Trump @ 1:36 mark
Month: February 2021
Experts call Peel guidelines to place children in solitary quarantine ‘cruel punishment’
Arwen~Fully reject this! It is nothing short of child abuse. Maybe it takes seeing the measures supposed health officials impose on our most vulnerable, our children, with no science to support to wake us up. Past time to take back our health, our lives from all forms of gov’t and institutions.
Drastic measure not supported by science and could have long-lasting psychological effects
Author of the article:Anthony Furey
Publishing date:Feb 27, 2021
Peel Health has issued guidelines to parents instructing them to keep any children who have been sent home because a classmate has tested positive for COVID-19 isolated in a separate room from all other family members for 14 days.
The severe guidelines, which apply even to small children who are dismissed from child care, are being criticized by experts as harmful and not supported by science
“This is cruel punishment for a child, especially for younger children, 4-10 years old,” Dr. Susan Richardson, a microbiologist and infectious disease physician who is also a professor emerita at University of Toronto, wrote in an email to the Sun.
“Shutting a child off from their parents and siblings for up to 14 days in this manner could produce significant and long-lasting emotional and psychological effects.”
The handout distributed at Peel Region schools explains, “If your child does not have any symptoms: the child must self-isolate, which means stay in a separate room, eat in a separate room apart from others, use a separate bathroom if possible.”
The handout also says, “If the child must leave their room, they should wear a mask and stay 2 metres apart from others.” Any other children in the household not only must be both separated from their siblings but also stay home for 14 days.
“This does not seem practically possible and is highly likely to cause harm to children who would already be experiencing considerable distress with having to remain at home,” Dr. Tess Clifford, the director of the Psychology Clinic at Queen’s University, said in an email to the Sun.
Clifford said those making decisions about pandemic mitigation measures need to consider the well-being of children across multiple domains of health.
“I don’t understand how any health-care professional has moved so far away from the fundamentals of public health and of doing no harm that they would think that basically incarcerating a child in a room for 14 days is in any way justified,” said Dr. Martha Fulford, an infectious diseases physician at Hamilton Health Science who focuses on pediatrics.
“This is shocking,” adds Fulford, “especially when you consider this is being proposed for children who are not in any way sick.”
The handout began appearing on social media in recent days as Peel residents balked at receiving it. The Sun confirmed the authenticity of the document with Peel Health, although it is also posted on their website.
“My 10-year-old granddaughter was sent home from school today because one kid in her class tested positive. Public Health instructed her mom to keep her in her room with no contact with rest of family for 14 days,” social media user Judy Martin wrote on Twitter.
“Sounds like child abuse to me. There’s a $5K fine for non-compliance.”
Dr. Richardson said in addition to the policy being harmful, it is not supported by science.
“An asymptomatic child in a classroom with one child testing positive is at very low risk for acquiring infection,” she says. “Most importantly, we are losing sight of the fact that if he/she should contract COVID while quarantining at home, they and their siblings are at an extremely low risk of suffering severe disease as a consequence.”
Pediatricians across Canada have previously noted that while COVID-19 is very serious in some categories of people, it does not pose a risk for serious outcomes in children.
Police on Guard for Thee ·A recent article published in the Toronto Sun on February 27th addresses guidelines issued by Public Health Agencies advising parents to isolate daycare, and school aged children who may have been exposed to a classmate who has tested positive for Covid-19, in their rooms for 14 days, even if they are asymptomatic.Dr. Susan Richardson, a microbiologist and infectious disease physician states:“Shutting a child off from their parents and siblings for up to 14 days in this manner could produce significant and long-lasting emotional and psychological effects.”Police on Guard has tried very hard to remain as neutral as possible providing information the public about the current legislation and their Charter rights.We at Police on Guard forThee. have tried to remain as neutral as possible by providing information to the public about the current legislation and their Charter rights, but we believe it is imperative to issue a very clear and concise statement at this time.This type of irresponsible direction from our institutions will have severe repercussions for our children. This policy amounts to state sanctioned cruel and unusual punishment in violation of section 12 of the Charter. Simply put, it is neglect. It is unfortunate that some parents will actually adhere to this direction, and for that we are saddened.We implore parents not to follow these guidelines as the consequences for our children will be extremely damaging and long lasting.
