Widdowson is a former professor who has been out of work since 2021, following her wrongful dismissal by Mount Royal University but has just won a major victory at the Alberta Labour Relations Board, which is recommending her reinstatement. For the past half-decade, she has been on the front lines of exposing the false claim that unmarked graves containing 215 dead children were found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. She has been repeatedly arrested for attempting to speak with students and faculty at Canadian universities about this issue, despite the officers arresting her witnessing multiple young men assaulting her and permitting them to do so with impunity. I got to join her in being assaulted by multiple young male students at UBC this January as the police looked on passively, before finally arresting her, without even questioning a single one of our assailants. The fake documentarians offered her a chance to speak about the hoax and the residential schools more generally.

As for Brian Porter, you do not recognize his name because, unlike Widdowson and Shepherd, he is not and has never been a public figure. He is an eighty-two-year-old retired teacher and history buff who resides in Brockville, Ontario, in the heart of Loyalist Country, in a town represented in the House of Commons by Sir John A MacDonald from 1867-91. Porter volunteers for local Canadian heritage events where he re-enacts key moments in early Canadian history, costumed as MacDonald.

I do not know the two retired RCMP officers who were invited to appear but understand that they were told they would be discussing their experiences of retirement after a lifetime of service in policing. And my guess is that not everyone lured into studio with elaborate deceptions that included fake names, companies, letterhead, etc. has come forward.

Those defending the folks working on the co-production have proceeded with one main line of defense: they fit into a subgenre of the mockumentary, made popular by the Borat films of humourist Sacha Baron Cohen, in which people are tricked into thinking they are being interviewed by a foreign journalist and asked absurd questions designed to expose the interviewee’s underlying prejudices or the absurdity of some aspect of American culture. Curiously, these defenders do not cite the current master of the genre (Cohen was forced to retire his personas Ally-G and Borat because they became too well-known and popular to fool anyone), Matt Walsh, who picked up where Cohen left off with his mockumentary Am I a Racist? (2024). Such is the “cooties” politics of today’s progressives that no matter how legitimate or effective a defense of comparing oneself to Walsh would be, they cannot bring themselves to cite him given his Christian conservative perspectives on the major issues of our times.

The conservative rebuttal to this defense has been to note that Walsh and Cohen were not paid millions by the government to publicly humiliate and take down prominent political dissidents, opponents of the current regime, critical of the Reconciliation Industry who are already targets of state-backed lawfare campaigns, as in the case of Widdowson and Shepherd.

As is often the case, I think that my conservative comrades fall too easily into complying with the establishment left’s framing of an issue. I would like to suggest that, once one stops focusing on the deceptive behaviour of the production team and actors, there is a much more appropriate comparison.

In 2007, while I was still deeply embedded in the Progressiverse, a group of my friends invited me to go to a screening of Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. I declined, not exactly politely. What I said was, “I think I’ve had my fill of movies in which fat men humiliate and harass receptionists.”

Should I back up?

Like many socialists of my generation, I started out as a big Moore fan. I still remember the late great Jim Winter, historian of the Victorian urbanism taking me and my first year university class to see Roger and Me (1989), the first of a new, confrontational, kind of documentary subgenre pioneered by Moore and a film of which I remain a big fan.

In it, Moore documents the economic and social collapse of his home town, Flint, Michigan, following the decision by General Motors’ CEO Roger Smith to lay off about 30,000 workers and close a number of plants. Throughout the film, Moore attempts to get an interview with Smith but is stymied in his efforts by Smith’s underlings. The spectacle of a local documentarian on a shoestring budget with a single plucky film crew attempting to hold the powerful accountable is compelling, especially thanks to Moore’s senses of humour and showmanship.

So successful was the formula that it gave us two decades of films featuring Moore and his film crew bursting, unwelcome, into corporate offices followed with Pets or Meat: Return to Flint (1992), The Big One (1997), Bowling for Columbine (2002), Farenheit 9/11 (2004) and Sicko (2007). But the formula and Moore became victims of their own success. Moore and his anti-capitalist views became so well-known that his ability to sneak, cajole or trick his way into an interview or public confrontation with a figure he targeted for criticism evaporated.

And all we were left with, by the late 00s was a rich, famous fat man sitting in corporate offices bothering receptionists. The power dynamic had inverted. What had begun with a courageous young man with few resources and little money chasing down the rich and powerful to hold them to account for ruining his hometown gradually became a rich, famous and influential man harassing and humiliating receptionists and other frontline workers, the actually powerless people in the situation.

Unsurprisingly, Moore and his films also became unfunny, their tone changing from irreverent to pious. To his credit, Moore read the room and changed formats. Sadly, however, his sense of humour did not return and his censorious piety has only begun to abate with his recent work on the Donald Trump movement.

It appears to me that, while the setup and intended format for Counting Coup may well have been based on the work of Cohen and Walsh, the show likely to hit our screens will be much closer to an under-produced mid-career Moore film in which highly paid American actors censoriously berate, torment and humiliate civic-minded retirees and women already reeling from efforts by the political establishment to financially immiserate them.

We are almost certainly in for another Woke “comedy,” this, one in which the audience applauds instead of laughing, in which paid surrogates for the government belittle sincere, civic-minded pensioners and women who have put their careers on the line to challenge lies about our history that it wishes to pass off as fact.

And the worst aspect of this is that the makers and funders of the show, along with millions of brain-dead progressives in this country will call this disgrace “speaking truth to power.”

LNG Canada, the actual export terminal and liquification facility is backed by a consortium of major international investors, including the disreputable European oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell, a company strongly implicated in extrajudicial killings of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta in the 00s and the defense of South African Apartheid in the 80s and Malaysia’s state-owned oil company, Petronas. To deliver “natural gas” from where it is fracked in the Peace River Country to Kitimat, 670km away, LNG Canada constructed the Coastal Gas Link pipeline, which starts on the other side of the Rockies in Dawson Creek.

In the original business plan for LNG Canada, it would produce what Prime Minister Mark Carney calls “low-carbon fossil fuels,” by using hydroelectricity to power fracking and liquification rather than simply burning a portion of the extracted natural gas to frack and liquify more.

This “low carbon” gas, which physically contains and emits exactly as much carbon as regular natural gas is not merely “low carbon,” when the LNG Canada deal is placed in a larger context, that of Clean BC, a huge mass comprising both binding legislation and non-binding aspirational targets with a goal of reducing BC’s domestic carbon emissions and producing a “net zero” economy (i.e. one that only pumps as much carbon into the atmosphere as it takes out).

While the BC government had enacted legislation permitting the construction of LNG Canada’s terminal back in 2015 under the BC Liberal government of Christy Clark, no progress was made towards construction until two key developments took place. First, the NDP dropped its objections to the construction of Site C, an enormous hydroelectric dam constructed to power the LNG industry and allowed it to proceed on an accelerated timetable. Second, Clean BC was rolled-out by the NDP-Green Party government led by John Horgan in December 2018.

With a new package including larger subsidies, the government was able to vote through a package of permits and subsidies in March 2019 and construction of both pipeline and terminal proceeded apace. While Green Party leader Andrew Weaver wanted to withdraw his party’s support for the government over the $6 billion in fossil fuel subsidies it included, his two caucus-mates, Adam Olsen and Sonia Furstenau opposed this plan, and the Greens continued to support the Horgan government in confidence votes until the fall of 2020.

BC’s “Net Zero” Energy Export Strategy
To understand BC’s industrial strategy over the past decade, it is necessary to view Site C, LNG Canada and Clean BC as interlocking parts of a single strategy.

First off, one must understand that while Clean BC is designed to reduce the amount of carbon emitted from inside BC, it is uninterested in how much carbon is emitted from fossil fuels extracted in BC but burned elsewhere. That is why it includes measures to double BC’s exports of coal and raw logs, in addition to a massive increase in natural gas exports.

Second, one must remember that the oil industry has not historically been unanimous in its approaches to government climate policy. Whereas North American oil companies, like Texaco and Suncor, have tended to align with the material interests of smaller oil companies seeking reduced government regulation and royalties, European and Asian companies, which comprise 100% of the investors in LNG Canada, are highly responsive to blue state and Western European investors and consumers who donate to environmental groups, drive electric cars and admire the work of Greta Thunberg and the soup throwers of Extinction Rebellion. These consumers and investors do not want their money going to the dirty oil of climate villains Exxon and Texaco. They want the “net zero” oil Royal Dutch Shell can sell them thanks to Site C, Clean BC and LNG Canada. “Climate conscious” oil companies, like Shell and BP, have also been proven more effective at obtaining political license and quelling opposition to major pipeline and infrastructure building, making them more able to take on large-scale projects requiring substantial government support and a pacified environmental movement.

And not just oil! I got to see BC’s energy export strategy up close, even before construction of LNG Canada was finished. En route to Tanzania in the fall of 2023, I had to spend the night in Heathrow Airport, with too few distractions and got to see Horgan government policy in action.

Aside from their shutting down open-net fish farming on Northern Vancouver Island, I opposed pretty much every environmental policy the John Horgan’s NDP-Green government enacted.

For instance, I had a major beef with the government’s response to the continued collapse of the the timber processing industry, i.e. sawmills and pulp mills, combined with the degrading quality of BC’s forest ecosystems and the wood they contained, thanks to generations of terrible reforestation policies and practices. Instead of changing course on silviculture policy, giving ecosystems more time to naturally recover and squeezing as many dollars and jobs as possible out of the remaining high quality timber, the government decided to make it easier to ship out unprocessed raw logs and to permit the use of all of the publicly-owned forest lands to make wood pellet fuel that could be sold as a cheap coal alternative for heating and thermal power generation overseas.

As I wandered around Heathrow in the middle of the night, I came upon a sign posted near the boiler heating system for my terminal. Heathrow Airport Holdings was proud to notify passengers that our terminal was heated with “net zero” wood pellets from British Columbia.

And I am absolutely certain that wherever LNG Canada’s gas is burned, there will be similar signs notifying consumers that the government or corporation burning it is a champion of the climate, burning, as they are, “low carbon,” “net zero” natural gas.

Confused Conservative Populists Versus Big Oil
Part of the way I was able to reconcile my work for the BC Conservative Party of John Rustad was the fact that I understood that, at great political and financial cost, BC’s NDP and Greens had successfully affixed the “net zero,” label to our coal, our gas and our wood pellets. And that, climate skeptic that he was, Rustad would tear that label off, even if it meant we couldn’t charge as much and we would lose access to key parts of the European fossil fuel market, i.e. governments, universities and corporations with the policy of preferentially or exclusively purchasing “net zero” fossil fuels, even if they cost more.

In my wildest dreams, I imagined Rustad taking power and construction on the pipeline and the plant shutting down, other LNG projects like Tilbury Island and Cedar LNG stopped dead in their tracks until the branding could be restored. But, even barring my best-case scenario, at least less gas would be shipped and less money would be made if a Conservative government alienated Shell and Petronas and destroyed their branding scheme.

I have been surprised how difficult it is to explain to my fellow conservatives the economic rationality of the “net zero,” label. It is easy to understand “certified organic” labeling as a commercial strategy, irrespective of one’s views on the desirability or superiority of organic food. But the problem is that it is very hard for conservatives in the US and Canada (not so the Eastern Hemisphere) to think clearly about things adjacent to the climate debate because our community uses opinions about climate to delineate its social boundaries.

But thinking at the top levels of the movement will have to sharpen soon. Even Alberta’s petro shill premier Danielle Smith is making accommodations with our federal government’s “net zero” marketing plan because, while dishonest and disgusting, “net zero,” as a branding tool, is neither ineffective, nor is it the spent force in public discourse some imagine it to be.

A strong case could also be made that the Book of Daniel, in the Old Testament, qualifies as an apocalypse.

Because of its focus on future events and the end of history in a final, rectifying conflict between good and evil, at the end of which good achieves a final and total victory, many think the term “apocalypse” refers to a work chronicling the end of history and predicting a just resolution. But the term for such a series of events is “eschaton.” The Apocalypse of John describes a rectifying eschaton in which Jesus returns.

The Apocalypse of John is rife with allegorical and metaphorical language; it is a text dense with much symbolism; and the precise meanings and referents of those symbols remain hotly contested more than 1900 years later.

The Communist Manifesto is also an apocalypse containing an eschaton and it is an eschaton expressed in plain and modern language. My guess is that almost no opponents of Marxism have any idea what the Marxist eschaton is. So, here is a very quick summary of the Manifesto:

History has been driven by class struggle; this is a dynamic, rather than fixed process whereby the two classes competing produce a third class, a synthesis, which revolutionizes production and becomes the new ruling class, which, in turn, calls up a new working class that it dominates.

This process has been iterating for millennia. Most recently, aristocrats and peasants struggled during feudalism, ultimately producing a new class, the bourgeoisie, who revolutionized production, in turn producing the proletariat and the capitalist order, which replaced the feudal.

But because of the bourgeoisie’s total immiseration of the proletariat, stripping them of all ownership of their tools and housing (i.e. “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”), they, instead of creating a new ruling class, a final, history-ending class conflict is triggered.

The workers battle the bourgeoisie and ultimately overthrow them, instead of creating a new ruling class and a new working class, something called the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is established and it dismantles the class system, producing a harmonious society in which everyone is a worker. Once that social transformation has taken place, the dictatorship dismantles itself, the state “withers” and we are left with a society of free people, governed by voluntarism and a cooperative spirit.

“Hooey!” you might say; “why would the dictatorship dismantle itself?” you might very reasonably ask, given what happens whenever Marxists take power. But you can see why I bothered writing this summary, given that alleged expositors of Marxism like James Lindsay claim that Marx and Engels preached a fixed, unchanging and unending class struggle between “the oppressed” and “the oppressor,” that they favoured total state ownership and control and oppose the existence of the freedoms celebrated by liberals. Instead, they saw history ending in a stateless world of free people and idealized that outcome.

But this is the problem with eschatology: it is a poor predictor of the actual society group of true believers will construct. While it is an undisputed fact that true believers in Marxism have, again and again, created the very opposite of the utopia described in the Marxist eschaton, less attention has been given to analyzing the eschaton of Canadian progressivism’s true believers.

Canada’s Progressives: Historically Anti-Marxist
In the first half of the twentieth century, there were a number of places in the industrialized West where Marxism had a strong political influence. Here are a few examples of the popularity of explicitly Marxist, Soviet affiliated parties in:

Beginning in 1928 until Hitler banned the party in 1933, the Communist Party of Germany went from fourth place and 11% of the vote to third place and 17% until Hitler became chancellor and began his repression of the party. In Italy, the Communist Party won 31% of the vote and took second place in the 1948, election, up from its 4% and sixth place under the leadership of Antonio Gramsci before Mussolini banned the party in 1929. In Spain’s 1931 election, the largest Marxist party, PSOE, won 16% of the vote and came first in holding the largest bloc of seats; and they repeated that feat in 1936. The French Communists first cracked 10% of the vote in 1928, with 11% and a fifth place finish and reached a zenith of 28% in 1946 when they came first in popular vote. Even in the US, Eugene Debs’ avowedly Marxist Socialist Party scored 6% of the national popular vote and fourth place in 1912 presidential election.

Meanwhile in Canada, the Communist Party’s best ever election result was 2% of the vote, one seat in parliament and sixth place in 1945, the only election in which the party won any seats at all.

Canada’s main socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, was based on two main ideological tendencies, Producerism and the Social Gospel and was actively hostile to Marxists, refusing any electoral alliances with the Communists and actively purging Marxists from its membership rolls in nine of the ten provinces in which it operated, grudgingly tolerating some Marxist participation in BC because of its lack of support from workers and smallholders in the agricultural sector there and the much greater importance of industrial trade unions in the province, some of which had Marxist leadership. But outside of a thin strip down the country’s west coast, Marxists were simply not relevant in the history of the Canadian left.

If one wants to understand the Canadian left’s descent into authoritarianism and the eschatology that has inspired it, one must look to the ideologies that animated the New Democratic Party, its precursors, the Progressives, the United Farmers and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, as well as the left wing of the Liberal Party, with which it co-governed and its precursors co-governed 1921-30, 1963-68, 1972-74 and 2019-25.

As I have detailed elsewhere, Producerism is not really a political ideology as much as a coalition of workers and small business people in certain industrial sectors. To find an eschaton or an animating ideology, one must look to the Social Gospel.

While the Social Gospel movement existed throughout Anglosphere Protestantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no place in which it was more concentrated than Canada. First coined in 1879, the Social Gospel swept through liberal mainline Protestant churches, especially the Presbyterians, reaching its crescendo in the Interwar years. It is not from Marxists but from social gospelers, from whom we get the idea of “institutionalized” oppression, e.g. racism, misogyny, etc.

The Social Gospel was explicitly associated with “progressivism” in both the US and Canada, not just with the parties bearing the name but with the larger movement, which had adherents in all major political parties. Initially investing in traditionally Christian forms of charity, housing, hospitals and soup kitchens, social gospelers gradually expanded their programming to include the unionization of ununionized workers, public health education and vaccination campaigns. And as the scale and ambition of its work became the embryo of the modern welfare state, social gospelers put an increasing portion of their energy not into delivering these cradle-to-grave programs but into the state with its superior powers of taxation and enforcement to become the means by which material aid was delivered.

With the advent of the Great Depression, many things previously delivered by the private sector, charities or local government were necessarily taken up by national governments, not just social programs but economic stimulus programs, with massive bank failures and the rise of Keysenian economics.

In the United States, while social gospelers gained considerable influence and shaped much of the New Deal Order, which would obtain in the US for the next sixty years, (1933-93), it was adulterated by other interests and ideologies within the complex, heavily brokered Democratic Party. Social gospelers had to complete in influence with Jim Crow segregationists, the urban political machines of the industrial North and the Catholic working class.

In Canada, on the other hand, there was a Progressive Party that held the balance of power at the national level from 1921 to 1930. Following the party’s collapse in the early 30s, it was replaced by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in parliament, a party even more deeply committed to the Social Gospel. Its first leader was a churchman, a Methodist minister, JS Woodsworth, who preached the Gospel from the pulpit before becoming a social worker and then, progressive politician.

Following Woodsworth’s term as leader, 1932-42, the party was led by teachers’ union leader Major Coldwell from 1943 until its relaunch as the New Democratic Party in 1961, under the leadership of the party’s favoured son, Tommy Douglas, another Methodist minister turned social worker, who had served as CCF premier of Saskatchewan, from 1944-61, bringing in the first single-payer healthcare system in North America. Douglas then served as leader until 1971.

The two most important leaders and thinkers to build the ideology of the CCF were Methodist churchmen who preached the Social Gospel first from the pulpit and then from the lectern as they helped to create the modern discipline of Social Work.

What fewer Canadians seem to know or remember is that the country’s Liberal Prime Minister, who governed Canada for all but six of the years from 1921-48, William Lyon Mackenzie-King, did not just espouse the Social Gospel; he wrote a book about it, one that, although heterodox, was based on the central tenet that distinguishes the movement’s theology from that of other Christians, a central tenet I once deemed benign and largely irrelevant but now understand to be a dangerous and extreme form of postmillennialist eschatology, something on which I will expand in the next section. (I’ll also provide some definitions for the religious terminology I am busting out.)

The Awards Ceremony
There is a wee dust-up going on in my church right now. While the more theologically minded among the congregation understand it to be a difference of opinion with respect to exegesis and hermeneutics (i.e. how one reads the Bible), such conflict inevitably shakes down into a lower level of abstraction and ends up being about what one concludes doctrinally or cosmologically from that reading of the Bible.

Broadly speaking, my church, which came into being not because of shared doctrine or shared theology but a shared experience of Christian persecution during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and ‘21. While congregants have shared a natural anti-authoritarianism, social conservatism and belief in the importance of sex differences in religious and social formation, one part of the church body come out of the Dutch Reform tradition and believe in a fairly moderate postmillennialism whereas the majority believe in a fairly extreme form of postmillennialism associated with the teachings of the Victorian Irish clergyman, John Nelson Darby, who propounded a way of thinking about Christian history known as “Dispensationalism.”

Every Christian eschaton based on the Revelation of John must contend with the idea of the Millennium, the thousand years that Christ and His people will rule the earth together.

“Premillennialist” theologies read Revelation and other texts as showing the earth deteriorating to an absolute ecological, political and social nadir, a world increasingly corrupt, bereft and unjust, a world effectively in thrall to Satan and the Antichrist. They believe that, at the depth of the crisis, Christ will return in glory, defeat Lucifer, the Antichrist and the earthly rulers in their thrall. He will then take up his throne on earth and rule, with His people, for a thousand years. Then the final phases of the eschaton will take place and a new heaven and a new earth will be fashioned by God.

“Postmillennialist” theologies tend to be more optimistic. My postmillennialist fellow congregants believe that the millennium will begin with Christ still enthroned in heaven, with his followers incrementally building a better world, a more peaceful, just, prosperous and Christian world. At some point during the Millennium, Christ will return to earth and join His people in building up the Kingdom but that is not as big a deal because he is already enthroned as this world’s king, ruling from heaven, working with his followers to build up His Kingdom. When his thousand year reign ends in a perfected human society, the final phases of the eschaton will take place and a new heaven and a new earth will be fashioned by God.

My church’s Dispensationalists congregants believe that Satan is currently the king of this world and Jesus, its future king; our Reformers believe that Jesus is currently king of this world and will, in future, take up his throne on earth.

The Social Gospel and other muscular or extreme forms for postmillennialism, especially the versions like Mackenzie-King’s, that largely deny the divinity of Christ and see his return in exclusively metaphorical terms, understand Christ’s arrival to be the last not the first event of the Millennium. In other words, the whole work of building the Kingdom of God, according to Mackenzie-King’s worldview is done by God’s people, on earth, on our own.

In my discussions with my pastor, I think he was surprised that, while my interpersonal sympathies lie with the Reformers in my Church, I am leery of postmillennialist thinking. He asked why; and the set of ideas I am presenting here suddenly crystalized in my mind: if you believe, as did the longest-governing Liberal prime minister of my country, as did the two founding figures of the NDP, that Christ is not divine, that his return is a metaphor, but that the Chrstian eschaton is a real and possible future, nay, the inevitable destination at which “progress” will deposit us, then there is a strange hubristic monstrosity to your vision.

The Social Gospel teaches, just as Marxism does, that human beings, on their own, can and will build the Kingdom of God, without God’s assistance. But, unlike Marxism, they make no distinction between the final utopia and the revolutionary government that will build it; Social Gospelers are like Marxists, except that they have collapsed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the subsequent Workers’ Paradise into one thing.

