Captain Airhead Opens His Mouth and Something Stupid Comes Out

 

Captain Airhead has stuck his foot in his mouth again.   Or, to put it another way, he opened his mouth again.   He is incapable of opening his mouth without sticking his foot in it.   Captain Airhead, for those of you fortunate enough not to be familiar with him, is the man who has been Prime Minister of His Majesty’s federal government here in my country, Canada, since the Dominion election of 2015.    In that time, not a year has passed without him being embroiled in at least one major scandal that would have ended the political career of anyone else, including scandals concerning him behaving in ways that had someone else been caught so doing he would have been the first to demand that such be utterly depersoned and driven from public life and polite society.    That he has managed to remain in office so long is a bit of a mystery although I assume that it has something to do with a deal signed with blood at the stroke of midnight in some unhallowed place.   This is a most reasonable assumption.   Since he clearly has no soul now he must have traded it away at some point.  The only real argument against it is that it would be beneath the dignity of the other party to strike such a deal with him.   Those who wish to be unkind often refer to him by the epithet “Justin Trudeau”.

 

So what has Captain Airhead said this time?

 

Earlier this month he showed up in Calgary, Alberta for a photo-op at the Stampede.   While there someone caught him on film talking with a Muslim father in the Baitun Nur Mosque, which is the largest mosque in the country and was the host of several events during this year’s Calgary Stampede.    The father expressed his concerns that his children were being exposed to indoctrination that was attacking their religion particularly on alphabet soup gang issues in the public schools.  Captain Airhead replied by basically telling him that he had swallowed “misinformation” peddled by the “American far right”, that the provincial curricula did not include “what is being said out there about aggressive teaching or conversion of kids to being LGBT” and that those who were saying that this was going on were people who “have consistently stood against Muslim rights and the Muslim community.”    The video of this was uploaded to social media and has generated a ton of negative feedback although not near as much as it deserves.

 

It is important to realize that the questions the Muslim father was putting to Captain Airhead were unavoidable evidence that the unstable coalition that is the foundation of his particular brand of left-wing politics is finally starting to unravel.   He made an attempt to save it by asserting that both Muslims and the alphabet soup gang were facing “increasing levels of violence and hatred” and that “one thing we don’t need right now is for communities that are facing hatred to start turning on each other”.   This was an interesting thing for him to say in the context of a conversation in which he himself was trying to turn Muslims against Christians over an issue on which they are historically and traditionally in agreement, at least in terms of the basic moral principles at stake.   It ought to be noted here that two years ago 68 church buildings in Canada were burned, otherwise vandalized, or desecrated in a string of Christophobic hate crimes whipped up by the media.  Captain Airhead, after giving a weak and anemic condemnation of the Christophobic hate spree, described the hate behind it as “fully understandable”.

 

This was not the first time that Captain Airhead had dismissed the type of parental concerns expressed by the Muslim father as “far right”.   A look at the previous occasion on which he used this language and the circumstances surrounding it is quite revealing with regards to the credibility of his attempt to assuage parental fears.   In the province of New Brunswick, Policy 713 was enacted by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development three years ago.   It required schools to maintain gender-neutral bathrooms, use the pronouns and names students chose for themselves, and to basically make the schools as alphabet souper friendly as possible.   Earlier this year, in May, the policy was placed under review following complaints from parents and the following month Blaine Higgs, Premier of New Brunswick announced that it was being revised.   The most relevant revision was that schools in that province would no longer be allowed to facilitate kids living double lives in which they assume new names and gender identities without their parents’ knowledge and consent.   Captain Airhead blew a gasket, threw a hissy fit, and denounced Higgs in a grandstanding manner in which he said such things as “Far-right political actors are trying to outdo themselves with the types of cruelty and isolation they can inflict on these already vulnerable people.”   Note that whenever Captain Airhead – or any other progressive, left-winger or liberal for that matter – speaks of “vulnerable people” he should be understood as meaning “people I am empowering to act as bullies to others with total impunity”.     This was the month that has been renamed after the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins or, to use its deadname, June, and Captain Airhead was addressing something called the Rainbow Railroad Freedom Party which, as I understand it, is an organization that helps alphabet people escape from actual persecution.  One would think that such an organization would know well the difference between being in danger of one’s life on the one hand and of your teacher’s not being allowed to keep secrets from your parents on the other and would have broke out into loud booing when Captain Airhead conflated the two, much like the Indians did when he walked onto the stage to give a speech at the opening of the North American Indigenous Games in Halifax last weekend.   To be fair, there was a little bit of applause later on when he finally shut his mouth, but it seemed like the type featured in the Statler and Waldorf segment on the Muppet Show where the one starts loudly clapping and the other says something to the effect of “it wasn’t that good” getting a response along the lines of “I’m not clapping because I liked it, I'm clapping because it’s over!”

 

Someone who one month equates the New Brunswick premier’s standing up for parents and no longer allowing schools to hide their under-16 children’s life-altering choices from them with inflicting cruelty is clearly not speaking in bona fide when the next month he tries to assure a father that the schools are not trying to convert his children to alternate sexual and gender identities.

