Why Conservatism Failed to Stop a World Gone Mad

 link to my Deep Dive on Substack

The End of "Pax Americana"...

... and the Dawn of a New Era of Great Power Competition in a Multi-Polar World

All of the assumptions of the post-WWII liberal era are being turned on their head as "Pax Americana" collapses and a new multi-polar order emerges in which America, Europe, and China find themselves on wildly divergent paths.

The relative stability of the American-led century is over and a new era of Great Power competition has begun, leaving everyone (including America) scrambling to adapt to the harsh realities of this emerging multi-polar world.

Read the full essay on my Substack

Clipping Leviathan's Fingers — How to Put a Permanent Leash on the Federal Government (Step 1: Senate Reform)

America was supposed to be a truly decentralized bottom-up republic designed to defend the rights and liberties of its citizens (and their local communities!) from tyranny in all its forms. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, what the Founding Fathers created was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Yet the entire 250-year history of the United States is one long slow erosion of that idea as America evolves to become an increasingly top-down, centrally-controlled, quasi-imperial state. America might still have an elected president, but by many measures it has long since become even more burdensome to live under Washington’s current thumb that it was to live under King George III on the eve of the American Revolution.

By contrast, our Canadian parliamentary system has long since been quasi-imperial in the structure of its constitution — and has been from its founding. The colonial governments of British North America that banded together to create the Dominion of Canada — much like Britain itself — were terrified of the “dangerous” republican ideas flourishing in America that sought to turn control of the government over to the people. And so, after losing its thirteen rebellious colonies during the American Revolution, the remainder of British North America set about designing a system that provided some illusion of democracy to its subjects while custom-crafting it to ensure that our “governors” would retain their free hand to shape our country and harness our men and our resources according to their will. Elite rule.

Canada’s seemingly benign constitutional motto “peace, order, and good governance” reflects that top-down vision that keeps the voices of its citizens at arm’s length from the levers of power. From day one, government in Canada has always been a top-down enterprise. For all intents and purposes, Canada is merely the natural home-grown successor state of King George III’s colonial government in both purpose and design.

Continue reading on Substack

Join Me in the Next Phase of My Writing Career

I'd like to invite you to support my 100% reader-supported Substack with a paid subscription.

This brief post is a little different from my usual posts because I’m writing to ask for your support for the next phase of my writing career.

Over the past four years, my writing has relied 100% on your donations, supplemented by Google Ads on my website. It helped me get my voice out, but I never imagined my essays would evolve into the role of an independent journalist/essayist at the heart of an escalating philosophical war. And yet, here I am.

To maintain a truly independent perspective requires a business model that is 100% reader-supported — no editors pushing agendas or production quotas, no outside grants with an axe to grind, and no ad agencies that can turn off the taps on “wrongthink” — that independence is key to being able to think outside the box and tell complex stories beyond the reach of mainstream media.

In other words, to dedicate myself to this full-time, I need to remove all the filters between you and me. And so, the time has come to change my business model to make this a full-time endeavour to produce the high-quality essays and Deep Dives that you have come to expect from me about the turbulent issues tearing at the seams of Western Civilization.

My friend Trish Wood once said that when one of my essays arrives in her inbox, she likes to pour herself a coffee and find a quiet, comfortable place to settle in for an experience. I don’t think a writer can ask for a better compliment — to create that experience away from all the mind-numbing noise is what I strive for with every Deep Dive.

And so, I’d like to ask for your support in the form of a paid subscription to my Substack. Going forward, I will publish all my essays here on Substack, while my website will be downgraded to serve as a supplemental directory to help you search my essays by topic. My contact form will continue to be active on my website.

Many (but not all) of my future posts will continue to be free because we can’t win a culture war from behind a paywall, while some topics will be reserved for subscribers only. I promise not to overwhelm your inbox — the goal is quality over quantity with Deep Dives that take several weeks to research and put together — interspersed by shorter, easier-to-digest pieces.

I hope you will consider a paid subscription, and I look forward to earning your continuing support.

