The Courts

This week we in the Dominion of Canada received some good news from the Federal Court.   It came about a week after we received bad news from the Court of Appeal in Upper Canada.   The good news consisted of a ruling.   The bad news, by contrast, was a refusal to rule, or even to hear a case.   I take this as further support for my long-established opinion that the courts of Upper Canada are the most corrupt in the Dominion.   Except maybe the courts of British Columbia.

 

The bad news was that the Upper Canada – for those who insist upon being slaves to the present day, the contemporary and the up-to-date, this is what you would call Ontario – Court of Appeal had refused to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson, the well-known psychologist, educator, author and philosopher, in his case against the province’s College of Psychologists, the body that issues his professional license.   The College had ordered him into sensitivity training because they didn’t like something he said on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.   The remark had nothing to do with his professional practice and was entirely political – he said something uncomplimentary about Captain Airhead.   That no professional licensing board ought to be able to discipline one of its members for expressing these sort of opinions in this way is a no-brainer.   Although Peterson could have just told the College to take a hike – he has not used his professional license in years and is not dependent upon it financially – he opted to take them to court and fight for the principle at stake.   Anybody whose job or career requires a professional license and who does not want the licensing board to be allowed to act as a proxy censor for his political or ideological opponents by blackmailing him into changing his opinions or keeping silent about them by holding a gun to his license should be grateful that someone was willing to do this.  

 

It should have been an easy win for Peterson.   The College of Psychologists was 100% in the wrong and should have been slapped down hard by the courts.   Instead the Divisional Court ruled in their favour.   By refusing to hear Peterson’s appeal, the Court of Appeal has closed the door to taking the case to a higher court.   You can only appeal rulings, not refusals to consider.   The right of a court to refuse to hear a case is for the purpose of preventing the judicial system from being swamped by trivial and nonsensical nuisance suits.   Like the man who dreams that his neighbour’s dog has torn up his flower bed and then repeatedly tries to sue his neighbour for damages.   This case is nothing like that.   The principle at stake - that professional licensing boards must not be allowed to serve as proxy censors for those who wish to “cancel” someone for his opinions – is vital and fundamental.   The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal, by abusing its right of refusal in this way, has demonstrated that it is no longer worthy of possessing that right.

 

The good news was that the Federal Court has ruled that Captain Airhead acted unreasonably in invoking the Emergencies Act on Valentine’s Day in 2022.   Captain Airhead, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.   He has occupied the office of Prime Minister in His Majesty’s government in Ottawa since 2015.   He resembles nothing so much as the result of an experiment at producing a golem using bovine excrement rather than mud and the word  שֶׁקֶר (sheker, “lies”) rather than אֱמֶת (emet, “truth”).   The official story, however, is that he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.  However he got here, we are in the ninth year of his misgovernment and everybody is pretty much sick of him.  

 

In 2022, we were going into the third year of the world-wide panic over a novel respiratory virus that proved to be more of a nasty strain of the flu than that apocalyptic, super-plague ala Stephen King’s The Stand that politicians, journalists, and the legal dope-peddlers that long ago supplanted the legitimate medical profession, claimed it to be.   By January 2022 the world was re-opening but Captain Airhead, who in the last Dominion election had flip-flopped and come down hard in favour of requiring people to take the experimental and inadequately tested new vaccines that had been rushed to production, hurling the most abusive terms in the liberal dictionary against anyone who thought correctly that the choice to be injected with such a substance must be strictly voluntary, doubled down and imposed new vaccine mandates as they were being lifted in other jurisdictions.   One such new mandate was on long-distance truck drivers who haul freight across the border with the United States.   In response, these truck drivers organized the biggest protest against heavy-handed, draconian, health protocols that Canada had yet seen.   Trucks from all over Canada formed the Freedom Convoy that descended upon Ottawa and encamped in the streets outside of Parliament.   It was an entirely peaceful protest that posed no threat to Canada’s national security.    The protesters basically threw a long, extended, block party in which they patriotically celebrated Canada and her traditional basic freedoms and exercised those freedoms in ways like associating with each other in large numbers, in person and close up that before 2020 we all took to be our basic Common Law right but which the politicians and health bureaucrats had been treating as crimes against humanity for two and a half years.   Their demands were quite reasonable – that the government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers, respect our fundamental freedoms, and stop committing the actual crime against humanity of forcing people, by denying them access to employment and society unless they comply, to agree to be injected with a foreign substance the safety of which they were not fully persuaded.  

 

Captain Airhead and his cronies refused to meet with the protesters to discuss their grievances, called them all sorts of bad names and accused them of all sorts of other political agendas that had nothing to do with the single-issue cause that brought them to Ottawa.   Then, on 14 February, Captain Airhead announced that he was invoking the Emergencies Act.  The Emergencies Act is a piece of legislation that was passed during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.  It replaced the War Measures Act that Captain Airhead’s father had invoked to crush the FLQ in the October Crisis of 1970.   In both cases this was major overkill.   The Emergencies Act like the War Measures Act gives the government extraordinary powers of detention by putting the governed under what is essentially martial law.   It came into effect immediately upon being invoked, although both Houses were required to confirm it.   When it became apparent the Senate was not likely to do so, Captain Airhead withdrew the invocation, but by this time the damage had been done.   The thuggish Ottawa police, led by one Steve Bell whose actions were so disgraceful that in my opinion the Canadian contemporary Christian artist of the same name might want to consider changing his, with the free rein given them had charged into the throng of protesters on horseback, trampling on some, beating others with batons, spraying many with pepper spray and tear gas, and otherwise brutalizing people who merely wanted the basic freedoms supposedly guaranteed to them by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms restored.   They were arrested in droves, their vehicles were vandalized and confiscated, and across the country the bank accounts of people who had donated to the protest were frozen.

