Two things are true at the same time: The anti-enforcement protests have a real social and popular base, and the anti-enforcement protests also have significant organizational and financial support from outside, and sometimes hidden or illegitimate, groups. These are not conflicting positions. On the contrary, social support and external backing together explain the size and influence of the protests.

It is tempting for conservatives and others in favour of law enforcement to point to the staged character of the protests and say, “Ah-ha! a conspiracy!” This may feel good, and it is true, but it avoids the problem of popular support for these protests, and deflects attention from the nature of that support. That support is significant in blue states, in urban areas, and most importantly among credentialed and institutionalized elites, who, while not good at governing, produce agitprop in large quantities.

The “Astroturf” Claim

Here is Laura Ingraham, a strong conservative voice, with Liz Collin of Alpha News and Asra Nomani of Fox News, illustrating my point:

Having covered the BLM riots, Collin (@lizcollin) knows Minneapolis and its progressive pathologies better than anyone (see her documentary on BLM here); Nomani of Fox has reported extensively on the funding and behind-the-scenes organization of the anti-government protests, and brings much relevant information. Her X account repays a follow: https://x.com/AsraNoman

In the clip, Nomani says that the anti-enforcement protests are, “absolutely an astroturfed movement. It is well-funded, well-organized, and well-coordinated.” Her second sentence is true, and she provides concrete examples to support her claims. There are many more in her X feed.

But the initial assertion that the movement is astroturfed does not follow from those important facts. The movement has a real social base and class and regional support. Astroturf is artificial grass, made of inorganic material. If we need a vegetative or horticultural metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that the movement is well-fertilized, and those who want a more graphic metaphor could refer to the bovine substance often used as fertilizer.

In the clip, Nomani speaks of pre-printed signs handed out to protesters off the back of a wagon. But those protesters were numerous and came from somewhere, and while degrees of commitment will vary -- some may just think protesting is kind of cool, or that it’s the happening scene, or a place to cruise -- even people who protest for social or personal reasons assent to some degree to the cause, and assimilate its premises and its vocabulary. There are a lot of such people, and neither the anti-enforcement protests nor the other leftist omni-cause protests, with which the current protests strongly overlap, could work without a large quantity of willing social cooperation.

The left tried the same tactic against the Tea Party

There is evidence that some protesters have been paid, but there are simply too many protests and too many protesters making too much noise for this to be a complete explanation. The left, with assistance from The New Yorker (see here), used to believe that the Koch brothers were behind the Tea Party or the Republican Party. But no quantity of Koch money could bring large numbers of people into the street. The idea that a significant popular movement is manipulated, contrived, or artificial is psychologically functional, offering reassurance that the enemy is not that frightening. For the left, which believes itself the party of the people, it also offered reassurance that popular support for the Tea Party was exaggerated, or even not real, thereby absolving progressive true believers of ideological dissonance, and the unfamiliar pain of further thought.

Conservatives should remember that shouting about astroturf did not help the left, even though not everything reported about the Koch brothers was false: the left’s avoidance of further analysis did not save them from President Trump, whom they hate so much more than the Tea Party or the Kochs.

Evidence of Inorganic Support

None of this means that the exposure of the networks of financial support behind the anti-ICE and other omnicause protests is not necessary or important. The networks are real and large, and their exposure is both tactically and strategically valuable, and we should value the reporting of Nomani and others who expose them. The author who posts on X as @datarepublican is another such voice, reporting on the funding of anti-ICE protests in Minnesota here, as is James O’Keefe, who has reported at great personal risk from inside the protests (link). Exposure is immediately damaging to the networks, and information is a long-term strategic gain.

In the clip above, Nomani mentions Neville Singham, a billionaire who lives in China, and organizations such as People’s Forum and the Answer Coalition. The presence of Singham does not mean that the protests are a Chinese creation, but it is a reminder that social discord serves Communist ends. The Answer Coalition has been around a long time, a fact which points to the social depth of the leftist anti-American movement. It did not appear yesterday, and unlike astroturf has roots both deep and organic, and well fertilized too. At the risk of going too far with horticultural metaphors, these leftist networks are old-growth, not new plantations.

The exposure of the left’s networks tells us not how thin and artificial they are, but how thick and socially rooted they are, and how long they have been around. They can best be fought by understanding where they come from, not by any artificially optimistic idea that mere exposure will cause them to wilt in cleansing sunlight. They are the effects of long-standing social pathologies, and exposure will help us to understand those pathologies, but it is only the first step to solving the problem.

The Social and Class Base of the Left

Any examination of the social roots of the omnicause will have to contend with what Marxists would call its social base: the large number of students, baristas, urban gig workers, teachers, academics or aspiring academics, and bureaucrats in the streets. They constitute what has been called an under-employed elite. They have been taught that they have special knowledge, acquired over many years in the madrassas of cultural Marxism that we call universities, and yet now they shuffle paper, rewrite emails, or serve cappuccinos or deliver Door-Dash, while Orange Man Bad makes decisions. Their feeling of impotence and of caste dishonour is as real as the anger it begets. That anger is socially important.

Also important are the credentialed elites who write for high-status newspapers and prestigious journals like The Atlantic and The Economist (links to examples of their falsehoods). Following those elites are the readers of those publications, both of which have large, paying, financially and socially upscale readerships. The Atlantic graces the tables of faculty clubs and lobbyists; The Economist those of CEOs. The social base of the anti-American omnicause combines an insurgent street-fighting Antifa sub-intelligentsia with a managerial class consisting of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and corporate executives. There are more than a few contradictions here, but many powerful social movements have brought together objectively opposed classes. The tensions can be productive, and it is usually only after the revolution that the Jacobins guillotine the moderates.

Too great an emphasis on the social base and structural roots of the left can lead to a paralyzing or black-pilling pessimism: how can one oppose a movement supported by so many powerful forces? But too great an emphasis on the mechanics of their movement can also lead to the opposite error, implying that it is all contrived by some guy in Shanghai, that nothing substantial is there, and that mere exposure will defeat the omnicause. Knowledge of their funding and methods is good intelligence, but intelligence must lead to analysis of the social roots of the anti-American movement, without which money and organization would have little effect.

Exposure is an immediate tactical victory, but tactics are not strategy. The information provided by the solid journalism of Nomani at Fox, along with @datarepublican and many other independents, is both tactically effective in the short term and a necessary form of intelligence-gathering. But we also need to know more about the organic social roots of what can only be called a low-level insurrection against the legitimacy of the United States.

The title and subtitle of today’s coverage of the Minneapolis violence contain two falsehoods, right off the bat. ICE is covered by federal law, so there is no impunity. And the only militia in the streets of Minneapolis is Antifa and its adjuncts.

Link here, likely paywalled.

The piece begins with tendentious framing and moves on to outright falsehood. Yes, the man shot was a citizen, but ICE's target is the illegal population. Three falsehoods then appear in rapid succession in the second paragraph:

1) Pretti, the man shot in Minneapolis, was interfering with and appears to be assaulting law enforcement, and is "not a good Samaritan." The day before the article’s appearance, his pattern of anti-police violence was exposed, by the BBC of all places.

2) "Protesters showed restraint" is absurdly false. Their violence was widespread and is extensively documented. Links in my parallel piece of yesterday link below.

3) ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is a federal law enforcement agency created by an act of Congress in 2002, not "a catch-all brand" for anything.

The final point is easily verified. Is The Economist trying to smear the entire immigration enforcement effort?

The Economist is in favour of high immigration, a debatable position. But here, it slides into running cover for Antifa and other leftist violence against federal law enforcement.

The denunciation of masking by federal agents is a case in point: agents are threatened with doxing by Antifa and others, and The Economist ought to know that.

The Economist is far from the only venerable institution aligning itself with the attempt by Minnesota and others to nullify the voters' mandate to enforce federal immigration law. The Atlantic and many other upper-class journals do the same, also using plentiful falsehoods - see below.

The Economist and The Atlantic unintentionally illustrate the defection of upper-class opinion to an anti-American left that seeks to undermine the idea of citizenship and to flood the West with third-world migrants. The Economist has made economic arguments for this, but behind it lies a cultural self-loathing.

I hope to post more on this theme in coming days.

The previous longer and more developed piece, with numerous links, on The Atlantic:

But the Minnesota ICE raids and the state of Minnesota’s nullification campaign involve President Trump, so they triangulate no more. Here is the CEO of The Atlantic, yesterday on X:

The full article, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong”, by Adam Serwer, is here (apparently outside the paywall, so they’re very pleased with it): https://t.co/CiHjM7VuDz

Before they decided that everything was racist, literary critics would speak of close or (another favoured word) attentive reading, calling for attention to the connotations and presuppositions of each phrase, even each word. A close analysis of this flaunted paragraph results in a pretty good fisking.

But first, the CEO’s three-word tweet is plainly false: the paragraph screenshotted is not extraordinary, but on the contrary, banal. It is competent in that it is grammatical (we live in an age of low standards), but its diction is a stream of clichés. It makes an impossible claim to moral and psychological knowledge, and the impossibility is obvious to anyone not inside the bubble. The attempt to sound profound is merely sophomoric, except inside the bubble, where the CEO is very pleased.

