Poilievre The Misogynist

The more we see and hear of Pierre Poilievre, the more there is to dislike. Alex Boutilier reports that:

Pierre Poilievre’s official YouTube videos included a hidden tag appealing to misogynistic online movements that Canada’s intelligence agencies view as a danger.

A Global News analysis of 50 of Poilievre’s most recent YouTube videos showed that they included a tag — hidden from viewers, but not from the videos’ publisher — used by a misogynistic online movement. The tag helps promote Poilievre’s videos among those circles, and signals to YouTube what users might be interested in the Conservative leader’s messaging.

The tag, #mgtow, is an acronym for “Men Going Their Own Way” — a mostly-online movement comprised of anti-feminists who attempt to cut women completely out of their lives. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the movement overlaps with more aggressive forms of “male supremacy.”

It’s difficult to quantify the size of the movement, and its overlap with other forms of misogyny both online and in the real world. But online spaces connected to the “manosphere” have proliferated in recent years.

Global News verified the tag was used on the videos using publicly-available software and checked it against the video’s source code.

Within hours of Global News sending a detailed list of questions to Poilievre’s office, the tag disappeared.

Poilievre’s office said the Conservative leader was unaware the embedded tags existed “and therefore was unaware they were used for uploads on his YouTube channel over the last” four and a half years.

Unaware? Welcome to Poilievre's Conservative Party of Canada.

Image: Global News

Toppling The Regime

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no intellectual giant. But she knows what she's doing. These days she has taken to calling Joe Biden's government a "regime." Greg Sargent writes:

No U.S. lawmaker rhapsodizes about political violence as enthusiastically as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Saturday, the Georgia Republican raged: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” After the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Greene suggested the United States is embroiled in “civil war.”

The term “regime” is a mainstay of Greene’s political vocabulary, and right-wing authoritarian nationalists in Congress and the media are using it more and more prominently. Understanding the term is essential to grasping what’s happening with today’s MAGA-fied right and why some experts fear we may be hurtling toward rising political violence and instability.

Greene is on the leading edge of this trend. After the Mar-a-Lago search, she suggested that only “countries during civil war” typically see such “rogue” behavior by the state. Soon after, the term “regime” quickly became central to the right’s Mar-a-Lago narrative as a way to express that thought.

The January 6th insurrection failed. But Greene is a sign that another insurrection is coming:

It’s telling that all the “regime” talk exploded after the Mar-a-Lago incident. After all, the search was authorized by a judge who saw probable cause to believe that three federal statutes may have been violated. It ended up recovering reams of classified documents that Trump hoarded, after his own lawyers suggested to investigators that none remained.

To call this the work of the Biden “regime” is really to say that the act of applying the law to Trump will be treated as fundamentally illegitimate. When Greene claims this is the stuff of civil wars and rogue regimes, she really means that holding Trump accountable to the law should be regarded by his supporters as an act of war.

What's going on?

Conservatism scholar Joshua Tait explains how this works in his etymology of the “regime” term for the Bulwark. The word, Tait notes, is meant to invoke a sense that a range of U.S. institutions — the administrative state, the media, universities, etc. — have been irredeemably captured by the left, creating a “regime” that in some vague sense exercises hidden but tyrannical control.

As Tait writes, in this formulation, Trump is the tribune of “the people” — selectively defined — who is waging war on their behalf against this disguised tyranny. The “regime” has fought back with more oppression, which proves the truth of the original formulation in a conveniently self-reinforcing loop.

“What do people ultimately do to regimes?” Tait asks rhetorically. “They topple them.” To call the legitimately elected Biden administration “the regime,” Tait argues, “is an implicit call to overthrow it.”

Steven Levitsky, a scholar of democratic breakdown, sees this as roughly analogous to Latin American countries in which the concerted delegitimization of elected governments was followed by coups.

“To call a democratically elected government a ‘regime’ is to deliberately undermine its legitimacy and justify authoritarian and violent acts against it,” Levitsky tells me.

The mainstreaming of the term among Republicans bodes badly for what’s to come, Levitsky warns. This comes after a large swath of Republicans went all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and then with placing him beyond accountability for the mob’s coup attempt, and as political violence is increasingly glorified in GOP politics.

Now the term “regime” is being employed strategically to justify the further abandonment of democracy, Levitsky notes: “This is clear evidence that a big sector of the party is now on authoritarian terrain.”

It's tempting to see Taylor Greene as an airhead -- because, in some ways, she is. But she is also very dangerous.

Image: Time Magazine

Legault's Victory

The Quebec election confirms that things have changed since we lived there. Forty years ago, the battlelines were between the Liberals and the Parti-Quebecois. Now four provincial parties duke it out. Chantal Hebert writes:

Until 2018, the Quebec Liberals and Parti Québécois played the leading roles in the debate over the province’s political future. On Monday, both recorded historically low scores in the popular vote.

The Liberals were essentially shut out of francophone Quebec. The PQ — with a mere three seats including that of leader Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon — will have to struggle to make itself heard in the provincial legislature.

The reason Legault won handily is the same reason our elections are contentious across the country -- the first past the post voting system:

The discrepancies are significant. The system inflated Legault’s victory. With almost the same vote share, the Liberals held on to the role of Official Opposition with 20-plus seats while the Conservatives — subject to a recount — won none.

But when it comes to the prospects of electoral reform, the Quebec proponents of a more proportional system are flogging a dead horse, one that is well on the way to the glue factory.

With the CAQ and Liberals both beneficiaries of the current system, unicorns will surround the legislature before the issue of electoral reform is live again within its walls.

More so than any policy, it is the CAQ’s positioning as a haven for federalists and sovereignists willing to focus on a common nationalist agenda that left the other parties fighting for crumbs in Monday’s election.

As the election demonstrated, none of Legault’s rivals holds enough cards to offer Quebecers a comprehensive alternative government, and irreconcilable differences stand in the way of any substantial alliance between any combination of them.

So what does the future hold?

Legault will not push sovereignty, but he will push the sovereignty of the French language -- which will mean further restricting the language rights of Quebec's anglophones and allophones -- those whose first language is neither French nor English.

And there are other battles on the horizon:

A showdown between the provinces and federal government on health-care funding is looming. Trudeau wants more input on where the money would be spent. But the prime minister could end up in a tug of war with Quebec and Ontario over the introduction of more private input in the public system.

On the environment, Legault wants the federal government to take a pass at assessing his government’s major infrastructure projects. Those include a controversial tunnel to link the Quebec south shore with the downtown core of the provincial capital, and the building of more dams to increase the province’s hydro output.

On the CAQ’s contention it should have total control over immigration to the province and against the backdrop of the party’s record on minority rights, the two governments seem headed for a major collision.

And then, of course, they will likely fight each other in the Supreme Court over bills on secularism and language.

So don't expect a detent between Quebec City and  Ottawa.

Image: The Toronto Star

Tax Fairness?

