Some follow-ups on past posts.
First, the David Brooks meltdown experience continues.
A little bit of background.
Last week Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested for obstructing justice by concealing an illegal immigrant from federal agents. The alien, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was in Dugan’s courtroom for a pre-trial hearing for beating someone over loud music.
As the federal agents waited outside the courtroom for the hearing to end, in order to make their arrest, Dugan was tipped off to their presence. She left the courtroom, told the agents (who had a warrant) that they needed to speak to the chief judge, and when they left to do so, she escorted Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out through a side exit into a non-public part of the courthouse.
A judge obstructing federal agents with a valid warrant. A judge actively harboring a violent illegal immigrant who had re-entered the country after deportation. These are the publicly accepted facts, but not knowing them won’t stop Brooks from his appointed rounds of inciting civic unrest.
“Well, obviously, they’re trying to send a note of intimidation, not only to her, but to all judges and maybe to all Americans.
“But I don’t yet know the specific details of this case, whether she escorted the guy out the jury door or whether she led him. So that’s all murky. I don’t want to comment on this specific case.
“But especially on the issue of immigration, there are a lot of people who are appalled by what the administration is doing. And there will be times for civil disobedience. And, to me, if she — let’s say she did escort this guy out the door. If federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, that is two things.
“One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic. And in times of trouble, then people are sometimes called to do civil disobedience. And in my view, when people do civil disobedience, they have to pay the price. That’s part of the heroism of it, frankly.
“And so you can both think that she shouldn’t have legally done this and that morally protecting somebody against, maybe not even in this case, but in other cases, frankly, a predatory enforcement agency, sometimes, civil disobedience is necessary.”
So, for Brooks, Dugan is a cross between MLK and Harriet Tubman. Running an underground railroad for violent illegal immigrants through her own courtroom. Brooks is really going to do this, be the Major Kong and ride the civic uprising bomb all the way down.
Question for Brooks: Do we want judges breaking the law based on personal whim, especially in regard to law enforcement officers trying to protect the community?
How would his concepts of “civil disobedience” and “note of intimidation” apply to Biden’s Justice Department and its response to January 6th (the largest manhunt in American history)?
I want to see Brooks on Joe Rogan. I want to know more.
Second, today is Election Day in Canada.
I had always thought that Canadians should mix traditions, and given that the Stanley Cup playoffs and their elections last only a month or two, Canadian politicians should grow “playoff beards” between the dissolution of Parliament and Election Day. I think Chrystia Freeland with facial hair would be an improvement.
A quick refresher regarding Canadian politics. The main contenders are the Liberal Party led by Mark Carney and the Conservative Party led by Pierre Poilievre.
Carney got the job when the Liberals kicked the guy who was prime minister for the past 10 years, Justin Trudeau, to the curb. Carney has held the reins of more national banks (Canada and the UK) and has more passports (three) than he has held elected offices (zero).
Poilievre’s claim to fame is eating apples. His whole electoral strategy was based on the simple fact he wasn’t Justin Trudeau, and then when his main opponent was no longer Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre ‘s campaign collapsed.
Right now it looks like the Liberals are not only going to win but will increase their seats in Parliament. If they see their mandate through to 2029, it will mark the longest period of Canadian government held by one party in more than a century (thank you Joe Clark, IYKYK).
Canada’s reward from this election will not only be Prime Minister Carney, the faceless central banker who will fight Trump (I wonder what insults DJT is cooking up), but to continue the national decline of the previous 10 years.
One interesting thing that came out last week was the publicizing of a report released earlier this year by Policy Horizons Canada, the “strategic foresight” office for the federal government. The report (Future Lives: Social mobility in question) points to the growing danger that downward social mobility may be the norm, and paints a plausible scenario for what that means for the Canada of 2040 if present trends continue.
Poilievre picked up on the report and used it to bash the Liberals. Most of the media quickly jumped on him, stating that the report was merely presenting a scenario, not making a prediction. A distinction without a difference. The premises that the report lays out are valid and the scenario is all too plausible. This is what everyone should have been talking about for the entire election: about whether to give the party most responsible for this looming disaster (Liberals) another four years in office.
Instead, nothing.
Also Poilievre deserves to lose if only for ignoring the report until the last moment. The report came out nearly four months ago and is implicitly a condemnation of Liberal Party governance (the reason it’s hard to stay in power for 10+ years is that by that point you own every problem).
