I was born.  My paternal grandmother, received the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon and I would read these whenever I visited her in Rivers.  It was through reading  Christian books from the library that I became aware of the significance of the events celebrated at Christmas and Easter.  In Bethlehem, the Son of God, Who with His Father and the Holy Ghost was and is and ever shall be, God, was born as a baby boy, having become man by uniting a true human nature to His eternal Person.  He did so, that He might save mankind from the bondage to the devil, sin, and death into which we had fallen in the infancy of our race by dying on the Cross for us, the innocent Lamb of God Who "taketh away the sin of the world" and rising again from the grave triumphant over His enemies and ours.  The summer before I entered high school I became a Christian in the sense of a believer who trusts and confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

At the time I had a rather low view of the Church as an institution.  Liberalism, in the religious sense of minimizing, explaining away, or outright rejecting such basic Christian truths as the deity and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to accommodate Modern notions, had made heavy inroads into the Anglican Church and all but completely taken over the United  which at some point around that time had elected an openly atheist moderator.  I had nothing but contempt for religious liberalism before becoming a believer and  had even less respect for it after.   For the first fifteen years of my walk as an active believer I attended non-conformist, mostly Baptist, evangelical and fundamentalist services, and thought that such things as church government were adiophora and the only thing about the organized  Church that mattered was the faithfulness of the sermon to the truths of the Christian faith.

When I joined and was confirmed in the Anglican Church, this was not because I had come to tolerate religious liberalism.  I remain firmly of the conviction that liberalism is not a defective form of Christianity but an entirely different religion altogether as J. Greshem Machen demonstrated in his Christianity and Liberalism a century ago.  Nor was it because the Anglican Church had expunged liberalism which sadly she has not, but because I had come to see that my earlier attitude towards  the institution of the Church was neither Scriptural nor supported by history.

Church government, I had come to see, is not adiophora.  The episcopal polity is not only the polity of the Roman Catholic Church, but of all ancient Churches that predate the Reformation, and furthermore, is clearly present in the Scriptures as the polity established by the Apostles themselves, the first bishops in the sense later attached to the word.  Nor was the soundness of the sermon the only thing that mattered.  Until the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist had been the central focal point of the service, at least as important as the sermon, and this was true not just of Rome but of all the ancient Churches.  

As for the soundness of what was preached and taught, I had come to appreciate that the best and fullest summary of the truths essential to the Christian faith was not the minimalist list of "five fundamentals" drawn up in controversy with liberals in the early twentieth century, or the Protestant confessions which are too narrow doctrinal statements to be considered the basic faith, but the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene confessed by all the ancient Churches.  When I joined the  Anglican Church I joined a parish where I knew the teaching and preaching to be sound, but  I joined the Anglican Church because she had come out of the Reformation with her episcopal polity and its Apostolic Succession intact, confessed the ancient and Catholic Creeds as her basic faith, and had recovered the centrality of the Eucharist.  This is how I would say that I am "Anglo-Catholic in religion", although such things as the Coverdale Psalter sung to Anglican plainchant, crucifer led processionals and recessionals, clergy and choir in vestments, and candles and bells and incense all strike me as more appropriate to coming before a holy God than "praise and worship" songs in which the most used words are "me" "myself" and "I", which sentiment is what is more commonly associated with Anglo-Catholicism today. 

I would probably replace "literature" with "culture" in Eliot's "classicist in literature."    Classicism is the position that man's creativity as expressed in arts, literature and culture was given him to serve a higher good, that rules govern the exercise of that creativity and the achievement of the good of culture depends on those rules,  and the output is therefore susceptible to objective and not merely subjective evaluation. Classicism, of course, requires that there be such things as classics in works of art. literature and music.  That which is "classic" is regarded by those with Modern, progressive, forward-looking ideas as "old", but this is because in the shallow following of fad-and-fashion that passes for thinking amongst them they cannot distinguish between what is old and what is timeless.  Timelessness is the distinguishing quality of a classic and that is true in music, the visual arts, architecture and the stage as well as literature proper.  Of course it is the passing of time that in most cases reveals a work to have this quality and most often when a new work is instantly proclaimed a classic it is simply a publicity gimmick into which little to no thought has been placed into the meaning of the word.  Still, it is not impossible to recognize a work that will prove to be enduring when it is new.  If care, skill, and knowledge of the craft or art have gone into the making of it these are good indicators.  Better indicators are that the message in the book, song, painting or what have you is addressed to more than just those of the present moment, although it may make reference to the present moment as a medium for conveying the message.  War, for example, is an enduring theme because its danger is ever present even in times of peace.  A work may speak only to a specific war, in which case it will become dated and bound to its own period.  It can, however, by addressing the reality of an immediate conflict speak beyond it to the enduring theme.  The poem "In Flanders' Field" was written in World War I and this is the war of which it immediately speaks but the truths it speaks are enduring and when the poem is recited every Remembrance Day we understand the words to apply to the fallen of all past conflicts.  The best indicator is when the work says something important about the transcendentals, the qualities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth that the thoughtful and reflective have held important in societies and civilizations in all places and all times because they are the ends of created being, and about God in Whom these must ultimately be sought if man is to fulfil the end for which he is created.  Note that the views expressed in this paragraph are not a judgement of popular culture from the standpoint of highbrow culture.  Picasso's paintings and Schoenberg's music are highbrow but utterly devoid of aesthetic value, whereas popular culture, which is not to be  confused with "pop" culture the distinguishing characteristic of which is that it is factory produced for mass consumption, contains much that is good and has produced many classics.   The truths asserted in this paragraph apply to popular culture as well as to highbrow culture.  

These are the essence of my Toryism.  In the case of royalism I have been a royalist all my life, at first instinctually, later in a more informed manner.  I arrived at Anglo-catholicism through a long spiritual journey that started with an evangelical acceptance of Jesus Christ combined with a fundamentalist rejection of liberalism in religion, and while it may not seem obvious to others to me it is evident that the destination was set from the beginning for the acceptance of Christ implies acceptance of His Church and to fully reject religious liberalism one must reject its seeds in all reforms of the sixteenth century except those that were absolutely necessary.  As for classicism, I can say that I have instinctually loathed the opposite of it all my life, having despised non-metrical verse, avant garde art, atonal music and the like from the moment I first encountered it, although active pursuit of the higher and elevating in culture came later, after much resistance of those who encouraged  me in that direction, and in part out of sheer cussedness such as when having encountered Mark Twain's remark that "everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them" I responded with "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read them.

Clearly my Toryism is not what calls  itself "conservatism" these days.  I am closest to today's conservatives when it comes to what they are against.  I oppose abortion and what is now called "Medical Assistance in Dying" because they are murder (as opposed to killing in self-defence, in defence of others and property, capital punishment, and for one's country in war, which are not).  That, however, may be something I have more in common with the conservatives of yesterday than those of today. I detest the courts turning violent offenders out onto the streets almost the moment they are arrested and making the public provide a supposedly safe supply of hard narcotics to drug addicts in the idea that this will reduce the harm they inflict upon themselves.  Ending "catch and release" is not enough, however, over a century's worth of progressive reforms to the idea of criminal justice needs to be undone and we need to get back to thinking of criminal justice in terms of making the offender pay his debt to society rather than helping the offender recover from the illness of crime.  As for drug policy, we need to fish or cut bait as the polite version of the saying goes.  Either go back to trusting people to make their own self-medication choices or eliminate the supply of illegal narcotics in a real, rather than half-ass, war on drugs.  Either approach would be a vast improvement to the public not-for-profit drug dealing that is the harms reduction model.

 I oppose illegal immigration, but unlike most conservatives go further and say that legal immigration is in need of serious reform as well, and the problems are not merely those of the last ten or twenty years or so, but go back to the sixties.   I think that the late French Catholic, monarchist Jean Raspail hit the nail on the head in his novel The Camp of the Saints which depicted post-World War II liberalism as leading the civilization formerly known as Christendom to an existential crisis in its enthusiastic preference of "the other" at the expense of its own as reflected in its enthusiastic embrace of immigrants and refugees in numbers too large to be absorbed without endangering the continuity of the civilization.  The point is not that racial or cultural "otherness" is an insurmountable roadblock to someone's becoming a true member of the community, society, country, and civilization they move to, that it is not is also illustrated in Raspail's book.  As Enoch Powell put it "it is a matter of numbers."

