“Fools, Nomads, Countrymen”

With the rarest, almost non-existent exceptions, every so-called “conservative” radio host, television pundit, website publisher, or political writer in America — in short, the entire faction of the public political discussion that used to tout itself as the “alternative” or “conservative” media — has sacrificed all claims to conservative principle, or at least rational consistency, over the past four years. These people have rendered themselves unworthy of being taken seriously on political matters ever again, by spending some or all of the past four years on the bandwagon of the most self-evident idiocy, demagoguery, and anti-American populist thuggery — or alternatively, in a few prominent cases, spending those years leaping on the “anything-but-Trump” bandwagon by supporting progressive authoritarians as something they labeled “a return to normalcy.”

If any of these individuals want their credibility back, they are now obliged to earn it, and the climb will and should be a daunting one, given how thoroughly they have discredited and dishonored themselves, politically and intellectually. They have been duped fools, cynical panderers, mercenary profiteers, or some weird combination of all three.

Is this a harsh judgment I am rendering? Yes and no. Yes, it is harsh, but no I am not rendering any judgment, but merely observing what is obvious. The cynics and profiteers deserve no better than the full harshness of my words. As for the first group, however, the sincerely self-deluded, I have genuine sympathy. I have done foolish things in my life, too — overestimated people of little value, hidden from uncomfortable realities, believed or half-believed plainly stupid ideas out of nothing but an emotionally immature will to believe. Humans do such things, and I am human.

And when humans do such things, they must then come to terms with the causes and effects of their foolishness, and try to reestablish their thoughts, or even, occasionally, their lives on a more rational footing. In some cases, this process of reconciling oneself to one’s foolishness is embarrassing, painful, or maddening. But there is no alternative, if we want to redirect ourselves onto a nobler or more sensible path.

Hence, what I have said about the “conservative media” members above — and again, this final remark is aimed only at the duped, not the calculating types — is indeed harsh, but it is far less harsh than the judgment they will have to render upon themselves in the coming months, if they are ever to find the courage to accept the extent of their folly, and begin to regain their political reason and self-respect.


There is nowhere left to go. Modernity’s dangerous promise of discovering new worlds has played itself out to its inevitable conclusion, which was its innate danger: all worlds are discovered. Discovered, settled, civilized, tainted, diseased, and disintegrated into formless states of power lust, collectivist self-enslavement, and nihilistic materialism.

We, the happy few, are all spiritual nomads now. We roam the deserted intellectual and political terrain, alighting only to rest a night, and then moving again as our fire ebbs to morning embers, to once more enjoy whatever we can of the day’s sun from somewhere above the treetops and across the seas, nowhere in particular from an external point of view. Our location and home now is only internal.


Communist Canada has “unveiled” — a peculiarly apt term — a post-lockdown spending plan that finance minister Chrystia Freeland calls “the largest economic relief package for our country since the Second World War.” This is a pretty way of saying that this “relief package” will create the country’s highest budget deficit since the Second World War — because nothing says “relief” like unprecedented government redistribution programs to correct problems caused entirely by unprecedented government-imposed restrictions on economic life.

Canada’s losses in WWII were incurred in defense of freedom. Canada’s losses in the Pandemic that Ate a Planet are being incurred in an assault on freedom. That is the simplest summary of the past seventy-five years in Canadian history.


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