Pepe, Peterson and the age of political confusion

I feel that it is time to clarify certain terms often employed  by both the left and right which appear to me to be improperly used as well as poorly understood. I am writing my blog today on the so-called alt-right movement. On what I believe to be some dangerous misconceptions regarding it. On the alt-right’s peculiar range of beliefs. Its weird association with an anthropomorphic frog named Pepe as well as some of its adherents’ dalliances with fascism.

This blog will deal with the most important yardstick for any political movement; how much centralized social control does it require? To what extent is social coercion needed for it to function? Asking this question honestly will allow us to place political systems on the left-right spectrum. Understand that the far left requires intense social coercion while as we move further to the right along the scale less coercion is needed. Why? Because moving to the right on the scale places increasing emphasis on the individual, and his/her rights as well as responsibilities. Obviously, I chose to live with the least amount of social coercion to maintain social cohesion. But where do your beliefs place you? We are about to find out.

All belief systems have their origins. But beware of any who have their origins in philosophies which purport to create utopia. Of all the warnings Professor Jordan B. Peterson gives, this appears to me to be the one which most concerns him. Here’s a list of the number of murdered civilians who died to help create utopia under communism. Data posted from http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/ ;

Communist Body Count: 149,469,610

Rank		Country
1		People’s Republic of China Body Count: 73,237,000 1949-Present (57+ years and counting)R.J. Rummel originally estimated China’s body count between between the years of 1949-1987 to be 35,236,000 (Rummel 1994). This excluded 38,000,000 million that died of famine during the Great Leap Forward. After the release of Mao: The Unknown Story, Rummel became convinced that the Chinese government was directly responsible for the famine, thus increasing his original estimate by 38,000,000 (Rummel 2005). 1,000 was added for Tienanmen Square in 1989 (Courtois 1999).
2		Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Body Count: 58,627,000 1922-1991 (69 years)The body count only covers the years 1923-1987 (Rummel 1996).
3		Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic Body Count: 3,284,000 1918-1922 (4 years)This body count does not include the 6,210,000 killed in the civil war (Rummel 1996).
4		Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Body Count: 3,163,000 1948-Present (58+ years and counting)1,663,000 is attributed between 1948-1987 excluding the Korean War (Rummel 1994). 2,500,000 is the mid-estimate for those who starved to death between 1995-1998 (U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea 2006).
5		Cambodia Body Count: 2,627,000 1975-1987 (12 years)The body count estimate is complete (Rummel 1994). The offical country name was Democratic Kampuchea during Pol Pot’s reign and then known as People’s Republic of Kampuchea afterwards.
6		Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Body Count: 1,750,000 1978-1992 (14 years)The body count estimate is complete (Courtois 1999).
7		Vietnam Body Count: 1,670,000 1975-Present (30+ years and counting)The body count covers the years 1945-1987 for Vietnam/North Vietnam and excludes 1,062,000 from the Vietnam War (Rummel 1994).
8		People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Body Count: 1,343,610 1974-1991 (17 years)The body count includes 10,000 political assasinations during 1977-1978, 1,000 children killed in 1977, 110 massacred in an Orthodox church in 1975, 80,000 during the civil war between 1978-1980, 250,000 that died in 1982 through Transit Camps, and 2,500 killed in a bombing raid (Courtois 1999). Another 1,000,000 is added for the famine during 1984-1985 (BBC News 2000).
9		Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Body Count: 1,072,000 1945-1992 (47 years)The body count only covers the years 1945-1992 excluding 100,000 from the Tito Partisans between 1941-1944 (Rummel 1994).
10		Chinese Soviet Republic Body Count: 700,000 1931-1934 (3 years)The body count only includes the Jiangxi and Fujian provinces (Chang 2005). Although Mozambique has 700,000 to its name, the Chinese Soviet Republic produced more bodies in a shorter time period and the estimate is low.
11		People’s Republic of Mozambique Body Count: 700,000 1975-1990 (15 years)100,000 civilians murdered between 1986 and mid-1988 (Young 1991) and 600,000 starved to death between 1975-1985 (Courtois 1999).
12		Socialist Republic of Romania Body Count: 435,000 1947-1989 (42 years)The body count only covers the years 1947-1987 (Rummel 1997).
13		People’s Republic of Bulgaria Body Count: 222,000 1946-1990 (44 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997).
14		People’s Republic of Angola Body Count: 125,000 1975-1992 (17 years)The body count only covers the years 1975-1987 (Rummel 1997).
15		Mongolian People’s Republic Body Count: 100,000 1924-1992 (68 years)The body count only covers the years 1924-1987 (Rummel 1997).
16		People’s Socialist Republic of Albania Body Count: 100,000 1946-1991 (45 years) The body count only covers the years 1944-1987 (Rummel 1997).
17		Republic of Cuba Body Count: 73,000 1961-Present (45+ years and counting)The body count only covers the years 1959-1987 (Rummel 1997).
18		German Democratic Republic Body Count: 70,000 1949-1990 (41 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997).
19		Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia Body Count: 65,000 1948-1990 (42 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1968 (Rummel 1997).
20		Lao People’s Democratic Republic Body Count: 56,000 1975-Present (31+ years and counting)The body count only covers the years 1975-1987 excluding 47,000 war dead (Rummel 1997).
21		Hungarian People’s Republic Body Count: 27,000 1949-1989 (40 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997).
22		People’s Republic of Poland Body Count: 22,000 1948-1989 (41 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997). Excludes 1,585,000 from ethnic cleansing between 1945-1950 (Rummel 1994).
23		People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen Body Count: 1,000 1969-1990 (21 years)The body count only covers the years 1969-1987 (Rummel 1997).

