Two Generations to Lose It All

One for Universal Prosperity - the ideas are already in place

This is the speech I gave to the Stop 30 x 30 Conference yesterday.

I want to explain to you how important your movement, the rural rights, the populist movement. This is a 500 year – possibly more – interruption, a shift, a very positive shift, in man’s development and you are driving the change.

Let me explain. I am an anomalous creature at this kind of gathering so let me tell you how I got here. I was trained as a reporter at Time Magazine when it was actually rigorous, went onto become European bureau chief of Life Magazine, and I’ve written for just about every one of the heavy hitters in a once storied profession in the US, Canada and the UK, all of which I now consider globalist propaganda. I would not write for the New Yorker or Globe and Mail or Time for anything now. It’s over. It’s dead. It’s gone, like Victorian England. These are vanity publications now, serving an ever-shrinking group who think of themselves as important. They are not the future. You are.

I moved home to British Columbia when my father was dying. My mother was psychologically fragile – she had been a patient of Ewan Cameron, Allan Dulles’s pet mind control evil genius, and while 95% of the time, she was perfect, extreme stressors like her husband of 60 years dying would count. When I was working in London I had bought a 30 acre forest on an island near their home in Victoria so I built a house on it, thinking I could range out from there. I’d not grown up out there, but my paternal great grandparents literally built the early waterworks, bridges and tunnels, clear cut the neighborhoods, laid the sidewalks, dug the tunnels and bought in the first piped water. The other set built pioneer financing, and in their spare time, with their friends from church, started the Vancouver General in a tent, so I had roots. I belonged. I felt ownership. And responsibility.

I was still writing for newspapers, fancy ones, like Harpers Magazine, and the Sunday Times, and once members of the environmental movement discovered this, they seduced me methodically and showed me all the wonderful things they were doing. I had lived and worked in mega-cities, so it was all new to me, and alarming. I sat in rooms and listened to dozens of them for months, and and then I started to ask questions, the way I had been trained to do.  I did not like the answers, because it mattered to me. It affected me, it affected the people I lived among. I grew up in the country, went to a country high school until I was sent away to school, so I could see the results, the effects they were already having.

Their economic theory entranced me for a bit, the green economy, the green new deal, but eventually, it was clear it was made of moonbeams and I could shred it like wet toilet paper. My mother had bullied me into getting an MBA, and one of my cousins was a leading bio-physicist, so I was used to debating with him, and I knew how to read science and statistics.  AND because I owned land, it aroused a whole set of feelings and assumptions and values that I didn’t know I had. So I went into every aspect of their work and I took it apart. The science, the land use, the stealthy attrition of property rights.

They did not take it well – I was harrassed, stalked, threatened, they tried to get me fired, they wrote my editors and publishers, they wrote nasty letters to the local newspapers about me, the phoned me ceaselessly, they drove into my driveway at midnight headlights and music blaring, then reversed at top speed. I became familiar with the local RCMP detachment. I had been writing a column for the Globe and Mail, then had an op-ed column in the National Post. The heat around me built, and at one juncture I had five stalkers, one of which was murderous and who the Crown prosecution took to court twice.

Incidentally the editors at Harper’s Magazine said the hate letters from the movement were worse than any received in their 150 years of operation.

And then I decided to subdivide my forest in half upon which all hell broke loose. In order to get through the process, I had to study what they had done regulation wise. NO JOURNALIST READS REGULATION. EVER.  I have never read or met one who understood its meaning and power. And that’s when I began to realize how massively destructive and frankly evil on a grand scale the movement was. In my province, which is one and a half times the size of Texas, starting in the the late 70’s they had methodically shut it down.  BC had the largest industrial forest in the world and by 1990, it was a shadow.  They shut down even the exploration for minerals and oil. They parked out the province. We have everything in BC. We could feed the world, supply all its minerals, its gas, its oil, its recreation and we could house a billion people. We are astoundingly rich, because of plates colliding over millennia, we have 10 different biogeoclimatic zones.

