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Was the Freedom Convoy the Start of the Third Northwest Rebellion? Part VI of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

This winter, as the Ottawa occupation wore on, many comrades of mine focused on the ways in which the participants in Canada’s Freedom Convoy were, in every way, handled differently than participants in protests I have much more actively supported, like the Shut Down Canada campaign in support of the Wet’suwet’en’s efforts to stop Royal Dutch Shell’s pipeline to Kitimat.

My friends on the Left very legitimately pointed out that, until the federal government proclaimed emergency powers legislation, the disorderly extended tailgate party the truckers and their supporters staged received an anemic response from law enforcement.

Not only was there no real attempt to fine, tow or arrest truckers for violating federal, provincial or municipal ordinances already on the books dealing with road blockages and illegal camping and parking but the normal tool for dealing with protesters on the left, the court injunction, was never utilized. Normally, logging and pipeline protests are shut down through the abuse of court orders, where the government backs a corporation in seeking a court order to prohibit “John Doe, Jane Doe and Persons Unknown” from doing something that hinders business or mobility.

These court orders are ubiquitous if you are a left-wing protester and have, if you are Indigenous, come packaged with escalating levels of police brutality and extra-legal property destruction. Furthermore, breaching a court order has no maximum sentence; technically, the courts can sentence you to death still, because the courts have ruled that parliament cannot abridge their sentencing power for the defiance of their orders.

This appears to have been driven by the social and class adjacency of the police to the truckers and a sense of identification police rarely if ever experience with Indigenous neo-traditionalists and environmentalists.

Consequently, progressives were absolutely correct in stating that, when it came to law enforcement, the protesters were treated with kid gloves.

But Canada’s political class and media elite are in no way trucker-adjacent and so, there was a way in which the protest was also treated with a severity with few precedents in spheres other than law enforcement, some of which I have already written on at length, and some of which I will recap here.

First, it must be understood that organized convoys comprising a mix of big rigs and pickup trucks incrementally forming up along a set of predetermined routes through a series of industrial towns in rural areas were already a phenomenon in Western Canada before 2022 began. These convoys, which began regularly converging on Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton and Calgary in the late 2010s were political in the sense that they were animated by a set of grievances organized around the participants’ identities as politically conservative rural industrial workers. The trucks and their occupants often had signage denouncing NDP politicians, carbon taxes, and similar fare, with mask mandates and vaccine passports added to the mix as the convoys entered the 20s.

The fact that the protests were more about saying “we are here. We demand to be recognized as an important constituency of people,” than about protesting a single issue was one of the excuses news media used to engage in what amounted to an organized blackout of these protests. When the protests were covered, they were more likely to show up in traffic reports rather than news reports. But I view it as real journalistic malpractice that protests comprising hundreds, sometimes thousands of vehicles and persons were essentially ignored, based on the flimsy excuse that they lacked coherent demands. Indeed, the absence of clear demands should have made these all the more worthy of investigation.

While this kind of “we are here and feel unheard,” convoy has not traditionally been a common kind of protest in Canadian history, it has a long and noble tradition south of the Rio Grande. Since the 1830s, groups of Indigenous and mestizo (the equivalent of Métis) in the Hispanic world have periodically converged on capitals in large numbers carrying the tools of their trade, often machetes and hoes rather than big rigs, pickup trucks and rifles, and simply occupy Guatemala City or Mexico City with many interconnected grievances but no clear demands. And then, after a time, heading home, satisfied or not, leaving a bunch of property damage in their wake.

Western Canada’s de facto media blackout of these mass mobilizations with unclear, organic and evolving systems of leadership made it easier for national media to characterize the “freedom convoy” as both unprecedented and impossible to understand.

This kind of tabula rasa gave the establishment legacy media greater scope to cast the protest in a negative light by attributing to the main body of protesters whatever the most absurd, extreme or unflattering view was that they could find. This was especially odious when a small minority of protesters arrived with Confederate flags and were told by the majority to either ditch the flags or go home. When this organic, democratic pressure succeeded, no mention was made of the sudden and equally rapid disappearance of Confederate flags from the protest. Instead of telling a story of the democratic, anti-racist spirit of the mobilization, media simply continued to show images of the flags and claim that it was all but the official flag of the protest.

The swastika, similarly, had faced immediate, grassroots organic resistance from most protesters, when it appeared on poorly drawn protest art placing it next to upside-down maple leafs with words suggesting that Canada had been taken over by Nazis. Instead of suggesting that this was an unsophisticated and extreme comparison, news media chose to offer their own exegesis of the protest signs claiming that the protesters were anti-Canada and pro-Nazi. Following this smear, grassroots participants worked effectively to get these signs to disappear too; but the media kept showing old footage.

As with any mass mobilization, like the Occupy movement of the late 00s, no matter who calls together a large group of unaffiliated activists and suddenly mobilized regular folks, the question of who the leadership is grows unclear over time. Again, news media were relentlessly agenda-driven in platforming the most extreme, the most unhinged, the most incoherent people who claimed the mantle of leadership as the occupation dragged on.

Instead of seeking out the most articulate people with the best arguments, as media sometimes do for environmental or Indigenous sovereignty protests, establishment media did the opposite here, trolling for “free men on the land” with whom to conduct interviews.

When protesters were falsely associated with local people unrelated to the protest attempting to burn down a local apartment building, media were quick to circulate unconfirmed suspicions and most did not correct these smears when municipal police and fire officials conclusively pronounced that the attempted arson was unrelated to the protest.

And then there was the debate around the Emergencies Act. While the government could perfectly easily have used the laws already on the books prohibiting illegal parking, blocking public roads, illegal camping and the like, they chose not to. They similarly eschewed their normal tactic of assisting private businesses, like the one that owns and runs the Ambassador Bridge, which was blocked later in the protest, with obtaining court injunctions. Instead, the government waited for the saner, more employable members of the protest to begin heading home before announcing that it required emergency powers.

No media or government rhetoric against pipeline or logging protesters that I can recall ever labeled my comrades and me as “traitors,” suggested we were “committing treason.” While we have also been called “terrorists” by government and media, that is typically for acts of sabotage and not for simply being physically present at the wrong place and time. Many in government and the Fourth Estate began comparing the protest to the January 6th, 2021 violent coup attempt in the United States and reasoned that because some protesters had called for the Governor General to fire the government if it would not resign that, by dint of saying the elected government was illegitimate, they were, simply by calling for its removal, committing an act of treason and perhaps deserved life imprisonment for doing so.

I have been part of a number of organizations that have called for the government to resign and for the Governor-General to step in and form a new one if it would not. In fact, I recall being part of a large crowd in Nathan Philips Square in Toronto in 2008 that listened to Stephane Dion who proposed to lead such an alternative government. I do not recall any news media or government MPs accusing our organic mass-mobilizations during the Prorogation Crisis of being seditious mobs suborning treason.

But, for me, the most disquieting aspect of the coverage was the use of the terms “invade” and “invader.” The truckers had “invaded” Ottawa and would not leave. It was therefore necessary to respond with emergency war powers. While there was also a set of complaints about “foreign money,” being donated to the convoy, the “invasion” rhetoric was weirdly unconnected to this.  

And there was one final major grievance against the convoy that I found especially disquieting: the anger that its members were proudly flying Canadian flags. Rather than seeing the proud and prominent display of the Maple Leaf as a sign of the truckers’ patriotism or loyalty, media began to suggest that the convoy had irreparably tainted the flag and had done something underhanded by appropriating it.

Citizens of a country had exercised their constitutional mobility rights to visit their own capital and had, upon arrival, flown their own flag. This, in the minds of the establishment and its friends in the media constituted “terrorism,” an “invasion,” “sedition,” “treason!”

Over the decades, my environmentalist and Indigenous neo-traditionalist comrades and I have been subject to a lot of media attacks and unfair coverage but nothing like this. But I nevertheless began to feel like I had heard this kind of language, this shape of discourse before. And then I put my finger on it: it was the language of the Anglo establishment press and politicians had used against Louis Riel and the Métis during the Manitoba Crisis and the Northwest Rebellion.

Riel, as rehearsed earlier in this series, was no Joseph Brant. He and his followers did not seek to create a separate, independent state, equal to Canada under the Crown. Their objectives were larger: they demanded co-ownership of the Canadian project. They did not seek treaty rights as Indigenous people but rather the co-equal control of Canada’s land tenure and ownership system, as Christians, as Catholics, and, most troublingly as Canadians.

Canadians progressives and their allies in the Laurentian elite have long been captured by a theory of diversity I have characterized as “neo-Ottomanism,” expressed in British imperial terms in the nineteenth century as “a place for everyone and everyone in [their] place.” Their vision of diversity is one of carefully policed cultural boundaries separating self-governing, racially transparent, culturally distinct communities, a vision that situates Indigenous people outside the Canadian project and non-status and non-neotraditionalist (i.e. the Christian majority) Indigenous and Métis people outside Indigeneity.

As with the Northwest Rebellions of the nineteenth century, many of those who participated in the convoy were not Indigenous by blood but were, instead, part of a larger Métis-influenced regional culture, similar to that of Alaska, West Virginia and the national US “migrant worker” culture of the 1920s. And like those rebellions, the convoy lacked coherent, stable demands because its central message was simple, “we co-own the Canadian project.” Canadian progressives and the Laurentian elite are rhetorically supportive of “self-government” projects, in part because they undermine Louis Riel-style politics.

What did not just offend but what threatened Canada’s political class more deeply about the protest than anything was its lack of “racial transparency” and its participants’ insistence that the Maple Leaf and the national project it represents belonged as much to each of them as it does to Justin Trudeau and his ilk.

What freaked out this nation’s elite was being faced with an emergent sectional nationalist movement, from Terrace to Timmins, that paired the power of the Maple Leaf with the power of the pan-Indigenous medicine wheel in its iconography. Such a movement, should it fully awaken and coalesce, should it become fully self-conscious, could offer the most serious challenge to the increasingly white guilt-centred, tone-deaf, histrionic ancestor-blaming nationalism being hawked by the likes of Trudeau. And that is why its participants had to be tarred as racists, Nazis, traitors and terrorists, not because of their demands but because of the nascent possibility of a different vision of Canada that they represent.

For those of you who think that I am romanticizing the incoherent mob that arrived in the nation’s capital and didn’t clean up after itself very well, I ask you to suspend judgement until you read the next part of my analysis. Because the forces that are reawakening the spirit of the Northwest Rebellion are anything but benign. The ghost of Louis Riel is driving the biggest rig at the head of the convoy, with a medicine wheel painted on one side and a maple leaf on the other but someone else entirely has pumped the gas into its tank.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

Reaction Formation and Climate Denial: Why Wildfire Season Will Produce More Denialists If We Don’t Change Course

Ever since climate activists adopted the “no debate” policy with respect to climate denialists, and since the rise of the modern far-right, we have seen an ongoing decline in Canadians’ belief that anthropogenic climate change is real. Since around 2010, the number of Canadians who actively disbelieve that our climate is changing due to human activity has climbed to between 25% and 30% of Canadians today, trending upwards with other, adjacent beliefs, like Young Earth creationism.