And here's what utopia looked like under the Nazis. Data taken from  https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193 ;

"What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and disarmed soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.

Number of Deaths

Jews: up to 6 million

Soviet civilians: around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figures for Jews)

Soviet prisoners of war: around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)

Non-Jewish Polish civilians: around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)

Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina): 312,000

People with disabilities living in institutions: up to 250,000

Roma (Gypsies): 196,000–220,000

Jehovah's Witnesses: around 1,900

Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials: at least 70,000

German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory: undetermined

Homosexuals: hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above)

Jewish Loss by Location of Death

With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow:

Auschwitz complex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps): approximately 1 million

Treblinka 2: approximately 925,000

Belzec: 434,508

Sobibor: at least 167,000

Chelmno: 156,000–172,000

Shooting operations at various locations in central and southern German-occupied Poland (the so-called Government General): at least 200,000

Shooting operations in German-annexed western Poland (District Wartheland): at least 20,000

Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps: at least 150,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union: at least 1.3 million

Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union): approximately 55,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia: at least 15,088

Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime: 23,000–25,000

Deaths in ghettos: at least 800,000

Other*: at least 500,000

*"Other" includes, for example, persons killed in shooting operations in Poland in 1939–1940; as partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, France or Belgium; in labor battalions in Hungary; during anti-Semitic actions in Germany and Austria before the war; by the Iron Guard in Romania, 1940–1941; and on evacuation marches from concentration camps and labor camps in the last six months of World War II. It also includes people caught in hiding and killed in Poland, Serbia, and elsewhere in German-occupied Europe."

Now that’s one hell of a utopia. Both systems have several things in common. Foremost among them are that both ideologies have their origins in socialism, both purport they can create utopia and both share the need for enormous social coercion for them to function. This includes laws which regulate thought and speech, just as we see in Canada today. Please understand that socialism means societal control of all social and economic interactions. It refers to the state run collective making 'the state' the manifestation of ‘the people', therefore socialism is no friend to the individual. Both types of totalitarian social control vied for ascension throughout the 20th Century because they cannot coexist. They pose too great a threat to one another. The other possibility is that would eventually merge under a more statist hybrid which would combine elements of both philosophies. Witness the crony capitalism we see today which to a large extent has replaced laissez-faire.

Here is an excellent article on the socialist origins of fascism; https://www.partyforfreedom.org.au/2013/05/21/the-socialist-origins-of-fascism-and-nazism/ .

