One of the things people have always believed about modern media is that video beats audio and audio beats the written word. Before the rise of “new media” on the internet, this meant television was better than radio and radio better than newspapers. In the internet age, the assumption now is that live streamers have greater reach than podcasters and podcasters have a greater reach than bloggers. Mixed in there are people who exist only as entities on social media platforms.
One reason for this assumption is youth culture. In liberal democracy, the young are treated like gods, in the same way novel social ideas are treated as gifts from the gods, so whatever young people like is heralded as pure and beautiful. Young people, especially children, are first drawn to images, then sounds and finally as they mature into adults, the written word. In modern liberal democracies, therefore, video platforms are treated like sacred altars where our most sacred members perform.
The youth culture phenomenon has co-evolved with the rise of mass media. In the days before mass media, young people were at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy. The first flicker of youth culture in America was the jazz age, but even there the people driving it were old by modern standards. The characters in The Great Gatsby, for example, are mostly early middle-aged. It was after the war with the explosion of Hollywood that youth culture blossomed into the centerpiece of modern life.
Another reason why video maintains a privileged place at the top of our social hierarchy is Baby Boomer culture. For Boomers, for whom mass media evolved, video was always the top. In the golden age of television, for example, the whole country would watch popular television programs. No newspaper or radio broadcaster had the reach of a popular television program. Hitting the big time in the field of news or entertainment meant getting on TV or in the movies.
As much as young people, and not so young people, complain about the Baby Boom generation, the Boomers still control the culture. That is plainly obvious with the panic over the Chinese virus. If the Boomers were twenty years younger, the virus would rate a few mentions in the New York Times science section. Since Boomers are now deeply involved in the health care system, anything medical is going to be of utmost importance to everyone. It is why nurses are now heroes.
The Z Man, “Thoughts on Modern Media”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-09.
May 13, 2025
QotD: The song is correct – video did kill the radio star
May 12, 2025
Is modern fiction in any way intended to be read by a male audience?
I belong to several genre-specific groups on various social media platforms, most of which appear to be disproportionally female in membership, and I read very little new fiction of any sort these days, partly for diminished interest and largely from diminished disposable income. I’ve often seen the assertion that men no longer read much fiction, but is it actually true?
You can see here some of the challenges involved in measuring reading habits. Are we talking reading books or purchasing books? Does buying correlate to reading or are women better gift givers? What about those hugely popular 20-part, 60-page-per-instalment romance series that might ratchet up purchases by women — anything like that in the fiction market for men? Should we base assumptions about readership of literary fiction on data about readership of general fiction, as many of the articles I’ve read do?
All we can safely say is that it does seem men read somewhat less fiction than women; they also read fewer books of any kind. As a person in the book industry, I wish that weren’t so, but it may not be a cultural calamity.
The most interesting article I came across in last night’s binge was published in 2009 by the University of Saskatchewan’s Virginia Wilson in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. She undertook a small study of boys aged four through twelve, interviewing them about their reading habits. Her theoretical perspective was that if anyone was ever going to understand the reading habits of boys, they needed to recognize that the experts were the boys themselves. She quizzed forty-three of them about their book collections, what they liked and didn’t like, and their motives for reading.
Each of the boys had a personal collection of books. These ranged from eight to 398 volumes, with a median of 98. All but one of the boys had fiction in his collection. The most prominent genres were fantasy, science fiction, sports stories, and humour. The boys had no time for love stories, books about groups of girls, and such classic children’s fiction as The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Asked about their favourite books, most of the boys pointed to a non-fiction title: joke books, magic books, sports books, survival guides, science books, references, atlases, dinosaur books.
The boys also read a good deal of non-book material: comics, manga, magazines, sticker books, puzzle books, and catalogues. A number mentioned reading video game manuals, both to learn more about the games, but also to heighten their enjoyment of the narratives within the games.
The manuals were part of a bent toward pragmatic reading, something they found useful as much as pleasurable. The boys often read to support another hobby — Pokémon, for instance. They also appreciated non-linear texts and plenty of illustrations.
Interestingly, many of the boys tended to discount their own reading. They often described the informational stuff they liked—those video game manuals or computer guides or research materials for science projects—as “not really being reading”. Serious reading, in their minds, involved novels and conventional non-fiction books.
Wilson’s conclusion was that at least part of the “boys and reading problem” might come down to what counts as reading. Informational nonfiction, comic books, computer magazines, graphic novels, and role-playing game manuals were “not necessarily privileged by libraries, schools, or even by the boys themselves”.
Of course, as Wilson notes, one shouldn’t generalize too much from a small qualitative study involving forty-three boys. There’s nothing definitive to be learned here about Trump or contemporary masculinity (although I’ve read several lengthy screeds based on less).
Wilson’s paper simply reminds us that reading is complicated, and most of the available research on reading habits isn’t. Survey respondents are typically asked if they read books for leisure, or if they’ve read a book in the last year. There are many reasons to read other than for leisure. There are many things to read other than books. And not all books are equal.
I haven’t seen a study that tracks if men spend more minutes per day reading sentences than women. Or one that drills down to find who reads the most newspapers, magazines, websites, newsletters, contracts, annual reports, research papers, instruction manuals, catalogues, and cereal boxes. Each of those formats is as potentially edifying (if not as much fun) as Morning Glory Milking Farm: A Monster Bait Romance, with its 47,570 enthusiastic ratings on Goodreads.
