Quotulatiousness

March 11, 2024

The ever-increasing risk that they’ll destroy the US political system to “save our democracy”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman outlines not only the threat of a re-elected Donald Trump, but the threat of what his opponents are clearly willing to do to stop him:

    I’ve run into a surprising number of progressives who apparently genuinely believe that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, that will be the last free and fair election that America ever has. These people believe that if Trump wins, then by the 2026 midterms, if not by the 2025 gubernatorial elections, Trump and his acolytes will have figured out a way to rig the elections, or disenfranchise large number of Democrats, or hack the voting machines, or some other nefarious plot that will end self-government. The irony is that these people are the mirror image of the Trump fans who insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats (or the Deep State, or whomever) rigged the elections, hacked the voting machines, etc. (Jim Geraghty in National Review, “A Reality Check on the Trump-as-Dictator Prophecies“)

Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator. Having won the election and become president, he did very little with his power. The most important thing he accomplished was getting three conservatives onto the Supreme Court, something that a more conventional Republican could probably have done as well.

He did, however, succeed in scaring the center left establishment, parts of the conservative establishment as well. He had no respect for the political, academic, media elite, for Hilary Clinton, Harvard professors, the New York Times or National Review. He was an outsider in a sense in which previous Republican presidents were not, with enough political support to raise the frightening possibility of a government, nation, world no longer going in what they saw as the right direction.

Responses included:

Russiagate, the attempt to claim that Trump was a Russian asset.

The attempt to discredit the information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included a bunch of former intelligence leaders implying, on no evidence, that it was a Russian plant, Twitter blocking links to the New York Post‘s article on the laptop.

After the 2020 election, with the federal government back in Democratic hands, attacks have mostly involved weaponizing the legal system to punish Trump and his supporters. The strongest of the cases against him, for deliberately holding classified documents after the end of his term, clearly illegal, looked less unbiased after it became clear that Biden had knowingly retained classified documents from his time as Vice President and knowingly revealed them (although, unlike Trump, he returned the documents once his retention of them became public) and was not being prosecuted. The weakest of the cases was a prosecution for an offense, falsifying business records, on which the statute of limitations had run — on the grounds that the expenditure being concealed had been intended to protect his image and so counted as a falsified campaign expenditure on which the statute had not run. That and prosecuting him for optimistic claims for the value of properties used as collateral for loans — all of which were repaid in full — and finding him liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages were based not on legal necessity but on the predictable bias of a judge or jury in New York City, where the 2020 electorate voted against Trump by more than three to one.

My previous post described a tactic by which, if Trump won the 2024 election, Democrats might have tried to prevent him from taking office. The recent Supreme Court decision makes that particular tactic unworkable but it is clear from the Atlantic article published before that decision that some Democratic politicians were willing to take the idea seriously. Arguable the three liberal justices took it seriously enough to object to the majority preventing it, although there are other possible explanations of their dissent from that part of the decision. The Colorado Supreme Court took seriously, indeed endorsed, the idea of defeating Trump by keeping him off the ballot. It is far from clear that if there is another opportunity to defeat Trump’s campaign in the courts instead of the voting booth it will not be taken. If, after all, the survival of American democracy is at stake …

Trump has been charged with both federal and state offenses. If he wins the election he can use the pardon power to free himself from conviction for a federal offense but not a state offence. James Curley spent five months of his term as mayor of Boston in prison for mail fraud, until President Truman commuted his sentence. Georgia’s Republican governor does not have the power to give pardons even if he wanted to; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles does but only after a convicted felon has served five years of his term. The governor of New York has the pardon power but is a Democrat unlikely to use it on Trump’s behalf. If Trump wins the election but loses at least one of the state criminal cases, does the state get to lock up the President?

Suppose that, despite any legal tactics of the opposition, Trump ends up in the White House, in control of both the federal legal apparatus and, through his supporters, those of multiple states. After the repeated use of lawfare against him by his opponents it is hard to imagine Trump refraining from responding in kind or his supporters expecting him to.

March 2, 2024

Get your new election narratives! Hot off the press!

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray isn’t impressed with two new political books hitting the bookstores at the moment:

It’s an election year, so get ready. Two astonishingly dullwitted books arrived in bookstores this week, on the same day, as their dreadful authors hit the airwaves to promote them. One was White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, about the breathtaking stupidity and backwardness of rural whites, who are destroying America. Taking care to be subtle, the publisher gave the book a cover that features a pick-up truck with an American flag and a Trump sign, leaving out only the weird kid with the banjo and the dude who shouts, “Squeal, boy! Squeal like a pig!”

