Skip to content

BC Politics

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

The Groundhog: Life After the Tories

My Two Years as a Tory
As some of you know, I was deeply involved in the BC Conservative Party the past two years, an experience that I do not regret, despite it ending in easily anticipated disappointment. The reasons for my involvement I made clear: I am from a jurisdiction, British Columbia, whose governments, at both the provincial and federal level are among the most extreme in the Global North when it comes to

  1. shutting down democratic processes, violating democratic norms and draining the power out of legislatures into the hands of the head of government and his unelected courtiers (i.e. the current premier was appointed by the chief lobbyist for Royal Dutch Shell after she, as “returning officer” for his election, disqualified all other candidates),
  2. the Woke capture of institutions and the enforcement of the movement’s bizarre American space religion as the de facto state religion, including the administration of loyalty oaths to the religion’s tenets to obtain or keep most white-collar jobs,
  3. the continued escalation and expansion of programs to facilitate and encourage self-harm, suicide and sex crimes, such as the promotion and distribution of free chemical castration drugs and addictive opiates and stimulants to children as young as twelve, as well the promotion and expansion of state-facilitated suicide facilities and the genital mutilation of troubled children; BC even has a serial child rapist housed in our local prison mother-baby unit!

Like many other anti-authoritarian populists from across the political spectrum, I worked hard to elect BC Conservative MLAs in 2024. And I am glad I did so for a few reasons:

  1. there was a chance we could not pass up that the anti-authoritarian populists would set the course of the party and that of the caucus, containing, as it does, so many newcomers to the legislature who might resist the efforts of the establishment to capture the party and make it part of the One Party, Three Factions system that has run BC for the past generation;
  2. I had the opportunity to meet, work with and befriend an incredibly wide diversity of grassroots activists working hard to oppose our society’s ghoulish and authoritarian turn;
  3. I had the opportunity to work in the BC Legislature, a building the province’s establishment has worked hard to keep me out of the past forty years; and
  4. I had the chance to immerse myself in the present-day culture of the Convoyist, Christian Right and other social movements about which the mainstream media offers only distorted and outdated images.

But the sad reality is that the young courtiers with whom John Rustad, the party leader, insists on surrounding himself, came of age, politically, within the conservative movement under Stephen Harper and his successors, who have actually led the country, until recently, in the destruction of democratic institutions, processes and culture. And this has helped to create a fundamental structural problem in all Canadian political parties: because the leader and his courtiers, not party members or voters, primarily determine whether candidates are nominated and re-nominated, in practical terms, elected officials see themselves as serving at the pleasure of the courtiers, not the reverse.

As a result, it has been fairly easy for the establishment to capture the party and reintegrate it into the One Party, Three Factions system that governs BC. The party has since  proceeded quickly to shut down any level of internal member-driven democracy through mass disenfranchisements and mass expulsions. And party caucus members overwhelmingly see themselves as serving not party members or BC voters but rather the leader and his unelected enforcers.

While this was always the most likely outcome of the BC Conservatives returning to the legislature under the leadership of John Rustad, it was not a certain outcome and, even in the context of a larger failure, my work did help to result in an expansion of the Overton Window in BC politics. Some Tory MLAs, especially those who have since defected to the splinter party, One BC, have stood in the legislature to speak up for biological and historical truth and against the speech suppression efforts in which the establishment and captured institutions in our society have been engaging. And I was pleased to see today’s Mainstreet Research polls showing the Independent Conservatives and/or One BC receiving the support of 10% of voters right out of the gate.

Old Growth and New Growth
This spring, even as my relationship with Rustad and his Young Turks entered its terminal stage, I found myself noticing, almost every week, positive signs in the larger grassroots social movement world. My institute’s gender critical group had become large and committed enough for some members to exit and start a new feminist organization that better expressed their views and approaches and incorporated some of the new energy that has been coming into my group. While schisms are often sad, I was very pleased to see that we had regained the grassroots capacity to have another organization split off without killing us and that people were not in such a defensive mode that they were sticking together out of despair or fear.

I was also contacted by a former elected official about him running an anti-Woke campaign for the leadership of the BC Green Party. While those efforts were ultimately stymied by the party bureaucracy itself, fearing his potential success, it was exciting not just to see this individual attempting a return to electoral politics but to see the number of Old Growth Leftists who were eager to hop on board and start organizing with him.

Then there was the decision of the federal NDP to select its least-Woke caucus member as its interim leader, who began his leadership by issuing a statement repenting of the party’s turn away from class politics and affirming its purpose as politics by and for workers. I also saw my friends in Deep Green Resistance conduct a successful European tour and site their annual conference in Philadelphia, far outside their core territory in Northern California where I have been attending their conventions.

Not only have I seen various members of the Old Growth Left emboldened and reactivated, one of the most exciting things I have been discovering over the past couple of years is just how many Freedom Movement (e.g. Convoyist) and Christian Right activists share a lot more of my concerns than just genderwang, authoritarianism and censorship. If one is looking for peace activists who question NATO, they are to be found on the so-called alt-right; ditto opponents of free trade and investor rights, who favour import substitution industrialization and/or smaller, more locally self-reliant economies.

Furthermore, because the Woke environmental movement has basically lost interest in almost every environmental issue except climate change, there is more environmental concern and activism on the part of conservatives than I have seen in decades. This is true especially in areas of environmental activism the left will not touch for one reason or another.

Cobalt and lithium mining, along with other forms of environmental degradation associated with electric vehicle manufacture are one area of focus. Endocrine disruptor pollution is, again, primarily the concern of conservatives because, on the Woke left, believing that healthy, natural endocrine systems are good is viewed as “transphobic.” Similarly, forest practices that render forests more likely to burn, like the elimination of succession growth trees such as aspen, face greater opposition on the right because climate activists like to depict the increasing number and intensity of wildfires as caused solely by atmospheric carbon buildup. And, practices that cause adverse local, as opposed to global, climate change are, again, primarily within the optic of conservatives and not the Woke left.