I detest radical feminism, the racial hatred of white people that goes under the name of "anti-racism", the Year Zero attempts to erase the past that go under the names of "anti-imperialism" and "anti-colonialism," the movement that in the name of "rights" is now demanding in the most totalitarian way possible that everybody not merely tolerate, not merely accept, but practically worship everyone who is other than cisgender and heterosexual and which insists that everyone pretend that someone who thinks he is a gender other than his biological sex, whether an actual gender or a make believe one, is what he says he is, and basically everything that the word "wokeness" has come to denote.  Where I would differ from conservatives is that their opposition to wokeness does not go much further or deeper than criticizing it for deviating from 1950's and 1960's, American liberalism.  My rejection of the vile race hatred of Ibraham X. Kendi does not mean that I am about to start pretending that Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint rather than a charlatan.   I  cannot stand the kind of idiot who in the name of feminism tells a neighbouring country that they should have voted otherwise in their last election because they owed it to the other candidate because she is a woman.  This is not because I think feminism to be a good thing of which he is a false representative.  Each successive wave of "feminism" has gotten crazier and crazier, because its real enemy from the first wave onward has not been the conspiracy of all men to oppress all women that has only ever existed in the fevered brains of those attached to this delusional movement but the reality of human nature that some people are men, others are women, that men and women are different, that these differences are not trivial but fundamental, "vive la différence" as the French say, and that trying to prevent this difference from expressing itself in social organization will inevitably increase rather than decrease the misery and unhappiness of both sexes.  "The personal is the political" was the motto of its second wave, a chilling statement that to these harridans there is no aspect of life that should escape the power of the state to remold it to their wishes.  For the best takes on feminism I refer you to Stephen Leacock's "The Woman Question" and to Dr. Johnson's observation  that "nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given her very little."

I am much further from "conservatives" when it comes to the things they are for.  I explained above the things that I as a Tory am for and these things, royal monarchy, Christ's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in its reformed Anglican expression, and classicism are all deep-rooted and ancient.  The things that "conservatives" say they are for are all Modern with roots no deeper than liberalism.  They are constantly changing because liberalism is constantly changing and to be a "conservative" today means little more than to be a defender of yesterday's liberalism against the changes proposed by today's. 

The most consistent things today's "conservatives" are for are capitalism and technological progress. With regards to technological progress while there have been undeniable benefits to developing newer and fancier tools that can do increasingly more things for us there are obvious detriments as well.  That we have given ourselves the ability to destroy ourselves and our world stands out.  Having technology do for us what we should be doing for ourselves is another downside that is becoming an increasing problem as technology advances into the AI stage.  Thinking is not something we should be outsourcing to machines.  The earlier stage in which computers took over the task of doing all calculations in economic transactions had the result that when the computers were down many of the people manning the tills in stores were unable to do the simple math required to make change.  A repeat  of that with other cognitive functions is most undesirable.   I regard the idea that we will eventually solve all our problems by technological advancement with the utmost skepticism.  The Scriptures say that idolaters, those who worship the works of their hands come to resemble their false gods (Psalm 135:18).  Faith in technological progress is a form of idolatry and it inevitably makes men and their societies resemble machines.  

Technological progress is an inseparable part of capitalism.  Capitalism is often confused with economic freedom but the two are not the same.  Economic freedom is a simple concept and a basic good that is far to be preferred to the universal slavery that is socialism, whereas capitalism is a complex system that developed by removing traditional restrictions on usury, applying technological progress to the production of industrial goods, and expanding international trade.  I talked about the downside to technological progress in the previous paragraph.  That large-scale international trade has its disadvantages as well as its advantages (comparative and absolute, in economic jargon) is obvious and until the 1980s, the element of liberal economic theory that conservatives rejected was that such trade should be unrestricted.  American conservatives have of late abandoned the free trade fetish they picked up in that decade.  Canadian conservatives would be wise to follow suit as the disadvantage of being too dependent upon trade with one's neighbour has become glaringly obvious.  Nevermind that the threat of crippling tariffs is attached to demands that we fix problems that we ought to be fixing any way, we should not be so dependent upon trade with the United States that its incoming leader can bully us around like that.  Add David Orchard's The Fight for Canada to the mandatory reading list.  As for usury, it undergirds and runs through the entire capitalist system, which is why that system is incompatible with a sound currency.  Sound money, is money that retains its purchasing power so that people can use it to save for the future, a quality that requires that the currency represents actual wealth, that is, real goods already produced.  Usury, however, turns a country's monetary system into a Ponzi scheme where the currency is backed by debt, wealth that has not yet been produced.  Since usury, like technological progress and international trade, is an essential element of capitalism, capitalism cannot escape this outcome.

Capitalism has been accused of evils of which it is not guilty, such as lowering the standard of living of workers (it raised it) and impoverishing the third world (the incompetent kleptocratic governments brought in by the decolonization and anti-imperialism that leftists love so much did that) but there are plenty of evils of which it can be justly accused. These include the uprooting of families, the decimation of rural communities, the disappearance of the family farm, urbanization and the accompanying evils of increased crime and erosion of trust and social capital that go along with it, the uglification of the countryside which is the real evil that those who claim to care for the earth and the environment ought to be fighting rather than the bogeyman of climate change, the reorganization of society so as to operate like an extended business rather than an extended family, a culture of throwing away and replacing rather than preserving and passing on, and dozens of others of a similar nature to these.  That socialism is an utterly unacceptable evil and economic freedom a good I have always held and always will maintain but this will not stop me from decrying these evils of which capitalism has been the engine and which conservatives, if they stopped for a second to think about what their chosen label implies, ought to realize that they should oppose too. 

The matter that probably best illustrates how I am closest to conservatives in what they oppose and furthest from them in what they are for is education.  Conservatives are opposed to the way schools from the earliest grades to universities have become indoctrination camps for pushing hatred of white people, hatred of Christianity, and hatred of Western countries and their history onto children and for exposing them to sexuality, and especially its more perverse forms, way too early.  I oppose this too.  Most conservatives promote STEM-centred education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  That these fields are immune to being turned into vessels for wokeness has of late been proven false, but were that not the case I would dissent from the idea of STEM-centric education because it is based on the idea that the purpose of education is to train children to be more successful cogs in the capitalist machine.  The purpose of education is to civilize children, for we are all essentially born savages and barbarians, so that they might be fit to be free subjects of the king and citizens of the state and for this there is no better education than the kind that starts with the basic trivium (grammar - Latin, Greek and first language, logic, and rhetoric), and builds on these with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  See Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning."  Along with these, the seven classical liberal arts, history should be taught in a way that neither demonizes the builders of civilization and its institutions like "Woke" history, nor interprets the past as one long march towards liberal democracy in the present day like what Herbert Butterfield dubbed "the Whig Interpretation of History" but as John Lukacks' "remembered past" that contains the good and the bad, in which the builders of civilization are presented as they were, a mixture of both, and leaves us free to honour them for their accomplishments and the legacy they have bequeathed us and simply because it is the debt we owe to those who have gone before us, without conscripting them posthumously into the service of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history."  It is best if this is taught in a religious context, preferably with the Church in charge of education rather than the government.

Happy New Year

God Save the King!

The Existential Crisis of the West - Redux

The prescient have seen it coming for a century now. In 1918 and 1922, the two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West were first published. In his magnus opus Spengler examined the civilizations or cultures – he used the latter term but the way the two terms were used and distinguished in the German thought of his day was very different from how they are used and distinguished in English today – of human history, and identified a super-organic life cycle that they each passed through, of which, he maintained, the modern West with its “Faustian” spirit of empirical exploration – the spirit exemplified by the Ulysses of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s eponymously titled poem – was entering into its final season.