 

“Far right”, of course, as Captain Airhead uses it is merely an empty pejorative with no real meaning.   Anyone who opposes him and his ideas if they can properly be called that is “far right” to Captain Airhead.   Of course the expression “far right” is rather silly even when used with a precise meaning.  It is often understood to mean “Nazi” even though the historical Nazis thought of themselves as leftists, opposed everything the original, traditional, and historical right stood for and embraced urban industrialism, rapid technological advancement, and basically everything the term progress conveyed in the first half of the twentieth century.   Even the one part of their program that was ostensibly right-wing, their fierce opposition to Communism, was not right-wing anti-communism, i.e., anti-communism based on a loathing of what Communism stood for - militant atheism, destructive revolutionary violence, egalitarian levelling, and blind faith in materialistic science - but the anti-communism of a rival that was as close to Communism as possible without being Communist, a fact evident both in the Nazis’ use of “socialist” in the name of their movement and in the remarkable similarities between the apparatus of totalitarian state oppression both systems established in their respective regimes.   The Nazis, therefore, were not right-wing at all in any traditional sense of the word, much less “far” or “extremely” right-wing.   The use of “far right” as an epithet, whether used with a precise meaning or simply as an empty slur, reveals the user of the term to be an idiot.

 

When people use epithets in this loose manner they eventually lose their force.  It has been several years since everyone realized that when a liberal calls someone a racist this doesn’t mean much more than “I disagree with you” or “I dislike you”.   This is why liberals have taken to using stronger insults like “white supremacist” or “far right”.   Since, however, these words have a much narrower meaning than “racist” their lifespan as effective liberal insults is much shorter.   Mercifully, the more liberally and loosely people like Captain Airhead throw these insults around, the shorter that lifespan will be.   I suspect that most parents who see the now viral video of Captain Airhead sticking his foot in his mouth and understand the context will think something along the lines of “if it is far right for us to want our pre-pubescent children protected from those who would rob them of the innocence of childhood by exposing them to non-traditional ideas about sex and gender way too early then count us as far right”.   I, for one, am willing to own the label “far right” if Captain Airhead insists on using it in this manner.   Since I am right wing in an ad fontes manner, i.e., still holding to and emphasizing the things the original continental “right” and the pre-conservative Tories stood for, i.e., pre-Modern traditions and institutions such as royal monarchy, orthodox Christianity, the Church and its Apostolic hierarchy, the code of chivalry, rural agrarianism, technoskepticism and our civilization’s entire heritage from ancient times and Christendom, “far right” is a less absurd label in my case than it is in those of most of the people to whom liberals apply it.   Since, in Canada, the equally absurd habit of referring to those who are “conservative” in the traditional, orthodox Christian, monarchist sense of the word as opposed to “neoconservatives” who are “conservative” in the American sense of being classical liberals as “Red Tories”, let us compound the absurdity by saying that I am a far right Red Tory.

 

The distinction just mentioned between the traditional and American senses of the word “conservative” brings me around to my final point about Captain Airhead’s remarks.   His use of the word “American” before “far right” is clearly intended to convey the idea that the parental concerns he was addressing is rooted in a form of thinking that is American and foreign to Canada.   This is extremely rich coming someone who not only leads the Liberal Party, which from Confederation to this day has been the party of Americanization in Canada, but who personally gives off the impression that he never wipes his own arse without permission from the White House to do so.   I have made the point several times in the past that the Canadian left has never had an idea that it did not borrow from the American left.   The progressive income tax, central banking, the welfare state in both its New Deal introduction in the 1930s and its Great/Just Society expansion in the 1960s, anti-discrimination laws, liberal immigration, judicial activism that banned the Bible and prayer from public schools, abortion-on-demand, and no-fault divorce are among the liberal innovations that were introduced in the United States first with Canadian liberals later following their example.   More recently, critical race theory inspired movements of national self-loathing, race riots masquerading as protests, and Year Zero monument toppling began with Black Lives Matter in the United States which was followed by Every Child Matters in Canada.   The exceptions that prove the rule are single-payer healthcare and same-sex marriage.

 

In the very matter which we have been discussing Captain Airhead by demonizing parental opposition to teachers indoctrinating their kids with ideas that conflict with their fundamental values is himself following an American example.   In the fall of 2021 several American school boards were facing heavy criticism from parents over what their children were being taught.   In this case the teaching of critical race theory was the pivotal issue but the conflict between educators who thought they had the right to propagandize children however they saw fit and parents who correctly insisted that they ought to have the final say over the educators was essentially the same.   In late September, the National School Board Association published a letter they had sent to J. Brandon Magoo, or, as he will undoubtedly be known now following the discovery of a white substance resembling sugar in appearance as well as the properties of being highly addictive and eliciting similar responses in the euphoric centres of  the brain in his residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, Joe Blow.   In the letter they asked Magoo to look into using the PATRIOT ACT, the piece of tyrannical totalitarian legislation passed in 2001 that allows the American government to circumvent the limits the American constitution placed on its powers in order to protect the civil rights and liberties of its citizens in the name of fighting the bogeyman of terrorism, against those parents who had the nerve to think that they had a say in what their own kids were to be taught, characterizing the parents who were showing up at school board meetings to loudly voice their complaints as hate groups, extremists, and domestic terrorists.   A few days later Magoo’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, sent a memo to FBI director Christopher Wray telling him that the Department of Justice would be announcing measures to address “the rise in criminal conduct directed towards school personnel” and instructing him to reach out to the United States Attorneys and local law enforcement within thirty days of the memo to coordinate their efforts in implementing the new measures.   Among the measures Garland’s DOJ took were the establishment of a task force in which counterterrorism agencies were represented and of a FBI snitch line to facilitate the tagging of outspoken parents as potential threats.   All of this was quickly leaked after which the school boards of almost half of the American states dropped their affiliation with the National School Board Association.   The humiliated NSBA apologized for the language they had used and withdrew the letter from publication.   It was later revealed that Magoo’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, had asked the NSBA to write the letter and provided assistance with its drafting.   Garland, subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, maintained that parents voicing their viewpoints at schoolboard meetings were not the issue, merely actual crimes like threats, violence, intimidation, and harassment.   Unfortunately for him, the only evidence that any such things were taking place on a scale out of the ordinary was the assertions of the withdrawn latter.   Those who made such assertions seem to have been engaging in the same sleight of hand employed by Captain Airhead in his assertion about “increasing levels of violence and hatred” against Muslims and alphabet people, a sleight of hand very common on the left today.   It involves the redefinition of “violence” to include words – and not just words of the “I’m going to *fill in violent act here* you” sort, but words deemed to be violent because someone who is offended by them no longer “feels safe”.   Indeed, the people who think that words can amount to “violence” in this way have even taken it as a step further and identified certain types of the absence of words as violence.   Remember how in the BLM hysteria of three years ago the inane slogan “silence is violence” was rolled out?   The idea behind this was that you need to jump on board the BLM bandwagon, affirm everything they told you to affirm, and start spouting the same drivel as them, and that to fail to do so was itself a form of aggression against those on whose behalf they purported to speak and so a form of “violence”.   People crazy enough to think this way and to think that educational professionals and experts have the right to decide what to indoctrinate kids with without the input or approval of the kids’ parents would obviously interpret outspoken and angry opposition to what they were doing as violence.  Indeed, this is exactly what can be found in the NSBA letter, which supported its assertions by referencing a number of incidents, nearly all of which merely involved angry speech rather than violence or the literal threat thereof.

