Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt

There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.   It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius.   Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28.    Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it.  Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean?  Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback.  Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.

 

On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July. 

 

In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke.   Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone.   Note the adverb “reasonably”.   The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count.   His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.

 

In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology.   Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks.   This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada.    Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence.   Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.

 

Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased.   Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey.  By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.  

 

Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies.   What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?

 

Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves.   The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this.   Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.  

 

In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done.     The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise.   They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he.    Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer.   When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view.    Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.

 

If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay.   That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well.   The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day.    It was a win for everybody!

 

If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.   

 

He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments.   He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday.   He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud.    He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.

 

He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage.   He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned.   They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.

 

Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner.   He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.

 

Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have.   The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.

 

(1)   That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report.  They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media  eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions.   “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked.   The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses.   Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community.   There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children.   No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half.   The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. 

Narrative, Fact, and “Fake News”

Suppose that you were to pick up a copy of the long-standing Liberal Party propaganda sheet that is considered to be Manitoba’s “newspaper of record” one day. I don’t know why you would bother. Let us say that you do it on a dare. The front page headline catches your eye:

 “Common Grackle Nears Extinction”.

 As it so happens, a specimen of said species has been annoying you all morning long with its obnoxious excuse for birdsong, (1) and this is far from being an uncommon occurrence.

 Intrigued but skeptical, you read on. The story that accompanies the headline tells you that the branch of the Manitoba government that keeps track of provincial avian populations has become alarmed at the shrinking percentage of Quiscalus quiscula versicolor – the local “bronzed” version of the Common Grackle – within the total bird population. Statistics are provided that demonstrate that each year for the past fifteen years it has dropped at least one rank on the catalogue of the most common birds in the province.

 “If this trend keeps up”, the Province’s Chief Ornithologist is quoted as saying “the Common Grackle will eventually be extinct. There are just under four hundred species of birds in this province. If the grackle continues to drop in rank, even by only one level a year, it will be practically extinct in less than four centuries, since it was not at the very top to begin with.”

The ornithologist and the article then go on to insist that urgent action is needed to prevent this imminent catastrophe.

You, having noticed that among the statistics cited in the article can be found the fact that whatever its percentage of the total bird population might happen to be, its own population size has not undergone a significant drop in absolute numbers within the province of Manitoba during the years in question, recognize that this is the only meaningful fact in the entire story and that it completely invalidates the “spin” of the narrative. 

You crumple the newspaper up and throw it away in disgust.

 Later that day, however, you find the same story is being highlighted on every local television news station. To your amazement, it continues to get top billing the next day, and the day after that as well. Polls are taken, which indicate that the vast majority of Manitobans agree that something must be done to “save the grackle.” This persists for week after week. You attempt, through a letter to the editor, to draw people’s attention to the narrative-invalidating fact, but are quickly branded a “denier” of the impending grackle holocaust, and start receiving threatening phone calls and e-mails, so you decide to leave the masses to their own irrational stupidity.

Now, the above scenario is, of course, fiction. The Common Grackle is classified by the conservationists as “Near Threatened”, which is the second lowest of their low risk categories. Its total North American population began to decline in the last half of the last century, after experiencing a boom in the first half. This is why it is not classified with the “Least Concern” category, but it is not likely to jump into any of the “Threatened” categories, or even the “Conservation Dependent,” for the simple reason that this species thrives on the kind of human activity – especially agricultural land development – that the conservationists argue endangers many other species. This partially explains both the boom and the decline of the last century. The decline of the population over the entire continent has not been reflected in the local population in this province – the narrative-invalidating fact from the fictional scenario is indeed a fact, even though the scenario itself is made-up.

The point of all of the above, if it is not already obvious, has nothing to do with grackles, birds of any sort, or conservation. It is about how people gullibly swallow media narratives even if the stories containing the narratives also include hard facts which completely invalidate them.

 Two obvious examples come to mind from this year alone. Beginning in March, the same mass media which two months earlier had labelled all talk of closing of travel in and out of China as “racist”, as soon as the World Health Organization declared a “pandemic” began pushing the narrative that the WHO’s recommendations – a universal quarantine/house arrest with the economically devastating closure of all business arbitrarily declared to be non-essential, and the socially/culturally/psychologically/morally devastating transfer of social interaction onto the internet to be draconically enforced by special enforcers armed with obscenely high fines and the encouragement of the kind of snitch-on-your-family-friends-and-neighbours culture previously associated with totalitarian regimes like the Third Reich and the Soviet Union – was the only option other than doing nothing at all. Since the world has survived previous pandemics without resorting to anything remotely close to this, the obvious implication of the media-peddled narrative of the “necessity” of this lockdown is that this pandemic is worse that all previous ones. The hard facts about the virus, however, from the same media sources, even the limited ones available back in March, never supported this thesis. Facts such as that a large percentage of people infected with the virus are completely asymptomatic, that the majority of those who do experience symptoms experience nothing more severe than the flu, and that even for those who do contract the harsh SARS form of pneumonia from the virus the risk of dying is quite low apart from the combination of age and multiple complicating health factors. What these facts all screamed was that even if this virus turned out to be more fatal than the seasonal flu, it is more comparable to the seasonal flu than to previous, far worse, pandemics. Which, of course, completely invalidates the narrative spin that says that inflicting all of this other damage upon our countries by embracing this form of medical totalitarianism was needed. Yet everywhere you go, you encounter people who accept that narrative, in spite of the facts.

The other example is that of the media narrative of the “peaceful protests” that Black Lives Matter organized following the death of George Floyd. Even as the media was telling us that these were peaceful protests, and that only fascists would consider the idea of quelling them by force, they could hardly cover up the arson, looting, vandalism and violence that accompanied these “protests” in most major American cities. Nor could they hide the fact that as these “protests” spread beyond American borders throughout all of Western Civilization, they began more and more to resemble the attempts by the Jacobins, Maoists, and Khmer Rouge – groups that belong at the top of the list of the most destructive and murderous of all of history’s revolutionaries - to raze history to the ground. All of which completely belies the description of these “protests” as “peaceful.”

In the last few years “fake news” has become a household expression. It has two primary meanings which are the polar opposites of each other. Captain Airhead uses the expression to refer to the spread of information in support of views which conflict with the narratives pushed by the mainstream media. The other meaning, of course, is that those narratives themselves are the “fake news.”

The events of this year have made it obvious for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, which of these two is the real “fake news.”

The question is whether anyone is left who has eyes to see and ears to hear.

 (1) My maternal great-aunt Hazel, before she moved out of her house, had a clock which would chime with a different birdsong for each hour of the day. When I would visit her there, and the clock would go off, we would look at it and I would make the joke “this clock is missing a few birds – where is the grackle, magpie, and raven?” Her answer would always be some variation of “if this clock had a grackle, it would be in the garbage.”