I was asked last night why, when I talk about politics, I focus on gun rights so much. Surely, said querent, there are lots of other important things for a libertarian like you to weigh in on. Censorship. DEI. AGW hysteria. The list goes on …
Fair question. It’s because many years ago L. Neil Smith, a libertarian SF writer sadly no longer with us, persuaded me of something important.
A politician’s attitude about firearms rights is a very reliable index for his actual attitude about individual freedom and agency.
Never mind what they say about other issues. A politician standing up for the right of ordinary citizens to be armed is sending a very reliable signal that he values their ability to assert their freedom, and trusts them to generally make correct choices about the use of violence even it might be directed against himself.
Conversely, a politician who is against gun rights is telling on himself. He fears the wrath of the people and wants them disempowered. He does not trust them to employ violence only when necessary.
And that’s actually the best case. In far too many cases, anti-gun politicians clearly dream of being the jackboot that stomps on human faces forever, and view the disarmament of the general population as a step towards that end.
If I must have politicians meddling in my affairs, I demand at the very least that they respect my freedom and my agency. That’s why I demand that they respect my right to keep and bear arms.
Gun rights may look like a narrow single issue. It isn’t. It’s an even better index of a politician’s attitude about liberty than questions about free speech and censorship, because it pushes the stakes higher. Because words can’t kill you, but arms wielded by enraged citizens can.
No matter what soothing words drop from his lips, no matter what promises he makes, the politician who tries to disarm you is always, always, always your enemy. Never forget that.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-11-06.
February 8, 2025
QotD: American gun rights
February 7, 2025
USAID still very much in the news
Pretty much any libertarian can quote chapter and verse of how governments waste taxpayer money, but even the most doctrinaire libertarian must be boggled at the extent of waste and corruption enabled by the use of the cover organization USAID. And it’s only one federal agency! We may never be able to get a proper accounting, but it seems that a vast share of US tax revenue has been going to things never dreamed of by the framers of the Constitution or even by the legislators that set up all these various agencies.
On MeWe, Marc Adkins shared a post from a friend, discussing the USAID mess:
One of the dangers President Trump, Elon and DOGE face is that there is just so much crazy, bad, virtually unbelievable news coming out of USAID, the sheer volume [de-]sensitizes people to it.
I must admit, I’m beginning to be overwhelmed by the bad news. One begins to feel a sense of futility, especially when you have been paying taxes your entire life — for me, I have paid taxes since I was sixteen (on my part time jobs and gig jobs through high school and college) — that’s 50 years, and while what I have paid is extremely small compared to the USAID budget, it is simple math to calculate that everything I have ever paid, as well as everything many of us have ever paid has been flushed down the toilet. That is a tough thing to take.
And this has been going on since USAID was created by JFK’s executive order in 1961.
One of the hardest things to swallow in recent years is discovering that your tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist friends may have been closer to the truth all this time. I mean, yeah, we all knew that the government wasted money as if that was their main job, but all the whacko theories about the CIA destabilizing hostile (and friendly) foreign governments (Ngô Đình Diệm waves hello), humanitarian projects being covers for espionage, all kinds of secret squirrel nonsense all over the globe … may have been far closer to the truth than what CBS, The New York Times, or PBS had to say about them. So instead of being the calm, rational people we thought ourselves to be, we’ve been the chumps for all these years. That will leave a mark.
I don’t think it is a leap too far to say that in some way, each one of us has paid for the enrichment of a vast array of US Senators, Representatives, cabinet members, agency heads and even vice presidents and presidents, as well as funding terrorists and brutal dictators worldwide. Hell, it appears we are paying lower level government employees double because the same people are drawing two paychecks!
Then there are the billions that are being automatically paid, flowing like a river to unknown entities, criminals, fraudsters, and into the accounts of programs, the authorization of which expired years and decades ago.
It is almost too much to take in, especially when, in the face of such obvious money laundering, payola, mismanagement and waste, Democrats hit the streets to protest the people uncovering all of it rather than screaming about the criminal waste and let’s not kid ourselves, this scandal is a left wing Democrat thing, they absolutely own it because this money is flowing to left wing NGOs, media and other organizations — I daresay there is a significant slice of the pie that winds up in Democrat coffers at the end of the process.
The memes are almost always on point:
The simple fact is they do not give two shits about the taxpayer working his ass off just have his entire life’s sum of his taxes from his career of working ten hours a day in the blistering sun and freezing cold just to pay his share of a USAID program for transing handicapped children in Botswana.
It is shameless, of course, but something we have come to expect from Democrats and every single Democrat who protests this should be run out of office and never allowed near government again — ever.
The problem isn’t really Democrats or even RINOs … it’s the seductive nature of political office, and the US government is the biggest, richest, most pervasive government that has ever existed. No matter how pure and noble your aims may be, prolonged contact with the vast resources of the US government and the ability to direct the efforts of that government toward your goals will overpower the scruples of the most honest of men. [Insert Elrond and Isildur “cast it into the fire” meme here.] This is, I think, why DOGE is so disruptive: it has the potential to utterly destroy vast swathes of existing government blight and perhaps even keep it from regenerating. A bit. Maybe. Even a dynamo like Elon will probably find that there’s just too much to tackle in one presidential term.
The butt hurt Democrats are beginning to parse things trying to minimize them. You heard how it works when Martha Raddatz told J.D. Vance after he mentioned that TdA gangs had taken over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado. She said, “The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes …” as if the people in those complexes should grin and bear it because it just isn’t that bad.
Democrats have tried this when illegal aliens commit murders. They will trot out numbers that “prove’ American citizens are far more violent and it’s just a few murders anyway — as if the murders of innocents like Laken Riley are a statistic rather than a completely avoidable tragedy.
There are ludicrous people claiming that millions being sent abroad to support DEI, transgender plays, or to teach the Taliban how to be sensitive to women’s rights is just such a small number, it is OK – when, as in the Colorado gang situation, none of it should be happening.
The millions upon million that were sent to the left-wing media outlets that complied with the Democrats’ wishes to have hit pieces written about GOP candidates is harder to defend, but I’m sure some moron on MSNBC or CNN will find a way.
Here in Canada, of course, we’re much more familiar with the government of the day getting the kindest of treatment from the media … because the media get big subsidies from that very government, but at least it’s somewhat out in the open. US media may have been similarly subsidized, but until now it had been completely obscured.
Some people legitimately need help, and I am sure there are programs that do have a benefit to America, but this is the Democrats’ fault because the only way I see to fix it is to burn it all down and start over with an ironclad approval and review process. Every one of these alleged aid agencies should be required to produce an annual report for public view the same way legitimate private charities do.
And the quicker we strike the match, the faster this gets fixed.”
