After decades of monopolizing nearly every form of mass communication, the left found its information cartel under siege with the new freedoms enabled by social media. Conservative voices previously blacklisted from the mainstream could now reach large audiences and quickly became a severe threat to the narrative.
It wouldn’t take long before the left called for censoring or banning anyone to the right of communism under the guise of protecting us from “hate speech” and “misinformation.” Now the left’s Orwellian censorship crusade has set its sights on the next frontier: ban all comments.
Recently, Yahoo replaced its comment section with the following disclaimer:
Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting[.]
This new policy is hardly surprising. Yahoo is well known for publishing headlines that do not accurately represent the story. Beneath the misleading title, the article is often a sloppy summary of the event, written by an overeducated twenty-something who took a break from writing about Kim Kardashian’s lip care routine to inform us on political matters.
After suffering through the unpalatable article, the payoff often was within the comment section, which can sometimes serve as a refuge where truth prevails in the form of thousands of comments eviscerating the fake news above.
During the California wildfires and power outages of 2019, Yahoo published a story from Quartz titled “California’s Massive Power Outages Show Climate Change Is Coming for Everyone, Even the Rich.” The article shifted blame away from bad environmental policies by California Democrats toward the climate change monster. Some of the most liked comments were:
“This has nothing to do with climate change. Nice try though!”
“California’s problems with electrical transmission due to restrictive environmental laws regarding tree clearing and lumber industry. Decades of fuel buildup becomes a disaster zone.”
“Kansas has wind & droughts, oddly no fire issues. Guess clearing dry brush isn’t a liberal choice”
“I’m 53 years old. I don’t have the best memory, but I do think I remember wind and warm weather in the summer while growing up in northern California. I could be wrong though. Maybe they didn’t have weather back then.”
This humiliating saga for Yahoo went on for years. Finally, they’ve had enough.
What’s the point of publishing propaganda if anyone can scroll to the comment section and find the author’s misleading representation of the story, or deliberate omission of facts, exposed?
This mission to ban comments is not new, but Yahoo joining the boycott is revealing.
A few years ago, major publishers like ESPN didn’t appreciate what they found in their comment section. For ESPN and many other major websites, the problem was anonymity.
The solution was requiring a Facebook login to comment on articles. This way, people will think twice about posting “hate speech” in comment sections if they are no longer anonymous. To ESPN’s surprise, attaching identities before commenting did not stop the barrage of ridicule toward ESPN for its partisan politics, support of Colin Kaepernick, and nauseating coverage of Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner receiving the Arthur Ashe award for courage.
The disdain for ESPN kept showing up within its comment sections, triggering ESPN to delete them altogether. Many other websites followed.
Fake news is all in vain if John and Jane Doe from Milwaukee can quickly dismantle its work in a few sentences. Now comment sections are becoming endangered species.
Do not dismiss the abolition of comment sections as trivial or unimportant. The extinction of comment sections on websites like Yahoo and ESPN is a domino falling within a larger inimical plot to ban all dissenting opinions. The left’s Utopia is a world where leftists can lie as much as they want, and nobody can contest their claims.
Twitter might be considered the most extensive comment section in the world, and like Yahoo, the media work hard to craft propaganda ripe to publish on it. The last thing they want is to have their lies exposed within the replies of their tweets.
Media elitists began pressuring Twitter to alleviate this predicament under the same phony pretense of stopping hate speech, abuse, and misinformation.
Twitter soon developed new features allowing users to hide specific replies to their tweets to combat “abusive comments.” The people at Twitter claim that this ability to censor comments reduces the amount of “toxicity on their platform,” but “toxicity” does not mean Sarah Jeong’s racism, professors claiming that the GOP and NRA want mass shootings, or Antifa promoting violence — things decent people might consider toxic. In leftist Newspeak, “toxicity” means any attempt to assail the leftist narrative.
The media attribute the motive for Twitter’s changes as an appropriate response to “pressure” to clean up its platform, but as Daniel Greenfield writes, “The pressure in question comes from the media. And its idea of cleaning up is censoring conservatives.”
Twitter is also testing a new technology, “sending users a prompt when they reply to a tweet using offensive or hurtful language, in an effort to clean up conversations on the social media platform.”
For the creators of fake news, the ideal solution is training people to self-censor.
How quickly terms like “pro-life” and “MAGA” find their way on the naughty list of hurtful and offensive language is unclear.
The purpose of eliminating comment sections on websites and replies on Twitter is to regain their monopoly of information.