Poilievre failed one of the cardinal rules of politics (and business) which is to understand the possible before it becomes visible and therefore common wisdom, something Trump instinctually understands. Poilievre was handed the Election on a silver platter and he blew it, and Canada will be a very different place by 2029 because of it.
BTW… did I mention that Brooks is originally from Canada?
Third, some happy news.
Cam Skattebo got selected in last week’s NFL Draft.
I have written about the revelation of Skattebo before.
He rose from being a walk-on at FCS Sacramento State to being the most iconic ASU football player since Pat Tillman. A relatively small RB at 215 pounds he runs to contact, both delivering punishing blows to defenders and acting like a human pinball bouncing off of would-be tacklers. He delivered one of the greatest performances in FBS college football history during the 4th quarter of last year’s Peach Bowl game against Texas, personally willing ASU to overcome a 16-point deficit and almost winning the game in overtime.
Now he is going to be a New York Giant.
I don’t know what the NFL has in store for Skattebo. I hate the Giants, but I cannot think of a better place in the world for him to be a success than in New York. They will understand Cam at the same instinctual level we did in Arizona.
Good luck and hoping a great story continues. The world needs more Cam Skattebo and less David Brooks.
Fourth, I place a major part of our current discontent on Richard Montgomery, the failed conqueror of Canada and the namesake of Montgomery County (MD) More on that later in the week.
“Question for Brooks, do we want judges breaking the law based on personal whim especially in regard to law enforcement officers trying to protect the community? ”
Brooks is a living, breathing, walking and talking straw man, still in search of his Dorthy. I remember, from so long ago that even Rush Limbaugh thought of him as a conservative for a few minutes, considering something that he wrote just long enough for him to contradict himself. I have never made that mistake since.
Much in that Future Lives paper could and has been said about America. There is a fundamental disconnect between the idea of “Social Mobility” and the golden age myth of getting a job with Megacorp and a gold watch 40 years later. In that myth the sheepskin was the golden ticket to not coming home from work with dirt under your nails. That myth also ignores that Megacorp started out as Microcorp in somebody’s garage or shed when that somebody took a risk.
The paper also doesn’t differentiate between inter-generational mobility and career advancement. Inter-generational mobility was a lot easier for the offspring of dollar a day farm hands than when your daddy is a six figure middle manager. The people that sign those paychecks tend to expect something more for their money than showing up. All the third assistant junior receivables clerk jobs dried up a long time ago. With flattening org charts, those six figure middle manager jobs are getting scarce too.
Major kong brooks just a hilarious character if chris buckley were still alive oh wait
Also Poilievre deserves to lose if only for ignoring the report until the last moment.
But did you see the video of him eating an apple? Wasn’t that awesome?
Anyway, don’t forget that decades ago the putative non-leftist party was willing to commit political suicide to enact a VAT. Eventually, the left failed so thoroughly that another putative non-leftist party took office, which was actually globalist. That’s how they ended up with the opposition to that bunch, which was even more globalist. If you give the public a choice between a globalist and a globalist, the public will choose the globalist every time.
Now we have Canada overrun with Indians and Chinese and Etc. No slam intended upon Indians and Chinese and Etc, but they aren’t Canadian. If you import enough of them, your country is no longer your country.
I suspect Canada is no longer viable. Oil from Alberta subsidizes the globalist welfare state in the east and tariffs against American dairy products apparently keep the Quebec regime alive. I find that weirdly hilarious but whatever.
The only way for this continue is for the US to continue to allow the status quo, which also seems to be no longer viable.
I doubt Poilievre can fix this, even if he wins, which looks unlikely.
Btw- why does every Canadian prime minister have to be French?
Canada’s fetish with multiculturalism really hit its stride in the 1980s,
The problems with Poilievre are really a reflection of a larger problem with Canada and its future. Canada, as going anti-American concern, has identified itself through various government institutions and programs. It is not a proposition like the US, since it is multicultural it cannot define itself in terms of a historic culture or identity. The institutions like National Health Care, universities, industry are all breaking down but nobody can run on “Make Canada Great Again” because that would mean gutting the institutions that Canada lets define their identity
Btw no parties really cared to make much of a program of doing their proper part for NATO
I found it amusing a few months when some Canadians upset over Trump wanted to forge closer ties with the EU. Why amusing? Because essentially Canada has become the EU
Why are so many Canadian PMs French? The Liberal Party is dependent on winning seats in Quebec so that often means a leader from the province – the 2 Trtudeaus, Chrétien, Paul Martin.