Every single prominent Fascist/Nazi cut their teeth on socialism. Here is an excerpt on fascist philosophy’s foremost philosopher, Giovanni Gentile;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile#Gentile's_definition_of_and_vision_for_Fascism

Mussolini, like Hitler, was a renown socialist. His break from the communist version of socialism was centered around his notion that the nation state was to be all important as opposed to supranationalism (globalism). It was over this disagreement that he was expelled from the socialist party. https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/precursors-origins-italian-fascism Therefore “Mussolini’s break with his party on the issue of war is a pivotal point in the history of fascism. Where more traditional socialism had made the workers themselves central and paramount, proposing an international harmony between them, Italian fascism reasserted the importance of national character and its distinctions; it sought empire and the aggrandizement of the Italian nation through war, which Mussolini said “brings all human energies to their highest tension.” Such ideas on the virtues of violence and the spiritual purification of the people through war Mussolini borrowed from syndicalism—the aspect of socialism to which fascism owes most. As historian Alexander De Grand argues, “National syndicalism was the original nucleus of the fascist ideology.” Syndicalism is a revolutionary variant of socialism that emphasizes the role of the trade union in the empowerment of the working class and in the reorganization or society. Distrustful of politics generally, syndicalists urged direct action in the form of wildcat strikes and violent propaganda of the deed, their philosophy stressing the morally transformative quality of violence. In the words of Georges Sorel, perhaps the greatest theoretician of syndicalism, “Proletarian violence … [is] a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization.” In Sorel’s accentuation of violent, physical acts of heroism, we see hints of Mussolini’s fascism. Syndicalism thus provides fascism with its point of departure from orthodox socialism’s hostility toward nationalism and imperialism.”

OK, I have argued that Fascism/Nazism and Communism are socialist left-wing ideologies. Which leaves one important question. How on earth does Fascism/Nazism get labelled as ‘far right’ while communism is labelled as ‘far left’ when they share the same origins? That is the real question. Well, as with many things, the answer is so glaringly obvious you will wonder why so many miss it. The two radical left-wing ideologies compete with one another. Therefore, they do not wish to be compared. Since the radical left controls much of the discourse on main stream media, they seek to create a false narrative to confuse people.

Back in 2013, when I was fairly new to Norway, I witnessed a very disturbing trend developing around the immigration issue. Norwegians were becoming polarized as a result. The government had refused to address problems with its immigration policies and at the same time appeared to engage in tactics aimed at undermining Norwegian culture. This included doing what Trudeau does at present, imply Norwegians were bigoted if they expected their government to fix said issues. This in turn had led to resistance in certain circles as well as a homegrown terrorist incident with a man named Breivik. Although this incident had happened prior to my time in Norway, the aftermath was still deeply felt and always will be. However, this fracturing of ideologies did not occur along a properly defined left-right political divide. It occurred along some very insidious old lines not new to Norway, namely fascism versus socialism. I heard the old arguments regarding nationalism versus globalism about the immigration crisis. I predicted this would create tensions and very sadly we are seeing that scenario play out. To put this succinctly, this is the old argument as to which version of social control is better, fascism or socialism? This is not good, to say the very least, yet so predictable.

Enough of Norway, I am home now. I came back in May of 2015. And yes, back to the same damn thing I saw in Scandinavia. By his own party’s admission, Harper was an authoritarian at best and an oligarch at worst. He insisted on clinging to the reins of power while refusing to listen to his own people. Partly as a result his party lost the election in 2015. Canadians were ready for a change. But it hasn't been the change they had hoped for. The current Liberal Party's government has proven itself to be far to the left of what many thought. Virtue signaling has become Justin Trudeau's government's only mantra. The old beliefs of placing the individual before the collective, of fair play as opposed to raison d’etat, and raising the law above government are long gone. Virtually the entire political class has been corrupted by a lust for power and control. People have become complacent. They place far too much trust in their political party of choice to do their thinking for them not realizing how many of our liberties we are surrendering to the state by doing so. Worse, we are failing our kids.

