The reality of the energy transition could be ugly for politicians
The Biden administration’s attempt to lower gasoline prices before the November mid-terms has been both amusing and disappointing. First the president attributed the run-up in oil and gas prices to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Then his government drained about a million barrels a day from the strategic oil reserve. After six months of that and with gasoline prices creeping up again, Mr. Biden went to Saudi Arabia to ask Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his help in keeping oil prices from rising at least through to the mid-term elections.
The prince said no, which was totally predictable. It appears none of the foreign policy experts advising the president understands basic human relations, let alone Arab culture. You can’t call someone a murderer and then expect him to turn the other cheek and meekly accede to your request for a big personal favour.
The substantial long-term damage to the important relationship between Arab countries and the U.S. has been driven entirely by short-term political expediency. This greenest administration in history at first seemed very committed to dealing with climate change and accelerating the timeline to achieve net-zero carbon emissions for the U.S. as a whole. A key driver for this goal is higher oil and gas prices. Economics 101 teaches that sharply higher prices for carbon fuels will reduce demand for them and promote the shift to alternative sources of energy, primarily renewables.
Well, Putin’s war on Ukraine and Biden’s war on fossil fuels have been very effective in delivering skyrocketing oil and gas prices. But now it seems another key driver of climate policy has been discovered: that a Democratic administration remain in office, a necessity that has run into the reality that people do not seem willing to pay the price, at least not right now, for the transition from carbon to non-carbon sources of energy.
Ardent supporters of the energy transition keep suggesting it will lead to the creation of millions of new jobs. (“There is no trade-off between the economy and the environment.”) There are at least two problems with this argument. First, it ignores the euphemistically named “adjustment process.” As the economy moves away from fossil fuels, many millions of people will lose their jobs and not “transition” easily and smoothly to the new jobs that might eventually be created. As with all dramatic policy changes, there will be winners and losers, and the losers likely won’t be fully compensated by the winners — or happy about that. That reality could be ugly for politicians.
As for the claim that the transition will eventually produce millions of net new jobs,
there is good reason for doubt.
Consumer-oriented industries, with the possible exceptions of food and shelter, will have to make drastic changes in their business models. The carbon footprints resulting from the continual introduction of marginally better products are substantial, which means the regular introduction of new products or of varieties of existing products will have to end. Think of the effects in automobiles, iPhones, clothing, furniture, cosmetics, detergents and so on. Further, until most electricity worldwide is derived from renewables or nuclear, the growth of the Internet will have to be curtailed. The millions of servers that are its backbone require large amounts of electricity for cooling and power. Will users willingly limit their reliance on social media and streaming services? Imagine the implications for business and commerce if they are required to.
If our production of carbon is to be reduced as much as the most insistent environmentalists want, market economies will have to move to much lower levels of production and employment. The yellow brick road to Green Oz does not run smooth. It might never actually reach Green Oz, and even if it does, there is no assurance that either the trip or the destination will be pleasant for everyone.
Until very recently, this political reality seems to have been forgotten. Politicians need to be careful in what they ask for and much more honest with the people whose votes they seek.
Fred Lazar is an associate professor of economics in the Schulich School of Business at York University.
Footnote Q & A:
Q: What is the difference between Golf and Government?
Everywhere I go, people are mystified about President Joe Biden’s economic agenda. So few of the policies comport with basic common sense that I’m asked the same question over and over: Is Biden intentionally trying to take a wrecking ball to the economy?
Is this all part of some diabolical plan, the “great reset,” to end our system of free market capitalism and replace it with some form of big-government socialism?
Biden keeps saying that he wants to be an historic president who will “transition” the country into a new worker’s paradise where no one uses fossil fuels or electricity or cars and equality is paramount, ahead of growth and prosperity. Is he taking us there with no regard for the collateral damage to America?
My belief is that, no, I don’t think this is an intentional, nefarious Dr. Evil-type plot.
But if this were a scheme to burn down the village in order to rebuild it,
Biden and his administration are doing a great job of it.
Here are seven Biden administration steps to undermine an economy and a society from within. They will all sound familiar with the president’s policies since he took office 21 months ago.
1. Dismantle the nation’s energy supply. We get 70% of our energy from fossil fuels. Biden has declared war on American oil and gas, making us more dependent on our enemies for our basic energy needs.
2. Don’t enforce the border. Biden is letting hundreds of thousands of potential criminals, terrorists, welfare recipients, and enemies of the United States into our country through a porous southern border with Mexico. Immigration is good, but it must be orderly and regulated.
3. Devalue the nation’s currency through inflation. Inflation is up nearly 15% since Biden came into office. Inflation is a means to erode the value of a currency.
4. Destroy the nation’s finances by running up the debt by multiple trillions of dollars of debt. No president in modern times has so recklessly pushed our nation into debt as rapidly as Biden through his $4 trillion in spending paid for with red ink.
5. Divide rather than unite the nation. Rich versus poor, black versus white, gay versus straight, rural versus urban. Biden promised unity. Instead, he pits groups against each other. This is the identity politics of the Left that is the opposite of “e pluribus unum.”
6. Dumb down and indoctrinate our children with anti-American propaganda in the schools and media. And allowing teacher unions and left-wing activists to take over the curriculum with anti-American propaganda. It is the opposite of nurturing patriotism and love of country.
7. Decriminalize a lot. Let criminals onto the streets. End bail. Empty the prisons. Let minor crimes go unpunished. Biden’s policies favor criminals over victims. It’s a scene out of a Batman movie.
Are these policies intentional or simply completely misguided? I don’t know. But does it matter? Either way, our country is in grave peril.
The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was being generous by describing interventionism’s nasty side-effects as “unintended.” Some younger interventionists are naïve, and know not what they do, but the older, street-smart captains of progressive politics understand the harms their policies entail. For them, the adverse consequences are features, not bugs.
The only downside is the risk of political retribution at the polls.
That’s the predicament in which the Biden administration now finds itself. It is also the theme of “Energy Inflation Was by Design,” a new report by supply-chain consultant Joseph Toomey.
