One of the bigger takeaways in the 2025 election cycle is the difference between journalism and the partisan slop that is served up by various obviously partisan “news” orgs. This needs to be brought to heel now.
The antics of Ezra Levant’s “The Rebel” at the leader debates were disgusting. They ultimately denied Canadians of the Q&A back and forth that was desperately needed.
This week, the United Kingdom Supreme Court (UKSC) issued a ruling that on the face of it invalidates transgender women’s rights under the law. I haven’t finished reading through the entirety of the ruling (I’m also not a lawyer - so reading this stuff is often slow going for me!), and I’m sure that others will have more clear headed things to say about the ruling itself.
However, my objective here isn’t to perform a deep dive into the ruling. This is more about how a ruling like this can be turned back on itself. The objective of these cases is clearly to shove transgender women (in particular) out of public life. To do so, proponents of these suits often dive behind what they think of as “scientific wording” - in this case, the phrase “biological woman” comes to the fore very quickly.
In a sense, such simplistic phrases are perfect for weaponizing, and they can be weaponized very effectively by transgender people and their allies. Even the UKSC ruling, while it adopts this language doesn’t attempt to provide any kind of meaningful definition of what this means.
A trivial version of taking it apart is a bit like the snarky quip about “organic vegetables”: It’s clearly a vegetable, and by definition it is organic in that no human being assembled it. Similarly, a transgender woman might well say “I’m biological, and I’m a woman - I don’t see a problem here”. It’s a bit facetious to do so, but given the approach being taken by the anti-transgender panic brigade, not entirely wrong.
The other end of it is when cases get before the courts, (and they inevitably will), we start off with bringing in biologists and have them give lessons to the court on the complexity of human biology when it comes down to reproductive biology and sex development. It’s strange - oh so strange - and efforts to treat it as some kind of rigid dichotomy are hugely problematic.
Pretty much every time you hear “biological woman”, you know you’re talking to someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re saying - biology isn’t simple, and it’s beyond laughable to try and reduce any human being to “the bits between their legs”. Every time the antis bring up transgender people as some kind of abhorrent problem, slap them down with all of the exceptions that already exist even if transgender people didn’t.
The logic they’re using is so rigid it’s brittle. Twist it on them until it breaks at every turn.
Will it be easy? Nope. But it needs to be done. Every single argument the “antis” are making to justify shoving transgender women out of public life is based on falsehoods. Their suppositions about transgender people are rigid and false, and that makes them vulnerable to attack - even when they think they’re backed up by the highest courts in the land.
So, back in late March, Poilievre was unveiling his platform for Quebec, and in that speech he talked about eliminating “woke ideology” from university research. At first glance, you might look and say “meh, so what?”
The problem, of course, is that this puts the politicians in the position of being the arbiters of what is “worthy” of being studied. As we have seen with Trump’s “campaign against Woke”, this goes much further than merely attacking research that involves transgender people. No, in fact the Trump administration has published a list of words that it has now banned. It is quite extensive - pretty much covering every area of discourse that conservatives have decided that they don’t like - climate change, equality, women, diversity, allergies, and even the analysis of applying science to either policy or medical treatment.
At its core, the conservative assault on “Woke” turns out to be little more than re-litigating every rights and politics issue that they have lost the argument over in the last century. “It’s gone too far!”, they declare. They complain that the research itself should not be done because it offends their “feelings” about the subject.
But what price do these bans on certain subjects exact from society? Well, in Trump’s America, it’s now next to impossible to study how drugs affect women versus how they work in men. We have known for some time that women have very different responses to treatments than men do, and that’s in a wide range of topics including cardiac care. But now that research is effectively halted in the US. When Harper was Prime Minister, we saw him engage in overt suppression of climate science, even going so far as to prohibit scientists from speaking on the subject without political authorization.
To posit a bit of a straw man, you might assert that Poilievre wouldn’t go as far as Trump has done on this file. But what does that even mean? Poilievre hasn’t shown us any evidence that he would moderate his behaviour, and in fact his willingness to emulate Trump on so many points suggests that in fact he would lift heavily from Trump.
But think about it from a government policy perspective. Do you think that a government should ignore science when forming policy? Or should policy at least consider the scientific evidence in that domain?
To make a somewhat extreme example, consider the legislature deciding to pass legislation governing the treatment of heart attacks. The evidence today around heart attacks is clear - treatment is urgent, and requires a combination of medicine and surgical interventions. Long term follow-up is necessary, and the patient is encouraged to make major lifestyle changes, including exercise. All of this has decades worth of research backing it up.
Now consider the government decides in drafting its legislation that in fact all that research is wrong, and because the politicians believe that a heart attack is an event that the victim should “tough out”, they ban ambulances from responding to calls that are possible cardiac events.
