You ever read Peter Turchin? He’s the historian who invented “cliodynamics,” a historical field that analyzes patterns in history in a scientific way, to try to find predictive meaning. His 2023 book End Times explains why he thinks we are in for a rough go of it in America, based on historical patterns. Back in 2010, he predicted that the 2020s would be tumultuous, based on his cliodynamic analysis.
When I became the Chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2014, I said some things I was not supposed to say. I made the observation that human rights tribunals had a bad reputation. This wasn’t received well.
In my first Annual Report to Parliament, I asserted that “Discrimination is not widely accepted in Canada. It is not acceptable to most Canadians to even hear a suggestion of prohibited discrimination, let alone engage in it.” I still believe that remains true today.
h/t Patti Jo
I have lived in Budapest for most of the last five years and traveled extensively throughout Western Europe in that time. Over and over again in my travels, I face Europeans demanding that I justify the policies of that ‘monster,’ Viktor Orbán. To be fair, they are under no obligation to support Orbán and his Fidesz party, but it would be nice if these critics had any idea what they were talking about. They usually don’t—especially when it comes to migration.
Long ago, I concluded that these Europeans, including British bien-pensants, have to scapegoat Orbán to escape blame for the messes they have made in their own countries via mass migration. I always invite them to Budapest to see for themselves what it is like to live in a safe, well-ordered city—one that achieves that not by heavy policing, but because it is not home to a population that is internally lawless and that hates the culture that has taken them in.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is quite talented at causing his enemies’ minds to explode. His latest missive on social media this week pointing out that “Nazi socialism” was indeed a form of socialism set off a thousand furiously self-righteous posts. Leaving aside for the moment whether it was wise for Poilievre to make this point, it is neither inaccurate nor misleading to say that Germany’s National Socialist party was “socialist” in much more than name, as much as Poilievre’s left-wing critics want to pretend otherwise.
I’ve written before about preference cascades — where large portions of the public, often a majority, conceal their views for fear of punishment, only to reveal those views when some precipitating event takes place. Classic examples include the fall of Communist regimes, like Ceausescu’s Romania, where even Ceausescu himself thought everyone loved him until shortly before he was stood in front of a wall and shot.
Usually those happen in one direction. But in contemporary America, they’re happening in two.
Scores of universities and research institutions in Germany and Austria on Friday announced their intention to drop their presence on the online messaging platform X (formerly Twitter), saying its algorithms were opposed to a discourse based on scientific and democratic integrity.
The planned withdrawal in the academic sphere comes as the German government says it is also considering leaving the platform because it was having an “agitated and polarizing” effect on public political discussion.
The same angst and disgruntlement that brought the Nazis to power can be seen in today’s woke leftist youth.
For years now we’ve heard that even moderately conservative Republicans are “far right” and deserving of the “Nazi” label. And Republican presidential candidates routinely are tagged with the “Hitler” label. The only time the label is removed is when the left finds it useful to contrast “good” Republicans with bad. So, for example, the onetime Hitler aspirant George W. Bush became “statesmanlike,” sort of, when it became useful to contrast him with the new boogeyman, Donald Trump.
A more subtle form of this labeling comes in the form of comparing our current situation to that of the Weimar Republic — Germany’s first attempt to create a constitutional democratic republic similar to our own, instituted after World War I in 1919. Despite high hopes, the new republic was troubled throughout its short life, riven by radicalism on both the left and the right, catastrophically failing in the end, and giving way in 1933 to Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship.
Pierre Poilievre stepped into the culture war on Sunday with a video decrying the assaults on Canada’s national culture that have erupted during Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Some of these are the direct fault of that government, such as the new passports that demean and cheapen Canadian heritage.
Welcome to the woke weird wacko world of Justin Trudeau.
Sign here if you want Canada back: https://t.co/Mlman54OiS pic.twitter.com/hbExw0cfy0
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) November 17, 2024
The opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics were deeply offensive to Christians around the world. Numerous people from across the denominational spectrum have described this event as blasphemous and even demonic.
However, I would like to say something to the non-Christians who may be uneasy about the opening ceremonies but cannot quite explain why. Perhaps the opening ceremony bothers you, but you’re not quite ready to align yourself with its Christian critics.
Is anyone else bored of ‘queering’? Everything’s getting ‘queered’ these days. We’ve had ‘Queering the Curriculum’. ‘Queering the Arts’. And my personal favourite: ‘Queering Palestine.’ This entails academics ‘unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle’. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. ‘Queering the Pavement’ is the only thing they’re interested in.
I haven’t watched the Olympics in years because it’s such a scam.
If you had told me a few years ago that one day Britain would have a secretary of state who thinks violent male paedos should be housed in women’s prisons, I’d have thought you mad. And yet here we are. Meet Lisa Nandy, Britain’s new secretary of state for culture, media and sport. She was asked at a Labour leadership hustings in 2020 if male criminals who identify as female, like Christopher Worton, should be banged up with men or women. ‘I believe fundamentally in people’s right to self-ID’, she said. ‘Trans women are women and trans men are men and should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing.’ Shorter version: put Worton in with the ladies.
Over the past month or so, we have witnessed several physical attacks on European politicians.
These began in mid-May, when Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico was the subject of an assassination attempt. He was lucky to survive.
A 1930s nightmare on the horizon?
Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.
At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.
Why does a country once regarded as a model of moderation and sanity now view itself as a seething den of blood-soaked bigotry and white supremacy?
Canadians used to have a reputation for being sane and moderate,” Oxford University professor Nigel Biggar said to me on a recent Quillette podcast. “If you have time, I’d like to know why you think Canada has gone the way it has.”
By “the way it has,” Prof. Biggar was alluding to my country’s strange, somewhat manic-seeming lurch into progressive radicalism since the election of Justin Trudeau, whose government now litters its policy agenda with paeans to intersectionality and anti-racism. This has been done with the express approval not just of Canada’s academic and activist establishment, but of the many Canadian journalists who now devote much of their time to hectoring readers and viewers about privilege, systemic racism and “decolonization”.
RESISTANCE is a strong word, evoking clandestine struggle against overwhelming odds: underground networks, such as the Dutch and French Resistance, refusing to accept occupation. Such movements attain near-mythical status, become hard-wired into national psyches. Resistance conjures an opaque world of subterfuge, valour and loyalty. It entails sober acknowledgement of usurped power, and daring, sometimes uncompromising, methods to wrest it back.
