Quotulatiousness

April 22, 2022

Pierre Poilievre’s social media campaign is going well

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

In The Line, Rahim Mohamed wonders if Poilievre’s campaign for the leadership of the federal Conservatives might follow a similar path to the flash-in-the-pan that was the Andrew Yang campaign:

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It may be hard to believe, but the race to crown the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is now well into its third month. If there is one clear takeaway that can be drawn from the campaign so far, it’s that one candidate, frontrunner Pierre Poilievre, has dominated social media.

By any metric, Poilievre’s social media presence dwarfs that of the other candidates in the race. He boasts nearly 340,000 followers on Twitter and more than half-a-million on Facebook. By comparison, none of his opponents has cracked six-figures on either platform. Poilievre’s personal YouTube page, which houses a growing library of hundreds of videos, has garnered over 39 million views since it was launched in 2011. As digital advocacy guru Cole Hogan tweeted earlier this month, “if you’ve watched Canadian political content on YouTube, you’ve seen Pierre Poilievre”.

And Poilievre has not just lapped his opponents in terms of quantity. The contrast between the polished, professional content that his digital team consistently puts out and the amateurish social media fare offered by the other candidates could not be more stark. Earlier this week, the Poilievre campaign released this excellent five-minute video targeting housing affordability, filmed on-location in Vancouver (the world’s third most unaffordable housing market). The video drew praise from unlikely corners of the Twittersphere. For instance, left-leaning Washington Post Canadian politics correspondent David Moscrop quote-tweeted the video, adding; “God I hope you lose but you’re onto something here.”

Poilievre has strategically highlighted issues that appeal disproportionately to the “very online”. For instance, housing policy is a preferred topic of conversation among the aging millennials who dominate YIMBY Twitter — many, ironically, tweeting from their parents’ basements. He has also embraced cryptocurrency; promising to make Canada the “blockchain capital of the world” and purchasing a shawarma with Bitcoin at a recent campaign stop in London, Ontario.

But before he uncorks the champagne, Poilievre would be prudent to take heed of lessons learned the hard way by another social media darling: failed New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang.

April 4, 2022

Reconsidering the legacy of conservative activist Mary Whitehouse

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

Mary Whitehouse was a figure of mockery and abuse for much of her time on the public stage, a one-woman British equivalent to the American “Moral Majority” in the 1980s, without the performative religious connections. Even those who agreed with her concerns were careful to distance themselves from her, yet Alexander Larman wonders if she wasn’t more right than wrong after all:

I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)

“The Queen of Clean”. “The Archangel of Anti-Smut”. Whatever you thought of the campaigner and activist Mary Whitehouse, she was hard to ignore. From her heyday in the 60s until her gradual decline in both relevance and physical faculties in the late 80s, she became the physical embodiment of social conservatism, loudly demanding that “family values” be placed at the heart of the national conversation, and that national evils (including pornography, abortion, swearing, homosexuality and the BBC in general) should be either tamed or dispensed with altogether.

Whitehouse died in 2001, and the obituaries trod a fine line between acknowledging her impact — even, at times, her importance — and denigrating her as someone who was almost driven insane by her campaign to clean up Britain’s screens. The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that one might have assumed was a natural ally, sighed “[she was] seemingly as concerned to eliminate the occasional ‘damn’ or ‘bloody’ as to prevent the worst excesses of pornography or violence” and the Guardian, a long-standing and probably inevitable bête noire, marked her passing by calling her “a self-appointed and much-derided guardian of public morals”, sneered at her “simplistic and nannyish” views and approvingly cited Ned Sherrin’s comment that “If she had been ignored for the last 30 years the world would have been a better place”.

It also, with some reluctance, admitted that “it was possible for many middle-of-the-roaders to think she was just possibly right”. The debate continues as to whether Whitehouse was an oddly prurient figure, whose apparently endless campaigning was dictated by some sort of strange mental imbalance (she boasted about her “direct line to God”, as if the Almighty were responsible for guiding her attempts to rail against the likes of Dennis Potter) or an ahead-of-her-time master of both media relations and social understanding. And now, for some reason, Whitehouse has once again returned to our screens and airwaves, two decades after her death.

The journalist Samira Ahmed recently presented a Radio 4 documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, that attempted to ask whether Whitehouse had somehow anticipated the rise of the internet, social media and society’s concomitant, and doomed, attempts to preserve the nation’s innocence amidst the ready availability of virtually every human depravity imaginable at the jab of an eager finger. This was followed by another two-part documentary on television, Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, in which various luminaries debated whether Whitehouse was simply a bigot who should best be forgotten about, or if she had a salient point that has, if anything, become more relevant since her death.