[Synopsis is in previous post Energy Inflation Playbook]
President Biden and congressional Democrats want to replace fossil fuels with a “zero-carbon” energy system. Their biggest win to date is the comically mistitled Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). A Penn-Wharton analysis estimated that the IRA would increase federal climate and energy spending by $369 billion over ten years. A recent article in The Atlantic touts a Credit Suisse estimate that actual climate-related federal support could reach $800 billion. That’s because the incentives for electric vehicles and renewable energy are “uncapped tax credits.” Moreover, since federal spending leverages private-sector investment, total economy-wide green-tech spending could increase by as much as $1.7 trillion.
Nor is that all. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that the IRA has increased its loan program authorities by up to $350 billion.
No wonder Democrats celebrated the IRA’s enactment. No bigger program to rig energy markets against fossil fuels was ever enacted.
The IRA aims to enrich thousands of enterprises, tens of thousands of employees, and millions of shareholders—all dependent on Democrats to keep the gravy train flowing. Hardly an “unintended” consequence.
But voters see and feel the downsides of Biden’s war on fossil fuels: the high costs of gasoline, electricity, and other utilities, which in turn increase the costs of food, rent, and consumer goods. Those effects, moreover, coincide with high general inflation, a cratering stock market, and negative GDP growth in two consecutive quarters. Biden tries to blame Vladimir Putin and Big Oil for America’s energy woes. That is nonsense, and the public isn’t buying it.
Toomey marshals overwhelming evidence that “energy inflation” is a core feature of the president’s climate agenda. And how could it be otherwise? A core progressive article of faith is that fossil fuels are too cheap because market prices do not reflect the “social costs” of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). Accordingly, no matter how expensive or scarce fossil energy may become for other reasons, taxing or capping fossil-fuel consumption to make it even more costly is hailed as a “climate solution.” Of course, handicapping fossil fuels is also touted as a way to make renewables more “competitive.” As President Obama enthused, cap-and-trade will “finally make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in America.”
The public, however, has repeatedly spurned proposals to tax or cap the carbon content of fuels or emissions. So, U.S. progressives now concentrate on rigging energy markets via targeted regulations, state-level renewable-energy quotas, and subsidies. As noted, the IRA sets a new standard for anti-fossil-fuel subsidies.
President Biden seeks to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 50-52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve a zero-emission electricity sector by 2035. That means that about half of all U.S. fossil-fuel consumption must end in eight years. Few investors want to park their capital in rapidly contracting industries. So, thanks to Biden, the market forecasts that supplies of oil, gas, and coal will decline relative to demand—and prices will rise. The expectation of shrinking supplies and higher future prices puts upward pressure on energy prices today.
An irony noted by Toomey is that by endangering fossil-fuel energy supply, Biden has not only increased fossil-fuel energy prices but also boosted oil and gas company profits and stock values. The short-term enrichment of oil companies may well be an unintended consequence of a long-term agenda to put them out of business. On the other hand, Biden’s boost to oil industry profits is also the setup for further interventions popular with progressive activists and politicians—windfall profits taxes, export bans, and Federal Trade Commission investigations of “anti-consumer behavior.”
Toomey demolishes the Biden administration’s allegation that oil companies are deliberately reducing refinery utilization to constrict supplies and raise prices. In fact, refineries are running at higher utilization rates than ever (about 94 percent).
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to “get rid of fossil fuels,” assuring one activist, “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”
Toomey reviews several Biden initiatives that back up such threats. The major ones, besides the government-wide, IRA-funded effort to channel “the flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments and away from high-carbon investments,” include:
Halting petroleum-development activity in Alaska’s National Arctic Wildlife Refuge;
Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords without asking for the Senate’s advice and consent;
Considering a non-attainment designation for ozone pollution that could curb drilling in the Permian Basin, which accounts for 43 percent of U.S. oil production; and
To provide historical context for the fiscal side of Biden’s climate agenda, Toomey discusses the Obama DOE loan program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment (“Stimulus”) Act. The best-known program beneficiary was solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011 despite receiving $535 million in DOE loan guarantees. Some readers may also recall a list of seven such “Stimulosers.”
In short, nearly seven out of ten Obama DOE loan recipients in a $32 billion loan program went bankrupt. The total federal financial support provided by the IRA for “climate-aligned” investments is potentially 36 times larger. The stage is set for scores of Solyndras. Toomey’s labor as a chronicler of the war on fossil fuels is nowhere near done.
Environmentalists have captured the Democratic party and, in their push towards Net Zero, are aiding Russia and China, a senior fellow at RealClearFoundation, Rupert Darwall, says.
Furthermore, the push towards Net Zero has monopolized “the money,” as the group includes many Silicon Valley billionaires, intellectuals, and the mainstream media, Darwall told The Epoch Times and NTD’s Paul Greaney in an interview.
In the interview, which aired on NTD’s Fresh Look America on Oct. 12, Darwall said a prime example of environmentalists taking over the Democratic party, and monopolizing the money, is California.
There, billionaire environmentalists have instituted “an aggressive green agenda” that doesn’t negatively impact them but directly opposes the average California voters’ interests, he said.
“Voters, and particularly in the Central Valley, who endure stifling temperatures in summer, had to pay ruthlessly high prices to condition their homes. They don’t have beachfront properties that are cooled from the Pacific.”
Darwall added that because California is “essentially a one-party state,” voters can’t correct the “extreme environmental policies.” Plus, environmentalists use a version of McCarthyism to stifle opposition.
In the 1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy accused thousands of innocent people and parties of disloyalty and allowing Communism to influence their lives and policies.
Darwall said environmentalists today use a similar tactic when they label anyone who disagrees with them as a “climate denier.”
“They know ‘denier’ is a very powerful term to be called. You may have seen a New York Times journalist interviewing the president of World Bank, and [the journalist asks] “are you a climate denier?’ It’s designed to chill debate. Not just chill it but prevent people questioning.”
[ Tip: Q: Aren’t you a climate denier? A: I am a climate thinker. ]
Green Imperialism
If this progression towards Net Zero continues, Darwall said he knew who will win.
“China and Russia. I mean, basically, the opponents of the West, geopolitically from stepping back, but they’re the big winners from the West deciding to bring itself to its knees. I mean, no modern economy can function without cheap, abundant energy and fossil fuel derived energy.”
