The Crisis, Thomas Paine
December 23, 1776
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
Those were the times of the American revolutionary war when the fight was for independence from Britain. These are the times of the radical Left’s attempt to transform the entire liberal-democratic, capitalistic West into Marxist, socialist pods under a global government. The times share the same goal: freedom for citizens to live their lives according to their own choices, NOT those dictated by government bureaucrats as directed by global elites.
And the US, battered giant that it is today, is still the ‘beacon on the hill’ with the strength & resilience to defeat the Left’s vicious attack on the West.
The radical Left, Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson describes this small cohort—AKA the Woke—in his podcast, May 2, 2023, as a minority with “ironclad discipline to walk in step”, who “control the ranks through fear” manifested in cancellation & humiliation. This is in total contrast to conservatives of all stripes who think independently and disagree both privately and publicly.
The latter is authentic human behaviour: a public example, the splintering of conservatives in Alberta into the Progressive Conservative Party & the Wildrose Party; a private example, the arguing about everything at every waking hour in the large, fractious family I grew up in. Ironically, in the private sphere the opposite is true: conservatives tend to value loyalty & fidelity to kin, creating stable families; the liberal-left, on the other hand, tend to put individual feelings first, creating a lot of single households.
For the Woke, the means are ALWAYS justified by the end—a blunt message with total focus overpowers conservatives’ more nuanced, more rational argument. Total agreement on anything should ALWAYS be a red flag—an SOS message that some one/group is coercing the others to fall in line or else. People agree & disagree on every subject and on every degree of the spectrum between agreement & disagreement. That is human nature.
The current madness, Victor Davis Hanson
The US needs a Churchill to step up and say, “No!” to the current madness dominating our Western institutions, because this madness is as evil as Hitler & Nazism were to our way of life in the 1930s & ‘40s.
The Biden administration has:
- destroyed the southern border & immigration law
- greenlighted 7 million illegal aliens
- ignored and/or turned a blind eye to Chinese spies infiltrating American institutions
- printed $4 trillion, leading to the worst inflation in 40 years tripling interest rates & doubling gas prices
- weakened the military with Woke ideology, leading to a precipitous drop in recruits
- weaponized the FBI, CIA and Department of Justice, with ideology, politics & race—not the law—guiding their actions
- overseen the destruction of “once-majestic” American cities, with their streets mired in refuse, needles & human excrement; plagued by rampant violent crime & homelessness; and fleeing middle-class families & businesses from the blue urban coasts to the red middle & south
- assaulted citizens by ostracism & career cancellation for saying that there are only two sexes, that climate change is not an existential threat to mankind, or that furthering equality—NOT equity—is the proper goal of the nation
Most Americans know what must be done, but the US needs some one/group who will:
- balance the budget, focusing the government on its proper mandate and ensuing that the bureaucrats do only what is legislated and firing them when they overreach
- enforce the law, abolishing the catch-and-release madness and punishing those who break the law
- return to legal-only immigration
- restore the military to perform its primary role of defending the nation
- produce the oil & gas that the US needs to fuel its standard of living
- insist that academia—from nursery school to post-graduate studies—protect free speech and stop proselytizing students
Intolerance is the new inclusion
To George Orwell’s famous three—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength”—John Robson adds another: “Hate is love.” Anyone who disagrees with the progressives’ playbook, even if it’s just a small digression, brings down upon himself their full Red Queen’s, “Off with his head!” Intolerance is the new inclusion in their rabid rush to impose DIE on governments, bureaucracies, academia and corporations—DIE is the perfect acronym because it kills value wherever it is imposed.
Orwell’s indictment of tyranny in 1984 and Animal Farm had the Lenin/Stalin Soviet Union as its target, revealing this communist ‘paradise’ for the hellhole that it was. But the radical Left, “whose maliciousness is exceeded only by its ignorance” (Roger Kimball, The Epoch Times, June 5, 2023), has taken it as a how-to template for imposing socialism/communism on the West. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the legacy media’s perversion of Orwell’s indictment. But more upsetting was the parroting of this perversion by too many young people. Sadly, the Woke dogma has saturated academia, producing platoons of useful idiots—again, Orwell defines them perfectly: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”—in the Left’s march to power.
Why do so many fall for this vicious political philosophy spewed forth from one of its originators, Karl Marx, in the mid-1800s? (Charles Dickens often named protagonists in his novels to fit their characters; Marx, a contemporary of Dickens, fits his own philosophy to a T: vile, selfish, lazy, dirty & smelly, and full of entitlement.) Benjamin Constant, a French-Swiss political writer (1767-1830), gives us a glimpse of the socialist/communist modus operandi. “They are so ready to spare us all sorts of trouble, except those of obeying and paying! They will say to us: what, in the end, is the aim of your efforts, the motive of your labors, the object of all your hopes? Is it not happiness? Well, leave that happiness to us and we shall give it to you.”