A powerful weapon in the left’s repertoire of indoctrination tools is presenting their opinions and beliefs as if they were ubiquitous. Social proof can supplant supporting evidence.
When elites are “ratioed” on Twitter for fraudulent claims, it reminds users that an opposition does exist. When articles smearing the McCloskeys for defending their home against violent mobs contain thousands of comments expressing support for the St. Louis couple, it undermines the illusion of unanimous agreement about the evil of the McCloskeys the writer attempts to convey.
Democrats do not want voters to realize that their radical opinions aren’t the majority. As they move farther left, the only way to uphold this illusion is to prevent unapproved opinions from entering the public view.
RIP, comment sections.
Bode Lang is a conservative blogger who regularly produces conservative videos on YouTube. You can find him at https://www.youtube.com/c/Bodelang.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has kicked Cambridge MPP Belinda Karahalios out of the Conservative caucus for voting against her party on Bill 195, a bill which prevents MPPs from being able to hold the government to account for its use of emergency powers. In a democratic country, politicians are supposed to represent their constituents. By punishing Belinda Karahalios for voting according to her conscience, Doug Ford is disrespecting political rights that are essential to a democracy. We must stop political leaders from trying to violate a politician’s duty to their constituents, regardless of the party this occurs in. So please sign this petition demanding that Doug Ford reinstates Belinda Karahalios into the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario immediately.
Politics can be a dirty sport, but what Ontario Premier Doug Ford did to Belinda Karahalios was so blatantly disrespectful to our democratic rights.
On July 22, 2020, Doug Ford kicked Cambridge MPP Belinda Karahalios out of the Progressive Conservative caucus. This was not due to a scandal or some sort of offensive statement. Doug Ford kicked out Belinda Karahalios because she felt that Bill 195 went against her conscience, and so she was the only Conservative who voted against it.
She had good reason to be against it as well. Bill 195 ends the state of emergency in Ontario, but lets Doug Ford and his government keep the emergency powers from it, such as the closing of businesses, managing workforces, and prohibiting public gatherings. Doug Ford and one of his Cabinet Ministers can extend these orders one month at a time up until 2022 without needing a vote from the legislature.
This means that if the government started using these powers in a way that was unjustifiably authoritarian in the next two years, our elected officials would have no way of stopping them.
Social conservatives should be on the front lines in calling out Doug Ford for this. Bill 195 was a bill that even many within the mainstream media had issues with. Various organizations with differing political leanings such as the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and the Ontario Nurses’ Association called out Bill 195 as an anti-democratic power-grab.
If a politician cannot disagree with their party leader on this, then how can assure that pro-life politicians can disagree with pro-abortion party leaders? How can we assure that pro-religious freedom politicians can disagree with secular politically correct party leaders?
This is what it ultimately comes down to: do politicians represent their constituents or do they merely represent the agenda of their party? It’s been taken for granted in our country that though our politicians typically align with a political agenda, their jobs ultimately are to represent us.
We’ve seen on the left that this is often not the case. In most federal parties, for instance, you can’t be pro-life. If we let politicians like Doug Ford get away with punishing politicians for doing their job at representing their constituents and their basic political beliefs, we may soon not have parties where politicians can vote according to their conscience.
This is not merely an issue Conservative party members need to worry about, or even an issue Ontarians need to worry about. This is ultimately an attack on democratic freedoms in Canada.
,You probably met Tamara in one of our FightTheFines.com stories last week. She got slapped with a social distancing ticket for walking the shores of an empty beach in Cobourg, Ontario. You see, despite having very few cases, the town of Cobourg decided to close its beaches as part of their new COVID-19 regulations.
After Tamara refused to accept the ticket, bylaw officers called in the real police, who handcuffed Tamara, took her belongings, and hauled her off to jail.
Some say it’s best to just pay the fine and stop going to the beach until we’re told it’s safe to do so. But we think it’s better to let power-hungry law enforcement, bureaucrats, and politicians know that WEWANT OUR TIME IN THE SUN!
If our politicians can go to their cottages during this “crisis”, we can go to the beach. We’re fighting this ticket even if it costs us more than double what the original fine is worth. But we think that’s a small price to pay for standing up for our personal liberties.
We have Sam Goldstein, one of the best civil liberties lawyers in the country. Sam has been hard at work on all our cases, including this one – watch our coverage at FightTheFines.com. Sam is an excellent lawyer, and he’s not cheap.
