Eugenus Rex
Published 6 Jun 2021In an insightful and sobering documentary, journalist Michael Cockerell chronicles the life and career of the politician, classical scholar, linguist, soldier, poet and altogether self-identifying outcast; the Right Honourable Brigadier John Enoch Powell. Featuring interviews with Mr. Powell, his family, friends and the former Prime Minister, the Baroness Thatcher.
Originally broadcast: 11th November, 1995.
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October 27, 2026
Odd Man Out | A Film Portrait of Enoch Powell (1995)
October 14, 2026
QotD: The rise of the Reform Party of Canada
A rejection of the new Canada, especially the largesse and overreach of the federal government into economic matters, was the perfect match for importing the new kind of libertarian-infused conservatism that became dominant in the 1980s with figures like Reagan and Thatcher. “Small government” conservatism provided a solid ideological foundation on which to build a new kind of conservatism to oppose aspects of the new regime, and it was also one that didn’t require nostalgizing for the old Dominion.
This small government conservatism wasn’t a homegrown ideology, it was adopted and imported from elsewhere. America especially. The dominant paradigm in postwar American conservatism became the fusionism that was associated with publications like National Review, and eventually became a dominant political force in Ronald Reagan. The success of this fusionism also made it appealing, and ready-made, to be imported to Canada and fused with this rejection of big government Liberal nationalism. In the process, Canadian conservatism begins to sound more American.
I’m not using this pejoratively and I don’t see this so much as a form of cultural imperialism. The adoption of this kind of conservatism made sense in response to the new Liberal nationalism. But it does present some serious problems for Canadian conservatism. This anti-nationalism and small government conservatism will appeal to some, especially in the West, but it’s not something that a national movement could be forged around.
This is what I mean when I say lots of conservatives don’t like Canada all that much. In adopting small government American conservatism, this kind of conservatism sounds like an American critique of Canada. Canadian healthcare looks “socialist” to American conservatives, and small government ideologues in America look at Canada and see big government “Soviet Canuckistan.” This is what Canadian conservatives adopting this kind of ideology sometimes sound like, and you can see why this has limited electoral appeal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
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October 13, 2026
No wonder the wokies hate J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter books used to be sacred lore to the woke generation until the author committed the unforgivable crime of defending the rights of women against the encroachment of trans-women. Yet, it doesn’t take a very close reading of the texts to discover so many things that appear to have slipped under the notice of the progressives and form the core beliefs of the fictional world she created:
Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang seems much more appropriate than it might have in the past
Potential is largely hereditary, family is most important, the media are lying parasites, the state can’t be trusted with education, and children should be taught armed self-defense.
These are not subversive readings. These are the plot.
The Harry Potter series was the most successful publishing phenomenon of the late twentieth century. It sold half a billion copies. Progressive parents handed it to their children as a parable about tolerance and the courage to stand against prejudice. The movies grossed eight billion dollars. The author became an icon of liberal cultural production and then, by a process that remains opaque to the people who made her famous, a figure of political villainy for holding positions indistinguishable from mainstream liberal feminism circa 2005.
Set aside the author. The books exist independently of whatever J.K. Rowling believes or is believed to believe. Read them for what they actually say. The worldview encoded in the narrative structure, the plot logic, and the moral arc is not the worldview the books were marketed as containing. It is considerably more interesting.
Blood Will Tell
Magic is inherited. This is the foundational premise of the entire fictional world and the premise from which everything else follows.
You are either born a witch or wizard, or you are not. No amount of study, effort, practice, or desire will make a Muggle magical. The reverse is also true: Squibs, born to magical families but lacking the gift, cannot acquire it. They are defective members of magical lineages, pitied and often hidden. Argus Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, is a Squib. His bitterness and cruelty toward the students is the bitterness of a man who can see the gift in others but will never have it himself.
[…]
Family Carries Everything
Harry survives Voldemort’s killing curse because his mother died to protect him. Not a metaphor. A literal magical mechanism. Lily Potter’s sacrificial love created a protection charm encoded in Harry’s blood that made him impossible for Voldemort to kill directly.
[…]
The Press Are the Enemy
The Daily Prophet is introduced early and is corrupt throughout.
[…]
The State Cannot Be Trusted to Educate Your Children
Dolores Umbridge is a government administrator appointed by the Ministry of Magic to reform Hogwarts.
