How Juvenal! – The Fourth Estate

The poet known as Juvenal – his full name was Decimus Junius Juvenalis - was born in the Volscian town of Aquinum (1) in central Italy around the middle of the first century Anno Domini. He studied rhetoric and law under Quintillian and served in the Roman military before obtaining a low level position in the Roman bureaucracy. A few decades later, still in the same position, and having grown very bitter about it, he picked up his stylus and turned to satire. Satire in those days was a more specific genre of writing than it is today. Then as now it was social commentary full of biting attacks on public personalities, but then in ancient Rome it had to be set in verse and composed in hexameter. Juvenal’s first attempts at satire landed him in hot water. He insulted the court of Caesar, and especially Domitian’s favourite, the actor Paris – presumably in the lines found in his seventh Satire although the book in which this has come down to us was not published until much later - and Domitian, not being known for his appreciation of this sort of thing, furiously sent him away to exile in Egypt. The exile was not long – it ended when Domitian was assassinated and Nerva became Caesar – but, having lost his estate and his position, he returned impoverished to Rome, where he became more bitter than ever as is plain to be seen in his extent writings – five books, containing sixteen Satires, published in the first four decades of the second century.

In the days when Juvenal was more commonly read than today the third and the tenth were the Satires which were general favourites. The third, which can be found in Book I of the Satires, depicts Rome as a city that has grown too big and hopelessly corrupt by acting as a sewer into which all the dregs of the known world drained, leaving no room for an honest but poor Roman. This Satire was imitated countless times in the period between the Renaissance and the death of classical education. One of the better known imitations was London, the first major work published by Samuel Johnson shortly after he moved to that city from his native Lichfield. It was a not-so-subtle attack on the Whig government of Robert Walpole and earned Dr. Johnson his first critical acclaim, from none other than Alexander Pope.

If Juvenal’s Satires themselves are less known today than they used to be, phrases from them are still universally recognizable. It is a rare bird (“rara avis”, Satire VI, line 165) who has never heard the expression “bread and circuses” (“panem et circenses”, Satire X, line 81) used to describe the means by which politicians bribe the masses into complacency. As familiar as these are is the famous question posed in the sixth Satire, which is by far the longest of them all, comprising in itself the entirety of Book II.

This Satire is addressed to someone named Postumus who is on the verge of marriage. Juvenal attempts to dissuade him by arguing that the last time female chastity could be found on earth was in the mythical, primordial, Golden Age before the Olympians overthrew the Titans and that Roman woman in particular had become so depraved that a man would have to be insane to marry one of them when he could opt for suicide or sodomy instead. That summarizes the first thirty-seven verses alone. From this point on Juvenal’s esteem for women enters into a downward slide as the poem continues for another six hundred and six lines, not including the thirty-four lines which in the manuscript discovered by E. O. Winsted in the Oxford library are inserted between lines 365 and 366. (2) Reading him today, one would almost think he had the #Me Too Movement in mind. Truly, he was a man ahead of his time.

The famous question actually occurs twice in the Satire, the first time in lines 346-347, the second time in lines 31-32 of the “Oxford fragment.” In both contexts, Juvenal begins by saying that he hears from his old friends all the time the advice to lock up your wife and keep her indoors. It is in response to this that he asks:

sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (3)

This can be translated “but who will guard the guardians themselves” or “but who will watch the watchmen themselves” or even “but who will police the police themselves.”

The last of these translations would sound extremely odd in the context of what Juvenal is discussing but it fits well with the broader application that has often been assigned to the question. This pertains to the state in its role of administering and enforcing the law. This role has often been compared to that of a watchman. The word Plato used for the governing class of his hypothetical ideal city could be rendered custodes in Latin, just as both words are conventionally rendered “guardians” in English. Minarchists, that is to say, those who argue that the state should be as small and limited as is consistent with law and order, (4) frequently use the metaphor of the night-watchman to illustrate what they see the role of the state to be. Transferred from its original reference and applied to the state in this capacity, Juvenal’s question becomes the question of who keeps tabs on the civil authorities and holds them accountable for how they use and abuse their power.

Ideological democrats would answer “the people”, but this is extremely naïve. It has been recognized since ancient times that it is the leaders who are able to sway the masses into supporting them who are the most likely to severely abuse civil authority. A much better answer is the old Tory answer of “God.” The Whigs, and all the liberals who have come after them, regarded the “divine right of kings” as a license for the abuse of power. If the king gets his authority from God, they reasoned, he can do whatever he wants. This is totally fallacious, of course, because if regal authority comes from God, this means that the king is accountable to a Power that is both absolute and incorruptible, for how he uses that authority. A king who believes in God, and recognizes God as the source of his authority, is far less likely to abuse that power, than some demagogue who climbs to power through the support of the people and who in his heart recognizes no power greater than himself.