Trudeau government should rethink its flawed changes to assisted dying
Fri., Feb. 26, 2021
Twelve months ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed our lives and pushed almost every other issue to the margins of public attention, we sounded a warning that Canada seemed to be sliding toward what amounts to a system of death on demand.
We worried that the right to medical assistance in dying, or MAID, was at risk of being stretched far beyond its original conception: to ease the pain of suffering people in the final stage of life, of allowing them a so-called “death with dignity.”
Today, that possibility is no longer a risk but a reality. The latest version of the federal government’s overhaul of the MAID system, encompassed in legislation called Bill C-7, is on its way to becoming law after a long series of delays and back-and-forths between the House of Commons and the Senate.
As it stands now, Bill C-7 would greatly expand the right to MAID in ways that many doctors, ethicists and even experts from the United Nations find deeply problematic. By eliminating the requirement that a patient’s death be “reasonably foreseeable,” they say the bill will undermine the rights of disabled people and make it more likely they will accept assisted suicide rather than be provided with proper treatment and supports.
The bill even opens the door to extending the right to assisted suicide to people whose only underlying medical condition, their sole reason for seeking death, is suffering due to a mental illness. The potential for abuse is both obvious and frightening.
All this is a far cry from what most people accepted as a valid, indeed compassionate, reason for legalizing assisted suicide back in 2016. And none of it has been as fully aired as it would be — and should be — if the pandemic wasn’t dominating almost every public moment.
Nor is any of this necessary. The federal government is bringing in these changes as a response to a Quebec Superior Court ruling in 2019, in which the judge decided that the law’s provision that death must be “reasonably foreseeable” is unconstitutional.
The government could have, indeed should have, appealed that flawed decision. Instead, it promised to bring the law into line with this one lower-court ruling, launched lengthy consultations on the whole issue of MAID, and eventually came up with a series of proposed changes laid out in Bill C-7. The Commons adopted them, then the Senate weighed in with amendments, and this week the government said it would accept some of those proposals.
One is that the right to MAID would be extended to people who are suffering solely from an underlying mental illness, though that wouldn’t take effect for two years. This is a complete about-face for the government, since its first version of C-7 explicitly excluded mental illness as grounds for demanding the right to an assisted death.
You don’t have to ponder this too long to see the potential for tragic outcomes. No doubt some people suffer in a “grievous” (the law’s language) way from mental illness, but surely those very conditions put an enormous question mark over their capacity to make final, irreversible decisions.
Advocates for the change say it’s discriminatory not to include mental illness, and argue that the law must respect the autonomy of the individual, the right of everyone to decide their own fate regardless of the type of medical condition they are suffering from.
That sounds lofty, but as many psychiatrists and advocates point out, how much true autonomy does a person have if society doesn’t offer them proper support to live their lives as fully as possible, if they are marginalized, unable to earn a living or access treatment, and feel they are a burden to others? Won’t they feel pressure to take advantage of an expanded MAID system just to escape all that? Is that really what we want — to set up a system where more and more people feel disposable, and in fact become disposable?
All that may apply to people with chronic conditions or disabilities as well, which is why hundreds of organizations advocating for them have come out against C-7. Added to that is a team of UN experts who concluded that the bill violates the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Canada has ratified. “Disability should never be a ground or justification to end someone’s life directly or indirectly,” they wrote. “Such legislative provisions would institutionalize and legally authorize ableism.”
The government’s proposed bill includes other questionable changes as well. For one, it would eliminate a 10-day waiting period between the request for MAID by a person whose death is foreseeable and its carrying-out, a pause designed to make sure there aren’t second thoughts. Only one witness, not two, would be required.
Medically assisted dying is no longer rare. Between 2016 and 2019, according to the most recent official figures, 13,946 Canadians exited life that way. If the trends continued last year and into the first weeks of 2021, the total would be over 20,000 by now, close to the number of people who have died of COVID-19 so far.
It’s important that we get this right. Better to put up with more delay than to rush through a flawed bill that hasn’t had the full public debate it deserves. The government should think again.
The Danger of Appeasing the Mullahs
- Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.
