Quotes from Neil Macdonald

Trump is a travelling freak show, and bound to say or do something laughably stupid wherever he goes, so, because he's president, he's news.

But that's the way America rolls nowadays. Consensus, laws and treaties are out. Smug, religion-soaked majoritarianism is in fashion. It is not coincidence that Bible study is returning to American public schools.

I am deeply sympathetic to Indigenous treatment at the hands of white society.

Trump has not only ordered a disturbing military buildup in the Persian Gulf, he's determined to punish any country that has continued to do business with Iran since he withdrew from the nuclear treaty the United States instigated and signed in 2015.

It seems to be the modern Canadian approach to Indigenous people: rather than deny their problems or accuse them of creating them through their own laziness, which was how my parents' generation dealt with the question, we now smother them with humid apologies and abnegation, but not actual compensation.

The other danger of the Snowden disclosures, of course, is that they reveal methods that should make any sensible person more careful about what he or she says on a cellphone or landline, or in an email.

Barack Obama actually grew up black in America. He knows a thing or two about being judged by the color of his skin, rather than the content of his character.

Personally, I saw no organized malevolence toward reporters in the IDF; I'd dealt with enough Israeli soldiers to know that many of them operated by the book. But I also knew very well that others among them were fanatics, some from ultra-nationalist settlements, and considered foreign journalists enemies of the Jewish State.

Fortunately for Canada it is part of the so-called Five Eyes network, along with the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand. These nations are in fact so integrated that they effectively comprise a single colossal listening organization, the most powerful in history, with America in charge.

While most of us have long understood that privacy is a fading commodity, something in human nature still expects that a phone call or email is a closed communication, and we tend to behave as though it is. That behaviour is what the electronic spies count upon, and want to preserve.

Obama has spoken out a few times since on race, but without much effect.

Trump might have a mouth like an open sewer, but at least he says something.

White nationalism is about keeping power white. Yes, yes, there are minority groups represented among Justin Trudeau's ministers, but they were all given jobs by a white guy.

A white nationalist would claim that flying the confederate flag on a state building is an expression of cultural history, rather than racial sentiment. A white nationalist would claim, as the television host Megyn Kelly once did on Fox News, that Jesus was white, and, by implication, God, too.

In Trump's lizard political brain, all Jews should unconditionally support Israel, so all American Jews should support him, the greatest supporter of Israel in the history of America and Israel.

White nationalism is in fact white supremacy. It's understandable that white supremacists would want to be called nationalists, but that doesn't make them any less supremacist.

As a senator, Obama denounced the Big Brother provisions of Bush's post-9/11 Patriot Act, particularly its sections enabling the state to spy on Americans without their knowledge. After taking power, Obama acquired his other face. That face speaks far less, but when it does, it justifies Bush's policies.

Americans are raised to believe that anything is possible in America if you are pure of heart and willing to work hard, which is nonsense, and that anyone can become president, which is even more foolish, and that free markets always make the right decision, which is nuts.

I don't know anyone who thinks the SNC Lavalin mess was well handled, and it was all driven by Justin Trudeau. A smart prime minister would have realized early that the situation was unwinnable, that trying to have a prosecutor overruled was unwise in the extreme, and let it go.

I, forever a product of my Scottish Calvinist upbringing, never knew how to react when someone smilingly took both my hands and told me 'Jesus loves you, and we love you.' I'd just grin rigidly, and urgently will it to stop.

I saw a bumper sticker once that stayed with me: 'God help me become the person my dog thinks I am.' I don't have the heart for this. Meaning, of course, that I'm the failure.

In early 2008, before the criminal greed of America's mortgage and investment bank industry nearly destroyed the world's economy, the balance sheet of the U.S. Federal Reserve stood at about $870 billion.

Certainly no university president, at least to my knowledge, has ever stood up and said 'this land is unceded, meaning it's not ours, so we're going to give some of it back.'

There is a small industry out there called media training. It offers instruction on how to 'control a narrative,' to use that awful term. Most politicians are clients.