Sunday 30 March 2008

A Glossary of Terms: Part Two


Here are some more useful terms, with examples of usage in context.


Pornocracy:

* noun; Greek, "porne" ("whore") + "kratos" ("rule"); hence "pornocrat", etc.

A pornocracy is a society organised around the notion that all human relationships ought to be motivated by market values and conditioned by market forces. The pornocrat believes that no aspect of human existence is above being made an object of commercial exchange and that, in fact, everything lying outside the reach of commodity exchange is inherently worthless.

The pornocrat's ultimate ambition is to elevate the act of prostitution to the level of a cultural ideal. Pornocrats typically refer to themselves as "libertarians", "classical liberals", "free-market fundamentalists" or "conservatives".

Conservatives tend to hate the idea of public health care, since it violates fundamental pornocratic principles. For one thing, no shareholders are making piles of cash at the expense of sick people.




"To Terminate, With Extreme Prescience":

* verbal phrase; modified form of pop culture reference.

One terminates with extreme prescience when one employs an elementary grasp of logic to predict the disastrous consequences of a plan premised upon malice, ignorance, and deception. Sadly, such terminators are usually denounced as "appeasers" and "traitors"... shortly before being proven right.

Eric Margolis debated Christopher Hitchens on the merits of the Iraq invasion . Hitchens' views were terminated, with extreme prescience.



Cacophilia:

* noun; Greek, "kako" (evil, ugly) + "philos" (lover, friend); hence "cacophilist", etc.

Cacophilia is a devotion to the ugly, the stupid, the vulgar, and the worthless. It represents the inversion of the traditional Western idealisation of the beautiful, the graceful, and the good.

Organised Cacophilism had been a marginal feature of Western civilisation until very recently, when the "American Century" ushered in a new, revolutionary era of ugliness, vulgarity and idiocy. Its current patron saints are Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, two of the leading exponents of that charming American invention--"slut chic".

Given the hordes of twelve-year-old girls who appear to be encouraged to dress like buck-a-suck crack-hoes, a substantial number of Canadian parents seem to be deeply committed to the spread of radical cacophilia. Shame.

Saturday 29 March 2008

A Glossary of Terms: Part One

The following terms do not enjoy wide circulation, but they should. I have included definitions and examples of proper usage in context:


Fulfordism:

* eponymous noun; derived from "Robert Fulford", Grub Street hack and relentlessly unctuous peddler of Canada-hating bromides; hence "Fulfordian", "Fulfordite", etc.


"Fulfordism" is the state of ethical and philosophical incoherence actuated whenever a patent mediocrity savagely denounces his nation for embodying the very vices that have afforded him the unmerited authority by which he makes his claims. Typically, the Fulfordite will complain that his countrymen "hate success" and are incapable of "excellence" while seemingly oblivious to how immeasurably far removed his own person and career remain from those lofty ideals.

"Amazing! Smith, who is chronically late and who takes two sick days off each week, was just heard whining about how inefficient our unit is. What a Fulfordian jackass!".



Banalysis:

* portmanteau noun; banal + analysis; hence "banalytic", etc.


"Banalysis" is the process by which the rote regurgitation of cliché and received opinion is passed of as the fruit of an authentic, critical engagement with the issues. It represents the fossilisation of thought. It is the counterfeit currency with which the media attempts to bribe the public into a resigned acquiescence before the status quo.


"Well, I guess I'll tune into "Mike Duffy Live" to hear all about the budget. He always provides decent banalysis".


Steynian:

* eponymous adjective; derived from "Mark Steyn", bumptious, laughably self-important neo-conservative hack.


"Steynian" is applied adjectivally to anyone who seeks to "defend" a civilisation while, in the process of doing so, displaying intellectual or ethical characteristics that are deeply inimical to it. Instances of this phenomenon can be calibrated using the "Steyn Factor" (SF) hierarchy:

1) Alpha Steyn Factor (ASF): this applies to a case where the Steynian actor, though ignoble, presents no significant threat to the civilisation he pretends to champion. The Steyn Factor is thus said to be in "latent effect". Mark Steyn is, himself, in this SF phase--unable to rise above mediocrity even in a self-defined endeavour.

2) Theta Steyn Factor (TSF): here, the actor is somewhat dangerous but in a way with which a healthy society can easily cope. The Steyn Factor is here said to be in "partial effect".

