Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator

 

Just when everyone thought that the combination of two and a half years of bat flu paranoia, online streaming services, and new film releases consisting mostly of the double digit latest installments in series that everyone had grown tired of at least a decade ago had finally killed off the cinema, Barbenheimer – the simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer -brought the teetering industry back from the brink of bankruptcy, as both films broke box office records their opening weekend.   The meme itself, which encouraged people to watch both as a double feature, probably had something to do with it.  I don’t know who exactly came up with it.   There is a well-known phenomenon in which rival film studies release similar films around the same time – think Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998, for one example.   This is obviously the exact opposite of that, two movies that could hardly be more different from each other being released at the same.   Of course this is not exactly an unusual phenomenon.  Arguably, it occurs every weekend.   In this case, however, the difference between the two seems to have struck someone, or rather a whole lot of someones as the popularity of the meme attests, as being much larger than is usual.     Or maybe it was just the catchiness of the portmanteau.   The first is a live action comedy featuring Margot Robbie as the fashion doll upon which Mattel built its toy empire.   The second is a three hour biopic starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist from Berkeley who was led the Manhattan Project in uncorking the bottle and releasing the genie of nuclear weapons into the world.   With Barbie being only an hour shorter than Oppenheimer, bringing the total running time of the two to five hours, it would have been a long night at the movies for anyone who took the meme literally.   Not, “watch the entire Ring cycle in one sitting” long, but a step in that direction.

 

Barbie proved to be the bigger hit of the two, taking in almost twice as much as Oppenheimer.  Since it is a highly politicized movie, a fact the filmmakers made no attempt to hide prior to release, some have jumped on this as debunking the maxim “go woke, go broke”.   An op-ed cartoon in the Baltimore Sun, for example, depicts Ron DeSantis as saying “go woke go broke” as he is trampled by a mob rushing into a theatre showing Barbie.   Tori Otten wrote an editorial for The New Republic maintaining that the Barbie opening weekend sales debunk the saying that she dubs “far right”.   Perhaps she has never heard of the other saying “the exception that proves the rule”.  That might be what we are seeing here.   Then again, the rule may simply not apply.   The implications of “go woke go broke” are that companies that were originally apolitical and sold their products to a general consumer base will lose a lot of customers if they start injecting politics, especially of the obnoxious, preachy, ultra-left kind that is now called “woke”, into their brand.     What happened with Bud Light earlier this year is the textbook example.   Or, and this is particularly the case when it comes to pop culture, if a story or character originally created to appeal to the kinds of people the woke hate is suddenly given a woke makeover, it is not likely to go over well.  If someone were to film a remake of Dirty Harry, for example, telling the story from the perspective of the liberal mayor and police commissioner, with Inspector Callahan breaking down into tears, coming around to their point of view, throwing away his .44 Magnum instead of his star, and hugging Scorpio and begging his forgiveness, then I would expect that movie to do exceptionally poorly in the box office.     A movie, on the other hand, about the doll that has been associated with the Helen Gurley Brown “you can have it all, girl” type feminism from pretty much the day Ruth Handler ripped her off from a more risqué German doll marketed for adult males and repackaged her in a pink box for girls, is not likely to be harmed at the box office by its having a feminist message.

 

Amusingly, the film preaches feminism in such a way as to completely undermine its message.   *spoiler alert*  The title character, a feminist of the Cosmo type her brand has long represented, lives in a world inhabited by her multiple versions, and the other characters of the franchise.   That world is a complete gynocracy.  Most people would probably call it a matriarchy but none of the females who rule the place seem to have any maternal instincts – except discontinued pregnant Midge - so gynocracy makes more sense.  To “stereotypical Barbie” this is a utopia.   It is also a mirror-image parody of what feminists think the world looked like before feminism and would still look like without feminism.   Barbie thinks that due to her influence the real world is like hers.  Then she has to visit it and discovers that it is not.  In the real world she is verbally dressed down by a young girl who spouts the extra crazy version of feminism that thinks that women are all oppressed “A Handmaid’s Tale” style in the Western world today and that Barbie is the “fascist” enabler of said oppression.   This girl and her mother end up going back with Barbie to Barbieland, where they discover that it has been taken over by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who had gone to the real world with Barbie, read about “patriarchy” in a library, went home and easily replaced the gynocracy with what he thought “patriarchy” was.   Note that patriarchy is the term feminists use for a society ruled by men qua men, who oppress women qua women, basically the Marxist concept of haves oppressing have nots, with the sexes taking the place of the economic classes.   The same objection that I made to matriarchy earlier apply to this usage of patriarchy.  The term logically suggests the traditional authority belonging to fathers which is a good thing not a bad thing.   Androcracy would be a better word for what the feminists are talking about.   It is not likely to catch on, but then as the thing it would denote only exists – and only ever has existed - in the fevered brains of feminists, it is not really needed.  

 

Now, and this is the point, nobody with an IQ over ten who watches this movie is going to think that the actual world around them either a) resembles Barbieland with the sex/gender roles reversed or b) resembles Kendom, the weird caricature that the idea of “patriarchy” inspired Ken to create.   Especially since in the movie, Barbie herself, after restoring her world to the way it was, sort of, opts to leave Barbieland for the real world and become a real girl with the help of the ghost of Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, who for some unexplained reason has the same powers as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.  

Something similar can be said about the movie’s man-bashing, which Piers Morgan and others have criticized. (1)   Yes, the movie does depict its male characters as stupid, incompetent, clumsy and boorish.   I can’t imagine anyone, however, who has not already been thoroughly brainwashed by feminism, watching the movie, and thinking that this is an accurate depiction of men.  Nor, I suspect, are many likely to be persuaded to think that the film’s portrayal of men accurately depicts how men see women, which is obviously the point it is, at least on the surface, trying to make.    It is simply too much of a caricature to be taken seriously.  The film comes across as pretending to promote feminism while actually satirizing it.   Except that this does not mesh well with anything else I have ever heard about filmmaker Greta Gerwig, I would be inclined to say this must be intentional.

