How does one distinguish cant from real concern or real emotion? The authors rightly say that there is no fool-proof test. Some people are more sensitive than others to the wrongs of the world: as Mrs. Gummidge puts it, “I feel it more”. But if I were to say with a pained expression, “I am so concerned about the situation in the Southern Sudan that I cannot sleep at night”, and you knew perfectly well that I slept like a log the night before after dining well, and furthermore that I had no connections whatever with the Southern Sudan, you would know that I was canting.
As the authors point out, canting has an inherent positive feedback mechanism. For example, in the game of more-compassionate-than-thou it is always possible to be outflanked by someone who claims an even wider circle of concern, a deeper fellow-feeling with the downtrodden, than any that you have expressed, so that you feel obliged, in order to come out top in this competition, to go another step beyond your original claim, which was bogus to start with. Once you start canting, it is difficult to stop, at least in the short term.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Expanding Tyranny of Cant”, The Iconoclast, 2020-08-26.
April 24, 2026
QotD: Cant
April 9, 2026
Carney gets another MP to defect, drawing ever closer to a Parliamentary majority
I’m not a Parliamentary history buff, but it strikes me that the number of Canadian Members of Parliament switching parties (always in the direction of the government) over the last year must be close to its historical high-water mark. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed yet another “Conservative” MP to the Liberal caucus in Ottawa:
Call me a cynic if you like, but something is fishy about Carney’s talent for drawing turncoats over to his side. It would not surprise me to find that many more MPs have been offered all sorts of incentives to discover that they were really Liberals all along. Once upon a time I’d have been unbothered by this, but I’m coming to believe that an MP elected under a party banner may choose to leave that party but if they switch to a different party (that also ran a candidate in that MP’s riding), a byelection should be called. If the voters in North Bumbleford-Moosehip-Bongwater are happy with the MP’s decision, they’ll re-elect him/her/them. If not, well, shoulda thought longer before turning traitor.
Along with many others on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, J.J. McCullough clearly feels the same way: “This floor crossing BS is out of control. If MPs in this country can just change parties whenever they want, then voters truly have no control over who becomes prime minister and runs our government. The whole Canadian system is based on the premise that parties MATTER.”
At least one opposition MP did go public about Liberal approaches to switch sides — it’s my belief that he’s one of perhaps dozens:
Ian Runkle (“Runkle of the Bailey”) responds to a typical middle-of-the-Canadian-road take by Spencer Fernando:
L. Wayne Mathison is viscerally against such backroom shenanigans when it comes to Parliament:
I am disgusted, and I am not going to dress it up with polite Ottawa language.
Marilyn Gladu crossed from the Conservatives to Mark Carney’s Liberals on April 8, 2026, saying constituents want “serious leadership” and “a real plan to build a stronger and more independent Canadian economy”. Her move gives the Liberals 171 seats, one short of the 172 needed for a majority.
That is exactly why people do not buy the noble script.
This is how Ottawa usually works. The speech is about conscience.
The reality is about power.
Suddenly the language gets soft, patriotic, and lofty right when the political math gets useful. We are asked to believe an MP was hit by a lightning bolt of principle at the exact moment her switch strengthens the governing party and brings it within one seat of majority control. Convenient does not begin to cover it.
Gladu says this is about leadership and collaboration. Fine. Then let voters decide whether they agree. That is the part these people always skip. They act as if a personal change of heart magically rewrites the contract with the public. It does not. People did not vote only for Marilyn Gladu the individual. They voted for a Conservative MP, a Conservative platform, and a Conservative opposition role. Crossing the floor without first seeking a new mandate may be legal, but it feels like a bait-and-switch because that is exactly what it is.
And spare me the line about “doing the best thing” for the riding. Every floor crosser says some version of that. It is the oldest detergent in the political cupboard. It is meant to wash ambition into service. What it really signals is this: I think my judgment now matters more than the basis on which you elected me.
That is where the anger comes from.
Voters are already drowning in managed language, staged sincerity, and plastic promises. Trust in politics is weak because people keep seeing the same pattern. Politicians campaign one way, govern another, then call the switch “leadership”. They wrap self-interest in national purpose and hope the flag covers the fingerprints.