A recent report highlights how little Canada's biggest corporations are paying in taxes. Fares Alghoul writes:

Canada’s largest corporations are making record profits and paying income tax at record-low rates, according to a new report from the non-profit Canadians for Tax Fairness.

The report found an “enormous increase” in the gap between what corporations would pay at the corporate rate stipulated in the tax code and what they actually paid. That gap grew to $30 billion in 2021 — an amount the organization says represents an “unexplained loss” to the country.

The report analyzed the profits and taxes paid by 123 of the country’s largest corporations with a market capitalization of $2 billion or more over the past five years. It found the annual tax gap in the three years before the pandemic averaged $13.5 billion, but that amount more than doubled — to $30 billion — in 2021.

“This was due to record high profitability combined with corporations pushing their effective tax rates down to record lows,” the report’s author, DT Cochrane, told the Star.

Amid inflation, growing deficits and a looming recession, “obviously this lost public money is concerning,” Cochrane said. “This unexplained loss of $30 billion could not come at a worse time.”

Obviously, something is terribly wrong. We've had forty years of trickle-down economics. After the financial collapse of 2008, you would think that we would have learned a lesson. 

Obviously not.

Image: Michael Roberts Blog

The March Backward

If you thought that the U.S. Supreme Court's last session was horrific, Ruth Marcus writes that you ain't seen nothin' yet:

Nothing in the behavior of the court’s emboldened majority suggests any inclination to pull back on the throttle. The Supreme Court is master of its docket, which means that it controls what cases it will hear, subject to the agreement of four justices. Already, with its calendar only partly filled, the justices have once again piled onto their agenda cases that embroil the court in some of the most inflammatory issues confronting the nation — and more are on the way.

Last term, in addition to overruling Roe v. Wade, the conservative majority expanded gun rights, imposed severe new constraints on the power of regulatory agencies and further dismantled the wall of separation between church and state.

The court is marching on toward fresh territory, taking on race, gay rights and the fundamental structures of democracy — this even as the shock waves of the abortion ruling reverberate through our politics and lower courts grapple with a transformed legal regime. And there’s every indication that the court intends to adopt changes nearly as substantial — and as long sought by conservatives — as those of last term.

The conservative justices are in a hurry:

In assembling its cases for the term, the conservative wing has at times displayed an unseemly haste — prodded by conservative activists who have seized on the opportunities presented by a court open to their efforts to reshape the law. The court reached out to decide a dispute about when the Clean Water Act applies to wetlands, even as the Environmental Protection Agency rewrites its rules on that very issue. It agreed to hear a wedding website designer’s complaint that Colorado’s law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation violates her free speech rights to oppose same-sex marriage, even though Colorado authorities have not filed any complaint against her. It took the marquee case of the term — the constitutionality of affirmative action programs at colleges and universities — although the law in this area has been settled and there is no division among the lower courts.

“They’re impatient,” Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus said of the conservative justices, especially the longest-serving, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. “They’ve spent a lot of time waiting for this majority to happen, and they don’t plan to waste it.”

They're doing this even as a majority of Americans see the court as a political weapon:

If the majority insists on its current and hurried path, it risks deepening the very questions about the court’s legitimacy that have tormented the justices — divisions reflected in the bellicosity of their written work and that have erupted, in recent weeks, into their public debate. At a moment of extreme and increasing national division, change of such velocity and breadth is unhealthy not only for the court but also for a nation being asked to abide by its rulings.

Nearly 80 years ago, Judge Learned Hand observed that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” By contrast, “this is a court that is very convinced of its righteousness,” said Stanford Law School professor Pamela S. Karlan. “This is a court on which there are a number of justices who are very eager to push the law in directions they prefer, and they don’t think to themselves, ‘We should go slow on these things.’ ”

Put simply, the conservative march backward continues -- with the Supreme Court leading the way.

Image: nature.com

Can He Beat The Odds?

The trucker's convoy is still here. And, Darrell Bricker writes, they're not going anywhere:

The so-called “freedom convoy” that blocked Parliament Hill and several Canada-U.S. border crossings may have dispersed earlier this year, but it won’t be leaving our political conversation anytime soon. At least, not if opponents of the federal Conservative Party and their new leader, Pierre Poilievre, have anything to say about it.

The most recent polling Ipsos conducted for Global News shows why.

The party most interested in reminding Canadians about ties between the convoy and Pierre Poilievre will be the Liberal Party. Why? The Liberals are in a very difficult spot. They currently trail the Conservatives in the national popular vote by five points. The Conservatives also lead the Liberals in all regions of the country west of Quebec, with a stunning seven-point lead in seat-rich Ontario. With these numbers, if an election were held tomorrow, the Conservatives would easily win a plurality of seats.

It gets worse for the Liberals.

Justin Trudeau trails Pierre Poilievre as preferred prime minister by about the same amount as the Liberal Party trails the Conservative Party on vote. Most worrying for the prime minister is how high his negatives are. Canadians who strongly disapprove of Trudeau outnumber those who strongly approve of him by a ratio of four-to-one. These negatives are also well ahead of those of Poilievre, who remains largely unknown to a significant number of Canadians.

Trudeau’s relationship with Canadians has gone through the full cycle of Ds: darling, to disappointment, to dislike. This situation will be difficult to reverse, even for a gifted politician like Trudeau.

Further on leadership, two data points jump out of the polling on how Canadians view Trudeau and Poilievre. Trudeau leads Poilievre by 16 points on which federal leader is most likely to “be in over his head.” This is astounding given that Trudeau has been prime minister for seven years and Canadians barely know Poilievre.

As worrying for the Liberals is that Poilievre and Trudeau are separated by only two points on which leader is most likely to have a hidden agenda. In the past, this issue has proven to be an Achilles Heel for the Conservatives. Not so much for the new Conservative leader.

If the Liberals can’t count on their governing record or the strength of their leader to provide them with an advantage going into the next election, then what about their strengths on policy? Unfortunately, there isn’t much for them to work with here either.

We asked Canadians about which issues they are most focused on for the next election. The top five that came back are: health care, the economy, housing, inflation/interest rates, and taxes. Unfortunately for the Liberals, the Conservatives lead on all these issues with the exception of health care, where there is a three-way tie. Even on the sixth issue, climate, a signature issue for the Liberals, the Liberals are tied with the NDP. In other words, the policy door is closed for the Liberals too.

So, things don't look good for the Liberals. However,

the poll shows Poilievre’s support of the protesters is a potential vulnerability available for the Liberals to exploit. The Liberals are too good at running effective, disciplined, and ruthless election campaigns to miss it.

Ipsos asked Canadians the following question: “As you know, Pierre Poilievre, the new leader of the Conservative Party, expressed his support for the freedom convoy protests that occurred in Ottawa and at border crossings last year. Are you more or less likely to vote for the Conservative Party because of his stance on this issue?”