 

Many have criticized Barbie as being far too political for a children’s movie and this criticism would be accurate regardless of whether it is the woke, feminist, propaganda that on the surface it can be read as or whether it is actually the most brilliant, satirical, takedown of the same ever made.   Except, of course, that it is obviously not a children’s movie as ought to be evident from the rating.   Like G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and its sequel, and the more successful Transformers film series, also based on children’s toys, this film’s target audience is not children playing with the toys today, but the children who played with the toys decades ago and are today adults, if only in the sense of having passed the age of majority.

 

Oppenheimer seems set to become Christopher Nolan’s most successful film yet.   It would probably have done even better if he had not insisted on shooting it only in IMAX, forcing moviegoers to either pay the steep price of an IMAX ticket or watch it in a theatre for which it is not really formatted.   It is a very timely film.   I suspect that a lot of people would agree with that statement because, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in said conflict on Ukraine’s side, we are closer to nuclear war than we have been since the Cold War ended.   That is certainly a valid reason for thinking the film to be timely   It is not the reason behind my statement, however.    Before looking at that reason a few remarks about the movie are in order.

 

The film does not just cover the period in which the atomic bomb was being developed.   It also looks at Oppenheimer’s revulsion at the destructive fruit that his efforts produced, his unsuccessful attempts to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and the ensuing falling away between him and his former colleagues.   The movie zig-zags between this latter part of Oppenheimer’s life, the period in which he led the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and an even earlier, pre-war period of his career.   In this earlier period he apparently identified as Snow White’s evil stepmother.   Or, at any rate, he tried to dispatch his tutor, Lord Patrick Blackett, played in the film by James D’Arcy, in the same manner employed by the witch in her final attempt on Snow White’s life.   Since the apple went uneaten, neither dwarves nor prince were needed.   Pity.  They would have been available for the movie since Disney kicked them out of its new ultra-woke live action remake of Snow White.     

 

In the storyline about the post-war part of his life the dominant theme is the growing animosity between him and US Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss, portrayed in the film by Robert Downey Jr.    The film is shot partly in black and white, partly in colour, with the colour parts depicting when the story is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the black and white depicting when it is told from Strauss’ point of view.   It is best to know that going into the theatre because otherwise the natural assumption would be to think it had something to do with the different timeframes the movie keeps switching between.  The contest between Oppenheimer and Strauss culminated in the 1954 AEC hearings in which Oppenheimer was asked about his Communist associations (before the war his social circle included several Communists, including his pre-war girlfriend Jean Tatlock, portrayed by Florence Pugh in the movie, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, portrayed by Emily Blunt in the movie, who became his wife, and his younger brother Frank, portrayed by Dylan Arnold) and stripped of his security clearance.   Strauss’s purpose in these hearings was more to publicly humiliate Oppenheimer than to harm him professionally – the clearance was set to expire the day after he was stripped of it.   Ultimately, it cost Strauss his own appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce when the US Senate voted against confirmation of the appointment in part because of the lobbying of scientists looking to avenge Oppenheimer.    In depicting these events Nolan does not stray from the Hollywood party-line on “McCarthyism”, which is not surprising since if any film since John Wayne starred in Big Jim McLain in 1952, two years before the Oppenheimer hearings, has dared to tell the other side of the story I am not aware of it.   Accordingly the film’s precise historical accuracy fails somewhat on this point.   That Strauss in hauling Oppenheimer before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board was carrying out a personal vendetta is accurate enough.  That the charges against him were bogus, well, that is not as clear as the film suggests and as many people think.   That J. Brandon Magoo took it upon himself, last December, to indulge in the empty gesture of voiding the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, suggests there might have been more to the charges than meets the eye.  

 

The reason, however, that I said that Oppenheimer is a very timely film, is not the Russia-Ukrainian War and the renewed threat of nuclear annihilation that the repentant Oppenheimer felt to be the inevitable outcome of his work nor does it have anything to do with Communism.   A notable moment in the film is when the title character quotes “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” upon his realization of just what he had unleashed, a line which earlier he had translated upon request from his pre-war Commie girlfriend during an, ahem, intimate moment.   The classical Sanskrit original of the quote comes from the Bhagavad Gita, an important section of the sixth parva or book of the Mahabharata, the longest epic poem still extent and one of the principal Hindu scriptures.   In its original context, the line is spoken by Krishna, avatar of the Hindu supreme deity Vishnu, to Prince Arjuna, the hero of the epic, and its intent is to convince Arjuna to go to war.   When Oppenheimer took to quoting this line in his post-war life it was rather to the opposite effect of this.   Another contrast, however, jumps out.   Oppenheimer in his testimony before the USAEC Personnel Security Board in 1954 said:

 

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

 

George Grant, the greatest thinker my country, the Dominion of Canada, has ever produced, was as fond of quoting these words, especially the first part up to the words “do it”, as Oppenheimer himself was of quoting the line from the Gita.   Grant believed that in these words Oppenheimer had captured the spirit that animates Modern technological progress and had also expressed in the same words, the very thing that was objectionable, or at the very least problematic from a Christian, ethical, and philosophical point of view, in said progress.    The question of whether or not something should be done is made subordinate to the question of whether or not something can be done and postponed until it is too late to ask the question because the damage has already been done.   Given what has already been noted about Oppenheimer’s thoughts, later in life, towards the atomic bomb, his words have the force of a mea maxima culpa.

 

As the trailers for Barbie and Oppenheimer were released and the hype for these movies grew we began to hear story after story about another technological genie in the process of being released from its bottle.   That is the genie of artificial intelligence or AI.