All ruined. All that promise, gone. Hundreds of thousands of resource workers on the street and told to work in tourism at $12 an hour during the summers. Massive amounts of immigration covered the crime. We are billions in debt, and we don’t need to be. In fact, letting British Columbia roar would pay off Canada’s debt and skyrocket a million families into wealth, peace, wonderful educations and unending achievement.

Gone.

Resources used to pay for education and our universal health care. Now, crime does. By the 80’s and Expo 86, Asian cartels moved in, working our immigration laws, bribing and paying off politicians and immigration officers and now Vancouver real estate launders most of the drug proceeds in North America. The casinos finish the laundering. Through our port, the second largest on the west coast of North and South America, come God knows what in drugs, trafficked children and women. Our economy is now based on the immiseration of addicts and trafficked women and children.

That is the legacy of the environmental movement in my world. And it makes me very very angry.

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When I wrote Ecofascists, I drove 20,000 miles throughout the US west, down to Texas and New Mexico and found the same regime had been put in place. I discovered all the regulations which made my dividing a 30 acre forest in half and building one other house on it, taking two years and costing me about $150K, drained into government coffers, were everywhere. It was a theft. A theft of my life, my energy and a ruination of the lives I saw around me. I sat in meetings where these ghastly people, paid always by the richest people in the world, while they ruined family after family after family. And when I travelled, the same thing.

At home, in town meetings, for years, I was the only one who was sitting there in opposition. The local papers still won’t publish anything I write, nor the city broadsheet in our provincial capital. I am entirely blacklisted. When I tried to hire a researcher during a set of policy papers I wrote, I put an ad in the paper, and a likely woman eventually said, look If I work for you, my social life will be miserable. No one will invite me anywhere. I’ve lived in nine different places so I have a lot of friends, and a lot of supporters, but with only two exceptions, all the women I’ve known are unspeakably ignorant and directly opposed. I went to a small lunch party last week, and an older judge was there, a woman, murder trials, and within minutes she was telling me that Climate Change was real, and I was comparable to a Nazi.

This is why change is coming.

After I published my first book with Knopf and Bloomsbury, with storied editors, my father gave me the memoir of my great great grandmother, Charlotte St John. At the age of 20, in 1850, she declared marriage was slavery and set off to see the world, which was at the time the Ohio frontier. She carried with her a melodeon and played, mostly in churches, for money. I was fascinated by her, of course, and so were my publishers, who saw her as an early feminist. In fact, the first American manifestation of the rights of women took place just south of her in Seneca Falls. New York, and hers was a massive family, her mother came from a family of 17 children, she from a family of eight, so there were relatives everywhere, and they were always setting off for month long visits with each other. They were also a family who wrote letters and diaries. And luckily for me her uncle, Seymour Phelps wrote a 3,000 page history of the family, which included letters, diaries, wills, deeds, a book which you can still buy. Equally, in all the little museums in upstate New York  and southern Ontario there is evidence of a family that thought deeply and discussed much.

They were Christians, serious, involved in all three of America’s Great Awakenings. Charlotte’s grandfather was one of those Promethean men who ran the first Pony Express through the Catskills when he was 15, and went on to build the fourteen locks at Lockport on the Erie Canal.  Up on the hills overlooking his canal works, he had a full on visitation by an Archangel, the lithograph of which is on the cover of his funeral program, the cowering man, the massive Angel. This was during the Second Great Awakening of the 1820’s, which burned through New York and Ontario, which was called the psychic highway.

From then on he became a whirlwind of charity, coming up to Canada to dig the first deep cut on the Welland which opened the west for both countries. He built schools and the First American Presbyterian Church, and would go round the farms in the mornings in his buckboard collecting little girls out of the fields for school and paying their fathers for their days work. He was also an Officer on the Underground Railroad. All his 17 children, wife, who died at 101, having had 17 children, various cousins and much of the town worked to rescue fugitives and set them up with land and houses. A cousin had married into the Mohawk,  and had to be smuggled out of Canada because he was such an activist for Indian rights, the British were about to hang him.

