If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
Kamala Harris has by come commentators been nicknamed “Kamala Chameleon,” because she seems to tell every interest group whatever they want to hear. She is against fracking; she is for fracking. She is against a border wall; she is for a border wall. She wants to confiscate guns; she is for the Second Amendment.
This, since she herself raised the comparison, is something else she and the Democrats have in common with Hitler. This is why historians have trouble classifying Nazi ideology, have trouble defining what Nazism actually was. As William L. Shirer observed in following Hitler’s rise, he would simply promise every crowd whatever he thought they most wanted to hear.
This makes sense, because Nazism’s core value was simply power, ultimately power in the hands of one man. Like the modern left, it saw all of human society as a power struggle. The goal was (and is) to get more power for yourself, not to advance anyone else’s interests. So you make whatever promises will achieve this. Once in power, you then do as you like.
Another way in which the modern Democrats echo the Nazis is in their embrace of the propaganda technique of the “big lie”: that if you keep repeating something often enough, it comes to be, or be accepted as, truth. This is the fundamental ideology of postmodernism. It is why they can assert that men become women, and vice versa, by saying so, and it must then be illegal for anyone to say otherwise. They use the big lie on the hustings again and again, asserting the Russian collusion hoax, the fine people hoax, the Vance sofa hoax, the Liz Cheney firing squad hoax, the drink bleach hoax, and a dozen others, knowing they are debunked.
It is the eve of the US elections, and the polls are contradictory—Including polls from previously highly accurate pollsters. Just the other day, one highly reliable pollster showed Harris up by three in Iowa, and another that Trump will win by seven. That’s no margin of error.
I think polling is no longer a science; I guess because people no longer answer their phones or are prepared to tell a stranger how they will vote. It is hair-raising to hear a pollster talk about all the adjustments they make to the raw data. I also keep hearing them cite polls, even their own, and then say “but I can’t believe that’s right.” In the end, they are guessing.
We should have a clearer idea by this time tomorrow.
God seems to have intervened again in the US election, again in Trump’s favour. The issue of the day is, unexpectedly, the killing of Peanut the squirrel by the NY state government. This seems well timed and calculated to endorse Trump’s message of less government regulation. It should also remind everyone of his “they’re killing the dogs. They’re killing the cats!” comments at the Harris debate; and seems to reinforce them. Big government does not care about animals. And people generally care more about their pets than other people.
Incidentally, it irritates me that commentators, even those opposed to the government’s action, keep referring to Peanut and Fred the Raccoon being “euthanized.” “Euthanasia” properly refers to mercy killing. This includes when it is done to animals—we do not refer to a chicken or a cow being “euthanized” at the abattoir, even though every effort is made to make their death painless. It counts as euthanasia if the likely alternative is suffering for the animal. Peanut and Fred were executed or killed by the state, not euthanized.
And since I mentioned it, about the phrase “they’re killing the dogs. They’re killing the cats!” Notice how often Trump’s comments are made into rap memes. It shows his profound talent as a rhetorician. His cadences are naturally musical. They are also naturally comic; timing is everything in comedy, and Trump has a perfect ear for rhythm and timing. This makes him always enjoyable and memorable to listen to.
He is completely aware of this; he works at it. Talking to Joe Rogan, he demurred that “Communist Kamala” was not an ideal insult, because it is hard to say. The rhythm is not great. He knows what he is doing.
It seems obvious that God is helping Donald Trump. There is his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt, obviously. But we have just seen something else miraculous.
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally should have been a powerful ending to his campaign. It seemed to me to make the point that all the coolest and smartest people were supporting Trump: Musk, Carlson, Ramaswamy, Vance, Gabbard, Kennedy, Hogan, Melania Trump, Dr. Phil. People with a lot of charisma and with independent followings.
This it seemed to me was an important message. The left has been able to run for some time on the premise that they were the cool kids, the club you wanted to join, with the parties you wanted to be invited to. The glamorous red carpet crowd.
MSG seemed well calculated to end that. Now there was a cooler group of kids.
An essential part of that was to have a good comedian to warm up the crowd; show “we” are the ones who have fun at our parties. Comedians have been in the forefront of the culture war, for this reason, all along.
Unfortunately, the chosen comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, a fine comedian, made a serious misstep. He referred to Puerto Rico, jokingly, as “an island of garbage floating in the Atlantic.” It did not matter that the joke obviously fell flat with his audience—he was not expressing the opinion of the room, let alone of Trump, who was not present. This was a gift to the opposition that looked about to overshadow the entire affair, and end Trump’s campaign on a bad note. To kill all the good of the rally.
But then God intervened. Harris held her own closing rally, at the Ellipse in Washington. As she was speaking, Joe Biden was on a video call responding to Hinchcliffe’s joke by calling Trump supporters the real garbage.