 

That AI poses a threat to mankind as great or greater than that of the Manhattan Project’s invention is something that even Elon Musk, the last person on earth one would suspect harboured technoskeptical sentiments, suggested that the brakes be applied.   Indeed, the man behind Tesla has been issuing these warnings for quite some time.    The AI threat that he has been talking about is a lot more serious than the threat to their careers that the striking Hollywood actors began to perceive about the time AI channels began to flood Youtube offering us artificially generated covers of every song ever written by every artist that never covered it. About five years ago he warned that AI was like “summoning the devil”, that it needed to be proactively regulated, because “By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it will be too late”, that it could produce an “immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and posed “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”. 

 

Of course when it comes to warning about AI, Musk was beaten to the punch by decades by a film maker.   As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay I am talking about James Cameron.   In Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, when he was asked by CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos to comment about recent warnings regarding AI he said “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn't listen.”

 

1984, in addition to being the title of George Orwell’s novel warning about a totalitarian dystopia, was the year that Cameron released The Terminator.   Directed and co-written by Cameron, this film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role as a cyborg assassin, sent back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor, the character played by Linda Hamilton.   The Terminator was sent by Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence designed by Cyberdyne Systems and placed in charge of nuclear defences that would declare war on humanity in the future and eventually be defeated by a resistance led by Sarah Connor’s son John.   The future John Connor, to protect his mother and his own existence from the Terminator, sends one of his men, Kyle Reese, portrayed by Michael Biehn back in time to protect Sarah.    Reese, over the course of the movie, becomes John Connor’s father, and he and Sarah eventually defeat the Terminator at the cost of his own life.   Before the Terminator is destroyed it loses an arm, however, which in the first of many sequels it is revealed falls into the hands of the creators of the future AI enemy of mankind, becoming the means by which they learn how to develop that technology in the first place.

 

Throughout the Terminator movie franchise both sides are constantly struggling to prevent an outcome that proves to be inevitable.   Skynet is constantly fighting against its own future defeat at the hands of the resistance, the Connors and their allies are constantly trying to prevent the rise of Skynet.   The fatality both are fighting a losing battle against arises out of the dilemma attached to the concept of time travel, that if you go back in time to change something, after having changed it you lose the motive to have gone back in time to begin with.   The present attempt to prevent AI from becoming the threat already visible on the horizon of the future often seems similarly futile but it is not.   The battle is not against a future that cannot be changed because it is the fixed reference point for everyone working to change it in the past as in the movies.   It is against a future that is only inevitable if we continue to accept the idea that when it comes to science and technology, we must first find out if something can be done, and, after having done it, only then ask the question whether we should have done it or not.   We must reject, in other words, the Oppenheimer ethic, and in its place firmly establish – or re-establish – the idea that we must first ask the question of whether or not something should be done, and not bother at all with the question of whether it can be done unless the answer to the first question is firmly determined to be yes.

 

If we don’t, we are at risk of unleashing a technological threat that would render the “battle of the sexes” type controversy surrounding the first of the movies discussed here moot.   For if soulless, sexless, machines take over the world, this would indeed be an end to any sort of “patriarchy”, real or imagined, but it would also be “Hasta la vista, Barbie”.

 

(1)   I find it hilarious that Piers Morgan has been taking this both personally and far more seriously than I have.   Morgan is liberal on most social and moral issues, albeit liberal in the sense of thirty years ago rather than today.  Indeed, the question he posed in ranting about Barbie’s man-bashing was “why does empowering women have to be about trashing men?” He framed it in that way to indicate his support for “empowering women”.   Frankly, I think there is far too much “empowering” going on in this day and age.   While people who talk about empowerment generally conceive of it in terms of self-fulfillment, in reality power is the ability to coerce others to do your will.   It is something that is very dangerous and needs to be constantly held in check and under control.   What is sorely needed today is not for more people of more types to have more power, as the left thinks, but a restoration and revival of authority, the respected right to lead, vested by prescription – the quality of having been tested and proven since time immemorial – in traditional institutions, the only thing capable of containing power and bending it to serve the ends of civilization, rather than unleashing it in a destructive manner.   The terms “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” if they were used to mean what their component parts suggest, which neither of them is, would denote fatherly and motherly authority respectively, both good things, -archy being the suffix corresponding to authority as –cracy is the suffix corresponding to power.   As far as “empowering women” specifically goes, I am unapologetically of the same mind as Dr. Johnson, “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, and Stephen Leacock, “women need not more freedom but less”, and think that every wave of feminism, including the first, was based on a fundamentally erroneous miscalculation of how little power women already had in the world, but did not take offense at this movie the way Morgan did.

Devil Departments

Of all the evils that Satan or Lucy as the gender-confused devil prefers to be called unleashed upon the world in the twentieth century, human resources management or HR and public relations or PR are among the most insidious.   A couple of socio-economic transformations – first from a rural society with an agricultural economy to an urban society with an industrial-manufacturing economy, then from an owner-managed industrial-manufacturing economy to a corporate economy managed largely by professionals trained in management – the private sector equivalent of bureaucrats –with both steps thought up in hell and overseen on earth by the devil himself, brought about the establishment of HR and PR departments.   See James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) for an account of the second of these transformations.  HR and PR are specialized fields within the more general field of professional management and the departments which bear these names are filled by people who have been trained in these specialized fields.   The theory on which professional management training, including HR and PR training, is based is the theory that the knowledge of how to properly run a company is technical knowledge, that is to say, knowledge that can be reduced to a technique – a set of instructions which followed will invariably produce the desired result – that can be written down in a manual, preferably in terminology distinct to the particular technique – technical language – so as to keep the secrets of the technique among the trained.   For an outstanding critique of technical knowledge in general, see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962).   On top of the problems that are common to every kind of training in technical knowledge, however, there are a lot of things that are distinctly wrong with training in HR and PR.   Foremost among them is that it resembles the viruses, radiation, and other contagions that turn people into the walking, brain-devouring, dead in the ever-growing plethora of films, graphic novels and video games about a zombie apocalypse.