On Substack, Francis Turner points out that we’re only into the third week of the Trumptastrophe, and it’s glorious:
We’re in the third week of the political tsunami that is Trump 2.0. The DOGE boys are getting access to systems and turning off the money flows and the DC swamp creatures are panicking. I think they may be mistaking what happens now for about as bad as it can get, while actually what we have now is that moment when the sea retreats abruptly from the beach and poor widdle crabs and fishies are left flapping in pools that are too small for them. Although the FBI agents and DoJ
persecutorsprosecutors who were involved in the Jan 6 investigations and the Jack Smith fishing investigations are probably feeling the wave coming down on them. In particular I would very much not want to be the agent who pawed through Melania’s underwear.Right now the lacka money, lacka graft and lacka future employment seems bad, and that may be all some of the bottom feeders experience, but in the weeks ahead we’re going to see just what the federal government was spending all that money on and just who was benefiting and what they were doing. People with nice modern automobiles, large houses and so on may be required to explain where the money for those possessions came from. That’s going to lead to prosecutions and, well, as Trump and the Jan 6 guys know the process is part of the punishment. Moreover, since the graft flow will have stopped, paying for defense lawyers etc. is going to be interesting. In particular it’s going to be really interesting because the big firms that might normally step up and offer pro bono support are likely to find the requests for support overwhelming and, simultaneously, their regular income from paying clients drastically reduced.
Well shucks
Mind you we have a while before that wave comes crashing down so it’s worth noting what we have learned so far.
The first is that Trump 2.0 is uninterested in slowing down. As I said in my previous post, DOGE are working 24×7 while the swamp is used to 9-5, Monday to Friday. With generous time for lunch etc. That means Trump/DOGE can (and have) got inside the OODA loop of the enemy. We can see this by how protests about DOGE actions are a couple of days after the action has happened. Moreover we see Trump people saying things like “yes we need to look at the Department of Education” which causes talking heads to rush to its defense. This is quite possibly a ruse and deliberate distraction.
February 6, 2025
The fascinating (domestic and) transnational role of USAID
One of the most interesting moves of the Trump administration so far has been the lightning strike to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID):
On closing it down Musk said: “USAID is a criminal organisation. Time for it to die.”
On Friday last week, Elon Musk and DOGE wanted access to agency systems of the giant USAID. When senior officials refused, by Saturday they were put on leave.
“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X.
“It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm it in,” Musk said in a live session on X Spaces early Monday. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.” — AP News
Elon Musk and DOGE closed the doors, and sent the head honchos packing. One officeworker said staff rushed to take down things like Pride Flags and incriminating books (whatever that means), and now they have lost access to their computers, and the site is down.
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk cut back rogue government agencies, USAID looks more and more like a giant money laundering racket. It has (or had) 10,000 employees and a budget of $50 billion dollars. It’s presented as a humanitarian aid group, but the AID in US-AID means the US Agency for International Development which turns out to mean anything and everything. The humanitarian projects include giving $53 million dollars to the starving EcoHealth Alliance which used that to pay for bioweapon research in Wuhan, China, helping to create Covid-19. USAID also funded the production of heroin in Afghanistan. The WhiteHouse revealed that USAID also funded DEI projects in Serbia, and DEI musicals in Ireland. They spent US Taxpayer money on transgender operas in Colombia and a trans comic book in Peru.
As Mike Benz describes it, USAID was the Ultimate Nerve Center Of A Rogue Foreign Policy Establishment
Mike Benz, former State Department Cyber expert, has studied USAID closely and says:
USAID grantee NGOs literally take their USAID money then turn around and lobby all key members of Congress to give more and more US taxpayer money to USAID each year in the budget. USAID buys an army of lobbyists with your tax dollars to give it more of your money.
He also wonders why USAID gave $27 million to the US fiscal sponsor of the group controlling Soros-funded prosecutors and telling them which American citizens and politicians to prosecute?
Indeed, somehow USAID is also one of the “BBC Media Actions” top ten donors? Go figure? It’s just the US of A helping out third world countries like the UK, right?
As Mike Benz said: the “BBC was in direct cahoots with USAID leadership on Internet censorship efforts to crush BBC’s online populist news competitors since 2017. I went over 9 hours of receipts on this in a 3-part private livestream lecture for my X subscribers”.
The BBC part of The Blob takes Blob money to lobby to cripple the media outside The Blob’s control. The words “Self Serving” come to mind.
Ron Paul agrees — USAID is a key component of US Regime change, meddling in foreign affairs. The news from Ukraine is essentially being controlled by USAID. Ukrainian media is Blob media.
Jo Nova posted a follow-up the next day:
Hands up who is still reeling with the news that USAID had 50 thousand million dollars of political and media influence? The annual budget of $50 billion dollars in the hands of unaccountable activist NGOs buys a lot of “journalists”, editors and teenage protestors. Suddenly a lot of global patterns make more sense.
Today we found out that news outlets like Politico, and the New York Times were being given millions of dollars from the US government.
Benny Johnson says:
This is the biggest scandal in news media history: No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis. Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID.
It seems some $27 million dollars went to Politico during the Biden years — and that’s just the subscriptions (not the USAID). Truly, Politico charges as much as $10,000 for a single “Politico Pro” subscription — and so the taxpayers fork out big bucks to pay for politicians “work expenses”, and the money ends up covering the salaries of journalists who are working hard to deceive the hapless taxpayers.
As ZeroHedge reminds us, Politico went in hard in the 2020 election to cover for the Hunter Biden laptop from hell.
They also point out that the Blob has many other ways to keep newspapers toeing the line…
It’s not just the subscriptions: there are huge “ad contracts”, dinner parties DC throws itself under the guise of “media conferences”, sponsorships, etc all paid for by taxpayers. Once done with Politico look at its spawn Axios, founded by Politico veterans
Niccolo Soldo included some commentary on the USAID shutdown in his weekend post a few days back:
Today I learned that all NGOs working in foreign countries that are funded by the USGov are having their funding suspended for 90 days. This is already sending shock waves around the world, as not only are State Department officials losing their shit, but local NGO employees are wondering how they can continue operating in the meantime:
People are quickly learning just how much of a footprint the USA has in their countries and how significant an influence they have on politics in their homelands. All of their Trojan horses are being exposed at the same time, meaning that it will take some time for most people to digest the sheer scale and size of US meddling abroad.
Mainstream media is already beginning to push back against this funding suspension, using their typical tricks to try and paint this order as potentially “risking the safety of millions“:
Marocco strode into the offices of USAid this week flanked by members of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, a special group Trump created, with clipboards in hand. Several hours later, almost 60 senior officials from the office had been put on paid leave. Veteran aid officials with decades of experience at the agency were escorted from the building by security, according to current and former USAid officials, and their email accounts were frozen.
“They wanted to decapitate the organisation,” said a current USAid employee. “And they did it by pushing aside the leadership and decades of experience.”
The purge followed confusion within USAid over the stop-work orders drafted by Marocco and signed by Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, leading some to believe that limited actions could continue if funds had already been committed.
The Guardian UK has decided to focus its attacks on Mr. Marocco.
“We have identified several actions within USAid that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people,” wrote Jason Gray, USAid’s acting administrator, saying the relevant staff would be put on administrative leave.