The paragraph under analysis, once again, for convenience (and in case the tweet disappears):

An Assertion of Virtue

Secret fears and moral depravity presume and inscribe what most Atlantic readers already think about Trump’s supporters. Rhetorically, the author is on solid ground given his audience, though of course empirically he has no access to anyone’s secret fears, and no more knowledge of morality than any other journalist.

The assertion that virtue is actually common is interesting if debatable. Many eminent philosophers would disagree. The ideas that virtue is not required for social functioning, or is so common that it can be presumed and assimilated to an idea of human nature, are in fact central to liberalism, which wants to argue for maximizing freedom and therefore slides easily into minimizing the possibility that vice could misuse freedom. Neo-Marxists, who are not few amongst the intelligentsia, go further and hold that virtue is a figment of false consciousness. Already, The Atlantic’s attempt at profundity plays them false.

The Tenets of MAGA, as Imagined

The second sentence announces that we are about to learn all the basic tenets of MAGA, and that all are false, indeed proven here false. We are left to infer these metaphorical cornerstones, which apparently are 1) that federal agents are brave, but Minnesotans are not; 2) that diversity is not a source of strength; 3) that social media atomizes society; and presumably (though we’re now at some distance from the opening declaration) 4) that Western civilization is worth preserving.

Presumptions (2) and (4) are clearly true and foundational to MAGA, though far from “all” of what MAGA believes. I’ll deal first with (1) and (3).

Federal agents face many dangers, especially in a world informed by The Atlantic, and like Minnesotans, some are brave. But the writers of The Atlantic live in a world where sweeping declarations are unscrutinized if ideologically conformant. Plainly, not all Minnesotans are brave: the deployment-dodger Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey come easily to mind, except at The Atlantic. Here is Frey at the time of the BLM riots that did so much damage to his city:

But some Minnesotans are brave. Liz Collin of Alpha News is an oppositional journalist of the kind not found on The Atlantic, and has courageously endured much harassment. Here is the same person who stormed the Cities Church, at her house during the BLM riots:

Point 1, then, is not really about courage or Minnesotans. It is there to allow The Atlantic to throw the invective “armed thugs” at federal agents who did not choose to be there, and who put up with much abuse from leftist ideologues.

Point 3 asserts that MAGA believes in an atomized society caused by social media, and, of course, means to imply that MAGA is a pathological consequence of atomization. Social media is more often and likely more accurately blamed for tribalization than atomization, but then we are not really here for sociological analysis.

Serwer tells us that Minnesotans “have found and loved one another,” and we are supposed to be impressed, but do we really want people turning to politics for love? A politics of love, like Kamala Harris’s attempt at a politics of joy, smacks of totalitarianism. The state ought not to go there. In no desirable society does the state concern itself with joy and love.

Diversity and Other Slogans

Serwer is, however, correct that MAGA is suspicious of the rhetoric of “diversity,” and does not think “diversity” a source of strength. Intellectual diversity can be a source of strength, but that is not what the rhetoric means. The associated languages of “community” and “cohesion” often mean precisely the opposite of “diversity”: they are demands for conformity.

“Community” in particular moves the focus of concern from the individual citizen (now in strong disfavour) to the group. It is an illiberal move, and it is deliberate. The language of diversity and community is a bureaucratic language, for all the spurious authenticity they want to imply. It is the language of the state bureaucracy, here decorated with transgressive trim.

The language of communitarianism is accompanied by an ideology of what Serwer calls “neighbourism”, the word “neighbour” occurring 16 times in the article: he doesn’t like citizenship, now superseded by physical proximity. I wrote about some of the problems of this rhetorical move from the citizen to the neighbour, a rhetoric now promoted to an ideology, yesterday.

A Civilization in Scare Quotes

Serwer concludes that the supposedly autonomous resistance of Minnesota has “preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization.” The mocking scare quotes are what gamblers call a tell: The Atlantic, quondam home of Brahmin letters, can no longer name its own civilization outside derisive quotation marks. We are in the presence of a massive collapse of cultural self-confidence. All that is worthy of preservation are middle-aged church ladies with whistles.

The Atlantic cannot, of course, resist imputing racism to ICE and Border Patrol - or is it MAGA? - accusing them of filling empty souls with “lies about their own inherent superiority.” Obviously, ICE and Border Patrol are as racially diverse as any bureaucrat could want, and Trump has increased the racial diversity of the Republican coalition. But we have again left the realm of fact and entered that of the leftist imaginary: it is always Little Rock in 1957.

Western civilization and American culture are reduced to nullities, and the progressive mind can see nothing left but race. This is tactically helpful, as race is a favourite subject. In any case, the left doesn’t see much value in the United States, and despises its culture.

A Journalism of Kitsch

On his way to this perorative paragraph, Serwer does actually commit some real journalism, reporting on people delivering food or using their cars to harass federal agents going about their duty. But it is kitschy and propagandistic: June Cleaver gathers food in a church basement, all-American infantilized “moms” face down ICE, just folks coming together in the face of the enormity of law enforcement.

Facts not Mentioned

Serwer mentions the Antifa-adjacent Minnesota ICE Watch organization, but its association with the violent anti-American left is not mentioned. Nor are the numerous incidents of violence, which are obscured into a few snowballs, nor the threats against independent journalists, nor the dubious funding and state-government links of Minnesota ICE Watch. Serwer presents a fantasy of what anarchists called autonomism: the autonomous and spontaneous organization of resistance, which is clearly not what is happening.

James O’Keefe is one of the journalists who have faced threats, in his case death threats.

Cam Higby (@camhigby), Hailey West (@haileyywest), and Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) are others. None is mentioned by The Atlantic. All have been harassed, assaulted and threatened. One doubts that compliant writers like Adam Serwer had the same experience. If he saw anything, he did not report it.

Here is violence, including a wounded federal officer, also not reported by The Atlantic:

Also not reported by The Atlantic (the list is long) is the extensive external funding of far-left groups. DataRepublican on X is a good source:

A Journalism of Deliberate Ignorance

The Atlantic practices a journalism of deliberate ignorance. The narrative is chosen first, the facts selected later. Some of the facts reported by mainstream journalists may turn out to be false (as with the child-as-bait story), but they are professional enough to try to avoid that. The primary tool of the propagandist is omission rather than positive falsehood.

The result is journalistic malpractice: it produces falsehood. It presents as spontaneous and peaceful what is in fact highly organized and calibrated violence. The threshold of leftist violence is skillfully judged so as to remain below the level that complicit journals could not ignore, and the compliant media cooperate. They have lost sight of the purpose of journalism, and write as activists. They are so pleased with the results, wrapped in a specious profundity, that they cannot see the problem.

The Atlantic is pushing a party line. Obviously, that line is supported by Laureen Powell Jobs, the Atlantic’s unsilent billionairess owner. The social fracture is clear: hegemonic power, exercised by high-status, credentialized and wealthy elites, opposes the democratic choice of the deplorables. They shout about “our democracy” while the administration implements the platform it got elected on, which makes another problem they can’t see.

The Globe and Mail, Canada’a national fishwrap, published yesterday a story by one Debra Thompson whose concluding sentence began “we keep us safe.” This is an Antifa and Black Lives Matter slogan, widely used on the violent and anarchist left.1 In this context, it is a dog whistle, the signal being heard by the cool kids, but not by the suits on their way to the Report on Business.

Full article (paywalled, I believe): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-ice-state-violence-minneapolis-immigration/

Nor is this the first time that Thompson has used this slogan as a motivating peroration:

Link (paywall): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-trump-war-democratic-cities-chicago-fighting-back/

The slogan’s placement as a rallying cry, a conclusion to 700 words of often inaccurate indignation (read on), is a choice. These are not four random words, or just a cliche thrown out by a writer who has run out of ideas and needs a rousing wrap. Nor is the slogan any kind of logical conclusion to a preceding argument. Its presence is awkward, which suggests purpose.

The Globe is an unreliable source of information on many current subjects, but here it unintentionally illustrates the connections between the violent left and hegemonic power.

Normally, the expression “dog whistle” is directed at the right, and more often than not, it refers to some anodyne phrase that the left wishes to exclude from polite society. Here, the use of the dog whistle raises a question: can the editor, or the rest of the newsroom, hear the whistle? Likely, the younger writers can, and the older think it millennial jargon, maybe kind of hip, or are just afraid to object. The dogs in this case are the violent left and also the activist professoriate, and they can hear it perfectly well.

Antifa Connections

Along the way to keeping us safe, Thompson twice repeats the debunked canard that Immigration and Customs Enforcement used a toddler as “bait”. The falsehood was obviously too good not to use, and Thompson may be admitting that by hiding it behind the indirect language of a paraphrase. The learned Jonathon Turley deals with it here.

Thompson is keen to tar ICE as “white nationalist,” using as her source an “experts say” story from the CBC, whose experts turn out be the notoriously biased Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The CBC is no more a reliable source than The Globe, but the reference serves as an unintentional reminder of the leftist capture of state-funded media. The SPLC I have discussed here (and yes, in that piece I defend Tucker Carlson, referencing his conduct to that point, not since). The SPLC once fought the Klan, but has moved far to the left, often running interference for Antifa. One of its attorneys was arrested for taking part in a violent Antifa attack on police facilities in Georgia.2

The SPLC is also related to the Antifa-supporting Canadian Anti-Hate Network, itself funded by the Liberal government.