In 1964, James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West: An Essay On the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism was published for the first time. This book is probably best understood as the third in a trilogy, the first of which was The Managerial Revolution, written immediately after Burnham’s break with his Trotskyite youth and the Socialist Workers Party and published in 1941, arguing that the capitalist world was evolving into something that would not be the socialist worker’s paradise predicted by Marxism, but rather the rule of a new class of technocratic corporate managers and government bureaucrats. The second was The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, published two years later, in which Burnham gave an overview of a Realpolitik theory regarding the inevitability of elites and the nature of political power that he traced from the writings of Florentine Renaissance political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli through the nineteenth to early twentieth century writings of Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, the philosophical framework that he had turned to after abandoning Marxism. By the time he wrote The Suicide of the West, Burnham had become one of the original members of William F. Buckley Jr.’s editorial team at National Review and the magazine’s principal analyst of geopolitical events. In The Suicide of The West he discussed liberalism as being the ideology of Western suicide. A familiarity with the first two books is helpful in understanding what he meant by this, for he did not mean that liberalism was formulated to bring about the end of Western Civilization, but rather that it was an ex post facto rationalization on the part of the governing elites for Western Civilization’s self-imposed collapse. Although this was written at the height of the Cold War – the Cuban Missile Crisis had taken place two years prior to the book’s release – the “suicide” Burnham was talking about was not merely what he perceived to be a losing strategy against the Soviet Union in the “Struggle for the World” (1) but also included internal moral, cultural, and social decay, into which category he put the immediate historical antecedents in his own day of the “woke” race revolutionaries of our own.

In 2002, Patrick J. Buchanan, syndicated columnist, speechwriter and advisor to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and Reform Party nominee for the 2000 American Presidential Election, released his The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigration Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. The subtitle pretty much sums up the thesis. As Christendom through secularization became Western Civilization, it lost not just its faith in God but its faith in itself. Since this process was more or less complete by the end of World War II, the period since has seen a radical and sustained fall in fertility throughout the Western world. To prevent the economic disaster that this threat to Western population size poses, and for other reasons, the governments of the liberal West have been admitting unprecedented numbers of immigrants from outside the West, and specifically the Third World. This combination, which adds up to a massive and rapid demographic transformation, spells disaster for the survival of Western Civilization in any recognizable form, and in the meantime, a far left ideology that is hostile to Western survival – Cultural Marxism – has captured the major cultural institutions of the West, from the schools to the media, and has been promoting an agenda of pushing the West’s loss of faith in God and its own civilization and its embrace of the suicidal combination of domestic anti-natalism, mass immigration, and radical multiculturalism ever further and further.

As their Cassandra like predictions of doom progressed from decline to suicide to death, Spengler, Burnham, and Buchanan each provided valuable insights into the phenomenon that four years ago I described as “The Existential Crisis of the West.” Today, I rather regret having used up that title so early. At the time we were seeing Europe inundated with migrants, whom the media represented as being asylum seekers from the Syrian Civil War despite abundant evidence that the majority came from outside the region affected by the conflict, and many of whom clearly displayed hostile intent towards the countries they were entering, as the plot of the late Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints materialized before our very eyes. Today, the news and entertainment media, academic institutions, big tech companies and other corporations, and bureaucrats and politicians of every stripe have united in insisting that no dissent be allowed to the Marxist Critical Theorists’ indictment of our civilization as being built upon racism and so thoroughly permeated by it that all white people are collectively guilty of it even if they have never had a conscious racist thought. This has been accompanied by a large scale campaign of intimidation on the part of far left activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The chaos has evolved from the familiar pattern of previous race riots – inner city arson, vandalism, looting, and violence – to the Maoist assault on figures of the past – to the current wave of vandalism and arson targeting Churches.

A question I have frequently encountered from those who are fed up with this sort of thing is “what do we do about it?”

The answer which people who ask this question are inevitably looking for is a practical answer, that is to say, one that would resemble a “How to” manual. How to stop Cultural Marxism in ten easy steps, or something along those lines.

I do not have such an answer, and, frankly, I have my doubts as to whether one even exists. The left devoted a century to capturing our cultural institutions and turning them into vehicles for disseminating its hatred of our civilization before making this aggressively totalitarian move and that preparation unquestionably is a major factor in their effectiveness today. We do not have that sort of time to prepare a counter-attack which is required immediately.

This much, however, I will say, and that is that unless we recognize this crisis as the threat to the very existence of our civilization that it is are prepared to deal with it as such, we have already lost. This means no more apologies for our history. No more apologies for being white. No more apologies for believing the Christian faith and practicing the Christian religion. No more wasting our time trying to persuade those who are determined to “cancel” anyone and everyone whom they condemn with one of their ever-growing list of –ists and –phobes that they are in violation of the canons of liberal thought because they don’t care.

When we are all in agreement on that, then maybe we can find a practical strategy for finally defeating this Marxism and saving what is left of our civilization.

(1) This is the title of another of Burnham’s books, the first of a trilogy that addressed the Cold War. It came out in 1947.

May They Rest in Peace

The last couple of years have seen the passing of several individuals whose thought has been influential on my own. In May of last year, the Hungarian born historian, John Lukacs passed away from congestive heart failure. I have had cause over the last month to recall Lukacs’ definition of history as “the remembered past” more than once. The past itself, of course, is beyond the reach of the mad iconoclasts, but history, through which we learn from the past, is under siege. It was from Lukacs, especially his first volume of memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), rather than from Mencius Moldbug, that I learned to embrace the label “reactionary.” He was an Anglophile and a Roman Catholic, who had fled to the United States after his native country was taken over first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, preferring America’s liberal republicanism over either of the rival twentieth century totalitarianisms, but whose sympathies in many ways lay with the pre-modern, pre-liberal, order of civilization. He warned against the dangers of populism and nationalism, but was also the author of a pamphlet that argued strongly against the kind of immigration that populists and nationalists generally oppose. He was also wise enough to see that the Modern Age was over, without turning that into a weird pretext for separating language from reality.

The following month came the news that Justin Raimondo had passed away from lung cancer. Raimondo was a very interesting character. He was raised in the state of New York and lived most of his adult life in California, two rather left-leaning states. He was the founder and editor of Antiwar.com, a website opposed to American military interventionism and adventurism. Raised Roman Catholic, he lost his faith, and was openly homosexual. While that may sound like the resume of an ultra-progressive, he supported arch-conservative Pat Buchanan all three times Buchanan ran for the presidency of the United States, to the point of actually working for the campaign. The last time Buchanan ran it was as the Reform candidate in 2000. Raimondo had addressed that party’s national convention urging them to nominate Buchanan, obviously successfully. More recently, and right up until his death, Raimondo had been a strong supporter of Donald J. Trump. His politics were, in fact, right-libertarian, and more specifically the kind of right-libertarian that is called “paleo-libertarian.” Think Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Hans-Herman Hoppe. Indeed, Raimondo was the author of the biography, An Enemy of the State (2000) of the father of paleo-libertarianism, Murry N. Rothbard. He was also the author of a history of the American “Old Right”, i.e., the American Right of the 1930s and 1940s that preceded William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, and the American Conservative movement. This Right began as opposition to the expansion of the American government in the Depression under FDR, and also on non-interventionist grounds opposed American entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbour. Raimondo’s history was entitled Reclaiming the American Right: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993). Buchanan wrote the foreword. I have read both of these books, as well as his The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (2003), although it was the monthly column he wrote for Chronicles in the last few years of his life that I appreciated the most out of all his writings.

Earlier this year, in a single week we lost both Sir Roger Scruton and Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien, who was the youngest member of the 1930s-40s Oxford literary club, the Inklings, will be remembered not as a primary author, but as the editor who took the supplementary writings to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, had left behind, edited them for publication.

Sir Roger Scruton, on the other hand, has left behind a vast corpus of writing on pretty much every subject imaginable. While primarily a philosopher who specialized in aesthetics – the branch of philosophy that deals with art and beauty – he was a true polymath. I have written reviews of two of his books – The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and How to Think Seriously About The Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012). The first was written at the beginning of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and the presidency of Ronald Reagan to show that true conservatism was not an ideological argument for freedom and capitalism, per se, but a reflexive defence of the good things which make up a civilized order, which are “easily destroyed, but not easily created.” The second examined the conservative roots of environmentalism to make the case for the responsible preservation of the beauty of our surroundings and our natural resources while avoiding the pitfalls of extremism that the environmentalism movement is noted for falling into. Many other of his books, including but not limited to his memoir Gentle Regrets, his short introduction to Beauty, his books on the aesthetics of music, his history of the Anglican Church, his takedown of the thought of the leading intellectuals of the Postmodern and Critical Theory influenced New Left, and his defence of Western Civilization against those who would attack it from without and within, The West and the Rest, have been of tremendous benefit to me. Countless of his insights, such as into the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence”, as well as his countering the left-wing charge of “xenophobia” with that of “oikophobia”, a term borrowed from the Lake Poet Robert Southey, are particularly relevant to this moment in time. So, for that matter is his personal experience. As related in Gentle Regrets and elsewhere in his writings, it was when he witnessed student radicals in the late 1960s behaving basically the way BLM and Antifa are acting today, with nothing but Marxist gibberish to back up their actions, that he realized his fundamental opposition to this sort of thing and became a conservative. Let us hope that many today will experience something similar, in reaction against the revolting, in both senses of the word, “woke.”