Some employees have openly rebelled. In an email to all staff seen by the Guardian, Nicholas Gottlieb, USAid’s director of employee and labor relations, said that appointees at USAid and “Doge” had “instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices”.
Calling the requests “illegal”, Gottlieb said he “will not be a party to a violation of [due process]”. Hours later, he was put on administrative leave.
In a separate email to the sidelined USAid senior staff, Gottlieb wrote that the “materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct”.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
The chaotic rollout of the ban has led to whiplash for critical programs around the world, from emergency Aids relief (which has been granted a waiver), to clean-water and sanitation programs, to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which the Washington Post reported on Friday had gone offline.
Yet there are few details of a vast review program, which is supposed to evaluate thousands of foreign aid grants as well as an expected torrent of waiver requests. And a number of the senior USAid staff put on administrative leave were lawyers who had helped prepare requests for exemptions from the foreign aid freeze, sources said.
Demoralization:
Previous cables indicated that the people involved would include Marocco or the new director of policy planning, Michael Anton, another political appointee. The state department declined to answer questions from the Guardian about who is evaluating the reviews and how many staff had been detailed to the process.
“We’re all trying to figure out, is there a review process? Who’s part of that review?” said the former senior USAid official. “Is it Pete Marocco and his two best friends?”
At USAid, other directives have been enacted that have both defunded and demoralised staff. Photographs of aid programs around the world have been literally stripped off the walls after a “directive has been issued to remove all artwork and photographs from the offices and common spaces across all buildings”.
Musk’s “efficiency department” has crowed about slashing $45m in scholarships for students from authoritarian Burma.
The $40bn a year that the US spends on foreign aid is less than 1% of its budget. But the US spends $4 out of every $10 spent globally on humanitarian aid, according to the state department, and the sudden cutoff has led to thousands of layoffs among US contractors and local partners around the world.
And of course:
A former USAid official said the decisions could put millions of people around the world at risk.
“If there’s a tropical cyclone that hits Cox’s Bazar tomorrow, then how are you going to save all those people, and then how are you going to rebuild if there’s a stop-work order?” said a former senior USAid official, referring to the city in Bangladesh where more than 1 million Rohingya refugees are living. “You could have people sitting there for 90 days and sitting and waiting for what? That’s what worries more.”
Critics who say that this order effectively reduces US influence abroad are absolutely correct … but what if this is part of a widely-assumed fundamental change in how the USA conducts its foreign policy?
Seen on the social media network formerly known as Twitter:
Trump tariff diary, day 5
The attention shifted away from the BOM kicking the Little Potato around as BOM floated the idea of annexing the Gaza Strip (as Eastern New Jersey?) on social media. There goes at least 24 hours of media hysteria …
Justin Trudeau’s vision of Canada
As I’ve pointed out a few times, the situation didn’t blow up out of nowhere (we’re back to the Trump tariffs, not the Gaza Strip), as Trump had given ample warning that this was an important issue for him. However, as Roxanne Halverson points out, Trudeau’s government paid it not the slightest bit of attention until Trump forced them:
This means Ontario Premier Doug Ford who threatened to cancel a $100 million dollar Starlink contract with Elon Musk to provide high-speed internet to northern and rural Ontario communities because of Musk’s strong ties to Trump. And perhaps BC Premier David Eby shouldn’t have threatened to take alcohol products from “red states” in the US off the shelves of BC liquor stores. And perhaps Team Trudeau shouldn’t been trying to play the mouse that roared by threatening to slap retaliatory tariffs on American products coming into Canada, given that it means Canadians will pay more for products like fruits and vegetables that we simply can’t get here in the winter. And that goes for all the provincial premiers, with the exception of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
And for all Canadians — particularly those who voted for Trudeau — who are so angry at Trump that they are blowing up the internet with memes, threatening never to vacation in the States, and booing the singing of the American anthem at hockey games — grow up and smarten up and rethink who your anger should be directed at.
Everyone needs to recognize the fact that Trump made it pretty clear about the tariffs when he was campaigning for the US presidency, after he won the presidency — but had yet been officially sworn in — and as soon as he entered the Oval Office. And yet everyone seemed so shocked when he did it — including Prime Minister Trudeau.
Trump also made it pretty clear what he was after — fix Canada’s porous border and fix the drug trafficking problem — and the fentanyl problem in particular. And thanks to the dithering of the Trudeau government — vacillating between “negotiating and diplomacy” and talking “tough”, as well as using the issue as a campaign tool, this is what it came to. Because, it would seem, Trump didn’t think his request was being taken seriously so he made it serious. One thing Trump recognizes is weakness, and it is something he is willing to take advantage of it. And in Canada he saw weakness — weak leadership and an weak economy. Another thing Trump is very good at, and that is rattling people and he did that in spades on Saturday — and by Sunday he got results.
For all the Canadians who are mad at Trump for starting these tariff wars, particularly those who voted for Trudeau. Remember this … if Canada had a strong economy that hadn’t been driven into the ground by ten years of Liberal economic, monetary, social engineering and “green” policies we wouldn’t be so vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs.
Trump didn’t halt the building of pipelines that could have taken our oil products to both eastern and western coasts to be shipped to markets overseas. This would have expanded markets for Canadian oil, meaning we wouldn’t be selling sell the bulk of it to the Americans at bargain prices. It wasn’t Trump who drove billions, if not trillions of dollars in investments out of the country by overtaxing businesses with ever increasing carbon taxes and various other in sundry operating costs, or stifling business growth with endless crippling green energy policies and regulations, or extinguishing any chance of expanding our natural gas production to sell to overseas markets by claiming “no business case” for it.
The business investment picture in Canada shows a clear decline dating almost exactly to the start of Trudeau’s time in office:
The Canadian government’s (and several provincial governments’) hostility to economic development and infrastructure expansion is clearly illustrated, I think.
QotD: Wokeness as substitute religion
And of course so much of the theorizing behind woke ideas is based on entirely unsubstantiated, faith-based positions. They believe in unconscious bias, and institutional power structures — things that you can’t quantify or put your finger on that just sort of exist in the ether like spirits. And to ask them to prove any of these positions is to simply get the response that well, they do exist because we know they do. Which is what a religious zealot would say.
So I think that certainly the best way to understand the social justice movement is to see it as a cult. Because then it all makes sense, and it also makes sense why they’re able to behave so barbarically toward those who don’t subscribe to their belief system. Because the hallmark of many religions is tolerance to a degree. And then where things start going wrong, where witches start getting burned at the stake and heretics start getting executed is where that tolerance runs out. And I think that’s what happened here: the social justice movement is a fundamentally intolerant movement. And fundamentally illiberal. There’s nothing liberal about it.
Andrew Doyle, talking to Spencer Klavan, “Titania McGrath and the Politics of Wokeness: An Interview with Andrew Doyle”, The American Mind, 2020-01-30.
