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BC Politics

These are Stuart’s articles on politics at the provincial level in British Columbia.

2024: BC’s Star Wars Holiday Special Election: My Jeremiad in Support of John Rustad

A couple of years ago, I promised I would write the occasional massively out-of-date movie review for this blog if it served a larger pedagogical purpose. Well, that time has come around again and I am now pleased to be reviewing the Star Wars Holiday Special a mere forty-six years late. 

Better, more humorous essays take a full inventory of the failure of one of the most bizarre examples of the 1970s variety show genre, featuring musical numbers by guest performers such as Jefferson Starship and Bea Arthur, who had mysteriously purchased the bar at Mos Eisley Spaceport. The show is a collage of barely-connected set pieces, some of which even sort of work, like the cartoon that introduces Boba Fett. But here are the most salient facts about the show for those who have somehow remained uninformed:

  • the show’s primary characters are Chewbacca’s family back on his home world and their closest family friend, Art Carney;
  • most of the dialogue is in Wookie and presented without subtitles;
  • most of the show involves Chewbacca’s family waiting for him and Han Solo to get home for Life Day, the Wookie equivalent of of Thanksgiving; 
  • Carrie Fisher is clearly so high that she has no idea who or where she is and Mark Hamill is slathered with thick makeup to conceal his injuries from a recent auto accident

So, with those salient points in mind, imagine this:

It is American Thanksgiving Weekend, 1978 and your kids are in the rec room, watching the second-ever Star Wars production and you walk in to see the gentle child-oriented science fiction retelling of the classic hero narrative but instead…

You watch a bunch of people dressed up as ape-like creatures in fur suits speaking in unintelligible shrieks and bellows. Then the scene cuts to Chewbacca’s dad wearing a virtual reality helmet Art Carney bought him for Life Day. And he’s watching a scantily-clad Diahann Carroll doing what appears to be a phone sex ad, while drooling and masturbating and mumbling in Wookie.

What ordinary, decent parent witnessing that scene would not decide to vote for Ronald Reagan at the earliest opportunity? Fundamentally, I think people fail to understand how the realigning presidential election of 1980 was non-crazy liberal Americans responding to their state of affairs with, “alright. That’s just enough. I’m calling dad.”

Here, in British Columbia, parents have been treated to a lot of Star Wars Holiday Special moments since their last chance to cast a vote in 2020, including:

  • CBC-BC’s broadcast of a ten-minute documentary celebrating a trans-identified nine-year-old boy who does exotic dancing for adult men at a strip club in Montreal and sells sex toys at a sex shop on Saturdays;
  • Steamworks, Vancouver’s original brew pub, hosting exotic dancing by a trans-identified female “drag-king,” on government-prescribed testosterone, who writes highly popular social media posts about how removing the duct-tape she puts over her developing breasts for her act tear off her skin and cause her to bleed;
  • the thirteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the Abbotsford homeless camp because the BC government prevented her parents from putting her in rehab and instead supplied her “safe supply” fentanyl and other opiates, starting at the age of twelve because that’s the je jure age of majority in BC when it comes to meth, opiates and puberty blockers;
  • the gala fundraising dinner promoted by Global TV-BC to support the hiring of extra security for the BC government-funded Carousel Youth Theatre’s summer “drag camp” for 7-11-year old boys to learn to do exotic dancing for adult men based on false claims by its organizers that transphobic bigots planned to assault the children enrolled;
  • the free cocaine-snorting and crack-smoking kits and instructions available through vending machines at local hospitals to people of all ages and mental competencies
  • the three-year public showtrial to delicense BC nurse Amy Hamm for her refusal to say that women have penises;
  • the eighth-grade BC teacher who taught her students a lesson on how to perform oral sex on each other and then provided each child with fruit-flavoured condoms;
  • the public beatings of BC children’s safeguarding activists such as Chris Elston and Meghan Murphy by antifa while local police looked on, laughing and pointing at the assaults;
  • the Canadian Bar Association’s successful effort to build on their triumph in putting serial rapists in women’s prisons and have serial violent pederasts housed in prison mother-baby units here in BC; 
  • the BC government’s systematic and secret provision of the chemical castration and lobotomization drug Lupron and of “safe supply” fentanyl to children as young as twelve, without the knowledge or consent of parents;
  • and those are just the first ten things that crossed my mind, presented in no particular order, never mind all the innocent, troubled children BC Children’s Hospital has lobotomized, mutiliated and sterilized in the name of Genderwang.

Basically, we live in a province in which the Establishment believes that anything that horrifies ordinary, decent people must be a good idea, that anything that activates the gag reflex of a normal adult is the categorical imperative of public good.

The reason people like me are overlooking the novelty, gaffes and disorganization of John Rustad’s BC Conservative Party and throwing all in is because ordinary decent people cannot and should not tolerate another moment of living under this bizarre sadistic pornocracy.

The co-founder of Los Altos Institute, Don Todd, a Marxist philosopher who was on the original Red Scare HUAC blacklist, wrote at length about how in a any true socialist society, common sense, as advocated by American revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine, sits at the foundation of any true free and democratic society. While, like all other terms, it has been battered and abused, Rustad is absolutely right to centre his election rhetoric around this principle. The reason we are not just failing as humans but as great apes (orangutans and bonobos wouldn’t “complicate” or “problematize” antifa’s young masked men beating up women in the street; their innate primate common sense would cover that) is that we have become alienated from our basic sense of disgust and revulsion, a fundamental aspect of the common sense that makes democracy possible. 

And it is common sense stripping away the credibility of premier David Eby every day. 

For those unaware of our premier’s long track record of contempt for ordinary, decent people and our gag reflex, let me take a moment to acquaint you with its highlights:

  • working with now-disbarred lawyer John Richardson in 2002-04, Eby formed the PIVOT legal society to “advocate” for Downtown Eastside drug addicts to bribe addicts with cigarettes and hard drugs to swear out false affidavits alleging illicit assaults by police that never took place;
  • other than defending Richardson against charges of resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, the only time Eby ever set foot in court as a lawyer was to make a constitutional challenge against the Criminal Code of Canada’s definition of aggravated sexual assault; Eby’s HIV-positive client had had sex without notifying his partners of his medical status and Eby argued that people with HIV and AIDS shouldn’t have to tell their sexual partners;
  • supporting, as head of the BC Civil Liberties Association, the Mormon fundamentalist compound in Bountiful, BC’s right to engage in the cross-border sex trafficking of underage girls based on their freedom to practice their “religion”;
  • naturally, then it should surprise no one that as BCCLA president, Eby argued that every fetish, including pedophilia, should enjoy the same legal protection as same-sex attraction.

Let’s be clear: the choice in this election is not a conventional one. The fact that I happen to personally like and know a bunch of BC Tory activists, some of whom are former NDP elected officials is actually neither here nor there. This election is about whether we continue to accept being ruled by monsters, freaks, perverts and ghouls. As a child, I never understood how or why the adults voted for Reagan. But now, I’m voting for John Rustad because this can’t go on any longer. 

I’m calling dad.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Sun Sets on the World of Prescott Bush and the Right-Progressives: Placing the Collapse of Kevin Falcon’s BC United in Global Context

Full disclosure: This article is by a partisan. I have returned to British Columbia from Tanzania at my own expense this fall to volunteer full-time for John Rustad’s BC Conservative Party. I have been a party member since John first crossed the floor to the Tories and count among the party’s candidates and organizers many friends and comrades. 

Any successful big tent party includes many people and constituencies who do not agree with the party on everything. That is, in fact, the hallmark of a broad coalition. So while I am passionate in support of the party and of John, I do not consider myself to be a conservative ideologically, nor do my many genuinely conservative friends and comrades consider me to be so. 

Disclosures out of the way, I am not writing this piece as a BC Tory partisan but in my normal role as an analyst of major trends in the politics of the Global North. If you are a British Columbian, or, for some strange reason, educated in our parochial history, feel free to skip the next section.

BC Political History to 2020 
For those not following the parochial politics of British Columbia, let me begin by filling you in on the specifics of our local politics. The first official political party to enter the BC legislature was, technically, the Socialist Party, which began winning the electoral district of Newcastle, then a string of company coal mining towns owned by the Dunsmuir family, on Vancouver Island in the 1890s. 

Upon the election of Socialists, BC’s previously non-partisan legislature decided to adopt the Canadian national party system and its members joined either the Liberal or Conservative caucus. In 1903, the Tories were elected with a slim majority but fell into minority government the following year. To save their government, they made an agreement with the BC Socialist Party to enact the forty-hour work week and other reforms in exchange for propping up the government. These policies proved so popular that the Tories won a series of landslide victories in the following elections and governed the province until 1916. 

From the 1890s through the 1920s, a handful of Socialist and Labour party members of the legislature were elected in mining towns at the province’s periphery. The parties were leaderless and centred on local labour councils. Although, in some elections, their combined vote share approached 20% of the provincewide vote, it seemed that their participation in government was something that could only take place at the pleasure of one of the two main parties. 

But in the 1930s all that changed. A new party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a proto-social democratic producerist party, with bold plans to socialize medicine, natural resources, electricity and a host of other major parts of the economy ran a full slate of candidates led by labour leader Robert Connell and won 32% of the popular vote on their first try in 1933. Although the party’s vote share fell slightly in 1937, a resurgent Conservative Party meant that they still gained on the governing Liberals and, had they not been leaderless and disorganized, might have won a three-way race against the two mainline parties.

The 1937 election was followed by a palace coup within the BC Liberal Party and the merging of its caucus with that of the Conservatives in 1938 and the leadership of coup leader John Hart. And ever since 1938, no matter how much the CCF or its successor party, the New Democrats, have moderated their views and policies, the overarching logic of BC politics on right has been this: “socialists” must be kept out of office at all costs.

This resulted in the creation of three big tent political parties that have dominated BC politics until very recently: the Liberal-Conservative Coalition (1938-52), the Social Credit Party (1952-93) and the BC Liberal Party (1993-2020). While these parties have proclaimed the same basis of unity since the emergence of what we might call the Second BC Party System, the leading ideology of each of these coalitions and their protagonists has shifted on a number of occasions.

The Liberal-Conservative Coalition is best characterized as a “welfare capitalist” regime that enacted kind of neofeudalism, partnering with major logging, energy and mining companies to build sawmills, pulp mills, dams, roads, mines, smelters and communications and energy infrastructure. The government and its supporters in industry, being primarily governed by a fear of socialism, sought to create a harmonious social contract that would settle the young men working in the bush, at the mills and down the mines by replacing work camps with towns and villages. 