I read so many concerns for and condemnations of contemporary males last night that it came as a surprise to learn that our most reliable measure of reading competence, the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, finds no real difference in literacy of men and women aged 16 to 64 in the US or Canada. We should all revisit that baseline before assigning responsibility for the state of civilization to whoever is or isn’t reading or buying contemporary fiction. (PIAAC did find that while Canadian literacy scores have been stable, US scores have slipped 5 percent since Trump was first elected. Make of that what you will.)
Does the men-and-fiction problem exist? I think yes, and my sense is that it’s one of both supply (what’s getting published) and demand (what men will read). I thought I’d have more than that to say. This is my kind of issue — the whole point of SHuSH is ill-considered opinion drawn from shaky evidence on a weekly timetable — but I can’t compete with what I’m reading, so I’m backing off for now.
I certainly find myself reading almost nothing that has been published recently with a few exceptions for well-researched and well-written histories and military histories. My preferred genre reading got taken over by the “jam the narrative into every story” crowd a few decades back, so I stopped buying SF and fantasy titles except those from authors I’d already read.
Hiding Sir John A. from the woke mob
Woke iconoclasm swept across the country, but the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park was hidden away inside a plywood box. James Pew catches up on the situation inside Queen’s Park Crescent:
“Free John” spray painted on the plywood boards covering the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Queen’s Park Toronto.
It’s not just historical content distorted by bad actors, it is the entire way history is thought about, taught, and used to legitimize all sorts of nefarious agendas, which forms a broader set of concerns. For instance, a Toronto man recently found himself in trouble over a meaningful act of non-destructive civil disobedience involving a monument to a beloved and needlessly contentious Canadian historical figure. Daniel Tate is an ardent patriot and founder of a civic advocacy group called IntegrityTO, who describe themselves as “a coalition of concerned citizens who want to restore integrity-driven leadership so that Toronto can be a great city once again”. In a minor act of public vandalism, and in a moment of frustration over the disrespect shown to Canada’s boxed up father of confederation, Tate spray painted “Free John” on the plywood hoarding covering the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park in Toronto. No paint touched the statue itself, just the plywood that hides it away from the public, and protects it from the angry and destructive social justice mob.
Sir John A’s Queen’s Park statue initially became the unseen centerpiece of the current unsightly plywood enclosure after an incident which took place in 2020; three radical social justice activists splashed it with pink paint. It is worth pointing out that this cherished monument to the father of confederation was first installed in 1894. And although Black Lives Matter activists Daniel Gooch, Danielle Smith, and Jenna Reid initially found themselves in hot water over their costly and disrespectful acts of public vandalism (they also painted statues of Egerton Ryerson and King Edward VII Equestrian), all charges were withdrawn in 2021. In their statement to the media the group said, “along with a coalition of artists, the group artistically disrupted statues of slaveholders and monuments to colonialism at Ryerson University and at Queen’s Park”. One would think Daniel Tate should be extended the same leniency for his “artistic disruption”.
Image of Black Lives Matter activists vandalizing the Queen’s Park statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, (via CBC)
As it stands, Tate has been criminally charged with mischief under $5000 which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Still in the preliminary stages, his next court appearance is scheduled for June 30.
Last month Tate appeared on AM 640’s The Oakley Show where he remarked, “The sad irony of it, people were defacing and vandalizing national monuments with impunity … four or five years ago. No Charges. We were all watching aghast at how this was all happening. And, it was acceptable somehow. And here I am five years later. I didn’t even deface a statue or a monument, it was literally a piece of plywood – the cheapest plywood you could find. And now I’m clogging the criminal justice system with this completely frivolous charge.”
While covering Tate’s case, independent journalist Daniel Bordman said, “This is a great example of 2-Tier policing because if he wrote Free Palestine instead he’d probably be given the key to the city”. And journalist Anthony Furey posted the following on X: “There has been so much lawlessness and disorder on Toronto streets in recent years that goes totally unchecked … But if you write FREE JOHN on a boarded up statue of Sir John A, police handcuff and arrest you on the spot – which is what happened to Daniel Tate the other week”.
This begs the question, if security was on-site to arrest Tate in the immediate moments that followed his minor spray paint transgression, why does Sir John A. need to be boxed up at all? One security guard around the clock would suffice. Does the Queen’s Park premises not already have security? It appears they keep a close eye on Sir John A’s unfortunate wooden container. So, why not free John? Beef up security a little if necessary, but let our first Prime Minister once again be visible and unadulterated in his rightful place of honour. For the sake of our blessed Holy Peter, it’s been five bloody years!
May 11, 2025
The devastating toll of Trump’s reckless plan to dismiss transgendered members of the armed forces
Chris Bray called this to our attention back in November, as President-elect Donald Trump foolishly planned to purge the US military of transgendered troops, regardless of the vast impact it was predicted to have on military readiness:
We’ll practically have no military left! It would be like a whole infantry division suddenly just vanishing: 15,000-plus transgendered service members.
You’re going to see this number a lot in the weeks ahead. The New Republic, today: “Donald Trump’s plan to ban transgender people from the military would have a devastating effect: At least 15,000 members would be forced to leave.”
That number comes from a 2018 report by the now-defunct Palm Center, a pro-LGBT independent research institute in California, which reached this conclusion: “Transgender troops make up 0.7% (seven-tenths of one percent) of the military (Active Component and Selected Reserve)”. Their best guess about a total number: 14,707. The media is just rounding that number up to the next thousand.