 

In accordance with the requirements of the Emergencies Act an inquiry was called and while Captain Airhead attempted to frame the inquiry so that the light of its scrutiny fell upon the protesters rather than the government he led, he did not succeed in this.   During the proceedings, in which Captain Airhead and his ministers testified, the government claimed that it had received expert legal advice that the Emergencies Act was necessary and that the conditions for invoking it had been met but when asked to share that advice hid behind the privilege of counsel.   Despite their not being forthcoming with the supposed grounds of their thinking the use of the Emergencies Act was justified, in February of 2023 Justice Paul Rouleau who headed the inquiry declared that the findings of his commission were that the “very high threshold” for invoking the Emergencies Act had been met.   That this was not the case was obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.   Rouleau’s ruling was widely dismissed as yet more Liberal Party cronyism.   Perhaps there is another explanation, but in any case, even had it ruled otherwise, the Public Order Emergency Commission was a toothless body that only had powers to investigate and give an opinion, not to make its findings binding in any way.

 

The Federal Court, by contrast, is a real court.   Its decisions are binding in law and affect future rulings.   When, therefore, its Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the government’s invocation of the Emergency Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified” this ruling has much more weight and potential consequences than had it come from Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission.   It amounts, for example, to a ruling that Captain Airhead and his Cabinet broke the law.   Not just in the sense of a misdemeanour or even a regular felony.  They broke the law in what is arguably the worst possible way in which politicians can break the law.   Without meeting the requirements of the safeguards placed in the Emergencies Act to prevent this very situation, they invoked the Act in order to make use of the extraordinary powers it grants government in situations of real emergency and did so in order to essentially declare war on Canadians who posed no threat to national security and who were merely, peacefully if noisily, demanding that government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers.   We all knew at the time that this is what they were doing, this is what the testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission indicates even if that body ruled otherwise, and now the Federal Court has affirmed it.

The only honourable thing left for Captain Airhead now – and for Chrystia Freeland and anyone else involved in that debacle – is to resign, and not just resign but follow the lead of David Lametti, who had been Minister of Justice and Attorney General at the time, and get out of politics altogether.   Unfortunately, people like Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland have no honour, and if they ever heard the word would probably have a conversation that would go like this:

 

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, what’s honour?”

Captain Airhead: “Duh, I don’t know, a dress?”

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, that’s sexist!”

 

My apologies for making Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland seem more intelligent in the above than they actually are.   It is difficult to invent dialogue that reaches their level of imbecility.

 

So they are likely going to cling to power to the bitter end.   Fortunately, coming so soon after a year in which what was left of their popularity rapidly swirled down the drain and was gone, this is probably going to hasten that end.

 

The Federal Court ruling could not have come at a better time.   Tucker Carlson, formerly of FOX News, now with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, came up to Alberta this week to speak in Calgary and Edmonton.  He took our government to task for its promotion of Christophobic hate, for its promotion of social and cultural capital eroding mass immigration, for its insane MAID (medical assistance in dying) program and its equally insane drug policy (harm reduction through safe supply).   Needless to say, I have no objections to what Carlson said on these matters and probably agree with 98% of it if not higher.   It very much amused me to see Captain Airhead’s remaining flunkies, such as Steven Guilbeault whose past as an eco-nut ought to have disqualified him from his current position of Minister of Environment, have kittens over his speeches.   It is almost as comical as the mainstream media’s attempts to portray Carlson as a promoter of “white supremacy”.   One can only hope they continue to lay it on thick, because the more they do so, the less meaning that expression will have, and the sooner the day will come when liberals will no longer be able to use it as a stick to beat and frighten people with.    Most amusing of all, however, was how Carlson packaged his appearance by saying that he was coming to “liberate Canada” from Captain Airhead.  

 

This is funny on two levels.  There is the level intended by Carlson, which was basically the verbal equivalent of poking Captain Airhead in the eyes or pulling some other similar gag from the Three Stooges.   Then there is the level unintended by Carlson – the hilarity in the very idea of an American “liberating” Canada or anywhere else for that matter.   Americans believe their country to be uniquely built on liberty, and in a way that is true, but the American concept of liberty is basically what you get when you take the ancient heresy of Pelagianism and the Puritan version of Calvinism and produce a Hegelian synthesis from these antitheses. This is a pale substitute for freedom as conceived by pre-Modern orthodox Christianity, which flourishes best under the reign of a king, like our own King Charles III.    “Freedom” as John Farthing put it “wears a crown”.   The United States was founded in revolt against the order of Christendom, as modified in the English Reformation, and as Loyalist Canada inherited it.   As far from our roots as we have come, I note, that eventually, our Federal Court, ruled against the legality and constitutionality of Captain Airhead’s most egregious overstep over the powers of his office.   In Carlson’s own country, four years ago, Donald the Orange, winning a larger number of votes than when he was first elected president, somehow lost the election to J. Brandon Magoo, who was unpopular even among Democrat voters - how he got the nomination is something of a mystery, and who didn’t campaign.   Magoo, who obviously belongs in a rest home somewhere, is equally obviously the puppet of somebody else who is actually governing the United States in line with the globalist-internationalist-high immigration-free trade-invade-the-world-invite-the-world consensus that prevailed during the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama administrations and against which Donald the Orange had successfully campaigned.   For four years Americans have been kept from having any kind of serious national discussion about the shenanigans that clearly must have taken place for Magoo to have won that election, by the fear of reprisals from the regime.   This fear was instilled by the Magoo regime’s successful efforts to portray the events that transpired on Capitol Hill, Epiphany 2021 as an “insurrection” against the American order supported by the past president.   Before being ousted from FOX, Carlson broadcast film footage that cast serious doubt upon that narrative of which there had already been plenty of good reasons to be suspicious.   Captain Airhead in the narrative he tried to spin about the Freedom Convoy in invoking the Emergencies Act was clearly trying to import into Canada the narrative that has worked so well to prop up the Magoo regime in the United States.   He failed, however, to make the inquiry into the Emergencies Act a witch hunt for his political enemies, the way the Democrats have made the inquiries into the Capitol Hill incident a witch hunt against Donald the Orange and his supporters.   The inquiry was into his actions, not those of the Freedom Convoy.  When the Commission ruled in his favour, an actual Court finally ruled his actions to be illegal. Let us pray, for Tucker Carlson’s sake and for the sake of his country that the lies propping up the Magoo regime will meet with a similar fate.

