U.S. Army Specialist Daulton Radler inspects his glove fit and is shown the proper procedures for donning personal protective equipment while awaiting to forward deploy to the coronavirus testing site in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. April 2, 2020. (Master Sergeant George Roach/Pennsylvania National Guard/Handout via Reuters)Media figures on both sides of the aisle failed to appreciate the extent of the threat until it was too late. Liberals shouldnt pretend otherwise.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed virtually everything about American life, with one prominent exception: While business, the arts, and sports are all on hold, the hyper-partisan political warfare that afflicts our public square has continued at the same pace and intensity as before.

As the present crisis has developed over the past few weeks, the chattering classes have kept busy interpreting everything that happens through pro-Trump and anti-Trump prisms. Many in the mainstream liberal media are intent on settling scores with Trumps cheerleaders in the conservative media, whom they have accused of fueling skepticism about the danger posed by the coronavirus. Yet in doing so, they are ignoring the fact that many on the left were just as confused about the pandemic at its start and just as eager to play politics with it as their favorite villains on the right.

A front-page story in the New York Times this week summed up the liberal indictment of the right. Focusing heavily on Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and right-wing talkers such as Rush Limbaugh, the piece took as its conceit that they had not merely gotten the story wrong but had badly misled their audience and helped encourage the most prominent consumer of conservative media President Trump to delay implementing measures to stem the pandemics spread.

Theres no denying that many conservatives were slow to realize the danger posed by the coronavirus, and stuck to talking points about its being no worse than the flu right up until the point in mid-March when it became apparent that we were facing a full-blown public-health disaster. Their knee-jerk reaction to the first calls for action on the issue from the White House was to assume Trump was covering his political bases rather than attempting to forestall a real emergency. And many of them saw panic over the virus as a liberal plot to establish a Hurricane Katrina-style narrative in which Trump would be declared to have been derelict in his duty.

As Times reporter Jeremy Peters details, Hannity, Limbaugh, and other conservative-media figures such as Candace Owens and Dennis Prager made statements in February comparing coronavirus to the regular flu and predicting its spread should not be a cause for alarm. Peters is also right to point out that, like Trump, many on the right turned on a dime in mid March, beginning to take the threat of the virus seriously.

But the underlying assumption of Peterss thesis is that conservatives were alone in making these errors, and that assumption doesnt hold up. Liberal media outlets, very much including the Times, were also slow to recognize the impending catastrophe. And at the earliest stage of the story, when the Right and the Left dueled over Chinas responsibility for the pandemic, liberals instinctive desire to disagree with Trump on everything led many of them to downplay the threat in a different but no-less-dangerous way than the Hannitys and Limbaughs of the world.

Peters notes that although some at Fox News mocked the idea of being afraid of the virus, others such as Tucker Carlson were touting the coronavirus as a threat in late January, specifically as justification for Trumps order limiting flights from China. While Carlson and a guest, Senator Tom Cotton (R. Ark.), were, according to the Times, merely spouting talking points to justify a prejudiced decision aimed at focusing hate on a foreign enemy, their counterparts on the left were taking the bait and downplaying the threat of the virus.

On February 5, the Times published an op-ed by global-tourism reporter Rosie Spinks under the headline, Who Says Its Not Safe to Travel to China? The article, an argument against Trumps restrictions on flights from China, took the point of view that the real problem with the virus was that it was promoting hate against Chinese people and hurting the travel industry.

The same intellectual reflex motivated politicians such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and his health commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, to spend February and part of March dismissing the pandemic. They urged New Yorkers to disregard any fears about the virus and attend the Chinese New Year celebrations and parade in New Yorks Chinatown. House speaker Nancy Pelosi did the same thing while promoting the Chinese New Year festivities held in her native San Franciscos Chinatown. In retrospect, such advocacy is hard to defend given the likelihood that the virus was already starting to spread. But at the time, the looming danger wasnt yet clear, so the political needs of the moment took precedence.

Meanwhile, on January 31, the Washington Post published an op-ed by former Harvard professor David Ropeik that sought to dismiss fears about the impending pandemic as a figment of our collective imagination, mocking the notion of a global health emergency. A few days, later the Post ran another opinion piece by a pair of academics under the headline Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus, which claimed fears about the pandemic were merely an invitation to harsh measures that would scapegoat marginalized populations.

Peters can point to instances throughout the following weeks in which Fox News personalities, Limbaugh, and others on the right pooh-poohed the coronavirus as no more dangerous than the seasonal flu, highlighted those who survived the disease, and accused the media of trying to perpetuate a hoax against Trump. But a detailed look at what the Times published in its opinion pages during the same period shows that neither its editorial board nor its roster of 16 regular columnists were sounding the alarm while some conservatives encouraged Americans to ignore the danger.

The first mention of the virus in the Times opinion section came commendably early, on January 29, and seemed to warn of what was to come. But even then, the papers editorial board praised the Trump administrations foresight and offered reason for cautious optimism:

To its credit, the administration has managed to keep some of the worlds leading infectious disease experts in key roles at top agencies, including the C.D.C., the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. If those professionals are given the resources and authority to respond to the crisis as their experience and the science dictate . . . the worst-case scenarios may yet be averted.

Though Peterss article complains that right-wing pundits remained insufficiently alarmed about the virus throughout February, the Times didnt seem too concerned about it either: After January 29, its editorial board didnt mention it again for a full month. When it picked up the issue again on February 29, in an editorial entitled, Here Comes the Coronavirus Pandemic, it expressed mild concern about Trumps belief that the situation was well under control, but, like many conservative-media outlets, hedged bets about what would happen next. There is still a chance that COVID-19 will be more fire drill than actual fire, the Timess editors wrote. The vortex of fear and market-tumbling anxiety may yet pass.

The Timess op-ed columnists did no better than its editorial board. The first Times op-ed column on the issue was even more dismissive of the pandemic than anything being said on Fox News. On January 29, Farhood Manjoos Beware the Pandemic Panic argued that alarm about the virus was unwarranted. Citing false assurances from the World Health Organization, Manjoo said the real concern was not the illness itself but the amped-up, ill-considered way our frightened world might respond to it.

Like many on the right whom Peters singles out, Manjoo compared the virus to the flu and other diseases that didnt pose such a catastrophic danger to American society. He claimed that, fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic, and that it might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world. . . . We should keep this sense of caution in mind in case American politicians begin pushing for travel bans, overbroad quarantines or other measures that might not be supported by the science.

To his credit, Manjoo eventually walked this back in a column published on Feb. 26. But the qualifying excuses he offered with mea culpa could just as easily be used to justify similar mistakes made by right-wingers:

To be totally fair to myself, my reasoningin that columnwas mostly on point: At the time, the new coronavirus appeared to be a far less worrisome danger than the flu, which killshundreds of thousandsof people around the world annually. The illness, since named Covid-19, had then killed fewer than 200 people, and the Chinese governments late but immense efforts to contain it looked as if they might work.

Manjoo at least had something to say about the virus early on, however wrong it turned out to be. The other 15 op-ed columnists employed by the paper that would subsequently excoriate conservatives for their lack of early alarm remained completely silent until almost the end of February. After January 29, the virus wasnt mentioned in the Timess opinion pages until February 26, when Gail Collins chose to attack the Trump administration for its lack of urgency in dealing with the problem.

And even at that late date some of the Timess influencers were still considering the possibility that the pandemic would blow over soon. On February 29, Nicholas Kristof wrote that, Nobody knows if the coronavirus will be a big one, for it may still fizzle. As of this writing, onlyone personis known to have died from it in the United States, while thousands routinely die annually from the seasonal flu. But increasingly, experts are saying that we should get ready just in case. In the following weeks, Kristof, too, would excoriate conservatives such as Limbaugh for expressing similar skepticism.

The bottom line is that the Times didnt get consistently interested in the coronavirus until the full extent of the crisis became apparent in March, at which point its writers believed theyd found a stick with which to beat the president and his supporters. While this does not excuse the mistakes made by conservatives and the administration in the critical months before the crisis hit, it does validate right-wingers beliefs that Trumps opponents were, like the president, reacting to the pandemic primarily as a political controversy rather than a public-health threat in those months.

Predictions are a perilous business for any pundit, and much of what both liberals and conservatives published and broadcast about the coronavirus in the weeks leading up to the middle of March turned out to be wrong. Both sides made these mistakes not out of a willful desire to mislead but because they knew little about the subject, much of what they did know was wrong, and they were, as is their deeply ingrained habit, apt to interpret the latest developments as confirmation of their preexisting political biases. Neither side should now attempt to rewrite history so it casts all the blame for those early failures on the other.

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Conservative Pundits Werent the Only Ones to Get the Pandemic Wrong - National Review

Madison in the sixties, early April the only liberal elected mayor.

The mayoral election of 1965 is polite but partisan and gives the city a clear choice between continuity and change: Conservative businessman George Hall, who ran the successful mayoral campaigns in 1961 and 63 for conservative businessman Henry Reynolds, and Dane County clerk Otto Festge, a Democrat from Cross Plains.