And … Chris Bray follows up on his November post, documenting the huge, unimaginable scale of long-term damage to US military preparedness:
As the new Trump administration prepared to issue an order forbidding transgender people to serve in the armed forces, a bunch of profoundly stupid news stories issued panicked warnings that military readiness would DEVASTATED by a giant purge of at least 15,000 transgender servicemembers, the very core of our military strength. Warplanes grounded! Ships trapped in port as all their trans sailors were tossed out! Whole artillery batteries sitting silent! […]
The removal of trans servicemembers would inflict such a ghastly crisis on the armed forces that it would take twenty years to recover our military strength! Destruction and ruin and crisis and collapse!
[…]
Now the removal of transgender troops is actually underway, and guess what?
The number is “up to” 1,000. It’s in the hundreds.
So. When — quite recently! — dozens of panicked news stories reported as fact that 15,000-plus transgender servicemembers were about to be purged, the news was frankly and nakedly a complete invention. They made it up. They sold an invented panic. The “news” was entirely fake.
Remember that, and apply that lesson widely.
May 10, 2025
“Train how you fight” – British plod edition
At Restoration, Connor Tomlinson looks at how British police forces are training and what it tells us about who they think they’ll be fighting:
Britain’s police aren’t training to stop riots—they’re preparing to crush the public.
One of the infamous quotes from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever”. He forgot to add, “on TikTok”. Last Thursday, the Metropolitan Police posted a montage of officers at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Kent, undergoing riot training. The caption read, “Bricks, bottles and fire bombs – our officers prepare for every eventuality at the Met’s elite training centre in Gravesend so they can keep you safe. Stronger tactics means safer communities.” It seems they had one specific “eventuality” in mind, as the mock rioters were wearing the Union flag. There wasn’t a keffiyeh or “Only good TERF is a dead TERF” sign in sight.
But fear not. The same Met Police who defended now-proscribed group Hizb ut-Tahrir’s demonstration after October 7th, saying “The word jihad has a number of meanings“, now insist that “The fact one of the t-shirts has a union flag on it is entirely coincidental”. Well, that’s me convinced. In fact, the Met are exhausted by your conspiracy theories, writing that “It’s disappointing we are increasingly having to challenge this sort of misinformation which only serves to increase divisions and tensions”. But the plummeting public trust in Britain’s police and justice system are of its own making. Britain’s security state is setting itself in opposition to the largely law-abiding indigenous host majority, while gaslighting them about the non-existence of a two-tier justice system that favors tribal minorities.
One might think, as Sam Bidwell suggests, the police should preoccupy themselves with preventing street conflicts not between Britain’s indigenous host and immigrant populations, but between its Indian diaspora and Pakistani enclaves. On April 22, Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 26 and injured 20 more in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Both nations cancelled the other’s visas, and are in the process of expelling foreign nationals before they expire. Pakistan has suspended all trade with and air travel from India. Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Modi has warned, “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist, their handlers and their backers, [and] we will pursue them to the ends of the earth.”
Thanks to decades of mass immigration and multiculturalism, Britain is home to powerful Indian and Pakistani ethno-political lobbies. Around 3 million Indians and 1.9 million Pakistanis live legally in the UK. They are substantially younger than the white British host population, and already brought Leicester to an ungovernable standstill in 2022 when Muslims and Hindus rioted for a month over a cricket match. Last Friday, both factions gathered outside the Pakistani Embassy in London for a mixture of a protest and a dance-off, replete with Indian, Pakistani, Israeli, and Palestinian flags. Most alarming was when Colonel Taimur Rahat of the Pakistani military appeared to make a throat-slitting gesture toward Indian protestors.
Both subcontinental factions have sympathetic politicians. They weaponize domestic antidiscrimination law to pursue foreign policy goals: for example, listing the denial of an independent Palestine and Kashmir as an example of Islamophobia, in guidance adopted by local councils. Conservative-party candidates committed to a Hindu Manifesto at the last general election, promising to further liberalize visa rules for dependents and elderly parents of Hindus already in Britain. Indian-heritage cabinet ministers, like Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak, instigated an unprecedented rise in Indian migration after Brexit. Patel described these migrants as “living bridges”, using Prime Minister Modi’s term.
May 9, 2025
They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment
N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:
The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …
As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.
In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.
In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.
In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.
One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.
In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.
In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.
In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.
But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.
Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.
But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.
It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.
The growing problem of antisemitism in Canada
In The Free Press, Casey Babb considers the growing risks to Jews on the streets of Canadian cities after the October 2024 terror attack and resulting Israeli military reaction:
“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
Late last year I sat down to breakfast in Ottawa, Ontario, with Dr. Einat Wilf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had come to Canada’s capital to speak about the war in Israel, what Palestinians really want, and the future of a possible two-state solution. Near the end of our chat, I asked if she had seen any of the “pro-Palestinian” rallies that had become a weekly occurrence in the city. “One of them went by my hotel last night,” Wilf said. “There’s a very dark energy to them. Serious pre-pogrom vibes.”
The word pogrom is the Yiddish word for “devastation” or “destruction”. What it refers to, historically, are the mob attacks that were a regular feature of life for Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries — attacks that most often were passively or openly supported by the state.
Wilf chose it deliberately.
In the roughly six months since we sat down together, the situation in Ottawa and across the country has only worsened. Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world.