Seventeen per cent of Canadians told us they would be more likely to vote for the Conservatives because of Poilievre’s support for the truckers. Conversely, 41 per cent said they would be less likely to vote for the Conservatives due to Poilievre’s position. Most importantly though, 41 per cent said Poilievre’s stance on the truckers would have no impact on their future vote.

The Liberals will not allow this much fence sitting to continue without challenge. They will push voters to pick a side. If the fence sitters split in the same ratio (roughly 2:1 to unfavourable) as those who have already made up their minds, then the Liberals will have something to work with. That’s why they will go all in on making the truck convoy and various adjacent issues the focus of their campaign. Otherwise, they can only wait for Poilievre to make a serious error or for some crisis to change their prospects. Nearly a decade in power has left the Liberals little else to work with.

Ten years is roughly the longest period voters will give any Canadian government. Time will tell if Justin can beat those odds.

Image: theglobeandmail.com

A World Of Problems

We live in a world of problems. Bob Rae writes from the United Nations:

We are meeting at a time of major disruption in the global economy, geopolitics and politics, the sustainability of the planet, global public health, the pace of technological change, and the inevitable human consequences of all of the above. The situation does not lend itself to simple bumper stickers, but we have become used, here at the UN, to referring to “a cascade of crises”, that fall into and amplify each other, and continue to have powerful consequences for the world, and inevitably for all of us.  

While I have been here as Canada’s Ambassador, this was my first UNGA high-level week, which is really ten days of nonstop speeches, side meetings, breakfasts, coffees, pull-asides, lunches, more coffees, dinners, and for the strongest among us, late night conclaves.  After two years of Zooms, FaceTimes, Webexes, MS Teams and every imaginable platform, it was all in person and in your face.  The world we faced was an even bigger mess than what we faced before the Great Distancing of March 2020.  Canada more than held its own, but it was hectic.

What is Canada's place in the world?

Canada is — by virtue of its history, geography, demography, social makeup and economy — directly implicated in the world.  We are an indigenous country, an Arctic country, a country of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Americas, and thanks to our dramatically shifting demography because of immigration, a country that is tied to every other country, language, and history, in the world. We are a trading nation, a country whose GDP depends on our economic interdependence with the rest of the world. We are members of a multitude of alliances, agreements, and associations. There is no part of the world that is far away or remote from us.  This is who we are.

And we cannot withdraw from the world:

Any attempt to ignore our global situation is bound to fail. The UN and multilateral agencies around the world are a critical place for us to do our business.

The most pressing problem at the moment is the war in Ukraine:

The issue for us is, how much do we care about these values and institutions? Four hundred years ago, Blaise Pascal wrote that “Justice without force is powerless, and force without justice is tyranny”.  We cannot afford to be powerless in our response to aggression.

But we face a myriad of issues:

COVID19’s effects on the global south have been serious, on both the health and economic fronts.  This will become a more serious issue this year and next, and we can expect continued pressure on global food and financial systems.

Conflict has been exacerbated, particularly in Africa, but elsewhere as well. This puts pressure on UN Peacekeeping and conflict prevention, but also on the global humanitarian situation, which is now more serious than at any point since the Second World War.  There are more displaced people, internal migrants and refugees, than even before. The challenge of responding adequately to this crisis is great.  Somalia and Pakistan are the immediate crises, but there are many others.  Our development and humanitarian budgets will be stretched, and will test our global commitment. 

Climate change will require greater efforts in mitigation (lowering emissions) and adaptation. The broad crisis in development is made even worse by climate change.

Since Kyoto, we have seen some progress in reducing the pace of the increase in emissions, but have consistently missed targets both at home and globally.  The painful reality for Canada is that we are a large per capita emitter and a small global emitter.  We can’t have much credibility without taking measures that will continue to be domestically challenging.  The upcoming COP27 meeting at Sharm El Sheikh in November will focus as much on issues of adaptation and climate finance as on the reduction of global emissions.  China and Russia will use the disruptive impact of the invasion of Ukraine to point out that Western rhetoric exceeds its delivery. The most important message on climate is that it is today’s issue and today’s crisis. It is not something that happens in 2050 if we fail to meet our targets. It is a crisis of today, not of tomorrow.

Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine has its parallels in other countries taking the law into their own hands, which puts international mechanisms of accountability under great pressure to deliver.  China in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, comes to mind as a particular challenge, but there are others.

We can no longer talk with any confidence of a “rules-based order” because the rules are being broken too often for those words to trip meaningfully off the tongue. The phrase that we have used since the Atlantic Charter was signed in Washington in January 1942, the war aims that united the Allies against the common foe, and underpinned the founding of the United Nations in 1945, is not respected by many governments. Any doubt about this has been swept away by Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the uneven response to this invasion from the rest of the world.

The world has never been an easy or languid place. It certainly isn’t now. Canada’s greatest orator, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, reminded his fellow Canadians in the debates on Confederation that “We are in the rapids, and there is no turning back”.  It shall take all our skills to keep us on an even keel. 

We are, indeed, "in the rapids."

Image: Canada Mission UN Twitter

Truth And Reconciliation Day

The history of any nation is part of the history of humanity. That means that every nation must confront its Heart of Darkness. Some nations refuse to do that. At the moment, the United States is trying not to do that. Attempts to confront history are labeled "woke."

With this newly established holiday, we are compelled to confront the dark part of our history. With each passing holiday, we will be forced to consider how far we have progressed or devolved. Let's hope we can learn from history -- and not repeat it.

Image: thestar.com

The R Word

A recession, we're told, is just around the corner. Heather Scoffield writes:

Deloitte Canada joins economists at Bank of Montreal, Desjardins and Royal Bank in seeing two straight quarters of “mild” economic contraction in our near future — perhaps as soon as the fourth quarter of 2022 which starts in October.

Don’t worry too much, we’re told. It will be painless, and it may even be good for us.

That’s wishful thinking.

Jobs, of course, are top of mind as soon as anyone mentions the R-word. Let’s not gloss over the fact that unemployment is near record lows. Canada’s labour market bounced back from the pandemic recession with surprising strength — a testimony to flexible and resilient employers and employees, as well as plentiful government support.

We are entering the downturn with a tight job market that has pulled in new workers and marginalized workers alike, buoying optimism for a more inclusive and diverse workforce over the long term.

So can it really be that bad?

There’s reason to be leery.

For one, the jobs bonanza of last year is over. Canada’s labour market has shed jobs for the past three months, and the unemployment rate rose to 5.4 per cent in August, albeit from a rock-bottom 4.9 per cent in July.

Brendon Bernard, economist at job-posting site Indeed Canada, has his hands on the day-to-day churn in hiring, and he still sees plenty of strength in the labour market. But it’s not like it was a few months ago. In May, for example, job postings were 74 per cent above their pre-pandemic levels. Nowadays, they’re 59 per cent above.

“We’re still in a job-seekers market, but there has been a momentum shift,” he says. “Things are starting to ease.”