 

In all of this, the Magoo administration proved even more adamant and inflexible in its support of the position that professional educators and educational experts should have control of pedagogy without having to answer to parents than the National School Board Association.   Indeed, considering that Magoo officials requested the NSBA letter and coached the association in the writing of it, it is clear that the impetus for labelling parents who disagree, parents who think that the job of raising their children belongs to them and that part of that job is protecting their children from those, including teachers, who want to poison their minds with critical race theory, gender ideology and other such excrement, parents who voice their views, as the equivalent of terrorists came from the Magoo White House.   The Magoo administration has shown a strong disposition ever since it took power to treating serious political opponents as a national threat.  

 

Captain Airhead, who scratches every time Magoo gets an itch, shares this disposition.   This was evident in his tyrannical invoking of the Emergencies Act to crush a non-violent protest against his unjust and evil vaccine mandates in February of last year.   It is evident today in his arrogant attitude towards parents who do not want their kids’ heads filled with garbage about sex and gender identity in school.   Such parental concern is not an American import as he suggests.   It would be better described as being universal, arising as it does out of the natural and good instinct of parents to protect their children.   If anything is an unwanted American import here, it is his own bad attitude.

 

He really ought to learn to keep his mouth shut.   You would think he would be sick of the taste of his own feet by now.

The Pollution of the Mainstream or Turn off the Bloody Television and Read a Book!

I am not a regular television watcher and have not been one for about fifteen years now. Towards the end of my college years I realized that I had already wasted far too much of my life sitting in front of a box that projects mind numbing drivel onto a screen. So when I moved to the city and got a job and my own place I made a conscious decision to make better use of my spare time. Having been a book-lover all my life, cutting television out meant that I had more time to devote to reading and so I have never regretted this decision. Today I only watch television when I am out at my dad’s place or visiting friends.

Consequentially, I had never heard of the Duggars until their recent scandal became a news item. I now know, thanks to the scandal, that they are a family from Arkansas whose television show, “19 Kids and Counting”, had apparently become the most watched program on what used to be called The Learning Channel. It is not a television show I would ever have watched belonging to a genre of programming that I particularly despise, that in which it is assumed that the absence of scripting and directing means that what is being recorded and broadcast is therefore “reality”.

The scandal concerns the eldest of the family’s nineteen kids, Joshua. A couple of weeks ago one of those celebrity gossip rags that offend the eye at checkout stations across North America dug up a ten year old police report about how he had groped several girls when he was 14-15 years old. This had been reported to his father, who disciplined him privately, put him through some kind of a counselling program, and made him confess it to an Arkansas state trooper who in a bizarre twist is now serving time for a sex crime himself.

The media have been using these revelations to crucify the Duggar family who are fundamentalist Baptists and believe in all sorts of things such as Christianity and patriarchy which the bien pensants of the media in their politically correct chronological snobbery consider to be appallingly backwards. Thus they are downplaying the fact that Josh Duggar was himself a kid at the time the groping took place. Omar Khadr was about the same age when the Americans captured him in Afghanistan and tried and convicted him for war crimes and the media has not stopped yapping about how he was “just a kid” ever since. Khadr’s were the greater crimes, but the same people that excuse his terrorism on the grounds of his youth, are howling for Duggar’s blood in spite of his. Unfortunately for Mr. Duggar he is of the wrong race and religion to attract media sympathy despite being himself a media personality.

This weekend an article appeared in the D section of the extra thick Saturday edition of the Winnipeg Free Press entitled “Stop whitewashing religious extremism for ratings”. One might be forgiven for thinking, based on the title alone, that the column, penned by sportswriter Melissa Martin, was calling for an end to the media lovefest for Omar Khadr. Alas that was not the case. For while the Khadr family, who as members of al-Qaeda consider themselves to be mujahideen, holy warriors of Islam, waging jihad against us Western infidels in the name of Allah, are certainly religious extremists in the sense of those who resort to the rather extreme means of lethal violence to accomplish the ends of their religion, it is the faith of the Duggar family that Martin is talking about. Since the Duggars, whatever their faults and failings, whatever their sins of omission and commission, may or may not be, have as yet, to blow up buildings, kill people, and commit war crimes on behalf of the Christian God, they are clearly not extremists in this sense of the term.