I say all this because that world, our collective history, has been twisted towards the dark, and almost everything we know now about the founding is false. There were thousands upon thousands of families like theirs. They were good people, scholarly, aspirational, ordinary, devout, bent towards creating Christ’s millennium on earth. What is taught in schools is falsified, Hollywood has done us no favors.  The Phelps’s arrived in 1630 “praying and expounding the word of God the whole way” and then “hung on their cooking pot, cooked their homely meals and went down to the founding of Windsor Connecticut“. One of them attended the first Continental Convention for Connecticut and became a General in Washington’s army, he and his son were Commissaries for the Revolutionary Army.

Thirty million Americans can claim descent from these people, and I think they are an imprint, a genetic imprint, burned deep.  For 200 years, immigration was limited, and in New England, they married and intermarried, kind of like a back and forth back and forth, digging those values deeper and deeper, the freedom and virtue of the ordinary, the promise of the future, hope, burgeoning hope, and they built town after town, after hospital after church after bridge and tunnel and canal. Their strength and independence and their view of each sacred being equal in the sight of God turned the U. S. into the beacon it still is, despite its many enemies, internal and external. The Spanish in the South recreated Europe with brutalist aristocrats and oppressed peasantry. In Canada, we still have the fiefdoms of Anglos who behave like nicer versions of the conquistadors. I grew up among them, so I know. That’s why we are such free riders on the U.S., we have an oppressive ruling class, called the Laurentian Elite.

Their, my ancient family’s vision, the vision we all share, that hope, is universal across every “race” and faith.  And universally robbed of us.

This is why I think massive change is coming. Another ancestor is a man called St. John Bolingbroke. I am descended from his brother through a couple of intermarriages. He arrived in Massachusetts’s in 1699, his son was a Colonel in the Revolutionary Army. Bolingbroke was much read by the American founders, he defined what they wanted in a democracy. Bolingbroke who was a Viscount, created the idea of the Country Party, which Angelo de Codevilla wrote about in his monograph, The Ruling Class. Bolingbroke believed in local control, and he built the idea of the Opposition, a country party aligned against the court party in London. We call it the UniParty. Or the Administrative State. The tenth amendment owes much to Bolingbroke.

He was also a defender of the Stuart right to the throne. He fought the Hanover takeover – the Saxe Coburg Gothas that King Charles is, he is a Guelph, one of the foul Black Nobility’s takeover of the British crown. Bolingbroke wanted Mary Queen of Scots descendants, not a German, not a version of what was then Globalist control of his country. For this he was stripped of everything and sent into exile. His titles, his lands, his houses, everything.  

As an aside, the eight families of the Black Nobility own the New York Fed, and it is to them Americans pay interest on the national debt. Much like the peasant tithing of Bolingbroke’s age.

Bolingbroke wanted to be the great thinker of his age, he lived in intellectual ferment, and he was best friends with Jonathan Swift, Addison and Steele, the founders of the Spectator, with the Earl of Oxford, and eventually his life was restored to him and for the next 20 years, he worked in Parliament creating the openings in legislation that allowed for the Age of Reason and the birth of the middle class. He fought the Uniparty every single day, along with his many friends and supporters, and what they created, the openings they created, the unpicking of all the privileges and corruption we see with the Bidens, the Clintons, the Obamas, Mitch McConnell, the Bush gang, it is not confined to the Democrats - the first manifestation of the idea of the Opposition. He called Parliament the “court” party, the world within they lived was centered around preference and contracts and getting as much money and titles and privilege as possible. It had nothing to do with fairness or equity. He broke with the Whigs and the Tories, and eventually his ideas, theirs, because they formed them together, were integrated. Slowly, after a decade, the authority of the Crown and the Church were undermined and the world exploded with wealth and energy, and migration, and art, and science, the founding of America, and above all the birth of the middle class.