Hall, sixty-four, is chairman of the Hyland Hall construction company and H & H Electric, and president of the board of directors of Madison General Hospital. Festge, forty-four, is a former part-time farmer who began his career in public service as Cross Plains town assessor in 1946 and has been county clerk since 1953; hes also a talented multi-instrumentalist who played with the Madison Symphony Orchestra when he was at the UW, and was later a public school music teacher in Black Earth.

The nonpartisan election has a strongly partisan tone. Festge, elected county clerk six times as a Democrat, features a photograph of himself with US Senator Gaylord Nelson in his campaign literature. Numerous Republican officials are among the 150 at Halls campaign kickoff at the Loraine Hotel. [i]All of the construction trade unions support Hall; municipal employees go for Festge. The Federation of Labors Committee on Political Education endorses both.[ii]

Halls top priority is an expressway from Blair Street through Law Park to connect to the Monona Causeway, finally nearing completion. So hes very much against building a civic auditorium there, where Frank Lloyd Wright wanted Monona Terrace to be. Hall wants a new site, close to the Capitol, to be designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation. Festge favors the Law Park site, but would support a different site if demanded by the public or recommended by the planners. The strongest support for a Monona Terrace auditorium comes from Republican attorney William Dyke, who finished third in the seven-man primary.[iii]

The candidates differ on open housing. Hall supports the current ordinance, which only covers forty percent of the housing units. Festge wants to eliminate the current exemptions and expand the law to all units.[iv]

Former assessor Festge focuses on financial issues, warning of the citys increasing debt and vowing to restore Madisons AAA bond rating, reduced to AA under Reynolds in 1963.[v]

Hall calls for a joint City-County Health Department and wants to consolidate the villages of Monona and Shorewood Hills into Madison. A member of the board of the Vocational, Technical and Adult schools, Hall wants Central High School closed and its building turned over to his system.[vi]

Both candidates support buying forty-acres at Milwaukee Street and Highway 51 for a full general hospital, and [vii] each supports the police policy of taking photographs at political demonstrations.

Theres little doubt about the outcome. Four years of Republican rule is enough for Madison. Festge carries nineteen of twenty-two wards on his way to a landslide twenty-point victory, about 25,000 to 17,000.[viii] A year into the Great Society, Madison has its first Democratic mayor since the first month of the Kennedy Administration.

Festge lays out an ambitious agenda in his inaugural message: settle the longstanding dispute with the Wright Foundation over fees and start a new auditorium process, buy land for the east side hospital, expand mass transit, improve relations with the university, and more.

But two years later, taxes and crime are both up, college students are starting to cause trouble, and the building trades are on strike. After winning by eight thousand votes in 1965, election night 1967 finds Festge ahead by only about thirty votes with just one precinct left to report.

The 46-yo- Festge almost got to run unopposed, but attorney and former broadcast personality William Dyke, who finished third in the seven-way primary in 1965, enters the race just hours before the filing deadline.[ix] A former aide to Republican lieutenant governor Jack Olson, Dyke enjoys active support of local and state GOP officials, while the Dane County Democratic Party doesnt even endorse Festge, even though he had been elected county clerk six times as a Democrat.

Dyke, thirty-five, campaigns almost exclusively on Festges spending, taxes, and purported failures of leadership, and avoids culture and crime.[x] And he proposes organizing a group of experts to advise UW graduates with advanced high-tech degrees how to create, finance and market new products.[xi]

Festge cites as his primary accomplishment the recent acquisition of a site on Milwaukee Street for the long-sought east side hospital, making progress on the Monona Basin auditorium and civic center and helping form the Alliance of Cities to lobby for more state shared revenue. And he notes that most of the tax hike has been for the schools, not city services.[xii]

Festge runs moderately well throughout the city; Dyke wins fewer wards but by larger margins, especially his Nakoma neighborhood. It all comes down to a final ward in University Heights. About 10 p.m., the last numbers come in, and Festge gets his second term by just sixty-two votes out of 35,000 cast. [xiii]

Chastened by his political near-death experience and sensing the brewing tax revolt, Festge vows to keep the tax rate at forty-seven dollars per thousand dollars of assessment. I believe we can provide for our needs through the normal increase in the citys valuation, he tells the council in his inaugural message. Its a statement he will soon regret.[xiv]

Festge proposes a land bank for industrial uses, and a new transportation commission. And he wants the council to create an advisory committee on housing and social services, to plan community services for the citys growing number of poor and elderly.

Having made more progress on the auditorium/civic center in two years than predecessor Reynolds had made in two terms, Festge also swipes at the small obstructionist minority doing a grave disservice to our city by continuing to fight the project, and says they deserve forthright condemnation.[xv]

Festge closes his inaugural message by calling the narrowness of his victory a challenge to me, my administration, and to this Common Council.[xvi]

He has no idea of the challenges to come.

And thats this weeks Madison in the Sixties. For your award winning, hand-washing, social distancing, WORT News team, Im Stu Levitan.

[i] Dane GOP Chairman Is Helping Campaign of Hall for Mayor, CT, January 14, 1965; Doyle Cites Festges Work as Important Background, CT, March 29, 1965.

[ii] 11 City Labor Leaders Support Hall for Mayor, WSJ, January 17, 1965; Witt, COPE Endorses Hall, Festge, WSJ, February 19, 1965; Coyle, Terrace Dominates COPE Candidate Forum, CT, February 19, 1965; editorial, How Long Will Madison Let Ald. Rohr Dictate Its Politics, CT, February 19, 1965; Brautigam, COPE Continues Dual OK for Festge, Hall, CT, March 23, 1965.

[iii] Coyle, Dyke Indicates Favor for Monona Terrace, CT, January 21, 1965; Hall Ends Silence, Raps Terrace Auditorium Site, CT, February 8, 1965; editorial, Festges Stuck with Terrace, WSJ, February 23, 1965; Coyle, Hall Favors Expressway through Site of Terrace, CT, March 13, 1965; Brautigam, Major Rivals Say That Terrace Site Is Principle[Principal?] yes Issue, CT, March 17, 1965.

[iv] Witt, Mayor Candidates Oppose Skywalks, WSJ, March 26, 1965; Brautigam, Metropolitan Problems Take Spotlight at Forum, CT, March 30; Coyle, Auditorium, Road Plan Pace Candidates Jabs, CT, April 1, 1965.

[v]; Festge Pledges Himself to City Beautification Program, CT, April 1, 1965.

[vi] Hall Says City, County Health Agency Needed, WSJ, March 29, 1965.

[vii] Hall Stresses Planning for New City Hospital, WSJ, March 14, 1965; Festge Presses Action on East Side Hospital, WSJ, March 28, 1965.

[viii] Aehl, Festge Wins Mayor Race by 8,000 Votes, WSJ, April 7, 1965; Coyle, Festge in Landslide Win, CT, April 7, 1965.

[ix] Dyke Beats Deadline, Files To Oppose Festge, WSJ, February 1, 1967.

[x] Fiscal Restraint Proposed by Dyke, WSJ, March 8, 1967; Aehl, Mayoral Race Based on Leadership, Taxed, WSJ, April 2, 1967.

[xi] County GOP Backs Dyke for Mayor, CT, March 31, 1967; Moucha,Dyke Plea Fails, COPE OKs Festge, WSJ, February 17, 1967.

[xii] Coyle, Festge vs. Dyke: Are There Any Issues? CT, February 25, 1967; Aehl, Dyke, Festge Attack, Defend, WSJ, March 11, 1967

[xiii] Aehl, Festge Barely Wins by 75-Vote Margin, WSJ, April 5, 1967; Coyle, Festges Win Is Affirmed, CT, April 15, 1967.

[xiv] Coyle, Mayor Vows Effort To Hold Tax Line, CT, April 18, 1967.

[xv] Coyle, Forster, Smith Off Auditorium Group, CT, April 18, 1967.

[xvi] Otto Festge, Mayors Annual Message, April 18, 1967, WI-M 1 MAY 50.1:1967/4/18, Wisconsin Historical Society Library [Will it be clear to readers where this source can be found?]. Yes

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Madison in the Sixties - the only liberal elected mayor - Wortfm

Liberal groups have dropped more than $20 million into advertisements attacking President Donald Trump and Republicans on coronavirus, a sign that the pandemic will play a central role in November's presidential election.

Democrats have used the outbreak in recent weeks to campaign in battleground states that could determine the presidential election, includingPennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Liberal advocacy groups and super PACs are airing ads slamming the president as slow in responding to the pandemic.

The multimillion-dollar efforts are fueled by groups bankrolled by some of the party's top donors, including billionaires Donald Sussman and George Soros.Protect Our Care, a dark money group established toprotect the Affordable Care Act, is the latest to attack Trump's response to the outbreak. The group putfive figuresinto television and digital ad buys late last week in battleground states. The ads will continue to run throughout this week.

Protect Our Care is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund at Arabella Advisors, a dark money network that funneled more than a half-billion in secret cash from wealthy donors to liberal initiatives in 2018. Dozens of advocacy groups fall under the Sixteen Thirty Fund's umbrella, which provides its legal and tax-exempt status to groups that are not recognized as nonprofits by the IRS. Protect Our Care also set up a "Coronavirus War Room" Twitter account to counter Trump's response. The group did not respond to requests for comment.