But, aside from these culture war “gotchas,” there is just more of a sense on the part of conservatives today that the forests are too quiet, our windshields too clean and our oceans too empty than there has been since I was a teenager.

After three years of living as a pariah in a shrinking world on the left, followed by two years living as a kind of refugee on the right, I feel like I am in a social location where I can organize and speak about what I believe in again. The combination of changes on the political right and the sheer number of refugees from Wokeness, like me, that it has had to take in, has created opportunities to get on with the work of building parallel, replacement institutions on the conservative/alt-right side of our cultural partition.

Groundhog Day
As I suggested in my recent article, the Death of Parable, our lack of access to agrarian and natural landscapes and their creatures has impaired our capacity to engage in metaphor, comparison and literary reference. Such is the case with Groundhog Day. The term now refers not to Groundhog Day but to a thirty-year-old film about a TV reporter covering the festival. When people say “Groundhog Day” today, they usually mean that they are being forced to live in a time loop, to endlessly re-experience the same sequence of events. Many have forgotten that this day was originally about the arrival of spring and oracular beliefs about a particular animal.

As legend has it, when a groundhog emerges from his burrow after hibernating through the winter, if he is able to see his shadow, he retreats into his burrow and hibernates for another six weeks. If he does not, spring is arriving.

I guess what I am really trying to say in this article is that, for the first time in half a decade, I cannot see my shadow. I feel in my bones that spring is finally coming for the Old Growth Left after a long, long, cold winter.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Forget “ignorance is strength;” in today’s Canada, weakness is strength

On June 28th, 1988 Brian Smith, the Attorney-General of British Columbia dramatically resigned his position during a speech to the provincial legislature. Smith had been at odds with Premier Bill Vander Zalm over major policy differences with his boss. After the resignation and speech, he spoke to reporters and then attended the caucus meeting that debated the fallout of his move. He remained a leading member of that caucus for the next year and a half, at which time he resigned to accept a job in the private sector. A week later, Grace McCarthy, the deputy premier resigned, also citing concerns about policy and leadership. Both remained members of the Social Credit caucus throughout Vander Zalm’s premiership.

Upon Smith’s resignation from the Legislature in November 1989, Vander Zalm called a byelection for his seat of Oak Bay-Gordon Head. Oak Bay’s popular mayor, Susan Brice, who agreed with the criticisms of McCarthy and Smith resigned her position to seek the Social Credit nomination. She was opposed at the packed and hotly contested meeting by Kathleen Toth, an anti-abortion activist, Vander Zalm loyalist and future friend and comrade of mine.

Toth lost the nomination to Brice who would go on to campaign on the slogan, “Send a message to Bill Vander Zalm—and make me the messenger.” Vander Zalm dutifully signed Brice’s nomination papers after she won a large, democratic mandate from party members and encouraged voters to support her. She was narrowly defeated by NDP candidate Elizabeth Cull, whose ignominious future in BC politics will be covered in a future essay.

That is not to say that the Social Credit Party’s caucus survived Vander Zalm’s leadership intact. MLAs Graham Bruce, Dave Mercier, Doug Mowat and Duane Crandall all temporarily left the caucus, caucusing as “Independent Social Credit” from October 1989 to February 1990.

Vander Zalm had no love for Brice when he signed her nomination papers or for McCarthy and Smith as they grumbled from his back bench. But he suffered their membership in caucus and suffered Brice’s candidacy for one simple reason—to do anything else would have made him look weaker than he already did.

Only a generation ago, you see, democratic norms in Canada were such that not permitting a candidate to run because they openly opposed your leadership, expelling members from caucus because they did not like how you were running things would have made a leader look weak, fragile, unable to face opposition in a caucus meeting, willing to void the democratic decision of party members simply to silence dissent. The thinking was, back then, that a leader who couldn’t win a vote fair and square, couldn’t face down his internal opposition in a meeting was so weak, so incapable of the thrust and parry of politics that they were axiomatically unqualified for high office.

A true leader, a powerful person, was someone who could keep a caucus in line, a party in line, a government in line through old fashioned loyalty and charisma. If a leader were in danger of losing a vote, he would be shaking hands, slapping backs and cutting deals right in the open at a nomination meeting, party convention or caucus retreat.

If a leader were concerned about whom the members would choose to represent them in a tough seat or a seat he wanted for one of his buddies, that leader would drive or fly to the local nominating meeting, just as NDP leader Mike Harcourt did in 1990, when his preferred candidate in Nelson-Creston, Corky Evans, was facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from environmentalist Wayne Peppard, who had signed up more new members than Evans and appeared on track to win at the meeting.

Back then, candidate nominations in Canada worked like nuclear missile silos. Two keys had to be turned to launch a candidacy, one by the local members at their nominating meeting and one by the party’s leader. Typically, if the party leader didn’t like the local choice, they would suck it up and sign the nomination papers anyway, the way Vander Zalm did with Susan Brice. If the leader really couldn’t abide the local candidate, they could refuse to sign, the result being that no candidate was fielded under the party banner, not that the leader would simply handpick a local candidate.

So, Harcourt and his guys headed up to Nelson and shook the hand of every person who attended. In plain view of the assembled media, many who had followed them up from the coast, they intimidated; they negotiated; they slapped backs; they made promises; they used charisma and star power. And they won the meeting, proving that Harcourt was a strong leader, a man with the charisma and authority to change the minds and votes of local party members at a consequential meeting.

Indeed, that was how Andrea Horvath and Peter Kormos swung enough votes from the ranks of my supporters to leader-preferred Julian Heller in the NDP nomination meeting for the Saint Paul’s byelection in 2009. But that era was practically over by then. The following year, it would not be a charm offensive or Kormos trying to dislocate my shoulder from behind that would end by NDP candidacy in the federal riding of the same name. My candidacy was simply vetoed by the NDP’s newly-installed “vetting committee.”