The thinking was that because–this seems unimaginable today–young single men who worked with their hands formed the backbone of socialist politics, the sensible thing would be to slowly, incrementally improve their wages, working conditions and benefits and house them in places congenial to family life, where they might settle down with a young woman and raise kids. Once immersed in respectable liberal capitalist society, the thinking was that they would lose their taste for socialist radicalism.

But the Coalition did not slay the socialist dragon and, following a succession crisis in the early 1950s, one of its members, WAC Bennett, of the legislature crossed the floor and became leader of the Social Credit Party and promptly, if only by a hair’s breadth, won the 1952 election. BC’s distinctive brand of Social Credit never incorporated the crypto-currency schemes of the original social credit movement of Clifford Douglas. Instead, it was a producerist party that largely maintained the neufeudal Tree Farm License system devised under Hart, a system that, like original feudalism, tied tenure over alienated crown land to obligations to the local populace, primarily in the form of the creation and maintenance of local sawmills. 

The Socreds, from 1952 to 1979, were ideologically promiscuous, socially conservative producerists who saw small businesses as their primary allies and profited from the local business communities that had coalesced in BC’s mill, smelter and mining towns. The party’s leadership was composed primarily of local businesspeople and did not see either their own bureaucracy or big business as entirely natural or trustworthy allies. It engaged in periodic culls of the provincial workforce and uncompensated expropriation, most notably of the private electric power producers and the creation of BC Hydro.

During their final eleven years in power, the Socreds transformed into a Thatcherite party that privatized pubic assets and enacted austerity programs. It was during this period that the relationship between big business and the senior members of the permanent bureaucracy began to improve, with public assets returning to the private sector and senior managers being granted new powers to enact austerity programs in their government departments. 

In 1993, the BC Liberals became the big tent under the leadership of Gordon Campbell, a former mayor of Vancouver who had eight years to craft a new coalition before taking power in 2001. This coalition is best characterized as being “right-progressive,” favouring the kind of alliance with big business as a partner in shaping the province, like the Coalition of 1938-52. But this was paired with management-directed austerity and reorganization and the creation and multiplication of government “authorities,” a management-heavy regional reorganization of government services directed by expert senior bureaucrats and executed through partnerships with private companies and non-profit organizations. 

Because it had been preceded by a Blairite NDP government in the 1990s, it had a civil service that was already, to a significant extent, already conversant with and supportive Third Way austerity practices and largely endorsed them, especially as many of the partners in these new service delivery schemes were non-profit organizations, the majority of whose employees and decision-makers were socially liberal, university-educated progressives. 

This new configuration of BC’s big tent “free enterprise” coalition as a partnership between business and the progressive courtier class did not just increase the legitimacy of austerity, contracting-out and other aspects of neoliberalism in BC’s managerial class and caring professions; it also produced the first and only progressive free enterprise coalition in BC history, a government not just known for privatization and austerity but for the most comprehensive Genderwang school curriculum of any Canadian province and a carbon tax designed to fight climate change. 

The Rise and Fall of Right-Progressivism
It would be unfair to call the governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark anachronistic, exactly. But the shape of political coalitions in the Global North began changing in the 1990s and that process has largely completed. In the twentieth century, politics largely ran along a left-right axis: parties of the left favoured largely regulatory and distributive projects conducted by the state and parties of the right favoured small government and less redistribution.

Both kinds of parties had a mix of two forces known as populism and progressivism. Like populism, progressivism traditionally existed on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The governments of Clark and Campbell were typical of right-wing progressivism as follows:

  • the close involvement of and deference to experts not just in enacting but in shaping government policy and the substitution of elected officials with appointed experts in existing policy-making processes, 
  • the adoption and promotion of novel and fashionable views about race, identity, family structure, human sexuality, etiquette, etc.,
  • the “voluntarily compliance” principle whereby the regulatory burden for environmental and other public safety and health rules is shifted from government officials to in-house experts and compliance officers within the private sector, 
  • the preference for non-binding, structured forms of public consultation facilitated by technocrats over binding, democratic political processes, and
  • the promotion of incentive-based eugenics to encourage sterilization, abortion and other restrictions on reproduction of low-status and undesirable persons,

to name just a few. Such policies were promoted by right-wing progressives for much of the twentieth century and are associated with figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush, scion of the Bush political dynasty and treasurer of Planned Parenthood, which has returned to its roots in promoting incentive-based eugenics campaigns. 

But, first in North America in the 1990s, and then spreading through the Global North in the 2010s and 20s, the right-left dynamic changed. As parties of the left adopted their own set neoliberal austerity, contracting out and privatization policies, policies I characterize as Blairite austerity politics ceased to substantially pertain to questions of distribution and ownership and became more focused on social issues and questions of expertise, social control and what is pejoratively characterized as “the culture war.”. This happened first in Canadian national politics in the 1993 federal election, in which the Progressive Conservative Party, a classic right-progressive party was annihilated in English Canada by the Reform Party, a populist party that had little time for experts and technocratic governance.

The next year, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America swept the Republican Party back into a congressional majority but, more importantly, radically disempowered the right-progressives in the party’s senate and house caucuses, placing a new politics of populist belligerence at the centre of US politics. 

By the twenty-first century, the right-progressives began abandoning their former parties and found themselves welcomed into parties of the left, often into leadership positions, now exerting more influence over policy than they did in their former parties of the right, as exemplified in the careers of Canadian MP Garth Turner and US Senator Arlen Specter. By 2015, the last three Canadian Progressive Conservative prime ministers, Joe Clark, Kim Campbell and Brian Mulroney were endorsing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party over Stephen Harper’s Tories.

And as the 2010s rolled on and the progressive and conservative worldviews began to diverge both more widely and more rapidly, this realignment also began spreading first to the rest of the Anglosphere and then elsewhere in the Global North. Policies on climate, gender identity and Covid were important sites of this rapid and growing divergence precisely because they were tied so intimately to high-stakes confrontations between popular classes and experts.

From London to Victoria
The last section might just as easily be fitted not into an article about the collapse of the BC United Party but about the massive migration of votes from the UK Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this summer, as the British Tories, another progressive conservative party that backs climate science and vaccine mandates and that took too long to turn against the Genderwang policies it itself introduced in 2010s. Or even the steady bleed of votes from the right-progressive German Christian Democrats to the populist Alliance for Germany. 

But what makes the party that governed BC from 2001-16 such a fascinating case study is the compression, the rapidity of the realignment that took place. Despite its poor showing in the 2020 election, British Columbia’s BC Liberal Party (as it was known then), Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Victoria was, like the British Tories, the striking exception to a large scale realignment of politics in the Global North. Like the Boris Johnson’s Tories, it had successfully defended its right flank and no candidate to its political right was elected, just as in the five previous elections held in the twenty-first century.

But the signs were there to see. While there was no credible party of the new populist right contesting the election, small parties, fielding no more than a dozen candidates, that had perennially scored in the low single-digits, at best, when it came to percentage vote share, got surprising results around the province. For the first time, a Libertarian Party candidate received more than 10% of the vote, ditto the Christian Heritage Party’s slate, as did the brand new Rural BC Party. Meanwhile the tiny Conservative slate won over 30% of the vote in their stronghold in the Peace River country. 

But rather than recognizing, as Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader has, that his party must embrace and include a resurgent constituency of anti-authoritarian, populist climate skeptics, Kevin Falcon responded to this new kind of conservatism by attempting to purge it from his party. By symbolically expelling his former cabinet colleague John Rustad on his birthday for retweeting a climate skeptic tweet, Falcon signalled that his party was an old school right-progressive party like Rishi Sunak’s Tories or Armin Laschet’s Christian Democrats. He underlined that point when whipping his caucus to cast a symbolic vote condemning the Freedom Convoy. And unlike Sunak’s Tories, Falcon’s party did not make any meaningful concessions to anti-authoritarian populists, unlike the 180 degree turn on Genderwang led by Kemi Badenoch. 

But such high-risk, boneheaded moves might have been survivable had he not chosen to pair them with a move that dramatically undercut his strategy: he renamed his BC Liberal Party “BC United,” recalling the previous big-tent right-wing coalitions that had governed the province. If Falcon were really trying to make the party a bigger, more inclusive tent that recalled the Coalition and the Socreds at their height, how could he exclude social conservatives, populists and other key constituencies that have formed a crucial part of the base of successful right-wing parties in BC? 

The BC Liberal Party was a dead party walking when Falcon took it over, a kind of party that is now obsolete, based on a coalition of groups and ideologies that no longer see themselves as natural allies or even politically compatible. You can’t both administer a carbon tax and retain the support of the industrial working class; you can’t both enact Genderwang and retain the support of most people active in faith communities; and nobody wants to hear about how you’ll better administer a society based on its liberal social consensus because there is no longer any such consensus. 

But Falcon’s shambles of a rebanding process compressed this death march, which could have occupied much of the 2020s and more than one electoral cycle, into just two years. Of course, that is only half the story. The other half of the story, that of how Rustad and his Young Turks pulled off one of the most rapid political ascents Canada has ever seen, is one in which I am a minor character and which you’ll have to wait a while to read about.

BC Politics | fusangite |

Our World Is Run By The Family Annihilator Patriarchs

A Discourse for All Communities
Due to the massive realignment our culture is undergoing and my distinctive place in it, I straddle multiple opposing discourse communities. As a person who is gender-critical, socialist and anti-authoritarian, a lot of my life entails code-switching because, to be effective, I cannot just work with the relatively small “gender critical” and “old growth left” communities where I feel most at home. And it is rare when I do not find myself engaged in an act of cultural translation, not carefully choosing different words to communicate the same idea to one audience that have used other words to communicate to another one.

Indeed, the fact that I do this was one of the justifying bases for the fifth cancelation campaign directed at me in 2023. Apparently, I was being immoral and misleading by communicating differently to my mainly anti-authoritarian populist audience on Twitter and my mainly eco-socialist audience on Facebook. Or so I learned from the clearly template-based correspondence I received from long-time friends and acquaintances last summer. Usually, this complaint appeared in paragraph two.

So, when I bust-out a term and it speaks immediately and clearly all the discourse communities in which I am present, to some degree, I take notice. I pay attention. And if there is one term I have generated in recent years that has done this, it is “Family Annihilator Patriarchy.”

