“Identity Politics”

When Attorney General and Justice Minister Arif Virani introduced the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, on Feb. 26, I expected this legislation to be the focus of the first query during question period in the House of Commons the next day.

I was disappointed.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said very little about the legislation. He issued a very vaguely worded statement the next day, without even referring to the bill by name, that there should be no redundant bureaucracy and people shouldn’t be punished for their opinions, while saying that people exploiting children or women should be punished by the justice system.

Canadians cannot allow politicians to curtail our freedoms by playing at identity politics.

Conservatives have always ridiculed the rise of the woke movement and identity politics. Traditional liberals have recently joined in, most notably the philosopher Susan Neiman in her 2023 book Left is Not Woke. In part, these liberals are attempting to reverse declining public support for left-wing political parties, which the public now associates with woke’s inherent extremism. But more traditional left-liberals fail to acknowledge their role in encouraging woke ideology, which conservatives warned for decades was the inevitable outcome of modern liberal thought.

Gender studies comes to policing.

Among anti-cop legislators, “defund the police” may have lost some currency, but “demoralize the police” is doing just fine.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first. (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)

The department’s personnel will spend hundreds of hours a day cumulatively on this bureaucratic task—time diverted from bringing criminals to justice.

Anti-Semitism is surging among the young. It is now positively hip to view Jews as ‘problematic’. Consider the recent Harvard/Harris poll which found that 67 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the US view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, then I humbly suggest you read a few more history books.

The poll results have horrified observers, as well they might. ‘Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?’, people were asked. ‘Oppressors’, answered two-thirds of the Gen Z respondents. Welcome to the era of TikTok fascism.

Ordinary Brits have long led far more ‘diverse’ lives than the elites who scorn them.

I was raised in a socially conservative, patriotic and very traditional household, of which my grandparents were the heads. They instilled in me what they would have called ‘British values’, and these have guided me through much of my life.

I grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in the knowledge that I was a ‘half-caste’ lad, born into a working-class family in Devon, an almost entirely white area. It slowly dawned on my child’s mind that, due to the reactions of some adults, having a parent from another country – especially one that was populated by brown people – marked me out as being unusual, perhaps very different. I did not feel different, but I became aware that others might see me as such.