Even if he’s giving us a healthy discount, fighting these cases is still very expensive. But he’s worth every penny — we’re already beating these cases in court!Please support our fight by donating at FightTheFines.com. And if you know someone who’s facing one of these ludicrous tickets, send them our way. If their case has merit, we’ll take it on. Yours truly, David Menzies P.S. If you want to donate to help us fight this and all our other cases, please go to FightTheFines.com. If you’ve already donated, you can still support us by following us on social media, liking and sharing our content with your friends, subscribing to RebelNews+, or making a purchase from the Rebel News Store. P.P.S. If you prefer to use snail mail you can send cheques to: Rebel News P.O. Box 61056 Eglinton/Dufferin R.O. Toronto, ON, M6E 5B2 Thank you.
, Tonight I’m having a book launch for my new book, China Virus: How Justin Trudeau’s Pro-Communist Ideology is Putting Canadians in Danger. It’s 100% sold out. I’m really excited about it.
But I think there’s a chance it could be cancelled.By the Communist Party of China. I know that sounds impossible.
The book launch is in Sherwood Park, just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. We have a contract with a grateful restaurant that is eager for paying customers after a four-month lock-down. So everything is set. But then the restaurant started receiving threats. Threats by e-mail. Threats by phone. Here, watch this video where I read out a four-page threat that was e-mailed to the restaurant: The threats weren’t even from Edmonton or from the restaurant’s customers.
Many of the threats were from out of town, from people with Chinese accents, warning the restaurant with all sorts of consequences if it dared to proceed. Now, make no mistake: my book is very pro-Chinese. As in: I support the Chinese people. I support Chinese democracy.
The real “virus” I talk about in my book — as you can see in the book’s title — is the Communist Party. And their chief victims are Chinese people themselves. So I want to draw a distinction between the Chinese people and loyal Canadians who happen to be of Chinese ethnicity, versus operatives of the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, the most passionate critics of the Chinese Communist Party are Chinese people. I stand with them.
But — as my book meticulously documents — the Chinese dictatorship bullies those democracy activists, even in Canada. And now they’re trying to do that to me. Some of the threats warn the restaurant of a boycott. That’s not very credible, given how the callers are all from out of town. Some threats warn of police investigations — also not credible. That’s what China does. That’s not how it works in Canada. (At least not normally — but you never know with Trudeau).
That four-page threat letter I saw also warned the restaurant of a giant protest — could be. I even heard that one Chinese operative had called up the restaurant, and offered them $3,000 to cancel my book launch! It’s not surprising.
As you know, Amazon banned my book for two months. And then after un-banning it, they banned it again. (And they un-banned it again — for now.) I think now we can now guess who was behind that Amazon censorship! Well, we’re going ahead with tonight’s book launch.
We’ve hired a security guard, and we’ve hired a lawyer, to come to the book launch to protect it from any threats. That’s crazy, but these are crazy times. If you have a ticket — we’ll see you tonight! If you don’t — don’t worry, we’ll have more book events across Canada. But now we know that we’re up against enormous forces, even more authoritarian than Justin Trudeau’s censors. If you haven’t yet got your copy of the book, please do so now before it’s banned for a third time.
And if you feel like it, please help support the book, by covering our legal and security costs, and our marketing costs — including the gorgeous billboard we just unveiled on the side of a major Canadian highway. (Maybe that’s what got China’s attention!) Just click here, or go to www.ChinaVirusBook.com. Thanks for your support. I believe in freedom for Canadians. And I hope that, one day, the Chinese people will have our same freedoms too. Yours truly, Ezra Levant P.S. We’re going to have more book launch events as pandemic regulations permit. We’ll post them at www.ChinaVirusBook.com. P.P.S. The book has been very well-received, with hundreds of 5-star reviews online! Click here to get your copy. I hope you like it as much
Toronto Mayor John Tory is really excited about Ontario
entering Stage 3 of reopening and bars and restaurants opening up
again.
Actually, what he’s really excited about is slapping
a whole lot of regulatory restrictions on them.
On Sunday, Tory sent a letter to Premier Doug Ford containing
six recommended rules to be imposed on these establishments, which
have absorbed a catastrophic financial hit due to the COVID-19
pandemic.
Tory is calling for mandatory masks for all staff and
patrons, earlier closing hours, occupancy restrictions, and for all
patrons to provide contact information that is to be kept for 30 days,
to allow for tracing as needed.
Wow! Where to begin?
Asking everyone for their contact information is not going to
go over well. That’s a bit of a safety issue. They might get a lot of
false information.