Those changes had been underway for some time, first in the Liberal Party of Canada, where the party changed its constitution in 1996 to permit the leader to unilaterally nominate candidates without local nomination meetings. Stephen Harper’s Tories were quick to adopt the same practice in 2003, followed by the NDP in 2010, just in the nick of time to stop me!

By the time the NDP adopted these changes, the legacy media was demanding them because the theory of what made a leader strong or legitimate had wholly inverted in less than a generation.

Today, a strong leader, is understood by the Canadian establishment as someone who can and should silence all criticism within their party and expel from its caucus and its membership anyone publicly critical of them. Giving one’s critics a hearing, debating areas of disagreement, seeking to bring one’s opponents around to one’s side, tolerating different camps in one’s party and dealing fairly with all of them, resolving disputes by voting not barking orders: these things are portrayed by our legacy media as signs of weakness, incompetence and disorganization. Personalities that, in any other time, would be understood as those of petty tyrants are understood to be the epitome of democratic statesmanship, and vice versa.

This sea change in our theory of leadership may have started in party back rooms but is now everywhere. Legacy media attacked Pierre Poilievre for meeting with Freedom Convoy representatives. While he did not take up most of their demands, he has nevertheless been pilloried in the national press for three straight years for merely speaking with people whose political views are controversial. That was once the duty of every politician in a democracy. Now it is seen not merely as a political failure but a moral one.

Furthermore, he took months of abuse from the media for allowing some of his MPs to meet with visiting members of the Bundestag representing the Alliance for Germany, the government-in-waiting, as the chamber’s second-largest party. Sure AfD has some controversial policies but not long ago, (a) it was not a party leader’s business to regulate every single meeting members of his caucus took and (b) it would have been viewed as a serious lapse of political and diplomatic etiquette for a visiting delegation of foreign parliamentarians to be denied a meeting with every single member of our parliament.

What would have looked like cowardice, smallness, a lack of curiosity, a failure of basic politeness, decency and hospitality in 1995 is lauded as statesmanship in 2025. The behaviours our culture has, for centuries, belittled as weak and tyrannical are now somehow supposed to be understood as courageous, as showing leadership. People who cannot or will not face, will not confront people who have strong opinions of their own, who are comfortable only in rooms of toadies, sycophants and stooges are, by definition, incapable of leading us anywhere good because they are not true leaders.

These may be stupid, ugly, petty times but true leadership is what it has always been, no matter how hard the media works to make cowardice seem courageous and courage seem cowardly.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

From South Chicago to Lower Post, BC: The Contemporary Relevance of Richard Wright’s Native Son

Orthodoxy and Un-Saying
People often mistakenly call Wokeness and its component parts “ideology.” While there are certainly ideological aspects of this godless religion, they are often not the most salient characteristics. Certainly, there are religious doctrines associated with this cluster of social movements, but the mechanisms by which they are defended or justified are not ideological in character. Indeed, when a movement propounding a religious orthodoxy takes an authoritarian turn, as Wokeness certainly has, ideologically driven argument is rarely its preferred tool for imposing its beliefs on the skeptical.

For instance, when Galileo Galilei was persecuted for propounding his scientific discoveries, the argument of the Roman Catholic Church was not that his views were incorrect. No argument was mounted against his ideas. Rather, the church argued that stating his views was impermissible and because his views should not have been stated, they were effectively un-said. No argument needed to be mounted against them at all; the faithful were not asked to disbelieve them but rather to act as though they had never heard them.

To state that Central Asian Muslim migrant communities in England are perpetrating violence against girls at a significantly greater rate than their neighbours is not a position UK Labour politicians argue against. They simply state that making this observation is Islamophobic. Because it is impermissible to make the observation, its veracity need not be evaluated. To observe that transgender-identified males are three to four times more likely to commit acts of sexual violence than other males is not a position anyone argues against. Such an observation is un-said because to make it is transphobic. To observe that the main reason that black Americans are more likely to be victims of violent crimes is because young black males are more likely to commit such crimes than other Americans is racist. The veracity of the observation is irrelevant. The problem is not vulnerable black Americans being assaulted; it is people talking about who is assaulting them.

These practices of orthodoxy enforcement, of un-saying, do not impact all of us equally. As you can see from the paragraph above, this kind of retroactive censorship hits the most vulnerable people in our society the hardest, working class teenage girls, incarcerated women and black seniors are just some of the constituencies whose victimization it is impermissible to talk about. Furthermore, if we expand our optic, we might also consider how ill-served young black men or men compelled by an untreated mental illness to mutilate themselves also are by this state of affairs.

Author Wesley Yang cogently observed on Twitter last week that, thanks to this phenomenon, “the best way to obtain immunity from consequence in today’s media environment is to make one’s wrongdoing aligned with dark stereotypes adhering to one’s group—so that a neutral description of what you actually did violates a taboo against exclusionary tropes.”

This “shoot the messenger” policy is today so vigorously defended by those claiming to be “anti-racism” activists that many imagine these practices of silencing observations that risk reinforcing negative stereotypes have always been a practice of anti-racist movements. But this is just another example of Woke reimaginings of the past to serve the present.

Richard Wright, Native Son and the Black Communists
Richard Wright, whose grandparents had been born into slavery, whose parents were sharecroppers, who grew up in violent, impoverished homes and the occasional orphanage lifted himself out of poverty to become one of the greatest black American novelists of the twentieth century. An autodidact with little formal education, Wright did not merely teach himself the craft of writing but dialectical materialism. His credentials as a Marxist and literary giant, not to mention his membership in the Communist Party, ultimately led to his selection as editor of the Daily Worker in 1937.

Shortly thereafter, he began work on his next novel, Native Son. Its main character was provocatively named Bigger Thomas. Bigger—whose name Wright said he chose deliberately to rhyme with “nigger”—was a young, violent black criminal who epitomized the stereotypes of young American black men that are little-changed in the eighty-five years since the novel was first published. “Thomas” referred to the obsequious and weak aspects of his nature by way of reference to Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Native Son was published in 1940 to great accolades from across the American left. The first novel by a black author featured by Book of the Month Club, it was praised by communists, socialists and civil rights activists; Hollywood made three movies of it, the first in 1951, starring Wright himself. Partly inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Bigger, an uneducated violent petty criminal, murders a young, naïve, white communist woman and, in prison, discovers not Jesus but Karl Marx. Orson Welles directed its 1941 Broadway debut.

