Categories for Musings

In next week’s column: campaigns may not matter, but words do

— 03.16.2017 09:20 AM

To wit:

Donald Trump – the combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, racist, sexist, fascistic Human Cheeto – showed all of us that Campaigns Don’t Matter.  You can run a really shitty one, like he did, and still win.

But.  But one thing, and it is deliciously ironic.  It is schadenfreude on a scale heretofore unseen in politics.  It is frigging beautiful.

You can see it in the decisions of federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii, issued late last week – but particularly in the must-read decision of Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu.  In it, Judge Watson threw out Trump’s second (allegedly kinder and gentler) executive order seeking a Muslim ban.  And he did so by relying upon the words of Donald Trump himself.

Judge Watson dismissed the Trump regime’s claim that a court would need to probe the Unpresident’s “veiled psyche” to locate religious animus. Jusdge Watson would have none of it.  Repeatedly, he cited Trump statements that were helpfully found in the pages of the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general.

“There is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Said he: “A reasonable, objective observer would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavour a particular religion.” 

The general consensus, now, is that the short-fingered vulgarian – per Canadian Graydon Carter’s now-immortal phrase – will continue to be hoisted on his own petard.  As he labours to render the United States of America an Aryan Nation, Donald Trump will continue to lose in court.  That is now very clear, to every legal scholar and constitutional expert.


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When you say: “I’m becoming anti-Semitic,” are you anti-Semitic?

— 03.15.2017 09:39 AM


Not good.

That’s what Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes said on a video, found here.

Here’s some other things he said:

  • “God, [Jews are] so obsessed with the Holocaust. … I don’t know if it’s healthy to dwell.”
  • “I felt myself defending the super-far-right Nazis, just because I was sick of so much [Holocaust] brainwashing.”
  • “…much less than six million [were murdered in the Holocaust] and they starved to death and they weren’t gassed.”
  • “[A man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine was caused] by Jews. That was by Marxist, Stalinist, left-wing, commie, socialist Jews.”
  • “[WWII was caused by the Treaty of Versailles, which was] disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals.”
  • And, as noted, “I’m becoming anti-Semitic.”

I don’t think there can be any doubt those statements are unambiguously anti-Semitic, but in case you have any doubt, they were enthusiastically promoted – and celebrated – by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and America’s current neo-Nazi leader, Richard Spencer:


Around the same time McInnes made his statements, another Rebel Media person, Lauren Southern, abruptly left the organization.  Southern also counts Spencer and assorted neo-Nazis and white supremacists among her fan base.  There is a lot of speculation online that she is more aligned with the National Policy Institute’s Richard Spencer than with Rebel Media’s  Ezra Levant.  Personally, I don’t know if that’s true: I have never watched any of her many (many) videos.

Now, am I fan of the Rebel web site? Full disclosure: not really.  That’s particularly the case after Rebel’s Faith Goldy defended a far-Right pedophile in a bizarre effort to slime me for, um, being critical of pedophiles.

Anyway.  Ezra and I have a long, long history.  We’ve slammed each other, we’ve sued each other, we’ve gone after each other.  When Sun News Network started up, Kory Teneycke asked us to enter into an armistice, and so we did.  It’s held ever since, and I’ve been content to let other people fight with Ezra.  Been there, done that.

And I will give Ezra credit for this much: one, he built the Rebel thing from the ground up, and he has turned it into a significant player in the Canadian media universe.  It’s not a news service, not by a long shot – it’s simply a web platform for Right-wing and far-Right-wing opinion – but it’s not inconsequential.

Two, Ezra is not an anti-Semite.  Not just because he’s Jewish – Ezra has been more critical of other Canadian Jews than Jim Keegstra, Ernst Zundel and Paul Fromm put together.  He’s not anti-Semitic because, basically, he’s not anti-Semitic.

So what, then, is he doing keeping the likes of Gavin McInnes on the payroll?  What is the truth about alt-Right heroine Lauren Southern and her speedy departure?  Is Rebel Media so free-speechy that it will now give an uncritical platform to Holocaust denier rhetoric?

Some say all this means the end of Rebel Media.  Personally, I doubt it.  They seriously underestimate Ezra Levant.

