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My Twitter accounts pinned tweet is one that says Trump would have elevated his reputation if he had conceded the election quickly; it concludes now people just hope he croaks. The tweet is dated Jan. 4, 2021so elevating the tweet is admittedly a kind of virtue signal: I am not the kind of Trump guy who backed his post-election antics, and Im pleased to have made that clear two days before what one writer aptly called the cornpone intifada.

But the people just hope he croaks line is too vague. The sentiment is shared by never-Trumpers and no small number of once pro-Trump activists and intellectuals who generally approved of his stated policy goals, only to experience a dysfunctional administration that accomplished little. As Ann Coulter (an early and vital Trump supporter) memorably put it, Trump is the opposite of a duck, flailing madly and going nowhere instead of moving quietly ahead in the water.

But it is not shared by Joe Biden, most elected Democrats, and the huge interlocking liberal complex of that makes up the mainstream media: for them, Trump is the best thing ever, someone they can portray effectively as a buffoonish fascist wannabe, while he remains an ineffectual foe with no real sense of how to use power. He is the essential glue and greatest hope of the Democratic coalition, and probably the only Republican a Democrat could defeat in 2024. Indeed, if the Democratic primary electorate moves leftward, as well it might, Trump could conceivably lose to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, ushering in authoritarian socialist rule in the United States by free election.

Of course, Trump is a useful foil to Biden, whose aging communication skills revive when speaking of his 2020 adversary. But the fixation on Trump and January 6 envelops the whole party. How many times a day does one hearfrom the lips of a Democratic official or a CNN or NPR commentatorthat piously pronounced phrase our democracy to connote all that the January 6 rioters and Trump purportedly threaten. The phrase feigns a reverence to American constitutional practices, which is why Democrats are so enamored of it. But almost invariably it is coupled with transformative action agenda that is the very opposite of constitutional regard: ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, the replacement of an Election Day where self-governing citizens go to the polls and vote by a rolling election period dominated by mail-in ballots and vote harvesting by activists. Such proposals are self-evidently designed to precisely subvert the mechanisms the Founding Fathers intended to encourage: gradualism and the need for decisive majorities to enact major changes into our democracyin other words, to undermine precisely the institutions which have made the United States arguably the most successful long-standing democracy in the world.

Writing for Unherd, Simon Cottee makes some comparisons between the way neoconservatives deployed September 11 as a lever for their long term agendas of war in the Middle East and the way contemporary Democrats are trying to use January 6. But if the goals of the neoconservatives were fairly tightly focused on the invasion of Iraq (and perhaps later Iran), those of todays liberal establishment are diffuse: for some they involve jettison of the checks and balances built into the American system, for others simply a means for the relegation of every aspect of Trumpismincluding the policy aspirations which remain broadly popular permanently into a realm of deplorable moral oblivion. In actuality, January 6 was a riot involving a few hundred mostly unarmed people whose breach of the Capitol was made possible by almost unfathomably poor preparation by riot control police (a critical factor about which we would surely be hearing much more if Trump and his administration bore responsibility for it). The Democrats seek to turn it into world historical insurrection whose nefarious meaning must be contemplated every day, as the New York Times somberly admonishes.

For the Democrats, every day that we talk about January 6 is a day where we are not talking about soaring rates of crime brought about by the progressives war on cops, or inflation accelerating to 1970s levels, or the months of rioting, egged on by prominent Democrats, including then candidates Biden and Kamala Harris, that followed the George Floyd killingrioting far more deadly and destructive than January 6. And every day of January 6 is a way to keep Trump in the spotlight, and in a way keep his persona central to the Republican Party. Its a goal which corresponds perfectly with Trumps own insatiable quest for the limelight; He seems to believe, perhaps correctly, that if he had (as he should have) conceded that he lost the election, albeit one held under unusual covid circumstances, his role as a future party leader would be diminished.