God Save the King!

Thanks for the Laugh Tucker, But No, His Majesty’s Free Canadian Subjects Do Not Need Your Type of “Liberation”

 As a madman who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, So is the man that deceiveth his neighbor, and saith, Am not I in sport? (Proverbs 26:18-19)

 

There was a dinner once, one of those formal affairs that people pay to attend and where they are forced to listen to a seemingly endless program of speeches.  At this one, the audience was about evenly divided between Canadians and Americans and they were intermixed among the various tables.   At the table where the speakers were sitting a debate broke out over concepts and styles of humour.   One speaker took the position that Canadians and Americans were indistinguishable in their senses of humour.   Another argued that Canadian humour was distinct from American humour. 

 

The debate continued through a couple of the formal speeches until the second debater, the one who contended for a distinction between Canadian and American humour, was on dock to speak next.   At this point he said that he would settle the matter.   “I’m up next”, he said.  “I bet you that I can separate the Canadians from the Americans in the room with a single joke.”

 

His interlocutor agreed to the bet and the speaker ahead of him concluded his speech.   “The ones who laugh are the Canadians” he said before going to the podium.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen” he said “I’m afraid I have some bad news.   The world will end at 7:30 tonight.   8:00 in Newfoundland”.

 

The preceding joke has, of course, been made largely obsolete by the demise of broadcast television and the explosion of new communications technology as well as by the waning number of Canadians who listen to or watch the CBC in any media format.   Today, the “8:00 in Newfoundland” joke would be more effective at distinguishing between older and younger generations of Canadians than distinguishing between Canadians and Americans.

 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson maintains that we Canadians have no sense of humour and cannot take a joke.    Is he right?

 

The backstory to this begins with a remark he made towards the end of last month on “Tucker Carlson Today.”   This is the show he does on Fox Nation, the station’s streaming platform.  It has different content and a different format from “Tucker Carlson Tonight”,his weekday evening show on the station’s main cable/satellite platform.   He was joking with a guest about our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.    In this context, he brought up all the money the United States is wasting on the Ukraine and asked “Why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau?   And I mean it”.

 

This came to the attention of Matthew Green, the Member representing Hamilton Centre in the House of Commons, who raised a motion on Tuesday, 26 January, calling upon the House to unanimously condemn Carlson’s remark.   Green and the party he represents, the socialist NDP, apparently took the Fox host’s remark as a serious proposal.   The motion did not receive the unanimous consent that was sought and was defeated.  

 

This prompted a response from Carlson on his show the following Wednesday.   “We don’t want to be too picayune or anything, but we did not suggest the armed forces liberate Canada” he said, either having forgotten his exact words or attempting to get the maximum mileage out of the distinction between a suggestion and a question.   Then, after a few remarks about everyone who cares about rights having fled Canada, Canada having become a dictatorship, the United States not liking dictatorships, and the like, he said that there is “so little going on in Canada, like civil liberties, that if you tell a joke about Canada, they go bonkers”.  

 

Green and his party, who have not let the matter drop but taken it from the floor of the House of Commons to their webpage where they are asking people to sign an online petition telling Tucker Carlson that his “hate” isn’t welcome in Canada, have responded very foolishly.   Even though he said “And I mean it” the overall laughing, flippant, tone of the conversation rather contradicted these words which he seems to have used much in the same manner in which teenagers, college students, progressive activists and other empty-headed twits use the word “literally”, i.e., as a sort of emphatic punctuation rather than with its actual meaning.   Carlson was joking.   It was an extremely tasteless joke.   Jokes about invading someone else’s country belong in the same category as jokes about murdering someone else’s children or raping his wife.   It is best not to bestow dignity upon such by acknowledging them, much less making an issue out of them in the halls of Parliament.  

 

Everything I just said applies to the joke that Tucker Carlson told intentionally.   There is another joke in his words, one which I rather suspect he told unwittingly.   It is a much better joke.