Her arrival at Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix is the politicization of education made literal. The Ministry does not trust Dumbledore. The Ministry does not want students to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts. A student body trained in combat magic is a student body that might resist. Umbridge’s curriculum is therefore purely theoretical: no spellcasting, no practical application, only reading approved texts about defensive magic that the students are forbidden to practice.
[…]
The books contain other lessons that the progressive readership tended not to discuss.
House-elves are slaves. They are hereditary servants bound to magical families, forbidden to disobey direct orders, and conditioned to punish themselves for disloyalty. Dobby is freed and becomes a hero. But Dobby is the exception. Most house-elves, including the Hogwarts house-elves, do not want freedom. Hermione’s Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare is played for laughs. The elves reject her knitted hats. They are offended by the offer of liberation. Dobby is a weirdo.
The narrative does not resolve this. The house-elves are not freed after Voldemort falls. The epilogue does not mention them. The implication is that hereditary servitude is acceptable if the servants are happy, and these servants are happy. Whatever else this is, it is not an abolitionist text.
[…]
What The Books Actually Taught
The Harry Potter series is a fundamentally reactionary conservative text dressed in the aesthetic of liberal tolerance.
It teaches that ability is inherited and the argument is only about whether pedigree or demonstrated ability should determine status. It teaches that family is the highest loyalty and the source of the most powerful magic. It teaches that the press serves power and the only response is to route around it. It teaches that the state will capture education to produce compliant subjects and that the answer is to arm the children. It teaches that some people are born for greatness and others are born for service, and the main thing is to get the sorting right.
None of this requires reading against the grain. It requires only reading.
September 26, 2026
Jacob Rees-Mogg says the quiet part out loud
Despite British news popping up here fairly regularly, I don’t closely follow individual politicians, so I didn’t have strong opinions about Jacob Rees-Mogg. I guess I had mild positive feelings about him based on what he’d said on various issues several years ago. I’d rather assumed he’d be out of politics by now with the collapse of the “Conservatives” after the Boriswave, but no, he still thinks of himself as a voice worth listening to … unfortunately.
Thoughts from the Shire suggests that we not blame Rees-Mogg too much, as he merely said out loud what they all think:
Don’t be too hard on old Jacob Rees-Mogg.
His recent call for the return of duty and the stiff upper lip, along with his warning that some of us may once again have to fight and die for our country, has predictably, and rightly so been met with howls of derision.
But here’s the thing, Mogg isn’t entirely wrong.
Duty does matter, courage matters, and sacrifice matters. A people incapable of defending themselves will eventually find themselves at the mercy of people who can, this is the story of world history. The problem is not the principle, the problem is the state of the nation, and perhaps more importantly, the relationship between those asking for the sacrifice and those expected to make it. People have rightly been pointing out that Millionaire Mogg, and his progeny are not likely to be the ones enlisted for the frontline, and that too often in our history the likes of Jacob have led many millions of good men to war. It is great that many have seen through Moggs BS rhetoric, and are telling him where he can stick his future war.
However we should not think that the masses of working class men that fought in past conflicts all did so out of patriotism, or because they listened to their betters, or were too stupid to see through the propaganda. Most knew their leaders were full of shit, most despised the upper crust types like Mogg.
It’s rather amusing that both the British and Canadian powers-that-be have spent a long time doing things to diminish the patriotism of their people — not least by mass immigration against the will of the voters — and denigrating the patriotic feelings they haven’t managed to fully suppress. Both ostentatiously treat immigrants, especially illegal immigrants better than they treat their own citizens, both with public support and judicial slight-of-hand to minimize or eliminate punishments when they do find themselves in court.
Now, British elites want the downtrodden young white males to ready themselves to go die for Ukraine, while Canadian elites want their downtrodden young white males to become, as John Carter put it, the Hoser Taliban and fight against the Yankee hordes of the Bad Orange Man. As if everyone will just magically forget that they spent the last decade and more actively trying to erase our history and blacken the reputations of the men who built our nation.