One might expect my feminist, socialist, deep green comrades in Deep Green Resistance to like it but its most welcome reception has actually been among comrades on the populist right, people from whom I held the term back, thinking it would alienate them. But no, my neighbour, a producer of news round-up videos for grassroots Donald Trump supporters and beef importer-exporter and folks like him seem to be the biggest fans.

The Family Annihilator: A Peculiar Kind of Mass Murderer
Like many important ideas I have picked up over the years, I believe learned about family annihilators in a Law & Order script by Quebecois Quiet Revolutionary and Catholic Modernist René Balcer, the most prolific contributor to the franchise. Family annihilators are the most under-represented sort of mass murderer in our mass murderer-obsessed entertainment industry.

The Paul Bernardo-style serial killer sex fetishist, the David Berkowitz-style cop-taunting brilliant psychotic, the ruthless big score robber of the Die Hard franchise, the hostage-taking desperate man of Dog Day Afternoon, the man at the end of his rope pushed into a killing spree depicted in Joker and Falling Down: these are the staples of the mass murderers of the screen. Family annihilators make for more upsetting, more uncomfortably uncanny TV.

A family annihilator is a man who relishes his patriarch/provider role in his family. He is proud that his wife and children depend on him for their material and emotional needs, whether or not this reflects the material or emotional reality. Whether progressive or conservative, politically, in relational terms, he casts himself in the role of a retro, traditional patriarch.

Whether he does this as a put-upon, solicitous Woke dad who does all the cooking and cleaning as well as being the bread-winner, showing what a feminist he is or whether he does this as a pious, stern traditionalist “family head,” is not really of interest. The point is that a family annihilator sees his family’s happiness, success, even survival as contingent on him, his labour, his moral clarity.

And this is how he derives his sense of self-worth: the guy everyone depends on, who provides for everyone, who is to be admired not because of his intrinsic value but because he, alone, he personally upholds a whole family.

When such a man faces circumstances that will materially or reputationally depose him from his role as patriarch, especially if they entail public shaming, he snaps. Major financial losses, conflict with the law, unemployment, etc.: these sorts of things inspire family annihilators to murder their putative dependents.

Their logic in doing so is this: their dependents’ lives would be over without them. They could not possibly handle the shame, poverty, loss of status that is coming. So the only responsible thing to do, the only way to actually carry out one’s obligations as a patriarch is to murder them all before they can experience the shame, poverty and loss of status. They see this act of mass murder as altruistic.

Of course, it is anything but. It is narcissism crushed to a diamond. The annihilator is the one who cannot handle the shame. So he murders the witnesses to his shaming. The annihilator feels valueless. So he murders his putative dependents before they can realize how little they actually need him.

Conservative Annihilators: Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte
I first developed the idea of the family annihilator patriarchy when I was in my final years as a left-progressive in response to the Trump Administration’s grudging compliance with an international demand for its emissions, climate and temperature targets more than a year into its mandate. When it finally did produce them, the Trump Administration inaugurated a new school of thought in the discourse community called “climate denialism,” by stating that its goal was to emit as many hydrocarbons as possible as quickly as possible to achieve its goal of raising global temperatures by 16 degrees Fahrenheit (“Eocene Hothouse”) by the end of the century, a rate of temperature change that has never failed to produce a mass extinction event.

When I read this, I thought of the first time I went bowling, at the age of six or seven. Having very poor hand-eye coordination, something with which I suffer to this day, I was completely unable to knock over any pins. Feeling increasingly frustrated as my peers were largely able to pull this off, I began bowling directly into the gutter, my only option for regaining my sense of agency over the humiliating situation in which I found myself.

No doubt inspired by this audacious discursive turn, Patrick Moore, whose entire professional career has been as a rent-a-quote man for eco-villains and has been dining out on his “co-founder of Greenpeace reputation” for nearly half a century, has developed a whole new school of climate denial, arguing that carbon emissions do indeed warm the planet and, because of an impending ice age, we have to warm it as fast as possible or we will all die.

But Moore’s refinement and pseudo-scientific justification of the Trump Administration’s position did not take place right away, even as it emboldened Trump allies to make similarly nihilistic claims. Jair Bolsonaro claimed that the Amazon Rainforest was not being destroyed fast enough and its indigenous people not dying-out fast enough. He promised to destroy the forest and its people as expeditiously as possible. And this was not limited just to environmental questions. Rodrigo Duterte, facing an epidemic of gang violence and vigilante murder in the Philippines promised to solve it with more extrajudicial killings by stirring pro-government vigilantes and police forces untethered from the rule of law into the mix.

This all struck me as family annihilator psychology:

Can’t come up with a plan to stabilize the climate? Fry everyone and everything as quickly as possible.

Can’t come up with a way to build a sustainable society and economy in the Amazon? Destroy the Amazon and eradicate its people.

Can’t bring law and order to Filipino communities and protect? Turn the communities into protracted street battles with more stray bullets flying in all directions.

These plans seemed underpinned by the idea that if you could kill the people you failed before they noticed you had failed them, this was as good as success because you could avoid shame in two ways, first, by eliminating the people who witnessed you failing them, and, second, by making their elimination seem intentional, not a failure but something you had intended all along.

Globalist and Leftist Family Annihilators
Around the same time this was happening, the new government of British Columbia was finalizing its climate policy. A coalition of social democrats and Greens, who appointed the former head of the Canadian Sierra Club its climate minister, had just been elected to govern my province.

They were and remain unmatched for high-flown climate rhetoric from Western Hemisphere governments and boldly rolled-out a plan called Clean BC to achieve “net zero.” Clean BC, in its present form, entails doubling BC’s coal exports, quintupling liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, building five LNG export terminals and pipelines to the fracking fields of the northeast, increasing fracking at a rate of more than 10% per year, permitting the conversion of BC’s remaining forests into a new export product: fuel pellets that burn as a dirtier version of coal, doubling the exports of BC forest products, admitting Uber and Lyft to the jurisdiction, thereby increasing taxi sector emissions by more than 50%, doubling fossil fuel industry subsidies, exempting Big Oil from the carbon tax, etc.

At the federal level in Canada, we see the same thing: the former head of Greenpeace Canada announcing an immediate climate apocalypse and angrily shaking finger at all the people who haven’t found a way to finance a home heat pump yet while building the oil industry a free multi-billion-dollar pipeline and jetting off to climate meetings on a private jet as our Minister of Environment.

We see similar combinations of climate emergency hysteria messaging and rapid increases in extraction and emissions of carbon around the world. In Germany, the SDP-Green coalition government is expropriating the homes of Bavarian villagers and forcing them off their land at gunpoint to create new open-pit coal mines.

But this goes far beyond climate: the globalist hatred of agriculture, the attempts to reduce regional food security and food productivity even as their own climate models presage collapsing fish stocks and declining agricultural yield and of course the absurd veneration of Genderwang, which sees the sterilization of healthy children as the ultimate ritual expression of the moral good, provoking mass rallies and huge ovations for sterilizing, lobotomizing and amputating the healthy body parts of children.

The “it ends with me,” family annihilator mindset is actually stronger among progressives today because they led with the claim that they could, would and were solving our interlocking environmental and economic crises. Unlike characters such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the progressive elites who hold their annual booze-up and super-rich singles mixer in Davos every year, people like Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and Al Gore, told us that they did have matters well in hand, that through technocratic management of a global neoliberal economic framework through multilateral international agreements, they were not just going to solve our environmental problems; they were going to make us all more prosperous, more equal and more democratic.

And so their shame, their humiliation, is even greater because they were not merely asleep at the switch; they magnified the problems even worse through their incompetence and hubris.

Their reaction, therefore, to their failure, is like my elementary school reaction: to bowl directly into the gutter, to warm the planet as fast as they can, to impoverish us as thoroughly as they can and to eliminate feedback mechanisms by which we can notify them of their failure by sabotaging the democratic process and refusing to even meet with those who disagree with them, instead characterizing their critics as conspiracy theorists and bigots.

Like true family annihilators, they are eliminating witnesses to their failure to deliver the prosperous, sustainable technocratic utopia they promised through a series of forever wars with no achievable victory conditions, by depressing fertility with endocrine disruptors and other pollutants, by reducing the birth rate by making it unaffordable to raise kids, by making lethal drugs like fentanyl more available, especially to children, by rapidly expanding euthanasia programs, like Canada’s MAID, by shutting down and smearing farmers, ranchers, fishermen and their work and by not just pushing but venerating our society’s most aggressive eugenics campaign since the 1930s.

Fortunately for us, the new censorship and myth-making industry made possible by the alliance between Big Data and the national security state, which has spread from China to the West rapidly, means that witnesses to failure can be reduced by more tightly controlling what people are able to learn, permitted to see and allowed to say they know, allowing elites to engage in witness elimination without actual murder.

Women of the Patriarchy
As in all successful patriarchies, some of the patriarchy’s work is being done by female leaders, characters like Chrystia Freeland and, I would argue, a larger amount than is typical of a patriarchal system, because, although men are always going to outdistance women when it comes to proficiency at and inclination towards murder (we’re just built to be better at it), the psychology of a family annihilator is a much more gender-neutral thing than that of a rapist serial killer who targets strangers.

The idea of being the sole provider of a family’s wellbeing is one women have readily taken on, often for perfectly good reasons. The 1970s divorce wave would likely have been more socially chaotic and cataclysmic if the female-headed family were not an idea with which humans were already comfortable to some degree, sociologically and biologically.

And so women’s protective tendencies towards their own children and others is being channeled into this increasingly normative elite psychology: family annihilation. Lupron for kids is care. Fentanyl for kids is care. (Yes, there is a BC government program that gives teenagers fentanyl to teenagers without their parents’ knowledge or consent.) Euthanasia for the depressed, disabled, the homeless is care. Shuttering farms and ranches is just good ecological stewardship.

Shame and Weakness, Not Malice and Competence
I do not want to suggest that our two teams of family annihilator global elites are aware they are family annihilators. As is typical of narcissism-related pathologies, most annihilators would struggle to even place themselves in a class or type of person because narcissists thrive on a sense of specialness and are notorious mirror-punchers, so awash in worthlessness and shame that any act of introspection is traumatic.

Rather, I want to suggest that the spread of family annihilator psychology is reflective of a growing senses of powerlessness, shame, weakness and doubt that are overtaking our elites. They are scared to admit their failures, unwilling to take responsibility, terrified to exposing how little they know and arrogant and foolish they have been. And they are scared of us and our disapproval.

The folks trying silence, starve and kill us today would prefer to be heroes who really did provide us with a clean, prosperous, fair society, who could honestly say they “saved the planet.” It is only their failure to do so that makes us targets of their displaced rage and shame at themselves.