 

While that comparison may seem a little over-the-top, HR and PR types are notorious for wearing phony smiles plastered over their faces all the time and constantly projecting cheerful and friendly demeanours beneath which lie cold, calculating, minds that would not hesitate either to stab you or their own mothers in the back if they thought it would advance the company’s interests or their own careers (HR) or to throw anyone under the bus or tell any lie no matter how big if it will create the image they are looking for (PR).   HR and PR positions basically require the person who fills them to be soulless and training in these fields is a good way to kill the soul.

 

With HR the soulless nature of it is advertised in its very name.   Think about what the words “human resources” mean.   They mean regarding and treating human beings as if they belonged to the same category as land, money, trees, petroleum, or any other sort of material asset that businesses own and utilize.   The alternative expression “human capital” that is sometimes used makes this even more explicit.   While “human resources” was actually coined in the nineteenth century (by John R. Commons in The Distribution of Wealth in 1893), and the thing which we now use the expression to denote became recognizable in its present form around the time of the first World War, it was around the second World War that the thing was joined to its name and the name entered general circulation and usage.   It is interesting, is it not, that this was a little over a century after the British Empire outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, committed its navy to eradicating the trade, and abolished slavery within its borders, and a little under a century after the United States abolished slavery as an ex-post facto justification for the bloody internecine war she fought with herself in the first half of the 1860s.   Today, progressives rail against slavery more loudly and more often than the abolitionists ever did, in the hopes of convincing weak and foolish governments to tax people who have never owned slaves in order to pay people who never were slaves, on the absurd and utterly false grounds that slavery was the cause of all the problems facing people who have the same skin colour as the slaves most people think of when slavery comes up regardless of whether their ancestors were slaves or not.   At the same time corporations, by naming the department that is the intermediary between upper level management and labour “human resources management”, have demonstrated that in their way of thinking their workers are their property and that it is labour-contracted-for-between-free-agents that was abolished in reality, slavery in name only.   San Jose State University Professor of Economics Jeffrey Rogers Hummel appears to have been on to something when he entitled his history of the war between the American states Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1999).

 

In 1922, the philosopher Martin Buber published his Ich und Du, the translation of which was published in 1937 as I and Thou.   His thesis was that to each of us as a subject, “I”, everything else is either an object, an “it” which we experience and/or use, or a “thou” with which we relate as another subject.  Impersonal objects cannot properly be thous, but primitive people often treat them as such.   Modern people make the opposite mistake.   Other people can be either its or thous but to modern people they are far more often than not its rather than thous.   It is perceiving and relating to others as thous, however, that makes our lives meaningful and makes each of us fully “I”.   The ultimate and eternal “Thou” is God Himself.   HR zombies are trained to address people as thous in their endless, empty, and meaningless jargon, while in reality treating them as its.  

 

It has been observed over the last decade or so that the sort of left-wing lunacy that we once thought was safely confined to the asylums that are the campuses of academe is now being aggressively promoted in the corporate world.    Many corporations now require their employees to undergo diversity, inclusion, and equity training which is a form of brainwashing with progressive propaganda.   Companies in which the portion of their workforce that regularly interacts with the public faces an increased threat of bodily harm due to criminal violence now sometimes add insult to the risk of injury by requiring their workers to take “de-escalation training” as if it were their employees’ fault that some punk, just released on bail and high on meth, assaults and robs them and as if the garbage techniques taught in such training would work in such a situation.   It is through HR that this sort of madness has infected the management of so many companies.

 

PR is no better than HR.   Public relations, as we know it today, goes back to just before the First World War when Ivy Lee was hired by J. D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the spin doctor for his family and their oil company.   What Lee was to PR in practice, Edward Bernays, Lee’s friend and the nephew of Sigmund Freud on both sides of his family, was in theory.   In 1945 his Public Relations was published.   According to Bernays, PR was not just old-fashioned advertising, but a scientific method of analyzing public opinion and, utilizing insights drawn from psychology and sociology as well as the means of the new mass communications technology, reshaping public opinion.   It is no coincidence that this closely resembles the subject of his earlier, influential, work Propaganda (1928).   Indeed, the most significant difference between PR and propaganda is that listening to public opinion as well as shaping it is essential to PR.   This does not make it less mendacious and manipulative than its close relative.   On the contrary it makes it a more effective tool of mass manipulation.   It is also the reason why in today’s “cancel culture” PR departments insist that that someone be thrown under the bus every time the “woke” mob demands that person’s head as a sacrifice.   It is why todays PR firms are less interested in helping their clients present themselves in terms of the excellence of the goods and services they offer than they are in presenting them as the most devoted adherents of the cult of feminism, anti-white race hatred, and alphabet soupism on the block.  

 

It makes one positively nostalgic for the good old days when they pursued more worthy and benign efforts like promoting the oil and tobacco businesses.  

 

Let HR and PR return to Lucy in the hell whence they came.   They have already done enough to make earth resemble that place.

Crime And No Punishment

 

I recently returned to Winnipeg after visiting my father on his farm where the radio is constantly tuned to 880 CKLQ the country and western station out of Brandon.   On the morning of the day I drove back they played a familiar classic by Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”.   The song is semi-autobiographical, written in reflection on the time the to-be country star served in San Quentin for an attempted robbery in Bakersfield.   I say semi-autobiographical for while Haggard did indeed reach the age of majority in prison the sentence he was serving was nowhere near as severe as the lyrics suggest:

 

And I turned twenty-one in prison doin' life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried

 

When I listened to these familiar words again this time it occurred to me to wonder what on earth someone would actually have to do to be sentenced to life in prison without parole while still a minor.  Even in 1957 when Haggard was convicted it would have had to have been a lot more than what he did.   California was not as crime-friendly then as it is today but they would not have locked a minor up and thrown away the key for an unsuccessful break and entry in which no one was hurt, not even with all of his priors.  His actual sentence was fifteen years of which he served three.   Today, it is highly unlikely that anyone in any jurisdiction outside of Texas would receive such a sentence for a similar crime.