If you doubt that assertion, it’s important to note that’s how others have described it, too.
In a report released on May 6 by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, it states that from October 7, 2023 through the end of 2024, antisemitism in Canada skyrocketed an astounding 670 percent. Further, between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2024, there were 1,500 pro-Palestinian rallies in Toronto alone. That’s over four a day — every day — for a year straight.
While the outbreak of antisemitism throughout the West has been precipitous in virtually every country — the tenor, violence, and extremist nature of Jew-hatred in Canada has ratcheted up in a way few other places on Earth have experienced.
Consider the following — much of which has gotten scant media attention.
Targeting Jews in Their Backyards
- In September 2024 protesters sympathetic to Hamas and the “resistance” jubilantly rallied outside a Jewish retirement facility in Ottawa where several Holocaust survivors live, and where 60 percent of the residents suffer from dementia. Chants of “Go back to Europe” and “We want bullets and missiles!” in Arabic could be heard from their bedrooms.
- On Remembrance Day in 2024 at Sir Robert Borden public school in Ottawa, where there is a large Jewish student body, a Palestinian protest song was the only song played during an event to honor Canadian soldiers. When pressed on the choice of music, Principal Aaron Hobbs said it was chosen to add some diversity and inclusion to a day usually about “a white guy who has done something related to the military”.
- There have been numerous instances where, in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, protesters have dressed up like Palestinian terrorists, including the October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
- Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protests surrounded the Holocaust Museum in Montreal in March 2024, where they shouted, “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews”.
- At a softball game for teenage girls between Canada and Israel as part of last year’s Canada Cup Women’s International Softball Championship in Surrey, British Columbia, protesters stood on the sidelines wearing keffiyehs, holding signs that read “Israel is a genocidal state”, with another equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
- In April, a pro-Hamas rally was staged in Winnipeg, just steps from a Jewish community center where children attend school and day care.
- During Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism on April 29, protesters stood in front of Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue in Toronto waving Palestinian flags. One man wore a sweater that read “Palestinian Holocaust: Never Again Is Now”.
- Earlier this month in Montreal, protesters were filmed chanting “All the Zionists are racists” through megaphones at a school for students ages 4 to 16 with intellectual disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders.
These activities aren’t normal protests. They aren’t in front of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa or the Israeli consulate in Toronto. They aren’t directed toward a specific Israeli policy, law, regulation, or act, and they certainly make no mention of Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other terrorist organization that has brought immense death and destruction upon the Palestinians. These are belligerent acts of aggression designed to intimidate Canada’s Jewish community, to coerce them into silence, and ultimately, to extinguish their public presence.
May 8, 2025
Ted Gioia is apparently “the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything“
I’ve been reading Ted Gioia‘s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he’s some kind of Bond supervillain:
Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.
Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.
Whoa! That makes me feel like a Bond villain.
I need some henchmen — any volunteers?
Ted appears to like the classic goon uniforms for his to-be-recruited legion of minions.
What an unexpected turnabout! For many years, I was known as an expert on music, especially jazz and blues.
But now I’ve taken on a new guise. I’m the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything.
I don’t sing the blues. I don’t write about the blues. I now deliver the blues.
I originally declined the interview request from The Atlantic. But their staff writer Spencer Kornhaber pushed back, insisting that I was an essential source for his article.
The subject was, he explained, a “pervasive suspicion that we’re in an era of cultural decline, especially in arts and entertainment”.
He said that I needed to be part of the story — because everybody saw me as the decline-of-culture guy.
This caught me surprise. But I thought it over. maybe this is why I don’t get invited to many parties anymore.
Dammit, Ted, we’re trying to have some fun here — and you keep droning on about the collapse of the Roman empire.
I eventually agreed to a phone conversation with Spencer, and that went well. And this led to him getting on a plane, and visiting me at home here in Austin.
To help him in his research, I laid out more than 40 books on a countertop in my library — these were essential works, I explained, for anyone studying social or cultural decline.
[At a future date, I will provide more details about these books, and share a reading list on — to quote The Atlantic — the “death of civilization”.]
But this begs the question: Is our culture really collapsing?
I spoke with Spencer for many hours about this subject. But only a few of my comments found their way into the finished article.
So today I’ll offer a fuller diagnosis for your benefit.
May 6, 2025
If “a trade imbalance constitutes an American ‘subsidy’ justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet”
Despite getting his preferred choice elected as Canadian Prime Minister, US President Donald Trump still seems determined to troll Canadians about becoming the “51st state”. Among his shifting set of justifications for this is the trade imbalance between the US and Canada, which Trump chooses to interpet as a “huge” subsidy the US is providing to Canada. On that basis, there are going to have to be a lot more US states in the future:
So now we have serious commentators gaming out the pros and cons of war with Canada. What started out as a mildly amusing bit of presidential “trolling” is now being discussed as next year’s Donbass.
If, for the purposes of argument, one accepts the President’s line that a trade imbalance constitutes an American “subsidy” justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet: last year Washington had a one-and-a-quarter trillion-dollar imbalance with the world. It’s not hard to figure out why: over recent decades the uniparty turned a country that used to make things into a crappy low-wage service economy. […] The US now has trade imbalances with — or “subsidies” of — not only the countries that you’d expect (China, Mexico, Germany, Japan, India) but a lot of ones you wouldn’t (Finland, Algeria).