The psychology of the family annihilator is unique among the psychology of murderers, except poisoners, in that it is about the avoidance of confrontation not fulfillment through confrontation. After all, these folks, are coming for us because they are scared even of confronting themselves, their own insecurities. Because if there is one aphorism our present age is proving out, it is this:

There is nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City (part 2): The Intolerant Urbanizer

Real Problems and Crises in Rural and Northern Canada
Wally Oppal is probably one of the most accomplished people every to have served in elected office in BC history. He served, from 2005 to 2009, as Gordon Campbell’s Attorney-General, Minister of Justice and Minister of State for Multiculturalism. He was part of the one four-year stretch of benign technocratic liberalism the BC Liberal Party managed to deliver during the second quarter of its sixteen years in power.

He was part of the government that unexpectedly introduced English Canada’s first carbon tax, one that course corrected to the political centre, after four years of slash and burn neoliberal austerity and privatization. Having already made a name for himself as a Supreme Court and Appeal Court justice, following his electoral defeat in 2009, Oppal was deemed that ideal person to chair a government commission into one of the worst episodes of police failure and dereliction of duty, the 2010 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into the multi-year reign of murderous predation serial killer Robert Pickton inflicted on the survival sex workers of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).

The does not stand alone. It is one of a half-dozen reports by different levels of settler and indigenous governments and international NGOs that investigated the larger phenomenon of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, including but not limited to Northwestern BC’s infamous Highway of Tears and Southwestern BC’s infamous DTES.

But while the report does not stand alone, it does stand out as the best of such reports. Like all others it has two main demands: (1) restore the bus and (2) close the camps.

If you want female members of the rural underclass to be abducted, raped and murdered less, they should probably have an affordable way to get from the Indian Reserve (i.e. brutally underserviced rural ghetto) to town for groceries, smokes, a movie, a trip to the pub. So, allowing the bus service to be withdrawn and then restoring only a fraction of it, with there being no bus service on most days and no on-reserve stops on most reserves is probably not a great thing. If only we could get the bus service back to 1997 levels!

The other demand, to close the camps, is equally obvious. Rural and Northern Canada is being emptied of towns and villages which are being replaced with temporary worker camps, known colloquially as “man camps.” Reversing Cold War policies that sought to settle workers in the industrial periphery in towns and villages with schools, hospitals and public amenities, neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies have sought to dismantle small towns and replace them with temporary encampments, single industry towns composed almost entirely of young men, without basic amenities, government services or an environment in which children could be raised.

Gone are the mining towns of the past with their community halls, small elementary schools and newspaper offices. Gone even are the restaurants and cafes as camp workers eat in enormous mess halls when not suppressing their appetites with central nervous system stimulants whose use is widely tolerated in the camps.

Because these camps are so dominated by energy sector workers, usually existing to construct pipelines, frack natural gas or build macro-hydro projects, enterprising academics in the US have found they can construct predictive murder maps just by knowing fracking and pipeline construction locations. The isolated, young, stimulant-using young men typically work two weeks in, two weeks out, spending the rest of their time in communities like Fort Mac and Fort St. John. To briefly reference an earlier article, this is why I tend to call the communities Rex Murphy idealized “Jeckyllvilles.”

Oppal’s Underappreciated Insights Into Self-Fashioning
But Oppal went beyond the usual “close the camps,” “bring back the bus” chorus to write in detail about how women and girls’ at-risk status follows them from low income rural communities in ways that have little to do with race. Oppal observed that the non-indigenous women targeted by Pickton and other predators shared key demographic characteristics: they were low-income and had migrated to the Vancouver as young adults.

Oppal argued that, for young, low-income migrants, urbanization is a crucial part of identity formation and self-fashioning, that becoming a fully agentive person with her own distinct identity and choices is strongly conflated with moving to the city for young women who find themselves in at-risk work, at-risk housing or in conflict with the law. To return to a rural community or even request help from people still residing in it is a shameful act for young adults who centre urbanization in the creation of their adult self.

In other words, the use of urbanization narratives in self-fashioning, in and of itself, places young women from the rural and remote communities at material risk by constraining their access to material and the range of places they can live. Not only is it shameful to return to one’s supposedly benighted community of origin or obtain aid from its residents; it is shameful to admit that one has experienced, violence, intolerance of exploitation in one’s new place of residence. It creates incentives for narrating painful, dangerous and exploitive work as more voluntary and less harmful than it actually is.

And this kind of thinking is hardly limited to survival sex workers and members of the urban underclass.

When one examines those most enthusiastic about stripping urban life of ideological pluralism, religious diversity, etc. we tend to see urbanizers disproportionately represented among the most intolerant. They tend to espouse the belief that the kind of community they left was not merely situationally problematic at the time that they but that rural communities are inherently benighted and that the kind of people who voluntarily live in such places are, axiomatically, people who are some mixture of ignorant, evil and stupid.

I am not, of course, referring to all people who move from small communities to large communities. I am referring to a particular subset in which the intolerance is most concentrated, although hardly universal.

Profiling the Intolerant Urbanizer
Most people who move to larger communities do so to take up a new job or attend an educational institution. These individuals typically do not centre their urbanization the same way when fashioning an identity and a life story. Those who move for college typically place their education at the centre of the adult identity they create; similarly, those who move for work typically place their new job at the centre of their self-fashioning project. It tends to be individuals who move and then find work or take up low-status employment prior to moving so as to finance the move.

Similarly, individuals who aspire to live in a particular city about which they developed an interest as a younger person and who move to a far-away city rather than the nearest major centre, are less likely to become intolerant urbanizers because their narrative is centred on attraction to a specific urban space, not their rejection of life in a small community. Intolerant urbanizers therefore tend to have come from lower-income backgrounds with fewer educational prospects and to lead adult lives with lower-education, lower-status jobs. Paradoxically, they often tend to accord greater respect to white collar work and higher education than those with more education and higher status jobs.

Because of this, they tend to see qualities in themselves that they value such as having high status friends and associates, being well-read and politically well-informed as arising primarily from their decision to live in a city. Consequently, they also tend to strongly associate rural communities with intolerance, ignorance, dead-end jobs, etc.

And because their decision to relocate is so central to their identity, it must always be viewed as an unalloyed and permanent good. For this reason, they are often hostile to positive news about rural and remote communities. An increasingly diverse and high quality culinary scene, the opening of a local university, these things annoy them but the news from home that intolerant urbanizers are typically most upset by is the election of non-conservatives by their former community. If their former community is expressing the same political views as the one in which they live now, its status as a benighted and unimprovable place that could never have been reformed, only escaped-from is compromised.

This is why “guns and religion,” “basket of deplorables” and “unacceptable views” discourse and quips by progressive politicians are so tempting to pepper a stump speech or interview with. They play so strongly to the intolerant urbanizers in the room whose self-fashioning narrative is premised this image of people from small communities as almost ontologically distinct from urbanites.

Obviously, there is considerable irony to this reality, given that intolerant urbanizers are leading the charge to make cities into the very sort of place they indict the countryside for being: rigid, unchanging, intolerant, pious and homogeneous.

While there have been intolerant urbanizers for as long as there have been cities, the authoritarian turn our society is taking amplifies their social power and encourages the ugliest, most problematic aspects of their worldview. Insecurity over this obvious irony, unfortunately, only magnifies the authoritarian impulse. Criticism of the widening gap between the ideal of the permissive, diverse, cosmopolitan city and the day-to-day reality of our increasingly authoritarian urban culture only increases the impetus for shunning, silencing and punishment of critics, a tightening of the circle and a further chilling of speech.

It is really the height of irony that the highest priority when it comes to controlled and coerced speech is the demand for a chorus of agreement about just how free, diverse and tolerant city life really is. From preschool onwards, educators, news media and opinion leaders relentlessly “celebrate” just how wonderfully tolerant the contemporary progressive city is. But those most committed to these celebrations are those raised outside of the cities, who have made changing their residential address in their teens or twenties the most important thing about themselves in the fragile identity that sits atop this migration story.

Self-made identities and self-fashioning projects are not equally important or present in all human societies. The intolerant urbanizer is part of a larger phenomenon about which I have written in the past: our society’s reversion to a baroque culture, one deeply concerned with social rank, one that transacts an increasing portion of social power through dynamics of honour and offense. Such societies tend to encourage and foreground forms of self-presentation as central to identity dynamics and the intolerant urbanizer is just one element, just one example of how these new social trends are curdling urban life in the Global North.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Why Do We Think Doing Crack in the Hospital Is Okay?

Anxiety in the Age of Trump
Whether or not one was a Donald Trump supporter, the end of the primaries in the summer of 2016 inaugurated a new age of vigilance, anxiety and outrage for Americans. Whether by virtue of Trump’s boorish norm violations, intentionally provocative communications strategy and general emotional dysregulation, or whether due to the near-constant attacks on the Administration’s functioning and legitimacy, a new baseline level of rage and fear took hold in Anglo America and much of the Global North, a pervasive psychosocial state we have yet to shake-off eight years later.

America’s stand-up comics were, for the most part of group of liberals already skilled in mocking and belittling America’s populist conservative movements. And many did a great job of skewering the Trump administration over the president’s apparently unhinged public behaviour and revolving door of officials, each greasier and more bizarre than those they replaced.

But the comedian who best expressed the sense of anxiety that pervaded America was John Mulaney. He offered the following metaphor: “It’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital… And nobody knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse. It’s never been in a hospital before.”

I quoted that bit many times during Trump’s four years in office and have a few times since, especially as that feeling of anxiety has not gone away, what with the Bumpkin Putsch, followed by the failed impeachment, the prosecutions, the efforts to disqualify Trump based on a crime the impeachment trial had acquitted him of. The feeling that there is a horse loose in a hospital has never gone away.

But the reason this description of the situation plays so well with people like me who were steeped in progressive culture is that it plays to an unconscious belief that society, as a whole, is just one gigantic hospital.

The Rise and Fall of the Giant Agora
At the zenith of neoliberalism in the late 1990s, no matter what party one supported at election time, no matter what church one attended, no matter where one was located, socially, when neoliberalism enjoyed cultural and ideological hegemony, we saw society as a gigantic marketplace. The agora had swallowed the whole city. The schools, the hospitals, the council chambers, everything existed in the context of the marketplace. If we wanted to say that something was good, we looked around for words of praise and said things like “profit,” “efficiency,” “competition,” etc.