 

All across North America today, both in the United States and in my country, the Dominion of Canada, major cities have seen a massive rise in violent crime especially in, but by no means limited to, their downtown, core, neighbourhoods.   More than one factor has contributed to this urban crime crisis, of course.  One of the disturbing aspects about the crisis is that “unprovoked random attacks” by strangers, i.e., when someone you don’t know from Adam comes up to you and assaults you for no discernable reason, which were previously very rare, have spiked and account for a huge percentage of the crime wave.   Two explanations for this jump to mind.   The first is the vast increase in mental illness over the last three years induced by idiotic governments forcing people into social isolation for long periods of time in a failed and absurd attempt to protect them from a respiratory disease that in most cases had only mild symptoms and from which the vast majority fully recovered.   The second is the increase in drug abuse, particularly of paranoia-inducing substances like crystal meth, which is partly due to the same thing that caused the uptick in mental illness, but which is also the result of stupid politicians having prioritized in their drug policy the making drug use safe for users over the safety of others who might be harmed by drug-induced violence.

 

These factors, while they help account for random stranger attacks, do not in themselves explain the larger urban crime crisis.   Another factor that significantly contributes to the overall rise in urban crime is the soft-on-crime attitude promoted by the sort of people who like to think that being forward-minded, progressive, and liberal amounts to being enlightened and that they are therefore more enlightened than others.  This attitude has in recent years been translated into various sorts of bad policies that are often described as “catch and release” or “revolving door”.   These include sentences that are too short or too soft, parole being too easily obtained and too early, and, more recently, pretrial release being too easily obtained even with multiple prior convictions.   This latter, due no doubt to its relative novelty, is the most discussed at the moment.   In several American jurisdictions liberals have demanded and sometimes obtained the elimination of cash bail either entirely, as in Illinois as of New Year’s Day this year, or for all but the most heinous of crimes, as in New York four years ago.   In Canada, criminal law falls under the jurisdiction of the Dominion government, even though in practice its day to day administration is carried out by the provinces, and so provincial premiers and legislatures cannot enact such policies within their own provinces the way American state governments can.   Not that any of the current provincial premiers would want to do so.  In January of this year all provincial and territory premiers signed a letter unanimously calling on the Dominion government to enact bail reform of the opposite sort to that of the just mentioned Illinois and New York examples, the toughening of bail laws to make it much harder for a repeat offender or one likely to repeat, to be released back into the public.  Unfortunately, the Canadian politicians most in sync with American liberals in their thinking on this matter happen to be the ones in power at the Dominion level.  

 

In 2018, while they still had a majority government, the Liberals introduced Bill C-75 which passed Parliament the following year.   Bill C-75 contained a number of amendments to the Criminal Code and related legislation such as the Youth Criminal Justice Act.   While I consider most, if not all, of these amendments to be bad, they fall into three categories.   The first is those which are bad for reasons that are not germane to what we are discussing here, such as the lowering of the age of consent for anal sex.   The second consists of amendments that limit the traditional rights of Canadians when accused of crimes.   Examples include the near-elimination of preliminary inquiries (intended to speed cases through the court system this has the opposite effect and so infringes on the right to a speedy trial), the abolition of peremptory challenge in juror selection (this infringes as it was intended to do on the defense’s right to exclude those prejudiced against the accused from the jury system), and allowing police to testify via affidavit (this infringes on the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser).   What needs to be said about these amendments is that while they do not err in the direction of being soft-on-crime in the sense we have been discussing (1) they are not legitimate steps in the opposite direction either.   There are a lot of people who confuse the rights of the accused with soft-on-crime but they are very different.   The rights of the accused are there to protect the innocent from the abuse of the criminal justice system.   They may, at times, result in a guilty person getting off, but they are based on the traditional conviction that for justice to fail in this manner is to be preferred over it failing by punishing the innocent, a conviction that is right and Scriptural (see Genesis 18).   Soft-on-crime policies do not protect the innocent from wrongful accusation but are rather about lighter sentences for criminals that disregard the safety of the public.   The third category consists of amendments of the soft-on-crime type.   Examples of this include the hybridization of offences and the related reduction of sentences and, most relevantly, the amendments to the bail provisions of the Criminal Code.  The stated purpose of the bail amendments was to make the earliest possible release the default outcome of an arraignment rather than detention, with fewer conditions and less requirements of cash, bond, or other surety.   In other words it was very similar in intent to Cuomo’s experiment in bail elimination in New York around the same time.

 

It was similar in effect too and one consequence of that was the aforementioned unanimous letter by the premiers demanding that the Dominion government walk this back and make bail harder for repeat violent offenders.   In May, David Lametti, who lamentably holds the portfolio of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in His Majesty’s government – lamentably because he has shown in numerous ways, the most recent being his favourable attitude towards criminalizing disagreement with the obviously distorted and easily debunked false official narrative about the Indian Residential Schools, that he ought not to be put in charge of the penalty box at a hockey game, much less the Ministry of Justice -  responded to the premiers’ demands with Bill C-48 which proposed further amendments to the bail system.   Unfortunately, but sadly not unpredictably, the “reform” that stands out the most is itself an egregious error of the sort contained in the second category of bad amendments in Bill C-75.   This is the proposed reverse onus for repeat violent offenders.   In other words, someone previously convicted of a violent offence, arrested a second time, would have to prove that he should be granted bail, rather than the Crown having to prove that it should be denied him.   This is something that all the Justice and Public Safety Ministers – Dominion, provincial, territorial – called for when they met in Ottawa in March.   Admittedly, this is a lesser offense against the principle of the presumption of innocence than reversing the burden of proof when it comes to guilt in an actual trial would be, but it still offends against the principle, opening the door for worse such offences.   Indeed, an examination of Bill C-48 demonstrates that most of the proposed amendments are merely different variations on the idea of reverse onus.   With all the possible ways out there of toughening up our policies towards crime without violating even in minor ways the ancient and sacred principles like the presumption of innocence that protect us all from abuse of the criminal justice system, this was the best the provincial governments could recommend and the federal government could come up with?