What makes this worse is the timing. Carney publicly welcomed Gladu into Liberal caucus the same day, and the result is not symbolic. It materially strengthens the government’s position in the House. This is not some minor personal journey. It changes parliamentary leverage. It changes committee numbers, confidence calculations, and the balance of power.
So yes, I’m pissed.
I am pissed because voters are treated like props in a story written after the fact. I am pissed because party labels suddenly matter a great deal during elections and apparently not at all when power is on offer. I am pissed because people who were sent to oppose Liberal policy can simply walk across the aisle and help entrench it, then expect applause for being “constructive.”
And there is another detail that makes this smell even worse. Local reporting says that in January, Gladu had advocated for byelections when MPs switch parties. If that report is accurate, then this is not just opportunism. It is opportunism with a side order of hypocrisy.
That is the real issue here. Not whether floor crossing is technically allowed. Not whether Ottawa insiders can invent a respectable sentence for it. The real issue is whether voters still mean anything once the election is over.
My view is simple. If you want to switch parties, resign and run again. Go back to the people. Make your case honestly. Ask for a fresh mandate under the new banner. Anything less might be lawful, but it is not clean. It tells voters their consent is temporary, conditional, and easily bypassed once the machinery of power starts humming.
That is why this disgusts me.
Because democracy is not only about counting seats. It is about keeping faith with the people who gave you one.
February 12, 2026
“Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens responds to a typical rage-baiting “we’re all good people except those evil right wingnuts” post:
Every invocation of “universal love” is always invoked to legitimize a very particular form of hatred.
The Left does this thing where it denies the existence of its own ideology as being political at all. It’s just “love”. It’s just morality-as-politics, or simply “being a good person”.
And Leftists insist this is all they’re doing, even as they engage in the most aggressive and ruthless forms of politics imaginable.
Nothing is ever depicted as a power struggle between competing worldviews. It’s always a crusade against social ills, pathologies, and evil itself.
“Conservatism” doesn’t exist to these people. There’s no legitimate opposition, only a criminal element that has to be destroyed because Leftists have already declared themselves to be the universal manifestation of morality, peace, kindness, love, progress, and everything that is good and just in this world.
But everyone can see just how utterly hypocritical these people are. We continuously see examples of these same people exhibiting the most immoral, disgusting, and downright evil manifestations of hatred and violence against people and factions that they despise.
They just call it “love” as they do these things.
Meghan Murphy has a similar point on progressive delusion and its domestic variant, Canadian delusion:
The phenomenon of progressive delusion is very much like the phenomenon of Canadian delusion. Both groups go about their lives presuming that everyone not only respects and admires them, but sees them as they see themselves: 100% right.
There is zero doubt in the minds of progressives and Canadians that the entire world envies their intelligence — they are the most informed, the most invested in The Science, the most rational, and the most educated. Not only that, but they view themselves as the kindest, most compassionate, and most polite.
Should a progressive deem not to ostracize, scream at, or punch a person who dares hold non-left political views, they consider themselves very generous. Imagine! They, a Correct and Good, allowing a Hateful, Stupid, and Wrong to share the same air as them.
The assumption that everyone around them bases their lives and relationships on political parties, activist movements, and propaganda that has been consistently wrong for at least a decade is strange. Imagine buying the Covid scam hook, line, and sinker, or repeating “Transwomen are women” ad nauseam for five+ years, and still assuming you and your “side” are right about everything. Imagine continuing to insist that the “good” side is that side that advocated for child sterilization, forced the elderly to die alone in hospitals on account of a cold, and banned people from the internet and public life for speaking truths we all acknowledge are true now, but were not your party line a few years ago.
I hate to break it to you, but you are the bad guys, not us.
February 1, 2026
Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:
The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.
Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.
Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.
He then elaborates:
It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.
America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.
Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.
Australia, same narrative as Canada.
New Zealand, same as Australia.
Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.
France, same as England.
Spain, same as France.
Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.
Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.
The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.
The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.
The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.
The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.
QotD: Don’t bother accusing progressives of hypocrisy … that’s a “category error”
Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.
DonatistsDemocrats are the real racists, amirite? In Clown World, hypocrisy is a category error:
Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, “Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold”. American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”.