“We’re basically cutting off our legs. The pain will increase. People are blaming Putin for the terrible winter the Europeans are going to experience this this year. But the way I would put it is Net Zero is Vladimir Putin’s best ally.”
Darwall further added that not only is the West hurting itself and helping Putin, but it’s also engaging in a sort of “green imperialism.”
As mentioned above, the president of the World Bank had been attacked, specifically by Al Gore, Darwall said, because the World Bank was one of the “big providers of finance to Africa.”
“There are over a billion Africans, and they are energy starved. Africa is an energy-starved continent. And the effect of Western green policies is to freeze, as it were, African Development at a very low level.”
Darwall continued, “Grid-delivered electricity is the doorway to the modern world. If you compare the 19th century to the 20th century, the big change is electricity.
“For Africa to flourish and develop, it needs reliable, cheap, grid-delivered electricity. And that is what people like Al Gore and John Kerry are denying Africans.”
Darwall specified that people like Kerry and Gore are pursuing an agenda that geologically damages the West, its strategic interest, and the economic and social interests of less developed nations.
Political Reckoning
As a result, Darwall believed a political reckoning is coming to the West. He says that as gas prices and inflation continue to climb, voters will show their displeasure for extreme environmental policies and “vote for the other party.”
That benefits Republicans, as under Donald Trump, the United States was an energy superpower.
“In those four years he was president, America was an energy superpower. And now this energy superpower is going around to the Gulf, begging OPEC plus to increase oil production. It’s absolutely extraordinary.”
As for Europe, Darwall believes significant political changes will likely occur in Britain and other countries, but Germany is fully committed to Net Zero.
When asked what would happen if the West reversed its Net Zero policy and returned to producing oil and gas, Darwall replied, “That’s a catastrophic outcome for Russia. Because Russia is a natural gas oil exporting country and economy, and it really, it needs those foreign currency earnings.
“Its economy depends on it. So, it would be terribly bad. It would be awful for Russia. That’s why I say that Net Zero is Vladimir Putin’s best ally.”
Philip Cross writes at Financial Post Canada The real threat to democracy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
Having failed at the ballot box, millennial climate activists will
pursue any means to impose their will on society
There are a number of important outcomes from Monday’s election in Quebec. Two of the most important are the eclipse of Quebec’s traditional political parties by new ones, including the Conservative Party of Quebec, and the growing gap between voters in Montreal and the rest of Quebec. But the feature I want to emphasize is the failure of the radical Québec Solidaire (QS) party to significantly expand its base.
Québec Solidaire based its campaign on the environment. It emphasized the existential threat of climate change that teenage activist Greta Thunberg trumpeted at a much-publicized 2019 rally in Montreal where she made the empty boast, “We are changing the world.” QS co-leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois called this election “the last chance” to stop climate change, as if Quebec’s actions could have any significant impact on global emissions.
The failure of Québec Solidaire to mobilize more support shows that even Quebec’s supposedly progressive electorate does not support the wholesale reshaping of our society and economy to combat climate change. The Green Party similarly failed to make the case for environmental supremacy at the federal level, seeing its share of the vote halved in the 2021 election from its already low level of six per cent.
Unfortunately, the failure of parties focused on the environment and climate change to win at the ballot box does not deter activists from looking for other means to impose their views on society. The mainstream media portrays the authoritarianism of populist movements such as Donald Trump’s as the greatest threat to democracy today. But this ignores how environmental groups resort to government regulations and lawsuits to circumvent the popular will and achieve their own goals.
Having failed to make their case in the political arena, environmentalists increasingly are asking the courts to impose restrictions that voters have not supported. In a current case (Mathur v Ontario) six teenagers are asking the Ontario Superior Court to agree that climate change is violating their rights and order the government to implement measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions — even though Ontario only accounts for 0.3 per cent of global emissions. The Supreme Court of Canada recently refused even to hear a similar class action lawsuit from another group of young people.
It is unfathomable that courts would agree to usurp government authority and dictate energy consumption, which is the basis of our civilisation and our economy. Yet not one peep has been heard from the media about the anti-democratic nature of this initiative. Instead, Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault lauded the youths involved in the Supreme Court lawsuit for their “passion” instead of criticizing their attempt to circumvent the democratic process and subjugate Parliament’s will to the courts.
In her book Paradoxes of Prosperity, University of Cambridge economics professor Diane Coyle notes a fundamental difference between the protest movements of the 1960s and those of today’s millennials. Dissidents in the 1960s were fundamentally anti-authoritarian and libertarian, looking for ways to increase personal freedom and individual choice. Millennial movements, by contrast, especially among environmentalists, have a prescriptive agenda they want to impose on others. Columbia University historian Kim Phillips-Fein observed in her book, Invisible Hands, that environmentalists have long been “hostile to the very institutional framework of a free society.” Young people are especially likely to attach diminished importance to democracy: in a 2017 poll only a third of American youths agreed it is important to live in a democracy while 18 per cent said they would welcome a military dictatorship.
Political parties with radical and draconian environmental goals have clearly failed to win significant support from the electorate. What is different and worrisome for the future of democracy is the growing willingness of millennial social movements to impose their narrow agenda on the public by any other means available. The real threat to democracy today is, not the populist right-wing movements that preoccupy mainstream media, but the attempt of frustrated environmentalists to circumvent elections.
Nearly 50 new government defendants have been added to the lawsuit that alleges the government induced censorship of state officials and others on social media.
The second amended complaint in the case, Missouri v. Biden, includes six new agencies, bringing the total to 13, and 41 new individual defendants, bringing the total to 54.
Altogether, 67 officials or agencies are accused of violating plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by participating in a “censorship enterprise” through pressuring Big Tech firms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to take action against users offering alleged misinformation.
Evidence backing the claims has been produced in discovery, including exchanges between White House officials and Meta, Facebook’s parent company and messages showing meetings between administration officials and the firms.
The new defendants include the FBI; former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andrew Slavitt; Dana Remus, counsel to President Joe Biden; Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent based in San Francisco; Janell Muhammed, deputy digital director at the Department of Health and Human Services; Allison Snell, an official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the State Department; and Mark Robbins, interim executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
One or more of the Big Tech firms that were subpoenaed in the case identified the officials as possibly communicating with them on content moderation relating to “COVID-19 misinformation,” the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the administration’s since-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, and/or “election security, integrity, outcomes, and/or public confidence in election outcomes (not to include issues of foreign interference or related issues).”