These are facts not to be discovered in the mainstream media. When not dog-whistling, they run interference for leftist violence. Yes, the following article contains posterior-covering codicils about “loose circles of local protesters,” but they are inaccurate, and the headline is the purpose:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-antifa-hasnt-existed-since-1933-trump-free-speech/

The Capture of the Institutions

In the penultimate sentence of her polemic, Professor Thompson invokes the authority of Professor Jelani Cobb (he of many honours, not to mention a Pulitzer) to the effect that “the fundamental civic unit is the neighbour,” echoing the rhetoric of leftist protesters.

Universities in the Anglo-Saxon world used to be run by conservatives; now they are run by people from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Thompson, writing in a formerly Tory paper, unintentionally reminds us of the leftist capture of the institutions of opinion formation, which is to say, the institutions of hegemony. The left commands the means of discourse, and with that, the means of the construction of meaning and the allocation of moral authority.

Professor Thompson’s own position as the “Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University” points to the taxpayer-funded and bureaucratically rooted character of those means.

These are powerful things, and the left puts them to a bad use. In the first paragraph of her earlier article (the second screenshotted above), Thompson complains about masked men, but the dog-whistle tells us that she cannot not be aware that Antifa regularly threatens federal agents with doxxing. The street-fighting black bloc left uses anonymous violence, and when federal agents protect themselves, the left intelligentsia pretends not to know that. Thompson’s talk about the “rule of law” is not hypocrisy; it is a tactic, but unlike the dog whistle, it is directed outward, and it depends on the ignorance of the target population.

Neighbours replace Citizens

For the professors, “neighbours” replace citizens as the basis of society. This is clearly motivated by the desire to legitimize the immigrant and illegal population, and to deny any special status to the citizen, let alone the old-stock or heritage citizen. They make an exception, of course, when someone useful to the Antifa side is a citizen, but that is purely rhetorical.

Beyond those immediate instrumental purposes, the dismissal of citizenship implicitly dismisses the legitimacy of the state granting the citizenship. That effect, the logical result of a rhetorical tactic, is likely more welcomed than intended in any self-aware way, but it is certainly not resisted. After all, the Professor, like her newspaper and like so much of the intelligentsia, is at bottom opposed to immigration enforcement and to borders, without which one has neither citizens nor a state.

The Denial of Democratic Legitimacy

Which brings us back to the professor’s final sentence: the anarchist insistence that “we keep us safe” is an intentional denial of the legitimacy of the police, and the denial of the legitimacy of the state is an inescapable consequence of that. These two denials are core parts of the ideology behind the BLM campaign to defund the police. Obviously, public safety is the central purpose of the state. If it does not (or may not) fulfil that purpose, and safety is secured some other way, why does the state exist? And who is the “we” in her slogan?

And who or what will fund Canada Research Chairs? If the state cannot compel, then it cannot raise the taxes that pay the professor’s salary.

Thompson’s final clause about “keep[ing] democracy alive” is in logical contradiction to the attack on the police and on the state. Democracy, as most of us understand it, is a system of choosing leaders and policies. Without a state, there would be nothing to lead, and no need for policies, let alone institutions to carry them out. Therein lies the rub: when the Antifa types talk about “democracy”, they don’t mean what most of us understand by that word. They have no clear idea what they mean, because a post-revolutionary eschaton cannot be clearly defined, as the more intelligent Marxists frankly avow. In the meantime, they believe chaos to be revolutionary and progressive, and think no further.

But I am not sure if the perorative professor of politics has thought that far. But she likely feels very edgy and transgressive, and has certainly told us more than she means to about the structure of power in our society.

• The Globe and Mail defended gender ideology, in the course of attacking Alberta Premier Danielle Smith here; and

• The National Post’s Mia Hughes introduced biological facts, here;

• Melanie Bennet ( ) of the startup revealed documents on teenage sex-change operations in Nova Scotia, here.

The paper of Canada’s managerial classes pushes gender ideology, its main street conservative competitor publishes medical facts, and the insurgent Juno News exposes alarming details of child sex changes. The social position of the three papers reflects the social position of gender ideology: it is an elite ideology, pushed from above and resisted from below. The resistance is gaining strength.

The occasion for The Globe’s defence of gender ideology is a legal challenge to Danielle Smith’s Bill 26, prohibiting what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming care.” More concretely, Smith’s bill prohibits hormones and sex-change operations on minors. It is a gruesome topic, which is why it requires a euphemism.

By “gender ideology,” I mean the currently powerful ideology that posits an immutable and demanding gender identity, and makes this identity the basis of a person’s claims to constitutional rights. This ideology flies a constantly mutating set of pastel-coloured flags, insists on the rights of a population defined by an equally expansible LGBTQ-QWERTY+punctuation initialism, insists that there are an indefinite number of genders, puts pronouns in as many places as possible, speaks of “sex assigned at birth,” puts drag shows and graphic sexual material in schools, insists that a man can be a woman, and in its most gruesome iteration streams confused teenagers into sex-change operations.

Hardly anyone is in favour of some but not all of these things. It’s a package deal, and for the ideologues, it is bigotry akin to Jim Crow to question any significant part of it. (More on this ideology, in the person of Liberal Senator Kristopher Wells, one of its more voluble ideologues, here.)

Debates about gender ideology follow a familiar pattern, illustrated by the three articles I began with. The ideologues of gender talk about identity and rights, while their critics reply with medicine and biology. The former think gender ideology is a civil rights issue; the latter point to the facts of biological sex. Obviously, the critics are right that humans are sexually dimorphic, and that one can no more decide to “identify” as the opposite sex than I could decide to identify as young and handsome.

There is a third way to understand gender ideology, and that is to look at gender ideology as a social and political phenomenon. Gender ideology needs to be understood sociologically, as a function of class, status, and power. As a class ideology, it functions as one of Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs, becoming a marker of status, identifying the holder as a progressive and sophisticated person. This goes some distance towards explaining how mystical “genderwang” (ht Jon Kay) woo-woo commands so much elite and institutional support, even in circles otherwise inclined to go on about “the science.”

Gender ideology is also justificatory of state power. By positing the existence of a suffering minority oppressed by repressive parents and needing the care of professionals, gender ideology both calumniates the traditional family, and justifies the existence of whole fields of bureaucratically administered knowledge.

The social status of gender ideology (and dissent therefrom) is reflected in the social position of the three papers I began with, and also in the personalities of the three authors. The Globe’s author is Dr Katharine Smart, a pediatrician and former president of the Yukon and Canadian Medical Associations. She is the voice of credentialized institutional authority. Mia Hughes of The National Post is a journalist who began by tweeting about gender ideology and women’s spaces, has spent the past five years researching gender medicine, and is now with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Melanie Bennet of Juno News is a citizen journalist who writes about the Marxist theories of critical pedagogy that have taken over school boards, a topic adjacent to gender ideology. Credentialized authorities push gender ideology in the most prestigious of papers; citizen journalists respond with facts in the venues open to them, initially on X or Substack, now in The National Post.

Mia Hughes’ appearance in The National Post has provoked recent gate-keeping complaints from Globe contributor Stephen Marche, here; see Hughes’ comment here. The elite’s need to push back is a sign that credentialized authority feels that its position is getting weaker.

The establishment would like to tell a familiar story of socially conscious expertise attacked by upstarts peddling rage-farming misinformation in down-market venues. The problem is that the upstarts are deeply knowledgeable, and have their facts right. As Hughes has documented in her “WPATH Files” exposé (WPATH being the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), medical institutions have been captured by transgender activists. And like Hughes, Bennet in Juno News has the receipts, in her case, internal reports from within Nova Scotia’s healthcare bureaucracy.

Disturbingly, Dr. Smart refers to WPATH as though it were authoritative, and ignores Hughes’ work. Yorkville’s national newspaper has not reported on the WPATH scandal at all, nor has it reported on the recent US Supreme Court Skrmetti decision, which also exposed problems in transgender medicine. The Globe has only mentioned the UK Cass Report, which resulted in the closure of the Tavistock Clinic, in passing and in opinion columns. The Globe has a habit of ignoring inconvenient stories (I give other examples here).

Dr. Smart begins by striking a libertarian pose — politicians should not interfere between a doctor and patient, “full stop” — but this is belied by her patronizing and dismissive attitude to parents, consultation with whom hides behind an “ideally.” In her world, families are secondary to doctors. The managerial state is a jealous master, and brooks no competitors.

Doctors are products of a state-adjacent and state-funded bureaucratic system, and this is true even in the United States. Their ideology is a product of that social environment. Gender ideology was produced in the universities, is propounded by legal, medical, and educational bureaucracies, and finds its class base among the employees of the state, including public sector unions and a plethora of government-funded activist organizations.