Sorry for the interruption, I’ll get off my hobby horse and let’s get back to Thoughts From the Shire:
Canadian troops going “over the top”
In the Past, the Upper Crust also Paid a Great Price in War
Nor, incidentally, did the upper classes always remain safely at home like old Mogg, and his ilk today. In the Great War, aristocratic families lost sons in extraordinary numbers. In 1919 the House of Lords recorded 160 sons of peers dead, “in many cases the hopes and heirs of their line”. Prime Minister Asquith lost his son Raymond. Bonar Law lost two sons. Public-school boys died in the same mud as miners and millworkers, and actually in a higher proportion. Go further back and the connection between leadership, and physical danger becomes even clearer. Kings fought, Chieftains fought, aristocrats fought. Martial ability was not the only qualification for leadership, but for much of history its obvious absence could certainly be a disqualification. It would have been unthinkable for a Celtic chief not to have been a great warrior, in fact the greatest warrior was often made chief precisely because he was the best warrior. Put the above into the context of today, the weak effeminate excuses for leaders we have in the West, not one of them would have the backbone to stand and fight for anything, let alone for you or me.
Contrary to common belief, in the past the man saying “Lets go to war” was frequently going with you, and on WWI the junior officer was actually going in front of you.
That matters.
Because the great change in our own age is not that ordinary men have suddenly become cowards (although it’s no doubt many are) and the upper classes armchair generals. It is that the bond between sacrifice, and belonging has weakened. My ancestors lived in mill-owned houses. They knew perfectly well where they stood in the social order, right at the bottom. Yet they fought in both world wars, remember there was no conscription in Ireland so they volunteered.
The thing is they were not fighting for an amorphous administrative machine called “the state”. They were fighting, in however complicated a fashion, for home, hearth, wives, weans, neighbours, streets, churches, towns, regiments, and the men beside them. They knew what was behind them, and beside them, they knew what they were trying to preserve, and that is where Mogg has the problem a bit backwards.
You cannot spend decades hollowing out common identity, weakening attachment to place, treating inherited loyalties as embarrassing, and reducing citizenship increasingly to an administrative relationship, then suddenly reach into the cupboard when war threatens and pull out words such as duty, honour, country, and sacrifice. You cannot look down your nose at the oiks and their gammon like ways, and then suddenly point out that they may have to die with honour and dignity.
Virtues like duty, honour, and sacrifice require roots, common beliefs and identities, a people!!!
So perhaps Mogg is right, we do need to toughen up. Perhaps we have become too comfortable, too passive, and too frightened of hardship. But the courage required of us may not be the courage to march obediently towards the next foreign battlefield for the virtue signalling elite, and their banker friends. It may be the courage to ask our own rulers some very uncomfortable questions first.
On Substack Notes, John Carter links to a Morgoth post on the topic, saying:
Jacob Rees-Mogg has been lecturing Brits about their “duty” to the nation, in particular their duty to die in Ukraine, while at the very same time he denies that the English people even exist as a nation at all. A “nation of mongrels”, he calls them.
He adopts the mannerisms of a grand old lord of times gone by, one of the landed gentry who bled and died en masse when they threw themselves into the trenches of the Great War, answering the very same call of duty to God, king, and country that Rees-Mogg cynically invokes. Will Rees-Mogg die in a slit trench in the Donbass? Will any of his four sons? Peter is 19 — old enough to fight. Will he? To ask the question is to answer it.
Rees-Mogg speaks of duty to fight for a country he will not fight for. He speaks of duty as he smiles upon the invasion of that country by the hordes of third world primitives he and his class continue to invite in. He speaks of duty, as the regime he supports bends itself to persecuting the men and women doing their duty to their country by attempting to fight back against the invasion.
September 9, 2026
The day after counter-tariff Tuesday
Yesterday, the Canadian counter-tariffs to the latest round of US tariffs kicked in. Maxime Bernier put it this way:
Canadians wake up today to a brand new tax hike; courtesy of PM Carney’s “dollar-for-dollar” countertariffs.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a weapon against Trump. It’s a tax on YOU.
Every time you buy steel, a fridge, manicure products or a laundry machine, etc. … you’re paying more so Ottawa can feel tough.
The Liberals call this “standing up to Trump”. I call it economic sabotage.
They’re taxing Canadians to feel good about “punishing” Washington. And who pays the bill? Families, workers, and businesses right here at home.
Trump started this pointless trade war. But two wrongs don’t make a right; they just make everything more expensive.
You can’t fight tariffs with more tariffs. That’s just stupid.
Happy Tax Day, everyone. Thanks, Carney.