 

It is a joke to think of the United States “liberating” another country.    From the moment they staged their Revolution in the Eighteenth Century the Americans have been talking incessantly about “freedom” and “liberating” people.  All this is and all it has ever been is enough hot air to float a fleet of Chinese spy balloons.  The Americans fought their Revolution to “free” themselves from the most liberal government in the world at the time.   That’s liberal in the older and better sense of the word which referred to the belief that government power needed to be restrained and limited to protect the personal rights and freedoms of the governed.  The American revolutionaries falsely accused the British government of tyrannizing them despite that government’s having taken a largely laissez-faire approach to them, because it would not let them forcibly convert the French Roman Catholics of Quebec to English-speaking Protestantism and would not let them go into Indian territory and take it by force.   When, about thirty years after their Revolution the Americans did indeed try to “liberate” Canada they found that the Canadians correctly understood their “liberation” to mean “conquest” and preferred to remain in the British Empire.   The Canadians fought alongside the British army and successfully repelled the American invaders.    In this period, between the Americans having attained independence from the British Empire in the eighteenth century and British North America’s Confederation into the Dominion of Canada in the late nineteenth century, we who remained in the British Empire generally enjoyed greater freedom, less regulation, and more decentralized governance than the Americans did under their new federal republic.

 

Before proceeding to comment on the United States’ next big “liberation” project I would like to expand upon the last sentence of the last paragraph by saying with regards to the relative freedom of Canada and the United States that the nineteenth century was not the last time in which the case could be made for Canada being the freer of the two countries.   It made news last month when the Frazer Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the United States released the 2022 edition of the Human Freedom Index and Canada was in thirteenth place – a drop from her previous spot of sixth, and the first time since 2012 that Canada has fallen below the top ten.   In the 2022 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom  Canada ranks lower yet, at fifteenth place.   Undoubtedly the present Liberal government has contributed significantly to the decline in Canadian freedom – the compilers of the Human Freedom Index say that a large part of this was due to Canada’s harsh pandemic measures and while provincial governments, mostly Conservative, contributed to this, the main push for lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine mandates came from the Dominion government.   Note, however, where the United States stands on both of these Indexes.   She is twenty-third on the Human Freedom Index and twenty-fifth on the Index of Economic Freedom.   In other words on both she is ten spots below Canada.   If we switch from discussing freedom in general terms to specific freedoms examples of freedoms that seem to have stronger constitutional protection in the United States than in Canada can be found.   Among fundamental freedoms, freedom of speech is the example that stands out and among auxiliary freedoms, the freedom to own and carry arms.   This, however, merely makes the rankings in these indexes that deal with freedom in more general terms all the more striking. These relative rankings are not an anomaly of the 2022 editions.  Nor can they be explained by pro-Trudeau bias.   The Cato Institute and Frazer Institute are libertarian think tanks and the Index of Economic Freedom is published by the Heritage Foundation – the foremost American conservative think tank. If there is any bias it would be in the opposite direction.   Undoubtedly such facts will cause some sort of mental breakdown among those incapable of distinguishing between talking the most and the loudest about freedom on the one hand and actually possessing and practicing it on the other.    

 

After failing to conquer Canada in the War of 1812, the next big “liberation” project undertaken by the United States followed upon the organization of the Republican Party in 1854 and the first election of a nominee of that party to the office of President of the United States in 1860.   Thirteen states found Abraham Lincoln to be such an insufferable ass that upon his election they decided to exercise the right of secession which the founders of their republic had written into their constitution after the original thirteen colonies had illegally seceded from the British Empire.   The breakaway states formed their own federal republic, the Confederate States of America, which the United States promptly invaded and conquered, employing brutal scorched earth tactics in what remains the bloodiest war in their history.    The states that wanted to secede were subjugated and those that had remained in the Union found themselves, alongside the conquered South, now saddled with a federal government that was exponentially more centralized, more powerful, and more intrusive than it had been before.   Naturally, the American government spun this as a war of “liberation” or, to use the synonym that was in vogue at the time, “emancipation”, i.e., of the slaves, and to be sure, after the war they passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing most types of slavery.   It is interesting, however, how that in his first Inaugural Address Lincoln had promised to do the exact opposite of that if the seceding states returned to the Union, whereas the Confederates had offered to abolish slavery if the United States would let them leave.   One might be tempted to think that the abolition of slavery, the accomplishment of which, oddly enough, required a deadly internecine war nowhere other than in the United States, was merely a pretext and that the true purpose of the war was to concentrate the political power that had previously been diffused through the American states in the American federal government in Washington D. C.

 

When the United States decided to enter World War I on the side of Great Britain, France and the other Allies their president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, sold it to Congress as a war to “make the world safe for democracy”.   Since such idealistic romantic drivel had nothing to do with the war as it had been fought  up to that point Wilson had to give the war a makeover and inserted into the conditions for peace at the end of the war that the German and Austrian emperors abdicate their thrones and these countries become republics.   This boneheaded blunder created the vacuum that two decades later was exploited by a man who consolidated both republics into one, made himself dictator, and set out to conquer Europe.   Once again Britain and the Commonwealth and France went to war with Germany and once again the United States joined us after her morally handicapped president figured out a way of maneuvering Japan into bombing his own country.   The Allies invaded Nazi-occupied Europe on D-Day and for once the United States took part in an invasion that actually was a liberation as the Allies drove the Nazi occupiers out of Western Europe.   Eastern Europe did not fare so well.   There it was the Soviet Union that drove the Wehrmacht back to Germany but rather than liberate these countries it enslaved them to Communism.   This was an outcome that the other Allies did not want but was forced upon them by American president Franklin Roosevelt, the bitch to Joseph Stalin’s butch.  

