A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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At The American Conservative, Declan Leary has a retrospective on Pat Buchanan’s famous 1992 “culture war” speech. Despite the condemnation the speech received then and now, Leary points out, Buchanan was correct in every one of his predictions—and then some.
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Canada is becoming an international cautionary tale on euthanasia as a series of horrifying stories about sick and weak people being offered suicide emerge. Here’s the headline from Forbes: “Canada’s New Euthanasia Laws Carry Upsetting Nazi-Era Echoes, Warns Expert.”
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Here’s now the National Post summarized this ongoing civilizational embarrassment:
Barely a week now goes by without some new case emerging of a sick Canadian being offered assisted death in lieu of treatment. Most recently, it was a Canadian combat veteran who was casually offered the option of dying after he approached Veteran Affairs Canada for help with his PTSD.
It’s a nightmare scenario that was envisioned by no shortage of ethicists and health figures when assisted death was first written into Canadian law. But with few exceptions, these warnings were ignored by the various court rulings that ultimately forced Canada into adopting the world’s most permissive regime of legal euthanasia.
I will quibble with their title, “How Canada ignored warnings that euthanasia would immediately go too far,” though. It wasn’t “Canada” that ignored these warnings. Safeguards were proposed in Parliament and voted down by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party and their progressive allies. Advocates were ignored entirely. They own this. These horrors are their doing.
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Here, by the way, are the full details of the Canadian veteran who was offered suicide after asking for help for his PTSD. Considering the staggering suicide rate amongst Canadian veterans, this is even more horrifying. Canada has utterly failed its struggling citizens.
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All of this is culminating in a sharply rising euthanasia death rate—over 10,000 in 2021 alone.
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Norah Vincent, the LGBT activist who penned the 2006 bestseller Self-Made Man in which she spent a year-and-a-half posing as a man, has died by suicide at a clinic in Switzerland. As Megan Basham noted: “So many stories of transgender people who commit suicide after receiving all the affirmation in the world—social, legal, surgical. Yet still so many still don’t feel whole. It is not loving to lie to confused, hurting people. It only prevents real healing.”
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If you want to know what’s coming next in Canada, it is likely euthanasia for children. Dying with Dignity is already advocating for this:
Dying with Dignity has been driving the debate in Canada, and they are calling for assisted suicide to be available to some "mature minors" (children). You'll notice that phrase is never used to advocate that kids can drive earlier. Nope, just suicide. https://t.co/OZMHbeuZ2k
— Jonathon Van Maren (@JVanMaren) August 22, 2022
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My friend Chris Elston had the opportunity to talk about his activism on Tucker Carlson. Give it a watch:
https://twitter.com/BillboardChris/status/1560470526744838144
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More soon.