Much of the final part of the book is a structural analysis of the economic forces that have manufactured Thomas and his ilk that caused so many young men to become uneducated violent criminals. The fact was that too many black men were poor; too many were uneducated; too many were violent; too many were Uncle Toms.

One would think that in our Woke moment, when ideas of “structural violence,” “institutional racism,” “colonialism,” etc. seem hegemonic that Native Son with its highly didactic Marxist concluding chapters would be a much beloved text among progressives. But we all know the reality. Were Native Son published today, it would be assailed as a racist, white supremacist text that reinforced racial stereotypes. Wokes would burn copies and call for Wright’s assault or murder for suggesting, as an eye-witness, that America’s black community has problems with men’s violence that are common to all communities and has problems that are exceptional and non-universal.

You Cannot Cure What You Cannot Diagnose
If one cannot name a problem, the chances of solving it become vanishingly small. If one cannot take notice of the specific features of violence and other social problems in a place like South Side Chicago, where Wright grew up, what chance do we have of addressing these problems? We cannot protect people from today’s Bigger Thomases on their block if we cannot admit that Thomas exists in the first place.

Whether it is violence in America’s inner cities or addiction on Canada’s remote Indian Reserves, an establishment that will not let you notify it of problems because it un-says every report cannot and will note help you. It cannot and will not design rational public policy responses when its discourse insists that there is no such problem because you haven’t reported it because it would be bigoted and reinforce negative stereotypes to do so. Not reinforcing the “drunken Indian” stereotype is more important than helping indigenous communities struggling with addiction.

That is why, today, it is the local Indian Bands in places like Lower Post and Skidegate are taking extraordinary and extralegal measures to protect their communities from the blizzard of drug dealing unleashed by BC’s “safe supply” policies. They realize there is no help coming from the white progressives running the government and the cops because these coddled souls imagine that the worst thing that can happen to you is that someone says negative things about a group you are part of. Not, say, death from fentanyl or a collision with an impaired driver. The establishment is so focused on protecting vulnerable communities from having their problems named that it is doing all it can to ensure that their problems cannot be solved because they cannot be discussed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

George Gibault’s and My Reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks, Decades Late

Tuesday Nights with George and Sarah Michelle Gellar

Tomorrow, I get to work on a long-delayed project, nearly a decade delayed, in fact, organizing a symposium in honour of my late friend George Gibault, twentieth-century conservative political strategist, courtier and public intellectual. For the event, I am going to be producing a series of papers about the different sides of George, the different aspects of this great man’s thinking.

While many disturbing recent events in provincial, national and international politics have made me think of George and his intellectual contributions, I feel that the atmosphere around me, the panic, the fragility, the vigilance demand that I start in a particular part of the Gibault oeuvre: speculative fiction. So, yes, this is going to be one of those blog posts where I post some massively out-of-date reviews of some cool, geeky shows from back in the day.

In 1998, I moved to Victoria, motivated, in part, by a major social faux pas that had made my native Vancouver a more awkward place to live. But I was also motivated by the fact that I had secured funding to work full-time, as BC Green Party leader, admittedly for a pittance. If I wanted to be seen as a legislator in waiting, I should move to be close to the legislature and take up residence in one of the four ridings that presented an outside chance of electing a Green.

My social circle in Victoria was small and, as my leadership of the party headed into complete crisis, it did not grow at the customary rate I experience when I move to a community. Instead, the linchpin of my week and of my social world was visiting George on Tuesday evenings to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Buffy was an important show back in the day but one that is not appreciated precisely because of how novel and innovative it was. The 1990s introduced one new major cinematic genre, the horror-comedy, exemplified not just in the Joss Whedon corpus but the Kevin Williamson Scream series. Horror-comedy was not just about the deft and clever ways that Williamson, Whedon and their ilk could use humour to release tension without destroying the ability of their films and shows to produce genuine horror and dread one moment, and a genuine belly laugh the next.

Horror-comedy also featured highly self-conscious, fourth wall-adjacent dialogue in which the characters do not recognize that they are fictional but do take active, ironic notice of the tropes and literary constructs that seem to rule their lives. The central characters, who are often supposedly adolescents, then, develop a strange speaking style in which they sound more educated, more sophisticated and more emotionally disengaged than the characters they play. This was not unique to horror-comedy but diffused out into TV and movies through overlapping stables of writers and audience expectations. In fact, Williamson’s prime time teen soap, Dawson’s Creek, despite being outside the genre, best exemplifies this dialogue style.

While the dialogue was thoroughly beguiling to us back in the day, today when one watches Buffy or Dawson, the dialogue sounds stilted, awkward. That is not because this kind of dialogue has been abandoned—far from it—it’s that we have got better at it with practice. Learning the smooth execution of this dialogue style was something still in the future when Buffy was first experimenting with this new way of ventriloquizing twentysomethings dressed as teenagers.

This dialogue style was just one of the major shifts in entertainment that Buffy unleashed. While the Six Million Dollar Woman, Wonder Woman and the old Batman TV franchise had introduced us to supernaturally strong women, the idea that tiny, anorexic women like Sarah Michelle Gellar could be highly sexualized action stars by having bodies that made no aesthetic concession to physical characteristics that make human bodies strong. In fact, Gellar’s first stunt double denounced the show, quitting over the way the star’s eating disorder was helping to send girls all the wrong messages about the human body. By using special effects, stunt doubles and importing Hong Kong wire fu filming techniques from Michelle Yeoh movies, America’s tiny, frail anorexic superheroines were born.