 

At the end of the Second World War, therefore, the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe up to and including East Germany.    Soon thereafter the Chinese Civil War would start up again and the Chinese Communists, whom the Americans had insisted must be part of any Chinese government that wished to have good relations with the United States, drove their main rivals the Chinese Nationalists off the mainland which they then turned into the People’s Republic of China.       The Americans had brought the Second World War to an end with the unconscionable act of actually using the new weapon of mass destruction they had invented in the Manhattan Project to kill thousands of civilians in a country that had been trying to negotiate peace terms for a year.   By the end of the decade the Soviets had obtained this technology and the nuclear arms race was on.   In the Cold War, the United States, now the leading power in the West, maintained military bases in Western Europe and a nuclear arsenal to deter invasion from the Communist bloc.   The nuclear arms race, however, meant that if the USA and the USSR were to directly attack each other both would end up destroyed and the whole world along with them.   Therefore, while the Soviets and Americans both sponsored revolutionary groups that sought to take over the governments of third party countries – and each described the goal of the groups they sponsored as “liberation” – neither was willing to risk the direct confrontation that would bring about Mutually Assured Destruction.  Accordingly, military ventures in which the United States came to the assistance of someone fighting against actual Communist forces, such as the Vietnam War tended to end in failure or at best stalemate as in Korea.   At the same time they used the Cold War as a pretext to overthrow the governments of several countries – Guatemala in 1954 for example – for reasons of their own that had nothing to do with Communism.  The countries they so “liberated” were hardly better off for it  

 

This last item, that the United States used the Cold War as a pretext to “liberate”, i.e., overthrow the governments of several countries for reasons that had nothing to do with containing or rolling back the spread of Soviet Communism, is the germ of truth in the interpretation of the Cold War popular with leftists of the Noam Chomsky variety.   Otherwise, this interpretation which treats the Soviet threat itself as having been non-existent, a fiction devised to cloak American capitalist imperialism, is wrong and laughably so.     Just as laughable, however, was the idea of the United States as the great protector of the free world against Soviet tyranny.  In many ways this is comparable to a mob protection racket.   You know how these work.   The mob boss sends some of the boys over to a local business where they say “real nice place you’ve got here, it would be a shame if something happened to it” and collect a payoff from the business owner for protection from themselves.  The Communist threat was real alright, but it came with a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.    I pointed out earlier how the United States’ having demanded the abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies created the vacuum that enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power.  While the American government did not have the opportunity of overthrowing the Russian Tsar in the way she drove the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties from their thrones since Tsarist Russia was on the side of the Allies, her Wall Street bankers financed the Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Orthodox Tsarist Russia and her Empire into the Communist, atheist, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the knowledge and approval of Woodrow Wilson.   As hard as it is for those raised in the Cold War with its dualistic mythos of the capitalist United States as the champion of light and freedom against the Communist Soviet Union the avatar of darkness and bondage to wrap their heads around the fact in the first half of the Twentieth Century right up to the start of the Cold War the attitude of the American government and indeed the American establishment in general towards the Bolsheviks and their regime was adulatory and supportive.   The Americans of that era saw the Bolsheviks as being brothers-in-arms in the common cause of Modern progress.   The difference between the Communist economic system and their own was less important to such Americans than their similarities.   Both the American and the Bolshevik regimes had been born out of revolution.   The Americans had rebelled against their king and established a federal republic, the Bolsheviks had murdered the Tsar and his family and established a federation of republics.   The Americans in their Bill of Rights had prohibited church establishment in their First Amendment, the Bolsheviks declared Soviet Russia to be officially atheist and sought to eradicate the church.   The Bolshevik approach was more murderous than the American, but both saw monarchy and the established church as that from which people needed to be liberated.   Both saw revolution as the means of liberation.   Both had a linear progressive or Whig view of history as moving from a dark past to a bright, shining, future and both had a materialistic faith in man’s ability to solve his problems through science and technology.   The United States was one of the first, if not the first, Western country to enact most of the planks of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.   For example, the second and fifth planks (“a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”) were implemented in the United States in 1913, the year before World War I broke out (1).   FDR’s fawning and obsequious behavour towards the worst of the Soviet dictators was not just some sick idiosyncrasy of his own, it was this earlier, positive, American attitude towards Bolshevism taken to its extreme.   While Americans quickly learned the true nature of the Soviet regime with the onset of the Cold War elements of the earlier attitude persisted until 1959 when the Americans helped put Fidel Castro into power in Cuba.   This too they thought of as an act of “liberation”.

 

When it comes to freedom or liberty, Americanism is largely zeal without knowledge.   The idea of revolution as the means of liberation is nonsense to anyone familiar with the history of revolutions the outcome of which is generally tyranny.  A stable and secure civil order is the prerequisite of freedom.  Revolutions are by their very nature inimical to stability and security which furthermore are the properties of long established institutions not of newly minted ones.  The new regime that emerges from a revolution has seized power, but has not attained authority and so must rely upon naked power to govern.   The very word tyranny itself originally spoke of usurpation, an ancient testimony to the fact that power that is seized is power that is abused.   The equation of freedom with democracy or the republican form of government is also nonsense.   Every dictator in the history of the world has come to power by claiming to speak for the people as their voice and champion and the most brutal dictators have been those with the masses behind them.   Every Communist state has been republican in form as was Nazi Germany.  With only a couple of exceptions the freest countries of the last century and indeed all of history have had parliamentary governments under reigning monarchs.   This is hardly surprising given what we just stated about a stable and secure civil order being the prerequisite of freedom and stability and security being traits that come with long establishment.   Monarchy is the most ancient and stable of government institutions.   Our American friends and neighbours are quite ass-backwards on all this.

 

Tucker Carlson appears to think that Canada has become a dictatorship under the premiership of Captain Airhead.   Is he right?

