Nick Fuentes vs. Piers Morgan

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Nick Fuentes. It was not long ago; perhaps weeks ago. And I had never heard him, only of him. He was, it seems, someone who loved Hitler and Stalin. Someone anathema to the right and the MAGA right, like the John Birchers back in the dahs of William F. Buckley. A radioactive character.

Last night Piers Morgan had him on for a long interview. I understand why. Tucker Carlson has been taking a huge amount of criticism for featuring Fuentes, and giving him a “softball interview,” not long ago, and not challenging his outrageous beliefs. “Platforming” him. So Morgan thought he could cash in on the publicity by also having him on, and then grilling him properly. Doing the supposed public service of showing everyone what a monster Fuentes really is, and more importantly, showing that he is a better journalist and more reliable right-winger than Tucker Carlson.

So I finally heard Fuentes speak for himself on Piers Morgan’s program.

Fuentes came across as honest, kind, likable, and highly intelligent. Piers Morgan came across in as dishonest, nasty, incompetent, and clueless. And the comments were some of the funniest things I have read in donkeys’ years. All pro-Fuentes.

Rather like Trump, Fuentes is saying things everyone knows are true, but no one is allowed to say. He is deliberately saying it in provocative, very direct, even hyperbolic ways, as a liberating protest against censorship and hypocrisy.

“I’m a racist, sure. Everyone is racist.” And Morgan uses that against him like a club. Yet that is just what the left is always saying about “whites”: that we are all racists, no matter what we think. So okay, so what? What’s the point in saying no? Fuentes is not a racist—he avers that all are equal before God. His point is that we need to get past this obsession with racism—with race.

“Hitler was cool.” Fuentes is not endorsing Hitler—he is stating a fact, plain and in our faces, that we deny at our peril. Why did anyone think a plurality of Germans voted him into office? If we cannot see the attractiveness of Hitler, we will vote another one into office. Of course Hitler was cool: he had a real sense of style. Great uniforms, great speeches, great rallies. He was not a “madman,” and he was not a one-off.

Fuentes’s most notorious quote is this, I gather: “"Jews are running society, women need to shut the f--- up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies."

This is of course deliberately outrageous. Fuentes himself apparently does not believe this as stated. It is hyperbole. Yes, Jews are highly influential—the question is whether this is a bad thing. Yes, women have a tendency to talk too much—to gossip, for example. Everyone knows this in their hearts, but cannot say it. And the Bible says women should defer to their husbands and keep silent in public gatherings. “For the most part” is clearly wrong, but blacks are obviously more inclined to violent crime than “whites.”

Fuentes made a lot of good and rarely heard points, about “performative cruelty,” about the value of celibacy outside of marriage, which seemed to go right over Morgan’s head.

But the essential point is this, and it is Fuentes’s essential point: if I disagree with someone else’s opinion, is it right to hate them or condemn them as a person or try to silence them or bully them? Of course not. This is not fair or honourable or Christian. Yet that is what Morgan and our present society immediately does.

Fuentes is a brave and honest man, and seems to be a true Christian.

NDP DEI DOA

The current federal NDP leadership race is attracting little attention. The NDP has faded into irrelevance. And there is no one in the current crop of contenders who seems likely to change that. No one is particularly prominent, there are no obvious flashes of charisma.

If the NDP is in this position, this has a lot to do with poor leadership choices in the past. It ought to have more vitality than this—the populist let in the US, under figures like AOC and Bernie Sanders, has been more energetic. As has the populist left in the UK, under Corbyn or Galloway. But a couple of times, just as it seemed to have broken through into relevance, the NDP seems to have gone for DEI hires at the helm. It has not turned out well.

Most obviously, there was the defenestration of Tom Mulcair, who won them 44 seats, and who had been a provincial cabinet minister in Quebec, in favour of Jagmeet Singh, who had been a provincial MLA. Singh defeated Charlie Angus, who had a seat in parliament and was an established author, publisher, and founder of charitable institutions. Not to mention, Angus had charisma. Singh has all the charisma of a high school student council president. One must assume Singh was elected due to his ethnicity. 

He led the NDP to seven seats and the loss of party status.

Don’t say this was due to racism among voters. I never saw or heard a single attack on him due to his ethnicity. It was due to sheer political incompetence, jettisoning any trace of principle and managing to fully identify the NDP with the larger, and widely unpopular, Liberal Party.

Their earlier error was to vote in Audrey McLaughlin as leader in 1989. She had been an MP for only two years; and won then only because she was given a special exemption from defending the federal party platform. The party chose her over Dave Barret, who has been the premier of B.C. It seems clear they elected her on her sex; so they could boast being the first major party to elect a woman as leader. 

