Czech Mate

I'm so sorry Donald Trump is still in all our lives, but I think, in a way, it's our own fault. Maybe not yours, but mine, for sure. Like, right now. Here I am, mentioning him again.

It's awful, though, isn't it. We survived a pandemic. But we're back where we started with Donald Trump.

Or are we?

I thought Donald Trump hadn't been in my life until there he was in 2015 running for the Republican Party nomination. But I was a monthly buyer of Vanity Fair magazine back in the day and at some point Ivana Trump started showing up in it.

It was odd, this tacky throwback from eastern Europe hawking diamonds and furs and showcasing her frat boy husband's gold-plated pile in Manhattan, in an otherwise stylish magazine.

She looked more like his mother than wife to me.

But as Graydon Carter explained to readers in one of his more memorable editorials, an issue thick with fashion ads meant an issue strong in relevant and insightful articles about our world from real journalists and erudite writers.

And just as I wrote the above paragraph it dawned on me what a pile of malarkey it was, this dowdy woman whose son Eric would grow up to be her spitting image, being sold to Vanity Fair readers as the latest super model/urban sophisticate/educated mind gracing its pages.

Anyway I went down a bit of an Ivana Trump rabbit hole after that and lo and behold turns out she lived in Montreal in the 70s with a defector (she herself had permission to come and go from Czechoslovakia, unlike anybody else at the time?) before meeting and marrying Donald Trump in 1977.

Her back story and explanation for the ease with which she could come and go was that she was an Olympic skiing star, likely completely manufactured as no actual record of such could be found in a 1989 search to corroborate her 1972 Olympics claims.

In 1990, after her marriage to Donald Trump was over and at an acrimonious stage, Ivana's 63-year-old father, an informer for Czech intelligence who apparently relayed information from his daughter (uh, say what? about... skiing? modelling? decor?) died suddenly of a heart attack.

Sure. Okay. And there's nothing odd about her falling down stairs to her death during an investigation into Donald Trump, who once raped and ripped out clumps of her hair in a jealous rage at his hair plugs not taking, and about whose treason and corruption she would have known everything, being intricately involved in his businesses, then being buried on his golf course.

It's the Russian way, though, isn't it. Or is it the American way? I mean, why is Donald Trump, blatantly obvious traitor, proven fraud artist, conman, well-documented rapist and best bud of convicted and found dead in his jail cell pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, and leader of a violent insurrection in early 2021 against the US government, the Republican Party's nominee for President, hosting white supremacist rallies all across America, instead of in prison?

But let's go North of the world's longest undefended border.

As I've pointed out many times, what was so terrifying about the Freedom Convoy was the support it had from leaders, past, present and future of our Official Opposition, the Conservative Party of Canada, while it attacked us, you and me, local councillors, MPs and their staff of the New Democrat and Liberal parties, so many Canadians either oblivious it was happening at all or chiming in to support our attackers.

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, was the blatantly obvious political sponsor of this attack on us, an unlawful occupation and attempted insurrection, after which the Conservatives elected him their party leader.

There were other contenders, too. They didn't have to elect Poilievre leader. They chose him. In a landslide victory complete with eliminating his main rival in case he ended up winning and MP supporters carting boxes of ballots around in public like is never done in legitimate elections, but, oh well.

Since when has an election involving Stephen Harper's Conservative Party not had its irregularities, eh?

Meanwhile, in the world of us ordinary citizens, the Freedom Convoy caused real and lasting harm. People who live and work in downtown Ottawa lost their trust in police, social cohesion already frayed from the pandemic was stressed to the max, our health suffered, some of us requiring medication and therapy due to panic attacks, people lost rent money unable to get to their minimum wage jobs as the city centre was shutdown, and disinformation from social media went from a trickle to a flood out into civil society, a steady stream of chaos inducing propaganda.

The Freedom Convoy and its fallout cost Canadians millions and millions and millions of dollars.

There are many people living in government town Ottawa who believe all the same Qanon nonsense their American cousins do. Pierre Poilievre is their man for Prime Minister. Why?

Why are so many Canadians behind this well-known, well-documented, thoroughly odious creep who has no respect for us, our laws, our democracy?

What's going on? His wife, Anaida, of "Pretty & Smart Co", a supposed online magazine she co-founded in 2019 (I googled, nothing happening on it), first shows up in a Senator's office, then moves into Poilievre MP tenant and best buddy, Michael Cooper's office, and next thing she's married to the woman-repeller (Poilievre, not his best buddy the other woman-repeller, Cooper), they have two spawn, and he has in-laws about whom nobody can get the straight skinny. Oh and surely it's just a coincidence he's also suddenly, blatantly, and obviously, unable to get a security clearance, even though he had one when he was a Cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's government, pushing the blatant and obvious lie that it's because he doesn't want one.

And just like Trump he's getting away with it.

What's with this Soviet-era type shit going on here?

And why is nobody who's anybody pointing at walking talking contradiction, former Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, self-proclaimed Putin-hater but blatant and obvious Orban-lover, Orban being, like Trump, blatantly and obviously pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine?

He, like Trump's Republican Party, is actively preventing Ukraine defending itself from Russia's invasion, which is no different from Germany's invasion of Poland, an invasion that led to our eventual involvement in World War II.

On that note, anybody who thinks we aren't in World War III isn't paying attention. We are and we have nowhere near the political and social cohesion we had in World War II. I know what I witnessed in February 2022. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party on the side of the Freedom Convoy and its attack on civil society, Western liberal democracy, sponsored by Russia and Trump's Republican Party.

It was treason, an insurrection, no different from January 2021 in the US except instead of attacking the harder target of Congress, the insurrectionists attacked the softer target of ordinary citizens and civilians.

And speaking of Stephen Harper, if the International Democracy Union, created in 1983 by Vice-President and former CIA director George H.W. Bush, isn't a blatant and obvious laundromat for global fascism, supporting blatant and obvious fascists like Trump and Orban, then what the hell is it? What does it do?

Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Anyway, I'm sorry to go on about it, even sorrier to have gone down a couple of rabbit holes writing this entry, sorrier still it doesn't seem to matter to so many of my co-citizens that they're rallying behind fascism Soviet-style and the politicians who pretending to be against it - even while being blatantly and obviously in lockstep with Vladimir Putin, its greatest proponent, and our greatest enemy.

Crazy-making, but that's the point, isn't it?