This reinforcing mutual self-interest of two campsthe Democratic establishment and Trump himselfnow constitute a real force in American politics, and possibly a barrier to any kind of enlightened leadership emerging from Republicans for the 2024 presidential race. The easiest way out one doesnt want to say out loud, but it does involve actuarial tables and the fickle finger of health.

Scott McConnell is founding editor of theAmerican Conservativeand author ofEx-Neocon: Dispatches from the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars.

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Why Liberals Secretly Love Donald Trump - The National Interest

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If the Trudeau Liberals want us to believe them when they insist they wont tax your home, they might want to stop talking about the issue and funding studies on it.

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The Liberals are testy and on edge once again as members of the public, pundits and politicos point to the latest call for a tax on homes.

This week a study funded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a federal Crown agency, put forward a proposal to tax homes worth more than $1 million. More shockingly, the tax proposal wasnt a standard capital gains scheme this proposal was to tax your home while you are living in it.

They propose an annual surtax on homes of between 0.5% and 1% per year to raise $5.8 billion annually for the government. That money, according to the report, would be used to provide benefits to renters.

All of this is the brainchild of Dr. Paul Kershaw who runs what is called the Generation Squeeze Lab at the University of British Columbia. His study, paid for by CMHC, seeks to fundamentally alter Canadian housing and to a large extent the Canadian economy by attempting to use government policy to encourage rental housing and co-ops while discouraging home ownership.

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There is no doubt that there is a home affordability crisis in much of the country driven by a number of factors, including policies of the federal, provincial and municipal governments. The solution funded by the Trudeau Liberals though is to tax homes, discourage home ownership and make that dream less affordable for many.

A home worth $1 million may conjure up images of mansions for some but the reality in places like Toronto, Vancouver and their suburbs is that this is a normal home price. The report even points out that 13% of homes in Ontario meet this criteria while in British Columbia its 21%.

Taxing these homes wont make it easier for the next generation to buy a home, it will simply be a wealth transfer from homeowners to renters.

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The Liberals should reject this idea in the strongest terms and tell CMHC to stop studying ways to tax homes. Otherwise, no one will believe them when they say they dont want to do so.

This isnt the first time the Liberals have toyed with the idea while claiming its not on their radar.

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In late 2018, the Liberals put together a series of policy proposals to be considered for the coming budget and the 2019 election campaign. Then Toronto MP Adam Vaughan tabled a proposal that called for taxing any gains on primary residences at 50% for a home sold after one year of ownership going down to a 5% tax on homes owned for five years.

The Liberals didnt proceed with it but they did consider it, something Vaughan denied in a tweet aimed at me and filled with abusive language on Friday.

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Thats a lieI wrote the memoits explicitly identified as an idea advanced to Govt by outside advocatesits a briefing note to Caucusnot a policy proposal& was definitively rejectedYoure lazy & being very dishonest, Vaughan tweeted.

The problem for Vaughan is that the paper he wrote is clearly labelled at the top, Policy Proposal 2 and even if they rejected the policy, they did consider it.

The Liberals keep flirting with this idea of taxing peoples homes, their primary residences, and then get extremely defensive when called on it. They must know the idea isnt popular with Canadians and will cost them votes but they still keep flirting.

Until that stops, I and the millions of homeowners across the country will continue to keep a close eye on what the Liberals are doing.

blilley@postmedia.com

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LILLEY: Liberals keep flirting with taxing your home while denying it's on the agenda - Toronto Sun

The Manitoba Liberals are bowing out of an upcoming Thompson byelection out of respect for late MLA Danielle Adams.

Adams, 38, was killed in a traffic collision on Highway 6 while driving to Winnipeg on Dec. 9, 2021.

The NDP MLA was elected to her first term in 2019.

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In a statement Thursday, Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said his party will not be running a candidate in the byelection to replace her, waiting instead until the next provincial election.

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If it were not for this tragic accident, Danielle would have held her seat until the next general election, said Lamont.

Politics is politics, and Manitoba Liberals are committed to running strong candidates and strong campaigns in every Manitoba constituency in the next provincial general election.