For the sake of making a point however, I am going to take the Tory answer, which is how I myself would answer the question, off of the table. If we answer “God” and by “God” mean God as He is conceived of in Christianity – the Omnipotent, Eternal, Unchanging Being Who is Perfect in His Justice, Righteousness, Mercy and Love – then we have a final answer to the question. If, however, we restrict the answers to those involving some sort of human agency, then we find that the question keeps repeating itself. Remember that the question is “who guards the guardians” or “who watches the watchers.” Any time you answer that question by naming some individual person, group of individuals, or human institution, these become the new “guardians” or “watchers” and the question must be repeated with regards to them. As long as you keep answering the question in this way, the question keeps repeating itself.

There is an institution that has long regarded itself as being the answer to the question at least insofar as it is asked in regards to the civil authority. I refer to the news media. In the eighteenth century, the news media - which at the time was synonymous with the press because there was no other medium - was dubbed "the fourth estate" (5), an allusion to the three estates of the realm – the clergy, nobility, and common people – and their representatives in Parliament. The expression suggested that the press was a more powerful estate than all of the others combined because it held them all accountable by reporting everything they did. Obviously, only a privately owned, independent press could fulfil this role with regards to the state. A publicly owned press would have the same power to shape and mold public opinion, but it would do so in the service of state interests rather than in the interest of holding the state accountable. Think Pravda and the rest of the controlled press in the former Soviet Union.

The mere existence of a public news medium, like the BBC or the CBC, is not enough to negate the news media's role as the watchers of the state, when it is a single voice among many, competing in a marketplace of information that is still a reasonably free forum. That can hardly be said to describe the unhealthy situation in Canada today. The Crown broadcaster has long been staffed primarily by adherents of the Liberal Party, and for this reason the CBC only subjects the government of the day to intense, adversarial, scrutiny, when the Conservatives are in power. The government agency responsible for regulating the electronic communications media, the CRTC, is also staffed mostly by Liberal-sympathetic civil servants. To make matters much worse, in the period since the Liberals returned to power in 2015, they have bailed out to the tune of billions, much of the private sector of the news media. Ironically, the Liberals justified the bailout of the media by pointing to how essential the media is in a free and democratic country, even though the bailout compromised the very independence that allows the media to function in this role.

The result can be seen everywhere today. For months Parliament has not been able to properly hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable. It adjourned at the beginning of the ill-advised pandemic lockdown, and when it resumed in April, it was at a much reduced capacity as the Liberals wanted and obtained with the help of the socialists and environmentalists. The Liberals have now succeeded, with the same backers, in sending Parliament into recess until the fall. When the previous Conservative government had Parliament prorogued for a much shorter period than this, the outcry from the media was deafening. They regarded this to be a mortal threat to democracy. Now there is mostly silence. Meanwhile, throughout this entire period, the Prime Minister has been giving brief updates almost every morning, in small press conferences admission to which has been tightly controlled to exclude unsympathetic and hostile questioners. There has been little objection to this with the exception of that which came from the small, private, online news companies that have been so excluded. Until earlier this week when a CBC reporter actually dared to put him on the spot with regards to the racial situation in the United States he had faced only Mickey Mouse questions tailored to fit his own agenda. The Canadian media has largely abdicated its role as watcher of the state.

A much worse problem exists, however, when the fourth estate fails to realize that quis custodiet can be asked of itself as well. Its power, let us never forget, comes from the same source as that of the archetypical populist demagogue, namely the ability to sway the masses and shape public opinion. This is a power that is no less dangerous in the hands of a press that does not regard itself as being accountable to anyone other than itself than it is in the hands of a would-be tyrant. Indeed, it is even more so.

Consider what has been happening south of the border for the last week. Race riots, with the looting, arson, destruction and mayhem that these entail, have sprung up in cities across the United States. The media bears the lion’s share of the culpability for this. For decades they have been deliberately distorting the facts about issues pertaining to race in the United States. Through over-reporting and hyper-editorializing every incident in which an unarmed black man is shot by a white policeman, and under-reporting all other police shootings that don't fit this pattern they have created the contra-factual impression in the general public that cops, especially white cops, use unarmed blacks for target practice. In reality, and the data clearly shows this, more whites are killed by the police than blacks every year. This fact is all the more significant in that the data also consistently shows that blacks commit a much larger percentage of the violent crime in the United States than their percentage of the American population, and that their percentage among the victims of police shootings is smaller than their percentage among violent crime perpetrators. The data also shows that police, white and black, are far more likely to shoot members of their own race than the other. The media does not widely report the studies and statistics that document this data, they instead make the specific incidents that fit the pattern they are looking for into their highlighted and headlined story for days, weeks, months on end. They trot out all of the victim’s family and friends, to eulogize and emote, in what is a cynical exploitation of these people’s pain, loss, and suffering in order to bully into silence anybody who tries to counter their narrative spin by pointing to the data. “How can you be so cold as to be talking about facts and statistics when these people are suffering?” is what their non-argument boils down to. Then they get pop singers, movie and television actors, and every other celebrity they can find to weigh in on the matter with their own uninformed and irrelevant opinion. This latter point should be sufficient to clue people in to the fact that they are seeing actors putting on a show instead of honest, truth-seeking, journalism. It is possible, of course, that they think of what they are doing as some sort of a "noble lie" justified by the need to raise “awareness” of white “racism” or some such rot. To someone who does not share their activist outlook, however, it appears more like they are trying to incite a race war, and their behaviour over the last couple of weeks would bear out that interpretation. Apart from giving the death of George Floyd the same treatment described above, they have encouraged and promoted what they persist in describing as peaceful protests, despite the looting and burning. Evidence abounds that these riots are not spontaneous uprisings in response to Floyd’s death but highly organized affairs, well supplied with transportation, bricks, etc., indicating that they were planned well in advance. The mainstream progressive media has for years been whitewashing the Blackshirt actions of the growing Antifa movement which is undoubtedly providing the organization here, suggesting a high degree of media complicity in producing this anarchy.