And she led the NDP from 44 seats down to 9. Because McLaughlin had nothing to sell, just more of the same old, at the very moment that populist ferment was breaking out in the West. Instead, the upstart Reform Party took all those anti-establishment votes.

This is a useful public demonstration that DEI hires do not turn out well. McLaughlin and Singh were out of their depth. Merit is the only principle that matters.

How would you feel if your heart surgeon were a DEI hire?

I'm All Right, Jack

My favourite prayer is the Salve Regina, “Hail Holy Queen,” not least because of its line “to you do we cry out, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” A priest of my acquaintance actually objected to this line. He, like so many supposed Christians, was of the “happy happy joy joy” school of Christianity. “This world is not a valley of tears,” he scoffed.

But I say, anyone who is at home and comfortable in this world is not of the kingdom.

Matthew 5:4:

Blessed are those who mourn,
For they shall be comforted.

Luke 6: 25: 

Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

Ecclesiastes 1:14:

 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Matthew 6:19-21:

 Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal;  but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

1 John 2:15:

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them

So there’s that.

Anyone of good heart must see the injustices of the world. Anyone who is nevertheless happy with things as they are is saying “I’m all right, Jack.” 

The world is a battle between good and evil. Anyone who does not see this is on the wrong side.

Why the World Is Going Mad

Charlie and Erika Kirk

Demonic possession is real. It is as Chesterton supposedly said, “When people cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, but in anything.”

This is something Jesus said in the Gospels: 

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.” – Matthew 12:43-5. See also Luke 11: 24-5.

The only way to avoid delusion is to make sure your house is occupied. Occupied, that is, by a permanent relationship with God. Descartes, too, reasoned this through, step by step. God alone is our assurance of the reality of anything else. Otherwise we cannot tell delusion from reality.

Belief in God is therefore our sole protection against delusion. Which is again why Christianity spread so quickly throughout the ancient Roman world, and then through Northern Europe, and then through the Americas, and now through Africa: because it was able to efficiently cast out demons, which is to say delusions, which were then so prevalent. 

And this is again why “mental illness” and mass psychosis has again become so prevalent in recent years, since the early 20th century. It is because with scientism, faith in God has been in decline. This way madness lies.

Our intuition tells us things are not random. We see the patterns, especially the brightest among us, showing some intelligence is obviously behind events. Things are not random. We have been lied to that they are. If we will not accept that God and the Devil are behind it all, we will resort to conspiracy theories, which become paranoid delusions: the classic schizophrenic delusions. It is the CIA. It is the Jews. It is the greedy capitalists. It is aliens. It is the WEF. It is the Vatican. It is the Jesuits. They are out to get me. They are trying to control my thoughts.

It is demons trying to control your thoughts. They may at times use other people for their purposes.

Not that all conspiracy theories are wrong. Which makes it all the harder to resist the temptation to see them everywhere.

I believe Candace Owens has recently fallen off this wagon, and us an illustrative case in point—despite the fact that she has fairly recently publicly converted to Catholicism. Not all who say “Lord Lord” really believe. I don’t think her conversion has been sincere—more like an expression of anti-semitism in reaction to her employers at the Daily Wire.

To my mind, the clearest evidence Owens is off the glory train is her conviction that Brigitte Macron, the French president’s wife, is a man. Suppose she is. Why do we care? Why is it anyone else’s business? This is gossip, which is always at best a temptation to the sin of calumny. And this looks like the sin of calumny. That Candace is going so hard after this shows she is at best ignorant of her supposed Catholic faith. 

But it is an impressive, compelling conspiracy theory—and salacious. Imagine—the entire French government and the world press has been subverted! What else might this explain?

Ownes has also, of course, gone after the Jews. She responded “Jesus is king” to Ben Shapiro in a heated exchange, seeming to me to use her religion as a club. Not good-hearted, at best.

I always take antisemitism as a sign of the Devil. The Jews are, after all, God’s chosen people. The Christian Bible says so; Jesus himself affirms it in the gospels. And all the evidence of history says so: the miraculous Jewish survival and record of accomplishments for civilization in general say so. Anyone who goes after the Jews is explicitly going against God, therefore, and committing the sin of Cain: envy.

But the Jews are the convenient universal scapegoat if you are craving a good conspiracy theory. They are a closed group, and they are amazingly influential.

Finally, Owens is now going after Turning Point USA, accusing them, and Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika, of conspiring to assassinate Charlie Kirk.

I can see why she thinks so. My intuition tallies with hers in finding Erika Kirk’s reaction to his death profoundly insincere. And it is all delightfully salacious. It is always self-gratifying to think ill of successful people. For women, of a beautiful and accomplished woman like Erika Kirk, a former beauty queen.