But these increases have not been even or steady. The biggest jumps have been associated with developments like the “heat dome” that killed hundreds of British Columbians with extreme heat last year, the increasingly out-of-control wildfire seasons and, relatedly, the destruction of towns like Lytton and near-destruction of communities like Fort McMurray.

Similarly, increases in climate skepticism has not merely increased in reaction to extreme weather episodes; its increase has also been uneven geographically. Increased denialism is something we see as concentrated in the resource extraction periphery of the rural West, in a strip from Timmins to Terrace, taking in Lloydminster, Fort McMurray, Fort St. John and the other hubs of extractive activity.

Some might argue that as Canada increasingly realigns its cultural and politics to resemble that of the US, this is only to be expected as rural Westerners are swept up in the anti-intellectualism of the American Right. Others might argue that the region’s economic dependence on the fossil fuel industry for the government subsidies it can command is all that is driving this.

But I want to suggest that these things are as much effects as causes and that the primary cause is a problem far more daunting than the Americanization of Canadian culture or the continued swagger of Big Oil in America’s crankiest vassal state:

Climate denial increases when people are directly presented with evidence of the Greenhouse Effect, of the climate crisis, when it incinerates their home or that of their neighbours, when it incinerates the trees on which they were depending for work, when unexpected late and early frosts destroy the crops on which one depends. It also appears to increase when an environmental comorbidity becomes too palpable, too apparent, like the lack of mosquito bites on one’s arm or the lack of dead bugs on one’s windshield, the eerie silence of a bird-less forest. The people experiencing these things most directly are concentrated in the region where climate denial is greatest.

In cities where people spend their days in climate-controlled spaces, where the birds and insects were already mostly gone, where gardening is a bourgeois pastime that exists primarily to demonstrate control of scarce land, not provide food, where only the smoke arrives from the wildfires because the region is already so heavily defoliated, climate skepticism is actually less.

In other words, the relationship between firsthand evidence and belief is the opposite of what one would assume.

This news is especially troubling because the environmental movement has always subconsciously relied on the climate event doing most of the work of mobilizing people to stop it, the way Marxists used to assume that the ever-increasing alienation produced by capitalism would do most of the work of mobilizing revolutionaries. But contrary to David Suzuki’s predictions in 1990, the approach of the climate event is increasing disbelief.

Yet, strangely, climate activists are not merely unprepared for this reality; they are non-responsive to it. Because the movement embraced an “awareness” versus “conversion” approach to persuading the public, one so obtusely unwilling to consider how people narrate changes in their lives, it is especially unprepared and ill-suited to pivoting on this basis. But there are other reasons: most climate activists are especially likely to succumb to the psychological phenomenon we are witnessing, but in different areas of their lives, affecting different aspects of their political beliefs.

The phenomenon we are witnessing is called “reaction formation.” It is a well-documented psychological response to manage protracted feelings causing discomfort, usually in the form of fear. For instance, a fear of death may manifest as a vehement assertion of the existence and importance of an afterlife. The intensity of a person’s professed conviction is not powered by belief in that conviction but rather, by its opposite. In other words, the more a person fears death, and the closer they come to that death, the more vehemently they will propound their belief in the afterlife, because the main person they are trying to convince is themselves, as a means of controlling their feelings of fear.

Whereas fear of death has powered Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, fear of the climate crisis has powered “climate fundamentalism.”

I want to suggest that one of the reasons the adoption of the package of beliefs that are included in conservative American thought is so popular in Canada’s northwest is because evidence of climate change is more immediate and frightening. The chance that your home will be destroyed in a wildfire, the chances that your job will be destroyed by extreme weather events, the chance that you will become geographically isolated by a flash flood, the chance that your food security is on the line as frosts and hails become more frequent and unpredictable—these things engender a kind of fear nobody in Toronto or Vancouver is going to experience, because our physical safety is more mediated by capitalism and the urban built environment.

This is yet another reason that 1980s climate activist David Lewis (the firewood collector and giant, not the former NDP leader) was so far ahead of his time. He felt that the most important message the climate activist movement could deliver to people was that losses were inevitable but we would “share the losses” equitably and not leave communities behind.

But instead, we have chosen to adopt the Hillary Clinton move and decide that the people living in our rural periphery are “deplorables,” something that came into sharp relief during the trucker “freedom convoy,” in which Canadian citizens were referred to as “invaders” of their own country and smeared repeatedly based on falsehoods or massive exaggerations.

The more we let our rural brothers and sisters know that we do not see them as full citizens of their own country, the more we will intensify the reaction formation that extreme weather events are already causing and the more climate denial we will breed. This is something we cannot afford to do at this time. If our political system were not completely captured, Greens or New Democrats would be touring rural areas offering government insurance against climate events, talking not about the “transition” of rural communities but the preservation of rural life in Canada. But instead, the plan is to call frightened people cruel names and condemn them as non-citizen interlopers when they try to express their anxiety to us.

We must share the losses and we must develop a concrete plan for sharing those losses, not aspirational debt-leveraged nonsense like the LEAP Manifesto, claiming there will be no losses and everyone will get richer. The rural working class know what that’s code for: them getting screwed again. We must do this and do it soon or fear will grow in the communities that are being hardest-hit by the Greenhouse Effect and that fear will intensify climate denial.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

What the Left Should Learn from the overturning of Roe v. Wade

It finally happened. Roe vs. Wade, one of the greatest pieces of liberal judicial activism of the twentieth century was struck down. For me, my comrades and millions of American women of childbearing age this is a tragic moment, another huge piece of the Cold War social democratic welfare state’s social contract sheared-off.

But this defeat was especially searing because, unlike P3s, a US-led global order, free trade, austerity and privatization, this was not a wind-assisted victory of an elite consensus. Because that is how people of the political left see those other losses: the establishment endorsed these things; they heavily bankrolled or Astro-turfed smaller or non-existent social movement groups to echo that consensus; they got pretty much all mainstream political parties, major corporations and the liberal media to present these things as not just beneficial but inevitable. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher said.

This win is different because the establishment was on our side and was, for the most part, against the movement that just won. While anti-abortion activists enjoy the support of some major corporations in America, they are not the majority; and while they enjoy the support of one of America’s major political parties, that support is not unanimous across jurisdictions. America’s extreme Northeast and Northwest still have pro-choice Republican parties. And it was not until the early 1990s that there was even one major mainstream anti-abortion media outfit, FoxNews. And it was not until the early 2000s that TV and movie dramas touching abortion, even on Fox, ultimately came down on the side of choice.

Finally, we must remember that, even in the religious sphere, most churches were not anti-abortion when Roe v. Wade was handed-down. The Roman Catholic Church officially and vehemently opposed abortion and so, partly to distinguish themselves from the largest single denomination (Catholics), most Protestants, including most Evangelicals used abortion as a means of distinguishing themselves from Catholics. Indeed, nothing short of a complete remaking of the American religious marketplace over the next four decades was necessary to create the near-consensus among regular churchgoers in the US that the state must regulate abortion. “Mainline” Protestant churches went from being the second-largest group of American churchgoers to a tiny portion comprising no more than a tenth; evangelicals pulled away from mainline denominations and joined with the rapidly-growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements; historically black churches soured on abortion; and churchgoing became a rural, rather than universal American pastime.

A grassroots movement, and one that does not enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, even today, conducted a half-century struggle and beat us.

Any person of any level of political seriousness must study this victory if they have any interest in beating the establishment at anything. Whether one agrees with the anti-abortion movement or vehemently opposes it, any person truly interested in a grassroots struggle against money and power should be studying this victory with a fine-toothed comb for years to come.

So, I thought I would offer a little bit of what I have learned, as an outsider, from my experiences of organizing with anti-abortion activists and the insights I gleaned, that other social movements would do well to follow.

In 1996, mathematician and political organizer Julian West and I decided to create a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations that would champion a provincial referendum on proportional representation. Early adopters who pulled in their organizations, and built our group, the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), so-named by Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s Troy Lanigan from the ground up. They included Troy, the BC Reform Party’s David Secord, the BC Marxist-Leninist Party’s Charles Boylan and the BC Family Coalition Party’s Kathleen Toth, among many others. As the organization evolved and took its various twists and turns, I worked with a number of anti-abortion folks on voting reform work, like Kathleen’s husband Mark, FCP candidate John O’Flynn, Christian Heritage Party leader Heather Stillwell, along with BC Reform Party pro-life insurgents Bev Welsh, backer of Wilf Hanni’s successful takeover of the party by the Christian Right, Wilf, himself and, finally, Chris Delany, the Bill Vander Zalm surrogate who merged Reform into the BC Unity Party.

In fact, my last speech as leader of the BC Green Party was as part of a panel on electoral reform the month after my defeat as party leader. It ended with a hug of appreciation for my work on the file from the Zalm himself.

ECCO’s sister, and later, successor organization was Fair Voting BC, founded by Nick Loenen, the Zalm’s seat-mate representing Richmond in the legislature 1986-91. Nick’s book on PR, the original bible of BC’s voting reform movement, A Case for Proportional Representation, was explicit in arguing that PR could be a vital tool whereby the anti-abortion advocates could wield real political power in the BC legislature and was crucial in piquing so much interest in PR on the Christian Right in the 1990s.
           

Most participants in our coalition were eager to try being in such a broad, disparate and diverse group but lacked cultural experience of this kind of work. And so it fell to those most experienced with this sort of thing to take the lead, and so our organization in many ways was imprinted with the style of coalition politics practiced by the anti-abortion movement.

Learning how to formulate complex communications, strategies and tactics with allies who disagree with most of one’s political views and find a significant portion of said views not just wrong but offensive is quite tricky. But this was a movement of Catholics who had persuaded members of evangelical churches that believed the Pope was the literal Antichrist to lock themselves to abortion clinic doors together.

A fundamental tenet of our meetings was that we needed to agree on as few things as possible; the more things we added to our list of points of agreement, the more likely the coalition was to fray, to collapse into arguments. Nearly every annual general meeting featured Canadians for Direct Democracy, a junior member of our coalition, attempting to get us to expand our mandate to include support for easier-to-use initiative legislation, binding referenda and other democratic reforms. Every time, CDD was voted down.

Because we learned from our Christian comrades that the strength of a coalition comes from its size and breadth and that every additional demand a coalition makes is one that makes is narrower, smaller and weaker, no matter how apparently small or intuitive.

