Mediaboss Marketing

The two groups are at loggerheads - but not on one crucial issue

Earlier this month, a skirmish broke out on the American right between white nationalists and classical liberals. The white nationalists, calling themselves the groyper army (dont ask), have been attending campus events organised by classical liberals in order to ask questions about demographic replacement, US support for Israel and the morality of homosexual acts topics on which the two sides disagree.

Both sides, and most commentators, have emphasised these disagreements. But the most remarkable fact about the controversy may be the one point of absolute agreement: the value of free speech.

By asking edgy questions and taunting the classical liberals for their unwillingness to take them up, the white nationalists appealed to this value, often explicitly. And their appeal was successful. Charlie Kirk, one of the classical-liberal leaders in this fight, was forced to write a conciliatory article declaring his belief in free speech.

We should not shy away from our differences but embrace the dialogue in good faith and with the understanding that the best ideas and the best leaders will win, and the conservative movement will be better off as a result, he wrote.

Nick Fuentes, a leader of the groypers, crowed over the article. Well, I agree!I agree with all of that I agree that we should not shy away from our differences.I agree we should embrace dialogue. And I also agree that the best ideas and the best leaders will win.

It is important to note this agreement because many classical liberals have assumed that the way to defeat white nationalism is to double down on freedom: free trade, free speech, free love. They assume that in the marketplace of ideas (unlike in real markets) bad currency somehow will not drive out good. In a speech denouncing the groypers, Ben Shapiro said: Whathelps America win the culture war is freedom: freedom against a government encroaching on your activities that dont harm anyone else.

Despite what so many well-meaning people believe, an ever more radical insistence on freedom will not defeat white nationalists. For many years, conservatives once the party of censorship and discretion, as men such as Irving Kristol well understood have revelled in provocation (triggering libs), disrupting safe spaces, and advancing an absolute idea of free speech. This shift in emphasis has reflected broader changes in our legal culture. Against longstanding precedent, the First Amendment is now widely seen as a licence for all manner of obscenity.

Conservatives now insist on free speech in large part because they fear being censored. For example, when the Satanic Temple tried to organise a Black Mass at Harvard, Robert Miller, a conservative law professor and a Catholic, wrote an article explaining Why Harvard was right not to ban the Black Mass. Millers argument came down to a concern that a similar sort of ban would one day be turned against Christians.

In 2010, the same concern moved Liberty Counsel, a Christian conservative legal organisation, to file an amicus brief in defence of Westboro Baptists supposed right to shout gay-baiting obscenities at the funerals of fallen soldiers. Today it is the offensive speech of the Phelpses, and tomorrow it could be religious, pro-life or pro-family speech, a press release said.

Underlying these very un-conservative arguments is an assumption that we cannot and should not distinguish between goodand evil, argument and obscenity, truth and falsehood. In contexts not remotely governed by the First Amendment, free speechis invoked against anyone who opposes the spread of evil ideas.

Classical liberals bear some blame for the rise of white nationalists. They spent years decrying censorship and according prestige to edginess and triggering. They defended Black Masses and Westboro Baptists, lest someone someday restrict the Catholic Mass and Southern Baptists. They thus rendered the conservative movement unwilling and unable to call evil evil and good good. One of their most eloquent champions, David French, has said: The fact that a person can get a room in a library and hold a Drag Queen Story Hour and get people to come? Thats one of the blessings of liberty.

Now classical liberals find themselves calling for dialogue with the likes of Nick Fuentes, who uses anti-Semitic slurs (Jewy Jewstein), has described the writer Matt Walsh as a race traitor he hates white people, and says of racial segregation: Even if it was bad, who cares? Once again, classical liberal conceits provide an opening for falsehood. Meanwhile, the alt-right trolls who pride themselves on opposing liberalism appeal to the same liberal conceits as mainstream conservatives.

In order to defeat the white nationalists and anti-Semites, conservatives must become less liberal. Only a conservatism that praises restraint and discretion will have weapons to fight those who are just asking questions about the Holocaust. Only a conservatism that abjures viewpoint neutrality will be able to side with truth against lies.