Again, as with the mandatory facemask rules, you have
to wonder whether recommendations like these are really about
protection—as is claimed—or politics.
Tory says that “experts” believe that masks keep people safer
and that restaurants and bars pose a higher level of risk for the
spread of the coronavirus.
Are these the same experts who were saying back in
March that masks weren’t necessary outside of hospitals, and that
anyone who suggested that the borders should be closed was a
racist?
We all want to stop the spread of COVID-19. We’ve all made
extraordinary sacrifices toward that end. No businesses have
been hit harder than the hospitality industry. Many of them have
closed and are never coming back.
In some cases, establishments built by generations of hard
work and dedication are gone forever.
A recent Leger poll shows that a national average of 22% of
Canadians will avoid bars and restaurants for as long as masks are
mandatory there.
We all need our country’s economy to rebound from this
setback, and bars and restaurants must be part of the resurgence. We
don’t need politicians like John Tory making the hard road back even
more difficult for them.
Mayor Tory’s recommendations are evidence of state overreach, which
has reared its ugly head during this crisis. Using the pandemic as a
cover, it imposes draconian limitations on our freedoms in the name of
the common good.
Those who voice opposition are shouted down as selfish and
reckless, and the statists consolidate their power.
Once given up, these freedoms will be difficult to regain.
John Tory is also calling for mandatory masks in
residential apartment buildings.
Canadians who feel more comfortable wearing a facemask should be by
all means do so, but masks should not be made mandatory.
Re-openings of businesses should be done responsibly and safely,
but without being hamstrung by statists who, having had a taste of
authoritarianism, are hungry for more.
I remain 100% opposed to making any eventual COVID-19
vaccine mandatory for Canadians.
I will continue to guard against any unjust
limitations of our rights introduced in the name of public safety or
other invocations of the “common good”.
The prescient have seen it coming for a century now. In 1918 and 1922, the two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West
were first published. In his magnus opus Spengler examined the
civilizations or cultures – he used the latter term but the way the two
terms were used and distinguished in the German thought of his day was
very different from how they are used and distinguished in English today
– of human history, and identified a super-organic life cycle that they
each passed through, of which, he maintained, the modern West with its
“Faustian” spirit of empirical exploration – the spirit exemplified by the Ulysses of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s eponymously titled poem – was entering into its final season.
In 1964, James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West: An Essay On the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism was published for the first time. This book is probably best understood as the third in a trilogy, the first of which was The Managerial Revolution,
written immediately after Burnham’s break with his Trotskyite youth and
the Socialist Workers Party and published in 1941, arguing that the
capitalist world was evolving into something that would not be the
socialist worker’s paradise predicted by Marxism, but rather the rule of
a new class of technocratic corporate managers and government
bureaucrats. The second was The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom,
published two years later, in which Burnham gave an overview of a
Realpolitik theory regarding the inevitability of elites and the nature
of political power that he traced from the writings of Florentine
Renaissance political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli through the
nineteenth to early twentieth century writings of Robert Michels,
Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, the philosophical framework that he
had turned to after abandoning Marxism. By the time he wrote The Suicide of the West, Burnham had become one of the original members of William F. Buckley Jr.’s editorial team at National Review and the magazine’s principal analyst of geopolitical events. In The Suicide of The West
he discussed liberalism as being the ideology of Western suicide. A
familiarity with the first two books is helpful in understanding what he
meant by this, for he did not mean that liberalism was formulated to
bring about the end of Western Civilization, but rather that it was an ex post facto
rationalization on the part of the governing elites for Western
Civilization’s self-imposed collapse. Although this was written at the
height of the Cold War – the Cuban Missile Crisis had taken place two
years prior to the book’s release – the “suicide” Burnham was talking
about was not merely what he perceived to be a losing strategy against
the Soviet Union in the “Struggle for the World” (1) but also included
internal moral, cultural, and social decay, into which category he put
the immediate historical antecedents in his own day of the “woke” race
revolutionaries of our own.
In 2002, Patrick J. Buchanan, syndicated columnist, speechwriter and
advisor to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and Reform
Party nominee for the 2000 American Presidential Election, released his The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigration Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
The subtitle pretty much sums up the thesis. As Christendom
through secularization became Western Civilization, it lost not just its
faith in God but its faith in itself. Since this process was more or
less complete by the end of World War II, the period since has seen a
radical and sustained fall in fertility throughout the Western world.