It is imperative, therefore, today, that we turn our serious attention to the question of who watches the watchers, with regards to the self-appointed watchers of the state themselves, the fourth estate.

(1) Now called Aquino.

(2) The same manuscript inserts a much shorter fragment after line 373.

(3) In the Oxford fragment this does not end with a question mark but a comma because it is followed by the relative clause “qui nunc lasciuae furta puellae hac mercede silent?” which basically says that the guardians take payment to keep silent about the girl’s mischief. The larger context in the fragment is interesting in itself. It begins with an attack on effeminate males which, if had been written today, would have landed the poet in exile again for some phobia or another, even if he had not already been driven out by the feminists over what he said in the larger body of the poem. Juvenal complains that theses have way too much influence over the minds of women and from this launches into a warning to husbands who rely upon eunuch servants to guard their wives’ fidelity. The gist of the warning is that there are plenty of Lotharios willing to masquerade as pansies in order to trick husbands into becoming parties to their own cuckolding and so the husbands need to make sure that the eunuchs are eunuchs indeed. This leads in to where the earlier discussion is repeated.

(4) This view is often ascribed to libertarians, who do indeed hold it, but libertarianism is more properly a specific set of arguments for minarchism rather than minarchism itself.

(5) Thomas Carlyle attributed it to speech given by Edmund Burke in 1787.

Old Toby and the Battle Against the Bat Virus

One of the most interesting and amusing aspects of the pandemic is the growing amount of data that suggests that tobacco smoking may under certain circumstances actually help fight the disease. It is an odd piece of information in that it so counter-intuitive. Other conditions for which nicotine is believed to have at least palliative and in some cases, perhaps, preventative effects, are generally chronic conditions of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The Wuhan Flu or, if you prefer, COVID-19, on the other hand, is a respiratory disease. In its ordinary, moderate, form it is not noticeably different from the seasonal flu. In its more severe and potentially fatal form, it develops into the intensive kind of pneumonia that was labelled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS when the first coronavirus of this type appeared almost twenty years ago. This is exactly the sort of disease to which one would expect smoking to make one particularly vulnerable. It is most dangerous to the elderly, those with other complicating factors, and especially the combination of the two. Foremost among the other complicating factors are chronic conditions that compromise the immune and respiratory systems. Tobacco has been increasingly demonized since 1965 precisely on the basis of its being a leading cause of such respiratory diseases as emphysema and lung cancer.

Initially, the evidence seemed to point to what one would logically expect, namely that tobacco smoking increased the risk of death from this disease. The countries that were hit the first and the hardest were countries where smoking is still as common today as it was in North America about fifty years ago – China and Italy. When the virus arrived in North America, the city that was hit the hardest was New York City the reputation of which as a city of chain-smokers persists to this day. All of this is consistent with the expectation that the habit of tobacco smoking increases vulnerability to the coronavirus.

That this logical expectation is in fact the truth is the position taken by the World Health Organization and by public health authorities around the globe. Within the past seventy-two hours - it was forty-eight at the time I commenced writing this - a large number of these have issued statements to that effect, warning the public against the idea that cigarettes might protect them from COVID-19. Many of these statements are poorly written and they give every impression of having been issued in haste as if in an effort to try and put out a fire that had sprung up where somebody had flicked cigarette ash onto an official narrative.

Rumours that even though the virus was taking its worst tolls in populations with a high percentage of smokers, the smokers themselves were surprisingly underrepresented among its victims, had been growing for weeks. Then they were followed by something that was substantially more than rumour. Late in April, a study done in France found that in China, France, and the United States, smokers were a disproportionately low percentage of those who required hospitalization for COVID-19. The Economist reported on this study early in May. Then, late last week the preliminary research of a study done in England on various risk factors associated with fatal cases of COVID-19, pointed in the same, surprising, direction with regards to smoking.