We also learned how to have political conversations in which we could share stories about highly charged, highly polarizing political experiences by changing the kind of story they were. Stories of logging road and abortion clinic blockades ceased being stories about old growth forests and the human soul; they became stories about being the kind of person who does this sort of thing, the run-ins one has had with the courts and police. Kathleen and I shared stories about what it was like to be a beleaguered party leader in a small organization full of eccentrics and fanatics.

In this way, what we agreed on stayed small but what we could talk about was as much as any group of people thrown together possibly could. I especially savour the memory of one night when we went for drinks after staging our annual general meeting. Every year, we would re-elect Troy president and, as he was a member of the Taxpayer movement, we always counter-balanced this by having Charles, the Marxist-Leninist, give his nominating speech. That year we had got into quite a personal tussle with CDD, whose representatives had shouted “the president is a dictator! The president is a dictator!”

Troy was commiserating with us afterwards and said, “It’s like they think I’m some kind of Stalinist,” to which Charles replied, “I’m a big fan of yours Troy. I’ve got your back. But I consider Joseph Stalin to be just about the greatest human being who ever lived and I’ll be damned if you’re going to say another word against him.” We all laughed very hard after that, led by the CHP’s Heather Stillwell, if memory serves.

Another big thing I learned from the anti-abortion movement is that you can turn a media blackout into a kind of internal publicity and morale boost. A generation before one could share crowd photos and selfies on social media and be seen by thousands of eyes, North America’s anti-abortion movement trudged through a worse media blackout than any I have ever faced—and I sure have faced a couple.

In Canada, the mainstream media would cover nomination contests in the Liberals and Tories where anti-abortion candidates for office would fight it out at nomination meetings or, as the 90s wore on, suddenly find their nomination bids vetoed by the party leader. But this did not extend to other demonstrations of the sheer size of the mobilized anti-abortion movement. When abortion clinics were blockaded, mainstream media would assiduously ignore the confrontation, no matter the turnout, even when those blockades led to multiple arrests.

But the most extreme moment of the blackout would occur annually on “Life Chain” day in which anti-abortion protesters would link hands and form into incredible multi-block chains of as many as five thousand human beings at a single location. I even asked Kevin Evans, then-anchor of CBC British Columbia’s six o’clock news about this and he confirmed that not covering the Life Chain was a matter of shared policy among all major broadcasters.

Imagine Extinction Rebellion going years or even decades without a single word of their bridge and road blockages hitting the mainstream media!

But what I found was that the week after the Life Chain was the week anti-abortion activists were most serene. Rather than feeling cheated by the lack of coverage, there was a sense of purity, of power that came from being so intentionally and obviously ignored. The Life Chain imbued a sense of confidence, the sense that their adversaries had run out of ideas for stopping them but the chain was lengthening anyway, that the power they wielded was growing and nobody co-owned it; it was all theirs.

And the very absence of coverage, the media’s implicit denial of the movement’s momentum served as proof of the real momentum it genuinely possessed.

A third important feature that merits rehearsal is perhaps the most surprising to outsiders: standing behind female leaders and listening to women. Kathleen had risen to prominence as the last president of the Social Credit Ladies’ Auxiliary, succeeding its long-time head, Hope Wotherspoon, who had ascended to the presidency of the whole party. Social Credit was the last of BC’s political parties to hold separate (sometimes concurrent) women’s conventions. And as any man who has tried to interrupt an assertive Mormon woman knows, the best place to build strong leadership skills for women is in single-sex spaces.

Not only did the churches from which anti-abortionists hailed contain and defend single-sex spaces and single-sex leadership positions, the province’s natural governing party had refused to abandon the separate spheres model until the late 1980s. This meant that there were female leaders trained, tested and promoted in female-only spaces who could meet any room she entered authoritatively and command that space. Phyllis Schaffly was not an outlier; she was a type within the Christian Right, a woman who had learned to control a room, unmediated by male power.

Given that the first and most powerful interfaith organizations in Anglo America, all the way back to the WCTU, were female-led, there was an additional expectation that conditioned this organizing. It was expected that single-faith gatherings were clergy-led and therefore male led; but by the same token, it was expected that interfaith groups and other coalitions would be more appropriately led by women. And women seemed logically qualified because if there is one gender cliché of which progressives and conservatives equally partake it is the idea of the woman as social bridge-builder, peacemaker and fence-mender.

The last observation I will make is that anti-abortion activists shared something that used to be more universal among climate activists like me: a never-ending sense of urgency, the sense that lives were being lost, people were dying every day they did not win.

That kind of profound urgency actually keeps activists from working themselves to the point of burnout, because of the knowledge that one needs to be able to keep struggling every day, that one cannot give up until victory has been achieved.

But that sense of desperation also breeds a cold political calculation, one that is willing, on the large scale, to ride on the backs of the corrupt and godless Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, if that’s the only way to get to the Supreme Court. That desperation was enacted on the small scale every day, at the grassroots level.

Kathleen Toth and I didn’t just find a way to be joyful comrades because we were friendly people who love the other humans; we did so because we were desperate, so desperate as to not let some ethos of personal purity get in the way of making the deals we had to, to save the lives we understood ourselves to be trying to save.

If we really care about the issues that animate us, it behooves us to ask: (1) is our coalition broad enough, permissive enough? (2) can we build our power and momentum without needing others to recognize it? (3) do we have a pipeline that is producing powerful female leaders? and (4) if we are as desperate as we say, are we really doing all we can?

BC Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

A Rising Tide of Racism Lifts All Boats, Part V of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

Before I started writing about the Trucker Convoy, I had been working on a long series about Indigeneity and the land question in Canada. These two series are now converging so I should probably urge those who joined us late to catch up by reading the first three parts of the series on the land question.

In one of the most successful uses of subversion propaganda in history, Indigenous people of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Anglo America hit upon one of the few effective ways of bridling European colonialism: appealing to the nostalgic and romantic sensibilities of colonists. As I have written elsewhere, historian Sam Gill offers a compelling case for Indigenous people adapting, modifying their demands and self-description to play on European sentimentality and romanticism about their own peoples’ experiences of conversion and colonialism.

Herodotus’s idea of “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods,” strongly informed how Britons thought about the druids and England’s Celtic past; it likewise informed Germanic thinking about the valiant resistance of the Saxons who fought and died to protect their sacred groves from Charlemagne’s armies. While this afforded Indigenous people more political purchase on the present, this rhetoric was and remains costly in innumerable ways.

For a start, it is moored to the idea of the Celtic Twilight, the sense that the old world of elves, giants and great men, while superior, is nevertheless inexorably fading, diminishing, giving way to a world of more numerous yet lesser men. This is one of the central thematic sensibilities in JRR Tolkien’s hugely influential Lord of the Rings; the elves may be better than us, closer to the earth, closer to the heavens, closer to the gods but they are fading and will inevitably be succeeded by “the world of men.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, this Indigenous propaganda coup coincided with another major realigning cultural event, “the closing of the frontier.” With the frontier closed and America filling with settlers, the Myth of the Vanishing Indian was born. Read any major encyclopedia or canonical authoritative text from the end of the nineteenth century and, it is clear that there existed a cultural consensus that to be Indigenous meant, axiomatically, that one was in a process of vanishing. If a person or a people were not vanishing, they were not Indigenous. If one was Indigenous, one was necessarily vanishing.

It is, in this light, that one might want to reconsider the “kill the Indian to save the child” rhetoric of conservative proponents of Canada’s Indigenous residential school system. It is, in fact, a statement that one does not want Indigenous children to vanish and therefore that they must be shorn of their Indigeneity. Imperialistic? Yes. Racist? Absolutely. Blinkered Western triumphalist? Sure. Genocidal—only if you think “cultural genocide” is more lethal than actual genocide.

Of course, Indigenous people were not naturally vanishing, despite the horrific consequences of the virgin soil epidemics. They were being made to vanish by the market, by public policy, by a host of forces arrayed against them.

Unlike the original progressives who were strangling the Indian to save the child, contemporary progressives love romantic vanishing Indians. The more Indigenous people seem to be associated with a noble, ancient, fading culture, the more “racially transparent” they are, the more progressives love them. Thanks to centuries of intermarriage, most Indigenous Canadians today do not have their Indigeneity unambiguously tattooed on the outside of their bodies; that’s why progressives like such folks better when their speech style and costume fill in any blanks left by their skin and facial features. Neo-traditionalist Indigenous people are the most racially transparent group of Canadians. More and more frequently as it engages in greater and greater patronage of self-tokenization as a public performance, the Indians progressives encounter at their events, giving the land acknowledgement have fashioned themselves to be, as Thomas King writes, “the Indian I had in mind” because that is the Indian they have paid to have arrive.

There are a million ways to be Indigenous in Canada and be fully Indigenous; there is no wrong way. Nathan, my (inadvertently) white-passing pipeline worker, Tory candidate and Catholic men’s group organizer friend is just as Indigenous as every other member of the Assiniboine people. There is a spectrum of ways of being Indigenous in Canada; from the non-status Métis people who celebrate Canada Day harder than anyone else and are most likely to enlist in the Canadian Forces to the late Splitting the Sky, the Mohawk neo-traditionalist radical who led the armed standoff at Gustafsen Lake as a member of the Sundance Movement.

And associated with these two polarities are opposing political demands: Joseph Brant’s belief in a sovereign, self-governing traditional Mohawk Nation with full independence within the British Empire, answerable only to the Crown is at one end; Louis Riel’s belief that the Métis people were the co-owners of the Canadian project, or at least the project as it existed in the West, a synthesis of its founding peoples and beliefs, ready to take their place among the nation’s leaders.

Both are legitimate strategies because only God can see all ends.

Yet what has happened in the past five years is that the latter strategy, what we might call the “Riel Strategy,” has become conflated, in both the US and Canada, with accusations of white nationalism. In fact, “white nationalist” has almost become a synonym of “white trash.” This might seem an extreme interpretation until we realize that, in the minds of progressives, the expression of white guilt is constitutive of one’s entitlement to experience true whiteness.

What has enabled this bizarre turn of events is the way in which progressives and conservatives have increasingly diverged in their theory of whiteness and the social meaning thereof. A common feature of what are called populist “white nationalist” movements around the world, from India to the United States to Brazil to the Philippines is the lowering of the Colour Line. For the Trump movement, high caste Hindus are white; whites from São Paulo and Rio di Janeiro are white; whites from Uruguay and Argentina are white; white trash are white; Alaskan Eskimos are white. Furthermore, the movement’s costume can be used to whiten an individual, even if they do not become fully white. The single most effective protection against police bullets for black Americans is not Kevlar; it is a MAGA hat.

We must understand that the genuine racism of these movements, their association with hate groups, including Nazis are politically possible because at the same time as they demand more discrimination, more bigotry against black people, Arabs, low-caste Indians, they are also engaged in democratizing whiteness, and offering it to more people. At the level of personal, individual experience, a nearly-white person joining a white nationalist movement is experienced as a reduction in the racism one personally faces, even if it increases the level of overall racism in society. The authoritarian right offers a path in which more of society is white but the consequences of not being white grow more dire by the year.

