Approximately 20 years ago, my distinguished friend Frank Buckley, a prominent intellectual commentator, author and academic, moved from Canada to the United States to accept a university appointment. He said he was “going from the best country in the world to the greatest country in the world,” and added that they are both great and good countries. While they remain great and good countries, they are both very beleaguered…
After spending five decades defending Canada’s security, democratic values, and its citizens’ right to free speech, I am astonished at how my remarks upon accepting the Vimy Award three weeks ago have been misrepresented and distorted. Some organizations I worked with have decided to cut ties with me as a result; so as my attempted cancellation continues, I take this opportunity to comment on the aftermath of an anti-woke speech.
This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.
What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities.
This is the courtyard of the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston.
Kathy purchased a similar pic when we enjoyed a wonderful visit there.
It hangs in our home and I am glad of the memory it keeps warm in my heart.
Kathy took me places I would never think to go.
I love her for that.
EXCLUSIVE: Canadian Military Says Critical Race Theory Being Used for Culture Change
The ideology considers history as a struggle between the “oppressive” white people and the “oppressed” non-whites, similar to the Marxist view, which sees history as the struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is attempting to overhaul its organizational culture to address discrimination and what it calls “systemic racism,” and to do so it’s in part relying on critical race theory, a quasi-Marxist ideology once confined to U.S. academia.
“Since April 2021, DND/CAF has continued to conduct research, seek expert opinions and input, and consult with Defence team members to inform and enhance our approach to conduct and culture change,” Department of National Defence (DND) spokesperson Jessica Lamirande told The Epoch Times.
No wonder they can’t find recruits. The CAF is a sick joke, CRT is a far-left extremist hate ideology targeting white people.
Who’d be a high school teacher in these woke times? Not me. It’s a “feelings” minefield in classrooms: all too easy for a student to take offence where none was intended, and all too easy to act on it at a teacher’s expense.
A hostile student — uncommitted, grudge-nurturing, frequently expecting higher marks than he or she gets — may allege that a teacher said terrible things in class: say, that he wished his cancer-stricken wife would die so he could find a new one; or that he described Paul Bernardo’s sex crimes in detail. Chances are good such charges will be taken at the student’s word, not the teacher’s.
The fashion world is not especially known for its morals. And yet even by fashion’s standards, this week’s BDSM bear controversy has been a weird one.
The #Balenciaga stylist is #LottaVolkova This is her IG before she set it private. Marc Jacobs actually comments on the little girl.
There is a very interesting thread a couple posts down that goes into more detail pic.twitter.com/ORJjKw4U5U
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) November 27, 2022
From higher education to football, purity spirals are ripping through all areas of life.
Let’s discuss two of the most ostensibly baffling phenomena of our times.
One is the mania for ‘decolonising’ university courses throughout the land, a trend that is now even bizarrely impinging on mathematics and computer courses. The other is the England football team’s persistence in ‘taking the knee’, long after the summer of madness of 2020 when this gesture first took hold in Britain. England are so far the only World Cup side performing this ludicrous American import.
The World Cup has shown us that virtue-signalling and virtue are not the same thing.
Two televisual events from my childhood stand out clearly in my mind: the Moon landing in 1969 and the incident at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, when – after winning the gold and bronze 200-metre medals respectively – black American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave Black Power salutes from the winner’s podium while the American national anthem played. My dad – a Communist and thus anti-American, but on the other hand a stickler for manners – made a singular sound somewhere between a tut and a cheer.
h/t DM
This is a politically motivated group that has no qualms about accusing mainstream conservatives of being racist and using the legal system to try to silence them
A recent decision by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has given Canadians yet another reason to question the federal government’s relationship with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN).
On Nov. 10, the court dismissed a defamation lawsuit launched by lawyer Richard Warman, also a board member of CAHN. Warman sued journalists Jonathan and Barbara Kay for tweets that criticized CAHN’s links to the Antifa movement in the United States, which has been covered by C2C Journal and The Federalist (the Kays did not name Warman himself in their tweets). In the end, the judge ruled that the tweets weren’t defamatory, which meant the Kays wouldn’t be liable.
Found in closet at Twitter HQ fr 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/3xSI3KvvHk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
… Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “It’s alarming. Campuses are being ordered to go woke.
“This QAA enforcement of anti-white and anti-Western racial hatred and division is iniquitous.
“It will undermine racial integration in our country and breed either resentment or self-loathing.”
Levi’s was among the wokest of the woke. And I was in on it
In February 2022 I walked away from my job as the first female global brand president of Levi’s after close to twenty-three years at the company. I’d given the better part of my adult life to Levi’s because of the product itself — I do love my 501s. (I have always preferred the button-fly on my jeans, rather than the zipper.)
Cue the gags about major controversy, general consternation and private satisfaction. A retired senior Canadian officer just delivered a salvo against cancel culture, whiny entitlement and “woke journalism,” his still-uniformed colleagues gave him a standing ovation, and the usual suspects reached for the smelling salts. A mirror might have been a better choice.
Girl Guides of Canada renaming ‘Brownies’ as it’s caused ‘personal harm’ to racialized girls
Girl Guides of Canada announced Tuesday that the organization is renaming “Brownies,” as it says the name has caused “personal harm” to racialized girls and the change will reflect its goals of empowering girls.
“We heard from several members and former members that the name Brownies has caused them personal harm, so we are changing the name of this branch to further remove barriers for belonging for racialized girls and women,” Jill Zelmanovits, CEO of Girl Guides of Canada, said in a press release.
… Retired Lt.-Gen. Michel Maisonneuve, accepting a top defence award Nov. 9 in Ottawa, also took a swipe at leaders who he claimed divide rather than unite. While not specifically naming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Hillary Clinton, Maisonneuve said “can you imagine a military leader labelling half of his command as deplorables, fringe radicals and less-thans and then expect them to fight as one?”
Good for them.