The underlying assumption here is that there exists a standard outside of oneself. What SJW believes that? If you want a learned citation for it, get our main man Marcus Aurelius back up in here: Of each particular thing ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature?1
SJWs are nihilists. Hypocrisy requires an external standard, and they don’t have one. All they have is their self — which they hate, and long to extinguish, along with everything else that reminds them of their hated, hateful self. Their every thought, word, and deed aims only at that — extinction — whether they recognize it or not.
In practice, then, SJW “hypocrisy” is a tool, a tactic — a really valuable one. They want to kick down some pillar of ambient civilization. And they’ve got all the time in the world to do it, because while they’re just getting on with it, their putative “opponents” are shrieking about hypocrisy! Often with some blather about “Chesterton’s Fence” or similar for good measure.
That’s Donatism, PoMo version. “If you’re going to tear down the fence, first you must explain how it got there, and what it was supposed to do, and then what you’ll be replacing it with.” No. Category error. They don’t care. They have never cared. The fence isn’t the point. Neither is the fence’s replacement, or whatever might be behind the fence, or anything else. They’ve never given any of that a second’s thought, because destruction is the point.
It’s the only point. Always. They have no other.
Thus we must reject Donatism. It doesn’t matter how flawed your “priest” is. The work is bigger than the man. The work transcends the man.
Severian, “The Way, Chapter 2: Guidance”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-01.
- A PoMo in joke. That’s not Aurelius, it’s Hannibal Lecter. But it’s an accurate paraphrase of Aurelius. Can you believe there was once a time when a bestselling thriller could make an allusion to Marcus Aurelius a small but important plot point? That time was 1988, for the record.
January 22, 2026
Carney in Davos … “the mismatch between message and messenger is … very special”
I make it a point not to listen to politicans’ speeches, as I need to keep my blood pressure within safe ranges for health reasons. A lot of Canadian commentators have been gushing with praise for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s bloviations at the WEF gabathon in Davos, because of course they have. Brave Mr. Carney standing up to the Bad Orange Man and getting ovations from the kind of people he’s most comfortable dealing with. How very nice for him. But as Chris Bray explains, it didn’t play quite as well with the rest of the non-Davos-attending world:
Mark Carney gave a speech in Davos, that fortress of democratic pluralism where hotel rooms inside the security zone cost thousands of dollars a night and no one with an expense account has to be lonely because the massive security forces don’t try to interfere with all the sex trafficking, which is very democratic. Anyway, the speech was stunning and brave, and everybody clapped a lot.
Someone put the word “flexes” next to the word “Canada”, apparently not intending to cause laughter, but yes: Mark Carney flexed and warned and puffed himself up like a man who’d just eaten the wrong part of the fugu.
You should watch it. Don’t try to eat or drink during the speech, because you’ll choke, and push any breakable household goods away from the reach of what will soon be your flailing arms, but you should watch him perform this extraordinary set of stranded symbols. The mismatch between message and messenger is … very special.
I was physically paralyzed as an effect of hearing this sentence from this face for a full ten seconds, and then I spasmed. It’s like watching Erich Honecker stand up to the East German regime. “We cannot tolerate misogyny, warns Jack the Ripper.”
Carney hinted broadly that the rules are breaking down in international relationships …
… which for the first time in a long time are being reshaped by mere power, a rare thing on the global stage, because there’s meanness and bullying and a rejection of friendly norms and restraint from … someone very bad, not that he was naming names, and so Canada is turning to new partners, extending the hand of friendship to nations and leaders that still care about rules and values and democracy.
The central banker who was selected as his country’s head of government before he’d ever stood for election to any office anywhere ever, the prime minister of a country where the government had just been rebuked by its courts for faking a national security emergency so it could suspend the rule of law and crush dissent, gave a real tubthumper about democracy and the rule of law.
The total absence of connection between “things being said” and “things being done” sets a record, here.
January 12, 2026
QotD: The death of satire
Enfield was doing what all court jesters should do: delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power. The jester’s often painful or embarrassing jibes can be taken in good faith and acted upon, ignored, or worse. The idea is to convey what everyone outside the court is thinking and how the ordinary person perceives those with power and influence. While Enfield’s work of this era certainly merits a more focused analysis, here I’d like to zoom in on one sketch based on a favourite Enfield target, the show Dragons’ Den.