Trans horror
Jennifer Bilak dissects the trans movement in her presentation, “Who is behind the Trans Agenda?” In their lust for power, the Western elites of the World Economic Forum are taking advantage of bewildered young people looking for meaning in a chaotic world. They are attempting to turn the scientific binary of male/female into a fractured spectrum of as many sexual identities as personal whim can invent, elevating the importance of chosen gender while denigrating biological sex—and in the process erasing women.
And then there is the Q in LGBQ+. The Rainbow coalition celebrates all the letters in its parade of ‘exploited’ minorities—but blurs the actual meaning of Q. Michel Foucault, a savant in the radical Left’s pantheon of heroes, defined queer as the right to man-boy love—in moral words, pedophilia—and lived it by traveling to Thailand to have copious sex with homeless boys, often in graveyards. Talk about exploitation! When this is exposed, it’s easy to see why the LGBQ+’s insist that children should have the right to make their own sexual decisions with no oversight by parents. In fact, parents would be forbidden from overruling their children’s choices.
So what a 1 Million breath of fresh air was delivered to Canadians by the 1 Million March 4 Children in September/23 all across the country! Families of all faiths & colours banded together to fight this push to sexualize our children by the PRIDE movement—a push that uses pornography to degrade women and destroy our capacity for love & family with its ultimate goal of a communist society where the state reigns supreme.
When you think the evil can’t get any worse, it does.
I started this blog in September, and then life intervened. The state of my legs took up chunks of quotidian life with their aches & pains, ministering to same, and medical appointments to track down their cause. Then a family visit home for Thanksgiving took up the week before to plan & prepare, and the week after to return house & self to the quotidian rhythm.
In the midst of our beautiful Thanksgiving weekend in Calgary came the news bombshell of Hamas’ attack on Israel. The terrorists—which our own publicly funded CBC refused to call by their earned terrorist name—#Defund the CBC—attacked in early morning from land, sea & air, first torturing, then killing some 1,400 Israelis. They were indiscriminate in their killing spree as they tortured, killed and mutilated the very young & the very old and everyone in between.
Then the news became even more nauseating: Hundreds in our Western cities joined protests in support—I still find in hard to believe—of Hamas. Many of the so-called intelligentsia were prominent among them. Many in our legacy media—with the sterling exception of the National Post, the best newspaper in Canada—bleated about ‘both sides’, attempting to paint the Hamas terrorists’ barbaric killing on the same moral level as the IDF’s defense of Israelis. Academics in our so-called best universities praised the attack and posted the Palestinians’ vicious slogans. University students led the charge of barbarism, offering ample evidence of their illiteracy in every measure of education.
An article in the May 13/23 Epoch Times proved prescient: “‘Unholy Alliance’ of Woke Left and Islamist Right is Destabilizing America: Asra Nomani”. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, says, “There’s a war for the values of classical liberalism. To me, they are simple ideas like individual freedom, free speech, the actual value of family, and something really important to me—a sense of equality, a sense there is no hierarchy of human value.” In contrast, in traditional, fundamentalist Islam, “You are denied individual rights because you are defined by the collective sense of what you’re supposed to live, how you’re supposed to marry, where you’re supposed to travel, and what you’re supposed to do for a living.”
Her moment of recognition “that we (Americans) were in a war with this extremism” was when Daniel Pearl, WSJ colleague, was beheaded by Islamists terrorists in Karachi, Pakistan, on January 23, 2002. “Danny, by being American, being white, by being Jewish, by having Israeli ancestry, was now at the bottom of that hierarchy of human value. That’s when I confronted the fundamental idea of identity,”
But the tide is turning.
But the tide is turning, as Hanson so eloquently described in a podcast with John Anderson, with Hamas’ barbaric assault opening the floodgates of outrage in the Western world. The majority centre-right turned away in horror from this medieval slaughter & decapitation of babies, rape & killing of young women, torture & killing of the old & disabled, and put its full support behind Israel. Middle America is supporting civilization—even in uber-left California whose citizens soundly rejected Newson’s reparations project—and the polls one year out from a presidential election are causing the Democrat Left nightmares. Middle Canada is supporting Western values—the 1 Million March 4 Children continues all across Canada, attracting parents across the spectrum of citizens—and booing Trudeau everywhere he dares to appear, even in the heart of Liberalism, downtown Toronto.
The choice is easy: Israel & Western civilization OR Hamas & medieval barbarism.
The US is making its choice. Now Canada must make ours, with the first order of business being soundly defeating the Trudeau/Singh coalition and electing a conservative/Conservative government.