On the one hand, there is little doubt that Whitehouse was a proudly ignorant and even destructive figure when it came to arts and culture. She refused to watch most of the programmes that she organised campaigns against, announcing, “I have too much respect for my mind,” and declined to consider such things as artistic merit, creative intentions or context. For her, nudity, violence and sex were things that had no place in British public life, and she was happy to roll up her sleeves and lead well-organised campaigns against things that she disapproved of. It was partly because of her that Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from exhibition in Britain for two decades, and her private prosecutions of Gay News and the director Michael Bogdanov for, respectively, blasphemous libel and staging a homosexual rape scene in The Romans in Britain, were vindictive and viciously closed-minded. The first was successful, the second was not, and its failure in 1983 saw the beginning of her decline from public relevance.

January 21, 2022

Conservatives versus the “Blob”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sam Ashworth-Hayes is writing here about the British Conservative party, but just swap out the names and it’s equally applicable to the Canadian equivalent, and very likely true for the rest of the western world:

The Conservative party is trapped in a nightmare of its own making. Number 10 is rocked by scandals, support in the polls is plummeting, the Northern Ireland Protocol (Chekhov’s car bomb) waits patiently for its return to the newscycle. As with every good nightmare, there is the sense of unease that something remains undone.

That something would be “conserving”. Set aside economic policy, where the Conservatives and Labour are still just about separable — although the new interest in higher taxes, spending and regulation is rapidly eroding this gap — and judge the period on the social axis: same-sex marriage, net migration at record highs, the march of progressive ideas through academia, business and press and into government speeches. You could be forgiven for thinking that Labour won the 2010 election, and every bout subsequent.

Why is that the Conservative party governs in such a fundamentally unconservative way? Part of the issue is that the average Conservative MP is, on social issues, basically indistinguishable from the average Labour voter, while the average Labour MP is to the left even of this. The centre of gravity in Parliament is well to the left of the general population.

A second part of the answer — and a partial cause of the first — is that the infrastructure of British politics is not designed for the right. When Michael Gove and his then-Special Advisor Dominic Cummings attempted to shake up the English education system in 2014, they found themselves publicly at war with what they termed “the Blob”: an amorphous conglomerate of civil servants, academics and unions that acted to gum up change and ensure stasis in the interests of its members. Rightwards reform is received as violent revolution, whilst the constant leftwards drift goes unremarked and unchallenged.

When Cummings made his way to Number 10, so did the concept of the Blob, expanded to include the BBC, various quangos, much of Whitehall and what is sometimes called “civil society”. The example of hate crime policy is illustrative of the general idea. The concept is not dissimilar to Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, or the Trumpian “deep state”. Critics of such accusations point out, not unreasonably, that coordinating so many constituent parts would be almost impossible — but this misses the point entirely. The purpose of a system is what it does, and individual elements responding to an ecosystem of incentives that produce given results can act in a remarkably coordinated way, when those incentives point in the same direction.

January 17, 2022

QotD: The British ruling class reaction to fascism and communism

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out of date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine gun – by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the “Red” does not understand the theories the “Red” is preaching; if he did, his own position as bodyguard of the monied class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.

The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain, etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler. But – and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national solidarity, comes in – they could only do so by breaking up the Empire and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about “the duty of loyalty to our conquerors” are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of both worlds.

One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what-not were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 3, 2022

QotD: The Sisyphean quest of conservatives looking for progressive approval

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When will Republicans stop trying to kick the Lucy’s football that is liberal approval? It’s never going to happen – no matter how soft, pliable, milquetoast, and Mitty you are, you’re always going to be trying to re-enslave black Americans, toss old people off cliffs, or destroy our democracy. But there is a solution to this problem.

Stop caring what liberals and their media toadies say. Be a conservative and make them pay.

It’s simple, effective, and much more satisfying than trying to get people who hate you to stop hating you.

It’s also more dignified. Look at Chimpy McBu$Hitlerburton. That was what they called George W. Bush back in the day. He was hardly hardcore – the guy was softer than a My Pillow and about 1 percent as based. But they hated him anyway, trashed him, slandered him, and even toobined to their assassination fantasies about him. But he was too gentlemanly to defend himself. Yet, once he retired to paint tacky pictures and began sucking up to the elite, he suddenly became a respected elder statesman. Now you have the Democrats positively orgasmic over his upcoming fundraiser for the doomed reelection bid of the Beltway Cowgirl Liz Cheney, who has likewise earned the temporary reprieve from the hate-tsunami by utterly betraying her fellow Republicans.

So, you can buy yourself some time. The price is your dignity, but if you crawl around on your belly and lick the toes of your vinyl-clad leftist dominatrix – oops, I assumed xis gender! – you’ll get a little less hatred for a little while.

These indisputable facts completely dispel the argument that the problem with conservatives is that they are too scary, that they must be bland and moderate and bipartisan and not upset the erotically-forgone wine women of the suburbs who channel their sexual frustrations into liberal politics. The idea that we will win these people over by not standing up for anything is just silly; how many times do you have to have a plan fail before you admit it’s a failure, GOP?