Over at Deloitte Canada, chief economist Craig Alexander has just called a mild recession starting in the fourth quarter. He too sees a cooling of the labour market but, as long as things unfold as he expects, he is forecasting “recession with an asterisk.”

The main reason the economy is poised to shrink, he says, is because companies stocked up heavily on everything they could earlier this year in the face of supply-chain disruptions. But now, supply chains seem to be working themselves out, and companies have no reason keep their inventories high.

In other words, nothing to do with jobs.

The question is, how will governments react?

In the wake of a poorly conceived mini-budget in the United Kingdom that introduced deficit-financed tax cuts, global markets have gone into convulsions. Currencies are churning, bond markets are in turmoil and the Bank of England was pushed into “whatever-it-takes” mode, intervening in markets to counteract the damage.

In Canada, the central bank has signalled it will continue to raise interest rates even as momentum in the economy is slowing. Its attempt to crush demand so it is better in sync with supply is delicate at best, and poised to hurt many vulnerable workers at worst.

And the latest poll suggests Canadians favour Pierre Poilievre as prime minister.

Buckle your seatbelts.

Image: mpamag.com

It Can Be Devastating

We're not done with COVID. And it's not done with us. Andrew Nikifork writes:

This question demands to be top of mind: What can COVID do to our brains?

Add to a growing stack of relevant research a controversial report published last week by Nature Medicine.

It suggests that seven out of 100 COVID cases could lead to serious brain problems that may last a lifetime.

The authors, led by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, used U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical records to track the brain health of 154,000 people who had tested positive for COVID.

Their conclusion, as summed up in a press release: “Those who have been infected with the virus are at increased risk of developing a range of neurological conditions in the first year after the infection.”

The lingering effects can be severe:

They include strokes. Cognitive and memory problems. Migraine headaches. Epileptic seizures. Involuntary muscle contractions. Hearing and vision abnormalities. Balance and co-ordination difficulties. Depression and anxiety. And symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease.

“We’re seeing brain problems in previously healthy individuals and those who have had mild infections,” said lead researcher Al-Aly.

“It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, female or male, or what your race is. It doesn’t matter if you smoked or not, or if you had other unhealthy habits or conditions.”

Dr. Wes Ely, an ICU doctor and expert in long COVID at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, called the results “shattering” and “insane” in a TikTok video.

The study has its critics. But, nonetheless, it raises several red flags:

Ely noted: “This VA Study is very large and even though it is 70 per cent white males who were unvaccinated, we already have data showing that vaccinated patients are still at risk for neurological and cardiological complications months after acute and mild COVID.”

Other research shows, for example, that even mild COVID infections can result in significant shrinkage of grey matter as well as lasting damage to neurons essential for sensory and motor function.

The virus can also penetrate the blood-brain barrier and ignite central nervous system inflammation. The blood-brain barrier is a sort of immunological roadblock that prevents infections in the blood from entering the brain.

A Danish study also found that risk of ischemic stroke, which blocks blood flow to the brain, was more frequent in COVID-positive patients than in those with respiratory infections.

“There have been several studies by other researchers that have shown, in mice and humans, that SARS-CoV-2 can attack the lining of the blood vessels and then trigger a stroke or seizure,” Al-Aly said in the news release. “It helps explain how someone with no risk factors could suddenly have a stroke.”

So don't throw away that mask. And don't listen to the morons who tell you that the mask is an infringement on your personal freedom.

Image: healio.com

Zombie Reaganomics

Last week, the Republicans released their campaign "platform." They called it a  "Commitment to America." Paul Krugman writes:

If you squint hard at the economics section of the Commitment to America, however, you can see the faint outlines of a familiar set of ideas — zombie Reaganomics. Which raises a question: Why are deregulation, benefit cuts and tax breaks for the rich still the ruling ideology of a party that now claims to stand for the working class?

First, it’s striking how many of the economic complaints are about things that are barely, if at all, affected by government policy, like the price of gas (which has come down a lot since its peak) and supply-chain disruptions (which have been diminishing).

Second, immediately after declaring that “we have a plan to fix the economy,” House Republicans say that they will “curb wasteful government spending.” As anyone who follows budget debates knows, that’s the ultimate weasel phrase. What spending are we talking about, specifically?

Bear in mind that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army: The great bulk of spending is on health care, retirement and the military. You can’t meaningfully cut expenditure without attacking at least one of these. So which parts of that spending are wasteful?

Senator Rick Scott wants to get rid of the insurance company:

Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has called for sunsetting all federal programs — including Social Security and Medicare — every five years, which would open the door to gutting America’s social safety net. Other Republicans have tried to distance themselves from that idea, although without removing Scott from his position. But again, what is this wasteful spending they propose to cut?

We've seen and heard all of this before:

We now have four decades’ worth of experience showing that deregulation and tax cuts for the rich do not, in fact, produce higher wages and faster economic growth. So the idea that tax cuts are the secret of prosperity should be dead, yet somehow it’s still shambling along, eating Republican brains.

For what it’s worth, financial markets share my skepticism. Look at what’s happening in Britain, where Prime Minister Liz Truss’s recent announcement of a Reaganite economic plan sent interest rates soaring and the pound plunging.

Billionaires may no longer run the G.O.P. the way they used to, but the party still wants their money. So plutocrat-friendly policies may be a way of keeping wealthy donors and corporations on board, even if many of them are uncomfortable with the right-wing social agenda.

The party still works for the wealthy. But it's added hate -- for all kinds of people -- to the mix.

Image: WordPress.com

He's In Trouble

Vladimir Putin is in trouble. His army is experiencing reversals. And he's calling up kids to replace his dwindling forces. Michael Harris writes:

In making these announcements, Putin has planted both feet in a bear trap. U.S. military experts who study developments in Ukraine with a lapidarian’s eye think that conscription will lead to more reversals on the battlefield. Does Russia even have the capacity to take such a large number of men and turn them into soldiers overnight? The Americans don’t think so. They say these new conscripts will be ill-trained, poorly equipped, and demoralized—which is a pretty good description of the ragged Russian units already in Ukraine. Putin has even taken to using mercenary convicts to shore up his battered forces.

Putin -- convinced that he  is a very stable genius -- has personally taken control of his army:

No modern, professional army operates like that. Command and control in combat is a vital component that goes out the window when the leading politician of a country makes himself the boss-hog general. Putin simply doesn’t know his ass from a bomb-crater when it comes to conducting a war. The results in Ukraine are making that painfully clear.

When Putin sent his invaders into Ukraine, most observers thought the Zelenskyy government would fall in a few days. There was a time when Russia controlled roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine.  Now, with continuing Western support, the betting is that Ukraine can not only reclaim lost territory, it may even be able to win the war.