While Protect Our Care attacks Trump over the pandemic, Tax March, another Sixteen Thirty Fund project, has targeted GOP lawmakers. The group poured $1.2 millioninto media buys against Republican senators David Perdue (Ga.), Susan Collins (Maine), Pat Toomey (Pa.), and Ron Johnson (Wis.) over their support for the 2017 tax bill that contained relief for some corporations that may benefit from the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus.

Liberal super PACs have also spent millions attacking Trump. PACRONYM, a super PAC tied to the dark money nonprofit ACRONYM, has spent at least $5 million on coronavirus ads against the president. Tara McGowan, the group's founder, said it's up to Democratic groups to push anti-Trump messaging during the pandemic while presidential candidates remain positive. PACRONYM received $1 million from Sussman and $250,000 from Soros's Democracy PAC late last year.

Establishment players such as Priorities USA, the largest outside Democratic super PAC, have been some of the biggest spenders to date. Priorities has already poured more than $7.5 million hitting Trump over the coronavirus in pivotal battleground states. Fueled by $8 million from Sussman and $5 million from Soros this cycle, the group began running ads in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in March.

"Trump's response to the crisis has been nothing short of a failure," the group said in a press release announcing its initial coronavirus ads. "He continues to lie constantly and fail to act in the best interest of the country. It is imperative that voters know the truth about Trump's failures so they can continue to hold their government accountable in this time of crisis."

Priorities plans to spend at least $150 million leading up to the November elections.

American Bridge PAC, led by liberal operative David Brock, has spent $6.3 million on coronavirus media buys. The PAC has received $2 million in funding from Soros this year. Individuals with ties to the Democracy Alliance, a millionaire and billionaire donor club cofounded by Soros that helps set the progressive agenda, have also provided large donations to the group. The alliance mapped out a $275 million spending plan for the 2020 elections.

American Bridge recently announced that it is joining forces with Unite the Country PAC, the super PAC backing Joe Biden's candidacy. The groups hope to raise a combined $175 million as they collaborate on research, polling, and ad buys against Trump.

Unite the Country has already spent seven figures on coronavirus-related attack ads against Trump. The pro-Biden PAC's biggest donoris Silicon Valley billionaire and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who has stepped up as a major Democratic funder in recent years. Unite the Country's founders also separately established Future Majority, a D.C.-based dark money "strategy center" that plans to spend at least $60 million in the Midwest.

As outside liberal groups pour tens of millions of dollars into attack ads against Trump, outside Republican groups have been relatively absent from the airwaves.

America First, the super PAC supporting Trump's reelection, recently announced a $10 million ad buy in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin after allegedly facing frustration from White House personnel and Trump's campaign aides over the group's inactivity.

Joe Schoffstall is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he spent three years with the Media Research Center and was most recently with the Capitol City Project. He can be reached at Schoffstall@freebeacon.com. His Twitter handle is @JoeSchoffstall.

Continued here:

Liberal Groups Spend More Than $20 Million Attacking Trump, GOP on Coronavirus - Washington Free Beacon

Star Trekand the Liberal Utopian Dream

When Gene Roddenberry first pitched Star Trek to NBC, he framed it as an epic voyage of rugged space pioneers akin to the westerns that then dominated the airwaves. What we got over the next three years was a deep exploration of two separate but linked phenomena: modern liberal politics and utopian technologies. By the former I don't mean what now passes for liberalism. Instead, it was a more robust sense of a future where, at least within the boundaries of the Federation, material need was largely overcome, people worked for pride or glory instead of money, and racism had disappeared from human cultures.

Android Face by bluebudgie (Pixabay License / Pixabay)

It was an uneasy balance of freedom and equality with a strong sense of individual human rights. Sure, Ensign Stiles (Paul Comi) might distrust the Romulans (and by extension the similar-looking Vulcans) in "Balance of Terror" (episode 1.14), but Captain Kirk (William Shatner) was quick to remind him that there was no room for bigotry on his bridge. There were hints that the Federation might even be a socialist paradise, though this was never entirely clear.

Yes, most of the female Star Fleet characters were secondary, but we should remember on Kirk's bridge there was a black woman (Nichelle Nichols as Nyota Uhura -- a first on network TV), an alien (Leonard Nimoy's Spock), a Japanese-American (George Takei's Hikaru Sulu), and later a Russian (Walter Koenig as Pavel Chekov). And there were a number of "strong female characters" as guest stars, right from the second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before", with Sally Kellerman playing Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, a heroic psychiatrist who saves the day.

William Shatner as James Kirk in Star Trek 1969 CBS Photo Archive/ IMDB)

Further, Star Trek doled out its liberal medicine in the candy-coated form of allegory: whether of the futility of racism (3.15 "Let That be Your Last Battlefield"), of the Vietnam War as part of a balance of power (2.19 "A Private Little War"), or of the dangers of letting computers make decisions for us (2.24 "The Ultimate Computer"). Most of these allegories with the notable exception of Roddenberry's own ham-fisted "The Omega Glory" could be swallowed without too much narrative pain, and without knowing the links to real political situations they hinted at.

Roddenberry's The Next Generation continued, for the most part, this utopian liberalism, featuring episodes where Cmdr. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) falls in love with Melinda Culea's Soren, a gender-fluid alien (5.17 "The Outcast"), where the crew faces peril on a planet ruled by women (1.14 "Angel One"), and where Cmdr. Data's (Brent Spiner) rights as an artificial person were defended ably by none other than Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard (2.9 "The Measure of a Man"). It was truly a "dignity culture", using sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning's categorization of how we react to personal offense (the others being honour and victim cultures).

If anything, Picard was too much of a stickler when defending the prime directive: unlike Kirk, he rarely tried to impose liberal values at the point of a phaser. For instance, it's hard to imagine him destroying the war-simulation computers that locked the planet Eminiar VII in a never-ending war with planet Vendikar as Kirk did in 1.23 "A Taste of Armageddon": Picard would have talked his way of out this one.

The foundation of Star Trek's liberal utopia was what I'll call utopian technology that allowed inter-planetary travel (warp drive), protection against alien threats (shields and phasers), and easy travel to a planet's surface and to other ships (the transporter). Next Generation added the choice of a wide variety of food, drink, and material objects (the replicator) along with unlimited leisure possibilities (the holodeck). Apparently no one abused their replicator privileges and went on drinking binges with endless pints of Romulan ale or, with the partial exception of Dwight Schultz's Lt. Barclay, became addicted to the sexual and power fantasies made possible by the holodeck. They had better things to do.

Science fiction stories offer five distinct levels of technology: primitive (that which we've long ago surpassed), contemporary, advanced (things we can realistically envision but don't have quite yet), utopian (things that make sense within a canon but we don't have any idea how to create), and magical (things that may seem "cool" on the surface but make no scientific sense). Our journey is one from Star Trek's utopian technology in the 1960s to a mixture of utopian and advanced technologies at the end of the millennium, finally to an embrace of magical technologies in the last decade, with notable exceptions. This journey parallels the decline and fall of inclusive liberal utopianism as we move from Kirk's Enterprise to Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and Michael Burnham's (Sonequa Martin-Green) Star Trek: Discovery. The technology and liberalism of recent series such as Discovery, Picard, and Doctor Who have more in common with Harry Potter's childish wand-waving than Roddenberry's original techno-utopian dream.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Armin Shimerman plays two Ferengi roles in "The Last Outpost" (IMDB)

Star Trek itself started to push back against its own utopianism starting in 1987, though more as parody than serious critique. In 1.5 "The Last Outpost" we meet the Ferengi, who Riker characterizes as "Yankee traders". At first portrayed as aggressive and greedy aliens, by the time of Deep Space Nine they became a parody of capitalism, especially whenever Quark (Armin Shimerman) quoted the hilarious Rules of Acquisition that could be all boiled down to one mantra: greed is good. Still, in this and others episodes Next Generation amped up the sense of cultural relativism, in keeping with the times. Not all alien species shared the Federation's post-capitalist egalitarianism. To drive this point home, the Ferengi were shocked that human women were allowed to wear clothes.

But Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager presented two more serious challenges to the original series' techno-utopianism. The first came from the Borg Collective, whose admittedly amazing technologies came at the expense of erasing any sense of individuality in the races they assimilated. In 2.16 "Q Who" and more dramatically in "The Best of Both Worlds" (3.26 and 4.1, 1989), we meet a species that absorbs not only the culture and knowledge of all races they come into contact with, but for whom individual rights are meaningless. Their members were little more than nodes on a vast digital network whose sole purpose is control. Their technological superiority to the Federation challenges the assumption that liberal societies produce the most sophisticated science.

The second challenge came from the Klingons 2.0, as re-envisaged by Next Generation. As I've said elsewhere, they were no longer loose analogues of Soviet-era Russians. Instead, they were space-faring Homeric heroes for whom honour and clan loyalties were supreme. Their technological sophistication may have been a bit below those of the Federation, but they were not unburdened by the cultural relativism of the non-interference directive, and were willing to fight their enemies with gusto if their honour was challenged.