True, Canada is closer than Algeria, so there are national-security implications for Washington: the country and its politicians (Trudeau, Carney) have been entirely hollowed out by Peking, but then so it goes south of the border (Biden, McConnell). And Trump’s plan for a “fifty-first state” will not solve that problem.
The “fifty-first state” shtick can’t ever have been serious, can it? Geographically, the fifty-first state would be bigger than the other fifty combined, and with a bigger population than California’s. Last time they added stars to the flag, both parties got something out of it: the GOP Alaska and the Dems Hawaii. So wouldn’t it make more sense to make Canada’s ten provinces and three territories a baker’s dozen of new American states with a couple of senators apiece? Yeah, sure – if you want Republicans never to win a national election again.
So, aside from last week’s vote, how is the other side reacting? Last Thursday’s print edition of The Spectator contained a curiously phrased squib from my old editor, Charles Moore:
The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the “honour to be a friend”, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse.
Let’s just run that again:
If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person …
The last time his mother opened Parliament in Ottawa was in 1977 — her Silver Jubilee year. Trudeau-wise, Justin’s father Pierre was not keen on it, but didn’t feel he could pick and win a fight with the Palace over it. A quarter-century later, Trudeau’s successor Jean Chrétien, a towering colossus of micro-pettiness, was annoyed at being given a crappy seat at the Queen Mum’s funeral and so scuttled Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee throne speech.
So why would Charles Moore think it “likely” that the King would be opening Parliament in Ottawa later this month? If, as it was in my day, Speccie columns for Thursday’s magazine have to be filed on Tuesday, that would make Moore the first guy in either the Canadian or UK media to know what was not revealed to the world until Friday […]
The King has travelled far less in the first three years of his reign than his mother did: shortly after her Coronation, the Queen set off on a tour of parts of the Commonwealth that kept her away from London for six months. Her son can’t do that because he’s very sick with cancer. So it’s quite something that he’ll land in Ottawa on Monday May 26th, deliver the throne speech the following day, and then fly out again. Carney wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t going to take the opportunity to put his view of Canadian sovereignty into the Sovereign’s mouth.
So, if Trump really has the “honour to be a friend” of the King, the only point of this 24-hour flying visit is so His Majesty can send the message that friends don’t let friends threaten to steal each other’s countries. In fact, he has made a point of referring to himself as “King of Canada” quite a bit of late. […] The “King of Canada” bit was done at the instigation of Carney. Which is odd. Especially from a party that has spent half-a-century diminishing and degrading the Crown, and for a monarch who is, unlike his mother, largely unloved and unloveable. Yet Carney seems belatedly to have come around to the old-school monarchist view that, without the Sovereign, there is insufficient to distinguish Canada from its domineering southern neighbour — especially when that neighbour keeps talking about taking it. On the other hand, both the King and his Canadian prime minister are bigtime players at the World Economic Forum, so they’re not the most obvious choice for defenders of national sovereignty. On the other other hand, it’s one thing to surrender it to fellow globalists, quite another to surrender it to Donald Trump.
I have no idea where this is headed, and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be happy to hear it. But Trump has doubled down on it, and Carney is playing the King card to oppose it. As longtime readers know, I have a general preference for smaller nations as happier homes for their people. If Alberta or Quebec voted to secede, why would you take the trouble to do that just to become a minor and inconsequential part of another big country?
But, that aside, why would it be in America’s interest to absorb a hostile population of mostly lefties over a vast and unpoliceable landmass? The history of the last thirty years is that China has shown there are subtler ways of taking over the world without firing a shot, while America has persisted in doing it the old-fashioned way and, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere, has gotten nowhere. Why add Canada to the list?
May 5, 2025
Post-election Bullshit Bulletin from The Line
Last week’s federal election has left us in the weird, unresolved situation of being not significantly different than the situation before the writ dropped. We still have a Liberal minority government, probably supported by the rump of the NDP caucus (minus Jagmeet Singh) and a reliable vote from the Green MP, which is enough to pass at least an initial confidence vote in the Commons. Before The Line‘s editors put the Bullshit Bulletin back into mothballs, we get a useful wrap-up post:
Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.
We want to now offer some advice to Pierre Poilievre: grow up.
Seriously. Because not calling your opponent to congratulate him is bullshit.
We don’t mean Mark Carney! We do think Poilievre should call Carney and offer congratulations and also test the waters to see what extent, if any, there is room for cooperation. We aren’t naive idealists. We know neither man is going to want to hop into the sack — politically speaking — with the other. But there are still norms in a democracy, and they should be observed. Poilievre did congratulate Carney in his remarks on election night, and did so with professionalism and grace, and that’s good.
But we’re actually talking about Bruce Fanjoy, the newly elected Liberal MP for Carleton, the riding that had been held for many years by … Pierre Poilievre. Fanjoy defeated Poilievre on Monday, and by a decisive margin. In an interview with NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto, Fanjoy said that he hadn’t received a call from Poilievre to congratulate him. Calls to the winners of a riding race by the opponents in that riding are routine. Fanjoy doesn’t seem much fazed by the lack of a call, but still. It’s not a great look.
Indeed, we might go so far as to say that not making a call will be seen as confirmation in the eyes of some voters of what they already thought about Poilievre. We aren’t the first to note that the Conservative leader is polarizing and has high “negatives” — Canadians tell pollsters that they dislike him. We understand that congratulating the guy that beat you must be like pulling your own teeth out. We also think we have a good enough read on Poilievre’s personality to know why this is particularly difficult for him.