Enfield excoriates the ludicrously pompous panel of wealthy, high-status business owners and their seeming right to supreme arrogance justified simply by their wealth. In one skit, Enfield and Paul Whitehouse arrive to pitch an idea as bumbling English entrepreneurs trying to get the “Dragons” to invest in their concept called “I can’t believe it’s not custard”. The Dragons, also played by Enfield and Whitehouse, sneer and spit venom at the Englishmen and their stupid idea, swiftly sending them away with no investment whatsoever.
The two white men later return, adorned in black-face and Jamaican accents with a pitch called “Me kyan believe it nat custard” and the Dragons fall at their feet, showering them with money. They then begin to compete with each other in sycophantically grovelling, fearful that the least enthusiastic of them will be deemed racist.
The sketch hits like a thunderbolt because Enfield holds up a mirror to a particular class of people, saying, “This is what you are!” We, as the common folk, take great delight in this lampooning because we know it to be a painful, somewhat grotesque truth. In an ocean of noise, it is a clear, bright signal that something is not right.
It is both a commentary on multiculturalism and a critique of those with power and influence. Yet, for some reason, this sketch lands harder than, say, a Spitting Image sketch in the 1980s targeting Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. There is a sense that an agreed-upon lie is being teased out into the glare of daylight and unceremoniously prodded and kicked about. The morality of the pretentious Dragons is a sham, and as such, their status is deflated before us.
Enfield revealed, in that single clip, the inherent fragility of the managerial classes dedicated to propagating via “virtue signalling” the values of the multicultural state. The millionaires of the Dragons’ Den panel adopt the attitudes and worldview of brutal free-market meritocrats, with the only subject of interest to them being whether or not a product or service is worthy of investment. Enfield implied that this worldview was a lie, a charade, and that they were no more outside of the central multicultural metanarrative than a Guardian journalist. The Dragons’ Den panel, and therefore neoliberalism, was not an alternative or competitor, but rather subordinate to the politically correct dogma of the age.
From the perspective of Britain’s liberal elite, Enfield committed a multitude of sins against them and their values, which probably explains why, after his show was shuffled off to BBC 2 to die, they never allowed themselves to be confronted with such lampooning ever again. The external frame from which people can gaze back into the general narrative would be kept permanently locked out.
Yet, this also marked a transition from a Blairite neoliberalism, in which the justification for mass immigration was to infuse British society with fresh energy and dynamism, into a more stagnant form wherein the upholding of the multicultural order became its own justification.
Morgoth, “How Multiculturalism Consumes Everything”, Morgoth’s Review, 2025-10-04.
December 30, 2025
QotD: Modern weddings
Chris Taylor, “Long Day’s Journey into Matrimony”, Taylor & Company, 2005-09-01.
December 19, 2025
Brendan O’Neill on the Islamophobia racket
In the National Post, Brendan O’Neill criticizes Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in particular, but he’s just the most recent exemplar of western politicians trying to blame society in general and “right wing extremists” in particular for the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists:
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke a total of 5,022 words in the day after the slaughter of Jews at Bondi Beach. And not one of those words was “Islam”. Or “Muslim”. Or even “Islamic extremism”.
He did talk about the “far right” though. Twice. We need to tackle “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”, he said.
What an odd thing to focus on the day after a father-and-son Islamofascist outfit had mown down 15 innocents, all while proudly displaying the black flag of ISIS.
To fret about the far right hours after suspected Islamic militants had carried out the worst slaughter of Jews in Australian history is cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.
It would be like turning up to the bloody aftermath of a KKK massacre and flat-out refusing to say the words “Klansmen”, “racist” or “white supremacist”. Well, we wouldn’t want to offend the pointed-hood community.
Some Australians were dumbfounded by the PM’s bullish refusal to name the ideology that fuelled this act of antisemitic savagery.
After all, at the time he was holding forth on the various threats to the Aussie way of life, officialdom had found the killers’ ISIS flag and other paraphernalia suggesting they had taken the knee to the death cult of radical Islam.
“What happened at Bondi was an act of radical Islamic terrorism”, thundered Sean Bell of the populist party One Nation. If the PM “cannot be honest” about the “radical Islamic ideology”, he said, “then he has no place leading the country”.
It’s hard to disagree. The first duty of a leader following the barbarous slaying of citizens is to tell the truth. If Albanese can’t even bring himself to mouth the words “Islamic extremism”, how’s he going to fight it?