February 5, 2025
Trump tariff diary, day 4
The Big Orange Meanie and the Little Potato had a phone call, after which the BOM announced a 30-day delay to the imposition of tariffs. In Canada, all of “peoplekind” were relieved to hear that they won’t have to give up their American-made binkies quite yet. Some appropriate snark from The Free Press:
It was actually a phone call between the BOM and the Little Potato, but we can imagine this is what it would have looked like in person.
Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Speedy Gonzales’d her way to a deal with Trump yesterday, promising to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the border to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs. In return, Trump agreed to pause his 25 percent tariff on goods coming from south of the border. Soon after, he struck a seemingly identical deal with Justin Trudeau, who said he’d appoint a “fentanyl czar” and promised to send 10,000 Canadian troops to the northern border. Who knew they even had that many?! Tariffs will still be levied against Chinese goods starting today, but Trump says he plans to talk with President Xi Jinping as soon as this week.
The FP isn’t wrong … the Canadian Army doesn’t have 10,000 spare troops just hanging around their barracks who could be sent to the border, so it’s much more likely to be a combination of Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, RCMP officers, provincial police (if the respective provinces are willing), and whatever the army can spare. (Trudeau refers only to “nearly 10,000 frontline personnel”, not “troops” as a lot of US reports state … that seems a lot more achievable.)
You may be wondering how the US President has such disruptive and antagonistic tools at his disposal. It’s yet another hangover from the Carter years, as Congress delegated these powers to the president in 1977:
Donald Trump as Napoleon the 47th.
Image generated by Grok.
The emerging on-off-on-off trade war between Canada and the United States has everyone asking “How should we fight?” — understandably enough — but we should not move too quickly beyond the question “How is this literal nonsense at all possible?” How did the U.S. Congress’s clearly specified constitutional power to regulate the country’s commerce with foreign nations fall into naked and unapologetic decrepitude? Why is every new American president now a Napoleon, and why isn’t this at all a political issue in the U.S.?
The American Constitution, it seems, has no political party apart from a handful of cranky, tireless libertarians like Gene Healy, Clyde W. Crews or Ilya Somin, who has a new article spitballing possible litigation approaches for Americans who lie in the path of the tariffs now being wishcasted into existence by Napoleon the 47th. Somin explains that President Donald Trump is using an openly contrived “national emergency” to invoke powers delegated to the White House by Congress in 1977, powers that are to be invoked only in the face of “unusual and extraordinary threats” to the Republic.
Since the president apparently has plenary power to define an emergency, and to do so without offering anything resembling a rational explanation, this act of Congress now appears to be less of a delegation and more of a surrender — a total abandonment of constitutional principle and the classical separation of powers. I pause to observe that the cheeks every Canadian should redden with slight shame at the spectacle of frivolous recourse to the law of emergencies causing obvious and sickening injury to the rule of law in the U.S. (Oh, no, that could never happen here!)
February 4, 2025
Trump tariff diary, days 2 and 3
Posted to social media yesterday:
To celebrate Groundhog Day, Governor Trudeau wore commemorative Groundhog-themed socks. Governor Trudeau’s announced counter-tariffs seem to have made no difference to the Big Orange Meany, so the Great State of Canada proceeds with plans to annex Guam and American Samoa. China has indicated interest in purchasing Vancouver Island or leasing the naval base in Esquimault. The National Post‘s Tristin Hopper suggested “Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him”, but we’ve already done that.
Today’s tariff diary entry was going to be:
Reports indicate that the Mexican government is folding to Trumpian pressure. Governor Trudeau insists he won’t budge, regardless of the economic damage to Canadian consumers … what a hero! A few of us may lose our jobs, our businesses, and our economic futures, but he’s willing to take that risk. Update: Trudeau folded like the cheap suit he so resembles. Tariff war on hold for 30 days as Trudeau looks for a way to sign the terms of surrender without any blame attaching to him or his party … he’ll probably blame the provincial governments and the federal NDP (who’ll still support him in Parliament, regardless).
… But the “pause” in tariff enforcement may be enough to let Trudeau and the Liberals — with the active connivance of the bought-and-paid-for Canadian legacy media propagandists — portray this as a great national victory and attempt to turn it into votes for Liberal candidates in the next federal election. I’d love to be proven too cynical here, but the Liberal track record isn’t good.
QotD: The American political spectrum
Then on the right you have (4) Right-liberals (“Classical liberals”), who share liberalism with groups (2) and (3) but reject (or at least substantially challenge) the idea that society can be “engineered” with positive results. This group largely left the Republican party between 2016 and the present (though some were already libertarians). Notably, (3) and (4) in the United States tend to share hawkish anti-authoritarian, anti-communist foreign policy views; this is where the foreign policy “blob” lives. To their right are (5) Traditionalist Conservatives. Because the United States was founded as a liberal country, they tend to still hold some liberal views (and respond well to liberal, “freedom-centered” framing) but their main ideological commitment is generally conservative in its literal meaning of being traditionalist, desiring things to not change or to recover that which has changed and there is a willingness to compromise on liberalism in the pursuit of that. This, I’d argue, is where the core of the Republican Party currently exists. Finally, you have (6) Right-Authoritarians, who come in various forms based on the authority they believe ought to structure society, e.g. populist authoritarians are fascists, whereas Catholic religious authoritarians are integralists and so on. But the core idea here is that there exists an authority, be it the “national will” (invariably channeled by an individual charismatic leader and often herrenvolk in nature) or tradition or the church or whatever else, which has a right to structure society which supersedes individual liberties. For our purposes, they key is they generally despise liberalism because it places limits on that authority. They tend to insist that liberalism makes societies weak even as liberal societies pound their favorite dictators into dust over and over again.
To put the spectrum another way, we might think in terms of publications: Jacobin (1) <-> Vox (2) <-> The Atlantic (3) <-> The Bulwark/Dispatch (4) <-> National Review (5); few major publications openly identify as being in (6) in the United States, but you can see editors at The Federalist or First Things platform political visions that [derive] from it. To the degree to which “horse-shoe theory” works it is because the thing that The Left and the Right-Authoritarians have in common is that they believe in an effectively unlimited claim on the individual by the community, whereas the core of liberal ideology is that the social claim on the individual is and must be limited.
Bret Devereaux, In a footnote to “Collections: The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-07-05.
February 3, 2025
Rational response to Trumpish provocations? Don’t be silly, we must run in circles with our hair on fire!
My first entry in the “Trump tariff diary” on social media perhaps takes the situation too flippantly:
President Trump trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state.
Trump tariff diary, day 1: Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada struck back at the Big Orange Meany by wearing particularly fashionable socks to his press conference. Ontario will remove all bottles of Jack Daniels from the government liquor monopoly distribution system. The American national anthem will be formally booed at all NHL games played in Canada from now on.
At the National Post, Tristin Hopper offers much more substantive and serious suggestions:
Order Ryan Reynolds to defame American directors until free trade is restored.
Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him.
Politely suggest that the U.S. may have confused us with China. Say that although both countries start with the letter C, China is the one seeking to destroy American hegemony via economic means, and we’re just an obsequious neighbour who sells them raw materials.