 

Captain Airhead certainly has a dictatorial mindset.   This was evident in the way he led his own party before he became Prime Minister and it has been evident in the way he has governed Canada since.   It was most on display in his response to the Freedom Convoy last year.   Rather than meet with and speak to those who were loudly but peacefully protesting his vaccine mandates he became the first Prime Minister in the Dominion’s history to invoke the Emergencies Act.   His father had been widely thought to have acted dictatorially in 1970 when he invoked the War Measures Act to deal with terrorists who were kidnapping and murdering people.    Captain Airhead invoked the successor legislation to the War Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest and moreover did so when the only aspect of the protest that was anything more than a nuisance to other Canadians, the partial blocking of traffic on important trade routes, had already been dealt with by local law enforcement without the use of emergency powers.   This was clearly the act of a Prime Minister who had lost whatever respect he may ever have had for the limits that tradition, constitutional law, or even common decency place on the powers of his office.   He froze the bank accounts of ordinary Canadians who were fed up with draconian pandemic measures and had donated a few dollars to the protest against such, he sent armed and mounted policemen in to thuggishly brutalize the protestors, and threw the protest’s organizers in prison.   Then, nine days after it was invoked he rescinded it.  However much he might think and act like a dictator, Canada’s constitution still works sufficiently to prevent him from actually being one.  After the Prime Minister declares a public order emergency both chambers of Parliament have to confirm the invoking of the Emergencies Act.   Captain Airhead was able to obtain such confirmation from the House of Commons when he and the leader of the socialist party shut down debate and whipped their caucuses into voting for it.   The Senate, however, was not about to rubber stamp the Emergencies Act.  They debated it vigorously and it would seem that it was because he did not have enough votes in the Senate to obtain confirmation that the Prime Minister revoked the Act and voluntarily gave up his emergency powers rather than face the humiliation of being stripped of them by the chamber of sober second thought.   Another aspect of our constitution that likely contributed to the revoking of the Act is the fact that Canada is a federation.   The Prime Minister had consulted with the provincial premiers before invoking the Emergencies Act, had received the general response that it was a bad idea, and a few days before he revoked it a couple of provincial governments announced that they would be filing legal challenges to it.

 

Could this sort of thing ever happen in the United States?

 

The year before the Freedom Convoy was the year in which the United States swore in a new president, Mr. Magoo.   To secure his inauguration, they sent in thousands of National Guardsmen and other armed forces and turned Washington DC into a military occupied zone.   Rather poor imagery for a country that boasts of its peaceful transfers of power but this was deemed necessary because of an incident that had taken place two weeks prior on the Feast of Epiphany.  That was the day that the American Congress was scheduled to meet to confirm the results of the previous year’s presidential election.   These were highly irregular results to say the least.  The incumbent, even though he increased his vote count from the previous election and carried almost all the bellwether states and countries, ordinarily near infallible predictors of an incumbent victory, apparently lost to Mr. Magoo, who’s having been nominated by his own party was somewhat difficult to explain given how poorly he had done in the primaries.   At any rate, the incumbent, Donald the Orange, believed he had good cause to suspect foul play.   As Congress convened on Epiphany, he held a massive rally of his supporters and aired his grievances.  The rally concluded with a protest march, and a portion of the protestors broke away from the main group and entered the Capitol.   This was declared to be an “insurrection”, “storming of the Capitol”, “coup”, “occupation” and “attack” and the powers that be in America continue to insist upon the use of this language although the facts don’t seem to warrant it.   It is a strange sort of insurrection whose participants feel no need to arm themselves to the teeth and mostly just walk around in weird costumes and take selfies.   In the fighting that broke out as the police went in to clear and secure the Capitol there were several injuries on both sides but the protestors clearly got the worst of it.   One of them was shot by the police.

 

Captain Airhead and his cabinet in framing their response to the Freedom Convoy were obviously seeking to evoke the image of what had occurred in Washington DC on the previous year’s Epiphany.   In both countries these events were followed up by public inquiries.   Note the difference, however.   In the Dominion of Canada, the focus of the public inquiry was the government’s response to the Freedom Convoy protest, her use of the Emergencies Act, and the question of whether or not it was justified under the terms of the Act itself.   The cabinet, including the Prime Minister himself, were essentially put on trial, held account for their actions, and subjected to grilling cross-examination.   In the American republic, the focus of the ongoing inquiry by the US House Select Committee has been on Mr. Magoo’s predecessor whom they are desperately trying to blame and prosecute for the “insurrection”.

 

So thank you for the laugh, Tucker, but no, we are far better off and far more free as subjects of His Majesty Charles III here in the Dominion of Canada, even with that dimwitted moron Captain Airhead as Prime Minister, than we would be “liberated” by your republic.   Let us worry about Captain Airhead.   You have enough problems of your own with Mr. Magoo.

 

 

(1)  Canada, by contrast, introduced the income tax at the end of the War as a measure to pay for it.   The income tax here never got as heavy and progressive as it got in the United States from the 1940s to the early 1960s.   From 1944 to 1963 the top American income tax rate never dropped below 90%.   It never made it that high here in Canada.   The Bank of Canada was chartered in 1934, twenty one years after the United States passed the Federal Reserve Act.

Abundantly Degenerate Liberals

 

The Anti-Defamation League has been in the news again.   When, two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic) was hit by a series of scandals concerning such matters as its dubious fundraising, amassed wealth, and deliciously ironic allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment leading to the firing of its founder Morris Dees and the resignation of its president Richard Levin, I hoped that some similar fate would befall the ADL.   Sadly, this hope failed to materialize.   Indeed, it might be said that in this period in which the SPLC’s reputation has sunk to an all-time low, the ADL’s influence has soared to new heights.   Due, presumably, to its new director’s connections to Silicon Valley, the ADL has been working alongside Big Tech to censor online speech and purge the internet of opinions of which it disapproves, a campaign that has turned into a blitzkrieg of thought suppression in the course of the last year.   It has now declared war on Tucker Carlson, the most popular talk show host on FOX News, basically for being the only mainstream television news persona with the stones to speak the unvarnished truth about immigration.