Slavitt was named because emails show he was in communication with Facebook regarding the combating of alleged misinformation. The messages show that Facebook was committed to censoring and de-emphasizing posts that were “departing from the government’s messaging on vaccines,” plaintiffs said. Slavitt also called for Twitter to ban Alex Berenson, an independent journalist, previously released messages show.
Muhammed, meanwhile, was in touch with Facebook to ask the company to take down pages and accounts that were allegedly misrepresenting themselves as representing the government. “Absolutely,” one of the Facebook employees responded.
Other discovery suggests the FDA “has participated in federally-induced censorship of private speech on social media about questions of vaccine safety and efficacy, among other subjects,” plaintiffs said.
The agencies that were added to the case did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, recently ordered defendants named in earlier complaints to comply with demands, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top medical adviser to Biden. The new documents do not include any more information from Fauci or the White House press secretary’s office.
The four groups in question – Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika – comprise the “Election Integrity Partnership,” which exists as a ‘concierge-like’ service for federal agencies such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to flag online content for censorship or monitoring by Big Tech using a “ticket” system.
Unsurprisingly, the head of Stanford’s Internet Observatory is a Clinton donor who previously served as Facebook’s Head of Security – while the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is largely funded by the Knight Foundation, whose board exclusively contributes to Democrat or Neocon entities.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration empowered three liberal groups to file tickets seeking censorship; the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP.
In 2020, we collaborated with Stanford (and others) to address misleading information about the election. Our team published a blogpost analyzing the spread of a video produced by Project Veritas. They threatened and then sued us (trying to silence our criticism). They lost. https://t.co/eJw3iKgKme
Also, we're getting the band back together (with several improvements) for the midterms — working with a range of collaborators to address rumors, misinformation, and disinformation around election processes and procedures: https://t.co/IuwvV27R1L. Follow @2020Partnership.
George Neumayer explains at the American Spectator The European Death Wish. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
It is seen in the boring hysteria about Giorgia Meloni.
The European elite’s sour reaction to the rise of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s next prime minister, reveals less about her politics than its own. It harbors a death wish for Europe — a willfulness passed off as a “progressive” ideology that has led to a culture of death, demographic implosion, a floundering economy, and the prospect of a Eurabian future. Consequently, any European politician with even a modicum of common sense poses a grave threat to the elite. Its description of Meloni as a “fascist” is gaslighting of the first order — a lame projection of its own desire to build a coercive one-party state.
Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was obviously an ideologue of the left, not the right — a socialist and atheist enamored by “progressive” schemes popular in the early 20th century. The unremarkable conservative and Christian views of Meloni bear no trace of that monstrous ideology of “human improvement.” It is the European Left, not the Right, that pushes eugenics against the disabled and elderly and that seeks to suppress freedom in the name of statism.
What European liberals call “progress” is just old barbarism and ancient tyranny
— the exploitation of the weak by the powerful — under a modern guise.
A crackpot devotee of the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mussolini recognized no power above the state. He treated God as dead, much like today’s secularists who declare any deviation from their edicts evidence of bad citizenship. (In America, this now takes the form of a politicized FBI that treats pro-lifers and conscientious parents like criminals.) While not as overtly brutal as Mussolini, today’s progressives echo his eugenic intolerance and statist scheming. Their whole cult of abortion is based on a might-makes-right ethos that gives off a strong whiff of fascism.
In the mouths of progressives, “democracy” is nothing more than a euphemism for regnant and unchallenged progressivism.
Whenever woke hysterical bores pronounce someone a “danger to democracy,” what they are really saying is that that figure impedes their Nietzschean will to power. Even the tiniest steps away from the grave they are digging for Europe cause them apoplectic consternation. Recall the European Left’s bashing of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for gingerly suggesting that Europeans procreate and stop poisoning the continent’s Christian roots.
Only in an age as unbalanced as this one would an Italian politician who quotes G.K. Chesterton and reads J.R.R. Tolkien be considered a threat to Western Europe. That Italian bishops are joining in these denunciations is another measure of our absurd times.
In other words, the Church in Italy is going to undercut one of the few politicians willing to support the revival of Christianity in Europe. Nothing that Meloni has proposed undermines Catholic social teaching. On the contrary, she pays homage to the central teaching underpinning it: The common good and the natural moral law are inseparable. Leave it to today’s hierarchy to treat the Church’s friends as enemies while protecting her foes. The progressives for whom Zuppi and company run interference abhor Catholic culture and seek to turn Europe into a relativistic wasteland ripe for an Islamic takeover.
If Meloni forestalls this future, that is all for the good. That future is a bleak one. She is right to say that the European Left wants to erase man’s God-given identity so that he becomes putty in the hands of the state. That was the ambition of Mussolini, and it remains the ambition of the godless progressives. The whole thrust of their thought is to deny God’s role in determining the good. With Nietzsche, they say that man, not God, is the measure of all things. Out of this subjectivism has come the torrent of transgenderism and all the other malign causes destroying the West.
Meloni simply recognizes the insanity of this subjectivism, which strips from man any identity rooted in God’s order and turns him into a slave of the state.
In truth, her espousal of Christianity is pretty mild, and she is hardly an old-fashioned traditionalist. According to the Italian press, she is not even married. She has a “partner.” But it doesn’t matter. The European Left will bay about her “theocracy” and “fascism” all while propping up politicians who actually subscribe to the statism of Mussolini. This is the European death wish — to kill its prophets and lionize its fools and enemies.
Background Post: Common Sense from Italy’s New Leader
The speech was delivered by Giorgia Meloni in 2020 introducing us to her worldview, values and purpose.. For those prefering to read her remarks, I provide a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Giorgia Meloni Winner of Sunday’s Italian Election
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I wish to thank you – thank you to our friends of the Edmund Burke foundation for inviting me to open this important event, for choosing Rome in Italy as a venue for this second edition of the National Conservative conference.
I entirely, entirely agree with your views on the need to put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity. The great challenge facing us today is defending national identity and the very existence of the nation-states as a sole means of safeguarding people’s sovereignty and freedom.
