Bonfire Of The Elites: Players Gotta Play
Item: Marc Kielburger, the co-founder of the WE Charity, informed the Commons Finance Committee that, in addition to the previously discovered $312,000 paid to Margaret Trudeau for speaking at WE Day, the prime minister's mother was also reimbursed $167,944 in expenses. Kielburger admitted that Margaret Trudeau was one of very few speakers paid for speaking, and she was not paid before Justin Trudeau became prime minister.
In the hyperinflation of the German Weimar Republic, the currency lost value on an hourly basis. A loaf of bread that cost one mark in 1919 was priced at 100 billion marks by 1923. People spent the worthless currency immediately, before it deteriorated further. The value of goods and services was shattered.
Disorder and rioting ensued. Extremists proliferated. The rest is history.
Contemporary society is experiencing its own Weimar crisis. But it’s not about a currency depreciating at warp speed. It’s a the frantic depreciation of societal capital. Wedged between WE, Covid19 and the #BLM phenomenon, many have lost their bearings and are drifting aimlessly between isolation and alienation.
The reaction to the Trudeau ethics mess is that people feel played by their elites. Cancel culture has vaulted snitches, political commissars and “church ladies” to positions of moral authority. No one feels safe from being doxxed or outed for a 30-year-old half-remembered quote.
Like people in the Weimar Republic, the average citizen is bewildered by the speed of change, the transitory nature of justice and the collapse of media credibility. Whether Western society follows the Weimar down the rathole remains to be seen. But signs aren’t good when everything you believe is subject to change in a week, a month or a year. How did you build your life?
In Canada moral hyperinflation has seen the destruction of public trust by Justin Trudeau and his party. The people who campaigned on not being the same old/ same old Liberals of the sponsorship scandal have managed to stumble over even that low bar of corruption.
Following Trudeau’s lapses in ethics/ judgement with the Aga Khan, Passage to India, SNC Lavalin, AladdinGate and Jody Wilson-Raybould Canadians now have a scam to surpass all scams: Trying to funnel almost a billion dollars in money and perks to the suspect WE Foundation of the Kielburger brothers who had employed his mother Margaret, brother André and friends.
To put lipstick on this Liberal pig, lapsed-judgment finance minister Bill Morneau and his family were also hip-deep in the WE fiasco (taking free trips to Africa), as were other cabinet such as Seamus O’Regan and party members. None of whom recused themselves from decisions in which they had a personal stake.
Outside of a tepid “oops” from Trudeau and Morneau (who tried to return his ill-gotten gains) there have been no actions other than quickly scuttling the Kielburgers scam— which was reportedly funnelling money to buy real estate in Canada and abroad.
(UPDATE: Under questioning from MPs Thursday, the prime minister suggested he knew nothing of the WE program till it was brought to him in cabinet, and that he tried to push back. In effect, he threw his subordinates under the bus.)
Watching the fatuous performance of the Kielburgers on Tuesday as they plead ignorance of the influence they’d spent so much time and money on by cultivating the PM— and the government’s blithering indifference to being bought— most Canadians could only ask how they can rid themselves of this kabuki corruption.
And, in normal times, a minority government like this would fall quickly. But the NDP, which holds the balance of power, seem in no hurry to defeat the Liberals— who still enjoy healthy support in their GTA crib and in Quebec. They’d have no such influence with the Tories. And so Trudeau and his version of accountability enjoy little threat to their power.
As we’ve written before , the Marxist group #BLM— a pariah a few years ago— is suddenly king of the hill in the U.S. after the death of “gentle giant” George Floyd (who was jailed for threatening a pregnant woman with a gun) at police hands in Minneapolis. There, the mayor allowed rioters to burn police stations and loot the downtown rather than confront a riot.
In Portland, Oregon, “peaceful demonstrators” have been fighting with police and burning buildings for 60 consecutive nights. The local politicians seem content to let the protesters burn and loot while criticizing federal police (translation: Donald Trump) for confronting the mobs. Corporate leaders, mortified about being targeted next by street gangs and online mobs, now paint #BLM logos on their goods and buildings.
Standing in the way of this is the polarizing figure of Trump. Beset by blame from the online mobs for allegedly causing 150,000 Covid19 deaths, he’s lurched from obeying all the advice from his medical advisors to freelancing about hydrochloriquine and ultraviolet treatments. His media feuds have also distracted from controlling the narrative.
The dissonance extends to the simplest things in life. While ordinary people are limited to 10 people at a funeral, when it’s a member of the political nomenklatura, such as John L. Lewis, hey, fill that church to hear a former president compare today’s police to Bull Connors.
No wonder Americans are perplexed and discouraged as they head into an election where the Left has already claimed that Trump will refuse to respect the result— ironically, the very thing they themselves did after their disastrous 2016 electoral defeat. And the Right predicts Armageddon in a Biden presidency.
As German playwright Bertolt Brecht noted at the heart of the Weimar insanity, “When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.” Pretty much describes the majority of people in this age.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.