- After the EU began pursuing ways of appeasing Iran, and after sanctions were lifted in 2015 due to the nuclear deal (which Iran never signed), Iran’s assassins and terror operatives ratcheted up their activities on the European soil.
- Governments around the world need hold the Iranian regime accountable for its foreign adventurism and its reprehensible repression of dissent and peaceful protests at home. They must adopt a firm policy of expelling Iranian “diplomats” and intelligence agents like Assadi, who may be plotting further terrorist attacks. They also need to consider closing down Iranian embassies until Tehran halts its terror activities.
 This month, the Turkish authorities detained an Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Reza Naderzadeh, 43, for his role in killing an Iranian dissident, Massoud Molavi Vardanjani, in November 2019. Reportedly, the Iranian diplomat was a staff member in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul (pictured) and had forged travel documents for Ali Esfandiari, who orchestrated the assassination. (Photo by Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images) |
Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.
This month, the Turkish authorities detained an Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Reza Naderzadeh, 43, for his role in killing an Iranian dissident, Massoud Molavi Vardanjani, in November 2019. Reportedly, the Iranian diplomat was a staff member in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and had forged travel documents for Ali Esfandiari, who orchestrated the assassination of Molavi Vardanjani.
The Iranian regime, it seems, targeted Molavi Vardanjani because of his social media campaign to expose corruption in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its elite Quds Force branch, and the theocrats’ military establishment. After serving as an intelligence officer for the Iranian government, he defected. “I will root out the corrupt mafia commanders…,” he wrote on social media. “Pray that they don’t kill me before I do this.”
It is not the first time that the Iranian regime has used Turkish soil to assassinate its opponents. In 2017, Saeed Karimian, a British television executive and founder of GEM TV, which runs 17 Persian-language TV channels, was shot dead in Istanbul. Before his murder, he was convicted in absentia in Iran’s revolutionary court for spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic. His killers, traveling on fake passports, were arrested in Serbia while travelling to Iran. An opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, stated that Karimian was assassinated by the IRGC on the direct orders of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
In Iran, orders to carry out assassination on a foreign soil likely come from top. As a senior US official, who requested anonymity, in the Trump administration previously told Reuters:
“Given Iran’s history of targeted assassinations of Iranian dissidents and the methods used in Turkey, the United States government believes that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security was directly involved in Vardanjani’s killing.”
To appease Iran, Turkey has lax visa requirements for Iran which likely make Iran’s assassination attempts in Turkey easier: it allows Iranian agents to commute more easily between Ankara and Tehran. Iranian citizens are exempt from obtaining a visa for visits to Turkey for up to 90 days.
The policy is the same for the EU. After the EU began pursuing ways of appeasing Iran, and after sanctions were lifted in 2015 due to the nuclear deal (which Iran never signed), Iran’s assassins and terror operatives ratcheted up their activities on the European soil. An Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, was put on trial in a breathtaking case that saw him accused of direct involvement in a terrorist plot in France. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors pointed out that, in June 2018, Assadi delivered 500 grams of the powerful explosive triacetone triperoxide to his accomplices with the aim of bombing a significant Iranian opposition rally in Paris. Had the plot not been discovered at the last minute, the terrorist act could have left hundreds dead, including international dignitaries and many European parliamentarians.
Another individual linked to the Iranian regime, Mohammad Davoudzadeh Loloei, 40, was sentenced to prison in June 2020 in a European court — this time, in Denmark — for being an accessory to the attempted murder of one or more individuals who are opponents of Iran’s current regime. According to Denmark’s Roskilde District Court, Loloei had collected information on a dissident, so far unnamed, and given it to Iran’s intelligence service, who planned to murder the man. The information included photos of the target’s house, street and surroundings. “The court found that the information was collected and passed on to a person working for an Iranian intelligence service, for use by the intelligence service’s plans to kill the exile,” the court’s statement read.
Governments around the world need hold the Iranian regime accountable for its foreign adventurism and its reprehensible repression of dissent and peaceful protests at home. They must adopt a firm policy of expelling Iranian “diplomats” and intelligence agents like Assadi, who may be plotting further terrorist attacks. They also need to consider closing down Iranian embassies until Tehran halts its terror activities.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
LIVE with pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson On Covid-19, what it is and what it is not. A must watch.