WTF Is Pepe? I watched an interview last evening, “Jordan Peterson sits down with the CBC’s Wendy Mesley to talk about political polarization, Pepe the Frog and his support from the far right. He has a new book called 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos. Peterson sparked controversy in 2016, when he spoke against a federal bill on gender expression and the University of Toronto’s policy requirement to address students by their gender pronoun of choice.” https://youtu.be/0BoOdMx_zDU  In this video Mesley tried to nail Peterson on the idiotic Pepe meme but failed, as most do who have the temerity to challenge his significant intellect and grasp of the psychological meaning of societal trends. But, there is one major thing Professor Peterson appears to fail to understand, at least in my layman’s opinion. The meaning of the left versus right political divide. When young people, apparently mostly young men, feel the need to identify with an anthropomorphic frog, well, I am at a loss as to what to write. But to take this further, to equate anthropomorphic frogs with Nazism? And Kek? WTF? I suppose I could dismiss this by saying “Ok, these kids are just brain dead", but that is not true, at least I hope it isn't. How the hell can anthropomorphic frogs and Nazism have anything, even in the most rabid leftist's addled brain, to do with conservatism or classical liberalism which subscribes to limited, responsible government? We advocate for small government which will leave folks to their own devices to keep and invest as much of their hard-earned money as possible such that government is just sufficient on the coercion scale to maintain law, order and good governance with basic social structures! Is this the best that parents and our publicly funded education system can do to teach our children about the very foundations of our system of limited constitutional government? Face it, we have failed, neo-Nazis aren’t right wing and I am not even certain anthropomorphic frogs have anything to do with fascism. Confused? I hope so, I am too. Let us end the confusion! Nazism, fascism, socialism, statism, and yes, political Islamism are all version of radical leftist ideologies under which we cannot live as a free people!

Peterson did make one thing clear though and hear it loud and clear when you listen to the video I have posted above. Identity politics is the mantra of both fascism and socialism, they just play that game for different reasons. We are all equal before the law. No identity group has rights, only the individual does. The individual is the single most oppressed minority. Choose your political philosophy carefully. And teach your kids to think for themselves or they will force you to answer to Pepe!

On the emergence of the bizarre collectivist mind

I have always been disturbed by ritualistic collective behaviour. Peculiar gestures repeated by groups of individuals who no longer understand what it means to be an individual. I suppose this is one reason I find clowns so creepy. Their odd exaggerated movements, peculiar makeup and dress which instantly identifies them as clowns. Not the least of that which I find disturbing about them are their antics which to me are not a bit funny. It wasn’t until the last five years or so that I thought much about my disgust for them either. Moving abroad changed that. Janteloven (tall poppy syndrome) is rampant in Scandinavia. There social conformity is based upon a mono-cultural socialist collective where conformist thinking is deemed mandatory.

As a baby boomer I often watched war movies. We were inundated with films about totalitarian societies which had lost affinity for the individual. Individuality in these societies had been replaced by some form of freakish inhuman collectivism. It doesn’t matter the type of collectivism, be it Fascism/Nazism, Radical Socialism/Communism, Crony Corporatism/Statism, or Islamism. All of these ideologies include peculiar affected behaviours which are repeated ad infinitum within the group that reinforce the fact that the collective group appears to share the same brain. One reason I find this so odd and off-putting is that such behaviours were so utterly foreign in my home as well as in the society in which I grew up where individuality was admired. It was expected that each person would have their own peculiar idiosyncrasies which were not the result of some weird collective will. It also led me to wonder, even as a child, how folks who had immigrated from such collective tyranny could, or even would, adapt to the openness of Canada where no single ethnicity defines our cultural mojo. It turns out that was a better question than I could have possibly imagined. The conclusion I have come to after much consideration and observation is they very often cannot adapt and most often do not.

As I became friends with children whose families had fled such collective tyranny I noticed a disturbing trend among these families to propagate the very ideology from which they had fled. The love of big government, state control and intervention into every cloying aspect of private human affairs caused them to favour political ideologies that would have left my ancestors horrified at the assault on individual liberty. The respect for parliamentary limits and separation of powers was simply too much of a foreign concept for these newcomers. They, for the life of them, could not understand why small government is more liberating even though the tyranny they fled was brought about by an over-vaunting centralized state which tyrannized people.