Kurt Schlichter, “Every Republican Is ‘Literally Hitler’, So Stop Caring What Libs Say”, TownHall.com, 2021-09-29.

December 10, 2021

Shovel-ready infrastructure we’re already busy working on … the superhighway to serfdom

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jacob T. Levy considers the warning about authoritarian solutions to societal problems given by Friedrich A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and shows just how little we heeded his concerns:

It is well-known that the classical liberal economist F.A. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to “socialists of all parties”, and wrote the book “as a warning to the socialist intelligentsia of England.” I suspect we now understate the importance of these facts. After decades of the Cold War and self-conscious conservative-libertarian “fusionism” in both the U.S. and Britain, what sticks in our memory of The Road to Serfdom is its defense of liberal open markets against economic planning and regulation of the sort advocated on the left. That is of course how it was wielded in the post-2008 surge in interest in it, in the wake of the financial crisis and the subsequent bailouts and stimulus packages: as a weapon of the right.

But if Hayek’s argument characterized socialist planning and regulation as a slippery slope, the slope did not only slope down toward the left. Fascist Italy and Germany figure even more prominently than the USSR in the book’s image of the despotism being risked:

    It is necessary now to state the unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose fate we are now in some danger of repeating … students of the current of ideas can hardly fail to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany during and after [World War I] and the present current of ideas in the democracies … And at least nine out of every ten of the lessons which our most vociferous reformers are so anxious we should learn from this war are precisely lessons which the Germans did learn from the last war and which have done so much to produce the Nazi system … [A]t an interval of fifteen to twenty-five years we seem to follow the example of Germany.

In the face of resurgent right-wing populist and nationalist authoritarianism in the world, it is worth reconsidering the legacy of The Road to Serfdom and of Hayek’s work to bolster liberalism.

Hayek warned of centralizing and authoritarian urges of both the left and the right, but it’s in the “permanent” government — the civil servants who remain in office regardless of electoral outcomes — that much of the danger to individual liberty lies:

Throughout Hayek is concerned for constitutional parliamentary government and the rule of law, and their protection against arbitrary government. The idea that freedom requires clear and general rules of conduct anonymously applicable to all — that government run by ad hoc edict is oppressive — was to be the major theme of his subsequent works in political theory, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liberty; but it is central to the argument of Road to Serfdom as well.

In the preface to the 1956 edition, Hayek described the postwar Labour government as having created a bureaucratic “despotism exercised by a thoroughly conscientious and honest bureaucracy for what they sincerely believe is the good of the country. But it is nevertheless an arbitrary government, in practice free from parliamentary control; and its machinery would be as effective for any other than the beneficent purposes for which it is now used.”

Here one hears a predecessor of the widespread classical liberal “we told you so” after the election, blaming the Obama administration for increasing the presidential power that the Trump administration would now inherit. But it is worth emphasizing that Hayek still called the purposes pursued by the left-wing bureaucratic state “beneficent”.

The tone Hayek adopts here is not the schadenfreude of contemporary whataboutism. Now that “hot socialism is probably a thing of the past” (hardly what one would expect Hayek to say were he the determinist caricature sometimes embraced by fans as well as critics), the welfare state calls for “careful sorting out” in the pursuit of its “practical and laudable” aims. He calls for the welfare state and social insurance to be implemented through general rules and fiscal policy rather than administrative coercion, nationalization, and direct economic planning, because the latter instruments “are not compatible with the preservation of a free society.”

H/T to Tamara Keel for the link.

October 15, 2021

“… a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats”

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

Matt Gurney looks at the federal Conservatives’ efforts in the September election and tries to assess how much the rise of the People’s Party of Canada impacted Conservative fortunes:

O’Toole planned to shift the CPC slightly toward the moderate centre on the assumption that the party’s traditionally lopsided wins in western Canada meant that it could lose a little on the right to flip some close seats in the east. This didn’t work. The Tories did shed support on the right, which might explain some measure of the PPC’s rise, but the CPC didn’t make up enough ground in eastern ridings to flip seats.

However, the election-night results are somewhat deceiving. O’Toole’s strategy was more effective than the final outcome suggests. In Ontario, in particular, the Conservatives materially cut into the Liberals’ advantage in the popular vote, effectively halving it, relative to 2019. This meant that the Liberals were extremely reliant on vote efficiency: a one-per cent swing of voters from the LPC to the CPC could have flipped dozens of seats, setting up a scenario where O’Toole could have been prime minister today. (These flips would not have come from the Greater Toronto Area, interestingly, where the Liberals continue to run up some lopsided victories of their own, but from other parts of Ontario and random seats all across the country. The election was closer than people realize.)