And then there’s the wonderfully nuanced title Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, by Obama-era US Attorney Barbara McQuade, who is now a law school professor after being asked to resign by Orange Hitler — though apparently a law school professor who is unfamiliar with the text of the 6th Amendment, thinking it exists to confer a right upon the public to have people put on trial right away.

[…]

The cover of McQuade’s book is somehow more obnoxious than the cover of White Rage:

See, it’s a giant clenched fist rising out of Middle America. Get it? Get it? It may take a moment.

These books: If, one day, by some bizarre chain of weird accidents, these are the only remnants of our civilization, no one will have the slightest idea what actually happened while we were alive. They’re miscategorized fiction. Every paragraph is full of obtuse faked reality; if you hold it up to the real world, it doesn’t even sort of match. Go click on the Amazon preview for McQuade’s book, if you’d like to see this for yourself […]

Onward: “Much of the American right glamorizes assault weapons, based on the absurd claim that the Second Amendment protects not only the right to bear arms but also the right to overthrow our government.”

My goodness, where would anyone get the claim that a founding-era American document meant to describe citizens as having a right to overthrow their government?

The Declaration of Independence, the literal founding statement of the nation that gave McQuade a government job:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson thought Americans had a right to “throw off” their government; Barbara McQuade finds it an “absurd claim”. Which one do you think understood the topic?

February 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau is his own Messiah

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson gets up a full head of steam (to borrow Matt Gurney’s phrase) over the Prime Minstrel’s brief visit to Alberta and what he revealed about his worldview and his sense of his own importance in an interview with a non-mainstream journalist:

Watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau give an extended interview to Alberta’s Ryan Jespersen is the first time I’ve ever felt visceral concern about the man leading this country.

I genuinely don’t mean this in any mean or partisan sense. What I mean is that this interview raised serious concerns about Trudeau’s headspace, his judgment, and whether or not this man in particular should be leading the country right now.

The interview wasn’t a disaster: Trudeau brought up fair points that deserve more consideration in Alberta, and I will discuss them here.

But on the whole, what I see here is a man who has wildly inflated his own policy achievements while in office. What I see is a man who cannot accept responsibility for his shortcomings, nor for the real decline in both state capacity and quality of life now affecting Canadians. What I see is a man who won’t take accountability for his own unpopularity.

And, most concerning, what I see is a man who thinks of himself as a messianic figure; a man blind to his own partisan ideology and bad behaviour, but hyper attuned to the same in others. A man who divides the world between black hats and white, and cannot admit the possibility of a legitimate alternative viewpoint — and can, in fact, only explain the very existence of such viewpoints by resorting to the belief that all of his critics have been fooled. Fooled. A word he uses over and over and over again, without realizing the contempt this word betrays of his own feelings toward his audience.

This is a prime minister who cannot see the beam in his own eye; who exemplifies the trait — best summed up by National Post columnist Chris Selley and cited often here at The Line — that Liberals are the sort of people who are sincerely convinced they would never do the sorts of things they routinely do, or are in fact currently doing.

Let’s start with the quotes.

Trudeau starts out by noting that right-wing politicians create wedge issues. “A lot of what the right is doing is about stoking up anger without offering any solutions.” And insisting that right-wing politicians have “realized it’s easy to instrumentalize anger and outrage to get people to vote in a way that is not necessarily in their best interests”.

The last two elections called, Mr. Trudeau. They would like to discuss guns, abortion, vaccine mandates, and pretty much every single other ballot question the Liberals have abused to squeak out minority victories by maximizing vote efficiency in crucial central Canadian ridings.

Of course, it doesn’t count when Liberals court disinformation, or stoke irrational fear about their opponents, because when they do it, they have Canadians’ best interests at heart. They’re the good people, you see.

For when you’re on the side of the angels, on a mission to preserve democracy itself from the manipulative wiles of right-wing politicians out to fool people from holding wrong opinions, what means are not justified?

I would also point out that in the same way that it would be insulting and inappropriate for me to delegitimize Trudeau’s authority by arguing that he obtained two weak majorities by fooling Canadians via manufactured outrage on wedge issues, so too is he required to show some deference to the will of the voters of Alberta. One does not have to agree with everything Premier Danielle Smith does or says or proposes to demonstrate respect for the fact that she is the elected leader of the province, a role she secured in a free and fair election. But, alas.