Jump forward through the many stages of decay which the Liberal Party has undergone as it betrayed its Classical Liberal roots. This corrupted party now boldly proclaims it represents the real identity of Canada in spite of their gross malfeasance. Today we have universities which demand social conformity ostracizing any who contradict their postmodern and Cultural Marxist agenda. "Social Justice Warriors" march in alt-left rallies wearing ‘pussy hats’ while howling at the moon since they can no longer respect the democratic outcome of elections. We live at a time when globalist oligarchs are waging war against the sovereignty of nation states as they attempt to create supranational collectivism by attacking the spiritual foundations of individual liberty under constitutional law. If you ask many today the purpose of constitutional law their answer will often be that such laws exist to provide some specific identity group with collective rights which of course, by extension, are therefore denied to individuals who are viewed by them as entitled. As a result bear witness to the rise of identity politics. Because of this the law is no longer administered blindly. People have sunk into some form of bizarre collective madness just as they did in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China replete with weird collective affected beliefs and behaviours. Read the latest news as advocates of this kind of tyranny gather to express their resentment toward the injustices of the patriarchy while protesting against the very foundational principles of the freest, most tolerant and open societies the world has ever seen. Even now our tax funded universities are targeting TA’s who attempt to broaden their students’ minds while the likes of Professor Jordan Peterson are labelled as alt-right by a corrupt Fourth Estate while the man is clearly not. We had better get our shit together and learn to think for ourselves in the face of this attack on empiricism, the rule of law and the individual. The individual has become the most at risk oppressed minority. The collective will always lie to gain power. The greatest tyrannies were created out of attempts to bring about utopia. Politically correct postmodernists, quit acting like a bunch of clowns, your antics are creeping me out!

The gradual shift toward progressive politics in Canada

Bent Andreassen who is an avid contributor to the debate in 'The Antioligopolists' Forum' on Facebook asked me a very important question today and one which deserves a thoughtful and detailed response. He asked why conservatives in Canada sold out to ‘progressivism’? To understand we must examine the following. Who were the original conservatives in Canada? Who were the Classical Liberals in the English sense? What did each believe and why? Where and when did these beliefs originate?

Let us begin with the British conquest of New France and the battle for Québec: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham,13th of September 1759, was a pivotal moment in the Seven Years' War and in the history of Canada. A British invasion force led by General James Wolfe defeated French troops under the Marquis de Montcalm, leading to the surrender of Québec to the British. The resulting colony would swear allegiance to the British Crown yet continue to pay tithes to the Catholic Church, live under Civil Law and endure the seigneurial system, an institutional form of land distribution established in New France in 1627 and officially abolished in 1854. In New France, 80 per cent of the population lived in rural areas governed by this system of land distribution and occupation. It was also a form of feudalism.

However, in what is now Ontario, as well as on the East Coast, something very different happened. It is said that roughly one half of the population of the original 13 Colonies in what would become the United States were not in favour of armed rebellion against the King. Although many of them were Classical Liberals as well as religious dissenters, they believed that discourse and debate would eventually cause the King to relent and end the injustice of taxation without representation and grant them representation by population. During the Revolutionary War many of the loyalists lost their land and were forced to take refuge in the British colonies to the north and east. Their loyalty to the Crown had cost them a great deal yet we also owe an even greater debt to them. Loyal to the British Crown they may have been, but they were no fans of absolutism and tyranny. They had reform on their minds to create a freer, more democratic and open society. Unlike their American cousins, these settlers, now known as United Empire Loyalists, used reason, discourse, and parliamentary debate to bring about democratic reform. It took much longer than the American Revolution had done to bring about suffrage yet the slower more discourse based process established a vital tradition in Canadian politics, that of reasoned, tempered debate. This group of liberty lover therefore became our first liberals in the English sense of being Classically Liberal. They favoured free trade, laissez-faire, maximum personal liberty under law, and a minimum of government intrusion on personal freedoms, low taxation and the freedom to worship and associate with whomever one wished. This group was comprised of farmers, small business interests, tradesmen and religious dissenters such as Methodists, Presbyterians and the like.

So, who opposed them? Why the Tories of course! Tory is still the name used to describe conservatives in Canada. What did the Tories represent? The Monarchy, the Church of England, the status quo and keeping the underclasses in their place. Who supported the Tory point of view? Senior government officials, military officers, the judiciary, bureaucrats, the High Church clergy, bankers and big business interests who hoped to maintain the stable British, stayed, status-quo. The entitled in other words.These folks were certainly not interested in sharing their privilege with the common rabble.