Too bad. A would-be national leader is expected to sometimes do unpleasant things. And we’re calling about a two-minute phone call here, not making a decision to send troops into battle (some of whom will die) or a decision that will alter the trajectory of our national history.
Make the call, offer congratulations, wish him well, offer any cooperation you can, and get it over with. And if you don’t, Canadians will be right to call bullshit on that.
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte notes the oddly incurious attitude of the Canadian mainstream media toward the man who became Trudeau’s successor as PM and leader of the Liberal Party:
Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Mark Carney became prime minister of Canada in March without our media delivering a single meaningful profile of him.
There was a time, only recently ended, when every party leader and most prospective party leaders (and most senior cabinet ministers and chiefs of staff) were subjected to scrutiny the moment they were deemed serious players. A reporter, usually a high-ranking feature artist, would be assigned by Maclean’s, Saturday Night, Report on Business, The Walrus, The Globe & Mail, The National Post, a CBC documentary desk, or any number of other outlets, to dig into the person’s past, read everything on the record, speak to friends and enemies and knowledgeable observers, weigh all the evidence and craft a narrative to give readers (or audiences) a sense of what made the person tick, and some idea of how to think about him or her in relation to public office. At their best, these profiles would provide a welcome counterpoint to how political actors chose to define themselves and how they were defined by their opponents. They were an arbiter of sorts, a first draft of history depended upon by participants in the political process, other media, and the informed public.
No one bothered to profile Carney, even though his advent in our politics had been rumoured for years. It was as though the press gallery in Ottawa assumed he was a known quantity because he’d shown up at the Politics & The Pen Gala for several years in his capacity as governor of the Bank of Canada.
Carney was not only sworn in as prime minister without sustained scrutiny, he made it all the way to the last week of a national campaign before the Globe landed what read like a well-intentioned but hastily assembled and not terribly revealing profile of him. Also in the last week, The Logic, a very good upstart business news site, produced a better one, but for a relatively tiny audience behind an expensive paywall.
Thinking and reporting in depth about the careers and characters of our leaders is perhaps the most important thing that journalists do. Yet Carney’s experience is not unique. If you want to know anything about our last two prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, you won’t find much in newspapers, magazines, or documentaries. You’ll need to read the books about them: Stephen Harper by John Ibbitson, Right Side Up and The Longer I’m Prime Minister by Paul Wells, Party of One by Michael Harris; Trudeau by John Ivison, Promise and Peril by Aaron Wherry, The Prince by Stephen Maher, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes by Paul Wells. There is a whole other shelf of aggressively critical takes on the two leaders which offer valuable insights amid their axe-grinding: Tom McMillan’s Not My Party (Harper), Mel Hurtig’s The Arrogant Autocrat (Harper), Brooke Jeffrey’s Dismantling Canada (Harper), Mark Bourrie’s Kill The Messengers (Harper), Yves Engler’s The Ugly Canadian (Harper), Ezra Levant’s Libranos (Trudeau), Candice Malcolm’s Losing True North (Trudeau). Additionally, there are books by the leaders themselves, Harper’s Right Here, Right Now, and Trudeau’s Common Ground, and a range of others written about particular issues or by other participants in their governments.
The past year has brought a wealth of books on our political leadership. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes (Sutherland House) and The Prince (Simon & Schuster) chronicled the last days of Trudeau’s prime ministership. Catherine Tsalikis’s Chrystia (House of Anansi) profiled the woman who ultimately brought him down. Andrew Lawton’s Pierre Poilievre (Sutherland House) and Mark Bourrie’s Ripper (Biblioasis) treated the Conservative leader who sought to replace him. Carney, seemingly intent on dominating the conversation about himself, was ready with another book this spring. The election delayed it until summer.
Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)
At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.
The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.
(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)
If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.
While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.
Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.
Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.
Still from The Battle of Britain
The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.
Make America Austere Again?
The first 100 days of the BOM haven’t been quite what anyone expected. Close allies and trading partners were shocked at the new administration’s devotion to 1920s tariff “diplomacy”, supporters were dismayed to not get lots and lots of perceived wrongdoers of the Biden administration getting perp-walked for the cameras, and ordinary Americans were presented with a much worse domestic economy than they were promised:
Trump wasn’t totally fixated on economic matters … he still found time in his busy schedule to troll Catholics on his Truth Social platform.
On Wednesday, in the prelude to a cabinet meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump made yet another remark to chill the blood for those concerned about his country. Trump’s cat-and-mouse game of arbitrary changes to American import tariffs is starting to raise concerns about prices and supply chains for consumer goods. The American economy has unexpectedly shrunk in the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, even though workers and businesses are scrambling to make purchases before the effects of Trump tariffs set in. The underlying state of the economy is probably worse than the short-term numbers.
Trump says this is all a matter of “get(ting) rid of the Biden ‘Overhang'”, i.e., it’s his immediate predecessor’s fault. And let’s face it: no other politician on Earth would say anything else 100 days into an executive term. If that was as far as Trump went, it wouldn’t be of unusual concern. What struck me was his separate remark implying that, yeah, tariffs might foul up supply chains a little in the transition to the glorious economy of the future, but haven’t we Americans had it too soft for too long?
“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” the president mused. “So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” The message, which brazenly puts the contentment of children front and centre, is one you can’t imagine any other American leader delivering so directly in peacetime: have you all considered being happy with less?