Carney’s plan all along has been to push Trump into saying and doing things that give Carney and the Liberals even more Boomer support. Pretty much controlling the relic media allows the government to massage the stories so that Dear Leader is never in the wrong and “the Bad Orange Man hates you and wants to destroy you”. Canadian boomers are among the last people in the world to realize that they’ve been systematically gaslighted since Justin Trudeau ran for Liberal leader … and the penny still hasn’t dropped. Enough of them are already psychologically prepared to destroy what’s left of the economy, Thelma & Louise style, if Carney invites them to. And he’s going to.
John Carter responds to a Ben Woodfinden article in the National Post, blaming dissident Canadians for not rallying behind Mark Carney to … do exactly the same sort of performative elbozo pantomime that the Boomer Liberals have been doing for over a year?
This misses the mark in a subtle but interesting way. The author invokes the concept of oikophobia against the Canadian online right for joining in (actually initiating) American mockery of Canada, arguing that Canadian rightists are themselves oikophobic for not instead supporting the Carnites.
This is incoherent. The Liberal regime is itself oikophobic, loudly so. Oikophobia is explicit Canadian government policy, as the author himself tacitly acknowledges by noting that we pointed out the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians decrying Trump’s lame Lake America stunt after a decade-long orgy of renaming every school, square, and street in the country in the name of a Woke ideology imported straight from America. That’s to say nothing of replacement migration, and racial preference systems that make white Canadians second class citizens. You can’t be oikophobic against the oikophobes.
There are certainly slopulist 51st staters out there, but their influence in the Canadian right is actually marginal, largely confined to a rump of lolcow Alberta separatists. The energy is all in Canadian Loyalism, and that is a different animal entirely.
The reason we’re happy to pile on to the Canadian political elite when the Americans mock them isn’t because we want to be America. It’s because we’re disgusted by the state of the country.
Trump can excoriate the Canadian military for being fat and woke because it is. That isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s because of decades of sabotage and social engineering by the Liberal Party.
Trump can joke about annexation because the Canadian military is weak. Again, that isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s the fault of the Laurentian elite, the very people now insisting that they can turn things around.
If Canada had a serious government, we’d be taken seriously. We don’t, and haven’t since Pearson at least. As a direct result of the deeply unserious clowns running the country into the ground, Canada is poor, defenseless, sclerotic, and despondent. Every time Trump makes fun of us, the very fact that his insults land is a condemnation of the elites that brought our beautiful country to this shameful condition.
Saving Canada requires circulating the elite.
And that’s why we pile on.
And since I try not to overtax my non-Canadian readers (the vast majority of you) with too many separate maple-flavoured posts, here are some sensible suggestions from Matt Gurney about fixing our own problems — which are legion, and mostly self-inflicted — rather than pretending that Trump is the problem:
… there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?
Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.
But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just … do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.
I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.
But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.
And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.
Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.
But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.
The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.
And just when the hell did that happen?
We can’t blame Trump for our laughably protectionist inter-provincial trade barriers. We can’t blame Trump because we’re functionally incapable of building a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and natural gas to Canadian markets. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-functional public healthcare systems. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-appealing market conditions for foreign investment. We can’t blame Trump for our deteriorating relationship with First Nations groups. These are all things that need to be fixed by Canadians. In Canada. No matter who might be occupying the Oval Office in Washington, DC.
Update: Added missing URL to John Carter’s post on X.
September 3, 2026
John Carter reports on “the largest gathering of Canadian nationalists in generations”
Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957
Having been peripherally involved in party politics in Canada since the mid 1970s, I hope you’ll forgive my occasional bout of cynicism about getting political change in this country through peaceful means … the long comfortable decades under the US nuclear umbrella has allowed Canadian political parties to get ever more unserious and willing to pretend that taking a two-and-a-half generations-long vacation from the world of realpolitik has been somehow our birthright. I love my adopted homeland and it is distressing to see how easily the Liberal propagandists (supported by the state-funded relic media) can get elbow-flapping choruses of Canadian boomers to chant the slogans and blandly accept the grand theft from their children and grandchildren without a blush of shame.
John Carter says there may still be hope that enough Canadians have recognized the awful situation we’re in and are willing to do what’s necessary to change our collective ways and get back onto a path of constructive nationalism rather than the tame opposition of the current Conservative Party:
I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this was an historic moment.
It was also a hell of a ride.