In understanding our history, we may begin to appreciate where the loyalties of differing voters are most likely to lie. It is also reasonable to assert that people today often vote based upon family loyalties irrespective of how political parties have changed over the years. It was the Classical Liberal element in Canada who did the most to move the nation toward democratic reform, it is also reasonable to state that it was the Tories who did the most to establish the institutions and system of governance required to support such reforms. Our first Prime Minister Sir. John A. MacDonald, who was a Tory, is renown for centralizing sufficient power (a great deal less than we have today) to unify the Dominion while driving an impossible railroad across the continent. Without his unifying vision the nation as it exists today would not have been possible.

In this way and in the historic sense both Liberals and Tories added greatly to the Dominion of Canada. Yet sadly this is woefully and blatantly no longer the case. Each has deserted its original vision and therefore lost its validity only to be replaced with a miasma of postmodern nonsense which hasn’t an ounce of historical or philosophical integrity. The moment we forget where we have been, we cannot possibly know where we are so that we may steer a course toward more responsible government. The lack of philosophical and spiritual insight informing today’s political discourse is stunning. It is small wonder that religions from abroad are replacing our ancestors’ deep passion for Christianity, and the free and open society it gave us! You may read my blog about the co-opting of Classical Liberalism by postmodernism here; https://therealistsadvocate.blogspot.ca/2017/03/the-coopting-of-liberalism-by-social.html

‘The Short Hills Affair’ MacKenzie-Papineau Rebellion 1837-1838

The following is a paper I wrote for a guided tour of St. JOhns ontario which was the scene of one of the engagements during the mackenzie-papineau rebellion of 1837-38

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short...

http://www.uppercanadahistory.ca/tt...

I am excited to speak with young people about Canadian history. History is living. It has often been written in the blood of patriots and tyrants. Many have defended liberty so that you may enjoy the freedom you are enjoying today. Yet there are forces at work today which seek to rob us of our liberties. Please allow me to explain.

“Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” - John Locke, "The Second Treatise On Civil Government” It may surprise you to know that Locke’s philosophy of having a property in and of one’s own person resonated so deeply among the colonists of North America in the late 18th and on into the 19th century. Yet Locke’s ideas were based upon traditions founded many centuries prior to him. From Anglo-Saxon times parliaments in England had placed limits upon kings and their governments to protect and respect the rights of the individual. Absolute monarchy was unheard of until the time of “Bad King John”. Because of King John’s excesses the English barons forced him to give his assent to Magna Carta in June 1215 at Runnymede. Magna Carta is the first legal document constituting of a fundamental guarantee of rights and privileges. It took centuries for these legal rights to be extended to the common man, however Magna Carta forms their basis.

Law must be blind to race, creed, colour and sex for all to be deemed equal under it. Law must also recognize that our rights as individuals are an extension of our person, inherent to our very being. We are not free because governments afford us rights, rather we are born free. Professor of History John Robson of the University of Ottawa has often stated that this understanding of inherent rights is unique to the Anglo-sphere. He refers to this as our “Shared Legacy of Liberty”. It winds like a golden thread throughout all our history. Time and again kings and governments exceeded their legal mandate to govern. Time and again common people rebelled against tyranny to bring about more responsible government.

How do these ideas, noble as they are, affect us today? I will be direct, special interest groups do not have rights. If the law is to recognize equality it must be blind, without prejudice of respecting one person’s interests or group’s interests above that of another. This is a significant challenge today when special interest groups are given special treatment. This idea is fast replacing an understanding that our rights are inherent. What do I mean by this? Let me quote Edmund Burke on this topic; “The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression.”

Let these great ideas frame our walking tour through St. Johns. Let your imagination travel back to the late 1830’s when what was then Upper Canada was involved in a mighty struggle to bring about suffrage and responsible limited government. We will learn what challenges our ancestors faced and how some of these challenges apply to us today. “In spring 1837, Lord John Russell, the British Whig politician who was then Leader of the House of Commons (the prime minister was then Viscount Melbourne), authored his "Ten Resolutions" on Upper and Lower Canada. The Resolutions removed the few means that the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada had to control the Executive Council. The Ten Resolutions were the final straw for William Lyon Mackenzie, and he now advocated severing Upper Canada's link to Great Britain and recommended armed resistance to the British oppression.”, (edited by David F. Hemmings for the Niagara Historical Society, 2012). Government both at home and in Britain had again exceeded its legal mandate to govern us be ignoring our rights. Folks from the local populace who, like Samuel Chandler, had been born in the U.S. remembered why the American Constitution had so clearly protected and defined those rights while guaranteeing limited government under law. The rights of the individual were to trump those of the state. Therefore, some were ready to take up arms against our government of the day which they viewed as tyrannical. These circumstances formed the backdrop for the MacKenzie-Papineau Rebellion of 1837-1838 and therefore the part of that rebellion that occurred right here in St. Johns, Ontario where this incident is known as the “Short Hills Affair”.