3) Omega Steyn Factor (OSF): at this stage, the actor has the power to bring utter catastrophe upon his society; the civilisation he has sought to save may need to be rebuilt from scratch. Here, the Steyn Factor is said to be in "full effect".


"When Joseph Goebbels maintained that only the National Socialist movement had the moral authority to destroy godless bolshevism and preserve Western Europe from Slavic rapine, he initiated a huge OSF".

Friday 28 March 2008

Blasts From the Past

Recalling a book I read a while ago and which I unreservedly recommend (Walter Gordon & the Rise of Canadian Nationalism) inspires me to offer a little quiz for the political junkies and history buffs among us.

I give you below four quotations from parliamentary speeches, all from 1956. Guess the party to which each speaker belongs. Just ask yourself, "Does this sound like a Liberal, a Tory, or a socialist?". The speakers' identities are given after the full list of quotations (hint: David Orchard is NOT on the list). Don't cheat. Ready? Here goes:


1."Canadians should declare their economic independence of the United States".

2. "If the government is re-elected, Canada will become virtually a forty-ninth economic state in the American union".

3. "What is happening before our eyes is nothing less than economic invasion by our neighbours to the south".

4. "History shows us that economic domination, if not resisted, if not altered, inevitably leads, by a process of absorption, to ultimate political domination as well".




Answers:

1. George Drew, Tory Leader of the Opposition; former Tory premier of Ontario.

2. John Diefenbaker, Tory M.P.; eventual party leader and prime-minister.

3. Leon Balcer, Tory M.P.; Diefenbaker's Québec lieutenant.

4. Davie Fulton, Tory M.P.; Diefenbaker's Minister of Justice.


Don't feel too badly if you failed the quiz: these days, it's hard to recognise real Toryism when you hear it.

"When More People Do Stuff, More Stuff Gets Done!"

The head of the Calgary Police Association says that more officers would solve more crimes.

Whoa. Slow down, Einstein.

But let us redeem that banality by using it as a pretext to observe an intriguing fact about the reality of Canadian crime. For too, tediously long, the West (i.e. Alberta) has worn like a dollar-store tiara the fanciful perception of itself as a disciplined, law-abiding land of God-fearing, upright folks who can only stand aghast at the havoc being wreaked upon the nation's moral fabric by the relativist, hug-a-thug policies of the decadent Eastern élite. The "Conservative" Party presumably expects those of us languishing in the benighted cesspools of Quebec and Ontario to thank Astarte and Baal that the "Alberta Solution" to crime has swept into Ottawa like a divine wind.

I have a better idea: let us be absolutely clear about which Canadian regions exhibit the strongest criminal proclivities. Data from 2006 (the latest available) tell us some fascinating things. Firstly, overall crime rates were highest, by far, in the West and were lowest in Ontario and Quebec. Secondly, urban homicide rates were highest in Regina, Saskatoon, and Edmonton and were lowest in the major Eastern cities. Overall, Quebec (liberal, decadent, relativist Quebec!) had one of the lowest rates of homicide in the country.

Note to Stephen Harper: we decadent, "commie" Easterners clearly do not need the "Alberta Solution" to crime. You Westerners, though, would do well to look into the "Eastern Solution" (if ever you tire of shooting and stabbing each other, naturally). If you ask us nicely, we'll be only too happy to help. After all, you are (despite what you like to think), fellow Canadians.

Thursday 27 March 2008

Amazing Grace

One of the privileges of being enrolled on Canada's "Politically Endangered Species" list is the right to submit nominations for membership. I therefore nominate Kevin Michael Grace as a worthy addition to the ranks of those conservatives who understand that current Canadian conservatism has become the ideological equivalent of chronic uremia.

Grace, a Toronto-born, Victoria-based freelance journalist, maintains the Ambler, a blog-like archive of musings on Canadian culture and politics. Many of the entries are devoted to a stylish and devastating deconstruction of neo-Con pretence. In his 2002 piece, "Fear and (Self)Loathing on the Canadian Right", he quotes right-wing Canadian Jamie Glazov's representative neo-Con virulence:

"Canada's destiny--being absorbed into the American empire--is much closer than we think. As a Canadian, I can hardly wait. I must admit: the supremacy of globalization and free trade fills me with an intoxicating sense of glee. After all, the victory of unrestrained international capitalism translates into market forces running unhindered in Canada, which, in turn, translates into a diminishment of Canadian 'sovereignty'--that absurd joke that has imposed socialized health care, federal funding of bilingualism and multiculturalism, and other intellectually-bankrupt policies, onto heavily-burdened Canadian taxpayers."