But back to the PPC. Did giving them room to grow on the right end up costing the CPC seats? If so, while that wouldn’t necessarily discredit the notion of moving the CPC toward the centre, it absolutely complicates it. If the Conservatives can’t take their right flank for granted, their lives get a lot more difficult. In a recent feature in the Toronto Star, Althia Raj, who apparently spoke to every insider on the planet, wrote that a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats.

That sounds about right, and it doesn’t sound like much. Indeed, if anything, there’s reason to believe that that is overly generous to the PPC.

[…]

In aggregate terms, the author found that while you could conclude that a handful of ridings were possibly but not certainly lost due to a PPC surge, you couldn’t definitively conclude that any were lost because the Conservatives gave up ground on the right. This gets us to the low-end figure cited by Raj, but looking at this report, I don’t know where the rest could possibly have come from.

Every additional seat would have been good news for O’Toole. And the rise in the PPC vote share is worth studying on its own merits — The Line continues to work with John Wright to firm up our understanding of the PPC, both as a political and social movement.

But as an electoral force that hurt O’Toole in the last election, while we can certainly say it didn’t help, it also didn’t seem to hurt much.

Having met dozens of eager PPC supporters over the last two election campaigns, I have to believe that at most one third of them are former Tory voters … a lot of the people I met were not habitual voters for any party before the PPC came along. At one meeting I attended in 2019, there were more former Libertarian voters than Conservative voters around the table, but neither group was a majority. A lot of them were fans of Maxime Bernier personally — and note that this meeting was literally in the heart of Erin O’Toole’s own riding, a couple of blocks away from his constituency office.

September 29, 2021

The federal Conservatives, post-election

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

As Erin O’Toole ably demonstrated in the September 20th federal election, when you deliberately exclude the SoCons, the libertarians, the gun-owners, the free speech advocates, and the fiscal conservatives, what you have left is a party that doesn’t have a lot to differentiate itself from the Liberals. Ben Woodfinden offers some thoughts on the Conservative Party’s immediate post-election phases:

I don’t want to spend long on this point because I find this kind of Conservative infighting (the tory syndrome), which is often about a combination of both ideology mixed in with personal feuds and rivalries, extremely frustrating. I think O’Toole deserves a second shot for a few reasons. I thought there was a lot to like in the platform, because O’Toole himself performed fairly well during the campaign for the most part, and the Conservatives are on the path to form government. I also think another leadership election is a bad idea and this habit of dumping leaders after single election results is extremely shortsighted. Changes are needed, but I don’t think replacing O’Toole is one of them.

Before some of you send furious responses about how I’ve “sold out” or how O’Toole sold out and therefore needs to go, I absolutely do think that portions of the base have every right to be angry. As I wrote in the Post column, what has angered many is not simply the campaign O’Toole ran, it was that he won the leadership running as a “true blue” and then pivoted to something else.

The Conservative Party is not a party of one. O’Toole needs to show some humility and work to rebuild some trust with these parts of the base (and caucus) who are upset and angry over this. The Conservative Party is very much a coalition of different groups who disagree on all sorts of things. Keeping these groups together is a delicate and at times challenging task. […]

Anyways, to summarize where I stand on this, and I have no plans of getting dragged into this too much – there needs to be some efforts on behalf of O’Toole to restore some trust with the various factions within the party that are unhappy, but I think overall some of the shifts that are being made are worthwhile ones. It would improve the discourse on conservatism in Canada if we moved beyond the red versus blue tory, liberal lite versus true blue framing that serves us poorly. While we need to wait for a full post-mortem and analysis of the results, there also seem to me to have been some positive signs that this realignment/blue collar shift can work. Matt Gurney interviewed an anonymous senior campaign official after the election for TVO, and something the official said intrigued me:

    Gurney: Whoa, hang on. That sounds like something we just shouldn’t blow past! What was the old Conservative coalition, and what happened to it?

    Conservative: [Laughs] Okay, obviously it varies by place, but think of it this way: our three legs were big business and corporate, rural and farmers, and a swing component. That third one was tricky. Mulroney brought the Quebec nationalists. Harper, we got them with ethno-community suburban outreach. But I think the Liberals are beating us on big business, and we need to accept that and pivot to small business, working-class, things like that. We just started doing that, and it’s already working. We did shockingly well in Hamilton. And look at northern Ontario. These places are in play for us now. Northern Ontario is going to get very interesting. But if I’m being honest, the question of who the new Canadian Conservative voter isn’t one we’ve fully answered yet. We’re winning the popular vote, but we still need to grow, and I think that needs more time.