Warmest regards,

Julius

Trump's War on Global Socialism (Part 2) — Canada: The Failing State That's Been Offered a Seat Inside Fortress America

In Part 1 of my Deep Dive into Trump’s threat to annex Greenland and Canada, I covered the philosophical war that defines Trump’s era (populist nationalism vs global socialism (a.k.a. globalism)), why the U.S. is dusting off the Monroe Doctrine that once motivated America to aggressively stamp out all foreign toeholds in the Western Hemisphere, and the complex reasons why annexing Greenland has become essential to the future national security of Fortress America as Trump pivots to face the globalist threat.

In Part 2, I’m going to put Canada under the microscope to understand the threat that Canada has come to represent to American national security when viewed from the Trump’s perspective, why the threat to annex Canada is thus far more real than most people think, and why a merger between Canada and the US might be the nation-building exercise that Trump needs in order to purge the global socialist belief system from the North American continent, much as the massive 19th-century mobilization to open up the Wild West to settlement in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War was the essential ingredient that allowed a bitter and broken America to heal their divided country and build a new cohesive national identity upon the ashes of the Civil War.

Continue reading on Substack

Trump's War On Global Socialism (Part 1) — Greenland: Dislodging Europe's Unwelcome Toehold in Fortress America

Trump has declared war against the Global Socialist movement. In this two-part Deep Dive, I am going to lay out the map of what is to come as Trump sets out to build Fortress America and purge the globalist ideology from its shores.

His opening volley, even before he took office, was to declare his intention to annex Greenland and Canada. As you shall soon see as this essay progresses, these are not just peripheral distractions but are actually two of the most important cornerstones of his strategy to confront the evil belief system that is tearing Western Civilization apart.

Pour yourself a cup of tea and find a comfortable place to read — I promise this Deep Dive is going to take you into truly uncharted waters.

Continue reading on Substack

On Being Canadian — "Neither, Mr. Coyne. Canada vs Trump is a false choice fallacy."

Trump's trolling about Canada becoming the 51st State has set our country on fire.

The "establishment" is rallying together in defense, terrified of Trump on the one hand and equally terrified on the other to discover that a sizeable portion of Canadians are so angry and feel so betrayed with the top-down federal and provincial political systems as a whole (rather than just being angry at one leader or one party) that they see Trump's idea not as a threat, but as glimmer of hope of liberation. 

The Great Unravelling — Why Democracy Failed, and How to Fix It.

Also available on Amazon.

An Essay by Julius Ruechel

(If you prefer an ad-free reading experience and would like to support my independent writing, this essay is also available as an e-book or in paperback on Amazon #CommissionsEarned.)

~

To the shining 'City on the Hill', in the hope that it may be renewed to inspire us all once again.

~

Introduction

"The countries concerned were compelled to abandon their tried and proven system, and replace it with the Western democratic system. Everywhere it has been implemented it has resulted in disaster and the complete antithesis of what was anticipated. The result was one man, one vote — once." 

— Ian Smith, the last prime minister of Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe.

Universal suffrage and progressive governance (social engineering) were promoted as benevolent ways to create a fairer, more just, and kinder world. Like so many utopian fairytales designed to put an end to abusive systems of the past, these alleged solutions to the shortcomings of older hierarchical democratic systems seemed unquestionably sensible and profoundly moral — at least in theory. 

Everyone gets a voice. And those in need are given a helping hand by a government that puts its thumb on the scales if and when the need arises. Anyone in polite society who failed to enthusiastically endorse these two noble-sounding ideas clearly lacked a brain and a heart. And so, the entire post-WWII democratic foundations of the Western world have been built on these two untouchable philosophical foundations. And, by hook or by crook, the moral West immediately set out to spread their modernizing democratic update to the rest of the world.

Some of the first signs that this updated version of democracy might not live up to expectations emerged in Africa. As Rhodesia's recalcitrant prime minister Ian Smith pointed out as he tried in vain to resist the West's "update" from spreading to his country, the rapid transition to the Western democratic system immediately and invariably led to authoritarian disasters wherever it was introduced. 