To prevent the economic disaster that this threat to Western population
size poses, and for other reasons, the governments of the liberal West
have been admitting unprecedented numbers of immigrants from outside the
West, and specifically the Third World. This combination, which adds
up to a massive and rapid demographic transformation, spells disaster
for the survival of Western Civilization in any recognizable form, and
in the meantime, a far left ideology that is hostile to Western survival
– Cultural Marxism – has captured the major cultural institutions of
the West, from the schools to the media, and has been promoting an
agenda of pushing the West’s loss of faith in God and its own
civilization and its embrace of the suicidal combination of domestic
anti-natalism, mass immigration, and radical multiculturalism ever
further and further.
As their Cassandra like predictions of doom progressed from decline to
suicide to death, Spengler, Burnham, and Buchanan each provided valuable
insights into the phenomenon that four years ago I described as “The Existential Crisis of the West.”
Today, I rather regret having used up that title so early. At the
time we were seeing Europe inundated with migrants, whom the media
represented as being asylum seekers from the Syrian Civil War despite
abundant evidence that the majority came from outside the region
affected by the conflict, and many of whom clearly displayed hostile
intent towards the countries they were entering, as the plot of the late
Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints materialized before our
very eyes. Today, the news and entertainment media, academic
institutions, big tech companies and other corporations, and bureaucrats
and politicians of every stripe have united in insisting that no
dissent be allowed to the Marxist Critical Theorists’ indictment of our
civilization as being built upon racism and so thoroughly permeated by
it that all white people are collectively guilty of it even if they have
never had a conscious racist thought. This has been accompanied by a
large scale campaign of intimidation on the part of far left activist
groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The chaos has evolved
from the familiar pattern of previous race riots – inner city arson,
vandalism, looting, and violence – to the Maoist assault on figures of
the past – to the current wave of vandalism and arson targeting
Churches.
A question I have frequently encountered from those who are fed up with this sort of thing is “what do we do about it?”
The answer which people who ask this question are inevitably looking for
is a practical answer, that is to say, one that would resemble a “How
to” manual. How to stop Cultural Marxism in ten easy steps, or
something along those lines.
I do not have such an answer, and, frankly, I have my doubts as to
whether one even exists. The left devoted a century to capturing our
cultural institutions and turning them into vehicles for disseminating
its hatred of our civilization before making this aggressively
totalitarian move and that preparation unquestionably is a major factor
in their effectiveness today. We do not have that sort of time to
prepare a counter-attack which is required immediately.
This much, however, I will say, and that is that unless we recognize
this crisis as the threat to the very existence of our civilization that
it is are prepared to deal with it as such, we have already lost.
This means no more apologies for our history. No more apologies for
being white. No more apologies for believing the Christian faith and
practicing the Christian religion. No more wasting our time trying to
persuade those who are determined to “cancel” anyone and everyone whom
they condemn with one of their ever-growing list of –ists and –phobes
that they are in violation of the canons of liberal thought because they
don’t care.
When we are all in agreement on that, then maybe we can find a practical
strategy for finally defeating this Marxism and saving what is left of
our civilization.
The Canadian Constitution Foundation has questioned the constitutionality of orders requiring face coverings in certain Ontario municipalities.
In a letter to Dr. Nicola Mercer,
medical officer of health at the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph public
health region, the CCF said that a June 12 order imposing the use of
mandatory face coverings in commercial establishments breached s. 7, s.
15 and s. 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The order prima facie violates the right to liberty of the
person under s. 7 because it forces people to cover their faces and
interferes with their bodily integrity, the CCF said. It also infringes
the right to non-discrimination on the basis of disability under s. 15
since it imposes a disproportionate burden on persons with disabilities,
including breathing problems like asthma and emphysema or trauma-based
phobia of breathing obstructions.
“[I]f a person has PTSD related to having their breathing obstructed,
they should not need to discuss this with strangers in order to buy
toilet paper or fill up their gas tank,” said Christine Van Geyn,
litigation director at the CCF.
The order does include an exemption which allows such individuals to
forgo masks, but the CCF argues that requiring a person to disclose
private health information in order to claim an exemption infringes
privacy rights under s. 8, particularly the right to informational
privacy. Forcing such a disclosure may cause a person with trauma-based
phobia to re-experience the traumatic experience and suffer reputational
harm.
The CCF said that the order should be repealed or at least amended
due to these issues. Tested against the requirements found in R. v. Oakes,
the limitation imposed by the order is not rationally connected to the
objective, is not minimally impairing and is not proportionate, the CCF
said.