I went and did some digging myself and what this anonymous official is saying here appears to check out, and if you combine this with the gains made in Atlantic Canada I think there are real reasons for optimism on this front. This election could be comparable to what happened with the Conservatives in 2017 in the UK, but in a positive way. Hear me out here. In that election Theresa May came close, but just fell short, on breakthroughs across the board that would have fully inaugurated her as the champion of this realignment conservatism. While it didn’t materialize in 2017, it did in 2019. The progress is there, and I really think Conservatives should give this another shot next chance they get, it really could pay off. The party needs to break through in suburban seats, and I think this “thoughtful populism” as John Ibbitson described it can absolutely do that in the next election.

September 24, 2021

Jen Gerson has some helpful advice for the Conservative party

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

Writing in Maclean’s, Jen Gerson suggests to the “conservatives” that they shouldn’t dump their new-ish leader on the basis of the party’s results in the September 20 election:

It’s come to my understanding that there is some considerable consternation about the future of Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, on the grounds that he underperformed in this week’s election.

I cannot help but wonder whether those now implacably resolved to booting the man for being inadequately conservative might, perhaps, consider getting a goddamn grip.

Yes, I understand that O’Toole ran his leadership campaign further to the right than his personality would otherwise suggest, in order to win over the Conservative base. And, yes, I understand that the unstated agreement behind this bait-and-switch was that O’Toole needed to show progress in key regions, particularly the 905. Also, yes, I understand that these gains failed to materialize, and that many conservatives feel both betrayed, and more importantly, no closer to government.

This state of affairs may ensure O’Toole’s leadership is unsalvageable.

Certainly, O’Toole and his brain trust seem to have rationally concluded that they could leave western conservatives hanging out to dry so they could chase votes in the GTA — because up until now, those westerners had nowhere else to go. However, the rise of the PPC suggests that they may now have somewhere to go …

Conservatives have a bad habit. They go into an election with reasonable expectations, enjoy some early momentum, and then let the excitement get to their heads. They reset those early expectations to something far less probable, and when the campaign produces exactly the results they predicted at the outset they declare the whole affair a disappointing failure.

I will note here that this complements the Liberal temperament, which interprets entirely lacklustre results as nothing short of a sign from the trumpet-wielding messengers of God blessing their mandate. Only the Liberals would see two successive minority governments with declining popular vote totals as clear-cut evidence that they, the worthy elect, have been chosen without reservation to lead the nation to paradise.

The Conservatives could use a little more of that energy.

These observations are provably true of both parties. The only amendment I could suggest is that the Liberals really do believe they have been granted the right to run Canada by divine providence (which few of them actually dare refer to in conversation) and view any interruption in their God-given right to rule as unnatural and a perversion of the arc of history.

Conservatives ought to have seen this election as the first in a two-election strategy. Fundamentally, the urbanites who hold the key to government don’t trust you, Conservatives. They’re worried about the conspiratorial lunatics in your caucus and your base, and they’re worried about who actually holds the reins of power in your party. Their distrust is fair, and will take time to repair.

If you dump your affable, moderate, centrist leader at the first opportunity because he didn’t crack the 905 on his first try, and you replace him with someone who will chase Maxime Bernier’s vanishing social movement like a labradoodle running after the wheels of a mail truck, you will wind up confirming every extant fear and stereotype this crowd already holds about you and your party.

It’s a trap. Be smarter than that.

The PPC nearly tripling the size of their vote over two years doesn’t quite match the characterization of a “vanishing social movement”, but I’m not who she’s trying to persuade here. It’s often said that modern “conservatives” don’t actually have a plan except to do what Liberals/Democrats want to do — just a little bit slower. O’Toole (and Ontario Tories generally) fits that description quite well.

September 19, 2021

Erin O’Toole suddenly scrambling to try to win back votes from Maxime Bernier’s PPC

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

John Paul Tasker reports for the CBC on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s last minute appeal to wavering supporters (that is, people who would prefer actual conservative or even libertarian policies to what O’Toole’s “Conservatives” have on offer):

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said today that conservative-minded voters sick of the Liberal government should park their votes with the Tories rather than turn to the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in this election.

Speaking to reporters at a campaign stop in London, Ont., O’Toole said his party is the only one in a position to replace the Liberal government and a right-wing vote split could lead to four more years of Justin Trudeau.

“There are actually millions of Canadians who are very frustrated with Mr. Trudeau. If they allow that frustration to do anything other than vote Conservative, they’re voting for Mr. Trudeau,” O’Toole said.

“There are five parties and there are two choices. More of the same with Mr. Trudeau or real change and ethical government with Canada’s Conservatives.”

O’Toole said Trudeau wants Conservative voters to “vote for smaller parties” rather than unify behind O’Toole’s candidacy.

CBC’s poll tracker has the PPC at 6.2% support, which is nearly four times what it was in the last election. Other trackers have the PPC at least a few points more than that, and it might be noteworthy that PPC-leaning voters are probably not be as interested in sharing their preferences with pollsters as supporters of more left-wing parties like the Liberals and Conservatives.