When Jesus said, “my kingdom is not of this world,” he was speaking, in part, against the Herodian Dynasty of the Judean state, a dynasty that sought to depict the first three kings Herod, who are largely conflated in the Christian Bible into a single Herod, (Herod the Great, Herod Antipas and Herod Agrippa). He was likely, at least in part, denouncing official state ideology. The Herodian state rested its theory of legitimacy on the idea that the reigning King Herod was “the Son of Man,” the messianic divine protagonist in the Book of Daniel, the Old Testament’s apocalypse and eschaton.

The Herodian state was authoritarian, despotic, paranoid and invasive of ecclesiastical and local forms of authority, in part because it believed it was God’s divinely mandated kingdom, not merely an earthly kingdom with a divinely-appointed king, a state whose ruler was not merely divinely anointed like Saul, David and Solomon but a state whose ruler was infallible and whose institutions were not flawed, imperfect human institutions but those of a divine and perfect kingdom. Even if the “slaughter of the innocents,” described in Matthew 2:16-18, was not literally true, it was the sort of thing people living under one of the Herods might expect of their king.

So, when my pastor asked, unaware of the complete, if not godlessness then Christlessness, of the Social Gospel asked me, “if we have built and run the His Kingdom on our own, what does Jesus even do when he shows up at the end of the Millennium?”

“Host an awards ceremony, I imagine,” was my reply, “maybe hand out little plaques.”

The Dangers of Running a Heaven on Earth
Knowing that God’s kingdom is not of this world is no excuse not to work on bringing his Kingdom about. “Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven,” is an important imperative for any Christian, but that imperative becomes dangerous, on its own, when not paired with the knowledge that God’s kingdom is “not of this world,” that no matter how hard we try, we cannot build the Kingdom by ourselves.

Once a society believes that it can or has built the Kingdom on its own, it becomes both fragile and hubristic, megalomaniacal yet fearful of criticism. Policies like MAID and genderwang become more possible, more logical if we believe that our society is the Kingdom, that we are thinking with God’s mind to know when a life should begin and end, that God did not quite finish the work of making a child’s body and some program of hormones and surgery can complete His work because our hands are His hands.

As I have previously explained in my essays on Anglo Canada’s strange and unique path to secularization, Woodsworth and Douglas were not that exceptional in transforming from churchmen and social scientists or social workers. While the theological language has long since been forgotten, we must understand that Canada’s welfare state is still infused with the giddy self-confidence, the certainty of people who believe they are building God’s kingdom brick by brick and that His role is not to guide them through prayer, to question and deliberate over their choices through His church. It is solely to commend them on a job well-done when they have finished building the kingdom, solely based on the work of their own bodies and minds.

Although the Canada’s progressive civil service and larger commissar class do not use conventional theological language, the structure of their of their thought is nevertheless one produced by the hubris, overconfidence, sense of authority, of infallibility that Christless, muscular post-millennialism imprinted on our country’s intellectuals a century ago.

The Demographic Atrocities of the Old World
During that same half-millennium, states like France, Japan and China eradicated multiple regional languages and cultures through major coercive, state-directed efforts to create homogeneous nations. Exceptionally brutal efforts to achieve ethno-linguistic assimilation continue in Chinese Xinjiang and Turkish Kurdistan. Similarly, policies of enclosure to domesticate and settle semi- and non-sedentary peoples continue up to the present day in the lands of peoples like the Bedouin of Arabia, the San of Botswana and the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania.

There have been processes of ethnic and religious partition in which thousands of people have died and millions driven out of their homes and historic communities, forced to relocate to new lands separated from the land they owned and tilled for generations. Germans in Slavic Europe, Hindus in Balochistan, Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, Greeks in Asia Minor, Christians in Sudan, the list goes on.

There have been long-term foreign occupations of territories that made the locals majority second-class citizens or non-citizens in their own country, in French Algeria and Vietnam, British Rhodesia and South Africa, the Ottoman Turks in Syria and Serbia, the Omani in Zanzibar, again, the list goes on.

Then there are the ethnic groups whose core territory has been violently incorporated as minority of a new polity against their will, suffering punitive assimilation and pogroms, Tibetans in China, Ngunis in Zimbabwe, Cabindans in Angola, for instance.

Then there are places where what began as a foreign minority occupation turned into a permanent settler majority in such places as Japanese Okinawa and in the Ainu lands of Hokkaido, Chinese Taiwan, Arabian Egypt, the Tswana Kalahari, Malaysian Borneo, Russian Siberia and Crimea, Chinese Manchuria, etc.

And then, of course, there has been genocide, actual genocide, in which a systematic effort was made not to marginalize, displace or assimilate a population but to kill it in its entirety—the Armenians of Turkey, European Jews, the Rwandan Tutsi, European Roma, Serbian Muslims, Syrian Yazidis, etc.

Why is it that there is no “stolen land” discourse in these places? Why do the people who control the land now not experience the kind of colonizer/settler guilt we see in the other half of the world? Why are there no reparations, no compensation packages, no special rights and concessions for these abused minorities, when many have endured far more profound violence and oppression than seen anywhere on the mainland of the Americas or Oceania?

If the peoples of the Old World have suffered equally or more violent and extreme atrocities in the same half-millennium as the peoples of the New World, why is the narration, consciousness and sense of obligation so different between the two worlds?

There is no single answer but I do want to suggest that there is a primary answer.

The regions where there exists and indigenous land question and where there are settler-led processes of compensation and special rights for indigenous peoples are the places where the Virgin Soil epidemics took place.

The Virgin Soil Epidemics
Many of the endemic diseases of early modern Africa, Asia and Europe began as zoonotic infections, micro-organisms that mutated in such a way as to jump from animals to humans. Because Eurasians and Africans had more domestic animals, creating more opportunities for zoonotic infection and different animals not present at all in the New World, Old World diseases produced mortality in New World populations on an enormous scale, resulting in the deaths of 80-95% of populations they hit. There are various reasons for the enormous scale of this mortality.

First and perhaps least importantly, indigenous people’s genetic makeup had not been changed by centuries of exposure. While Old Worlders had experienced centuries of millennia of natural selection, with those whose genetic makeup made them less symptomatic, less disabled by infection out-competing those other genetic makeups in the population.

Second, Old Worlders, with centuries or millennia of experience with these diseases, had oral and written traditions about how best to nurse those infected to maximize their chances of survival. Old Worlders also had cultural practices like quarantining to mitigate the spread of illnesses and, in many parts of the Old World, there were even hospitals with personnel specialized in nursing and treating specific illnesses.

Third, many endemic diseases such as smallpox conferred an immunity on those who survived a first infection, meaning that they were, in the Old World, childhood diseases to which adults nursing the children were immune. Not only were adults immune, and basic nursing practices common knowledge, when a community was hit with disease, adults kept raising and harvesting food, trading for goods they could not produce, making political decisions.

In the New World, smallpox might arrive in a community, travelling up a trade route and disable the whole community, children and adults alike. Nobody would have knowledge of how to nurse sufferers, nor the energy to do so as they too would be disabled by the disease. The economy would shut down. In the New World, many of the dead from smallpox epidemics were actually those who recovered from the disease only to starve to death because they food cultivation and distribution systems were so severely disrupted.

Large-scale complex societies based on horticulture or agriculture were more severely impacted than hunter-gatherers in many cases, because of the need for not only specialization but also a minimum demographic scale to make their economies work. Oral tradition societies had their own special vulnerabilities. The Virgin Soil epidemics killed-off the old more than the young, disrupting the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and annihilating knowledge accumulated over generations, practical, historical and cultural, wiped out as the bodies storing it died before being able to pass it on.

The areas most extremely affected were those with large, navigable river systems and complex societies of maize, bean and squash-raising peasants. We used to think that the Amazon rain forest was ancient and its small population of “uncontacted” hunter-gatherers unchanged since time immemorial. We now know it was the location of a thriving maize-raising, complex civilization, too connected by water, too effective at trade and transportation, a society through which Old World disease could spread, centuries before the European settlers who brought it even began to arrive. And that many of the “uncontacted” tribespeople were survivors of a once-great complex society.

Such was the magnitude of the depopulation of the Mississippi and Amazon basins that, as field turned to forest, controlled burning ended and human populations plummeted, it significantly de-carbonized the atmosphere, intensifying and prolonging the Little Ice Age, producing the global crisis of the 1640s as rapid climate change in the Old World destabilized almost every significant large state.

Hernan de Soto, George Vancouver: these men witnessed and chronicled the strange wastelands left by smallpox, empty lodges, abandoned religious sites, overgrowing fields because, as much as they were the first Europeans to get to the places they “discovered,” the microbes Eurasians and Africans had arrived first and done the work of conquest.

Settler Responses to the Epidemics
There are some ironies to consider at this point. It turns out that one’s chance of dying in a Virgin Soil epidemic were actually greater the further from Old World colonists one was. The closer you were to settlers and their slaves, the more you were likely to know about these new diseases and their treatment. Furthermore, while Old Worlders might have murderous intentions towards you, they might not. They might help nurse you through the disease.

The officials and decision-makers running the European empires that claimed the New World were a diverse bunch. Some were humanitarians who genuinely cared about the survival of indigenous peoples but there was a larger and more significant group: those who needed labour to extract the great bounty the New World offered in old growth timber, land ideal for conversion to sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations, precious metals and gems. African slaves were costly; indigenous workers had no upfront cost. Putting African slaves down a mine was crazy–one cave in and the money you had spent for twenty years of future labour could vanish in a day!

France’s grandiose plans to create a Louisiana like the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru were stymied by the severe lack of indigenous labour. Even though the Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian monarchies built an incredible machine for moving British people to the New World, English colonies still faced constant labour shortages; meanwhile every other European empire was even more constantly hobbled by severe labour shortages in the territories it conquered.

European empires, concerned that their competitors were developing faster rolled out policies to reduce indigenous mortality. When villages became too depopulated to maintain the scale necessary for an agricultural economy, the Spanish Hapsburgs initiated congregación, a policy to merge villages and resettle them under church supervision. In areas unsuitable for cultivation, the English provided labour-saving devices for trappers and hunters, kettles, guns, ammunition at a surprisingly low mark-up. Measures like these were not examples of bleeding heart humanitarianism but of steely-eyed realism: the whole Spanish extractive complex in Greater Mexico was fueled by the maize produced in those congregated villages. British culture produced few voyageurs; they needed indigenous people to bring the furs they desired to their coastal factory-fort complexes.

To put things simply, the opinion that too many indigenous people were dying off was shared by almost everyone in the New World, producing in much of the settler population a sense of guilt and failure, a wish that they and their forbears could have somehow done more to reduce the mortality.

Deserved and Undeserved Land
This sense of guilt, which the romantic, Seeker and conservationist movements transformed into a curious ahistorical idealization of indigenous societies, tapping into that ancient Athenian trope of “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods,” was accompanied by a sense of an undeserved windfall.

South Africa’s Boers, Rhodesia’s Settlers, Algeria’s Pieds Noir felt entirely deserving of their land, having fought and killed, having taken on whole armies of locals, defending their farms every day from a hostile local majority. They had earned it with blood, through true conquest. Settlers of the New World had most of that work done for them, by a lethally destructive vanguard of microorganisms that preceded them, sometimes by centuries, literally decimating the conquered in slaughters never even witnessed.

It is not really true that the land settlers of the New World occupy was “stolen.” But it was, without question, un-earned. Also, as something unearned, it feels like it does not really belong to us; it does feel stolen. And besides, the loss of indigenous knowledge and culture hobbles native societies up to the present day. Surely, if there are victims, there must have been a crime, some hideous crime.

So, we have an inclination to hand some of it back, give out compensation, grant special privileges to the survivors of the original population. Maybe that will make us feel like it belongs to us. And when that doesn’t work, we re-describe our ancestors as black-hatted murderous villains, dream up episodes of germ warfare that never actually took place, create fictitious mass graves, create folklore that exaggerates the military strength of the Sioux, Iroquois and Comanche, that imposes a false coherence and vision on the military coalitions of Pontiac and Tecumseh. Maybe if our ancestors really were ruthless, sociopathic, genocidal mass murderers, people who dump 215 children into a mass grave in front of a school and then force the other students to bury them, they really did the work of deservedly conquering the land.

These problems were all pretty benign in their manifestation when I was child. It seemed harmless to go along with myths that assuaged our guilt and explained the trauma suffered by indigenous societies. But now, they are yoked to authoritarian forces that threaten our society, Communist Chinese imperial neocolonialism, the dispossession and the destruction of the property rights and heritable wealth of the middle and working classes, the replacement of democracy with technocratic neofeudalism.

Neither we nor our indigenous neighbours can afford to indulge these feelings any longer, for we indulge them at the expense of our democracy, our independence and future generations.

When the British first encountered them in the 1770s, they recognized the Hawaiians as a civilized people; they called their leaders “kings,” not “chiefs,” this despite the fact that, like other Polynesians, Hawaiians’ clothing, or lack thereof, was immodest in the extreme by European standards and, like most Polynesians, their technology was stone-age. Yet, at the very time the British were calling leaders of the vastly more numerous and technologically advanced Kikuyu people of East Africa, “chiefs,” when the British looked at Polynesian leaders, they saw princes and kings.

That is because Hawaiian society generated high levels of material surplus. Hawaii’s Polynesian settlers brought many invasive species of plants and domestic animals and practiced agro-pastoralism with pigs, taro root, breadfruit, sugarcane and coconut palms, converting native ecosystems into major generators of surplus, surplus that, along with old growth timber Hawaiians began exporting to China and Japan, as cash crops, as soon as they gained access to European maritime technology in the nineteenth century.

This surplus, in turn, produced “civilization.” Hawaiians were the first people the British had encountered who were actually more passive-aggressive than they, better at contests of restraint and continence. Like a civilized people, they had complex etiquette systems that not only required practice and study to learn; they mandated different behaviours not just on the basis of sex but of class and caste. Like a civilized people, they had an aristocracy who could be identified both by behaviour and by costume and body modification through tattooing. These aristocrats, furthermore, held most of the land in forms of title not unlike European feudalism.

Throughout the nineteenth century, as a new coal-fired European imperial competition snapped-up territory the world over, the clearly civilized character of the Hawaiian people spared them direct invasion and annexation because, back then, Europeans justified their conquests based on their “civilizing mission,” and their duty to spread Christianity. Like the Cherokee, Hawaiians were quick to adopt European orthography to write their own language; and they used this strategy to achieve high literacy levels by mid-century. Like the Tswana, they were proactive in welcoming Christian missionaries and facilitated Christian conversion by the royal family and their courtiers leading by example through public conversion.

But, like the other peoples of the Pacific and Americas, their lack of immunity to European disease meant that only the most and least geographically isolated Hawaiians could escape decimation by Old World disease. The total population of Native Hawaiians collapsed from as many as 400,000 at the time of Cook’s arrival to a mere 90,000 prior to their annexation.

This sudden population vacuum attracted settlers as reliably as the Virgin Soil epidemics had in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. Migrants flooded-in, not just from Germany, the US and Britain but also from China and, especially, Japan. Indeed, Japanese and German settlers were the two largest groups by the time the kingdom entered its terminal phase.

Following Kamehameha V dying without an heir in 1872, the Hawaiian Kingdom entered into a period of dynastic instability and contested succession, which plagued it for the rest of its existence. As the kingdom degenerated into aristocratic feuding of coups and counter-coups.

Finally, in 1893, a group of Hawaiian courtiers, aristocrats from the old system, formed a junta of six Hawaiians and seven settlers from Germany, England and the United States to block what they saw as an imminent Japanese takeover, in which the new and unpopular queen would become a vassal to the Emperor of Japan. This junta sent for American military aid and inaugurated the period of US rule that continues to this day.

Today’s Hawaiians
Fast forward to the summer of 2010. I am living with my girlfriend Rachel, who has just started a PhD program at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. We chose not to live on College Hill, where rents were steep and housing typical of a student ghetto but right on the main drag downtown, Westminster Street, recently re-cobbled in the latest of the city’s gentrification attempts, in a newly renovated hep, cavernous, artsy loft.

That fall, we got a new nextdoor neighbour, a twenty-year-old Hawaiian woman enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. She drove a Mercedes Benz. She had a gorgeous girlfriend. She had attended Barack Obama’s inaugural ball in 2009. Her father owned about 80% of the utility and telecommunications grid of Hawaii. When she did her end-of-year class presentation at RISD in the spring of 2011, it was attended by the governor and both US senators for the state of Rhode Island. They did not attend any other students’ and certainly no local students’ presentations.

This brings me to the deal struck by those visionary six courtiers back in 1893. They cashed in their political power for a more durable sort: property rights and resource concessions. They conceded their governance powers as local rulers and archipelago-wide courtiers for fee simple title to their land, fishery concessions and resource rights. And the junta functioned as the embryo of a hybrid elite containing the old noble families and the representatives of Dole and United Fruit.

These aristocrats inaugurated a new kind of hybrid system, a cosmopolitan capitalism undergirded by precolonial aristocratic privilege, where a united elite extracted agricultural labour from native Hawaiians and Japanese settlers alike. This is the world in which Barack Obama grew up. As the grandson of a white bank vice president, he was sent to an elite private day school for his education but was ineligible to attend the island’s most prestigious boarding school; it remains reserved for those of aristocratic Hawaiian blood.

DEI and the Global Ruling Class
Many have remarked that of all the many forms of oppression and disadvantage experienced in our society, the two most powerful are not recognized as forms of social or political disadvantage at all in DEI policies. Rather than recognizing sex as a force that strongly conditions one’s experiences and horizon of possibilities, DEI policies recognize the nonsense characteristic of “gender identity.” Almost as perniciously, class is also effaced, at best, as a factor and, more often than not, DEI policies actually discriminate against working class people in favour of the commissar class and bourgeoisie.

Former Harvard University president, plagiarist Claudine Gay, exemplifies the kind of person DEI policies place in high office. Unlike dozens of black, female academics more qualified for her job than she, who came out of the working class, or the underclass, who grew up in the Projects, she grew up as part of the global cosmopolitan elite, attending elite boarding schools, her family moving around the world, from the Caribbean, across the US, to the Arabian Peninsula, underwritten by her elite family’s monopoly on concrete manufacturing in Haiti and their substantial land holdings there and in the US.

As I have written elsewhere, DEI policies are unlike traditional “affirmative action,” policies which focused on ensuring that non-white applicants for entry-level and low-wage jobs did not face hiring discrimination. DEI, on the other hand, focuses on high-qualification, high-status jobs in management and academia and does not seek to eliminate discrimination but rather to discriminate in favour of non-whites and individuals with uncommon sexual tastes and habits.

It has been my contention for the past half-decade that DEI is less than uninterested in improving the lives of working class and underclass people. Rather, it is part of an effort to create a single globalized multiracial, multicultural elite, engaged in the shared project of exploiting working class people of all races and cultures.

The Land Question in Canada
Whatever deficiencies there were in the indigenous land and education policies of John A MacDonald and Wilfrid Laurier, the Hawaiian system was simply not on the table. The reality was that there were few areas of Canada where there existed sufficient surplus to produce elitist, hierarchical societies.

Outside of the lands in Lower Canada granted to the Iroquois Confederacy in exchange for their military aid in the Seven Years War and War of 1812, Canada, from the Atlantic to the Rockies, was characterized by semi- and non-sedentary, hunter-gatherer or low-surplus horticultural societies that generated negligible surplus and, consequently, negligible political complexity. And Canada had pretty much the lowest surplus societies of their type; the poorest, least sedentary, least horticultural Siouan societies existed in the southeast corner of the Prairies. Similarly, of the equestrian buffalo-hunting societies, the Plains Cree had the fewest horses per capita and the smallest share of the buffalo hide boom. And the Miqmak generated a fraction of the winter harvest and annual stores of the Abenaki to the South in Maine; most of their small surplus came from the Atlantic fishery, not horticulture.

In an effort to ensure treaties were signed in the Great Plains and Boreal Forest, the Laurier government had to cobble together fake sub-national polities of local leaders selected almost at random to produce the “numbered treaties” to grant themselves some sort of legal title to huge swaths of the West.

The Northwest Coast: An Anthropological Paradox
But Out West, things were a whole other kettle of fish. While most of the BC interior, prior to settler arrivals was characterized by low- and no-surplus societies, the extraordinary wealth of the Pacific made the Northwest Coast a fundamentally different place. The salmon, the eulachon, the whales made the Northwest Coast an oil-exporting rentier state long before the miracle of petroleum was discovered. The oil from eulachon and salmon, the wind-dried and smoked preserved salmon: these were things of such great value, they travelled down the old “grease trail” to California. The fecundity of the ocean, its oysters and clams, the abundance of berries, the enormity and versatility of cedar meant that all of the evils that come with surplus had already arrived on the Northwest Coast, long before Europeans turned up.

There was spectacular jewelry; there were great works of wood-carved art; copper was imported from the other side of the Great Plains to make both tools and luxury goods. Such things were often appreciated at potlatches, where, in the style of many Buddhist-influenced artistic movements, the art was destroyed to fully imbibe a spirituality recognizing the ephemeral nature of beauty. Slaves were also sacrificed to show the wealth of an aristocratic house, to demonstrate that even its slaves were but straw dogs.

There were wars up and down the coast, and war captives were often taken as slaves. Indeed, the slave trade sometimes became such a source of economic dynamism that the need for more slaves might provoke a war, just as in the Old World. These were complex societies of principalities, clans and classes. Body modification helped to entrench those class boundaries with noble families binding their babies skulls to produce elongated heads, just as the Chinese gentry were binding their daughters’ feet.

A unique thing was achieved on BC’s Northwest Coast, a fascinating anthropological reality: feudalism without peasants, hierarchy without agriculture. Complex, if small, kingdoms and principalities dotted the coast from Juneau to Arcata, a world with the pomp and ceremony of early medieval Japan and the dozens of warring, slaving kingdoms and principalities of early medieval Scandinavia.

And yet, even though one of the first relationships Northwest Coast peoples had to the outside world were the business partnerships linking Nuu-Chah-Nulth princes and kings to Kamehameha’s courtiers, to the fur and Coolie traders of Canton, organized by John Meares and John Hanna in the 1790s, Canada chose not to see the First Nations of coastal British Columbia as kings and aristocrats. Maybe its was the lack of agriculture.

The Rise of the Hawaiian System in BC
But, starting in the 1970s, that began to change. Because BC’s legislature and Canada’s parliament had failed to initiate any positive, constructive policy to solve BC’s land question in the province’s first century of existence (aside from Treaty Eight in the Peace Country and a handful of treaties on Vancouver Island negotiated before Confederation), it ultimately fell to the courts to deal with the Canadian Northwest Coast’s unique lack of treaties with indigenous people.

This lack of treaties was not a problem arising from some theory of natural rights. A foundational law that shaped the constitutional order of British North America was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, one of the “intolerable acts” over which the American Revolution was fought. The same Proclamation that established British sovereignty over the area north of the United States contains a provision, requiring that a treaty be signed with local indigenous people in order to acquire their land.

