The recent convention of the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) became a microcosm of the inanity of identity politics found in forums ranging from politics to higher education. Participants were given familiar “equity cards” as literal card-carrying members of groups demanding preferred treatment. The problem is when one identity group demands preference over another. The result, as seen in Winnipeg, was calamity and quickly became comedy.
Many in education have long pushed equity cards and “identity markers” to get students to define themselves by their race, disability, gender, or other criteria. Even computer science teachers are told to tailor their lessons to identity markers. Such markers are treated as essential to creating “Identity safe classrooms.”
There are even DEI games where children are encouraged to “match” their identity groups.
At the NDP convention, people were given equity cards to give preference to certain identities over groups such as males or whites. The problem is that the cards create an entitlement that can clash with others’ claims to speak first.
The cards were based on identity categories, including gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ status, and Indigenous status. You were supposed to be able to jump ahead of others because of your priority identity.
One video shows a person holding up their green gender equity card to claim the right to speak first as another woman waves her pink race equity card to speak. What followed were objections to people not yielding to those with greater priority or right to speak with one noting that cards for people who identify as Black women “have no value outside of this space.”
Then there was the speaker who called out another delegate for the sin of misgendering the speaker who identified as “non-binary.”
The collapse of the equity house of cards is due to the inherent myth that identity politics produces equity. It is, in fact, a separate system of privilege and entitlement. It is used to marginalize other voices in the name of amplifying other voices.
The greatest impact is to balkanize a population or party rather than emphasize common identities. The alternative is to enforce uniform treatment of any speakers based on such novel devices as a line to speak.
Under this cutting edge approach, people are guaranteed to speak in the order in which they line up to speak. It may be a radical experiment for the NDP, but it has been shown to have some success in other areas.
Did any of the cards provide get out of jail free or $200 for passing Go?
Turley– “One video shows a person holding up their green gender equity card”
“A person” and “Their”? Please don’t use a plural pronoun when a singular is correct.
It is jarring when reading and it is wrong.
If you want it to be genderless use “it” or “its”.
“A person held up its gender equity card” catches the spirit and the quantity.
The NDP is essentially Canada’s Labour Party, supported by the CLC, positioned to the left of the Liberals. If it has lost ground, either the country has moved to the right (doubtful) or the Liberals have moved to the left (seems likely).
The NDP is a completely irrelevant fringe party that holds 6 out of 343 seats in the Canadian parliament.
It previously held 103 seats in 2011, and is on a fast track to extinction.
They are not even recognized as an official [party anymore. Any group that has less than 12 seats is not recognized as an official party in Canada. They are simply a motley group of extremists that are no longer relevant in Canada.
The Canadian people have rejected them as a meaningful political entity.
I don’t know if anybody caught it yesterday, but during arguments Justice Alito jokingly mentioned the use of Claude AI and perhaps using it to issue rulings for the Supreme Court.
Crazy thing is AI is already being used to create arguments and motions in court. How long before a judge decides to use AI to determine a ruling with a complex case? The military is already using it to pick targets, businesses are using it to get rid of white collar jobs. Even crazier, how long until lawmakers simply use AI to create constitutionally sound laws that would be difficult to repeal by judges or even the Supreme Court?
Those who are actively experimenting with AI and its growing capacity to produce relevant answers and solutions will eventually achieve those scenarios. How will we know if a lawmaker just used AI or a lobbyist offered an AI created “model legislation” that would be essentially judicial review proof of something like that?
The NYT’s Corrections noted the other day that a book review it published contained unattributed chunks of The Guardian’s review of the same book.
Turns out the freelancer who turned it in had used ai to write it, and the ai included The Guardian’s prose.
The Grey Lady opposes both ai writing and plagiarism.
yeah, sure George tell about your AI usage on this blog. You comments used to be 500 words of BS, then when you were caught, suddenly your comments dropped to 50 words and unintelligible. Sure George, tell us about AI.
You sound resentful. Obsessive. You must be confusing me with john Say.
