Last Call

 

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.

Godwin's Law

 

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. 

Yes, fascism is here.

Dead Cat Bounce

 

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. 

The Virtue of Pride

 

A lovely man.

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 Roots of Censorship

 

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.

When Did You Last Think of the Roman Empire?

 

A bunch of the guys hanging out

A thing what went around the internet some time ago: women asking their husbands and boyfriends how often they think of the Roman Empire. And being shocked to hear that men commonly think of it every day.

This is a good illustration of the difference between the male and female minds. We have, thanks to feminism, spent decades pretending that men and women are the same but for a few specific body parts. Otherwise feminism collapses: there may then be a good reason why there are more men in engineering, say, or higher management, and more women in nursing or secretarial positions.

Men think of the Roman Empire often, because it is the foundation of our civilization. Most notably, it is when and where Christianity emerged; but we also owe to the Romans much of our legal system, our languages, our writing system, our calendar, our customs, our political structures.

And men spontaneously take responsibility for keeping things on course, for society as a whole. Forget the Roman Empire, and we forget where we came from and where we are going. The ship drifts aimlessly onto the shoals.

Women do not have such worries. For them, he personal is the only political.

This is also why men can read maps, and women get lost. I used to do a little test in my classes: first, I would ask all the women, and only the women, to point North. They would have no idea. Then I would ask the men. Most would be able to do so.

Men have an internal compass in all matters, not just geography, pointing to absolute terms of reference. Women lack this. Exploring, women navigate by visible landmarks and asking directions. Their perceptions are purely situational and relative. Men will navigate by compass direction and absolute distances.

It is all of course designed this way, by God or nature, so than men and women are compatible; so they can form a permanent, mutually supporting union to nurture children. The man leads, and the women is the perfect “help-meet,” as Genesis prescribes.

Men are better in maths, and gravitate to maths, because math deals in absolutes. Women are better in language, and gravitate to language, because language is all about synchronizing with others.

As a result, it is a fundamental error to put women in leadership positions. With rare exceptions, they will almost immediately lose sight of the mandate and wander down primrose paths to unpredictable destinations. Their job may be to sell beer; instead, they will devote the company’s advertising budget to something like promoting transgenderism; or nicer offices for the staff.

To put women in leadership positions is, therefore, a way for any organization, nation or civilization to self-destruct.

This is of course why Saint Paul said women should keep silence in church. The Buddha similarly resisted allowing women to become mendicants, saying the dharma would deteriorate twice as fast as a result.

As always, there is something to be said for the wisdom of the ages.

A New Hope

 

Here’s a cheerful thought. Our current leaders seem to be the least competent and most corrupt in modern times. The elites seem to have gone mad. And yet—I have never been one to admire politicians. Those I genuinely admired in the past could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Bryce Mackasey, Eugene McCarthy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Men of genuine principle.

Yet there are suddenly a lot of public figures out there I genuinely admire, and would vote for with enthusiasm: Pierre Poilievre, J.D. Vance, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard.

I may be culturally prejudiced here. One thing I notice is that most of these figures are Irish and Catholic. All except Tulsi Gabbard.

Bad times throw up good leaders.