And, once again, he's making nuclear threats:

If Putin is still rational, he will understand that the person who lifts the lid on that Pandora’s Box won’t see anything good happen. Russia is not the only country with tactical nuclear weapons. The West would be under tremendous pressure to ride to the rescue if Putin actually used his most fearsome terror weapon on Ukrainians. 

However, there are signs that ordinary Russians have had enough:

There is a real possibility that the war in Ukraine will not be decided on the battlefield of the world’s bread basket, but in the public squares of Russia. When was the last time you saw men, women, and children taking to the streets to oppose Vladimir Putin? That is exactly what they have been doing in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

More than 1,800 of them have been detained, half of that number are women and children.

Why are they in the street, knowing that their lives could be blown out like a candle, by a regime that doesn’t tolerate opposition? In a country where people keep falling out of windows, the sudden knock on the door could come at any time. They are in the street because they have heard the news from the front, where thousands of young Russians have been killed or wounded in this misbegotten and mismanaged war. According to the Ukrainians, who lost 9,000 military personnel in the first six months of the war, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s forces have killed or wounded 45,000 Russian troops.

The message in Russia is getting clearer: Putin’s “special military operation” is not a patriotic effort to liberate Russians or to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. It is Putin’s folly, a dreadful meat grinder that mothers in Russia have come to see as a threat to their families. That’s why 18 different regions in Russia have actually called for Putin’s resignation. Sadly, dictators don’t resign, they get even.

Or they are overthrown. Stay tuned.

Image: qz.com

Don't Believe Him

Robert Rotenberg -- who shared an office with the late Eddie Greenspan -- has some advice for Donald Trump's lawyers -- don't believe him: He writes:

I’ve been a criminal lawyer for more than 30 years, and at some point in almost every case my client will turn to me and say: “You believe me, don’t you?”

I always give the same answer. “My job is not to believe you. It is to defend you.”

When you see the repeated folly of Trump’s many lawyers, it is painfully clear they have crossed that line, or at least have tiptoed right up to it. It is astounding that any lawyer would sign an affidavit stating they had themselves done a “diligent” search of a client’s home for evidence. Hence, you see their silence in court on issues such as whether or not Trump declassified the documents.

Speaking of documents, I have a hunch about the Mar-a-Lago case. You may remember how Conrad Black got caught on video secreting boxes of evidence out the side door of his office. Have you noticed that Trump and his lawyers have gone quiet on the question of security videos from his resort?

My prediction: at some point we will see a video of the former president padding around in his bathrobe at three in morning, rifling through his boxes of documents. My advice to his lawyers: do not ever sign an affidavit stating you have never seen the video.

There is a reason why Donald Trump's lawyers eventually get disbarred.

Image: Politico

Pure Theatre

Following in the steps of the Orange Jesus, the Conservatives have gone to war with the media. Bruce Arthur writes:

First, let’s all hope Garnett Genuis is OK. You would hate to see the Conservative MP taking different routes to work, holed up in a motel, mattresses against the windows, worried for his life. You’d hate for him to feel unsafe.

That said, we should live in the real world, too. Every week the federal Conservatives seem to find a new way to make media the enemy, and this week one member of the media helped them along. Freelance journalist Dale Smith, who is often accused of being sympathetic to the government, watched Genuis pepper an inflation question with lyrics from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which was based on the largely imaginary crisis before this one, if you’re keeping track.

So Smith tweeted, “Genuis tries to includes lyrics from ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in his question, and I cannot adequately tell you how lame it is. When horses are this lame, you shoot them. #QP.”

Smith is said to have a tendency to irritate much of the Ottawa press corps, and this was a careless, irritating turn of phrase. But let’s be honest: any real-world interpretation of that phrase would not find any more violence in the tweet if Smith had said, say, break a leg.

But the Conservatives have decided media is the enemy, and that this serious moment in human history is a great college debate club game. Genuis, House leader Andrew Scheer and party leader Pierre Poilievre took public umbrage, and the usual right-wing press cranked up the outrage engines. There was some confusion, but it was clear the Conservatives asked that Smith be banned from the West Block on a security basis, and removed from the Parliamentary Press Gallery either temporarily or permanently.

Genuis asked the Speaker to rule whether Smith’s tweet impacted his ability to do his job, which could open a big parliamentary can of worms, or give the Conservatives a chance to complain the system is rigged against poor ol’ them.

Smith's tweet was stupid. There's a lot of that going around these days. But the Conservative response was pure theatre:

This is such patently empty and performative grievance that it’s a wonder CPC members didn’t stock up on fake blood. You might note the obvious asymmetry between the parameters of political rage — the convoy, for instance, was deemed a national security threat by law enforcement, and the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre confirmed that, involving specific threats to at least four ministers. You could point out the Conservative Party itself has embraced the convoy, and all the anti-public health, media-hating rage that came with it.

And even if you could put all that aside, you have to have a child’s sense of cleverness to consider this a real-world gotcha. It’s like saying that because someone said speak of the devil, they were summoning Satanism. Scheer tried this before, pretending that referring to political defenestration meant encouraging murder via open windows. Maybe, somehow, he even believes it.

That's what politics have become these days -- pure theatre.

Image: 

At the Funny Farm

Two days ago, Donald Trump claimed that he could declassify documents in his mind. Chris Walker writes:

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump claimed that he could have declassified government documents he removed from the White House upon leaving office simply by using his mind.

“There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it,” Trump said. “You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it.”

It's Trump's latest defense in the ongoing FBI Mar-a-Logo saga:

Trump’s comments contradict his previous claims about the transfer of classified documents to his home, however. Last week, for example, the former president said he had given “verbal orders” to declassify the government materials — although experts have said that this argument doesn’t hold up in court, either.

Trump’s latest defense — that he can just “think” the documents declassified, and they will be — was panned by many social media users.

“If all documents can either be classified or unclassified by the president in his head, but no one knows it until he says it, are all government documents both classified and unclassified?” a tweet from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. “Did we just invent Schrödinger’s Document?”

Others noted that Trump’s comments undercut his previous defenses of his removal of classified documents.

“The focus is understandably on Trump’s claim of mental declassifications from his Hannity interview,” tweeted New York Times senior political reporter Maggie Haberman. “But he appeared to indicate he intentionally sent the documents to Mar-a-Lago, which cuts against the ‘it was an accident’ claims.”

Trump keeps trying out new defenses. But, with each defense, it becomes increasingly clear that he doesn't belong in the White House. He doesn't belong at Mar-a-Logo. He belongs at the Funny Farm.

Image: Truthout

The Anti- Populist

Pierre Poilievre claims that he's a populist. Actually, Linda McQuaig writes, he's an anti-populist:

Let’s face it: Pierre Poilievre is a dead-ringer for someone you’d meet at a private school debating tournament.

I mean no disrespect — either to the new Conservative leader, or to private school debating tournaments (which I confess to attending in my youth). I just mean that all the media hype about him as a fiery populist is just talkity-talk. In truth, Poilivre is more debating nerd than populist — by a country mile.