At the time, we had no idea that this was the second station on the train from lower strength standards for female fire fighters in the 80s to the pathological sex denialism of the 2020s, in which we pretend that we can put a man in a boxing ring with a woman and expect a fair and equal fight.

Place and Metaphor in the Pacific Northwest

But George and I were not focused on any of that. Our epiphany concerning the show was not about the implausibly yet entertainingly-talking characters or the equally implausible yet absolutely real young female bodies that kept our eyes focused on the screen. We felt we recognized something in Buffy from our shared love of the rural Pacific Northwest.

For those who did not spend the second half of the 90s glued to Buffy, let me sketch the basics of the show. Buffyand her high school friends attend Sunnyvale High School, the only high school in the medium-sized California town of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale has the distinction of containing the “Hellmouth,” the literal gates of hell, which causes a clustering of demonic supernatural phenomena around the town. Each episode centres on a monster or other demonic force related to the Hellmouth set on endangering and threatening the town and transforming or eliminating its residents and being opposed by Buffy and her trusty band of classmate sidekicks.

Each episode typically features witty yet fundamentally unreal banter among the characters, often adjacent to the fourth wall; each also typically features cool wire-fu-style fight scenes between the diminutive 5’2” Buffy and enormous, powerful monsters or teams thereof. Each season of the show is structured around a major villain who has come to Sunnyvale to open the Hellmouth in service of some dastardly world-ending plan they spend the season putting into place.

While Buffy’s fellow students and Sunnyvale’s townspeople are always glad of Buffy and her friends’ Herculean efforts to save them and their town, their work is never acknowledged and is only spoken-of in hushed tones. Furthermore, whenever there is a major supernatural disaster in public view or an attack by a whole army of monsters, police and city officials work to cover it up, issuing perfunctory and unbelievable denials, usually blaming meth.

The reason for this is explained, to some extent, when it is revealed that the archvillain of season three, the town’s mayor, is actually a demon seeking to transform into his full monstrous arachnid form when he opens the Hellmouth, during his “ascension.”

But as the mayor is defeated, the US government moves in to begin conducting experiments on the local human and vampire populations. And it was at this point that George (mostly George) and I put together what Buffy is really about. It is about living in a single-industry town. The Hellmouth is like a large coal or uranium deposit; it kills and sickens a portion of the townspeople, an open secret that nobody can talk about. They cannot talk about it because the Hellmouth/mine/mill/smelter attracts all the outside investment to the town. Nobody would invest in the town; there would be not jobs if it did not contain the gates of hell.

And so, the politics of Sunnyvale are the politics of a town like Mackenzie, Trail or Kitimat. Lead poisoning and cancer stalk the streets, producing sickness, madness, and the jobs and investment, without which the town would dry up and blow away.

And then it hit me: Sunnyvale is, in a way, a specific town: Hanford, Washington, home to America’s most Chernobyl-like nuclear reactor. People from surrounding towns, but not Hanford itself, speak of the Hanford Necklace, a neck scar of about the size and angle of vampire bites on Buffy, from lymph cancer surgeries, which are exceedingly common for those who live near or work at the Hanford Reactor.

To this day, I have no idea how self-conscious the show was in exploring this theme or whether the structural premise of the show would inevitably describe the society of a single-industry mill town. But that was the thing about thinking aloud with George: the point was to find the predictive pattern. Such patterns were inevitably bigger than authorial intention or conscious conspiracies and schemes.

George applied the same logic, along with some possible hints in the script to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the comedy-horror-surrealist prime time soap opera of the early 1990s. The town of Twin Peaks, which seemed to be concurrently located on some hybrid of Koocanusa Reservoir and Lake Champlain, was supposedly in the Interior Wet Belt of Washington State, mysteriously abutting an oddly Francophone region of British Columbia, which hosted a casino/brothel called One-Eyed Jacks that one could reach primarily by crossing an unnamed transboundary lake under cover of darkness.

Twin Peaks, the town, was full of oddities, an elderly bellhop and parttime giant, an extradimensional dwarf, an oracular woman with a telepathic log, portals into another dimension, known as the Black Lodge, a serial killer demon named Bob who gets around by transforming into an owl, etc. Agent Cooper of the FBI, one of the original late 80s metaphysical detectives along with Dirk Gently and the unnamed investigators of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, who uses investigative methods he has learned in a dream from the spirit of a Tibetan lama.

Twin Peaks juxtaposes all of this strangeness with images and affirmations of the simple greatness of small town America, with its wholesome diner food, donuts, drip coffee and pie. While some characters are crooks and literal demons, most Twin Peaks residents are the salt of the earth, just a tad quirky, like Big Ed Hurley’s (proprietor of Big Ed’s Gas Farm) wife who has an eye patch, superhuman strength and an obsession with silent drape runners.

All this under the old growth conifers swaying and buckling in the wind and rain, under a permanently grey sky.

George was the one to notice that there are two real world locations the show informs us are near Twin Peaks. The dialogue even tells us the approximate distance to Grand Forks, BC, if not Spokane, WA. And there is a single inescapable conclusion George felt one must reach about Twin Peaks. The original series is actually a documentary on Nelson, BC and the area surrounding it. When people would question him about this and suggest that there are no giants, dwarves or Log Ladies in Nelson, George would typically reply, “Well, obviously you’ve never spent a significant amount of time in the West Kootenays.”

BC Politics Geekery | fusangite |

Fragility, Sensitivity and Canada’s Authoritarian Turn

Stupidly, I was in an argument about my support for the Freedom Convoy with an old acquaintance on Facebook the other day. I generally prefer to do my arguing on the Twitter because it’s easier to have arguments in which professional censors do not intervene. But, because it is probably the least socially partitioned platform these days, one can have experiences there that just don’t happen so much on Twitter anymore.