Colby Cosh reported on all of this in an article that appeared in the National Post on Monday. What the studies seem to be indicating is that if age and sex are the only other factors considered, smokers are at greater risk than non-smokers, but if people have chronic respiratory conditions or an “inferior socioeconomic status” they are at less risk if they are current smokers than if they are ex-smokers or just non-smokers. Cosh in his report included the caveat “No one, including me, will advise a non-smoker to start smoking to ward off the novel coronavirus” to which he adds, amusingly “But, uh…if I had pre-existing plans to quit I might personally have delayed them.”

Cosh followed up on this with a second article on Wednesday. In his first article he had observed that the studies in question offered no explanation for why this would be the case. Whether it was the nicotine in the cigarettes, the tar or added chemicals, or even merely the habit of frequent coughing associated with smoking that made the difference, was a matter that would have to be inquired into separately. After his first article he had been contacted, however, by a Greek doctor named Konstantinos Farsalinos who had written about this oddity back in April. Farsalinos had offered two suggestions as to an explanation. The first is that nicotine might hinder the coronavirus’ ability to generate a “cytokine storm” and thus turn a person’s own immune system against him. Nicotine is believed to inhibit precisely those cytokines that have an inflammatory effect and which cause so much damage when driven into overdrive by the virus. The second suggestion was that nicotine might affect the production of the ACE2 enzyme which is the virus's main entry point into cells in a way that causes its protective function to kick into high gear and work against the virus. Cosh notes that these explanations are not mutually exclusive, nor are they the only possibilities.

Since the thought that tobacco smoking might convey even the slightest of health benefits runs completely contrary to health fascism’s oldest and most sacred narrative it is no wonder that that the public health authorities have been issuing panicky statements, full of misspelled words, grammatical errors, and logical fallacies in their haste to condemn the aforementioned studies and assure the public that demon tobacco is still sporting its horns and cloven hoofs. Amusingly, they have attacked the French study on the grounds of alleged ties between its lead author and the tobacco industry. What makes this so funny is that it comes from people funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Among the things this industry is noted for are its aggressive attempts to stamp out any alternative forms of treatment to their expensive, patented, medicines, its advertising strategy of brainwashing people into thinking the solution to all their problems is to be found in a pill bottle and thus instilling in them a psychological predisposition towards substance abuse and addiction, and its unethical and inhumane experiments and tests, generally carried out in countries that don’t have strict laws against these things. If any industry makes the tobacco industry look squeaky clean by comparison it is the pharmaceutical industry and that industry owns the World Health Organization, the public health authorities, and most of the medical profession, lock stock and barrel.

Their corrupt influence has certainly been on prominent display throughout this pandemic. That the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, also commonly used for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is highly effective in treating coronaviruses of precisely this type has been known since the first SARS outbreak. By the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March, studies in Europe and elsewhere were already showing that this was true of this virus as well. More recently, the extremely high success rate of those physicians who have used this drug to treat COVID-19, especially in combination with zinc and the antibiotic azithromycin, has pretty much conclusively demonstrated that it works and it works well. There has been a thoroughly dishonest campaign of media disinformation that claims otherwise. The drug's known side effects have been greatly exaggerated. There was that outright deception involving people who self-administered a form of chloroquine that is used as a cleaning product with disastrous consequences. A test in which it was administered after the severe form of the disease had already progressed to the point where the patients were put on ventilators, a point at which the chances of any treatment – including the ventilators – working drops to next to nothing, was touted as "disproving" the drug's effectiveness. Against the ever-growing body of success stories from physicians using this drug in the field, the media has trotted out the "experts" who insist that its efficacy can only be demonstrated by a particular kind of clinical trial. While this is impressive to those who reflexively genuflect before scientific authority, others, who are more familiar with their methodology, will recognize that the kind of trials they are talking about are tests where all the variables are completely under the control of the "researcher" thereby granting him control of the outcome. This entire smokescreen can be partly explained by the fact that the drug was promoted by Donald the Orange. The media would go out of their way to contradict him no matter what he said. If he were to say "the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds are singing in the trees" they would say "the sky is black, it is a dark and stormy night and that is the howl of the timber wolf you hear" and then dig up some expert somewhere who would back them up against the evidence of their own eyes and ears. There is more to the explanation than this, however. The anti-malaria drug has been around for almost a century and is cheap to produce. Treating COVID patients with it would be far less profitable for the pharmaceutical industry than forcing everybody to take some expensive, patented, vaccine.

It is people on the payroll of the corrupt industry described above who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to stomp out the fire set by these interesting studies about tobacco. This is perhaps stronger evidence than anything in the studies themselves that there is something to this.