The Dominion Society was founded barely over a year ago, and rapidly exploded to over three thousand members across the country. It is a peaceful and explicitly non-partisan political advocacy group dedicated to advancing the cause of remigration within Canadian civil society. So far its activities have consisted mainly of selling branded merchandise, putting up posters, cleaning up parks, rallies to oppose Canadian towns from tearing down statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Samuel de Champlain, and a whole lot of social media campaigns.
To anyone in possession of some shred of sanity, all of this would seem to be entirely unobjectionable and non-threatening. To the Canadian government, which long ago released its hold on the last tenuous threads of sanity, this is a five-alarm political fire. They are, it seems, terrified of the Dominion Society to the point of hysteria.
Until recently the Canadian media – which by virtue of a generous state funding apparatus is de facto state media – has for the most part done its best to ignore the Dominion Society, treating it as an irrelevant collection of disgruntled kids who aren’t worth reporting on. That isn’t to say that the political class was not aware of DomSoc. Their founder, Daniel Tyrie, showed up at the Conservative Party conference several months ago with a number of supporters, trolling the Conservative Party of Canada with a big “Conserve What?” sign outside the front door of the venue, showing a picture of CPC leader Pierre Poillievre wearing a Sikh temple hat during one of his many ethnic pandering junkets. The CPC very much noticed this, and were not impressed.
Since then Tyrie and his supporters have sparred with various CPC politicians on X, ratioing them on a fairly regular basis. On February 15th, the Flag Day that marks the 1965 transition from the original Canadian flag to the Maple Leaf, the House of Commons account got thoroughly ensignmogged by a swarm of Canadian nationalists declaring that the Red Ensign was their real flag.
Seriously, just look at the replies and quote tweets. An unending sea of red ensigns.
The flag day ensignmogging was a remarkable eruption of nationalist energy, and it’s very difficult to imagine that the Canadian government has not noticed the sudden popularity of the Red Ensign and the Canadian shield as symbols of Canadian nationalism. This use of these discarded symbols makes Canadian politicians palpably anxious. They have spent many decades patiently erasing Canada’s past in order to socially engineer the wild colonials into the universal economic subject, and the revival of ethnically particular medieval heraldry signals something stirring within the deep recesses of the mass psyche. The natives are restless. Old and terrible gods are awakening.
The question of course is what they can do about that. So far the answer has been “not much that matters”. It would be one thing if the Dominion Society was a bad optics skinhead cult called the White Reich Front or something, brandishing sonnenrads on their shield walls as they formed up for street battle with Trantifa. This would be easily dealt with as something obviously frightening and foreign. But the Dominion Society is none of these things. It is named the Dominion Society, as in the Dominion of Canada – Canada’s official, full name, being a Dominion of the British Crown. Its symbolism draws upon Canada’s own traditional symbolism, symbols that are indeed still quietly used by the Canadian government itself, and it is therefore quite impossible for the regime to characterize DomSoc as something frightening and foreign on aesthetic grounds alone. Worse still, DomSoc is very smart about how it operates. They don’t march through the streets shouting and getting in fights: they’re polite and friendly, focusing on media activism and political pressure campaigns. Their messaging stays strictly within legal boundaries. Their over-arching goal is direct and simple: to popularize the concept of remigration, normalizing it as a topic in the national conversation, such that voters will begin spontaneously raising the issue with politicians: “If we can bring people in, why can’t we send them back? Planes fly in any direction.”
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September 1, 2026
Despite police efforts, the Dominion Society successfully holds their conference
The Dominion Society of Canada had planned to hold their conference at a venue in Hamilton, but Hamilton police took it upon themselves to harass the owners of rental facilities to ensure that the conference could not take place. Despite active police intervention, the organizers found an appropriate site in Burlington and the event went ahead after all:
It’s always a good look when the local police are trying to intimidate businesses to prevent a peaceful legal gathering from taking place.
On August 29th, the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) hosted a sold-out conference bringing together domestic and international speakers.Taking place in Burlington, the event was originally announced for Hamilton and was elevated to the status of international incident by legally dubious political policing, the likely unconstitutional interference of federal agencies, and numerous violations of political neutrality by local municipalities and charitable organizations.
Launched in 2025 and swelling to several thousand members by 2026, the DSC exists to advocate for immigration restriction and Canadian nationalism. Controversially, this includes a ten-year halt to immigration and the deportation of millions of non-citizen residents.
