Dear Leader Letter # 18

From: Al Neitsch
Sent: June 30, 2022 10:07 AM
To: Al Neitsch; mayor@airdrie.ca; Peter Brown; Airdrie-Cochrane; Airdrie-East; councillors@airdrie.ca
Subject: Repressive Tolerance, Lack of Perspective, and The Right Side of History

Hello All,

Happy Canada Day!

  In this era of ‘repressive tolerance’, and in spite of limited resources, I will gladly pay $5 to anyone that I have originally sent this article to, that reads this perspective, and responds with a quick, “Thanks, I have received this perspective and will consider the contents’. The only responses I get are from a councilor in Calgary for goodness sake. As a long time Canadian contributor to public servant’s employment and lifestyles, and all levels of government, I shouldn’t have to incentivize your consideration because it’s really part of your job. If you are receiving these perspectives and deleting them or have blocked them, you contribute to what this article is all about and a large part of the problem. Hiding behind agendas, bylaws, protocol, and purviews and being unresponsive says so much about your collective mindset. Canada is heading towards a critical mass sequence of events that, if they haven’t affected you personally already, surely will in the near future. Any incentives you may have already received to not entertain and act on public perspectives, such as exemption from vaccine mandates, or financial gain, or threats to your right to live in a free Democracy, or whatever, won’t necessarily grant you everlasting safety and security. Everyone’s days on this earth are numbered. This is scientifically proven. Depending on your spiritual beliefs, your fate will be determined, or is preordained by your actions on this earth. Why not choose transparency, integrity, honesty and a brighter future for yourselves and your families? For all of us?

   Expanded public transit, E-Scooters, new libraries?, and the constant virtue signaling in aid of political social engineering do not endear you to the people you are to serve. They are oppressive and fall in line with larger plans for our world that you may be unaware of or unwilling to understand. There will be a right side to the history that is being made right now. Where do you want to be?

Happy Canada Day!

  No points for not going with Manitoba’s ‘New Day’ pronouncement. The decision to fly the Canada flag in Airdrie must have been a difficult one to make. The fireworks will fizzle and pop like ‘morning after’, New Year’s champagne and will only provide further distraction from what’s really going on. The parade will be tempered with other celebratory messages besides Canada Day. The Liberal government and various entities, such as the UCP, and those local governments that ‘align’ themselves with them have made it very clear in their actions and words that Canada is in line to be among the first ‘Post Nation States’. What a thing to align with! It would be fitting to fly the flag upside down to truly represent where and what Canada is right now. Canada is a former great nation under distress and is under attack by forces both foreign and domestic. Our flag seems to be flying at half mast so much these days. This too is a distress signal. Perhaps it’s best to not fly it at all until true Canadians take back their country. Let’s be optimistic that we will take it back.

Once again,

Happy Canada Day!

Sincerely,

Al Neitsch

403 400 4477

Bruce Pardy: On Speech and Conduct, Repressive Tolerance Is a Feature, Not a Bug

June 4, 2022 – Epoch Times   6 Minute Read

Commentary

It’s OK to insult conservatives, truckers, and vaccine skeptics, but it’s not OK to insult Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the federal NDP. That’s the lesson to be taken from acting Peterborough police chief Tim Farquharson. After protesters at a May 10 provincial election rally in Peterborough called Singh a traitor, Farquharson called their actions “morally unacceptable” and their belief systems “reprehensible, unconscionable, and in some cases, criminal.”

Double standards on speech and conduct are baked into our current political order. Burning churches and blocking railways are blows in support of social justice, but peacefully protesting vaccine mandates constitutes a public order emergency. Defying lockdown rules is a threat to public safety when parishioners gather for church services in parking lots, but not when thousands gather for Black Lives Matter marches. Law-abiding gun owners are vilified while minimum sentences for gun crimes are eliminated. The hypocrisy of our authorities is no accident. Their choices are deliberate and calculated.

“We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails,” says James Lindsay, the leading American intellectual critic of the illiberal politics of the progressive left. “[I]t is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the right, that broken logic is centred in the no-longer-tolerant left.”

That logic, according to Lindsay, is rooted in a single 1965 essay by neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse called ”Repressive Tolerance,” whose theme Lindsay encapsulates in one sentence: “Movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.”

This is the world we now inhabit. If you are not on board with the prevailing program, your speech and behaviour must be crushed. Intolerance should extend to actions as well as to expression, Marcuse wrote, “true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance … at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified. … Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds.”

Once upon a time, when they were cultural mavericks, liberals championed free speech. Establishment conservatives were the censors, urging limits on obscenity, blasphemy, and communist propaganda. In a free society, went the liberal argument, all must be able to express ideas and opinions no matter who has the reins of power. Freedom of expression protected the dissenter, the rebel, and the heretic from the orthodoxy of the prevailing view.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Free speech is no longer needed to protect the left, whose sensibilities now prevail. Liberalism has morphed into the dominant ideology of woke progressivism, which rules government, mainstream media, universities, big corporations, public schools, public health authorities, and, increasingly, courts. It turns out that progressives were less interested in the principle of free speech than in promoting their own values.

You can’t miss it unless you avert your eyes. The Trudeau government, for instance, has repeatedly promised to pass legislation to monitor social media for “misinformation” and “hate speech.” A new orthodoxy is being established: Speech consistent with progressive norms is legitimate, while contrary opinions are racist, alt-right, or violent; whether speech is objectionable depends in part upon the identity of the speaker and the subject; attacking European culture, whiteness, Western values, or Christianity is proper speech, but defending them is beyond the pale.

In this era of repressive tolerance, the most exhausting, ineffectual political figure is the earnest conservative. Rather than condemning the illiberal liberal, who openly expresses an aggressively intolerant agenda, the conservative instead honourably refuses to believe it.

We should stop political bickering, says Scott Aitchison, a candidate for the leadership of the federal Conservative Party, and instead respect one another.

“Conservatives reform institutions,” says Jean Charest, a leadership rival who wants to preserve the CBC. “We don’t tear them down.”

But the ideas championed by Marcuse and his intellectual comrades have already irredeemably overtaken most Canadian public institutions.

Our naivety is among the most useful, effective, and dangerous weapons in the arsenal of the woke. Chamberlains of our day cannot accept that Canada is now dominated by a leftist elite bent on the cultural transformation that they transparently promote. Those who bemoan polarization of the electorate have become blind to what is happening right in front of their eyes. The country is polarized because one side rejects the legitimacy, indeed the existence, of the other.

These are not your grandparents’ liberals. They mean what they say. Listen, and then ignore at your peril.

This column is a contribution to Inside Policy of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.