Arwen~ Dr. Hodkinson is very courageous in standing against the cult-like COVID narrative. Watch Dr. Hodkinson remove the mask from COVID. Watch and share. Starts at the 4 min mark..
Trudeau’s Canada: Low achievement, high self-esteem
Philip Cross: We feel very good about ourselves — but for no apparent reason
Author of the article:Philip Cross
Publishing date:Feb 26, 2021
Tristin Hopper’s weekend article in the National Post asked why Canada can’t get things done anymore, from procuring vaccines to renovating 24 Sussex Drive. Malaise about Canada’s performance is entirely justified as our pampered public sector fails to deliver and few Canadian brands dominate in the global marketplace.
With Trump gone, Canada becomes easy to ignore
Even our public sector seemed admirable by international standards. The 2009 Obamacare debate in the U.S. was filled with envious references to our health-care system, while obtaining a university education here required much less student debt. The World Bank touted “the Canadian Pension Model” to the world. By 2012, the National Post’s Joe O’Connor could write that “Canada got its swagger.” Justin Trudeau’s election in 2015 briefly made him a global hero to progressives before images of blackface, accusations of scandal, and a failure to deliver results dulled his allure. The boast that “the world needs more Canada” reached peak popularity with our 150th anniversary in 2017, although for many outside Canada it really meant “the world wants less Trump.” With Trump gone, Canada becomes easy to ignore.
Canada’s public sector is clearly underperforming these days. Our vaunted health-care system is inoculating Canadians slower than some Third World countries. The insolvency of Laurentian University highlights a vulnerability in the funding model developed by many universities, which rely heavily on high fees for foreign students who are now staying home because of the pandemic. The Canadian Pension Model turned out to be based on unrealistic assumptions about rates of return as interest rates plunged.
Even more worrisome is that Canada is good at starting companies but not at nurturing them to global stature. Global leadership in key industries has disappeared. Canada claims just one of the Financial Times’ 100 leading global firms: Shopify. Smaller countries like Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and South Korea all have at least two companies on this list.
Nor have we been able to build on our strengths in banking, energy, or technology. Attempts to capitalize on our reputation by creating an institute for banking stability in Toronto came to nothing. Canada’s major contribution to global finance today is to serve “as an ATM and safe deposit box for money laundering” from China, according to Jonathan Manthorpe’s The Claws of the Panda. Our assumed technological prowess in everything from artificial intelligence to aerospace has not produced a successor on a global scale to Nortel or Blackberry. Canada’s superpower status in energy is undermined, as Tristan Hopper noted, by an inability to build pipelines or new hydro dams.
In sum, Canada has the same problem as many of our children: high self-esteem without high levels of achievement. We feel very good about ourselves — but for no apparent reason.
Before becoming Governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem co-authored an op-ed arguing that more companies should embrace “Brand Canada.” He questioned why business people shrink from the concept of brands for countries while embracing brands wholeheartedly in the corporate world. Canadian firms evidently do not share Macklem’s confidence in “Brand Canada.” All our major banks have stripped any homeland reference from their names, replacing Canada, Toronto, Montreal and Nova Scotia with meaningless initials. This seemed misplaced during the financial crisis but turns out to have been prescient as the glow has faded from Canada’s image.
Macklem easily could have asked why companies should adopt Brand Canada when Canada does not embrace them? In his 2017 book Canadian Failures, Alex Benay, previously Chief Information Officer of Canada, wrote that “the United States’ identity is as much defined by Ford and Apple as it is by Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.” But rather than treating our companies as national symbols, Canadians are more inclined to identify with public programs like Medicare. We seem embarrassed by resource industries such as the oilsands, when they should be seen as symbols of Canadian innovation and technical know-how.
Ignoring commercial success has long-term consequences. Michael Bliss, Canada’s leading business historian, said “the one prescription for the eventual failure of the Canadian experiment in nationality would be to create an ever-widening gap in standards of living between the two North American democracies.” Nations need to figure out which parts of their identities function well and don’t need changing and which parts are no longer working and do need changing. In today’s Canada, a lot is not working well and needs changing, starting with an expensive yet oftentimes inept public sector and a widespread indifference to the importance of private sector efficiency and innovation.