This is why I find the title of Yoram Hazony’s latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, effective. Because in a few words it clearly sums up the fact that our worldview is the exact opposite to what they would like to force on us. Yoram, your book will scandalize Italy. And I will gladly make my part on this effect because I intend to quote it frequently.
Our main enemy today is the globalist drift of those who view identity in all its forms to be an evil to be overcome and constantly acts to shift real power away from the people to supranational entities headed by supposedly enlightened elites.
Let us be clear, let us bear this clearly in our mind because we did not fight against and defeat communism in order to replace it with a new internationalist regime, but to permit independent nation states once again to defend the freedom identity and sovereignty of their peoples.
It is in this same spirit that today Fratelli d’Italia is fighting for a Europe of free and sovereign nations as a serious alternative to the bureaucratic super state that has been gradually foisted on us since the Maastricht Treaty, following the rationale of the external constraint whereby there is always someone who claims the right to take decisions in place of the sovereign peoples and the national governments.
And although that someone in Brussels or Frankfurt, Davos or the City of London lacks democratic legitimacy, every day it conditions the economic choices and the political decisions of those who have been vested with that legitimacy by the popular vote. It means that whether the false democrats like it or not, national conservatives in every latitude are actually the only real democrats. Because it is only by defending the nation state that we defend the political sovereignty that belongs to the citizens of that state.
But of course a national conservative cannot be content with claiming to be a democrat. Democracy without values becomes demagoguery, and can itself heighten decadence. I believe that it is not difficult for the conservative world to identify the substance with which we want to fill our democracies. We do not need the ideological indoctrination manuals that are so dear to the left.
Our vision of values and our worldview is actually quite simple as a great philosopher that Francesco mentioned who died a few days ago. Roger Scruton pointed out the real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things they love. And another great father of conservative thought, John Tolkien, wrote a similar thing in one of the characters of his Lord of the Rings:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
This was Faramir’s worldview ; this worldview is embodied every day by millions of ordinary men and women and sometimes even by some of the great men of history. Throughout this history, where John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to whom today’s meeting is dedicated. John Paul II was a patriot who knew perfectly well that nations and the fact of belonging to a people sharing the same historical memory were the bedrock of the freedom of every man. He never tired of repeating that there is no Europe without Christianity, a teaching which is more topical than than ever today when the Christian identity of Europe is under attack by a distorted secularism that even attacks the symbol of the Christian tradition while throwing open the gates to the most intransigent form of Islam that wants to apply Sharia law in our European homelands. In which lies at the heart of the Islamic terrorism that has caused caused bloodshed in Europe and in the United States.
John Paul II’s patriotism also enabled him to view today’s historical events in the light of a Christian realism shorn of all rhetoric, as in the case of immigration. He considered that the right to emigrate had to be preceded first and foremost by a right not to emigrate, to live in peace and dignity in one’s homeland. Christian Petra was also critic of mass immigration when you think about that.
Today John Paul II would be on the European Union’s blacklist as a dangerous subversive; but not for us. Neither would Ronald Reagan have faired any better. More than any President of the United States, Reagan stood for the American “We the People” of that preamble to the Constitution that based national democracy on the principle of popular sovereignty, another great enemy of the globalist league.
I was very impressed by the metaphor Reagan used to describe the conservative movement as a three-legged stool. Without any one of these three legs, the stool will collapse. In the three legs of our defense, fiscal and social, defense– the first leg is a patriotic soul, which today would be called sovereignist. It means the defense of nation and interest in popular sovereignty.
The second leg is economic freedom, which means also a just relationship between government and taxpayers. A great lesson of conservative thought is that an oppressive tax system not only limits free enterprise, production and consumption, but it also destroys the commonality between the state and citizens. Because over taxation enforces the state to build up a system of controls similar to that of the totalitarian regimes, restricting individual freedoms.
Awakening the economy as a free enterprise, lower taxes, less bureaucracy, public investment in infrastructure and the defense of national interests this is the recipe with which President Trump today is making the American economy Strong. And it is the recipe that we would we would like to bring to Italy, to Europe as an an alternative to the blind austerity Germany wanted. which so far has only benefited Germany and the big financial speculators.
And the third leg is the social soul to protect religious and moral values, the noblest purpose of all political action. These values and principles are found in the three concepts of today’s meeting: God, Freedom and Nation. Or in the Italian formula to which I am very attached: God, Homeland and Family.
One of the founding values of conservative movements is the defense of the natural family. They would like us to give up defending the family, considering it to be an archaic and backward concept to be superseded. They would like to convince us that a family is any emotional bond between sentient beings; that it is a sign of great civil and moral progress to pay a poor mother to keep her child in her womb for nine months and then snatch it from the her arms to give it away to whoever has bought it.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Free indeed, but never free for the sake of something, for fulfilling a life project. Free indeed, but fenced in within a predetermined enclosure, because if you dare try to climb to clamber over it, you are censored by the new Menlo Park high priests of the only school of thought allowed.
So our task is to counter this drift and to reaffirm that the nation is the place where our values are safeguarded and transmitted, renewed every day as the common sense of the people forging an identity that is the greatest treasure in the world. Our opponents paint us as obtuse nationalists in love with old verities, rejecting any dialogue, ready to wage war on the slightest pretext.
But that is not the case. The sovereignty of nations is not out to destroy Europe, it wants the true real Europe of peoples and identities, not the abstract Europe decided in back rooms by technocrats. It does not want to impose its own interests at the expense of other nation states. When Trump says America first or we say Italy first, it certainly means defending the national economic interests of those countries.
But as conservatives I think we have to focus above all on the world of high finance and the great economic powers that are imposing their will on the nation-states. As I say it the message our homeland first means reaffirming the primacy of the real economy over the financial economy; of popular sovereignty over supranational entities with no democratic legitimacy. Modern national conservatism defends the identities of nations as the basis for the new forms of cooperation.
That is why while defending the Italian sovereignty, we cannot forget to defend Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Kachinsky’s Poland, once again under attack from the European progressive mainstream. That is why, without the shameful ambiguity typical of the left, we defend the right of the State of Israel to its security and future peace and prosperity. Our patriotism is the will to defend our homelands from the great challenges of our age; challenges that will mark the future and the very survival of our civilization. We have to face together the division between extreme nationalism which is as bad as the weakness of ill-defined supranational entities such as the European Union.