After the last election campaign, a CBC News analysis showed that — even with its rather dismal level of support — the PPC likely cost the Conservatives seven seats in the House of Commons by splitting the vote (six seats went to the Liberals, one to the NDP).

With polls suggesting PPC support is now well above its 2019 level, the party’s impact could be even greater in 2021.

While polls suggest some PPC support is coming from first-time or infrequent voters, there’s no question the PPC is drawing at least some support from former Conservative voters.

[…]

“The Conservative Party is not conservative anymore,” Bernier said today in response to a question about O’Toole’s warnings about a vote split.

“O’Toole has flip-flopped and adopted the Liberal program on the few remaining issues where there were still difference between the two parties, such as the carbon tax, gun bans and COVID passports,” Bernier said in an emailed statement. “Mr. O’Toole will have to live with the consequences of his failing strategy.”

Some of Bernier’s recent momentum is driven by his opposition to pandemic measures. The PPC leader has slammed the proposed federal vaccine mandate as a “draconian” and “immoral” measure.

August 28, 2021

Flagging enthusiasm

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

In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh considers the suddenly politically relevant position of the Canadian flag:

The other day, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole made mention of the fact that the Canadian flag atop the Peace tower in Ottawa has been flying at half-staff for almost three months and that as prime minister he would put it back up — countermanding the specific order Justin Trudeau gave on May 30. O’Toole’s remark was a brief one dropped in at the end of a longer statement, but he did say we should be proud of our flag, which some people still think of as a Liberal contrivance, and he made the point that being proud of Canada goes hand in hand with wishing to improve it.

I saw this the other day and commented on social media that “I expect the Canadian dying media to be All. Over. This. — Conservative leader Erin O’Toole just called for the Canadian flag to be raised (they’ve been at half-staff officially since the end of May). If the media have their way, this will guarantee a huge majority government for their crush, Justin Trudeau.”

I admit, this was a bit glib, and not all the Canadian media are in the tank for Justin, but (as the old joke about lawyers had it) the 90% give the other 10% a bad name.

First of all, if sticking up for the proper display of the flag counts as wrapping oneself in it, doesn’t using it for gestures of regret (or the dreaded “virtue signalling”) really qualify as the mirror image of this? Trudeau made a point of making sure we knew the lowering of the flag was his own initiative. Liberals have spent a couple of generations working their asses off to constantly remind us that it’s a Liberal flag, which is precisely why conservatives in Ontario towns starting with “B” love the Red Ensign. It is natural to wonder whether, given the apparent Liberal sensitivity about our blood-soaked banner, we won’t get a third national flag before everyone’s finished adapting to the second one. […]

Canada is a place where literal Conservatives can’t “wrap themselves” too tightly in the literal flag: this isn’t the United States, where the positioning and context of the flag in ads or on stage will let you know instantly whether you’re at a Republican or a Democratic event. (The presence of an eagle is always a good clue.) Yet our Liberals have manoeuvred themselves into a position, somehow, in which it is awkward to fly the flag too high.

Can Trudeau now set a date for the raising of the flag to its position of respect and dignity, having plumb forgotten to do so in the first place? And if he is the renewed choice of the Canadian people as prime minister, will he be able to hoist the thing back up? Will this happen the day after the election? The first week? After prolonged consultations with First Nations, perhaps involving a royal commission?

You see, there is an aspect to this that goes beyond politicians battering at one another with flagpoles and other national paraphernalia. O’Toole’s comment didn’t just remind us that we’re Canadians and we should like our flag. It reminded us that we have a government that often seems to have a big problem thinking 30 seconds ahead, let alone six months.

July 25, 2021

QotD: The Two Rules of Modern Journalism

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

RULE # 1: Because journalists are required to be open-minded, exercise independence of spirit, and display a healthy amount of skepticism, the words and deeds of politicians, leaders, and the powerful — as well as those of regular citizens being interviewed — must constantly be questioned, second-guessed, doubted, fact-checked, challenged, and, more often than not, interrupted (more or less politely).

RULE # 2: Rule # 1 only applies to Republicans.

(And to anybody leaning conservative.)

For Democrats and leftists, the typical query is more along the lines of “pray enlighten us to your glorious plans for fundamentally transforming the United States of America (we will be quiet now).” (Close second: “kindly tell us how much people have suffered, and are still suffering, in this dreadful country of ours.”)

Erik, “The Two Rules of Modern Journalism”, ¡No Pasarán!, 2021-04-16.

July 22, 2021

Conservative cancel culture?