Donna LaFramboise also reacted to the Ryan Jesperson’s interview of Justin Trudeau, saying that he’s like the Borg from Star Trek:

While visiting Alberta this week, Justin Trudeau was interviewed live by Ryan Jespersen, a former Edmonton morning show host whose podcasts are available on YouTube and elsewhere. That’s when our Prime Minister said the following:

    There is, out there, a deliberate undermining of mainstream media. There are the conspiracy theorists, there are the social media drivers who are trying to do everything they can to … prevent people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts — the way CBC and CTV, when they were our only sources of news (and Global) used to project across the country at least a common understanding of things.

Screen capture from a YouTube compilation – “The Borg Collective Speaks”

Mr Trudeau referred to “people on the fringes” who eschew the “mainstream view”. He said his government’s trying to “make sure Canadians understand the importance of not being fooled by misinformation, by disinformation”. Earlier in the interview, he said Albertans were being “fooled by right-wing politicians” and that oil sands workers have “been fooled” by energy companies.

Mr Trudeau is the Borg from Star Trek. He doesn’t respect alternative views. He has zero interest in listening or negotiating. If your analysis conflicts with his, you’re the problem. Renounce the fringe. Fall into line like the other Borg drones. Adopt the common understanding of things being fed to you by the government funded mainstream media.

February 22, 2024

Trump’s crude, threatening rhetoric on NATO’s cheapskates is … right

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé joins all right-thinking people in condemning Donald Trump’s campaign trail threats to not defend NATO’s freeloaders if they’re attacked by, say, Vladimir Putin:

Donald Trump recently called into question the core principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As a collective defence alliance, NATO operates on the principle that an attack against one member is an attack against all. This principle is enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO agreement. Although Article 5 allows each ally to respond as they see fit, there’s an understanding that allies have an obligation to defend each other.

On the campaign trail, Trump declared that, if elected, he wouldn’t defend NATO allies if they’ve failed to spend two per cent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence. Not only that, he said he’d encourage Russia to attack these allies. As Trump reiterated last week: “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect, okay?” These comments raised serious concerns within NATO. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, warned that Trump is striking at the underlying logic of the alliance. The Secretary General stressed that “We should not undermine the credibility of NATO’s deterrent”.

What should we make of Trump’s threat? On the one hand, it’s clearly dangerous and evidence that a second Trump presidency could shake the foundations of the alliance. We should rightly be worried and condemn such reckless rhetoric. On the other hand, this is classic Trump. His approach to international politics can best be understood as “mobster diplomacy”. He demands personal loyalty as the head of the “family” of Western liberal democracies. When it comes to trade deals, he echoes Don Corleone in making offers that partners can’t refuse. As for alliances, he sees them as a protection racket. When it comes to NATO allies, his message is simple and direct: “Nice country you have there … pity if something happened to it”.

Allied leaders and academics can protest that the two per cent target isn’t a payment to the United States; it’s a measure of the relative amount allies spend on their own militaries, not a fee they owe Washington. While true, it’s a waste of breath to point this out. Trump and his supporters don’t care. They see most allies as freeloaders who’ve been coasting on American military power for too long. And you know what? They’re not wrong. That’s the rub for those who are understandably horrified by Trump’s comments. Far too many NATO allies, including Canada, have been content let the United States carry a heavy defence spending burden, while we focus on other priorities. That’s what Trump is ultimately getting at here, however menacingly.

Canada has been particularly unwilling to pay its agreed share, actually cutting the military budget late last year while many of our European allies were increasing theirs. We’re habitually the ones who slip out of the room when it’s our turn to buy a round, militarily speaking.

February 15, 2024

Tune in for the propaganda, stay tuned for the epic meltdowns

Filed under: Europe, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Are you old enough to remember when “news” in the legacy media was, well, calmly presented factoids (accurate or not) that might get you upset, but the emotional content wasn’t heightened or enacted by the hairspray heads in front of the camera? Those days are long enough past that they might never have happened, as Chris Bray illustrates:

Spend a minute of your life looking at a chart that shows how much countries spend on their militaries as a percentage of GDP. The US spends about 3.5%, while Germany spends about 1.4%. For years, hawks have argued that the US should spend 4% of GDP on defense, in a well-known debate about reasonable funding for security. NATO members commit to a target of 2% or better, and many don’t make that goal. Donald Trump says he told the leaders of NATO countries that they should make or beat their military spending targets to ensure their own security, and as a negotiating ploy he poked at them and said that he wouldn’t bother to defend people who wouldn’t bother to pay for their own defense.

You can agree with his argument or disagree with his argument, and make whatever argument you want about the carefulness or recklessness of Trump’s rhetorical style, but none of this is obscure.

