One Ontario school board’s draft lesson plan declares, “Racism is ordinary, the ‘normal’ way that society does business.” Another claims white supremacy is woven directly into its own practices and policies. Such evidence reveals how quickly and unquestioningly critical race theory has become normalized throughout Canadian society in education, politics and culture. Borys M. Kowalsky takes a close look at the origins of this radical woke ideology and details the revolutionary threat it poses to the values of liberal democracy. Can it be stopped?
“As a valued customer, a dedicated member of our expert team will be with you very shortly.” All of us encounter variations on this ubiquitous line – at minimum insincere, exaggerated and misleading, if not deliberately false. Many of us barely even notice, while nearly all have given up fighting it. But what does it actually take to inure a culture to misdirection, deception and falsehood – to lying? What is the motive source that would seek such comprehensive degradation? And where might it lead? David Solway explores how lying has become institutionalized into a structural component of cultural and political life, seeing its origins in deep recesses of human nature, its contours outlined by theologians of ancient times – and its dreadful potential exploited and put to unprecedented uses today.
A bright young woman – let’s call her Kylie – heads off to university. She had a great childhood and loves her family, but now learns from her prof that they are oppressors. She meets some other cool students, all members of groups victimized by the evil system of which she and her parents have been active if unwitting parts. Suddenly, Kylie gets it. She’s woke! Her soul lights up. The world must be remade and, now that Kylie is with the enlightened, she will help save the future. It all seems very new and exciting. In fact, it’s deeply reminiscent of something that was done before – nearly two millennia ago – and which the perspective of time has rendered absurd if not exactly comical. Drawing on a solid body of scholarship, Tom Flanagan goes back to ancient Gnosticism to illuminate the derivative nature of today’s wokeness and its connection to Progressive identity politics.
Most of us have heard it said that a lot of science and engineering went into bringing you the automobile gleaming beneath your gaze in the showroom. A lot goes into the act of driving as well. And while many people no doubt find driving banal or worse, Patrick Keeney believes there’s also a lot at stake. To drive, he writes, is to exercise our skill at being free, to display our competence, to accelerate for the sheer joy of it, and to negate the technocrats who strive to make our lives idiot-proof and safe. To steer our very lives, as it were. To Keeney and the author of the book he reviews in this essay, few places are better than behind the wheel, breathing the heady air of freedom.
The future belongs to Canada. And it seems it always will, at least going by the many failed predictions of Canada’s imminent emergence as a praised and respected world-class nation. That’s because it’s not really about Canada in the global community, it’s all about us and our insecurities, writes Benjamin L. Woodfinden. That’s also why Woodfinden expects prodigious commentator, author and former news media magnate Conrad Black’s prescription to transform Canada into a “laboratory” – though a “sensible” one – for great new policies, or at least policies Black thinks are new and great, to go the way of similarly grandiose historical attempts.
Disasters – natural or otherwise – have a way of bringing out extremes in human behaviour and emotions. And so it was with the Easter Week fire at Cathédrale Notre-Dame in Paris: from the Catholic priest who risked his life to save irreplaceable relics and artwork, to French businessmen pledging grandiose sums for rebuilding, to the almost psychotic architecture some proposed for the restoration. For Patrick Keeney, the near-catastrophe triggered deep reflection on our era’s tense relationship between science and spirituality.
During his decades of involvement in Canada’s conservative movement, Gerry Nicholls has seen the right lose cultural influence and suffer more electoral losses than wins. Yet even as leftist smear-and-fear campaigns reach new heights of slander, Nicholls is heartened by this month’s big victory for the united right in Alberta, and hopeful for a larger conservative political and cultural renaissance in Canada and beyond.
Like many young people, Johnathan Strathdee got his progressive ideals from the public education system. In high school he learned that capitalism is unfair, oppression is endemic, and environmental catastrophe is imminent. Then he read Plato and learned that the world is not so simple.
The Mueller report icing the Russian collusion charges did not end Trump Derangement Syndrome. You can still trigger an argument just by wearing a red baseball cap with a certain caption on it. But a new book about the Trump era so far, by American conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson, is mercifully TDS-free. Hanson’s bias in The Case for Trump is that whatever the failings of the disruptor, the Deep State needed disrupting. As the SNC scandal lifts the veil on Canada’s own Deep State, Barry Cooper wonders if it will be the harbinger of our own disruptor.
For decades professional catastrophist David Suzuki has called humans “maggots” and a “cancer” on the Earth. His misanthropy is celebrated and taught in schools. His favourite mangled metaphor casts humans as bacteria. But the doctor of doom ought to know that we are more complex and creative organisms than microbes. The arc of human progress – for all its fits and starts – proves his “science” is hogwash, write Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak, as it was with all the Malthusians before him.