Progressives have, probably reactively, become increasingly committed to raising the colour line, offering incentives for people to identify as something other than white. And they are increasingly concerned about racial transparency; the worst race to be, for progressives, is unknown, without precise knowledge of someone’s race, how are they to be located in the Great Neoliberal Chain of Being. And whereas conservatives tend increasingly to construct race as a binary, white/non-white, in or out, progressives grow more committed to a neo-Ottoman racial hierarchy with a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Whereas too many conservatives now view a lack of whiteness as an insufficiency, progressives have returned to the nineteenth-century practice of seeing different races as possessing special, boutique knowledge and talents that are transmitted through the blood. However, as much as progressives purport to see their increasingly separatist, diversity-celebrating racial order as egalitarian, the reality is that they are slinging white superiority nearly as much as conservatives. It’s just that the rhetoric of white supremacy is very different.

One of the most horrid neologisms to come out of the alliance between Big HR and postmodernists is the term “logocentric.” The idea is that there are so many ways of knowing and all are equal. In fact, white people are supposedly cursed with being “logocentric,” i.e. they use reason and math to figure stuff out. Indigenous people are not “logocentric”—they have ancient, quasi-magical ways of knowing that are supposedly better than reason. Whereas progressives once thought that things like the Enlightenment and mathematics belonged to everyone, they now assert that they are the exclusive property of white people, in one of the most outrageously racist humblebrags of all time.

Another feature of progressive whiteness is compulsive ancestor-blaming for everything that has ever gone wrong. No African ever sold another African into slavery. 9/11 was caused by Europeans imposing “cis-normative heteropatriarchy” on the Islamic world, which had previously been a feminist paradise. What white progressives are really saying when they articulate these views is that our ancestors were amoral supermen in complete control of the engine of history, that only white agency exists in history, that white people do things and non-white people have things done to them. Only white people possess moral agency in history, another amazing racist humblebrag.

A final example is the discourse of “cultural appropriation.” Cultural appropriation used to refer to the events like those depicted in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, when American record companies recorded folk songs that had existed as a non-commodified shared good and converted them into their intellectual property. The conversion of shared, non-commodified cultural production into a thing that could be owned and commercialized used to be what this term meant.

Today, “cultural appropriation” has come to mean that the “right” to make certain kinds of art, certain kinds of music, certain kinds of food lives in the blood, that it is heritable and biological. Even acts of imaginative empathy to narrate the experiences of others is understood now as a violation of these rights. Right now, the government of Canada is in the process of creating a regulatory framework to prohibit the production of art and literature that one has not inherited the right to make. Soon, a white person telling a story from a black person’s viewpoint won’t just face loud condemnation from Woke Canada; it may soon be disqualified from state patronage in the form of grants, airtime and gallery space.

Of course, this “stay in your lane,” theory of culture is premised on a complete misunderstanding of what culture is, that central to the operation of culture is movement and exchange, that culture is a way you navigate difference, not a way to achieve separateness. Such an approach also saps our ability to actually love and understand one another because acts of imaginative empathy are now understood to be theft. Trying to understand people of other races, to see their world through their eyes was once the core of anti-racism; now progressives claim that it is the essence of racism.

And this should not surprise us because, just like the return of authoritarianism, rising white supremacy is a global, society-wide event that is leaving no one unscathed. So, we must acknowledge that the ascendant tendencies within both progressives and conservatives share a commitment to the permanent inferiority of non-whites. But whereas the new white nationalist conservatism thrives on the effacement of racial transparency, progressivism increasingly requires this.

Whereas conservatives offer non-whites an unequal part in their nationalist projects, white progressives do not include non-whites in their nation-building efforts; instead, they favour sponsoring parallel nation-building projects run by their tokens and surrogates at a remove in other communities. As an example of this, just yesterday, a BC progressive podcaster and opinion leader suggested that it was racist for non-Indigenous people to have opinions, to think thoughts, about massive development projects if they were being conducted by Indigenous people, even if that project is across the street.

For all their lectures about the evils of South African and Israeli Apartheid, progressives sure do love a good Bantustan.

In the next part of the series, I will apply the ideas I have put forward here, with specificity, to the Canadian Trucker Convoy of 2022, beginning with the provocation that, if Louis Riel were alive today, he would have been at the head of the convoy, in the biggest rig, with the Virgin Mary and a medicine wheel painted on the side.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

The Fall and Rise of America’s Original “White Trash,” Part IV of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

With the fall of Jim Crow and the rise of neoliberal “free trade,” labour mobility, investor rights and austerity programs, there was a shift in the language that Anglo Americans used to talk about race and class. And it was one with which I had a pretty direct, visceral experience. At the beginning of the 1980s, based on the “one drop rule,” I was a black kid “passing” for white. By the end of the 1990s, I was a white man.

Not all acts of passing were understood to deceptive or intentional. Lots of people who, according to the law and the census, were black effortlessly passed in Anglo American society. Back then new friends, employers and political associates were necessarily more curious about one’s family, home town, etc.; those ubiquitous wallet photos of the late Cold War were not just commemorative; they were defensive. They were props that did not just burnish one’s reputation as a family man or devoted wife but as a full member of white America.

As I has said elsewhere, the reason race remains with us is that it is dynamic and adaptive, always changing in ways that maintain its relevance and apparent descriptive power in our interactions.

The 1980s and 1990s were a time of fundamental economic and social transformation the world over, with the rise of neoliberalism and the ideological hegemony it exerted over all political formations, from Margaret Thatcher’s Tories to Tony Blair’s “New” Labour to Boris Yeltsin and other former East Bloc commissars turned neoliberal “reformers.”

An important aspect of this a phenomenon known as the “Rust Belt.” The fact is that industrial employment in both the manufacturing semi-periphery comprising places like Michigan and Ohio, and in the extractive periphery comprising places like Chile and British Columbia, high wage manufacturing employment had been in decline even in the 1960s and 1970s. But the brunt of these job losses had been experienced by non-white workers, Indigenous bush workers in BC, mestizo miners in Chile’s Atacama Desert and black industrial workers in the American heartland.

The massive increases in poverty and unemployment among Indigenous and black workers had been blamed on supposedly too-generous welfare programs of the Great Society, the government housing projects, lack of “role models” for racialized male youth, the counterculture and, of course, drugs. But really it was just a mass of job losses due to off-shoring, deindustrialization and mechanization being experienced first by the least white workers. White workers disproportionately kept some of the last remaining high-wage, unionized, industrial jobs while non-whites were over-represented in early layoffs.

However, as Anglo American society moved through the second half of the 80s and into the 90s, there was simply no way to confine the masses of industrial layoffs to, amplified by the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988 and NAFTA in 1993, to non-whites, who had been pushed out of most recent industrial work already.

Worse yet, while the layoffs of the 1970s and early 80s had taken place in the context of an expanding welfare state, as the 1980s layoffs wore on, they took place in the context of a contracting one. There was no massive increase government housing; instead, governments were selling off the housing they had built for the poor. There was no increase in welfare; instead, governments began rolling-out new income austerity programs that prohibited people from receiving government benefits after a fixed period, even if they had no alternative income source.

It is in this context that the term “white trash” took on a more expansive meaning, seeming to wholly blot out its previous one. While it is true that many of the poorest white industrial workers in the American Midwest and Southern Ontario had, just like their former black co-workers, migrated from the former Confederate States of America in the early twentieth century, the new primary usage of the term “white trash” made no distinction among the white working class people for whom the layoff notices finally came.

Beginning in the 1990s, “white trash” took on the definition it has largely retained up to the present day. It referred to working class white people clearly bearing the stigmata of poverty, worn clothes, residence in a manufactured home, unemployment, dependence on government assistance and the afflictions that we often problematically associate with these things, depression, poor nutrition, addiction and family breakdown.

Charismatic religious movements that are especially appealing to those in poverty also became part of the stereotype. Andrew Chestnut’s work on this subject is very important, showing that subscription to movements that believe strongly in faith healing and other unscientific medical interventions is concentrated among those who lack access to medical services due to poverty or remoteness. Following Chestnut’s line of reasoning, we can also see an interest in school vouchers and charter schools is likely to be concentrated among those who lack the financial resources of those who enroll their children in private schooling but wish to deliver things private not public schools are designed to deliver.

As we presided over massive increases in working class unemployment, rapid declines in wages, as men were forced out of industrial work, and the concurrent evisceration of state programs designed to provide support under those circumstances, we began to build our contemporary “they had it coming” narrative.

The white working class had it coming, the story goes, because they voted for the wrong people, an absurd assertion given that austerity and off-shoring were enacted by every political party, irrespective of its position on the political spectrum. We added to that a lack of commitment to education and self-improvement, even as postsecondary tuition fees and other costs massively increased.

Furthermore, as class analysis came to be rejected by formerly socialist and social democratic parties and came to be replaced by “intersectionality” and other theories of oppression that deny the importance of class, a new theories of the virtuous and unvirtuous poor began to develop, whose full elaboration we see today in a pile of retconned nonsense called “critical race theory.”

If one ignores class but emphasizes the role of race and gender identity as the sole loci of discrimination and oppression, one can create a film negative of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” cliché. People with boutique sexual and gender identities and people of colour have an excuse, a justification, for poverty. But straight working class white people have no excuse. They are all, after all, awash in “white privilege.”

Journalists, commentators, analysts and comedians associated with the political left increasingly replaced the powerful and wealthy with rural, working class white people as the butt of their jokes. And the term “white,” whether modifying “trash,” or, more politely and increasingly frequently, “working class,” exculpated these individuals from accusations of “punching down.” The white working class were not the largest chunk of an oppressed working class but were, instead, comfortable people who had squandered their “white privilege.”

This reached a crescendo with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Not only had Trump the temerity to focus his message on America’s white trash, he praised key aspects of their culture, with its do-it-yourself-ism, its autodidacticism, its religiosity, etc., despite the supposedly self-evident backwardness of these things.

More tellingly, when 58% of America’s white working class voted against Trump they were singled-out and blamed for his victory, whereas, middle- and high-income white women, a majority of whom had voted for him, were not. This condemnation and blame-shifting was perfected by Ta Nehisi Coates and the Afro-pessimist intellectual school which argued that, despite the fact that a majority had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, America’s white trash were so sexist, so racist that they never had and never would vote for a black person, a woman or anyone else their bigotry told them to hate.

While Coates produced an emotionally satisfying narrative of political impotence and futility that met the psychological needs of 2017, it applied too broad a brush to too large a portion of the population to have any practical utility. For reformers, it offered no solutions; for political careerists, it offered no opportunities.