DSC’s first conference, this was a deciding moment for the increasingly notorious organization and was strongly opposed by left-wing and anti-nationalist groups, including local civic and social planning organizations, the Jewish rights and advocacy group B’nai Brith, Hope Not Hate, and the state-backed Canadian Anti Hate Network.
The event nearly passed with little notice. But moderates and liberals across the country were alarmed at a chilling assault on free assembly and expression mobilized against DSC at all levels of power.
Ahead of the event, the Hamilton Police Service urged venues “to consider the impact this event and its messaging may have on the broader community when making decisions about hosting it” and claimed “the messaging associated with DomCon is divisive and exclusionary and can negatively impact the sense of safety and belonging within our community”.
Dominion Society founder Daniel Tyrie condemned the move to use police resources to dissuade venues from hosting the conference: “Today we learn that they are going venue-by-venue to pressure businesses into canceling on us or refuse our booking. Is this an appropriate use of police resources in a city as dysfunctional as Hamilton?”
In a call with Wire Tap Media, Inspector Darren Murphy denied that Hamilton Police Service (HPS) were engaged in political intimidation, and confirmed the steps taken by HPS to keep DSC out of Hamilton.
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July 30, 2026
Canadian conservatives need different leaders, say Liberal media
Unlike the Liberals and NDP, whose leaders get a media honeymoon that sometimes lasts for years, Conservative leaders are never given the slightest break by presstitutes paid by the Liberals. (Anyone further to the right than the centrist Conservatives get almost no media attention at all, as Maxime Bernier can attest.) L. Wayne Mathison responds to “helpful” suggestions for how the Conservatives can get rid of their current unpopular-with-the-state-media leader and replace him with someone more “acceptable”:
The pattern is obvious.
Scheer was supposedly too awkward. O’Toole was too inconsistent. Pierre is now too aggressive, too divisive, too nasty. Change the leader and the criticism changes with him. The objective stays the same: keep Conservatives apologizing, retreating and replacing leaders while the Liberals remain the default governing party.
The elite Red Tories never wanted Pierre Poilievre as leader because he threatens the arrangement they are comfortable with. They prefer a Conservative Party that manages Liberal policies a little more efficiently, attends the right receptions and never seriously challenges Ottawa’s permanent political class.
Put on the economics hat and the incentives become clear. The people closest to government often do very well under bigger government. Consultants get contracts. Lobbyists gain influence. Bureaucracies expand. Well-connected corporations receive subsidies and protection. Housing owners watch scarcity drive up their assets. Ordinary workers get higher taxes, weaker wages, expensive housing and declining public services.
Pierre’s real offence is that he speaks directly to the people paying the bill.
Canada has nearly every advantage a country could ask for: energy, minerals, farmland, fresh water, educated people, stable institutions and access to the largest market on Earth. We should be one of the wealthiest and strongest countries in the world. Instead, our political class keeps managing scarcity, blocking investment and teaching Canadians to expect less.
Conservatives should stop chasing approval from commentators and insiders who will never support them. Back Pierre. Defend the principles. Make the economic case clearly.
Prosperity should not be reserved for the people who already know how to work the system.
The best investment the Liberals ever made was buying the loyalty of the relic media with a dollop of cash from the government’s coffers. They already were mostly onboard with the Liberals — those that didn’t think the NDP was too far right — but the financial leash made even the mavericks think twice about substantive criticism of the man who co-signed their pay cheques.
Update: Fixed missing URL.
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July 29, 2026
The changing nature of Canadian patriotism
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jay Currie contrasts the kind of patriotism most Canadians grew up with against the politicized version hijacked by the Liberals as a tool in their never-ending quest to re-shape Canadians in their preferred image:
Sitting out here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island overlooking the Olympic mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I am bemused by the Eastern Canadian debate on Canadian patriotism. @BenWoodfinden weighs in as does Auntie Andy @acoyne
The current version of the debate is focused on whether the Conservative Party is “patriotic enough”. In less fraught times that would translate to “love of Canada” but now it comes down to anti-American and, more importantly, anti-Trump enough.
Probably because, after twelve years of Trudeau/Carney there is very little “Canada” left to love. We’re a post-national, genocidal, nearly European entity ruled from an embattled Ottawa beset by Americans, Chinese and our own separatists.
From the Ottawa/Toronto point of view Canada’s singular attribute is our willingness to punch Trump right in the nose. And woe betide the traitors like Smith, Moe and Frechette who are not willing to get behind Captain Canada as he takes his roundhouse swings.