Conservatives must be ready to say that the freedom to host drag queen story hour is not a blessing of liberty. At the same time, they must be able to say loud and clear that they oppose white nationalists and anti-Semites, especially ones that wrap themselves in Christian garb. Our civilisational inheritance is spiritual, not racial. We were taught by a Jew to love; we were not taught to hate Jews.

Classical liberals have built a conservative movement that valorises dangerous ideas, thereby allowing people whose ideas are dangerous indeed to gain a foothold. That is why in the latest conservative debate, both sides need to lose.

Read the original here:
How classical liberals paved the way for white nationalists - Catholic Herald Online

VICTORIA (NEWS 1130) The impending transit strike has taken top billing in Question Period in Victoria on Tuesday.

Its no surprise that things got political in B.C.s capital, as Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson accused Labour Minister Harry Bains and the province of doing absolutely nothing to resolve the ongoing dispute.

Can we hear from anyone on the government ranks who has an idea of what they are going to do tomorrow rather than sit in their offices and watch television, Wilkinson said.

Liberal Jane Thornthwaite also took jabs at the B.C. NDP as the clock continued to tick while workers and students scramble for back up plans.

What message does the minister have to the thousands of students who wont be able to get to class tomorrow morning? she said, to which someone in the Legislature responded with: Call an Uber.

Bains has maintained that outside interference, like a mediator, is not the solution.

Holding firm that collective barganing is the path to a deal, Bains said that is a process the Opposition has shown they do not respect.

It is really sad that the Opposition are trying to score cheap political points at the expense of the labour dispute, Bains said. They know the dispute will be resolved at the bargaining table and the parties are at the bargaining table. It will be resolved and Im fully hopeful.

He added that he remains hopeful a deal will be reached before transit screeches to halt after midnight.

Im more optimistic than that party over there is ever going to be when it comes to collective bargaining, Bains said of the Liberals.

Still, the minister said he understands how stressful this situation can be for transit users, and said TransLink and the union do too which is why they are back at the bargaining table.

The union representing bus and SeaBus workers, joined by their national president, sat down with Coast Mountain Bus Company and TransLink on Tuesday to try and hammer out a deal.

Read this article:
Liberals accuse NDP of doing absolutely nothing to help resolve transit strike - CityNews Vancouver

Here's what our writers and editors are reading this week.

Matt Purple, managing editor:Earlier this month, I wrote a piece about C.S. Lewiss That Hideous Strength, which I find to be one of the most compelling dystopias ever written. But I neglected to mention its prequel, Perelandra, the second entry in Lewiss Space Trilogy and probably the best novel he wrote. As fiction, its deeply sublime (not pretty, as his dreaded Green Book might have had it). Set largely on the planet Venus, it finds the trilogys hero, the suspiciously Tolkien-esque Dr. Elwin Ransom, trying to save the local Adam and Eve from being corrupted by evil as happened back on Earth.

What stands out most in Perelandra is the world building. Whereas That Hideous Strength is confined largely to faculty rooms and laboratories, Perelandra allows Lewis the full breadth of his imagination, and he unfurls before us an otherworldly Eden. There are shifting islands and massive waves, vivid colors and delicious fruits, friendly dragons and strange frogs, along with the King and Queen, the planets first man and woman who live amid all this in harmony. Lewis crafts his world with such carehis descriptions, though extensive, are never boringthat by the time he introduces evil, you find yourself dreading that any of it might be sullied.

Beneath Perelandras story is a subtler version of the critique of Francis Bacon that Lewis also makes in That Hideous Strength. To be good is to fill ones hierarchical place in nature under God; evil arises when one comes to see this as subjugation, when one heeds Bacon and tries to gain knowledge about nature and thus power over it.