Now any harm caused by Hinchcliffe’s ill-advised joke was miraculously turned instead on the Democrats. Not fair to blame Harris for what Biden said? Surely more reasonable than to blame Trump for what some comedian said. Hinchcliffe was joking; comedians have license to say outrageous things. Biden was not joking. Biden obviously meant the people themselves—and Hinchcliffe probably did not. The most reasonable interpretation of what Hinchcliffe said is that he was referring to actual garbage. Which is a recognized problem in Puerto Rico. If he did mean the people, Hinchcliffe was calling 3 million people garbage. Biden was calling 150 million people garbage. Hinchcliffe can be forgiven for saying something politically unwise; he’s a comic, not a politician. Biden is an experienced politician and president of the US. His words matter far more, and must be taken far more seriously.
Levels of magnitude worse.
Now both Hinchcliffe’s joke and Harris’s closing message are totally eclipsed by Biden’s remark. What looked like a blow to the Trump campaign has become a serious blow to Harris’s, in the dying days of the campaign.
I now predict Trump will not only win all the “seeing states”: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. He will also win Virginia and New Hampshire.
Not because the polls are wrong. It has long made me nervous that Republicans have casually assumed the polls will undercount Trump supporters. First, being a Trump supporter is more acceptable now than it was; we should see fewer “shy Tories.” This needs to be taken into account. Second, this assumes the polls have not been able to correct for previous undercounts. Surely they are trying to do so; how can we just assume they have failed? Third, the concept of “push polls,” partisan Democratic pollsters faking their results to make Harris look stronger, makes no sense. The political polls are done primarily as advertising by the pollsters to attract corporate clients. Publicizing a poll that turns out to be inaccurate is obviously against their interests. At least close to the voting date, their polls are bound to be as accurate as they can make them.
But I predict a stronger than expected Trump showing because, as they say, polls are just a snapshot. You need to look at trends. Trump has the momentum, and that momentum should continue up to polling day, pushing his numbers higher than they look now. The Biden comment ensures the momentum for Trump continues, perhaps grows. Second, any voters undecided this late in an election cycle tend to break against the incumbent party. They are almost by definition unsatisfied with the most obvious choice, which would be the incumbents. They are looking for alternatives.
It is grimly comic that the Harris campaign has in the dying days of the election whittled down their argument to the claim that Donald Trump is a Fascist.
For this is a perfecdt illustration of the popular misreading of Godwin’s Law: “the first party to mention Hitler has lost the argument.”
Either inadvertently or semi-consciously, they are conceding the election. They are telling us they know they have lost.
They are also projecting. Fascisim is indead among us once again, and a clear and present danger. But it is the Kamalites, wokes, and Democrats who are fascists.
What is fascism: at or near its essence, it is the collective over the individual. That is what the symbol of the fasces illustrates. This is the postmodern opinion, prevalent on the left: reality itself is a social construct. The individual exists only as part of the group. Hence the leftist/Democratic stress on ethnic identity, intersectionality, and group rights over individual rights.
As an economic system, fascism is a cartel formed by government in collusion with big business. Corporations become an arm of government, doing its bidding. Which has clearly happened under the Democrats over the last few years, with corporations enforcing censorship, enforcing vaccine mandates, while small businesses and competition are crushed by government policies.
Fascism is totalitarian: the government claims the right to dictate even the details of our lives. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini put it. It is the left that demands more laws and regulations. It is the left that declares “the personal is political.” It is the left that wants to police even the pronouns we can use.
Fascism believes that reality is a social construct. Mussolini said, “Fascism is relativism.” The state can invent reality. This is what the left believes today: it believes it can declare a man a woman, or invent new genders. This is why it believes so fiercely in censorship: saying a thing is so makes it so.
The state also gets to decide right and wrong. Fascism rejects “conventional morality.” The Nazis called it “slave morality.” And the modern left rejects it. This frees them to do whatever they want in moral terms.
This suspends the “do unto others” principle, and frees those in power to abuse unfavoured groups. The latter have no rights; their existence does not serve the collective. In Nazi Germany, Roma, Slavs, and Jews. In leftist America, white “cis” males, Asians, increasingly white women.
And this leads to holocaust. In Germany, as we all know, the Jews, the Roma. In modern America, unborn children. Soon, if Canada’s model is followed, the poor and infirm. Their existence is inconvenient.
I think it’s worth considering whether Justin Trudeau’s entire career as Canada’s PM has been the Liberal Party’s dead cat bounce.
I’ve long thought Jean Chretien destroyed the Liberal Party by making the party structure dictatorial, entirely top-down, the leader getting to choose or refuse local candidates. This might have been convenient for the leader, but it cut the party off from the grassroots. No surprise that it drifted away from any base over the years, and began to listen only to echoes and its own elites.