And so now we’re living through an ORANGE MAN LITERALLY HITLER CRISIS, as Orange Satan Drumpf tells the Putin Devil to absolutely MURDER all the Europeans and the world teeters in agony at the very brink of a harvest of slaughter. Here, let Forbes just give you the news, straight and factual and to-the-point:

THE MEAN MAN SAYING FOR THE PUTIN DEVIL TO MURDER ALL THE LITTLE BABIES professional journalists calmly explain, absolutely biting through the rubber nipple on their pacifiers. Sackcloth, ashes, endlessly refillable SSRI prescription: journalist starter kit.

In the car a few minutes ago, I turned on the radio mid-interview to hear a hysterical NPR anchor begging a European pundit to agree that Trump is a vicious monster, and the European — I missed his name — sighed and said that look, this is a debate that we’ve been having for a while, it’s a pretty normal discussion. BUT DON’T YOU THINK HE’S AN ORANGE MURDER DEVIL!?!?!? Then they played an important clip of Slow Joe Biden slurring and fake-shouting about Trump’s un-American cruelty, sounding almost as angry as he was when he talked about how many actual chips they put in the potato chip bags. This is why I listen to NPR in short bursts, like a gun run from an A-10. Brrrrrrrrrt, and off.

But what’s inescapable about this extremely dull moment, yet again, is that an allegedly elite layer of political, academic, and media figures are taking something routine and willfully inflating it into a five-alarm global crisis. It … must be a day ending in -y? Nothing is ever bad, or disagreeable, or arguable; every event is The Absolute Worst. Every development must be discussed in hyperemotional terms; every objectionable act is devastating, terrifying, destructive, ruinous, treasonous, unforgivable. No one disagrees with us; rather, they are ENEMIES OF EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR!!!!!

February 12, 2024

Find Me The Votes

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson has a giggle while reading through Find Me The Votes by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, which presents the other side of the narrative about Bad Orange Man trying to steal the election in Georgia in 2020:

I admit I giggled all the way through the research of this, breaking out in helpless laughter by the end, hoping that I wasn’t going completely mad. First it was the book, Find Me The Votes, written by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, about the Crazed Crackers who think the Georgia election was stolen and the Noble Black Woman who was putting things to right.

I persisted in calling the book in my head, The Ballad of Fani Willis, and kept waiting for the melody and lyrics, but I am not a musician and only the title came. Annoyingly, on repeat.

Isikoff, most remembered for writing for Newsweek when it was respectable, and others when they were respectable, is now head of Yahoo News, and has gone completely bonkers with Trump Derangement Syndrome. His associate in This Noble Task wrote, I believe, the first third which was all about the Noble Black Woman and her Noble Career and her Noble Father who was an entirely nice and not-murderous-at-all Black Panther, and how she felt that the massive uptick in violent crime in Atlanta should not take precedence over fighting the Crazed Crackers whose Awful Leader was Donald Trump. Fani gets the full-on-dripping-sentimentality treatment invented by Bill Clinton, her nobility and hard work, and wonderfulness and Godliness percolates all the way through it. I love how complete atheists like Isikoff like to work the God angle thinking that evangelicals will fall under his dark spell. Yeah, it just makes you look sleazy, buddy.

Willis thought her RICO case was her ticket to the Big Show. The White House. The First Noble Black Woman President of the United States of America. Apparently the Georgia Senate gathered the same and charged her with 23 Articles of Impeachment, mostly having to do with using said RICO case for her political career, not to mention paying the inexperienced, still-married, lover-lover $625,000 over 18 months. Charged with “the misuse of her office for political gains rather than the pursuit of justice”, this really needs a western ballad, with a zydeco vibe.

The second part introduced me to Trump Derangement Syndrome, which I mostly have managed to avoid. God in heaven this is awful stuff, purely hate-fueled madness. This part was written by Isikoff and I’d bet a million bucks he was drunk or on edibles all through it. In my opinion. Anyway, he trots out the usual villains and their wild accusations NONE OF WHICH HAVE ANY MERIT WHATSOEVER. THE ELECTION WAS NOT STOLEN. THIS IS ALL RIGHT WING GARBAGE. Even Rudy Guiliani who shut down the Mafia plaguing New York and managed New York through 9/11 is treated with zero respect and a lot of hateful mockery that anyone on the right is not allowed to use because hate, but lefties can express virulent hate all day with impunity.

QotD: The Golden Rule of Canadian Politics

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

But we forgot the golden rule of all Canadian politics: The voter will demand all manner of lofty principles from his government, provided he never has to sacrifice or pay for it in any noticeable way whatsoever. Name any popular high-minded pursuit of government — from stream rehabilitation to famine relief — and it all comes crashing down tomorrow if you start making it an itemized charge on everyone’s utility bill.