Among the activist organizations are Egale1 and Skipping Stone2, so-called NGOs suing Alberta over Premier Smith’s protective Bill 26 legislation. NGO of course stands for “Non-Governmental Organization”, but a state-funded “non-governmental organization” is a contradiction in terms. They might better be called “Near-Governmental Organizations,” as they are effectively auxiliaries to the permanent bureaucratic state.

The fact that these organizations are funded by Ottawa and suing Alberta points to a problem of federalism wrapped up in the emotive arguments about gender ideology.

Legitimating the State

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has pointed out that the more power the state accumulates and the more extensive its intervention in citizens’ lives, the greater the state’s need for legitimation. Across the modern West, the state meets its need for legitimacy by setting itself up as the defender of oppressed minorities. Traditionally, the state justified its power with reference to external defence on the one hand and law and order on the other. This leaves the Canadian state in a particularly embarrassing situation, given that the Americans look after defence, and that Ottawa is no longer much good at law and order. Here in Canada, the need for more minorities is particularly acute.

As an undistinguished commentator put it (link on image):

This brings us back to Premier Smith’s bill protecting youth from gender and trans ideology, the ideology defended by Dr. Smart. The Premier confronts an ideology constructed by and serving the interests of the permanent bureaucratic state. In our society, class conflict often takes the form of conflict between elected leaders and the permanent bureaucracy. On the level of class, the electorate confronts the managerial class that staffs the bureaucracy, and its surrounding panoply of near-governmental organizations and elite newspapers. Inevitably, and without conscious irony, the managerial class deems the elected leaders a threat to democracy, and in this country, to Canadian values.

Premier Smith speaks for popular resistance to the bureaucratic state, and to the class that provides both its ideological validation and its permanent staff. This is one reason why Yorkville’s national fishwrap, the paper of the managerial class, is happy to provide space for the ideologues of gender, but never for their opponents. Indeed, they do their best to deplatform opponents. For oppositional views, we must listen to oppositional voices like Mia Hughes and Melanie Bennet, in oppositional or at any rate less prestigious venues.

1

Egale is Canada’s best known gay-rights organization. Having won the gay rights battle, they have gone on to gender ideology (link on image).

2

Skipping Stone’s site, does not mention the federal government, though it does receive some federal funding. It is also funded by the City of Calgary. In the aggregate, it is 40.26% state-funded (h/t Jamie Sarkonak in The National Post https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-liberal-funded-charity-stops-alberta-from-protecting-minors-from-gender-ideology

Source: https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/hacc/srch/pub/dsplyRprtngPrd?q.srchNmFltr=skipping+stone&q.stts=0007&selectedCharityBn=719337081RR0001&dsrdPg=1

Federal grants: https://search.open.canada.ca/grants/?page=1&sort=agreement_value+desc&search_text=%22skipping+stone%22; and skippingstone.ca

The Canadian left, now taking the form of the ironically-named “Liberal” party, has taken an authoritarian turn, locking up its opponents, attacking freedom of speech, thought, and conscience, and creating an unjust two-tier legal system. Its only effective opponent is the Conservative Party of Mr. Poilievre.

Liberal authoritarianism was most egregiously displayed in their use of war measures (the Emergencies Act) against peaceful protesters. But that outrage is part of a larger pattern: the Liberal Party has introduced repeated censorship bills and will do so again, and has created a two-tier legal system in which disfavoured but peaceful protesters go to jail while violent leftists and old-fashioned non-political criminals go free.

It now looks as though the Liberals are slightly ahead. This is a complete turnaround from just three months ago, when the Tories had a 20-point lead, caused by a nationalist reaction against President Trump’s 51st state talk, and his on-again-off-again tariffs, and enabled by the resignation of Trudeau and the coronation of the more sober Carney. That massive political turnabout reveals the brittleness of the large lead the Tories had not long ago. Many were simply parking their votes, or their answers to pollsters, with the Tories. Here, from the CBC, is a graph showing a massive spike as Trump took over and Trudeau resigned:

Source: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/.

That spectacular rise in Liberal support speaks of the socially dominant position of the nationalist left in Canadian life. And that social fact points back to the need for a Conservative victory: all the institutions, from the media, to the universities, to police leadership (as opposed to rank-and-file), to a large crowd of NGOs and purported public interest and civil rights organizations, to the legal profession including most importantly the judiciary, are on the left. The only counter-balance can be the elected federal government.

Civil Liberties Problem One: War Measures against Peaceful Protest

The Liberals’ worst offence against civil liberties was the invocation of the Emergencies Act — in other words, war powers — against peaceful protesters (I’ll avoid the often-annoying habit of using inverted commas around ‘Liberal’, as illiberal as that party has become, give that “Liberal” is also a proper name.)

I wrote about the state’s panic at the time, here. Rupa Subramanya wrote with much greater empirical support here. The Liberals’ answer to the largest popular protest in Canadian history was to invoke war measures, without any attempt whatsoever to negotiate (there were negotiations at the municipal level, which emphasizes my point that the federal government could have participated, but refused). War measures were their first and only answer, and those war measures were justified by a blast of cynical and purely instrumental lies about terrorism and insurrection (more, with primary documents, here).

Nor was this just Trudeau’s authoritarianism. On 7 February 2022, Carney anticipated the government’s lies, taking to the pages of The Globe and Mail to urge force against “sedition” and “insurrection.” (Globe article here, but paywalled, reproduced by on X here.) This was just seven days after the start of the protests, and Carney made no suggestion of negotiations. That The Globe carried no contrary views, but went full-on with the “Nazi/racist/hate” propaganda against the Freedom Convoy, speaks of the establishment’s fear and panic in the face of popular protest, and illustrates my point that the Convervatives are the only oppositional party in this election.

Civil Liberties Problem Two: Censorship and Freedom of Speech and Thought

The second major Liberal attack on civil liberties takes the form of repeated censorship bills. The National Post reviews the defects of the most recent “Online Harms” bill C-63 here, but I fear is wrong to say that the era of such attempts at censorship is over. It will be back if Carney is re-elected. The Liberals are determined that the Freedom Convoy and other signs of popular dissent are caused by “misinformation” (always), and that the solution is to tell us what we may think. Christine van Geyn of the Canadian Constitution Foundation puts the case most succinctly on X here.

The Liberals’ “online harms” bill proposed a draconian mechanism whereby anyone could complain of “hate speech” to a non-judicial commission administered by government bureaucrats. The Liberals’ past efforts to appoint obvious antisemites to human rights bodies, and the domination of state institutions by the left, can leave no doubt that the intent was to suppress speech unfriendly to the left.

Civil Liberties Problem Three: Our Two-tier Legal System

The final danger to civil liberties posed by the Liberals is the construction of a two-tiered legal system, where dissent is treated severely, while favoured (usually left-wing) protest and old-fashioned non-political crime are treated with indulgence, when not ignored entirely. This is arguably the most serious civil liberties problem we face, and it is intertwined with those above.

The problem is displayed in sharp relief by the fact that the legal system has come down like a ton of bricks on Chris Barber and Tamara Lich , leaders of the Freedom Convoy, while it has little interest in real violence from Antifa. The contrast is outrageous, and it ought to be unnecessary to say that it does not matter which causes command anyone’s sympathy. Actual violence, as opposed to the campus hurt-feelings kind, is overlooked, while protest threatening to the system faces repression.

The photo on the left below is from an Antifa anti-NATO protest in Montreal in November 2024. The other caused conniptions in the national security apparatus.

Nor is the Montreal protest an exception. On 17 February 2022, the same day that Chris Barber and Tamara Lich were arrested in Ottawa, violent Antifa-style black-bloc fighters in at least platoon strength launched a coordinated multi-directional attack against the Coastal Gas Pipeline worksite in British Columbia. Three years later, there have been no arrests. Few are aware of this large-scale terrorist attack, nor of the subsequent firebombings of police vehicles, as neither the media nor the state have any interest in it. Many among the chattering classes, and among potential supporters of the Liberal Party, will be sympathetic to the attackers’ environmentalist objectives, and for them, the story is uncomfortably off-narrative. One of the best accounts is Lauren Southern’s documentary Pipeline Wars, here.

I’ve written more extensively on our discriminatory legal system and the Coastal Gas attack in the past - links in the footnote.1

Another example is the Indigo bookstore vandalism case, in which there was more vandalism than in the three weeks of the Freedom Convoy, but most charges were dropped, and even the few convictions got discharges. Antisemitic protest has a left-wing colouration, and the fact that many of the accused were professors (you can’t make this stuff up) or other members of the laptop class points to an element of class as well as political discrimination.2

It is easy — depressingly easy — to find more examples of two-tier policing, of police indulging jihadists but arresting journalists, of antisemitic violence minimized, of Freedom Convoy and other populist protesters pursued while leftists are ignored.

Nor is mere negligence always the issue: here is independent journalist Natasha Graham being brutalised by the Montreal Police, to the cheers of jihadists, just two weeks ago:

More here.

The problem is deeply rooted, and while the Conservatives will not be able to solve it at a stroke, the Liberals will make it worse.

A Systemic Problem

The problem of two-tier policing is systemic, and is a part of the same system that produces Liberal censorship bills, and that enabled the Liberals’ use of war powers against working-class protest to pass with only a few harrumphs from the opinionating classes.