 

What is behind this push to implement policies that turn dangerous criminals back out into the streets as quickly as possible and to meet complaints about how this undermines public safety not by walking back said policies but by eroding the rights of the accused and the principles that underlie them?

 

We might say that it is an inversion in the priority of sympathies in which some people sympathize more with those who commit crime than with those who are its victims.    This inversion manifests itself in a number of different ways.   One of these is the liberal’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy and right of defending one’s self, one’s loved ones, and one’s property from criminals.    Look at the current uproar over country and western singer Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” and the accompanying video.  The song’s lyrics talk about violent urban crime such as sidewalk assaults, carjacking, liquor store robbery, etc. and challenges the thugs who do these sort of things to “try that in a small town”.   Sniveling idiots like Sheryl Crow have accused Aldean of “promoting violence” in the song and worse idiots have accused him of promoting “lynching” on the flimsy grounds that one had apparently taken place a century ago on the popular filming location where he shot the video.   To normal people, the person who sucker punches someone on the sidewalk, the carjacker, and the liquor store robber are guilty of criminal violence, and someone fighting back in defense of himself and his community is using legitimate force.  The distinction is lost on liberals – and people who whatever their politics have had their minds and souls destroyed by being brainwashed with human resources and public relations “education” – who use the word violence to describe people who exercise their God-given right of self-defense to repel criminal assaults with force but avoid using this word for the criminal assaults themselves.  While this inversion would not be a wrong answer to the question, it is a description of the problem rather than an explanation for it.

 

We could say that it is a result, intended or otherwise, of sixty to seventy years of liberal and progressive crusading against discrimination.   The population of prison inmates looks very different from the general population.   This may be true of economic status.   The imprisoned are far more likely to come from poverty than from wealth.   Note, however, that the poorer outnumber the richer in the general population in any society.   It is certainly true of race.   In the United States the black percentage of the prison population is far higher than the black percentage of the general population.   In Canada this same disparity exists between the representation of North American Indians in the prison population and the general population.   By contrast, in both countries, the percentage of Asians in gaol is far lower than in the general population.   It is also true of sex.   Indeed, here the greatest disparity is to be found.   In Canada, women represent on average about five percent of the incarcerated.   In the United States it is higher, about eight to ten percent.   In both countries, however, men are vastly overrepresented in the prison population if the basis of the comparison is their representation in the general population.   Even though the disparity with regards to sex is much, much, greater than the disparity with regards to race, and greater still than the disparity with regards to economic status, it is never alluded to by those who demand the criminal justice system be reformed in a softer-on-crime way because it is unfair.   Neither do they reference Asian underrepresentation.   This is because both of these facts go against their narrative in which society and its structures are biased against women rather than against men and in favour of whites against all other races.   Indeed, when it comes to the huge disparity with regards to sex, this not only goes against the narrative it rebuts it entirely.   The reason men comprise ninety percent or higher of the prison population is because men commit ninety percent or higher of the crimes that land one in gaol.    There is not really much of a dispute about this.   Discrimination in the system, therefore, is not the cause of male overrepresentation in the prison population which is not really overrepresentation when the basis of comparison is what it should be, the percentage of males in the general population who commit crime.   This suggests that something similar could be argued for the overrepresentation of blacks in the American prison population and of Indians in the Canadian prison population, a suggestion supported by the underrepresentation of Asians in the prisons of both countries, which can hardly be explained by a racial bias that favours whites against all others, and by statistics gleaned from the victims of crime as to the race of the perpetrator.   Liberals and progressives treat any suggestion that the races overrepresented in the prison populations of Canada and the United States are not overrepresented when contrasted with the percentages of each race among the criminal perpetrator population rather than the general population, no matter how backed by facts and data that suggestion may be, as arising out of racism.  Their actions, however, and the policies they support demonstrate that they do not really believe this, that on an unspoken level they acknowledge it, but in their need to be seen and to see themselves as sympathetic with American blacks, Canadian Indians, and, to switch to the economic status category, the poor, they blame the larger society for this.   This makes them, of course, vulnerable to all the ugly accusations they hurl against others.   Blaming the larger society for the overrepresentation of American blacks, Canadian Indians, and the poor is to deny agency to blacks, Indians, and the poor.   Furthermore, justifying being soft-on-crime in the name of being fair to these groups, overlooks the fact that they are also overrepresented among the victims of crime.   This is a fact that goes hand-in-glove with these same groups being overrepresented among the perpetrators of crime because the majority of crimes are in-group rather than perpetrated by members of one racial or socioeconomic group against members of another.   Therefore, it is favouring soft-on-crime policies that is discriminatory against these groups, because even if American blacks and Canadian Indians are represented among perpetrators of crime at a higher percentage than they are represented among the general population, the majority of these groups are not criminals and all members of these groups, here including the poor, are at a higher risk of being the victims of violent crime than the general population, and so need the protection of hard-on-crime policies more.   However, liberalism and progressivism’s misguided, ill-informed, and myopic crusade against discrimination, while it may explain the shape of the arguments currently used by soft-on-crime liberals and the policies they currently support, it does not explain the origin of their way of thinking.