The answer one would expect the median American voter to give is “Hell no”. It’s crazy that I should have to write this, but consumer abundance is a defining feature of the United States! During the Cold War, American supermarkets were the unanswerable argument for economic freedom: you could summarize the United States pretty reasonably as “It’s the country that coined the word ‘super-market'”. In our hyper-interconnected social-media world, I see a dozen conversations a week in which some European boasts of affordable healthcare, walkable neighbourhoods and having July and August and half of September off work every year: the inevitable answer from Americans is “OK, but have you been inside a Buc-ee’s, Gustav?”
Of course, it’s been a very long time since media-decried austerity in government has actually meant any kind of actual reduction in outlay … it’s usually just a (very) slight decrease in the rate of increase rather than actual dollar-value reduction. But, as Chris Bray points out, this time for sure:
I was planning to spend $100 on groceries this morning, but then I decided to slash my grocery budget, so the amount I actually spent on groceries plummeted to just $99.97, plus a small eight dollar supplemental on previously deferred grocery needs, bringing the total to a shockingly parsimonious $107.97. These major cuts caused serious alarm in my household.
Donald Trump, Politico warns, is scorching the earth:
This is the common theme everywhere, as the administration offers the first not-very-detailed hints about its plans for FY ‘26 discretionary federal outlays. The Huffington Post concludes that Trump is pulling out the BUZZSAW:
The Federal News Network sums up the size of the hit, and compare the topline number to the language about scorched earth and buzzsaws:
Overall, the administration is looking to increase national security spending next year by 13% and decrease non-defense discretionary spending by 7.6%, meaning the White House is asking for $1.7 trillion for the discretionary budget down from $1.83 trillion this year.
While the White House plans don’t get into the subject of total federal spending, focusing narrowly on discretionary spending, the implication is that federal spending overall will go from about $7 trillion to about … $7 trillion. But TBD.
You can read the entire White House proposal for discretionary funding here. Trump is proposing deep cuts in some federal departments and programs, but is also proposing to offset those cuts with sharp increases in military spending and “homeland security”, meaning border security and sending poor gentle immigrants to places where Chris Van Hollen will fly to stare into their beautiful eyes.
May 3, 2025
German democracy under threat from extremely extreme extreme right AfD
That, at least is the judgement of the German domestic intelligence agency assigned responsibility for sniffing out threats to German democracy:
This morning, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) officially reclassified Alternative für Deutschland as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. The BfV is Germany’s primary domestic intelligence agency; it is subject to the Ministry of the Interior and tasked, among other things, with policing the democratic respectability of ordinary Germans and their political parties. The upgraded AfD classification is supported by an extensive and totally secret 1,100-page assessment of AfD activities and beliefs, which BfV analysts have been preparing since last year.
Everybody expected the BfV to do this. Leading Social Democrats in particular have been urging the BfV to release their new assessment for months. They see it as a political justification for initiating ban proceedings against the party. As I wrote last week, it is now likely that the new CDU/SPD government, or the new Bundestag, or both, will ask the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to weigh an AfD prohibition. This new assessment matters mostly because it is the first concrete move in that direction.
The only thing that is really surprising about this news, is the timing: I and everybody else expected the BfV to wait until the CDU and the SPD form a new government and appoint a new Interior Minister. Instead, the sitting Interior Minister Nancy Faeser appears to have forced this assessment through in the final four days of her tenure. This, and not AfD poll numbers (as some have speculated), is the reason this is happening now.
[…]
Among other things, the assessment allegedly cites these extremely right-wing remarks from an 11 August 2024 speech by Hannes Gnauck, who sits on the AfD federal executive committee:
We must also be allowed to decide once again who belongs to this nation and who does not. There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers. All of us here in this market square are connected by much more than just a common language. We are connected by an invisible and simply inexplicable bond. Each and every one of you has more in common with me than any Syrian or Afghan, and I don’t have to explain that – it’s simply a law of nature.
The assessment also includes this absolutely extremist 25 August 2024 statement by Dennis Hohloch, an AfD staffer in the Brandenburg state parliament:
Diversity means multiculturalism. And what does multiculturalism mean? Multiculturalism means a loss of tradition, a loss of identity, a loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.
Finally, the BfV would like us to know that their assessment includes this insanely extreme (and since-deleted) tweet from Martin Reichardt, a Bundestag staffer:
Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures.
Obviously the BfV are leaking their choicest, least arguable, and juiciest bits of evidence – the stuff they think will really turn ordinary Germans against those evil AfD Nazis. I invite you re-read these three passages with that in mind, and then try to imagine for yourself what an absurd cultural and ideological bubble these people must inhabit, to find these remarks scandalous.
Poilievre to run in Alberta riding when the byelection is set
After losing the seat he’d held for more than 20 years in this week’s federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s political future was clouded. An Alberta MP-elect, Damien Kurek has volunteered to resign so that Poilievre can run in his riding.
Seatless Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will run in an Alberta byelection as Conservative MP Damien Kurek “temporarily” steps aside.
In a press release, Kurek, the Battle River—Crowfoot MP-elect, said he was relinquishing his seat for Poilievre because it’s “what’s best for Canada” and the riding. Kurek was first elected in the Alberta riding in 2019.
Poilievre lost his Ottawa-area seat to a Liberal challenger by more than 4,000 votes in Monday’s election.
