Liberalism Exposed by Orlando

“It's just obvious”, Chicago School economist Milton Friedman told Peter Brimelow back in the 1990s, “you can't have free immigration and a welfare state.”

These words are not as well-known as his “there is no such thing as a free lunch” but they ought to be. It is perfectly consistent to be opposed to both open immigration and the welfare state. One can make a rational case for either against the other. To try and have both, however, as all Western ex-nations have sought to do for decades, is to invite every would-be free rider in the world to come to your country and leech off of you.

Friedman, who was a libertarian, would have chosen free immigration over a welfare state. I, a somewhat libertarian, High Tory patriot, would lean towards having neither, while regarding a modest welfare state – much more modest than we have today – as the lesser of the two evils. These are positions that can be intelligently defended. The progressive or left-liberal position that we must have both is not, which is perhaps the reason why progressives, rather than try to intelligently defend the indefensible, instead try to silence everyone else with emotional accusations of being cruel, hard-hearted, inhumane, bigoted, unfeeling and the like.

This is not the only example of progressive liberals simultaneously endorsing two things that are mutually exclusive. If someone were to say “it’s just obvious that you cannot have a culture that affirms and celebrates homosexuality while also being open to Islam” he would be just as right as Friedman was. Once again, a person can argue against both of these things simultaneously without self-contradiction. Or he might make a convincing case for the one that excludes the other. It is those who insist on having both who are writing a prescription for disaster. Once again it is progressive liberals who do this and who denounce anyone who opposes either of their pet causes as being bigoted and unenlightened.

If the folly in this had not already been obvious before, it was certainly exposed for all the world to see by the events in Orlando, Florida this past weekend. In what has been described as the worst such shooting in American history, a twenty-nine year old son of immigrants from Afghanistan, called 9-11 to announce his intentions and his allegiance to the Islamic State and then went into a gay club called the Pulse and shot the place up, killing about fifty people and wounding about fifty others.

Liberals, with the exception of those gay rights groups that have now endorsed the Donald Trump campaign, have learned absolutely nothing from this about the mutual exclusivity of the causes they espouse in the name of such banal drivel as “social justice” and “human rights”. If we do not include US President Barack Obama’s emotional meltdown and hate-filled tirade against Trump the liberal response to the shooting has basically been twofold.

First, quite predictably, they are blaming the incident on the accessibility of guns in the United States and what they call the American “gun culture” and calling for more restrictions on gun owners. That way, the next time someone declares his loyalty to ISIS and hatred of the United States, and in the name of Allah sets out on a one-man jihad, his efforts will be frustrated and defeated by the fact that he has to obey a law that prevents him from owning guns. Peter Hitchens has already said all that needs to be said about this kind of stupidity when in his reflections on Orlando he observed that America’s gun laws were a lot laxer fifty years ago before these kind of shooting incidents became common place, noting that such shootings also occur in countries with strict gun control like Britain, Germany and Finland while being much rarer in Switzerland. Hitchens argued that “an inquiry into the correlation between drug abuse and violence” would be “the most rational and effective response to the horrific news from Orlando” which suggestion contains far more good sense than all of those coming from the gun-hating lunatics on the left.

Secondly, and again predictably, they have been blaming conservative Christians for the incident. The same people who consider it to be a horrible and unfair generalization to blame the actions of this man on his own religion have no problem blaming it on another one altogether. This is what enlightenment looks like, folks, and it is indistinguishable from what we used to call being just plain crazy.

According to the looney-tune left, Christians are responsible for creating a “culture of homophobia” which drove this young Muslim into a murderous frenzy. He pledged his loyalty to a regime that kills homosexuals by throwing them from rooftops. Islam is the dominant religion in the ten countries in the world where homosexuality is a capital offence. Yet, liberals expect us to believe that the source of his murderous hatred is not his own religion but Christianity, a faith whose adherents are also routinely targeted by ISIS for death.

Who do they think they are fooling?

Liberals maintain that all religions are equal, an idea that can be held only in a mind that regards all religious beliefs as false and therefore takes seriously the beliefs of neither Christians nor Muslims. As Sir Roger Scruton recently explained it “the new ideology of non-discrimination” means “not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable.” Not believing anything himself, the liberal cannot accept that Christians might genuinely believe that God made mankind male and female and gave the sexes to each other in marriage so that we are not therefore free to change this institution to accommodate homosexuals in the way the liberal considers to be reasonable. No can he accept that Muslims might sincerely believe in anything that would prevent their full integration into Western society or lead to a violent clash with Western culture or a portion thereof. Faced with evidence that somebody does actually believe something, he seeks to silence that person and extirpate the belief for, as Sir Roger further explains “What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them.”

Despite their promises of twenty years ago that their campaign for gay rights would not infringe upon anyone else’s rights and certainly not upon the freedom of religion of devout believers, the ink had hardly dried upon the legislation and court rulings that secured their victory in Canada, the United States, and throughout the Western world, before Christians were being dragged into court, fined thousands of dollars, and forced out of their businesses because they would not alter their Christian convictions to suit liberalism.

This is the behaviour of bullies, and bullies are natural cowards. It is not surprising therefore, that much depends upon whose beliefs have come into conflict with liberalism. Liberals are not about to risk the beheadings, bombings, and other messy possibilities that might result from offending believers whose faith has not been three-quarters diluted with liberalism already and includes concepts like jihad. Therefore, when someone does something in the name of Islam that offends them, they take it out on Christians. Which is why today, their response to Orlando looks less like genuine outrage over a horrible atrocity and more like the cynical use of the suffering of one of the groups for which they feign compassion at the hands of another to further kick a defeated foe while he is down.

That’s just how classy they are.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Principles and Prejudices

The old year has passed away, a new year is upon us, and that means that once again it is time for my traditional “where I stand” essay. This tradition did not begin with me but with one of my favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who retired from the Orlando Sentinel in 2001 and from his syndicated column in 2008. Reese believed writers owed it to their readers to make a full disclosure of their views, affiliations, and everything that gave them their particular slant once a year and encouraged other writers to do this by setting an example himself, devoting one column around New Years, sometimes the last of the old year, sometimes the first of the new, to doing this. I liked the idea and have kept this tradition myself every year since I started “Throne, Altar, Liberty”, beginning with the essay “Here I Stand” in 2011.

I am a Canadian. I am furthermore a Canadian nationalist, although I dislike this term and would prefer the older term patriot. In Canada, however, it is the custom for patriots to refer to themselves as nationalists, just as in the republic that is our neighbour to the south it is the custom for nationalists to refer to themselves as patriots. Patriotism consists of loyalty, attachment to, and love for, one’s country, its traditions, and its way of life. It is a feeling, a sentiment, and even, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued convincingly, a virtue. It develops naturally as an outgrowth of the smaller attachment one feels to one’s family, home, and what Edmund Burke memorably called “little platoons”. Nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology. In nationalism one’s nation or country is not a beloved home to be defended when attacked but a cause around which to rally the masses. It does not develop naturally but requires indoctrination. When I say that I am a Canadian nationalist, in keeping with my country’s custom, what I really mean is that I am a Canadian patriot as I have just explained the term. I was born in Canada, raised in Canada, have lived in Canada all my life up until now, and intend to live in Canada for the remainder of my life. I feel about Canada the same way I feel about my family and friends, about the people and places I have always known and loved.

There is another kind of Canadian nationalism, one which actually is a form of nationalism rather than patriotism. Peter Brimelow aptly described this kind of Canadian nationalism as “one of the toadstools of history”. This is the kind of Canadian nationalism that was historically associated with the Liberal governments of Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, with the new school of Canadian historians that was partial to these governments – think Peter C. Newman and Pierre Berton – and which seems to be the only kind of Canadian nationalism our public broadcaster, the CBC, is interested in. This is the kind of Canadian nationalism that John Farthing described as the “pure-Canada cult” in his excellent book Freedom Wears a Crown, which is among other things the classic rebuttal of this cult. This kind of Canadian nationalism sees the Canadian identity as something Canada needed to forge anew after WWII and from which everything our country inherited from Great Britain needed to be either excluded and eliminated or underplayed and ignored. I loathe and detest this kind of Canadian nationalism. The Canada of which I am a patriot, is the country confederated under its own Parliament based on the British model in 1867, which obtained full sovereignty over her own affairs through evolution rather than revolution, by growing up within the British family of nations under our shared monarch, rather than by severing family ties. I see our country’s heritage of Loyalism, not just as manifested in the American Revolution but when Canada stood by Britain from the beginning of the Second World War, as the top of the list of things for which Canadians can rightly take pride in our country.

I am a Christian, and while I look back upon my evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, when I knelt down to pray and told the Lord Jesus Christ I accepted Him as my Saviour, as the beginning of my Christian experience, I no longer use the word Christian in its evangelicalese sense of someone who has had such a conversion, but in the more traditional sense of someone who holds to the faith affirmed in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. I was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church when I was a teenager and more recently confirmed by a bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada. I am reformed in my understanding of justification – that salvation is a work in which God is the only actor, accomplished for us in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, freely given to the world by grace and received simply through faith, and catholic in my understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, established by Christ through His Apostles to continue His incarnational presence in the world after His Ascension back to the right hand of the Father in Heaven by the collective indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and commissioned by Him to bring His grace to the world through the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Politically I am a Tory. By referring to myself as a Tory I do not mean to indicate my support for any political party but rather my holding to a set of political convictions. In Canada, like other countries with a Conservative Party, this distinction is often made by use of the expression “small c conservative”, but I prefer the term Tory, despite the potential for confusion, because my political convictions are closer to those of the Tory Party of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than of the Conservative Party into which it was reorganized early.in the nineteenth century. I believe that human beings are by nature social beings who are born not as individuals but as members of pre-existing social groups, from their families up through their local communities to their nations, and that while it is good and natural for people to develop a sense of individuality within these groups as they mature it is bad for them to become alienated and isolated, and that these social groups from the family up to the nation, are best regarded as organic wholes in which past and future generations are included with those living in the present. I believe, therefore, that governments should rule with the good of their societies viewed as such organic wholes in mind. Therefore, our most important civil institution is the office of the monarch. The monarch can represent the organic whole of a society, including past and future generations, in a way no elected politician ever could, because the royal office is filled not by popular election but by a line of succession and so embodies the principle of continuity. For the same reason the office of monarch is vested with something far more valuable and important than the power politicians obtain through winning elections – sovereign authority. Power is the strength to compel obedience, authority is the right to command obedience. The man who wins an election, whether as representative of his constituency by obtaining the largest number of its votes or as leader of the government by obtaining the support of the largest number of representatives in the legislative assembly, obtains thereby a form of power – the strength of numbers. While power in this form can come from below, true authority can only come from above, from a source that transcends politics in the sense of the struggle for power. Whether that source is conceived of as constitutional order, prescription (long established custom), divine right, or a combination of these, the office of monarch is uniquely suited to be the representative of both the transcendental source of authority and the organic whole of society. The office of monarch is also the safeguard of our social and civil order against the threat of tyranny, a threat which when it arises, almost always comes from a demagogue who claims to be the voice of the “will of the people”. It is well that in our constitution the institutions of senate and elected assembly make up the state together with and under the monarch, joining, in Stephen Leacock’s words “the dignity of kingship with the power of democracy” so long as we remember that for a government to be truly civilized, authority must take precedence over power and power must support authority. These convictions are what I mean when I describe myself as being a Tory.

While it is obvious that holding to a royalism rooted in an organic view of society in which the community precedes the individual is incompatible with an acceptance of the individualism and contractual view of society that is the underlying philosophy of libertarianism, I nevertheless, with a few important qualifications and exceptions, usually agree with the libertarians on questions of whether the government should legislate or not. I fully agree with satirical novelist and High Tory Evelyn Waugh’s libertarian statement that while men cannot live together without rules these “should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.”

I do not share the libertarian’s faith in the ability of market forces, unimpeded by legislation, to bring about a perfectly just distribution of goods and wealth but I do share his contempt for socialism’s confidence in the ability of government planners to do a better job of it. I think that under ordinary circumstances people as individuals, families, and other groups and organizations, know and are better able to manage their own business than anyone else and that governments should let them do so without intrusion and interference. This does not mean pure laissez-faire because, while governments cannot possibly manage any person or group’s business better than that person or group, much less the business of every person and group in the country, government’s can and ought to be able to manage the business of the country as a whole. A farmer, for example, does not need the government to come in, boss him around, and tell him how to run his own farm. A country, however, which needs a healthy agricultural industry to ensure an uninterrupted food supply, may need government to protect the industry if it is threatened.

Social legislation that ensures that a basic standard of living is within the reach of every member of society so that nobody goes without food, clothing, shelter or health care due to old age, infirmity, economic recession or depression, or other factors beyond their control, but only through their own bad choices is a necessity in any civilized country today but this too ought to be kept at the bare minimum. Those who support a more expansive social safety net frequently accuse those of us who try to keep it minimal of a lack of generosity, compassion, and Christian charity but when governments can only pay for these programs with money they have obtained by taxing their people, generosity, compassion, and charity have nothing to do with it. It is not generous, compassionate, or charitable to give to one person what one must first take from another. There is no virtue in being liberal, let alone magnanimous, with other people’s money. Furthermore, the expansion of basic social legislation into a welfare state can hardly be described as compassionate and charitable when it clearly contributes to illegitimacy, the break-up of families, children growing up without fathers, high rates of violent crime, and intergenerational poverty and dependence among the poorest sectors of society. The proper end of social legislation is not to try and achieve the unattainable and false ideal of equality but to alleviate misery and so prevent the kind of dissatisfaction and unrest that could threaten the civil and social order.

Often libertarians will say that government should not pass laws pertaining to morality but this is nonsense which displays an appalling ignorance of the nature of both laws and morality. Morality is a system in which human behaviour is classified into the categories of right or wrong. Laws are always statements about morality. Every law says either a) a certain behaviour is wrong in itself and hence prohibited or b) that a certain behaviour is prohibited and therefore wrong. That having being said, governments ought not to pass laws against everything that is morally wrong but only against acts which cause injury to other people, the institutions of society, and the civil order. It is enough that the police maintain the Queen’s peace, they do not need to be Mrs. Grundy’s enforcer as well.

Many today go further than this and say that questions of morality, right and wrong, are private and personal, to be decided by the individual rather than the community or society. This too is nonsense. Yes, every man must make his own moral decisions, but this means choosing his own actions not creating his own personal system of morality. The morality of his community, society, and civilization, contained in its mores and folkways, customs and habits, stories and songs, religion and culture, is the indispensable instrument by which he learns to make moral decisions and to cultivate virtues and it is the role of his parents and priests, family and church, community and its elders, to provide him with this means. This is not the role of the State and the State ought not to usurp this role nor should it undermine the efforts of the institutions and authorities whose role it is.

There are many today who look upon the last several decades since the end of the Second World War as an unprecedented Golden Age of human enlightenment in which we have made great strides towards achieving freedom, prosperity, and racial, sexual, and social equality. I am not one of those. When I look at the same decades I see the moral, spiritual, social, and cultural disintegration of my country and the wider Western Civilization to which it belongs, often in the very things those progressives consider to be “advances” over which to pat themselves on the back. If the equality of the sexes, for example, is a laudable ideal then it follows that artificial contraception and abortion must be legal, affordable, and universally accessible, for as long as women are getting pregnant, bearing, giving birth to, and nursing children with their bodies, their choices as much as those of men will ensure that the roles of the sexes will be different and not fully interchangeable, hence not equal. Abortion is the deliberate termination of innocent human life by the will of the person upon whom that life is dependent and whose instinct and duty is to protect it. It is difficult to conceive of any greater evil. George Grant was quite right when he described the arguments made in favour of it as the fascist concept of the triumph of the will masquerading behind the language of liberalism.

These revolutionary moral, social, and cultural changes are always spoken of in the language of liberation by those who look positively upon them just as they depict us who take the negative view as being puritanical zealots who wish to impose a narrow morality upon society by force of law. I find it difficult to understand how the replacement of social and cultural taboos against sexual immorality which were deeply rooted in tradition and the wisdom of the ages with newly coined taboos against thoughts and words that are deemed to be “politically incorrect”, i.e., objectionable to the brutally inflexible ideology of egalitarianism, can possibly be regarded as being liberating. Surely telling a man what he can and cannot think and say is far more intrusive than telling him that if he gets a woman pregnant he should do right by her and the child. Furthermore, these changes did not just happen on their own due to forces outside our control. They happened because those who wished to bring them about obtained enough influence in the State so as to be able to use its power to tamper and experiment with the social and moral order.

An example of this is how the law has been used to change the fundamental nature of marriage. I do not mean the recent change to include same-sex couples – that is merely a superficial consequence of the real change, albeit one that is already proving to have its own deleterious consequences on what Roger Scruton calls “the autonomous institutions” of civil society, as pressure is being placed upon religious-based educational institutions like Trinity Western University and will eventually, as everyone who is not a complete moron can see, be placed upon clergy and churches as well, to change their teachings and practices so as to be in accord with the change made in the civil law. The real change to marriage was the introduction of no-fault, easy divorce. This transformed marriage from a permanent union, formed by solemn vows, to which both partners are expected to make sacrifices of self into a temporary arrangement of convenience between couples, easier to get out of than a business partnership, that comes with legal perks. By creating no-fault divorce, government divorced marriage from all the reasons for which the institution exists in the first place and undermined other social authorities. The church is robbed of its authority if, after the priest proclaims the words of Christ, “what God has joined together let no man put asunder”, a judge is able to sign the union out of existence the next day without any fuss or muss.

I would like, of course, as one who willingly accepts the label of reactionary, to see all these changes reversed, just as I would like to see the general decay in Western thought of which they merely the most recent manifestation reversed. We have gone from thinking of the Good, the True the Beautiful as transcendent realities, that are what they are, and which it is our duty to pursue and approach to the best of our imperfect ability to thinking that they are whatever we decide them to be for ourselves. It took all the centuries of the Modern Age to bring this about but now, in what is awkwardly and absurdly called the Postmodern era, we have in a few short decades done to such visible realities as sex, what we had previously done to the invisible, transcendental, realities. Where this process of decay and disintegration may lead us next if it continues much longer, I shudder to think.

On that cheery note it is time to bring this essay to a close.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen

Lawrence Auster, R. I. P.

Lawrence Auster was buried yesterday, Tuesday April 2nd, 2013, in Philadelphia, having passed away peacefully on Good Friday morning in a hospice in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Mercifully, his death brought an end to a long, painful, struggle against the pancreatic cancer that killed him. Alas, it also brought an end to his even longer struggle against the liberalism and progressivism that have been killing the things he loved the most – his country, the United States of America, the Christian faith, and white Western civilization. Other traditionalists will continue the struggle and keep his memory alive but our side is weaker for his loss.


Mr. Auster was a right-wing pioneer in more ways than one. He was one of the earliest voices in the revival of the American immigration restriction movement. In 1965, the American government had passed an Immigration Act which introduced an open door, mass immigration policy, similar to those being introduced by liberal governments throughout the Western world. Public debate of these policies was actively discouraged by liberal media and academic elites, who insisted that the only possible grounds for opposition to such policies was an irrational prejudice against people of other ethnicities and races and branded as “racist” anyone who questioned liberal immigration and the cult of diversity. In the 1990s the opposition to this heavy-handed imposition of manufactured diversity began to organize itself. In 1992, political commentator and former Presidential aide Patrick J. Buchanan sought the Republican nomination in the first of three presidential campaigns in which he ran on a platform of immigration reform. In 1995-1996, major mainstream publishers like Random House, W. W. Norton, and Basic Books put out books by authors like Peter Brimelow, Roy Beck, and Chilton Williamson Jr. which presented intelligent arguments against the liberal position and in favour of a more restrictive immigration policy. Before all of that, however, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism had appeared, published in 1990 by the American Immigration Control Foundation. The author was Lawrence Auster.

While Mr. Auster’s book was quite short, being a booklet really, of only ninety pages, it was also lucid, intelligent, and straightforward. He directly addressed the central problem with liberal immigration – its corrosive effect upon a nation’s identity and cohesiveness. He followed up The Path To National Suicide with a few other short booklets on immigration, also published by the AICF, and for a short time was allowed to present the case for immigration reform in mainstream conservative publications like National Review, Newsmax, and FrontPageMag. This was not to last, unfortunately, and, like so many other of the most interesting and intelligent voices of the late twentieth century American right, he found that the official organs of movement conservatism were no longer interested in listening to, much less printing, what he had to say.

By that time, however, he had his own outlet for his writings. This was A View From the Right, a weblog founded in April 2002 by James Kalb, who turned it over to Mr. Auster later that year. At VFR, he continued to defy the spirit of the age, speaking tabooed truths about immigration, race, sex, and morality. Yet his work was more than just an expression of unpopular views on controversial topics. He also sought to articulate a traditionalist, conservative, philosophy that was not just a repackaging of an earlier version of liberalism, that did not rest upon a foundation of liberal ideas.

He believed in his country and its political and cultural traditions and in the Christian tradition of Western civilization. Christianity was more to him, however, than just the religion of the civilization he identified with. It was his personal faith as well. Jewish by birth and ethnicity, he recognized his Messiah and was a Christian by faith and practice. He was converted, baptized, and confirmed in the Episcopalian Church and in the last week of his life, was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

He and his insightful commentary on the events of the day will be missed.

Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him.

This and That No. 9 (Pre-Election Edition)

Our next federal election is rapidly approaching and judging from the advance polls we are living in interesting times indeed (remember that "may you live in interesting times" is supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse). If the actual election goes the way the polls are indicating (which is by no means guaranteed) the Conservative Party will finish with the largest number of seats with the New Democratic Party having the next largest and the Liberal Party being significantly reduced in seats.

I am certainly shedding no tears for the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is the party which has spent all of its existence trying to rob Canada of her rich heritage while arrogantly presenting itself as the voice of true Canadians. The Liberal Party began as the party of free trade, which sought to distance Canada from her British heritage, her loyalty to the Crown and to the British Empire, and to replace Canada's British ties with ties to the American Republic, believing that Canada's destiny lay with the United States. George P. Grant, Canada's most brilliant conservative philosopher, wrote his famous Lament for a Nation in the belief that the Liberal Party had succeeded in this goal, when it and the NDP brought down the Diefenbaker government in 1963 over the Conservative government's refusal to allow American nuclear weapons onto Canadian soil.(1)

While Lester Pearson, the Liberal leader who became Prime Minister after Diefenbaker, probably did not see himself the way Grant saw him, i.e., as working to make Canada a province of the American Empire, he certainly went out of his way to undermine Canada's traditional identity. Canada had become a country in her own right in 1867. The title the Fathers of Confederation chose for our country was "The Dominion of Canada". The word "Dominion" came from the eighth verse of the seventy second Psalm and was chosen as a synonym for "kingdom" which would be less potentially provocative to our American neighbors than the originally proposed "Kingdom of Canada" (see the discussion of this in The Kingdom of Canada, an excellent one-volume history of Canada until 1963, by Manitoban historian W. L. Morton). Pearson, however, treated the term as a synonym for "colony", which was essentially how he regarded Canada's status at the time. He saw our flag at the time, the Canadian Red Ensign (a red background, with the Union Jack in the canton, and the shield of the Canadian coat of arms in the fly) as a "colonial flag" and in 1965 succeeded in having it replaced with the current flag. The so-called "colonial flag" was the flag our armed forces fought under in Canada's most glorious military moment, when we fought, side by side with Britain, against Hitler in a war we entered under our own Parliament's declaration. (2)

Pearson was succeeded, as Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister of Canada, by Pierre Eliot Trudeau. Trudeau, a Quebec law professor and far-left journalist, would have been unelectable had Pearson not brought him into the Liberal Party, made him his Justice Minister, and groomed him to be his successor. (3) Trudeau continued Pearson's program of abolishing Canada's traditional identity and replacing it with a new one, with a Liberal stamp on it. Indeed, the foundations of virtually everything Trudeau did as Prime Minister had been laid in the Pearson premiership. It was Trudeau's government that passed the Official Languages Act in 1969, making Canada officially bilingual, on the recomendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism which Lester Pearson had started in 1963. It was Trudeau's government that passed the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977 and established the Canadian Human Rights Commission/Tribunal. Section 13 of the CHRA would became a major threat to freedom of speech in Canada in the decades to follow. The Trudeau government had already set limits on freedom of speech, however, in 1970 when the Criminal Code was amended to criminalize the distribution of "hate propaganda". This was done on the recommendations of the 1966 report to the Minister of Justice of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada, headed by Maxwell Cohen. The Cohen Committee had been commissioned by Guy Favreau, Pearson's second Minister of Justice (Trudeau, who was a member of the Cohen Committee, was Pearson's fourth and final Minister of Justice).

It is important that we understand the connection between Official Bilingualism, Official Multiculturalism (which Trudeau declared in 1971), and mass immigration on the one hand and the loss of political liberty which we have suffered in Canada on the other. The two are very much interconnected. To understand the connection, we need to abandon a notion, that was very popular in rural and Western English-speaking Canada when I was growing up, and remains popular among much of the old support base for the Reform Party of Canada. Trudeau was not acting against English Canada on behalf of Quebec. Trudeau was acting against traditional English Canada and traditional French Canada alike. If anything, he hated the latter more than the former. Remember that the Quebec Trudeau grew up in was the ultra-conservative, Roman Catholic, Union Nationale Quebec of Maurice Duplessis (4). Trudeau, like Pearson, wished to replace both traditional English Canada and traditional French Canada with a "new Canada" in which everybody would be both English and French.

Thus the Official Languages Act declaring Canada "officially bilingual" and the official declaration of Canada to be "multicultural" according to the mosaic model. In the last year of the Pearson premiership, a new "points system" was introduced into Canadian immigration, in which new immigrants would be approved on the basis of their knowing English or French, having skills that we are in short supply of in Canada, and other such positives. That part of the system is non-objectionable but it came with a number of large backdoors that Trudeau was able to exploit in order to drastically alter the demographic makeup of immigrants coming into the country. This was done deliberately in order to undermine the ethnic homogeneity of both the traditional English Canadian communities and the traditional French Canadian communities in the hopes of grinding down both traditional communities in order to replace them with "new Canada". All of this rot about "hate propaganda" was introduced as a tactic to silence critics of the government's policies. (5)

Trudeau left his biggest and most devastating change for last. In 1982, he had Canada's constitution, the British North America Act of 1867, repatriated to Canada and renamed the Constitution Act. What "repatriation" meant was that now the constitution could be amended by Canada's Parliament without it having to be voted on in London. This, in itself, was not the problem. The problem was that Trudeau could not resist adding something to the Constitution which drastically altered its nature. That something was the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms".

Do not let the name of that document fool you. You do not possess a single right or freedom today, as Canadians, as a result of that Charter, that you did not possess prior to 1982. Nor are your rights and freedoms as Canadians more secure as a result of it. The exact opposite is the case. Before 1982, you already enjoyed, as subjects of the British/Canadian sovereign, all the traditional, prescriptive, rights and freedoms of Englishmen. Those freedoms, include the freedom to do whatever you want so long as it is not specifically proscribed by positive law, and rights which protected you against the arbitrary use of government power. All of those rights and freedoms were rendered less secure by the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms". In section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, many of your most basic freedoms are listed (freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of association, etc.) and in sections 7 through 14 your traditional rights protecting you from the arbitrary abuse of government power are listed. Section 33, authorizes the government to pass temporary laws which ignore completely all those rights and freedoms, for a period of up to five years. This is called the "notwithstanding clause". Section 1 of the Charter, also gives the government room to weasel out of these rights and freedoms by saying that they are "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society".

This is the Liberal Party's legacy in Canada. I will not be sorry to see them lose their influence in this country.

It is unfortunate, however, that their downfall must be accompanied by the rise of the NDP. If the NDP really has risen to 31% popularity in this country that does not speak well of the intelligence of our electorate. I just checked out the NDP's platform over at their website. Jack Layton is saying that he has an " affordable plan" to "get Ottawa working for your family - one practical step at a time". That sounds pretty good. The problem is that Layton appears to have forgotten what the meanings of the words "affordable" and "practical" are.

His first "practical step" is to "hire more nurses and doctors". The expansion of this says that more nurses and doctors will be trained and incentives will be given to doctors who have left Canada to return. Who is going to pay for the nurses and doctors to be trained? "Incentives" translates into money. Who is going to pay for that?

What Jack Layton wants you to think is that he and the government he leads will pay for all of this. The problem with that is that the only resources government has to pay for anything are what it obtains from you and from me through taxes. This is a fact which Layton's program consistently ignores.

His second "practical step" is to "work with the provinces to double your public pension", which again raises the question of where this money is going to come from, and to "offer you more choice over your retirement savings". These are mutually exclusive. If the government doubles your public pension, that means it will have to take more money from you now in the form of taxes. If it takes more money from you now in the form of taxes, that will reduce your choices as to your retirement savings, not increase them.