As a gesture of fealty to American continental supremacy, immediately adopt the U.S. Constitution as Canadian law. Uphold it about as loosely as our existing constitution so there’s no material change.
Volunteer an honour guard of Mounties to serve alongside the Secret Service. Force them to wear red serge if Trump asks.
Offer to pillory a Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago if the tariff threats stop, but don’t specify which one.
Put sugar in the crude oil so all the U.S. refineries seize up.
Instead of shutting off Canadian electricity exports, export too much electricity so that their toast burns and the coffee is too hot.
Send Trump a bentwood box filled with smoked salmon as a gesture of goodwill. When he opens it, it’s just filled with bees.
On a rather more serious note, PPC leader Maxime Bernier posted this on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter:
It’s important to understand that the 25% tariffs announced by President Trump today are NOT imposed on Canada — they will be paid by American consumers and businesses who buy goods imported from Canada. Tariffs are a tax, and Americans who will have to pay more or go without our products will be the first to suffer.
Of course, Canadian exporters of these goods will as a consequence lose clients, contracts and sales, and will be forced to cut down on production and lay off workers. Or they will lower their prices to keep market shares and will see their profits diminish.
Because 75% of our exports go south of the border, our economy will for sure be very negatively impacted by this.
The stupidest thing our government can do however to deal with this crisis is to impose the same kind of tariffs “dollar for dollar” against US imports.
The US economy is ten times bigger than ours, much less reliant on trade than ours, and much less dependent on our market than we are on theirs.
Not only would retaliatory tariffs have much less impact on American exporters, they would immediately impoverish Canadian consumers forced to pay more for imported goods, as well as destabilize Canadian businesses that need inputs from the US in their production processes. It would more than double the harm of the US tariffs to our economy.
Trade wars are bad for everyone, but they are much worse for a small country with fewer options. We simply cannot win a trade war with the US. It’s very unlikely that Trump will back down. All we will do is provoke a massive economic crisis in Canada, until we are forced to capitulate.
Another self-destructive thing to do would be to set up giant “pandemic-level” bailout plans to support everyone affected by this trade war. This will simply bankrupt our governments even more than they already are and make us even weaker.
So what should we do?
1. Double down on efforts to control our border, crack down on fentanyl dealers, deport all illegals, and impose a complete moratorium on immigration, to answer Trump’s immediate concerns about Canada.
2. Tell the US administration that we are ready to renegotiate North American free trade and put dairy supply management and other contentious issues on the table.
3. Wait and see to what extent Trump is willing to keep tariffs in place despite the harm it does to the US economy. Despite his pretenses that Americans don’t need our stuff, the reality is that on the contrary they have few other options for crucial resources like oil, lumber, uranium and other minerals, etc. He will stop acting like a bully when he sees that he can get more results by sitting down and negotiating.
3. To reduce our dependence on the US market, immediately implement an ambitious plan to tear down interprovincial trade barriers and help our impacted exporting industries find alternative markets in other countries.
4. Immediately implement a series of bold reforms to make our economy more productive, including: reduce corporate and personal taxes, abolish the capital gains tax, abolish all corporate subsidies, get rid of excessive regulation, remove impediments to the exploitation and export of natural resources, drastically cut government spending, mandate the Bank of Canada to stop printing money and start accumulating a gold reserve to prepare for the global monetary reset (which is likely part of Trump’s plan).
In short, instead of adopting a suicidal strategy to confront Trump, we must do what we should have done a long time ago to strengthen our economy and our bargaining position. The transition will be rough, but not as much as complete bankruptcy and disintegration.
My strong suspicion is that Trump’s extended tantrum directed at Canada is actually a way to provide pressure against other future tantrum targets … “if he’d do that to friendly neighbour Canada, what won’t he do to us?” An updated version of Voltaire’s quip that Britain needed to shoot an admiral every now and again pour encourager les autres.
Coyote Blog facepalms over Trump’s self-sabotage of the US economy:
Trump’s first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become. […] Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally. I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.
Seriously, this is beyond awful — and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real. Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US. No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers. I don’t have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade — that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation. But I will offer a few ironies:
- After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods. That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
- Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump’s base. No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
- Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions. While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions. And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.
The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should. My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him. I have always said that I don’t think Trump is a particularly good business person — he has run business after business that has failed. But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.
February 2, 2025
Captain Trumpmerica versus the Post-national Maple Protectionists
Donald Trump has made picking fights with the corrupt oligarchs of Mexico and Canada a key part of his appeal to American voters. Canada used to be a proud nation, but after years of deliberate mismanagement and stubborn opposition to innovation and growth, we’ve become — as Justin Trudeau so smugly put it — the first “post-national state” that has “no core identity [and] no mainstream”, because we’re a plaything for the WEF and other transnational organizations. Elizabeth Nickson calls us a “failed state” and that swapping in globalist WEF’er Mark Carney for globalist WEF’er Justin Trudeau will make no positive difference:
25% tariffs will ruin us. The tariffs mean one million small businesses — all which sell to the U.S. — will contract and many will close their doors. And then Trump, as he promised the unions, will pull “our” auto industry. Then we’re done.
Who is to blame for this?
The following is going to be crude because Canada is so boring (that’s deliberate) that no one cares. There are a thousand ultra-complex rationales on why Canada is failing and all they do is obfuscate. I’m not pulling punches, softening rhetoric — it is bad. It is urgent. This is the death of something that 75 years ago was shining, sunlit, exciting. That country? That country was killed by the Laurentian elite, weak, cosplaying Marxism to stay in power, themselves outwitted by investment bankers who plan to steal everything not nailed down. In so doing new elements were forcibly injected into the population: envy, resentment of the successful, sloth, the refusal to grow up, be strong and independent. We effectively sit on top of the U.S., seething with envy, in wet diapers.
We are a broken country. Everyone who understands the world knows this. The only people who don’t are deluded Canadian socialists, which is to say our entire elite and all our “knowledge class”. Dissent is ignored. Or jailed.
Central banker Mark Carney, WEFer paramount, is being parachuted into the Liberal party in order to sell us off to the investment banks who will harvest us for our resources. Our people? Future serfs in Special Enterprise Zones. We already have the regulation in place. No taxes, no worker rights, no enviro controls, no self-determination, no agency, no freedom. Time frame? Ten years, twenty at the outside. The inevitable end of hard-core socialism.
That is what Carney did to Canada in the ‘08 crisis, a crisis entirely created by larcenous government and investment bankers: he loaded us up with so much debt that the moment the economy turned, the working class — and Canada is now 75% working class — paid for it through interest rates so high they crippled and broke every middle class family with a mortgage. Then, he moved to England and did it to the English. His name there? Mark Carnage. During the ’08 crisis, he in Canada and the UK and Obama in the US transferred trillions in public wealth to the investment banks to keep them going after the worst crisis since ’29. A crisis they caused. That was the people’s money, not theirs.