But look at the practical effects of Owens’ campaign: it is attacking the victims of a crime in their time of grief. It is calculated to destroy Kirk’s organization, his legacy, and all that he was trying to do. If Erika Kirk did not assassinate Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens is trying to do so. This is the sort of calling-card the Devil leaves in his wake. He is always doing the opposite of what he pretends to do.

Owens’ conviction that French intelligence and/or Israel and/or the CIA or someone are trying to assassinate her is the next step in her paranoia.

It is not lovely to watch.

The Thomas King Affair

 

Thomas King

Thomas King has just joined a long list of “pretendians”: people who have become famous because of their “First Nations” ancestry, who then are revealed not to be native at all.

Here’s a partial list: King, Buffy Sainte-Marie, “Iron-Eyes” Cody, “Grey Owl,” Elizabeth Warren, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Ward Churchill, Sacheen Littlefeather, who famously accepted Marlon Brando’s Oscar, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Chief Thundercloud, Joseph Boyden.

There is something odd here. Firstly, the prevalence of pretendians shows clearly that many of European ancestry can easily pass as an Indian: Thomas King is actually German and Greek, Sainte-Marie and “Iron-Eyes Cody” were both Italian, Sacheen Littlefeather was Hispanic, Archie Belaney, “Grey Owl,” was English. By appearance, no one can tell.

 And it is not just non-Indians who cannot tell the difference. Indians cannot tell the difference either. There is clearly nothing in physical appearance that consistently distinguishes Indians from Europeans.

My cousins have their Indian cards. Half of them are blonde and blue-eyed.

How can this be? Native Canadians supposedly developed in complete isolation from Europe, far more so that, say, sub-Saharan blacks, or East Asians. Yet in those latter cases physical differences are plain to see.

The obvious explanation is that, over the past few centuries, there has been a thorough integration of blood lines. In genetic terms, there is no separate Indian “race.” 

But the second question is why so many people want to be thought to be Indians, and why it is such a problem for others if they do. It is also pretty easy for any European to pretend to be Irish, say, or Jewish, but few seem to, and if they do, nobody thinks it is a problem.

People do not want to be considered Irish or Jewish, by and large, because they risk being discriminated against. And if they choose to identify as Irish or Jewish regardless, they are greeted with open arms by those communities. So “pretend Jews” are not a problem.

If, by contrast, people want to be considered Indian, and the Indian community considers this a problem, it is the strongest evidence that Indians are actually advantaged by that identity: there is discrimination, and it is entirely in their favour.

As ought to be obvious. In Canada, they get many benefits by treaty. There are many “DEI” or “affirmative action” programs favouring them, in just about any field.

But apart from this, Indians always command great social prestige. In New England, people claim rank by boasting that their ancestors came on the Mayflower. To which Will Rogers was able to boast that his ancestors were already there to greet them. Logically, this trumps in terms of social class. In Virginia, the equivalent boast by the upper classes is that they can trace descent from Pocahontas.

And every Indian woman is traditionally thought to be an “Indian princess.”

Patent medicine firms used to hire Indians to sell their products—"snake oil.” It gained them credibility. Everybody trusted an endorsement by an Indian. It is a bit of an exaggeration to draw a parallel with the British tradition of claiming “By appointment to His Majesty,” but it is on the same spectrum.

It has always been to one’s advantage, therefore, to claim Indian ancestry. It bought respect, sympathy, and attention. And everyone traditionally wants to claim some.

More recently, Canadian “First Nations” seem to be evolving into a legally recognized upper class, with proprietary claims on all the land, just as in old Europe, and the right to be consulted and to veto measures they do not like, just like the House of Lords.

The Devil's Century

Leo XIII

It’s time for some good news. Things may look dark, but it is true that often the darkest hour is just before the dawn.

Christian civilization, sometimes called “Western civilization,” seemed to lose its mojo at about the time of the First World War. So for about a hundred years. As it happens, this fits a prediction by a pope—Pope Leo XIII. He had a vision at the altar that Satan was to be given control for a hundred years—the 20th century. Now, perhaps symbolically, we have Pope Leo XIV. We have seen the worst of the dispiritedness of Christendom in the past few years, with declining church attendance, rising suicide, mental illness, and addiction, mass immigration from non-Christian lands, the toppling of statues, anti-“white” discrimination in historically “white” countries, and postmodern denial of reality itself. But there are signs that is turning around. It has not hit the general public yet, but prominent figures are publicly converting to Christianity almost daily. The sense is that the “New Atheists” have lost the argument, and theism is ascendant in the academy. Scientism is losing credibility with scandals like the Covid countermeasures and vaccine, the draconian measures demanded in the name of climate change, and the inability to reproduce results in published papers. 