Grace later relays the reaction to Canada's post-9/11 debasement of Dr. William Christian, Tory historian and George Grant biographer:

Prof. Christian laughed when he was asked about the future of Canada because "I'm much more pessimistic after the World Trade Center bombings than I've ever been. The process of assimilating the two countries is accelerating far more rapidly than I ever thought possible: in the military, in the customs union, in economics, dollarization. When Chretien led the other four leaders to the WTC site, I thought it was almost a political abasement. And never has the Canadian media been so servile."


Grace then quotes Dr. William Gairdner, old-school conservative and passionate anti-Trudeau militant:

Mr. Gairdner argues that the Canadian Right is not conservative. "It is now outrè to suggest there is such a thing as the 'good life,' that a common vision of it is even possible and that civil society and all its institutions should be conscious of that. Autonomous individualism has replaced conservatism."


Grace ends with a reflection from B.C. publisher Karl Siegler:

[Siegler] argues that Canada's disappearing sovereignty is not the fault of the Right. Rather, it is "the fault of the liberals, and I mean that in every sense of the word, and both small and large 'L.'" The Canadian Alliance, he contends, is just as liberal as the Liberals...Liberals are flexible, 'forward-looking' and 'progressive.' They are historical positivists. They believe in inevitability, like the 'inevitability' of Canada merging with the United States."


As engaging as his real journalism is Grace's more "gonzo", first-person mode. This from a 2005 skewering of Rachel Marsden:

My question for members of the "conservative movement" in America or Canada is this: What are the benefits of membership? If tribal solidarity ("us vs them") is your thing, there are other, far more rewarding binary divisions: Yankees vs Red Sox, Eskimos vs Stampeders, Celtics vs Rangers, Coke vs Pepsi, dogs vs cats... Conservative movementarians will reply that their membership demonstrates they are on the side of prudence vs recklessness, right vs wrong and even good vs evil, but I remain unpersuaded. What has the conservative movement ever done to make America and Canada better places? And no, I don't mean the phantom accomplishment of growing the Gross Domestic Product, whatever that might be.


Grace and I are not always in harmony (for instance, a recent offering suggests that he is a modest admirer of the late Enoch Powell; I am not), and his output seems to have slowed considerably of late. His site is richly and deeply archived, though, and so much of what he says desperately needs saying. Ultimately, Grace manages to make this lonely Tory feel just a little less alone.

Invade This

For most Americans, history is worthwhile only when exploitable as raw material for ideological suppositories: an event cannot take monumental hold over the American imagination without being purged of all un-heroic inconveniences and moulded into a smooth, bullet-shaped commodity which, when slid into the dark, uncomfortable cavities of the national psyche, is expected to provide a soothing, gooey balm of exceptionalist self-adoration (contrariwise, we Canadians take pains to ensure that our history is communicated in ways as visually rebarbative and emotionally attenuating as possible--witness the disgracefully under-produced and woefully inept “Heritage Moments” series).

Now I have seen much of puerile “America-Kicks-Ass” insolence in my time, but nothing prepared me for the supernova of Stalinist revisionism that is First Invasion: War of 1812, an "educational" History Channel video that makes the report of the plenary session of the first COMINTERN look like a fairly even-handed, unbiased analysis of world affairs.

Someone has posted a trailer for this dreck on YouTube. "On September 11th, 1814," the narrator intones, speaking of the attack on Baltimore, "America is on the brink of annihilation". Yes, September 11th ! The implication is clear: "Al-Qaida weren't the first murdering barbarians to attack us. We were once almost annihilated by invading Redcoats and Injuns!".

The thesis of the video is that the War of 1812 was a British/Canadian invasion of the U.S. and that America was a small, practically defenceless victim of British imperial cowardice and irredentist avarice. Keep in mind that this is not a vanity video produced in-house by Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan and sold strictly by skinheads at John Birch Society meetings. This is irreproachably mainstream and, given how many North American teachers feed their students videos rather than books whenever they can, has very possibly provided millions of American young people (and, sadly, thousands of their Canadian equivalents, I am sure) everything they know about that fascinating conflict. Outrageous.

Visit the trailer, if you dare. The comments are hilarious. Clearly, the poster expected a round of applause for his efforts (he even includes a quaint preface to the trailer). Things didn't go so well...