Star Trek: Next Generation - Tony Todd (L) and Michael Dorn (R) as Klingons with honour in "Sins of the Father" (IMDB)

When we watch 3.17 "Sins of the Father" or 4.26 and 5.1 "Redemption Parts I & II", it's not a stretch to see parallels with family drama and Machiavellian politics seen in Shakespeare's histories such as Richard III, Henry V or Macbeth. They in effect told us that modern liberal societies lacked a sense of noble struggle so typical of warrior cultures. In "Redemption" the new emperor Gowron (Robert O'Reilly) challenges Worf's (Michael Dorn) insistence on Star Fleet protocol and thus the utopian liberalism of the Federation when he asks him to seek Picard's help to defeat the Duras clan:

Gowron: You come to me and demand the restoration of your family honour and now you hide behind human excuses? What are you, Worf? Do you tremble and quake with fear at the approach of combat, hoping to talk your way out of a fight like a human? Or do you hear the cry of the warrior calling you to battle, calling you to glory like a Klingon? ("Redemption")

It's clear that the Klingons represent a return to honour culture, to the idea that sovereign individuals have a duty to defend themselves according to a warrior code.

The golden age of sci-fi television was the 1990s, when one could watch everything from the paranormal police procedural The X-Files, the wacky reality hopping of Sliders, the grand space opera of Babylon 5, and the weirdness of Lexx and Farscape. One major theme connecting many of these series was the idea that state bureaucracies and official police forces could no longer be trusted or were entirely absent. As Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) told Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) with his dying breath at the end of season 1 of The X-Files, "trust no one." Instead, we get a number of shows about a group of criminals and rogues trying to escape the long arm of the law.

It all starts with the BBC series Blake's 7 in 1978, where our heroes are seven British rebels on the run from a malevolent and authoritarian Federation. We see a much weirder band aboard the planet-destroying living ship over four seasons of the Canadian-German production Lexx. Its crew included an undead Brunnen-G assassin name Kai (played by London, Ontario's own Michael McManus), a human security guard named Stanley Tweedle (Brian Downey), a sex-starved half-human, half-lizard named Zev (Xenia Seeberg) and a horny robot head named 790 (Jeffrey Hirschfield ). They had stolen the Lexx, the most powerful weapon in the universe, from His Divine Shadow, and use it to go on many strange adventures.

Farscape - Ben Browder as John Chrichton (1999) (IMDB)

Better know is the Australian show Farscape (19992003), which starred Ben Browder as the pistol-packing astronaut John Crichton, who winds up on another living alien ship with another band of criminals. These include the semi-human former Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black), who Crichton has an epic love affair with; Ka D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), a Luxan warrior with strange facial features; the plant-woman Zhaan (Virginia Hey); and two characters played by puppets, the squid-like Pilot (voiced by Lani Tupu) and the arrogant Dominar Rygel XVI (voiced by Jonathan Hardy). For a season they're chased by a revenge-seeking Peacekeeper Captain named Crais (Tupi again), later by the half-lizard Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), who wants John's wormhole knowledge.

Both Lexx and Farscape feature super-powered ships created by tyrannical governments where our heroes are outsiders being persecuted by supposedly legitimate governments. There's no sense that space is a utopian final frontier where liberal dreams can be pursued.

Perhaps the most iconic show in this genre is Firefly (200203). In it Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), an erstwhile Han Solo-style smuggler captain, leads a crew of eight civilians with various motivations, ranging from making enough money to survive to avoiding the clutches of the Alliance, which governs the central planets of two solar systems this space western takes place in. The world of Firefly is a direct parallel to America after the Civil War, where Union Blue and Confederate Grey are replaced by Alliance Purple and Independent Brown, with the rebels losing in both cases.

Though there are hints of an incipient intersectional feminism here the four female crew are all "strong female characters", with Zoe (Gina Torres) clearly dominating her husband Wash (Alan Tudyk, the pilot), and the unstable River Tam (Summer Glau) seeming to have psychic superpowers there is still a sense of balance of skills between crew members of diverse identities. But the world of Firely is no utopia: the technology is partly a return to the primitive world of horses and six-shooters, while our heroes spend more time escaping the law than exploring new frontiers.

Lastly, Andromeda (200005) deserves a brief mention as a sort of hybrid between the rogue ship and Star Trek motifs. The crew of the Andromeda are the typical misfits seen in other rogue ship series there's the shady smuggler captain Beka Valentine (Lisa Ryder), the Nietzschean warrior Tyr Anasazi (Keith Hamilton Cobb), the unstable techhead Seamus Harper (Gordon Michael Wolvett), and the catlike purple alien Trance Gemini (Laura Betram). But presiding over them all is Captain Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo), who wants to use his powerful ship to re-establish the long-dead Systems Commonwealth, a stand-in for the Federation. Though it's widely agreed that Andromeda's writing fell apart after its second season, it presents an interesting combination of utopian and dystopian visions of the future.

Starting in 2003 and still in play is the turn in sci-fi television from exploring the final frontiers of outer space to the internal frontiers of genetics and digital networks. As for the former, the Canadian show Orphan Black (20132017) starred Tatiana Maslany as a series of clones created by the Dyad Institute. These clones, who are scattered across the world, slowly discover themselves over the first season or two, and agree to band together to discover who is out to kill them. The main character is the English punk Sarah, who witnesses the suicide of one of her clones, a cop named Beth, in a subway station. She decides to impersonate her.

There are numerous threats to the clones' well being: Beth's boyfriend Paul (Dylan Bruce), who is really a plant by Dyad; Dr. Aldous Leekie (Matt Frewer), the Neolutionist spokesman of Dyad; the evil clone Rachel, who works for Dyad; and the murderous Ukrainian clone Helena, who has been brainwashed by a religious cult into think that cloning is sacrilege. This show rarely strays from advanced technologies, and presents a model of civil society where anything goes as long as you have money and power. It also buys into the intersectional fantasy that most straight white men are corrupt or evil, but at least balances this with plenty of evil women.

On the other hand, Channel 4's Black Mirror (2011-now) presents a world about 15-minutes into the future where contemporary or advanced technologies create an episodic series of dystopias where one or more new devices ruin people's lives. Most episodes simply amplify the technologies we're already addicted to in our daily lives cell phones, computers, video games, social media, virtual reality to see their impact on the lives of the episode's characters. For example, in 1.3 "The Entire History of You", Liam Foxwell (Toby Kebbell) becomes obsessed with replaying audio-visual recordings made by the "Grains" implanted in his and his wife Fee's (Jodie Whitaker) heads, leading him to tracking down her infidelity with the slimy Jonas, and the fact that he may not be the father of their child. The episode imagines a society where everyone is always recording everything that happens around them, unable to forget past slights and painful experiences.

In 3.1 "Nosedive", the culture is addicted to a Yelp-like personal ratings app that determines your status and access to goods, which turns most citizens into superficial conformist clones. Those who refuse are socially cancelled, or in extreme cases imprisoned. Charlie Brooker's series confirms Michel Foucault's notion that a Panopticon may be an efficient method of surveillance, but it's crippling to the human spirit.

Finally, the best sci-fi series of the naughties, Battlestar Galatica (200309), combines these two themes. In the opening mini-series 12 human colonies named after zodiac signs are attacked by the long-absent Cyclons, sentient robots who have developed a way of replicating human beings almost perfectly (though they only make 12 models). Fleeing the devastation, a rag-tag fleet of civilian ships lead by what we assume is the last surviving battlestar, the Galactica, seeks out the 13th colony, Earth.

Commanded by the gruff Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos), this aircraft carrier in space survived by not being networked to the fleet, and thus avoiding a computer virus that allowed the Cylons to disable the other colonial warships. Packed full of hotshot pilots such as Adama's son Lee AKA Apollo (Jamie Bamber), Starbuck (re-envisioned from the 1978 series as female, played by Katee Sackoff), and Boomer (Grace Park), the colonials are on constant watch for the enemy within -- Cylons posing as humans, of which there are many.

Though there is an element of discovery, the weapons are contemporary (guns, missiles and nukes), and the politics dystopian and conspiratorial. It was the perfect series for post-9/11 America. The last vestiges of Adama and President Roslin's (Mary McDonnell) liberal sentiments are tested over and over, as in "Pegasus" when a second battlestar appears captained by the ruthless Commander Cain (Michelle Forbes). The crew of the Pegasus regularly torture Cylon prisoners for information, refusing to acknowledge them as sentient beings, as part of the savage war against the "toasters".

Somewhere around 2013 a relatively new political ideology swept across university campuses, leftist political parties, and the mainstream mass media. It has different names, though I'll call it "intersectionalism", or simply woke politics. It claims that Western societies are racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic patriarchies where people are divided into groups bitterly fighting for power, some of them oppressors, some of them oppressed. Individual identities, thoughts, and actions no longer matter. If you were in a victim group, you should be given wealth, status and power; if you were an oppressor, you should accept your collective guilt and atone for your group's past sins in some sort of quasi-religious ritual. Though some refer to it as "liberalism", it has no concern for traditional liberal values such as freedom of speech (see Twitter for evidence), as it cancels its enemies through social media hate campaigns and takes a supremacist rather than inclusive approach to sexual and racial equality.