Tristin Hopper, “‘Stick a fork in me; I’m done’: Inside the thoughts of the carbon tax”, National Post, 2023-11-11.

February 11, 2024

To “protect our democracy”, we’re only going to have one name on the ballots

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray chronicles the efforts of the brave men, women, and the other 57 genders to protect our democracy by keeping would-be dictators, wreckers, and looters off the ballot in as many states as possible (perhaps all 57 if things go well):

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

As Democrats try to force Donald Trump off the ballot, and Democratic prosecutors charge him with crimes, they’ve also just opened an effort to keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. off the ballot with a complaint that could lead to civil penalties, an injunction against signature-gathering activity for ballot access, and criminal charges. You see where this is going.

The Democratic National Committee has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against Kennedy., alleging violations of federal campaign finance law. The complaint also names the Kennedy campaign and a PAC, American Values 2024, alleging that the PAC and the campaign are illegally coordinating campaign activities. You can read that complaint by clicking here, or by opening the PDF file below:

The heart of the complaint is on pg. 2 (footnotes removed, but available at the link or in the PDF):

    American Values 2024 has stated it will spend approximately $15 million to assist Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to earn a place on the ballot in the states in which it is most difficult for Mr. Kennedy to achieve that goal, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, West Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas. American Values 2024 will do this by collecting signature petitions in each state to assist Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to qualify for a place on the ballot.

    In all the states in which American Values 2024 has announced it will assist Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to get on the ballot, state law presumes – and in most states requires – that the candidate or the campaign committee will take the steps necessary to qualify for the ballot…Put simply, to qualify for the ballot under state law, American Values 2024 must coordinate its activity with Mr. Kennedy and his campaign in a way that violates federal campaign finance laws.

The FEC has civil enforcement authority, and the DNC complaint asks the FEC to “seek such monetary, declaratory or injunctive relief as necessary to remedy these violations.”

February 3, 2024

Justin Trudeau doesn’t seem to understand why he’s losing so much support from voters

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tailing on to the previous article, here are some thoughts from The Line‘s Matt Gurney about the strengths and weaknesses of Justin Trudeau — and I despise the man, but I accept he’s a very good politician — and the odd fact that he can’t seem to grasp the reason for his ongoing fall in popularity among Canadians:

… it was a specific comment by the PM that really stayed with me. It’s this:

    … Trudeau does believe, however, that Liberals are up against something relatively new in this climate, which he calls opinion-as-identity politics.

    “I don’t think that was a feature too much of other times in politics — where what you think about something actually creates the circles and the people that you actually associate with, and it defines who you are.”

I’m going to let Tom Cruise in the delightful and little-remembered sci-fi film Oblivion convey my reaction to the PM’s comment there:

This is a statement that I’m having a hard time processing, and that I’ve been reflecting on for weeks, because there is no version of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — at least, in my understanding of the man — that is dumb enough to believe such a silly thing. Dividing ourselves into tribes identified by our opinions on stuff is exactly what human beings do, and have always done. The first monkey to get out of a tree and stand on solid ground and think to themselves, “Hey, it’s kind of cool down here,” was undoubtedly, immediately ostracized by all the other monkeys that thought that life atop the trees could not possibly ever be beaten.

And we’ve been finding new things to disagree about, and kill each other over, ever since. Which skin colour is best, which holy book contains the real guide to salvation, which ideology is the path to true human enlightenment … human beings have slaughtered each other by the millions over this stuff for as long as there have been human beings. Sure, every so often we squabble over resources. Who gets to control which oil field or prime cattle pasture and the like. But most of our nastiest fights have been over opinions about stuff. Maybe substantive matters, things like racial identity or religious affiliation, but still just opinions. And if we’re honest, some of the opinions have been pretty dumb. Not worth killing or dying over.

Hell, as I was thinking about writing this column, my young son very solemnly and seriously told me about some drama on the schoolyard he’d been part of. It turns out some kids who are normally good buddies had come to tears and almost to blows because … they liked different NFL football teams, and tensions were running high during some of the recent playoff games. I know it’s easy to dismiss this as just boys being boys, but I actually think it’s pretty useful here as an example of humans being humans. There is nothing that symbolizes the way we simian-brained weirdos approach life better than imagining a bunch of thinking, feeling people becoming emotionally overwhelmed because of a disagreement over which collection of overpaid athletic prodigies should advance while a different collection of overpaid athletic prodigies wearing another colour shirt heads home for a long break.

