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Brownstone Institute

Make no mistake, the Israel-Hamas conflict is Canada’s fight too

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11 minute read

By Joe Adam George

The threats posed by the ‘new axis of evil’ comprising Russia, China and Iran have now mushroomed into two major conflicts

On October 7, Canadians woke up to images of grisly war crimes committed by Hamas, a listed terrorist entity in Canada, halfway across the world in Israel. Following their deadly and barbaric incursion into the Jewish nation from across the Gaza border, an estimated 1,000 Hamas terrorists methodically mutilated, raped, burned and murdered at least 1,300 Israelis in horrific ways not witnessed since the Holocaust. Still reeling from the surprise attack, Israel formally declared war on Hamas the next day, vowing to ‘wipe them off the face of the Earth’.

With the conflict now into its third week, the events unravelling in the Middle East and, indeed, across the globe, since the deadly morning of October 7 spell grim news for Canada. Still facing global ridicule and isolation after a crisis-laden September during which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau managed to get into a diplomatic spat with India and, inexplicably, honoured a former Nazi unit soldier in the Parliament in the presence of visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Israel-Hamas conflict is a headache he could have done without; especially given the complex nature of Jewish and Muslim vote bank politics at home.

As Canada turned inwards amidst culture wars and socio-economic crises in recent years, the threats posed by the ‘new axis of evil’ comprising Russia, China and Iran have now mushroomed into two major conflicts involving our allies, Ukraine and Israel. A third conflict, involving Taiwan, may be on the horizon. These conflicts have once again proven that rogue state and non-state actors cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. Any delusions of grandeur or signs of weakness will only lead to more violence, inevitably targeting innocent civilians.

Regrettably, a large (and stubborn) segment of the Western foreign policy elite continues to believe funding or coddling our ideological foes will somehow make them allies and acquiescent to change. On the contrary, they only hold us in further contempt by using our funds and credulity against us and our national interests. Take Pakistan as an example. Despite showering the terrorist haven with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in international aid, it continued to commit multiple transgressions, including allegedly harboring America’s Enemy No.1 and the late Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden (who, of course, was shot dead in his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound in 2011).

Fast forward to the Israel-Hamas conflict, it is clear the West hasn’t learned from its past follies. With reports confirming Iran’s role in Hamas’ attacks on Israel, one only needs to look at the deluded Iran nuclear deal and other appeasement policies of the Biden administration and fellow Western democracies to ascertain why Israel now finds itself in the fight of its life. It is also precisely why, this time around, the decades-long conflict feels different; not only because of the unspeakable violence Hamas unleashed on innocent Israelis but because of the Israelis’ resolve to wipe out the terror group. The West, including Canada, are culpable for having played down the existential threat posed the Hamas ‘death cult’ and even funding extremism through donations to controversial entities like the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine and the Near East (UNRWA). We’ve also been far too lax in our own back yards, failing to exercise proper oversight over domestic charities and allowing university campuses to become hotbeds of vicious anti-Western and antisemitic sentiment.

Needless to say, the chickens have finally come home to roost. With five Canadians confirmed killed and another three held hostage by Hamas, it is bewildering and despicable to see fellow Canadians, sympathetic to the pro-Palestine cause, openly celebrate the death and destruction caused by the Hamas attacks.

Never one to disappoint when it comes to diaspora politics, the first inclination of the Trudeau government, faced with a deep fear of confronting an angry Arab mob or jeopardizing the Muslim vote bank, has been to appease and take no action against unauthorized pro-Hamas rallies promoting antisemitism and glorifying terrorism, even going so far as to disrupt antisemitism conferences. But this is the wrong instinct. Enabling support for a proscribed terror group guilty of heinous war crimes cannot be allowed in a country where all members of society are considered equally subject to the rule of law. The inaction of the West is what emboldened Hamas in the first place. It must end now.

Laws banning such rallies, similar to the one imposed by France, and canceling visas of foreign nationals participating in them must be seriously contemplated here in Canada. Also, in the interest of national security, amendments to the Citizenship Act ought to be made to revoke citizenship of individuals linked to terrorist groups even if it would render them stateless, as is practiced by the UK.

With Canada-based individuals and groups allegedly laundering money on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) must be directed to conduct regular and independent forensic audits of these entities in partnership with the Five Eyes and other global law enforcement agencies.

The Trudeau government’s awful record of accountability and vetting when it comes to disbursing funds to vile anti-Semites is a key reason why the $10 million Canadian aid promised to Palestinian civilians must be frozen to prevent it ending up in Hamas’ hands.

Other time-critical countermeasures to support Israel and prevent this war from spilling over would be to list the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization and reimpose the UN sanctions to kneecap Iran’s capability to purchase and supply missiles to its regional terror proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

The West needs to understand that Israel is doing them a favour by eliminating Hamas. Fueled by the widespread (and deplorable) global support for their attacks, we can expect an emboldened Hamas, which recently called for a  global ‘Day of Jihad’, to encourage lone-wolf attacks like the ones that took place in Beijing and Paris. The complete and total destruction of Hamas isn’t just a matter of Israeli security; it’s a matter of global security.

Make no mistake. Just as Hamas took advantage of the distraction created by the political infighting in Israel, the West is highly susceptible to similar attacks given the domestic turbulence in many countries, including Canada. Moreover, as FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Americans, the success of the Hamas attacks is likely to inspire other terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS to call for similar attacks in Western democracies, as seen from this week’s attack in the Belgian capital of Brussels.

Yet, the Trudeau government remains sheltered from the ugly realities of the rest of the world, especially the Global South, and woefully unprepared to protect Canadians from the emerging threats, as seen from the recent blocking of the Conservative opposition’s Bill C-350 to list the IRGC as a terrorist entity in Canada.

While Canada remains a safe haven for terrorists and transnational criminal organizations, Canadian values, interests and national security continue to be severely undermined by vote bank politics, foreign interference, criminal impunity, poor intelligence sharing and defence budget cuts. With the Liberal government prone to sleepwalking into one political disaster after another, the Israel-Hamas conflict ought to serve as a much needed wake-up call for PM Trudeau to prioritize Canada’s foreign policy and national security interests over self-serving vote bank politics. It may already be too late for Canada to avoid Europe’s fate as a hotbed for jihadist terrorism.

If the Liberal government isn’t up for this fight, it’d be in Canadians’ best interests for them to step aside and allow more serious people to take charge.

Joe Adam George is a former foreign policy and national security research intern with the Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank, Hudson Institute, and a communications strategist. He lives in Ottawa

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Brownstone Institute

If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker 

Who Controls the Administrative State?

President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.

It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.

The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.

How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.

All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.

The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.

Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.

This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.

The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.

The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.

The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.

A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.

There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.

Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.

Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.

After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?

So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.

What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.

We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.

All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.

What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.

For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.

That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.

That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.

There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.

First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.

That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.

Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.

In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.

Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?

Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.

Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.

If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.

The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?

Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.

Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Hysteria over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Promise to Make Vaccines Safer

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Rebekah Barnett  

“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.

In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:

“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.

You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.

An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?

Source: Katie Couric on Instagram

The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.

People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.

This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.

A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.

This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.

“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.

“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.

“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”

Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.

At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.

Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Rebekah Barnett is a Brownstone Institute fellow, independent journalist and advocate for Australians injured by the Covid vaccines. She holds a BA in Communications from the University of Western Australia, and writes for her Substack, Dystopian Down Under.

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