Woke ideology has spread like a virus throughout sci-fi television since 2017, when Jodie Whitaker became the first female Doctor on BBC's long-running series Doctor Who, and the stories ramped up the social justice themes started in Peter Capaldi's run on the show. Rather than fun explorations of weird alien species and worlds powered by an inclusive romanticism, the show became a preachy series of moral lessons for recalcitrant toxic males.

Star Trek: Discovery - Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham (IMDB)

The social justice virus metastasized rapidly throughout the casting, scripts, and direction of Star Trek: Discovery that same year. For the first time a Trek series focused on a single character, Michael Burnham, a Mary Sue-style "strong black woman" who can do no wrong, despite staging a mutiny against her captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) and starting a war with the Klingons in the opening episode. She is eventually charged with her crimes, but is let off by Star Fleet to help them win the Klingon war she started. Burnham is continually praised by her crewmates, despite being arrogant and insufferable and making huge mistakes. She is an intersectional fantasy.

To make things worse, until Anson Mount's Captain Pike appears in season two, all the straight men on the show are either quickly killed off Admiral Anderson (Terry Serpico) in the opening battle, a mansplainer named Connolly (Sean Affleck) in the opening episode of season 2 or turn out to be villains Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) is a surgically altered Klingon spy, while Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) is a violent neofascist refugee from the mirror universe. The Klingons 3.0 seen in the series are given a bizarre orc-like appearance whose mantra "Remain Klingon" is an admitted dig at President Trump.

This banal allegory will have all the staying power of acid-washed jeans. Gone is the canonical view of the Klingons as honour-bound warriors: they are now a thinly-veiled allegory for white nationalism. To make things worse, Burnham becomes the narcissistic center of the whole "red angel" time-travel plot in the second season, since the universe isn't big enough to contain her ego, though she saves it anyways.

Added to the magical politics of the show are magical technologies, devices that not only destroy the Star Trek canon, but make no narrative or scientific sense. Chief among these is the Tardigrade drive, which hooks up the ship's engines to a giant bug which allows it to instantaneously travel to anywhere in the known universe, powered by mushroom spores, moving through an inter-stellar network of fungus roots. Besides wrecking Star Trek continuity and any sense of exploring a distant frontier which is, after all, only a bug-jump away it turns out that CBS probably stole the idea of a spore drive from an indie video game developer named Anas Abdin, whose 2014 game Tardigrades contains not only characters suspiciously similar to Burnham, engineer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), Dr. Hugh Cubler (Wilson Cruz), and Ensign Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman), but an almost identical spore drive.

This idea of magical technology is repeated in the current (2020) series Star Trek Picard, from a similar production team headed by Alex Kurtzman. So far we've learned about androids made entirely of flesh that can leap like Superman through the air, a forensic machine that can scan a room for past events, a magical Borg gate that can transport its users anywhere in the galaxy, a set of brass knuckles that can repair machines with the power of imagination, and the fact that an entire artificial brain can be re-constituted from a single positron. Picard continues the post-millennial theme in popular culture of preferring magic to science, in keeping with intersectionalism's rejection of the biological basis of sex, the structural basis of grammar, the logical basis of philosophy, and the market basis of capitalist economics.

The writing in the show is once again sloppy Admiral Picard is somehow held responsible for the loss of millions of Romulans after their sun goes supernova, despite the vastness of the Romulan Empire and fleet, and the fact that the rescue fleet being built on Mars is destroyed by rebel sentient androids. Set against Picard's feeble and guilt-laden character are a series of strong women the super-powered android twins Dahj and Soshi (Isa Briones), the Star Fleet security chief Commodore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita), the ever-whining Raffi (Michelle Hurd), the sinister Romulan agent Narissa (Peyton List), the brilliant scientist Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) only partly alleviated by Santiago Cabrera's suave and funny Captain Rios. Once again it's a rogue ship theme, this time with the mission of saving a single android. No final frontiers or inclusive liberalism here.

The Expanse (2015) - Steven Strait as Jim Holden (Photo by Syfy/Shane Mahood/Syfy - 2016 Syfy Media, LLC / IMDB)

To end on a positive note, the best sci-fi series of the last decade is The Expanse, like most of the superior post-1995 sci-fi series filmed in Canada. Though it does make most of the villains white males, it returns in part to Star Trek's inclusive liberalism on the bridge of the Rocinante, with a nice balance between the visionary captain James Holden (played with dignity by Steven Strait), the thuggish Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), the charismatic Martian pilot Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar), and the warm and sympathetic "Belter" Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper).

In it, our solar system is divided between a United Earth, the Mars Congressional Republic, and the rough-and-ready inhabitants of the asteroid belt and outer colonies, who form the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA). All are threatened by an alien "proto-molecule"m which takes over the Eros station and travels to Venus, where it creates a stargate that is launched toward Uranus. The science is realistic in terms of gravity creation, space travel, and weaponry, although the actions of the proto-molecule are mysterious. Though at heart a return to the rogue ship theme, there are hints of utopian dreams in the Martian attempt to terraform the planet, the OPA's attempt at independence, and the urge to explore new worlds now accessible through the alien-created stargate. The Expanse represents a firing of the retro-rockets on sci-fi television's crash into woke dystopias. Stay tuned for more.

This essay was originally presented at a science fiction club in London, Ontario, Canada.

Excerpt from:

From the Enterprise to the Discovery: The Decline and Fall of Utopian Technology and the Liberal - PopMatters

In Canada, there have been regular attempts to link Canadian gun organizations with the NRA, accusing legal gun owners of infiltrating government to form corrupt and unsafe firearms legislation. Yet, despite the allegations, tangible proof has been conspicuously absent from these claims. Until now. But its not from the group youd expect:

Canadas anti-gun lobby was recently caught engaging in this behavior.

In light of recent gun ban measures announced by Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair and firearms sales reaching an all-time high over societal fears of the COVID-19 virus, its a good time to revisit Canadas most infamous gun scandal in order reveal how backdoor dealings with an MP from the Liberal Party of Canada and the unethical actions of Canadas largest anti-gun lobby group continue to shape federal firearms legislation.

The Canadian Firearms Advisory Council (CFAC) advises the federal government on firearms policy. CFAC is supposed to represent gun owners and unlicensed civilians alike. Its a complex task, as there is a great deal of misinformation in the public sphere about firearms. For example, StatsCan shows gun ownership is way up, yet homicide is down. Government research proves Canadian gun owners are less likely to commit homicide, yet continue to be portrayed as a threat. The low homicide rate makes practical sense once you learn Canadian gun owners are screened daily by law enforcement.

The data has become a major problem for extreme activist group PolySeSouvient. The organization is starved for Canadian statistics to support their anti-gun position. Year after year, poly has been forced to rely on decades old high-profile shooting incidents and victim testimony in an attempt to manipulate public emotion due to Statscan releasing numbers which continually assert Canadian firearms ownership is extremely safe.

Senate committee hearings last year revealed Canada has 2.2 million licensed gun owners, yet over the previous decade, only 169 homicides involved a legal gun owner, leaving no substantial or plausible link between gun ownership and homicide. While any shooting event is certainly tragic, data from RCMP and StatsCan reveals that most of Canadas firearms problems stem from criminal gang violence, not gun ownership.

So, after years working with PolySeSouvient (Poly Remembers, made in memory of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of 1989) and receiving sympathetic exposure from biased media outlets, it seemed as if Nathalie Provosts efforts finally hit pay dirt in 2017 when she was appointed as vice chair of CFAC by the Trudeau Liberals.

Provosts appointment was met with suspicion by many Canadians due to work shes done the anti-gun lobby since 2010. Shes also a shooting victim, of the aforementioned Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. CFAC appointees are required to remain impartial, recusing themselves from lobbyist activity while appointed.

Special treatment of vice-chair Provost was seen almost immediately after she strangely refused to learn existing Canadian firearms law by refusing to take the Canadians Firearms Safety course. She was personally excused from this practical measure by Canadas former Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who claimed it was insensitive and inappropriate for her.

Unfortunately, the concerns surrounding Provosts appointment became justified after an ATIP request initiated by Tracey Wilson of the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights uncovered the infamous mandate letter in which Provost was identified as a Member and Spokesperson for her former anti-gun colleagues:

It seems Provost was eager to flex her new powers as vice-chair. The communication was sent to Ralph Goodale mere months after her appointment to CFAC, a direct violation of her mandate to refrain from lobbyist activity. Credit to Wilson here for predicting Provosts behavior and catching her almost immediately.

In the subsequent fallout, Provost was investigated by the federal lobbying commissioner. Despite public outrage, she managed to avoid disciplinary action due to a legal technicality: no evidence could be found that she was paid or compensated directly by Poly. Sound familiar?

Yet, its hard not to see a glaring conflict of interest here. Whether she was paid for her actions or not, the evidence is damning. Free lobbyist activity is still lobbyist activity, and the document clearly favours Polys organizational goals, not CFACs. No other group aside from Poly was consulted in the recommendation letter. It was neither submitted nor co-developed by CFAC. The letter came directly from PolySeSouvient with Provosts signature. Why was she still working with Poly nearly a year after being appointed to vice-chair?