The only possible answer must be the alliance of homelands that believe in a common destiny. It is this vision that has led us to join the great family of the European conservatives: the idea of a new Europe as a confederation of sovereign nation-states capable of cooperating on important matters while remaining free to take decisions regarding matters affecting our daily lives. It is much more than a choice of political positioning. It is taking up a firm stand and choosing sides.
I have an image in mind of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II walking in the gardens of the president residence in Florida back in 1987. It is the image of two great men walking together alone along the paths of history in that brief period in the 20th century that was to change the world very shortly thereafter with the collapse of communism thanks also to them.
Remembering them here today it is not simply to pay them tribute. It is a warning, a commitment not to betray their dream of freedom, which is our dream of freedom too. Thank you.
Footnote: Confirmation that Media Pushing Left Wing Propaganda
USA Today: Giorgia Meloni: Who is Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini?
NY Post: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
BBC: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
The Guardian: Giorgia Meloni is a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe
CNN: Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right government since the fascist era of Benito Mussolini
NY Times: Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back
The Conversation: Giorgia Meloni and the return of fascism: how Italy got here
Summary: A person claims to be a proud mother, Italian and Christian. For this she is labeled: Far-right. Which tells you she is mainstream and the labelers are far-left.
Carson Holloway writes at American MInd Actual Malice. Excepts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Constitutional government demands a free but responsible media.
America’s corporate press is out of control. It claims to be an institution essential to successful self-government—and it would in fact be so, if it did its job responsibly. But all too often the American press seeks not to facilitate democratic deliberation by informing the voters but instead to shape political outcomes by dealing in hysteria and misinformation. More specifically, the corporate media routinely seeks to pull the nation’s politics leftward by using defamation to render prominent figures on the right odious to the public.
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
These stories did not pan out, in the sense that they never led to legal charges, much less convictions. But they succeeded in what was no doubt their primary purpose. They were used to harass important figures on the American right, to hinder their political careers, and to prevent them, as much as possible, from engaging with voters on important issues.
As I argue in a new Provocations essay published by the Claremont Institute’s Washington Center for the American Way of Life, our press and our politics need not be this corrupt. Our present media culture of character assassination is not the necessary result of a free press.
It is instead the result of a licentious press, which is in turn the creation of a licentious Supreme Court.
In the English and American legal tradition, the time-honored remedy for false and defamatory publication is the libel suit. For most of our history, the real possibility that victims of defamation—including politicians—might sue for damages and succeed imposed a salutary check on the press. Simple prudence then required reporters and editors to make sure that allegations were true before publishing them. That wholesome discipline tended both to protect the reputations of individual Americans and, at the same time, to support the truthfulness of the nation’s political discourse.
This changed, however, in 1964, when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan—a decision that revised American libel law and ushered in our present era of press licentiousness. Writing for his colleagues, Justice William Brennan used the Court’s ruling in the New York Times case to impose a novel First Amendment doctrine on the country. The original and traditional understanding of the First Amendment had held that libel was unprotected by the Constitution, that it was outside the scope of the “freedom of the press” enshrined in the First Amendment. The New York Times Court departed from that older understanding by holding that, henceforward, “public officials” would be held to a different standard than ordinary citizens when they sued for libel. Subsequent rulings expanded the new requirements to the more expansive category of “public figures.” The result: under the now prevailing standards, public figures must demonstrate “actual malice” in order to sue successfully for libel. That is, they must show not only that they have been defamed by false publication, but also that the publisher acted with knowledge that the published material was false, or at least acted with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.
The ruling resulted in a kind of revolution in American libel law. Prior to it, public figures could and did sue successfully for damages when they had been the victims of false, defamatory reporting.Today, thanks to the actual malice standard, it is practically impossible to do so—even when the press has admittedly publicized falsehood. Thus, most recently, Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times failed, even though the Times conceded that it had erred in its claims about Palin, because the court held that Palin could not demonstrate “actual malice” on the part of the Times.
Contrary to Justice Brennan’s claims, the “actual malice” standard is not required by the First Amendment. The Founding generation did not understand the “freedom of the press” to include a license to libel. They held that libel was wrong, was outside the scope of the freedom of the press, and gave no thought to special standards, applied selectively to different classes of citizens, that would permit the press to get away with libel in some cases.
By imposing the “actual malice” standard, the New York Times Court not only erred in its interpretation of the First Amendment. It did serious damage to our nation’s political way of life, by undermining several key goals of our form of government. Americans are rightly taught that the core function of their government is to secure the rights of the people. But the New York Times doctrine actually erodes protection for a valuable right—the right to one’s reputation. Our country is also premised on the idea of equality. The New York Times doctrine, however, creates inequality among various classes of Americans—most obviously between ordinary citizens and public figures, whose right to reputation is less protected. Finally, America was founded to be a self-governing nation.
But self-government is made into a charade when a pervasive culture of press dishonesty prevents the people from making rational and informed judgments about those contending for public office.
The Supreme Court helped to create these problems, and the Supreme Court can do a good deal to correct them. There are signs that some justices, such as Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, are interested in doing so. Their colleagues should join with them and reverse New York Times v. Sullivan at the earliest suitable opportunity.
The speech was delivered by Giorgia Meloni in 2020 introducing us to her worldview, values and purpose.. For those prefering to read her remarks, I provide a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Giorgia Meloni Winner of Sunday’s Italian Election
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I wish to thank you – thank you to our friends of the Edmund Burke foundation for inviting me to open this important event, for choosing Rome in Italy as a venue for this second edition of the National Conservative conference.
I entirely, entirely agree with your views on the need to put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity. The great challenge facing us today is defending national identity and the very existence of the nation-states as a sole means of safeguarding people’s sovereignty and freedom.
This is why I find the title of Yoram Hazony’s latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, effective. Because in a few words it clearly sums up the fact that our worldview is the exact opposite to what they would like to force on us. Yoram, your book will scandalize Italy. And I will gladly make my part on this effect because I intend to quote it frequently.