By calling the Duggars’ religious beliefs “extremism” Martin is saying that they fall outside what is considered at the moment to be the mainstream. This is an accurate enough assessment. The problem is that the contemporary mainstream has become so polluted and toxic that it is not a place that any sane person would desire to be.

Martin’s article is evidence enough of that. It is a feminist diatribe that begins with a progressive cliché that would have been almost clever had it not been done a gazillion times already in the past, the bait-and-switch in which she asks her readers to think of a hypothetical faith with a very negative attitude towards women which she describes in terms that seem intended to conjure up images of the Khadrs’ religion before revealing that it is the faith of the Duggars of which she is speaking. Her complaints against the Duggars’ faith are that it stops women “from seeking true education”, that it sees “all of women's hardest-won rights” as “pathways to sin” and their bodies “as vessels from which to beget a new army for their faith”, and that it has attacked “not just abortion rights, but also protections and rights for LGBTQ people, and sometimes take aim at equal-pay laws and no-fault divorce” and has sought “limits on access to contraception”.

Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.

“Abortion rights”, while accepted as mainstream today, are a concept that is indefensible in itself. The expression refers to a woman’s supposed right to have an abortion, which feminism predicates upon the argument that a woman’s body belongs to her, that she alone has the right to decide what happens with and in it, therefore since pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body, she has the right to terminate it if she wishes. While there is a semblance of logic to this argument it vanishes completely when you realize that the right to have an abortion which feminism claims for women, would bestow upon each woman the power to decide for reasons personal to herself whether another human life lives or dies and upon women collectively the power of life and death over the entire next generation and unilateral control over human reproduction. Seen in that light, abortion rights are utter madness. That our society has given women these “rights”, in recent decades, and that the mainstream of our society accepts that women ought to have them, proves nothing except that our disregard for the value of human life is such that we now owe Adolf Hitler an apology for the way we have been judging him for the last seventy years.


I could make similar arguments against no-fault divorce and everything else on the list individually, but it would be simpler to address the glaringly obvious theme running through virtually all of them. From “access to contraception” to “abortion rights” what stands out about the modern, mainstream, things Martin finds it so incredible that anyone would oppose is that in one way or another, they tend to separate sex from reproduction, and womanhood from motherhood. Feminist ideology declares its goal to be the liberation of women and their elevation to full humanity which feminism accuses Christianity and pre-feminist Western tradition in general of having denied them by the reduction of women to being merely wives and mothers. The idea is that for a woman to be human in the fullest sense, she must first be an individual who shapes her own role and destiny according to her own will. Feminism, therefore, looks with suspicion upon motherhood and those who enthusiastically embrace it by, for example, having 19 children, while itself embracing everything that separates sex from reproduction, such as contraception, abortion, and homosexuality.

To separate sex from reproduction, however, is to separate it from life, to render it sterile. It is hardly appropriate to regard this as being a liberation. Rather than elevate human eros to something higher than the biological function we share with the animals, as everyone from Plato to the doctors and theologians of the medieval Church sought to do, it reduces it to something less than that biological function.

What if, similarly, feminism got it wrong and the path to full humanity is not a generic, plastic, individuality but manhood for a man and womanhood for a woman? What if it was not Christianity, tradition, and “the patriarchy” which reduced women to something less than fully human by seeing them as wives and mothers – just as men were seen as husbands and fathers – but feminism which has reduced womanhood to something less than fully human by separating motherhood from it? While feminists love to accuse their opponents of being narrow-minded and bigoted feminism itself is such a narrow ideology that those within it find it difficult to formulate such outside-the-box questions for themselves. When a feminist does ask herself such questions and honestly strives for the answers she will usually find herself outside feminism, like the late Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Unfortunately, susceptibility to narrow ideologies like feminism is the norm rather than the exception.

It is ironic, therefore, that the first accusation Martin makes against the Duggars’ Christian faith is that it stops women from seeking “true education”. For the very fact that Martin is undoubtedly correct in identifying her own views as those accepted as mainstream today is an indicator that true education has simply not been available to most people of either sex for decades. True education begins by training people to think - to learn and understand what others have said, thought and written, to reflect critically upon it, and then to express intelligently their own thoughts - and it develops and expands through contemplative exposure to “the best that has been said and thought in the world” from the earliest ages down to the present.

A mind that has truly been educated is unlikely to fall prey to indoctrination by the kind of narrow ideology that expresses itself in such shibboleths as “women's hardest-won rights” and “long dominated by a white Christian majority” or to the chronological snobbery that assumes that the ideas that are generally accepted by the public today are therefore superior and enlightened, even if they would have been regarded as sheer lunacy in all times and places previous to our own day, and regardless of whether or not they can withstand scrutiny. We could do with more true education today, but it can no longer be found in the public schools or the universities, or anything else belonging to the now hopelessly polluted mainstream. Men and women seeking that education today, will have to look for it outside the mainstream, in the territory that the Melissa Martins of this world call extreme.

The Big Bad Bill

As Michael Oakeshott pointed out several decades ago the rationalism that has come to permeate all of Western thought since the Renaissance reduces human knowledge to technical knowledge, traditions to ideologies, and the art of statecraft to problem-solving.  The reduction of state-craft to problem-solving, the methodology of the engineer, in turn reduces society to a set of designs and blueprints, and the struggles, difficulties, and evils that people face in their everyday lives, to problems awaiting a rational solution from the government.