Wednesday 26 March 2008

"Conservatives" Hate Canada: Part MMXCIV

Blogging Tory "The Canadian Sentinel" apparently doesn't think his own nation is good enough to be accorded much promotional space on his blog. The place is a virtual mens-room wall of non-Canadian graffiti. We've got "pro-Israeli" (i.e. Arab-hating) links and banners; we've got belligerent Right-wing American propaganda (WorldNetDaily, "VigilantFreedom", etc.); and we've even got U.S. government links (Homeland Security, Central Command, etc). The place is a virtual extension of the U.S. Embassy, if it were run by Ohio militiamen.

Amid all of this febrile celebration of foreign allegiances, Canada is accorded a single link, to the Canadian Forces--and don't for a minute think that this guy would condescend to include even this meagre afterthought were our Forces not currently sepoys carrying out American initiatives in Afghanistan.

And that, friends, is the complexion of Canadian "conservatism" today: it is the self-loathing, obsequious champion of our bitterest and most ruthless economic and cultural competitor. With "conservatives" like this, we don't need any anarchists.

Then we have "The Canadian Republic". This "conservative" passionately espouses a political system and cultural history utterly alien to those of his own nation. His blog might as well be called "Canadian Sultanate", frankly--yet he feebly pleads his loyalty and conservative bona fides by arguing that he loves "freedom" and simply seeks to take Canada from under the "yoke" of British oppression.

Apart from offering my outraged sympathy if, indeed, the Redcoats have been behaving as badly in this man's neighbourhood as his sentiments would suggest, I would argue that a "yoke" that has produced one of the freest, most orderly and most prosperous nations in the world has been a light one indeed and that ludicrous hyperbole is a poor excuse for a political philosophy.

Clear Grit republicanism was silly enough in the Nineteenth Century, when it at least wore its own shabby rags. It's even sillier in Tory drag.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

The Last Election as Cultural Symptom

The results were certainly impressive for the CPC--especially when one recalls that this party (when it was known as the “Reform Party“), just ten years ago, was putting most of its energy into purging itself of its neo-Nazis.

Given how congenitally bitter so many CPC militants seem to be, it is difficult but necessary to dampen their two-year-old elation by pointing out that Stephen Harper ran on a platform of policies utterly alien to his actual beliefs and completely divorced from what he and his Reform-Alliance jihadists have been fighting for over the last fifteen years. I wonder how humiliating it is for a leader to scratch together a modicum of electoral credibility by fronting an agenda which he would have denounced as "socialist" back when he had the guts to stand or fall on his actual values?

Harper's big problem? He expected a majority, which would have allowed him to pull his "bait-and-switch" without fear of backlash. He'll have to wait for next time. Meanwhile, his government has needed to look "Canadian" in order to have any hope of getting a real mandate. The frustration has told on Harper and the party's other Reform-Alliance ideologues. They’ve become even more bitter and hateful in government than they were in Opposition. Emotionally, they are grinding their teeth down into tiny stubs.

The media (typically) have missed the things that are most interesting about this administration. For one thing, this is the first time since Alexander Mackenzie that we have elected to the prime-ministership a man who has been openly hostile to most of the foundational elements of our society. This is news. Also, libertarian continentalism has replaced socialism as the Prairies' prime political export.

The media have been equally silent about the many ways that nothing has changed. For instance, the government is still, basically, liberal--even more so than the Liberals were. Everything Harper believes in--provincial supremacy, laissez-faire, populism, American moral superiority--is Clear Grit liberalism.

Naturally, everything he believes is wrong. “Populism“, for example, is gibberish: national institutions and processes are demonstrably not safer in the hands of "the people" (ask German Jews or American blacks how dependable "the people" are in the preservation of justice and the rule of law). It is the Crown that has preserved our freedoms (and, I would argue, has done so more effectively than the equivalent sovereign authority of any other nation). What is needed is intelligent reform of the ways Crown prerogatives are administered, rather than radical re-engineering based on soggy, populist nostrums.

Tory historian Donald Creighton wrote this about the results of the 1935 election:


The Liberals had always preached a highly decentralized Canadian federalism; they had opposed Macdonald's national policies during the Nineteenth Century; and they had resisted most Conservative attempts to use the power of the state to carry out the characteristic national purposes of the Twentieth.


Sound familiar? The "Conservatives" are the new Liberals-- conveniently, as the Liberals haven't been much of anything for some time.