The PM’s yellow-bellied dodging of the i-word was shocking but not surprising. Other Western leaders have behaved similarly in the wake of Islamist outrages. They have furiously thumbed their thesauruses for spins on the word “extremist” — fanatic, militant, evil — all so that they can avoid committing that most gauche faux pas in polite society: talking about the problems in Islam.
This is the dire handiwork of the Islamophobia industry. For years now, Islam has been ruthlessly ringfenced from free, frank discussion.
Mock Muhammad and you’ll be damned as “phobic”. Crack a joke about the Koran and you can expect a mob of fundamentalists at your front door. Say Islam has an extremism problem and the self-elected guardians of correct-think will drag you off for re-education.
We’ve witnessed the rehabilitation of medieval strictures against “blasphemy”. The end result is that even as women and children writhe in agony from the wounds inflicted on them by Islamist militants, still our leaders won’t say that i-word. It clogs in their throats. They dread cancellation more than they cherish truth.
[…]
After every attack, the same platitudes are trotted out. “Nothing to do with Islam”. “Islam is a religion of peace”. We’re gagged from naming the threat we face, from correctly identifying the men who are killing our fellow citizens.
Believe them when they show you what they are, Oz edition:
In The Line, Ariella Kimmel thinks there are signs that at least some political figures are getting the right lessons out of the events of the last few years:
In the wake of the terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, it seems as if leaders are finally starting to realize the risk of allowing antisemitic extremism to run unchecked for years.
Calgary’s new mayor offered a powerful example of what this means in practice.
At Calgary City Hall’s Chanukah celebration, Mayor Jeromy Farkas delivered remarks that stood out not only for their eloquence, but for their accountability. He spoke plainly about antisemitism and acknowledged the very real fear that Jewish communities are living with. Most importantly, he made clear that civic leadership means showing up publicly, consistently, and without excuses.
In a room of just over a thousand, he declared “let me be absolutely crystal clear. There is no place for antisemitism in Calgary. Not on our streets, not in our schools or campuses, not at protests, not online, not hidden behind slogans, not excused as politics, because Jewish lives are not expendable. Jewish safety is not expendable.”
That moment was especially symbolic given Calgary’s recent past. Two years ago, then-Mayor Jyoti Gondek refused to attend a Chanukah event amid pressure and controversy. Farkas’ presence this week marked a break from that pattern. It signalled that someone, finally, was willing to take responsibility.
That is what leadership looks like.
The Bondi Beach attack should force a reckoning in Canada. If we want to avoid becoming the next headline, this country must do more than mourn; we must decide, clearly and concretely, that extremism has consequences and that antisemitism will not be indulged.
In Canada, politicians were quick to offer condolences. Statements flowed with the standard lines – “my thoughts are with the community”, “our government condemns all forms of hate”, “no one should be targeted for practicing their religion”. The words are familiar, and quite frankly hollow, because for the past two years, many of the same leaders issuing their thoughts and prayers have either ignored, excused, or actively engaged with movements that normalize hostility toward Jews.
Since October 7, Jewish Canadians have watched as public spaces became hostile territory. Synagogues require police protection, while Jewish schools are shot at and community centres are defaced. Rallies openly glorify terrorist groups, call for the destruction of Israel, and chant slogans that any reasonable person understands as genocidal, such as calls to “globalize the intifada”, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, “there is only one solution, intifada revolution”, and “resistance is justified”.
What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is the gap between rhetoric and reality among leaders. Politicians speak of fighting hate while refusing to enforce existing laws against intimidation, mischief, and hate-motivated harassment. They speak of unity while legitimizing groups and movements that openly reject the safety of Jewish communities, even giving funding through government programs meant to combat antisemitism, to organizations that perpetrate it. They issue statements condemning violence abroad while tolerating the ideological conditions that make violence inevitable at home.
December 17, 2025
“The core hypocrisy of modern Western governance”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo discusses the extremely weird experience we’ve all lived through since 9/11 in almost every major western nation:
For more than 20 years, Western governments told their citizens that Islamist extremism posed an existential threat. Entire generations were sent to fight the Global War on Terror. Soldiers were killed, families were broken, civil liberties were curtailed, and trillions were spent, all justified by the claim that terrorism had to be stopped over there so it would not reach us here.
Then something strange happened.