Beginning in 1969, the hereditary aristocrats from the Nisga’a nation mounted a legal battle demanding the return of or compensation for their traditional territory, based on the Proclamation and the principles laid down in the English constitution, based on the Common Law and its codification in Magna Carta in 1215.

Since in 1973, the courts have shaped the land question in British Columbia, first in Calder v. British Columbia, then in Guerin v. The Queen (1984), Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), Tsilhqotʼin Nation v British Columbia (2014) and now in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada (2025). Even leaving aside the BC legislature’s recent shambolic interventions in 2019, attempting to reinforce the direction the courts were heading, BC’s judiciary has been accelerating down a clear path over the past fifty years: the empowerment of pre-existing indigenous sovereignty and title over traditional territory.

But the form that title and jurisdiction are taking are very different from what we see in Latin America and even the US, where legislatures not courts have led on land reform. Latin American land reform policies, designed to uplift landless indigenous people, have been levelling and class-based, in 1920s Mexico, 1950s Guatemala, 1970s Peru, etc. the rural working class and underclass benefited irrespective of race and race relations often benefited through cross-racial joint economic ventures. Indigenous aristocrats only benefited if their lineage had somehow lost its wealth and thereby became eligible for government assistance. Land reform policies were not for those who had retained their pre-colonial wealth in the form of land or some other form of capital.

But, in BC, we are doing the opposite: deepening racial divisions in our rural communities, handing out land in direct rather than inverse proportion to indigenous people’s inherited wealth and aristocratic status. In fact, because Canada’s courts have based their land reform policies on Magna Carta and the Royal Proclamation, the right to negotiate the fate of off-reserve territory and jurisdiction over that territory has been accorded only to those of noble blood. Irrespective of how band council elections go, it is not elected chiefs whom the courts understand to possess the “unceded territory” but hereditary chiefs, or, to make our language plan, the feudal lords, the princes and princesses, the kings and queens of petty realms and lordships.

Let there be no mistake: our courts have decided that the just settlement of the indigneous land question is the restoration of feudalism on the BC Coast. In the thirty years since our first modern treaty that recreated the Nisga’a Nation spanning an area the size of Luxembourg, the gap between rich and poor among the Nisga’a has only grown; the Nisga’a face an even worse housing affordability crisis than the rest of BC, despite two thousand people being handed an area the size of a European country. Nisga’a wealth has grown; Nisga’a art has flourished; the nation’s share of the Nass Valley fishery has reached epic proportions. But is life any better or different for poor Nisga’a living in shoddy rental housing in Prince Rupert, Terrace and Vancouver? No. In fact, while massive wealth has been transferred to indigenous elites since 2015, the life expectancy of regular indigenous folks has fallen at the staggering rate of one year per year. The chasm between rich and poor, both indigenous and settler, is growing wider and faster under indigenous neo-feudalism.

That is because British Columbia is instituting the Hawaiian System at last. And while the politics and material order might be feudal, there is nothing primitive about it. The great aristocratic houses of the Northwest Coast are finally taking their place next to the great aristocratic houses of Hawaii in the diverse, equitable and inclusive New World Order.

Because it is my policy never to address an issue in an essay unless I have something to bring to the conversation that no one else has, I have not written an essay on the egregious Bill C-9 that was just rammed through parliament nor on my friend Barry Neufeld’s jailing and $825,000 worth of lawfare fines this year, for instance.

But, with the Supreme Court challenge of Québec’s 2019 Laicity Law imminent and the federal government arguing that the Court should limit the efficacy and scope of the Notwithstanding Clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, many pro-freedom Anglo Canadians are having a lot of trouble supporting or identifying with either side in this debate. And so I am weighing in to offer my full-throated support of Jean Francois Legault’s moribund government in its Supreme Court fight and offer some novel information and answers that may help pro-freedom Anglos understand what is at stake and better appreciate Québec’s position on the matter.

First proposed, in a more comprehensive version, as the Québec Values Charter by the Parti Québecois government of Pauline Marois in 2013, Québec’s ban on religious garments in government workplaces was finally enshrined in law in a slimmed-down bill by the Coalition Avenir Québec in 2019. The law is similar to but much less comprehensive than the French, Egyptian and Turkish bans on hijabs, niqabs, etc. in public spaces, which the original PQ law more closely resembled.

Legacy of the Duplessis Regime and the Quiet Revolution
During the late 1950s and 1960s, the province of Québec went through a major social and political upheaval called the Quiet Revolution. Prior to the 1960 election, the province of Québec was an authoritarian, theocratic Catholic state; under the rule of strongman Maurice Duplessis, almost all social services were provided by the Roman Catholic church. There was not even a provincial Ministry of Education and the number of Francophone university spaces was tiny and, again, monopolized by the Church.

Instead, government was focused on keeping Québec’s workers pliable, poor and uneducated; Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, broke strikes, cracked heads and even shot uppity mine and industrial workers to grease the wheels of the economy. During harvest seasons, it was not temporary foreign workers from Mexico or recent Filipino and Indian immigrants who filled-out the labour force in Western Canada. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Okanagan fruit harvest was brought in by early school leavers from Québec, Canada’s original source of migrant agricultural labour, kept out of better work by lack of English and a lack of advanced math and literacy skills.

Duplessis was not the only authoritarian Catholic leader of his day who enjoyed a de facto concordat with Rome, enabling him to appoint bishops and gather information about his citizens through church records and voluntary surveillance. During the second major global Red Scare in the 1930s, a number of men like Duplessis came to power justifying their authoritarianism based on the need for vigilance against the communist threat.

There was Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist from 1936 to 1975, António de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968 and Ireland’s Éamon de Valera who governed from 1932-59. Whereas Franco and Salazar ran full-on dictatorships that cancelled elections and wholly suspended democratic rights, de Valera’s government was much more similar to Duplessis’s.

Sure, there was violent intimidation of the opposition by both police and Union Nationale and and Fianna Fáil party thugs; the Church pressed its thumb on the scale hard; employment blacklisting was common; ballot boxes were stuffed in many ridings; opposition voters had trouble making it to the polls unless opposition candidates’ own personal bruisers could best the government thugs in local street battles. But occasionally, elections were lost.

De Valera was out of power briefly 1948-51 and 1954-57 but his opposition was able to do little because it was a coalition of literally all tendencies opposing him and also because the judicial, ecclesiastical and bureaucratic officials Fianna Fáil had appointed did not really recognize the new governments as either legitimate or likely to last. Similarly, Duplessis was out of power for five years of his impressive twenty-three year run from 1936 to 1959 but it scarcely mattered, the Union Nationale machine ground on.

In the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, secularization was a slow, gradual process that was generally nonviolent. In many ways, secularization was not so much a break with the country’s religious past as the growth, deepening and diversification of a free marketplace of religious ideas that began with the English Reformation. Including atheism or even Islam was not a great stretch in the nineteenth century because there were, at that point, not just a host of Protestant denominations but new, barely Christian movements like Mormonism and Unitarianism.

But in countries that had dodged or reversed, like France, the Protestant Reformation, secularization was a more sudden, radical and, often even violent process, especially if it happened before the Second World War. Mexico fought two civil wars, La Reforma and the Cristero War over it. France had a bloody revolution. And the laws these countries enshrined in their constitutions reflected this different history, laws limiting the ability of clergy to participate in politics, stage mass demonstrations and parades and wear religious garb in public.

There are women alive in Québec today who remember life under Maurice Duplessis and his authoritarian regime and one of the things they remember is how, like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, the church’s enforcement of a dress code for women was a central part of its authoritarian project. Church, state and party worked in harmony to surveil, call out and punish widows not wearing black, young women whose skirts were too short, women wearing trousers and other forms of “immodesty.”

Such costumes indicated one of two things; women who were too independent, too feminist, out of ideological accord with the government or their husbands or fathers who were too permissive, too modern. Either way, the way women dressed allowed church, state and party to collaborate in identifying, repressing and punishing dissent. Furthermore, women who took the hint and complied with the province’s implied dress code signaled capitulation, submission to the power of Dupless’s authoritarian state and chilled dissent.

In the 1960s and 70s, as the Liberal Party and later, Parti Québecois, secularized, democratized and liberalized Québec society, they called the Duplessis years the Grande Noirceur, the Great Darkness.

People’s memories usually go back to about the age of six, meaning that native-born Québecois women over the age of seventy-two have a memory of those times and hundreds of thousands more have heard stories of those times from a relative who survived that oppression, a mother, grandmother, aunt, older sister.

How do you suppose they think about banning hijabs and niqabs? Do you imagine they think they are oppressing and hurting Sunni and Shi’a women, telling them they are unwelcome in Québec? Or do you think that maybe they understand themselves to be fighting for those women’s freedom just like Quiet Revolutionaries Thérèse Casgrain, Jean Marchand and Pierre Trudeau fought for theirs? Those women, after all, come from countries that lack a free religious marketplace, that, if they have secularized at all, have done so through the same kind of sudden, radical changes that once gripped Québec.

How do you imagine CAQ, PQ and Conservative voters see the Québec Liberals and Québec Solidaire making deals with local Imams to gain the support of local mosques to turn their members out on election day? Might these progressives look like a new generation of misogynistic Union Nationale thugs?

The Origins of the Notwithstanding Clause
Now that I have helped to explain why this law seems reasonable to people whose experience of secularization was more dramatic, radical and recent that that of English Canadians, I need to reacquaint English Canadians with some of our own history.

In 1982, Canada had had a Bill of Rights since 1960. John Diefenbaker was not just responsible for giving Canadians a bill of individual and democratic rights; he was also the Prime Minister who, the next year, enfranchised indigenous people.

But that year, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the Quiet Revolutionary, had a more ambitious plan for guaranteeing human rights to Canadians. During his high-stakes negotiations with Canada’s ten provincial premiers to patriate the Canadian constitution and complete the process of gaining full independence from the United Kingdom, he wanted to enshrine these rights in supreme law, to make them part of the constitution, enabling the courts to strike down any law, federal or provincial, that was understood to violate these rights.

Trudeau, a lawyer who had made key contributions to the Quiet Revolution by giving free legal advice for those whose human rights had been violated by the Duplessis regime, trusted the courts to apply the law dispassionately and rationally. But his opinion was not shared by the premiers of most provinces. Seven of English Canada’s nine premiers joined with Québec’s separatist premier Rene Levesque in opposing the law.

For some, like PQ Premier René Lévesque, individual rights were coming at the expense of groups rights, the ability of communities to defend their distinctive character, such as the right of Francophone Quebeckers to make what they saw as restrictions on the rights of Anglophones necessary to preserve the French language by limiting things like access to English-language public school and the display of English signs for retail businesses, as they had been doing since 1976. For some, it was simply about the diminution and circumscription of the power of their legislatures to make laws and transfer that power to another body.

But some of the sharpest and most forward-looking objections came from the one sitting democratic socialist government in Canada. While British Columbia and Manitoba had recently elected New Democrat governments in the 1970s, Saskatchewan’s NDP was a descendant of the much more radical, much less conventionally liberal Cooperative Commonwealth Federation that had governed the province 1944-61. (Its Québec wing, at the time, was led by Casgrain.)

While the NDP was, from its inception, a coalition of unionized workers and left-leaning urban liberals, the CCF had entered government as a rural producerist party with little urban support, a coalition of industrial workers and yeoman farmers, infusing the Saskatchewan NDP with a deeper class analysis. Furthermore, the old CCF had also faced rigged elections and collusion between the media, judiciary and governing parties to falsely tar them as aligned with the USSR and use discriminatory laws and judicial overreach to tilt the table at election time. The big syndical professions, doctors and jurists had also used all their might to prevent the election of the CCF and, once elected, the implementation of the laws they passed.

Saskatchewan premier Alan Blakeney, originally elected as a CCFer in Tommy Douglas’s government, and his Attorney-General Roy Romanow broke the impasse between the Anglo premiers and the Trudeau government by proposing the Notwithstanding Clause, which gave provincial legislatures the power to exempt laws they passed from charter challenges for five years, after which time the exemption would sunset.

They did this because they understood not only that the judiciary were unelected appointees who could not be fired or recalled from office and were therefore not democratically accountable. They also did this because they understood that the judiciary was dominated by the class from which Trudeau himself came: the urban bourgeoisie and that, consequently, they would tend to function as a cartel defending their own class interests and those of other urban bourgeois cartels against the interests of, say, rural industrial workers. Fundamentally, there was no guarantee that the courts, granted such vast powers, would read the Charter as literally or dispassionately as Trudeau appeared to hope.

We now live in a Canada that, when it comes to elite judicial capture, class and sectional antagonism enacted through the courts, syndicalism and non-literal exegesis of the law, our judiciary is, as Ricky from Trailer Park Boys would say, “Worst Case, Ontario.” While the farmers and industrial workers of the Prairies are now understood to be “far right” deplorables and their culture and class interest belittled from the creature shambling around in the flayed skin of the Canadian Left, the Blakeney government’s ingenious contribution to the Charter is one of the few tools they still possess to defend their communities and their democratic rights.

The Federal Government’s End-run Around the Constitution
But the Carney government wants to do away with that last line of defense. They are offering the absurd argument that a section of the constitution whose sole purpose is to shield laws from judicial review is being “misused” because it is being used to shield a law from judicial review and that the courts have the power to circumscribe the use of the notwithstanding clause. In other words, they are saying “this clause of the constitution seems to say that it unambiguously and unequivocally ties your hands but maybe you don’t need to take it so literally. Maybe it is your decision as to when your hands can be tied and when you can just decide to untie them.”

This is doubly dangerous, inviting further judicial overreach in two ways, first by removing one of the few guardrails limiting the power of the courts to override the democratic will of citizens enacted through legislation and, second, by encouraging an increasingly non-literal, creative exegesis of supreme law by the judiciary.

Essentially, the federal government is asking the Supreme Court to unilaterally override the constitution’s amending formula which requires the consent of seven off ten provinces comprising a majority of Canada’s population and instead rewrite its most controversial section, the Charter, by judicial fiat.

The government of Québec is being depicted by the Anglo legacy media as authoritarian but the irony is that, in this age of compelled speech, institutional capture, unprosecuted street violence against political dissidents, the enshrining of a set of magical beliefs and rituals as a de facto state religion complete with parades and flags, blacklists and bogeymen and an entrenched bureaucracy and press that do not recognize the opposition’s legitimacy or right to govern, we Anglos have a lot to learn from the people of Québec and the workers and farmers of the rural Prairies, their struggles, their history and their understanding of just where the threats to our liberty are coming from.

Aesthetics and aestheticization have always been important to the rhetoric of militant tyranny. The physicality and dire consequences of violence have been neutralized, even transformed through aesthetics for millennia. Indeed, the kin strife and fratricides of the Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita are specifically excused because the artistry of his killing is so beautiful. But this had to be explicitly stated and argued in the Vedas. In a truly fascistic discourse, such things are self-evident; a fascist discourse needs not argue that aesthetics matter more; fascist discourse sits atop the presumption that aesthetics not merely a thing that matters but the metric by which political action and thought should be evaluated.

One sees this so clearly in Riefenstahl’s films. They make no ideological and utilitarian argument for Hitler and his regime; their arguments are framed in the ontology of an aesthetic. “The leader is the party!” “The leader is the party!” is the crowds’ most compelling chorus. The aesthetic grandeur of the rally, the parade, the huge flags, the monumental architecture depicted are the films’ arguments, as are the beautiful, beautifully clad followers of the Fuhrer.

Furthermore, again as evinced in Riefenstahl’s films, the public rallies and parades of the Nazi party and in the monumental architecture of the regime, aesthetics are not merely the primary tool used for fascist legitimation but also for fascist intimidation. The scale of the monument, the size of the parade, the deafening shout of the Fuhrer functioned to overwhelm, to disorient, to intimidate, to paralyze the opposition.

I do not see either of the two socio-political camps into which our society is being polarized as the next Nazis. The morbidities and madness of our times may resemble the events of the 1920s and 30s, something over which I have spilled considerable ink. But history rhymes; it does not repeat. But I do want to suggest that our thinking is becoming more fascistic overall with respect to the use of aesthetics as a kind of political reasoning and that this aestheticization of politics is not being experienced equally in all social movements.

It should surprise no one, in light of my change of political alignment in recent years, that I see the aestheticization of politics is being experienced far more acutely in the political body shambling around in the flayed skin of the Left. And, because the world is a deeply ironic place, it is most in evidence when the left accuse their opponents of fascism.

What Is Fascism?
There remains and should remain a robust debate about how to define fascism. Some definitions are overly broad, others overly narrow. Founding NDP leader and Saskatchewan’s longest-serving premier, Tommy Douglas, for instance, offered an oft-quoted definition that was hopelessly broad, arguing that “Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” While Douglas used the term “begins,” rather than “is,” the reader is nevertheless left with the impression that all opposition to socialism is incipient fascism.

On the other hand, some argue that the writings of Benito Mussolini fully and comprehensively define “fascism,” as his party were the only successful fascists who called themselves fascist, even though there are ways in which they are not descriptive of regimes and movements universally acknowledged to be fascist, such as the Nazis.

The definition of fascism with which I worked, as a historian of the twentieth century, falls somewhere in between. There is a set of authoritarian regimes that flourished between 1920 and 1970 that were not identical but had a strong “family resemblance” to one another, sharing many but not necessarily all of a set of characteristics. These regimes include Francisco Franco’s Spain, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Ioannis Metaxas’ Greece, Maurice Duplessis’ Quebec, Juan and Isabel Peron’s Argentina (as distinct from the first Peronist regimes of the 40s and 50s) and present-day Iran.

The first of these, obviously, is the aestheticization of politics, discussed above.

Second, a distinctive characteristic of successful fascist movements, apparent from early in a fascist party’s rise is not just the practice but the belief in an end to the state’s monopoly on violence in favour of an oligopoly of violence held by major political parties. While one might expect party militias to be demobilized or merged with law enforcement in the police states fascists create, the continuation of parallel or supplementary party-run, in addition to state-run, armed forces is a near-universal feature of fascist governance. Fascists create violent party systems.

Third, while fascists often achieve their initial power by democratic means and then transition to one-party states that criminalize opposition, the performance of mass popular support remains important to fascists at all phases of their regimes. While many one-party states, especially self-styled socialist authoritarian ones continue holding elections in which citizens are often compelled to cast votes for the ruling party, most authoritarian states tend to begin eschewing large public meetings, gatherings and rallies, once having achieved power. Fascists, on the other hand, see a highly mobilized populace as a key aspect of maintaining power, rather than an incipient threat that might turn on them. Mass rallies and performances of popular support, however compelled, remain an important part of legitimating and maintaining control as long as the fascists remain in power. Fascism is populist.

Fourth, fascist regimes involve substantial state-business fusion, where the line between business leaders of major industries and political decision-makers is even more blurred than in typical capitalist societies. Similarly, to an even greater extent than in progressive societies that lean heavily on state-anointed oligopolies, there is a blurring of the lines separating the personal finances of political leaders, the state and major industries. Fascism is self-dealing.

Fifth, one of the reasons high levels of political mobilization work as well as they do for fascists is that people are mobilized against an out-group in society. For fascism to work, there has to be a group that is (a) irreconcilably hostile to society, (b) diffused through society like a metastatic cancer and (c) subhuman and therefore right-less and outside the protection of the law.

Sixth, in fascist populism, like many other forms of populism, election losses are depicted as illegitimate and defeats not accepted. The oligarchs and other forces typically depicted as being “against the people” in populist discourse will often be credited with pulling off an unfair victory through disinformation, ballot box stuffing or other forms of cheating.

Fascism and the Trump Movement
In 2015, during the rise of Trump, I was one of thousands of academics and public intellectuals who advocated an end to the West’s cultural prohibition on comparing contemporary mainstream political movements to the fascist parties of the Interwar Years. Like many other left-wing thinkers, I was worried that Trump was bringing fascism back to mainstream politics and there were reasons I was legitimately worried, some of which were borne-out in the years that followed, some of which were not.

Like the Bernie Sanders campaign, which I supported, the Donald Trump campaign was unabashedly populist. Both campaigns attacked elites and the political establishment, including the establishment within their own parties. So, just like many successful non-fascist campaigns, there is no question that all three of Trump’s presidential campaigns were populist in character, pitting “the people” against the establishment. They also featured big rallies and public events which continued even after elections and, in Sanders’ case, spun off separate organizations just to maintain levels of mobilization post-election. So, I think there is no question that the Trump movement met one of six conditions, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for fascism.

The two Trump Administrations also, without question, have engaged in high-level state-business fusion, mixing the funds and business dealings of its leaders with the funds and economic programs of the state. In his first term, Trump negotiated business deals for his companies concurrently with diplomatic negotiations and did so unapologetically, using none of the fig leaves preferred by more venerable corrupt self-dealers like Mitch McConnell. The second Trump administration’s relationship with Elon Musk shows not just a conflation of corporate and government funds but of Musk’s and Trump’s political and interpersonal relationships. And a through-line for the regime has been Trump’s use of his Mar-A-Lago resort as a kind of secondary American diplomatic and political capital, like Camp David, but his own personal property for which he bills the state.

But, as much as the Trump Administration has clearly met the fourth criterion for fascism, it is, again a necessary but not sufficient condition. The administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were also rife with self-dealing but functioned as an uncharismatic bulwark against fascism in an increasingly fascist global scene. There are a lot more corrupt self-dealers in government than there are fascists at any given time.

As we saw with the January 6^th 2021 riot and literally hundreds of his public statements, Donald Trump is of the opinion that any election loss he experiences is illegitimate and a result of rigging and cheating. Like populist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the long-time darling of the American left, Trump has not merely refused to accept legitimate election losses; he has, at best, spoken out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to violently overturning election results and, at worst, has attempted to do so.

Fascism and the Democrats
But in other ways, the Trump movement and administration fail to live up their billing as fascists. Not only has Trump not aestheticized politics; he has, in various ways, actually materialized politics. In place of symbolic discourse and governing by symbol and ritual, Trump has favoured a return to long, natural, literal speeches in which his positions are expressed in unsophisticated, unpretentious, simple, clearly directly materially referential terms. In place of coherent and complex aesthetics, Trump offers images of gaudy opulence juxtaposed with plain and unsophisticated speech.

Rather, it has been his opponents who have aestheticized politics with racially curated teams for public presentation, grand entrances, like that of the Abortionmobile at the 2024 Democratic convention, and vanguards of masked, disfigured grotesques when militants are on the march. If there is a recent moment that crystalizes the aestheticization of US politics, it is Drew Barrymore kneeling and supplicating herself on the floor to cross-dresser Dylan Mulvaney during the 2022 midterms.