 

This is so because liberals have been soft-on-crime for a lot longer than they have been obsessed with discrimination.   In the “Enlightenment”, the seventeenth and eighteenth century movement away from the light of orthodox Christianity into the darkness of the superstitious idolatry of science and materialistic reason that took Puritanism, the anal retentive form of Calvinism and transformed it into liberalism, the anal retentive form of secular agnosticism, the early liberals decided that traditional criminal justice was barbaric and cruel both in its penalties – death for capital crimes like murder, corporal punishment, fines, public humiliation, exile and such for lesser crimes – and its underlying theory – that by breaking the law, criminals incurred a debt to society which they had had to pay.   In place of the older penalties the early liberals wanted incarceration to become the default penalty for crime which they achieved in the nineteenth century.   In the traditional system gaol was merely for holding the accused until trial, long term imprisonment was reserved for political prisoners.   Punishing people for their crimes, the liberals said, was not justice but revenge.  This is nonsense.  In all the ancient accounts of the origins of the traditional criminal justice system, from Aeschylus’ tragedic account of the origins of jury trials in his retelling of the myths of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes in the Oresteia to the account of the establishment of refugee cities in ancient Israel in sacred Scripture, the criminal justice system was not based on revenge but implemented to curb the lust for revenge and protect societies from out of control cycles of vengeance.   Although obviously, for criminal justice to do this, it must legitimately satisfy the need which blood vengeance seeks to satisfy in an illegitimate manner – unsuccessfully as its tendency to get out of control indicates – there is a careful and clear distinction between the two.   In revenge, a wrong doer’s debt is owed to the victim or his kin, and they exact it from him to the extent that they are able and that they themselves see fit.  Under justice, the debt is owed to the laws of society, it is not exacted by those with a personal stake in the case but by the lawfully appointed court and its officers, guilt has to be investigated and established and the accused has the right to present his own case, and the law places limits on the penalties that can be exacted.   The Lex Talionis – “an eye for an eye” – whether enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi or the Law of Moses is in its fundamental nature, a limit on the penalty someone can be made to pay for injury to another.   The principle underlying it is that expressed by Cicero in De Legibus III.4, noxiae poena par esto, more commonly remembered as the Roman legal maxim culpae poena par esto which means “let the punishment fit the crime” (or “offense” in Tully’s wording).   By treating the traditional system of criminal justice as being the very thing it was designed to limit, prevent, and replace the liberals committed a most impious injustice against multiple generations of their ancestors stretching back to antiquity.   They argued that making a criminal pay for his offence must not be the goal of the criminal justice system, that the only acceptable goals were deterring others from committing similar crimes and reforming or rehabilitating the criminal.   This was the original liberal soft-on-crime attitude.

C. S. Lewis answered this earlier version of the liberal soft-on-crime attitude in an essay entitled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” that was originally published in The Twentieth Century in 1949 and later included in the collection of his essays posthumously edited and published by William Hooper as God in the Dock in 1976.   Lewis clearly felt very strongly on the matter – he alluded to it in later essays, asked T. S. Eliot to write an essay about it in a letter in 1962, and included a discussion of it in his novel That Hideous Strength.   What made Lewis’ response so interesting is that he based his case against the progressive view to which he gave the name found in the title of his essay and his defense of the traditional view on the argument that the progressives’ humanitarian theory failed on the very point on which it claimed superiority over the traditional view, that is, treating offenders in a humane, dignified manner.   Its advocates think it “mild and merciful” but in reality it “disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end”.   Removing the concept of “desert”, i.e., the offender getting what he deserves as punishment for his crime from the picture, removes “the only connecting link between punishment and justice” so that without retributive justice, rehabilitative justice is not justice at all.   By treating crime as essentially pathological and the courts and prison system as essentially therapeutic, the progressive humanitarian theory opens the door to excessive punishment by transferring the decision as to the fate of the convicted into  the hands of “technical experts” trained in “special sciences “which “do not even employ such categories as rights and justice”.   These, since they are operating under the idea that they are curing the criminal rather than punishing him, are not bound by the limits which justice places on what punishment can be exacted from a criminal and will keep on until they are convinced he is cured.   Lewis argued that this theory made it possible for good men to act “as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants” or “even worse” because “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” since “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” and while they “may be more likely to go to Heaven” they are also “likelier to make a Hell of earth”.   Lewis argued that far from being “humane” the system advocated by the progressives in the name of humanitarianism treated law breakers as less than human.   This seems indisputable.  The traditional system treated the criminal as responsible for his actions and so owing a debt the payment of which squared the criminal with the law and society.   The progressive humanitarian system denies responsibility to the criminal and keeps his crime dangling above his head forever as the experts who “cured” him keep perennial watch lest he have a “relapse”.

 

Lewis’ answer to the humanitarian theory, since it addresses it on the level of its fundamental injustice, is an answer that would stand even if the experiment in “curing” criminals had been one hundred percent successful.   The experiment has not been successful.   It has rather proven to be a colossal failure.   Yes, people have gone to prison and come out reformed.   Merle Haggard, referred to at the beginning of this essay, is an example.   His reformation in San Quentin, however, had less to do with the prison’s rehabilitation system working than with its retaining part of the older retributive system.   California did not abolish the death penalty until 1972.    Haggard was sent to San Quentin while Caryl Chessman was serving his last days on death row there before his execution in 1960.   Chessman’s early life, with the experience of being in and out of detention, initially for petty crimes, later for more serious ones, mirrored Haggard’s in some ways.   Later, however, he had been convicted of the “Red Light Bandit” crimes, a series of robberies and rapes that had taken place in the Los Angeles area in 1948, and sentenced to death.   By Haggard’s own testimony it was the experience of being caught brewing liquor in San Quentin and sent to “the shelf” – a row of solitary confinement cells in the same part of the prison as death row – where he saw Chessman, awaiting his execution, and this scared him straight.    He was rehabilitated in prison, but not by the prison, at least not in the direct sense that liberal supporters of the rehabilitation theory had in mind.   Others have entered prison and for various reasons – being further corrupted by worse criminals themselves, being hardened by prison culture and as a necessity for survival, etc. – have ended up worse than when they went in.   According to a research summary entitled “The effect of prison on criminal behaviour” published by Public Safety Canada in November 1999 which looked at 50 studies involving 300 000 offenders “None of the analyses found imprisonment to reduce recidivism”.