This approach to the governing of a society is itself problematic.  The troubles that we face as societies and as individuals are not all problems that the government can solve.   Some may simply not have the kind of formulaic, universally applicable, solutions that rationalism looks for.   Others may have solutions, but ones which the government is not particularly suited to find or implement, and which are best left to be worked out by families and individuals for themselves.   When government problem-solving is applied to troubles of these sorts, it is costly and ineffective at best, and at worst will make the problem worse and/or create new problems.

Here in Manitoba, the New Democratic government has recently introduced a bill which is designed to solve the problem of bullying in the schools, particularly cyberbullying. Support for the bill has been drummed up by the main-stream media, the tendency of which, to take private sorrows and elevate them into national crises, only exacerbates the problem of government problem-solving.

 

Is bullying a problem the government can solve or will the bill only make things worse? 

To determine the answer to this we will need to examine the bill itself.

In evaluating a piece of proposed legislation the first two questions we need to ask are a) what evil is this law intended to prevent, limit, or eliminate and b) what good is this law intended to promote.   After ascertaining the answers to these two questions we must then ask whether the evil and the good are the sort that make legislation necessary to combat the one and desirable to support the other.   These categories do not include all evils and goods and, in fact, probably the vast majority of evils and goods are not of these types.   Legislation always comes with a cost – a social and moral cost as well as an economic cost.   For this reason it is well to accept as a general rule that legislation should reserved for the attainment of goods that are worth the cost and for the combat of evils that cannot be properly dealt with apart from the administration of law.  Once we have determined that the evil a bill is designed to fight requires legislation, and that the good the bill is intended to promote is worth the cost, then we must ask whether the means by which the bill proposes to achieve these worthy ends are the right means.

There is another line of questioning that we need to kind in mind throughout this entire procedure.  It  begins with the question of what other effects the legislation will have other than those it is directly and explicitly intended to accomplish. Are these effects desirable or undesirable?  If the latter, they must be counted as part of the cost of the legislation, and when we come to the question of whether this bill is the appropriate means to its stated ends, we will need to consider whether another means of attaining the same ends that does not produce these undesirable effects is possible.

Having established the method of our inquiry, let us now turn our attention to Manitoba’s Bill 18, The Public Schools Amendment Act (Safe and Inclusive Schools). (1)

 

The evil that Bill 18 was drawn up to deal with is the evil of bullying among school age children. This  includes bullying of various types, but with a particular emphasis upon a new form of bullying that is called cyberbullying, i.e., bullying by means of technological media, especially cellphones and the internet.   The good that it is designed to promote is identified in the parenthetical clause in the bill’s title “Safe and Inclusive Schools”.  Since safety and inclusivity are two quite different and not obviously related things we will treat them separately when we try to determine whether in fact they are “goods” and if so whether they are goods of the kind that would justify the passing of this bill.

That bullying is an evil hardly seems to need demonstration.  It is a form of cruelty to those who are perceived to be weaker than oneself in one way or another.  Since it serves no end that  is either good or necessary it cannot be said to have any redeeming qualities.  Victims of bullying have often been able to turn their persecution into an opportunity to develop important, positive, character traits such as endurance, courage, and the ability to stand up for oneself.   This does not alter the nature of bullying itself, however, which remains an evil.

The question, however, is whether it is an evil that demands a response in the form of an act of the legislative assembly.   Until very recently, nobody seems to have thought it to have been so.  Bullying in various forms, from relatively mild teasing and put-downs to the more serious extortion of money, food, or servitude from smaller and weaker kids through physical intimidation, has been around for a very long time.  In the past the received wisdom on the subject was that if bullying required an authoritative response from above the authorities most competent to deal with it were parents and the school principal and teachers acting in loco parentis.   It was not the sort of thing one called the police over and certainly not the sort of thing that you introduced a bill in the legislature or parliament over.

If bullying is currently such a problem that an act of government is required then either we have discovered that all previous generations were wrong about the matter or some change has taken place so that what was not necessary before is necessary now.  If it is the latter that means that either bullying itself has evolved to be a more serious menace than it was in the past or that the means by which previous generations dealt with bullies are no longer effective.

Were previous generations wrong about bullying?

That seems extremely difficult to believe.   Past generations possessed a storehouse of accumulated and passed down wisdom which we in the present have ignored and discarded to our own peril.   That wisdom had more to say about bullying than just that parents and teachers were the authorities best suited to deal with it.  It also taught that authorities of any sort, acting from above, could only do so much and that bullying was usually best dealt with in another way.   Bullies are, by nature, cowards.   They do not go out looking for fights where the odds are even or stacked against themselves.  They pick on those weaker and smaller than themselves.   They tend to gather to themselves packs of weak-minded followers to boost their confidence in their own strength.   This insight into the nature of bullying has not exactly been lost but its implications, obvious to earlier generations, have been largely ignored.   If bullies are cowards, the best way to deal with them is to stand up to them and refuse to be intimidated.   If they are not deterred by the mere fact that you refuse to be intimidated then learn to fight back and defend yourself.   Not only is this more effective in deterring bullies than a crackdown by authority on bullying it helps form in the victim of bullying courage and confidence that will help prevent him from developing into a bully himself and which he will need later on in life because bullies are not limited to the schoolyard.

Previous generations appear to have been far more sensible than our own on the subject of bullying as on most other subjects so if anti-bullying legislation is currently necessary it must be because some change has recently taken place.   

Has bullying itself changed and if so is the change such as to make anti-bullying legislation necessary?

