A colleague comes to my office.

“You know I was going to Canada for a conference,” she says. “You signed my travel request.”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s a good university. I’m sure you’ll enjoy.”

“Well, I decided not to go,” the colleague says. “I heard that US citizens are being detained in Canada and sent to concentration camps.”

“There are no concentration camps in Canada,” I reassure the colleague. “It’s a very peaceful country. You are not in danger.”

“No, I heard that it’s Trump.”

“Trump detains people in Canada?” I ask.

“No. Yes. I don’t know how it works. But I heard that if you go to Canada, you might not come back.”

“It’s OK, you’ll come back,” say I despondently, beginning to wish this weren’t true.

“I heard it had something to do with Trump,” the colleague perseveres. “That if you travel to Canada, you might disappear and then nobody hears from you again.”

“Well, I’m going to Canada two weeks before your conference,” I say thinking that I don’t get paid nearly enough. “If I don’t come back, you’ll know whom to blame.”

“Trump?” she asks hopefully.

“Sure,” I say. “Blame Trump’s Canadian concentration camps.”

After the conversation ended, I took the rest of the day off.

🔴 Small boat migrant avoids jail after punching female police officershttps://t.co/3QX6USHmlw

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 30, 2025

He repeatedly punched these policewomen and had to be dragged off one of them. He’s not going to jail but people who tweeted something un-PC are jailed. Can people of progressive political beliefs explain why this is reasonable or fair?

In the absence of a strong identity of their own, Canadians reacted to America’s shift to the right by shifting further to the left. The irony of the situation is that, in order to affirm their right to be their own country, they embraced an ideology that does not see the concept of “a country” as meaningful:

The only “anti-American” mode that Canadians can conceive is to shift left – i.e., a “nationalism” that ultimately coincides with the anti-nationalist trajectory of advanced liberalism.

https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/make-canada-conservative-again

Adolescents start the journey of becoming their own selves by rejecting the example of their parents. It’s a necessary stage in their journey towards adulthood but it’s not adulthood. They will only become adults when they make their own decisions without using their parents as a starting point.

Canadian national identity is still in this adolescent stage of confusing independence with what in reality is complete thralldom. There has never been a situation of US citizens making political decisions based on anything that happens in Canada. In this state of self-inflicted inequality, Canadian lamentations that Americans don’t take them seriously as a nation sound like a teenager’s pouting that mom and dad don’t respect him as a fully autonomous individual.

I had no idea that Grant existed before reading Deneen’s article today. This is a crying shame and also very typical of what I talked about yesterday. I’m obsessive, and this means that I read every syllable of everybody who mewled anything about neoliberalism at any point in time. Yet I never heard that Canada had its own Zygmunt Bauman thirty years before the actual Bauman.

Get a load of this, for example:

Grant recognized that liberalism was more radical [than even Marxism] due to its fundamental commitment of freedom that ultimately sought (and required) liberation from human nature itself. Grant was especially attentive to the close alignment between liberalism and an embrace of transformative technology. “The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only public value” (56).

Liberalism wants to liberate us from human nature. It wants to achieve the state where there are no negative emotions, unpleasant feelings, or conflicts arising from human beings coming together. It seeks a reality where humans are not constrained by our biology. Where we can choose and remake every aspect of our bodies. Even today it takes hard work to make this argument. In 1965, for a dude born during WWI to say something like this is extraordinary.

Grant argued very correctly that liberalism (I call it neo while he didn’t which is utterly insignificant) is more dangerous than Marxism. Yes, Marx was completely mistaken in that communism was possible. But at least Marx’s fantasy involved people coming together and becoming less selfish for the common good. It’s in the name. Yes, it’s a pipe dream, absolutely. But the dream itself is a lot less malignant than the solitary human god of neoliberalism with his sewn-on body parts and claims to being able to remake the world, vanquish death, and become eternal.

Reader V07 asked yesterday what Canadian national identity could be. Well, Grant offers an answer. “We were the first on the planet to catch the advent of a new era and analyze it presciently ” is a pretty kick-ass identity. We are the new hub of world philosophy. We create ideas. What’s not to like?

Why should Deneen, an American, try to reveal to Canadians their own intellectual greatness? I’m sure Grant wasn’t working in a vacuum. There must be a whole intellectual tradition there. It’s up to Canadians to find and describe it.

Patrick Deneen has written an excellent article on why the revival of Canadian nationalism pushed the country to the left and not to the right:

Canadian conservatism remains firmly under the control of the “Old Right” – the Right of Reagan-era fusionism, and even today heavily overrepresented by libertarian business interests. I encountered not just one, but several booths proudly sporting the visage of Ayn Rand as an icon of a “conservatism” — a label that Rand herself rejected, and a form of “conservatism” that many Americans now rightly suspect of not having conserved anything at all. Joining her on one banner – the “Ladies of Liberty Alliance” – was the libertarian, transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey, dedicated foe of conservatism. Such is the general state of conservatism in Canada.

https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/make-canada-conservative-again

Canadian conservatism has not been able to detach itself from neoliberalism, and that made it hostile to nationalism. Between the neoliberal Left and the equally neoliberal Right, people will always choose the Left because neoliberalism is so much more natural to it. If freedom and choice are your gods, then your side is quite automatically the one that celebrates the freedom to snip away body parts or identify as whatever strikes your fancy.