And the Conservative Party is failing on the patriotism front precisely because a significant part of it thinks punching the Yanks in the nose is possibly the dumbest thing they have ever heard. Why the Hell would we do that?
On the Auntie Andy/Woodfinden scale of patriotism this disqualifies the CPC from ever winning a federal election because only Canadian Patriots should be allowed to command the Ottawa ramparts eyes firmly fixed on the perfidious Yanks.
As a thought experiment try to define Canadian patriotism without reference to the US or Donald Trump. I assure you it can be done. The way you do it is begin with the ground you are on. Where is it? What is it? What can you see?
Now, think about your neighbours, the stores you go to, the pub you like, the golf course or soccer field or swimming pool you prefer, the schools you went to, the teams you played on, yes, your favourite NHL team, vacation spot, drive.
Essentially these and hundreds of other details are the ground truths of your Canada and it is that Canada where your patriotism begins. The Canadian flag, the Peace tower, your favourite version of “Oh, Canada” are all abstractions of this ground truth.
People don’t fight for “King and Country”, they fight for their children, their spouse, their parents, their neighbours. That is where the real loyalty lies. It’s acutely local and it accretes across time, across generations.
The Liberal Party project of the last half century has been to replace this hyper-localized patriotism with an synthetic, denatured, atomized Patriotism which defines itself by what it is against, not what it is for. It is a deeply unsatisfying project.
The fact the CPC is wary of this synthetic patriotism is to its credit. Looking at its messaging in the last election at least a part of the CPC understands that Canada is the ground you stand on, not an invention of Ottawa. It’s the right message.
At Without Diminishment, Carl Vallée identifies one of the structural strengths of the left that allow them to concentrate on achieving and maintaining power: unity of vision across all progressive parties.
Exit Trudeau, enter Carney.
It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.
The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.
Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.
In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.
Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.
Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.
Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.
Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.
If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.
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July 19, 2026
The rise of the populist right in Australia
Celina outlines the conditions that allow populist movements to displace traditional centre-right parties as Australia’s One Nation under Pauline Hanson is in the process of displacing the Liberals:
Everyone has an opinion about why One Nation is surging. Most people argue it’s immigration. Others say it’s the cost of living, housing, or just a general distrust of politicians. And obviously all of those things are factors.
But of course, all of those explanations are just opinions, and more importantly, they don’t really explain why this is happening now.
One Nation isn’t the first party of its type to emerge, in fact, Australia is actually pretty late to this trend. We’ve already watched similar parties rise in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and across much of Western Europe.
[…]
So if immigration alone explains One Nation’s rise, why didn’t One Nation explode ten years ago?
The answer, according to a growing body of political science, isn’t simply that voters changed. It’s that the centre-right stopped functioning the way it used to. For decades, parties like the Liberal Party acted as gatekeepers. They bundled together free-market economics, cultural conservatism and a vague patriotism into one broad electoral coalition. But the Liberal Party has fractured rapidly and everything has changed.
This is exactly what happened with Trump and the Republican Party, with Brexit and then Reform UK in Britain, and with similar populist parties across Europe. The rise of the populist right isn’t just about people becoming more conservative, it’s about the collapse of the old centre-right policy formula. Australia is now going through exactly the same process.
As a comparison, Reform UK established itself as the dominant force on the British right rivaling the Tories whilst they were already crumbling, which allowed those voters to become apart of Reforms broader support base. Analyses of the 2024 election in the UK found that around 80% of Reform voters had voted Conservative in 2019. The same thing now seems to be happening with One Nation. Some of that growth comes from former Liberal voters. Some comes from people who previously supported smaller right-wing parties and have now consolidated behind One Nation because they think it’s the only party capable of replacing the Liberals. Some comes from Labor. But overwhelmingly, this is a story about the collapse of the centre-right rather than some sudden ideological revolution among Australians.
So yes, immigration matters. Cost of living matters. Housing matters. But those things explain why voters became dissatisfied. They don’t explain why millions of those voters suddenly stopped expressing that dissatisfaction through the Liberal Party and started expressing it through One Nation instead. To answer that question, you need political science and when you look at the research, the rise of One Nation starts looking like Australia’s version of a much bigger political realignment that’s already transformed much of the Western world.
