Dominion Congress
An upcoming event, a couple of podcasts, a touching of base, and some scattered thoughts on flags and institutional abandonment
I know, I know. What the hell, John, it’s been over a month since your last essay, and you’re fobbing us off with a low-effort promotional notification?
Well, yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing.
To be honest, I’ve been in something of a creative slump the last few weeks. I’ve started a few pieces, but nothing quite got to the level where I felt it was worth sharing, despite some of them already having gotten rather long. You’d be surprised, maybe, to know how often that happens – I publish maybe one word in ten of what I actually write.
It’s also, quite frankly, been something of a shit month. There was an unexpected death in the family, which generated an unexpected amount of work, and no sooner was that deal with than the temperature plummeted into the minus mid-twenties centigrade over a sustained period of weeks, a regime in which my hibernating metabolism puts my brain into power saving mode. This time last year I was enjoying the Argentinian summer, a much easier climate in which to think. Then there have been various other demands on my time relating to my earlier academic career (which is more of a hobby now, albeit a hobby with obligations...) and a search (which I hope is now complete) for a more permanent domicile satisfying my criteria of location, size, and affordability. The ability to even contemplate such a purchase is in no small part due to the support some of you have shown, and it is really impossible for me to properly express the depth of my gratitude. Of course, that also accentuates my guilt over not having shared anything with you over the last month, but I cope by telling myself I don’t want to publish crap.
When not taking refuge in cozy William Gibson novels, I’ve been wasting entirely too much time on social media, which is easy to do when your energy levels are shot, and which I really need to take a break from because I’m starting to get screenburn. It’s not without its savage joys, however. Sunday was Canada’s Flag Day, on which we commemorate the replacement of the old Red Ensign with the modern Liberal Leaf, and this year the event was marked by an uprising. Canadian nationalists Ensignmogged the replies of the House of Commons, the Senate, the prime minister, the leader of the loyal opposition, and anyone else of any prominence who posted a leaf. Some of those threads had hundreds of replies, all posting Red Ensigns, Canadian shields, and demands to give us back our flag. You really love to see it.
Here’s a thread I wrote for Flag Day, giving a quick intro to the shenanigans surrounding Canada’s adoption of the new flag, as well as the symbolic meaning of the new flag (shallow, meaningless) and the old flag (rich, deep):
(btw, many have pointed out that there’s no difference between the two top flags in the infographic with which I opened this thread; this is because the first flag is wrong, it includes the Cross of Saint Patrick which wasn’t part of the Union Jack at that time).
Of course, some have suggested that the old Red Ensign is a bit dated, given the Union Jack dominating a quarter of the area. I’m not sure I agree – Australia and New Zealand retain it, and it’s an indication of imperial British origins, which after all Canada was founded upon. Then again, the shield already accomplishes that nod to historical rootedness, and it’s fun to imagine something a bit different, which centres the Canadian shield, further emphasizes the heraldic Medieval aesthetics, and introduces a bit of pleasing asymmetry, for instance by placing the shield between a white Saxon dragon in the East and a white Canadian polar bear in the West:
All of this ensign stuff may seem like terminally online nonsense, but I really don’t think it is. Only a few years ago Canadians were barely even aware that the Red Ensign or the Canadian Shield existed. They had been effectively erased from history. Then nationalists pulled them out of the memory hole and repurposed them as battle standards around which to rally the Canadian chuds, reawakening their sense of themselves as a people. The growth in its popularity online has been explosive. There is no longer much of a distinction between online and off; the idea that “the Internet isn’t real life” isn’t true anymore, because the Internet ate the world. What happens on social media bleeds out into the streets. It’s also worth keeping in mind that there are far more people who lurk social media than there are who actively post. Here on Substack, for example, the typical view to comment ratio is around 100:1; on X, the view to reply ratio is generally a factor of 10 higher. If you’ve got hundreds of people posting something, that’s probably indicative of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, who agree. Anyhow, here’s Conservative Member of Parliament David Bexte posting about how much he loves the Red Ensign.
In between all of this lollygagging, I’ve been on a couple of podcasts, which I’ll share further down, but first I’d like to announce an event I’ll be speaking at in June: the 2026 Dominion Congress, organized by Scyldings, the promo art for which goes hard as fuck.
The event will take place June 26th to 28th in Southern Ontario. It will not be recorded; the only way to see the talks is to attend in person. It’s a bit pricey but it includes the hotel room, which I imagine accounts for a large fraction of the sticker price. Other speakers include Dave Greene (who I understand is yet to confirm), Edward Dutton, Bruce Pardy, and Der Schattenmacher, which is a good mix of Canadians and Europeans. There’s also a surprise guest, whom many of you will know, who will be announced tomorrow.
I’m not entirely sure what I’ll speak about, though I suspect I’ll be adapting a piece I’ve been plugging away at off and on since the summer, tentatively titled All The Way To True North. The prospect of a public appearance also gives me some motivation to buckle down and lose the poundage I accumulated over the holidays ... between Christmas, the family death, and the freezing cold I didn’t see the inside of a gym for a couple months, which has played its own role in my midwinter melancholia (I finally dragged myself back into the gym this week, which feels great, by which I mean that my everything is wonderfully sore).