Whether or not that is the case, of course, is something that must await further studies before it can be determined. As I pointed out at the start of this essay, it certainly seems to be counter-intuitive. It would certainly tickle my fancy, however, as someone who despises the public health authorities, the pharmaceutical industry, the mainstream mass media, and the anti-smoking nuts alike, if something like this, sure to stick in the craw of all four, were to be confirmed.

Shall Past and Future Generations Rise in the Judgement and Condemn us for our Folly at This Moment?

Suppose that for some reason – let us say that you are looking to graduate with a degree in Mad Science from Evil Genius University and are required to demonstrate that you can practically apply what you have learned in theory - you wanted to create a shortage of essential goods during a crisis. How would you go about doing so?

The simplest way by far would be to get people to panic over the very shortage you wish to create. Start spreading the word that due to the crisis we are facing an impending economic shutdown and that everybody should grab as much as they can while they still can to prepare for the days ahead. The word would spread like wildfire through the masses, who, despite any number of sober, sane voices warning them to keep calm and behaver rationally, can be relied upon to do their part by rushing to the markets, hording everything in sight, and creating the very shortages you have warned them about.

Bada bing, bada boom. You are now able to pick up your degree, rub your hands, cackle maniacally and say “Fools! I’ll destroy them all!” Although you might wish to express that infamous sentiment in the perfect tense.

That the masses can be depended upon to do their part in the above, not so hypothetical, scenario is due to one of the quirks of fallen human nature, the one we normally think of in terms of crowd psychology or, if we wish to use a more pejorative expression, mob mentality. People, when they act together as a crowd, mob or mass, do not act in an informed, rational manner, regardless of how educated or intelligent they may be individually. Every demagogue, that is to say, every would-be tyrant hoping to be swept into power on a wave of popular support, knows this to be true, and seeks to capitalize on it.

There is a saying of Edmund Burke’s that Russell Kirk was fond of quoting that could be taken as a contradiction of this if misunderstood. The saying was “The individual is foolish; but the species is wise.” By “the species”, Burke meant the human race considered collectively, not just at a moment in time, as in the phenomenon of the masses, but over the course of generations. His point, which is a very true one, is that the judgement of such a collective as it has come down to us in folkways and mores, habits and customs, tradition and prescription, is far more trustworthy than the judgement of any individual. It is helpful to consider Burke’s original statement, in its original, unabridged, albeit less pithy, form:

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right. (bold added by myself for emphasis)

What, one hundred, two hundred, or five hundred years down the road, will be the judgement of the species, upon us who are alive today, for how we have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?

If you have not already figured it out from the question asked in the title of this essay, a paraphrase of Our Lord’s biting judgement on the generation that saw His earthly ministry and rejected Him, I suspect it will not be a favourable one.

Those who will receive the least condemnation from this assize, that of the collective judgement of the human race over the course of human history, will be those who are receiving the largest share of the blame at the moment, namely the hording masses, who have descended like a swarm of locusts upon the shelves that once contained toilet paper, medication, canned goods, and other emergency supplies. It is not in the nature of crowds to behave in an informed, rational, manner, and so they can neither be expected to do so nor held accountable when they fail to do so.

Far greater condemnation will fall upon those who generated the panic in the first place, namely the mainstream media. Ever since they learned, in December of last year, that a new strain of coronavirus was behind an outbreak of respiratory disease in Wuhan and the surrounding region in China, they have bombarded the public with non-stop coverage of the disease, irresponsibly focusing on the unknown rather than what is known – namely, that the majority of people who are infected with this virus experience only mild symptoms similar to a cold or the flu and that those most at risk for experiencing the disease at its worst – severe difficulty in breathing, organ failure, intense pain and death – are the same demographic most at risk of dying from seasonal influenza or, for that matter, any other infectious disease, those over the age of 65, those who have pre-existing medical problems, and most especially those who fall into both categories. The mortality rate for this virus appears to be about ten times higher than for regular strains of the flu but this does not mean that everybody is ten times more likely to die from it than from the flu. Those who belong to the at-risk demographics are more likely to die from this virus than they are from the flu but this does not mean that this is true of everybody else. It also does not mean that those in the at-risk demographics are more likely to die than they are to survive. Even for those in the most-at-risk demographic, the survival rate is still much, much higher than the mortality rate. For people under fifty, the mortality rate is below the one percent that represents the ten times worse than the flu figure. Eighty percent of fatalities have been among people sixty or older, and over ninety percent of fatalities have had other, complicating, medical conditions. Note, that since most who contract the virus experience mild symptoms and many experience no symptoms at all, the total number of people who have been infected is much higher and consequently the true mortality rate much lower, than what is reflected in the official statistics.

These are the sort of things – the facts, what we do know – that the media should have been emphasizing, especially the fact that the vast majority of those who contract this virus experience nothing worse than the average cold or flu. Instead they focused on what we do not know and so, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, they generated a panic. .

The worst condemnation will be reserved for those who are most responsible for behaving in a calm, rational, manner, those who have a duty to set an example for the masses and provide them with leadership, rather than following them into an irrational panic or, worse, exploiting that panic for their own ends. Here I refer to our civil and ecclesiastical leaders.

