RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most people are blissfully unaware of the havoc wrought by our misnamed “Social Justice” and “Human Rights” ideology until they are themselves hit by a summons, a legal suit or a ruling in law that deprives them of their peace of mind, robs them of productive time and leaves them substantially out of pocket. It is like being struck by a bolt of lightning while believing oneself to enjoy adequate shelter. My wife and I have been struck by such unexpected intrusions into our lives on three separate occasions over the last few years.

Indeed, the first strike was like a political klaxon alerting us to the perils of telling the truth in a climate of moral evasion and widespread hypocrisy. We received a notice of defamation from a large Muslim organization in response to a candid article my wife had written when she was editor of Freedom Press Canada, an online journal run by my publisher at the time. This was our first experience of lawfare in action. Apprized by legal council that a court case could set us back two or three years and up to a quarter of a million dollars with little to no prospect of winning, we had no choice but to settle. Since we live in a country in which Muslims are regarded as innocent victims of bigotry and anti-Islamophobia legislation is pending, the alternative would have been bankruptcy.

A short while later, my wife found herself once again under siege as the result of a complaint of discrimination brought by a disgruntled student before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. The charges were baseless and plainly refutable by email records and other evidence. The fact that there was “nothing there,” as our lawyer commented, did not deter the HRT from pursuing a hearing. After two years of our living under a cloud of anxiety, the case went to mediation and the charges against Janice were “disappeared.” (The proceedings are described in her recently posted Fiamengo File series.) But the legal fees were astronomical and, since we were not engaged in a Civil Court trial but an HRT tribunal operating according to its own arbitrary laws, the costs were not reclaimable. We asked our lawyer whether we could counter-sue the student for defamation and related damages, but it turns out that, unlike the process in Civil Court, HRT complainants are protected from “reprisal.” “My experience was just a little glimpse,” Janice wrote in an introductory comment to the video, “into how a society becomes totalitarian when it decides to work outside the law (or too often, now, even within the law) to create ‘justice for the weak’ rather than justice for all.”

Whatever happened to those friendly, blue pith- helmeted British “constables on patrol” of yore? The stolid ones who walked the foggy streets armed only with nightsticks, and gave you some visible assurance they were on the lookout for bad guys, and not you?

They’ve been long buried, or retired, or have been replaced by PC-friendly, PC-compliant nonentities who’ll take orders and harass or arrest advocates of the freedom of speech, rather than risk dismissal and a pension for calling a Muslim a Muslim. They’d prefer to arrest Winston Churchill for bad-mouthing Nazis or Muslims than blow a whistle in pursuit of criminals. Paul Weston, a British libertarian, was arrested and silenced for reading excerpts from Churchil’s The River War. The “constables” are now on the lookout for you and for any evidence of “hate speech” against especially Muslims.

It’s evidence of Britain’s capitulation to Islam that it persecutes the advocates of the opposition of such capitulation that three individuals were barred from entering Britain because they allegedly posted a threat to “public safety” by holding their views. Lauren Southern, and Austrian activist Martin Sellner of Génération Identitaire and his girlfriend, American author and YouTuber Brittany Pettibone. Southern was detained in Calais, while Sellner and Pettibone were imprisoned for three days after being grilled on their political beliefs and speeches in Islamized Europe.

Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London, and determined to “transform” the City into a Sharia-compliant center of Islamic triumph, has called for the tech companies to sift out and crush free speech, as though the tech companies weren’t doing enough already. Do not defame Islam with “Islamophobia” or you will “spend a night in the box” or worse. Khan makes Oliver Cromwell look like a Quaker. The American Thinker has his number. On March 14th it ran this article, “Sadiq Khan Squelches Freedom of Thought and Expression”:

NY State has just granted parole to one of three killers in the Black Liberation Army who in 1971 shot two cops in the back, shooting one 22 times as he pleaded for his life. The three member State Parole Board claimed that the 70 year old prisoner had finally taken responsibility for his actions and expressed regret and remorse for his crimes. Think of that standard compared with the Metropolitan Opera firing 74 year old James Levine for incidents of purported sexual harassment which took place many decades ago and were not reported until years after. Think of the 83 year old architect Richard Meier whose exhibition of collages was just canceled by Sotheby’s and whose gift to his alma mater Cornell was similarly declined due to allegations of sexual harassment, which included the affront to one of his assistants in having to look at images of female genitalia in the collages.