“The people of Battle River—Crowfoot will be represented well by Pierre for the remainder of this Parliamentary session, and I will keep working with our incredible local team to do everything I can to remain the strong voice for you as I support him in the process, and then run again here in Battle River—Crowfoot in the next general election,” Kurek said in a statement.
At a press conference in Ottawa on Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he would call a byelection as soon as possible and that the government would play “no games” with Poilievre’s quest to win a seat.
Apparently, Carney is going with the less-unfriendly path rather than delaying the call for a byelection for the full allowable period (as Justin Trudeau certainly would have done).
May 2, 2025
Trump’s victory lap after getting his preferred PM elected in Canada
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper rounds up American reactions to the Liberal victory in the Monday election, as many Americans seem to agree that Carney’s win was at least partly their doing:
As the U.S. awoke to a renewed Liberal government on their northern border, Americans of all political persuasions embraced the view that they — for better or worse — had caused it.
“Carney owes his job to President Donald Trump,” was the Tuesday view of the Washington Post editorial board, declaring that the U.S. president had singlehandedly thwarted the election of a populist Conservative government in Canada.
The Centre for American Progress Action Fund — a left-wing Washington, D.C.-based think tank — framed Carney’s win as a model for how anti-Trump rhetoric can win elections.
“Prime Minister Carney’s success demonstrates that resistance to President Trump’s bullying has mass popular appeal,” read a statement.
Actor Billy Baldwin, a perennial backer of progressive causes, cheered Carney’s victory with a viral social media post declaring “Trump singlehandedly delivers the election for the liberals in Canada with his 51st state bullsh-t.”
Even Rolling Stone, which put Justin Trudeau on the magazine’s cover in 2017, opined that Canada’s newest Liberal government was effectively a Trump creation. “Donald Trump single-handedly elected a new Canadian Liberal Government that was down 25 points in January with his endless ’51st State’ bloviation,” wrote the publication.
Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro broke down the Canadian election in an extended segment on his Tuesday show, framing it as a direct failure of Trump’s foreign policy.
“Let’s be real about this; the rhetorical attacks on Canada have not actually resulted in a net good for the United States,” said Shapiro. A perennial critic of Trump’s tariff policy, Shapiro said that the White House’s habit of “yelling at Canada” had helped install a “far left-leaning internationalist” hostile to U.S. interests.
“All of this started off as a joke, and I think President Trump is so committed to the bit at this point that he couldn’t get off the train,” said Shapiro, in reference to Trump’s repeated pledges to turn Canada into the “51st state”.
A Republican consultant quoted anonymously by Politico on Tuesday was of a similar view, saying the outcome in Canada was a “pretty specific result based on the tariffs and 51st state trolling.”
On his Substack, Paul Wells offers some advice to Mark Carney about his dealings with Pierre Poilievre at this awkward time for the Conservative leader:
Stornoway in the Rockcliffe Park area of Ottawa, Ontario. It has been the official residence of the leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament since 1950.
One danger for Mark Carney is that he will be taught how to be a terrible politician by terrible politicians. A low-stakes test case is at hand. In this as in all things, a decent guiding principle should be: Don’t be like your opponent, and don’t be like your predecessor.
The test at hand is the uncomfortable predicament of Pierre Poilievre, who used to be a Member of Parliament and may want to be one again. In the meantime he is still the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
Poilievre lost his seat in Carleton on Monday night. This is not entirely his fault. Liberal campaign teams from neighbouring ridings were invited to spend part of their time door-knocking in Poilievre’s riding. But candidates should try to win even when their opponents work hard to defeat them. I bet this thought has occurred to Poilievre since Monday.
The usual route to the Commons, for a leader who is not yet an MP, is to run in a by-election. Often new leaders find a sitting MP somewhere to vacate their seat and enable a by-election. Brian Mulroney ran in Central Nova in 1983, Jean Chrétien in Beauséjour in New Brunswick in 1990, Stephen Harper in Calgary Southwest in 2002.
Assume Poilievre can find some Conservative MP-elect willing to abandon a seat they just won so Poilievre can try his chance (again). How should Carney react?
It’s really a question in three parts. Should a by-election be held quickly or much later? Should the Liberals run a candidate? Should the Poilievre family keep living at Stornoway, the Opposition leader’s official residence, in the meantime?
I’m hearing from a lot of people who say Carney should wait as long as the law permits — up to a half year after a seat opens — before calling the by-election; that the Liberals should definitely run a candidate; and that Poilievre and his family should be evicted from their current fancy abode.
I spent part of Wednesday debating these questions with readers on Substack Notes. Most of the people offering this advice — let him twist, then hit him hard — pointed out that if Poilievre had a say about an adversary’s career plans, he would do everything in his power to make that adversary hurt.
I think it’s bad advice. It manages to be bad tactics and bad for the soul. The two considerations don’t always line up, but here they do.
Carney should call a by-election as soon as possible after a sitting MP resigns — 11 days after the notice of vacancy is received, the minimum permitted in law. If asked, he should prefer that the Poilievre family stay at Stornoway in the meantime. And while the third question is less clear, I’d argue that the Liberals should refrain from running a candidate in the by-election.
This plan would have Poilievre back in the Commons as soon as possible, with minimal risk and discomfort. He’ll be lucky to receive such generous treatment and, while I’m less confident than ever that I know how he thinks, what he should feel is gratitude. I suspect the feeling would confuse him.