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

Kurt Schlichter addresses the notion that “cancel culture” is alive and well among conservatives as much as it is among progressives:

“A little Black Rifle Coffee pour over this morning.” by jonmrogers is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Is there a conservative cancel culture? No. What there is now is a consensus among conservatives that we will refuse to subsidize institutions and entities that hate us. “Cancel culture,” properly understood – in this time of words meaning whatever they need to mean at any given moment, I’m going to have to insist on fixed definitions – is the attempt to use formal and informal sanctions to stop people from expressing dissenting views. But conservatives don’t care what the conservatives who cry about it when they are caught shafting us – hi Kristi! – think; conservatives care about what these people do or don’t do. Labeling our rejection of squishes and RINOs as “cancel culture” is a cheesy attempt to stop us from insisting that conservatives actually conserve. If the left, and the GOPuffballs, want to call this act of self-preservation “cancel culture” and shame us into unilateral disarmament in the name of some sort of pseudo-consistency, let them try. We’re not tying ourselves up with alleged “principles” anymore; ideological bondage is not our scene.

[…]

There was a certain coffee company created by vets that embraced a kind of vet-bro/gun vibe and it worked hard to cultivate a following in the conservative community. And then they stamped their combat boots hard on their own tender beans. Black Rifle Coffee Company’s problem provides an important lesson not just for companies seeking to operate on the conservative tip, but for GOP politicians as well.

What happened? BRCC gave an interview to The New York Times that many cons saw as taking sides against us conservatives. Did it or didn’t it take sides against us? The company denies it and is trying to repair the damage, but the facts of the case are not the point we are discussing here – the point is how conservatives, the cheated-on wives of American politics, reacted when they felt, rightly or wrongly, betrayed.

The conservatives went nuclear. Here’s the thing a lot of people seem to not understand. No faction has been screwed over by its own side more than conservatives. How many politicians, when they had the power to do the conservative things they ran on, opted for favorable WaPo coverage over keeping their promises? The incentives to cooperate are huge … like coverage in the DC paper of record explaining how one has “grown”. But we’re done with the bait-and-switch. We’re super-sensitive and super-suspicious, because we’ve been burned before.

So, conservatives have a hair trigger for perceived betrayal – if they even suspect it, they go off. Those seeking our support should act accordingly, as cons have been serially betrayed for decades. Take W, please, back to his ranch to paint his paintings. But before you do, remember what he did to all of us who defended him when he refused to defend himself – he talked smack about us as he partied with his new pals the Clintons and Obamas.

The Ahoy Crew used to at least pretend to be with us – Cap’n Bill Kristol, David Aptly-Named French, Jonah Heavy G Goldberg, and the rest turned on us the second they perceived their sinecures were in peril due to our swelling demand for actual victory.

Them or us. Pick one. But you can’t choose both, or neither.

Update: The CEO of the company is either in desperate damage control mode or genuinely upset at the misrepresentation of his views by the New York Times:

Let’s get the air cleared right away. Black Rifle Coffee’s founder and CEO has spoken out and is disputing how his comments were presented by the New York Times and represented by those reacting to the article, who were led to believe that Black Rifle Coffee bashed conservatives.

Evan Hafer decided to set the record straight regarding the “significant amount of misinformation being put out on the internet” about Black Rifle Coffee and about statements that he has made.

Hafer quickly debunked the notion that he made derogatory remarks about BRCC’s customers or conservatives and then proceeded to explain how the New York Times deliberately twisted his words and took them out of context. According to Hafer, his conversation with the NYT Magazine reporter was in the context of racism and anti-Semitism in America in light of Hafer being the target of an organized attack last year because of “my last name and my heritage.”

“We were purely discussing that,” Hafer says, and he was not conflating those groups with conservatives.

“The New York Times, as we know, the chances of them being objective were fairly slim, but we gave them the opportunity,” he added. He went on to mention veterans issues he hoped to bring attention to. But, unfortunately, the New York Times chose to go with “the salacious headline” about the company instead.

Hafer reiterated that racists and anti-Semites have no place in his company.

June 12, 2021

Canadian “Conservatives” start listing their preferred pronouns

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

Mark Steyn surveys the “conservatives” in the UK, the US, and last-and-least, Canada:

Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill (preferred pronouns she/her).
Photo attributed to “Michelle Staff” via Wikimedia Commons.

So much for UK conservatism. What of Canada? The two most rock-ribbed “right-wingers” in the Dominion’s politics, Doug Ford of Ontario and Jason Kenney of Alberta, have taken the position that conservatism is an indulgence you can’t afford in a pandemic: Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no conservatives in lockdowns.

At the federal level, the cautious and eventually stalled incrementalism of Stephen Harper was followed by the unprincipled hollowness of Andrew Scheer and, after his predictable failure, the everything-must-go massive-storewide-clearances of Erin O’Toole. Even so, I was startled by a tweet from Michelle Rempel Garner, an Alberta MP whom I knew only as an occasionally lively thorn in the side of Justin & Co. Ms Rempel Garner was responding to the appalling killings of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, which within minutes had been seized on by the media-left alliance for the usual purposes, notwithstanding that the perp does not appear to fit the desired narrative. Nevertheless, the outbreak of vehicular “Islamophobia” was taken by Michelle Rempel Garner as the perfect opportunity for an express checkout:

    I humble myself and ask forgiveness, and seek to make things right.