Our main enemy today is the globalist drift of those who view identity in all its forms to be an evil to be overcome and constantly acts to shift real power away from the people to supranational entities headed by supposedly enlightened elites.
Let us be clear, let us bear this clearly in our mind because we did not fight against and defeat communism in order to replace it with a new internationalist regime, but to permit independent nation states once again to defend the freedom identity and sovereignty of their peoples.
It is in this same spirit that today Fratelli d’Italia is fighting for a Europe of free and sovereign nations as a serious alternative to the bureaucratic super state that has been gradually foisted on us since the Maastricht Treaty, following the rationale of the external constraint whereby there is always someone who claims the right to take decisions in place of the sovereign peoples and the national governments.
And although that someone in Brussels or Frankfurt, Davos or the City of London lacks democratic legitimacy, every day it conditions the economic choices and the political decisions of those who have been vested with that legitimacy by the popular vote. It means that whether the false democrats like it or not, national conservatives in every latitude are actually the only real democrats. Because it is only by defending the nation state that we defend the political sovereignty that belongs to the citizens of that state.
But of course a national conservative cannot be content with claiming to be a democrat. Democracy without values becomes demagoguery, and can itself heighten decadence. I believe that it is not difficult for the conservative world to identify the substance with which we want to fill our democracies. We do not need the ideological indoctrination manuals that are so dear to the left.
Our vision of values and our worldview is actually quite simple as a great philosopher that Francesco mentioned who died a few days ago. Roger Scruton pointed out the real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things they love. And another great father of conservative thought, John Tolkien, wrote a similar thing in one of the characters of his Lord of the Rings:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
This was Faramir’s worldview ; this worldview is embodied every day by millions of ordinary men and women and sometimes even by some of the great men of history. Throughout this history, where John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to whom today’s meeting is dedicated. John Paul II was a patriot who knew perfectly well that nations and the fact of belonging to a people sharing the same historical memory were the bedrock of the freedom of every man. He never tired of repeating that there is no Europe without Christianity, a teaching which is more topical than than ever today when the Christian identity of Europe is under attack by a distorted secularism that even attacks the symbol of the Christian tradition while throwing open the gates to the most intransigent form of Islam that wants to apply Sharia law in our European homelands. In which lies at the heart of the Islamic terrorism that has caused caused bloodshed in Europe and in the United States.
John Paul II’s patriotism also enabled him to view today’s historical events in the light of a Christian realism shorn of all rhetoric, as in the case of immigration. He considered that the right to emigrate had to be preceded first and foremost by a right not to emigrate, to live in peace and dignity in one’s homeland. Christian Petra was also critic of mass immigration when you think about that.
Today John Paul II would be on the European Union’s blacklist as a dangerous subversive; but not for us. Neither would Ronald Reagan have faired any better. More than any President of the United States, Reagan stood for the American “We the People” of that preamble to the Constitution that based national democracy on the principle of popular sovereignty, another great enemy of the globalist league.
I was very impressed by the metaphor Reagan used to describe the conservative movement as a three-legged stool. Without any one of these three legs, the stool will collapse. In the three legs of our defense, fiscal and social, defense– the first leg is a patriotic soul, which today would be called sovereignist. It means the defense of nation and interest in popular sovereignty.
The second leg is economic freedom, which means also a just relationship between government and taxpayers. A great lesson of conservative thought is that an oppressive tax system not only limits free enterprise, production and consumption, but it also destroys the commonality between the state and citizens. Because over taxation enforces the state to build up a system of controls similar to that of the totalitarian regimes, restricting individual freedoms.
Awakening the economy as a free enterprise, lower taxes, less bureaucracy, public investment in infrastructure and the defense of national interests this is the recipe with which President Trump today is making the American economy Strong. And it is the recipe that we would we would like to bring to Italy, to Europe as an an alternative to the blind austerity Germany wanted. which so far has only benefited Germany and the big financial speculators.
And the third leg is the social soul to protect religious and moral values, the noblest purpose of all political action. These values and principles are found in the three concepts of today’s meeting: God, Freedom and Nation. Or in the Italian formula to which I am very attached: God, Homeland and Family.
One of the founding values of conservative movements is the defense of the natural family. They would like us to give up defending the family, considering it to be an archaic and backward concept to be superseded. They would like to convince us that a family is any emotional bond between sentient beings; that it is a sign of great civil and moral progress to pay a poor mother to keep her child in her womb for nine months and then snatch it from the her arms to give it away to whoever has bought it.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Free indeed, but never free for the sake of something, for fulfilling a life project. Free indeed, but fenced in within a predetermined enclosure, because if you dare try to climb to clamber over it, you are censored by the new Menlo Park high priests of the only school of thought allowed.
So our task is to counter this drift and to reaffirm that the nation is the place where our values are safeguarded and transmitted, renewed every day as the common sense of the people forging an identity that is the greatest treasure in the world. Our opponents paint us as obtuse nationalists in love with old verities, rejecting any dialogue, ready to wage war on the slightest pretext.
But that is not the case. The sovereignty of nations is not out to destroy Europe, it wants the true real Europe of peoples and identities, not the abstract Europe decided in back rooms by technocrats. It does not want to impose its own interests at the expense of other nation states. When Trump says America first or we say Italy first, it certainly means defending the national economic interests of those countries.
But as conservatives I think we have to focus above all on the world of high finance and the great economic powers that are imposing their will on the nation-states. As I say it the message our homeland first means reaffirming the primacy of the real economy over the financial economy; of popular sovereignty over supranational entities with no democratic legitimacy. Modern national conservatism defends the identities of nations as the basis for the new forms of cooperation.
That is why while defending the Italian sovereignty, we cannot forget to defend Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Kachinsky’s Poland, once again under attack from the European progressive mainstream. That is why, without the shameful ambiguity typical of the left, we defend the right of the State of Israel to its security and future peace and prosperity. Our patriotism is the will to defend our homelands from the great challenges of our age; challenges that will mark the future and the very survival of our civilization. We have to face together the division between extreme nationalism which is as bad as the weakness of ill-defined supranational entities such as the European Union.