But it’s all deeply unsettling, and pretty off-brand, too.  When Ezra Levant is prepared to play host to the likes of Gavin McInnes, spouting anti-Semitic filth, well…it’s not good.

For him.


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Whither thou goest, middle class, in your dark S.U.V. at night?

— 03.14.2017 10:19 AM

I was mad.

I was listening to a cabinet minister on the radio this morning. He was invoking the penultimate progressive political totemic, the vaunted “middle class.” (The ultimate progressive divinity being “progressive values,” which no progressive can define, and which therefore makes it the very problem it seeks to address.)

He went on and on and on about “the middle class,” apparently secure in the knowledge that we all know what that is. “Nobody knows what the middle class is,” I yelled at the radio, but the radio didn’t listen. “It’s a political fiction. It’s a bumpersticker phrase. It’s an illusion that breeds cynicism.”

But the radio ignored me.  The cabinet minister kept blathering on about “the middle class.”

I remembered that I have written about this, many times before. Here’s one thing that I’ve written, plucked from my book Fight the Right:

Along with the right words, and better focus on values, progressives also need an alternative narrative. More particularly, we need a narrative that connects with the values of citizens in a way that they understand.

The great global recession of 2008 – and the cataclysm of despair that it unleashed – has receded somewhat. But its effects are still felt all over, and nowhere as much as among what we once called the middle class. Foreclosures, layoffs and broken dreams are everywhere to be seen. The ongoing legacy of the recession is pain and misery, and a rising tide of anger.

Where, in the midst of all of this, has been the Left? What have liberals had to say about all of this gloom and despair? Mostly, nothing. Progressives have been virtually invisible at the very time when the old dogmas and old fixes of the Right are, to many, a cruel joke…

“There are several reasons for [the] lack of Left-wing mobilization,” writes [Francis] Fukuyama, “but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian Right.”

What does that mean? It means that Western democracy (and the middle class that at one time gave it purpose and legitimacy), are at risk of vanishing entirely if the Left does not get its act together. For instance: median incomes in the United States and other Western democracies have been stagnating since the 1970s. “[The middle class] may today benefit from cheap cell phones, inexpensive clothing, and Facebook, but they increasingly cannot afford their own homes, or health insurance, or comfortable pensions when they retire,” Fukuyama writes.

The centre of capitalism, as everyone from the Occupiers to the billionaires at Davos have lately observed, cannot hold. To many, it is a well-intentioned but essentially failed theory. But the Left, Fukuyama declares, is absent from this crucial discussion, and is also AWOL from offering cogent alternatives. “One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis,” he says, “is that, so far, populism has taken primarily a Right-wing form, not a Left-wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members vote for conservative politicians who serve the interests of precisely those financiers and corporate elites they claim to despise.”

The academic Left, the feminist theorists, the post-modernists and the professional multiculturalism advocates all have plenty to say, Fukuyama concedes, but not to those they most need to achieve real democratic (and economic) change. “It is impossible to generate a mass progressive movement,” Fukuyama dryly notes, “on the basis of such a motley coalition: most of the working-and lower-middle-class citizens victimized by the system are culturally conservative, and would be embarrassed to be seen in the presence of allies like this.”

The biggest problem for the Left, Fukuyama would agree, is a lack of credibility, a lack of authenticity – and the lack of a values-enriched narrative. What is needed is an ideology for the future. Fukuyama, again:“Politically, the new ideology would need to reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitim[ize] government as an expression of the public interest…It would have to argue forthrightly for more [wealth] redistribution and present a realistic route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics.” 

The task, of course, is immense, and the rewards uncertain. Why bother? Because, Fukuyama says, “Inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth has already become self-reinforcing: the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests.”

The Left must step up.

But here’s the thing: as evidenced by the ritual invocation of “the middle class” on the radio this morning – without defining what that is, and who makes it up, and why it is so important in a civil society – it is just so much political prattle.  It is words.

The Right don’t even pretend to represent the middle class.  But as Brexit showed us in June 2016 – and as Trump showed us in November 2016 – the middle class aren’t offended by that, not in the least.  They will vote against their own economic self-interest, every time, if someone comes along and talks to them in the values-laden lingo favoured by the Right, and abhorred by the Left.

Want to reach the middle class, and mobilize them?  Reach their hearts, not just their heads.


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