With regards to our ecclesiastical leadership, allow me to remind them that Our Lord calls us to walk by faith not by fear – except the “fear of God” which is something entirely different from the kind of worldly paranoia we see on display in those Churches that are shutting their doors. Advising those most at risk to stay home is one thing. Cancelling all services in entire dioceses is another thing altogether. There are plenty of other ways to reduce the risk for those attending public worship. I refer you to the recent article “Keep The Churches Open” by R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, for an excellent discussion of this matter. I refer you to A. N. Bethune’s Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto, in particular the account of his heroic efforts during the choleric outbreaks of the 1830s for an example of what walking by faith rather than fear in a time of plague looks like.

As for our civil leaders, there are no words strong enough to express my contempt for their exploiting this mass panic to impose what is essentially Communism on us. Here is what a rational response to this pandemic would have been:

A) Quarantine all that we know to be infected for the duration of the period in which they are contagious.
B) Quarantine all who are at special risk.
C) Quarantine anyone coming into the country for two weeks.
D) Advise everybody to take the same special precautions that they are normally advised to do during flu season. Make an extra effort to impress upon people the importance of this. Recommend frequent handwashing, sunlight, fresh air, Vitamins C and D and the like.
E) Otherwise let everybody continue their normal affairs.

The preceding is what a government truly concerned about the health and welfare of the country they are supposed to be leading would do. Instead, they are exploiting the situation to gain a totalitarian level of control over our countries.

Do some research about what life was like in the Soviet Union prior to perestroika, glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You needed the state’s permission to go anywhere. Large meetings, other than the events organized by the Communist Party that you were required to attend, were forbidden. There were shortages of essential goods. You had to wait in line for hours to get a loaf of bread. The state promised everything to everybody but failed to deliver. Churches were closed. Any form of social organization that was not under the control of the omnipotent state was actively discouraged. Friends, neighbours and family members were encouraged to spy on each other and report if the rules were being broken.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease COVID-19, has come and it will go. Will we ever regain the precious freedoms that we are sacrificing in order to fight it? It took seventy years before the Soviet regime loosened its iron grip on the Russian nation and empire.

I do not wish to create a different sort of paranoia. Perhaps, and let us all hope and pray that it turns out this way, the “curve” will be “flattened” as appears to have happened in South Korea and as the Chinese, who are probably lying, say has happened in their Communist hell-hole which begat the whole problem in the first place, and within weeks – a couple of months at the most – the government will loosen its draconian controls, and we can return to some semblance of normalcy. Let us hope that the “months” that Prime Minister Trudeau has been talking about mean “two at the most” and not the “eighteen” as some have been recommending. Let us hope that this is not the beginning of forcing us to live this way on a permanent basis, as is desired by the climate change alarmist lunatics. Let us hope that nobody listens to those bat soup crazy individuals who are already claiming that the government is not being draconian enough.

If however, the aforementioned desired outcome does not occur and we end up living under this kind of totalitarian control for the long haul, past generations looking upon us from beyond shall condemn us for having thrown away the heritage of freedom they bequeathed to us, and future generations shall condemn us for leaving to them nothing but a heritage of Communist slavery.

No, Andrew Scheer’s “Social Conservatism” Did Not Lose the Election

In light of the public discussion that has taken place since the Dominion Election on October 21st, a point that I made in my reflections on the outcome of that election deserves reiteration. The views which Andrew Scheer, Conservative leader, was said to hold on abortion and same-sex marriage, are not the reason the Conservatives failed to win the election, nor are they even a significant contributing factor to the loss. The evasive, wishy-washy, manner in which Mr. Scheer handled these matters when they were raised during the campaign may have been a contributing factor, but the right-wing views attributed to him were not.

The vast majority of commentators in the mainstream media, being overwhelmingly progressive, maintain otherwise, of course, but in this, as in most things, they are completely wrong. Indeed, on some level they know that they are wrong, which is the very reason they insist so strongly and so frequently on their mistaken notion that social conservatism cannot be sold to the Canadian public. They want it to be true and believe that if they tell Canadians it is true often and loudly enough that will make it true. The principle they are operating upon is one famously spelled out by an infamous, Austrian psychopath in the tenth chapter of his memoirs, ninety-four years ago.

Andrew Scheer in an interview with the Canadian Press shortly after the election said that he believed it was possible for someone with conservative views on abortion and same-sex marriage to be Prime Minister of Canada. He was right, but it would have been better if he had been saying this firmly, strongly, and consistently prior to the election. A few days later, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh responded by saying “You cannot have Mr. Scheer’s beliefs and be the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s pretty clear.” One wonders if he was able to say this with a straight face. Of all the electable parties in Canada, Mr. Singh’s takes the position furthest to the left on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and they were the biggest losers in the election, dropping from third to fourth place in total number of seats, and going down four percentage points in the popular vote. Mr. Scheer’s party, by contrast, increased their number of seats and their percentage of the popular vote. If the election results say anything about social conservatism, and it does not, it is not what Mr. Singh thinks.