What else? Ive been on a Greek kick lately. In that vein, I recently read the Oresteia, another trilogy, this one of Greek tragedies written in the fifth century BC by the playwright Aeschylus. For those who remember the Odyssey and are curious about this Agamemnon fellow about whom none of the characters can say hello without extensively bemoaning, these are the plays for you. They tell the story of Agamemnons return from Troy, his murder at the hands of his treacherous wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, the revenge of Agamemnons son Orestes, Orestes trial for murder, and his ultimate acquittal by the goddess Athena as the foundation of Athenian law. The plays arent just tragic but often gruesome, covering a sequence of death and revenge that began long before Agamemnon. As the chorus puts it: The slayer of today shall die tomorrow / The wage of wrong is woe.

Aeschyluss The Persians is also worth a read, if only because it so brilliantly demonstrates the suppleness of the Greek mind. It tells the story of Greeces victory in the Greco-Persian wars, but from the Persian point of view and without devolving into cheap schadenfreude. Its remarkable how many supposed hallmarks of contemporary storytelling were anticipated by the Greeks 2,500 years ago. We moderns are not as special as we like to think.

Read the original post:
TAC Bookshelf: Of Christians and Liberals and Greeks - The American Conservative

When viewed from the outside, South Africas classical liberals seem well on their way to completing cognitive capture of the Democratic Alliance (DA 2.0). This is the type of cognitive capture that Wall Street alumni completed in the build-up to the global economic crisis of 2008. And we know how that ended.

With this, they have, once and for all, shed the decency and political liberalism of the old Progressive Federal Party, the progressivism of Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, Alex Boraine, Tiaan van der Merwe, Dene Smuts, and Peter Gastrow, among a few others.

The best thing that can be said about the DA 2.0 is that it is at least in touch with global political movements of the 21st century, not the good ones, it should be said. In fact, it joins a group of fighters who want to rescue Western civilisation, who are quite unable to accept the failures of the Enlightenment, emboldened as they are by the likes of Steven Pinker who conveniently ignores the fact that modern science (very much in an era of Artificial Intelligence, but ever since the Manhattan Project), lacks an inherent ethical basis.

Nevertheless, the new DA 2.0, now increasingly being captured by the classical liberals, would defend the most egregious of capitalisms iniquities with claims that 5,000 years ago we did not have flushing toilets and now we have smartphones so shut up! and dont complain about inequality or patriarchy. They would insist, also, that meritocracy would solve all the problems in a country wracked for nigh on 400 years by the structural and somatic violence of European colonialism (which the British historian JM Roberts described as an assault on the world), settler colonialism and apartheid.

What the DA 2.0 overlooks is that when individuals or groups are purposefully restricted, directly or indirectly (stripped of their land, their families and communities destroyed) over decades or centuries, they are prevented from outliving their potential as human beings. But, the DA 2.0 is up there with the best of early 21st-centuryalt-rightists who pray at the shrine of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.

As for the ruling alliance (while were at it) well, they remain in revolutionary reverie with Cold War imaginaries, beholden to structures (How did structures become such an infuriating word?) by democratic centralism (Vladimir Lenins favourite form of decision-making), and the insistence that the party line before conscience must determine everything a party member does. The EFF seem like a bunch of ideologically lost bandits who have to be saved from themselves, and are not worth discussing, here, now.

Fear of a non-white planet

A global, more historicist approach to the political economy may help us understand the significance of the return of Helen Zille and Gwen Ngwenya to the DA. Daily Maverick has previously reflected on the way that Zille slipped seamlessly among the more presentable folk in the alt-right. The so-called classical liberals the blue-blazer with the crested breast-pocket branch of the alt-right are in some sort of panic an almost eschatological panic over the decline of liberalism and the end of Western civilisation around the world. There is a significant collection of more recently published books and academic papers published on this decline of liberalism. We can deal with this in a simple way.

The eschatological part of the panic is its association with the decline of the West or the end of Western civilisation. Here we have echoes of Peterson, Shapiro, Pinker, and Niall Ferguson. In this respect, the DA 2.0 are what the woke would describe as defenders of white heteronormativity. Jokes aside, the decline of the West is a serious drift. So often by the West people refer to European values, the Enlightenment and generally how everything that everyone does in the world every day (well, almost) was established by white males dead or alive. In some ways the West is an imagined community (imagined because not every member of this community has actually met and broken bread with every other member), as much as it is an imaginary construct; the West here refers to a kinship of sorts among the WENAO nations (Western Europe, North America and Oceania) not all of which lies in the actual west.