 

The Anti-Defamation League is decades older than the SPLC and is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first organization of this type to have been founded.   Whereas most self-appointed, full-time, anti-racist watchdogs sprung up after World War II, during and after the American Civil Rights Movement, in order to capitalize on that era’s wave of popular sentiment against racism, the ADL predates the First World War going all the way back to 1913.   While it is popular among some of the ADL’s foremost critics on the right today to maintain that the organization started well but got sidetracked during the tenure of its current director who had been a special assistant to Barack Obama, in reality the organization started out bad and became worse.

 

The ADL started out operating under the Chicago branch of the B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), a fraternal philanthropic organization that could roughly be said to be the equivalent for Jews of what the Knights of Columbus are for Roman Catholics.   Its founders were two Chicago lawyers, Adolf Kraus who was the president of the order at the time, and Sigmund Livingston who became the first president of the ADL.   Its stated purpose was to combat the defamation of the Jewish people in particular, and ultimately “to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens”.   This, as good and noble as it sounds, was a mere façade.  Apart from the fact that the ADL has never seemed to have any qualms about lying about (defaming) its enemies, thus making a mockery of its own name, throughout its history it has blurred the distinction between unfair and unjust words and acts towards Jews qua Jews and justifiable criticism of the same, just as it has blurred the distinction between criticism of Jews qua Jews whether unfair or justifiable and criticism of individuals who are Jewish on the basis of their words and deeds as individuals.   It has also been susceptible to the charge of promoting Christophobia, which, of course, contradicts the second part of its purpose statement.

 

With regards to the first of these points, consider the incident that sparked the founding of the ADL in the first place.   Earlier in 1913, Leo Frank, the factory supervisor of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia was convicted of murdering 13 year old Mary Phagan, an employee of the factory who had been found raped and strangled in its basement.   Frank was the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the story became the subject of contentious discussion throughout the United States.   Powerful Jewish individuals in the American northeast such as Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and Albert Lasker, the Chicago based advertising baron (he had just become the head of Lord and Thomas which became Foote, Cone & Belding) , became convinced, or at least took the public position, that Frank was innocent and was being railroaded for anti-Semitic reasons.   The founders of the ADL were of the same persuasion and today their interpretation of these events is taken as established in the history books.   It is curious though, that fabricated evidence at the site of the murder pointed to the black nightwatchman Newt Less, and the man whom the supporters of Frank’s innocence maintain was the real culprit, the janitor James Conley whose testimony to being Frank’s accomplice helped convict him, was also black.   For the ADL’s interpretation of the incident to be correct, it would require that in the city of Atlanta, Georgia at the height of Jim Crow, anti-Semitism so trumped anti-black prejudice that a white man was framed for the rape and murder of a 13 year old white girl by a black man, because the white man was of the Jewish faith.   The story did not end with Frank’s conviction.  He appealed, with Lasker covering much of his legal fees, and eventually his sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment.   About two years after his original conviction he was kidnapped from prison and lynched to death near Phagan’s home town.   An ugly ending to the story for sure, but it reinforces the point.   How likely is it that in the Georgia of 1915 a white man would be lynched for a crime of this nature perpetrated by a black man?

 

I have given much detail about the Frank case because of its instrumentality in the founding of the ADL but it is hardly an isolated incident.   In 1982 the ADL hosted a posh luncheon ceremony in which the legendary sharp-tongued comedian and actress Joan Rivers in an unusually teary-eyed and sentimental performance for her presented the “Torch of Liberty” award on their behalf to one Morris B. “Moe” Dalitz.   A few years later they would name him “Philanthropist of the Year”.   Dalitz, who had made a fortune in bootlegging and illegal gambling during the Prohibition era, had taken his ill-gotten gains and invested them in legal casinos in Las Vegas, where he later expanded his legitimate business interests into a more general property development, earning himself the nickname “Mr. Las Vegas”.   In the post-World War II era he carefully constructed for himself the image of a reformed gangster turned legitimate businessman which he fiercely defended, famously suing Penthouse magazine in the 1970s for an article that maintained that a country club and spa resort that he had built near San Diego was built with mob money and serviced a mob clientele.   Dalitz dropped the suit after the magazine published a letter of apology, although by Rolling Stone’s 1976 account of the case the defendants appeared to have been winning the suit.  A more serious allegation was that beneath his veneer of legitimacy he was the head of operations for the Las Vegas branch of the activities of his life-long friend Meyer Lansky.   Lansky, who died the year after Dalitz received the award from the ADL, was the co-founder, with his best friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel whom he later had killed, of Murder Inc., and who went on with Charles “Lucky” Luciano to build the National Crime Syndicate.   He was the biggest mobster in the United States for half of the twentieth century and his criminal empire stretched around the globe.    Siegel had run Lansky’s Las Vegas operations until his murder in 1947, and Dalitz, who began investing in Las Vegas casinos around that same time, was widely believed to have been his successor.    Indeed, there have been allegations that the ADL itself basically functioned as a public relations firm for Lansky and while the ADL never honoured Lansky, who lacked a respectable public image, the way it did Dalitz, and Lansky does not seem to have directly donated to the ADL in his own name (many of his most prominent associates, Dalitz among them, however were substantial donors), there is plenty of circumstantial grounds for believing these allegations to be not entirely false.   At any rate, the ADL had always been quick to make charges of anti-Semitism against those who concentrated on Lansky, Siegel, Dalitz, etc. in exposing organized crime.