It’s ridiculous. But it’s us. It’s humans. Through and through. I’m a sports fan, too, and I’m well aware of the fact that sports are one of those handy things we use as a society to channel our base, primal, aggressive instincts. I get up and cheer wildly when the Leafs beat the Canadiens because it satisfies some part of my brain, and millions of other brains, that would probably otherwise result in Toronto and Montreal raiding each other for chickens. Or worse. Human beings are constantly deciding stuff and then sorting whole populations accordingly, and then getting emotionally invested in those divisions. I like it more when we channel it into sports rivalries and fights over who has the superior bagel.

How can the prime minister not understand this about us?

January 29, 2024

What’s a little imaginary evidence among Laurentian co-conspirators?

Elizabeth Nickson may be speculating a bit ahead of the situation, but it really does look as if Trudeau is facing electoral disaster (but as long as Jagmeet honours their agreement, he doesn’t have to face the voters quite yet):

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh, he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats. With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN. The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the police which proceeds to investigate.

The astroturfed outfit accused a podcaster of being a “white supremacist” and an “accelerationist”. The RCMP then provided CAHN’s “evidence” to legislators who then fed it to the subsidized media. Like a very, very good little girl, Canadian senator Paula Simons said he (the podcaster) wanted to “accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate”, during a debate in the house. None of this was found in any of the hundreds of hours of said podcast. Nevertheless, it was reported widely across the media as cold hard fact.

As in every single western democracy now staggering under unsustainable government-caused debt, the “natural ruling party” stood up for the thousands upon thousands of activist groups who besiege citizens with scare- and sob-stories meant only to increase the tax base for the Liberal elite. In recent years, to combat growing anti-government populism, elites in every western democracy have also supported political action groups meant to drive its enemies into the dirt. As reported by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, these are coordinated through the Five Eyes and gamed at the World Economic Forum, in a cross-cultural assault by the elites on the people.

In short, CAHN drove virtually 100 percent of the evidence used to invoke the Emergencies Act. All of its accusations were found to be fake, fictionalized or exaggerated, as the attached FOIA documentation demonstrated. The outfit is a typical attack dog, staffed by members of the hard left, like this character, its face: Sue Gardner. These people are sent around the Stations of the Activist Cross, acquiring credits, awards and citations, to give themselves credibility, without having creating anything of value in the real world. The marshalling of the greedy hard left by corporatists to force ideological purity upon the middle and working classes was a masterful strategy. It, and its international cadres, are entirely focused on destroying the political power of the middle and working classes by accusing them of “racism” and “hate”.

The residential school system in the historical record and in current politics

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay discusses the residential school system debate that’s likely to become one of the issues in the next federal election:

Canadians deserve to know the truth“, Pierre Poilievre told reporters earlier this week, regarding 2021 claims made — but never investigated — of unmarked graves at the Kamloops, B.C. Indian residential school. Poilievre said he was open to “a full investigation into the potential remains at Residential Schools”, wherever that may lead.

This is a bold move, taken in the full knowledge that the Liberals will put a demonizing spin on his comments, even though the Conservative leader also said that “the residential schools were an appalling abuse of power by the state and by the Church at the time”. If Poilievre feels confident to, as he put it, “stand in favour of historical accuracy” on this file, then he believes a critical mass of Canadians will support the proposal.

Trudeau’s government, by contrast, is wedded to the unquestioning, emotive approach to IRS history. From the day that First Nations announced the “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves in Kamloops, arising solely from a finding of “soil disturbances” by ground penetrating radar the Liberals sprang into supportive action. They were emboldened by an overzealous media, starting with the New York Times, which falsely claimed a “mass grave” had been found. Flags were lowered, and Trudeau issued a plangent apology for the children “whose lives were taken” at Kamloops.

Only there was no evidence of lives illicitly “taken”. To date, in spite of the government’s allocation of $7.9 million for the task, no excavation has been done at Kamloops. Excavations in other suspected sites have not turned up human remains. But the media long avoided contrarian copy. (Post columnist Terry Glavin’s May 2022 feature article on the graves in these pages broke the mainstream silence.)

Not that there wasn’t any published pushback. There was plenty, from a cadre of highly accredited scholars, investigative journalists, judges, lawyers and independent researchers, who have amongst themselves amassed probably a million hours of research into all facets of government-Indigenous relations, including the IRS. Only they appeared in non-mainstream media, such as C2C Journal, the Dorchester Review, True North, the Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Quillette and in some cases their own substacks. For their pains, most of them were labelled “deniers” by media and politicians.

Excellent articles on the IRS by these indefatigable researchers have now been compiled into a single volume, Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by historian Chris Champion, publisher of the Dorchester Review, and Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Research Group (I am an IRSRG board member).

