See, the idea was for them to crop the pic, cuz I don’t have a recent “official” author photo (too busy actually writing stuff to sit for one…)
And, er, that didn’t happen obviously. Sigh.
I’m kinda sorta hoping FrontPage will swap out that delightful photo of me at the Little Church of the West, Las Vegas, Nevada last summer for, say, the cover of my book, which is far more aesthetically pleasing… We authors are such picky pain in the ass divas.
If any of you experience an exploding computer monitor after surfing over to the interview, I promise to reimburse you.
In the meantime, thanks very much to the folks at FrontPage, for letting me switch places and be the interviewee for a day, to talk about my new book The Tyranny of Nice: How Canada crushes freedom in the name of human rights — and why it matters to Americans.
Here’s an excerpt from my interview with FrontPage:
Most of the debates about the Human Rights Commissions and freedom of speech in Canada take place in the rarefied realm of “Capital I” Ideas, about what John Stuart Mill said 150 years ago and so forth.
However, I was one of the first to point out publicly the rather more mundane facts that many debaters seem either accidentally or intentionally oblivious to:
The fact is, 100% of those found guilty of “hate speech” in Canada have been white, Christian and/or conservative — and about 90% have been working class. And obviously the staff of the HRC are all university types, lawyers etc, as are the most vocal members of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Now, I grew up below the poverty line in Hamilton, Ontario — Canada’s version of Pittsburgh, with a little New Jersey thrown in. I was the first person in my family to finish high school. I grew up around people who talk to each other in the flesh the way all these alleged “neo Nazis” did on the internet. Not the crazy Protocols stuff they reprint, mind you, but some of those guilty of “hate speech” have done little more than question immigration levels or make crude jokes about this or that ethnic group.
And because multiculturalism is the de facto state religion of Canada — as far as the liberal Establishment is concerned — such jokes and discussions are forbidden. You see, the proles must remain silent as the great enlightened liberal Elite rule the nation.
(…)
About property rights: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (our Constitution) doesn’t enshrine private property rights. That’s (again, subconsciously) why those gay activists felt they could try to force a Christian printer to print gay rights pamphlets, or Muslims could try to, in effect, hijack Maclean’s magazine, demanding that they reprint
their Islamist “counterpoint” to Steyn’s articles.These demands are made with straight faces, because most Canadians simply don’t have that bred in the bone sense of private property that Americans have; the Kelo decision would have been greeted with shrugs up here, had it even made it to the Supreme Court. And Canadians take it for granted as well that the government is obliged to guarantee their “equal right” to well pretty much everything from cradle to grave, including having their articles published in privately owned magazines or using someone else’s printing press.