Deneen cites George Grant, a Canadian nationalist who warned in 1965 that Canadian (or any other) nationalism is doomed:

The United States is [simply] the most progressive society on earth and therefore the most radical force for the homogenizing of the world. By its very nature the capitalist system makes the national boundaries only matters of political formality.

Grant was a visionary who described the horror of neoliberalism over a decade before it started to dawn on anybody else how scary it was. He’s not known in Canada and zero national pride has accrued to the achievement of having the first philosopher in the world to have described the threat of the approaching neoliberalization. As usual, Canadian are silencing their own achievements and erasing themselves from history. The threat to their statehood is not in the White House. It is inside themselves.

Now I’m desperate to know what culture has normalized girls pursuing boys with lewd comments and douchebag behavior.

Does anybody have any ideas? It’s news to me that such a culture exists.

It’s admirable that Mikhail Veller, a Jew, makes the responsibility of Jews for the catastrophe of wokeness very clear in his novel. Soviet Jews are the only Jews in America and Canada who reliably vote for the Right but that’s not an excuse to avoid talking about responsibility and complicity.

Of course, as I keep reading it has become obvious that not only can’t an American write something like this, it’s hard to imagine an American even reading the novel and not perishing of guilt and PC scruples by chapter six.

The professor learned absolutely nothing. He is still using DEI arguments to debate DEI.

I used GT to translate one of the chapters of Veller’s novel. It is titled “History 1619.” The leftist ideology has triumphed, and this is a school lesson in history that is being taught after the decisive victory of the left. I will put most of the chapter under the fold to avoid cluttering the feed. Press page 2 under the text to see the rest of the chapter.

Chapter 37

HISTORY-1619

— So, in our last lesson we talked about the discovery and development of America by Africans. Aina, how did this happen?

— America was discovered by the Vikings. It was in the third century AH. Europe was still barbaric. But sailors from Africa had already sailed around Europe. They had settlements even in the north. There were few Africans, and they took local whites with them on their voyages. One such expedition, led by an African captain, reached the shores of America.

— Well done, Ilfat! And what happened next?

— Then the whites who had sailed to America began to destroy the native Americans. And the Africans stood up for them. But there were more whites, and they killed all the Africans. Then the native Americans avenged the Africans and killed all the whites.

— So sadly, children, the first discovery of America by our ancestors ended. Well, what happened next? Who knows?

— Me!

— I know you know. Kwabena! Stop smoking in the classroom! Did you hear the question?

– I heard everything!..

– So answer.

– What? – What happened after the first discoverers of America died?

I first discovered the concept of a nation-state when I was starting my Master’s degree in Canada. I’m talking, of course, not about “a country” but specifically the way of being a country that is a nation-state. That it needs a group of people to come together and articulate what the “we” inhabiting it is like. And rewrite the history to make the “we” either eternal or necessary. And create a canon of artists, statesmen and achievements that justify the “we” and make the artificiality of the nation unimportant. I had left Ukraine which was clearly failing its historic chance of nation-building. Today, there’s not a person in Ukraine who doesn’t agree that this crucial work wasn’t done, and we are now seeing the tragic results of that.

Overjoyed by my discoveries as all young graduate students are, I started bugging every Canadian in sight with questions about what the Canadian national identity is. What I discovered was that people couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve references to the US. “We are not the US” is the underpinning of the Canadian identity, which means there is no identity. If you ask me to tell you about myself and I explain that I’m nothing like my colleague Heidy, you’ll think I’m a weirdo with no personality.

Canada has a lot of material for its nation-building. The two cultures of the Anglos and the Gauls are a great basis for identity. The Nordic nature. When Spain lost its colonies, it built a whole identity from the barren landscape of Castile. The Spanish identity isn’t “we are not the French.”

Canada has a fascinating literature but try finding it at a Canadian bookstore. I regularly engage in this exercise and it’s back-breaking work because there are no aisles called “national literature.” Canadian books are diluted by the sea of American lit that is, understandably, more vast. It doesn’t occur to anybody that people should have a chance to go to the store and find their national literature without tons of additional effort.

The important events of Canadian history have all been shat on. All that people are told about their history is how bad it was. Imaginary genocides are promoted while real achievements are never discussed.

Ask a Spaniard what the Spanish identity is, and you’ll immediately hear about the greatness of the Spanish language, how Spain got half of the world to speak its language, how Cervantes, and how Lope, and how Calderón. Ask a Frenchman , and you’ll hear about the Republic and laicisme and Enlightened philosophers. Ask an American , and you’ll hear about “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. Ask a Canadian, and the first thing you hear is “unlike Americans, we have free healthcare”, the emphasis being on “unlike Americans ” because even Cuba has free healthcare and what a big whoop that is.

Cubans, by the way, spent a century thinking about their national identity. The Caliban, sugar versus tobacco and what that symbolizes. Then, they ditched all that and took the road of “we are not Americans”, and we see where that led them.

The sad reality that a crucial Canadian election became about Trump should be a wake-up call. Liberal, conservative, or NDP, any Canadian should be unhappy with this fact. If you don’t want to be a 51st state – and you absolutely shouldn’t want it – don’t act like one. Don’t vote for or against Trump. Vote for your own nation but first figure out what it actually is.