Not all were in favour of rebellion however. There were more sober and moderate voices who were advocating for reform by renewing the vigour with which they petitioned the government. Both the moderates and the rebels essentially wanted the same thing, namely suffrage and an end to the tyrannical practices of the governing “Family Compact”. However, the moderates and the radicals employed radically different means to achieve this goal. In the end, the moderates won as the MacKenzie-Papineau Rebellion failed to overthrow the government. However, democratic reform came through parliamentary discourse and debate in the form of the Baldwin Act of 1849 which finally brought limited suffrage to Upper Canada. Despite the success of the moderates in advancing the democratic process while placing limits on governmental overreach, it is also fair to say that the threat posed to the government by the MacKenzie-Papineau Rebellion had helped cement the outcome. The government could no longer continue to resist the will of the people.

Throughout the Anglo-sphere this story has often been repeated. When governments became a law unto themselves the citizenry forced their governments to be recognize their rights under the law. The American Revolution was one such instance which was fought for perhaps the most British of all reasons, that is that no government has the right to tax its citizens without representation. This is the basis for the parliamentary system we have inherited. Our nation is founded on these ideals; “Law above government, the individual before the collective and fair play as opposed to raison d’état”. These underlying principles continue to guide our ideals of limited government under law. We must guard them jealously. There are powerful forces who would rob us of them.

At the end of the tour I will provide you with a list of web-sites. In using them you may research the many topics you may wish to research since my time with you today is limited. I hope all of you will develop a passion for understanding how it is that we have achieved a society renown for its tolerance, fairness and love of liberty under law. I encourage you to learn more about the tyranny of the “Family Compact”, the grievances suffered in Upper and Lower Canada during the 1830’s, discover more about the firebrand MacKenzie himself, his newspaper “The Colonial Advocate”, his Lower Canadian colleague Papineau, as well investigating more about Samuel Chandler and his fellow rebels. Their leader Colonel James Morreau was the only one executed for the Short Hills Affair while many others, like Chandler, were deported to Van Diemen’s Land, now known as the state of Tasmania, Australia. Learn how Chandler escaped from that penal colony to return to America undergoing many harrowing exploits of daring do. Thank you for listening. Now let us walk down the valley to the former site of Chandler’s home. There we will begin our tour.

What is populism?

Today we most often hear about populism in the pejorative sense. But is it an insult? Why do the powers that be view it as such? Firstly, populism does not necessarily assert political affiliation. That's the first thing we need to be aware of regarding the populist movement.

The second characteristic of the populist movement I have drawn from Wikipedia: “Populism is a political doctrine that proposes that the common people are exploited by a privileged elite, and which seeks to resolve this. The underlying ideology of populists can be left, right, or center. Its goal is uniting the uncorrupt and the unsophisticated "little man" against the corrupt dominant elites (usually the established politicians) and their camp of followers (usually the rich and the intellectuals). It is guided by the belief that political and social goals are best achieved by the direct actions of the masses. Although it comes into being where mainstream political institutions fail to deliver, there is no identifiable economic or social set of conditions that give rise to it, and it is not confined to any particular social class.”

The third characteristic of populism is that it is fundamentally a negative reaction to an external, unknown and indefinable post-national identity being foisted upon us by supranational globalists in an attempt to replace our natural birth identities with their ideological identity. Here in Canada this post-national identity is most commonly referred to as 'multiculturalism'. Multiculturalism results in the migrants’ cultures taking precedence over the currently existing one(s). This includes more than a healthy dose of ‘white man’s guilt’. The migrant's culture is viewed by the political elite as having value while the value of our own is negated. In other words, they are attempting to impose a post-national and post-ethnic identity on us, unless of course you are a newly arrived migrant. If that is the case then the migrant is more than welcome to keep their cultural identity and religion intact, even if it poses an existential threat to our western way of life. As a result we are witnessing throughout the western world our cultures (most commonly Anglophone and European but to a lesser extent Francophone) being supplanted in favour of that of more recent migrants. The excuse used by the supranational social progressives to justify this is that somehow we should feel guilty for our ‘white privilege’ and surrender our identities to some new and undefined post-national identity proposed by them even though they are unable to define what such an identity might be.