The same governments that built their legitimacy on that fear now insist that even discussing the cultural, security, or integration risks associated with mass immigration from unstable regions is immoral. Raise concerns and you are no longer a citizen asking questions, but a bigot, an extremist, or a threat yourself. In some countries, speech alone now draws police attention, while violent acts are reframed as isolated incidents or stripped of ideological context.
The irony deepens when you look at the timeline.
During the first years of Covid, terrorism all but vanished from news coverage, just as Covid seemed to erase the common cold, cancer, and every other cause of death from public discourse. Nothing had disappeared. The narrative had simply changed. Attention was redirected. Fear was reassigned.
Now, as governments pursue aggressive mass immigration policies, the public is told that questioning outcomes is unacceptable, even as the very threats once used to justify war reappear domestically. The message is clear and profoundly cynical: the danger was real when it justified foreign wars, but discussion becomes forbidden when it complicates domestic policy.
This is not tolerance. It is coercion.
And now comes the final insult.
The same political class that demands silence at home is preparing to demand sacrifice abroad. The same citizens who are told to accept social breakdown, rising crime, collapsing services, and cultural fragmentation are being told they may soon be required to fight Russia to “defend our way of life”.
What way of life, exactly?
The one being systematically dismantled by the very governments issuing the call. The one they are actively transforming into something unrecognizable through reckless policy, moral intimidation, and managed decline. They are asking people to die for values they no longer practice and for societies they are actively degrading.
This is the core hypocrisy of modern Western governance.
We were told to fight, bleed, and die to defend liberal democratic values. Now we are told those same values require silence, compliance, and obedience, while our countries are reshaped without consent and against the will of the people who built them.
A government that suppresses debate at home while demanding loyalty abroad is not defending democracy. It is consuming it.
And history is not kind to regimes that ask their people to die for a future they are busy destroying.
October 22, 2025
The Anti-Coynist Manifesto
In a guest post at Without Diminishment, Michael Bonner takes a blowtorch to the boomer hippies and particularly to Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne. But first, the obnoxious boomers:
Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.
In their own minds, they invented rebellion; they stopped a war; and they discovered sex. The latter phenomenon, they still believe, was quite unknown in former ages. So were drug-taking, vulgarity, and poor hygiene. These, as it was believed, were the means of “finding oneself”, and there was no more important task in life. Automobiles were likewise a singular obsession, and the Good Life meant not only driving but also eating, attending films, and copulating in cars.
They were an unusually forthright lot, who were apparently well educated, but who nevertheless espoused many absurd and contradictory notions. Their parents, who had gone to war to fight Nazis, were themselves branded as fascists by their own children. They professed to revolt against money and materialism; and yet, when they came of age, these were their primary interests. They were the generation that attended Woodstock in defiance of a flu pandemic, and were later the most assiduous followers of Covid-19 restrictions.
At the frightening name of Woodstock, it will be obvious who I mean. The Boomers were born to the men and women who had endured the privations of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and everything in between. It is the Boomers who prove the adage whereby good times make weak men and weak men make hard times. They disliked the ease and prosperity into which they were born, and sought to erode them. The 20th-century fear of Soviet subversion or nuclear annihilation was therefore misplaced. For where the Soviets failed, the Boomers triumphed, leaving our culture and our politics in ruins. They are still at it, as the gravitational field of their huge demographic mass continues to distort our politics. Worst of all, the Boomers’ peculiar vision of personal freedom, norm-busting, and individualism at any cost now passes for conservatism.
And on to Mr. Coyne himself (full disclosure: I’ve met Mr. Coyne a few times at early Toronto blogger gatherings and he seemed quite a sensible chap 20 years ago):
Does this Boomer conservatism have any luminaries or pundits? In Canada, it has one and he towers over his acolytes and opponents alike as a learned giant among intellectual pygmies. Or rather, that is how Andrew Coyne undoubtedly imagines himself. So great a spokesman of the Boomer conservative mentality is Coyne that the entire movement could be named after him: Andrew Coyne-ism.
Who has not heard of Andrew Coyne? He is now a columnist with The Globe and Mail and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National. He wrote for the National Post and once edited its editorial and comment section, but resigned in 2015 during the federal election. The cause was a dispute with executives over the rejection of a column composed for election day, in which Coyne failed to endorse the Conservatives. Coyne described the dispute as an unwelcome intervention that threatened his editorial independence, stating on Twitter that he could not allow the precedent to stand and needed to protect his reputation as a columnist.