It is from this West that we, almost everyone in the world, today, use the Georgian calendar; before that, we used the Julian calendar, and before that, we used the Roman calendar. In fact, the physical world as we know it, as a cartographic reality and the states that make up the international community, are all Western constructs. Very many people still speak of BC, Before Christ, and Anno Domini, the year that Christ was born. This is the Christ, mind you, that is always depicted as a white dude. From the West, we also got capitalism and communism, television and telephones.

Almost all our heroes are westerners (and we follow them in cult formation on satellite TV, live streams and literature, from Middlemarch to Maya Angelou an American writer). For most of the past 100 years, the (white) cowboys were the good guys and the bad guys were the Indians. We could go on and on, but the point is that the DA 2.0 fits into that bracket which believes that the West is best. It follows that Western ways of thought and methods rationalism, reason, facts that speak for themselves, utility maximisation, the constant search for greater profit, meritocracy and hard work have moved us from the time before flushing toilets to smartphones and who wants to give up all that progress?

The Wests others are coming: Be afraid

This discussion is philosophically rich, but I always come back to an October 2011 cover of The Economist which tells its readers to be afraid, and successive others which refer with great foreboding to the rise of China and India, the putative hegemons that are positioning themselves geo-economically, militarily and strategically to replace the US.

This time its different, though, this changing of the guard. Recall that after the Second World War, world dominance shifted from Whitehall to Washington. But that was okay, the West (white people) were still in control of the world, and all the beliefs and values referred to above remained unchallenged. It is these beliefs and values that remain so precious to the DA 2.0. It becomes clear when DA 2.0 members complain about black people dancing and singing in Parliament that institution that South Africa adopted from the West. How dare its sanctity be soiled by dancing and ululating natives.

So, we get back to Ngwenya, the hummingbird that flew so high and ended up in a hurricane of Western (white) fear and loathing, of a secular eschatology that is everything the classical liberals hold dear. Everything is being destroyed by all this talk about race, rolling back injustices of the past through meaningful and deliberate intervention, and searches for justice. Ngwenya, now apparently Zilles chosen one, believes (and she may be right) that everything she (and Zille) has achieved was through individual hard work and endeavour. If hard work was a guarantee of prosperity, Africa would have tens of millions of women billionaires.

So, here we are, then. The former home of liberals has been rebooted and is, now, unequivocally among the classical liberals living in fear of the decline of Western Civilisation, and everything associated with it. And Gwen Ngwenya is back as policy head of the DA 2.0. What could go wrong? DM

Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.

Please note you must be a Maverick Insider to comment. Sign up here or if you are already an Insider.

See the article here:
The DA 2.0 has (finally) killed the liberalism of Helen Suzman, Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine - Daily Maverick

Chrystia Freeland deserves a lot of credit for saving Canada from Donald Trump. Can she save the Liberals from Doug Ford, Jason Kenney and Franois Legault?

That may sound facetious, but it is, in essence, the task shes been given in her position as minister of intergovernmental affairs. If Octobers election proved anything, its that Canada is a country in which the bonds of unity can never be taken for granted. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau let them fray badly in his first mandate. In the opinion of many, he contributed substantially to the fraying. Its never clear how deeply this prime minister absorbs any of the lessons hes been offered since first taking office, but the voting results, and the growing cacophony of provincial acrimony, have evidently made him aware at some level that something serious needs to be done to bring calm to the provinces. So hes turned to Freeland.

Perhaps thats a sign that he understands Freeland has skills he lacks. It is no small achievement to have gone head-to-head with the White House over Canadas most vital trade relationship and emerge with a deal that protects Canadas interests while allowing the vainest and most self-centred of presidents to claim victory. The new NAFTA is a true rarity of the Trump administration, a complex accord that satisfies all three signatories, and has the backing both of the Oval Office and a divided Congress that has been at war with itself since the day Trump took office. Even as one wing of Congress is trying to oust Trump on impeachment charges, legislators on all sides are working hard to find a way to approve the pact so they can prove theyre capable of something besides partisan bloodshed.