The answer to the first part of the question is clearly yes.  The rapid development of communications technology in recent decades has brought about a change in the way bullying takes place.  Today there are countless means of communication available to people through computers, cellular phones, and the various handheld electronic communications devices that have evolved from the latter.   You can communicate with people all around the globe through e-mail, instant messaging, chatrooms, blogs  message boards, and various sorts of online social networks.   You can virtually instantaneously send from one cell or smart phone to another, text messages and visual images, including digital photographs you have taken with the phone itself.   Amazing as all of this technology is it has become an instrument of bullying as well as of communication.   The use of internet era communications technology to harass and intimidate other people is called cyberbullying.

Has the advent of cyberbullying created a need for legislation that was not needed before the age of the internet?

Advocates for legislation like Bill 18 would answer that in the affirmative.  Indeed, the idea that cyberbullying is a greater threat to the wellbeing of children than any form of bullying that antedated the internet is the heart of the argument for anti-bullying legislation.  The recent rash of cyberbullying induced suicides is given as evidence in support of that claim. 

It is natural when something terrible like a suicide takes place, and the cause is traced back to something that is in itself ugly and obnoxious like cyberbullying, to think that something “needs to be done” about it.  This is an ordinary, emotional, response to such an occurrence.  While we should not discount the emotive altogether, we need to resist the impulse to allow ourselves to be driven by it. 

Let us try to think calmly and rationally about the matter. 

Do all cyberbullying victims commit suicide?

No, the vast majority do not.

Why do some cyberbullying victims commit suicide when the majority do not?

There are different reasons.  In some cases it might be because the victim was particularly vulnerable.  In other cases it might be because the cyberbullying was particularly vicious.   This certainly seems to have been the case with the recent suicides of Rehtaeh Parsons in Nova Scotia and Amanda Todd in British Columbia.   The bullying in these cases included felonious behaviour, such as rape in the Parsons case, the distribution of explicit pictures of minors and extortion.   

Which leads us to an important point. Cases of cyberbullying where the victim commits suicide are atypical of bullying cases in general. In cases like those of Rahteah Parsons and Amanda Todd, the cyberbullying involved extreme persecution that broke several already existing laws. How can suicides, committed in response to behaviour that was already illegal, be evidence of the need for provincial and possibly federal legislature, against a more general kind of bad behaviour that does not typically result in suicide?

The other possibility that might justify legislation as a response to bullying today when it was not necessary in the past would be if the means of dealing with the problem in the past are no longer effective today, if the authorities that dealt with it in the past are no longer capable of handling that.   For reasons that will be explained when we return to it we will defer a discussion of this possibility until later.

Let us turn now to the “goods” this bill is supposed to promote and consider safety and inclusivity each in turn.

Just as bullying is undoubtedly an evil, so safety is undoubtedly a good, something to be desired in and of itself.   We want schools to be a safe place for children to go and learn and a bill that has school safety as its end has a laudable goal.   Having said that, safety is not the highest good, not even the highest good of state educational policy.   This qualification is necessary because there are many people who seem to hold a kind of consequentialist belief that school safety is an end which justifies all means.   With reference to Bill 18 this sort of thinking would manifest itself in a conversation similar to the following:

Person A: I do not support Bill 18, I think it is a poorly thought out, knee-jerk reaction to cyberbullying, with a hidden agenda.

Person B: You don’t support Bill 18? You are against school safety? What kind of a monster are you?


The flaw in this kind of reasoning can be demonstrated by a simple hypothetical example.


Suppose the government were to pass a law which placed armed guards and watchdogs in every hall and classroom of every school in the country, required all students to submit to full body searches before entering the building, ordered school authorities to confiscate all personal property that was not immediately needed in the classroom, and basically turned all public schools into day-prisons.

Would this make the schools safer and help prevent future school shootings?

Undoubtedly.

Would this increase in school safety be worth the price of forcing youth to undergo a prisoner’s existence for the duration of their education?

Of course not. A person would have to be insane to think so.

Means need to be evaluated, not independent of, but definitely distinct from, their ends. Bill 18 has a worthy goal in school safety, but that goal does not mean the bill itself deserves our support.

The goal of inclusivity is different from the goal of safety in that inclusivity is not a good in the same way safety is. We do not need to ask the question “safe from what” to know that safety is something to be desired, in and of itself, albeit not necessarily something to be sought whatever the cost. With inclusivity, however, the question “inclusive of what” must always be asked. Inclusivity can be good or bad, depending upon what is being included.

The kind of inclusivity that Bill 18 is designed to promote is not a good.  It is in fact an evil.  It is the very malignant cancer that is eating away at the soul of all Western societies.   It is the inclusivity that is currently the primary ideal of left-liberalism.   The progressive ideal of inclusivity is a combination of the older progressive ideals of equality and universality.   Equality and universality have been ideals of both liberalism and the revolutionary left throughout the Modern Age but until recently they were tempered and modified by other ideals and by the constraints of reality.  Then, after World War II, the left began its crusade against “racism”.   Racism, a word not much older than the Second World War itself, is usually understood to mean prejudice against other people on the basis of their skin colour or ethnic ancestry.   It has been used to describe a wide range of behaviour from telling ethnic jokes and holding ethnic stereotypes to refusing to associate or do business with people of certain races to actively persecuting people of other races.  The left declared racism to be the besetting sin of the Western world.  Progressives reinterpreted the history of Western civilization as one long series of racist assaults on other people that led inevitably to and culminated in the Nazi Holocaust.   They then set out to eliminate Western racism, establishing a no-tolerance policy for white racism in even its mildest forms, while ignoring racism committed by other peoples.   They made it their goal to radically transform all Western societies, from traditional organic societies into which outsiders may be admitted but which maintain a core biological and cultural continuity from one generation to the next into universal societies, with no cultural identity apart from a commitment to universalism and egalitarianism, full membership in which is open to anyone, anywhere on the planet, who wants it.   The progressive ideal of inclusivity began as this new model of society.