However, as Peter Menzies points out, our Laurentian Elite are still 100% protecting us from the baleful influence of American culture … well, the commercial bits anyway:
Next Sunday, the federal agency responsible for the flourishing of national culture and identity will be swamped with complaints. The grumbling will emanate from Canadians enraged they can’t get more American culture. Yes, America may be in the process of humiliating Canada as its lamest of lame duck leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, waddles into the sunset. And, for sure, most of us are mortified that U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to make an example of us as he launches his mission to bring the globe to heel and Make America Great Again.
But the bitching directed in the days to come at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) headquarters in Gatineau will originate from Canadians angry they can’t watch American Super Bowl TV ads along with the game. A perennial contender to be the most watched TV event in Canada, the Super Bowl also has traditionally been the most controversial event on the CRTC’s calendar.
The USA can slap us silly with tariffs. It can send hundreds of thousands of us into unemployment and despair. It can mock our disinterest in maintaining the essentials of nationhood and drive us into unsustainable debt. Trump can brutalize our national esteem and taunt us for our cavalier attitudes towards the defence of our sovereignty. And he can lick his big beautiful lips while pondering our potential as the 51st state.
But what will really light us up Feb. 9 will be being unable to watch Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reinvent their famous restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally or Michelob Ultra’s production starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara as a couple of pickleball hustlers. Or Matthew McConaughey channeling legendary Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka for Uber Eats. And the Clydesdales. Everyone loves those Budweiser Clydesdales, particularly the cute little foal making a debut.
It doesn’t matter that the ads cost $7 million U.S. (which will convert into heaven only knows how many bazillion loonies in the months ahead) for a 30-second spot. Or that for more than a decade many of the commercials have been available on YouTube. Canadians don’t want to watch a Super Bowl adorned with Government of Ontario and Maple Leaf Foods ads. They want to watch the game like real Americans and relish the full, unfettered American experience.
At the National Post, a sad recounting of just how badly we’ve been let down by our politicians — and not just recently … this is a decades-long list of conscious self-harm for short-term domestic political advantage:
Bold counter-attacks against the U.S. can’t work, because all the ideas Canada could have put into action to make such a response viable are collecting dust on the cellar shelf. Drop interprovincial trade barriers that amount to a $200-billion penalty on the national economy every year? That only became a serious conversation in the last month. It should have been a serious conversation 10 years ago, if not more.
End supply management? Out of the question — think of the Quebec votes such a move would cost. The Big Milk lobby is a strong one.
How about resource development? Because Canada is ultimately a resource-exporting economy? No; we’ve been cancelling energy projects at the slightest objection and building more legislation to stand in their way. Industries like mining and fishing, already mired in growth-choking regulations, are increasingly refashioned by governments into welfare and “reconciliation” initiatives, repelling private investment that would have brought prosperity to the country as a whole.
Diversify away from the Americans? We’ve only done the opposite: since 2017, Canadian trade has become more focused on the U.S.
Canada should be a prosperous, growth-oriented economy, but instead, its government — and the people who continuously vote for economy-stagnating policy — settle for subsistence and redistribution of a shrinking pie of wealth. Their choices for the past decade have left us without enough fat to get through a cold trade winter.
Prompt retaliatory counter-tariffs are hence unwise. Such a move would put Canadians in the path of two separate blows, one from the front, the other from the back. And while immediate counter-tariffs could affect Americans whose support the president depends on — as was the case in the 1930s, when Canadian counter-tariffs prolonged the American Great Depression (while inflicting domestic pain) — those Americans have much bigger economic fat stores. In a trade war of attrition, expect Canada to lose.
That leaves us, unfortunately, with the less-glamourous immediate option: play this by the book. The United States-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, which will be violated by any across-the-board tariff Trump applies, needs to be challenged with the mechanisms agreed upon by party states. During the process, Canada must remind Trump that it’s just following the agreement that he made.
February 1, 2025
China produced DeepSeek, Britain is mired in deep suck
In the Sean Gabb Newsletter, Sebastian Wang discusses the contrast between China’s recent release of the DeepSeek AI platform that appears to be eating the collective lunches of the existing LLM products by US firms and the devotion of the British Labour government to plunge ever deeper into their Net Zero dystopian vision:
Net Zero image from Jo Nova
For those few readers who may be unaware, DeepSeek is an advanced open-source artificial intelligence platform developed in China. Released in late 2024, it has set a new standard in AI, outperforming American counterparts in adaptability and capability. It excels in natural language processing, machine learning, and data analysis, and — critically — it is open source. Unlike the proprietary models that dominate the American tech landscape, DeepSeek allows anyone to adapt, improve, and use it as he sees fit. It’s not just a technological triumph for China; it’s a serious challenge to American domination of information technology and an opportunity for those who want to break free from the stranglehold of Silicon Valley.
As a Chinese person, I take pride in this achievement. It’s a testament to what my people can achieve with focus and ambition. But my concern is less about taking pride in what China has done and more about lamenting how little Britain has contributed to this revolution. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, seems to have no place in this new world of AI-driven progress. The question is why?
The answer is simple: The people who rule Britain have chosen decline. Crushing taxes on income and capital gains, and inheritance taxes, punish those who want to create wealth. Endless regulations stifle ambition, making it easier to conform than to innovate. Worst of all, there are the net zero policies, which have made energy costs the highest in the world, making electricity unaffordable and unreliable. Industries that depend on energy have been priced out of existence, and the dreamers and doers who might have built the next DeepSeek are being ground down by a system designed to reward mediocrity.
Net zero is not a noble goal born of misconception; it’s a disaster by design. It’s a wealth transfer scheme that takes from ordinary working people and hands billions to a small clique of green profiteers. The winners are the wind farm builders, the financiers running opaque carbon trading schemes, and the activists cashing in on government handouts. The losers are everyone else — families struggling to pay energy bills, businesses forced to close, and an entire country left unable to compete.
Compare this to China. DeepSeek wasn’t luck — it was the product of a system that rewards innovation. Electricity in China is cheap and reliable. Regulations focus on enabling progress, not blocking it. Ambition is celebrated, not treated as a threat. The ruling class there, for all its many and terrible faults, understands the value of creating wealth and technological self-reliance. Britain’s ruling class, by contrast, has abandoned the idea of building anything. They’d rather sit in the City of London, counting money made elsewhere, than see industry and innovation flourish in the country at large. They have chosen decline — not for them, but for us.
January 31, 2025
Canada – sovereign nation or “post-national state” with “no core identity”?
In The Line, Andrew Potter retraces Canada’s history from British colony to self-governing Dominion to proud mover-and-shaker in the postwar world to whatever the heck it is today:
There is a map that shows up on social media from time to time, and it looks like this.
Sometimes it is followed by this one:
And then maybe this one:
What’s the point of these maps? Apart from noting the obvious, which is that Canada is sparsely populated, and much of the population is gathered in cities very close to the border with the United States, they raise important questions about the exercise of political power and its legitimacy, forms of governance, and, ultimately, sovereignty. By what methods did Canada come to be, and by what right does a small and relatively concentrated group of people, most of whom live down by the Great Lakes or along the St. Lawrence River, lay claim to almost ten million square kilometres of the Earth’s landmass?