Britain in the late 1970s showed that countries can pull themselves out of a prolonged tailspin. Unless Canada makes an equivalent turnaround in its current slide into mediocrity, others will soon be labelling us with the tag often applied to Brazil: “the country of the future — and always will be.” Potential is not enough. If you want to be a player on the global stage, at some point you have to prove your worth by actually delivering results.
Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Trudeau’s Canada: Low achievement, high self-esteem | Financial Post
Unmasking the Medical Experts
February 22, 2021
Masks have become an unwelcome staple of American life with no end in sight. Mask recommendations change faster and more frequently than the weather. How did we get here?
In the medical world, particularly in operating rooms, masks protect patients undergoing surgery from bacteria passing from the mouths and noses of surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists, to an open surgical wound.
The Rolls Royce of masks is the N95 mask, used by healthcare workers when caring for COVID infected individuals. Assuming the mask is properly fitted and worn, a given for healthcare workers (but much less likely for a shopper in the grocery store), they are generally effective.
I say generally because the COVID virus is about 0.125 microns in size while the N95 mask pores are larger, at 0.3 microns. But the N95 mask is not simply a miniature chain link fence but uses fibers and electrostatic charges to capture viral particles.
Most individuals, however, are wearing loosely fitting cloth masks, cheap surgical masks, or bandanas to cover their face and nose. These masks easily allow breath to escape through or around the mask, as this video from Dr Ted Noel illustrates.
Negative mask consequences range from the annoying, like headaches and bad breath, to the potentially harmful, as in impaired oxygenation and gum disease. Then there are the psychosocial and developmental aspects, especially for children.
As we have never been told to wear masks, or socially distance, during past flu seasons, masks for COVID are a new phenomenon. Is the actual virus that much different from the seasonal flu virus in terms of size or transmissibility such that we need new rules? What have the medical experts said about masks in the past?
Last March, the World Health Organization did not recommend mask use for individuals, “unless they are sick with COVID or caring for someone who is sick.”
“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland.
In April 2000 guidance, the WHO was against routine public mask use.
Medical masks should be reserved for health care workers.
The use of medical masks in the community may create a false sense of security, with neglect of other essential measures, such as hand hygiene practices and physical distancing, and may lead to touching the face under the masks and under the eyes, result in unnecessary costs, and take masks away from those in health care who need them most, especially when masks are in short supply.
Infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci last March said,
There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
Former Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams agreed,
“Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” Adams purportedly tweeted on Feb. 29, 2020.
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
Yet masks became a staple of life, not only in America, but also in many parts of the world. Was it logical? Did it “follow the science”?
The Danish mask study provided some science to follow via a randomized controlled trial published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use.
They did not conclude that there was NO protection, only not a significant degree of protection for the community. Are there any comparable studies demonstrating a significant benefit to mask wearing? Why haven’t those studies been performed to “follow the science”?
Dr Fauci doubled down last month, advocating for two masks, “So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.
Then why not 3 or 4 masks, or 10, as each layer adds more protection? Where does such logic turn into absurdity?
YouTube screen grab
He quickly clarified days later, saying about double masking, “There’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference,” acknowledging that the CDC will follow the science, “And that’s the reason why the CDC has not changed their recommendation.”
A South Carolina chair of anesthesiology doubled down on Dr Fauci’s initial comments, “If you put three or four masks on, it’s going to filter better because it’s more layers of cloth.”
Is there science to follow on that, or simply the logic of, “If one is good, two must be better”? How does that work out in other areas of medicine, particularly for medications? One Prozac improved my mood so imagine how much better I’ll feel if I take three or four pills instead of just one.
There is another aspect of masks receiving scant attention, concern over the environmental impact of abandoned face masks. If masks are actually capturing COVID virus, are the masks being disposed of as medical waste or simply dropped in the trash or in parking lots?
COVID can persist on inanimate surfaces for up to 9 days, yet infected masks are being discarded anywhere and everywhere like cigarette butts. The UK alone will generate, in one year, mask waste equivalent to over five Eiffel Towers. Add in the rest of the world and it could be an Eiffel Tower of masks every few days.
