Why are we denied our own history?

Delighted to have been interrogated at length by Mike McDonald and my old comrade Geoff Meggs about the history that lies on the other side of the firewall built by the Liberal Party establishment & its various well-to-do corporate-sector collaborators, public-sector bureaucrats and ideologues in the social sciences and humanities faculties.

The jumping-off point is the coming British Columbia Day long weekend. Be kind because I’d been up all night working on an inquiry for the National Post, mostly on Chinese spies, and I decamped straight into this interview. This week I’ve been working round the clock from a related vantage point on a broader inquiry that will occupy a large tract of the National Post this weekend, to be accompanied by a special edition of the Real Story newsletter.

It’s no mere coincidence that BC Day coincides with Emancipation Day.

Emancipation Day teaser: It’s an almost entirely forgotten history. It’s hidden away by all the prevailing postmodernist doctrines that oblige Canadians to be ashamed of themselves, and it’s not particularly convenient to certain of the more strident tendencies within the “anti-woke” schools of thought, either.

In that story, Canada came within a hair’s breadth of a war with the United States and the loss of what the Fathers of Confederation would go on to imagine as a peaceable dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Trump administration’s “51 state” provocations invoke memories of those times, and there’s a great deal of bloodshed, intrigue and betrayal in the story, which played out across the entire western half of the North American continent.

I’ll tell the story as an epic standoff between two men:

Sir James Douglas was born in Dutch Guyana, the son of a Scottish planter and a “free coloured woman” from Barbados. A lifelong fur trader, Douglas led the northward retreat of a forgotten multicultural society of loyalists following the 1846 partition of the vast Columbia territory. He’d go on to become the governor of both the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia.

The U.S. Army’s Gen. William Harney was a mass murderer notorious for his policy of slaughtering the inhabitants of entire Indigenous villages. Court-martialled four times, he always landed back on his feet because his patron was Senator Jefferson Davis, who would go on to serve as the president of the Confederate States in the U.S. Civil War. Harney led the 29th U.S. Infantry Division in an invasion of the British-held Columbia territory in 1859.

I’ll be doing another podcast in the next couple of days that will dive into all that. Unless and until that epic drama gets proper big-screen treatment, reading about it here is the best you’re likely to find anywhere online, I regret to say.

So seriously, buy a sub.