When it comes to transforming the state’s violence monopoly to a party violence oligopoly, this was a major concern of mine when the Trump movement began because it appeared to be heir to a movement that had attempted just that, the Tea Party.

In the highly consequential midterm elections of 2010, three of the most prominent candidates for the movement, who had pulled off major upsets in Republican senate primaries, each had a group of thugs attached to their campaign that got into violent altercations with political opponents. Joe Miller, favoured to win Alaska, Sharron Angle, favoured to win Nevada and Rand Paul, favoured to win Kentucky, all had a group of campaign workers who committed street violence on their behalf.

Following much media controversy, Paul disbanded and denounced his thugs and pulled off a narrow victory in Kentucky. Angle and, especially, Miller, went down to improbable defeats, in which the population of their states swung massively against national trends and returned corrupt, establishment incumbents in their stead.

For the next four years, Republican politics continued this turn against political violence as did radical conservative politics in the US. I was worried, like many, that the arrival of Trump on the scene would reverse this positive trend we were seeing. But, despite the best efforts of Roger Stone and a few white supremacist ghouls like the man who ran down Heather Heyer at the Charlottesville rally, the Bannonite populism of the Trump movement ended up being a force for nonviolence.

Meanwhile, on the left, political violence has grown not only more trendy but more integrated into the party system, as in a fascist movement. High level Democratic lawmakers, senators, even, endorsed the George Floyd rallies in May 2020 and continued to do so even as they escalated to looting, assault, arson and murder. This behaviour was not punished in any way, quite the reverse; one of those most strident went on to become Vice President of the country; another is the current front-runner in the Minnesota gubernatorial election.

Today, Antifa terrorists carry out the bidding of Democratic politicians and Big Pharma in a highly organized fashion and receive cover from liberal media and politicians even when they attempt to murder law enforcement officers carrying out their duties live on camera.

But here is where I got things really wrong: many of us who watched Trump’s 2016 campaign, as distinct from his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, believed that Trump had singled-out Mexican Americans and Muslim Americans for special harassment and persecution, who would be treated as out-groups outside the protection of the law and subject to vigilante violence undergirded by violent rhetoric from the presidential bully pulpit.

We should have noticed we were getting something wrong because both of these groups’ support for the GOP rose in the 2016 election, as they have continued to rise, as the Trump Administration has delivered higher levels of material safety and opportunity for these groups and greater protection from governmental attacks on their religious views and the removal of illiberal, criminal illegal immigrants from these communities.

Rather, it is, again the Democrats who have moved to continue to dehumanize and undermine the rights of the “deplorables” who support Trump. Law enforcement officers, opponents of genderwang, conservative Christians and other “deplorables” do not enjoy the protection of the law in “blue” jurisdictions; and the situation is even worse in my native Canada, the country with the most severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome on earth.

Here, we can be and are routinely assaulted with impunity, fired from our jobs for holding supposedly constitutionally protected views, subject to lawfare and interpersonal harassment. Furthermore, we are also blamed, scapegoated for the failure of every policy whose failure we predicted—we are understood the be saboteurs, working for some hostile foreign power, Israel, Russia, etc. We are not to be engaged in debate or even seen in social settings; we are dangerous pariahs in liberal society whose words are understood to be violence, in order to justify the violence meted-out against us.

In Canada, our churches and synagogues are burned and defaced; in Colorado and Oregon, our businesses are smashed-in and looted or driven out through boycotts and lawfare.

We were right to develop a new willingness to talk about and look for signs of fascism in 2015. I do not regret taking that position. I just wish that more people who joined me in doing so a decade ago were committed to going wherever the evidence takes us.

My mom, Valerie Jerome (1990-present)/Parker (1964-89), was an immensely popular elementary school teacher and coach with an impressive thirty-four-year career as an instructor. For over half of that career, she taught fifth grade and physical education and she closed that career out at Southlands Elementary School, in the far southwest corner of the City of Vancouver, abutting Regional District Area A (the University Endowment Lands) and the Musqueam Indian Reserve. As a result, the student body at her school was composed of the children of the richest, whitest, most educated Vancouverites residing in the UEL, Dunbar or Mackenzie Heights and a generally low-income group of students from Musqueam, the latter comprising about 25% of the school population.

In 1990, my mom had an exceptionally gifted group of students, even more intellectually precocious than the generally high calibre at Southlands and was teaching seventh grade instead of fifth. I was in first year at UBC and my mom asked me to come in as a guest instructor one day and teach a couple of William Blake poems to her class. There were some brilliant girls in that class, Kristina Cockle, Ainslie Parsons, others whose names I do not remember but by far, the intellectual stand-out was Wade Grant, son of Wendy Grant, chief of Musqueam, the first elected female chief in BC history.

Wade was witty, confident, insightful, empathetic. Everyone knew he was going places.

While many of us in that room might have predicted that he would one day replace John Turner as the area’s Liberal member of parliament, I do not think any of us would have guessed that he would become one of Canada’s most unapologetically fascistic MPs, sending paid goons to mete-out street-beatings to opposition leaders and intellectuals.

This, you see, is why the “would you go back in time and kill Hitler” counterfactuals do not work: you wouldn’t kill Hitler because you probably wouldn’t recognize him unless you knew his name. If you went back to that Austrian elementary school, you would probably pity and give extra support to the alienated, diminutive introvert constantly working on his mediocre art projects.

As the horror of Canadian society shows me every day, fascism is not some innate inclination born into a person but a series of bad choices leading to a murderous conclusion.

When I was at UBC being kicked and pushed by the mob that punched local member of the legislature and One BC party leader Dallas Brodie in the shoulder and rabbit-punched Frances Widdowson, the author and professor, I had no idea that some of those folks were actually employees of Wade Grant who had taken it upon himself to support a planned assault on the woman who represents the area he represents federally at the provincial level by furloughing his constituency workers for the day.

I learned of this via X thanks to a repost by BC Conservative Party Executive Director Angelo Isidorou of which One BC’s account had taken note. Nico Slobinsky, a local Zionist opinion leader, with whom I have sided on some local and international issues in the past, put out a shocking and outrageous tweet amplifying one that Grant had put out. It read

Harassing and intimidating elected officials and their staff is unacceptable. Everyone deserves to do their job in safety and security.

It amplified Grant’s tweet:

Today a staffer for @Dallas_Brodie entered my constituency office unannounced and began recording my staff and an innocent constituent without their consent. They walked through my office filming and trying to agitate people for a reaction.

These tweets were sent out in reaction Masha Kleiner, a diminutive, older, female One BC activist, a refugee from the USSR, proud Canadian and resident of Grant’s riding, entering Grant’s constituency office, a public space, by definition open to all of the constituents he serves, and filming his staffers to confirm their identities and active participation in the violence that, like Dallas me and, she had also experienced at UBC. Instead of being welcomed into the office as a constituent, or—heaven forbid, receiving an apology from the men who had assaulted us—, Masha was confronted Grant’s three large, youthful constituency assistants and ordered to leave the office on pain of police involvement.

It should be noted, at this point, that not only is a constituency office a public space, a storefront into which constituents are supposed to bring their problems and perspectives, but constituency office staff are in public-facing positions. When you sign up to be a constituency assistant, you agree to act as a public surrogate for the legislator who hires you. You are expected to interact with constituents and to fill in for your boss at public events like high school graduations. Your picture is supposed to be in the local paper. So, the idea that filming or photographing constituency assistants is somehow “harassment” is an absurd and repugnant idea.

But here is what is truly incredible:

A member of parliament sent his constituency assistants i.e. his surrogate public faces to help lead a mob whose purpose was to void the speech, assembly and mobility rights not merely of private citizens but of a fellow legislator and to do so using violence. Wade Grant sent his people to break the law, violate the rights of his constituents and shut his opposition down through violence and intimidation.

And he has gone to the press to complain that he is being held accountable for the acts of fascist violence by his paid thugs. According to the mainstream media, Grant and his employees are the true victims here because one of the women at whom they directed their violence confronted them and filmed them, as public figures, in a public space, as it was her democratic right to do.

What we can see from this is the degree to which Grant’s consciousness, his assumptions, his theory of justice, his idea of what is and is not shameful, are those of a fascist. He really does think he and his staff are victims of the people they assaulted. This is not “like fascism.” This is fascism. And Wade Grant is on the cutting edge of Canadian fascism.

In the same week that conservative New Yorkers are blamed for being victims of an unsuccessful IED attack, we see the same kind of “shouldn’t have been dressed that way” logic in Canadian politics.

The fascists are here. And there is no way we could have guessed who they would turn out to be.

While the Manson Family, Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple and the like are well-remembered as exemplifying the madness and excesses of the time, the more interesting and important stories of 1970s cults are not of spectacular flame-outs and failures but of surprising survivals, not just of the cults themselves but many of the dark practices associated conversion and retention of followers through psychological manipulation. Although legally extant before the 70s, Scientology is often seen as exemplary of these survivals.

People talk rather less about the Landmark Forum, in many ways a more influential organization than the Church of Scientology. Landmark was originally founded as EST, standing for Erhard Seminars Training, named for Werner Erhard. EST developed key cult recruitment and conversion tactics during their early years, in particular, the idea of a short (no more than a week, sometimes even just an extended long weekend) “course” in which participants were isolated from outside influence, kept awake and meeting for long hours, through careful manipulation and physical proximity “open up” to facilitators and other new recruits about deep, emotional subjects, often events or relationships that they experienced as shameful and undermined the face they wished to present to the world.

Much has been made of the term “struggle session,” in the criticizing Woke practices of mobbing and shaming and their similarity to the tactics of 1970s Maoists modeled on Red Guard practices from the Cultural Revolution. EST produced a different type of struggle session, one that was, on its face, less aggressive, more benign, more sincere and curiosity-driven. But, in a successful EST course, each of the participants should break down and then be surrounded by other converts as they weep and confess to some form of cognate shame that makes them feel illegitimate, unentitled to be who they are, undeserving of the face they present the world. Whereas, in a Red Guard struggle session, one’s fellow converts are accusatory, threatening, in an EST struggle session, one’s fellow converts are kind, empathetic, curious about just how this shame has structured one’s life.

The public confession, the breakdown, the love-bombing fused with critical concern constitute the centre, the crescendo of the EST process. As with many cults, the process of conversion is to break the self down to nothing, to a worthless heap of shame and guilt and then, for the rest of the weekend, rebuild it but inside the cult, dependent on the cult, and with a renewed strength that is wholly reliant on the cult’s continued approval and valuation of this new self.

Joining cults naturally engenders some level of social disapproval from those outside the cult. This disapproval is just one of many tools cult use to retain their members who are now not only dependent on the cult for their sense of self-worth but also now feel as though those outside it do not want them to value themselves in this new and exciting way, as though those outside are a hostile force. Although EST felt no need to do so, many cults go further in this direction suggesting that Lucifer or some other malevolent force is behind their newfound disapproval and their long-time sense of shame and inadequacy.

For the past forty-two years, EST has gone by another name: the Landmark Forum, a less obviously cult-like more businesslike organization with shorter but more expensive “courses.” Today’s Landmark occupies a curious status, half-wealth seminar, half-self-help cult.

While a couple of my friends have found Landmark beneficial, most I know who have taken their first “course,” come away with the sense that they have dodged a bullet, after observing the standard one-two punch of cult indoctrination:

A) Break down the identity and self-worth of the potential cultist
B) Rebuild the identity and self-worth of the cultist but inside the cult and dependent thereupon

Two Phases: Two Prime Ministers
The best way, I believe, to understand the special intensity with which progressive madness is afflicting today’s Canada is to understand the Trudeau and Carney ministries as comprising the two phases of classic cult indoctrination. Beginning in 2016 but dramatically intensifying in the 2020s, the Trudeau government relentlessly attacked Canada’s national identity in an endless series of struggle sessions, designed to destroy citizens’ sense of identity as Canadians by making Canada, its languages, its history and its symbols worthless and shameful.

The Maple Leaf was no longer a shared symbol but the flag of pestilent terrorists, spreading disease and insurgency across the country with their convoy and extended tailgate party in the nation’s capital. Editorials and essays on state-funded media explained that the symbol on ordinary people’s coffee mugs, lawn chairs, hoodies, etc. was both a symbol of Canada’s evil white supremacist genocidal past and, concurrently, the symbol of disease-ridden terrorists who had “invaded” Ottawa and were going about spreading Covid far and wide.

And if the Maple Leaf was a symbol of extreme right conservatism, what must the cross be!? A technology so unreliable its primary visibility in popular culture is on ghost-hunter shows was used to justify a completely baseless claim that the corpses of 215 children murdered by priests and nuns were buried outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. So it was “understandable,” that unprosecuted, masked vigilantes would burn over a hundred churches during his premiership, Justin Trudeau explained.

Christianity, the Maple Leaf… what about John A MacDonald and the Fathers of Confederation? Genocidal monsters every one, unfit to be depicted in statues, unfit to appear on Canadian money. What shameful ancestors we had!

The Underground Railroad and Canada’s abolition of slavery? Harriet Tubman and Joe Fortes? All fabrications, exaggerations or distractions. No, any black person who came to Canada seeking freedom was a chump, a patsy, lured into moving to a genocidal, white supremacist, racist hellhole!

Every non-white person was to feel even more ashamed than white Canadians whose families were merely heartless oppressors; patriotic non-white Canadians—not only were they supporting a genocide; they were chumps cheering for their own oppression!

And all the while, Justin Trudeau cried. He wept. He wailed. He begged forgiveness, not as the leader of our country but as a kind of Christ counterfeit substitute sacrifice, the Old Man’s Sacrifice of his son in our place that he might go through the struggle session as our proxy, on our behalf.

A couple of years into the 2020s, there were only three kinds of Canadians in the worldview espoused by the Trudeau Ministry: repentant genociders, racialized victims and chumps, and bad people, people who just didn’t get that Canadianness was not something to be proud of. What was wrong with those people? Why couldn’t they get it? Well, some of it was probably because they were stupid, rural and/or uneducated. People who kept being proud of their flag, their history, their country were more rural, less vaccinated, with less college, more likely to be doing a working class or industrial job. Maybe it was just their self-evident stupidity that made them keep being proud Canadians or maybe it was some other force.

By 2022, the communications people around Trudeau, his trained seals at the CBC and his phalanx of state-funded QuaNGOs began pumping out the smears. The Convoy had actually been an attempted military coup that the intrepid RCMP had only narrowly averted; the junta of generals who would take charge had already been selected and thousands of guns had been brought to Ottawa to massacre the parliamentarians and local citizens. A key organization in this was “Diagolon,” (actually a joke about the geography of anti-Woke opinion made on a podcast) a vast dark conspiracy hellbent on the total destruction of Canada and its future annexation to the US. “And Pierre Poilievre is meeting with these terrorists!” Liberal surrogates proclaimed.

But behind the network of Christian nationalist militias and gender-critical activists, who, according to CSIS and RCMP sources were the greatest terrorist threat to the nation, now, what was the real power? Donald Trump, the swaggering, foulmouthed populist on his way back into the White House. The so-called proud Canadians, it turned out, were anything but! We were not merely ignorant, pestilent, violent and stupid. We were actually traitors, deplorables under the control of Trump.

And suddenly, the struggle session reached its crescendo, its climax and went into reverse. Mark Carney told Canadians that it actually was good to be a proud Canadian. In fact, one had to be a proud Canadian to defeat Trump and his treasonous, pestilent, ignorant minions who were merely masquerading as patriotic Canadians. The Canadian identity was now rebuilt inside and dependent upon the Liberal Cult.

So, we know the story: upon the inauguration of Trump and the anointing of Carney, Canadians rushed back to the thrift stores, storage lockers and and landfills where they had thrown their Maple Leaf regalia and, as many were gone for good, retailers made good money re-selling people flags, coolers, lawn chairs, hoodies, etc. that they had, less than five years ago, thrown out, given away or burned.

But this Canadian nationalism is different. It is a fundamentally fascistic nationalism because it is dependent, primarily, not upon the good qualities of Canadians, on the common qualities of Canadians, on the shared past of Canadians, but on the self-evidently evil qualities of the Donald Trump movement and the deplorables within Canada who serve him.

There is a new nationalism in town. It may have the same flag. It may have the same anthem. But it is animated by something very different than the old nationalism: the need to root out and exposed the supposed enemies of Canada. Alberta separatists have joined mRNA skeptics, gender criticals, convoyists, conservative Christians, Zionist Jews and others as the group against which this new nationalism defines itself, a nationalism that depends on the continued existence of an implacable, half-hidden threat at home and abroad.

For much of the twentieth century, the Western Hemisphere was ruled by regimes that traded on a brittle, paranoid nationalism that excused the stripping of human rights and the abridgment of democracy. Back in the day, Spain, Ireland, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and much of the rest of Latin America—even Quebec before 1960—lived under regimes that built an oppressive, undemocratic nationalism on paranoid discourses of anti-communism that saw all local opposition to misrule and corruption as instigated by the USSR and its agents, a mirror of the situation in Eastern Europe but using ideas of nation, rather than class to justify authoritarian rule.

The Canada of Mark Carney is increasingly coming to resemble such regimes. But it has only been able to effect this transformation through its success at transforming Canada from a country into a cult.

And that is because, no matter which tribe the partition of Canadian society has forced you into, no matter what performative language you may use to talk about the graves in order to avoid criticism, fit in with our crew or seem as reasonable or as compassionate as possible, Canadians are not complete and total morons. We might be a cowardly people, as passive-aggressive people, a childish people but, whatever views we might publicly express about an issue, we are not a nation of complete dimwits.

Here are the things we all know:
On May 27^th, 2021, the Roseanne Casimir, chief of the Kamloops Indian Band announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected a set of soil anomalies in a field that the band had concluded were the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old.

In the four and a half years since, the band has received $12.1 million in funding to excavate the soil anomalies. No excavations have taken place. Today, the band refuses to either return the money or conduct an excavation. They now claim that these putative unmarked graves are on sacred ground and can never be excavated.

Curiously, the public figures who assert that the bodies of murdered children are there all back the band’s position that under no circumstances should any attempt to be made to verify the claim or return the money. The only people calling for further investigation are skeptics of the claim, people labeled “residential school denialists,” despite many being scholars who have professionally studied the residential school system for years.

Similar claims were made in Manitoba in 2021 based on the same ground-penetrating radar technology, claims that have been investigated through excavations, such as at the Anishinabe Pine Creek First Nation. They found that the soil anomalies were not the remains of human beings or any other creature. There were no bodies found at all. And this is hardly surprising, ground-penetrating radar is an unreliable technology, treated as accurate and conclusive in only two contexts: ghost-hunter shows and the Kamloops residential school.

Except that this is not even the case. The technology did not say there were graves; a UBC professor operating the technology did. But she has been unwilling to explain how she reached the conclusions she did or, in fact, submit to any critical questioning of her work. Indeed, for the past two years, she has assiduously avoided any public forum where she might be asked such questions and has refused to respond to inquires about them. We know that an unreliable technology was used; and bold conclusions were drawn but no one is willing to explain how the conclusions were derived from the dubious evidence.

Thanks to Canada’s billion-dollar Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we have comprehensive lists of all the students enrolled at Kamloops and other residential schools, including those who died at the school, those who graduated and those who dropped out. Not a single one of those students disappeared, unaccounted-for, at the school site. Furthermore, there are no outstanding missing persons reports either to police or Indian agents by parents concerning students not returning from the school unaccountably and thereafter being missing.

The Kamloops Indian Band has just shy of 1600 members, spread over a considerable area; they are the largest band within the Shuswap First Nation, a group of a little less than 7000 people covering an area the size of a medium-sized European country, stretching from Williams Lake to Invermere. One would think that, with such a tiny population and one that was significantly smaller at the time the residential school operated, and has only really rebounded in the past generation, that someone would know the name of one of the missing, murdered children, that some family might remember the unaccountable disappearance of a child as young as three years old. And yet, no one can summon-up the name of a schoolmate, relative, neighbour, etc. No one even hazards a guess as to who the 215 dead children might be, where they came from, why nobody ever talked about their disappearance and why nobody ever reported them missing.

But let us suppose that those who claim to believe in the graves are sincere in their beliefs. This raises even more questions.

If we entertain the possibility that the people still shilling for the 215 graves are sincere, then these questions arise:
If 215 children were indeed murdered, is it not important that they be identified so that they can be properly mourned and buried, interred in sacred ground, according to the religious and spiritual traditions of their families?

If 215 children were indeed murdered, and the residential school was in operation into the 1980s, the murderer(s) may still be alive and at large. Should we not investigate these murders and see that the perpetrators are brought to justice?

If an act of mass murder, in which more than 10% of all of the children of the Shuswap people alive at the time were killed, has been covered-up and not prosecuted, should we not figure out how this took place, who the high officials were who enabled it, who the law enforcement professionals were who swept it under the rug?

If families lost children and the TRC missed these deaths, should additional compensation not be paid to the families who experienced these tragic losses?

And if people are obstructing the investigation of one of the most savage and depraved acts of mass murder in Canadian history, should those attempting to block the investigation necessary to obtain crucial forensic evidence of this monstrous crime not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice? Shouldn’t the chief be arrested for post-facto complicity in the cover-up of an atrocity by blocking what should be the most important forensic investigation since Robert Pickton’s farm?

Yet, those who insist that this terrible crime was committed appear to be doing their utmost to shield the perpetrators, whether living or dead, from any accountability for such a monstrous and despicable act.

The only logical conclusion we can reach is that they know there was no crime. Far better to view these folks as despicable, cowardly, face-saving liars because the alternative is so much worse: it is to see BC’s Attorney-General Niki Sharma and Kamloops chief Roseanne Casimir as accessories after the fact to the most despicable act of mass murder in BC history, using the full power of the state to prevent the perpetrators of an atrocity of this magnitude from being brought to justice.

But let’s get real: the fact that every single person who publicly espouses the existence of the 215 unmarked graves opposes any forensic investigation tells the whole story. The non-existence of the 215 dead children is a rare area of total epistemological consensus on the part of all Canadians. Everyone knows there are no graves; the only debate is over what to say about the hoax.

A lot has been made, too much in my view, of the $12 million dollars of government money now lining the pockets of a small number of the many many looters working full-time in Canada’s Reconciliation Industry. The fact that a small number of people made money off this hoax does not account for the fact that half the country vehemently insists it was a hoax and the other half is tentatively saying “it might be a hoax. Further investigation is required.”

And it certainly does not explain why member of parliament Leah Gazan has twice tabled legislation in parliament, with the support of her party, the NDP and the governing Liberals to fine and incarcerate anyone merely suggesting the possibility it is a hoax. That legislation is wending its way toward becoming the law of the land, after being delayed by the Trudeau government’s suspension of parliament.