But as we entered a period of socio-political realignment in the early 2010s and the commissar class who dominate the Pharma and Data sectors began to eclipse the neoliberals as our cultural hegemons, our understanding of the world began to shift away from seeing everything through the prism of the market. Covid and the opioid crisis helped in this shift but the re-categorization of all pain and unpleasantness as “trauma,” and all responses to it as “triggering,” was just as important.

What had begun in the 1990s with the huge-scale prescription of third-generation SSRI anti-depressants reached its culmination as we came to redefine feeling bad as inherently problematic. Our identities began to shift, too. Those who have embraced the new progressive culture of the commissar class, have come to engage in self-fashioning behaviours of self-diagnosing oneself into a series of pathologies, with the assistance of the ubiquitous online psychiatric diagnostic quizzes, funded by a pharmaceutical industry eager to receive more orders for psychiatric drugs.

In British Columbia, the government’s policies of steadily reducing and restricting citizens’ access to free medical care have resulted in the normalization of psychiatric self-diagnosis, presented by telephone during ten-minute appointment telephone windows at clinics that charge cold hard cash to see a physician in person. More and more British Columbians are on speed as internet ADHD self-tests have come to be accepted by the province’s overloaded clinics and Adderall and other amphetamine prescriptions are dispense by phone and online. One doesn’t need to tell the government one is an addict to be prescribed meth substitutes, although that works too; one can just say that it’s tough to concentrate, what with a horse being loose in the hospital.

But it is not just during a doctor’s appointment that your average progressive British Columbian announces a set of psychiatric self-diagnoses. This is how people who have adopted the culture of the commissar class talk about themselves all the time; within a few minutes of meeting someone at a fashionable party, one begins to hear one’s new acquaintances list of mental illnesses, even before they get to their preferred pronouns.

Indeed, psychiatric self-diagnosis has become the linchpin of self-fashioning in the progressive world. As being unique and special in the sight of God is not a culturally or emotionally available option, the language one uses for both describing one’s uniqueness and begs not to be bullied in this, one of the most judgemental and predatory social orders of recent times, is to “identify into” a series of neurological disabilities and sexual fetishes.

The term “neurodiverse,” one that initially made sense only at the population level, has become conflated with “neurodivergent” and applied at the individual. If one can no longer be unique in the sight of God, one can at least be unique and special in the sight of an imaginary all-seeing doctor.

That is because what Mulaney was telling us is that we have stopped believing that society is a gargantuan, all-encompassing marketplace and has become one huge world-containing hospital.

However rational, well-intentioned and even life-saving Covid policies were, when the state began to regulate the size of the crowd you could meet for drinks, have over for dinner, even host at a backyard barbecue, a consequence was that the hospital made your home one of its rooms, your street one of its wards. The reason we have re-described ourselves as a bag of diseases and other conditions necessitating medical intervention is that we have accepted the logic of the commissars, that society is now an all-encompassing hospital.

Brad West and Doing Crack in the Hospital
It is in this context that we must approach Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West’s recent interview with the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer. In response to the BC government announcing a review of its new policy of letting hospital patients carry weapons and buy, use and sell illicit drugs while in hospital, West suggested that the government could save its money. His review was done, “In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”

What baffled those outside the Progressiverse was how this could even be a thing, how it was that, in an environment where powerful drugs are being administered by highly trained professionals, trained in predicting and managing drug interactions, how addicts shooting up street drugs of unknown provenance or purity could possibly be remotely safe and not undermine the precise care they are receiving. How on earth did we get here? How could one reasonably administer opiate pain relievers when patients were also self-administering unknown types and quantities of opiates?

And weapons!? How could it be safe for people doing central nervous system stimulants and undergoing intensive, painful and disorienting medical treatment to be armed with hunting knives and boxcutters?

The answer is simple: if society is a hospital then the hospital is society.

And in the giant society-spanning hospital, everyone is a doctor or a patient, and as evinced in the increasingly ubiquitous signage about not upsetting and “triggering” receptionists and medical personnel at clinics, both.

If everywhere you go is the hospital, then whatever you are free to do in the world, you are, axiomatically, free to do in the hospital because if the world is the hospital then the hospital is the world.

Generally, when a society idealizes something, whoever or whatever is being idealized is actually being singled-out for special punishment. No society idealizes female virtue like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Similarly, our society grows ever more shabby in its treatment of people genuinely neurologically disabled. Autistic people have been pushed out of self-advocacy organizations and the public square by people who are merely a little quirky or socially inept. Their spaces have been invaded and their silencing has enabled, as Hillary Cass’s review most recently pointed out, a mass sterilization campaign to be waged against autistic youth in the name of genderwang.

Similarly, mental healthcare has all been all but withdrawn from people truly disabled by addiction and madness. Treatment has been replaced by “supportive housing” and tent cities. It seems that the only right of the addicted and insane we defend is their right to be miserable, to sleep rough, to defecate in the streets, to shoot up in parks and to scream at passers-by. And there is a logic to this too. The more ill health there is, the more society really does seem like a gigantic understaffed hospital.

Medicalized Societies Are Sick Societies
We are not the first society to decide to see everything through the prism of medicine and disease. In recent studies of Franciscan and Jesuit catechisms written in Iroquoian languages, we find that the societies embroiled in the “mourning wars,” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein Huron and Iroquois warriors engaged in endless capture-oriented military campaigns to replace population lost to smallpox and other Eastern Hemisphere diseases also saw the world in medical terms.

Almost every positive thing Christian missionaries promised new indigenous converts was described in the Iroquoian languages, as a form of medicine. Every good thing in the universe, grace, salvation, sustenance, community was presented as “medicine.” That is because a society only decides it is a gigantic hospital if those living therein know that sicknesses of body and mind have metastasized into a social sickness, a society-wide cancer, in the case of the Iroquois, an epidemic not just of smallpox but of something they called “false face disease,” a consequence of centuries of continuous war, disease and martial law.

The way out of such a society, such a state of being is not more medicine. It is not categorizing more things as sickness and categorizing more activities as medicine. Prescribing chemical castration and lobotomization drugs to children may be called “medicine” but there is nothing healthy about it. Offering to murder disabled, homeless and depressed people through the MAID program is called “medicine” but it is anything but. Amputating people’s healthy body parts or adding prostheses and fake orifices so they can better resemble the Japanese cartoons they believe to be their “true selves” is not medicine by any reasonable definition, nor is secretly prescribing fentanyl to teenagers as part of some sort of Opposite Day “harm reduction” plan.

You see: the thing that makes our society sicker, more dangerous than the late-stage Iroquois Confederacy is that a hospital is a hierarchical, authoritarian bureaucratic institution that conflates power, expertise and medicine into a single authoritative principle. In this society, whatever the state does, is, by definition, “medicine,” irrespective of whether it makes you more or less healthy, irrespective of whether it makes you suffer, irrespective of whether it even kills you.

If there is a solution, I would suggest we can find it in the Tao Te Ching:

“He who is sick of sickness is well.”

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Socialism and the First and Second Left: How the Forty Hour Week Came to British Columbia

Gordon Campbell killed my grandma.

I don’t mean this in a “fuck you Gordon, die in a fire!” kind of way. I like Campbell fine and think he went out on a high note as premier, with his audacious tax policies, that sought to undo some of the damage he did with his first round of tax policies a decade before.

It is more that my grandma was pretty damn tired of being alive by the time she was in her mid-90s. Always fashionable and fit, she could not handle the shame of getting around with a walker. You can purchase a stylish cane. There are no stylish walkers. She had also outlived more than a dozen bridge foursomes and was just too demoralized to go to all the work of assembling another bridge group, only to have its members die on her in a year or two.

The daughter of George Martin, a welder and Bolshevik soap-boxer (yes, an actual Bolshevik; he assiduously followed global communist politics and had taken a position on the Bolshevik-Menshevik split when it happened), my grandmother was also deeply demoralized by the rise of Third Way neoliberalism and the destruction of the world’s democratic socialist parties in the 1990s. So pissed off was she that she contributed her bookkeeping expertise to helping me build the BC Green Party, expertise she had last used to help the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) set up its Vancouver office in the 1970s.

So, when Gordon Campbell was elected BC premier in 2001 and proudly announced the repeal of the forty-hour work week in 2002, my grandmother was pretty sure that it was time to go.

My grandmother was born in 1908, four years after the BC legislature enacted the forty-hour work week. And she felt that she should never have had to live to see the day that this victory for working people, made before she was even born, would slip away. For her, it served as the final piece of punctuation marking the end of the aspirations of the socialist movement.

The political moment into which my grandmother was born during what Mark Twain termed “the Gilded Age,” was the time in which, around the world, socialists came of political age. The period that began in the 1880s and ended with the 1929 global economic crisis did not just contain the Mexican and Russian revolutions. It contained the founding of Britain’s Independent Labour Party in 1893 and its first election to national government in 1923.

As I have argued ad nauseam on this blog, we live in a time much like those years, with its rapidly widening wealth gap, ownership concentration, ballooning consumer debt, penchant for cross-dressing, chaotic international order and debate over women’s sport. The particular aspect of that time that I want to focus on in this essay is the collapse of “the left” as a political coalition.

History of the First Left
“The left” is a term that started as a literal description of a set of allied voting blocs in the French parliament in the lead-up to the Revolution of 1789. Initially, it simply referred to the collection of Estates-General members who favoured radical and revolutionary change. Dominated by liberals, almost from the outset it included socialists, secularists, suffragists, prohibitionists, Abolitionists, advocates of colonial devolution and supporters of land and tax reform. In the ensuing decades a similar “left coalition” coalesced the other great industrial democracies, Britain, Prussia, etc.

It made sense, during the nineteenth century, for members of the left to make common cause. The rising trade union movement was key in legitimating “the left” as a strategic political coalition as liberal parties made space on their parliamentary slates for candidates backed by trade union locals in the burgeoning industrial cities of the age. Class consciousness had not reached the point where individual labour candidates were viable in winner-take-all electoral systems and so liberal parties and trade unionists mutually benefited from their alliance.

While there were of course major conflicts within the left among its constituent groups, and especially between its dominant and original political grouping, the liberals, new political movements that, by virtue of a shared belief in modernization and reform, saw themselves as equally legitimate claimants to the mantle of the Left.

Conflicts between labour and capital were intense when it came to questions like the scale of permissible industrial action and the use of police as strike-breakers. But these were, to an extent, mitigated by shared left-wing beliefs and assumptions such as the status of women and children as protected classes of person within the workplace and without and a shared belief that freer trade and fewer tariffs would benefit both industry and the poor.