Indeed, the notion that he’s a populist — someone who backs working people over elites — isn’t just wrong, it’s downright silly. He’s actually the anti-populist: instead of championing the interests of working people, he routinely crushes those interests.

Sure, he’s quick to bad-mouth the “elite” — you know, people like teachers, public health officials, journalists or anyone who supports vaccine mandates or thinks it’s bad to honk horns all night while people try to sleep.

Strangely missing from his elite are CEOs, billionaires, hedge fund managers and other corporate bigwigs who actually make the decisions that shape our economy and impact the pocketbooks of ordinary Canadians.

Today’s corporate elite is focused on suppressing the suddenly revived aspirations of working people to make more money.

If workers want to make more money, they have to act collectively -- in a union:

So where does Poilievre, the fiery populist, come down in this classic struggle? Well, he’s solidly on the side of the corporate owners who want to make it hard for workers to flex their muscles through unions. He has a long history of pushing anti-union legislation and denouncing “union bosses.”

In 2020, he proclaimed himself dedicated to bringing “right-to-work” laws to Canada. These notorious U.S. laws, with roots in the Jim Crow era, are aimed at undermining unions. Barack Obama said they’re about “the right to work for less money.”

Poilievre has enthusiastically served wealthy interests most of his life. As a teenager, he was already focused on helping the rich, arguing in an essay competition that, if he were prime minister, he’d abolish the capital gains tax — an odd policy choice for a 19-year-old supposedly grappling with how to make the world a better place. Poilievre didn’t win the contest, but he landed a job with its corporate sponsor.

He also blended seamlessly into the right-wing Alberta crowd, glomming onto Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Ezra Levant. But his conservative juices really started flowing when he served as a pit-bull in the cabinet of Stephen Harper, acting out the prime minister’s basest instincts.

Poilievre could be dubbed Harper Lite, or maybe Harper XXL; he’s got all Harper’s ideological rigidity, mean-spiritedness and ruthlessness — just without the charm.

Like his hero to the south, Poilievre is a fraud. In the case of Trump, New York's Attorney General made that abundantly clear yesterday.

Image: YouTube

Food Insecurity

Food Insecurity has become a major problem for millions of Canadians. Armine Yalnizyan writes:

Almost six million people were food insecure last year in Canada. More than a third of them were in Ontario, where 16 per cent, or one in six households, struggle with food insecurity.

Food insecurity ranges from having to limit the essentials to doing without food entirely because of lack of money.

In Ontario in 2021, 249,000 households missed meals, reduced their intake of food or went days without eating. Ontario was the only province where more people were food insecure in 2021 than in 2020.

Count on more people going hungry this year. That’s because food is the most difficult to ignore of the three basic drivers of decades-high inflation rates: housing, gas and food.

Food has also become the most relentlessly rising cost in household budgets, up 10.8 per cent this year over 2021, the fastest pace of price growth since 1981.

To deal with the problem, the Trudeau government has put several measures in place:

Last week the Trudeau government introduced $4.6 billion in federal aid to be spent on inflation relief until the end of 2023, almost every penny for those with low incomes.

The package includes $2.5 billion over the next six months to provide a bit of extra cash for about 11 million people currently receiving the GST tax credit, providing low-income seniors an additional $233.50, a single mom with a child $386.50 more, and a couple with two children an extra $467.

There is also a one-time $500 top up to the federal housing benefit, costing $1.2 billion and reaching 1.8 million eligible renters.

Predictably, the Right is up in arms:

Bank economists and some fiscal conservatives have pushed back hard against these measures. As in other countries, the chattering classes have embraced a new economic theme: government efforts to fight inflation will trigger even more inflation by adding spending to the mix.

Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s new leader of the Official Opposition, chimed in, saying: “The problem with spending more money as a solution to inflation is that it simply pours more gasoline on the inflation fire.”

In truth the measures are so modest (only $3.2 billion in additional spending this fiscal year, targeted to cash-strapped households) that they amount to about 0.1 per cent of nominal GDP and one per cent of current growth, hardly a tail that could wag a dog.

Along with the child-care fee rebate, financed by the feds and promised by the Ontario government to start in April (money that has yet to arrive in mailboxes), there’s a lot of talk but not a lot of cash flowing to households.

There’s no chance current measures will spur inflationary overspending anytime soon, and there is more trouble on the horizon this fall.

Gas prices are down from the highs of the summer, but forecasts are pricing in significant increases in the coming months.

Poilievre blames all this on Trudeau. He calls it "Justin Flation." He's loud. But he doesn't know much.

Image: The Toronto Star

Ends And Means

If you've been following the comments at this site, you will notice that I have received a lot of blowback on my post about migrants being trafficked to Martha's Vineyard. I assume a lot of the commenters are Americans. I usually don't receive many comments from Americans. Obviously, I touched a nerve.

My response has been that the post was about means, not ends. It seems to me that many of those who disagree with me have missed the distinction between the two. Never mind that these people were in the United States legally. To send them north means that they will miss their appearance in court and risk deportation. Deportation seems to be the point. 

Migration -- like inflation -- is a worldwide problem. But, as happens so often, the problem is seen from one's backyard. Yes, it is a problem that is very complicated and difficult to solve. But you don't solve it by trafficking human beings. There are laws against that.

We used to believe in a simple moral principle: The end doesn't justify the means. That principle applied in a world where good and evil were seen as two guideposts for living one's life. Those guideposts have now been replaced by Winning and Losing. Under the new paradigm, what matters is winning. How you win no longer matters. All that matters is that you win.

That, unfortunately, is the prime directive in our brave new world.

Image: Shmoop

Far From Rosy

Pierre Poilievre has taken over the Conservative Party and Michael Harris is not impressed:

It has been a rocky debut. It seems the boys over at headquarters stuck their hand in the blender when they sent a text message to party members in the Quebec riding of Richmond-Arthabaska. They advised members to demand that former Conservative MP Alain Rayes resign his seat. Rayes couldn’t stomach the prospect of Poilievre’s leadership and became an Independent. That triggered the attack of the cyber goons.

The party quickly apologized for its overreach. Their ludicrous explanation for this obvious exercise in punitive politics was that the message was “automated.”

Even automated messages don’t send themselves. It wasn’t sent in error. The only error was underestimating the blowback surrounding this act of petulant payback. They seem to have forgotten something pretty basic. Rayes’ political future is between the MP and the constituents who elected him, not Poilievre’s minions in head office.

What did Poilievre do? He got even:

Poilievre himself did what a lot of autocratic personalities do when put in an embarrassing situation: he made stuff up. The new leader dismissed Rayes’ own explanation of why he became an Independent: the man didn’t like what he saw on offer from Poilievre during the leadership race.