It did not end there.   The success of the antiracist crusade led other progressive movements to latch on to the concept of inclusivity for their own causes.  Feminism, a radical movement whose intellectual foundations had been laid in the 19^th Century by liberal and revolutionary writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Friedrich Engels, had achieved success early in the 20^th Century in its demands for political, educational and legal rights for women.  In the 1960s it was reborn with a new goal – the equal inclusion of women in all areas and aspects of society that had previously been exclusively or primarily the domain of men.  Around the same time the sexual liberation movement, which demanded the abolition of traditional moral constraints on human sexuality, began to gain momentum.   It too adopted the language of inclusivity.  Traditionally Western societies had defined forms of sexual behaviour other than heterosexual, monogamous, marriage as being morally deviant.  The sexual liberation movement insisted that the standards be changed to be more inclusive of alternative forms of sexual behaviour.  One particular branch of the sexual liberation movement was especially successful in adapting the ideal of inclusivity to its own ends.  That was the gay rights movement.   Traditionally, Western societies had, for obvious reasons, regarded it as being normal and desirable that men be sexually attracted to women, and vice versa, that they form monogamous relationships, and have and raise children together.   The gay rights movement insisted that the definition of normal be changed to include attraction and relationships between people of the same sex, that these relationships be regarded as equal to heterosexual relationships, that heterosexual relationships in no way be privileged over homosexual relationships, and indeed that society bend over backwards to include homosexuals in the distinctly heterosexual world of marriage and child rearing, by redefining marriage and allowing homosexuals to adopt children.

All of this nonsense is wrapped up in what the authors of Bill 18 mean when they say the bill will help make schools more “inclusive”.  The bill itself makes that explicit.  Section 4 (2) of the bill would add a subsection 41 (1.8) to the Public Schools Act which would read:

A respect from human diversity policy must accommodate pupils who want to establish and lead activities and organizations that

a) promote

(i) gender equity,
(ii) antiracism,
(iii) the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people who are disabled by barriers, or
(iv) the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities; and

b) use the name “gay-straight alliance” or any other name that is consistent with the promotion of a positive school environment that is inclusive and accepting of all pupils.

It would seem that the people behind this bill are exploiting the suffering of cyberbullying victims in order to promote a progressive, left-wing agenda.   This is rather distasteful, showing the complete lack of class we have come to expect from the New Democratic Party.   Even if that were not the case, however, this particular progressive agenda would be objectionable. 

Family is more important than business. The home is more important than the marketplace or the halls of government. The purpose of education is to prepare children to be responsible, adult members of society. Being responsible, adult, members of society includes many things of varying degrees of importance. The duties and responsibilities of behind a husband and father for men, and of being a wife and mother for women, are more important than the pursuit of a profession or career. The preparing of boys to be husbands and fathers and of girls to be wives and mothers is a part of education that is best done by parents in the home rather than teachers in the school, but the education provided in the schools should be supportive of this effort in the home and not subversive of it. “Gender equity” is neither consistent with nor compatible with this family-centric view of things. A school “human diversity policy” that requires the promotion of gender equity would be subversive of the role of parents in the home.

In theory, antiracism means opposition to unfounded prejudice against and/or mistreatment of people of other races and to the ideological exaltation of one’s own race as superior to others or destined to rule others. In reality antiracism is itself an irrational prejudice against white people. Antiracists typically believe that racism is most prevalent or even only found among people of white European ancestry, when in reality, it is the extreme tolerance of other people to the detriment of one’s own that we call “liberalism” that is the moral disease of the Caucasians. Antiracists treat the slightest verbal expression of racial prejudice on the part of a white person as the moral equivalent of leprosy, requiring the person who uttered it to be exiled and ostracized from the community while dismissing the idea that acts of criminal violence against white people by people of other races could possibly be motivated by racial prejudice.

There is also a great deal of irony to the fact that a bill that is purportedly against cyberbullying would be promoting antiracism.   You can see this irony for yourself, if you care to plunge into the Stygean depths of the netherworld of the internet, by checking out the blog known as Anti-Racist Canada.  You will see that the author or authors of the blog, who hide behind the anonymity of pseudonyms like noonespecial200 or nosferatu200, occupy a large part of their time and bandwidth in such activities as tracking down the online activities of obscure, “white pride” or “white power” groups, “outing” their members, infiltrating their Facebook and/or other social media connections, reposting their pictures and words, and subjecting them to ridicule.   You can judge for yourselves whether in all of this the “ARC Collective” is engaged in a valuable public service or whether they are just facilitating the future perpetual harassment of the people they write about and, if the latter, whether this is not a classic example of cyberbullying.

If it is objectionable that the public schools be used as instruments for propagating the progressive agenda of gender equity and antiracism, it is that much more odious that they would be used to promote the “awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.”  Do not let the white-washed language fool you.  A program designed to promote “the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities” will not merely be telling children “you should not harass, bully, or otherwise be mean to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or whatever” but  rather “you are not allowed to think that for men to be sexually attracted to women, and women to be sexually attracted to men, is more natural, normal or right than whatever other alternatives are out there”.   If that were not the case, this part of the bill would not even be controversial, for the opponents of the bill are not arguing for the position, which few if any hold, that people who are not heterosexual ought to be bullied.