Alan Clark used to refer to Enoch Powell, the Tory statesman who delivered a famous speech warning against immigration and the consequences of the Race Relations Bill to Birmingham in 1968, as “the prophet.” The same appellation could be applied to French author and explorer Jean Raspail, who died earlier this month at the age of 94. He travelled the world in his early life, exploring, and doing what could have been preparatory field work for a career as an anthropologist. His earliest writings were travel memoirs, later he turned to writing novels, incorporating his experiences of the world while globetrotting into his fiction. It was these which won him critical acclaim. His religious and political views – he was a traditionalist Roman Catholic, a royalist who longed for the restoration of a legitimate, Catholic, French monarchy, and someone who deplored most if not all modern ideas, trends, and movements – also found their way into his books. The most well-known of his novels, however, which appeared in French in 1973 and in English translation by Norman Shapiro in 1975, was The Camp of the Saints.

The title alone, borrowed from the twentieth chapter of St. John’s Apocalypse, suggests the prophetic nature of the novel. The story opens on Easter morning on the French Riviera, where a retired academic from his home near the ocean, watches as masses of liberal lunatics gather on the beach to welcome the arrival of a vast mass of the poorest of Calcutta’s poor, arriving on ninety-nine ships. The novel then goes back a few months in time to explain how they got to that point. The Belgian government had closed down a charitable adoption program when it was swamped with too many applications, after which, a prophet of sorts, “the turd eater”, having been turned away from the Belgian consulate, addresses the multitude with a parable that curiously borrows the lines from Revelation from which the title of the novel is derived, although twisting their meaning to the effect that the thousand years allotted to the God of the Christians was at an end, and now He must surrender His kingdom to Allah, Buddah, and an assortment of Hindu deities. At his encouragement they board the hundred ships – one is lost along the way – and set sail for France. This provokes much discussion in France over what is to be done – but due to the extreme liberal cultural climate, everyone - the politicians, news media and celebrities, clerics, very interestingly headed by a Latin American pope – all give the answer that the migrants must be accepted and welcomed. The armada is dubbed the “Last Chance Armada” as in the “last chance for mankind” and this, along with “We are all from the Ganges now” and other such tripe are the only acceptable way of speaking about the situation. A handful of individuals are brave enough to dissent – we are slowly introduced to them throughout the novel – and these all gather at the aforementioned academic’s house to make one last stand for Western Civilization. When the French president, who knows full well what must be done and had been counting on the only remaining right-wing publisher in France to make the point for him, sends the military to the beach, he cannot find the courage to order them to fire, and leaves it up to their consciences, at which point they defect. France is swamped and shortly thereafter coloured immigrant communities rise up in major cities throughout what was once Western civilization, while Western borders fall as the Chinese swarm into Russia, the Palestinians overwhelm Israel, etc. The narrator, indicates that the bastion from which he is writing, Switzerland is about to fall, bringing white, Christian, Western Civilization to an end forever.

It is almost twenty years since I read this novel for the first time. I have read it many times since and, to compound the thought crime indictment against me, have given copies of it out to others. Over the course of the last decade, it has come more and more to resemble a prophetic description of our own times. Its author lived to see this happen. Let us hope and pray that the story does not end the way he wrote it.

Apocalypses 2020

Years from now, provided there is anyone left to write the history, the year 2020 AD might very well be dubbed “The Year of the Apocalypses.” That is not a typo, the plural is deliberate.

A mere three months ago, in a period that already seems to have been wiped from living memory by the death of George Floyd, we were told by the mainstream mass media that we were living out the reality of Stephen King’s The Stand. A superflu was spreading around the globe like wildfire, threatening all life in its path. We would either die a horrible death from an asphyxiating pneumonia that causes excruciating pain, or, more likely, would experience ordinary flu symptoms, or, just as likely, no symptoms whatsoever. In the name of saving us all from this fate, our governments suspended our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion, told most people other than those involved in the production and distribution of food and medicine that their jobs and businesses were “non-essential”, and ordered everybody to stay home and to stay at least six feet away from each other at all times. It looked very much like our governments had decided that to avoid living out The Stand we needed to live out George Orwell’s 1984 instead, and learn to love Big Brother.

We have now moved from The Stand into The Camp of the Saints. In this novel by Jean Raspail which first appeared in French in 1973, white, Christian, Western Civilization is brought to an end by its own liberalism. First, the liberalism which permeates France from the top to the bottom, prevents her from doing what is necessary to preserve her own existence when threatened by the invasion of an armada of decrepit ships laden with the teeming, impoverished, masses of the Third Word. France’s president knows what must be done to save France, but is unwilling to say it publicly. The overwhelming message, expressed in mindless and banal slogans, from the political and cultural leadership of the country is that the migrants must be welcomed and embraced. This part of the story occupies the largest part of the novel. After France’s refusal to turn away the migrants lays bare the weakness of the West for all to see, anti-racist uprisings occur in every major Western city with the West’s own, progressive and liberal corporate, governmental, ecclesiastical, and media elites defecting to the side of the revolutionaries.

Five years ago I wrote about how the migrant – or “Syrian refugee” as the media falsely labelled it – crisis in Europe, was like watching the first part of Raspail’s story come true. Today, what we are seeing looks more like the second part of the story. The Black Lives Matter movement has capitalized on George Floyd’s death in the custody of the Minneapolis police to organize events in every major city in not just the United States, but in Canada and throughout the Western world. Called “peaceful protests” by an adoring and sympathetic mainstream media, they are more accurately described as riots, being all too frequently, and hardly coincidentally, accompanied by mass looting, vandalism, arson, and violence. In all of this they are no different from previous race riots, such as those of the “long hot summer” of 1967. This time, however, they have the endorsement, not just of empty-headed celebrities, but of major corporations and religious and political leaders as well. Indeed, with all the monument and statue toppling that has being going on, “insurrection” would be a better word than even “riot.” It is very much starting to resemble the global racial insurrection in The Camp of the Saints.

Earlier this year, when the previous Apocalypse was underway, many of us noted that the way the politicians, the media, and the World Health Organization were talking about keeping the lockdown in place until a vaccine was developed and then making that vaccine mandatory, was sounding suspiciously like the passage in the thirteenth chapter of the actual Apocalypse of St. John in the New Testament that speaks of the Mark of the Beast. This was even before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the United States House of Representatives devised a bill authorizing the American Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend $100 billion in programs for “Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone” with regards to the coronavirus and gave it the number HR6666. I made a few jokes about Bill Gates, a major funder of vaccine development and who was talking last year about implanted vaccination records, acting like he were auditioning for the role of Antichrist, but I promptly regretted it when a friend tried to turn it into a tiresome and tedious discussion of the fine and minute points of eschatology and what has to happen before what in the unfolding of the last of the last days.

Now it seems that another contender for the infamous Mark has appeared on the scene. In these anti-white racist rallies, the representatives of civil authority such as politicians and policemen, have been expected to participate in a ceremony that is usually called “taking the knee.” It began in the world of athletics four years ago when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49s, knelt during the pre-game playing of the American national anthem as a protest against what he erroneously believed to be the state of affairs in his country with regards to police racism. It is obvious from the way it is being used in the rallies today that is has developed into something far beyond what it was in its original context. It is demanded as a sign of submission and contrition – albeit with no absolution proffered.