Tories must be prepared to admit that Canada is drifting away from the anchorage our ideals once provided for it. It seems hardly possible for a nation to abandon the values that animated it, but it can happen. During FDR's New Deal, Americans embraced collectivism, turning their backs on two centuries of the rugged individualism that defined them. Why? They panicked and assumed there was no other option.

We, too, are panicking, but ours is a quieter panic--a panic of anomie: Canadians are the products of education systems which teach nothing of the moral significance of this nation's founding and history; we grow to adulthood without the slightest notion that we are bound by shared civic responsibilities and historically-determined obligations. Our political imaginations are "provincial" in the worst sense and are dulled into impotence by the bovine vulgarity of our (overwhelmingly American) news and entertainment media. Toryism has as much chance of thriving in such an environment as a dolphin has in a thimble full of turpentine.

Thus the Tory's dilemma has nothing to do with Stephen Harper. Our main opposition is not to a political party. Increasingly, we are opposed to an entire culture--our own. This is a sad fact which we must come to acknowledge.

An agenda as counter-cultural as ours has become needs to be as educational as it is political. The Reform Party knew this, back in the late 'Eighties. It had the Fraser and C.D. Howe Institutes behind it, the support of an entire province's media and political elite, and was in tune with the general cultural effects of Americanisation. We have nothing like that in our favour, but we must start to find equivalents (or build them), or else the midnight of this Dark Age shall thicken and blot out even those stars that still shine.

Monday 24 March 2008

More on that "Hack-Led Apparatus"...

David Orchard’s recent humiliating gelding at the hands of Liberal Party apparatchiks (and the party’s consequent, richly-earned karmic creaming) cannot fail to recall to one’s mind the spectacularly sordid conditions under which the CPC slithered out of the swamp during those sad, fag-end days of 2003.

Most political parties begin as the literal incorporation of an idea, a mission, or an aspiration. The CPC, though, is what remains of the chalk outline Peter MacKay drew around the corpse of a once-proud organism whose “leader” slaughtered it lest it be re-made into something truly worthwhile though the magic of a reanimating spirit. As a David Orchard organiser and 2003 delegate, I had front-row seats to this degrading auto-da-fé.

David Orchard was a nuisance to the P.C. Party hierarchy, as it was worm-eaten with fierce Mulroney loyalists whose mission--as they saw it--was to perpetuate the great man's legacy and redeem his shattered reputation among Canadians. They were willing to sacrifice the party in the process since, for them, a party without Mulroney (or one that rejects his ideas) simply was not worth having. This explains much bizarre behaviour. Think of their decision to have Mulroney as the keynote speaker at the 2003 leadership convention. Were they worried about featuring, for the delectation of thousands of Canadians watching from home, Canada’s most universally loathed figure? No, because they had already begun to euthanise their own party.

Their Mulroney-worship explains their FTA-obsession. The FTA is a crucial component of Mulroneyism but is only tangentially related to Conservatism. To say otherwise is to say that all Conservatives must believe that wage and price controls are the solution to inflation, since that was the position of a Conservative party leader in 1974.

Alas, since the FTA was Mulroney's only successful initiative, his loyalists carry the thing around on their shoulders--as if it were the Ark of the Covenant--to ease the pain of their hero's crashing fall and of his party's annihilation. It is a way of saying, "Despite everything, we won".

Thus, Orchard was, indeed, targeted for termination, but his political assassination was but one element of a grander scheme. Nobody can sensibly deny that the collapse of the party was an inside job, perpetrated with the knowledge and collusion of Harper and the Alliance leadership.

Let us cast our minds back to 2002-2003. The P.C. leadership candidates have to beg and scrape for pitifully inadequate donations. They go deeply into debt--all except Peter MacKay, who has thousands, even millions, to throw around. Where does this virtual unknown get this kind of coin, when even the whole P. C. Party fundraising apparatus had been coming up dry for years? Corporate Canada had placed its hopes on the Alliance and had been funding it to the hilt since Stockwell Day's tenure; Stephen Harper obviously gave MacKay access to well-heeled Alliance donors. In exchange for what? One can only guess.

Meanwhile, things go to plan. MacKay monopolises the youth delegates, those voters most susceptible to being bought with free CD's, booze, pizza parties and all the other inducements so freely used in ridings where the MacKay machine is strong. The result? The 2003 convention is awash in MacKay youth delegates, most of whom think that John A. Macdonald is an ex-defenseman for the Maple Leafs and that the P.C. Party is something to which you wear a toga. Imbeciles, all.