The pack hysteria that has overtaken America has been headlined by the Hollywood response to Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey , Bill Cosby and many other members of that community, largely on the basis of testimony of sexual harassment or assault given years after that may have occurred. In the case of James Levine, the media reported abuse of teenagers and of interest, the film which received many Academy Award nominations, winning the Oscar for its screenwriter, is Call Me By Your Name, a languorous look at a homosexual affair between a teenage student and a much older graduate student. The difference in age is never questioned, nor is there any trace of assumption that the older man might have unduly influenced the younger one. To the contrary, the boy’s father confesses his own regret at not having had the courage to experience a similar rite of passage in his own youth. Almost every man accused by the MeToo and TimesUp posses has apologized profusely either for wrong-doing or for being insensitive albeit misinterpreted, yet this has been insufficient for the various corporations, foundations, museums, universities and media centers for whom dismissal is the only appropriate response.

In a recent article for the New Republic, Nell Irvin Painter, a retired Princeton historian whose work focuses largely on race, discussed “othering” – a concept that she explained with reference to Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 story “The Artificial Nigger”:

A white man, Mr. Head, and his grandson Nelson visit Atlanta for the day. Mr. Head, a poor and sad old man, undertakes to tutor Nelson in racial hierarchy. On the train to the city, a prosperous black man passes by. At first, Nelson sees “a man.” Then, under Mr. Head’s questioning, “a fat man…an old man.” These are wrong answers. Nelson must be educated. Mr. Head corrects him: “That was a nigger.” Nelson must undergo the process of unseeing a well-dressed man and reseeing a “nigger,” to understand the man as Other and himself and his uncle as people who belong to society.

This episode in O’Connor’s story does indeed capture a lamentable fact of mid twentieth-century life: back then, many Americans belonging to certain groups did view members of certain other groups primarily, or even exclusively, as members of those groups, and as their inferiors. Fortunately, this type of reflexive prejudice receded dramatically in the decades after O’Connor wrote her story. In no country in human history, in fact, have members of such a wide range of ethnic and religious groups succeeded in truly becoming a single people, viewing one another not as parts of an “Other” but as fellow and equal citizens – and as friends – as was the case in late twentieth-century America.

Yet leftist ideologues in the media, academy, and politics would have us believe otherwise. For decades now, high-school students – and even children in grade school – have been taught that America, far from being the land of opportunity, is the land of bigotry. Their teachers have told them all about America’s legacy of slavery – but have omitted to explain that until a few generations ago, slavery existed in every human society, that it still exists now (mostly in the Muslim world), and that what makes America distinctive, when it comes to this subject, is not the fact that white Americans once owned black slaves but the fact that white Americans fought our nation’s bloodiest war to liberate blacks from bondage.

Pacts such as the TPP find expression in long and complex documents because all parties know the others are predisposed to cheating. And cheat they do. Unlike Donald Trump, those now lambasting his position on tariffs refuse to accept that genuinely free trade is no better than a fairy tale.

When Donald Trump announced the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium many conservative commentators – some of whom I suspect have never been within cooee of an economics text – became free-market economists overnight. I heard some bringing Adam Smith into the frame in support of free trade. Now it is true to say that Smith favoured ‘free trade’ but with more nuance than those who casually drop his name.

Like most people who studied economics I read some of Smith’s work but not much of it. The late, great economist Mark Blaug in his book Economic Theory in Retrospect spoofed the notional man who laboured through every word of The Wealth of Nations before revealing his view that there “probably never was any such man.”

That said, it’s a safe bet that Blaug read a lot more of Smith’s magnus opus than most economists of the past and infinitely more than the current breed. He makes the point that Smith supported free trade but also understood that “protectionist measures are justified…in retaliation against foreign tariffs.” There, you see, fair trade. Trump and Smith in furious agreement.

This is my view. Those who spout the free-trade mantra live in fairyland. They simply don’t know what they are talking about. There is no such thing as free trade between independent nations.