Then he blamed worldwide inflation on Justin Trudeau:

Trudeau’s inflation is, of course, one of the unpleasant fictions Poilievre hopes to market to Canadians. The PM has some heavy baggage, as any third-term leader has. But Trudeau doesn’t own inflation, any more than Joe Biden does in the United States, or former British PM Boris Johnson did in the United Kingdom—other than in a cynical political sense.

Inflation is a global problem and Poilievre knows it. But in the politics of anger and blame, which will be the twin pillars of his leadership, there is no political advantage in the facts. Poilievre’s big bet is that “normies” are so pissed off with the price of gas and groceries, they are in the mood for some major scapegoating. What better scapegoat than the man currently on top of the political wedding cake: Justin Trudeau.

Unfortunately, many Canadians are unaware of how Poilievre became leader:

A very small number of Canadians, in a political party run by control freaks from the Harper era, made him leader. Poilievre does not in any way have a national mandate, just the overwhelming endorsement of a party controlled by his patron, Stephen Harper.

For all his championing of everyday Canadians, and the excesses of the “gatekeepers,” the man who has lived off the public dime all his working life is set to move into a mansion where the public will pay for his meals, his booze, and his entertaining.

With Poilievre in this country's future things look far from rosy.

Image: Macleans

First Principles

 Andrew Coyne tries to make the case for centrism:

Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre are far from twins, or (so far as I know) space aliens. Yet they, and the parties they lead, present the voter with much the same predicament: a choice limited to two wholly unappetizing options. Both parties, it is widely acknowledged, have strayed far from their traditions, to the point that each has become unrecognizable to large numbers of long-time party members.

Each, in its own way, has lost contact with the vital centre of Canadian politics. Rather than practical approaches to questions important to the average voter, each offers a mix of doctrinaire policy and irrelevant hobbyhorse issues. Which may explain why, for the first time in Canadian history, neither party can attract the support of more than a third of the voters.

Yet the one thing that can never be suggested is that this situation should not continue: that it is anomalous in any political community that the middle ground should be deserted soil, unrepresented and uncontested; and that, so long as the two main parties continue to court the fringes, the broader public interest will remain ignored.

In the end, centrism is hard to attain -- because the centre keeps shifting:

It is true that elections are decided by the median voter – as a matter of arithmetic. But the median is not some fixed meridian. It moves, in response to the push and pull of political debate. The party that tosses aside everything it ever believed in pursuit of the middle may find the middle simply recedes before it. Success in politics, rather, goes to the party or the candidate who moves the middle to them – sometimes by redefining what “the middle” means.

Which is to say: A party need not aim for the middle, and yet still end up there. Centrism ought in this sense to be considered much like the other “isms” – conservatism, liberalism etc. – not as something to be pursued in its own right, but as the indirect result of a number of more fundamental choices.

It's deadly to decide that you're a Conservative or a Liberal before deciding what you believe:

It is striking how many people decide first that they are a conservative, or a liberal, or what not – or, worse, a Conservative or Liberal – and only then decide what they believe. Their reaction, on encountering an issue for the first time, is therefore to consult their chosen belief system, as if it were an all-explanatory guide, and not a mere tendency.

Surely the reverse makes more sense: figure out what you think about things first, then see which ism most closely resembles the result. Start from first principles. How absolute are individual rights, and in what circumstances might these be overridden? Is everyone equal? Should they be? In what ways, and in what ways not? How far would I go to make them more equal, and by what means? And so on.

A serious effort to think these through might well find that none of the isms fully answers these questions, on its own; each gives a part of the answer. In which case the wiser approach might well consist in taking from each what it has to offer, striking a balance between them. That begins to look like centrism.

Centrism, then, need not and should not imply an aversion to ideology. Ideology is simply the set of principles by which we make sense of the world. Centrism is the realization that a useful ideology is not necessarily contained within the limits of the conventional isms – in fact, probably isn’t.

The "centre" is where your first principles are -- not what a political party says it is. These days, few of us give a lot of thought to first principles.

Image: AZ Quotes

Ugly Stuff

In recent days, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas have sent a bus load and a plane load of migrants to Washington and Martha's Vineyard. The Martha's Vineyard stunt focused the attention of the nation. Michele Norris writes in The Washington Post:

It’s all part of an ongoing shift-and-dump campaign from Southern Republican governors who are using desperate people as political pawns to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies. It happened again Thursday when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) claimed credit for sending two surprise buses full of migrants to D.C., where they were dropped off near the residence of Vice President Harris carrying all they have in clear plastic trash bags.

These moves surely delight those in the Trumpian base who have taken to social media with glee. The surprise drops are meant to underscore the alleged hypocrisy of liberals by forcing them to deal with an influx of immigrants.

But the residents of The Vineyard showed DeSantis and Abbott for who they are. It's a place that practices what it preaches:

It’s . . . a place that has over many decades opened its arms to various waves of immigrants, and it did so this week with no warning or preparation, standing up an emergency shelter within hours — finding food, clothing, inflatable beds, children’s toys, feminine hygiene products, linens and volunteer interpreters who speak Spanish.

DeSantis and Abbott claim to be Christians. One of the tenets of their faith is to welcome strangers. Not so for these hypocrites. In fact, they are two modern examples of the essential American hypocrisy:

It was all a hoax, and similar to the play toward hypocrisy this week, the thought then was that if busloads of Black families with lots of kids showed up in Hyannis and other cities, the Northerners would balk, and their insincerity would be exposed for all to see. Instead, local leaders, Black and White, formed a Refugee Relief Committee and arranged housing and jobs and got the children enrolled in schools.

So, what is the real objective when governors such as Abbott and DeSantis engage in this kind of charade? I think we know.

They are playing with people’s lives to impress their base.

It’s ugly stuff. And it underestimates the generous spirit of this country.

There is a long history in the United States of human trafficking. But, recently, those who engage in it have been indicted and jailed. DeSantis and Abbott should be treated like the many others who have spent time in the Graybar Hotel.

Image: The Toronto Star

The Real Problem For Evangelicals

Evangelicals are at the heart of the MAGA movement. They make a lot of noise. But they ignore the real problem they face. Lots of sheep are fleeing the flock. Jennifer Rubin writes:

White evangelical Christians dominate the MAGA movement. Fear of civilizational decline, dire warnings of an existential crisis and howls that religion is under “attack” form the basis of much of the MAGA ideology. And the apocalyptic language deployed by the right wing bears a striking resemblance to Christian end-times imagery.

But while conservative Christians love to blame the left, a new Pew Research Center poll shows that their problem is not secular elites.

Prominent right-wingers, including former attorney general William P. Barr and current Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., cite growing secularism as a threat to our entire way of life. Barr (while still in office!) raged during a speech at the University of Notre Dame: “This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”

Alito’s recent rant in Rome was not his first fiery tirade against an imagined assault on religion. Back in 2020, he thundered: “It pains me to say this but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” This summer he was at it again, denouncing “hostility to religion.”