I suggested that, while the proponents of the dangerous ideology of Truckism might staged the longest, largest, loudest tailgate party to date, the Convoy was far less physically dangerous, far more law abiding  and, most importantly, far less lethal than comparable mass protests like the George Floyd protests, the Occupy movement or the Indian farmers’ march. It lacked the open air drug market scene of Occupy and consequently did not produce the masses of overdose deaths and close calls Occupy camps did. It lacked the vigilantism, vandalism and mob violence of the Floyd protests and so, did not get anyone shot, unlike the protests sponsored by Black Lives Matter.

So, why was it so much worse than these rallies? And why was it necessary to use emergency powers against it?

My interlocutor replied that it was because of all the horn honking at all days and hours. That would be annoying, I responded. No. It’s actual torture. It’s an atrocity. It’s banned in the Geneva Convention. (Of course, so is putting men in women’s prisons but no matter!)

One of the biggest problems I have speaking across the social partition with my friends who continue to reside in the progressiverse is that I often do not credit that they sincerely hold some of the beliefs they espouse, that saying obvious falsehoods is such an important boundary maintenance practice these days that I tend to go that route more frequently and more ungenerously than I should.

But I felt a real note of urgency, of sincerity. This person could not imagine suffering more profound than a couple of weeks of frequent and annoyingly loud car and truck horn blasts through the night in a major city. This was such extreme violence, such extreme suffering, such trauma that Nuremberg-style trials should possibly be empaneled to punish the Truckists for this heinous crime!

Having just spend a year living in Dar Es Salaam with my neighbourhood’s late night bars and pubs and my apartment complex’s chickens, I was tempted to suggest that your average Canadian could not handle the noise culture of any major world city, even when a massive protest was not going on.

On the same day—yes, I managed my time very poorly that day—I found myself in an equally useful but similarly illuminating debate about British Columbia’s Bill 7, an actual enabling act, one of many tributes to the original 1933 version, very much in the style of Nicolas Maduro and other authoritarian strong men who periodically ram a bill through parliament declaring a continuing state of emergency, necessitating that the head of government rule by decree. In this case, BC’s government wants two years to rule by decree, collect personal information unhindered, restrict speech and mobility rights and enact or amend any provincial law without resort to the legislature.

Why? Well, because these aluminum tariffs really hurt BC. In fact, they are causing such unprecedented disruption, such extreme hurt that of course the government needs unfettered powers. Canada, the story goes, has never faced so great a threat as the Trump Administration’s punitive and arbitrary tariffs. Donald Trump is the biggest threat to Canadian rights and liberty because he is depriving us of our fundamental right to sell Rio Tinto’s aluminum ingots to foreigners, unobstructed.

But again, I sensed the genuine fear, desperation, need for order.

But if we didn’t need this kind of legislation when the far more impactful softwood lumber tariffs went into effect four separate times through the 1980s, 90s and 00s, why do we need an enabling act now? Because this is worse. Because the real threat is what Trump says he wants to do, to annex Canada, to punish Canada—he’s revealing his mind to us, the fact that the tanks will be rolling across the border any day now.

But we didn’t need such sweeping authoritarian legislation even when we were fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo eighty years ago. Why now? Because this is literally the scariest thing that has ever happened to Canada. Scarier than Ronald “Nuclear Warning Shot” Reagan was elected, scarier than when we headed to Vimy Ridge or the Battle of the Bulge, scarier than our actual war with the US back in the 1810s.

I think people are sincerely feeling these emotions because fear is contagious but also because exhibiting fear and panic strengthens authoritarian social impulses and that is what our leaders want right now. Rule by decree is saleable only to bullies and cowards, to the extent that the two categories are separable.

In other words, I believe that core to the rise of cultural authoritarianism among Anglo Canadians has been a new politics of personal fragility, one inextricable from the rise of Justin Trudeau and the new nationalism he hawked. I wrote about this disturbing trend and where it might send us in the early days of the 2015 election campaign following a striking and bizarre moment at the first federal leaders’ debate:

I was initially so surprised by Justin Trudeau’s sudden pivot, echoed in pre-rehearsed, stage-ready tweets and Facebook posts from campaign surrogates, to immediately assert that his continued feelings of bereavement surrounding his father’s death a decade and a half ago required some kind of disability accommodation by everyone else in Canada. Gerald Butts and other Liberal surrogates instantaneously reacted to Tom Mulcair’s assertion that the NDP’s multi-generation track record of standing up for Canadians’ liberty was demonstrated in their opposition to the War Measures Act in 1971. Apparently, this implied criticism of Trudeau’s dad was dirty pool and had hurt the prospective Prime Minister’s feelings. The recent emergence of medically invalid but nevertheless popular “trigger warnings” on US college campuses had, somehow, leapt across the border and now, fifteen of the past fifty years of Canadian politics were off-limits for fear of causing one rich white man to experience hurt feelings.

But I am no longer surprised. This bullshit is totally working. All kinds of random people, veterans struggling with amputations and PTSD, precariously employed minimum wage workers, racialized populations being stripped of their citizenship rights—these people, ordinary Canadians, are getting really concerned about how Mulcair was insufficiently considerate of Trudeau’s hurt feelings. How is it that the feelings of one attractive, privileged, successful, white adult male could become the object of so much sympathy that the entire narrative of the campaign changed in one day? How could Butts and the other Liberal strategists have calculated that so many Canadians whose easiest day is tougher than Trudeau’s hardest would have become so concerned about another national leader being inconsiderate of his feelings?

In hindsight, this scene was a harbinger of what would go wrong with this country over the past decade. The man who would later unconstitutionally use emergency powers against his citizens couldn’t be grilled on the subject because to elicit his opinion about the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis because it might hurt his feelings.

But I want to go further: Justin Trudeau’s use of performative grief, of his own tears as the linchpin of his rhetorical strategy helped Canadians slide faster towards cultural authoritarianism. You see: Trudeau’s tears functioned as both sword and shield. They could be used to indict the behaviour of others not by demonstrating its wrongness but rather by how it impacted the Prime Minister’s emotions. The tears were, more importantly, a shield. They allowed Trudeau to dodge questions, not just those he was took choked to answer but, more importantly, all the questions his tears stifled in the throats or on the lips of his interlocutors, the passive-aggressive intimidation of a very powerful man crying.