 

With regards to the second point, the ADL’s promotion of Christophobia, this has been evident throughout the history of the organization but became especially prominent during the directorship of Abraham H. Foxman, who succeeded Nathan Perlmutter in that role in 1987 and continued as director until his retirement in 2015.   In 1999, Foxman attacked the Rev. Jerry Falwell for saying that the Antichrist would be a Jewish male.   Regardless of whether one agrees with Falwell’s understanding of Bible prophecy or not, this was hardly an anti-Semitic statement but a logical implication of the very idea of the Antichrist – the devil’s counterfeit of the true Christ who will arise in the last days as the ultimate villain of history.   A counterfeit is a fake that is intended to be passed off as the real thing imitates.   Therefore it has to be as close to the real thing as possible.   Thus, that the ultimate counterfeit of the Messiah would have to be Jewish, can be logically deduced not only from Christian theology, which correctly asserts that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the true Christ, but from Jewish theology, which denies this truth but certainly teaches that the awaited Messiah will be Jewish.   It does not require the belief that the Jews are the source of all evil, are the worst evil in the world, or any other such nonsense, and indeed, obviously contradicts such crudities because it is based upon the ultimate God-sent Deliverer being Jewish.      Foxman, however, betrayed no capacity for understanding these points.

 

A few years later Foxman began attacking Mel Gibson over his film The Passion of the Christ.   The attacks began long before the film was released and before Foxman had even seen it.   Foxman condemned the movie as anti-Semitic because it portrayed the Gospel accounts of the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Christ accurately – to the point of using the actual tongues of the day with English translations in subtitles – without altering the story to place 100% of the blame for the crucifixion on the Roman authorities and excusing the Pharisees, the chief priests, and the Jerusalem mob.   For Foxman, irrational though this false dichotomy be, it was either place all the blame for the crucifixion on the Romans and completely exonerate the Jewish leaders of two millennia ago or place all the blame for the crucifixion on all Jews of all times including those alive today.   Underlying this irrational point of view was the idea that traditional, historical, Scriptural Christianity had been discredited by the Holocaust- despite the obvious fact that the Third Reich was the product of the shift away from Christianity in Modern German culture - and that therefore Christianity had to change its beliefs, wherever Jews found them to be offensive, even if this involved falsifying the facts of history as recorded in Christianity’s sacred texts of the New Testament.   When groups like the ADL speak of meaningful interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews this is precisely what they mean by it – a one-way discussion in which Jews speak, Christians listen, and then Christians make whatever changes to their own faith and practice that  Jews demand.   Those like Mel Gibson who are too traditionalist to go along with this nonsense are then vilified and condemned.   When, several years later, the actor in a state of inebriation went into a tirade against the Jews, Foxman gloated that he, that is Foxman, had been vindicated in his accusations, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect, or of the simple fact that after years of being subjected to Foxman’s style of abuse, which included unbelievably arrogant demands that Gibson denounce his own father (a traditionalist Roman Catholic who rejected Vatican II, pointed to by ADL types as the prime example of a positive outcome of the kind of interfaith “dialogue” described above), if anyone was justified it was Gibson in his tirade and not Foxman by it.  

 

Abe Foxman retired from his official position at the ADL, if not from his career as America’s foremost equine rump impressionist, six years ago, but the organization can hardly be said to have improved under the leadership of his successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose previous gigs included corporate executive and Obama administration advisor, and who looks like someone who crawls out of his parents’ basement only to do a bad cosplay of Lex Luthor at comic book conventions.   Under Greenblatt’s leadership the ADL has moved much further to the Left than it was even under Foxman.  Foxman was a liberal, for sure, but at the beginning of his tenure as National Director the ADL commissioned Harvey Klehr’s 1988 survey of Communist subversive groups in the United States published by Transaction as Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today, something that it would be difficult to imagine the ADL doing under the current leadership.   Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalist Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (sic), has done an excellent job of documenting the ADL’s further-Left shift under Greenblatt at the Center’s e-zine Frontpagemag, including the ADL’s strange new alliance with the segments of the Far Left that are rather less than friendly towards either Israel or the Jews (see here, here and here for examples).

 

It is Greenblatt who in his capacity as ADL CEO has been writing letters and giving interviews on CNN, demanding that FOX News fire Tucker Carlson for having the audacity to use the word “replacement” in criticizing liberal immigration policy in the United States.   “White supremacists”, use that word after all, and to use a word that “white supremacists” use is to fully embrace and endorse everything “white supremacists” believe, just as to be in the same room as a “white supremacist” or breathe the same air as a “white supremacist” is to implicate yourself in his ideology.   Absurd as that sort of “argument” is, it is what has passed for logic at the ADL for decades, long before Greenblatt took over.   Anybody who has perused the profiles they have put together of people they have accused of “racism”, “hate”, etc. over the years, will recognize the style.

 

Lachlan Murdoch has, so far, stood by Carlson and refused to give in to the ADL’s demands.   Let us hope that he continues to do so.   There are not many today who have the courage to withstand the ADL’s bullying and intimidation tactics for long, just as there are very few willing to speak the truths that Tucker Carlson has been speaking.

 

If Murdoch is willing to stand by Carlson for the long haul, then perhaps it is time for FOX News to go on the offensive, and shine the light of exposure upon the bullying, lies, and corruption of the ADL.