 

The liberal and progressive attitude towards how society should deal with crime and criminals has consistently been based on the conceit that their ideas are more “humane”, “enlightened”, “kind”, “compassionate”, et cetera ad nauseam than anything that preceded them no matter how ancient and time-tested-and-proven.   Initially, this manifested itself as the idea that it is more “humane” to treat criminals as rats in a social experiment in rehabilitation in prison laboratories than to treat them as men, responsible for their actions, who owe a debt to society and society’s laws.   Later, as the progressive conceit evolved from an attitude of superiority to the past and the civilization we have inherited from it to one of hatred for said past and civilization, it manifested itself in the idea that the criminal is the true victim, the real blame belongs to civilized society, and so civilized society must be made to pay rather than the criminal, who should be released into the rest of society as soon as possible with as few conditions as possible.   The progressive mind has proven remarkably resistant to the abundance of evidence demonstrating these ideas to be the very opposite of “humane” and “enlightened”.   For people who are always shooting their mouths off about their “compassion” and demanding that various groups be made “safe” from words and ideas that offend them they are extremely blithe about how their absurd policies make everyday life less safe from the threat of actual physical harm due to violent crime in our cities.

 

Ultimately, the liberal and progressive conceit goes back to the superstition they imbibed during the period that would more appropriately called the Darkening rather than the Enlightenment.   Having transferred their faith from the True and Living God to the idol of science, they no longer recognized that the True and Living God, in Whom both Perfect Justice and Perfect Mercy are untied without compromise, has delegated authority to two earthly institutions, to one of which He gave a sword and charged it with the exercising of Justice, to the other of which He gave a pulpit and an altar and charged it with bringing His Mercy and Grace to people all of whom are offenders under Divine Law.   The State, consisting of the king and his ministers, an earthly depiction of the government of the Universe, God as King of Kings, served by His ministers in Heaven, for which reason king-headed government is the only legitimate form of the State, was given the sword of Justice, but Justice that was to be tempered with Mercy, for which reason kings and the courts that act in their name have always had the power of clemency and pardon.   The Church, consisting of the Apostolic priesthood and the congregations of baptized Christians they shepherd, brings God’s Mercy and Grace to the sinful world by preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments.   While the Church’s ministry is primarily one of Mercy and Grace, as the State’s ministry is primarily one of Justice, just as the State must temper the Justice it exercises with Mercy, so the Church’s Apostolic leadership has been given the keys – the power of excommunication – to exclude from the ministration of Grace those who defiantly persist in rebellious and open sin until such time as they repent.   No longer recognizing the God from Whom the authority of Church and State alike are derived, liberals and progressives reject the Church and have replaced divine Mercy and Grace with inferior human substitutes the burden of distributing which they have placed on the State, the divine authority of which they have sought to replace with democratic power, the power of the mob.   Idols always fail those who worship them, however, and it has become abundantly clear that liberalism’s efforts to create a new justice superior to the old and more merciful after cutting itself off from the Source of true Justice and Mercy have failed and unleashed upon our civilization the opposite of both Justice and Mercy.

 

It is about time that we as a civilization turned our backs on liberalism forever and returned to the True and Living God, Who is Merciful and Gracious to all who turn to Him in repentance and faith, but has given to the State the sword to punish crime and expects it to be used for the safety of us all.

 

(1)   The elimination of peremptory challenge in jury selection is not “soft-on-crime” in the sense of making it easier for someone who has committed a crime to go unpunished or with insufficient punishment.  It was included in Bill C-75, however, because the Prime Minister and his Justice Minister at the time – Jody Wilson-Raybould - were outraged that a Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted for using lethal force in defending his farm against an Indian youth who was on the farm for criminal purposes.   Indian groups decried the acquittal as racist because they thought they should have been represented on the jury, apparently failing to understand that one purpose of jury selection is to keep people prejudiced against the accused off the jury and that since a larger percentage of their own end up before judges as the accused than their percentage in the general population it is very much against their own interests to make it harder to do this.   To make it clear, imagine the situation in reverse.   Imagine that some young white idiot went onto a reserve with evil intentions and got himself killed.  Then image that the Indian that killed him was charged with manslaughter or murder.   Then imagine that whites had shown up for the jury selection process making racially charged statements against the accused and were rightly excluded for prejudice against the defendant.   An all-Indian jury acquits the defendant, and the parents of the white kid slain, backed by the organized white community, denounce the outcome and demand that in all future trials where the accused is Indian and the victim white, they be guaranteed spots on the jury.   If you can see what is wrong with the demands of the whites in that scenario, understand that the exact same thing is what was wrong with the demands of the Indians in the real scenario. The real outrage in the affair was that the farmer was charged in the first place.   This was an assault on the right of self-defence for the purposes of appeasing a group that was practicing the very racism of which it was accusing others.   Attacks on the right of self-defence are a different form of “soft-on-crime” since it is against crime, especially violent crime, that this right is exercised.   As for the Prime Minister and Wilson-Raybould, they should have both been required to step down out of office after making their disgraceful remarks in which both were guilty of political interference in a matter of criminal justice, ironically, the very issue over which the two would shortly thereafter find themselves in conflict in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

 

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.