To support its argument of a lack of rational connection to the
objective, the CCF cited the relatively low local rate of community
transmission in the area and questioned why the order applies to retail
commercial establishments but not to other places also subject to public
gatherings, such as churches or community centres. The CCF said that
the order should be amended to require masks only when physical
distancing of six feet is impossible.
The order is not minimally impairing because it fails to consider its
impact on the privacy and equality rights of persons with disabilities,
who risk reliving trauma and experiencing reputational harm, the CCF
said. Therefore, the CCF asks for an amendment to the effect that an
employee of a commercial establishment should accept a claim for a
medical exemption at face value, without requiring a disclosure of
private health information.
Most Read
The CCF then said that the $5,000 fine imposed on commercial
establishments who do not enforce the order is disproportionate, given
that much lower fines were implemented during the peak of the outbreak.
The order should be amended to set a $500 fine instead, the CCF said.
“It is our strong preference not to commence litigation, when simple
amendments to the Order would achieve the goal of protecting both the
health and the rights of citizens,” wrote Van Geyn.
The CCF intends to send letters to other Ontario communities with
similar orders either implemented or contemplated, such as York Region,
Kingston and Waterloo.
SURREY, BC., October 1, 2015 — Stockwell Day with Dianne Watts, Conservative candidate for South Surrey-White Rock on the campaign trail in Surrey, BC., October 1, 2015. The Conservative Party has promised that it will crack down on criminal gangs if it is re-elected as the governing party in this months election. (Nick Procaylo/PNG) 00039336A [PNG Merlin Archive]
The Fall Of Stockwell Day
And What It Means For Conservatives
July 1st, 2020 | JH
I
met Stockwell Day in Regina back in 2002 when he was running for the
second time to reclaim his leadership position of the Canadian Alliance.
I trekked out to one of his fundraisers in a church basement surrounded
by seniors in order to listen to his pitch. When he was introduced, I
expected him to walk out on stage, but he surprised us by entering from
the back of the room. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and he shook my hand
as he made his way through the crowd and up to the podium. It’s funny
how little interactions like that can have a big impact on people at a
personal level. Suddenly, he wasn’t just a guy on TV, he was a real
person that I met face-to-face. I was a fan before, and I’ve liked him
ever since.
Unfortunately, Stockwell
Day has become the latest victim of cancel culture. His appearance on
CBC’s Power & Politics defending Canada from accusations of systemic
racism seems to have been the bait that finally tripped the trap.
Stockwell misread the current mainstream zeitgeist and thought that
tarring Canada as being systemically racist was the realm of far-left,
critical theory SJW activists. Instead, he learned the hard way that the
needle at the centre of the Overton Window has yet again moved left and
that not recognizing Canada as inherently racist makes you an apologist
for bigotry and, as a result, racist yourself.
(article continues after ads)
Stockwell
Day’s very reasonable, boomer-era assumption that hating Canada for
being systemically racist is the wheelhouse of the far-left was sadly
and embarrassingly corrected with him being cancelled.
Since then, Stockwell Day
has resigned from the boards of both Telus and theCanadian law firm
McMillan LLP. He will also not be featured on CBC’s Power & Politics
anymore since his taboo-breaking has made him a pariah. Stockwell
briefly made a public tweet stating, “By
feedback from many in the Black and other communities, I realize my
comments in debate on Power and Politics were insensitive and hurtful. I
ask forgiveness for wrongly equating my experiences to theirs. I commit
to them my unending efforts to fight racism in all its forms.”
This
refers to Stockwell using his experience being bullied as a kid with
glasses to the experiences of black people experiencing bullying due to
their race. It’s a ham-fisted analogy, but the point was correct. People
will always find reasons to divide us and, if race isn’t available,
then some other difference can be substituted. It’s just the
mean-spirited aspect of human nature to try to “other” people based on
inherited characteristics. It creates in-groups and out-groups. These
dynamics will never change, but the goal of minimizing bullying should
always remain a goal.
But it’s not enough for the mob.
There was blood in the
water and they pounced. The thing is, though, I don’t blame the SJW mobs
for doing what they did. At this point we should know better. The blame
lies with Stockwell Day and the boomer-era conservatism that brought us
to this point in our culture.
What lessons can be learned?
1. Conservatives need to boycott the CBC and all leftist media
Why was Stockwell Day on
CBC providing his opinions in the first place? The idea is that he
provides balance. When a topic comes up, the CBC would love to just have
three talking heads espousing far-left worldviews and trying to one-up
each other regarding who’s the most progressive. This is too much
obvious bias for a supposedly “centrist” program to allow, so they bring
in a conservative voice to function as the foil.