Meantime, the computer revolution and now the AI revolution are strong evidence that civilization is not moribund, but more likely on the threshold of a new renaissance, with which should come renewed optimism and pride. 

The aggression of Islam has also caused “Westerners” to realize that they are, in the end, fundamentally culturally Christian.

Civilizations can have bad centuries. It is time for Christendom to come thundering back. Reinforced, I might add, by the renewed cultural vitality of East Asia: Japan, Korea, Thailand, China, Vietnam. Cultural exchange is the essential vitamin of culture.

Despite draconian measures by governments, there is an obvious worldwide trend towards so-called “populist” movements. MAGA in the USA; Reform now leading the polls in the UK; France’s RN and Marine LePen; Meloni in Italy; Milei in Argentina; AfD in Germany; Wilders in the Netherlands. There is an obvious tide towards greater equality, greater democratization, greater freedom; a throwing off of elites. It seems the next stage of liberalization, as happened in the Age of Enlightenment. With better communications and access to information, with everyone owning a printing press and a broadcast license, there is greater ability for the general public to communicate and coordinate, and less scope for government repression. It will be increasingly difficult for oppressive governments to keep the lid on. We have seen this in the Arab spring, in the Canadian trucker convoy, in the Gen X protests in Nepal or Mexico. Governments are scared, and this is why they are trying draconian measures. But I think the technology is against them.

There is suddenly a lot of chatter about antivirals like ivermectin and fenbendazole as possible cancer cures. They are also cheap—out of patent. They are non-intrusive, with apparently few side effects. They may work on other viruses as well—the flu, the common cold. Imagine a world without these diseases. 

Once upon a time, we did not know any effective treatment for bacterial infections; and many died of tuberculosis, or gangrene. Then we discovered antibiotics. It was surely only a matter of time before we discovered the equivalent for viruses. Perhaps we have. 

Many are worried about job losses due to AI; that is surely one common cause for alarm. The job cuts seem to be already beginning. It is hard to conceive of a white-collar job that cannot be done soon and cheaper by AI. But this is looking only at the downside. This also means that the very expensive products of white-collar work will soon be cheaper. Going to law, drafting contracts, accounting, medical care, and the like, could soon be almost free. For consumers, this should mean a time of great abundance—and we ae all consumers.

Elon Musk has an unbeatable track record for seeing what is coming. And he sees a world in which there is “universal high income” without work. Everyone will be “far wealthier than the wealthiest person today.” He sees this within ten or twenty years. We will work if we feel like it.

That does not sound so bad.

We will need more power for all this; and many have long been alarmed about global warming. But improved nuclear power generation, including fusion, seems to be coming onstream now; not to mention much improved batteries, better solar power collectors, and geothermal options. Energy, a major bottleneck, may soon become cheap, non-polluting, and abundant.

This might all be wrecked by war. But the lesson of the current war in Ukraine may be that war is no longer worth the cost. And if it is fought, it will probably in future be fought by drones and automated vehicles attacking infrastructure. This, at worst, seems to mean fewer deaths.

Are we on the dawn of a golden age?

Proof There Is No Racism in America

I see that Koreans are rapidly turning white. In this, they follow the Japanese, who were declared white by the old apartheid government of South Africa. In this they follow a path once trod by the Italians, the Irish, and the Jews.  All used to be “non-white” or the equivalent in the popular mind. There were Irish slaves, and signs saying “No Irish Need Apply.” Today, the Irish are considered generically white, as white as anyone, and the Jews perhaps “ultra-white.”

From this it is obvious that “non-white” is not a racial designation at all. It is a euphemism for something else, something more like a class distinction. If an ethnic group becomes prosperous, this makes them “white.” So “non-white” essentially poor. 

But this is not a class distinction in the Old World sense, either. In class societies, there is little or no mobility. You remain in the class you were born into, regardless of prosperity or personal effort. This has obviously not been so for many Irish, Italians, Japanese, or Jews. 

And it also does not quite mean “poor”; for there is indeed a class of “poor whites.” 

To be non-white, it seems you must be poor, and belong to a group that seems to have a strong independent identity and stands apart from the cultural mainstream.

So there is no racism in North America; and perhaps in the West generally. Blacks have not been discriminated against; nor have Canada’s First Nations. If they have remained “non-white,” while other groups have moved into the mainstream, the reason must be found elsewhere.

The problem is first, that these groups are chronically poor, generation after generation. Secondly, they have persisted in seeing themselves as distinct and apart, with their own culture, rather than integrating with the cultural mainstream. Segregation is the problem, but it is self-imposed.

And as their poverty is not due to discrimination, the fact that they are chronically poor suggests some flaw in their chosen culture. Not hard to see this if you listen to “gangsta rap.” Or if getting an education is considered “acting white” or cultural genocide.