Once Britain, the United States, and other Western countries adopted a policy of pressuring non-Western countries to replace their existing systems of governance with "modern, inclusive, progressive democratic systems" (in which the ballot box was suddenly thrown wide open to one and all), one country after another across the whole of the African continent was systematically plunged into a rapidly escalating spiral of violence and plunder as various communists and socialists used the ballot box to seize power, proclaim themselves as king in all but name, and then weaponized their democratic institutions in a ruthless effort to hold on to that power forever. It amounted to revolutionary regime change, facilitated by the ballot box, and was immediately followed by the entrenchment of a kleptocratic one-party state masquerading as a democracy.

The Story Beneath the Climate Story — "A Half-Truth Is the Worst of All Lies Because It Can Be Defended in Partiality."

Most of the lies hollowing out our world contain some distorted kernel of truth — they often only become lies as they are stripped of their broader context and bent to fit a dominant narrative. As ancient Greek philosopher Solon once said, “A half truth is the worst of all lies because it can be defended in partiality.” 

There's no better example of this than the nonsensical climate propaganda that has been relentlessly pushed onto society by our academic institutions, by the media, and by our political elite. In this article I am going to share a few heretical examples from my new book (Plunderers of the Earth (link to Amazon.com#Commissions Earned)) to illustrate how cartoonish oversimplifications about our ever-changing climate are not only wholly wrong despite containing kernels of truth, but that by flooding the world with this false narrative we have become blind to a much larger and much more complex story unfolding right beneath our feet, with profound implications for the future of our civilization.

Let's start with some of the easy stuff on our way towards the bigger underlying story.

I'm Back! Personal Update and Book Announcement! (Plunderers of the Earth)

Link to Amazon
#CommissionsEarned

When the world is burning, the hardest thing of all is to resist the paralyzing urge to fixate on the flames. Somewhere in between the two extremes of either burying one’s head in the sand or losing oneself in outrage at the senselessness of it all lies the middle path that is forged by focusing our energies on the things within our control.  

Even the myths passed down to us by our forefathers warn us about this — as the wicked biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were engulfed in fiery destruction, Lot and his family were saved because they kept their eyes on the path that led them away from the chaos. But as they fled, Lot's wife turned to look back at the infernal cities as they were consumed by a rain of burning sulfur and was promptly transformed into a pillar of salt.

In 2022, my wife and I put the bright lights of Ottawa in our rearview mirror and moved back to our familiar stomping grounds near the family farm in B.C.’s North Okanagan region. After ejecting the furry four-legged rodents infesting our new walls, renovating to remove all traces of their destruction, updating the building, and bringing order to all the chaos that comes with settling into a new home and a new life, I finally recovered the headspace to write. 

I expected my first writing project to keep me “offline” for a couple of months, but as the tangled threads of the story I set out to tell grew ever more complex, a few months quickly turned into two years. 

"Words From the Dead" — How to Lift Society from the Ashes of Postmodernism (plus an important book recommendation)

The Harrowing of Hell, by a follower of
Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1450-1516

One of the most destabilizing aspects of the chaos of the past few years is that the pillars of society—our democratic and academic institutions, along with our courts, media, police, doctors, corporate giants, and thought leaders—have not only been unable to resist the postmodern deconstruction of society but have become active perpetrators in a war on reality that is turning classical liberal democracy into a grotesque parody of itself. 

How did the institutions that were meant to prevent civilized society from devolving into a barbarian free-for-all become the drivers of the current descent into madness? How do we wake society from a nightmare in which nothing is sacred, freedom is blasphemy, and roosters are laying eggs... when society merely shrugs its shoulders in resignation?

