I read yesterday where a reporter from The Atlantic referred to Substack as “the intellectual dark web.” The implication is that all writers, scholars, artists, and other philosophical thinkers who presently challenge the authoritarian Left’s hard turn towards a neo-Stalinist state, in which truth is decided by a central Prime Ministerial committee and disseminated by state-run media to the masses, from whom discussion, debate or dissent is neither required nor allowed, are compromised, wrong-thinking, subversives operating murkily in the shadows.
It would not even surprise me to learn that post-secondary institutions across North America, such as the one I used to work for as a tenured Communications Studies professor—great, taxpayer-funded institutions of mediocrity and indoctrination—have banned sites like Substack from their campuses in the name of diversity and safety. Soon they will burn their own libraries to protect us.
I wanted to write and clarify for the many new readers joining us since I weighed in with the truckers, that I am hard Left. I I have never voted Conservative. I will never vote Conservative. I would rather spoil a ballot with a bawdy caricature of Gore Vidal and Truman Capote tag-team fellating Pierre Poilevre than vote for Max Bernier. I have voted NDP or further left—Marxist-Leninist and Communist—in each federal election since 1992. My great-uncle Frank Snowsell served as CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) MLA in B.C. (The CCF became the NDP) and later served as the President of the NDP in BC.
These days, Frank Snowsell would never have made it as an NDP MLA or MP. The Snowsells were immigrant fruit farmers. Our family did not have the money—not anywhere close to it—now necessary to buy your way into a candidacy at the provincial or federal level for any of the three major political parties—including the NDP. Worse, he was a man. He represented no minority. Son of a bitch, had even served his country in the evil military. Plus, no money? The NDP would laugh him out the door if he showed up today.
Yet I fully support the truckers. The same truckers who get called Extreme Right by every media outlet in this country. So do many of my Leftist friends from all around the globe. The media does not tell you this. Many of the trucker supporters are racialized. The Canadian media either ignores this is or disparages them for betraying their tribe. Many of the trucker supporters are from the working class more generally. There are servers out there. Bartenders. Do you know that in B.C., and elsewhere in the country, many servers cannot dine in the same restaurants that employ them? Servers have no vaccine mandates. Restaurant customers do. Do you know that many of the people taking your I.D. at the door of your favourite brewery are unvaccinated Leftists? How can a mandate so unscientifically-applied actually merit shutting down legal strikes and protests by hard state force? How can any Leftist justify appealing to Bill Blair—the villain of the Toronto G7, the cop who made his fortune by legalizing cannabis…after securing his no-nonsense reputation by imprisoning tens of thousands of cannabis users for possession—to coerce cops to use greater violence on more citizens by threatening their salary if they don’t? Some joining the truckers are protesting Trudeau’s mishandling off the Fentanyl crisis—which has killed far more people than Covid ever came close to.
If you read the CBC you get the impression that the strikers are all yokel Christians. Here again, to readers new to portesaintmonty, I need to point out that I am on the record, repeatedly, as fucking hating modern North American Christianity—in almost all of its variations. But Canada is a country that offers religious freedom. To all. Even evangelical Christians. As such, they have a right to protest. The same as actual, real Leftists like myself do as well. And in the same way. The Left can block ports and railways. The Right can block borders and streets. Good for the goose, good for the gander. I don’t actually know what a gander is, but fuck yeah, I bet it’s good for it. Real good. And protests from the Right and the Left can find common ground any time they feel like it. If you are supporting or advocating state-sanctioned violence against protesters, you’re not of the Left. You should come up with a new name for yourselves.
Besides Uncle Frank, you know which other NDP OG would not be welcomed were he to reappear? Tommy Douglas. Are you fucking kidding me? A Christian farmer from the prairies? No way, Tommy Douglas would be told he was a racist just to be safe, and asked to vacate the premises. In all honesty, the protesters in Ottawa look and sound a lot more like Tommy Douglas’s NDP, a lot more like Frank Snowsell’s NDP, than anything Jagmeet Singh or John Horgan have ever assembled. Their NDP is more of a coalition of self-righteous, overly-paid public servants working hard to preserve their privilege on the backs of the actual working people they used to support, but no longer do.