Sounds like an exercise in MI (mutual infantilization).
NDP= No Distinct Properties
I think it is accepted understanding that it is inherent in all of nature for marginalization, ostracization, and/or social rejection or hesitancy, as a matter of survival and social cohesion. Even in the fields of botany, biology, zoology, etc., species are recognized as either “native” or “alien.” After all, who came up with the words “normal” or “abnormal?”
That being said, in the human species and mostly due to moral evolution, “acceptance” is often forced upon others, with little effort by those ostracized to create a channel for acceptance. Instead, it becomes a retaliatory “in your face” effort to gain acceptance.
While looking up the YouTube video provided by the good professor, I looked off to the right for other related videos. I found this one which evokes the good and commonality among all of us, i.e., ‘I will not force myself upon you, but please look at what I have to offer you.’ (I am not familiar with the song or the lyrics, but I doubt there are many who can do a better job delivering it!)
“They Didn’t Like Her Look, But Then She Sang Like a Star!” @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szoM2gwNt5Q
(scroll past the two commercials)
Ever since Canada declared its independence from Great Britain in the 1960s, it has been drifting toward incoherence.
“elitist, “I am more entitled than you!” Guess you don’t know the definition of elitist? Good job none the less. 🤣
Gorsuch and Barrett pretty much destroyed the absurd Trump administration position on birthright citizenship in a remarkable exchanges with the fast talking, but slow witted Solicitor General John Sauer.
Trump’s position is that birthright citizenship should only apply to children whose parents are “lawfully domiciled” in the U.S. They interpret the phrase, “under the jurisdiction of” in the 14th Amendment to mean “domiciled” in the sense of being a lawful resident. The implication is that any child born to someone not domiciled in the US cannot be a citizen. In his presentation, Sauer emphatically described that birthright citizenship turns on meeting the “domicile test”.
Gorsuch asked a very pointed question, if Native Americans born in the U.S. today would qualify as birthright citizens under Sauer’s “domicile test”. Before he joined SCOTUS, Gorsuch was a judge in Colorado where he had considerable experience dealing with Native American rights and tribal law.
Gorsuch focused on the administration’s “domicile” test, which argues that only children of parents with a permanent, lawful intent to remain in the U.S. should be citizens.
Gorsuch pointed out that Native Americans on reservations in 1868 were physically “domiciled” in the U.S. and had a lawful intent to stay permanently.
If domicile was the only requirement, then Native Americans should have been birthright citizens immediately in 1868. However, history shows they were excluded by the 14th Amendment until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
When Sauer initially replied that Native Americans are granted citizenship “by statute” (referring to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924), Gorsuch cut him off, insisting that he should set aside the statute and answer whether they would be considered birthright citizens under the 14th Amendment itself.
Sauer suddenly realized that he was caught in a logical contradiction. He then stumbled in his response saying, he wasn’t sure and that he would have to think that through.
Gorsuch highlighted that the administration’s “domicile” rule is a modern invention that doesn’t align with how the 14th Amendment was actually understood in the 19th century
Why was Gorsuch’s question so important and an obvious trap that Sauer fell into?
The 14th Amendment’s original “jurisdiction” clause was historically interpreted to exclude most Native Americans because they were considered members of sovereign tribes rather than fully under U.S. jurisdiction. They only received universal automatic citizenship through the 1924 Act.
Gorsuch noted that Native Americans living on reservations were clearly “domiciled” in the U.S. in a physical and intentional sense.
Historically, the Supreme Court ruled in Elk v. Wilkins (1884) that Native Americans were not birthright citizens because they owed allegiance to their tribes, not the U.S. They only received universal citizenship through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
The Trap: If domicile is the only metric for citizenship, as Sauer argued, then Native Americans should have been considered birthright citizens from the moment the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.
The Flaw: If the government’s new “domicile” test were correct, the 1924 Act would have been redundant.
The Implication: By forcing Solicitor General John Sauer to admit that Native Americans might be birthright citizens under his test, Gorsuch highlighted that the administration’s theory is a “revisionist” departure from both historical understanding and existing statutes.
