A stick can hurt me
but overhearing your conversation cannot
We’ve been having a great couple of days here at the ranch. Last Sunday, visitors started pouring in. Two families who had not made any reservations, stayed overnight for the entire week in our cabins. They have been riding us and exploring the entire ranch. I gladly carried their weight, because I overheard many an interesting conversation. In fact, they had paid us an impromptu visit because, well … they had originally booked at Golden Diamonds. Indeed, that’s the hoity-toity place whence cowboy Hunter came over and joined our team. It turns out that Golden Diamonds do not only have attitudes towards their cowboys, but also vis-à-vis their customers. Not the most thoughtful management style, I would say, but then I am just a horse and I don’t manage Golden Diamonds.
So here is what made the two families move over to us. They had planned to stay for an entire week at Golden Diamonds, but they decided otherwise after just a single evening. Everything was fine, until they had dinner. Besides them, two other families were seated in the dining room. One of them happened to be Marc van Schuylenbroeck’s. Mark is a Member of Parliament from the Medicine Jaw riding. So it shouldn’t surprise that the MP talked politics at the dinner table. At one point, Marc spoke in a loud voice and said: “The West needs more truckers. Truckers have been having much more common sense than most academics these days. It’s an absolute shame that they saw their bank accounts frozen for saving our freedoms by speaking up about the blatant government overreach. We can’t let that happen again.”
At that point, all hell broke loose. In fact, the fourth table was a little different from the others. A duo was seated at that table. One had short purple hair and the other one blue hair just a smidge longer. Both wore badges that stated their pronouns, lest somebody have the vile idea to misgender them. When they overheard MP Marc’s casual conversation, they were “shocked and personally offended” and they thought it to be a “shame that they would have to hear such fascist, right-wing extremist propaganda” when they were on vacation. They ran in tears to the Golden Diamonds ranch house and demanded that the management intervene in “such an unpleasant experience.”
Here at our ranch, that would be the end of the story. Not at Golden Diamonds though, who have a policy that states that “no visitor may negatively affect others’ experiences.” Thusly, the Golden Diamonds management asked MP van Schuylenbroeck and his family to leave, which they did. That was after he stated that he “will soon implement laws to avoid this sort of nonsense from happening again,” though. That said, there was one thing Golden Diamonds had not counted with. They may be upmarket, but they are still a ranch in ranch country. Therefore, their average clientèle happens to be a little more in tune with their root chakras than the blue-haired, which was the case for the two other families, who had never seen something even remotely close to this unfold. They both left in solidarity with MP van Schuylenbroeck. In need for emergency accommodation, they ended up in our ranch and we did what we could to make sure they had a good time.
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There are few things that still manage to astound me these days. Who thinks that what happened to these families is preposterous, yet a one-off occurrence, should take heed that it is in line with broader developments in the West. The United Kingdom has the dubious honour to be spearheading this initiative. In 2023, the Worker Protection Bill was introduced, which contained clauses that would have made employers liable for any form of harassment their employees incurred. If that still sounds reasonable, then that is because the devil is in the detail. In this case, “harassment” was defined overly broadly, such that it did not only encompass sexual harassment, but all kinds of “harassment.” English law already did not require physical contact for a harassment case to classify as such, as merely a sexually tainted joke would suffice. However, by broadening the definition of harassment to “all kinds,” any sort of speech or joke deemed “uncomfortable” by somebody, could end up being a case of harassment. If that weren’t enough, this legislative proposal did not only burthen employers with the duty to shield their employees from harassment by colleagues, but also by … customers.
The proposed law was soon nicknamed the “Banter Bouncer Act,” since it terrified business owners in the hospitality industry, who would soon be required to police their customers’ speech, lest it offend one of their employees. While it is hard to fathom that this text was introduced under a Conservative government, pressure from hospitality businesses and non-profits like Free Speech Union eventually managed to have it watered down to be only applicable to sexual harassment. Howbeit, whoever thought that that marked the end of the preposterous concept of banter bouncers in pubs, would be dreadfully mistaken. As it stands, the freshly inaugurated Labour government has recently introduced a legislative proposal entitled the Employment Rights Bill, wherein the exact same clauses have reappeared that were deleted from the Worker Protection Bill just a year ago.