It's time to take a deep dive into the myths, stories, and grand narratives that bind society together in order to understand why society is unravelling and how we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

A Brave New World Without Rights: Ending Mandates Does Not Strip Government of the Ability to Do This Again

There is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”

Bystander at the Switch (updated): The Moral Case Against Mandatory Public Health Measures

(this article is an updated version of my article from February 7th, 2021)

Do you remember the moral riddle taught in grade school called the "Bystander at the Switch" (also known as the Trolley Problem)? It was a story about a runaway train hurtling towards a cluster of people stuck on the tracks ahead. But you have the option to pull the switch and send the train down another track with a smaller number of people on it. You have the option of saving some lives by sacrificing a smaller number of others. Do you pull the switch?

In grade school the riddle was posed as a moral dilemma. But it's not. There was only ever one correct choice. We invented universal human rights to make it clear that no person or government has the right to pull the switch to send the train down another track towards a sacrificial group of victims. 

Our Side of the Story: My Autonomy is Not Negotiable, My Country Is Not An 'Opportunity for a Reset'

This essay is an urgent appeal to all the politicians, public health officials, policemen, judges, doctors, journalists, and to every single person in Canada and all around the world who continues to support mandatory public health measures, vaccine mandates, and coercion. I would like to give you a complete picture of what is at stake, from my perspective, so you can judge my concerns by my own words and not through the distorted words of our mainstream media. 

For two straight years the world has only heard your side of the debate. Please take the time to hear ours. Please recognize what you are doing, what you are breaking, the illiberal world you are creating, acknowledge the way in which you are using the pandemic as an opportunity to rewrite the economic and legal underpinnings of our society, and address the elephant in the room: are any of your heavy-handed measures actually achieving anything other than to destroy the fabric of society?

Although this essay barely scratches the surface of all that has happened, I hope it may provide an accurate overview of the enormity of what has happened over these past two years and serve as the first step towards a long-overdue conversation.

Who Do You Trust If You Can't Trust the Science? — Mythbusting Whether Flu Was Rebranded as Covid

Ordinary claims require ordinary evidence.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

— adapted from Carl Sagan

"How do we know that the flu hasn't just been rebranded as Covid?"

Quite a few people have suggested this controversial explanation for the pandemic, highlighting that the flu disappeared just as Covid arrived. They also pointed to massive problems with PCR tests and raised concerns about the trustworthiness of the SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence. Since our health officials have been playing fast and loose with the truth on just about everything else, and with so many other conspiracy theories turning out to be partially or even entirely true (remember when vaccine passports were called a conspiracy theory?), why not that too? 

The problem with trying to answer this question is that PCR testing is so technically complicated that most of us are unable to independently judge whether PCR tests are merely picking up fragments of influenza DNA that share similarities with portions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And most of us do not have the technical expertise to judge for ourselves whether the SARS-CoV-2 genome has truly been isolated and fully sequenced, or whether the published gene sequence used during PCR testing is actually just a virtual computer-generated imposter. 

In light of our own limited technical expertise, should we track down knowledgeable experts and rely on them to tell us the answer? In other words, should we "trust the scientists", as so many politicians and public health officials like to tell us at every opportunity? As we've seen in comical detail over the past two years, the problem with this approach is that if you put 10 experts in a room, you're likely to get 11 opinions. Which one should we trust?

The False God of Central Planning: The Mysterious Reappearance of the Flu, Natural vs Vaccine-Induced Immunity, the Inability of the Vaccines to Control the Virus, and Other Extraordinary Lessons About the End of the Pandemic (𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁)

Colds and flus mysteriously disappeared over the past two years only to return recently in many countries, often with a vengeance. While only rarely discussed and frequently dismissed as a mere curiosity, the mystery of the disappearing flu is actually one of the most important events of the past two years. Unpacking this mystery provides deep insights into the future trajectory of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, exposes the abject failure of the vaccines to control the pandemic, and puts the final nail in the coffin on futile public health measures like masks and social distancing. Get ready for more than a few surprises as you follow me on another deep dive into Covid mayhem.