The criminal law is complex: the law itself is a federal jurisdiction, but its administration is largely provincial, though the judges are appointed federally. The police are largely municipal, except where they are provincial, or federal (RCMP) but often under provincial contract. Our two-tier legal system cannot therefore be blamed entirely on the federal government, nor can it be rapidly fixed by a new federal government. But a continuation of the old federal government, the government of a party that actively favours the two-tier system, will make things worse. Among other things, the Liberals will continue to infect the system with leftist judges.

The Conservatives’ attitude to our two-tier legal system is diffident, and speaks volumes about the political environment they face. The Tories will condemn fiercely and rightly the release of non-political violent criminals, but have had nothing to say about the vindictive prosecutions of Freedom Convoy protesters, nor even about the large-scale though little-known Coastal Gas attack, or the other problems mentioned above. Of course, it is their job to get elected and to offer the Liberals no points of attack, so they must consider tactical factors. That they are not comfortable complaining about two-tiered political prosecutions points to the constellation of opinion-shaping power surrounding the problem. As I began by observing, the institutions are dominated by the left, and the Conservatives are understandably cautious about getting tarred as “far-right.”

Those tactical considerations reinforce the point that the only way to get any kind of balance of power in this country in the immediate term is to elect a Conservative government. Under the Carney Liberals, the authoritarian left will control both the elected government and the institutions beneath and around it; there will be no separation let alone any balance of powers. Under the Conservatives, the authoritarian left will be at least partly restrained from above.

Civil liberties will improve under the Conservatives - there will at least be no censorship bills - and they are guaranteed to get worse under the soi-disant Liberals. Vote accordingly.

https://x.com/SheilaGunnReid/status/1914369557978079252

The report was apparently first surfaced by Holly Doan of Blacklocks. https://x.com/mindingottawa/status/1914789100181446976

Not making up the hunting and gathering line: it’s on p.7 of the document. I’ve uploaded the PDF document, as the official Government of Canada links may be disappearing. (We really need an upload capability on X.)

The link to the GoC site: http://horizons.service.canada.ca/en/2025/01/10/future-lives-social-mobility/pdf/future-lives-social-mobility-en.pdf

Future Lives Social Mobility En

190KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

My own X thread on the document:

https://x.com/mfproudman/status/1914390483138211845

As I wrote yesterday, the “our democracy” people have it exactly backwards. Abusing the legal system to target the opposition party and its nominee is the opposite of the rule of law. The Harris/Biden administration believes half the country to be “fascist” MAGA extremists, and wishes to exclude them from the realm of legitimate political life.

Many use that expression to mean a strict or severe enforcement of the law, when in its original sense, deriving from the English legal theorist A.V. Dicey, it refers to an equal application of the law without regard to personal identity or political allegiance. This is clearly not how the law is applied to Trump, nor to his supporters, and not even to conservatives as a group, all of whom are targeted for arbitrary prosecutions.

Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for the same supposed offense that Hunter Biden and Merrick Garland did not go to prison for, with the sole exception that Bannon and Navarro were found in contempt of a Congressional committee that violated established precedents that permit the opposition party a voice.

Anti-abortion protesters have been jailed. Parents concerned about gender ideology were called “domestic terrorists,” and the administration only backed off when there was a public outcry.

Political opponents like Tulsi Gabbard were put on terror watch lists. Critical journalist of was visited by IRS agents on exactly the same day he testified before Congress. Journalist James O’Keefe was arrested by the FBI, and the contents of his devices leaked to The New York Times. The IRS and the FBI punish whistleblowers who complain about politicization.

What will happen if Harris is reelected? She (or whoever is making decisions) will be unconstrained by the media, that one-time opponent of arbitrary power, which now swallows the Administration’s narratives whole. She will have four more years to appoint more judges and more prosecutors, including special prosecutors, to pursue vendettas against opponents. Anyone who protests against this administration or its policies will risk being labeled an insurrectionist or a terrorist or an extremist, and arrested and imprisoned on spurious charges. Lawyers who defend them will face professional and career consequences, and the press has shown itself unconcerned with the civil liberties of deplorable garbage people.

This is the conclusive argument against Harris: if re-elected, this administration will have unchecked power, supported across the left-dominated institutions, from law enforcement, to the intelligence agencies, to the unelected bureaucracy, to the legal profession, to much of the judiciary (including especially the all-important DC courts). The regime will have the full support of the media, which no longer scrutinizes power but instead runs interference for it, and the tech companies and social media as well.

Reasonable people can differ about tariffs or taxes. But with an administration that arrests its critics, those issues are beside the point. This is a civil liberties election, and President Trump is the only candidate who has never arrested his political opponents.

After the obligatory misrepresentations of Trump’s words (an example, and many others are possible, here), the editor of The Globe wipes the spittle from the keyboard, and produces the following helpful paragraph:

The Globe is correct to say that democracy is not immutable, but not in quite the way they mean. The range of democratic decision-making has been contracting for some time, and I name below a large number of prominent issues that hegemonic elites, in the adventitious form of Kamala Harris, would like to remove from the realm of democratic decision-making, all the while shouting about “our democracy.”

The Globe’s second sentence explains that “democracy is, rather, a story we tell ourselves.” This is a neologistic use of the term, and not how most of us understand it. In its normal sense, democracy is a system for choosing leaders and for choosing government policies, and not just a story, or a myth, or a comforting fiction, let alone a bunch of things we are instructed to believe. The Globe’s third sentence states explicitly that our shared stories must tell us that our society’s institutions function well (specifics below). But what if those stories are in fact false? That is a question they avoid because in that case, Trump would be the true small-d democrat.

Democracy as a System for Choosing Leaders

Going back to democracy in the old and normal sense, where the people choose leaders, it is plain that Trump is the democratically chosen nominee of his party. He was chosen by primary voters, over the objections and certainly the hopes of much of the Republican machine.

No such thing can be said of Harris, who won no primaries in this cycle, or for that matter in the last. She is a machine politician (even her supporters at The Economist admit that) who went from being Willie Brown’s mistress to being Vice-President because she checked the right DEI identity boxes, and has now become the nominee because Biden avoided any real primary contest in the current cycle, and could no longer hide his mental decline. She is a default nominee chosen by a coterie of panicked party grandees after frenetic backstairs skullduggery that we shall only learn about after the election. To call this “Democracy” requires a lot of storytelling.

Democracy as a System for Choosing Policies

Democracy should be about choosing leaders, and also policies. Without arguing that a democratic government should operate by plebiscite, or that every policy should be popular, there should be some correspondence in a democracy between a government’s policies and its platform, and also between the popular will and the policies of the government.

Herewith a list of issues in current US politics, in a rough order of prominence:

• Immigration and border security

• Abortion

• Crime

• Foreign policy and war

• Women’s rights and spaces, and gender ideology

• DEI and racial preferences

• Tariff and industrial policy

• Environmental policy

• Censorship

My point is not that Trump or Harris is right or wrong on any of these. It is simply that on none of these issues can Trump’s policy be called undemocratic. On each, Trump’s position is advocated clearly and loudly (this is Trump, after all). By contrast, two things are notable about Harris’s positions: they represent elite over popular preferences, and are often simply not mentioned in her speeches, being passed over in silence because she and her handlers know they are not popular, but intend to go ahead anyway.

What a Marxist would call the social position of the two campaigns’ policy positions could not be more different: Trump’s position is normally that of many ordinary people, Harris’s that of elites, and often elites who want to avoid the matter for the duration of the campaign. Running through the list above in more detail, and in the same order (TL;DR readers can skip forward):

Open borders and mass immigration: This is a policy followed furtively, with migrant flights arriving literally in the middle of the night, and the open border has been closed for election season because the Harris people know that it is unpopular. Mass immigration is favoured for ideological and electoral reasons by Democrat and left-wing activists, but denied in public. This is the opposite of democratic policy-making.

Abortion: Abortion is the topic on which Trump is politically weakest (certainly in the view of the Harris campaign, which bangs on about it). Trump’s position is that policy should be made by voters at the state level, and not by judges in Washington. Whatever one thinks of the substance of the question, this is hardly undemocratic.

Crime: The American people are assured that crime is declining and all is well, based on questionable statistics contradicting popular experience (as Rupa Subramanya argues here). Again, what Trump talks about openly, Harris passes over in silence, reserving the matter for policy elites, while surrogates blather about “misinformation.”

Foreign and Defence Policy: The Democrats’ foreign policy positions are little mentioned by the Harris campaign (and also contain large internal contradictions, as I argued here.) Trump’s nationalism and his aversion to foreign entanglements are disdained by Washington policy elites, and answered only with McCarthyite cries of “Putin!”.

DEI, Gender Ideology and Women’s Spaces: Trump takes the popular position, the “trans women are women” dogma being a bureaucratic and faculty club position. As with racial preferences, Harris avoids the topic in public, except when her campaign accuses Trump of racism.

Tariffs and Trade: Free traders are much higher on the social scale and also richer than those who support Trump’s call for protectionist tariffs. Reasonable people can disagree about trade policy, but neither position is inherently undemocratic.