What it absolutely does not explain is a crowd of hundreds of fanatical, violent college students screaming, pushing and hitting a group of a half-dozen scholars and politicians because we set foot on a university campus to question the academics standing behind the hoax.

As I observed in my essay comparing the state of the contemporary left to the Donatist Crisis under Emperors Diocletian and Constantine, it is basically impossible for a belief to function as a test of loyalty, as a means of maintaining the boundaries of an authoritarian community, if the belief is not obviously false or nonsensical. If the belief is even remotely convincing on its face, it might be one that is voluntarily held by someone and, consequently, not a useful measure or mechanism of social control.

But if you are going to create a special national holiday, in which people are required to don garments of a certain state-selected colour to perform their membership in a community that centres a particular belief, it had better be a belief none of the people in the state-mandated orange shirts truly hold. It must be an idea that has to be true not one that is true.

One of the reasons that Canada has advanced so quickly down the path of cultural authoritarianism is this additional tool for policing the boundaries of progressive society and its straitjacket political and institutional consensus. Not only must one espouse the view that some women have penises in order not to be cast as a dangerous hatemonger in Canada, one must also espouse the view that there are 215 dead children buried in an apple orchard in Kamloops, children whose identities none of us knows and that none of us must ever be permitted to know.

People are rarely moved to mobbing and violence in support of things they believe or know to be true. People are moved to act out their massive internal cognitive dissonance on the bodies of strangers when something has to be true but is simply not. It is a desperate attempt to silence the voice of doubt inside one’s own mind by silencing all external voices of doubt, to externalize the policing of one’s own doubt.

But that effort always fails; the doubt remains; and a new act of performative lying, silencing and repression is required.

I grew up at a dining room table that hosted Leon Bibb, to whose twins Robeson served as godfather, and who sang Joe Hill with Joan Baez to the crowd at the Second Selma-Montgomery March in 1965. King and the civil rights tradition have meant the world to me not just because of my heritage and my family’s association with the civil rights movement but because they have had practical use and power in my own life.

My environmental activism in the 1980s and 90s was steeped in the non-violent civil disobedience tradition exemplified by King’s ministry and politics in the 50s and 60s. When I was placed on trial in the BC Supreme Court for my role in the Clayoquot Sound logging road blockades in the summer of 1993 (I was the fourteenth arrestee), I bonded with a woman in my mass trial, Betty Krawczyk. She had been a teenager in Mississippi when the Freedom Riders and soon, she followed them north and became a fixture in the old activist left of British Columbia, in which I grew up.

As I recently clarified to a young, new friend, the kind of activism we did, non-violent civil disobedience (NVCD) is not a form of protest that exists in all or even most societies. While rioting, rallying and a host of other forms of protest are near-universal, NVCD exists as a protest tradition in fairly few societies. That is because it is not a universally effective tactic; it only works against a certain sort of adversary and requires, I’m sorry, conservatives, I still defend the word, a high level of imaginative empathy in order to be effective.

Additionally, NVCD requires both physical and philosophical training in order to be practiced correctly. This means that it must be undergirded by a whole pedagogical system that can deploy trainers to do one-on-one training in physical disciplines like going limp and preventing one’s body from going into a defensive or combative position. This training is typically linked to a set of spiritual beliefs about one’s adversaries, like the Quaker and Doukhobor idea that each of us contains an “inner light,” a small spark of the light of God, himself. In the 1950s through 1990s, Quakers, Mennonites, Buddhists, Jains, Doukhobors and members of other traditions within or descended from Christianity and Hinduism poured thousands upon thousands of hours of training into the Civil Rights, Peace, Environmental and other old school left-wing movements to educate people like me on the best practices for peaceful, nonviolent protest and the arts of self-discipline and bodily control that went with them. I was not an especially good or competent student; but I know the curriculum.

Fundamentally, NVCD works on one’s adversary’s sense of honour and shame. Mahatma Gandhi, after serving as a business suit-clad, top hat-wearing courtroom lawyer in proto-Apartheid South Africa, like thousands of other members of the educated bourgeoisie of India sent to run the Empire in Africa, was steeped in a deep knowledge of the English mind. While there is no doubt that his practice and theory of nonviolence made use of ascetic Hindu concepts and practices, at its core was a robust understanding of the theory of honourable conduct that powered the Empire’s sense of its own entitlement govern the people it colonized. It was not just exporting education, science and Christianity; it was intervening, the world over, because the British people had a special and deep understanding of and honour for the idea of “fair play.”

With a kind of ruthless sang froid absent in King’s later Civil Rights movement, Gandhi marched women and children into the rifle sights of the soldiers of the British Raj. And sometimes those non-combatants were shot. Every time the troops of the British Raj massacred more innocent non-combatants, the British story of their civilizing mission, their belief in fair play, their sense of masculine honour took another beating. Ultimately, Gandhi’s Quit India campaign succeeded because it destroyed the British sense that they were the good guys; because the good guys don’t shoot or beat non-resisting, peaceful women and children in the street. No longer able to justify their presence in India, according to their own logic for their presence, they sent Lord Mountbatten to negotiate their way out.

It should be noted that, during the 1930s, Gandhi was very concerned about events in Germany not just because of the plight of Jews and other minorities there but because Nazism had ignited a new political Aryanism in India and Nazi tribute parties were springing up in the Raj and princely states. He corresponded with a number of Jewish leaders, recommending NVCD; their response was pretty much unanimous: NVCD will not work on the Nazis because they will not see beating or shooting non-combatants in the street as dishonourable, according to their worldview, especially if those dissidents are Jewish, Roma or gay, groups understood by the Nazis to be subhuman.

The US Civil Rights movement could not always have succeeded using NVCD. Only in the era of broadcast media were the victories of King and his allies possible because those on the front lines of the Jim Crow system, the Klansmen and the White Citizens’ Councils they served were not that put off by not just killing but raping and torturing uppity blacks at public events. Lynchings were large, participatory affairs where crowds queued up to have commemorative photographs taken next to the dead or dying black person, sometimes after having taken a “souvenir,” like the digit of the victim’s finger one had just cut off with plier and burnt off with a blowtorch.

But the expansion of television in the 1950s was a game-changer. Black protests in the South did not have to touch the conscience of the local Klansmen. They just had to touch the conscience of Yankee TV viewers in Boston or Los Angeles. Why are our troops in Saigon but not in Selma, if we are the good guys? That became the question of America in the 1960s. If John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnston were willing to send America’s troops across the Pacific to free people from tyranny, why not across the Mason-Dixon Line?

Over time, the collective shame of the whole American nation overwhelmed the parochial dehumanization of the Jim Crow system and, an increasing number of Southerners’ moral optic changed and they became disgusted with themselves, through a TV-leavened national contagion of decency, exemplified in the moral turn of post-assassination attempt George Wallace.

The Riot At UBC
On Thursday afternoon, I stood with Frances Widdowson, Jim McMurtry and Dallas Brodie to support their free movement, speech, assembly and association rights. As a canceled and defamed former academic myself, Frances had invited me to attend to stand with her in support of academic freedom and free inquiry, and the need to investigate the dubious claim that there are 215 unmarked children’s graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

We were met by a crowd of hundreds of chanting students who pushed, punched, kicked and elbowed us, focusing most of their attacks on Dallas and Frances, per the standard practice of Antifa to focus their violence on the oldest, most diminutive women in any group they confront. Although we had eight highly competent paid security, this was not nearly enough as the police looked on passively as we were assaulted.

Ultimately, the cops intervened only when most of us had been pushed away from Frances who simply sat down on the ground and weathered the violence for a few minutes. Like me, the cops must have begun to worry that there was a non-zero chance, the students might escalate their assaults and potentially kill or severely injure her. Eventually, they decided to arrest her for trespassing on public property, but they chose not to detain any of the young men who had assaulted her.

As I was being pushed away from her. Frances said, “let them hit me. Let them spit on me. People need to see that the violence is only coming from their side.” I recognized that turn of phrase. It is the language of a society in which I grew up, a society that no longer really exists, the Old Growth Left. Frances’ scholarship, a scholarship that focuses on material reality and class, comes out of the socialism-informed tradition of EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class situated her, like me, on the left of the academic world until recently. A socialist, an atheist, Frances comes from that vanished society too.

But what chilled me about her words is that I have heard them so many times from Lierre Keith, co-founder of the Women’s Liberation Front and Deep Green Resistance, the woman who coined the phase “Old Growth Left.” Lierre eschews security when she speaks at rallies in San Francisco and Portland and has been rewarded with multiple trips to the hospital, courtesy of Antifa. Now that she has turned sixty, this will likely get worse as masked Antifa youth zero-in on the oldest, most diminutive woman in a crowd as the target of their violence.

With that in mind, I decided to use my height and capacity to project my voice, along with the fact that I am a very large man and scum running Antifa put me at the bottom of their list of whom to assault, to dress the crowd down. I found a few choice things to say that produced genuine temporary upset in the crowd, like my response to their “Whose campus!? Our campus!” chant, “It’s yours? I thought it was unceded indigenous land.”

But there is one thing I said multiple times that didn’t produce any upset, confusion or reaction at all. “How do you feel, woman-beaters?” I would ask, “Beating on small women in their sixties? This is the look you want to go with?”

They didn’t care. At all. Men in their twenties seeking out the oldest, smallest woman in a group so they could hit her was, in their minds, in no way a fault. As I later observed when besieged in the UBC Aquatic Centre, this is a sign we are failing not just as humans but as great apes; most of my primate brothers and sisters still possess a natural sense of revulsion at young men assaulting women more than twice their age. Most orangutans still get these basic ideas of honour within a society.

And it was then that I realized that Martin Luther King Jr. is dead in a way he has not been until quite recently. When Leon sang Joe Hill in Selma, he sang, “‘But Joe, you’re ten years dead’ ‘I never died said he…’ ‘From San Diego up to Maine in every mine and mill, where workers strike and organize, it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.’” I had always felt that King was not dead as long as the nonviolent freedom struggle continued.

The Sad Truth About the Tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.
But here is the sad truth.

NVCD’s effective practitioners, like Lierre and Frances, were trained years, more likely decades ago when there were still a lot of teachers steeped in the physical and spiritual practice enough to be able to teach it. Now, the liberal Mennonite peace churches, the Quakers, the Doukhobors, they are almost all gone. And the handful of churches that nominally continue these traditions have almost all been captured by the “words are violence” misogynistic loons now on the supply side of beating nonviolent protesters. So, even if people wanted to learn the fine art of NVCD, who would teach them?

But much more worryingly, what would be the point of teaching them. The progressives on social media, including personal friends of mine, for the most part, see nothing dishonourable about a group of young men cornering an older woman and beating her for thinking the wrong thoughts.

The problem is that, for years now, it has been on full display that the Wokes are exclusively on the supply side of public street violence against feminists, violence against Jews, violence against Christians, violence against the unvaccinated. Some people may engage in perfunctory denials but everyone knows it is true.

One of the fatal flaws in the Old Growth Left was a kind of intellectual arrogance that made us poor communicators and poor tacticians. That culture, the country I am from, the country that no longer exists, over-represented people who deemed themselves intelligent, thought ourselves good explainers and made unwarranted assumptions about our adversaries putative ignorance.

Consequently, old school lefties always want to convert problems of courage, problems of decency, problems of incentives into problems of information. If we could come up with a plan, where the solution was for us to “educate” people by pointing them at information we deemed important, that would always be the plan; it was a self-indulgent way of us doing our favourite thing, explaining, irrespective of any empirical evidence that the “explaining,” “educating” and “informing,” were doing any good or solving any problem.

I love Lierre and Frances and what they represent. They represent a faith in the decency of our adversaries and the myriad fence-sitters who enable them that I no longer have. There is simply no evidence to support the contention that this time, ordinary, decent people will see the woman-beating, the spitting, the death and rape threats as things only the bad guys do and identify who the bad guys are, finally.

Some decent people are scared because they know Antifa will come for their jobs, their homes, their kids, their vehicles. Some people are less decent than they imagine because they have modified their moral system to see violence against women who disagree with them as in no way a fault; such folks have embraced the Woke moral turn: that one’s rightness or decency inheres in one’s blood, one’s affiliations, not in one’s conduct. But no one doesn’t see what is happening; one just excuses it or one excuses one’s own inaction in the face of injustice.

Anyone who does not yet know how violent and depraved the Woke Omnicause activists have become is ignorant in the classic sense of the term. They are engaged in ignoring information on a massive scale and if they are going to this much trouble to not know, we would be most arrogant to think that our next act of public martyrdom will break through the intellectual phalanx those still claiming ignorance have set up to stop it getting through.

Not only is Martin Luther King, Jr. dead. His tradition of protest is useless in this moment. And the people who could teach it to younger folks, even if it were, no longer exist. We face an uncertain future and we must face it with a combination of the physical courage of Frances and Lierre but also, with the courage to know that there is nothing magical about NVCD; there might be something, maybe even something miraculous but not magical. We need to regroup, tactically, in the face of the perverted, amoral mob we are staring down. Everyone already knows that they are the ones bringing violence and savagery; in fact, to work, their campaign of terror requires that everyone know this.

The days of “raising awareness” have long been over.

Some of my friends also took the opportunity to restock their ammunition, purchase new firearms and get their guns cleaned. The fear was that the supply chain problems and climate of fear and division might interact with pre-existing social and political resentments and could touch off lawlessness and a breakdown in public order, as, indeed, would happen just a few months later that year in Seattle, Minneapolis and other “blue” cities around the United States.

And this was hardly the first time in my life that fairly normal urban people of the political left engaged in the stockpiling and “prepper” behaviour we normally associate with Constitution Party voters living in rural compounds in Montana.

When Ronald “nuclear warning shot”/“evil empire” Reagan was elected US president in 1980, my dad laid in a bunch more Campbell’s soup and, back when it was weird to do so, got hold of a lot of bottled water. People like him who were not living in apartments cleaned up and renovated their unfinished cellars and, if they already had one, their fallout shelters. The worry was that if we survived the nuclear blast, the water in our aquifers and reservoirs would still likely be contaminated with nuclear fallout.

Reagan gave us some more scares prior to the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev, during half a decade of brinksmanship with the senescent General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the USSR, enough for my dad to modify the design of his 100% solar-powered painting studio and backup dwelling on Wasa Lake, after he left Vancouver’s West End. He kept extra water on hand there too.

These behaviours were not necessarily an overreaction. Even before Reagan’s election, my piano teacher, Judy, had stockpiled water when Skylab entered into a decaying earth orbit and ended up dropping pretty hazardous waste on Australia and the Indian Ocean during its reentry into earth’s atmosphere in 1979. She again filled all the cups, glasses, sinks and washing machines in her house when before debris from Russia’s Kosmos 1890 hit the Pacific Northwest in 1989.

I also remember a bunch of my friends not coming out for the New Years Party in 2000 because of their fear of the Y2K bug, which was supposed to paralyze the world’s computers systems, leading to massive supply chain failure, financial chaos and a breakdown in law and order. While I was celebrating, friends of mine all over BC were hunkered down with guns, ammo and propane, drinking vodka and eating meal replacement bars.

We’re Next! He’s Invading!
Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration last January, an ever-increasing proportion of my rapidly dwindling circle of progressive friends have become vehemently insistent that any day now, any minute really, the tanks will roll across the Canada-US border and the airstrikes will begin as Trump, whom they believe has become the absolute dictator of America, wholly unfettered by the nation’s constitution now-obsolete system of institutional checks and balances, rains fire down on Canada and annexes our territory in its totality.

For months, this was just something that showed up in the memes and posts my friends would share on Twitter and Facebook. But then things got weirder. Following the Trump Administration’s self-serving alliance with anti-Maduro forces in Venezuela’s authoritarian ruling party and the American oil industry to replace the dictator of Venezuela with his deputy likely eventual successor a little early, the overwrought “the tanks and airstrikes are mere hours away” spirit of progressive social media somehow entered the legacy media. Following a bog-standard American-led coup, little different from the George HW Bush’s replacement of Manuel Noriega or any of the other more than a dozen bloody coups in Latin America that the US has pulled off for American business interests in the past 150 years, Canadians reacted in an unprecedented manner, by announcing “oh no! We’re next!” We did not think this when Manuel Zelaya went down in 2009, nor even in 2019, during Trump’s first term, when Evo Morales was pushed out of office, when Elon Musk famously remarked “we will coup who we want,” making it clear that the US government had removed Morales, in part, to secure Musk’s access to Bolivian lithium.

And yet, today’s Globe and Mail editorial is announcing, yet again, that we can and should expect an immediate invasion of Canada by US ground and air forces, a theme the paper has repeatedly hit in its formal editorial and columns since October 5^th, last year, i.e for more than three straight months. CTV, Canada’s largest private broadcaster joined in last month, running stories featuring experts talking about the impending invasion. And obviously, CBC, the Jonestown loudspeaker of progressive Canada cannot resist getting in on the act, given its primary mandate being to frighten seniors, like FoxNews could only dream of doing.

In a recent social media debate a progressive friend made a disreputable rhetorical move I used to make on occasion, when, as a progressive, I believed that the more I disagreed with someone, the more accurately I could read their mind. He suggested that everyone in Canada believes the tanks and planes are coming any day. People like me are just cheering for the invasion to succeed because we wish to serve the Trump administration as local satraps.

The fear was palpable, just as in the overwrought social media posts from my friends who are now busting out recent “the invasion is really happening” public opinion polls asking whether Canadians should try to negotiate when the US invades or whether we should fight to the last man. These polls don’t just show that progressive Canadians are the best people; they show that conservative-leaning Canadians are traitors because about half of us believe we should try to negotiate in the unlikely event we are hit with an unprovoked attack by the largest, most deadly military on the face of the earth. The progressives I see talking this up are really genuinely terrified. But the thing about fear is that it is the great chameleon of emotions; I have seen it disguise itself as self-righteousness, as courage, even as love. It is very easy for our fears of one thing to disguise themselves as a fears of something else.

Where Are Your Canned Goods? Your Ammo? Your Protests?
I say this because, when I ask progressives why toilet paper, canned goods, dry goods and bottled water are so plentiful in town, they seem bewildered. But it was only six years ago that they were stockpiling precisely these things simply because they feared supply chain and logistics breakdowns; now, they fear air strikes, troops marching across the border, submarines sinking our ships and tanks rolling across our fields. Why no prepping?

Also, progressives are really great at organizing rallies and vigils about things they care about, even rioting when peaceful assembly isn’t moving the needle. Where are the protests at Trump businesses, Musk businesses, American consulates, the American embassy, etc.? Surely, if progressives can muster such numbers to protest Israel’s actions in Gaza, a more direct, immediate threat, with more prominent, logical and accessible places to protest, there should be some major protests. So, why no rallies, no vigils, no riots?

Progressives are also really good at petitions and letter-writing campaigns. Why am I not seeing petitions or letters calling for the recall of Canada’s overseas troops, calling for a major military recruitment drive or even conscription? Also, should there not be a lot of Canadians signing up for the Reserves, signing their kids up for cadets? And why no letters, delegations or petitions to JD Vance, John Thune, etc.? And yet, all I see is people saying “I will fight to the death,” but not even applying for a firearms acquisition certificate.

It seems to me that the best way to measure what progressive Canadians truly fear is to look at what they are spending their time on, i.e. social media: predicting the imminent start of the war, advocating the summary execution of all ICE officers when the Democrats regain the presidency, denouncing non-progressives and insufficiently hysterical progressives as fascist quislings secretly welcoming the invasion, claiming that the Trump administration’s current crackdown on illegal residents in conflict with the law is identical to murdering six million Jews, etc.

Back when the Tea Party was the most unhinged political movement in the US, Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom ran an interview of a fictionalized Bob Bennett, following his defeat by Mike Lee in the Utah Republican senate primary. “A lot of my colleagues are so afraid of losing their seats that they are pretending to be crazy.”

I believe progressives are more afraid of other progressives than ever before. Progressivism has become an elimination game, like musical chairs. Every time the music stops, someone new is identified as insufficiently progressive and the machinery of cancellation turns on him or her. That means one has to be vigilant; if one doesn’t take the most extreme, the most hysterical position; if one doesn’t catastrophize Trump’s latest batshit crazy pronouncement, one might be left behind, eliminated, unpersoned. Because at this point, when a Canadian progressive hears, “the cabinet, senate and house have tools they can use to stop Trump from invading Canada and will almost certainly use them,” they hear “I want Donald Trump to immediately invade Canada and make me the head of his secret police in my town.”

You see: that’s the thing about fear, the greatest deceiver of human emotions. It fools you first.

Of the many important terms that have been counterfeited, inverted, parodized and the danced-upon, perhaps “empathy” has been treated most cruelly. Whether on the left or right, it is understood that empathy is where people look around a room, find who is putting on the most histrionic performance of demanding to be pitied about having a hard time and then conferring moral authority on them, transferring resources to them and letting them call the shots. The only debate is over whether this practice is virtuous or vicious.

One of the favourite reasons progressives offered for claiming Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a justifiable homicide meriting applause and celebration was Kirk’s attempt to move away from the word, entirely and, in its place, use terms that had not been so thoroughly transformed into a parodic version of their own opposite. His two most useful quotations on the subject are:

“Empathy blurs judgment, it clouds truth. Sympathy allows compassion with clarity. We need more sympathy, not empathy” and
“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage… Sympathy I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.”

Progressives asked why Elon Musk precisely copying Emmanuel Macron’s “my heart to you” gesture proved that Musk was a Nazi and that Macron was an anti-fascist champion explained that they knew he was doing a Hitler salute, despite the motion and arm position being different, was that Musk did not believe in empathy and was therefore a Nazi. Musk’s actual words were:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit; they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Musk’s quotation is a textbook example of people misusing the term “empathy.” What he is describing is sympathy, the virtue Kirk praised. Sympathy is the impulse to react to seeing a pitiable person in a piteous or degraded state or doing a piteous or degraded thing and responding with… pity, a pity motivating one to take action to aid the person who is in a bad way.

Compassion is a little different. Compassion is about going beyond merely feeling pity and suffering with the oppressed, the abject, the degraded person before you. There is no question that both of these things are good; both can be exploited by histrionics and crybullies, just as Musk suggests. And, of course, because of his Silicon Valley background, he is thinking about the term in the cybersecurity sense, a piece of code that takes advantage of a flaw in a network to engage in malicious and harmful actions.

I disagree with Kirk’s criticisms of actual empathy but they are criticisms of what we all understood empathy to be prior to the Gaslightenment. Kirk was largely arguing that empathy is a relatively new concept and term to refer to a kind of mind-reading, an ability to see into the inner life of another that is based on a sort of hubris, the sense that one can see into another and thereby perceive their goodness or moral rectitude more accurately than one really can.