Perhaps thats a sign that Trudeau understands Freeland has skills he lacks

Outside the U.S., Freeland helped nail down a trade deal with the European Union that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson cites as his goal if and when Brexit is achieved. Shes also handled the task of dealing with Chinas leadership at a time when its abandoned diplomacy for a nationalistic megaphone.

Given her record, it might seem that finding harmony with a handful of provincial premiers would be an easier task. Obviously it wont have the international implications, but thats no reason to underestimate the ability of Canadas political class to pick fights with one another. Kenney might not be in office now if Rachel Notley hadnt underestimated the pig-headedness of her fellow premiers, not to mention members of her own party. And Kenney has plainly decided that doing battle with Ottawa is to be a core part of his governments identity. The combative address he delivered a week ago in Red Deer was nothing if not fair warning to the new minority government that he sees it as a major impediment to the pursuit of Albertas best interests, and hes far from alone in that view: Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe left his post-election confab with Trudeau looking downcast and predicting more of the same tone deafness from an Eastern-oriented administration fixated on its same old obsessions.

Freeland will also have to find a way to make nice with Ontarios Doug Ford, who spent much of the federal election in hiding but was nonetheless treated to a startlingly aggressive series of insults and attacks. Fords first year in office was filled with stumbles, and it may be that Trudeaus people assume the remainder of his term will prove as self-destructive, but there are signs that Ford isnt planning to go along with that scenario: his walking time-bomb of a chief of staff has been dumped, rhetoric has been toned down, contentious policies have been softened or re-thought and Ford made a point of congratulating Trudeau on his re-election while stressing the strains on national unity, which he likely doesnt believe are the fault of the provinces. Hes offered to host a gathering of the premiers to discuss the unity problem, an offer that won the praise of Toronto Mayor John Tory, who hasnt always been a fan of the Ford family.

There is one near-certain means to put smiles on faces at Queens Park, and thats to trundle Ottawas cash-dispensing machine into the province and set it on high. The Trudeauites have never demonstrated a reluctance to spend money in bulk, and would have been lucky to place a distant second in October if not for the voters in and around the Toronto megalopolis. The region desperately needs money for a vast expansion of public transit, and transit fits nicely into the Liberal climate change agenda, so if Freeland finds herself spending a lot of time championing the delivery of large cheques to grinning Tories, it wouldnt be a total surprise. It cant hurt that shes also now the deputy prime minister, and represents a downtown Toronto riding, quite near that of Finance Minister Bill Morneau. So while the Liberals may not fathom Western alienation, they should certainly grasp what makes Toronto happy.

It cant hurt that shes also now the deputy prime minister

That leaves Quebec, where Legault has spent much of the past year inviting Ottawa to keep its nose out of local affairs. Should the courts fail to derail Bill 21, the contentious provincial secularism law, Trudeau could find himself forced to keep his heavily-hinted-at plan to intervene, an act that would impact unity like an improvised explosive device. Add to that the fact that some concessions likely to make Jason Kenney happy like a radical change in equalization are just as likely to inspire outbursts of political outrage from Quebec, and the traditional demands for redress. It wont help to have newly-empowered Bloc Qubcois leader Yves-Franois Blanchet tossing out separatist complaints about any federal action that isnt wholly and completely designed for the sole benefit of Quebec, as he has shown great skill in doing.

Freelands political skills are such that she managed to emerge from the SNC-Lavalin affair unscorched, despite her bosss ugly display towards two serious-minded and intelligent women. Shell need that and more if she hopes to keep four grumpy premiers happy, at which point shell probably face a chorus of complaints from the other six that they werent getting equal attention. Its the nature of Canadian federalism, a perpetual effort to test the strength of the bonds that hold us together.

Twitter:

See more here:
Kelly McParland: Can Chrystia Freeland save the Liberals? (And Canada, while she's at it) - National Post