I would hope you would be outraged by such legislation, and you would be calling on the politicians to pay attention to the scientific literature on the subject. Yet, that is exactly what we are seeing on so many levels with conservative politicians writing legislation on other matters - they are ignoring any kind scientific evidence in favour of their “feelings” about the subject.
To be clear, science doesn’t write policy, but science produces information that should be used to guide policy. If a subject makes you uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean it should not be studied - in fact to me that makes it more important that it is studied actively. Similarly, politicians should write policy, but not direct what _cannot_ be explored in research.
But what is this conservative “war on woke” really about? When I look at it broadly, it seems to boil down to unwinding equality because a bunch of white dudes are all butt-hurt that they aren’t the only ones with a say any more.
DEI - which is in many respects about dismantling the legacy of racism and marginalization that was pervasive in society even after the civil rights era supposedly made us all equal (it didn’t, it just knocked over the legal impediments to equality).
Immigration - oh yes, the problem of “the immigrants”. Whether this is “great replacement theory”, or other aspects of immigration like temporary foreign worker permits, at the end of the day it boils down to this existential fear that “white males” won’t be able to compete. They might wrap it up in respectable looking terms, but it’s really just racism with a thin gauze of “concern” wrapped around it.
Women’s reproductive rights - at its core, this is a matter of bodily autonomy. The whole abortion fight has always been about regulating women’s bodies - a matter rooted in a myriad of ancient fears about the female body. Medicine has gradually dismantled the superstitious beliefs that those fears once buttressed, but far too many still view women, sexuality, and pregnancy with deep mistrust. But, as a central theme in conservative thinking, fighting abortion remains stubbornly consistent - even when the logic behind their claims is no longer relevant.
Transgender people - like female reproductive rights, this is all about bodily autonomy. The idea that transgender people exist poses a huge, complex problem for the conservative mind. Not only does it connect back to women’s rights in general (because so much of women’s oppression in the past has to do with reproduction), but in fact transgender rights are inextricably connected because the transgender person represents a radical form of both bodily and social autonomy that centres on the individual. Conservatives tend to value conformity, and transgender people are the opposite of conformity. In fact, transgender people push back on all the social pressures that they experience in the process of actualizing themselves as human beings.
All of this connects back to an underlying fear on the part of conservative men that somehow these social changes make them “lesser” in society. They don’t, of course - we still live in a society where being a white male carries an enormous amount of power and privilege. Look at the people who are the biggest opponents of “woke” - almost inevitably they are anything but the “prime specimens” that they think themselves to be. Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre - none of them are ideal, and frankly if it weren’t for money or notoriety, any of them would be ignored as simply snivelling twits.
The “war on woke” is really about restoring a social hierarchy that died out decades ago - and it’s being conducted at the cost of the rights and freedoms of real people.
This morning, I awoke to hearing an interview of Senator John Fetterman on the radio. It was this interview:
To be clear, I don’t know Fetterman from any other US senator, and I have no engagement with him politically. What I heard in this interview was a case study of why the Democrats have been so utterly ineffectual in countering Trump - they still think this is “normal politics”, and are treating Trump as “just a minor political disagreement”.
Several times in the interview, Fetterman said “well - Trump can’t run again in 2028”. I wanted to scream when I heard that. Seriously - he said that … out loud … after so many clear signals from Trump that he doesn’t give a damn about the law, conventions, or other factors that represent a limitation on his personal powers.
Then he walked through a whole bunch of issues - and he correctly identified that Trump has “filled the zone with 3’ of sewage”. Sure he has. What the good senator is overlooking is, of course, that the issue is in fact not the sewage, but the willingness of Trump and his allies to spew it. It is another variation on Goebbels’ “big lie” - pure propaganda and a smokescreen for their real objectives. To borrow from the work of Paul Ekman, lies succeed because nobody does the work to identify them - Trump lies constantly, and the Democrats in particular haven’t bothered to even so much as call them out.
Democrats have convinced themselves that what we are seeing right now as little more than a “kindly argument over the height of the hedge”. It isn’t. The Trump Administration is actively moving to break the system of checks and balances that have held the abuse of power by any one branch of government in check.
DOGE isn’t going to “make a more efficient bureaucracy”, its sole job is to break the bureaucracy and render the administrative aspects of government so ineffective that whatever privatized hellscape Musk is dreaming up will seem like a good idea. Public health - nah - don’t need that (until the next outbreak of major disease…); food inspection? - who needs that? Vehicle safety? Has anybody else noticed that Musk’s “CyberTruck” is basically a return to the standards of the 1950s, where looks and mass were the solution to things, and well if you got in a crash, good luck to you.
Democrats need to realize that what is being installed in Washington is not “a neighbourly disagreement”, it’s closer to the arrangement that Putin has with his oligarchs than it is to any kind of recognizable democracy. _IF_ there is any kind of election in 2028, it will not in any way be a “fair” election - it will be an election where every kind of cheating will be rampant - all in the name of ensuring that whoever is elected will be a willing accomplice to Trump.