That incident is a microcosm of the problem. One may fairly complain, as Coyne did, that the Harper Tories failed to please every member of their coalition equally, though such a thing is rarely possible. But the rest of Coyne’s complaints concerned a “bullying, sneering culture” of “the low brow and the lower brow”. The imperfection of policy merely annoyed him, but he hated the Conservatives’ tone. They were not sufficiently respectful, they traded in insults and did not agree that “learning and science are to be valued, not derided”, apparently. In contrast, “a politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed” was “the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau”.
Trudeau: a paragon of civility? Surely some other Trudeau is meant, not the opposition MP who called the Minister of the Environment a “piece of shit“. Not the man who, at a “ladies’ night” campaign event, was asked which country he most admired and said it was China’s “basic dictatorship“. Not the man who announced that the excitement of a political campaign amounted to “pizza, sex, and all sorts of fun things“. Not the man who mused about such subjects as “making Quebec a country” if Canada were to become too conservative and the need to put Quebeckers in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda” — whatever that means. Not the man who once halted an interview with a French-Canadian journalist in order to demonstrate the right way to fall down a flight of stairs. I pass over the more lurid stories of groping a reporter’s buttocks, wearing blackface, and singing the “Banana Boat” song.
Alas, it is the same Trudeau. Nevertheless, Andrew Coyne-ism can excuse all such behaviour along with the decade of sanctimonious bullying and decline that followed it. For none of it is as bad as the wishes and worldview of the mostly rural, western, and blue-collar Conservative base. Such people are too angry and too vulgar for their own good. Including them within the benefits of Confederation must be rigorously circumscribed, and allowing them to shape public policy cannot be allowed at all.
October 19, 2025
Reframing the loss of elite legitimacy as a “loss of faith in democracy”
On his Substack, Frank Furedi illustrates how the public’s declining trust in political elites across the western world is being reframed in the legacy media as declining faith in democracy itself:
No doubt you have come across commentators and legacy politicians whining about the public’s loss of trust in democracy and in the key institutions of society.
“France is not alone in its crisis of political faith – belief in a democratic world is vanishing” commented Simon Tisdall last week in The Guardian.1 He noted that “belief that democracy is the form of governance best suited to the modern world is dwindling, especially among younger people“.
The tendentious claim that the current era of political malaise is an outcome of a loss of commitment to democracy is regularly echoed by mainstream commentators. This was the message of a recent Politico headline that stated that “Europe’s democracies are in danger, warn Merz and Macron”.2 It cited the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stating that these “threats dwarf anything seen since the Cold War”. He noted that “the radiance of what we in the West call liberal democracy is noticeably diminishing”, adding: “it is no longer a given that the world will orient itself towards us, that it will follow our values of liberal democracy”.
If anything, the French President Macron was even more pessimistic than Merz. He warns that Europe is undergoing a “degeneration of democracy due to attacks from without and from within”. He was particularly concerned about the loss of faith in democracy within France. “On the inside we are turning on ourselves; we doubt our own democracy”, he noted, before adding, “we see everywhere that something is happening to our democratic fabric. Democratic debate is turning into a debate of hatred.” This statement coming from a man, whose presidency lacks a genuine mandate and relies on bureaucratic maneuvering exposes the cynicism of his concern for the “degeneration of democracy”.
[…]
Loss of elite authority
In reality the crisis of democracy narrative serves to mystify the real issues at stake. This narrative offers a misdiagnosis of the very real loss of legitimacy of the ruling elites as a loss of belief in democracy. As far as this dominant narrative is concerned every time people vote against the representatives of the legacy political establishment democracy is in trouble. So long as they win elections and populists aspirations are confined to the margins of society democracy is represented as a big success. But the very minute people vote the “wrong way” the mainstream commentators craft alarmist accounts about democratic backsliding. That is why the Remainer lobby often represents the outcome of the Brexit Referendum as an expression of “democratic backsliding”.
In theory, the term democratic backsliding refers to the declining integrity of democratic values. In practice it means the estrangement of significant sections of the public from their political institutions. The term democratic backsliding serves to mystify a very significant development, which is the legitimacy crisis of the legacy political establishment. Once understood from this perspective it becomes evident that it is not democracy that people no longer trust but the people and the institutions that rule over society.