Throughout his campaign, MacKay makes speech after speech of excruciating dullness--upon which a real idea never seems to trespass--with all the charisma and passion of over-ripe eggplant. That's fine, though, because the MacKay machine subverts the delegate selection process virtually everywhere, with the tacit support of P.C. Party Headquarters.

Naturally, the Orchard campaign is MacKay's main target: in one riding, the Riding Executive tells known Orchard supporters to vote at an address which turns out to be a derelict pawn shop. MacKay's operatives take no chances and cast a wide net. At a function in Ottawa, leadership candidate Heward Grafftey is brought almost to tears while telling me how MacKay militants had bribed Brome-Missisquoi voters he had known for years, finally saying, "I don't want to be in a party that allows this."

I go away wondering why MacKay would risk having these misdeeds leak to the press and destroy the credibility of the party. I never suspected then what I know now: MacKay knew that there was no longer going to be a party.

Until a journalist decides that this sorry tale is worthy of a full investigation, we may never know how deeply Stephen Harper was involved in MacKay's manoeuvres, but we can reasonably assume that Harper helped bankroll them and that he expected delivery of the P.C. Party in return. He then sat back and watched the “leadership” campaign (probably smirking every time MacKay angrily denounced the very notion of a merger). In short, Harper may well have helped fund and plan one of the most egregious acts of political fraudulence in living memory. The merger was technically an indictable offence, since Harper was literally the receiver of stolen goods.

One may say, "But this isn't like the Sponsorship scandal. Nobody lost any money." No, we just lost our dignity and self-respect. Watergate didn't cost American tax-payers a dime: Nixon simply established a parallel government that operated above the law, yet democracy is a treasure above all price, and, like Nixon, Harper and MacKay debased what is most precious to us; thus, what they did is far more ignoble, far more sinister than anything scoundrels like Chrétien and Guite have done.

The worst is that they got away with it and now serve as exemplars of the dictum that corruption works. I'm sure the 2003 youth delegates were well instructed: I gather that a new generation of disillusioned drop-outs and amoral hacks was birthed that year, and, as a degrading influence upon national morale, that out-reeks the Sponsorship affair…by far.

Sunday 23 March 2008

What is Conservatism?

This question is crucial to anyone who wishes his politics to have intellectual and moral content. Current political discourse is hopelessly incoherent: Conservatives are no longer conservative, and Liberals are not necessarily liberal. Canadian electoral participation rates are plummeting because our options consist not of living political philosophies but merely of competing political machines cynically striving to out-fundraise and out-spin the others.

Fundamentally, a party has the right to speak to Canadians authoritatively as a "conservative" party only when it establishes itself on the bedrock of what conservatism has always meant to Canadians: love of tradition, respect for the honour and sovereignty of the Crown, acknowledgment of our organic connection to Europe, and a desire to protect the uniqueness and indivisibility of British North America as a political and moral entity. This is Canadian conservatism. There is no other. That which fails to espouse those four principles may be part of legitimate political discourse in this country, but, in the guise of "conservatism", it is mere imposture. No amount of recycled Clear Grit and Social Credit populism or culturally illiterate Calgary School cant will ever change that.

Axiomatically, a conservative holds to the values of his nation's founders. For example, the views of American communists may deserve tolerance, even respect, but they are radically (and quite apart from their objective merit) "un-American". No sane person would describe as "conservative" notions which transgress those that served as the philosophical premises of his nation.

Similarly, no one is obliged to consider as "conservative" notions that are alien to the mission of our Founding Fathers. This truth must be our lodestar, as our media, political and corporate élites will not soon tire of perverting conservatism into its opposite. For two decades they have striven to "re-brand" conservatism, as if it were a kind of bargain-basement toothpaste. Consequently, it has been cheapened into just another mass-produced and shrink-wrapped trinket--perfectly designed to complement the callowness of our generation’s post-NAFTA, Wal-mart-centric soul.

The task of a real conservative is to keep alive the idea that conservatism can and must have a spirit, a mind, a memory, and deep roots in our living tradition, and, by so doing, reveal the current “Conservative” Party of Canada as the soulless, corrupt, hack-led apparatus it is. Canadians respond passionately to sincerity and commitment and are desperate to elect people with core values. God willing, they will someday get that chance.





For "Red Tory" (aka Martin Rayner): Il miglior fabbro...