It is noteworthy that this ritual abasement involves a gesture that is virtually identical to what is called genuflection in Christianity – the bending of one knee and touching the ground with the other. The significance of genuflection in Christianity is as a sign of respect and reverence in acknowledgement of the presence of God. It was originally derived from the recognition of God as the King of Kings. One would bend one knee when called into the presence of his earthly liege lord and Sovereign. The Church, in recognition of God as the Highest of Kings, reserved the other knee for the acknowledgement of His presence. In the Roman Communion, and the higher of the Churches of the Anglican Communion, it is customary to genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation in both the Nicene Creed and in the reading of the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, in acknowledgement of the fact that God had come down from His throne in Heaven to dwell among men as one of us. Other genuflections, such as those made by the celebrant during the consecration of the elements of the Eucharist, and by the congregants upon entering and exiting the building or their pew, are in acknowledgement of Christ’s Sacramental Presence.

The practice is not universal among Christians among whom there are many theological disagreements with regards to Christ’s Sacramental Presence. When a violent and totalitarian movement, however, starts demanding that people demonstrate their submission by making to it a sign of respect that has traditionally been reserved for the presence of Christ, all the faithful should recognize that it is the Enemy of their souls who so demands their submission and allegiance.

Whether or not this is “the” final, Mark of the Beast, of prophecy, I have no idea. The way things have been going we are likely to get two or three more Apocalypses in before the end of the year. Either way, our duty is plain and that is not to submit.

Those who take the knee, do so at the peril of their own souls.

Hic Sto

It is January 1st, the octave day of Christmas, and the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord. It is my tradition at this time of the year, one that I borrowed from the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, to write a full disclosure to my readership of my positions and prejudices at this time. Being a man of very conservative views and instincts, these have not changed much since I began writing and so, needless to say, there is always overlap between pieces of this kind, although I try to make my wording fresh each year. This year I have reused the title of the first of these essays but in Latin rather than English.

Allow me to begin with the title of this website - Throne, Altar, Liberty. This title is an affirmation of my belief in and loyalty to the institutions of classical Toryism - royal monarchy and the small-c catholic church. It also affirms my belief in personal freedom which is widely thought of as a classical liberal value. There is significance in the order of these words. "Throne and Altar", which are to Toryism what "blood and soil" are to nationalism, are placed before "Liberty" because I am a Tory first and a small-l-libertarian second. This ranking also reflects my conviction, contrary to the theories of liberalism, that a stable and peaceful social and civil order in which the aforementioned institutions are secure and firmly established is the foundation upon which personal liberty must be built and the environment in which it can flourish. I reject in its entirety, as obviously contrary-to-fact, mindless nonsense and drivel, the liberal theory that man's "natural" state is an individual existence outside of such an order and that his freedom stems from this state. I even more vehemently reject the liberal notion that democracy is the safeguard of liberty, and hold instead to the sane and sober judgement of the ancient philosophers, compared with whom the moderns are mediocre thinkers at best and more often than not contemptible fools, that democracy is the wellspring of tyranny. I respect our parliamentary form of government, not because it is democratic, but because it is an ancient, time-honoured, institution with prescriptive authority. I regard republicanism, in the Roman-American-modern sense of "kingless government" with utter abhorrence, although I accept the ancient Greek ideal that the Latin res publica originally denoted, that good government is that which serves the good of the public interest of the commonwealth. I have been thoroughly royalist by instinct all my life, and like my hero, Dr. Johnson, I combine the Jacobite view of royal authority with loyalty to the present reigning House.

I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen, was baptized by immersion while I was a teenager, and confirmed by an Anglican bishop as an adult. I had five years of formal education in theology at what is now Providence University College In Otterburne, Manitoba and have continued to study theology informally ever since. As my theology has matured I have embraced primitive small-c catholicism and small-o orthodoxy, i.e., the teachings of the early Apostolic church, before the schism between the Greek and Latin churches. This is the faith which St. Vincent of Lerins said was held "everywhere, always, and by all" in the undivided catholic (whole) church, and of which Bishop Lancelot Andrewes said the boundary of was determined by "One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after." In the schism, the Greek and Latin churches each maintained that she was the holy, catholic church confessed in the Creeds, from which the other had broken away in schism. Schism, however, is something that occurs within a particular church or between particular churches within the catholic church. Both sides, by identifying themselves as the whole of what they prior to the schism were clearly only a part, became guilty of schism. The true catholic church contains both and is fully present in all particular churches wherever there is organic, organizational continuity with the Apostolic church, the ecumenical Creeds are faithfully confessed, the Word, both Law and Gospel is proclaimed, and the Gospel Sacraments (Baptism and the Eucharist) are dutifully administered. The small-c catholic, small-o orthodox faith, as confessed in the Apostles', Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Athanasian Creeds is entirely consistent with the great evangelical truths of the Protestant Reformation - that the Holy Scriptures as the infallible written Word of God are the final authority by which all church teachings and practices are to be judged, and that since human beings, due to the Fall of Man into Original Sin are incapable of producing the righteousness that our Holy and Just Creator requires of us as revealed in His Law, our only salvation is that which has been freely given us by God in His Only-Begotten Son, Our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ and which we receive by faith. Indeed, these latter truths are implicit in the Creeds, a true understanding of which requires them.

I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba, to which I attribute my lifelong bias towards rural simplicity against urban cosmopolitanism, a bias I have maintained despite having lived in the province's capital city of Winnipeg for two decades. Manitoba is a province of the Dominion of Canada. I love my country, and its true history, heritage, traditions, and institutions. At the time of the American Revolution, when the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America rebelled against the British Crown, Parliament and Empire, and built their republic on the foundation of classical liberalism, other British colonies such as those in the Maritimes and the newly acquired French-speaking, Catholic colony called Canada, chose to remain loyal. Loyalists from the thirteen colonies, facing persecution in the new republic, fled to these northern provinces. In the century that followed the American republic frequently threatened invasion and conquest, and actually attempted to make good on those threats in the War of 1812, in which the English and French subjects again remained loyal, and fought alongside the Imperial army to successfully repel the Yankee invaders. Shortly after the Yankees waged a bloody war of annihilation against their more civilized Southern brethren, the provinces of British North America began the process of Confederation into a single country, which would be built upon the foundation of its Loyalist history, retain rather than severe its ties to Britain and the rest of the Empire, to be governed by its own Parliament, modelled after that in Westminster, under the common Crown. This was the beginning, not only of the country, the Dominion of Canada, but of the evolution of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. We had a strong sense of who we were as a country in our national identity based upon our Loyalist history and heritage which served us well in two World Wars. Sadly, much of this has been forgotten by Canadians today. This national amnesia has been actively and aggressively encouraged by the Liberal Party of Canada. For a century the Grits have proclaimed themselves to be the party of Canadian nationalism, while doing everything in their power to make Canadians forget the history and heritage that make us who we are as a country, such as stripping our national symbols of all that would remind us of that history and heritage. This was done because the Liberals see our Loyalist history and heritage as roadblocks standing in the way of their perpetual hold on power. The only consistent value the Liberal Party has ever had is its own power. It is the embodiment of everything I loathe and detest.

I am very much a man of the right if we speak of the right with the meaning that was attached to it when it was first used in a political sense in the eighteenth century - essentially, as the continental European equivalent of seventeenth century British Toryism. As a man of this right, I recognize a large gulf between myself and much of what is considered right-wing today. I do not mean right-wing as liberals dishonestly use the term, i.e., with connotations of fascism and national socialism, twentieth century movements that were modern to the core, had little to nothing in common with the historical right, and which were identical in almost every way to their overtly left-wing counterpart, that international conspiracy by atheistic, materialistic, totalitarian thugs against order, freedom, religion, decency and civilization in general that was known as Communism. I mean the soi-disant right of the day. David Warren once wisely reflected that "Toryism is the political expression of a religious view of life" and that "Conservatism is an attempt to maintain Toryism after you have lost your faith." Mainstream North American conservatism today is little more than a form of classical liberalism. When joined to the prefix "neo-" it denotes a particularly obnoxious form of classical liberalism that seeks to remake the entire world, by military force if necessary, into the image of American, technocratic capitalism and democracy. The North American "religious right" bears far too close a resemblance to Puritanism, the fanatical blend of Pharisaism and Philistinism that was the original enemy of the British Tories and got the ball of modern liberalism rolling in the first place, for my liking. The more radical self-identified right, the "alternative" right, is a blend of populism and nationalism, civic nationalism in the "lite" version, overt racial nationalism in the "hard." While I have the traditional Tory distaste for populism and nationalism, both of which are based on the modern notion of popular sovereignty, a Satanic notion dreamed up by liberals to challenge the sovereignty of the king in the commonwealth, the episcopate in the church, and God in the universe, I have a great deal of sympathy with the "alternative" right when it speaks truths about race, sex, and immigration that mainstream "conservatism" has been afraid to speak for decades.