But in the 1890s, that shifted throughout much of the Anglosphere. In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed in Britain, ultimately resulting in the Labour Representation Committee splitting from the Liberal Party. And English speakers were actually late to the party. German’s socialists and trade union movement had abandoned their partnership with liberals in 1874. In France, the parliamentary divorce took place in 1885.

Throughout the Gilded Age, socialists and liberals would find themselves on the same side of certain issues and in accord on certain causes but these movements understood themselves to be adversarial and were, naturally, embittered by their recent divorces. But socialists, in particular, sought to make it clear that they were not part of some larger political community in which both they and the liberals were in fundamental accord. At both the movement level and in electoral politics, socialists sought to show their independence from liberals, reminding working class people that both liberals and conservatives were movements controlled by and representing “the bosses.”

Socialism and the Forty-hour Week in British Columbia
My grandma grew up in Gilded Age BC because her dad was blacklisted from dock work for his Bolshevik soapboxing, first in Glasgow and then in Belfast. Vancouver, British Columbia, was the western terminus of the British North American rail system, port with such severe labour shortages that communists, criminals and malcontents from the four corners of the earth could still find a decent day’s pay.

And the province had a strong and militant labour movement thanks to the Dunsmuir coal baron dynasty that controlled middle Vancouver Island with their own private army, occasionally assisted by the RCMP. Consequently, BC was one of the first places in the British Empire to elect socialists to its legislature.

Even before the capitalist members of the legislature had separated into the Liberal and Conservative parties, the Labour Party elected its first member in 1898. The following election, in 1903, BC’s first true multi-party election returned a Conservative government with a razor-thin majority, one that eroded over the course of the year, leaving the Tories in a minority in 1904.

Rather that voting with their erstwhile fellow leftists, the Liberals, to bring down the Tory government, they negotiated with Premier Richard McBride to enact a series of socialist policies, the best-remembered of which is the forty-hour work week.

BC’s is an early example of socialists not being cowed into working with liberals and progressives in service of some kind of putative larger left but it is hardly unique to this period. Rather than swearing fealty to one set of bosses or the other, socialist and labour parties and movements played the capitalists off against each other in an effort to secure the best deal for workers. This kind of audacious and often successful brinksmanship caused voters to begin electing socialists as governments in their own right, a political outcome that grew more common as the Gilded Age wore on.

History of the Second Left
But big things changed in the early 1930s with the rise of Stalin as the USSR’s sole hegemon, the rise of the Nazi movement, Franco’s victory in Spain and the realignment of liberal political economy by John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beginning in the 1930s, responding to the growing consensus in the West that fascism was the greatest threat capitalist societies were facing, Stalin encouraged Soviet-aligned parties to throw themselves into “popular front” politics, not just joining but actively organizing grand anti-fascist, anti-conservative coalitions with progressives and liberals.

Even in places like Canada, where popular front politics never went anywhere electorally, the effects of Stalin’s decision, one shared by many socialists who suddenly found renewed common ground with liberals around basic issues like free speech and elections, was to restore the idea of “the left” as a grand coalition, a large and diverse political community, whose main constituent groupings were liberals, progressives and socialists.

Following the Second World War, the shared project of building the welfare state, albeit motivated by different reasons, kept “the left” together as a political and cultural community. When people said “left wing,” and “right wing,” they had clearly understood meanings. People could be “centre left” or “far left”; the left were always getting into arguments but the arguments were about the correct way to authentically be left-wing, for the most part.

At the height of the Cold War left consensus, social democrats were called “liberals in a hurry,” suggesting that there was not really much disagreement about the political direction society should head among those of the left, just the velocity at which the destination should be approached.

But all that changed in the 1980s and early 90s.

First, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then Soviet Union, there was simply no foreign policy justification for liberals to support the welfare state. Those who had worked hardest to enact welfare state policies, leaders like Lester Pearson, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnston, and Richard Nixon were Cold War hawks who believed that matching or exceeding whatever material guarantees the USSR offered was critical to victory.

For the first thirty years of the Cold War, building the welfare state had been the logical means of both pacifying the domestic left with material concessions and roles in its construction and competing with the Soviets in the international field of public opinion, claiming that a capitalist welfare state, organized on Keynesian economics could outperform a “democratic centralist” one-party state when it came to delivering housing, healthcare, education, etc.

Suddenly, all that social spending ceased to double as defense spending.

Besides, much of the left was becoming entranced the Third Way, a kind of PG-rated neoliberalism that offered a sort of Thatcherism with a human face, especially attractive to liberals and progressives. But even many former socialists, especially those more class-adjacent to their liberal and progressive allies, suddenly discovered the virtues of austerity and free trade.

In battles over the rise of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” programs, investor rights treaties like NAFTA and Maastricht, with their secret courts and irreversible privatization provisions, socialists were utterly routed in the 1990s, whether in electoral contests, like the 1993 Canadian election that came close to eradicating the New Democratic Party or in the internal politics of big tent left-wing parties, where the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Mike Harcourt routed the parties’ socialist factions.

Socialism After the Second Left
Socialists have reacted to this in a disappointing way. None of the optimism about socialism’s future and the rising power of labour that had ended the First Left were apparent in the 1990s. Socialists had not voluntary exited the left because their prospects looked better outside than inside. They had been marginalized, reduced to little more than mascots of a bygone age within the parties and larger movement culture of the left.

But instead of grimly accepting what had happened and marching forward on our, we socialists instead covered our defeat and humiliation in a rose-tinted nostalgia. “The left” was no longer a historically contingent alliance of disparate movements and interests but a sentimentalized identity rooted in the past.

To accept our defeat within the left was too much in the context of the massive geopolitical and economic setbacks we were experiencing, the collapse of industrial employment and private sector unionism. So, the worse the left treated socialists, the more explicitly anti-socialist its social values and political ideas, the more socialists sentimentally idealized “the left” not as a political possibility in the present but as a post-political social identity rooted in a story about the past, about one’s political and moral lineage and pedigree.

Socialists’ stirring speeches about the moral virtue, noble history and their unshakeable allegiance to a floating signifier called “the Left” have, of late, been in inverse proportion to their actual power and relevance on the contemporary left. The left doesn’t need or want them. It has achieved its current political hegemony by reuniting left-progressives with right-progressives. It has achieved its current electoral power by building a coalition of the private and public sector managerial classes and those who hope to enter them. Socialists and workers are nothing short of an inconvenience on today’s left. Hence its now-constant disparagement of working people.

Like it or not, if socialists ever want to work with the left again, it won’t be by pretending we have not been evicted. It will be the way we did during the Gilded Age, through brinksmanship and careful, strategically rational agreements an alliances. Sentimentally pretending we are still part of the left is the most effective way for socialists to give away the little remaining power we have.

We have to get back to building socialism outside the left, operating independently of the left and we have to get over this idea that the owner class somehow has worse cooties than the managerial class. Because evidence does not support that view. A lot of workers have got there. Maybe if we did, we could actually get something done like, I don’t know… bringing the forty-hour work week back to BC.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

My Baby Pictures: My First Political Essay, June 1992 on Consensus and Green Politics

I just found this piece while checking through my archive to make sure the 1992 chapters of my memoirs were accurate. I hope this piece disabuses those of you who think my PhD has anything to do with my writing practices or anything else about me of such a notion. This is an essay by a twenty-year-old who dropped out of first-year university.

IS CONSENSUS POSSIBLE IN THE GREEN PARTY?
By Stuart Parker

Several people have put it to me that the consensus process has been harmful to the development of Green Parties because it is a cumbersome and ineffective means of making decisions. I disagree with this strongly. I have seen consensus work effectively in a number of situations and believe consensus to be a valuable process for making decisions in groups. It is my belief, however, that the Green Party of B.C. is doing a great disservice both to itself and to the cause of advocating consensus by perpetuating the myth that the decision making process it is currently using on the provincial level is consensus, or even a distant relative of the process.

Having been an advocate of consensus decision making, and having applied it to groups I have organized outside of the Green Party, I had been puzzled by the lack of success in using the process experienced by the Greens and had always put the problem down to the behavior of a number of individuals. It was not until the B.C. Greens Annual General Meeting of 1992 that it occurred to me that a key and essential element of consensus was missing from Green Party decision making. I was reading and copying down the notes left by a workshop on values important to the functioning of consensus. The notes said, “trusting and respecting everyone.” It occurred to me that the element of trust had clearly been missing since I became involved with the B.C. Greens in 1989.

According to those practicing consensus, it is clear that trust is absolutely essential to the process. Unlike unanimity decision making, wherein concessions on unrelated issues are exchanged for consent on a particular issue, consensus presumes that every person operating within the process is working for the benefit of the group. It also presumes that every participant needs to have a high level of trust in the intelligence and motives of all his or her fellow participants. Under the original definition of the consensus process (as opposed to the one now used by the B.C. Greens), the facilitator is charged with phrasing and proposing all decisions adopted by the group, based on his or her sense of the group’s feelings on this issue.

The party’s faith in the intelligence and selflessness of its facilitators was obviously so seriously jeopardized by 1989 that the facilitator had been demoted to the role of chair in meetings, simply to keep a speakers’ list and receive motions from the floor. The term “enrichment” had been demoted to “friendly amendment” and a voting fallback had been introduced to the process so that blocks could be overridden.

The 1992 Annual General Meeting saw a movement by the party closer to the original definition of consensus, with a one day workshop devoted to consensus decision making, the reintroduction of trust building exercises and increased socializing between the participants. While a sense of trust in the process was not fully restored, the party moved closer to a group capable of using consensus. The 1992 meeting was also by far the most culturally homogeneous, being comprised, almost entirely of participants not only politically but socially part of the alternative movement, virtually all of whom felt fully comfortable and appreciative of the fact that the meeting took place at someone’s home. With a narrow cultural base, the meeting was more comfortable with a consensus process.

1991-92 also saw a sharp (50%) membership decline in the party and an even sharper decrease in funds. While during the growth years of 1988-91, consensus had changed into a unanimity oriented version of Robert’s Rules, after the party’s extremely disappointing showing in the 1991 provincial election, full unanimity, trust oriented consensus came back into vogue. This interestingly parallels the original adoption of consensus in 1985, which had followed the boom years of 1983-84. Membership had dropped from 1200 in 1983 to 700 in 1984 to roughly 350 in 1985. This had followed extremely disappointing electoral showings as well.