Environmental Policy: Climate change is a dinner party and not a popular cause. RFK’s version of environmental policy, focusing on chemicals in food and pollution in places like East Palestine, commands wide popular support, but elite disdain.

Censorship: The Harris/Biden policy of censorship, as revealed in the Twitter Files and also in the Facebook Files, is supported by Beltway elites but not defended by the Harris campaign, which would prefer to avoid the topic. “Misinformation” is the new false consciousness, essentially an argument that the populace is too stupid to make its own decisions about who to trust.

One does not need to agree with all or indeed any of Trump’s positions to see that they are not in themselves undemocratic. Trump’s positions in fact find social support from what an earlier generation would have called the popular classes. It is Harris’s policies that are supported by elites and followed over popular objections, and attempts are made by Harris’s media supporters to remove them from the realm of polite conversation. If either campaign is against democracy in the commonly understood sense of popular decision-making, it is that of Harris, who would like policies on important topics like mass immigration, gender ideology, women’s spaces, war, and censorship to be reserved to credentialed elites operating without too much popular interruption.

The Stories of Democracy (New Sense): Mostly False

This is where democracy in the old popular decision-making sense meets democracy in the neologistic stories-we-tell-ourselves sense. The Globe’s cherished stories are myths that Trump has rudely interrupted, and managerial elites are very upset. Here are The Globe’s obligatory stories:

• “Our elected legislators have our interests at heart”: Many legislators persuade themselves that they have our interests at heart, but that is not quite the same thing;

• “That our political opponents deserve our respect”: Some do, but others like Harris (and Trudeau) imprison their opponents (nor do Trump or the “garbage” people get much respect);

• “That the courts are fair”: failure to believe this would make the critical race theorists and until this campaign most Globe journalists enemies of democracy. It is transparently the case that the courts are not always fair (more below);

• “That the media are balanced and honest”: No reader of the mainstream media can believe that (examples from the Globe here);

• “That bureaucracies are competent”: the people of western Carolina would not agree, nor the Marines who died in the Afghan chaos, nor the residents of long-term care homes;

• “That elections are safe from interference”: In 2020, Zuckerberg (with $400 million for ballot harvesting) and the 51 intelligence agents who said the Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” obviously did not agree, and interfered anyway, and to great effect;

• “That democracy’s incremental nature is preferable to revolution and upheaval”: sometimes upheaval may help to avoid worse;

• “That we do not want to be ruled by a single, unaccountable, all-powerful person”: true, but nor does anyone want to be ruled by an all-powerful unaccountable bureaucracy operating through a cipher like Biden or Harris;

• “That the rule of law is paramount”: The Globe, like so many, does not understand this concept and supports an arbitrary use of the law against those it considers deplorable.

The Rule of Law

I have mentioned the rule of law last, and it is the most important of these points. Many use that expression to mean a strict or severe enforcement of the law, when in its original sense, deriving from the English legal theorist A.V. Dicey, it refers to an equal application of the law without regard to personal identity or political allegiance. This is clearly not how the law is applied to Trump, nor to his supporters, and not even to conservatives as a group, all of whom are targeted for arbitrary prosecutions.

Trump has been prosecuted for matters relating to classified documents and mistresses, while obviously Biden and Clinton have not. These prosecutions were aimed at him personally. The prosecuting District Attorney in New York ran for office with explicit “I’ll get Trump” ads. This is the opposite of the rule of law.

Similarly with Trump’s supporters: Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for exactly the same thing that Hunter Biden and Merrick Garland did not go to prison for. Peaceful January 6 protesters have faced prison sentences,1 and even those who were guilty of violence face long sentences and spurious “terrorism” enhancements, unlike protesters for more privileged causes like BLM, Antifa, or Hamas who normally go free. There is much more that could be said, but the long and short of it is that the Harris/Biden administration holds political prisoners. This makes it an enemy of the rule of law, and the elite media run cover for it.

The Contradictions of Democracy (New Sense)

The “our democracy” people are in favour of what General Pinochet called guided democracy: there will be elections within firmly policed boundaries, and with few real policy choices. The differences between parties will be differences of personality and style, at best of emphasis, rather than of substance.

Under “democracy” (new sense), the electorate will choose between alternating groups of Washington insiders. Under “democracy” (new sense), the cultural left will control all the institutions and make all important policy decisions on anything elite opinion cares about, from mass immigration to DEI, from women’s spaces to crime, from war to censorship. Under “democracy” (new sense), the voters will have an occasional choice of cipher, perhaps selecting an affect or a cackle, a skin colour or a gender, though in this election even that was lacking on the Democrat side.

Trump is the only candidate supporting democracy in the normal popular choice sense of the word, indeed the only candidate supporting constitutional government and the rule of law over the rule of a deadening bureaucratic state able to censor and when necessary to arrest its opponents.

This is the central contradiction of the elite’s conception of “democracy”: it removes most decision-making power, even over matters as basic as civil liberties, economic policy, and war, from the realm of democratic choice. It talks incessantly about “our democracy,” but really thinks the populace too stupid to make important choices, which it would reserve to purported experts and Beltway elites. It is a contradiction at the core of the Harris campaign, and we should thank Canada’s national fishwrap for making it so plain.

1

One example: https://x.com/julie_kelly2/status/1851651507927613928; ’s substack contains many more, scandalously many.

Declassified with Julie Kelly

Breaking news, analysis, and commentary related to the weaponization of the U.S. Department of Justice. Unique coverage of January 6 and pending criminal indictments of Donald Trump. Occasional recipes and food pics as bonus.

Bullets were fired at a Jewish school in Toronto this week. Again. I have lost track of the number of attacks — firebombings, shootings, vandalism — on Jewish institutions. Antisemitism has become routine, and the reaction of the establishment, led by the Prime Minister and including the media, is mere rote pro forma press release pabulum, lacking conviction and scandalously ineffective.

The same people who used the Emergencies Act against peaceful protesters and who continue to abuse the criminal justice system to persecute the leaders of the entirely peaceful Freedom Convoy are not too concerned about antisemitism, nor about open support for terrorism, nor ongoing violence in the streets. A large part of the problem, as I wrote last week, is that the new antisemitism comes from the left. This leaves our leftist establishment at a loss.

Robyn Urback of The Globe and Mail has noticed the hypocrisy. But The Globe, like the rest of the elite media, is part of the problem. Its account of the Freedom Convoy was strongly alarmist and complicit with the government’s “unacceptable racists” narrative, while its reporting on antisemitic and anti-Israeli protests portrays them as at least in part justified, or at any rate legitimate. The Globe has this in common with the rest of the mainstream media.

The New Antisemitism of the Left

We saw last week protests in Vancouver in which in which protesters shouted “Death to Canada!” in the same breath as, “Death to the United States, and death to Israel!” The protesters also expressed support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, and burned a Canadian flag.

It would sound supercilious to observe that the protesters overestimate the importance of Canada, whose disappearance would have no effect whatsoever on the Middle Eastern questions that exercise them so greatly (in that at least they are very Canadian). But the protesters see Canada as a Western country — on that they are right — and it is the West that is the true object of their hatred. This new antisemitism of the left is an antisemitism that is at bottom anti-Western and anti-patriotic. The Jews, once accused of un-patriotism, are now accused of being too American and by extension too Canadian.

Elite Media on the Freedom Convoy

Urback begins by describing the Freedom Convoy as a threat to order, and an “organized menace”. I live and work in downtown Ottawa, and had not been paying great attention to the news when I heard honking in the street. Going outside, I discovered a joyful scene, full of happy people, and some really nice trucks. Clearly, Urback is getting her information from The Globe and Mail, which doubled down on swastikas, but did not trouble to speak to convoy participants or leaders. But while Urback is wrong about the Freedom Convoy, she is right that the same standards applied then would make the current pro-Palestinian movement also a national emergency.

I wrote about my observations at the time of the Freedom Convoy here. The more industrious , now of , spoke to 100 participants, which is about 100 more than most mainstream outlets, and found neither racism nor extremism.

The Free Press

What the Truckers Want

For two weeks, the 18-wheelers, the semis, the tractors and the pick-up trucks streamed through the snow and ice into the center of Ottawa, the Canadian capital…

Read more

4 years ago · 1312 likes · 656 comments · Rupa Subramanya

Elite Media on Leftist Protest

The opposite side of the mainstream media’s bias is displayed by their prevaricating “both sides” approach to antisemitic protest. Long-lasting occupations at universities were reported as matters of civil liberties (of the protesters), of anti-colonial or anti-war or pro-Palestinian protest, and as legal contests involving the property rights of universities. Harassment of Jews and journalists by the occupiers was simply not reported. Disruptive and violent street protests, including those with smoke bombs and pyrotechnics, are similarly ignored.

We are dependent upon Rebel News and other oppositional or independent journalists, chief among them the indomitably sardonic Caryma S’ad, for news of the ongoing low-level violence surrounding these protests. Here is Rebel’s Alexa Lavoie reporting on an occupation in Montreal:

The problem is one not merely of government policy, but of hegemonic opinion, which is to say of the mainstream and credentialized opinion that appears in The Globe as in the rest of the prestige media. Elite opinion downplays or simply fails to report ongoing violence and harassment. When antisemitism is reported, it is covered as isolated incidents, as matters for the police blotter, and is not connected to the larger antisemitic and anti-Israeli movement. This is one reason why the violent left targets independents: the far left wishes to control coverage, and knows they can rely on the averted eyes of the elite media.