January 28, 2024

We had to destroy the democracy to save it

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibi asks if there’s already an “electoral fix” in place, as we see more and more evidence that Joe Biden and the Democrats will stop at nothing to keep Trump — and would-be Democratic challengers — off the ballot completely:

The fix is in. To “protect democracy”, democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House”. It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy”. Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy”. Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will”.

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

    We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.

The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.

NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.

Summer, 2020. The TIP media blitz.

For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.

January 20, 2024

Looking for some kind of consistency in political commentary

In The Line, Matt Gurney notes that the reactions to a former National Post columnist seeking the nomination for the Conservatives in a 905-area seat fall into depressingly predictable patterns on partisan lines:

Anyone have a standard they can apply consistently in each of these cases? If so, should we maybe write it down or something?

Here’s my take: Each of these cases posed some problems, but none of them fatal, because I think the fear of influence peddling and favour currying actually has the flow reversed: media figures don’t skew their on-air or in-print work to seek political opportunities, but political parties absolutely actively recruit like-minded people with large media profiles.

Maybe I’m wrong. Okay. Just tell me the rule, then, and I’ll go with it.

And then, oh Lord, there’s the rest of it.

Maddeaux’s announcement was met with some, uh, interesting responses. Liberal MP Pam Damoff went right after Maddeaux over a column she’d written on gun control; Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier took umbrage with Maddeaux’s comments on bilingualism. This is fine; Maddeaux has stepped into the political arena and political attacks on her are fair game. But what was stupid was how Conservatives and their numerous social media proxies rushed to play the misogyny card.

Check out this, by long-time CPC staffer and now comms professional Laura Kurkimaki. Kurkimaki tweeted “[S]everal Liberal ministers attacked a young woman today on social media who had just announced she’s running for a @CPC_HQ nomination … Interesting, the same people who say add women change politics, feminist government, sunny ways etc. Embarrassing. Desperate.”

I hope Kurkimaki doesn’t feel picked on here; I chose her comment as a representative example of the eye-rolling array of responses for two reasons: it’s one of the less gross examples of the rush to portray Maddeaux as a victim of sexism; I’d rather not link to the dumber ones. Further, I actually mostly agree with Kurkimaki’s broader point: the Liberals do seem really rattled by Maddeaux’s announcement, and that’s interesting.

But back on topic: is Maddeaux a fair target for reasonable criticism, or does she get some kind of protected status because she’s a woman?

I vote the former! And I suspect that her Liberal critics, from cabinet ministers right on down to the #IStandWithTrudeau crowd on X, would agree. The problem, of course, is that those very same people, again from the cabinet right on down to Trudeau’s social media proxies, are probably mostly — all? — guilty of reacting with exaggerated outrage and cries of misogyny when certain other women are attacked. Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Maryam Monsef … I can tell you from personal experience that if you make even reasonable and narrow criticisms of the policies and political performance of those three women, or other prominent Liberals who tick at least one DEI box, you will be swiftly informed that you are, in fact, simply a prejudiced white man.

Oh.

Of course there is sexism in our politics. And other forms of prejudice. And social media is absolutely flooded with rank misogyny and every other disgusting societal cancer you can imagine. Freeland, Joly and Monsef have all been, and will continue to be, targeted with absolutely appalling stuff. Just as Maddeaux has been, and will continue to be. All of it is disgusting.

But for all that, some of what people have to say about these women and their professional performance will be fair, or at least reasonable, and it is incumbent on all to not fake being idiots who cannot tell these two things apart. It’s dumb when it’s Conservatives pretending that Maddeaux is being attacked because she’s a woman, it’s dumb when the Liberals do the same to protect Freeland et al, and, in what I think was the uber-example of this kind of brainrot, it was really dumb when Trudeau responded to credible reports of Chinese electoral interference in Canada, which his government had basically ignored, by lecturing everyone about anti-Asian racism.

January 17, 2024

“The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Batya Ungar-Sargon attempts to explain at least one aspect of the inexplicable-to-liberals Trump appeal for many Republican voters:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

To the surprise of no one and the dismay of the liberal commentariat class, former president Donald Trump has crushed the first GOP primary election.

Iowa, which voted twice for Barack Obama before flipping to Trump in 2016, gave Trump a decisive win Monday night. And in Iowa, as in the Republican Party and the country more generally, the class divide was the defining feature of the night.

According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin — just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many — 33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.

That’s a 30-point gap in support for Trump — and a 25-point gap for Haley. It’s the gulf separating the college-educated from the working-class, who don’t just have different candidates of choice but different concerns, different struggles, and different priorities.