Free-trade deals find expression in long and complex documents. They are long and complex because of a litany of carve-outs and also because each side knows that the other is predisposed to cheating. And cheat they do.

Does anyone think that a US vehicle manufacturer setting up shop in Mexico doesn’t get a sweetheart deal from the Mexican government? Does anyone think that China operates in the best traditions of laissez-faire? And where are the purists in arguing for dismantling the plethora of barriers that every country puts around its agricultural sector? Let me repeat for the benefit of so-called free traders: there is no such thing as free trade.

What is the truth about international trade? On the whole, without doubt, it has been enormously beneficial. But, like many beneficial things, it should not be embraced willy-nilly or lauded beyond its potential bounty.

International trade provides scope for all sides to reap gains as specialisation increases the total quantity and quality of the output of goods and services. However, the distribution of these benefits between countries is indeterminate; in the sense that economic theory offers no reliable way of predicting the outcome.

At a recent literary festival it was not enough for those who disagreed with a fellow speaker merely to protest her words and sentiments. Rather, they assaulted patrons and filled the air with threats and menaces while the police, as usual, did nothing. Free speech, it seems, is now a public nuisance

It is difficult to estimate the strength of the tide against free speech in the Western world: in other words to navigate safely between the Scylla of panic and the Charybdis of complacency. But recently I have had two experiences that suggest to me that our attachment to freedom of speech is by no means so strong as to be unbreakable, and that those who wish to restrict it are a good deal more active and passionate, though not necessarily more numerous, than are those who want to defend it. In a world of monomaniacs, the reasonably balanced man, the man who sees the world as “so various, so beautiful, so new”, is at a perpetual disadvantage, engaged as he is on asymmetric (and boring) warfare against the fanatics of the latest mad orthodoxy.

Our current monomania is that of transsexualism which, as with all modern monomanias, is like the dawn that comes up like thunder outer Berkeley ’crost the Bay. Yesterday, for example, I read in the Times that the National Association of Head Teachers in Britain has issued “guidance” (the kind that communist dictators used to issue when they visited locomotive repair workshops or sausage factories, their words of wisdom on every subject being taken down by scribes), to the effect that there should be books in all schools for children under the age of eleven about “transgender” parents, and that “trans people, their issues and experiences”, should be “celebrated across the school”. This raises the interesting question of how exactly one celebrates transsexualism: dancing round a maypole hung with packets of oestrogen or testosterone, perhaps?

College rape has become a national scandal. We are constantly informed that female students live in peril of being sexually assaulted in proportions that defy statistical credibility. Recently, for example, Andrea Horwath, Ontario NDP leader, claimed on national television that the university is a dangerous place since one in three female students will be sexually assaulted. No crime on the planet has such a victimization rate which, if true, would require something approaching martial law to redress.

In any event, the NDP leader is bravely confronting the danger as she visits various campuses prior to the provincial elections. Andrea, however, judging from a recent appearance on CBC TV, is safe.

Thanks to such unseemly advocates and their emasculated brethren (who proliferate in the political, academic and legal professions from which their careers or ideological agendas materially advance), the rape meme has spread throughout the U.S. and Canada with bubonic rapidity. The real victims of the plague, however, are not female students but circumstantial evidence and common sense.

Let’s consider. What responsible parent would send his or her daughter to university if she stood a 33% chance of being sexually assaulted and her life potentially ruined? Or would not labor to find an institution where she might conceivably emerge unscathed from her studies? And why, for that matter, would female students now outnumber their male counterparts by a significant number and graduate in greater numbers as well, which MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman in their 2013 study, The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education, call a “tectonic shift” in the educational landscape? The disparity is approximately 60-40 and, in some departments like English, as high as 80-20.

Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. There were only two attendants to accommodate 11 passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance.

Such growing efforts to ensure that the physically challenged can easily fly are certainly welcome. But when our plane landed—late and in danger of causing many passengers to miss their connecting flights—most of the 11 wheelchair-bound passengers left their seats unassisted and hurried out. It was almost as if newfound concerns about making connections had somehow improved their health during the flight.