These conservatives are
then expected to provide a conservative perspective to a
non-conservative group of commentators and a non-conservative host. All
of this is then presented to a non-conservative audience.
Eventually after a certain
amount of time passes, the conservative foil oversteps the liberal
framing and says something that progressives consider to be “beyond the
pale” and they are then cancelled. Tom Flanagan was another former
conservative commentator that comes to mind.
Why do conservatives even
bother? We all know that the CBC is a bastion of both Liberal propaganda
and a more general progressive purveyor of far-left worldviews. Why
don’t they just boycott this activist organ?
Two reasons.
a). The idea is that by
appearing on these programs you can get the message out to people who
might never hear or consider conservative points of view. That’s valid,
but does it work? Does it really? Being a token diversity hire to play
the bad guy to an audience of progressives isn’t really changing hearts
and minds like people think it might. These commentators are always
surrounded by other commentators who mock and rebut them and the whole
thing always plays out within a solid liberal frame. You must be
extremely savvy as a conservative to both battle your opponents
logically and get your message out coherently.
Why not skip it all
together and sell to people who are buying? Playing the bad guy on CBC
doesn’t do anything for conservatism and it doesn’t do anything for the
player themselves. Beyond that, why provide content of any kind for the
CBC? They hate conservatives. Why work for an institution that hates
you?
b). There is a desire
amongst many conservatives to seek the approval of the liberal
establishment. If only we can show them that we’re not all bad and we
simply have a different perspective, then surely, they will respect us
and befriend us!
Don’t fall for it. They
see you as an enemy to their agenda and are using you as a rube. This is
a weakness of conservatives and always has been. Since our culture is
centre-left (and increasingly far-left) the mainstream culture is moving
further away from where conservatives used to live. It’s not pleasant
to be on the outside looking in, so many formerly mainstream
conservatives try to appease progressives by being the moderate
conservative that good-thinking progressives allow to exist in good
company.
“Why was Stockwell Day on CBC providing his opinions in the first place?”
The
trappings of power and prestige are all inside the progressive realm.
You must subscribe to the “Cathedral” of progressivism in order to be
seen as a good person. Appearing on CBC alongside progressives and
getting their reluctant approval is gratifying for many conservatives
because it allows them to be viewed as “in good standing” amongst the
mainstream.
The
problem in the long run is that these conservatives are functioning as
house slaves and are the epitome of cuckservatism. Don’t be the useful
idiot of the left. They will chew you up and spit you out and the house
you think you’re living in will be revealed to be built on sand.
2. Boomer-era conservatives need to update their operating system
When Stockwell Day ran for
Prime Minister in 2000, the liberal media went berserk. They took all
the smears and strategies learned from attacking Preston Manning and
threw it at Stockwell Day ten-fold. The idea at the time was that
Stockwell Day had more charisma and presence as a leader. He was more
photogenic and athletic. His visuals were easier to sell to low-info
voters and this would make him a much better contender than Preston
Manning’s nebbish style.
Stockwell was given a
full-scale media attack regarding abortion, his religion and the
privatization of healthcare…and it worked. He picked up only 6 seats and
the unity of the party quickly fell apart. As we know now, Stephen
Harper took over the party and minimized the social conservatism and
more ambitious and robust aspects of the party platforms. After merging
with the PC Party, the modern CPC became a managerial party centred
mostly around money. By the time Harper lost, the party was considered
too right-wing by many…simply too unfriendly by some. Scheer replaced
Harper with an identical platform…but with a smile. By this time, the
country had moved so far left that the CPC was now considered far-right,
and Scheer’s milquetoast social conservatism was viewed as “beyond the
pale”.
Now we’re looking at a
Peter MacKay leadership in which he is ardently pro-choice and eager to
march in Pride parades. Climate change is a high priority for the guy,
and he wants to end the coal industry as a result. He’s okay with
euthanizing old people so long as the government isn’t forcing doctors
to do it against the doctor’s will. And of course… systemic racism is
obviously a part of Canada’s identity.
This is the front-runner to lead the Conservative Party of Canada.
Ten years from now, Svend Robinson may as well run for leadership. It just keeps getting worse.
Why is this?
