Rob Bogunovic (2019 & 2021 PPC Candidate for Chilliwack-Hope)
Chilliwack, August 7, 2022
Politics used to be about policy debates and rival visions for the future, but today something has shifted. Today’s political arena is littered with irrational fears which are being exploited to promote delusional remedies. This has made a great many hysterical, and partisan politics has invaded almost every sector of our society. A new hegemony has taken hold, one so powerful that it has become taboo to even point out its existence.
One of the most obvious examples is the belief that climate change is an existential threat to all humanity. Climates do change, but the current narrative has people believing that slightly warmer temperatures a hundred years from now are going to doom the planet. The narrative also insists that the world is already suffering the harms of rising temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels.
The idea that humanity has impacted the climate is not controversial. The clearing of forests will affect the rate of precipitation, alter the earth’s albedo, and change the way the land absorbs and converts energy. Deforestation contributes to droughts, soil-erosion, affects wind velocity, and imposes numerous other effects upon the weather. We have known this for generations, yet our modern “experts” now blame CO2 for all these effects. According to NASA, CO2 is greening the earth. People call CO2 pollution, but it’s basically plant food.
The alarmists claim that sea levels are rising and the rate is accelerating, but tide gauges don’t tend to support this second assertion. At Vancouver, the rate of rise has been steady for a century, and the rate is 0.3 mm/year. That means Vancouver will likely experience 3 cm of sea level rise in a hundred years. Alarmist propaganda has created numerous images of the Statue of Liberty under water, but the rate of rise in New York is 2.8 mm/year, and at that rate it will take over 10,000 years for saltwater to touch the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Erratic weather is going to kill us – and is already killing us – and we’re supposed to completely ignore the fact that global climate-related deaths are down to 1/20th what they were a century ago. Per-capita, the death rate is 1/80th what it was a hundred years ago. Back in 2005, UN experts declared that we would have 50 million climate refugees by 2010, yet when 2010 arrived, there were just 7.2 million refugees in the world, and almost all of them were refugees of war. The largest share of them were Palestinians, 700,000 of whom were displaced in 1948. Denied citizenship in all the Muslim nations where they sought refuge, the number of Palestinian refugees has risen to over 4.7 million due to the birth of children and grandchildren within their camps.
By way of solutions the alarmists demand that we get the world off fossil fuels ASAP, and they don’t seem to care that this will raise the cost of energy globally while simultaneously crippling agricultural production.
The effect would be the death of hundreds-of-millions of people. The policies promoted by alarmists are significantly more dangerous than the climate change they seek to avoid.
Another narrative claims that systemic racism is ubiquitous in all our institutions and that cops are hunting BIPOCs in the streets. We are to believe that cops are deliberately murdering poor innocent souls for absolutely no reason other than the racial hate these cops carry in their hearts. Systemic racism is the only explanation Leftists allow to explain the over-representation of certain demographics within our justice systems. Advance any other explanation and you’ll to be denounced as a racist oppressor who needs to be oppressed – and they’ll never tell you how many oppressive acts against the oppressor it will take before the oppressor becomes oppressed. Our current overlords pretend that Canada has a serious problem with white supremacy ideologies manifesting everywhere. This is regarded as a great threat – almost equal to the threat of climate change which - we are told - is also racist and sexist because … reasons. Racism is even more dangerous than Covid-19, which is why all the established authorities endorsed people attending large BLM protests during the 2020 pandemic.
Observing what unfolded in the wake of George Floyd, one might assume that the delusional remedies being pursued by the Left involve looting and rioting and burning city blocks to the ground whilst untold millions are illicitly funnelled into the pockets of BLM founders and the DNC – but that was mostly an American phenomenon, and it was all “mostly peaceful”. When the rage subsides, the remedies evolve into affirmative action campaigns, mandated training in implicit biases, inclusion, and diversity, and calls to defund the police. Leftists also deride white people for their fragility and advocate differential sentencing and early release where race is the primary consideration.