While angry voices on the right rail against barbarians attacking religion from the outside, on the inside the pews are increasingly empty:

In fact, the church quite simply has failed to attract and retain believers. As Ron Brownstein explained last year in the Atlantic: “The claim that any Democratic victory will irrevocably reconfigure the nation taps into a deep fear among key components of the Republican coalition: that they will be eclipsed by the demographic and cultural changes that have made white people — especially white Christians — a steadily shrinking share of the population.”

That process is well underway. The Pew poll tracks the rapid decline of self-identified Christians: “The projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, ‘nones’ [those affiliated with no religion] would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.”

Christianity is losing adherents — in droves. “A steadily shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years,” Pew found. “At the same time, having no religious affiliation has become ‘stickier’: A declining percentage of people raised without a religion have converted or taken on a religion later in life.”

In other words: “With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.”

The decline is especially acute for White evangelical Christians. “The overall declines in the proportion of Americans who identify as Christian over the last few decades have been driven primarily by declines among White, non-Hispanic Christians,” Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, tells me. “A first wave of White non-evangelical/mainline Protestant decline began in the 1970s, followed by White Catholic decline and, more recently — just since the mid-2000s — White evangelical Protestant decline.” He adds, “Over the last 15 years, White evangelical Protestant decline has actually been markedly steeper than the White non-evangelical Protestant decline.”

Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters share a common experience: They know they have failed. Their response to that failure has been a determinization to force their vision of the world onto non-believers. And, if the non-believers refuse to accept their reality, Trump and Co. will punch their lights out.

Image: The Christian Broadcasting Network

Who He Is

If there are those still among us who don't know who Pierre Poilievre is, his first press conference after becoming the leader of the Conservatives should settle the matter. Karyn Pugliese writes:

By now the video has gone viral. At least by Canadian standards.

It shows newly minted Conservative Party of Canada Pierre Poilievre being heckled at his debut news conference by Global News chief political correspondent David Akin.

Before the news conference started, reporters had been told there would be no questions, but Akin asked questions anyway, shouting them out from the floor, drowning out Poilievre’s statement.

At first, Poilievre tried to brush it off as a joke, saying a “liberal heckler” must have shown up. Then he pushed back saying he’d never heard Akin interrupt the prime minister this way. Finally, Poilievre capitulated under pressure and agreed he’d allow two questions from the media. He then restarted his speech without further interruption.

Pugliese asks:

Who the hell calls a press conference, then tells reporters they can’t ask questions?

It’s right in the words: P-R-E-S-S conference.

Dear politicians, if you want to reach the public without the media, you’re free to open a Facebook page or post more of your spicy attack ads to YouTube. Maybe suck up a few million taxpayers' dollars to fund a PR “war room” like Jason Kenney and if your voters keep coming back, more power to you. You can even launch your own news site like Doug Ford did.

However, there are still citizens in this democracy who invest their time and money to support a free press. They want journalists to represent them, to seek truth and demand accountability.

Poilievre demands accountability of others, but he assumes there is none required of him. Make no mistake. He's an authoritarian. And we will see more of the same kind of behaviour.

Image:

A Very Dark Place

Jen Gerson writes that Pierre Poilievre's victory means that the Conservative Party is now actually the Reform Party:

If this Conservative leadership race was a fight for the soul of the party, as former Progressive Conservative activist and senator Marjory LeBreton recently posited, well, the results are in. Reform is back, baby. Moderate conservatism is dead, and the harder-right, angrier, rougher edge will live the life everlasting. In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Self-described centrists in the party have certainly been angered by Mr. Poilievre’s online rhetoric and pro-crypto appeals, not to mention his sympathy for the anti-mandate freedom convoy. Some of them were so perturbed by the prospect of Mr. Poilievre’s ascension that they organized under the title of Centre Ice Conservatives, a dust cloud of respectability meant to form itself into the nucleus of a new party.

These centrists envision themselves as realists repulsed by ungenteel politics and disinclined to pursue policy proposals that would be declared extreme on the CBC. There would be sound logic to this argument, except that no one ever seems to be able to define what a centrist believes, nor what he or she actually wishes to accomplish.

During the Harper years, there was constant tension between the Reformers and the old Progressive Conservatives. That tension is gone:

This division has been palpable in the Conservative Party for decades, and it played out most recently under the tenures of former leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole. Both men failed to resolve the growing populism within their own ranks with the perceived realities of what the general electorate would accept from their party. Mr. Scheer, a genuine social conservative, tried to appear inauthentically centrist in order to win more progressive constituencies. Then there was Mr. O’Toole, a genuine centrist who tried to appear inauthentically conservative in order to win the leadership of his party.

Neither approach achieved an electoral breakthrough.

By winning the leadership handily, Mr. Poilievre has slayed this internal philosophical problem. He can only be exactly what he is, and his party must now be likewise.

The problem is that Poilievre and his followers are just plain ignorant of so many things. That ignorance will lead him -- and those who sing his praises -- into a very dark place.

Image: QuotesGram

Nihilistic Negation

The American mid-terms are two months away, and the Republican ad campaign, according to one donor, is all about "nihilistic negation." What does that mean? Dana Milbank writes:

Over the past month, the [advertising] fund has posted 35 ads on its YouTube channel that focus on the November elections. Of these, only one is positive. The rest? Pure nihilistic negation.

“Carl Marlinga made his living representing sexual predators. Now he wants to represent you,” announces one ad, in Michigan, targeting a Democrat who worked as a judge, prosecutor and criminal-defense lawyer.

“His first big job? Working for a senator who was indicted for bribery,” proclaims another ad, in California, attacking Democrat Adam Gray, who wasn’t implicated in any crime as a young legislative director for a state senator.

Another, attacking Democrat Hillary Scholten in Michigan, claims she “dismissed the destruction and praised the rioters” after violence at a racial-justice protest. The ad concludes: “She’s with them, not us.” The ad cites a Facebook post of Scholten’s from May 31, 2020, that said precisely the opposite: “I’m pleading with those who take to the streets to make that effort peaceful and to not resort to violence and destruction.”

All of this is straight out of Donald Trump's playbook:

Many of the ads are no more than Trump-style name-calling. “Weak.” “Crooked.” “Self-serving.” “The worst kind of politician.”

“Vote Against Jahana Hayes: Completely Delusional” is the name of an ad in which several (apparently White) voters are shown a clip of (Black) Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.). They comment: “Insulting. … Completely delusional. … It’s laughable.”

One refers to Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) as “clueless Katie” — three times in 30 seconds.

“Tony Vargas Isn’t Just Liberal, He’s Crazy Liberal” is the title of one attacking a Democratic challenger in Nebraska. It calls him “crazy liberal” twice.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic challenger Chris DeLuzio is identified as a “Radical Socialist Professor.”

Trump has swallowed the Republican Party whole. If he were one of Charles Dickens's characters, he'd suddenly fall victim to spontaneous combustion. All that would be left would be the smell of rotting hay.

Too much to hope for.

Image: Listverse