Barrett also pointed out the absurdity of the administration’s “allegiance” theory, – the idea that parents must owe “total allegiance” to the U.S. for their children to be citizens.
Sauer conceded that the primary purpose of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved African people and their children.
Barrett then raised the case of an enslaved person brought to the U.S. from Africa against their will who viewed themselves as a captive and never intended to stay, thus lacking “allegiance” or “domicile” in the way Sauer defined them.
If Sauer’s “allegiance” test were applied strictly, many of the very people the 14th Amendment was written to protect would have been excluded from citizenship because they had no intention of staying when they first arrived. When they arrived they did not intend to stay and they definitely did not feel allegiance to a country that held them captive.
The absolute absurdities and logical contradictions in Sauer’s argument are plainly obvious to any rational observer.
This absurd interpretation of the 14th Amendment will go down by a vote of 7 to 2.
Thomas and Alito will twist themselves into a Gordian knot of absurdities to rationalize Trump’s position, as they always do.
Thanks for posting. Did not read it.
Lets see Anonymous the know it all on every subject. If the four billion women in the world get pregnant they can just jump on an airplane flying to the U.S. Once in the U.S. they can give birth and poof the baby is an American citizen. If they do it in California the welfare checks are soon to follow.
You can bet that the cost of their flight will be paid for by the welfare scammers in California. Just being anti Trump on every subject is also simply being anti intelligent. The know it all strikes again.
Wait, that’s the result of thinking through?
First sentence told me it was off-topic TDS nonsense from Gigi. Did not read past that.
Shouldn’t this be on your own blog where you direct the preferred subject of the day?
Canada has been a joke for a very long time. But it used to be funnier….
Canada was a reasonable country for a long time, until the elder Trudeau led it down the European Social Democracy road. Gun control continues to be irrational — the long gun registry cost a fortune, and had to be abandoned.
Ah, the one major flaw in the progressive ideology of the “perfected man”. They can’t/won’t accept the fact that humans have built-in (either genetically determined, or G-d given) proclivities that override any slight manipulation by other mere mortals. Their hubris-inebriated sense of self-righteousness and above average IQ allows them to think that their superiority gives them the wisdom to re-shape a world that, again, was (either, through dint of extraordinary evolution had arrived at its necessary state, or had been divinely planned – you pick). They will always fail because they only rely on humanities good nature and ignore the other half of the human psyche. But, true to their defiance of facts, they will continue to bedevil the world in a fashion similar to various other plagues that been wrought on us such as marxism, islamism, and let’s not forget, leperosy.
Um… you sound like a NDP nutjob.
No privilege card for you.
Again, only inventive and hate – your typical left loon – totally inadequate at debate because that would require a functioning brain stem.
Being anonymous again fat mama?
What you wrote was not debate materials, it was your typical a pathological rant.
Good grief, Turley is really leaning into the ‘filler’ content while waiting for a script that makes Sauer’s birthright citizenship arguments sound coherent. It takes a special kind of irony to challenge the 14th Amendment using the legal genius of John Eastman, only for Trump to TACO his way out of the room before the other side even spoke. Whether it’s a disastrous Supreme Court showing or a botched war in Iran, Trump’s new foreign and domestic policy is simple: Walk away and hope the gas prices don’t follow him. I look forward to Turley’s ‘both sides’ fairy tale tomorrow.
George/X: What a resentful, hateful, coveting outburst from you, yet again, first thing in the morning!
I do hope you realize that you have become theeee poster child on this site who reflects the very subject of today’s topic, –i.e., how to correctly handle those who feel marginalized by others and feel the jealous need to strike out against all of them, especially their host who graciously permits their insulting presence here. Do you agree with the good professor’s approach
to one who bites the hand that feeds him/his need?
(p.s. please notice my moniker carefully so that you do not confuse me again with someone else, in your hurried effort to strike me down.)
THanks, George. Have a nice day.