And that is why, since 2017, we have been seeing a slow return to the prior definition of white trash. Sure, America’s white working class is all over the place; but there are especially benighted, especially stupid, especially backward, especially bad people who form the core of the Trump movement.

Actual scholars of the Trump movement, who use ethnographic data and analysis are pretty clear on who the core of the movement are: local notables: the guy who runs the monthly prime rib dinner for the Elks Lodge, the woman who runs the local scholarship fund for the Parent Advisory Council, the president of the local chamber of commerce or board of trade, the treasurer of the local hospital association. These individuals are the backbone of the Trump movement because their ability to function as mediators of financial aid in their communities is threatened by an expanded social safety net and by expanded bureaucracies mediating access to essential but privatized services like healthcare. But that is not who is depicted as the core of the movement.

The core of the Trump movement, the most backward, the most irredeemable came to be understood as the original white trash. From 2017-2020, progressive journalists and academics took innumerable trips to Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi to interview the poorest Trump voters they could find, to unlock the absurd liberal non-puzzle of people “voting against their interests.” (As though anyone anywhere votes based on a personal financial calculus derived from political parties’ election platforms!)

The key to the Trump movement, journalists and scholars decided, was not to be found in the Scranton Board of Trade or the Kenosha Rotary Club but in the most rural, most remote, most impoverished communities in its poorest states.

And it is at this point in this essay series that we begin to circle back. These communities have the distinction of retaining a greater portion of what I referred to in part two as “migrant worker culture,” a set of related subcultures that have been strongly influenced by Indigenous and Métis traditions, in addition to significantly over-representing Indigenous descent relative to the rest of America.

I am not arguing that all or even most people in rural Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi are of Indigenous descent but I am arguing that they are the most culturally and genetically influenced by Indigenous culture and history. And that this influence is an un-verbalized assumption the vast majority of Americans still carry with them. Suspicion as to the incomplete whiteness of these folks has never really gone away.

And what is worse is that this assumption interacts with a novel obsession of progressives, that of racial transparency. It is as though, when modifying “trash” or “working class,” in the progressive lexicon, the word “white” is actually an expression of suspicion, of incomplete belief in these people’s whiteness. Why that should suddenly matter to progressives, who, until recently, were the least racist Americans, and what the opposing set of ideas about whiteness to which this belief reacts are will be covered in Part Five, as we begin our journey back to the 2022 Trucker Convoy.

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Origins and Legacy of Anglo America’s Racial System, Part III of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

In 1985, Stephen Rogers, British Columbia’s Minister of Forests committed a major gaffe that made headlines in BC’s paper of record, the Vancouver Sun. Rogers, the new minister, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Mississippi. The Mississippi forest industry was presenting a greater and greater competitive challenge to BC forest products as BC;’s industry increasingly focused on chewing-up the boreal forest into particleboard or making similarly low-grade shakes and shingles, as the more impressive old growth began to run out and industrial reprocessing became more important.

But what landed Rogers in hot water was not anything he said about wood quality, technology or labour. What got him in trouble was his characterization of the workers in the Mississippi industry, whom he dismissed as “poor white trash.” It may surprise readers to note that those who called for his resignation or demotion attacked him for racism.

While the term “white trash” came, for a time, to define a much larger class-based group during the 1990s, back in the 1980s it still retained its original meaning from the 1600s. And, to understand where Rogers was coming from and the racism he invoked, it is necessary to say a bit about the ethnogenesis of America’s “white trash.”

From its inception, Britain’s colonial project in the Americas was sharply divided along North-South lines. Its northern colonies were populated by two main groups of colonists: religiously-motivated settlers who saw New England as a region where they could build a Calvinist society and free young men in high-risk occupations like logging, whaling and fur-trading. It was a society based around yeoman farming of subsistence crops by free people on small parcels of land. Boston was a vibrant emerging city populated by free people.

The southern colonies were a very different place. Their elite planter class controlled vast swaths of rich valley bottom land, which they turned into vast monocrop plantations to ship out indigo, rice, tobacco, sugar and the other highly prized commodities of the Age of Sail. The labour force on these plantations was, like the loggers and whalers of New England, largely comprised of poor, young men of the working class. But whereas most of the labour in the North was free, the labour in the South was compelled, unfree. The majority of the young men were indentured servants who had been sentenced to seven-year terms of slavery, sold to the planters and shipped across the Atlantic against their will.

When these seven-year terms of indenture ended, the young men were dismissed from work, penniless, sometimes offered the chance to continue their work at poverty wages but just as often simply discharged with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

With the valley-bottom land now monopolized by enormous, well-armed plantations, the young men who stayed often looked to the upland regions, regions to which local Indigenous people had also retrenched. These Indigenous communities were often the targets of vigilantism by the now-free but largely penniless young men who had worked in the plantations. These young men did not simply seek to seize the well-cultivated and fenced Indigenous farms; they sought out Indigenous women who faced a blizzard of abduction and sexual violence from these invaders.

Sometimes Indigenous people responded with organized punitive expeditions that counter-raided, burned crops and threatened to destabilize the uneasy treaty peace the planters had bought with Indigenous nations. The local legislature, the Virginia House of Burgesses, which had steep property requirements, shared the view of the governor and imperial government back in London: the problem was the young men; they had been debtors, vagrants and thieves back in England and their criminality was irrepressible. And so, at least on paper, government sided against the young violent men and with Indigenous people.

The problem was that, at the level of enforcement, there was little interest in enacting the imperial grand design. Most of the men engaged in law enforcement in the colonies had more in common with the young, violent men—in fact, they were often young men of the same class, press-ganged into military service or otherwise forced.

A potential solution to the problem of these unruly young men was presented by the Dutch in 1620: African slaves, captured according to the doctrine of “just war” in the Congo Basin and West Africa. But this actually served to intensify the problem of the young men for the first half-century of slave-purchasing. That is because it was not clear whether it was appropriate to keep black slaves for more than seven years, whether they had a different status or different legal rights than the indentured servants. Consequently, the number of both enslaved and free Africans in the South grew steadily through the seventeenth century. And a degree of class solidarity began to develop between African and European workers, especially on the plantations that used a mixture of European and African, free and unfree labour.

In the upland regions, African and European men served together in the irregular and unofficial militias that prosecuted a slow-motion war against the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, gradually driving out the land’s original inhabitants… mostly. The fact was that, unlike the Puritan Fathers of New England, the planter elite of the South was neither particularly interested in or capable of luring young women across the Atlantic. This meant that, whether by rape, abduction or, sometimes, mutual consent, it was largely Indigenous women who bore the children of the first generation of uplanders.

So it was that, within a generation, the idea that the blood of the uplanders was impure, tainted with the blood of Indigenous people, something that only intensified as small amounts of African blood began entering this mix in the second and third generations of this system.

Then in 1676, the original system broke. Nathaniel Bacon, a planter aligned with the uplanders proposed to the Virginia House of Burgesses a large, state-supported punitive expedition against the Indigenous people to clear more land for European and African occupation. The proposal was defeated and Bacon rallied his own army from the irregular militias, which grew as European servants and African slaves left the valley-bottom plantations to join this popular army.

And the army’s ambitions grew as it became more diverse, more radical. Its members seized the prime land the planters were monopolizing and marched on the capital of Jamestown, driving out the governor and holding the legislators at gunpoint.

Over the next four years, the British Empire regrouped, easily retook Virginia from Bacon’s rebels and rolled out the new racial system that would come to define the American South and British Caribbean for centuries to come. White servitude in the mainland colonies was abolished and the full rights of Englishmen were bestowed on the uplanders. African slavery was, on the other hand, made not just lifelong but indefinitely heritable.

It is this system that used terms like “hillbilly” and “white trash” to refer to the descendants of the indentured servants. These terms were not simply geographic and class signifiers. They implied that these people’s work as tenant farmers, farmhands, overseers of slaves or owners of low-value, high-elevation, low-productivity land arose, at least in part, from their blood being tainted with that of non-white, especially Indigenous people.

Essentially, Rogers had used the American equivalent of the Canadian term “half-breed,” the pejorative not used for all mixed-race Canadians at that time but specifically for the Métis. Earlier that year, in fact, an engaged liberal at our family dinner table had proclaimed, “I’ve just seen the most wonderful documentary on Louis Riel. I will never utter the word ‘half-breed’ again; it’s such a bohunk word.” (“Bohunk” was the rough Canadian equivalent of Polack, our nation’s generic anti-Slavic pejorative.) Canadians were growing more sensitive to anti-Métis racism in the mid-80s and so Rogers’ remarks were especially ill-timed and ill-received.

But, as I have written elsewhere, the persistence of race arises from the dynamism and flexibility of racial systems; the colour line is powerful precisely because it is in constant motion. The changes to our racial systems in the following ten years were substantial and affected me personally.

In 1985, blackness in Anglo America was still governed by the “one drop rule”—individuals of African descent with skin and hair as light as mine were understood to be black people who were either intentionally or unintentionally “passing” for white. In 1985, the bullies at school understood me to be a black person who could and did “pass.” For most of the twentieth century, most Anglo Americans understood that white-looking people were not necessarily white and efforts were made to discern the “true” race of people who looked like me.

At that point in history, “white trash” referred to people who were not really white but were granted a limited degree of whiteness as long as they functioned as supporters and enforcers of white supremacy for the planter class and Southern elite, a role into which they had been pushed in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion and in which many continued up until the late twentieth century as foot soldiers of the Klan and White Citizens’ Leagues. Naturally, those who did not participate in these enactments of white supremacy were often hit with insults like “not white enough to be white trash” but nevertheless retained membership in the group.

For reasons that will be explored in the next part of this series, the racial categories into which these people and people like me were placed dramatically shifted in the decade following. But, more importantly for my purpose here, I believe that we have been returning to the original definition over the past decade and a half. “White trash” and its polite euphemism, “the white working class” have been inexorably tacking back to meaning not the American white proletariat as a whole but specifically the passing Métis of Anglo America’s internal periphery.  

BC Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |

“Does Todd Palin Exist?” and Other Questions Raised by the Ottawa Trucker Convoy – Part II

To understand the curious case of Todd Palin, it is necessary to understand that whereas all Indigenous people in North America have experienced and continue to experience a genocide, these experiences are variegated, diverse and regional in character. So, a few words on the historical experience of Alaskan Eskimos (yes, that is the term they use to describe themselves, as distinct from the Canadian Inuit and Inuvialuit who have rejected that term).

More than any other Indigenous group in the United States, the experience of Alaskan Natives was conditioned by a doctrine known as “termination,” the primary legal doctrine of the US and Mexican governments with respect to Indigenous peoples for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although proposed for Canada by Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Stephen Harper, the policy has never been enacted here. It entails the abolition of Indigenous governments and reserves and the privatization of reserve land.