Progressive Ideology and Media Coverage

A large part of the problem is that the antisemitic and pro-Palestinian protesters speak the same language of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as many of the journalists on The Globe and the rest of the elite media. The media do not (always) share exactly the same ideology as the protesters, but they do have adjacent ideologies. The moderate newspaper-writing left believes that the extreme left is well-intentioned, likely has half a point, and is at any rate a legitimate voice moving society in a good and progressive direction.

The elite media believe none of these things about populist protest, which they therefore view as rationally incomprehensible. This incomprehension leaves them grasping at conspiracy theories (Russians, foreigners, far-right podcasters) when covering ordinary Canadians who object to being bossed around by Ottawa. It leaves them open to the government’s propaganda, as became evident during the freedom Convoy, when there was direct collusion between the government and the media.1

Right-wing violence, if any could be found, is congenial to both forms of leftism. Left-wing violence is openly advocated by the far left, but more difficult for the moderates to explain away. We have it on the authority of The Globe, four years ago, that Antifa is a conspiracy theory, and they have published nothing further on the topic in the ensuing four years, evidence to the contrary being passed over in embarrassed silence (I provide one instance that I saw personally, an Antifa protest in Ottawa, here.)

There is also a racial element to the elite media’s relative unconcern with leftist violence. Many pro-Palestinian demonstrators are recent immigrants, and have brown skins and unusual names. Our elites are axiomatically in favour of “diversity” and hence of mass immigration. Antisemitic violence puts them in the uncomfortable position of suspecting “racialized” people of bad actions. Embarrassment leads again to silence.

Urback: A Refreshingly Naive Legal Proceduralism

Urback ends by asking, “Why is some intimidation tolerated, while others elicit a federal response? When, exactly, does a crowd cheering for the death of Canada become an emergency?” She thereby accepts the government’s characterization of the entirely peaceful Freedom Convoy as “intimidation,” while posing, not entirely rhetorically, the question of two-tier policing.

Urback’s naive legal proceduralism — in plain language, she applies the same rules to the Freedom Convoy and to antisemitic protest — helpfully illustrates the fact that laws in Canada today, as across the West, are not applied equally to all. We live under a two-tiered legal system. The rule of law is at an end when those in favour with power, or belonging to privileged groups, or demographics whose support the ruling party hopes for in an impending election, enjoy special dispensations, while those who shout “Freedom” or honk horns but will never vote Liberal face frozen bank accounts, police horses, and months or years in prison.

Urback is clear that she is not advocating the use of the Emergencies Act, i.e. the War Measures Act, against anti-Canadian and antisemitic protesters, and I agree with her. It seems in any case that the government does not know who is guilty of many of the worst attacks, so they would not know who to arrest or whose bank accounts to seize. I for one do not trust them with any more power than they already have.

Enforce the Laws We Already Have

It is already illegal to shoot at schools, to firebomb synagogues, to threaten, to assault or to harass, to fire pyrotechnics in public streets, to vandalize businesses. All that is required is to enforce the law. The government had to fabricate charges of violence or incipient violence against the Freedom Convoy. Now antisemites have brought the real thing into our streets. Where is the RCMP, the OPP, the Hendon Project, CSIS, the CSE, the NSIA, FinTrack, and the rest of the alphabet soup of police and intelligence agencies used with such vindictive enthusiasm against Tamara Lich and the joyful truckers?

I therefore turned with interest to an article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail under the title, “The tragedy of our time is that antisemitism rises equally from the left and right.” The Globe, once a Tory paper, has recently gone woke (and become completely unreliable), so I was briefly encouraged to see at least the acknowledgment that left antisemitism is a problem. I was quickly disabused of any hope: the primary object of Gopnik’s ire is inevitably Donald Trump.

This makes Gopnik a useful example of the left’s blind spots, all the more useful for his not being a fool. His essay, now reprinted in the Saturday review section of the Globe, began as an address at Massey College of the University of Toronto, not far from the site of a recent long-lasting antisemitic occupation. This he does not mention, nor the ongoing violence in our streets.

https://x.com/CarymaRules/status/1842928766076817805

The old antisemitism, the antisemitism to which Hitler gave genocidal expression, insisted that Jews were less than fully patriotic. They were not properly national, being accused of transnational and cosmopolitan loyalties. The new antisemitism attacks Jews for being Zionists, which is to say for being loyal to Israel, a Western country. Israel is seen by the left as a Western settler state, and the left directs at Israel the hatred normally reserved for that most compelling Western settler state, the United States. Once antinational, Jews are now accused of being too nationalist.

The left’s hatred of Israel is an inevitable consequence of its anti-Western ideology: if you believe axiomatically that Western countries are creations of colonial white supremacy and therefore always and essentially in the wrong, you will end by condemning Israel and supporting Hamas. This is the basic logic of the left’s conception of history (as I argued here), and many follow it with a dogmatism too stupid to recoil from the absurdity of its necessary ending in queers for Palestine.

Gopnik does not see this: he insists on seeing the old and the new antisemitisms as sharing an origin. Apparently, the roots of antisemitism are to be found in anti-elitism, elites being “defined simply as people who read and argue about their reading.”

His treatment of the new anti-colonial and anti-Western antisemitism consists of little more than a verbal trick: one aspect of the old antisemitism was anti-intellectualism (true); current elites think themselves intellectual (true), and their critics are for Gopnik really criticizing their broadmined sophistication (false); so criticism of elites follows what Gopnik calls “the base template of antisemitism.”

Gopnik’s real target is Donald Trump, lumping in Brexit and the French National Rally for effect. For Gopnik, good people are universalist and intellectually engaged; antisemites are neither of these things, so anyone he thinks particularist or anti-intellectual is an incipient antisemite. Adding elites into the mix makes criticism of current elites not merely anti-intellectual but implicitly antisemitic, a very pleasant conclusion for a New Yorker writer; his audience at The Globe and at Massey College will like it too. Ergo, Trump, who has a Jewish daughter and is unapologetically supportive of Israel, is antisemitic.

The great blind spots in Gopnik’s account are two, and both obvious: left anti-semitism depends for much of its popular support on immigrant Muslim populations, and also on the Antifa left, a demi-monde of permanent students, baristas, trust-fund kids, and others in search of a purpose now provided by the cause of “revolution intifada.”

The Hamas/Hezbollah Islamic fundamentalists and the queers for Palestine start at very different places, but are united by their hatred for the West, and above all for the United States, the most powerful Western nation, and for Israel, the most admirably combative.

Muslim fundamentalists begin with the recidivist anger of a defeated people confronted with the manifest superiority of a Western power. The Arabs have started at least six wars with Israel, depending upon how you count, and have consistently lost (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2023, and yes one can debate 1956; the constant terrorism and missile attacks of recent decades don’t easily fit the list of years). A religion both militant and eschatological, based from its origins on military conquest, and promising the ultimate victory of Islam, is regularly humiliated on the battlefield by a power its theology hates. The resultant anger has now been imported into our streets by short-sighted politicians in search of immigrant votes.

The Antifa left starts from a different religion, the secular religion of Marxism, but ends in the same hatreds: of America, of the West, and most of all of Israel. The left’s roots are in the secular intelligentsia, and much of their popular support comes from students and others keen to feel idealistic and on the right side of the present big issue. America is a hetero-patriarchal racist genocide state, the ever-expanding list of epithets pointing to the iterations of cultural Marxism that constitute the left’s ideology. All that is needed is anti-imperialism to cement the link to Islamic fundamentalism.

A key difference between the old antisemitism of the right and the new antisemitism of the left is that the old came from sub-literates in beer halls or their mother’s basement; the new comes from high-status and highly credentialed people in our society’s most prestigious institutions. The antisemitism of the right came largely from below; the new antisemitism comes from above. This is a point to which Gopnik of The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and Massey College is strangely blind.

Much of the new antisemitism is a foreseeable consequence of mass immigration, exacerbated by the abandonment of any attempt at assimilation (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has seen). Under the hegemony of cultural Marxism, diversity is an irrefragable good, rendering assimilation tantamount to racism if not cultural genocide. We have lost the elementary measure of self-confidence that would be needed to require immigrants to assimilate into our foundational culture.

Gopnik himself illustrates these problems: for him, the opponents of mass immigration are the real antisemites, and the violence pro-Hamas protesters bring to our streets goes unmentioned. We now have mobs of masked men harassing Jews in the streets of Toronto, Montreal, New York, and London, but Gopnik like so many progressives, like the editors of The Globe and Mail, thinks Trump is the problem.

Just this weekend men were arrested in Montreal preparing to firebomb a synagogue, a crime passed over in silence by The Globe.1 But for Gopnik, Trump and other nationalist politicians are voices of “authoritarianism” and “popular fascism.” The “fascism” accusation is particularly ridiculous against those who wish to contain the state within its proper boundaries (as I pointed out last week). It is an accusation that echoes the old Marxist habit of calling everything right of centre “fascist,” an unintentional reminder of the Marxist roots of current progressive ideology.