Before we get to the meat of the letter, its important to note Provost later resigned from her position on CFAC in public outrage, claiming the liberals were too timid on assault-style guns, that her consultations were obviously useless. A revealing insight into Provosts mindset, corroborating the accusations of bias she faced during her investigation.

As for Ralph Goodale, due to his riding in Saskatchewan having many gun owners, he failed to win re-electiononly to be resurrected via an outrageous boutique hire by the Trudeau government.

Lets examine the key portion of Provosts mandate: Ive highlighted items in yellow which have already come into partial or full effect. Items in orange are currently being proposed through a rumored OIC.

Provosts public tantrum and subsequent resignation is baffling. A full six out of the eight items she requested were either partially imposed through RCMP bulletin or legislated via Bill C-71. Fast forward to 2020 with Justin Trudeaus proposed OIC gun confiscation, something he promised never to do, and it makes the final tally eight-out-of-eight, a perfect score for Provosts impartial recommendations.

Some gun owners may argue #7 came into effect in 1978 when full auto rifles were banned with bill C-51, however the slang term assault weapon is rhetoric used by anti-gun lobbyists which has no true meaning I am aware of. As such, my feelings are that imaginary objects cant be banned.

Regardless, this was a highly successful attempt (despite the unethicality) at lobbying our government. Canadas 2.2 million gun owners were completely ignored regarding this legislation, even after public consultation and senate committee hearings came back heavily against Bill C-71. The whole affair stinks to high heaven. It makes one wonder how often this corrupt dynamic occurs on other issues in the Canadian political landscape, yet slip through unnoticed.

Item number two of the mandate is a direct request to forbid marketing of the Canadian Firearms Safety Training. Its absurd. Why would an organization which claims to be devoted to public safety, want to discourage Canadians from taking safety training?

One hypothesis is that Canadas anti-gun lobby is trying to limit and impede the firearms licensing process. Canadas federally mandated safety courses are a prerequisite for licensing. By making it difficult to discover and enroll in safety courses, it could slow gun adoption rates. Also, citizens who take the CFSC and CRFSC are immediately made aware that Canada already has significant and severe gun control measures in place.

Gun owners are tested extensively on firearms legislation, becoming intimate with storage, transport, and usage laws through four separate examinationstwo written and two practical. After completion, graduates often realize terminology and discussions surrounding firearms in the media are frequently based on hyperbole.

Its hard to convince informed individuals more gun control is necessary once they learn their pistol is not only magazine limited, but federally registered and must be locked inside a secure case, with an additional trigger lock inside, and even then can only be used at a gun range which requires additional training and annual cost.

Unfortunately, It would seem the Liberal government may be trying to pre-emptively enforce this measure by closing the Canadian Firearms Program during the COVID Crisis, halting new firearms applications in Canada until further notice which means until Miramichi is re-opened, Canadians cant get a new gun license.

Mandate number seven from Provosts infamous letter references assault weapons designed for killing humans.

However, Canadas licensing process tests knowledge for every class of firearm available on the Canadian Market. Technical specifications, function and safe handling of assault weapons or military style semi-automatics is nowhere to be found in the course or testing because neither is a real classification of firearm.

Which brings us to today.

The language in Provosts letter is deliberately dishonest. Its an attempt to fool the general public, by using hyperbolic definitions. It seems Canadas anti-gun lobbyists are interested in creating a new firearms classification which is not based on technical specification, ballistic performance or function. By seeking a vague umbrella term worded to frighten the public, they are creating a generic label to ban any firearm they dislike in the future.

This approach was tried in New Zealand last year with disastrous results. Noncompliance is rampant. The new legislation criminalizes hundreds of thousands of gun owners with no violent history. Worse, the small percentage of gun owners who actually did choose to comply were rewarded with a massive data breach that gifted criminals with all their personal info and addresses exposing thousands to potential firearms theft. Its an absolute nightmare. New Zealand is in a far more dangerous position with respect to criminal firearms risk than a year ago. Lets not forget the shooter came from Australia, a country with similar gun laws in place.

Ultimately, what we have brewing here by Poly and the Liberals is a billion dollar solution to a manufactured problem, using sleazy back door channels to implement corrupt legislation with no debate, consultation or vote in the house of commons.

See the rest here:

How the anti-gun lobby infiltrated the Liberal government - The Post Millennial

It appears that Benny Gantz is going to fold right in with Benjamin Netanyahu to undertake annexation of the West Bank, or large portions thereof.

This is a huge blow to liberal Zionists who counted on Gantz as head of a centrist anti-Netanyahu party to move Israel away from the settlement project. Now hes doing the opposite. The insult was redoubled when Amir Peretz, the leader of the Labor Party, with all of three members of parliament, announced that he was joining forces with Gantz.

Bottom line, there is no political force in Israeli Jewish politics for ending the occupation. The only force inside Israel against occupation is the Joint List of Palestinian legislators; and theyre not allowed anywhere near government.

Yesterday on a J Street Zoom conference, two alarmed Israelis were imploring Democratic politicians to warn Israel that if it continues on this course, it will alienate the Democratic Party and undermine bipartisan consensus for Israel. In other words, Democrats should be threatening Israel with actual reductions of aid if Israel continues on this course.

But liberal Zionists never endorsed such threats over 25 years of Israeli expansion and feckless peace processing.

The obvious question about this liberal political disaster is: How did the liberal Zionists get it so wrong? These people hate the occupation, as a threat to the two-state solution. They have documented the abuses of occupation for 20 years. Yet why did everything they did to stop the occupation fail?

The answer is that liberal Zionists mistrusted the left more than they did the Zionist right. They were happy to argue the question with the Zionist right, in a spirit of Jewish solidarity (and lose again and again).

They didnt even allow the left in the room. Because much of the left is anti-Zionist. And in the end, liberal Zionists really believe in the need for a Jewish state more than an end to the occupation.

So the only tool that could have stopped Israel economic/symbolic global pressure through the nonviolent Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement the liberal Zionists wanted nothing to do with. They ran numerous campaigns denouncing BDS. They supported legislation that says BDS is antisemitic.

The rightwing Israeli government is terrified of BDS. Benjamin Netanyahu rails against it as an existential threat, as undermining Israels reputation. Israel spends millions to combat it and rightwing Israel lobby groups spend millions here to fight it and try to make BDS illegal. Liberal Zionists largely joined the fight of its rightwing friends. Because many BDSers are against a Jewish state, and that was the number one priority for liberal Zionists. Liberal Zionists said the BDS campaign was against the self-determination of the Jewish people.

So even though liberal Zionists hated the occupation they became patsies for the occupation. Here are some of their tactical collapses:

They said that Israel responded to love not pressure, look at Bill Clinton and Camp David, so we shouldnt pressure Israel and make her feel insecure.

They said that it was ok to talk about possibly conditioning aid to Israel that paid for the demolition of Palestinian villages, as Jeremy Ben-Ami said last October. But that $4 billion in aid must never be reduced. J Street doesnt think there is a reason for to reduce the level of the aid.

They said that political support for Israel must remain bipartisan. They did not want the aid politicized.

They said that they would rather have the company of rightwing Zionists than anti-Zionists. Americans for Peace Now is on the board of AIPAC. J Street invites a lot of conservative American Zionists to speak, but never an anti-Zionist Jew (though some young ones slip through the cracks).

The liberal Zionists tried to redline anti-Zionism because they were concerned that anti-Zionist pressure would empower Palestinians who dont believe in a Jewish state, and the result would be a one-state nightmare, bloody rollercoaster, as someone once put it, and possibly some implementation of the right of return under which Palestinian refugees or their descendants would get back homes and property stolen from them during the Nakba. Liberal Zionists were terrified of the right of return, which is a pillar of the BDS campaign, because it threatens the Jewish majority in Israel, and was thought to destabilize Israel. Though as even Leanne Gale pointed out in a rare anti-Zionist dissent at a J Street conference, the two-state solution called for addressing the right of return, and the real fear was BDSs call for equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

And I actually think thatthatmay be the most threatening plank of the BDS movement to many of us in the American Jewish community. Because it really gets to the heart of Zionism itself. It really gets to the heart of, Do we believe deep down, that there can be a Jewish and democratic state?

The liberal Zionists are Jewish organizations, and in the end they respected conservative codes of Jewish solidarity: Jewish collective support for the Jewish state, because 95 percent of American Jews are for Israel. Jews must speak in one voice in Washington, because our support is existential, we hold the breathing tube for Israel in the courts of the superpower.

And so the one tool that Israel fears, international pressure, the liberal Zionists refused to support. The tool that liberals used so effectively in the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa to fight systemic racism, liberal Zionists worked against.

And look what they got, one apartheid state. That Israel no longer has a political constituency for a genuine 2 state solution or ending Israeli occupation is the most under-reported and under-analyzed realities in all Middle East policy analyses, writes Khaled Elgindy of Brookings.

The calls to punish Israel now for the colonization of the West Bank are too little too late. Theres one sovereign in Israel and Palestine, Israeli leaders are all for the occupation, and they all take American support for granted. As well they should. The liberal Zionists were all talk and no action.