You can find out more about the event, and purchase tickets, here:
https://scyldings.com/dominion-congress-2026/
So, the podcasts. First up was an appearance on Coffee and a Mike with Michael Farris. Michael is a wonderful interviewer, who knows just how to draw his guests out: what to ask, when to speak, when to let the guest talk. A gentleman and a professional. I tortured the poor man a bit by postponing a few times due to aforementioned unexpected circumstances, but when we finally sat down we had a great discussion. He started out by asking me about how and why I started writing, from where the conversation naturally drifted towards the state of academia, the state of entertainment media, events in Minneapolis, and the Amelia phenomenon.
You can find an ad-free episode here on Substack:
Or you can watch for free, but with regular interruptions by ads intended to annoy you to death, on YouTube:
The second podcast was with Kontrarian Korner with Ben Kelleran, who had me on a year or two ago. This was another great discussion, covering entirely different subject matter. Ben picked my brain on the subject of an Albertan independence referendum, Canadian annexation into the New Colossus, and the Ukrainada scenario. After that we switched gears to discuss institutional breakdown and the generational political divide.
On the subject of Alberta, I’ll say that polling data so far has support for sovereignty at around 1/3 of the population. This is significant, and a sign of deep dissatisfaction in Canada’s alienated western provinces, but not yet at the level where separation is a probable outcome. It’s further worth pointing out to western readers that independence might not be the panacea they hope for. The Conservative Party of Canada is representative of western elites, and they’re every bit as enthusiastic about mass migration as the Liberal Party of Canada is. If anything, the CPC is more enthusiastic: the Liberals dashed to the right of the CPC on immigration over a year ago, and after they started restricting student and Temporary Foreign Worker visas, the CPC responded by grilling them in the House of Commons over being mean to foreigners by telling them to go home when their visas expire. Then there was the utter fiasco of the recent CPC conference in Alberta, during which the party voted to uphold a policy allowing non-citizens to vote in party elections (yes, really: our political candidates are chosen for us by foreigners), and to uphold some kind of gender woo pronoun policy. The point is, learn from Brexit: Brexiteers were motivated largely by the desire to prevent the inundation of the Yookay by even more third world migrants than the country had already absorbed, and Britain’s Conservative Party rewarded them with the Boriswave.
Institutional breakdown is an interesting subject. This isn’t just a function of the usual narrative of competence collapse thanks to fumbling diversity hires, though of course that’s a large factor. Something I haven’t seen people talk much about is that people are quietly opting out of institutional employment. Again, this isn’t only a political thing, with white males abandoning the woke cathedral. Millennials and younger, of whichever political persuasion, have grown up online. That means they’re used to a media environment in which they read, watch, and do what they want, when they want, how they want. The characteristic entertainment medium is not the book or the broadcast, but the open world game. This makes younger generations particularly impatient both with managerial hierarchies, which tend to tightly constrain individual initiative, and with 9-to-5 workdays, which feel quite opressive if you can get your work done in a few hours. This is probably especially acute for the more intelligent and competent, for whom being managed by people of lesser ability is a professional affront.
As an example, I can point to an educator I know, who abandoned secure employment as a public school teacher to pursue her fortune as a tutor. In doing so she gave up a good pension, benefits, and a steady paycheck for an uncertain income from personal clients. However, she also gained the freedom to set her own hours, rather than being locked to the school day; the freedom to teach in whichever way she thinks best, using whichever methods and materials she chooses, rather than teaching the curriculum chosen for her by the Ministry of Education in precisely the way the midwits of the Ministry tell her to teach it; and the freedom to choose her own clients, rather than being required to endure whatever behavioural problems get dumped in her classroom. While her income is much lower in the short term, the upside potential is effectively unbounded, and dependent largely on her own effort and performance rather than on whatever seniority schedule the teacher’s union negotiates with the Ministry.
That’s just one example, of course. I suppose I’m another example myself, as are many of my friends. I hear sometimes of recruitment problems at large employers in both the public and private sector; this is usually attributed to HR Karens and their woke AIs filing every resume from a qualified white male in the circular bin, and that’s definitely a factor, but I suspect that many are also simply choosing to work for themselves, turning side-hustles into self-sustaining careers. The hassle of getting hired at a large institution – sending out hundreds of resumes, jumping through hoops of multiple interview rounds – just isn’t worth whatever salary and benefits they offer, especially when you factor in the annoyance of having to follow asinine directives from corporate, especially when there’s no guarantee you won’t simply get fired a few months or years down the road when an Artificial Intelligence or an Actual Indian gets your job, and have to go through the whole humiliating grind again.
As before, the ad-free version of the episode is behind a paywall here on Substack:
But you can also listen to the free but aggravating ad-supported version on YouTube:
That’s all for now. I hope to have something with greater meat on it for you soon. Thank you all very much for your patience, for taking the time to read this, and most especially for your support.
No worries about your publishing -- I'd much rather get infrequent good stuff than regular slop :-)
Beavers are noble animals- industrious, family centered, and capable of improving their environment for their own benefit. They may not get the young man's blood boiling like a fearsome predator, but they build rather than just rapaciously consume. It's one of the less obnoxiously rotten symbols and humiliations the modern Canadian state subjects it's people to IMHO.