Boomer-era conservatism is
really just slow-motion liberalism. Boomer-era conservatives like
Stockwell Day are always behind the curve, while switched on, forward
looking conservatives like Michael Chong are ahead of the curve. What
they have in common is that they are simply at different points on the
liberal spectrum. Boomer-era conservatism follows liberalism along like a
shadow, adopting yesterday’s zany progressive idea as tomorrow’s
long-held conservative principle.
Most conservatives in
Canada are on the slow end of the spectrum. When this happens, they are
left baffled and destroyed by the culture they no longer recognize.
Conservatives need to upgrade their awareness so they can accurately
understand their place in society, or they need to give up their
ideological proclivities and follow the herd.
What happened to Stockwell
Day is the same thing that happened to Don Cherry and then Wendy Mesley
(of all people!? Not even liberals are safe) and will likely happen to
Rex Murphy and then Conrad Black and then… and then …and then…
All the professional
Canadian Conservatives have operating systems that are ten or twenty or
thirty years behind the curve. Jason Kenney is running the Ralph Klein
playbook and it’s not working out so well for him. Why? Because it’s not
the 90’s anymore. Stephen Harper ran a 2006 campaign in 2015 and he
lost badly. Andrew Scheer ran a 2015 campaign in 2019 and he lost badly.
Severely normal Canadians
holding what they believe to be severely normal views are risking having
their lives destroyed simply because they’re not up to speed on our
current cultural zeitgeist. We are living in a cultural revolution right
now and if you want to avoid the Red Guard you need to act accordingly,
be smarter and get up to speed.
3. We are in this position because official conservatism has failed
Imagine being Stockwell
Day on Power and Politics and thinking how ridiculous it is to condemn
all of Canada as being systemically racist. This “inherently racist
Canada” point of view was held only by the most radical of far-left
activists up until, oh I don’t know, five minutes ago? Being a patriot
is a natural part of what normal people think being a conservative
should be. The fact that it is now mainstream to view our whole system
as racist should be a wake-up call to conservatives. The fact that
Stockwell Day has been cancelled because he had the audacity to be a
patriot on CBC should be a wake-up call. Many events that have occurred
repeatedly in the past should have been wake-up calls.
Conservatism has failed to
conserve anything of value. One civilizational plank after another has
been marginalized, ridiculed, degraded and attacked for decades now.
We’re at a point where the government has willfully shut down the
economy over a virus that is marginally more devastating than the
regular flu and asserted a level of totalitarian control like we’ve
never seen before. In order to mitigate the effects of shutting
everything down, the federal government decided to run a $300 billion
deficit, consisting mostly of handing people free money.
People love the free money
so much that if an election were held today, Justin Trudeau would win
in a landslide. The fact that he broke his quarantine in order to
display his supplication by kneeling to mobs of woke protestors has only
won him more respect from Canada’s progressive mainstream.
Where are the conservative principles in all this?
We’re living in total
madness and conservatism has nothing to say for itself. If conservative
principles worked, we wouldn’t be where we are right now. Completely
dominated by madness. The conclusion to this situation is not going to
be “conservatism”. Something new and much more assertive needs to arise.
My journey away from
mainstream conservative to something more fringe has mostly been forced
upon me. I used to be what I thought was a “right of ‘centre-right’
conservative”, but as the madness builds, I now find myself as a
dissident extremist inside my own country. Combined with taking the
Benedict Option, I have carved out a savvy right-wing position that I
hope will allow me the camouflage and subterfuge to thrive inside our
current zeitgeist.
Conservative-minded people
in Canada need to do the same, because we’re not going to vote our way
out of this. The politics of our age is just meaningless window
dressing. Our late-stage democracy is collapsing in on itself. We won’t
be able to paper over our problems with borrowed/printed money forever.
Our system itself is degrading quickly and our culture is leading the
way.
As of this article being
published, Stockwell Day has disappeared from public life. His once
active Twitter account has stopped, and he has made no public
appearances of note. I wish Stockwell Day all the best. I hope he’s made
enough money to live comfortably in retirement and I hope he drains his
golden federal pension dry. I respect the guy and can sympathize that a
worldview developed during formative years in the ’50s and ’60s and
’70s can innocently lead to the woke guillotine of cancel culture today.
He shouldn’t have had to apologize, because we shouldn’t be at a point
where an apology is demanded.
We shouldn’t have to live like this.
Something (many things)
have gone horribly wrong with this country and if ever there was a time
for Stockwell to bow out and go fishing, now would be that time. As for
everyone else, update your operating system, get red-pilled and act
accordingly. This is no longer the Canada you think it is.