Let me put it to you plainly. Some people claim to believe that it is every woman’s right to terminate the lives of her children, at least prior to their births. Of these lunatics, the number that would have voted Conservative had someone other than Andrew Scheer been leading the party is miniscule. It is probably not enough to make the difference between the win or the loss of a single seat.

Conversely, there are sane people in our country, a lot more than the mainstream media would like you to think, who rightly consider it to be morally outrageous that in Canada women are legally able to obtain abortions right up to the moment of birth. This includes people with a wide range of differing opinion as to what legal limitations there ought to be on abortion. Some would like to see it prohibited only in the third trimester, others would like to see it restricted to the first, and others still would ban it altogether. There are those who would make an exception in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape, while others would say that to do so is to punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. Some maintain that abortion should be permissible when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mothers, others would say that while saving the life of the mother is certainly a priority, termination of the pregnancy is permissible only as an unintended consequence, never as the intended outcome. There are also differences of opinion as to who bears the burden of criminal guilt over abortion – the doctor, the mother, or both – and what the penalty ought to be. Those of us who take the most hardline anti-abortion position possible and would ban any and all abortions from the moment of conception with no exceptions but with strict penalties for all involved are, sadly, a minority but those who think that there should be legal restrictions of some sort are much larger in number, almost certainly the vast majority.

Let us make two unwarranted and absurd assumptions about such people. The first is that these are all aware of the difference between their own position and the post-1988 status quo and therefore of the fact that Parliamentary legislation would be necessary to arrive at the place in which they want the country to be. The second is that they view everything other than abortion through the lens of ceteris paribus and so choose whom to vote for based solely on this one issue. How, given these assumptions, would Scheer’s campaign have appealed to such people in the last election?

The answer is that while Scheer’s pro-life and socially conservative background would not have driven them away, like it would all the hard-line pro-choicers who would never vote Conservative anyway, his insistence, in response to progressive badgering, that he would not re-open the issue, would have given them no incentive to vote Conservative. What Scheer was saying was that the Conservatives, under his leadership, would in practice, act no differently than the Grits or the Socialists. In which case there was no reason whatsoever for pro-life, socially conservative, people to vote for the party that has long taken their votes for granted, while doing nothing to deserve them.

The conclusion is inevitable – while Scheer’s stated views in the past on abortion and same-sex marriage were not a significant contributing factor to the Conservative loss his waffling on these same issues during the campaign was. The weasely, mealy-mouthed, evasive manner in which he conducted this waffling, did not help things much either.

For decades progressive politicians and pundits have been telling the Conservatives that they need to limit their platform to fiscal conservatism because social conservatism loses elections. For far too long, the leadership of the Conservative Party has been listening to them. The exact opposite is the case. How many people practice rigid, self-denying, austerity in their private lives? Of these, how many make it their political priority that the government do the same? Fiscal conservatism is rational, sensible, and responsible, but it appeals only to economic eggheads and not the public. For most people, the immediate benefit to themselves of government spending programs will always outweigh their portion of the collective cost of government. This is the obvious political application, perhaps even more valid than the original ecological application, of Garrett Hardin’s famous parable of the “tragedy of the commons.” Nobody has ever won an election on fiscal conservatism alone. It has to be packaged with other, more appealing, policies. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were no exceptions to this rule.

This is the lesson that Andrew Scheer and the Conservative leadership ought to learn from our last Dominion election.

What are the odds that they will learn it?

Captain Ahab Gets His Whale

In Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, New York District Attorney Abe Weiss and his assistants, such as Larry Kramer, faced with the constant howling of the wolves of racial grievance stirred up by demagogues like Reverend Bacon, are in a desperate, Captain Ahabesque, search for “the great white defendant”, thinking that they have found him in the book’s protagonist, a Wall Street trader named Sherman McCoy whose adultery has landed him in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Well, it now appears that the “great white defendant” has finally made an appearance in the person of Dylann Roof, the twenty-one year old drug and video game addict charged with the mass shooting in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina last week. Assuming that what we are being told about Roof is accurate, he appears to be everything the progressive Left could have hoped for in a mass murderer: a white, Southern, male who posed with the Confederate battle flag and wrote a lengthy manifesto declaring his intention to start a race war in response to all the black-on-white crime in America. You would almost think the Left had invented him.

Let’s get the ceremonial statement of the obvious over and done with. The shooting of innocent people in a church is a heinous and horrendous crime for which this punk ought to be convicted and executed. There, now that we have gotten that out of the way, we can move on to discuss the larger issues surrounding this incident.