That almost already killed it under Ignatieff. It was running on fumes. It has to take a bit of time to kill what had become the Natural Governing Party. That implies a lot of inertia. Even so, choosing Trudeau as leader looked like a desperation move, to keep those yellow dog Grit instincts alive by evoking the sainted memory of his father.
About a generation seems right for the death throes of such a large cultural artefact. You need a full generation of new voters to break the spell. Chretien left office in 2003.
And Trudeau the Lesser never did that well. He lost the popular vote in all but his first election, when he was a novelty and could make the matrons swoon. Against Scheer and O’Toole, both of whom chose the appalling strategy of trying to sell themselves as just like Trudeau. As soon as Canadians were offered, with Poilievre, a clear alternative, the wheels came off the little red bandwagon.
When it works, it works, but the life of a centrist party is always precarious. Maybe more suited to the Canadian temperament than most others, but it can easily be squeezed into oblivion by any passionate disagreement between left and right. The British Liberal Party died, as any real contender, in the 1920s. In Canada, centrist parties have been squeezed out in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
I predict that Justin Trudeau or the federal Liberal Party without him will lose the next election. Nor can they save themselves with any new leader. And I predict they will never return to power.
A certain sister of my acquaintance worries if she is guilty of the sin of pride. For usually, when she goes out to eat at some restaurant, she concludes she could have cooked the meal better herself at home. How likely is that?
Fairly likely, in fact. There is a reason so many restaurants offer “home cooked meals,” or call themselves “Mom’s.”
In the real world, it is hard to judge whether your idea that you could do better than some professional is a matter of pride, or simply true. Somebody, in the end, has to be the world’s best chef; and he cannot be accused of pride for thinking so.
Many people are falsely accused of pride out of envy. Anyone who is especially good at anything will be accused of pride. It is a way for those less competent to cope. I realized this back in the days of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian PM. He was constantly being accused of arrogance. It was obvious to me that he was not arrogant; he was just a lot smarter than the journalists questioning him, and was not prepared to pretend he was stupid for their benefit. Why does he have any such obligation?
And this, pretending to be dumb, is a difficult skill to master. Ronald Reagan pulled it off—but he was a trained actor. Donald Trump pulls it off, despite his Ivy League education, and it is the secret to his political success. In Canada, Jean Chretien had the knack, or Ralph Klein. Michael Ignatieff went down to defeat because he hadf not learned it. People hate those more competent than themselves, and will want to hurt them. Most often by calling them proud or arrogant.
But Adam could easily be accused of pride had he refused to take his wife’s advice and eat the damned apple. How dare he assume he knew better than she?
So people are about equally likely to underestimate or to overestimate their abilities, to be too proud of them or not proud enough of them, because the opinions of those around them are not a reliable measure.
We know in our hearts that this sort of pride, confidence in your own abilities, is not sinful. I remember some friend remarking kindly to my grandmother, “you must be proud of your children.” And I winced at her answer: “Of course not. Pride is a sin!” We know in our hearts that was a nasty bit of Pharisaism. Of course one should be proud of one’s legitimate accomplishments, and those of one’s children, or one’s nation. There is a passage in Yeats:
For Parnell was a proud man, No prouder trod the ground, And a proud man's a lovely man, So pass the bottle round.
We know pride, personal dignity, is a good. It is a form of integrity. The misunderstanding that Christian morality rejects this has been a common enough cause of souls going astray, making it seem a “slave morality,” in Nietzsche’s term.
William Blake taught the essential measure: “humble before God, not before men.” That is the only test. To be humble before the next guy you talk to has an even chance of being an idolatry. But one must always submit to the wisdom and the justice of God. You kneel to God; you do not kneel to tyrants, or your fellow man. You pray for guidance and for perspective.
The root of the current drive for censorship, “deplatforming,” cancel culture, and unfriending, which has destroyed so many lives and so many relationships, is simple and obvious. Too many people are lying; especially people in power. You never want to silence anything you believe is untrue. There is no drive to censor the claim that the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth. Conversely, you never want to end debate if you believe you are telling the truth. If you discover the earth goes around the sun, contrary to what others have assumed, your instinct is not to suppress the field of astronomy. It is to publish, present your arguments, and take the win.
Therefore, what we are not permitted to say is a reliable indicator of what is true.
An obvious current example is the drive to criminalize any claim that the Indian Residential schools in Canada were not genocidal, or that there are no mass graves of students.
I suppose I’d better not proceed to other examples. It is, after all, taking a risk. But you can find them for yourself.
Once one becomes committed to any one lie, there is a multiplier effect: truth in general begins to look threatening. You will want to restrict speech as a matter of principle. .Who knows otherwise what might slip out?
And underlying the commitment to a lie is a growing popular philosophy that we are gods and can decide for ourselves what we want to be true.
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