As I observed in my original commentary, there is nothing new about linking social and political rank and power to a politics of sensitivity, fragility, even. The Princess and the Pea is, in some ways, the ultimate Enlightenment description of political legitimacy, that only a true princess would be so sensitive as to feel a single dried pea through seventeen goose down mattresses.

Last week, in Nanaimo, a criminal trial took place of a man who assaulted a woman on her way home from a parents’ rights protest. More than a foot taller than the fifty-two-year-old, the man who had more than a decade and a foot on his victim explained to the court that he had to punch her in the face because she made him feel “unsafe.”

Those present to support the victim were baffled that this appeared to amount to the sum total of the assailant’s defense. But he clearly believed (and the courts might agree with him), that feeling uncomfortable or whatever “unsafe” means to an individual like this was a nothing short of a threat to his very existence.

More importantly, as with Justin Trudeau in that fateful debate, it is clear that preventing certain people from experiencing unpleasant feelings, even if those feelings might only last moments is more important than Canada’s national leaders being able to debate emergency powers legislation and its abuse. After all, stopping certain people from feeling bad is enough reason to use those very emergency powers; it is even sufficient reason to breach our society’s state monopoly on violence to permit the dozens of unprosecuted assaults against women rallying and speaking in support of their rights and those of their children.

But, of course, the problem with the success of efforts to punish, chill and silence speech high-status individuals find hard to tolerate is that the more people are protected from speech that makes them feel bad, the less able they are to handle such speech when it somehow gets around the barricades. Consequently, offense-based speech restriction produces an ever-receding horizon of offense. And that means an ever-increasing demand for new legal, social and technological tools to manage the increasingly fragile personalities.

In essence, we are becoming addicts of censorship, state censorship, community censorship, self-censorship and even compelled speech and like addicts of all things, more censorship creates more tolerance (i.e. speech sensitivity) which then requires more censorship.

Those we coddle by acceding to their authoritarian demands inevitably grow ever more despotic and fragile. People who are so used to other people preventing them from having experiences that elicit negative or challenging emotions lose their ability to manage their own emotions and become increasingly convinced that it is the job of everyone around them to manage their emotions for them. Those who refuse to be conscripted into changing their speech and that of those around them to accommodate the acquired fragility of special persons are understood to be hate criminals, bigots who deserve whatever is coming to them, firing, beating, incarceration, whatever!

As this vicious cycle of offense-taking and new forms of punishment and overreaction, we are generating a society that genuinely believes that it is the president of the United States’ duty to make sure foreigners like us are prosperous, that believes our prosperity must be guaranteed by the US government and that it is not merely a nice thing but a fundamental right. We expect coddling in a widening set of contexts.

Canadians have experienced far greater hardships than these tariffs but, when one asks why the BC government did not require the ability to rule by decree during the Softwood Wars, the Salmon War or the two actual World Wars, the answer is “but Donald Trump keeps talking about the ‘51st state.’ Can’t you see the tanks are going to roll across the border and begin killing us!” Unlike our reaction to Reagan’s far more serious threats of a nuclear first strike, our interpretation a 10% duty on aluminum ingots, because these very fragile, sensitive folks all believe they can read Trump’s mind, is that it is identical to soldiers marching into town and shooting our family members and neighbours.

What an increasingly number of Canadians cannot handle and require unprecedented measures to handle is being taunted and trolled by Trump. Of course, we really need sweeping emergency powers because those powers must be used to prevent Trump from making us feel angry, scared, powerless, humiliated, insecure because we have lost the ability to manage those normal emotions and how need not just a media bubble lying to us about our ability to vanquish the US in a one-on-one trade war or even conventional war; we need the full coercive power of the state to shut people up, shut people down—anything to solve the emergency called “our feelings.”

Of course, not all Canadians are understood to deserve or can conscript the state and those around us into managing our emotions. Obviously, women and girls wishing to protect their sports, spaces, privacy, etc. must manage their own emotions, even “reframe their trauma,” to make sure that the Hearers of this Manichean system are the exclusive beneficiaries of this external emotion-management.

Our society is growing more authoritarian by the day and that authoritarianism is powered by inculcating novel and escalating forms of fragility, concurrent with the expectation that this fragility is everyone’s problem except one’s own. And when people see no difference between special, designated individuals hearing words they would rather not and such things as murder and assault, we know where that goes: exactly where Canada is going now, concurrently descending into both increasing vigilante violence and increasingly authoritarian government.  

Sensitivity is important; empathy is important; but so is taking responsibility for one’s own emotions, even if they are a reaction to the actions of others. This country needs a corollary to Pink Shirt Day, maybe Blue Shirt Day, the day where we celebrate those who are continent and responsible, who manage their own emotions and learn the most important thing about bullying: how to stand up to a bully. Because if you don’t learn to stand up to bullies, you are fated to become one, like the petty authoritarians with whom the Canadian establishment is replete and who constantly seek new means of lawfare, intimidation, threats and violence to prevent themselves experiencing feelings they have made themselves too fragile to handle.

Cue Flight of the Conchords!

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Class Contradictions of the Conservative Courtier

My old friend George Gibault, the director of Social Credit Caucus Research from the 1970s until the party’s ultimate collapse in 1994 was exceptional. He played a significant role in an internal coup against Premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1988, working with Finance Minister Mel Couvelier and Attorney-General Bud Smith to radically circumscribe the powers of the premier and place much de facto authority in the hands of Couvelier and Smith.

George’s involvement in that high-level decision was exceptional because he was a career courtier who had risen through the ranks of the party’s unelected activists and through the party bureaucracy in the Victoria legislature while it sat in government.