It gets more interesting when you open up the expanded version of his platform. He promises to "increase the annual Guaranteed Income Supplement to a sufficient level in the first budget to lift every senior in Canada out of poverty immediately", again giving no indication as to where the money to do this is going to come from. The section entitled "Improving Family and Maternity Leave Benefits" is a fascinating example of the ways in which language can be used. He describes his "Employment Insurance Compassionate Care Benefit" as "more flexible and generous" and says that it will "permit family members to take up to six months leave from work to tend to relatives near the end of their lives, up from the current six weeks". Now what that means translated into ordinary English is simply this: that he will pass a law ordering employers to give their employees six months leave to take care of dying relatives. He has managed to describe a law which tells someone that they have to do something as an act of permission which is "more flexible and generous". What an utter perversion of the English language!

He promises to create "25,000 new child care spaces per year for the next four years" and to create "integrated, community-based, child-centred early learning and education centres that provide parents with a “one-stop shop” for family services". The former is yet another expensive promise that Layton will have to pay for out of your pocket. The latter sounds like something out of a dystopic novel, the establishment of government institutions to program your children.

It is disturbing to think that there are actually enough people considering voting for this man that some commentators are actually taking seriously the idea that he might form the next government.

It is not the role of government, people, to provide you with everything that you want but which you do not want to pay for out of your own pocket. That is not the government's role because the government is not capable of filling that role. A government's only resources are what it receives in taxes from its people. The purpose of government is to provide what only government can provide - laws, justice, defense of society against foreign attacks, etc.

It is most likely that the Conservative Party will form the next government. The best thing that can be said about the present Conservative Party is that it appears to be committed to maintaining Canada's ties to the monarchy. "A belief in our constitutional monarchy, the institutions of Parliament and the democratic process" is one of the Conservative Party's "founding principles". As a Johnson Tory that gets my whole-hearted approval.

Sadly, there is very little else I can think of that is good about the present Conservative Party. It was founded by a merger of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Reform Party of Canada/Canadian Alliance. It tends to unite the worst qualities of both of these parties. It has proven to be no friend to those wishing to restore traditional freedom of speech in this country. It has barred controversial speakers like British Labour MP George Galloway and American conservative scholar Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from entering the country, giving absurd official reasons, when it is their controversial speech that is truly being targetted. It was Stephen Harper who appointed Jennifer Lynch Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Lynch defended all of the most atrocious behavior of that body. Stephen Harper and his immigration minister Jason Kenney have shown themselves to be committed to Trudeau's vision of multiculturalism. (6) Stephen Harper continues to declare that social issues like abortion will not be discussed.

So, who do I vote for on Monday?

If only the Rhinoceros Party were running a candidate in my riding!



(1)Ironically, Grant was the uncle of the current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Michael Ignatieff's mother was Grant's sister.

(2) Pearson, who thus insulted Canada's brave World War II veterans, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1957, for talking the United Nations into creating an army of international busybodies to help the UN more effectively go around the world, sticking its nose into peoples' conflicts where it isn't wanted, and get credit for doing good when it 9 times out of 10 just makes things worse.

(3) "But it was obvious that he was systematically building up Trudeau, by bringing him into federal politics in 1965, by making him his won parliamentary secretary in 1966 and then justice minister in 1967, by orchestrating constitutional, legislative and party happenings to ensure his prominence, and finally by resigning on 1968 at the moment best calculated to benefit him and inconvenience his rivals. At various times afterwards Pearson admitted his role, and the other candidates had no doubt they were up against what one of them, the young John Turner, denounced as 'the Liberal Establishment' and its 'backstage deals'" - Peter Brimelow, The Patriot Game: National Dreams & Political Realities (Key Porter Books: Toronto, 1986) p. 62. At the same time Trudeau was brought into the Liberal Party, two of his far-left friends Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand came with him. The trio were dubbed "the three wise men".

(4) One of George Grant's criticism's of John Diefenbaker was that he should have strengthened his government by working with the Union Nationale in Quebec. Grant attributed Diefenbaker's failure to do so to Baptist prejudice against Roman Catholics.

(5) Supporters of our "hate speech" laws will tell you that they were drawn up to combat a threat from Nazism and other forms of violent racism in Canada. This is pure nonsense. A law to combat the threat of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster would make more sense.

(6)http://www.vdare.com/grace/100817_camp_of_the_saints.htm