Given the tragic circumstances of Danielles passing, we believe that this is the right and honourable thing to do.

Lamont called on his Progressive Conservative colleagues to do the same.

2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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Manitoba Liberals decline to run candidate in Thompson byelection out of respect for late MLA - Globalnews.ca

When, after 9/11, the neocons agitated for regime change in the Middle East, they believed that history was on their side: so they conjured up the existential threat ofweapons of mass destruction, just in case history had other ideas. More than a decade later, this tactic has found favour with a wholly different tribe: Americas liberal establishment.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesnt live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to mobilise at every level. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: Jan. 6 is not in the past, were warned. It is every day.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had beenrightall along: that Trumps hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their livesmeaning. There were now Right-winginsurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wantedthe Capitol siege to happen.

By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clintons marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was ablowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of sexual relations, as Clinton had sought toclaim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amissexpression, the Age of Vanished Normalcy: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, aclash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need topre-emptivelyact to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, asChristopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. Hitchens, who confided that he felt exhilarated at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principlefor the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was theprudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchenss metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of therioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was existential: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amassWMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based onunreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever foundand Saddams relationship with al Qaeda wasoverblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Todays liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patentlydoesnt exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, likecomparingthe storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest thatfar-Right terrorismin America has increasedmarkedlyover the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of aperpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophicto a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk ones life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.

More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. Such nostalgia, henoted, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.

So whenThe New York Timespublishes an editorial on how every day is Jan. 6 now, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the successor ideology.Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In hismemoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for animpending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isnt their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue even if it means engaging inirresponsible fear-mongeringand flagrant exaggeration.

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The liberal fantasy of the Capitol coup - UnHerd

While recent instances of religious intolerance and bigotry may have shocked many, data on Indian attitudes and behaviours - particularly among young people - show that these attitudes are the mainstream, and not the fringe.

For some time now, Indians have held fairly conservative views about how the country should be governed in broad terms. The World Values Survey, a conglomerate of various country-level polling agencies, has surveyed sample populations around the world on their views on various social values for nearly forty years. In the latest round (20102014), the Indian sample demonstrated a lower commitment to democratic principles than most other major countries. India, along with Pakistan and Russia, featured below the global average on the importance accorded to democracy. Indian respondents had an even lower regard than Pakistani respondents for civil rights that protect peoples liberty against oppression as being an essential part of a democracy. Indian respondents expressed greater support for a strong leader and for army rule than most other countries and the global average. The share of Indians who thought that a strong leader was very good for the country was higher than in any other country even Russia (World Values Survey, 2018).

Elections are just a waste of time. We should have a strong leader, a saintly and noble man who we can trust, and then he and the army can run the country in the right direction, Mahesh Shrihari, a thirty-three-year-old accountant based in Bengaluru in southern India, told me. Shriharis grandfather was a Gandhian who had spent time in jail during the struggle for Independence. His father, Ramalingam, had been a lifelong Congress supporter, until he discovered the anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare who captured middle-class Indias

imagination in 2013. Ramalingam then lost all interest in electoral politics. Shrihari, however, is a dedicated supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has only ever voted for him Ill discuss anything with you, he told me, religion, spirituality, science, feminism. I am up for a good debate. But I will not hear a word against Modi from anyone. That is the end of the conversation for me because I know the person is not worth wasting time on.

India ranks poorly on relative commitment to democratic principles on other international opinion polls. In a 2015 Pew Research Center global survey, the importance that the sample of Indians gave to freedom of expression was lower than all the surveyed countries but Indonesia; by 2019, the share of Indians who said that it was very important that people could say what they want without government censorship was the lowest in the world, lower even than Indonesia, and lower than in 2015. India joined Tunisia and Lebanon at the bottom of the list of countries that believed that it was important for the media to be able to report and people to be able to talk on the internet without censorship.

In 2019, India was below the median of countries that believed it was very important for human rights organisations to operate freely in their country without State interference, as compared to European nations, which valued this highly.