If the preposterous concept of “banter bouncers” can work its way into being codified in a “free” country in the West, we should be forewarned that that may replicate in other Western countries. Many will object that this will be impossible in North America, since Canadians have Charter Rights and the United States has a First Amendment. Not so fast, though. Even if we weren’t aware of the exact legal context of such rights, we would have definitely been able to observe that they do not apply to what happens inside private businesses. The First Amendment protects against censorship by the government, although the forcefulness of that protection seems to be dim, particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision on the preliminary injunction in Murthy v. Missouri. Yet neither the First Amendment, nor Murthy v. Missouri apply to private businesses, who can implement very different rules on their premises.
Given that preamble, the picture above is a window sign posted in a North American business. While this business may have specific reasons to post the sign, let’s focus on the statements made and the implications these could have if more businesses started to implement such rules.
We reserve the right to refuse service or ask anyone to leave if we feel that they are negatively affecting the experience of others.
This reverberates the sound waves that emanate from certain corporate and intelligence circles, who pretend that negative statements overheard from others constitute “micro-aggressions” that leave “lasting psychological harm” behind. Even if that were true, there would still be an issue with the above statement, as well as with the concept of “harmful speech,” which is very straightforward: experiences are subjective. What I experience as positive, may be experienced negatively by others and vice versa. If a Jew enters the business, who wears religious insignia and thereby makes muslim customers uncomfortable, will the business owner ask the Jewish customer to leave? Likewise, when pro-Palestine supporters wear keffiyehs that make Jewish customers uncomfortable, will they be asked to leave? Or will the business owner be antisemitic and islamophobic at the same time and ask both to leave? Likewise, when a Trump supporter is made uncomfortable by a customer who wears a Kamala Harris hat, will the Democrat be asked to leave? Or the other way around? Or both?
In a healthy society, it is perfectly normal to have disagreements. We have democracies because differences of opinion will always exist. Since different persons have different personalities, the same experience can make one person feel comfortable and another uncomfortable. It is absolutely impracticable for businesses to ascertain that no customer is “negatively impacting the experience of others,” since that will essentially mean that the business ends up having no customers. While it is very ill-advised to introduce such as policy at the level of the individual business, to suggest to codify the same on a national level as may happen in Britain, is absolute insanity and leads to a fundamentally dysfunctional society.
The premise to “make everyone feel comfortable” and “eradicate micro-aggression” or “hate” may sound well-intentioned, but just a little scrutiny reveals that it is both unattainable and unworkable. As to the politicians and non-profits who are pushing this, they may either be doing so out of ill-advised good intentions, or out of darker motivations. In fact, while the objective to “make everybody feel comfortable” is impracticable in a society with diversity of opinion, the picture changes when not everybody’s opinion needs to be accounted for.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what we are observing in the present-day “free West.” For instance, let’s dig into the recent protests in Canadian cities and the ensuing actions from the Canadian government. On the one hand, truckers who protested peacefully in 2022 were countered by a draconian government response that invoked the Emergencies Act and went as far as closing the bank accounts of anyone organizing or financing them. They were relentlessly called “Nazis” by mainstream Canadian media, as well as “Russian assets,” even though there wasn’t the slightest evidence that they were doing more than to merely advocate for freedom of movement of individuals, an individual liberty that had existed for the entire length of the country’s history. Canada’s response to the 2022 trucker protests entered the history books as one of its most disgraceful pages, recently underlined by a court decision that named the response “unreasonable.”
In the 2022 protests, truckers never incited to violence of any kind. That stands in shrill contrast though, to the recent “pro-Palestinian” protests. In Toronto, “protesters” roamed a neighborhood with a high proportion of Jewish residents. There, they glorified the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by impersonating him and displaying “Lived a Hero, Died a Legend,” no matter that Sinwar authorized countless atrocities against Jews, both on October 7, 2023 and before. Moreover, they chanted “Free Tickets to Amsterdam,” alluding that a reference to the recent “protests” in that city in which Israeli soccer fans were chased through the streets and beaten up was somehow praiseworthy. Beyond making the Jewish residents feel uncomfortable, these “protesters” are inciting to violence, more specifically, antisemitic violence, which is a hate crime. Moreover, they support the terrorist organization Hamas. So we would expect the police to take action, right? Nothing of the kind happened. In fact, when Jewish-Canadian reporter Ezra Levant merely tried to document what was unfolding, Toronto police arrested him. Why? Because “his presence alone was inciting violence.” In Montréal, protests went farther and turned into actual violence. Store windows were crashed. Also, a “protester” threatened a Jewish counter-protester with the “final solution.” So let’s get this straight: the Canadian legal system has meanwhile become so one-sided that actual pro-terror “protesters” who incite or commit real violence, who engage in what is otherwise deemed hate speech and hate crime and who support actual terror organizations, are largely left unchecked, while a journalist who tries to film the course of events is arrested for “incitement to violence.” Just like in Britain, in Canada “incitement to violence” has meanwhile lost all meaning. What leads to arrest for “incitement to violence” can either be “anything you do or say” or “nothing,” depending on where your opinion resides on the current spectrum of political correctness.