In 1906, Alaska became the last jurisdiction in the US to enact termination. But unlike Mexico (1922) and the rest of the US (1934), termination was not repealed during the Interwar period. It would not be repealed until 1971. This means that for the majority of the twentieth century, Indigenous Alaskans were legally indistinguishable from the colonist neighbours.

Furthermore, its repeal was less comprehensive. Instead of restoring Indigenous polities as an order of government as the Roosevelt Administration had done in the contiguous US in 1934-36, it followed the Mexican path and converted Indigenous governments into corporations without significant law-making powers.

There are some important reasons for these substantial differences. First, unlike most US states, public land in Alaska is primarily owned by the state government and not by the federal government, meaning that, following statehood, the federal government lacked a significant base of public land from which to unilaterally compensate Indigenous groups that had lost their land. Second, and much more relevant, there has been a much greater degree of demographic parity between Indigenous people and settlers through much of Alaska’s history than there has been anywhere between the Arctic and the Yucatan. Not only were settlers less likely to move to Alaska than other regions of the US due to its climate and unsuitability for farming and other pre-industrial settler occupations but colonization of much of the area of Alaska took place after the development of vaccines, substantially reducing the impact of the virgin soil epidemics on Indigenous populations.

This meant that, given the pre-existing mixed Russian-Indigenous population and the phenotypic differences between Alaskan Natives and those further south and east, significant numbers of Indigenous people were able to engage in intermarriage and racial passing that were off the table or significantly more challenging in other parts of North America. In other words, termination produced successful political, social and economic outcomes for a far larger portion of the Indigenous population.

Also, we also must recognize that the Roosevelt government’s repentance of termination and re-creation of the Reservation system was not simply an altruistic move. A significant challenge to both capitalist labour discipline and American settler culture emerged from what scholars term “migrant worker culture” because the effects of termination converged with other social forces to produce what became the effective container of significant parts of Indigenous culture.

Indigenous people were an important part of migrant worker culture for a variety of reasons. First, for many Indigenous people, especially in Oklahoma (formerly Indian Territory), termination had produced dispossession and landlessness; those who had been involved in subsistence agriculture and other forms of settled rural life now found themselves not just without homes but without communities. Second, many Indigenous people had been settled in regions unsuitable for sustainable habitation and food production as part of the unfair treaties that created the original reservations. Third, many Indigenous people came from non- and semi-sedentary cultures that saw seasonal migration for work not as a new capitalist imposition but as consistent with an Indigenous past. Fourth, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous people especially on the Pacific Coast and the Great Basin had successfully and in large numbers incorporated themselves into American capitalism through migratory work in seasonal industries, such as fishing and cannery industries that had displaced fur trading as the basis of the Alaskan economy.

But these Indigenous people were joined in migrant work by increasing numbers of settlers with their own reasons for moving into more seasonal, short-term work. First of all, the putative boom of the 1920s was sustained in large measure by two things: economic stimulus financed by high-interest consumer borrowing that increased aggregate demand and economic deregulation and abandonment of anti-trust and other prosecutions of corporate collusion and malfeasance. This meant that wages did not keep up with growth; working conditions degraded; employment security declined. As a result, an increasing number of Americans took to the road, fleeing debt and unemployment.

The devastation these policies would have caused anyway was exacerbated by the disastrous demobilization policies following the First World War that threw former soldiers into unemployment and often homelessness, while denying them sufficient health care for their grievous mental and physical injuries. Many former soldiers passed became part of the migrant worker community.

At the same time, strong social movements that had not only organized radical and marginalized most likely to be forced to move to stay in work lost strength as a result of Red Scare policies amplified by the government’s war powers to shut down dissent and socialist organizing, policies that were continued post-war to prevent America from facing the kind of revolutionary threat that had toppled the Russian government and come close to doing so in Germany.

The International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and US Socialist Party lost members, votes and power. This did not just mean a loss of political influence and muscle on the picket line. It also meant a loss of cultural and social programs and mutual aid networks.

Finally, in 1926, the year the Socialist Party entered terminal decline due to the death of Eugene Debs, its long-time presidential candidate, many of the predominantly mestizo (mixed Indigenous and white) and Indigenous Mexican migrant workers who had been migrating between Mexico and the American Southwest found themselves trapped on the US side of the border year-round as immigration policy changed.

Taken together, this meant that there was a substantial growth in the number of migrant workers, that those workers looked to this new community not only as a source of sustenance and reciprocity but as a source of culture. And that this culture was strongly, and scholars argue, disproportionately influenced by the culture of Americans and Mexicans of Indigenous heritage.

The onset of the Great Depression only increased the number of migrant workers and this group presented a challenge to the American government in two important ways. First, the nigh-universal Western triumphalist, Social Darwinist idea of sedentary life being the bedrock of civilization and republican citizenship, that had been used to justify so much of the genocide, war and dispossession visited on Indigenous people was suggesting that American was literally de-civilizing. This fear was amplified by the fact that migrant worker culture was so heavily inflected by Indigenous culture. It was as though white people were literally being transformed into Indians as America looked on. Second, migrant worker culture constituted a threat to the American capitalist social contract because it was a form identity and community that class-based and cut across the racial divides that had been intentionally set up to prevent workers from uniting. What the organizing practices and high ideals of the Wobblies and Socialists had not been able to maintain in the lead-up to the war, cross-racial class solidarity, was now being created by the material conditions of the age.

Pulling Indigenous people out of the centre of the migrant worker culture and community was just one part of Roosevelt’s comprehensive New Deal to prevent the rise of revolutionary movements in the US.

Except in Alaska.

Not only was Alaska a backwater; its occupational mix was overwhelmingly migratory. And it was left alone, largely because the influence of migrant worker culture was not seen as either as threatening or as solvable as the culture of the Lower Forty-eight. And, consequently, the normative culture of Alaska has been much more influenced by migrant worker culture, strongly conditioned by Indigenous culture, since the beginnings of the cannery system following its purchase from Russia in the nineteenth century.

The many factors I have detailed above help to explain why only one in three Alaskans of Indigenous heritage chose to join the tribal corporations created in 1971; many accepted cash payouts for personal termination instead; others simply did not engage with the process at all.

In large measure, that is because Indigenous Alaskans generally, even those who joined in 1971, identify far more with Alaska and as Alaskans than Indigenous people of the contiguous US.

This might help to explain why the only 2008 Palin family election scandal associated with Todd Palin was his long-time membership in the Alaska Independence Party, the state’s separatist party. And he was certainly not the only Indigenous person in the state to believe that Alaskan sectional nationalism and not membership in an Indigenous polity was the best expression of his cultural and political aspirations. Because Alaskan Natives have more ownership of Alaskanness, more see being Alaskan as the way to express their distinctively less-sedentary, more wilderness-centred culture.

As we have seen in great Latin American leaders from Benito Juárez to Evo Morales, establishing a powerful stake in regional and national cultures and movements is a solid tactic for Indigenous people to achieve real cultural and material gains. And we might do well to think about how this kind of tactic has been in intermittent play within Canada since Confederation.

Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

“Does Todd Palin Exist?” and Other Questions Raised by the Ottawa Trucker Convoy – Part I

This is going to be a long essay, likely published in multiple parts. Making the argument I am making will entail, as my English friend Tony would say, “going ‘round the houses.” So, please be patient; I promise a significant intellectual payoff by the end.

The moment I began to fully understand the collective unhinging of progressives over the unruly protest that occupied Ottawa through much of February this year was when I read a seemingly unrelated and, I initially thought, laughable editorial on National Public Radio.

Until I read the piece, I had been blissfully unaware that, since 2014, the emojis available on social media and messaging platforms have been available in an increasingly large number of possible skin tones, that the thumb in a “thumbs up” could be in a range of colours if I just scrolled down more.

NPR’s piece argued that we can better challenge “white privilege” by being more conscious of each other’s skin colours in online communication and that communication that does not foreground the race of each interlocutor is somehow problematic. The thinking seemed to be that not reminding one’s interlocutor of one’s race at every opportunity would somehow recapitulate racial oppression through online communication.

Leaving aside the intellectual legitimacy of the argument, what the piece and the various responses it touched-off in other media made clear is that people we might call leftists or progressives today (labels I have personally renounced, as a socialist and materialist) are deeply concerned by what I will term “racial transparency.”

When we talk about progressive Identiarianism, we often, myself included, focus on its novel beliefs about sex and gender i.e. that gender and sex are highly mutable characteristics driven by personal choice and individual consciousness. Furthermore, sex and gender are understood to be things about which one cannot trust one’s eyes, ears or nose, that a person with a deep voice, full body beard and a penis has an equal chance of being a man or a woman.

But, coupled with this belief in the flexibility of gender is an increasing belief in the immutability and visibility of race. Unlike sex and gender, race cannot be changed through cosmetic surgery, changes in costume, etc. because it lives in the blood and is tattooed unambiguously on the body. Acts of racial passing have gone from a virtual irrelevance in the late twentieth century to issues of global importance for the Woke. Half a decade later, everyone still knows the name of the Spokane NAACP president who got a perm and spent some time in a tanning bed to appear black, when, in fact, she was from a white family. Rachel Dolezal remains a notorious and despised person around the globe for impersonating a black person in order to hold a volunteer position in a third-tier industrial city in Eastern Washington.

In the world of the Woke, there is a clear system of incentives and disincentives instructing one on how to be a racialized person. The more one’s speech, costume and behaviour telegraph one’s non-whiteness, the more one accentuates one’s racialized status, the better-received one is. On the other hand, the more one focuses on non-racial aspects of one’s identity and minimizes differences in appearance, costume and behaviour, the more one is viewed with suspicion.

In other words, progressive Identitarians have come to see the effacement of racial difference and practices of passing as increasingly transgressive.

American progressives love black people of faith, as long as they are members of the Black Church, special religious denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church that only serve black congregants. Black Catholics, black Mormons, not so much, especially because black Mormons and Catholics often assert that their Mormonism or Catholicism is more important and relevant to them than their blackness. Similarly, Canadian progressives love and celebrate and patronize Indigenous people who are members of neo-traditionalist movements that seek to re-create pre-colonial religions like the Sundance movement and Handsome Lake Church. But those same progressives will lecture you on how it is offensive to even speak to Indigenous people about mainline Christian churches, even though far more of them are members of churches like the Catholics, Anglicans and United Church of Canada. Indeed, white progressives will sometimes depict the Christian majority of Indigenous Canadians as traitors to their own people but, more commonly, they will describe them as victims of something called “cultural genocide.”

While we now understand that efforts to coercively strip Indigenous people of their culture through institutions like the Canadian residential school system were wrong and did incalculable damage whose consequences still ravage Indigenous communities up to the present day, framing this as genocide has its own set of problems.