While courtiers have always been an important part of politics in any system of government, different social orders strongly condition who becomes a powerful courtier and how. When George was coming up politically, during the last decades of the Cold War, the most senior courtiers, especially in conservative parties, were not people who had risen through the ranks of junior courtiers. Premiers and Prime Ministers hired men—and it was overwhelmingly men—out of other careers, “successful” businessmen, academics, prominent lawyers, who would typically place their assets in some kind of trust to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest and self-dealing. They would also take a significant pay cut. The discourse was that they were “giving something back,” engaging in “public service.”

We all know that the trusts were not very blind and that the friends and relatives of the courtiers would soon find the government making decisions that improved their bottom line. Nevertheless, the public performance of virtue did condition our horizon of expectations. When these men were revealed to be self-dealers, hypocrites, we would be outraged, genuinely, because their authority supposedly came from their altruistic virtue. Men like Jimmy Pattison, the future billionaire, were given prominent jobs for a nominal or token salary; such jobs were an effective tactic for self-fashioning and virtue signaling for those wishing to graduate from a mere rich and successful businessman and enter the financial elite.

Conservative parties also had a healthy verging on unhealthy suspicion of civil servants. Indeed, provincial civil servants did not gain the right to vote in BC elections until 1972. The sense was that the civil service was a separate and hostile locus of power in a legislature. Both of BC’s major parties continued conducting gratuitous reorganizations and civil service purges until the end of the twentieth century. Political power, understood as a zero sum game, meant that every bit of power an unelected government employee gained came either at the expense of the liberty of the citizens or at the expense of the power of elected representatives.

Perhaps because of the outsized influence of Warsaw Pact refugees within Social Credit, the party, George especially, feared the political world in which we now live, in which the managerial class has become fully self-conscious and self-interested and has, as a cartel, seized state power from elected officials primarily through the courtier subset of the managerial class or, as they used to say out East, the commissars.

As the twenty-first century has worn on, our baseline has shifted and we have normalized the way that the courtier class has usurped the power of elected officials and how it has come to control its own promotion structures, making career courtiers the norm, for the first time, on the political right.

Ironically, this has also led to a decline in our expectations that our politicians, elected and unelected, will or should not engage in brazen self-dealing and looting of the public purse. If being a courtier is just a profession, like any other, expected to act in its own interests and make no pretense of a special virtue, altruism or sacrifice, how are we to object to them pursuing “their own interests.” And this has bled to our expectations of elected officials, especially as their wealth has increased so rapidly relative to the rest of the population.

But, especially since the advent of Trumpism and the other Bannonite movements around the world, parties of the right have developed a class politics utterly inimical to the courtier class. At a moment when their parties and governments, like all others, are in the vise grip of the commissars, conservative parties find themselves crucibles of class conflict. Courtiers inside conservative parties might strike the odd anti-Woke pose and try to sound like Andrew Tate but they are fundamentally motivated by the same class interests that motivate progressive courtiers and the permanent civil service.

In other words, to be a decent conservative courtier, one must be a supremely self-conscious, self-examining class traitor. At my job, I try to follow George’s example and be exactly that. But that’s the problem with neoliberalism: you cannot solve systemic problems solely through personal virtue. And so, the only other option is that conservatives must break the power of the labour system, smash its promotion structures, purge the ranks, slash the pay and install good old fashioned senior courtiers.

And this is why the managerial class hates Elon Musk more even than Donald Trump. Because the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk’s control of is something out of the Cold War, before the managerial class became self-conscious and seized huge chunks of state, social and institutional power. Not only does it place a wealthy, eccentric businessman with no government experience at its head; its primary purpose is to conduct a massive civil service purge and concurrent reorganization, seeking to break the hold of the commissars on the state.

And Musk is not the only “inexperienced” and “unqualified” Trump appointee. Nearly every cabinet nominee was assailed during confirmation for the fact that they had not come up through the supposedly meritocratic civil service. Again and again, Democratic senators implied or directly stated that a person who was not already a member of the courtier class, who had done work like this before inside the state, was simply incapable of being a cabinet minister.

Instead of concealing their belief that the state should be a meritocratic technocracy and not a popularly elected democracy, they bared their fangs, with Chuck Schumer suggesting that if the Trump Administration were not careful, they might be personally destroyed or even killed by an intelligence agency. Indeed, throughout mainstream media, we see that the term “democracy” has become its own opposite, now meaning Mandarinate. Those, like Rob Reiner, wishing to “save democracy” mainly mean by this that they wish to preserve the governing power of the commissars and protect the commissars’ authority from the democratic rabble full of unqualified people exercising common sense.

The problem for these putative saviours of democracy is that if Elon Musk or Robert F Kennedy or some other prominent wealthy outsider is actually competent to do their job and carrying it out competently, it is a standing refutation of the commissars’ claims of running an expertise-based, meritocratic outfit that produces uniquely and solely qualified experts for leadership positions.

And this is why we see such an odd political configuration: industrial workers, youth and the old school bourgeoisie in an alliance to restore some modicum of twentieth century representative democracy as the commissar class rushes to finish dismantling it. But this coalition has been able to get further in the United States precisely because, while the culture of political parties and of the judiciary has been captured, to a large extent, by the commissars, America’s robust and democratic political institutions have proven harder to tame.

A country like Canada has made substantial and devastating changes to its democratic institutions to ensure that its parties, across the spectrum, are controlled by the courtier class. As I have stated in previous essays, Jean Chrétien’s 2003 Election Act gave the office of the leader of every party direct appointment powers over candidates. And between 2004 and 2010, not only has an increasing proportion of candidates been directly appointed; all parties have established “candidate vetting” committees composed entirely of courtiers, with secret memberships that meet in secret and produce no minutes. These committees can veto any candidacy at will and without cause.

In a country like Canada, legislators do literally serve at the pleasure of the courtiers who can, with no institutional primary system, veto a legislator’s re-election bid with the stroke of a pen. And without a primary system, I do not know how Canada’s political system will confront the contradiction of interests between the interests of the conservative courtier class and the class alignment of the parties they serve. But that confrontation is coming, nevertheless. It is inevitable. I wish George were here to puzzle it through with me.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

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 |