As it happens the narrative of “democracy is in trouble” smacks of pure hypocrisy. Those who communicate this narrative are not so much interested in the integrity of democracy but in ensuring that people vote the right way. From their perspective if people vote the wrong way than democracy becomes dispensable. That is why more and more we hear the refrain that there is “too much democracy”. “Democracy Works Better when there is less of it” warned Financial Times commentator, Janan Ganesh.3 As far he is concerned, “no global trend is better documented than the crisis of democracy”, by which he means that too often people vote against the advice of the elites.
September 26, 2025
John Carter revisits the cancellation debate
As part of a much longer essay, covering a lot more ground, John Carter considers the pro and con arguments for the much-cancelled right to fully indulge in cancelling figures on the left in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the widespread celebration of the murder by leftists:
Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.
The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.
Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.
But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.
We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 … or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 … to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.
The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.
Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it”. Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed “Anti-ICE” rather than “Fuck ICE” on his bullets.
The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.
Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).
The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:
It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.
Now, you can say “they’re just lying”, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.
[…]
In a lot of cases, however, calling them “liars” isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.
That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.
We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.
September 20, 2025
BC Ferries, federal financing and Chinese shipyards
As you may have heard, at the same time that Canadian politicians of all parties were thumping the tub about buying Canadian, British Columbia’s provincially owned ferry corporation decided to buy new ships from China … and the federal government not only gave the deal their blessing, they added in a billion dollar underwriting guarantee to boot:
In Ottawa they call it “arm’s-length”. Out in the real world, people call it duck-and-cover. At Meeting No. 6 of the House of Commons transport committee, MPs confronted a simple, damning timeline: Transport Canada’s top non-partisan official was warned six weeks before the public announcement that BC Ferries would award a four-ship contract to a Chinese state-owned yard. Yet the former transport minister, Chrystia Freeland, told Parliament she was “shocked”. Those two facts do not coexist in nature. One is true, or the other is.
There’s an even bigger betrayal hiding in plain sight. In the last election, this Liberal government campaigned on a Canada-first message — jobs here, supply chains here, steel here. And then, when it actually mattered, they watched a billion-dollar ferry order sail to a PRC state yard with no Canadian-content requirement attached to the federal financing. So much for “Canada first”. Turns out it was “Canada … eventually”, after the press release.
Conservatives put the revelation on the record and asked the only question that matters in a democracy: what did the minister know and when did she know it? The documents they cite don’t suggest confusion; they suggest choreography — ministerial staff emailing the Prime Minister’s Office on how to manage the announcement rather than stop the deal that offshored Canadian work to a Chinese state firm.
Follow the money and it gets worse. A federal Crown lender — the Canada Infrastructure Bank — underwrote $1 billion for BC Ferries and attached no Canadian-content requirement to the financing. In plain English: taxpayers took the risk, Beijing got the jobs. The paper trail presented to MPs is smothered in black ink — hundreds of pages of redactions — with one stray breadcrumb: a partially visible BC Hydro analysis suggesting roughly half a billion dollars in B.C. terminal upgrades to make the “green” ferry plan work. You’re not supposed to see that. You almost didn’t.
How did the government side respond? With a jurisdictional shrug. We’re told, over and over, that BC Ferries is a provincial, arm’s-length corporation; the feds didn’t pick the yard, don’t run the procurement, and therefore shouldn’t be blamed. That line is convenient, and in a technical sense it’s tidy. But it wilts under heat. The federal lender is still federal. The money is still public. If “arm’s-length” means “no accountability”, it’s not a governance model — it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The fallback argument is economic fatalism: no Canadian shipyards bid, we’re told; building here would have taken longer and cost “billions” more. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t — but it’s the sort of claim that demands evidence, not condescension. Because the last time Canadians heard this script, the same political class promised that global supply chains were efficient, cheap and safe. Then reality happened. If domestic capacity is too weak to compete, that’s not an argument for outsourcing permanently; it’s an indictment of the people who let that capacity atrophy. And if you swear “Canada first” on the campaign trail, you don’t bankroll “China first” from the Treasury bench.
August 14, 2025
QotD: It’s not hypocrisy when progressives do it …
Severian, “Fade to Black”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-23.