The erosion of standards in the justice system into entire arbitrariness has to stop. It degrades the justice system into merely a legal system, a system that only applies certain legal documents when the defendant is not liked. This erosion is clearly driven by certain “elites,” who think they can force people into respecting their inverted morals. Of course, this will never work. Respect has to be earned and there is really nothing in the present “elite” opinion that earns it, be it censorship, pushing of impracticable DEI agendas and destructive ESG investing, or their support for genital lobotomy for minors or Jihdism. Nothing in this list earns even the least respect, so it has to be enforced.
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The country that has gone the farthest in that sense is Germany, where “insulting” any politician foreign or domestic, can lead to imprisonment. Recently, German authorities raided a 64-year-old pensioner’s home, confiscated his laptop and brought charges for insulting the Vice Chancellor. What the poor man has done, is to call the Vice Chancellor “Schwachkopf,” or simple-minded … Yet authorities, the Vice Chancellor and the German mainstream media defended the pensioner’s arrest because his meme “distracted the Vice Chancellor from his duties.” They stated that “allowing insult is just a gateway drug to more serious crimes.” Can anyone still take this seriously? My conclusion from the course of events would be that if the Vice Chancellor is offended by memes, he does not have the mental composure one would expect from a leader. Moreover, if such memes “distract him from his duties,” then he doesn’t know all too well how to prioritize his activities and therefore, he really isn’t fit to be in public office. Yet these are not the conclusions drawn by German authorities, who now enforce lèse-majesté laws broader than anything enacted in the Middle Ages. Yet at the same time, German authorities do not seem to be as competent at containing Jihadism, as witnessed by the numerous knife attacks.
Elites’ fixation on “enforcing respect,” however, will backfire. In fact, as opposed to what is currently reported by the Reichsschriftsteller* in the mainstream media, societal cohesion is not under threat from online comments. It is under threat, though, from the erosion of legal standards. Election results in Western countries collectively indicate that a steadily growing group reject left-wing agendas. With continued erosion of legal standards, it suffices that a critical mass realize that just anything can get them arrested, so they stop caring about any laws. In that case, society inevitably descends into the abyss of chaos. That is a real threat to societal cohesion, propelled by left-wing agendas.
The effort to “eradicate negative experiences” will also fail in private businesses. As a customer, I want to patronize businesses in which I can feel relaxed. Relaxed implies being able to express my thoughts and feelings without having second thoughts about offending the weak-minded and blue-haired. Regarding small business, the recipe is simple: patronize the ones that do not have the pretentiousness to know for you what is right. As to large businesses, there is no need for concern at the time. However, what could happen is that arbitrary and ever-changing ESG criteria could try and enforce publicly traded businesses to enact policies that effectively police speech. The way to counter this is by making the use of ESG criteria in financial decisions illegal. Also, we should legally revert voting rights to actual shareholders, even if they own fractional shares through mutual or exchange-traded funds, which would end the disproportionate impact fund management entities like BlackRock or Vanguard have. Implicitly, corporations would have to adopt to the will of the majority of shareholders, instead of the will of a handful investors with an oversize share of voting rights.
Eventually, we can rest assured that the thought police will not penetrate businesses. The universe has created many extremes, who are in a continuous, dynamic act of balance, perfectly symbolized by Yin and Yang. A functioning society tries to accommodate for those dynamics. Respect being codified or not, society will soon revert to the greater good: spontaneous expression. That is expression of thoughts and feelings in an unfiltered way, straight from the divine source, which is a million times superior over self-censorship.
Eventually, both families who stayed with us for the week, were very happy. Both said that they will return some time. They rode us horses many a time. While they did not have their Pavé de veau et son mousse d’épinards au Grand Marnier as they would have had at Golden Diamonds, they were very happy with our brisket straight from the smoker. And guess what? They did not leave as diabetics.
*Scribe of the Third Reich
Exactly. If your own agenda cannot stand up to scrutiny, you have to shut its opponents up.
Part of a continuing trend toward more centralization and government control ...