My disappointment in the shortcomings of mainstream contemporary conservatism and other modern "rights", however, pales in comparison to my loathing of the forces of progress and modernity and my disgust at the state of folly and depravity into which they have plunged what used to be Christian civilization. Any explanation of what I stand for would be incomplete without an explanation of what I stand against and why.

Liberalism, the self-appointed ideological champion of personal freedom, rejected the ancient understanding of the good that is freedom which was best expressed by King Charles I just prior to his martyrdom as consisting "in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods may be most their own" and redefined it in terms of the absence of restraints and limitations on the fulfilment of the desires and wishes of the individual will. Yet the more liberalism succeeds in removing traditional limitations from individual wish-fulfilment, the more its redefined liberty comes to resemble tyranny, freedom's perpetual foe and opposite. When liberalism speaks in terms of the rights and freedoms of women, the aged, and the infirm, it is to promote legal abortion on demand and euthanasia, thus displaying a callous devaluation of human life that is remarkably similar to that of the Nazis and Communists. George Grant hit the nail on the head thirty years ago when he described the judges who struck down abortion laws as having "used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought—the triumph of the will."

Then there are liberalism's offspring, progressivism and the left, which together with their parent make up the unholy counterfeit trinity of the Modern Age. Progressivism is modern man's humanistic confidence in our species' unlimited ability, guided by liberalism's ideals of freedom and equality, to employ reason and science to better the human condition. The left is progressivism translated into political activism, the movement that seeks through political means to put progressivism's faith in human self-improvement into practice. While no sane person would ever oppose improvement that actually is improvement the spiritual blindness that is at the heart of the refusal of liberalism, progressivism, and the left to acknowledge either the limitations that God has placed upon us in nature, both ours and that of the world around us, or the limitations we have placed upon ourselves through our sinfulness is sufficient explanation for why progressive "improvements" are so often counterfeit or chimerical, why they not infrequently make things worse rather than better, and why when they actually do involve genuine improvements they usually come with a cost that has not been taken into consideration and may very well be too high. Liberalism, progressivism, and the left, viewed as they actually are rather than as they present themselves, are simply the efforts of Fallen man, refusing to acknowledge his exile from Paradise or to return by the appointed means of Grace, to reclaim what he has lost through force. Their substitution of equality for justice, human rights for natural law in which duties are antecedent to all rights, and democracy for royal authority exercised for the public good of the commonwealth, is simply idolatry, the ancient error of replacing God with mundane goods, higher goods with lower goods, and, in this case, genuine goods with counterfeit ones. Their dismissal of the wisdom of the ancients is what C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield dubbed "chronological snobbery" and their self-congratulatory exaltation of modern achievements is what the ancients called hubris.

Liberalism, progressivism, and the left are as morally bankrupt as they are spiritually blind. This is not a commentary on the actions or lifestyles of individual progressives but rather on their ethical thinking. They hated the old rules because of the limitations these placed on the fulfilment of individual desires and so they replaced them with new ones. Yet the old rules were, for the most part, few, simple, and clear and straightforward. These are the marks of good rules. The new rules are numerous, and far too frequently vague and hazy. These are the marks of bad rules. Worse, the new rules seem to be designed to function as weapons in the hands of anyone who wishes to take offence at the words and acts of others. This is most obvious when it comes to the new rules drawn up by liberalism's granddaughter feminism to replace the Christian sexual ethic. The latter was clear and easy to understand - either marry a spouse and be faithful or be celibate, all other alternatives are prohibited. Human difficulty in following this in practice never arose out of any problem in understanding it. The same can not be said of the rules of this new era of ex post facto withdrawal of consent.

Although the new morality is touted as being more "rational" than the old, the idea that the mind should govern the body and reason control the passions was essential to the old morality. Vices such as Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust were what occurred when natural human appetites were allowed to rule our behaviour and consequently run to excess. Virtues such as Temperance and Chastity were the habits, cultivated over a lifetime, of curbing these same appetites and allowing them to be governed by our reason. The new morality, however, has clearly elevated emotion over reason, and mind over body. The new cardinal virtues are feelings such as compassion, sympathy, and empathy. Profess to act based on one of these and your deeds will be lauded, no matter how much harm they objectively do. Make your decision based on cold, hard, facts and logic and you will be condemned, no matter how much good you objectively do. How else except by the elevation of the feeling of "compassion" over all rational considerations can we explain the progressives' determination to disregard the well-being of their own countries and civilization in order to throw out the welcome mat to the Third-world invasion thinly disguised as a refugee crisis that has in recent years materialized out of the pages of Jean Raspail's Camp of the Saints? How other than by a perverse setting of the body over the mind can the neo-Puritan demonization of tobacco, which can only hurt the body, at the same time and by the same people, who exalt and glorify marijuana which destroys the mind, be explained?

Yes, moral bankruptcy is the only way to describe this new morality that proclaims itself rational even as it places reason under the heel of feeling, and which pats itself on the back for emancipating man while binding him with rules that are petty and tyrannical in nature.

The liberal, progressive, left is at its worst when it thinks it is at its best. It congratulates itself on its opposition to "racism" and zealously hunts down all expressions of racial self-interest on the part of white people, however peaceful and benign, but it turns a blind eye to overt racial hatred and violence when these are directed towards white people. It strains out the gnat of Avarice within capitalism while swallowing the camel of Envy that is socialism and pretending that it tastes like charity. (1) It cynically uses the cause of preserving the environment, a worthy cause in itself albeit one that is often very ill-informed by pseudoscience, to justify destroying an industry upon which countless livelihoods depend and artificially raising the cost of living with a tax that hurts those least able to afford it the most, so that it can turn around and offer a rebate conveniently timed to arrive just before the next Dominion election.

This year I resolve to be firmer in my opposition to the left than ever before.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen


(1) The Seven Deadly Sins were never considered to be equal. Avarice (Greed), Gluttony, Lust and Sloth were the lesser of the Seven. They are purely human failings being natural human appetites indulged in to excess. Anger occupies the middle area, and Pride and Envy were the worst of the Seven. These are the Satanic sins which led to the devil's fall. In commiting them man imitates the devil. Envy is the hatred of others and desire to tear them down because they possess something you do not. Envy toward the haves rather than charity towards the have nots is the essence of true socialism, which of course is more than just the government relief programs that are often loosely labelled as such. It is the worst of sins hypocritically pretending to be the highest of virtues. The lesser sin of Avarice, by contrast, is in no way essential to the ownership of property, laws securing the same, and the general common sense truth that in ordinary circumstances the individual, head of the household, business manager and civil government are the ones best suited to look out for the interests of the individual, family, business, and country respectively, all of which have been fundamental elements of civilization from time immemorial. It is more reasonable to see a hint of Avarice in the doctrine of laissez-faire but this, after all, was a doctrine dreamed up by the liberals of the eighteenth century.

More Assorted Reflections

The first Assorted Reflections can be found here.

- Although Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans claimed to be fighting for the freedom of the people against “tyranny”, it was King Charles I who had the love and support of the common people. The Jacobins, likewise, declared themselves to be the champions of the poor of France, even though in the cahiers detailing their grievances the poor of France had not called for the overthrow of the monarchy, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were in fact more popular than the men who deposed them, the Revolution was instigated by a cousin of the king, and most of its leaders were upper class intellectuals. Marxism considered itself to be the voice of the proletariat (factory workers) despite the fact that its founders were a pseudo-philosopher (Marx) and a factory owner (Engels), it has always been led by intellectuals, and has never drawn significant support from the actual working classes, who generally suffered the most wherever it came to power. Similarly, the feminist movement appointed itself the voice of the female sex, although it has never spoken for family oriented women who make marriage and children their top priorities and is overtly hostile to Christian women who believe the Sixth Commandment applies to both sexes. The claims of black activist groups to speak for all blacks and of the Anti-Defamation League to speak for Jews are further examples of the same.