The Conservatives as the traditional party of Empire never had a foothold in Quebec though Mulroney managed to have Quebec nationalists in his 2 governments until Meech Lake failed.
It looks like Trump’s campaign to talk up Canada as a US state killed Poilievre’s electoral chances, but that’s ice water under the bridge. Canadians resent the United States. People from the United States can’t understand why Canadians don’t want to be like people from the United States.
Brooks is a talented writer who started as a conservative and moved to greener pastures. You can’t blame the guy for making a living. If you think of most columnists as essentially entertainers it makes sense. He seems to get under conservatives’ skin more than most lefty talking heads do.
His unrequited love affair with obama his unmistakable contempt for the tea party later maga those are two compass points
I saw a comment on X last night. It said that Canadians are former subjects. The immediate argument would be Americans are, too, but we took our independence from England while they asked nicely for it. When they got it, they held fast to being a Commonwealth nation. I think that’s what causes the resentment Canadians feel toward us, a resentment that flares when they hear Donald Trump trolling them. There is an essential virility to the American character that is lacking in Canada. Not individually; they fought hard in both world wars. But generally. They derive a ton of benefit from America’s economic dynamism, while restricting their own.
No serious person believes Trump is serious with the 51st state trolling. Remember: seriously but not literally. But Canada is a country with a very real inferiority complex. It eats at them that we intend to call the shots and will listen to them only as a courtesy. It must rankle them that the most famous moment in hockey history is Team USA beating the Russians at Lake Placid, and that Lord Stanley’s Cup has been in American hands for 30+ years. That’s a real thing among them, that resentment. And contending with the problems they have just to stick it to Trump and America is a real motivation. It’s incomprehensible to us, but there it is.
As for Poilievre, he squandered his moment by getting into high dudgeon about Trump like the rest of his people. My prediction had he won would have been that he would have quickly moved to bring the two countries closer together. But he chose Canadian patriotism over conciliation, or even just laughing off Trump’s jokes. He played to our beliefs about how uptight and insecure Canadians are, instead of just being cool and assured, like the man who ate the apple. In so doing, he’s doomed his own people to inexorable decline while this country thrives. What an utter fool.
So it looks like the Liberals will only maintain a minority government, not a majority, though narrowly and results aren’t final. A minority government isn’t the same as a coalition, while the Liberals will be dependent on other parties on parliamentary votes those other parties won’t be formally brought into government with ministerial portfolios.
In reality a minority government is a worst case scenario for everyone
This is a continuation of the status quo over the past 3 ½ years as Trudeau was dependent on the far-left to keep power. Even though the NDP will have many fewer seats and the Liberals are only a few seats from a majority, my guess is the Liberals will once again form an alliance with NDP since the alternatives will be a an alliance with the Quebec nationalists BQ or a grand alliance with Conservatives.
Note Canadian parties have very strict partisan discipline, this isn’t the Kevin McCarthy experience, everyone will expect the various MPs to toe their respective partisan line in Parliament.
Having said that I would not expect a simple continuation of a Liberal- NDP alliance. There was a lot of dissatisfaction within the NDP about how it essentially enabled Trudeau for all those years and my guess is that even with many fewer seats they will demand more policy concessions from the Liberals pulling Carney even further to the left.
The wild card here is of course is Carney. Nobody really knows the man. He hadn’t lived in the country for 12 years before running to replace Trudeau. He never held elected office. He was a big net-zero guy and had his daughter go to the notorious Tavistock Institute in UK.
He is going to have deploy an amazing set of political skills that would tax even the most experienced politician. He will need to negotiate a deal with other parties to keep power with the danger I just mentioned that the most likely partner, NDP, is going to want much more than it did for the past 4 years. Canada doesn’t have a tradition of coalition governments and its history of minority ones is a mixed bag. Justin Trudeau managed to keep one going for years, 40 years ago Joe Clark’s minority government lasted just a few months and was a punctuation mark in the 15 year run of Pierre Trudeau.
Carney is going to need to form a government while making sure he’s isn’t pulled too far to the Left because there is a good chance Canada will have another election within a few years.
So Carney has a very narrow political window to operate and the political environment in Canada has a number of centripetal forces, regional separatism. Not just Quebec, but also out west and Alberta has had a 40+ year feud with central Canada over its ability to exploit energy resources in the province.