NGOs [non government organisations, or charities] are out to defame the country. They take money from foreign countries and from the Church and they instigate poor tribal people against the government, Manu Koda, a twenty-fouryear-old from Raipur in eastern Indias Chhattisgarh, told me. Koda, who now lives in Kolkata, studied in a missionary-run school that functions as a charity in Raipur, and when the country went under the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in March 2020, a local NGO arranged for dry rations for his mother and grandparents back home, he told me. But those were the only good ones, he insisted. His friends in college who were affiliated with the militant Hindu right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and a well-known Hindi nightly news anchor, had convinced him of the evil of NGOs. He was now part of a Facebook group that called itself Fans of [News Anchor]. Koda regularly saw pictures of NGO signboards posted there, with lurid tales of kidnapping and sex abuse in the captions. He did not need more evidence.

The country was also below the median in its commitment to the free operation of Opposition parties. India was at the bottom of thirty-four countries surveyed in the share of respondents who believed that a fair judiciary that treated everyone equally was important. Only four countries had a lower share of respondents who said that it was very important that honest elections were held regularly with a choice of at least two political parties.

Yet, Indians remain believers in their government. In a 2019 Pew survey, a median of 64 per cent across the nations surveyed believed that political elites were out of touch, disagreeing with the statement, Most elected officials care what people like me think. This opinion was particularly widespread in Europe where a median of 69 per cent expressed this view. Seventy-one per cent shared this opinion in the US. In contrast, just 31 per cent in India felt this way. Indians were also particularly likely to agree the State is run for the benefit of everyone. Most Indian respondents believed that voting gave people like them some say about how the government runs things. Indians in 2019 were among the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working.

But alongside this belief in the State comes a muscular majoritarian notion of what the state should regulate.

A study of four Indian statesGujarat, Haryana, Karnataka and Odishafound that two-thirds of respondents felt that the state should punish those who do not say Bharat Mata ki Jai, a nationalistic slogan that Muslims say militates against their religious beliefs, in public functions, and those who do not stand for the national anthem. As levels of education rose among respondents to the survey, so did support for restrictions on free speech; close to half the respondents with a college education or more supported restrictions on freedom of expression. Three-fourth of respondents expressed what the survey described as a majoritarian form of nationalism. Only about 6 per cent subscribed to a strongly liberal nationalism and a further 17 per cent took a weak liberal nationalist position. The highest proportion of respondents with this majoritarian nationalist position were those with a graduate or postgraduate education. These positions included the belief that the state should punish those who do not respect the cow, considered sacred by some Hindus, or eat beef. About two-thirds of respondents supported the view that the State should punish those who engage in religious conversion.

Younger people do not have much more progressive beliefs; a 2017 survey on the attitudes of young people found that six out of ten respondents supported banning movies which hurt religious sentiments, even more so among Muslim youth, 70 per cent of Hindu youth were opposed to allowing anyone to eat beef, and one-third of young people opposed inter-caste marriage.

This is not a liberal country, nor do most Indians likely see liberalism as a virtue. Under 17 per cent of respondents in a nationally representative survey described themselves as modernthis included just 16 per cent of the youngest respondents. A majority of all respondents, young or old, rural or urban, uneducated or graduates, described themselves as traditional (as per Lok Foundation/ University of Oxford - CMIE Lok Survey Pulse II).

There was once perhaps an assumption that education and urbanisation would automatically drive change towards more liberal values in India. But it no longer seems as if these transformations are inevitable. The education level or wealth of respondents had little impact on the likelihood of experiencing social bias according to a recent survey. Moreover, there was little difference between the experiences of rural and urban respondents; 28 per cent and 27 per cent of rural and urban respondents, respectively, indicated that they had faced social bias. These findings suggest that urbanisation and improved access to education may not automatically reduce social bias.

Extracted with permission from Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India by Rukmini S., published by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications, December 2021. You can buy the book here.

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Liberals are really Indias fringe: What a new book on data says - The News Minute