When political parties suffer emotionally crushing defeats, as with the Alberta Social Credit Party in the early 1970s and the B.C. Social Credit Party in 1991, where a party’s showings have fallen short of their expectations by orders of magnitude, there are what is known as “back to the roots” movements. In the case of right wing parties with a populist base, this means more barbecues, more meetings in rural areas, policies further to the right, active promotion of “Christian principles,” a movement away from active support of transnational business to small business, etc. In essence, such a movement attempts to create a culturally homogeneous party of white, rural, Christian people, driving away even faster the few mainstream supporters the organization the party has been able to hang on to. After all, it is much easier to handle a crushing defeat, when all the remaining supporters can feel better socially about one another because they not only have similar politics, but similar friends, are of a similar age and class and of the same religion.

Most political movements with populist roots tend to want to go back to those roots to cope with major defeats. Perhaps if the New Democrats had ended up with seven seats in 1991, instead of the Socreds, we might be seeing militant, old line socialist trade unionists taking over the party, pushing feminists and environmentalists to the fringe.

So, here we are with the Green Party and its own “back to the roots” movement. The 1992 Annual General Meeting Agenda invited people to enjoy “drumming and cappuccino” and “invoking the goddess from within.” The Canada Day weekend was forsaken in favour of the summer solstice, which is not a long weekend, in the extreme southwest corner of B.C., on a farm. The reaffirmation of consensus was only the crowning touch, and no wonder that it worked better, when the cultural base to which the meeting and party appealed were narrowed so effectively. We were able to send signals to career oriented people, members of organized religions and generally anyone not a member of the Gulf Islands, Kitsilano, New Age culture that they would not fit in culturally to our AGM.

As was explained to me by the writer of the agenda (whose views on Green policy I respect tremendously and whose work on hosting the meeting I do appreciate) “Well, that’s ‘island life.’” Well, the fact is that most of the people in BC, we are trying to reach, including many environmentalists, don’t live on our island. We are not here to promote a culture, we are here to promote a political program. Counter culture and electoral politics are not easily compatible. While both are necessary to achieve social change, the active fusion of the two strategies will render both impotent.

It is not the Green Party that will save the world, and there is no single strategy that will. The Green Party should be making itself the most effective tool to engage in electoral politics, while it leaves other groups working to save the planet to make themselves the most effective lobbying tools, or monkeywrenching tools, or alternative cultures. For the same reason that environmental groups do not limit themselves by supporting a single political party, and thereby narrowing their base of supporters, so the Green Party should not be narrowing its base culturally.

So how does this reflect on consensus? It is clear that consensus is an effective process in an affinity group of culturally similar people, and I believe, capable of enhancing such a group. But when it is applied to a larger group, without a basis of trust, with membership criteria based solely on paying a fee, either the process breaks down or the group consciously or unconsciously undertakes a policy to discourage the membership of people with whom they cannot easily establish a basis of trust. From 1988 to 1991, we have watched the first process happen and now we are switching to the second. It seems that we have a choice: either to make a farce of the process or create additional membership criteria. Because right now, the membership form mentions neither trust nor culture.

If the Greens are to move ahead, it is my belief that we must create a party inclusive of all people who share our concern for the imminent breakdown of planetary life support systems. We must therefore adopt a process which does not have trust as a prerequisite.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

There Is Nothing Socialist About David Eby’s $8 Billion Deficit

The Strange Case of Grant Devine
In the spring of 2001, former Conservative Saskatchewan premier Grant Devine addressed a private luncheon of Fraser Institute supporters at a swanky downtown Vancouver hotel. There were good reasons for the event to be private. Devine was, even among the most ardent members of the political right, a controversial figure. His government had gone down to one of the most crushing defeats at the polls in the province’s history in 1991, with the party falling from 45% of the vote to 25% and losing 28 of its 38 seats in the legislature, with every single urban MLA going down to defeat. And that was only the beginning.

Senior staffers, backbenchers and even cabinet ministers were prosecuted by the RCMP for an organized expense fraud scheme that had been common knowledge in the Devine government’s final term in office. Former cabinet ministers did jail time for stealing public funds. One committed suicide to avoid an imminent arrest. In the 1995 election, the party was reduced to five seats. And its caucus crossed the floor to form a new party called the Saskatchewan Party, to which the NDP referred in the 1999 and 2003 elections as the “Conservative Party witness protection program.” It has not held a seat since.

But the total destruction of the Saskatchewan affiliate of their party was not even the thing about Devine of which grassroots Canadian conservatives most strongly disapproved. In the late 80s and early 90s he had plunged Saskatchewan deeply into debt by building infrastructure in rural communities far beyond what local demand could support and undertook a pricey administrative reorganization of government to fill the many office buildings he constructed in small communities around the province. He also instituted direct subsidies to farmers and ceased charging resource royalties to oil companies and he sold off most revenue-generating part of the government.

Devine’s government remains widely viewed as the most fiscally irresponsible government anywhere in Canada in the 1980s. Not only did they leave office awash in debt; they had created a massive structural deficit that would take a decade of austerity to eliminate.

The Real Dangers of Public Debt
So, at the private luncheon, where no media were allowed, he was asked about this very thing. His response, and I must paraphrase here, was that he knew, a year into his final mandate, that he was facing certain defeat in 1991. And therefore he chose to destroy the province’s finances so that, when the NDP returned to power, they would be unable to bring in any new government programs, that they would be forced into enacting austerity and not expanding the welfare of the province that gave birth to Canadian Medicare.

I have no idea if this was a mere excuse concocted with the benefit of hindsight or whether it was the plan all along. But it was clearly true: plunge a jurisdiction far enough into debt and its ability to make political choices democratically is profoundly undermined. And one has a pretty good idea of who will be making the political choices in an indebted jurisdiction: the global financial elite, the banks, the bond-raters and the investor class.

Historically, the Saskatchewan NDP, the first democratic socialist party ever to take power in North America, has always been debt-phobic. The party held power for seventeen years before introducing Medicare because it felt that for the policy to have a chance, the province would need to be debt-free.

Because it is private companies, especially Standard and Poors, owned and run by the global financial elite, who hand out credit ratings, a heavily indebted and heavily borrowing jurisdiction can only continue enacting its policies if they meet with the approval of the elite of the financial sector. And once upon a time, it seems like just the other day, New Democrats did not understand the corporate elite to be their best buddies.

As a provincial finance minister I once knew reported of her meeting with Standard and Poors, the fiscal responsibility of your jurisdiction and its future financial plans are but small factors in the determination of your jurisdiction’s credit rating. Bond raters and bankers are, like everyone else, ideological. And they want to see governments and people who share their ideology do well and those who do not, not quite so well.

The reality is that a credit rating downgrade by the bond-raters, changes in the lending terms of banks and other governments are political in character. And, the more indebted you are, the more additional borrowing you need to conduct for the coming fiscal year, the greater the ability of the global financial elite to throw your jurisdiction into a debt spiral through a series of interest rate hikes.

Back in the 90s, we saw that play out at the international level as governments like Zimbabwe’s and Argentina’s went into these tailspins, ultimately resulting in World Bank bailouts contingent on World Bank officials being given control of the countries’ finance ministries decisions over program funding leaving their capitals and moving to New York and Geneva.

I have never understood organizations like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ argument that borrowing money is somehow socialist or left-wing. Certainly, there was a time when a lot of borrowing was done by social democratic and liberal governments to more rapidly expand their economies and build the welfare state more quickly during the first phase of the Cold War (1948-80). But this was a period when the global financial elite were part of broad society-wide consensus that producing prosperity and a social safety net for working and middle class people was essential to winning the Cold War for the capitalist side.

As that consensus evaporated in the late 1970s and early 80s, borrowing policies that had worked in the 1950s and 60s stopped working. That was partly due to the restructuring the global financial system in 1974 but more importantly, because, unlike in the age of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, the financial sector no longer saw itself as a partner in the construction of the welfare state.

The NDP’s Dramatic Fiscal Policy Reversal
When John Horgan and Carole James, his finance minister, came to lead the first BC NDP government in sixteen years, they were proud of the small budget surpluses they posted during their half-decade in power. And this was just one aspect of their commitment to policy continuity with the government they had replaced. This was, in large measure, because their government’s senior decision-makers were veterans of the party’s nine turbulent years in power during the 1990s, especially after its re-election in 1996 when it faced a capital strike by the mining industry and other major sectors of the economy.

The late 2010s and early 20s NDP was not just afraid of the banks. They were afraid of pretty much every major international industrial cartel. Not spooking or upsetting the mining and petroleum sectors was almost the categorical imperative of the Horgan regime. That is because, like a credit rating downgrade, a capital strike can hobble an economy and destroy the ability of a government to pursue its agenda as the economic contraction causes its revenues to fall and its costs to grow.

So, what are we to make of the new fiscal approach of premier David Eby, the tyrant who succeeded Horgan because the official returning officer, who just happened to be a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, running the succession process, disqualified Eby’s competitor and acclaimed him with nary a vote being cast by the party or its caucus?

The official $7.9 billion budget deficit he and his finance minister announced for 2024-25 is only part of the story. The actual increase in BC’s debt will be just shy of $20 billion thanks to borrowing hidden away in shell games around capital spending and crown agencies and corporations. The province’s debt to gross domestic product ration will climb from 17.6% to 21% in a single year leaving us $123 billion in the hole. And it is not like this will be a one-time thing, the forecast for the 2024-26 deficit, if Eby wins re-election this fall is $6.3 billion, a number sure to grow as the date of next year’s budget approaches, even if we pretend the inevitable orgy of pre-election spending announcements this fall is not going to happen.

Since becoming premier and, as I remarked above, even in the process of becoming premier, Eby has made it clear that he is a janitor for the global financial elite, someone whom they can trust to continue the massive subsidies to the Royal Dutch Shell and the other partners in LNG Canada, someone they can trust to continue throwing a million dollars a day at the Site C dam, whose energy will power the increased fracking operations necessary to fill the pipeline to Kitimat.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical industry can trust him to pursue to most aggressive policies to increase the supply of legal opioids, going so far as to issue fentanyl to high school students without their parents’ consent or knowledge. And readers of this blog know what I think about his government’s other aggressive policies to destroy kids’ endocrine systems and get them hooked on pharmaceuticals they will need for the rest of their lives.

And that is why in my view, Eby is pursuing fiscal policies that undermine the ability of any successor government, his own or another party’s, to deviate from the policy course British Columbia was on before the NDP even formed government.