Working-class Americans are worried about the economy, immigration, our foreign entanglements, and the disappearing American Dream — all issues Donald Trump not only talks about but has a solid record on. Haley represents the GOP that Trump replaced — the free-market, chamber-of-commerce, nation-building version of the party that is dominated by a donor class whose interests are completely at odds with those of the working class.

Unfortunately for Haley, her party is now the party of the working class. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.) As much as the Republican donor class wishes Haley were the party’s nominee, there’s no going back for your average corrections officer.

The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party. The average liberal feels well-represented by the Democratic Party because the Democrats’ base, like the party leadership, are college-educated elites. They share the same list of priorities. But the average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China.

Whether they realize it or not, this is why Democrats truly hate Trump. Without him, the left would soon have had a pretty permanent monopoly on power.

But if Iowa is any indication, not so soon after all.

Should Trump manage not to get thrown off the ballot (or sent to jail) by the time the election rolls around, he can’t count on Justin Trudeau for support:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says voters in the United States will face a choice later this year between optimism for the future or nostalgia for a past that never existed.

Trudeau made the comments in Montreal today to a business crowd in reference to Donald Trump’s victory Monday in the Iowa Republican caucuses, which gives the former president an early lead for the Republican nomination ahead of the November election.

The prime minister says a second Trump presidency would be difficult for the Canadian government, as there are many issues on which he and former president disagree.

On Monday, a majority of Iowa Republican supporters said they back Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Though he didn’t mention Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre by name, Trudeau said Canadians will face a similar choice to American voters when they head to the polls.

January 16, 2024

“Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray plays the “for the sake of argument” game about the Bad Orange Man:

Let’s pretend. I’m going to accept a bunch of arguments that I don’t believe, for the sake of argument, and see where they take us. For the next two minutes, it’s all true: Donald Trump is a vicious racist, an unspeakably cruel man, and the figure whose ascension to power ends American democracy and turns the country into a fascist dictatorship. All of that is perfectly obvious, for the purposes of our exercise, and only a fool or a fellow traveling fascist could pretend not to see it.

Now: If all of that is true, why can’t America stop him? A thoroughly established constitutional republic, nearing its 250th year, with a deep well of legal and political tradition and thoroughly entrenched institutions, can’t stop a vulgar Nazi thug, who keeps winning and advancing. Right? Distinguished statesmen like Joe Biden and Jerrold Nadler can’t hold the line against the death of the republic, despite their decades of accumulated wisdom. This is already making me feel like an idiot, but I’m committed.

The problem is that, if the prevailing “mainstream” argument about Donald Trump is true, it condemns all of the important political norms that Trump’s critics say they’re protecting. Immune systems that can’t stop a virulent infection are failed immune systems. If Trump is what Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney say he is, then they’ve condemned … everything else. Everything else. The emergence of a Hitler figure, the implosion of the rule of law, the collapse of political institutions, and on and on: None of that happens in a healthy country.

So if you want to argue that this is what’s happening, you must argue that America is in a state of ruin. You have no choice. No Weimar republic, no Nazis. Failure comes from failure. Hitler figures don’t arise from healthy societies.

Turning well to my left, Christopher Hedges has been making this argument for years:

    The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.

Taking off my Daily Kos hat, let’s reformulate. Donald Trump is an unusual political figure, and both his election to the presidency and his continued political importance are signs of an unusual moment. But outsider attacks on the supposed mainstream are not uncommon, and we have a long line of outsider figures who’ve played this role in various forms: William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Ross Perot. Thomas Jefferson attacked the Federalist mainstream, and the existence of the Republican Party grew from exhaustion with a broken center. A schoolhouse in Ripon was our Trump Tower, the place where people broke with the available choices. And then, you know, the Civil War, but still.

The ridiculousness of the current manufactured crisis is found precisely in the inability of existing institutions to fend off the challenge. To deliver the kind of sophisticated analysis that makes bartenders enjoy our conversations so much, it’s because our existing institutions suck. I roll my eyes at the “Orange Hitler” part, but I see the failed Weimar republic part that Trump’s critics (other than Hedges) often imply without noticing. The common refrain on social media in the face of institutional failure: “You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.” A healthy politics would already have seen off the moment, instead of deepening a completely unnecessary societal wildfire with a long series of increasingly insane overreactions: WELL LET’S ARREST HIM AND IMPRISON SOME OF HIS SUPPORTERS AND THROW HIM OFF THE BALLOT THAT SHOULD PRODUCE CALM AND RESTORE ORDER.

Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly.

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