My guess is that there will be another election within two years
Early indications is that Carney is going to run a slash and burn, anti-US, TDS government because that’s about all he has. The structural problem Canada has is that it lives in the US’s economic and cultural shadow, it’s not just about tariffs and industry and auto pacts. The relationship between the US and Canada is unique not only in they share a common border but given that the US is much larger and much more dynamic and is very easy for Canadians to integrate into; Canada cannot a growing disparity with the US because there is always the danger its best and brightest will emigrate.
So outside of this first (only?) Carney government there will an end game playing out over the next 5 to 10 years. Canada is facing its greatest danger in 150 years, more so than the Quebec Quiet Revolution. The biggest question implicitly underlying Canadian history is how it shares the North American continent with the US, it may argue and yell and threaten to build ties to the EU (snicker) but in the end it’s the US which sets the equilibrium for the relationship. The US, through Trump, has decided to flex its prerogatives in regard to North America.
For all the historical talk in 1775, 1812, and 1867 of invasion. For all the talk of Trump making Canada the 51st state. The most likely and dangerous scenario for Canada is that it ends not with a bang but a whimper as growing economic stagnation drives both emigration and regional separatism. The Policy Horizons Canada report I linked to pointed to the danger that stagnation will lead to emigration; I had to laugh when I read it because it did not make explicit to where Canadians would emigrate to but everyone knew it meant the US.
The Western experience of dealing with civilizational sclerosis over the past 20 years has shown how incredibly difficult it will be for a country to pull out of its nosedive. Trump is the remarkable exception to that but it is not clear whether he will succeed and it is clear that no other country is willing to take that path, witness European countries dealing with the “far right.”
If Trump does want to annex Canada, I can think of no better way than having Carney elected. He (Carney) is the antithesis of Trump in so many ways. I will expect a sugar high to a Carney government for the next 12 months or so as the media and establishment works to keep him afloat but that he will prove inadequate to the job. I might be wrong, but I doubt it
Mike, that’s a ridiculously informative post. Tell me: with the demise of Poilievre, who lost in his riding, are there any other names among the Conservatives who are prepared to step up? Because down here in the US, his is the only name we’ve been hearing. Is it accurate to assume that the Conservatives are even less actually conservative than British Tories? I imagine the US’s squishiest RINOs still seem like rightist firebrands to these milquetoasts, no?
Also, Trump is less a conservative or Republican and more of an anti-establishment politician. Is there any semblance of an anti-establishment movement in Canada?
So it appears that we have failed states both to the
South and the North of us.
Mitchell – A few updates
First apparently there are a few ridings going through recounts. Depending on who you read, the Liberals may gain a few seats but still full short of a majority. However Parliament has a 12-seat minimum for elected officials to be seated as a party in the House of Commons. The NDP will only have about 7 and there is speculation that Carney could get enough to cross over to give him a majority without policy concessions.
As far as Poilievre’s future., it is possible the Conservatives would have an existing (or in this case a newly elected) conservative MP in a safe seat resign and allow Poilievre to run in an by-election in order to sit in Commons. If Carney hadn’t called an election, that’s probably what the Liberals would have done for him
There doesn’t seem to be a push by Conservatives to kick him out even though he was a klutz. If he did, that would mean the Conservatives would be on their fourth leader in five years.
An anti-establishment movement in Canada? Well in one sense that is an oxymoron given both the Canadian motto ‘Peace, Order, and Good Government” as opposed to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; a major part of the Canadian identity is the national healthcare system.
Also keep in mind that Canada is the ultimate anti-American country. In a sense everything is opposite day, the quickest way in politics to shoot down another party’s policy is to label it American. If Trump said he was for oxygen, there would be a push for Canadians to hold their breath. For all their smugness and assumed moral superiority, it saddens me to see them act like teenagers. Needless to say any populist movement is now seen as an American Trojan horse.