Lin, hateful, resentful, coveting? Huh? You’re keep mistaking fair criticism for other things not in evidence. Are you sure you’re a lawyer? Yesterday, your moniker was easily confused with that of an alleged bizarro “Lin”. I was not the only one ‘fooled’ on what could have been an April fools prank. Your complaint to Darren and continued warnings about an alleged impostor were a bit humorous.
I seriously have doubts about your claims of being a lawyer if you cannot recognize the fact that Turley’s opinions and views are fair game for criticism just as mine are.
And….strike you down? Wow. Do you accuse an opposing counsel in court of being jealous, resentful, or hateful when they rebut our counter our arguments? Come on Lin, surely you’re not that obtuse. Right? Yours truly X
george
You’re keep mistaking fair criticism for other things not in evidence.
********************
Did you really say that geroge. How many folks on this site, have said the same thing about you.
Dustoff, you had to ask even after reading it? Who is Geroge?
How many? I would have thought you would know. Apparently not.
Lin,
Great take down of the slow and dumb one!! Well done!
Why don’t you take him down your stupid illiterate fool. Never seen you post anything but ass-kissing, Olly, Dustoff, Hull idiot etc..
You ain’t got the smarts to formulate anything worth reading and debating.
Upstate, I note a continuous desire to take you and Upstate Farmer down. (see below)
In a way that is music to my ears because it shows that the left lost the intellectual battle and the intellectual road you and OLLY take. He is a know-nothing fit only to hang onto your tailpipe in an attempt to slow you down.
Upstatefarmer, take down? You see everything as a ‘take down’ don’t you?
Maybe you should offer your own takedowns.
Good grief, its George again. Anyone get what he’s ranting about today? Didn’t read it.
You read it. Everyone does. LOL!
Not fair to Professor Turley. His columns routinely give us things to consider which in some cases we would not otherwise know about. Case in point: the Canadian NDP gathering in Winnipeg
This topic really brought out all the bitter lefttards!
Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet both explain that totalitarian movements do not start with tanks in the streets; they start by reshaping how people are formed. You first atomize individuals, strip away any shared civic identity, and then give them a new identity, a cause, and an enemy to rally against.
Turley’s post today is a small but very clear example of that kind of mass formation at work. The people in that room probably do not think of themselves as part of a totalitarian movement, and I am not saying they got up this morning wanting a dictatorship. But the tools they are using are the same tools those movements rely on: you break people into narrow grievance identities, teach them to trust the card more than any shared “we,” and they become much easier to steer.
That is why “formation” matters so much. Either we are being formed as citizens for self‑government, ordered liberty, and a common national identity, or we are being formed for something very different, and what you see in that Canadian hall is a picture of the latter.
OLLY
You do not seem to understand that the NDP is a completely irrelevant fringe party in Canada.
Instead you fly off into one of your predictably absurd rants about “forming citizens”, and “self-government”. You are a ridiculous one trick pony who responds with these nonsensical diatribes in exactly the way that Pavlov’s dogs respond to the bell.
The NDP has only 100,000 members. In the recent election they won only 6 seats in the 343 seat Canadian parliament. They previously held 24 seats.
Now that they have less than 12 seats, they are no longer recognized as an official party in parliament.
They do not get any funding to hire staff.
They do not get any committee assignments.
They do not have a right to speak in debates.
The Speaker can completely ignore them in the house.
They play no functional role in the Canadian federal government whatsoever.
This post by Turley is a completely irrelevant push piece designed to rile up the MAGA mob, and as you prove, it has worked as designed.
You are right that the NDP is small and weak in Ottawa right now. That is not really what I am talking about. The American colonists were also a fringe within the British Empire until their ideas and their formation work caught up with history. The point is that big political shifts almost always start in “irrelevant” corners, where people are quietly being trained to think in a new way.
What I see in this Turley post is not just a goofy Canadian sideshow. It is a live example of how people get atomized into narrow identities and then taught to seek protection and meaning through those identities instead of through any shared civic “we.” That is the formation piece. We have watched the same basic pattern here, as a lot of once‑fringe groups and ideas have done decades of quiet work in universities, media, HR, and nonprofits and now have enormous influence over the modern Democratic Party. So I am less interested in how many seats the NDP holds today and more interested in what kind of citizen these little experiments are building for tomorrow.
So Olly somehow connected Arndt and the NDP. What a leap… into insanity.
Another goofy Olly comment. He’s about to set the blog record for the most irrelevant comments. Surpassing X/George.
Atta boy Olly, you go.
OLLY
You really are an absurd one trick pony.
This response is completely nonsensical gibberish. A completely meaningless word salad of terminology that you have manufactured for your own purposes that has no meaning outside of your absurd little world of fantasy.
You seem to think that the NDP is a small irrelevant fringe group that is “quietly training people to think in new ways”, as if they are the thin edge of the wedge that will eventually become more mainstream.
In fact, the exact opposite is true. They have steadily lost support over the last 15 years.
Here are the results of the last 5 elections.
2011: 103 seats
2015: 44 seats
2019: 24 seats
2021: 25 seats
2025: 6 seats (they initially won 7 seats, but one of them defected to the Liberals)
So you see, your absurd hypothesizing about the “pattern” that is developing is absolutely ridiculous.
The ridiculous antics of this declining fringe party are being rejected by the Canadian people.
Even some of their own members are rejecting the party’s current antics as demonstrated by the fact that one of the elected members in 2025 defected to the Liberals in protest.
You base your absurd analyses of “forming citizens” and “self-government” in an entirely fact free land of wild fantasy.
@OLLY
Same here, OLLY. Equally concerning is the apparent fact that those who are dismissive or enabling of it (which amounts to the same thing) will have to live in that world after it’s coalesced whether they like it or not. Foresight is virtually non-existent in a society addicted to comfort.
Your average progressive may have been fooled into believing they are privileged or elite; they are not, and the actual elites will insure they do NOT rub elbows with said created world.
We learned this lesson 250 years ago; just the past couple of decades have served to erase that memory. Useful idiots, indeed.
Exactly James, that is why I keep coming back to formation. The people who shrug this off or quietly enable it are going to have to live in the world that forms out of it, whether they ever consciously chose it or not. If there is one constant in any society, it is the process of formation. People can dismiss it as a nothingburger, mock it, or ignore it, but it still goes on. Through families, schools, media, and institutions, every culture is always teaching people how to see themselves and how to live; the only real question is what kind of person it is forming.
Our Founders worried hard about forming citizens fit for a free republic. Today we are watching a different kind of person being shaped in real time, and comfort makes it very easy to pretend that process has no destination until we suddenly find ourselves living inside it.
Olly, you are a fruit cake
Such a common gambit. The matter complained of is small and insignificant so it should be paid no mind. Until of course it’s grown and is no longer insignificant. But now you can’t criticize it because you are marginalizing a significant minority. Until it grows some more and it’s now mainstream and you can no longer complain about it because you are out of touch on the wrong side of history. No dice. The time to take note of a toxic trend is when it is in its infancy. I assume, anon, that you agree that this NDP identity card nonsense is just that? So, we can actually agree and join forces to marginalize it further rather than fight about it.
@garyesq2k2
Respectfully, it was in its infancy 20 years ago, and no one cared to heed any of the warning signs in spite of the expressed concerns of many.
We really are probably one election away from a tipping point now.
Still, Canada and Britain are currently the best object lessons in the West; I really do think in the left’s hubris Hillary was supposed to win handily and we’d be mired in the same muck on the same timeline, hence the absurd levels of doubling down from 2020 onward.
Nevertheless, this is all fully in motion now, not its nascent stages, and it is absolutely generational. We need to do better *now*.
Hope you’re right. I still believe that this card nonsense would be rejected by all but the most leftist members of our Congress,. But the degree to which this matter is an infant for a teenager is a fairly mild quibble. We’re in basic agreement.
What, no Privilege Card today Olly?
OLLY,
Well said.
I find it ironic that the supposedly inclusive NDP is more like a segregated, elitist, “I am more entitled than you!” party. On the face of the video, it is truly comical they are even having those . . . discussions. But as you point out, they are using those tools in an attempt to reform society to conform to their individual “equity” for some to stand above all others. In their quest for equity, they have to erase the rights of the individual, and, of course, free speech.
“elitist, “I am more entitled than you!” Guess you don’t know the definition of elitist? Good job none the less.
Upstate, I appreciate that you actually get what I am driving at. At some point more people are going to have to bother trying to understand the psychology behind how a culture shifts right under our noses. Otherwise we are left scratching our heads, wondering how we end up with a Supreme Court justice who will not define “woman,” how “Black Lives Matter” is celebrated while “All Lives Matter” can get your city burned, how someone like Spanberger in Virginia or Mamdani in New York becomes the respectable face of ideas that would have been fringe not long ago, or how people will defend the killer of an insurance CEO while doing everything possible to shield an illegal alien who murdered a jogger.
All of that looks random and insane until you see it as formation work. Small groups, often written off as fringe, spend years atomizing people, breaking down any shared civic “we,” and then rebuilding their identity around grievance, enemies, and a new moral code. That is how you get sanctuary cities, no‑go zones run by radicals, and mobs ready to punish anyone who still talks about equal justice or ordered liberty. Turley’s little Canadian video is not the whole story, but it is a clear snapshot of the same process.
OLLY
This is completely nonsensical pseudointellectual gibberish.
Now you are trying to connect a rapidly declining fringe party in Canada as an explanation for your perceived shortcomings of SCOTUS judges, Mamdani and Spanberger.
You are delusional
You are completely out of your mind.
The NDP in Canada is a fringe party in rapid decline. It is being rejected by the Canadian people, and is on a fast track to extinction as I pointed out above with recent election figures. It is not in any way, shape or form a group that will any influence whatsoever in the near future.
You are drawing absurd conclusions about a group of whackos who are in the process of being rejected by the Canadian people.
Yep, we damned near lost the transgender battle until we recognized that while a small group of people, the underlying premise behind transing kids was an IDEA not just an action and that the IDEA behind the trend needed to be fully examined and rejected.
Gary, that is exactly it. There came a point where I had to step back from fighting issue by issue and start asking what kind of ideas and psychology were driving all this. That was my systems‑thinking kicking in, with Bezmenov always in the back of my mind, and then Desmet helped me see the pattern. If we do not dig down to that level, we stay busy arguing the minutia and never touch the root. The transgender fight is a perfect example. It was never just about individual “actions” in a clinic or a school. It was about an idea of the human person, the body, and identity that had to be exposed and rejected. The same is true here. These equity cards look like a small procedural gimmick, but underneath is a whole idea about what a human being is and how a citizen should be formed. If we do not name and challenge that idea, we will keep losing ground even when we win the occasional skirmish.
OLLY,
Well said.
We are seeing the formation at work. Just last weekend there was another “No Kings” protest, in which some got violent. So, yes, there clearly is what was once fringe group is now being accepted as mainstream. We also saw how they attempted to normalize things that we consider to be absurd, like pornography in elementary school libraries.
Upstate pigger, well said! Even you don’t understand the nonsense you post.
The people who get upset when we notice and mock marginal movements can never tell us when a movement is sufficiently popular to warrant a critique.
Gary, well put. The folks who scold us for noticing and mocking “marginal” movements never seem able to say when, exactly, a movement becomes big enough to criticize. By the time it passes whatever invisible threshold they have in mind, the ideas have already marched through the institutions and it is too late. And the hard truth is that many of the people doing the scolding have already been captured by the movement itself. Once you buy into the underlying ideas and language, any early warning looks like bigotry or overreaction instead of prudence. That, too, is part of the formation: you get trained to police the critics more harshly than the ideology that is quietly reshaping the culture.