It is easy to draw lines on maps. Anyone can do it. If you want those lines to represent some sort of generally accepted reality, two things must be true. First, the people inside the lines need to see those lines as legitimate, and be willing to take the necessary steps, up to and including the use of force, to assert them against outsiders. And second, enough outsiders of sufficient global importance also need to recognize those lines.
Any student of Canadian history knows that the borders of Canada are highly contingent. Rewind the tape of the past, and there are any number of moments where things could have turned out differently. In some scenarios, Canada ends up smaller than it currently is; in others, Canada ends up larger, perhaps substantially so. And in some alternative histories, Canada does not exist at all — or if it does, we’re all speaking French.
There’s nothing that is either sinister or celebratory in pointing this out. History is a bunch of stuff that happened, and in some cases, things might have turned out differently. But again, if you know your Canadian history, you know that the process by which Canada went from a French fur trading outpost to a collection of British mercantile colonies to a continent-spanning multinational federation and parliamentary democracy was made possible only through a rough admixture of ambition, cunning, scheming, coercion, violence, strong foreign support, and, between 1812 and 1814, war.
To get to the point: Canada’s sovereignty wasn’t something we just stumbled upon, nor is it something we were happily given. It was a thing we did. We did not do it alone, though; for most of the 19th century, the main ongoing threat to Canada’s sovereignty was the United States, while the ultimate guarantor of that sovereignty was Great Britain.
That dynamic shifted over the first half of the 20th century, when the British Empire went into decline, and the United States became the dominant world power. There was a short period after 1931, while British influence was ebbing and that of the Americans was flowing, in which Canada stood more or less independent and autonomous. This largely ended in 1940; Britain was on the ropes against Nazi Germany, Canada was in Hitler’s sights, and an increasingly anxious Franklin Roosevelt invited Mackenzie King down to Ogdensburg, New York, for a friendly chat about continental security.
“… and 10% for the Big Guy”
In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Miranda Devine’s new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America:
Even now, roughly half of Americans seem to believe that all the attention that’s been paid to Hunter Biden and his laptop has to do with his love of prostitutes and drugs rather than with high crimes and misdemeanors committed by him on behalf of his dad and other members of the clan. Even now, many Americans seem to be blithely unaware of the mountains of evidence showing that Hunter has long been fleecing foreign firms on Daddy’s behalf. For some reason those clueless Americans, even if capable of accepting that Hunter was up to no good, simply can’t believe that his pop – good old Lunchpail Joe – has ever been guilty of anything. (These same people, of course, are convinced that Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician ever to come down the pike.)
This blindness to facts – or stubborn refusal to pay attention to them – is immensely frustrating. And it must be especially frustrating for Miranda Devine, the Australian-American New York Post journalist who, in Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021), detailed the contents (by turns sordid and criminal) of Hunter’s celebrated computer, the story of which her newspaper broke 20 days before the 2020 presidential election, and who in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, focuses on the cover-up.
To say that Devine tells her story in impressive detail would be an understatement. Like War and Peace, The Big Guy opens with a long list of the main players, just in case you lose track of who’s who. And you will. Reading this book isn’t just like reading War and Peace – it’s like reading War and Peace at the same time as One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to remember a slew of foreign-sounding names, many of which sound very much alike, all the while following an exceedingly labyrinthine narrative.
To be sure, this tale also involves plenty of Americans, some of them public officials who, when they scented the heady whiff of corruption in the Biden circle, actually did their jobs by digging into the facts and gathering evidence. Others, alas, are people who also held positions of authority but who did their damnedest to put up “roadblocks” or “obstructions” or “delays” or “logjams” – to use some of the many synonyms that Devine uses to describe efforts to keep the public in the dark.
And boy, was there a lot to cover up. Among the expenses that Hunter tried to write off on his taxes – not that he was quick to pay them, mind you – were disbursements to prostitutes and drug dealers and memberships in sex clubs. During one “crack and hooker bender” in 2018, he spent $8,000 on a single sex worker, $140,000 on a stay in Las Vegas, and $34,000 on a sojourn at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. The Chateau Marmont is legendary for playing host to celebrities on drug binges, but Hunter caused so much damage to his room that he was banned from the place thereafter, which even he suspected was a first.
Part of the reason why Hunter was able to go through a small fortune so quickly was that he had a “sugar daddy” by the name of Kevin Morris, who for reasons that still remain a mystery chose to give him millions of dollars over the years to save him from financial crises (such as the ones posed by the relatively modest monetary demands of Hunter’s baby mama in Arkansas). A 2019 book contract with Simon & Schuster also netted Hunter a $750,000 advance, even though the book (surprise!) ended up selling so few copies that it made back only a tiny fraction of that sum. Then there were his paintings, which brought in at least $1.5 million. People laughed when Hunter first revealed his artworks to the world in 2020, but I didn’t: they’re no worse than a hell of a lot of contemporary art – and, after all, the art market these days is as much about laundering money than it is about aesthetics.
But Hunter’s main sources of mazuma were foreign companies. One of them was Barisma in Ukraine. Another, in Russia, was run by a man named Zlochevsky who said that Hunter, whom Joe Biden had called the smartest man he knew, was in fact stupider than Zlochevsky’s dog. A third was the Chinese energy company CEFC, a leading promoter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. CEFC put Hunter on its board – and paid him millions – in exchange for his promise to use his father’s name to “open … doors around the world” for the firm.
Collecting loot from all these sources and funneling some of it to family members involved a complex network of bank accounts and shell companies that was designed to make the moolah tough to trace. To illustrate the process, Devine follows the path of a single $5 million payment by a CEFC affiliate to one of Hunter’s firms, HWIII. Over time, Hunter transferred most of that $5 million to another firm of his, Owasco; in addition, he wired some of it to his uncle Jim’s company, after which Jim’s wife, Sara, withdrew a fraction of that sum and deposited it in the couple’s personal account and dispatched a $40,000 check to Joe Biden.
QotD: “Did you know the government faked the moon landings?”
Today I am compelled to much more sympathy with people who have come to believe that. It’s still objectively stupid, but I understand how they got there. It’s an interaction between a low-trust, polluted information environment and the cheater-detection module wired into human brains.
If you pose people a logic problem phrased in two different ways, one of which is “spot the cheater” and one of which is not, they’ll do substantially better on the first version. We are social animals who survived by forming trust networks, and for millions of years spotting the cheater was a life or death matter.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a person of average intelligence — not very good at following complex arguments or extracting generative patterns from large masses of evidence. This person has gradually become aware over the last quarter century that public information sources are saturated with lies. The media is corrupt and partisan, corporations deceive to boost their profits, education is ideologically captured, and governments constantly peddle vast falsehoods to gain compliance.