See original here:

Liberal Zionists couldnt end the occupation because they feared equality more than Israeli right - Mondoweiss

OTTAWA MPs will have to get back to work in Ottawa, before employers will get the funds from a massive $71-billion wage subsidy program the Liberals announced last week, but opposition parties say theyre prepared to work with the government to get the bill through.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed Tuesday parliament would have to return and pass the bill before the program could be implemented.

That does require us to move forward on parliamentary legislation and thats what were talking about right now with parliamentarians, he said outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa.

The proposed wage-subsidy program is broader than the measures in earlier legislation to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, which was passed on March 25.

That legislation was passed through a special sitting of Parliament with just a fraction of MPs present, in order to reduce the possible spread of the virus. The bill originally contained a number of provisions, including some that would have given the Liberals unlimited tax-and-spend powers until the end of 2021, that led to a standoff in Parliament and a marathon negotiating session.

The original wage subsidy program in the March bill only covered 10 per cent of an employees wages and there were several other restrictions. The new program, as proposed in the draft copy of the bill the National Post obtained, is much broader with a subsidy of up to 75 per cent.

While there is no agreed time for Parliament to return yet, all sides are negotiating with the aim to do so soon. Once an agreement is reached, Speaker Anthony Rota would have to give a minimum 48-hours notice to recall the House.

Liberal House leader Pablo Rodrguez provided a copy of the new bill to opposition parties Monday evening, hoping to deal with potential issues in advance.

We really did have problems the last time and so there was a lot of concern and skepticism

Conservative House leader Candice Bergen said they were concerned the new legislation would have similar issues to the previous bill, but so far it appears to do only what the government said it would.

We really did have problems the last time and so there was a lot of concern and skepticism, she said. It is more in the spirit of what the government said they were going to be doing.

As currently written, businesses will be able to claim the subsidy as long as they can demonstrate they have suffered at least a 30 per cent drop in revenue and will be able to measure that either against revenues from 2019 or from January and February of this year.

Bergen said the Conservative have some tweaks they want to make to the legislation, but generally they want to see the program up and running.

We want to get people the support that they need, she said. We want the money out to people as soon as possible.

NDP House leader Peter Julian said theyre also skeptical after the previous experience and want to ensure the bill is as advertised.

We are going through it with a fine-tooth comb, he said.

Passing the legislation through the House of Commons normal process would take more than a week. The government is aiming to pass the legislation with unanimous consent, which could be done in an afternoon. Bergen and Julian said all sides are now working out the details of that process.

Julian said the NDP wants to see the Canada Emergency Response Benefit improved, because it currently misses many people.

A third of jobless dont have access to the benefit, people really need those supports.

Julian said his party would prefer a universal benefit paid to everyone as some governments have done rather than the current benefit that only applies to certain people.

I am hearing from families that are really struggling to put food on the table and they need the kind of response that we have seen in other countries.

I dont think we are coming in there with an our way or the highway mentality

Julian said he is confident all parties can come to a resolution.

I see good faith on all sides and I am confident and optimistic that we will be able to resolve these issues.

The Conservatives have also made suggestions to improve the governments response to COVID-19, including a refund of GST businesses have collected in the last six months and reversing an increase to the federal carbon tax that came in this month.

Bergen said the Conservatives do see room for negotiation, but dont intend to impede the wage subsidy.

I dont think we are coming in there with an our way or the highway mentality.

But, she added, the Conservatives expect the same flexibility from the government in return.

If Parliament is to be recessed for an extended time frame Conservatives want some mechanism for holding the government to account, she said.

We also would like the opportunity on an ongoing basis to ask the ministers questions, to ask the prime minister questions.

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com | Twitter:

Originally posted here:

COVID-19 crisis: Opposition ready to work with Liberals on new wage-subsidy bill - National Post

Ten days ago the big news from Israel was that Benny Gantz was abandoning his opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu amid the coronavirus emergency and they were moving to form a unity government of former rivals, with a strong and all-Jewish majority: Netanyahus rightwing bloc of 58 seats + 15 or so of Gantzs shattered centrist Blue White party.

Now the days pass and no Israeli government! Why not? The news from Israel is that Netanyahu is negotiating under a lot of pressure from his right wing to use the Trump window, which may be closing soon, to annex the West Bank; and Gantz has folded. The main stumbling block to a new government are judiciary issues touching on Netanyahus indictment.

It seems sadly we are inching closer an closer to a reality we have worked hard to prevent, Adina Vogel-Ayalon of J Street said today: what liberal Zionists call annexation, but the right calls sovereignty (and the left calls the one-state reality).

Nancy Pelosi needs to act now and call Benny Gantz to head off the possibility, Tal Shalev of Walla News told a J Street webinar.

Shalev that Netanyahu has had a brilliant month politically and Gantz has folded again and again on negotiations over annexation, so that today it seems his Blue-White partner Gabi Ashkenazi is the only real block to annexation. Shalev said the agreement-in-progress between Gantz and Netanyahu for a new governing coalition gives Netanyahu authority and power to move ahead with annexation whenever he wants while consulting with Gantz and consulting with the international community. Consultation means nothing, Shalev said. Gantz will say that there are some limitations, but it seems like thats more of a mask, and it seems that Gantz acceded to all Netanyahus demands on annexation.

Gantz tried to block annexation but failed repeatedly as Netanyahu said forget about it, Shalev said.

Gantzs political difficulty is that there is a solid (all-Jewish) majority in the Knesset for annexation, and Trump is for anything Israel wants to do, so the moment is now. Netanyahu has a strong hand because Gantz already gave up his political capital; coronavirus has made Netanyahu a popular emergency leader and; Netanyahu can always hold out for a fourth election in which his chances are even better, given the breakup of Gantzs Blue White party.

Nimrod Novik, a foreign policy veteran, told J Street that negotiations are changing by the minute, but the latest terms are for a three-month freeze till July 10, on annexation.

On top of that, Netanyahu got good news today when Amir Peretz of Labor, who commands three seats, said he will join the Netanyahu bloc for annexation. So Gantz has lost political capital on the supposed liberal-Zionist side to stop Netanyahu.

Labor is officially a dead party. Amir Peretz merged his three seats into Gantzs Blue-White party, reports Lahav Harkov.

Novik lamented that annexation has gone from the whims of a messianic minority a few years ago to being all but Israeli policy. Its unbelievable. And even limited annexation will end almost inevitably with us controlling the entire territory and the 2.6 million Palestinians.

Though Netanyahu hasnt annexed any territory in ten years, the pro-annexation forces are inside his Likud party, not just on the far right.

Trump-joy contributes to the moment, because Israelis have gotten the feeling that they are invincible and can do anything they want and there are no consequences, Shalev says. Benny Gantz was so afraid of this feeling that he never came out against annexation in the recent campaign, met with Trump on friendly terms, and never presented a strong alternative to annexation.

Liberal Zionists regard annexation as a disaster because it would officially end the two-state solution in the eyes of the world. Besides presenting Israel with a whole set of security challenges related to the loss of a puppet authority, the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank, and the potential loss of Jordanian cooperation with Israel on Palestines eastern border and on the Haram-al-Sharif too, or Temple Mount in occupied Jerusalem.

Novik called on Democrats in the United States to act: Youd better act to deter this. Threaten Israel with the end of bipartisan support for Israel among Democrats and Republicans, by doing things we wont be able to accept, and maybe politicians will wake up.

Why doesnt Nancy Pelosi pick up the phone, call Benny Gantz? Shalev said, and tell him, This could be very, very dangerous. That would be more substantial pressure, with all my due respect to the liberal Zionists who are threatening Israel with consequences. Start communicating with Gantz as a real player.

While Novik said that thecost of annexation would be 52 billion shekels a year to Israel, or about $12 billion, four times the American security assistance. Let that sink in, Novik says.

Liberal Zionists are treating this as an emergency. The Israel Policy Forum board of directors implored Gabi Ashkenazi and Benny Gantz not to join a government that will annex territory in the West Bank. IPF writes as proud Zionists who have devoted our lives to supporting Israel.

We write to you as American Jewish communal leaders who are proudly Zionist, unquestionably pro-Israel, and who have devoted our lives to supporting the State of Israel and ensuring an ironclad relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

In the midst of this unprecedented health and financial crisis for Israel, we respectfully urge you not to use the need for unity in the face of emergency to create a different crisis for Israel by moving forward on unilateral annexation.

The IPF says that annexation would really wreck the relationship with American Jews (who have become more and more distant from the Jewish state):

Should annexation be advanced, the majority of American Jews who oppose such a policy will feel more alienated from Israel as a result. Just as we expect that our own government focus on the crisis at hand without using the fear and uncertainty felt by Americans to push through harmful and unrelated policies, we ask that the leaders of the Jewish state to which we are all so committed do the same.

The foreign policy establishment in the U.S. is also responding. Colin Kahl formerly of the Obama administration:

Even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, theres growing concern that the right wing in Israel will push for annexation, perceiving a shrinking window to do so. Doing so would be profoundly unjust, costly, & dangerous. It would also jeopardize bipartisan US support for Israel.

