, 03.16.2018 03:49 PM

KINSELLACAST #5: resisting the Trump/Brexit agenda!



By popular demand, here’s my Merv Leitch QC Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law.

If there’s one section I want to emphasize, it’s this one:

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Barack Obama said that while he was still President — and never have his words been truer than they are now. No fairy-tale impeachment is going to take place. No Trump/Brexit voters are going to magically come to their senses, and say they were wrong to vote the way they did. This is going to be a grinding, tough war every step of the way.

11 Comments

  1. Patrick says:

    To what extent would fiscal progress, and worker protections and rights help to move social values forward? Society has changed a lot, and people aren’t secure in their income, and that impacts a lot of things – having a family, feeding a family, feeding yourself, buying a house – even to stay off the street. So my question is to what extent would enhanced workers rights and job protections, and fair compensation reduce hate? There have always been bigots, but naive youth are much easier to recruit when they are starved for opportunity and looking for answers – so how much of this surge in hate, and racism, and Nativism is the result of wealth concentration robbing everyday people of opportunity? Progressives seem to lose that fight to the false bravado of the right wing, which made no sense to me because they would starve you, and tell you it’s good for the economy (worker anxiety – lower wages, less protections, poor treatment are often cited as a catalyst for productivity – kind of thing that motivated slaves i guess).

  2. Patrick says:

    Other thing I’ve noticed is that on the “progressive” wing folks are eager to show you how smart they are, and some are very smart, but on the other side, the nasty Nativist jingoistic asshole side – they’re informed by cartoons, and they discriminate against education – So smart talk won’t change em, but cartoons might.

  3. Peter says:

    Sure, Patrick, cartoons will save you. Setbacks for so-called “progressive” forces have become a wave. We have Trump, of course, but also a steady, huge loss of elections by Dems during the Obama years (900 of them) . There was Brexit, but also the destruction of moderate Labour. Traditional centre-left parties across Europe have been decimated. Canada has been somewhat insulated, but Ford won one of the world’s most multi-ethnic cities (he won the non-white vote) and look who is leading the Ontario polls.

    In response to this tectonic shift, there are a few, voices on the left that offer honest analysis and self-criticism, but that kind of honesty can be painful and so the general response is to blame it all on stereotypes of their own making like angry old white guys, various “ists” (racists, misogynists, etc.) and now folks who hate readin’ and learnin’ and make do with cartoons. This permits them to admire their superior minds and virtues no end when they look in mirrors, to define their opponents as beyond the pale of civilized discourse and to double down on the rhetoric and politics that keeps on getting rejected.

    The problem isn’t that the other side isn’t reading, Patrick, it’s that your side isn’t listening.

    • Fred from BC says:

      Thanks for that, Peter. Best post of the month.

      You ever notice how our side never dresses up in black, donning masks and storming university campuses to prevent someone else from being heard?

      • doconnor says:

        Sounds a lot like what the police did in G20 in Toronto.

        • S9CA says:

          Indeed, and with the blessing of the McGuinty Liberals. And a Chief of Police that is now the Liberal MP for Scarborough Southwest.

        • Fred from BC says:

          No, it sounds *exactly* like what those 200 Black Bloc assholes did when they broke away from the peaceful, legitimate protest to go on a rampage of smashing storefronts and public property, looting and vandalizing banks, clothing stores and coffee shops, setting fire to cars and just doing whatever they could to provoke the police. It sounds *nothing* like a scripted speech given by a public figure to a peaceful gathering of people in an auditorium on a university campus.

          • doconnor says:

            The Black Bloc should be condemned, but what they did was less serious then illegally abducting about 1,000 people off the streets.

            The Liberals, Conservatives and former NDP mayor Miller need to be condemned over this.

  4. James Smith says:

    Well put Mr Kinsella. I’ve felt for some time the 1% have used the Alt Right & their fellow travellers to forward their agenda of greed & guile. I’ve always put this down to cognitive dissonance, but having just read a very sobering story about BC’s Chris Wylie & his role in Cambridge Analytica I wonder. I also wonder if all the door knocking me & my pals do will be in vain, but I’m too old to give up now. Pity Mr Wylie didn’t come & work for you rather than Steve Bannon.

  5. Peter says:

    “You ever notice how our side never dresses up in black”

    Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean what often comes out of their mouths isn’t appalling. Current politics are tribal. The left disowns the “little people” they once claimed to speak for and indulge in name-calling and virtue-signalling while the right responds with a kind of defiant, rhetorical iconoclasm that gives a pass to anger and resentment. What’s going on in the States these days illustrates the modern distemper. Every damned offensive or crazy thing Trump says or does is met with a chorus of right-wing pundits saying “Yeah, but…Hillary!” , while “Yeah, but… Trump!” is seen by the much of the MSM as a complete response to criticism of the pompous and insufferable Dem leadership. Behind them, reflective voices trying to reach out are drowned out by mobs baying their outrage in 280 character or less.

    Look at our own little homegrown microcosm–Ontario. Wynne vs. Ford? Two candidates so offensive and unsuitable to govern that the only positive thing that can truly be said about each of them is that they aren’t the other. The funny thing is both seem to sense that and are making it the basis of their platforms.

    • Fred from BC says:

      Yeah, true. The current situation in Ontario is eerily similar. Why did the Democrats have to run one of the most despised people in America as a candidate (even after she got caught stealing the nomination from the legitimate candidate)? Why wouldn’t Kathleen Wynne, after her part in the McGuinty government and everything she’s screwed up since, step down for the good of the OLP (and the province itself, for that matter)? Why doesn’t the news media do the same job it used to do?

      So many questions, no obvious answers…

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