Where Kirk and I agree is that empathy is a kind of virtual sense; it operates like a sense but is actually created through the use of other senses, combined with one’s memory and intelligence. The main way it does this is through forms of recognition and comparison. The main way I use empathy is my ability to detect a part of another person that resembles a part of me. Is this person feeling what I have felt? Acting as I have acted? Confused in the way I have been confused? Etc.

But here is where I depart from a false premise that sucked in even Kirk, which is shocking, given the man’s deep commitment to Christianity, even if to a different flavour than my own.

When do I use my empathy? When is it most urgent that I am as empathetic as humanly possible? I use empathy most rigorously when I am in danger, when I am being treated unfairly, when I am overmatched by a malevolent or predatory force. If I see something monstrous, cruel, unhinged coming at me, I look deep inside myself and try to find a part of me that is like the creature coming at me. Is there some part of me I am suppressing now, some episode in my past when I was this cruel, selfish, blinkered, unfair, vengeful, insensitive, brittle, uncompassionate?

Does my empathetic sense always succeed in finding something resembling the evil coming at me inside my past, my present or the parts of myself that I suppress and push down? No. I do not contain all possible evils in the human species, myself, but I do contain many.

What everyone in this stupid empathy debate seems to believe is that people are seeing good in others because they are outwardly generalizing their goodness in too generous a way. But that presumes that everybody is good and knows they are good. I am of the opinion that no person who is certain of their own goodness is likely to be good. A good person is a vigilant person, a person constantly wondering, “am I being good?” Many of the best people think they are, overall, bad or morally neutral people and engage in good behaviour, in part motivated by the fear or even certain knowledge of all the bad things inside them and in their past, even if they thought they were doing good at the time.

Goodness does not breed certainty and it certainly does not breed proxy certainty. People who are sure they are good, sure they know the minds of others and are sure they know which of those minds are good and which are evil are likely insensitive, smug, self-righteous shitheads who cause a lot of hurt in the world. The crybullies assailing our societies are not exploiting the empathy, sympathy or compassion of the do-gooders who become their flying monkeys; they are exploiting the blindness, vanity, incuriosity and narcissism of people who have drunk too much from the well of pop psych “self esteem” discourse.

Dana Carvey’s first great character, the Church Lady of Saturday Night Live epitomized this sort of person, so smugly certain of her goodness, so sure of the contents of others’ hearts that she was a risible force for cruelty and stupidity. The West is not failing because we are awash in empathy but because we have lost the courage to take the first step in empathetic thought: look courageously and accurately into ourselves. \

We have no empathy to exploit.

Aside from Constantinople, every city was reduced to a population of less than 10,000. Material and financial surpluses vanished. Effective political jurisdictions shrank and feudalism began, where what little political power existed entailed transferring nearly all of the surplus populations were able to generate to arming and maintaining local warlords and their brute squads. These feudal lords were often part of larger polities that had kings but all these kings could deliver, at best, was the capacity to get the local brute squads to cooperate in a military endeavour.

In early medieval feudalism, the government provided one service to you, if you were lucky: not beating the shit out of you right now and fighting other people who tried to.

And yet, somehow, in this environment of state failure and subsistence, if you needed counseling, almost every community, no matter how small, had a trained professional who provided it for free to anyone who needed it. That person was called a priest; and the counseling was called pastoral care. They were financed through a local buyers’ club/co-op/health insurance program known as tithing.

Early medievals had a clarity that our society of surplus and abundance lacks: the understanding that customized, one-on-one mental health treatment is so important that, next to being protected from physical violence, it is the most important guarantee a society can provide.

Strangely, the richer our society has become, the larger the clinical vocabulary it has developed for various forms of madness, the less universal this crucial psychosocial intervention has become. Fewer state-run medical systems have include one-on-one counseling and those that do are engaged in increasingly austere rationing thereof. Substitutes have been rolled-out in the form of prescription drugs and the threshold for receiving these drugs is being steadily lowered as governments’ standards for releasing profoundly mind-altering drugs have been continuously diminished with pharmaceuticals being handed out via five-minute telephone appointments with doctors, the submission of “self-diagnosis” questionnaires and pharmacist-issued prescriptions.

But the lack of universality is not even the biggest problem with the collapse of the church-run, pre-secularization mental health system.

The biggest problem is that, with the emergence of the psychiatric and psychological professions, we turned some of the most important premises of more than a millennium of successful mental health treatment protocols on their head. And I want to speak to this from direct personal experience:

From 1978-79, I was counseled by two child psychologists. From 1980-81, I was counseled by a child psychiatrist. In 1992, I was counseled by two psychiatrists specializing sexual health. In 1997, I was counseled by a psychiatrist specializing in developmental psychology and a hypnotherapist. In 1998, I went to a second hypnotherapist. In 2002, I was counseled by a psychiatrist specializing in pharmaceutical treatments. In 2006, I saw two psychiatrists, a cognitive behavioural therapist and a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst. And from 2007 to 2009, I was counseled by one of the best cognitive behavioural therapists in the country. In 2011, I went to yet another psychologist for counseling and from 2013-14, I was counseled by a psychologist specializing in mindfulness-based approaches for sexual abuse survivors. From 2015-21, I intermittently saw a dialectical behavioural therapist with the same specialty and, later that year, received EMDR treatments from a dialectical behavioural therapist. And all this was topped off with couples’ counseling from a social worker 2020-22.

I have provided this boring and repetitive laundry list because I want to point out that across the counseling field, across disciplines, methodologies, approaches, there are certain commonalities, verging on universals, among our civilization’s approach to one-on-one spoken mental health interventions.

Whoever was counseling me and however I was being counseled, if I spent too much time talking about the problems of my friends or comrades and too little talking about my own, the counselor would urge me not to waste our valuable time talking about my worries and concerns about people other than myself. I had to focus more closely on myself. Similarly, when given “homework” I was urged to further ruminate on my own thoughts, my own feelings, my own aspirations, to make lists of my problems and my bad behaviours.

If there were something quirky or odd about me, something standing in the way of my aspirations or handicapping my ability to do something or placing that thing wholly out of reach, even though many or most people did not have that problem, there was a focus on discovering its etiology. Where did this disability, this injury, this damage come from? Was it a deficiency baked into my genes from birth or had it been beaten into me? Was there a malefactor who could be blamed for whatever was wrong with me?

Since I have begun attending church regularly, receiving pastoral care from my minister, Jory, and praying regularly, the contrast is striking. I am told that it is natural to be flawed and imperfect, that each of us is unique in God’s eyes and loved in spite of our flaws and deficiencies, and that these imperfections and our feelings of insufficiency and guilt are natural, baked into the world, since Adam and Eve, the parents of the whole human race left the garden. We should expect to fall short or wide of the mark and to feel guilty that we do, and to have patience and forgiveness for others because they are just like us in this regard.

My “homework” is not to ruminate on myself but to pray for the health and success of others, to focus on their problems and ask God to help them or for me to engage in acts of service like food preparation, childcare and the like. I attend meetings of other men striving to do God’s will and we discuss our struggles to live up to His commandments to serve and help others, to try to lead by example in our communities. We pray for one another, especially focusing on how the family men in our group can be better husbands and fathers to their wives and children.

What undergirds all this is the most fundamental difference in how we approach our universal feelings of insufficiency and guilt, i.e. Original Sin. Modern counseling focuses on convincing ourselves that we should love ourselves because we are good people who are doing our best and that many of our problems and failures are the fault of our genes, our parents, past lovers, pedophiles or a blow to the head and that therefore we really are lovable people doing our very best under tough circumstances.

In my church community, we are told that, try as we might, we probably could do better and are not doing our very best much of the time. We are told that everyone is flawed, disabled, handicapped and that is just the state of the human race; those things do not make us special; they make us just like everyone else. We are told that we are not naturally good people but what goodness inheres in us arises from our efforts to be good, our striving to be better than our nature, to live in an imitation of Christ. Why should we love ourselves, then? Because God, who is bigger and better than we could ever be loves us. We have no business, no right to second-guess God. We are obliged to love ourselves, to pick ourselves up and try again to be better people because He believes we can and tells us that we must.

Or, as Trailer Park Boys so aptly put it:

JULIAN: Ricky, all you’ve done since you got out of jail is live in your car and grow these three weed plants.
RICKY: I think that’s pretty good, considering.
JULIAN: No. It’s not.
RICKY: I’m doing the best I can here.
JULIAN: I know. But it’s still not that good.

That’s how conversations with God go, except that He adds, at the end, that he still loves you anyway.

We have forgotten a millennium of best practices in mental health. We have replaced a universal program that is pro-social, service oriented and outwardly directed, designed to focus on our similarities and shared struggles to a rationed, non-universal program that is individualistic, inwardly directed and designed to focus on our small differences from one another.

And the results are clear: although, or perhaps because, we are awash in material abundance, miserable and alienated from one another. And yet, we refuse to turn back. Our desire to see our flaws as special and curable illnesses and injuries rather than universal state of all humanity, to be striven against valiantly is gradually turning our society into a gigantic mental hospital for the unloved.

The Omnicause
On May 7^th, 2022, Extinction Rebellion’s Bristol chapter announced that “Climate Justice = Trans Rights” as the organization mobilized its members to join Antifa in beating, spitting and screaming at a group of women assembled in the city to discuss their sex-based rights and the threats genderwang presents to women’s safety, health, rights and spaces. This phenomenon of leftists conflating all positions on all issues into a single “omnicause,” has only intensified since the October 23^rd, 2023 pogrom. Now, we see blue-haired folks with bespoke cross-sex hormone facial hair rallying for Decolonial Queer Climate Justice for Palestine.

For those just encountering my writing, the first cancellation campaign waged against me was in September 2020, while I was serving as interim leader of the BC Ecosocialist Party, a party organized in large measure to stop pipeline development in BC. The problem was that even though I had been a climate activist since seeing the cracked mud and flamingo bones that had once been Kenya’s Lake Nakuru in 1988, I did not believe that “trans women are women,” “sex work is work” or any of the popular new orthodoxies that had been gaining popularity among environmentally concerned socialists like me.

I think one of the most important reasons I have been subject to so many cancellation campaigns since 2020 is that, despite my considerably activism against genderwang, I still insist on agreeing with the left on certain key issues like pipelines and fracking. This upsets leftists far more than if I had become a climate nihilist or denialist because I am a standing criticism and refutation of omnicause thinking.

Only just this week, when former Green Party leader Andrew Weaver and I teamed up on Facebook to denounce the BC Green Party’s decision to vote for fossil fuel subsidies and fracking in the 2019, 2020 and 2025 budgets, younger Green Party loyalists assailed us, defending the party’s capitulation to the fossil fuel industry on the grounds that he and I are “old white men.” The young activists said they looked forward to the day that not one single Green Party supporter would be an old white man or a social conservative.

As a result of so many cancellation campaigns animated by this kind of purge thinking and so many of my pre-2020 friends publicly denouncing and shunning me in the past five years, almost everyone I now socialize with is a conservative.

Boundary Maintenance and Conservative Community
By this I do not mean that all or even most of my friends and comrades call themselves conservatives. And some bristle at the epithet because they are Marxists, environmentalists or socialists who are labeled “conservative” because they have rejected the omnicause thinking of the left. We variously call ourselves “leftugees,” “Old Growth Leftists,” “anti-authoritarian populists,” or some other insider term. But such terms have no purchase among those who remain in the omnicause. To them, often simply by virtue of our personal friendships or political alliances with conservatives, we are “literal Nazis,” “racists,” “misogynists,” “ableists,” “transphobes,” “Islamophobes,” “white supremacists,” “denialists” and “genociders.”

But the reality is that you cannot identify your way out of being a conservative just because you think you are not one, any more than you can identify your way out of being white or male. The crowd, society—they decide whether you are male, whether you are white, whether you are conservative.

While I might not think I am a conservative because I remain a small-state eco-socialist, my opinion doesn’t matter. I have been force-teamed into conservatism. And not only have I been forced into that tribe by my former comrades; I have been reverse-credentialed into that tribe because my former comrades’ relentless attacks and interpersonal harassment of me burnish my reputation among long-term conservatives.

And I have to say that, when the cancellation machine really spooled up on the left, conservative communities were faced with a choice: they could harden their boundaries to keep us from diluting their communities or they could roll out the red carpet and invite us in. For the most part, they have done the latter and impressed us with their generosity.

But that is not to say that conservative communities in contemporary North America have given up on having cultural norms, mores and boundaries. Any community, no matter how tolerant of newcomers with new ideas, cannot hang together without those things. And, much as genderwang functions on the left to police community boundaries, climate denial performs that function for the right.

If conservatives want to detect if someone else is a conservative, conversations about the affordability crisis quickly turn to the price of gas and, from there, the stupidity of carbon taxes; conversations about the weather turn quickly to the absurdity of the supposed scientific consensus on climate change.

In those situations, even I am more socially strategic than I should be. Leftugees are terrified of being ostractized by the other half of society and becoming even more socially and professionally marginalized, although conservatives, as an overall group, have become increasingly condemnatory and intolerant of cancellation behaviours in their own communities. As a result, far too many of my comrades who were pushed out of the left because they didn’t think women had penises, didn’t think prostitution was liberating, didn’t support open borders, kept opposing free trade agreements, or whatever the issue was, within a few months, have come out against climate science because of the strong psychosocial incentives for doing so.

I am not one of those people. I continue to support curtailing carbon emissions, stopping pipelines, ending fracking, protecting old growth, etc. and all my conservative friends know this about me. Instead, I have chosen to spend more time taking up environmental issues only conservatives seem to care about. I spend more time working on opposing endocrine disruptors, lithium mines, cobalt mines and wind farm megaprojects. And I now work for Deep Green Resistance, the folks who coined the term “Old Growth Leftist.”

But now, British Columbia faces a major environmental issue that requires all environmentally concerned people to stand together.

The Challenge of the Northern Gateway Pipeline
There is a reason we have had a ban on oil tankers in the Inside Passage and off the Northwest Coast for fifty-three years: oil spills could inflict devastating damage on local marine ecosystems and the Pacific salmon and halibut fisheries. Similarly, there is a reason we opposed Enbridge’s construction of a diluted bitumen pipeline through the Yellowhead corridor ten years ago: pipelines leak and, especially when going through the kind of remote, barely accessible this proposed pipeline would traverse, those leaks take time to detect and longer to clean up, destroying spawning streams, trap lines, farms and local lakes and aquifers.

Have we invented less leaky pipeline technology in the past fifty years? Not based on evidence from the Kinder-Morgan Pipeline the government just twinned at taxpayer expense. Have we invented oil tankers that do not leak when they collide with rock outcroppings and other ships? Nope. There have been appreciable changes in the science and technology of moving oil since we decided to reject Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, nor have there been any significant changes in oil tanker tech since we instituted the tanker ban.

What has changed is this: the danger and toxicity of what we are shipping. Diluted bitumen is, in all ways, worse than crude oil. It is more likely to kill wildlife and plants, more persistent in the environment, more likely to cause pipeline ruptures, more likely to create dead zones on land and sea. Also, the main thing used to dilute tar-like bitumen is natural gas, a fuel that requires fracking in order to extract, the only fossil fuel that produces nearly as many carbon emissions at the point of extracting as it does at the point of use.

The other thing that has changed is this: thanks to the precedent set by Justin Trudeau’s nationalization of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, the oil industry now expects the government to build it free pipelines and run them at a loss. Ten years later, instead of Enbridge shareholders paying to construct, insure and repair Northern Gateway, we all know Canadian taxpayers will be on the hook for that, even if that has not yet been announced.

I am ready to fight this pipeline. DGR is ready to fight it. But will this end up like the last impending environmental disaster Deep Green Resistance tried to fight, the Thacker Pass lithium mine in 2021-22? Mainstream environmentalists showed up at Thacker Pass not to support local indigenous people and DGR activists but to protest DGR’s involvement because its leaders do not think women have penises. Destroying DGR and sending our troops home was more important for mainstream environmentalists than stopping an environmental disaster and the destruction of indigenous lands. They would rather side with industry than tolerate any plurality of opinion on unrelated social issues.

The reality is that there are a lot of pipeline megaproject skeptics among “conservatives” like me; and there would be more if conservatives were not using climate as a boundary maintenance condition and progressives were not persecuting, punishing and hounding-away anyone who disputes a single article of the omnicause from helping them. Will pipeline skeptics come together to fight this disaster waiting to happen or will BC’s environmental leaders begin culling their own ranks? That is not up to me. I hold out a faint hope that, as my FOOL (Friends of the Ozone Layer) mentor David Lewis said at the darkest of hours, “I still have faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.”

After attending a spontaneous and unplanned “convention of the canceled” in California in 2023, I have adopted Women’s Liberation Front and Deep Green Resistance co-founder Lierre Keith’s expression for the constituency the organization has represented for the past five years, “the Old Growth Left.” For those who understand a little about forest ecology, the term is highly accurate, in part, because of its fundamental pessimism.

You see: when an “old growth” or primeval forest is clearcut by industrial logging, the ecosystem does not fully recover; instead, what appears is not a new old growth forest but a “second growth” forest, an ecosystem with a fraction of the biodiversity, resilience, topsoil and richness of the forest it has replaced. And that is the problem with the Old Growth left, like Tolkien’s Fangorn Forest, my favourite magic realist representation of old growth, it grows smaller, older and more isolated; it never expands; it only contracts.

And this is not just a problem with Los Altos; it is a problem with the whole Old Growth Left. That is not to say that there are never young people or new people who join, that there are not saplings growing out of the nurse logs, that there are never new needles on the trees. But, until the world around it changes, the big picture is senescence, contraction and decline.

But this process of aging and decline is not just making the this community one in which it is harder to organize. What I have been witnessing is that, ironically, as much as this community is one that was brought into being by people escaping the cocktail of censorship, orthodoxy, neo-McCarthyism and Zersetzung that we politely call “cancel culture,” our communities are increasingly embracing those very things from within. And this is happening because we are on a collision course with another social phenomenon that this article is mainly about and it is the reason, both specifically and generally, that I have decided that I need to find different communities and strategies to work for the things in which I continue to believe. Ultimately, the Old Growth Left is on a collision course with the Public Radio Senior.

And that is why I resigned this fall as president of Los Altos after thirteen years.

Age Segmentation and the Rise of FoxNews
FoxNews became the massive profit centre and ratings juggernaut that it is today because its owner and managers figured out key properties of an increasingly rapidly changing and frightening world, but one in which a growing portion of the population had aged out of the workforce and was enjoying a better-funded, better-supported and longer retirement than ever before. It also helped that, with family cohesion and intergenerational solidarity and community hitting an all-time low, in part because of the growing generational disparities of financial security, these seniors were less likely to be living with working-age adults or caring for school-age children. The world of seniors since the 1990s has increasingly been populated by other seniors.

This has not just been the case when it comes to family units getting smaller, more fragmented and less materially integrated across generations. Membership in mainline and liberal churches has collapsed, either shuttering churches entirely or giving way to a growing number of congregations whose youngest members are in the fifties and whose average age is in the seventies. And we have seen the same phenomenon with fraternal and veterans’ organizations like the Freemasons and the Legion.

The world in which seniors have been living has become both more remote and more frightening and confusing. And this, unfortunately, goes hand in glove with organic neurological changes that are affecting more seniors more, not just because they are living longer but because they receive less mental stimulation, read less, perform less childcare and work less than previous generations of seniors.

FoxNews succeeded because it harnessed negative forces in seniors culture for financial gain. When observing the culture in nursing homes, what we see is a culture strongly inflected by dementia; even those who do not suffer from some form of mental senility themselves take on beliefs and behaviours we associate with dementia because they live in a subculture which over-represents and culturally reflects the demented. Similarly, because so many people in them do have chronic health conditions and grow steadily more unhealthy the longer they stay, the subculture is also one of hypochondria, one centring on complaints about one’s diseases, dissatisfaction with the efficacy of treatment and the anticipation of a new diagnosis.

One of the first ways FoxNews harnessed this for profit had nothing to do with programming; it had to do with advertising. Fox began courting advertisers who sold products that offered miracle cures and dubious treatments. Companies that exploited forgetfulness were also courted, offering products on installment plans that people would forget they had signed on to.

But the dementia symptom that the programming and advertising really focused on was fear, fear of novelty, fear of strangers, fear of change. And this grew steadily easier to do the less of the society around them seniors had contact with. It was much easier for the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Rupert Murdoch and Karl Rove to stoke fear of what was happening in schools if seniors had no grandchildren and no regular contact with those they did have. It was much easier to stoke fear about what was happening in city cores if seniors met their shopping needs at a suburban mall, especially if they lived in a suburb that was primarily composed of other seniors. Without conscription and with military enlistment dramatically falling among non-working class folks, America’s global battlefields also became more remote.

In other words, the more isolated seniors became from different parts of their society, the easier it became for people like Sean Hannity to treat places seniors almost never went, and with which seniors no longer had close secondhand experiences, as almost-blank canvasses on which to paint frightening images of threatening forces that could only be kept at bay by trudging out and voting for local conservative candidates.

As seniors’ sociological perceptions and political views were increasingly shaped by a larger nursing home political culture, this fueled additional isolation. Discussions of politics at family dinners grew more fraught, intra-familial political and religious arguments grew more intractable because arguments were no longer about how to respond to the events taking place because there was no longer any agreement on what was even happening.

From “Fair and Balanced” to “The Narrative”
In order for Hannity and his ilk to paint over the Iraq in which no weapons of mass destruction were found and depict an Iraq in which they were, something had to change and the basic level of journalistic practice and the UCLA School of Journalism was on the cutting edge of this, something I wrote about thirteen years ago. I look back on those times in the culture of political information as a healthier, more innocent time now, something I could not have imagined then.

Leavened, no doubt, by friendly donations and endowments by the American right, journalism schools, led by UCLA began using something called the “Fairness Doctrine,” in American communication law to more effectively paint over messy realities with comfortable distortions and sometimes even outright lies.

It must be understood that the Fairness Doctrine is a uniquely American policy with respect to the news media’s coverage of politically tinged communication because it embeds the binarism of the two-party system in law that does not directly pertain to the electoral process. The idea is that “both sides” of an issue must be covered and that if coverage is one-sided, the news organization has breached its license to broadcast. While this doctrine had existed since the inception of broadcast licenses, its scope was radically altered first by FoxNews’ interpretation of the policy and then disseminated through journalism programs like UCLA’s.

During the Cold War era when “objective journalism” was the order of the day, the idea was that news media would investigate a situation and discover the objective facts of the matter. They would then report on those facts and present opposing views of how to respond to the fact pattern in as balanced a way as they could.