So, populist insurgencies are underway in Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands … so why not in Canada, where all of the conditions are at least as pro-populism as any of the others? My answer is propaganda. Most Canadians still get their daily news and opinions from traditional sources — almost all of whom are now directly on the government’s payroll. Most Canadians are as insulated from dissident voices as Germans were in the 1930s … and Canadians still trust their government more than most other westerners.
July 16, 2026
QotD: The nostalgic British elements of Canadian nationalism
Britishness survives as civic nationalism. Old British Canada may be gone, but aspects of that Britishness live on. We should celebrate our history and our historic symbols, but this alternative shouldn’t set about restoring it all. A future oriented embrace of our history needs to be built around the active parts of this Britishness that have now become truly Canadian. For example, the Crown in Canada is not now just a British institution, it’s a Canadian institution. Same with our democratic institutions and parliamentary traditions, which we must work to strengthen and renew.
Embracing this enables us to thread the needle on our relationship with America. Part of what makes us different historically, culturally, ideationally, and in disposition from America, is this history. Just as Canadian Britishness has survived to the present day in unique ways, our desire not to become Americans is alive and well. A homegrown Canadian Britishness enables us to continue this without falling into crass anti-Americanism, and without requiring us to embrace the new Liberal nationalism to reject America. We should see America as an amicable cousin, but one that we are distinct and different from.
But most importantly, what this new kind of national identity needs to build around needs to be an evolution of the liberal nationalism that emphasizes and consciously builds around our regional pluralism. […] but the kind of rationalistic liberalism that our modern national identity is built around, while sold as a way of dealing with diversity, suffers from some serious internal tensions. Liberalism, especially the Canadian variant of it, implicitly depends upon and encourages a degree of homogenization that flattens hard cultural differences. We need to become more pluralistic, and less liberal.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
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July 13, 2026
A Fair Reading of The Camp of the Saints
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jul 2026Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints has gone from obscurity to infamy in recent years, drawing condemnation for its highly … unflattering depiction of third-worlders. Much of this condemnation comes from people who haven’t read it, or gave it only a shallow and cursory read. But if we let the book speak for itself it can be quite insightful at times, and the true target of its scorn becomes brutally evident.
Rather than use politically-charged b-roll, it’s all hiking shots this time. Mostly to cover some edits. This is a great one for those who listen to these on the commute. Or the commode as the case may be.
00:00 Intro
01:03 The Story
14:22 Escalation Curve
17:38 Hamadura and “Whiteness”
22:05 Culture and Ethnicity
26:33 Why so Serious?
30:09 The End of a World
34:14 Your Virtual Right-Wing Uncle
35:48 A “Martian” Perspective🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
🔹 Oh, and book 2 of Stellar Drift is out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTVXK4CN
May 20, 2026
Canadian politics can be bad for your mental health
As a rule of thumb, the more you pay attention to Canada’s political circus, the worse your state of mental health becomes, IMO anyway. On a more serious note, David Clinton got curious about a recent Manhattan Institute project tracing American mental health trends:
Image from The Audit
The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.
I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election — the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.
There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1
I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.
I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.
Anxiety
I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.
The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.
Overall Mental Health
Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).
- In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.
I mentioned the other day that the US was fully justified in “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence due to the Canadian government’s continued delinquence on military matters (and Prime Minister Carney’s blatant desire to tweak American noses while neglecting joint interests with the United States. At The Line, Matt Gurney says this won’t be the only tangible sign of American impatience with our ongoing fecklessness:
As I posted on social media when sharing this: “This is another gentle reminder to the f*ckwits in the Canadian government that they are playing with existential fire when they work to actively piss off our American allies.”
First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.
The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.
Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.
We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.
So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.
Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?
The Carney government has made, and continues to make, plenty of announcements about plans, and potential deals, and future capabilities, and so on … but the Americans can’t help but notice that little is actually being done despite all the sound and fury on the PR side. Canada belatedly reached the long-agreed-upon 2% of GDP target for military spending, but most of it was a bookkeeping exercise of moving existing costs onto the Department of National Defence budget (the Canadian Coast Guard and parts of Veterans Affairs) but not much improved in Canada’s actual defence capabilities.
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May 12, 2026
First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election
After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:
Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.
The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.
Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.
Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!
Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.
It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:
The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.
And that is the point. He goes on:
The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …
Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.
Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”
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May 9, 2026
Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer
I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:
Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.
The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?
Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.
While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.
A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.
The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.
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