Because if this plunge into debt continues, the effects of a credit rating downgrade or a capital strike on BC will soon be so catastrophic that another premier would have to spend years paying down the debt before they dared apply the same carbon tax to Big Oil that they do to individual consumers, before they enacted appurtenance legislation to revive our sawmills, before they stopped experimenting on children with dangerous, dependence-inducing drugs.

If a government wants to change course on any major issue of concern to the global financial elite, it will have to be preceded by years of austerity and policy continuity.

This idea that racking up debt is somehow socialist is absurd because what this kind of government debt really does is drain power out of our legislature and into the boardrooms of the banks and bond raters in New York while their stooge, Premier Eby does a soft shoe routine to distract us and his sycophants praise his supposedly courageous borrowing program.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Ugly Symbiosis Between New Democrats and Church Burners

Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.

And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.

When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.

They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.

But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.

Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.

And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.

Why is this?

I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.

Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.

There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.

Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.

The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.

My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.

In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.

People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Segregationists Who Burn Churches Are Who They Have Always Been

Unpopular authoritarian regimes often intimidate their subjects into faking popular enthusiasm and support through extortion, coercion and intimidation. But when such regimes are weak, the best they can do is to intimidate their subjects into silence, at least. This is the reality of modern Canada, a weak government, led by weak, authoritarian men, who lack the power to terrorize the populace into a fearful ovation and must settle for browbeating the majority into silence.

I grew up in a black family in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the stories from my mother, aunts and uncles, as well as veterans of the US Civil Rights movement like folk singer Leon Bibb, friend of the great Paul Robeson, at the dining room table. One of Leon’s most evocative stories was of the first time he witnessed a lynching on a countryside drive with his father on the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s. He talked about how after witnessing the swinging corpse of a young black man, a silence descended over their car and followed him and his father into their house when they returned home.

Unable to compel ordinary, decent Canadian people into the kind of terrorized ovation a great authoritarian like Joseph Stalin might elicit in support of his government’s most depraved policies, Woke Canada must settle for the grudging silence of its non-white Christian population as its governments proceed with a set of bizarre and perverse policies opposed, by the vast majority of the Canadian public, a majority that has been cowed by relentless smears, threats and intimidation.

Yet, as the Kaufman report, just released by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, states, when anonymized by pollsters, Canadians of all races, religions and cultures share a profound skepticism of the articles of faith of Woke Canada. While I do not share the report’s analysis about structural racism (indeed, this article is premised on the opposite belief), the data about Canadian public opinion, on which it is based, is indisputable. And it is no coincidence that the strategy we see being used to shut down opposition to the establishment is based on the one Woke lie that has been successfully sold to Canadians, according to the report: that there are mass graves of hitherto-unidentified bodies of First Nations children near abandoned residential schools.

Last week, a surveillance in camera in Saskatchewan captured a striking image. A Roman Catholic Church whose congregants are primarily of African, Middle Eastern and Filipino origin, in Regina, was the site of Canada’s ninety-seventh church arson since the start of 2020. But it is not the flames emanating from the gasoline poured into the church that was most striking. The camera captured an image of a young, white man, wearing a white hood performing the arson.

Having grown up as I did, such an image is an especially chilling one for me. We descendants of slaves know of the long tradition of white men in white hoods burning the churches of racialized people.

The Klan Is Not An Organization But A Property of American History
What historians call the First Ku Klux Klan, which flourished from 1865-89, burned the churches of their former slaves throughout the South during the violent process euphemistically called “Redemption,” whereby black voters were intimidated and murdered to allow white majority governments to seize power and disenfranchise black citizens. The Klan favoured the churches because they were typically the sole or primary place black people could congregate. Lacking community infrastructure and real estate, black churches played a special role as political meeting hall, community centre and place of worship.

So the irregular Confederate militias torched these buildings and often the people inside to intimidate black people, to let them know that the simple act of assembling on their own terms would not be tolerated.

That original Klan died out after it had outlived its purpose and restored Confederate rule to the South. But following the release and smash success of America’s first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which the original KKK were portrayed as the heroes, those responsible for America’s reunification and true ethnogenesis with the inauguration of the Jim Crow system. A new Klan formed, this time with broader interests, as a mass national organization that opposed Slavic, Jewish and Catholic immigration, as well as supporting ongoing racial segregation and its expansion to the national level.

In reality, the Second Ku Klux Klan was created as an insurance and mail fraud scheme and fizzled after a series of criminal prosecutions but, in its day, it nationalized tactics previously confined to the South. Black farmers in Upstate New York were lynched and mosques, synagogues, and orthodox churches became targets of arson by young, white-hooded white men.

My mother, aunts and uncles all remember the church bombings and burnings of the Civil Rights Era, after the Klan had reassembled, this time as the paramilitary of the White Citizens’ Council movement. The Third Ku Klux Klan was not so much an independent organization but the paramilitary wing of White Citizens’ Councils, its violence functioning as a kind of initiation process to vet ambitious young white men the Councils installed in leadership positions in state-level Democratic Parties to resist the national party’s efforts to integrate the party and end segregation and disenfranchisement.

This time, the churches were targeted not just because they had remained the primary civil spaces of black people in the South but because the Civil Rights Movement had decided its public-facing leadership should be churchmen like Martin Luther King Jr. and church activists like Rosa Parks.

That Klan fizzled-out when the last miscegenation laws were repealed and avowed segregationists like George Wallace recanted their white supremacy in the early 1980s. While individuals like David Duke continued to grab the odd headline by claiming to lead an organization that barely existed, the reality is that like its two previous incarnations, the Klan fizzled-out as an organization.

The thesis of this essay is that the Klan is that it is not so much an organization as a set of reactions inherent to the Anglo American racial system. Until the premises and structures underpinning this system change in profound and fundamental, ways, we will be overshadowed by the Once and Future Klan.

Four Years of Church-Burnings in Canada
In 2020, young white people began donning white hoods and setting fire to racialized people’s churches all over Canada in response to a controversy over whether there were undiscovered mass graves of indigenous children near former residential schools. Shockingly, despite nearly one hundreds arsons having been committed since this controversy erupted, only one arsonist has been arrested or charged.

Kathleen Panek, a young white woman who wore a conventional black hood, rather than a KKK-style face-covering white hood was identified through camera footage, charged, prosecuted and convicted. While her lawyer claimed that she was under the influence of drugs and upset with her boyfriends, Panek has remained closed-lipped about her motives for destroying a Surrey church whose congregants are Egyptian immigrants. 

So the only clues we have had about the other arsonists came from their social media supporters, who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Woke. The constituency least supportive of the burnings, which originally targeted indigenous Christian churches exclusively, before branching out to include Filipino, Coptic and other non-white urban congregations, were indigenous people. All factions of indigenous civil society, from the most neo-traditional and eco-conscious to the biggest pro-business, pro-development folks roundly condemned the burnings and begged the arsonists to stop.

This has had no effect. Woke, white Canadians continue to applaud or remain silent as the most sacred buildings of constituencies with whom they purport to sympathize are destroyed. Just four days ago, a Conservative MP seeking a unanimous motion of condemnation of the church burnings was shouted down by NDP and Liberal MPs refusing to grant consent.

Churches of indigenous people, churches of immigrants, churches of racialized people—their burnings have either been celebrated or Wokes have averted their gaze. No condemnations have emanated from supposedly “anti-hate” organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. They are busy sharing lists with Antifa so that when these non-white people of faith object to government policy, they can be more efficiently doxed and threatened.

I have found it telling that Woke activists were eager to label the participants in the Freedom Convoy as Klansmen and suggest, without the slightest evidence that they are led by the KKK. That is because fundamental to Wokeness is its use of projection as a rhetorical tactic to sow confusion in its adversaries.

There is one group of white supremacist, white-hooded, church-burning segregationists in Canada and we know who they and their friends are. Only one social movement is fighting to racially segregate university campuses and classes, the Wokes. Only one social movement is asserting that whites are intellectually superior to non-whites (the euphemism they use is “logocentric”); the reason non-whites just can’t do math as well and can’t even show up on time is that whites are uniquely logocentric, according to the ideology propounded by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Only one movement in Canada is claiming that history is made exclusively by whites and that non-whites are just bystanders and victims.

As we have seen in the fiasco at Harvard, Wokes are not interested in appointing competent, intelligent minority tokens to represent them in their elite-level diversity projects. They want to see the least competent, the least qualified, the most dependent, the most precarious non-whites in token positions. Because that is all they expect of non-whites: inferiority.

Think of all of the brilliant black female academics who have out-published and out-taught Claudine Gay a hundredfold, the formidable black and Asian women of American politics who could out-organize and out-debate Kamala Harris in their sleep. That’s because, if a minority token goes off-script, their fall needs to be immediate and precipitous; so one seeks out tokens with the fewest accomplishments and the most skeletons.

Going off-script is, after all, highly consequential, when Wokes wield so much of their power through acts of extorted ventriloquism. As Cherokee author Thomas King observed, nothing upsets white liberals more than one not being “the Indian [they] had in mind.”

When Canadian Labour Congress officials assert that lesbians, women’s rights and child protection activists are white supremacists controlled by evil, shadowy American money, leavened by “Russian disinformation,” they need reality to resemble, at least superficially, their outrageous claims. And that means keeping down, keeping silent non-white Christians who are deeply concerned about the capture of our schools by genderwang and deeply racist teachings, asserting their children’s inherent racial inferiority as a host of disciplines and skills.

Indigenous Christians, immigrant Christians, non-white Christians need to be intimidated, to be kept silent, lest they contradict the white supremacist “narrative” of the Wokes, that they love all this tokenization, DEI racism and genderwang. And one of the ways you do that is a four-year campaign of burning their churches.

Does this mean someone is orchestrating the burnings? No. But I do think that we can now assume that the enthusiasm the Canadian establishment has for punishing the perpetrators is about the same as that of Dixie’s establishment during the last round, half a century ago. Those wielding the hammer, the commissar class are not trying too hard to stop this because they’re not sure that it’s wrong.

Am I asserting that there is a conspiracy here? No. Am I even asserting that Wokes are aware that they are white supremacists, that their whole tearful colonizer act is a giant racist humblebrag? No. What I am saying is that: I don’t care who the Wokes think they are; I don’t care how they self-identify, who they believe they are or what they think they’re doing any more than I care about the inner life of the supporters of the first three Klans.

What matters is this: if white people are putting on white hoods and burning the churches of non-whites who need to be kept in line to be kept out of politics and civil society, it doesn’t matter how they identify. If people fighting to segregate schools and propound doctrines of non-white inferiority, we already know who they are.

They are the Ku Klux Klan.

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