- From its beginning feminism has drawn inspiration from both liberalism (classical) and Marxism, with some feminists leaning more toward liberalism, others towards Marxism, but with a general alignment to the liberal-left. The liberal-left has always been inclined towards democratic and small-r republican institutions of government – an inclination which in no way conflicts with its inclination towards totalitarianism. Within such institutions, feminism had to fight for the right of women to vote and to hold elected office. Conversely, we on the conservative-right have traditionally been inclined towards the institution of hereditary, royal, monarchy. This institution has allowed for reigning and even ruling queens and empresses since the dawn of human history.

- Feminism has strange priorities. On New Year’s Eve, 2015, gangs of migrants harassed, assaulted, and in some cases raped large numbers of women in Cologne and other German cities. The feminist outcry over this was insignificant, almost non-existent in comparison to the loud noise they are currently making over Brett Kavanaugh, the charges against whom are unsubstantiated and suspiciously timed. Indeed, most feminists have jumped on the “migrants welcome” and anti-Islamophobia bandwagons, proving that while politics makes strange bedfellows, intersectionality makes the strangest bedfellows of all.


- While I do not take the position that women ought to be kept barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, I do think a case can be made that this is what should be done to feminists. Especially the male feminists.


- It has been reported for a couple of weeks now that Her Excellency, Julie Payette, is less than happy with her position as Her Majesty's vice-regal representative in the Dominion government and that others are less than happy with her performance in that role. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that she was chosen for the position by the Liberal Party. The Grits, and especially the Trudeau branch of the party, have long lacked both an understanding of and an appreciation for the office of the Governor General and the grand, traditional, institution of royal monarchy it represents. So, when it falls to them to choose the next Governor General, they don't look for the person best suited to represent the Queen in Canada - which is the actual, constitutional, purpose of the office - but for someone to be the face of Canada, as they envision it, which is constantly changing, to the world. There is a simple solution to the problem. I have long maintained that while the Canadian Senate is badly in need of reform, the reform it needs is reform that respects and is consistent with the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us in 1867. The complete overhaul of the Americanized, Triple-E, model proposed by the old Reform Party is unacceptable. The most necessary reform could be accomplished simply by removing control over who is recommended to be appointed to the Senate from the Prime Minister's office. Having the provinces, rather than the federal government, recommend the appointees to the Senate seats allotted to them would be an obvious way of doing this. Similarly, it should not be the Prime Minister who advises the Queen as to who her representative should be. Indeed, unlike the Senate, in the case of the Governor General's office it was not established in Confederation that the Queen would appoint based on recommendation from the Prime Minister's office, but rather, until the Statute of Westminster the appointment was made on recommendation by the Imperial Privy Council. In the Liberal Version of Canadian history this is regarded as a step forward in the evolution of Canadian nationhood. This is because the Liberal Version falsely superimposes America's story - the story of former colonies forging a new national identity after severing the imperial connection - upon Canada. Canada's true story is the exact opposite of this - the story of Britain's loyal North American colonies, English-speaking Protestant and French-speaking Catholic, coming together to create a new nation that would deliberately retain the connection, that would in time become more familial than imperial. Since so many Canadians do not know our own story, transferring the right of recommendation from the Canadian PMO back to London would not sell in this day and age, but that is not the only option that suggests itself. The Queen's Canadian Privy Council, minus the current Prime Minister and Cabinet, is the appropriate body to make the recommendation.


- Mazo de la Roche, at one time Canada's most popular novelist (she also wrote plays, short stories, and a memoir), had very strong views as to who was qualified to be Governor General. According to her biographer Ronald Hambleton she believed the office should be restricted to the aristocracy and preferably a member of the royal family. De la Roche is buried very close to the grave of Stephen Leacock in the churchyard of St. George the Martyr at Sibbald Point in Sutton, Ontario. Both were traditional Canadian Tories - royalists, who believed in Canada and her British institutions and connection, and were suspicious of American liberal republicanism. With her reverence for nobility and the aristocratic ideal, so obviously on display in her Jalna books, de la Roche was more properly the High Tory. Apart from his royalism and his views of race and sex, Leacock's dissent from egalitarianism was in the direction of individualistic meritocracy. He was, perhaps, the quintessential Canadian Low Tory.


- Canada's British institutions and familial connection have historically been means to the end of preserving Canada's independence from the United States. The reverse is also true, that the cause of maintaining Canada's independence from the United States has been the means to the end of preserving her British institutions and familial connection, valued as goods in themselves. The main weakness of Canadian Toryism, apart from the fear of being seen as too right-wing by the electorate that has led to far too much left-ward drift over the years, is that while it always recognized the first point, it seldom fully grasped the second, which is the more important of the two. John Diefenbaker was an exception to this. John Farthing, whose Freedom Wears a Crown articulated and defended the point, was another. Neither man was properly appreciated by the Conservative Party.


- Conservatives of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries looked back to the eighteenth century statesman Edmund Burke as their prophet. Ironically. Edmund Burke was a member of the Whig (liberal) Party. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. The ideas that conservatives most respect in Burke are his defence of the British monarchy and established Church, his condemnation of "armed doctrines", his revision of social contract theory to make the "contract of each particular state" into a "clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society" that is a "partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born," and the local patriotism of his "little platoons," all of which come from his Reflections on the Revolution in France, written late in his career, and which better reflect Tory convictions than those of his own party. Indeed, this sharing of ideas has gone both ways. Thomas Hobbes, who introduced social contract theory to begin with, and David Hume, the noted eighteenth century skeptic, are both recognized as significant contributors to the development of the ideas of classical liberalism, but politically both were affiliated with the Royalists/Tories. In Hume's case this only really comes out in his History of England. At any rate, excellent as many of Burke's "neo-Tory" insights in the Reflections are, conservatives would do better to look to his friend the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the oft-quoted Dr. Johnson, as their eighteenth century prophet. T. S. Eliot was one conservative who recognized this, and his famous statement "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics" consciously echoes Dr. Johnson's definition of a Tory.


- Canadian conservatism began as an adaptation of British Toryism. It was royalist, but, due to the greater denominational differences that have been here since before Confederation (French Canadians were predominantly Roman Catholic, English Canadians were traditionally English Anglicans and Scottish Presbyterians, with a sizable number of English Methodists and Baptists and Irish Catholics, and smaller numbers from other denominations) it was less associated with church establishment than its British parent, although it was far from being secular, and Canada, contrary to the claims of certain ignorant Grits, has no tradition of separation of church and state. Since the 1950s, and the birth of the American conservative movement (as recently as 1950 Lionel Trilling could write "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition"), Canadian conservatives have tended either to borrow ideas from American conservatives (Canadian neo-conservatives) or to emphasize the differences between Canadian Toryism and American conservatism and try to re-align the former with socialism, progressivism, and the left (Red Tories). Both tendencies are mistakes, in my opinion. Contrary to some clever arguments from the Reds and the examples of lovably eccentric individuals like George Grant and Eugene Forsey who were able to blend religious conservatism and the Tory love of Canadian institutions with otherwise left-wing views in their personal philosophies, there is no natural affinity between Toryism on the one hand and socialism, progressivism, and the left in general on the other. Canadian neoconservatives, however, have had the perverse tendency to pick out of the big tent of American conservatism, the ideas that are least compatible with our own Toryism and neglect those that are the most. That big tent originally consisted of classical liberals or libertarians (liberals in the nineteenth century meaning of the term), ex-Communist Cold Warriors, and traditionalists like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. The traditionalists borrowed from British classical conservatism as many ideas as they could compatibly incorporate into a liberal republic. Obviously, these are the American conservatives most compatible with our own Toryism. They are also the most neglected by Canadian neo-conservatives. This is perhaps not surprising when we consider how neglected they are in their own movement. Their role in the big tent was largely supplanted in the 1970s and 1980s by the New Right and (American) neo-conservatives. The New Right was an alliance between populist-nationalists and the Religious Right. There was some overlap in position between the older moral and social conservatism of the traditionalists which corresponded closely to that of British and Canadian Tories but the predominantly evangelical/fundamentalist Religious Right more often seemed to be a revival of Puritanism, the theocratic Calvinism that had been the first form of liberalism before it went secular, and the Tories' oldest enemy. The American neo-conservatives were New Deal, liberal, Democrats who defected from the left when the New Left became pro-Soviet and pro-Palestinian. These became the arch champions of American, neo-imperialistic, militarism. It is from the classical liberals and American neo-conservatives that Canadian neo-conservatives have borrowed the most. The Religious Right has had much less of an impact, perhaps because of the large influence of social justice theology on our evangelicals, although interestingly the socially and morally conservative George Grant, usually considered a Red Tory, was willing to look on the Religious Right as allies in the fight against abortion and euthanasia. With the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, the populist-nationalists, with the backing of a sizable portion of the Religious Right, rose to ascendency in the big tent of American conservatism, much to the disgust of the Republican Party elite, an alliance of the neo-conservatives, classical liberals (except the Trump-supporting paleolibertarians), and a minority of the Religious Right. Already in Canada we see signs of this impacting us, with Doug Ford leading the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to victory on a populist-nationalist platform, and now Quebec having given a majority government to a party which, like Maxime Bernier's proposed new federal party, blends classical liberalism with populist-nationalism. What this entails for the future of Canada and Canadian conservatism remains to be seen. I will still be holding on to my classical, Canadian, Toryism with a willingness, as always, to entertain worthy ideas from any of these other varieties.