But as the twenty-first century began, objective journalism began to give way to “balanced journalism.” And this played out before our eyes in the coverage of the Bush Administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. While every other major news organization in the US reported that, contrary to the Administration’s claims in their justifications for the war, no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. But on FoxNews, being “fair and balanced,” the network’s slogan up to the present day, entailed giving equal time to those saying the weapons had not been found and those who falsely claimed they had.

As more new journalists trained in these ideas of “fairness and balance” came of age professionally, networks vied to peel away part of the massive viewership Fox had achieved as the TV ratings juggernaut of the early twenty-first century, and as the left began its attempt at its own Fox, MSNBC, these changes also permitted reductions in research and fact-checking staff. As “fair and balanced” went from a cynical strategy for holding onto an audience by telling them what they wanted to hear into the ethical way to do journalism, it became increasingly important for anchors, reporters and talkshow hosts to make sure that if one side were obviously lying and the other were not, to take measures, through selective quoting, editing and questioning, to conceal that information lest the reporting seem unbalanced.

That stated, as I observed when I returned to this topic in 2021, if you watch FoxNews for a week and have intact critical thinking skills, you mostly figure out what the actual news is

If Breitbart or FoxNews had existed in the 1960s, most people who believe them today would not only have disbelieved them. They would have found them laughable, funny, absurd. Even the John Birch Society and Lyndon Larouche activists would have found their explanations unusable because of the conspiracy theories would not be self-consistent with their last retelling. Too many details would be missed or wrong.

This has only been reinforced by what I saw from state-controlled media during my year in Tanzania. I could follow the various failures and scandals of the state-run electrical utility simply by reading the government’s propaganda, explaining away blackouts, brownouts, construction delays and changes to the composition of the utility’s board of directors. That is because, as bad as “fair and balanced” journalism is, there is still an ethical compulsion to cover opposing views, even in a slanted and condemnatory fashion, and to permit people propounding those views to speak directly to the camera. Because “fair and balanced” bears resemblance to the “study the controversy” pedagogy pushed by Young Earth Creationists, truth-tellers must be platformed, even if those presenting to the truth-teller attempt to strip from the coverage any sign that they are more aligned with objective reality than their opposing interlocutor.

Consequently, I kind of miss the days when “fair and balanced” was as bad as it had got. Today, I even watch FoxNews on occasion, not because it has become one iota more responsible and accurate a news source but because an even worse set of journalistic practices have taken over my previously preferred news sources as part of the battle for the eyes and ears of a new generation of seniors.

In March 2024, Katherine Maher, CEO of National Public Radio in the United States stated that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction,” expressing a view that had come to predominate in the progressive media since the rise of the Donald Trump movement in 2015. As has now been exposed, in the past ten years, major news media had chosen not merely to suppress concerning information about the political corruption of the Biden family, problems with Covid-19 vaccines, the origins of Covid, the dangers of “gender-affirming care,” and a number of other important issues before the public; they also worked to fabricate connections between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign and other important matters.

Departing from the idea that discredited third-party views had to be juxtaposed with empirically validated views by sheering them of necessary context, per the doctrine of “fairness and balance,” a more muscular ethos of fabrication has taken hold of left and liberal media. Not only have news organizations become active, collaborative participants, working with intelligence agencies and progressive political parties, not merely to cover but to fabricate falsehoods; they unleashed a war on “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

Those who correctly stated that the Biden family was engaged in political corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere were not merely muzzled and silenced in mainstream media; they were defamed, mocked and legally harassed for “spreading disinformation.” Furthermore, “disinformation,” was, itself, redefined not to mean intentional fabrications falsely presented as factual information but instead to mean statements contrary to progressive understandings of the public interest, irrespective of their veracity. Initially leavened by the desire to increase Covid vaccine uptake by making Anthony Fauci, the pharmaceutical industry and their experimental vaccines seem more safe and credible than they really were, this anti-“disinformation” crusade has now spread to almost all issues of special interest to progressives, irrespective of any credible claims of urgency or public safety.

Furthermore, this crusade has jumped the fence and has ceased merely to concern journalists and has become the agenda of lawmakers. That is why over thirty people per day are being arrested for their social media posts in the UK and the Canadian parliament is currently considering a bill to incarcerate any person who correctly states that no unmarked graves of indigenous children have been found since the 2021 claim that there were hundreds.

This sort of thing is justified using the shabby language of postmodernist theory and the Derridean idea of “narratology,” that there is no truth or falsehood, only competing “narratives,” and that we should propound the “narrative” that conforms most clearly to our theory of what is just, not what the objective facts are. Because in the vulgar debasement of narratology adopted by present-day progressives, there are no objective facts, only “competing narratives.” Indeed, there is no world, only competing stories about the world.

Jim Jones versus Tamara Lich
A former girlfriend of mine vividly described the role of FoxNews in the far right evangelical home in which she grew up. The TV was never turned off. The channel was never changed. FoxNews functioned as “the Jonestown loudspeaker” of her household and, more generally, of far right America in the 00s. Jim Jones was successful in keeping tight control of his impoverished cultists in the jungles of Guyana by reading them distorted versions of the news, day and night, inflected both by a strategic paranoia designed to make the world around them seem even more frightening than the hell into which they were plunging and by the amphetamines he was constantly taking in order stay away and keep broadcasting for days on end.

While my parents’ generation, the Silent Generation, were the last to be sucked primarily into the FoxNews vortex, a new generation of seniors has since come of retirement age, the Baby Boomers. Whatever their economic idea, the Boomer generation has been the most “progressive” voting demographic in history. By and large, they have been enthusiastic about decriminalizing abortion and homosexuality, multiculturalism, the United Nations, gay marriage and the other progressive causes of their day, and similarly condemnatory of evangelical and conservative Christianity, restrictions on migration, etc.

The Boomers are also more educated than any generation preceding theirs and have a special respect for expertise and are dismissive of old-fashioned “common sense” traditions we associate with Thomas Paine and America’s founders, giving rise to “do you own research” exhortations by populist conservatives being countered with “trust The Science,” from progressives.

Consequently, while some Boomers have tacked steadily to the political right as they have aged, most have not, and FoxNews, while designed structurally for the kind of open air retirement home existence I described above, is completely unsuited to these folks’ needs when it comes to content.

Instead, state-funded news media, especially 100% state-funded media, like America’s National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio operations have led the way in creating a new kind of progressive Jonestown loudspeaker, one that disseminates different falsehoods, stokes different irrational fears and suspicions, amplifies different health scares and touts different medications and prophylaxes.

In arguing with my CBC-listening senior friends, I have learned that “Diagolon,” a joke about the geographic distribution of conservatives in Anglo America made on an obscure Canadian podcast is actually a vast paramilitary international terrorist organization that, without constant vigilance, could seize control of Canada in a violent military coup. Indeed, they believe that the extended tailgate party staged in Ottawa in 2022 by truckers and their supporters opposing vaccine passports was just that, that it came armed to the teeth and brought with it a junta of retired generals ready to kill all of Canada’s progressive parliamentarians and commence a violent dictatorship.

Despite there actually being no organization and no acts of violence attributable to Diagolon, CBC continues to talk up this non-organization and the dangers it presents to Canadians. CBC is also happy to give fawning coverage to groups like the Canadian Anti-hate Foundation and our government’s own spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and their completely evidence-free claim that, of all domestic terrorist threats, gender critical folks like me who oppose the sterilization and lobotomization of troubled children present the greatest danger of a domestic terrorist mass-death event, that people like me and Meghan Murphy are merely the public face of a huge underground network of violent fanatics, armed to the teeth, ready to engage in the mass murder of the children we purport to be trying to protect.

Furthermore, the signs of the imminent coup and mass treason are everywhere. CBC has run “analysis” and “opinion” pieces on its web site, podcasts and radio programs explaining that such acts as singing our own national anthem’s official lyrics or flying our country’s own Maple Leaf flag are “far-right dogwhistles.” Daily acts of patriotism are now explained to progressive seniors as signs that a vast, violent insurrectionary fascist movement is communicating in code, all around them.

That is why most believe, unlike Canada’s under-60s, that the courts are not, as most Canadians believe, captured by bizarre and out-of-touch liberalism but are actually working for the fascists. Why else would the courts have decided that using the government’s war powers to shut down a nonviolent protest by some truckers was unconstitutional? Diagolon has its hooks in everything!

Like FoxNews seniors, Public Radio Seniors live in a world in which they are surrounded by conspiracies hellbent on destroying their way of life, not to mention an ever-increasing number of threats to one’s health. We must keep masking! We must conduct bizarre culls of domesticated ostriches! We need another booster! We need more flu shots! We need new “anti-hate” laws!

Furthermore, these things all have a single culprit, the conflated person of Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin. Anyone who believes Trump has some good policies could only think that because of “Russian disinformation.” That’s why some of my CBC-listening senior friends are circulating a petition calling on the government to amend the Election Act so that every candidate who registers has to swear that they will not contradict what the government says is true during the campaign and, if they break that oath, they will be removed from the ballot. Only then can our elections be free from “foreign interference” and “Russian disinformation.”

While FoxNews seniors merely believe liberal media are wrong, Public Radio seniors believe that conservative media like Fox, Rebel, the Western Standard, the Epoch Times and Juno News are existential threats to the nation that must be shut down and their reporters jailed for spreading “disinformation.”

In this way, public radio is actually out-competing Fox in providing a retirement home experience. Retirement homes are cliquey and factionalized. They are like middle schools but with more paranoia and forgetfulness. And, as I learned from my weekly visits to Muriel Bird, my late grandfather’s fiancee at her retirement home in the 1980s, residents get into adversarial dynamics of “worrying” each other by engaging in small acts of theft, sabotage and other schoolyard torments. FoxNews offered nothing but the ballot box as a location to strike back against the gathering storm. Public Radio puts all kinds of strategies up for grabs.

Public Radio Seniors Culture Threatens the Old Growth Left
How is it that I know about this? Ironically, it is through the Old Growth Left, which comprises a larger portion of Public Radio seniors every year. Seniors are not merely over-represented in the Old Growth Left by demographic accident but because of their inherent resistance to cancellation and the threats of cancel-culture. While massive social ostracism and stigma are powerful forces, cancel culture is able to pack the punch it does because of its control over workplaces, professional associations, schools and the child protection system. It can inflict devastating material consequences on a person, like revoking their license to practice their profession and, in the most extreme cases, seizing and sterilizing your children.

And it is not merely that seniors are not directly having these experiences, the same lack of access to eye-witness testimony about downtown cores, workplaces and schools that once served the agenda of the right is being repurposed to serve the agenda of the progressive left, painting over reality with nostalgic or paranoid simplifications or flat-out fabrications.

Consequently, the working-age population of the Old Growth Left, especially those with kids, have had to make a sharp break with progressive culture. However, seniors are more numerous in the Old Growth Left because they do not face such consequences. Furthermore, many are able to remain in blissful denial that the progressive left has become as monstrous as it has become, especially if that particular morbidity, like the epidemic of prison rape caused by genderwang is either completely suppressed or actively lied-about by progressive media.

Whereas most working-age Old Growth Leftists I know have rejected almost all of the new positions progressives have adopted since 2015, like open borders, free trade and the trustworthiness of Big Pharma and jihadist Islam, retired Old Growth Leftists tend to see the one issue where they are not in accord with the rest of the left as aberrant, as exceptional and likely to be corrected.

One would think this would make them less likely to bring the practices of cancel culture to their organizing work. But instead, this is what has happened: the “there is no cancel culture, just consequences for bad behaviour” ethos is typically part of the package of new beliefs and behaviours that these individuals accept uncritically, in part because they are already socially and neurologiclaly predisposed to adopt retirement home dementia culture behaviours. Seniors socially isolated from non-seniors do not even need the justifications of cancel culture they hear on public radio; when isolated from other generations, our retirement homes show they are likely to turn into middle school mean girls anyway.

Consequently, cancel culture is seeping into the Old Growth Left via Public Radio Seniors culture. Over the past year, I have had increasingly frequent troubling interactions in my organizing with seniors bringing cancel culture into places I had fled to escape it. The politics of vindictive interpersonal punishment are entering the Old Growth Left through one consistent vector. In some cases I have been able to stop it; but in others, like my beloved Institute, I have had no choice but to flee to higher ground.

I Admit It. I Have Changed.
In one of the most memorable scenes from the first season of House, there is an exchange between the main character and his best friend. While the context and meaning of the dialogue is not the same as the point I am making in this article, it is close enough that I often hear myself in this dialogue when I return to this absolute gem of early twenty-first-century TV.

Wilson: You alienate people.
House: I’ve been alienating people since I was three.
Wilson: Oh, come on! Drop it! You don’t think you’ve changed in the last few years?
House: Well, of, of course I have. I’ve, I’ve gotten older. My hair’s gotten thinner. Sometimes I’m bored, sometimes I’m lonely, sometimes I wonder what it all means.
Wilson: No, I was there! You are not just a regular guy who’s getting older, you’ve changed! You’re miserable...
House: Of course I’ve changed!

I am writing this post because I think everyone can see that I have changed and I have pushed back against those observations for reasons I will also go into.

In 2018, I campaigned for proportional representation in a provincial referendum in my home province of British Columbia. As in two previous referenda in 2005 and 2009, I squared off against my long-time political adversary, social democrat and trade union lobbyist, Bill Tieleman. We had the good fortune to meet in person at the radio station where we were debating and discovered we actually really liked each other. In fact, as the campaign dragged on and my own side made a series of boneheaded decisions that left me isolated and alienated, I came to realize that Bill was the one new friend I actually made during the referendum.

And he paid me a compliment that I treasured so much that I have been hiding behind it for the past five years because, especially when he made it, it is largely true about me up to the present day. He said, “Stuart I normally dislike party switchers. They seem untrustworthy because they change their opinions about important issues about which people should be consistent. But you keep switching political parties because you refuse to change your opinions.”

My alienation and ultimate cancelation from the left stemmed from my refusal to change my views on a number of issues Wokeness has caused the left to shift radically on. I do not want to belabour the individual issues so here is as concise a list as I can make about the big issues:

1. Immigration: I have believed for my entire adult life that countries need to be strategic and careful about how many immigrants they let in each year, that this number should fluctuate based on a country’s need to steward its land responsibly, keep housing affordable, keep wages livable and fair and maintain infrastructure that can support the population. And, except when I got carried away by the offensive comments of some Reform Party MPs in the 90s, I have always believed that we need to discuss immigration policy rationally in the public square with everyone free to speak their mind.

2. Free trade and tariffs: I have never supported neoliberal free trade agreements. I am not a fan of goods or money crossing borders unobstructed. I believe that free trade has damaged countries’ self-reliance, economic diversity, wages and ability to democratically set public policy. It has also come at an environmental cost, bloating the logistics industry and increasing carbon emissions. I especially oppose post-1988 trade agreements that have granted corporate and investor rights and limited governments’ ability to socialize and expropriate important things like railways and energy systems and enforced these laws using undemocratic secret courts.

3. Women’s equality and dignity: I have never believed that women should have to compete for sports scholarships or medals against males, be incarcerated with men or be prohibited from having same sex spaces.

4. Carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting emissions, pesticides and herbicides: I oppose synthetic pesticides and herbicides in agriculture, chlorine bleaching, industrial processes that emit dioxins, furans and the like into our air and water.

5. Homosexuality: I have always supported gay marriage and the legal and social equality of gays and lesbians and their right to their own spaces and organizations for same-sex attracted people. I have never considered same-sex attraction to be a fetish and have never supported multi-partner marriage, incest or the legal and social conflation of fetishes and mental illnesses with same-sex attraction.

6. Big Pharma and Big Data: As a socialist, I am generally not a fan of big business, period. But these two industrial sectors’ behaviour as speech-suppressing, propaganda-spreading, junk science supporting cartels has escalated significantly over the past decade, causing my suspicion of these industries to grow, simultaneous with them gaining unprecedented levels of support and trust from the mainstream left.

7. Freedom: For most of my life, I was part of a massive social consensus that both the state and individual citizens had a duty to safeguard liberty, in particular, freedom of speech, assembly, association and movement. This consensus is gone but I still believe in freedom.

On these and a few other issues I have not been able to follow the left’s 180-degree turns between 2012 and the present and, as a result, have been labeled on social media and in the mainstream media variously as an “ableist,” “racist,” “transphobe,” “homophobe,” “literal Nazi,” “transmisogynist,” “fascist,” “stochastic terrorist” and “white nationalist conspiracy theorist.”

But ultimately, one’s politics cannot be wholly aspirational or abstract; they must rest upon evidence and experience. Indeed, one of my criticisms of progressives is that their politics are becoming so unmoored from evidence and experience as to constitute a form of ontological dualism.

Over the past five years, many former friends have angrily demanded to know why my opinions of people who have defamed me, harassed me, tried to have children in my care apprehended, got my publishing deals canceled and got me fired from jobs simply because of my political views have worsened just because they have tried to ruin my life, or why my support for causes, movements and organizations that have done the same has waned. All I can say is “wouldn’t it be weird if they hadn’t?” You are not supposed to like people or groups that do things like that to you. It’s constitutive of possessing self-worth.

But I now have to reflect that it is not just people and groups about which I have changed my opinion. The evidence of recent years has caused me to change some significant beliefs I have about the world.

Drugs and Addiction
As the Onion put it so eloquently in their headline “Drugs Win Drug War,” the War on Drugs failed to produce any kind of victory over drugs, the state of our streets or the health and dignity of our people. Instead, we see unambiguous and escalating signs that a generation of “harm reduction” policy has failed to reduce the harm drugs are causing in our society. Harm reduction was a great theory that I began publicly supporting thirty years ago; there were solid reasons to back it. Based on the knowledge we had at the time about the failure of the Drug War and solid scholarship like that of my friend Bruce Alexander, it seemed smart to back roll back drug prohibition and help connect addicts with drugs the state was distributing and inspecting. I have no shame about having been wrong, with the best of intentions.

But today, I think we all know that both the Drug War and Harm Reduction have failed and we are left with a scale of addiction, drug deaths and human degradation we could not have imagined fifty years ago. I also have, under my belt, three decades of struggling with my own substance use and abuse issues. And the prospect of the state just giving me free cocaine or benzodiazepines if I returned to Canada in 2024 made me seriously think of staying in Africa.

Should we restart the Drug War? Absolutely not. We need to have a big talk about how to build a society in which we are collectively less drunk and on drugs. But thanks to the Woke habit of labeling any discussion of the plight of a marginalized group as “hate,” the conversation we desperately need is being filibustered. Going forward, we need a new public policy direction on substance use, one that pays more attention to culture and sex differences and one that reinforces social bonds.

Big Government and the Welfare State
When I first joined the Green Party in 1987, I was very enamoured of bioregionalism and the small state/anarchist tradition from which it grew. I liked the idea of keeping the state small and communities strong, using informal structures, culture and tradition to support people’s material welfare and police their behaviour.

But then along came neoliberal austerity. And again based on experience, I began witnessing the social and material devastation that came from cutting government social spending so I became a defender of the twentieth-century welfare state and the New Deal Order as leader of the BC Green Party, using my bully pulpit and superior organizing skills to conduct a total ideological makeover of the party into a social democratic one. I even feuded with the Ontario Green Party over the next seven years over their insistence on adhering to original green ideology.

But again, experience has changed this. Wanting government to be big and comprehensive only makes sense if you trust the government not to use its sweeping powers to persecute you or force you to do something fundamentally contrary to your principles. There is a reason that refugees from the old USSR and East Bloc and refugees from Communist China tend to back small government parties. They know the dangers of making something capricious or malicious so big, powerful and consequential.

I have also experienced more poverty in my life than most people from my educational and class background. And I have learned that the thing most damaging to one’s sanity, dignity and decency is losing the ability to give others gifts or do others favours. I realize that the state bureaucratizing so many acts of charity and charities pushing out volunteers by professionalizing their work and reducing charitable support to donating funds, our social bonds and generous instincts have been slowly atrophying.

In one of the first major sociological studies of the original Trump movement’s success back in 2016-17, it was noted that many of its leaders were local notables who raised money and dispensed charity in their communities who felt that their work had been made or was being made obsolete. I now realize they were on to something, because it is no coincidence that the places where we see the sharpest declines in empathy are in cities where a combination of culture, professionalization and state action has made people abstractly generous but increasingly cold and dead-eyed at the human scale.

We need to remember that that most great thinkers have favoured this. Even Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto ends with “the withering of the state.”

Sex and Gender
Here I have to confess to true hypocrisy. When I think back to when I first politically dissembled in order to fit in, it would have to be the late 1980s when I said that I was okay with reducing the minimum strength requirements for women if they applied to be firefighters. I would state “if I don’t care if a firefighter can carry someone as big as me out of a burning building, why should you?” But the fact was that the more female firefighters I saw, the more I saw my chances of dying in a fire increase and that did not make me feel good.

Over the course of the 1990s, thanks to the roles in which stars like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Zhang Ziyi were cast and with improvements in film special effects and the introduction of Hong Kong “wire fu” to Hollywood, it became more and more awkward to talk about real sex-based differences between male and female physiology and psychology. With gay marriage the civil rights cause of the day and neoliberalism pressing women into the workforce as family-supporting jobs declined, it also became fashionable to say that there was no difference for fathers and mothers. To suggest that people like me, from single-parent families have more psychological problems and are more likely to grow up poor became viewed as hateful and bigoted.

And we all know where this ended up, with serial rapists in women’s prisons, men beating women in Olympic boxing and crowds of masked, self-mutilating, fetish-obsessed lunatics chanting “trans women are women, trans men are men, trans rights are human rights” and beating women who disagreed in the street while the police smugly looked on.

As with drugs, I do not have the answers as to where to go from here. I do not want to go back to the world of Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique, in which women were pushed out of the workforce, trapped in cul-de-sacs and drugged and lobotomized to keep them down. But the way this society is handling the difference between men and women is somehow even worse than that. We need a big conversation about that, the kind of conversation Charlie Kirk was gunned down for trying to facilitate.

I am not offering a complete inventory of all the ways I have changed politically but it is time I came clean and spoke clearly about where I have, and stop claiming that my politics is the same as it was in 2019. That is not true of any of us because, as crazy as we all are now, nobody is that crazy.

The sense that a combination of shame politics and a technology that freezes one’s every word in amber for all time would lead to some sort of absurd crisis of shame and confusion was hardly unique to Alannah. Her words simply gave humorous voice to the feeling of unease that has been building in people’s gut since the days of good old fashioned web forums, even before the rise of social media.

The problem of having a multi-decade easily accessible record of everything you typed on the internet when you were going through a break-up, when you were drunk and on drugs, when you were very depressed, when you were conscripted into a social or political conflict about which you were under-informed, is that not only do a lot of people disagree with much of what you typed, so do you, in all likelihood.