Because this is the thing and I am going to put it in 21^st century language. Out in the country, the hinterlands, the flyover country,  away from the corruption of preference and greed and the theft of public money lie all the ideas, all the creativity, all the excitement and the energy. And when people like the Bidens and Trudeaus come in, they don’t just pay off their people, everything they do suppresses that activity, whatever terrible idea they seize upon to do that – the stupidity of carbon is the madness of today.

So what everybody here today is – we are all members of the country party. We are a rebirth of Bolingbroke’s Opposition. We hold the key to abundance and wealth for all, not just the few hundred thousand who read the New York Times and the Globe and Mail.

Bolingbroke felt a moral superiority lay in the country because it was moored to nature and what was possible for human life, life enfleshed, the life that feeds us, clothes us, houses us. He objected to the exclusion of natural rights from the court party, in public life and he deplored the normalcy of war. He stated war empowers royal absolutism, because even as we have seen, emergencies like covid, mean that natural law is overthrown and tyranny becomes seen as “necessary”.

The second thing I learned from this old family of mine, who were prominent in their home places, but not city people, court people looking for government jobs or money. They were involved. For twenty generations, in their towns, they were present and working within them to make them work. During my childhood, my father, who ran textile mills, would go out two or three times a week to meetings in the place where we lived. There would be literally no way that my great Uncle Orson and Bea would have allowed Vancouver, their city to be taken by criminal cartels.  My great aunt and uncle in Vancouver, who I met in my 20’s, knew where every sparrow fell in their city. In my family you were judged on the level of your adult commitment to making your home place better, and your efficacy in that.

But my generation was too damn busy with pleasure and gratification and in the case of women, excessive amounts of self-care and self-cherishing. All my contemporaries where I live are “artists” of some sort. Town government is beneath their notice. And that is true even of the golf playing, sailing, Tuscany vacation rental people.  The meetings were full though, filled with environmental NGO’s the members of whom were paid by the richest people in the world to be there and to angle for the suppression of the economy, of housing starts, of any business.

Two generations to lose it all. All the work of the millions of people who built the US and Canada, the small towns where people thrived and grew, where kids were well educated, where it was clean, crime free, drug free, where doctors did house calls, where people knew your name, where you were held and cherished and watched over. Where there was promise everywhere, where you could build and grow.

Today I can go into a post office where I have been thousands of times over 25 years and people still ask to see my ID.  We are anomized debt slaves, good for nothing but laboring on Maggie’s farm. And Maggie is a member of the WEF.

The past three years have been so terrible that I am not the only person at town meetings anymore. Last weekend a million Christians and Muslims demonstrated against the trans agenda and thousands upon thousands wrote letters. The truckers are seen as heroic, except for those in the Court party, and our current populist Conservative candidate is polling fifteen points ahead of Justin Trudeau. When I moved back to Canada 20 years ago, conservatism was being reborn through Reform, representing the people, rather than the powerful. Today’s conservatism in Canada has grown a thousand fold and is gathering in people who once considered themselves on the left.

I’ve always been fascinated by social movements and what normal people are up to, so I cruise socials looking for evidence. People are very very angry, and there are tens of thousands of citizen journalists, doing what the media doesn’t do anymore. The ideas of personal sovereignty are everywhere, everything in the culture is being questioned at every level and the environmental movement is hated, just hated. The idea of 15 minute cities of being penned in and measured is hated. In England they have torn down all the cameras in low emission zones and right now there is a freedom march through Hyde Park. I could cite you thousands of examples of fighting back. So as George Bush (another foul globalist) once said, Help is On the Way.

On my island which is the last place I expected, there is a growing movement of people on our side, who are even more radical than anyone in this room, and they are opposed. Meetings are becoming more active, and last year we defeated a 2050 plan, and the planner who tried to institute it was fired. Now, they tiptoe around, and they are focused not on “saving” things but how to hack through the web of regulation they built so people are no longer living in their cars in one of the richest places in the world with thousands of “pristine” acres. We have a long way to go but the culture has swung behind us.

We are not alone anymore.