First, there is a problem with conflating the actual murder of people with efforts to make them change their views and values through pressure or force. Both things are clearly bad. But are they really appropriately conflated? Is changing or challenging who someone believes themselves to be really the same as killing them? That viewpoint is certainly popular these days. Saying “you are not who you say you are” is understood by progressive Identitarians as an act of genocide or attempted murder when employed to keep natal males our of women’s changing rooms.

Second, there is the problem of the many Indigenous societies that have adopted Christianity who now see it as part of their identity. The Zapatista movements of the 1920s, 1990s and present understand the Mayan people as a proudly Catholic people, who see their Catholicism as part of their culture and part of what they seek to preserve and restore, like their language and land. This should surprise exactly no one, given that every society that understands itself to be Christian has gone through this process, from the third-century Ethiopians to the fourth-century Greeks, to the ninth-century Saxons to the fourteenth-century Poles.

One of the moronic truisms of progressive thought is that cultural assimilation never works. That is because people who successfully assimilate become invisible and the only people one can find to ask about assimilation are those for whom it has failed.

But the most important problem is this: it suggests that the personhood of individual Indigenous Christians is incomplete. First, white people who choose to be Christians today are understood to be fully agentive in this choice; the choice to be baptized is wholly their own and their choice, if not respected, is at least understood to be their own choice. On the other hand, progressive Identitarians see the decision of Indigenous people to be baptized as Pentecostals or Catholics or whatever as resulting from without; they would never choose that themselves; their baptism must be a result of colonialism, capitalism or some other monstrous force that is making the choice for them. They could not possibly have chosen Christianity of their own free will.

Second, the Indigenous Christian majority are understood to be partly dead. They are the walking dead victims of the cultural genocide, people whose adoption of Christianity has killed all or a part of their spirit(s). Or maybe they are dead entirely.

Religion is not the only thing that Identitarian progressives believe renders Indigenous people dead or partly dead. White people, they believe, are uniquely “logocentric,” that the Enlightenment legacy is not a global one of which we all partake but rather a part of white supremacy. Indigenous people who reject the supernatural and champion science and classical philosophy, like BCIT’s Michael Bourke, are also victims of the genocide. So too are the Indigenous people who congregate at the Canada Day free concert at the Pacific National Exhibition to eat burgers and wave a flag or two are not so much Canadian citizens as genocide victims. Eschewing traditional dress for a business suit, moving off the reserve or out of the Indigenous ghettos in Winnipeg, Saskatoon or Vancouver into a white neighbourhood, all of these things are signs of damaged, incomplete personhood.

And that is because these Indigenous people are committing the sin of Rachel Dolezal: they are making a lie of the progressive belief in the heritability, immutability and visibility of race; they are not being racially transparent. The neo-Ottoman social order of twenty-first century progressive North America, with its aesthetically curated diversity, and its contemporary resurrection of the “a place for everyone and everyone in their place” ethos cannot be sustained in the face of widespread racial passing.

In the mind of the Identitarian progressive, there is one kind of bad non-white person: one who cannot be visually detected and consequently cannot be publicly aestheticized or tokenized.

In this context, the very worst sort of Indigenous person is the sort who refuses to construct their identity in racial terms at all, as epitomized by the husband of US vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Todd Palin. More about Todd in part two.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

Why the Coverage of the Trucker Protest Should Worry All Canadians

My career as a political essayist began thirteen years ago when I was asked by Rabble.ca to expand on my views about the prorogation crisis and why public opinion had turned so sharply in Stephen Harper’s favour, even among supporters of the parties trying to topple his government.

My thesis, then, bears repeating today:

In our voting system, the most successful party is one best at reducing the number of choices its potential voters feel that they have. A look at Liberal messaging shows that Jean Chretien became increasingly reliant on his ability to convince potential NDP and Green Party supporters to vote for his party. And despite his antipathy for Chretien, Paul Martin intensified this approach. What we missed during that time was how this change in Liberal tactics helped to change Canadian ideas of what made a legitimate government. As the Liberals lost their capacity to intimidate left-of-centre voters, they lost power. And Canadians learned a lesson: a government’s legitimacy comes not from its ability to appeal to the majority but instead from its ability to control and discipline its own supporters and potential supporters.

In the ensuing thirteen years, this idea has become increasingly entrenched in mainstream Canadian values. If a candidate for office or legislator expresses any view contradicting their party’s leadership in any way, it becomes a scandal, even if their view is broadly supported by the public and the head office view is unpopular.

It is covered in the media as a threat to a party’s ability to govern because the leadership’s control over its legislators and prospective legislators is less than absolute. It reveals not that a party is diverse, complex and pluralistic (all things once deemed core Canadian values) but rather that the party is weak and unsafe because it permits diversity, complexity or pluralism. The country that invented the Westminster parliamentary system still routinely tolerates dozens of MPs voting against a party’s leadership and yet not just remaining in the fold but eligible for future promotion. Indeed, the Westminster system was designed to handle major splits within the factions it represents.

Caucus rebels, back in the twentieth century, were understood to be legislators who could be expected to vote against and/or publicly contradict their leaders during every term they served. Today, the definition of a caucus rebel is a legislator who votes in lock step with their party, never makes a public pronouncement not approved-of by the party but grumbles about having to do this in private with their core supporters. MPs and MLAs, right now, are being punished by chiefs of staff and party whips simply for privately grumbling—that is all that dissent has become.

As I predicted back in 2008, the people who now hold this belief that anything less than total control and absolute discipline is a sign of weakness and illegitimacy are now what pollsters politely call “the centre-left.”

Sadly, as with all broadly held cultural assumptions, these values concerning control, submission and dissent eventually escape their original context and run rampant through society. If people become convinced of a new moral order for how the world above them should run, it ultimately shakes down to the world below.

And we see this here with centre-left reaction to the national truckers’ protest in Ottawa. No permanent organization is running this protest, which appears to be built around social media, a GoFundMe page and a loose affiliation of local leadership groups developed in provincial protests by truckers over the past few years.

And of course, it does not represent all or even most truckers in the industry. The crew who are in Ottawa are whiter, more rural and more right-leaning than the industry as a whole, which is, in turn, whiter, more rural and more right-leaning than Canadian society as a whole. The folks in Ottawa are also more likely to be “owner-operators,” who have financed their heavy equipment through financial institutions. Those driving trucks owned by extended families or by trucking companies directly are much less likely to be part of the protest.

There is no doubt that a small fraction of these individuals are members of Canada’s tiny fascist militias, the Sons of Odin, the Proud Boys and other far-right political groups and that a disproportionate number voted for the People’s Party. In addition, the spirit of the protest and the issue it is taking up, vaccine passports, have attracted members of right-wing groups that are not themselves truckers but wish to express solidarity or see the protest as an organizing and recruitment opportunity.

Those of us who cut our teeth in the 1980s peace movement know this story well. The Vancouver Peace March used to attract 10% of the city’s population (50,000 protesters at its peak) for its annual walk across Burrard Bridge to support global nuclear disarmament. And, consequently, the vanguard of the march comprised the Trotskyites, Maoists and other communist sectarians and foreign dictator fan clubs who saw this as their big annual opportunity to radicalize and recruit ordinary anti-nuclear activists.

Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or the most radical protesters and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed and was mocked by the mainstream press, who depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of its support.

But today, that approach is working because our society’s mainstream values have changed and because the target audience is a different one.

Because Canadians, as a whole, but especially centre-left voters have now come to believe that the legitimacy of a movement inheres not in its size or the diversity of people and views it represents but rather in its ability to discipline and control its supporters, this protest looks both illegitimate and frightening. Not only is this protest not controlling the speech and signage of its members; it is celebrating its refusal to control these things and instead sticking to the basics of making sure protesters are nonviolent and law-abiding.

And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being. Let me rehearse the kinds of sloppy reporting we are seeing here:

  • The most bigoted and ignorant Tweets and Facebook comments by individuals supporting the truckers are being cherrypicked and reported as news about the protesters’ shared beliefs, usually without even checking to see if the person is even in Ottawa as part of the protest. The views are not those of the organizers, just its most offensive and deranged supporters. This move, akin to writing a peace march article primarily covering the views of pro-North Korea and nudist activists at the walk, is going over shockingly well with Canada’s urban centre-left because it signifies to them one or both of two things (a) the truckers are all homophobic Klansmen or (b) the organizers are unable/unwilling to control the speech and signage of every participant in the protests.
  • Mainstream politicians like Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus are able to credit any hate mail or abusive communication “the convoy crew” and have the protesters and organizers collectively blamed for the communication. Again, this rhetoric is only effective because we have made the belief that the organizers of a protest can or should control the private correspondence of every single participant and supporter a reasonable one.
  • Despite a recent passing interest in toppling pro-Confederate and pro-war statues in the United States, Canadian progressives have suddenly become very concerned about nationalist statuary. While I would never try to politicize a Terry Fox statue, myself, the level of offense centre-left urbanites are taking at people placing entirely removable and undamaging objects and signs on Ottawa’s Fox memorial is deeply worrying. No one has toppled the statue; nobody has even got paint on it. Similarly, the fact that there is urine of unknown provenance in the snow near the memorial to the unknown soldier is now being redescribed as protesters, as a whole, urinating on and thereby desecrating the war memorial. Who knew that the mere possibility of a half a dozen or fewer individuals disrespecting a war memorial by urinating near it could de-legitimate a gathering of thousands in the minds of Canada’s mainstream centre-left!?
  • Many protesters are making false and unreasonable comparisons between present-day Canada and the early days of Nazi Germany. Like most Canadians, I find these comparisons deeply offensive. But that is what they are: deeply offensive comparisons, born largely of ignorance and a persecution complex. The prevalence of such comparisons among the truckers would, in my view, be a reasonable issue for news media to cover. But, instead, what we see is rhetorical overreach into falsehood. News media are depicting the hand-drawn swastikas and upside-down maple leaves used in the posters making those comparisons as endorsements of Naziism and opposition to the existence of Canada. While I am sure there are some genuine Nazi sympathizers among the thousands of truckers in Ottawa, the protest art I have seen using the swastika is the basis of an inaccurate and offensive comparison and not an endorsement of Hitler. Fortunately, because Canadians’ willful embrace of ignorance and stupidity, urban progressives who can, themselves, barely hold onto the idea that one can compare one thing to another thing, are unable to imagine that the truckers may be using symbols to make a comparison—no, they must all be Nazis, traitors.
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While it is true that I agree with the truckers on the main issue they are raising, that of vaccine passports, they are not my political community. I agree with them on few if any other issues. Many do hold views I find not just disagreeable but repugnant. I am sure many are climate denialists, for instance.

I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence.

We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry?

They will wonder if those folks also came to be known as these things the way they did. As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims.

There is a high price to pay when you decide to cry “wolf” over fascism in a political situation like our own, where the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide.