This problem is especially acute for the generations that have grown up entirely in the world of the internet; not only are all their bad adult and dumb thoughts on the internet, so are opinions they expressed at ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty... I would urge my contemporaries to think about being followed around for the rest of their life by every terrible poem they wrote about their adolescent crush not working out.

One of the defining but typically unstated differences between the progressive and conservative communities in our societies, one of the things that most strongly drives social partition are the opposite ways those communities handle the photographic and textual record the internet leaves of their most embarrassing and offensive moments.

As progressives scour thousands of hours of audio and video recordings for “gotcha” clips of Charlie Kirk, a few will no doubt surface. So, it is useful to ask: how informative are the statements of a man at the age of twenty-one about the views of that man at thirty-one, especially if he has made repeatedly said the opposite in the ensuing ten years? In many ways, how you answer this question weighs heavily but not exclusively on whether you are a progressive or a conservative.

The conservative approach is exemplified in Donald Trump’s response to the “grab them by the pussy,” remarks he made, unaware he was being recorded. “It was just locker room talk,” was his repeated justification. While this came off as lame to me at the time, Trump spoke to a reality of human social interaction. For every conversation, for every social context, Sufi mystic Idries Shah argues that we build a new self to serve the moment. Of course, people don’t say the same thing in the locker room that they say in bed with their spouse that they say at work that they say at Christmas family dinner with the inlaws that they say after going to see a stand-up comic. In some situations, we are deliberately cruder than normal to impress or connect with people; in others, we are deliberately more polite and refined.

Just as importantly, we change over time. We have great moments and we have disgraceful moments. And part of the appeal that I now see (but did not at the time; the world had yet to spend half a decade beating this insight into me) for voters in 2016 was that voting Trump was a way of saying “I refuse to answer for everything I have said in the past in any context in this context, the public square. In that way only lies madness.”

While some greasy conservative journalists and influencers continue to look for embarrassing photos and quotations from progressive activists’ past and post them as “gotchas,” this practice has steadily declined in conservative circles in the seventeen years since its zenith during Barack Obama’s first presidential bid, when conservative social media was chockablock with out-of-context quotes from Dreams of My Father about Obama’s past drug use and his period of avoiding social interaction with whites. And it went from Obama’s associations with Bill Ayers all the way back to his very birth and its documentation.

But post-Tea Party Trumpite conservatism was largely about pushing back against having to always be polite, always be accurate, always be on the record. Those attacks declined not because they ceased to send progressives into a tizzy but because conservatism became about pushing back against increasingly constraining progressive theories of etiquette, refinement and self-control, governed by a growing double standard. It became about creating spaces where people could speak in an unvarnished way without fear of future retribution.

In other words, over the past twenty years, conservatives have come to treat past online posts and the internet record generally like past speech. They apply to the internet the ethos heavy drinkers apply to the ill-advised remarks they made at that party. Yes, the words are still there; they return in painful, embarrassing flashes in one’s private memory but they are governed by a social agreement that they should not be referenced or remembered too precisely, that pretending a remark never happened or accepting a perfunctory excuse and moving on is what is called for.

The internet record may be precise and accessible, but conservatives have, to solve a pressing social problem, developed new traditions of etiquette that pretend it is murky, vague, hard to find and best explained by eyewitnesses, not puzzled out by way of chronological text comparison.

If conservatives, over time, are shifting towards the position that we should behave as though internet audio, video and textual content is identical to past unrecorded speech, even though it is not, we also see the emergence of a very different progressive framework for understanding people’s past speech and actions, something I need to spend a few paragraphs introducing.

Progressives are increasingly adopting a radically different, nigh-incompatible way to engage with people’s past speech and writing: proof-texting.

Proof-texting is a fairly new way of dealing with a large corpus of variegated written material that came out of the rise of Muslim and especially Christian fundamentalism during the nineteenth century. It resulted from simultaneous increases in literacy rates and in the proportion of unchurched people in society. Atop these demographic phenomena grew certain religious ideas:

1. The Bible is not merely a text God inspired men to write; it is, effectively, written by the hand of God himself;

2. Because God is perfect, pure and consistent, the Bible is not merely inerrant but completely self-consistent;

3. Because the Bible is completely self-consistent, any excerpt from it, no matter how small, is a shard of pure, shining, unadulterated truth;

It is ironic that a culture of reading that grew out of eighteenth-century tent revivals and culminated in the modern non-denominatonal suburban megachurch would become the way people of the left, not people of the right, talk about the the textual record. But this is where proof-texting practices were developed, long before progressives became enamoured of them.

Proof-texting enabled ministers, often without any theological training of their own, to cherry-pick from the Bible and produce a collage of quotations, shorn of the context provided by adjacent verses and chapters, to say pretty much anything the minister wanted to say. I do not want to suggest that proof-texting exegetes understood themselves to be manipulative, dishonest or agenda-driven, just people whose sloppy handling of texts allowed them to see exactly what they wanted to see but experience this not as a manipulation but a discovery of the text’s true essence.

Earlier generations of progressives found proof-texting to be odious and easy to mock. The Bible does contain obvious literal contradictions; the synoptic gospels, after all, were the manifestos of three opposing factions of the early church and the differences between them reveal much about the early years of Christianity. While a Christian would see a unified whole emerging from the juxtaposition of these texts and wrestling with their differences, the Bible, without some kind of interpretive intervention does contradict itself, in the literal sense.

Also, previous generations of progressives believed in progress, the false idea that human society is somehow naturally and axiomatically evolving towards a better, more sophisticated, more intelligent future state. If progressives were Christian, they tended, a century ago, to believe in a form of postmillennialism called the Social Gospel. In this tradition, part of the holiness of the Bible came from the fact that it was, itself, progressive, that its doctrines progressed from a primitive religion to an advanced spirituality, a progress that has supposedly continued even after the text left off.

But new assumptions, new beliefs arising from America’s Third Great Awakening are changing that. The Third Great Awakening or “Wokeness,” is much like the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s, full of politicized, apocalyptic religious enthusiasm propounded by the unchurched to the unchurched.

In this new world of immortal, immaterial souls that possessed gender and race, even before being born into a physical body, progressives have adopted a new theory of the self, the opposite of the original progressive one. If a child of three “just knows” he was “born in the wrong body,” and we know, with absolute certainty, that his gender has a fixed nature that existed even in the womb, it implies that people are who they are their whole lives; there is no change; there is no salvation. When someone falls away from progressivism, they are not understood to have left the path of righteousness; they are understood never to have to have been on it, to have been a fraud the whole time, whose apostasy and depravity circumstance has later revealed.

As I have written elsewhere, the new progressive theory of the soul combines the worst of American space religions, Calvinism and the now defunct world religion, Manicheism. Eschewing old school progressivism, which saw people’s moral and intellectual development, progress over time as a microcosm of a universe evolving towards perfection, this worldview has undergone a 180-degree reorientation in the past decade or two. Now,

1. like the Mormons and Nation of Islam, progressives believe that the human soul has a fixed nature and essence even before birth that is carried through life;

2. like Calvinists, they believe that our nature is predestined, that we are predestined to salvation or damnation and, while we might pretend to have a different nature for a time, the truth will out;

3. like Manicheans, they believe that the universe is organized into two teams: the Sons of Light (the oppressed) and the Sons of Darkness (the oppressors), but that most of the Sons of Light do not comprehend their role and must be enlightened by a subset of the Sons of Light known as the Hearers (the Woke).

Consequently, contemporary progressives have imposed a false and permanent consistency on the self. A self has a single atemporal unchanging essence and because of that, one can proof-text from a life story. What someone said on mushrooms on a Discord server in 2004 reveals their inalterable essence in 2025.

Of course, even if people don’t exactly “progress,” we change not just over the years but from context to context, minute to minute. So, the modern progressive is faced with the same problem as a fundamentalist proof-texting minister: how to handle the obvious contradictions. And the answer is the same as in a suburban prosperity gospel megachurch: through contests of social power.

Whoever occupies the pulpit, holds the megaphone, prints the tract, edits the newspaper, it is they who determine which quotations to cherry-pick to define the person of whom they speak. This kind of exegesis is even more powerful when applied to living persons than to texts because nearly everyone has said embarrassing things the internet can find. People will go along with these exegete-bullies not just because they confirm a simple and facile worldview, in which their followers are the Sons of Light, blameless for the ills of the world, but because they feel a need to remain in the good graces of these folks, out of fear their gaze will be turned to their imperfections, sinfulness, darkness.

There is no way to solve a debate between fundamentalists over whether the Levitical commandment to kill homosexuals or Jesus’ commandment to love everyone is the true meaning, the true essence of the Bible’s teachings. When you premise your argument on inerrancy and complete self-consistency of your source, there is only one way to resolve such a dispute: shouting the other side down through repetition and belligerence.

Consequently, you cannot convince progressives who repeatedly bang on about some youthful utterance by Kirk or insist on quoting the first half of his explanation of the difference between empathy, sympathy and compassion and refuse to read, quote or understand the second half. They are fundamentalists; they have proof-texted Kirk and because they can find or make half a dozen troubling quotes since his late teens, they know he is one of the Sons of Darkness. And part of their motivation for labeling him as such is their certain if subconscious knowledge that, if they contest this opinion, their past comments, stands and affiliations will come under scrutiny and, given enough scrutiny in the age of the internet, anyone can and will be revealed as a Son of Darkness.

While we often focus on political issues when we examine the partition of our societies into separate progressive and conservative social spaces, the reality is that much of our social churn is not governed by ballot box issues but by how we interact socially. The strongest appeal of conservatism is not its political ideas; it is the fact that day-to-day life in conservative society is less frightening. The rules of etiquette are easier to understand, easier to follow and change less frequently; one’s friendships are more secure, less stressful and longer lasting; and one feels less frightened and intimidated in social interactions.

Of course, this has not always been true or even true for that long. But that is the other key difference: progressives believe conservative culture has a permanent, unalterable essence, that whatever conservatives believed, however they acted during Ronald Reagan’s first term is how they are today and how they always will be until the end of time.

And they will proof-text to prove it!

Basically, Interstellar is an okay movie, as far as it goes. But its exploration of themes of parent-child attachment and loss through non-sequential, disordered time was, in all ways, surpassed by Arrival (2016), which centres a mother rather than a father and, in some ways, functions as a rebuttal to Interstellar. If you want to see a movie about parental love unstuck in time, download Arrival and skip Interstellar. Every contradiction that Interstellar elides or avoids is confronted head-on in Arrival.

The reason I am reviewing Interstellar today has nothing to do with its central storyline but instead has to do with the subplot built around the uncredited and totally unexpected appearance of Matt Damon in the third act of the film.

At that point in the movie, the main characters must undertake a profoundly risky mission to find a planet to which the human race can escape and resettle from a dying earth. A previous set of volunteers, known as the Lazarus Expedition, has been sent through a wormhole to find a habitable planet on the other side. The Lazarus crew has split up, intentionally, each scouting one potential planet, despite the probability that the planet each one scouted was unlikely to be fit for human habitation and the fact that they would be unable to return, even if they survived landing and scouting, unless the planet was chosen as humanity’s final destination.

Upon passing through the wormhole, the crew discover that three of the twelve members of the Lazarus Expedition had reported landing on habitable planets. On the first planet, they discover only wreckage from the arrival and a hostile water world, where one member of the expedition is killed.

Increasingly short of fuel and time (time is proceeding faster for the expedition than those they left behind on earth), they then head to the next planet that has received a favourable report but discover a frozen globe with a rough, inhospitable surface beneath the ice. To their surprise, upon landing, they meet the lone explorer (played by Matt Damon) who had placed himself in cryo-sleep in the hopes of rescue after spending years scouting the surface and making his reports.

He persuades them that, while the planet may look bad, overall, there are small enclaves, pockets of habitability, to which he purports to lead them, before ambushing, assaulting and leaving them for dead. His reason, he explains, is that while he was ready to make this expedition and put his life on the line, to risk all to save humanity, the prospect of endless loneliness followed by death was too much for him—as it would be for anyone—he lectures them, before his plan backfires and he dies.

Having lived through neo-McCarthyism, through neoliberal Zersetzung, this performance struck a deep chord with me. Damon’s character had exactly the worst amount of courage for a person to have. Had he lacked the moral courage to undertake the mission, the physical courage to complete his survey, the tactical courage necessary to entrap and murder his compatriots, he could not have placed the human race within a hair’s breadth of extinction. A man of lesser courage would never have undertaken the mission in the first place; once along on a far-away planet, a man of less courage might have walked into the snow and let it take his life; upon arrival of his potential rescuers, he might have lost his nerve and not had the nerve to overpower and murder those who arrived.

Those who have hurt me most in the past five years were those who assured me that they had the courage to stand with me against the authoritarians but for whom the challenge proved too much and who betrayed me more unexpectedly and at closer quarters than a person with less courage would have.

The Benedict Arnolds of human history hold a special place of infamy not because they were cowards at heart but because they were courageous people too proud to imagine that their courage could fail them.

The Third Mile
The other work mentioned in the title of this piece is Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novel, The Riddle of the Third Mile, which refers not merely to the Biblical passage Matthew 5:41 but its rendering in the most poetic of English Bible translations, the King James Version (KJV). The New Revised Standard Version, similarly to other translations preferred by academics, as the most textually accurate, says “and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile,” an unambiguous take as to how far one must go if compelled to walk a mile, the KJV, like subsequent translations steeped in the tradition of that text, is more ambiguous, “and whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain,” or, per the New American Standard Bible (NASB), “whoever forces you to go a mile, go with him two.”

In the NRSV, it is clear that one must walk two miles, the first one compelled, the second voluntary. But the wording of the KJV, NASB is more ambiguous: is one walking two miles or three? Is God commanding that we walk a third mile?

In the 1983 mystery novel—and here come more spoilers; you’ve had forty-two years to read it—it is discovered that the criminal mastermind behind the elaborate series of murders and humiliations is, himself, dying of a brain tumour and that he struggles until he draws his very last breath to complete his scheme, to bring his vision to life, falling short my just a hair’s breadth, as he collapses in the street.

One must also wonder whether Lord of the Rings might have, among many other things, been a commentary on the idea of the Third Mile, organized, as it is, into a tripartite story of a man, Frodo the Hobbit, compelled to walk hundreds of miles, carrying an unbearable burden. Because, in the end, Frodo’s own will fails; his companion Sam’s strength fails and it is only by God’s grace, through the exercise of mercy in the refusal to kill Gollum earlier in the story, that the journey is completed and evil is vanquished.

There are many complex reasons that I accepted baptism this Sunday at church but the Riddle of the Third Mile, one to which my church’s Bible attests, is among them. During the five years since my cancelation and the twelve discrete, separable cancelation campaigns I have endured in those sixty months, those who have consistently done the most harm to me have not been the most craven of my former friends and comrades but those whose courage took them just far enough, just close enough to me for their betrayal to cause unexpected and crippling injury, those with exactly the wrong amount of courage.

Today, my efforts to start a new life and career are under most strenuous and intense attack by just such a person, someone whose courage failed, causing me much injury and sadness, someone so ashamed that I witnessed their failure of courage that they cannot accept my forgiveness but instead seek to destroy the evidence that they collapsed in the Third Mile.

And, like Damon’s character, and most who fail in the last mile, their shame is hidden from them by their pride. Because it is not so much that those with the wrong amount of courage are simply less courageous; their courage, whatever the amount with which they have been endowed, is something of which they are proud, in which they feel confident. It is their very certainty that they are courageous, honourable people that permits their courage to fail; their lack of vigilance, their lack of doubt allows their cowardice to ambush them, often, itself, disguised as courage.

This is what we see in the final soliloquy from the explorer whose courage failed, a pride, a smugness, a sense that, even at his moment of the most abject failure of his courage, he partakes of a greater courage, a greater wisdom, a greater realism that his audience have simply failed to achieve. Sins are best hidden under one another, and it is through pride that cowardice can disguise itself as courage.

The central generative paradox on which Christianity rests is that it calls us to greater strength by foregrounding our weakness. Those with the wrong amount of courage, those who become vendus, traitors and apostates do so because are too certain of their courage, too convinced that whatever their decision or action, it must be grounded in courage, just a courage that is... more intelligent... more pragmatic... more goal-focused, not one that is insufficient.

I am very tired. I will make it through this last mile not by denying my exhaustion, my fear, my sense of despair but by being vigilant about and repentant of those things, by acknowledging that my courage, just like every other unassisted person’s could, and will inevitably, fail. Whether you prefer to think of things in terms of God or in terms of the Christian community I have joined, I know that, by myself, I am not strong enough to go on to the end without the help of something bigger than I am, something more than and outside of myself and it is with that knowledge and that support that I hope I can complete what is before me.

Normally, in medicine, women get short shrift. Medications are less likely to be adequately tested on them in part because of social factors but also because of biological factors associated with the monthly cycle of changes pre-menopausal female bodies undergo and the biological “resets” women experience from pregnancy and menopause, enabling what are typically lifelong chronic conditions in male bodies to suddenly appear or disappear, like schizoaffective disorder and fibromyalgia. Situated in a patriarchal society, medicines and treatments for women are, overall, deprioritized relative to men. But I would argue that drug addiction, I would argue, is a striking exception to this overall pattern.

First, we must consider the fact that it is much rarer for women, especially young women, to develop drug addictions if they have not experienced trauma, often in the form of sexual or domestic violence. Given that the social workers, nurses and other carers on the front lines of this struggle tend to over-represent women, especially young women, Mate’s theory of trauma-driven addiction rings true because these carers’ lifeworld confirms that. The young woman in the friend circle who ends up in a life of addiction typically is someone who was interfered with sexually or a refugee from a relationship with a violent drunk. There are not a lot of young women living lives of addiction who are not traumatized.

But among males living lives of addiction there is a much greater diversity of etiology and some of it baked right into the young male brain. Until five seconds ago, when political correctness and sex denialism really took off, we all recognized that it was in the nature of young men to engage in dopaminergic, high-risk activities. Unless they are real emotional outliers, as I was, or constrained by profound social pressures, young men absolutely love risking their lives or at least feeling like they are.

Off-roading, dirt-biking, bungee jumping, drag racing: young men love these activities in ways the rest of us just don’t. Older men tend to like these things more than women do but by no means as much as young men do. And for much of human history, this has been embedded in the labour system, sending young men out to do deep sea fishing, whaling, logging, raiding and, of course, war.

There are obvious evolutionary reasons for this that need not be belaboured. They should just be obvious. Human reproductive rates are not affected by the large-scale mortality of young men in the way they are by female mortality. Societies need high-energy, competitive, dispensable individuals to do most of their inter- and intra-species violence. So much the better if those folks have a natural attraction and inclination towards such activities.

But our society is so gripped by safetyism that we make laws, administer drugs and alter social norms to inhibit young men’s attraction to dangerous, exciting activities. Except one: hard drugs. Smoking crack, smoking meth—these things check the same boxes; they’re just way more unhealthy and antisocial and yet, mysteriously, they are the main loophole young men have for escaping a society trying to wrap them in bubble wrap and Velcro. Young men sleeping rough is bad conduct we must punish them for unless they are doing so because they are drug addicts.

Our society’s social policies, if one didn’t know better, would almost seem designed to channel as many young men as possible into drug addiction.

Addiction and Fetishization
Then there is the matter of male sexuality. Not only do communities structured around addiction permit, as a result of their members’ states disinhibition and/or euphoria, more casual sex, more weird sex, more fetish indulgence and more and cheaper prostitution; they also have the capacity, by virtue of simple membership to indulge certain fetishes.

Men who fetishize sex with unconscious people, with people who are unwilling or unable to consent to sex—these men naturally gravitate towards communities of addiction, as do homosexual men who might be otherwise too inhibited or ashamed to have sex with other males otherwise. Also, as BC public schools breathlessly inform children as young as ten, sex on meth is cool because you can have sex continually for literally days.

And then there is a growing demographic within young men: males who have cultivated a humiliation fetish. Our society has gone the extra mile to encourage and promote male humiliation fetishes. Just ask the key trans identified males leading the genderwang movement. People like the Wachowski Brothers proudly inform us that a genre of pornography actively pushed through algorithm on free streaming porn services called “sissy porn,” helped them to embrace a transgender identity.

Sissy porn is premised on the idea that it is sexually arousing for men to be seen by others as abject and subhuman in a sexualized way. Its videos often have voiceovers saying things like “you are just a hole,” or “you are livestock” and feature men with prosthetic breasts and other feminizing cosmetic changes in sexual situations that are humiliating and reinforce their abject state.

Because of the enormous amount of state and corporate power behind the promotion of humiliation fetishes, even behind our school system to the service of the pharmaceutical and porn industries, an increasing portion of young males are being made to find the idea of appearing in public in a degraded or confused state, half-naked and engaging in humiliating activities like begging or defecating in the street sexually arousing and are sexualizing addiction.

“It’s the same whether you’re breaking the law or not. Profit capital supply and command” -- Ricky from Trailer Park Boys
At the end of the day, though, our society’s drug problem is predicted and described by the most basic Economics 101 foundational theory of microeconomics: the pricing mechanism or, as it is sometimes called, the Law of Supply and Demand.

As any first year economics student will tell you, if you increase the supply of a good, with aggregate demand steady, two things will happen: the price of the good, per unit, will fall, and the total amount of the good purchased and consumed will increase. But, especially, in a peripheral commodity economy like BC’s the Law of Supply and Demand is understood to apply to everything except whatever we think is really important right now. So, people will assert that this law applies to everything but housing, everything but natural gas, everything but drugs. But it actually applies across the board.

If you increase the world’s supply of natural gas, natural gas gets cheaper. And so does coal. And because they are cheaper and more abundant more total fossil fuels will be burned. If natural gas makes coal cheaper and some people switch from burning natural gas to coal, coal will get cheaper and more plentiful and more people will burn it. That’s what we see every day.

Now, imagine that instead of trying to make a profit on our natural gas, we gave it away for free. This would only magnify the effect I am describing. And that is what “safe supply” is. It is like we are running a restaurant and start giving free desserts to all patrons and then being surprised that total dessert consumption is increasing, that some people who didn’t order a dessert are now eating their free desserts and many who had already ordered dessert are eating two desserts or, heaven forbid, some people are collecting all the unused free desserts at their table and eating three or four.

We are flooding the market with drugs, increasing supply, dropping prices and acting surprised that more drugs are being consumed. When I was questioned by supporters of the current policy in Nanaimo last year, one of them said: “but these drugs are substitutes for illicit drugs.” My response: “you know what a cocaine addict wants after they burn through a gram of coke? Another gram. And all we have done is reduce the price and increase the availability of the next gram.”

Of course, “safe supply” drugs are not really free. We buy them, through our government, from the pharmaceutical industry, an industry that turns vulnerable people’s ill health and addiction into shareholder profits and dividends.