I agree! Another point that's been brewing in my mind today after I wrote the previous note.

Sometimes former advocates for "social and environmental justice" causes, (e.g. feminism, climate change, animal rights, etc.) who turn conservative still believe in those causes. Or at least they believe in the principles that inform those causes (such as the idea of justice or non-harm) but they see the movements that identify with those causes as corrupt -- as I did. I did not want to see it but was forced after years of looking the other way.

So for example, I still believe protecting the environment and reducing animal cruelty and curbing the mass extinction of species are good causes. I still think some corporations should not engage in human rights violations in third world countries, e.g. mining corporations that dump acid mine waste into rivers and shoot the locals if they object. That's obviously wrong, even if we need minerals for society to function. I still think we should care about future generations -- but that concern now includes the unborn whereas before it only included future victims of environmental devastation. I still think workers deserve a fair shake and should not be exploited. Tenants should not be gouged. And so on.

However, after thinking through these issues on a case by case basis in depth, and observing the activist movements that claim these issues, I realized that:

(1) The issues are not as cut and dry as the activists make them out to be. The corporations are not always the villains we want them to be and excessive state regulations and taxes are not always for the best. Climate change claims should be questioned and debated since computer models can be wrong, for example. It's not always as black and white as these activists pamphlets make them out to be.

The activists see the world in binary terms as good and evil. They the activists are good; the corporations are evil. This is too simplistic. And revolution, tearing it all down, won't make the world a better place; it will make it much worse place. It will bring out the worst in humanity if things fall apart. This is why I distrust the World Economic Forum - because they seem to want our society to be replaced with their Utopian model, which to me sounds dystopian and totalitarian.

Most of the activists I knew longed for a better world but failed to see that tearing down the old institutions and practices that keep things stable would just make things ten devils worse.

(2) The activist movements themselves -- at least the upper echelon of them, the leaders -- are not really interested in solving the problems. They are only using them to acquire wealth and power for themselves, e.g., NGO and student union leaders with big salaries or fanatical activists who covet power and use the movements to get it.

We know the latter by the fact that they impose "intersectional" race and gender politics into the cause, which serves the purpose of weeding out the older more sensible activists (alienating or scapegoating them in many cases). They are like the Red Guard in Mao's Cultural Revolution, purging the society of the old people.

One can never be revolutionary enough in their view, and counter-revolutionaries -- or in modern terms, alleged racists and misogynists -- are all around and must be purged. For instance, feminists in such groups will target a man as a sexual harasser or rapist -- with zero evidence -- and go after him. I have seen this a few times. A good cause can thus be hijacked or usurped by these Marxist activists for their own ends. It alienates decent folk who believe in the cause but are repelled by the fanatics and tyrants taking it over.

I have seen this occur in nearly every movement I supported. And now I've seen it happen to the society as a whole over the last five or six years, with important institutions such as the media, government, corporations like Wal-Mart, universities, the courts, the entertainment industry, etc -- all succumbing to the woke DEI agenda. Even the Pope went woke! What happened in higher education and in activist circles in past years is now happening across the Western world as the Leftist activists who picked this stuff up in college get positions of power in our society and spread that worldview. Think of Disney for example. Are they making things woke to fulfill some nefarious agenda of ideological subversion, to divide and conquer us, or do they really believe in this nonsense?

Or take the case of climate change. Let's say for the sake of argument that the science is valid and it should be a serious concern for our society. What does that mean in practical terms? In Canada, Trudeau thinks it means he should impose a carbon tax to reduce fossil fuel consumption. The problem is that while his government gets a lot of money from it, it does nothing for the environment, because: (1) Canada's carbon footprint is negligible in global terms and China is the # 1 emitter. (2) There is no proof that the tax reduces fossil fuel consumption. All it does is impoverish people already suffering from inflation. A person in the country can't drive less and can't take public transport.

Then there is Bjorn Lomberg's point that even if it is real, it's not the most urgent matter facing humanity. He may be right. At one time, I would never have entertained the idea that he may be right, but casting off the mantle of activism has liberated my mind to question things and not just go along with the party line.

Lastly there is argument that climate change is being used for as a pretext for state authoritarians to wield even greater power over us by imposing a social credit system, and essentially doing to us in perpetuity what they got away with during the pandemic (lockdowns, mandates, and government overreach). In other words, state tyranny. The WEF even seems to want mass population reduction. How?

Again, it does nothing for the environment in the end, but it gives them absolute power over us. If we object they say, as they did with medical tyranny, that it's for "the common good." With this understanding of what's happening, protecting individual liberties we normally taken for granted has become paramount in my view. A good cause can be misused for a bad purpose. It's similar to the history of religious authorities in the church taking the faith of people and using it for their own ends.

Some people say they are not conservatives but "classical liberals" -- meaning in favour of freedom of speech, religion, the press, etc. They differentiate themselves from the authoritarian Leftists who want to suppress free speech. Maybe they still have a negative association with the term "conservative." All "conservative" really means is that the person values individual freedom and liberties and wants a prosperous safe society that's good for families. For many, faith is part of it. But what Leftists hear when you say "he's conservative" is "he's greed, selfish, racist, stupid, and deluded." They seem themselves as "progressives" who are so much better than all the horrible sexist racist people of the past. It's simplistic and self-serving to think this way. It betrays an ignorance of the real complexities of history and the lives of the people who came before us.

Leftists like to think they are morally and intellectually superior to conservatives. They create a strawman caricature of the conservative as racist, sexist, the "deplorables" described by Hillary Clinton to refer to the working-class blue-collar Americans who voted for Trump. Trump himself they love to hate, buying into the MSM propaganda against him, uncritically.

Returning to the activists, the NDP makes a great show of standing up for this or that cause. At one time I too was involved in it. But the people who run it are making big salaries, which they got used to as student union leaders. They internalized Marxist dogma and woke ideology. They are often dishonest and conniving in my experience. They played politics and merely used the causes in a rhetorical way; they were not committed to those causes.

The moral bankruptcy of the NDP now is apparent in the fact that they have been propping up the corrupt Trudeau government for years, with zero regard for the pain and suffering of the working classes. The trucker's protest was evidence of that. They protested the inhuman and unnecessary lockdowns and mandates and disdain the elites in Ottawa had for them -- which we saw on full display when Trudeau disparaged them as "racists" and "misogynists" and froze bank accounts. He wanted to be a dictator after the Chinese model of governance, and even said so aloud. And the NDP was all for it and also taking bribes from China to skew the election -- which is treason.

The NDP, like the Labour party in the UK, is not for the working classes. They are elitists who use the ideals of the rank and file to gain power -- much as described in Orwell's Animal Farm, itself based on the rise of Stalinism. The NDP leaders are the pigs and the general members are like the sheep. This is why I can never support these kinds of movements again; they attract corruption too easily. The rank and file are naïve idealists (as I was), not seemingly aware of the authoritarians who use their volunteer labour to aggrandize power and who care nothing for the cause.

Sorry this was so long. I had to get it out of my system :)