Roof, it has been widely reported, began his descent into homicidal madness, when, following the Trayvon Martin shooting, he searched for black-on-white crime online, was led to the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and found countless examples of rapes and other violent crimes committed by blacks against whites which have gone under-reported in the mainstream media. Progressives in the media, with the help of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Centre which capitalize on the fear of white racism that they spread to raise funds while masquerading as experts on hate, have jumped all over this and concluded, in what passes for logic in the progressive mind, that the Council of Conservative Citizens must therefore be blamed for the Roof’s actions.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Progressives “reason” that the Council of Conservative Citizens by reporting on black-on-white crime is trying to stir up race hatred against blacks among whites. If that is the case, what then are progressives in the media trying to do when they make every single racially-motivated crime committed by a white person a front page headline and breaking news story and then ceaselessly talk about it for months on end while saying virtually nothing about racially-motivated crimes against whites? Are they trying to stir up race hatred against whites among non-whites and/or self-loathing among whites? Stories about racially-motived crimes committed by whites always seem to be interpreted in such a way as into suggest that they are the tip of the iceberg, that many, if not most, white people secretly harbour racism that could easily turn into the kind of violent racial hatred manifested in people like Roof, and that something must be done therefore to re-educate white people. A better case can be made that the mainstream media seeks to make whites the targets of racial hatred, than that organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens, in countering the narrative of the mainstream media, seek to make non-whites the targets of racial hatred.

Douglas Quan, writing in the National Post a few days ago, said:

One statistic the group [the Council of Conservative Citizens]often cites is that there are 20,000 rapes against white women by black men annually.

Immediately thereafter he goes on to write:

What is not mentioned is that the 2008 U.S. justice department report upon which that number is based shows the vast majority of sexual crimes against white women that year — more than 88,000 cases — were committed by white men.

In other words, according to Quan, the Council of Conservative Citizens has misrepresented the facts through partial reporting, presumably to generate fear of black rapists on the part of whites. Quan himself, however, has neglected to mention all of the relevant statistics. The report in question does indeed say that more white-on-white sexual crimes occurred than black-on-white. It also says that more black-on-black sexual crimes occurred than white-on-black. It consistently shows that crimes in which the offender and victim are of the same race, white-on-white or black-on-black, far outnumber either black-on-white, or white-on-black crimes. One more statistic needs to be considered to get the full picture, and that is that of white-on-black crime. The report gives the percentage of sexual crimes committed against black victims in 2008 in which the offender was perceived to be white as 0.0%. Indeed, in the vast majority of categories of crime, the report finds black-on-white crime to be a larger percentage of crimes committed against whites than white-on-black crime is of crimes committed against blacks.

What does this information tell us?

The fact that crime is more likely to take place within a race, by blacks against blacks or whites against whites, than by members of either race against the other, is an excellent argument against racist fearmongering. The fact that interracial crime is far more often black-on-white than white-on-black, however, tells us who the real racist fearmongers are. If white women are far more likely to be raped by white men than by black men, blacks are far more likely to be murdered by other blacks than by whites, much less by deranged racist lunatics like Dylann Roof. One would never know that from listening to the narrative of the mainstream media.

In that narrative animosity towards other races is treated as being an affliction almost exclusively of white people. This narrative is clearly not supported by the facts, as the higher likelihood of interracial crime being committed against whites than by whites indicates a higher level of racial animosity towards whites among blacks than towards blacks among whites, but it contributes to those facts by promoting fear of whites among blacks and other non-whites, which in turn generates racial animosity towards whites. That animosity manifests itself in the black-on-white crime rate that the media ignores on its best days and attempts to hide and deny on its worst. When the facts about black-on-white crime and the media’s mendacious handling of them become known to a diseased mind like Roof’s, mercifully rare incidents like this one can ensue. None of this excuses the crime, of course. My point is that the media figures who are pointing the finger at organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens that exist to counter their dishonest narrative, should look to the proverbial three or four fingers pointing back at them.

The percentage of crimes committed by blacks in the United States is disproportionately high when compared to their percentage in the population. While progressives accuse anyone who notices this of being racist, think about the significance of this fact in light of the statistics we have already considered. If intraracial crime is committed at a much higher frequency than interracial crime then a disproportionately high rate of commission of crimes among blacks means that they are also victimized at a higher rate. If those who sanctimoniously preach that “black lives matter” truly believed their own words they would realize there is a problem that needs to be addressed here and attempt to deal with it rather than scream “racist” at anyone who points out these facts while pretending that the biggest threats to black people are racist cops and Dylann Roofs.

Instead, they prefer, like the prosecutors in Wolfe’s book, to pin their hopes on validating their delusions by finding that “great white defendant”. Of course, unlike the fictional Sherman McCoy, the real Dylann Roof seems to be guilty of the crime of which he is accused. If the murder itself was not proof enough of Roof’s insanity, his handing the progressive Left exactly what they wanted would surely suffice.