    I have privilege; I am cis/straight/white. But I am also a woman who works in a system dominated by white maleness.

    But no excuses. I will do what I can.

Seeing the above at the great Kate McMillan’s website, I assumed it was a giant leg-pull by Ms Rempel Garner, as did many other of Miss McMillan’s readers. So, as she clarified, no, sorry, it’s for real. The Tory member’s Twitter account now shows her pronouns: “she/her” (at the time of writing). In 2019 it was a big deal when Kamala Harris, at the start of a Democrat debate, announced her pronouns. Less than two years later, “conservative” politicians want a piece of the pronoun action too. Already a key player in O’Toole’s shadow cabinet, the she/her move could make Michelle a shoo-in for Deputy Prime Minister.

Except, of course, that that would require the Tories to win an election.

Guys, it was a joke that modern conservatism is just progressive policies on a five-year delay … please stop taking it seriously!

June 11, 2021

The concept of philanthropy is another one with conflicting meanings to the left and to the right

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

In the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff has a bit of fun outlining the recent kerfuffle over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s attempt to use her grandmother’s situation in Puerto Rico for scoring political points, and then explains why the notion of philanthropy is a very different thing to progressives than it is to conservatives:

“Charity in the dictionary” by HowardLake is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Well may we laugh about (and be disgusted by) the hypocrisy, corruption and indifference shown by prominent members of the left towards the very people they supposedly care about. But it would be to miss the broader point relating to how the left views the world, the role of politics, and the place of the individual.

It might surprise many that the caring and compassionate left isn’t actually all that big on philanthropy and charity, i.e. people helping other people. What could be wrong with that? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if even more people helped even more other people? Well, no, the left would say, because it’s not something that people should be doing in the first place; it’s not their responsibility. It is up to the state to solve all the social and economic problems; our role as citizens (as well as, thanks to the open borders advocates, non-citizens) is to be the grateful recipients of the government’s largesse. For the more elite group (no pun intended) – “the rich” – their role is to pay for all this with their taxes. Private initiative is by its very nature limited and patchy; only the all-seeing and all-powerful state can ensure that everyone who needs “free” assistance (and that’s literally everyone) gets it in a comprehensive, uniform and fair way. Hence, AOC won’t lift a finger to help her grandmother because it’s the state’s duty to help everyone rebuild their lives after a natural disaster. Occasional Cortex already contributes with her taxes on the hard-earned Congressional salary, and in any case, she’s not some billionaire, you know.

With that attitude, needless to say, you won’t be surprised to learn that much of what goes for the left-wing philanthropy does not actually go to help those in need to solve their problems and provide them what they are lacking. Instead, it is largely channels to finance political agitation by the activist-industrial complex to make the government (whether through lobbying, campaigning or helping elect sympathetic law-makers) take responsibility instead. That’s what people like Soros, Laurene Powell-Jobs (Steve Jobs’ widow) and MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’ ex) are all about – billions spent to create more activist jobs to agitate for the state to create more public sector jobs to run the “Big Daddy”.

But it goes deeper than that, back to Marx himself in fact and to his analysis of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. According to Marxism, both in its original class-based iteration and the more recent race/gender/sexuality variants, every society is divided into two mutually antagonistic groups: the powerful oppressors and the powerless oppressed, with the society structured in the interest of the former by facilitating in every possible way the exploitation and keeping down of the latter. Thus, all the problems, ills and injustices are “systemic” in nature; they are a feature, not a bug. To solve them and so to help the downtrodden you need to overthrow the entire old unjust system and build a new one that benefits the masses. Based on this sort of understanding of the world – to which, coincidentally, people like AOC and BLM founders all subscribe – any private charity is bound to be ineffectual and shortcoming. After all, what can a person, however generous with their money and time – even if there are multitudes of them – do to solve problems that are the direct (and intended) consequence of the way the society has been set up? Nothing, of course. You can’t mend it, you have to end it. But not only is it naïve and pointless to try, it’s actually counter-productive and therefore positively wrong. Because while no philanthropic effort can solve systemic problems, it can actually provide some limited and temporary relief. Such relief, however, by its very nature is a band-aid solution, i.e. not a solution at all. All it does it momentarily numbs the pain, and that is bad, because the oppressed masses need to feel the pain and feel it good in order to spur them into revolutionary action to overthrow their oppressors and on the ruins of the old build the utopian new society of equality and justice. This is the far-left’s accelerationism: the worse it gets, the better it gets (for the prospects of radical change).

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