In this environment, and given the capacity limitations of the average human, the cheater-detection module goes into overdrive. The least bad strategy is to try to spot the worst liars and then believe the opposite of everything they say.
“The moon landings were faked” has to be understood as a symptom not of individual insanity, but of governing institutions and elite classes who have repeatedly burned up their long-term credibility for short-term gains.
This trend had been building for a long time, but undoubtedly culminated with the series of colossal lies, blunders, and “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” reversals around COVID.
I wish I knew a way back from this. I’m not sure anything less than the abolition of secrecy could do it.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-27.
January 30, 2025
The MAGA movement as “America’s Thermidorian Reaction”
Fortissax lays out the case for Canada remaining separate from the United States, in what he says is the longest single article he’s written. It is indeed a long piece, from which I’ve selected a small portion that helps identify the US MAGA movement as something other than just pro-Trump activism:
“Canada’s national identity is rooted in Order, as expressed in its national motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government, conceived by Sir John A. Macdonald. This stands in contrast to the United States, whose core value is Liberty, reflecting its liberal and individualist foundations in the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The MAGA movement, as explored in my colleague and fellow Canadian Endeavour’s article, can be understood not as a counter-revolutionary or genuinely reactionary force, but as America’s Thermidorian Reaction — a movement within the post-WWII liberal order to purge its own radical excesses. Endeavour draws parallels to the French Revolution, where the Thermidorian Reaction was not a restoration of the monarchy but a moderation of the Reign of Terror’s extremism, and to the Soviet Union’s Destalinization, which sought to distance the regime from Stalin’s radical policies without abandoning communism.
Similarly, MAGA does not aim to dismantle the liberal framework established during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, marked by the Civil Rights Act and Hart-Celler Act, but instead seeks to address the instability caused by the radicalization of this framework during the “Great Awokening” of the 2010s. Its faith in “colourblind meritocracy” is rock solid. Just as the Thermidorians and Khrushchev’s regime sought to preserve their respective systems by eliminating destabilizing elements, MAGA represents an attempt to recalibrate the liberal order by challenging excessive ideological commitments like open borders, identity politics, and globalist policies.
While MAGA appeals to traditionalist sentiments, it ultimately operates within the boundaries of the same liberal system it critiques, lacking the philosophical depth to present a true alternative. Trump’s 2016 campaign was fueled by widespread dissatisfaction with the establishment and a sense of cultural alienation among, working-class European-Americans. As an outsider candidate, Trump faced opposition from both political parties and the media but managed to channel populist anger into an unexpected victory. However, his presidency revealed that he posed less of a threat to the system than many anticipated. Trump’s administration implemented some reforms but fell short of disrupting the liberal order, leading many elites to reframe him as a tolerable alternative to the increasing instability caused by radical left-wing movements. The 2024 campaign differs significantly from Trump’s earlier runs because he has garnered support from influential elite factions. Figures in Big Tech, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and segments of the Zionist lobby, see Trump as a tool to stabilize the system without fundamentally altering it. While Trump continues to appeal to his populist base, his elite backers are likely to exert more influence over his presidency than grassroots supporters.
The Four Agendas of America’s Elite
Endeavour outlines four major agendas driving the U.S. political landscape, which often overlap but also compete for dominance:
- The Anti-White Agenda (Wokeism)
This agenda promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as core principles, advocating for identity politics, demographic transformation, and the demonization of traditional Western cultural norms. Organizations like the NAACP, SPLC, and Open Society Foundations champion this cause.
- Managerialism
Focused on centralized control, managerialism, coined by James Burnham, expands bureaucratic oversight in both public and private sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic epitomized managerial overreach, as policies enforced compliance on an unprecedented scale. Key proponents include BlackRock, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- The Zionist Lobby
Primarily concerned with ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel, the Zionist agenda overlaps with wokeism in promoting leftist social causes but diverges when these causes conflict with Israeli interests. Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL straddle this divide.
- Big Tech
Initially aligned with wokeism, Big Tech has begun to push back against its most radical elements due to its impact on innovation and competence. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) symbolizes this shift, as does growing discontent with DEI mandates within the tech sector.
While these agendas are not inherently unified, they collectively uphold the liberal framework established in the 1960s, even as they compete for dominance within it. I’ve defined these forces in the past as left-liberalism vs right-liberalism, which I covered here: MAGA & Wokism
Parallels to Historical Thermidorian Reactions
MAGA’s role is likened to historical Thermidorian Reactions, where moderates sought to rein in revolutionary excesses to stabilize their regimes. For example:
- The Thermidorians ended Robespierre’s radical Reign of Terror, easing persecution and executions while maintaining the republic.
- Khrushchev’s Destalinization moderated Stalin’s authoritarian rule but preserved the communist system.
Similarly, MAGA seeks to temper the radicalism of woke managerialism without challenging the core tenets of the liberal order. The “Great Awokening,” characterized by intensified DEI policies, identity politics, and cancel culture, parallels the Reign of Terror and Stalinist purges in its ideological zeal. Trump’s 2024 campaign represents an attempt to dial back these excesses and restore a degree of moderation.
Challenges Facing the Thermidorians
Despite its goals, MAGA faces significant hurdles in moderating the system:
- Demographic Shifts: The growing influence of progressive, non-white voting blocs entrenches leftist policies.
- Institutional Entrenchment: Managerial bureaucracies are staffed with ideologues deeply committed to woke principles, making reform difficult.
- Superficial Reforms: Even if MAGA eases censorship and curbs DEI mandates, it is unlikely to reverse structural changes such as demographic transformation or the Civil Rights Act.
Endeavour contends that MAGA’s moderation of woke managerialism may improve short-term conditions but will not address deeper contradictions in the liberal order. For example:
- The Zionist lobby’s support for both Israeli ethno-nationalism and woke policies in the U.S. creates unsustainable contradictions.
- Universalist egalitarianism remains fundamentally flawed, and attempts to reform it, like Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the USSR, may inadvertently accelerate systemic collapse.
While MAGA may temporarily stabilize the United States, it will not fundamentally alter the trajectory set in motion during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The deeper issues of demographic change, cultural alienation, and institutional decay remain unresolved. Trump’s vision—and likely that of most within the MAGA movement—is rooted in nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s, a romanticized era cherished by many baby boomers. This idealized vision imagines a time when race was purportedly invisible, the black middle class thrived, and patriotism unified Americans across racial lines. This narrative conveniently ignores the darker realities of that period, including the L.A. race riots and the rise of militant groups like the Black Panther Party. At the same time, this Thermidorian Reaction is being leveraged to solidify control over America’s imperial vassals, with the Anglosphere serving as its primary appendages and European nation-states as key dependencies. Populist movements across Europe echo rhetoric nearly identical to that of MAGA, with many receiving direct or indirect support from individuals and entities affiliated with the movement. Figures like Elon Musk have actively amplified some of these efforts, like promoting the Alternative für Deutschland party and bolstering independent actors aligned with MAGA’s agenda, thereby expanding its influence across the Western world. Not ideal, but a means to an end for sure.