Figure 1: Global circulation of Influenza viruses (Source: WHO FluNet)

Message from a Reader Working in Long-Term Care

I’d like to share a message I received from a reader in reply to my recent post (How the Grinch Stole Christmas from Nursing Home Patients Who Won’t See Another One) in which I discussed the horrifying impact of the rapid testing fiasco on long-term care patients. Her message speaks volumes.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas from Nursing Home Patients Who Won't See Another One

Once again, families are being prevented from visiting loved ones in some nursing homes in Ontario - only essential workers are allowed in. Why? One of the excuses this year is that there's a shortage of rapid tests so they are unable to screen all visitors.

But why is there a shortage of rapid tests? As usual, there's more to the story than the headlines would suggest.

"A Half Truth is a Whole Lie": The Omicron Variant, Cross-Reactive Immunity, and the Manufactured Illusion of an Unprecedented Virus

(Spanish translation by Pablo a. Calviño available here 🇪🇸)

(Polish translation by Mariusz Wesołowski available here 🇵🇱)

On December 2nd, 2021, a study published on medRxiv (pre-print) found that: "Population-level evidence suggests that the Omicron variant is associated with substantial ability to evade immunity from prior infection." At first glance this seems to directly contradict the large number of recent studies demonstrating long-lasting immunity to Covid after a natural infection (more than 141 studies to date). How can both of these things be true?

Meanwhile, another study published in medRxiv (preprint) on December 8th, 2021, confirmed that vaccine-escape is happening with the Omicron variant, which means that the current batch of vaccines are not capable of neutralizing the Omicron variant. Too bad for everyone that's already had 3 doses of the magic elixir. Go back to square one.

Pfizer has already reassured the world that it can have an Omicron vaccine ready by March of 2022. BioNTech's CEO has confirmed that the Omicron vaccine will be a 3-dose vaccine. And in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, when Pfizer's CEO was asked if it is good news that the Omicron variant might spread faster but be milder and therefore offer a path out of the crisis via natural immunity; he replied that this would not be good news because more spread could lead to more mutations (i.e. it might lead to still more variants). Yup, they actually asked a vaccine maker if natural immunity might provide an alternate solution to end the pandemic (no conflict of interest there🙄). Of course he said no. Of course the excuse is... the risk of more "variants". And of course his only approved solution is... more vaccines. Never let the illusion of a crisis go to waste, eh? 

And to top off the insanity, the FDA has now asked a federal judge to give it until 2096 to release all the data and info it used to authorize Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine (that's 75 years!). Our world is run by clowns. 

There are moments when the public health messaging during Covid reminds me of the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant wherein the blind men argue about the nature of an elephant based on the kernel of truth at their fingertips despite being utterly unable to see the larger reality standing before their eyes. But we are not living through a harmless parable. Our public health officials, vaccine makers, and media are manipulating our perception of reality. They are trying to blind us from seeing the full elephant by using deliberate oversimplification, half-truths, and out-of-context facts to manufacture (and exploit) an illusion of unprecedented danger. The most damaging lies are the ones that are built on a distortion of the truth. 

So, it's time for another deep dive into the evolution of variants and the subtleties of our immune systems to get some perspective...

"A half truth is a whole lie." — Yiddish Proverb

Democracy in America: The Devil's Bargain, the Bear in the Cage, and the Doorway to Freedom

Once upon a time there was a bear kept in captivity in a small cage. The caged and abused bear spent most of its life restlessly patrolling the perimeter of its cage. Then one day rescuers came and removed the cage. Yet the bear continued to patrol the perimeter of the cage, never stepping outside of its boundaries, which now existed only in its mind.

I used to think this was made-up story to illustrate an important psychological point. Sadly, it was a true story, and it wasn't an isolated case. On January 29th, 2021, Zenger News reported a story about another bear called Ina, which spent 20 years in a tiny cage in a zoo in Romania. In 2014 she was rescued and released onto a wildlife reserve. Seven years later, out in the woods, she still spends many days simply pacing around in a circle, which corresponds exactly to the dimensions of the no longer existent cage. The cage defined her world for so long that she cannot properly comprehend life without it.

Society is that bear. We speak the language of freedom. Yet we use government to wrap ourselves in the chains of yesteryear.