Masks take 450 years to biodegrade. How many will end up in oceans and landfills, contaminating water and food chains with micro-plastics? Will sea animals become entangled in elastic mask straps as they are with plastic six-pack rings?
Where are the environmentalists? While AOC and the Green New Deal harpies are busy defending frozen windmills in Texas’s cold dark winter last week, they show no concern over the environmental effects of gazillions of discarded masks.
So here we are, not following the science on whether masks provide a clinically significant benefit based on mask type and circumstances of use, how many are necessary, or when multiple masks morph from virtue signaling to suffocation. And ignoring the environmental science as well.
The carbon footprint of a backyard grill is of concern to NPR but not the effects of discarded masks. The so-called experts can’t seem to make up their minds on all of this.
Which raises the age-old question about COVID: Was it ever about the virus?
Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer. He is on sabbatical from social media.
Why the prince and princess of woke had to leave the royal family
Harry and Meghan’s narcissism doesn’t sit well with the ideal of public service.
BRENDAN O’NEILL
EDITOR 22nd February 2021
ShareTopicsPOLITICSUK
So Harry and Meghan are out. The Prince and Princess of Woke are formally splitting from the monarchy. The Soft Megxit of 2020 – when the painfully PC pair flounced off to North America with the intention of becoming ‘financially independent’ – has become a Hard Megxit. The queen has decreed that Harry and Meghan’s antics are incompatible with ‘the responsibilities and duties that come with a life of public service’ and therefore they have to hand back all their royal patronages. This is about as close to saying ‘bugger off’ as the famously restrained queen will ever get.
What’s this all about? What does Megxit tell us about the world, if anything? Listening to the Meghan-loving chattering classes you’d be forgiven for thinking the poor dear and her loving husband were driven out of this godforsaken country by racism. Naturally, these people wilfully overlook that the vast majority of Britons took Meghan to their hearts when she got hitched to Harry, and only tired of her when she started wagging her manicured fingers at us about everything from feminism to climate change. Your everyday Brit doesn’t take kindly to being talked down to by right-on aristocrats who then get on a private jet to wing it to Elton John’s swanky pad in the South of France or to some barefoot, bullshit eco-gathering of the super-rich.
Others blame it all on the press. Our horrible, rapacious press, criticising Meghan day in, day out. They even cheer when Harry and Meghan launch legal cases against the media for saying rude or revealing things about them. It is testament to the middle classes’ turn against press freedom – which, let’s not forget, was won for us by people who dissed royalty, by the likes of the 18th-century prince-mocker John Wilkes – that they will cheerfully support two arrogant royals’ crusade against the papers. ‘Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan, their media critics are far worse’, says Marina Hyde at the Guardian. It’s not surprising that an aristocrat like Hyde would defend two aristocratic bores from the rabble that is the redtop press, but it’s pretty shocking the Guardian won’t stand up for press freedom against the Sussexes’ constant barbs and suing.
All these narratives tell us more about the narrators than they do about the reality of Megxit. They confirm the snobbery of the woke set, who are more than happy to take the side of a privileged pair of virtue-signallers over what they view as the irredeemably prejudiced British masses. And they confirm the ongoing, increasingly irrational hostility of the posh against the ‘low-rent’ press, which is now blamed for every ill in society. Meghan’s sadness? Our dumbed-down culture? Sexism? Far-right activism? Blame it on the tabloids. It’s the Sun wot did it.
The truth, as always, is more complex. What the great Harry and Meghan flounce really demonstrates is the incompatibility of the modern culture of narcissism with the old-world ideals of duty, loyalty and service. Meghan felt trapped in the royal family not because Princess Michael once wore a colonial-era brooch or because it is so hard to spend your days chilling in palaces, but because royal life runs so counter to the shallower, selfie-era, virtue-advertising outlook that Meghan has come to embody over the past couple of years. Megxit is fundamentally a battle between the narcissism of the 21st century and the more stoic, giving culture of the past.