If you think I’m joking, just remember that in the days following his loss in 2020, Trump was calling up governors and other state level officials demanding that they twist the results in his favour. You think that’s gone away? I don’t.
Senator Fetterman argued that going after Trump for his conduct “didn’t work”. Democrats DIDN’T go after Trump for his conduct. They were too busy worrying about alienating Trump’s supporters. Trump’s supporters are the people who needed to have the stinking pile of Trump’s misdeeds dumped on their front lawns at every turn.
Democrats LET Trump win by not calling out his misdeeds at every fucking turn. While he was playing duck and weave to avoid being held criminally responsible for his actions, what were Democrats saying? NOTHING. They held their tongues - on the basis of “it’s before the courts”. Yes, it’s before the courts - that is true. That doesn’t stop the Democrats from calling it out for what it is. Trump had no regard for the rule of law - in fact his game playing itself demonstrated that.
Trump said during the campaign “you won’t have to vote again”. Did the Democrats take that and run with it? Nope. They sat there worrying about offending his supporters.
Democrats have themselves tied in knots over the idea that if they take a hard line on something, they’re going to “offend” their opponents. The Democrats are worried about offending someone if they complain about DEI, Critical Race Theory (CRT), or Gender Ideology. Most of Trump’s supporters haven’t read a book in decades - they have no idea what these things are. The comeback for all of them is “So, you support oppression and discrimination against those you don’t understand?”
A guy like Trump will weaponize everything in sight. Democrats need to realize that it doesn’t matter what they say, a chronic liar will always find a way to turn it around on them. They need to take a hard line and call Trump’s actions and words out at every turn. Not “oh, he’s just exaggerating”, or “it sounds bad, but he probably won’t do it”. No. If he says it, assume he’s going to do it in the most detrimental way possible and hammer him with it.
In the legislature, use every legislative delaying tactic you can find - don’t worry about being painted as obstructionist - the GOP has been doing exactly that at every turn since Obama was elected in 2008. Every stunt they have used, you can use too.
Get mad. Show some emotion. This isn’t a dispute over the height of the hedge. It’s far worse than that - and Americans deserve far better than the half-assed “well… maybe his supporters have a point” nonsense we’ve been getting. His supporters don’t “have a point” - they’re either just as conniving and malicious as Trump himself, or they’re willing fools conned into believing Trump’s version of “The Big Lie”.
Nothing less than democracy and freedom are on the line now. It’s time for the Democrats and other parties in other countries to wake up to that reality and play hardball.
There's a bundle posts on YouTube and other places on the Internet speculating wildly about Trump's health, and whether or not he will live through the entirety of his second term as President of the United States. I get it - he's such an awful person that any little straw of hope is better than nothing.
But, frankly it doesn't matter, and here's why. It's no longer about Trump - at this point, he's the pitch man and that's about it. He'll do what others tell him to do as long as someone funnels another million into his bank accounts somewhere that it can't be touched - and that kind of transactional stupidity is straight up oligarchy.
Look at Trump's nomination for various cabinet and other high in the government positions. They are all obscenely wealthy, and frankly utterly unqualified for the positions they hold. There are so many probably and overt conflicts of interest in these appointments it's bonkers. Then we get to the half dozen or so utterly looney appointments like RFK Jr. - a man whose cheese slid off his cracker a long time ago.
Most of these people are the types who think along the lines Ayn Rand did - if you aren't ridiculously wealthy, you are a parasite leeching off other "more productive people". The reality is, of course, quite the opposite - most of these people got ridiculously wealthy by a combination of family wealth, scamming the hell out of people, and lastly off the backs of honest workers that they see as patsies for their schemes.
Trump's cabinet is a veritable "rogues gallery" of people who are setting up for a smash-and-grab theft on a scale that the world hasn't seen since Putin and his oligarchs pushed Yeltsin out of office. They aren't moving to make a "smaller, more efficient government", they're going to break it up and sell it to themselves. The level of self-dealing that is going to happen will be stunning, and every one of them will walk away with their wallets bulging just a little more than they already do - and you the taxpayer will be paying more in fees as they try to monetize every single transaction.
Now, let's say Trump falls over dead tomorrow. JD Vance steps in and takes over as President. Do you think Vance is going to do anything to slow down what has already begun? The odds are very good he won't - as long as the oligarchs pass a few million each to keep their posts.
What we have been witnessing since January 20 is the installation of what will become an oligarchy government. Even if there is an election in 2028, it will be at best a show process, and there may be a turnover in the cabinet, but by then the senior layers of the bureaucracy will one way or another be beholden to the oligarchs either through direct ownership of government agencies as "free enterprise businesses", or plain old corruption.