They also propose new media censorship laws to ban hate speech – which is broadly understood to be any speech that Leftists hate. Canada’s Liberal government is now qualifying and regulating journalism, empowering the CRTC to regulate social media, and promising even more funding to the CBC and other news outlets who faithfully regurgitated their favoured narratives. All this is done under the pretext of fighting back against “misinformation” and “disinformation” whilst preserving a “free” press that is anything but free.
When Covid-19 burst into the news cycle back in March 2020, people reacted like it was the new Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, even though the numbers out of Italy told us it was more akin to the Hong Kong Flu of 68/69 – a flu so devastating that no one even thought to cancel Woodstock.
To save us from Covid, we social distanced six feet while obsessively sanitizing everything except for the subway cars in New York City when it was the epicentre of the North American outbreak. We shut down all social gatherings, closed schools and churches, and restricted travel. Many jurisdictions shoved Covid positive patients into care homes so that the most vulnerable members of our society would be immediately exposed. We cancelled surgeries and cancer screenings and urged people to stay indoors and severely limit their social circles, and we put police tape around playgrounds. We were advised not to wear masks, then told we should wear them – that “my mask protects you and your mask protects me”. Then we were mandated to wear them, and when mandates finally lifted, some among us continued wearing them for their own protection, and we were advised not to laugh.
We banned Ivermectin, “debunked” the idea that vitamin D was helpful in reducing risk, and mandated a “vaccine” that was “safe and effective”. Then they started pushing boosters because vaccine immunity waned rapidly, so it turns out the “vaccines” weren’t very effective, or even very good at stopping the spread of Covid, and if we had simply mailed people vitamin D (with instructions on how much to take), it would likely have been vastly more effective than any of the measures we adopted, yet no level of government has ever presented us with a cost-benefit analysis for all the destructive policies they imposed on us while ignoring our constitution.
We are told that Canada is still a free and democratic country, that men can become women and women can become men, that abortion saves lives, bugs are delicious, repression is progressive, censorship is tolerance, your silence is violence, and “the science” must never be questioned – ever. We are supposed to follow the science as the science follows the money, and we watch in silence as the “Great Consolidation” accelerates the transfer of wealth and power from the middle class to an oligarchical elite.
Powerful narratives are being built upon irrational fears, and all the proposed remedies appear suspiciously calibrated to erode the very foundations of Western civilization. I’m not sure what it will take to effectively push back against the new hegemony infesting all our institutions. The forces arrayed against rationality are immensely powerful. Public education, the courts, some churches, major corporations, media conglomerates, and tech giants are all colluding to advance delusion and confusion.
What I do know is that we can’t win if we continue employing the same strategies that have gotten us in this predicament in the first place. The Conservatives have been tepid opponents to these irrational “progressives”. They mollify and meander, and their occasional victories merely stall the advance of the narratives that war against reality and impoverish us all. Take any progressive narrative from twenty years ago and you’ll find most “conservatives” paying them lip-service today.
Political correctness boxes them in, and rather than lead, they are led by polls. They shift their platforms, and don’t even notice how badly they have drifted.
I support the People’s Party of Canada because it offers a real opposition. At the launching of our party, we declared war on political correctness. Since the beginning we have sought to expose error, confront lies, and change minds. We can win, but only if like minds join us in the struggle. So many of the other parties are pitching poll-friendly fantasies. We proclaim what we know to be true – believing that truth is what sets us free – every one of us.
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Rob Bogunovic, Vice President, Fraser Valley Regional Association
Having been a teacher in Chilliwack for more than 20 years, Rob's vast knowledge of history and social sciences made him a formidable debater during the federal election campaigns of 2019 and 2021 as the PPC Candidate for Chilliwack-Hope. Now, stepping into a mentorship role for the Fraser Valley Regional Association, Rob will continue to offer his well-prepared and worldly wise style of leadership and service to the community and future Fraser Region candidates. Email Rob at: vice@fraservalleyppc.ca
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