The Conservatives (or Progressive Conservatives) as they were known back then imploded in the early 1990s and were went from government to two seats in the 1993 Election. They were a Frankenstein monster of central Canadians, westerners, and Quebec nationalists and that collapsed with the failure of the Meech Lake Accords. The westerners went off and created as close to an anti-establishment party as I think ever existed – the Reform Party. The problem was that it ended up splitting the right-wing vote with what remained of the Conservatives allowing the Liberals to run roughshod and this forced the Conservatives and Reform to reunite in the early 2000s
Long story short, it’s hard for a national anti-establishment political movement to emerge because it needs the support of the squishy parts of Ontario. You do find these sentiments in politics, such as they are, on a regional basis out West in Alberta and Saskatchewan
There was a strong anti-establishment movement in late 2021 in response to Trudeau’s draconian COVID lockdowns which led to the Trucker Convoy protest that resulted in thousands of protesters and their 18-wheelers occupying the area surrounding the Parliament Building in early 2022. Imagine people living on the street in tents and their trucks in the middle of a Canadian winter. They also launched protest blockades of several border crossings
Trudeau started off by calling them fascists, far-right, Trumpist riff-raff and all the usual nonsense. He then declared the Emergencies Act, which is the updated version of the War Measures Act. This was the only second time it was enacted in peacetime, the other time was by his father in response to the FLQ. Justin didn’t use troops but rather police but they crushed the protests, cleared out Ottawa and the border blockades. They didn’t do a huge national manhunt but they did all sorts of things using the criminal code and froze bank accounts
It really was a remarkable part of Canadian history and is something that is a permanent stain on Trudeau’s record and Canadian history because its crushing and the COVID protocols marked a sharp authoritarian turn in Canadian policy. Keep in mind that when Trudeau declared what amounted to martial law, regular police had already cleared the border protests and really all that was needed to deal with Ottawa was some tow trucks
But no, the Canadian establishment was going to deliver a message. A commission later found Trudeau acted improperly but there were no ramifications about it because the Establishment was going to treat this as their Jan. 6
The Canadian media of course played along with Trudeau’s depiction of the Trucker Convoy. A good alternative view of someone who was an Ottawa resident actually got around and walked around the protests is from Rupa Subramanya
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/18/the-truckers-have-changed-canada-forever/
She said in a later interview that she knew the media and government were lying about the protests when she came upon a group of sympatico protesters from Alberta and Quebec enjoying each other’s company. Another citizen journalist wrote (in a blog post I lost the link to) described the kumbaya spirit of bouncy castles for children and Sikhs from Montreal.
That was three years ago and we haven’t seen that spirit in a public sense since then , but my guess it’s there.
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2025/04/29/western-canada-secession-why-does-the-west-stay-in-canada/
From that link:
British Columbia has 19 border crossings with the United States, Alberta has 6, Saskatchewan has 12, and Manitoba has 16. There is just 1 narrow 2 lane road through 1,000 miles of wilderness connecting all of Western Canada with Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, yet the East rules the lives of Western Canada?
One narrow two lane road connecting east and west. I found this not credible but my brief perusal of Google maps indicates otherwise. Wow. Google informed that there were no traffic issues in the section I observed, so at least there’s that.
I said above that I thought Canada was not viable and this sort of thing is one giant reason why.
I’ll add another. I was born in Canada and retain a bit of personal knowledge of events there. My province at one time had an economy based upon commercial fishing. Then the fish disappeared. The locals blamed European fish factory ships that vacuumed up everything in the sea, processed commercially valuable fish for sale, and dumped everything else overboard. That included young fish to small to be useful. This practice eventually destroyed the fishery.
The provincial government of course complained, but Ottawa essentially ignored them and denied that European overfishing was the problem. Then by some mischance someone from the province was appointed fisheries minister and somehow arranged for the Canadian coast guard to board one of these European ships and it turned out that, yes, the Euros were killing baby fish. Nothing was done and my impression is that the Canadian federal government was amused at the thought that anything would be done.
Now no one has any reason to care about my personal bio and this was decades ago, but my point is that the Canadian elites have been mismanaging the entire country for decades. It isn’t just the West that has reason to be upset with Ottawa.
When the Constitution was being framed, the English Civil War was not long past living memory. That George III was the first George that spoke passable English, albeit with a strong Geraman accent, was a reminder that all those with a more proximate connection to the throne had been eliminated, several with extreme prejudice. Moreover, many had personal experience, having served in colonial assemblies modeled after the English Parliament. They chose differently and not from lack of careful consideration.
Every parliamentary government I can bring to mind seemed to spawn political parties like rabbits in the 20th century. Mostly this has produced chronic coalition or minority, therefore congenitally weak, governments. Thus, at the mercy of the minority “partner”. Ross Perot was able to derail Bush’s re-election but no discernible impact on Clinton’s administration or much of anything else. The occasional “independent” Senator has even less impact.