Two passengers had boarded with two dogs each. No doubt the airlines’ policy of allowing an occasional dog on a flight is understandable. But now planes are starting to sound and smell like kennels.

Special blue parking placards were initially a long-overdue effort to help the disabled. But these days, the definition of “disabled” has so expanded that a large percentage of the population can qualify for special parking privileges—or cheat in order to qualify.

In California, 26,000 disabled parking placards are currently issued to people over 100 years of age, even though state records list only about 8,000 living centenarians.

Current crises such as homelessness and illegal immigration did not start out as much of a public concern.

Originally, progressive politicians felt that cities should bend their vagrancy laws a bit to allow some of the poor to camp on the sidewalks. Bathroom and public health issues were considered minor, given the relatively small pool of so-called “street people.”

Heinz gets by with a mere 57 varieties, while the latest fashion in human sexuality purports to discern 112 strains of gender. What academics and activists won’t acknowledge is the injustice of conventional women being bulldozed by a 6’6″ ruckperson formerly known as Bruce.

These days you can find ‘educated people’ correcting you if you use the word ‘sex’ to refer to either of the two categories which divide humans (and most other beings) according to their reproductive function. Do you mean “gender” they will say. Hmm? The fairer gender?

You will read John Stuart Mill’s essay on The Subjection of Women without once coming across the word gender. Plenty of “sex” no “gender.” Gender is a modern construction when applied biologically to distinguish men from women. It has caught on because it lends itself to fragmentation. Sex is binary. Gender, apparently, can be a continuum of finely divided sexual orientations.

Those in the know claim there are many complex gender variations among folk on the planet. As I am not one of those in the know I Googled. Prominently, on the first page of search results, was a site, apath.org. It listed 63 genders broken down by physicality, personality, preference and descriptor. For example, number 57 was an “Androgyne, female-attracted hermaphromale.” Mindboggling.

Another site lifehacker.com.au was less ambitious in referring to a Queensland University survey which listed in less exotic terms 33 different genders. Even so, the meaning of descriptors such as neutrois, genderqueer, demigender, and trigender, are not immediately obvious (to me). I re-Googled with a slightly different query. Up popped Tumblr, wherein ambition knows no prosaic bounds. Tumblr is a social-network blogging site; which, I concede, heretofore, has escaped my attention. On my count, it lists 112 different gender types. Maybe it’s a spoof? I would like to think so. Take the first one on the list.

“Abimegender: a gender that is profound, deep, and infinite; meant to resemble when one mirror is reflecting into another mirror creating an infinite paradox.”

This and most other of their gender types are even more mysterious to me than are cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I am out of my depth and must move on.

What I am moving onto is men’s and women’s sports, which I do understand. Or I did. Now I have a deep sense of unease about the whole business of sex-segregated sports. Even mixed doubles in tennis is open to interpretation as to how mixed it is or has to be.

No person chooses their parents, their place of birth, their nationality or their color. We have no say as to whether we will be born to a rich family or a poor one, to an educated or uneducated one. We are not given options as to physical or mental attributes. As Justice Thomas said, we must play the hand we are dealt.

Certainly, some are more privileged, but that has been true throughout history. However, almost all immigrants to America, whether they came in the 17thCentury or the 21st, emigrated because they were poor and persecuted. But early settlers did not consider themselves victims. They couldn’t. They would not have survived. Through belief in themselves, hard work and perseverance, they converted difficult circumstances into opportunities. In Justice Thomas’ words, they played well the hand they were dealt. Some failed, but most succeeded. Had they not, we would not now have the country we have.

Setting aside the role chance plays, success is a function of aspiration, creativity, tenacity, hard work, risk-taking and being opportunistic – a “can-do,” positive spirit. Justice Thomas grew up in the Jim Crow South, with few options open to poor, rural blacks. He never knew his father, and when his mother’s home was destroyed by fire he went to live with his grandparents on their hard-scrabble farm. Every critic of Justice Thomas – and they are legion among progressives – should read his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, so as to understand the obstacles this man overcame. A bust of his grandfather, a dirt-poor Georgian with nine months of education, sits in his office. It is inscribed with his grandfather’s favorite quote: “Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.” His grandfather was victimized against but was not a victim.