This is where the Windsors’ and the Sussexes’ spat over ‘service’ is interesting. The queen firmly insisted that Harry and Meghan’s ‘independent’ globe-trotting did not sit comfortably with a ‘life of public service’. In the passive-aggressive manner of a certain type of Californian, Meghan and Harry fired back that everyone can do some ‘service’. ‘We can all have a life of service. Service is universal’, they said.
They don’t know what service means. Here’s the difference: the Meghans of this world primarily serve themselves, always seeking new opportunities for self-expression, virtuous preening, ‘emotional growth’. The queen, in contrast, serves the crown. She has negated the self. She suppresses her self-expression, her political views and her emotions, to the end of submitting to something bigger than herself: the crown, the monarchy, the constitution. Now, we can discuss whether the crown is good or bad – I’m a republican, so I’m not a fan. But it is clear that Meghan and Elizabeth II have unbridgeably different understandings of ‘service’. Meghan’s idea of service always involves her expressing herself and revealing herself and reminding us how virtuous she is; the queen’s idea of service is to hide the self, to fold it into a larger, apparently more important project. The queen is about service, Meghan is about self-service.
This is clear from how Harry and Meghan talk about the monarchy as if it were some kind of hot-desking workspace where you might pick up a few new skills before ‘moving on’. Last year they said they wanted to ‘make a transition’ and ‘carve out a progressive new role within this institution’, as if they were media consultants and the monarchy a mere brand. They said they wanted to ‘continue to collaborate with Her Majesty The Queen’, as if the queen were a fashion house and they were Jameela Jamil-style celebs providing it with a dash of BS ‘social change’. Again and again, they show that they have a very weak grip on the ideas of duty and loyalty, of giving things up for a greater good.
The cult of narcissism is widespread today. We are encouraged to obsess over our bodies and our image, to work out exactly where we fit on the infinite list of made-up genders, to obsess over our mental wellbeing, to hide in a ‘safe space’ in order to protect our sacrosanct self-esteem from any form of insult or inquiry. And of course this all generates a very flimsy sense of self – not the robust selfhood of 19th-century liberalism, but the fragile, easily injured selfhood of the social-media era, in which we require constant validation and protection from rowdy speech or else we will feel ‘erased’
So in inviting us to turn away from big, sacrifice-demanding national or social projects, and encouraging us instead to obsess over the self, the culture of narcissism represents the worst of both worlds. It diminishes the old idea that it can be good to devote oneself to something external, to something important, while also nurturing a warped form of individualism that is built on notions of fragility, fear of freedom, and psychic enslavement to the validation of officialdom and of others.
This is the culture Meghan and Harry now symbolise. Their idea of public service is a fleeting one, involving little more than occasionally giving talks at a women’s shelter or doing a Spotify chat with ‘social changers’. And their sense of self is both an obsessive and a fragile one – witness their focus on wellbeing and mental health and, in Meghan’s words, ‘sharing our pain’. The queen could not be more different. Her public service has been full-on, lifelong, unflinching; and her selfhood is of the confident, stoic variety. These are the moral and social clashes swirling around Megxit. I might be a republican, but in this spat I’m very much Team Queen.
Why the prince and princess of woke had to leave the royal family – spiked (spiked-online.com)
It’s No Longer Liberal vs Conservative
Medical Censorship & Harms of Lockdowns – An exclusive interview with 3 Frontline doctors.
“Freedom of expression is enshrined in our Constitution, and is imperative in a free and democratic society, as it underpins other human rights, such as the freedoms of thought, conscience, association and assembly. Free expression is vital to robust and open debate in order to formulate sound and reasoned public policy. This video reveals the disturbing, and dangerous, trend of how peaceful voices of frontline physicians who dissent, and disagree, with state policy regarding COVID directives, are being silenced. Dr. Gill, Dr. Phillips and Dr. Lamba have all come under attack for their expression that public health directives and mandates are grossly flawed and misguided, and for calling attention to the incredible harms of the governments’ forced lockdowns. Their desire to speak about the research they know, and the harms they witness, is driven by their conscience. Their only purpose in doing so is to live up to their oath “to do no harm”. They have no other motive. They stand to gain no profit, and in fact, to lose everything.
Settle in and listen with an open mind and heart.”
Now or Never 