More importantly still, I am trying to sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, disciple and control as Canadians’ primary political values. The fact is that those values are authoritarian. In a nation wherein rapid, dramatic change is not just a moral necessity but an ecological one, we need to retain the capacity for mass mobilization and our capacity to resist an authoritarian regime, irrespective of whether it calls itself progressive or conservative.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority

It is coming up on two years since Covid arrived in Canada on a large scale. And with the exception of the Atlantic provinces, we quickly adopted what has become the approach to Covid in most of the Global North: lots of hygiene theatre governed by the imperatives of neoliberalism.

In a way, Canada west of the Gaspé has been a leader in developing not just the policy but the discourse around Covid that has spread through the G7 nations and around Oceania and the European Union. The basic policy is this: if an activity accelerates the spread of Covid but its participants are making money for someone richer than themselves by participating, it should proceed. Only if hospitals and other crucially necessary systems are overwhelmed because of these activities shall they be temporarily halted or scaled-back. But if an activity does not make money for someone richer than the participants, it should probably be stopped or radically circumscribed.

These policies leave people feeling angry and emotionally wrung-out. They are supposed to work harder and work longer hours to compensate for all the lost labour and efficiency due to Covid. But they can’t see very many of their friends or relatives for support and community, unless they do so somewhere other people can make money. I have lost track of the number of times my provincial health officer has declared, without any evidentiary basis, that a gathering that would be unsafe around a kitchen or dining room table will be safe at a local restaurant or bar. Similarly, children, Bonnie Henry has repeatedly claimed, can only give each other Covid in each other’s homes; it cannot transmit in schools. Henry, there, is a bit of an outlier; only Donald Trump held out longer in making baseless unscientific claims of childhood immunity.

Of increasing importance in our governments’ performances of theatrical, half-assed vigilance has been the introduction of vaccine passports. The premise on which the passports were introduced seemed a reasonable one: vaccines would prevent or radically reduce Covid transmission, thereby making gatherings of pass holders. While the passports made the civil libertarian in me pretty squeamish, I decided that this temporary abridgement of human liberty might be a necessary price to pay for a Covid-free nation.

But, as we all know, this initial premise for the passports was false. The common variants of Covid in this country are variants whose mortality and morbidity are significantly reduced by the vaccines but on whose transmission rates vaccination has had a much smaller than anticipated effect and one that has continued to decline over time as the variant mix has changed. For a while, public health officials and government leaders tried to maintain their defense of the passports as a measure to halt or radically slow transmission but they have slowly given up selling us that substantial exaggeration and have changed their message.

The new idea is that the purpose of vaccine passports is that they are a means by which we can force unvaccinated people to get their shots. The idea, our governments and respected opinion leaders are now explaining, is that these passports can be used to compel people to be vaccinated against their will by threatening their access to their friends, their relatives, meeting spaces in their communities and, most importantly, by threatening their ability to be employed.

Before continuing, let me make clear that I think everyone without a medical condition making it ill-advised or potentially lethal, should choose to receive as many shots as they can sign up for. I just got my third on Monday and I don’t expect it will be my last one. I want this to happen because I don’t want to see my neighbours dead, hospitalized or suffering lifelong “long Covid” symptoms. All of those things are not just bad outcomes for unvaccinated individual but for society as a whole.

But I disagree with the government’s increasingly coercive vaccine mandates for two reasons:

First, I wish we lived in a society like Eisenhower’s America, in which all sectors of society trusted the government and the vaccine they got the pharmaceutical industry to produce. But we do not. Significant groups of people in our society have so little trust in their governments that they balk in terror at accepting any new state invasion of their personal space of decision-making. Rather than engaging in the process of re-earning that trust, government spokespeople are, instead, belittling, demonizing and marginalizing anyone who says they do not trust the state with their health. Those who oppose the passports and even those who simply question them are automatically tarred as “white nationalists,” Klansmen, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers. They are increasingly depicted by progressive politicians like Justin Trudeau as enemies of the people, people “who hold unacceptable views.”

This kind of language, in turn, helps to whip up hysteria against vaccine opponents. Thanks to the Identitarian orthodoxy and the neo-McCarthyism (sometimes called ‘cancel culture’) that is used to enforce it, progressives are already not just permissive of but enthusiastic about using summary firing and professional blacklisting as ways of dealing with the enemies of the people. A long-time comrade of mine, who is immune-suppressed due to having leukemia and requiring regular chemotherapy and other body-punishing treatments, was advised by her doctor not to be vaccinated and possesses an exemption. Nevertheless, efforts were made to see her writing contracts were not renewed and she braved daily threats against her life on social media, some by former comrades and friends.

Second, and relatedly, I do not believe that the establishment wants the people it has now branded as the enemies of the people to become vaccinated. While it is clear that the introduction of the vaccine passports caused a lot of people to become vaccinated, it is my belief that the passports are now producing the opposite effect, and public health officials know that.

I say this because any reputable public health professional today knows about what is called “denormalization theory.” Smoking and other kinds of addiction have been extensively studied in BC because we, as legendary addictions theorist Bruce Alexander puts it, we have a “uniquely addictogenic culture.” A little over a decade ago, former COPE city councilor Fred Bass and polymath health scientist Amy Salmon made a significant contribution to the study of denormalization and the perverse effects it can produce.

Most anti-vice public awareness campaigns, such as those against tobacco smoking and drinking during pregnancy, are attempts to “denormalize” vice activities in the public’s mind. The message of the campaigns is that successful, normal, contributing members of society do not engage in these disreputable activities. Such activities are not respectable and engaging in them marks oneself as someone not deserving of respect. When examining the whole population, evidence shows these campaigns to be successful; smoking rates fall, drinking during pregnancy declines.

What Salmon and Bass discovered, however, is that one’s reaction to denormalization is directly contingent on the social position in which an individual is located and what their expectations are regarding their future social position. Social stigma only works as a threat, it turns out, if you are not already awash in stigma anyway. Consequently, they found that the smoking denormalization campaigns they studied functioned like cigarette ads for working class Indigenous adolescent girls and other groups that are not only marginalized but nurture little hope of changing their social position over time. When bombarded with an anti-smoking denormalization campaign based on the norms of English Canada, more poor Indigenous girls buy more cigarettes younger.

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Fortunately, Indigenous Canadians, especially those living on-reserve, entered the Covid era with a strong cultural memory and proud, pre-colonial traditions of quarantining and other public health measures that allowed them to survive the deluge of European disease that reshaped the demography of a continent. Indeed, BC’s government has put more energy into undermining on-reserve public health measures than into supporting them (the BC government has smashed Tsimshian, Haida and Heltsiuk quarantines by cabinet order).

Consequently, the most vaccine-hesitant have tended to be members of the working class and underclass with cultural memories destined to cast a pharmaceutical industry-government alliance in a less flattering light, like the ongoing opioid epidemic. These vaccine-hesitant folks, are often the lowest-wage workers, the most likely to practice an organized religion, those most likely to work with their hands and/or industrial tools owned by their employer or through a loan with a local bank.

You can already picture the vaccine-hesitant person in your mind’s eye. He’s rural; he drives a pickup truck; he voted Tory or People’s Party in the 2021 election; he lives in a manufactured home; he goes to church or at least his romantic partner does; he is white or Métis; he probably even smokes. That is the effect of a denormalization campaign interacting our pre-existing sectional and class resentments.

A sane public health policy would, once having achieved near complete vaccination of respectable folks, change its messaging and begin targeting groups that have become more vaccine-hesitant because of the denormalization campaign. They would work with evangelical and Catholic clergy and opinion leaders to promote vaccination; they would work with oil industry officials who are trusted by rig workers; they would try to persuade holdouts to get vaccinated by changing their message and approach.

Instead, the very opposite is happening. Rather than ending denormalization, they are heaping stigma upon stigma, smear upon smear. First, government spokespeople disingenuously conflate opposition to passports with vaccine non-compliance, erasing the thousands of Canadians like me who are triple-vaccinated but still oppose mandates. Once redescribing us as an unvaccinated drain on the public health system, they then reason that because white nationalists are also overrepresented in the manufactured homes and work camps of Northern Canada, it must then follow that opposing vaccine passports and white nationalism are two tenets of a single political community. In this gross and inappropriate abuse of the intellectual concept of the political dog whistle, it is argued that opposing vaccine passports is both a declaration that one is unvaccinated and a statement of support for the creation of a white nationalist Petro state in Western Canada.

A handful of people argue that this is simply the next logical step in a strategy to force full compliance. If people do not just lose their jobs and larger careers but are tarred in the public square as racists, Klansmen, neo-Confederates, even Nazis, surely more will capitulate and knuckle-under, and beg for that jab in the arm, begging for mercy from the stern consequences of the technocratic state. The thing is: the kind of people who respond to escalating intimidation and threats are the kind of people who are already vaccinated.

So I do not think that is the purpose of this in the minds of our nation’s establishment. They are, I believe, playing with a kind of purity politics that would make Narendra Modi blush. The idea is to declare a growing portion of people to be outside society, itself, like the Dalits of Indian history, the ultimate scapegoats whose very touch renders whatever it contacts impure, beyond the bounds of society itself.

The idea is to create a class of permanent exiles, like the Roma of Europe, people we can push out of our workplaces, our restaurants, our pubs, even our family gatherings, a living example of the fate of those who step outside the bounds set for our ever-narrowing discourse. Already we are blaming them for individual and public health outcomes they could not possibly have changed by being vaccinated. No doubt, with the over-representation of coal-rollers and rig workers among them, we will increasingly look to blame them and not companies like Royal Dutch Shell or agencies like our armed forces for climate change.

Our government’s vaccination policies and their responses to anti-passport protesters are clearly not designed to make holdouts less vaccine hesitant. It is almost as though they have been designed to provoke key elements of the working class into becoming more entrenched in their vaccine refusal, making them increasingly financially and socially precarious, more desperate and more willing to consider extreme political positions and movements.

And it is this that will win Justin Trudeau his sought-after second majority.

Now that the Canadian establishment, progressives and centrists are increasingly comfortable in conflating opposition to vaccine passports, vaccine non-compliance and white nationalism into single phenomenon, the Trudeau government can make the argument that our society is actually full of Nazis, that not just the People’s Party but the Conservatives are rife with them. And that these vaccine non-compliant folks are responsible for the Covid epidemic not being over.

This will not just lure the Conservative Party into wave after wave of purges of candidates and members as it continues its desperate quest to recapture the mainstream; it will stampede NDP and Green voters into casting Liberal votes to protect Canada from this massive outbreak of pestilent white nationalists.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We need governments that put down the hammer and stop the smears, governments that care more about getting their political opponents’ health protected than manipulating them into a dangerous and unnecessary political confrontation.

Because the end-game is clear: the denormalization of political dissent.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |