Pesach, Palm Sunday, Pandemonium.

If it feels as though the ground is shifting beneath your feet, that's because it is.

Passover

We’re now a quarter of the way through what’s shaping up to be the 20th year of freedom’s retreat around the world, by the reckoning of Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. Fewer than half the world’s people are citizens of democracies. Rroughly four in ten live in police states, and the rest go about their lives in the half-light of autocracies, kleptocracies and oligarchies.

Not to make this newsletter an homily but the plagues that blight the world are relevant to consider at Passover, which has just begun, since the customs of Pesach recall the Israelites’ emancipation from Pharoah’s slavery and the dawning hours of the Exodus. No such liberation is on the world’s horizon at the moment.

With the Trump Administration’s determination to normalize relations with Vladimir Putin, we may have reached the final unraveling of NATO’s 76-year Trans-Atlantic Alliance. Which brings us straight away to the savagery in Ukraine.

Palm Sunday

It’s an auspicious day in Ukraine, where the Orthodox believers and Greek rite Catholics have been more or less following the same liturgical calendar for the past couple of years, reconciling the Julian and Gregorian traditions. The first full moon after the vernal equinox comes into it as well. The upshot is that this year the dates of the important holy days coincide.

At about 10:15 this morning, as the people of the city of Sumy were on their way to mass, Russian ballistic missiles tore into the heart of the city, killing at least 34 people, including two children, and injuring more than 100.

This was an act of terrorism, plain and simple, of the kind Ukrainians have had to put up with in a constant blitz for three years now.

Ukraine’s only hope lies in a global rejection of the Trump administration’s policy of appeasement, Europe’s supply of advanced air defence systems to Kyiv, and an intensification of economic sanctions on Russia, and on Putin and his oligarchs.

Pandemonium

We’re all finally being wrenched into a reckoning with the west’s decision to put a knife to its own throat by admitting China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Globalisation as we’ve known it since then is coming to an end, and I’m not convinced this is necessarily a bad thing.

It’s just the worst possible outcome that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump and a variety of ayatollahs, emirs, caudillos and other such strongman types are emerging from the wreckage, triumphant.

Just this past week, for instance, U.S. President Donald Trump administration has:

Imposed variable country-specific “reciprocal tariffs” that aren’t reciprocal on 57 countries, with some tariffs as high as 50 per cent, then rescinded those tariffs, or “paused” them, but retained ten-per-cent tariffs across the board on everyone. After Beijing announced counter-tariffs, the Trump administration boosted tariffs on Chinese imports from 50 percent to 90 percent, then 104 percent, then 125 percent, then 145 percent.

The latest is that smartphones, computers semiconductors, solar cells and memory cards and a variety of electronic devices will exempted from American tariffs, wherever those products might come from.

As for Canada, the latest is that Trump’s “border” tariffs of 25 per cent are to apply to non-CUSMA-compliant goods - roughly have our exporters haven’t had to bother to register their goods with USMCA because there was never a need to - and then there’s a ten percent tariff rate on oil, gas and potash, and 25 percent applied to steel and aluminum and the auto sector.

With all-party support, Mark Carney’s sort-of interim government has applied “matching” counter-tariffs on about $94.5 billion worth of American imports.

About China and Canada. . .

I’m on it. Which is just one reason this weekend’s Real Story is abbreviated, and why there’s no paywall today. Another reason for the absence of the usual heft for a weekend newsletter: My right hand is broken. Or something. I think it’s boxer’s knuckle, and I didn’t even earn it by punching someone.

In lieu of what I’d had in mind, here’s my latest in the National Post, Carney may not know why China likes him, but it's plain for all to see, which is part of my ongoing effort to bring people up to speed on the collusions and collaborations between the Liberal Party establishment and the influence peddlers of Beijing’s United Front Work Department and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.

See also this past week’s meganewsletter on the subject, with a surfeit of links and resources, about Liquidiation Day and how Beijing's gravitational pull grows stronger every day as Europe and Canada look to a world without the U.S. in the wheelhouse.

Yet another reason: The Lenten abstinence concludes today. I’ll be raising a glass to the pride of County Louth, the journalist and statesman Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the youngest Father of Confederation, born on this day 200 hundred years ago. McGee envisioned a ‘patriotism that wrongs no one, burdens no one, menaces no one, dishonours no one.’

A glass to that, too.