Trump is an old man now - he will be Theodin to Musk's Grima Wormtongue. Whether he survives or not really doesn't matter.
If you had any illusions about MAGA having taken on cult-like traits, you only need to read some of Bannon’s statements in this article.
He instructed Musk to “sit back and study” to understand MAGA’s - and what supporters believed was Trump’s - America First stance to keep U.S. jobs for Americans.
“They’re recent converts,” Bannon saidTuesday on his War Roompodcast, referring to Musk and other tech-world Trump supporters.
“We love converts,” Bannon noted. “But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.”
This is Bannon putting himself in the place of being the high priest of MAGA, and setting up for quite the “palace power struggle” once Trump is sworn into office. Interesting stuff.
While it’s been clear for quite some time that MAGA is very cult-like, deliberately avoiding facts for whatever conspiracy theory of the day has been ladled out to them through the disinformation networks. The idea that Trump has been “persecuted” by the Biden administration because of the criminal prosecutions that stem from his actions both before becoming President in 2016, and leading up to the Jan 6 storming of the capitol.
Bannon talking about “new converts” is very interesting all by itself - speaking quite directly to the quasi-religious nature of MAGA as a system of beliefs. I might disagree that there is anything systemic about MAGA beliefs, but then Bannon goes on to talk about “studying” the faith for “many years”. That itself is also very intriguing language.
MAGA is, at best a collection of conspiracy theories and counter-factual narratives - it hardly has a coherent narrative that one would expect from a formal religion. However, Bannon seems to be positioning himself as the “Speaker for MAGA” in Trump’s circle - and that all by itself is interesting. Clearly he sees himself in the role of the cleric at the shoulder of the king, advising the king on how to keep the peasants happy.
To the extent that he can do that, it makes Bannon potentially quite politically powerful - and certainly a rival to players like Musk and Ramaswamy in the Trump White House. However, it’s also a dangerous conceit for Bannon to think that a volatile rabble like MAGA is going to obey his word. The issue will come to a head when Trump and Bannon disagree on something that Musk / Ramaswamy want to do.
At its most fundamental level, MAGA is about self interest and deifying ignorance and feelings over knowledge and evidence. Musk is ultimately about his own self-interest, but his self-interest is not going to align with that of most individual MAGA followers - the ones who currently believe Bannon - but will they believe Bannon when Trump aligns himself with Musk? Or will they pivot to following Trump’s word?
Bannon might be the high priest, but Trump is their putative saviour …
I need to comment on the political pressure to force people experiencing addiction into treatment. Superficially, it seems to address a problem in society, but the reality is that this is a political approach to the wrong problem.
Is addiction (and the deaths resulting from a toxic drug supply) a problem? Absolutely. Is this a solution to the social issues that are being assigned to addicts? No.
Let me explain myself.
Let’s assume for a moment that forced treatment will actually work, and produces a stream of people who are now former addicts. Most of the people we are going to push into these programs are likely homeless, and therefore living fairly rough lives. If they’re “lucky” they might be able to sleep in shelters, or have a room in a decrepit old hotel now being used as housing. (Neither environment is exactly a good place to live - and a lot of the same factors that lead to drug use exist in both).
At the end of the treatment program, we (theoretically) are going to release these newly sober people back into society. Guess what? You’ve just released a “newly sober” homeless person back into the same environment they were in before. How long do you think it’s going to be before they relapse when suddenly all their old buddies are around, and urging them to participate in the same activities?
Sure, creating these “shiny” facilities that we can sweep the homeless people into makes all the suburban types happy - they don’t have to look at the people who have ended up at the bottom of the social and economic ladders any more.
But, unless you are addressing all of the issues that lead to homelessness in a constructive manner, guess what? You’re just creating the same “revolving door” problem that we complain about in the criminal justice systems. Once that door starts spinning, not only do you have problems with relapse, but the risk of overdose goes up as well. Oh, and let’s not ignore the effects of “institutionalization” that happen when someone spends extended periods in an environment where they have little or no control over their daily existence.
There are a myriad of issues that need to be addressed: housing, income, mental health, addiction, socialization (including integration with society), and a dozen other factors. Treatment for addiction is but one facet of a much more complex problem that we need to think about intelligently. Reactionary politics aimed at people freaking out over seeing a discarded syringe somewhere is missing the point, entirely.
These problems didn’t appear overnight, and they won’t “go away” overnight because suddenly we give police the ability to round people up and force them into treatment. At best you’re sweeping things under the carpet and hoping they’ll go away on their own after that. They won’t. They don’t. The solutions to these problems require all of us to take notice and realize that the systems we live in aren’t working the way they should and major change is needed.
When a person working full time can’t afford a decent place to live, we have created a problem - and no, the “invisible hand” of the free market isn’t going to fix that. There are fundamental problems in our society that are the precursors to homelessness and addiction.