Read more here:

Gantz and Netanyahu reportedly agree on annexing West Bank and liberal Zionists appeal to Pelosi - Mondoweiss

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (WAVY) Huntington Ingalls Industries, owner of the Newport News Shipbuilding division, announced on Thursday that the company has updated and extended its liberal leave policy due to the continued spread of the coronavirus.

The updates will begin Monday, April 6 and be enterprise-wide. The leave is designed to allow flexibility and additional options for employees who need to make arrangements for families, child care, business closures, and any other planning needed due to the coronavirus.

The updated and extended policy defines the following situations as eligible for liberal leave:

The company released that employees who fall into one or more of the categories may be eligible for unemployment insurance by applying through the employees state agency.

Newport News Shipbuilding released that it plans to have the liberal leave in effect until at least April 30. Information on NNSs liberal leave documentation process can be found online.

The policy follows along with the recently passed Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to expand financial lifelines for individuals and their families, according to a statement released. At HII, we have been following the CARES Act closely and have decided to modify our liberal leave policy in response to the acts unemployment insurance ruling to provide greater options for our employees and their families.

Read more about Newport News Shipbuilding daily coronavirus updates.

See the article here:

Huntington Ingalls updates and extends liberal leave policy for Newport News Shipbuilding and other divisions - WAVY.com

While coronavirus ravages the globe and hits all major financial capitals, it is dawning on the common man that the capitalist ideology and liberalism has failed to rise to the occasion and this fair weather friend called capitalism is an anathema to the word humanity.

Interestingly, it is also becoming apparent that states like China, with central control and disciplined populations, are more suitable to fight pandemics like Coronavirus. Some of the so-called mature democracies like the US and European countries as well as noisy ones like India have not only failed to come out with a cohesive response but also resorted to gimmickry and deflection. The recent example of Indian PM Modi asking 1300 million Indians to come out in their balconies and clap and light candles is testimony to this absurdity. Someone from Dharawi Slum in Mumbai, the largest slum in Asia, asked PM Modi through social media with three families living in a hundred square foot room, where should they find a balcony.

As per Wikipedia, economic liberalism is a political and economic philosophy based on strong support for a market economy and private property in the means of production. Although economic liberals can also be supportive of government regulation to a certain degree, they tend to oppose government intervention in the free market when it inhibits free trade and open competition.

As an economic system, economic liberalism is organised on individual lines, meaning that the greatest possible number of economic decisions are made by individuals or households rather than by collective institutions or organisations. An economy that is managed according to these precepts may be described as a liberal economy.

Adam Smith and his followers in the west advocated for economic liberalism, emphasising on free markets and private ownership of capital assets. Economic liberalism is also considered opposed to non-capitalist economic orders such as socialism and planned economies. It also contrasts with protectionism because of its support for free trade and open markets.

If economic liberalism was considered as a panacea to all problems faced by humanity, why did states intervene in Italy, Spain, France, US and even in South Asia and Africa to stem the tide of coronavirus, and, why did a socialist state like China fare better in this pandemic?

Since mainstream media in most democracies is controlled by vested corporate interests and the rich, the discussion on rights of the 99% vs the 1% rich does not take place openly. Coronavirus has exposed this nexus and its time to highlight it for the general public.

Foreign Policy magazine conducted a short survey, asking some leading thinkers and opinion makers to come out with their assessment on the impact of coronavirus on the New World Order.

Stephen M Walt believes that the pandemic will strengthen the state and reinforce nationalism. Governments of all types will adopt emergency measures to manage the crisis, and many will be loath to relinquish these new powers when the crisis is over. COVID-19 will also accelerate the shift in power and influence from West to East. South Korea and Singapore have responded best, and China has reacted well after its early mistakes. The response in Europe and America has been slow and haphazard by comparison, further tarnishing the aura of the Western brand.

Walt goes on to conclude that conflictive nature of world politics. Previous plagues including the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 did not end great-power rivalry nor usher in a new era of global cooperation. Neither will COVID-19. We will see a further retreat from hyper-globalisation, as citizens look to national governments to protect them and as states and firms seek to reduce future vulnerabilities.

In short, COVID-19 will create a world that is less open, less prosperous, and less free. It did not have to be this way, but the combination of a deadly virus, inadequate planning, and incompetent leadership has placed humanity on a new and worrisome path.

Robbin Niblett stated that it seems highly unlikely in this context that the world will return to the idea of mutually beneficial globalisation that defined the early 21st century. And without the incentive to protect the shared gains from global economic integration, the architecture of global economic governance established in the 20th century will quickly atrophy. It will then take enormous self-discipline for political leaders to sustain international cooperation and not retreat into overt geopolitical competition.

Getting closer to home in South Asia, we find the same failure of economic liberalism at play in India. On one side, India boasts billionaires and brainiacs, nuclear bombs, technology and democracy, whereas on the other, it conceals the fact that two-thirds of people in India live in poverty or on the margins.

Why is India getting exposed in her own people and the international media? For decades, India has remained on the top spot of countries with 70% population living below or on the margins of poverty line. Tens of millions of people remain destitute and thousands of farmers commit suicide each year. Nearly 40 percent of Indian children under 5 are short for their age, a sign of chronic under nutrition. Then it invented the witchcraft of playing with figures thus bluffing the Indian nation and the international community.

Indian Finance Minister announced a relief package worth Rs1.70 lakh crore to help the nations poor tackle the financial difficulties arising from Covid-19 outbreak. Under the relief package, at least 800 million poor people will be covered; this package will translate into an additional five kilos of rice/wheat for every individual for a period of one month.

Indian mega-slums like Dharawi are made up of millions of informal workers who run mega cities like Mumbai, these slums are without sufficient drinking water supply, without garbage disposal and in many cases without electricity. The richest 10% in India controls 80% of the nations wealth, according to a 2017 report by Oxfam. And the top 1% owns 58% of Indias wealth. (By comparison, the richest 1% in the United States owns 37% of the wealth). Another way to look at it: In India, the wealth of 16 people is equal to the wealth of 600 million people.

The coronavirus lockdown in India created a wave of poor and hapless people who were evicted from their work places and temporary homes by the rich, since they could not pay for their food and rent, the world witnessed a massive migration of approximately 10 million Indian marching for hundreds of kilometres to their villages, some of them dying on the roads. This March of Shame has actually become an epitaph on the grave of economic liberalism in India.

To conclude, economic liberalism has played havoc in developed and developing countries and has failed the test of our times; it has created a swamp of money in the hands of 1% super rich and the states have become hostage to these individuals and multinational corporations. The post-corona environment is definitely going to change how states and the people come up with a new social contract.

Adeela Naureen and

Umar Waqar

The authors are freelance journalists. They can be reached at adeelanaureen@gmail.com.

Originally posted here:

Coronavirus and economic liberalism - The Nation

On Tuesday, a host of liberal Twitterati which loves to see PM Narendra Modi with egg on his face lost its collective marbles in joy mind you when they thought the Modi government had allegedly buckled to Uncle Sams pressure and allowed the export of hydroxychloroquine after Trump threatened retaliation.

A host of individuals including top Congress leaders like Rahul Gandhi and Shashi Tharoor not to mention the literati on Twitter got super excited about Trumps retaliation and Modi supposedly buckling to pressure.

Some even got misty-eyed about the time when Indira Gandhi showed Richard Nixon his place.

The CPI(M) known for its love for Uncle Sam slammed Modis capitulation to brazen blackmail. This came despite the fact that India was already engaged in a discussion on HCQ supply after Trump and Modis speech.

For starters, Trumps retaliation comment came after a reported asked him questions. But more on that later.

Secondly, as explained by the Print editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta, among others, the outrage is misplaced if one accepts the true chronology of events.

Heres the dateline:

April 4 Trump calls Modi, say he has request Modi for HCQ that Uncle Sam had ordered, and admitted that India also needs a lot.

April 5 Roughly 4 AM IST Trump says he had another conversation with Modi and India will likely release the required HCQ and makes the retaliation comment.

Read the transcript:

Trump said: I dont like that decision. I didnt hear that that was his decision. I know that he stopped it for other countries. I spoke to him yesterday. We had a very good talk and well see whether or not that is. I would be surprised if he would because India does very well with the United States. For many years theyve been taken advantage of the United States on trade. So I would be surprised if that were his decision. Hed have to tell me that. I spoke to him Sunday morning, called him, and I said, wed appreciate your allowing our supply to come out. If he doesnt allow it to come out, that would be okay. But of course there may be retaliation. Why wouldnt there be? Yeah.

Now heres the real problem. Even before Trumps statement, several reports had already pointed out that India had agreed to lift the ban.

They were Mint, The Hindu and The Print. This occurred even before Trumps evening presser. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together who doesnt have an agenda can clearly see

But as the old saying goes, a lie can travel halfway across the world even before the truth can get its boot on. Now with Twitter, the lie doesnt even need to leave its house during quarantine.

The rest is here:

Sorry liberals, Modi didnt buckle to Trumps retaliation threat to export hydroxychloroquine heres the full story - Free Press Journal