An article by John Ivison in The National Post of Feb. 12 was entitled: We need a new party for the political ‘homeless’. Its basic idea was that the Left and Right both here in Canada and the States are so entrenched in mutually exclusive world-views that some moderate, centralist force needs to emerge to heal the rancorous divide between Liberals and Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.
In his third paragraph Ivison states: “Both the progressive left and populist right have stoked tribal emotions and the tribes are feeding off an unhealthy silage of fear and hatred.”
Much later in his article he suggests that what used to bind Canada’s disparate political parties together was their shared respect for “those principles of compassion, open markets, individual rights and limited government—-the principles of classical or economic liberalism.”
Oddly, given his apparent support of individual rights and limited government, Ivison has nothing but disdain for Canada’s trucker convoy which would seem to be championing those very values. Identifying this utterly peaceful demonstration as but another far-right movement rooted in “tribalism,” he does what our journalists and “intellectuals” have been doing ever since the early Sixties, and that is denounce any perspective not in keeping with the dominant Leftist assumptions of our era as somehow extremist and irrational. But Mr. Ivison, that classical liberalism you seem to see as the answer to our political prayers, is a self-evident presence in the lives of millions not debilitated by your political bias. It is in fact the rational “conservatism” endorsed here and espoused by dozens of online pundits who are neither racist, misogynist, anti-science, or indeed any of those “extremist” designations typically assigned to them by those of your mind-set.
I cherish the perspectives of Gad Saad, Ezra Levant, Candace Malcolm, Rex Murphy, Jordan Peterson and so many others here in Canada who, in spite of their constant dismissal in the mainstream media as “far-right,” have rarely espoused anything but simple common sense. In the States, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Dennis Prager, Dave Rubin, Tucker Carlson, etc., etc., espouse rational “conservative” views utterly devoid of “tribal” biases and yet they too are consistently denigrated as “extremists” by the brain dead defenders of the “progressive” status quo.
Hence this absurd world in which suggesting that the philosophers of Ancient Greece were demonstrably more evolved than those who shaped the cultures of the tribes of the Americas, is now considered White Supremacism, though every philosopher of the Enlightenment, the fathers of “classical liberalism,” would agree in an instant. The fact is the Left, in spite of Ivison’s delusions, is now so pervasively irrational that it is incapable of granting that “conservatives” are indeed today’s liberals!
Most are familiar with Hitler’s notion that the Big Lie, if endlessly repeated, will ultimately take hold in the minds of an unthinking public. Sadly, he was right.