- The elements of genuine moral and social conservatism are the beliefs: a) in an unchanging and universal moral order or natural law with fixed standards of right and wrong (C. S. Lewis’ “Tao” from The Abolition of Man), b) that tradition, through which the accumulated wisdom of the past is passed down to us, is a more reliable guide to these standards than private, abstract, reasoning, c) that the cultivation and nature of right habits of behaviour (virtues) is more effective than the imposition of rules at producing right decision-making and that while the information transmitted in the process of cultivating such habits necessarily includes some rules, the bulk of it cannot be codified as rules and can only be learned from example, which is best accomplished in the home with the support of the teaching ministry of the church, and d) that the government’s role is the “ministry of the sword”, by which it makes and enforces the laws that uphold the peace, order, and justice that provide the civilized framework for all of the preceding points. The popular perception of moral and social conservatism, however, has largely been shaped by the New American Religious Right, the most immediate direct ancestor of which was the Prohibition movement which grew out of the Temperance Movement supported by evangelical and fundamentalist revivalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is often forgotten today that Prohibition was considered to be a Progressive cause, both big and small p, at the time, and also had the support of the Social Gospel movement (theological liberalism) and first-wave feminism. Indeed, in Canada at least, the latter was largely responsible for Prohibition passing – the provinces generally voted Prohibition in immediately after feminism won the franchise for women in World War I and then voted it back out again once the men returned from overseas. While Prohibition did have its supporters among Conservatives, the most traditional Tories and the churches most associated with classical conservatism, the Anglican Church which at the time was still “The Tory Party at prayer” and the ultramontane Roman Catholic Church of pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, opposed it. Stephen Leacock gave lectures against it pro bono public! There are significant differences, of course, between the Prohibition movement and the New Religious Right. The former sought to impose on society a new law, the complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages, which was not grounded in tradition, had not been part of mainstream Christian orthodox moral theology (it belongs rather to the Islamic tradition) and which, despite the best efforts of Rev. William Patton to prove otherwise, clearly contradicts the Scriptures. The latter was a response to a moral revolution that removed long-standing, traditional rules, which are supported by orthodox Christian moral theology. There is nothing in its opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and the ongoing sexual revolution with which genuine moral and social conservatism would disagree, but in its presentation it evokes the image of previous evangelical backed moral crusades, such as Prohibition and the seventeenth century Puritanism that would put a man in stocks for kissing his wife in public when he returned from a three year voyage on Sunday, an unattractive image to say the least.


- David Lane was a disturbed individual who rejected the Christian faith in which he was raised for a revived, Nordic, paganism and embraced a violent racialism and was eventually sent to prison for the crimes he committed as a member of the Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group that supported its activities with funds obtained through armed robbery. Obviously a man who any sane person would consider to be utterly repugnant. What is interesting, however, is that if you take the "fourteen words" meme attributed to him, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", and substitute any other colour or racial identity for "our" and "white" you will end up with a statement that would be considered unobjectionable, non-offensive, acceptable, laudable, and even an essential goal of social policy by liberals, progressives, and other self-identified "enlightened" people. Make the substitution and you will see what I mean. This provides us with a challenge for the soi disant "enlightened." Either admit, that despite its unsavoury origins and associations, there is nothing objectionable in the content of the “fourteen words” meme or disavow all the other racial identity politics that you support.

- Another white nationalist meme is that of “white genocide.” It purports to explain the observable phenomenon that has sometimes been called “white death,” i.e., the vast shrinking, over the last century, of the Caucasian percentage both of the total world population and of the populations of historically white countries, that has accelerated after the post-World War II Baby Boom as white fertility has dropped and white populations have been aging without reproducing themselves, relying instead upon immigration to replace themselves. The explanation offered by the “white genocide” meme is that this is due to the plotting of some racial enemy. Although there certainly are leftists who express their hatred of white people in genocidal terms, an obvious example of which being Noel Ignatiev, and genocide would be an apt description of what is being done to the whites of Zimbabwe and South Africa, the phenomenon as a whole is probably better described as “white suicide.” The white nationalists are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “who is doing this to us” they should be asking “why are we doing this to ourselves.” The answer is liberalism.

- Forty-five years ago, in the eerily prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints, French author Jean Raspail warned of the coming death of Western civilization through an invasion of the masses of Third World poor aided and abetted by a suicidal white liberalism. The author was not a populist-ethno-nationalist, at least not primarily, but rather a traditional Roman Catholic and a legitimist royalist. Perhaps this explains his insightful prescience.


- Both the left and the right believe that ethnocentrism has both a healthy and a toxic form. Where they disagree is over what constitutes the difference between the healthy and toxic. The right would say that a healthy ethnocentrism is the kind of in-group loyalty that promotes and facilitates social cohesion, trust, and cooperation whereas toxic ethnocentrism is characterized by a paranoid distrust and violent hatred towards other groups. The left is more simplistic. For them it is a matter of skin colour. If you have the wrong skin colour, white, your ethnocentrism is toxic, no matter what form it takes, if you have the right skin colour, all others, it is healthy, even if it is expressed in paranoid and hateful terms.

- Today “enlightened” seems to mean “uncritically following the latest trends and fads in modern philosophy.” Come to think of it, that’s what it meant in the days of Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant and Rousseau, as well.


- Finding economic truth boils down to one question: who is the most competent to make the decision? If it is a decision that primarily affects the individual and his family, then the individual and family are under most circumstances the most competent to make the decision. There are obvious exceptions of people who lack the rational facility to make their own decisions, but for the most part this stands true. Conversely, if it is a decision that primarily affects the good of the country as a whole, the government is the most competent to make the decision. Again there are obvious exceptions, such as when the government consists of arrogant, egotists, obsessed with reading everything through the lens of the latest trend in progressive and politically correct ideology, but generally it is the case. The doctrine of laissez faire or economic liberalism is the error of thinking that the individual is competent to make all decisions (and that the common good of the whole country is thereby brought about through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”). Socialism is the error of thinking that the government is competent to make all decisions, including those that individuals and families should be making for themselves. The latter is by far the worst error of the two, but they are both errors.


- When someone says "satire is dead" they generally mean that things so bizarre have been happening in reality that it would be pointless to parody them. Satire is dead, but for an entirely different reason - the widespread influence of liberal, progressive, and left-wing thinking. The left does not get satire, because the left is incapable of distinguishing between basic human imperfection and huge evils that demand immediate rectification. This is because they refuse to accept the basic Christian truth that human history, between the Fall and Second Coming, is the history of people with the fundamental flaw of Original Sin, and that perfection cannot be expected on this earth and in time. Therefore, their response to any perceived imperfection is "this is unacceptable, it must be smashed, crushed, destroyed, and replaced with perfection." The point of satire, however, is to help us live with our imperfections, by allowing us to laugh at them. The political, social, religious, and cultural institutions that make for the good and civilized life are not perfect, but they can never be perfect, so rather than smashing them, crushing them, and razing them to the ground, let us laugh at their imperfections, so that we can appreciate them, warts and all. This spirit is completely foreign to the progressive. This is also why the greatest satirists - Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Stephen Leacock, and Evelyn Waugh to give a few examples, have been Tories.