The only possible answer must be the alliance of homelands that believe in a common destiny. It is this vision that has led us to join the great family of the European conservatives: the idea of a new Europe as a confederation of sovereign nation-states capable of cooperating on important matters while remaining free to take decisions regarding matters affecting our daily lives. It is much more than a choice of political positioning. It is taking up a firm stand and choosing sides.
I have an image in mind of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II walking in the gardens of the president residence in Florida back in 1987. It is the image of two great men walking together alone along the paths of history in that brief period in the 20th century that was to change the world very shortly thereafter with the collapse of communism thanks also to them.
Remembering them here today it is not simply to pay them tribute. It is a warning, a commitment not to betray their dream of freedom, which is our dream of freedom too. Thank you.
Footnote: Confirmation that Media Pushing Left Wing Propaganda
USA Today: Giorgia Meloni: Who is Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini?
NY Post: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
BBC: Far-right pol Giorgia Meloni poised to become Italy’s first female PM
The Guardian: Giorgia Meloni is a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe
CNN: Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right government since the fascist era of Benito Mussolini
NY Times: Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back
The Conversation: Giorgia Meloni and the return of fascism: how Italy got here
Summary: A person claims to be a proud mother, Italian and Christian. For this she is labeled: Far-right. Which tells you she is mainstream and the labelers are far-left.
There wasn’t much drama to the event. Ever since the Conservative leadership race was announced, it was clear from the crowds that showed up at Pierre Poilievre’s rallies that he was the enthusiastic favourite, and by a long shot. He did not merely win. He was a rocket. The rest were Volkswagens.
Secondly, he also demonstrated from the first he was serious, by which I mean the tone and substance of his speeches gave indication this was a guy ready and eager to take on the current leader. He found both a theme and manner that kept the crowds swelling till the very end. Turnout had the excitement level of a general election, and there is no reason whenever the next election occurs—if and when Jagmeet Singh uncouples his diminished NDP from the Liberals—that excitement will abate. In fact, it will be greater.
Justin Trudeau, should he hang on, will go into it as the underdog, and should he drop out before the challenge, Chrystia Freeland will not be the challenger so many in the media have been pretending or building her up to be. Ms. Freeland will be carrying Mr. Trudeau’s baggage, and the only good thing about that is that it won’t be at Pearson Airport.
The Liberals, after their long and dreary tenure, are at present a roaring catastrophe.
They are stumbling in every conceivable direction. They cannot maintain even the most basic and routine of government functions. They have made a mess of issuing Canadian passports—the passport being the most significant and symbolical instruments of citizenship. At the same time, their precious monomania about “systemically racist” Canada has Heritage Canada and the CRTC blindly doling out over half a million dollars to a certified antisemite (not even resident in Canada) to teach “anti-racism”!
They were a mess at the beginning of COVID, maintaining—as always with the Liberals—that it would be “racist” to ban flights. Now at its end or expiry they impose the wantonly useless arriveCAN app and are still uselessly forcing passengers on flights to mask up (between meals) to add two more miseries to the nightmare that is getting in or out of major Canadian airports.
A great country in Europe, under an energy siege from Vladimir Putin, comes to Canada to see if our country can help with its extensive supplies of oil and gas, and is turned away empty handed.
Because Canada under Green Justin has done everything but declare the the oil and gas industry a criminal activity. Instead, that German chancellor is given the promise of a “hydrogen facility” in Stephenville, Newfoundland, which if it ever should develop, which if it ever should develop will come at least a decade past the current crisis.
Trudeau gave Greta Thunberg, the teen scold, a better welcome.
We haven’t had a real Parliament in nearly three years, and the promise is that when it resumes fairly soon, this too will be a “Zoom” production. Every other public event, from concerts to sports shows to conferences, are back to normal, but the Liberal-NDP absentee parliamentarians insist face-to-face House of Commons sittings are a health hazard. No one believes this, but the NDP and the Liberals shamelessly insist on it anyway.
Still, full cabinets can fly to B.C. for special meetings. Do you think that when the PM and the cabinet fly they are wearing masks? Were they wearing masks when they convened for lunch and dinner in B.C.? Does Trudeau wear masks on his many foreign jaunts? Parliament is not functioning as it should and must when members are virtual ghosts, when the whole of Parliament, physically, does not meet. This “health-risk” is just opposition avoidance. The Ottawa press gallery should be pushing this point with force and relentlessly, but alas, no.
Finally, the whole style of this government—apart from its incompetence, its aimlessness, its evolution into nasty and divisive rhetoric, and its resort to “wedge” issues (Trudeau’s cant against the unvaccinated in last summer’s election)—has an even bigger problem.
It has become annoying.
The virtue-speak, the always cloying telling Canadians what they are thinking, the endless moralizing homilies always reflecting self-congratulatory lights back on the speaker, whether the PM, the environment minister, or heritage or diversity. A little smug glow on first entering office is a forgivable folly. But it wears thin in seven years after a trail of ethics breaches, grossly gaudy foreign adventures (the Great Costume Tour of India), numerous still-unfinished inquiries, and above all the Liberals’ manic absorption with global warming.
The government is tired. And it is annoying. It would not take a campaigner of Pierre Poilievre’s now-proven skills to take it down.
It is an old and true maxim in politics that opposition parties do not win, governments defeat themselves. And this one over the last year in particular has an unwonted keenness in preparing for its own departure.
Poilievre will be attacked remorselessly. The larger part of the media will not make it easy for him. But his leadership campaign displayed both focus and energy. Whenever the contest comes he will enter it with eagerness, facing a defensive and exhausted opponent.
Stephen Moore writes at Washington Examiner 
Having failed to make their case in the political arena, environmentalists increasingly are asking the courts to impose restrictions that voters have not supported. In a current case (Mathur v Ontario) six teenagers are asking the Ontario Superior Court to agree that climate change is violating their rights and order the government to implement measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions — even though Ontario only accounts for 0.3 per cent of global emissions. The Supreme Court of Canada recently refused even to hear a similar class action lawsuit from another group of young people.
We reject all this without a moment’s hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman and any children they may have, They are creating a world of alleged individual rights and formal freedom. In theory we are free or almost free to do anything we like: free to take drugs , free to have an abortion , to take the lives of human beings suffering from serious illnesses and therefore defenseless. Only rights and few if at all do this
Carson Holloway writes at American MInd
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
Science Matters 