I will make my fourth point. The complete rejection among Canadian populists, in fact among populists all throughout the western world, of the notion that our governments have the right to define what it is to be a Canadian, a Norwegian, a Dutchman, or a German, etc. and surrender our identity and sovereignty to globalism. Why? Because globalism's desire to impose its supranational identity on us lacks the validity of our own natural birth identity. Also because globalists have no right to interfere with our sovereignty. Populism is first and foremost a repudiation and rejection of such collectivist ideologies. For the populist, gloablist ideology not only doesn't make sense, it is insidious and an assault on our free and democratic right to govern ourselves. Remember Prime Minister Trudeau stating that we have no core cultural identity as Canadians? After which he further asserted Canada is the first post-national state? http://www.torontosun.com/2016/09/14/trudeau-says-canada-has-no-core-identity Well, he can go pound salt! The man is dangerous and his government poses an existential threat to Canada and our identity as Canadians!

The coopting of liberalism by social progressives

“Historically, Canada has had two liberal phases. Prior to the 1960s, Canadian politics were classically liberal, i.e., there was a focus on individual liberty, representative government, and free markets. This brand of liberalism can be traced to the arrival in Canada of the United Empire Loyalists and the enactment of the Constitutional Act of 1791. The Constitutional Act established representative government through the elected assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada. While the Loyalists were faithful to British institutions and opposed to American republicanism, they were committed to North American ideals of individual liberty and representative government. This brand of liberalism was prominent though the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier, which advocated such policies as free trade with the United States, and beyond.

The second liberalism began, roughly, in the 1960s with the election of Lester B. Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and can be traced through the politics of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, and Paul Martin. This liberalism is what is properly called in a global context social liberalism, or what contemporary North American use of the word signifies as liberalism: liberal democracy, social justice, social progressivism, Third Way, multiculturalism, diplomacy in foreign policy, and a regulated free market economy (during the Trudeau era the Liberals arguably supported a mixed economy). In this second sense, the Liberal Party of Canada is presently one of the more liberal political parties in the Americas. By contrast, prior to the 1960s, the Liberal Party was one of the most liberal parties in the world in the first sense.

There is argued to be a third phase of liberalism emerging that is centred on a more sustainable form of politics. The argument is that action is needed to ensure that the environment, economy, and social elements of society will function not only in the short term, but long term as well. If action is not taken on all of these pressing issues then it can cause a direct threat to our freedoms. This emerging new liberalism is centred on an ideal of 'timeless freedom' which seeks to preserve the freedom of future generations through proactive action today. This would extend both positive and negative rights and responsibilities to future generations.” - from Wikipedia

The second phase of liberalism defined above has led to its complete coopting under the third phase of post-nationalism, otherwise known as globalism. Justin Trudeau has openly stated that Canada is the first “post-national” state. Liberal Parties throughout Canada have completely repudiated their own Classical Liberal roots by selling out to extra-national interests, multi-national conglomerates and the big banks. Provincial and national interests have been replaced by globalism. Since progressive liberals no longer place Canadian interests in the fore, they now answer to extra-national interests such as those posed by George Soros. Progressive liberals openly disavow the importance of protecting our borders, recognizing our cultural identities as Canadians and these most Canadian of all values: “Law above government, the individual before the collective and fair play as opposed to raison d’état”. The current situation under their fiscal and social mismanagement has therefore become intolerable. They have utterly reneged on dealing with indigenous issues which remain a national crisis of conscience. We must put an end to our current reserve system which is effectively a system of apartheid. We encourage you to work with those who, like me, are dedicated to restoring true Classical Liberalism. Together we can renew a parliamentary focus on individual liberty, representative government, and free markets in Canada. While remembering the 150^th year since our Confederation, and in defence of true Canadian ethics, we invite you to join us in restoring Classical Liberal values to the Dominion!