This part of the bill is even more subversive of parental authority than the clause about the promotion of gender equity. An important part of parenthood is raising your son to be a good father and husband himself, and raising your daughter to be a good wife and mother herself. Parents should not expect the schools to do their job for them but they have the right to expect that the schools they send their children too will not be actively subverting their authority and hindering them from doing their job. The task of preparing your son to be a good father and husband, or your daughter to be a good wife and mother, requires the assumption that your son will eventually be a father and husband and that your daughter will eventually be a wife and mother, the assumption of heterosexuality as the default and the norm. To attempt to eliminate the idea of heterosexuality as the norm or default on the grounds of an ideological notion of inclusivity is to undermine a fundamental element of the task of parenthood. To turn schools, with which parents entrust the education of their children, into institutions for the propagation of ideology that undermines their raising of their children, is particularly and extremely obscene.

We have seen that bullying, the evil which Bill 18 is designed to combat, has until very recently been left to the authority of parents and teachers and that it is questionable that it requires a legislative response today. We have seen that one of the goods Bill 18 is designed to promote, safety, while unquestionably a good, is not a good to be attained by any and all means possible and that the kind of inclusivity the bill is intended to promote is not a good at all but an evil. Since the bill has therefore failed the test of ends, the test of means is unnecessary, but we will submit the bill to that test nonetheless.

The main thing Bill 18 sets out to do is to amend the Public Schools Act to include a definition of bullying. Section 3 of the bill includes three subsections that would be inserted into the Public Schools Act as Section 1.2. The first of these gives a definition of bullying, the second specifies characteristics and forms of bullying, and the third states that the person who “intentionally assists of encourages the bullying behaviour in any way” is to be considered as participating in the bullying alongside the person who is directly carrying it out. The definition of bullying reads as follows:

In this Act, “bullying” is behaviour that

(a) is intended to cause, or should be known to cause, fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other forms of harm to another person’s body, feelings, self-esteem, reputation or property; or

(b) is intended to create, or should be known to create, a negative school environment for another person.

Definitions can err by being either too broad or too narrow. A definition that is too broad includes too much. An example would be to define water as “a liquid”. This would include all liquids in the definition of water, regardless of their chemical substance. A definition that is too narrow excludes things which should not be excluded. If one were to define a liquid as “water”, for example, this would exclude all liquids that are not water.

This is a definition that is way too broad. The presence of virtually anything that a person objects to could be said to create “a negative school environment” for that person. The action that creates “a negative school environment” doesn’t even have to be intentional, it just has to be something that “should be known to” have that effect, which is an extremely vague way of putting it. Who exactly is supposed to decide what “should be known to” have these effects and what should not? Furthermore, everything that hurts someone’s feelings is included in this definition, with the same qualifications as pertain to the creating of a negative school environment.

The effects of defining bullying so broadly can only be bad. If this definition is included in the Public Schools Act, and school boards are required to incorporate it into their policies on bullying, it will mean that school officials will be required to administer and police social interaction, especially social interaction, between their students. It will mean that every thought students express, every word they say, will be subject to review to determine that no one else’s feelings are hurt by it. The difference between this and the hypothetical armed guard/watchdog policy discussed earlier when considering the objective of school safety is only one of degree, not of kind.

Bill 18 is clearly not the solution to the problem of bullying.

Is there a solution to the problem?

If there is, I doubt it would look anything like Bill 18. While legislation like Bill 18 is peddled by the government and its media supporters as giving tools to school boards, principals, and teachers to fight bullying, all it really accomplishes is to interject further provincial government control into the educational system. Earlier, in considering the question of whether bullying is now a problem that requires legislation, we deferred the question of whether the authorities that dealt with bullying in the past, parents and teachers, were no longer competent to do so. That is a question more appropriately considered here, in the contemplation of alternative solutions to bullying, because of an interesting paradox. A case can indeed be made that parents and teachers, who were capable of dealing with the problem of bullying in the past, are no longer capable of doing so. The authority of parents and of teachers has undeniably been greatly eroded in recent decades, which would certainly undermine their ability to deal with bullying. Yet, although this fulfils one of the conditions which could potentially make anti-bullying legislation necessary now when it was not in the past, ironically such legislation itself would contribute to the very situation which has been eroding parental authority.

Over the last century or so a transformation has taken place in public education. Originally a very decentralized affair, in which neighborhood schools and their boards were directly answerable to the parents of the students, and government control was minimal, it has evolved through a number of means, such as the infusion of funds from the government and previous progressive campaigns to establish uniform educational standards and the like, into a highly centralized system that is basically the educational branch of the government. This changed the role and authority of teachers. Their authority had originally been derived from that of the parents to whom they were deputies of a sort and who generally stood behind them and upheld their authority. As government gained control of education the basis of the teacher’s authority shifted and the teacher became more the agent of government than the deputy of the parent. Parents and teachers became more competing, rather than cooperating, authorities, especially since the new government-controlled educational system was increasingly used by progressive forces to subvert traditional authorities and institutions. This weakened the authority of parents and teachers alike.

If this decay in the authority of parents and teachers has contributed to the present problem of bullying, which it has, and Bill 18 would add to one of the biggest reasons for that decay in authority, which it would, then perhaps the solution to the bullying problem lies in the exact opposite direction, a relinquishing of government control of education, devolution of educational authority back to local school boards, the re-establishment of parental control over their children’s education, including their right to send their children to schools where they won’t have politically correct nonsense shoved down their throats.

It would at least be a start.

(1)   http://web2.gov.mb.ca/bills/40-2/pdf/b018.pdf