Rip Van Winkle went to sleep a socialist and woke up a fascist
Rip Van Winkle woke up in Canada and was immediately exposed as Far Right.
The Cancel Culture has claimed another victim. Rip Van Winkle, who reached the pinnacle of celebrity in the democratic socialist movement in the late 60s, was outed as a Far Right politician by Canada's Great Arbiter of Truth, the CBC. In a broadcast aired on August 30th, CBC's flagship investigative news program "The Fifth Estate", produced evidence that Van Winkle espoused right wing extremist views on immigration, free speech, same sex adoption, pedophilia and biology.
It was not the first time that Van Winkle made the news this year. In fact he gained national attention for waking up from the coma that followed a car accident he was involved in June of 1969. Medical staff were astounded to find that he was cognitively uncompromised by the experience. No sooner did he regain consciousness when minutes later he was his old - or young - self again. Van Winkle picked up where he left off, lecturing doctors, nurses and visitors alike about the need to nationalize the commanding heights of the economy, institute a guaranteed annual income, impose a stiff capital gains tax and reduce immigration intakes in order to defend the wages and working conditions of Canadian workers. He kept quoting the father of Canadian democratic socialism, J.S. Woodsworth: "The best friend of the working man is a tight labour market!"
It was the last contention that landed Van Winkle in hot water. In fact it led to a CBC investigation.
CBC journalists soon discovered that Van Winkle's positions on a range of issues were, to use Justin Trudeau's phrase, "unacceptable". So much so that NDP* leader Jagmeet Singh called upon Big Tech to censor and shadow ban him. "I mean, what recourse did I have? The man espoused social conversative values" Singh complained. "Who does he think he is, Tommy Douglas? Next thing you know he is going to speak out against Justin Trudeau's use of Emergency Powers in the same way that Douglas opposed Pierre Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act. Pretty soon he is going to portray me as a facile, unprincipled opportunist with a totalitarian impulse and no sense of history. Go figure."
What particularly incensed Singh was Van Winkle's reaction when he was shown video of the Freedom Convoy. Van Winkle expressed his admiration and support for ordinary working-class people whose constitutional rights were brazenly violated, including the Sikh truck drivers now at war with Singh. Though Van Winkle's NDP membership had long expired, the spectacle of an NDP activist in 2023 siding with actual workers was too much for Singh to take. Apparently, when Van Winkle was recovering in the hospital, no one had the heart to tell him that the NDP today is not the NDP of yesteryear. It is no longer a party of honest, hard-working 'deplorables' but a collection of wine drinking, CBC-listening, artsy-fartsy bed-hopping deviants and counterfeit environmentalists. The Salt of the Earth.
Van Winkle's downfall was as steep as his rise was meteoric. He went from hero to zero in a matter of weeks. Even the environmental organizations that he had supported before his accident were quick to blacklist him. As Sustainable Population for All director Robyn P. Cookwood remarked, "The first thing that any population reductionist or immigration reformer must do is to condemn racism. Van Winkle woke up, but he is not woke. We could try to reform him through Neuro-Linguistic Programming but the reality is that you can't teach an old racist dog new tricks. We could whisper buzz words like "Inclusion" and "Outreach" until the cows came home but it would have little effect. Best to stonewall and boycott him."
What "sealed the deal" for CBC listeners was that Van Winkle opposed same-sex adoptions and the entry of story-telling groomers into primary school classrooms. He stubbornly adhered to the quaint notion that every child deserves both a male and a female role model in the home, and that parents should have a role in the education of their kids.
These views, and others, did not go over well. According to pollsters, 83% of the CBC audience found it appalling that he did not support "reasonable accommodation" for Muslim students who want prayer rooms in public schools. As one listener put it, "Secularism in schools was designed to boot Christianity and the Lord's Prayer out of classrooms, not target Muslims. It was about the separation of church and state, not mosque and state. Islam is cool."
Particularly incendiary was Van Winkle's contention that chromosomes matter. "If you have XY chromosomes you're male. If you have XX chromosomes you're female. End of story." Van Winkle clearly did not understand that sometime during his long sleep, biology became a "social construct". And obviously, he still does not understand that "hate" speech is not free speech, and that the Committee for Public Safety (aka the Liberal-NDP coalition) is in charge of defining what "hate" means.
So what accounts for Van Winkle's paradigm shift? How did he travel so far down the road to darkness? How did he manage to veer so far to the right? How does a man of the Left become a man of the Far Right? The answer, Van Winkle explained, is quite simple. 'You stand on the Left, close your eyes and stay put while the ground underneath you shifts far to the Left. You nod off, wake up a while later, and learn that you are on the Far Right. You don't even have to lift a finger." It can be a rude awakening. Especially for a guy that stuck to his Old Left guns. Can Winkle turn around? Can he change and move with the times? Not bloody likely. His core beliefs have hardened and there is no turning back. Ostracism and rebuke only stiffen his resolve. He will continue to believe in objective reality to the bitter end, and die on the battlements defending the welfare state from the impossible demands that massive unending waves of migrants will make upon it. He will never buy into the Noble Savage Cult or repudiate the achievements of Western Civilization. He will never succumb to identity group politics or compelled speech.
The CBC is right. Van Winkle is incorrigible. He does not belong in Justin Trudeau's post-national state. There is no room in Trudopia for racists, misogynists and transphobes. No place for those who would dare question the self-evident virtue of Diversity, and the unmitigated benefits of mass immigration. No forum for people who would criticize the sacrosanct concept of "equity", nor tolerance for those who would reject Repressive Tolerance. Progressive post-national Canada must be about a Diversity of Faces, not a diversity of viewpoints. All Canadians must be guaranteed a Safe Place.
The vote is unanimous:
Rip Van Winkle should go back to sleep. Never to rise again.
What then shall the state do with him?
Vaccinate him! That should do the trick. He could become one of the five hundred thousand plus vaccine casualties that the MSM and Big Tech are doing their best to cover up before innumerate progressives open their eyes and learn to count. You know, the people equate so-called 'anti-vaxxers' and climate skeptics with "science denalism", when skepticism is the very essence of a scientific approach and not all vaccines are created equal. The same people who speak of "the science" as if science was univocal. The same people who invoke "science" in their defence of a monolithic global warming narrative then turn around and claim that men can bear children and that gender is a scientific category!
Over to you Pfizer. It's in your hands. Don't worry, your legal immunity from lawsuits is still intact and the Herd has been conditioned to comply. The global Milgram experiment conducted between 2020-22 was proof positive. The timing is perfect. A new Covid scariant is rumoured to be in the wings. Go for it! Van Winkle won't know what hit him.
* The NDP - Canada's democratic socialist party - and the Socialist Party of the United States, were both led by United Church ministers. Tommy Douglas in Canada, and Norman Thomas in the United States. These people were social conservatives. They would have been repelled by the Cultural Marxist agenda.
About the author: Canadian author Tim Murray was a long-time Canadian democratic socialist mugged by the reality of Limits to Growth. His new awareness led him away from traditional left/right dichotomies toward steady-state solutions, and a fierce determination to fight the fake environmentalism of the Sierra Club and their clones. He was the co-founder of Biodiversity First, a director of Immigration Watch Canada, and is currently on the board of Population-Environment Balance. He is an avid hiker and nature-lover who co-exists with wolves, cougars, bears, and bald-headed eagles in the North Gulf Islands of British Columbia.