The new antisemitism comes from within the institutions, speaking in the dulcet tones of “diversity” while importing millions of foreigners from a hostile and inferior civilization, and recruiting to its service an alienated sub-intelligentsia of Antifa radicals primed for violence against their own society. The new antisemites don’t just hate the Jews, they hate the rest of us too, and for the same reasons. The problem of antisemitism is part of a larger problem of cultural self-confidence: we need to secure our borders, to re-establish order in our streets, and to recapture our institutions from the self-hating left, the root of the new antisemitism.

At election time, the Democrats want to be the party of Harry Truman, but their most committed supporters think the U.S. to be at root the country of George Wallace and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

While the activists rail against colonial genocide and capitalist partriarchy, the suit-and-tie inside-the-beltway wing of the Democrat Party wants to administer a global superpower managing crises around the world, not to exclude a war or two.

"We are morally tainted, but follow us anyway," is not a convincing message. It requires leaders to speak out of both sides of their mouths, with the result that no one believes anything they say. It results in the absurdities of Marxist BLM flags flying from US embassies, woke transgender ideology being pushed by the State Department, stern-faced generals preaching against “white rage,” and a regime that despises its own people holding forth about democracy.

Reduced to a visual vignette, the central contradiction of this ruling party is expressed by the contrast between the fluorescent Karine Jean-Pierre, checking so many boxes, racial, sexual, and identitarian, and the stolid Admiral Kirby, a man in a gray suit, but at least in command of the basics of names and places, and aware of the facts his duty requires him to obfuscate.

The old Bush-era neo-cons believed that the US was a good and virtuous country, so powerful and so compelling as to be capable of bringing democracy even to the most atavistic corners of the Islamic world. Whatever its other problems, the democratic evangelism of the neo-conservatives was at least not internally self-contradictory.

The flight of many Bush-era neo-cons, now including the Cheneys, from the vulgarity of Trump into the welcoming arms of the Democrat Party emphasizes the internal contradictions of that party. A party that refuses to secure the borders of the United States wants to fight for those of Ukraine and Iraq.

President Trump's position is that the US is a good country with serious though soluble problems, a country that needs to pull back and look to its own interests. Trump’s view has the advantage of internal coherence, and unlike the globalist philanthropy of the Bush years, it does not require the cooperation of any foreign powers, least of all of Islamic fanatics.

Trump’s denial of the self-hating premises of the Democrats’ woke ideology motivates their endless charges of racism, and those charges while wrong in any precise sense are at least authentically felt: the woke Democrats honestly believe that dissent from the ideology of white American guilt is racist. The Beltway Democrats with equal horror and also equal anger agree that Trump’s self-contained nationalism represents a repudiation of their worldview, and also a threat to their jobs. The internal contradictions of the Democrats, the anti-nationalists and the super-nationalists, are forgotten though not resolved in their hatred of Trump.

But the hatreds of the two wings of the Democrat Party, though converging on Orange Man Bad, come from diametrically opposed motives. The left hates Trump because he loves America and wants it to be a strong country, the establishment because he wants the United States to be a normal country and not a global hegemon.

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard often highlights the ground-level realities behind these abstract considerations: few of the Democrats' leaders and fewer of their activists have served in the wars, while Trump, notwithstanding bone spurs long ago during the Vietnam War, represents those who fill the ranks though not of course those who fill the E-ring. The Trump position is more coherent and also more authentic, while the Democrats' quadrennial facade of patriotism is just manipulative.

We saw last week a statement signed by 741 generals, admirals, and senior security-state officials. I don’t doubt the patriotism of the 741, nor their horror of Trump’s mercurial personality. But their patriotism is in plain contradiction with the core ideology of the woke activists who form the Democrat Party’s base. The 741, like the managerial elite they represent, want to run an assertive and essentially hegemonic foreign policy, necessarily resulting in periodic wars. Successful war, like successful empire, requires behind it a martial society and a measure of moral backbone rooted in a social consensus. The lack of that consensus, steadily eroded by the para-Marxist half of the Democrat coalition, almost guarantees failure.

The Trump policy of recuperation and rebuilding enjoys by contrast the united and enthusiastic support of his party. It is genuinely held, honestly advocated, and congruent with the interests and aspirations of his supporters. And Trump’s position — a strong America, seeing to its own interests — has the great advantage of not being internally self-contradictory.

None of these things can be said of the self-abasing globalism of the ruling Democrat Party. The contradiction between the anti-American pseudo-Marxism of the party’s base and the globalist ambitions of its elite is most conspicuously displayed in the flip-flopping tergiversations of Vice-President Harris, who cannot decide if she wants to be Harry Truman or Ilhan Omar.

Here, we have not a basement fulminator but an account associated with VP Harris's presidential campaign calling President Trump "fascist". This is new and dangerous ground:

https://x.com/harris_wins/status/1838696548613468377

The Harris campaign's specific allegation refers to Trump's insistence that he would fire generals who push woke ideology. The allegation is ridiculous. Civilian control of the military is a basic constitutional principle.

But it is the source of the absurdity that is most disturbing: it is common to hear leftist demonstrators, professors of sociology, and other woke ideologues bang on about "fascism," but not the Vice-President of the United States, nor her surrogates. A slogan once restricted to the anarchist Antifa left has migrated into the Vice-President's office. The Overton window is moving rapidly leftward.

The charge of fascism is an old Marxist habit. It comes naturally to those who think themselves on the correct side of a preordained history, expressing their anger at the failure of reality to conform to ideology. This is particularly the case when ordinary people, like President Trump's many working-class supporters, are guilty of supporting the wrong party. The Marxist reaction partakes of the anger reserved for the renegade.

The charge of fascism reflects the easy habit of arranging political beliefs on a left-right spectrum, and since President Trump's diverse supporters are clearly not socialists, Marxists, or other good Democrats, they must be over on the deplorable right, and since they are not Mitt Romney and wouldn't fit in at the opera, they must be far-right fascists. We get a lot of such one-dimensional thinking from the party of intellectual sophistication. They find the easy conclusion useful and also motivating, and intellectual laziness reinforces partisan anger.

It is from the original fascist Mussolini that we get the word "totalitarian." Mussolini boasted that under his rule Italy was a totalitarian state, where the state controlled everything, and the individual was as nothing in comparison to the nation. A fascist government was the biggest of big governments. To call President Trump, who wants to contain the state within its proper and limited boundaries, a fascist is historically ignorant as well as ideologically one-dimensional.

In practice, the allegation of "fascism" labels its target as illegitimate, beyond the pale, and certainly beyond discussion or engagement. And if argument is not possible, then all that is left is force. In the streets, this incites rioting, and in the minds of cranks, it may incite assassination attempts. In the Oval Office, we have no assurance it will not result in the use of anti-terrorism powers created to fight Al-Qaeda against domestic political opponents.

This wouldn't be new ground for the current Biden/Harris administration. Political opponents such as (@TulsiGabbard on X) have been put on a terrorist watch list, and critical journalists like (@mtaibbi on X) have been harassed by the IRS. And J6 protesters, including many who were peaceful, have faced vindictive prosecutions and terrorism charges.

Today, the charge of fascism is inflammatory and therefore dangerous. It calls into question VP Harris's judgment, and recalls the authoritarian tendencies of her party: if Trump and the Republicans are fascist, why not just arrest them all?

(also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/mfproudman/status/1839125409545253311)

Frank Graves is a well-known political pollster, and I don’t doubt that he accurately surveys the opinions of his sample. The problem is what counts as “disinformation”. In 2022, Graves published a similar “disinformation index” using the COVID lab leak, an explanation now widely thought to be true, as his first example of disinformation. This time, he asks about economic growth, and he is the one who gets his facts wrong, according to the International Monetary Fund statistics below. Graves himself is pushing disinformation.

The exercise is circular: Graves is really measuring skepticism of elite opinion.

He is no doubt correct that conservatives are skeptical of the views of progressive elites, but it is tendentious to call this “disinformation”. Someone in the US Department of Homeland Security defined “mal-information” as information that is true, but off-narrative. This would be a better description of Graves’s “disinformation.”

Grave’s last outing: “Disinformation” in 2022

I went in detail through Graves’ 2022 attempt to measure disinformation here:

Graves’ conclusions were very useful to state institutions, including the Prime Minister’s staff, and were duly cited by state and mainstream media, establishment commentators, and by the “disinformation” industry. But as I argued then, they rely entirely on the establishment’s conception of “disinformation”, starting with the idea that the "lab leak" theory was disinformation: Graves was just measuring dissent.

Graves, it is relevant to note, has a long-standing hostility to conservatives and to populists.

Disinformation in 2024

Graves summarizes his current study, apparently not yet out in full, on X/Twitter here.1 The influential Professor Timothy Caulfield, a well-funded state authority on “disinformation,” retweets Graves’s conclusions with approval (more on Prof. Caulfield from the estimable investigative journalist Andy Lee here; from me here).2

The left-wing cultural magazine CultMtl reports on Graves’s study here, from which I take this screenshot, which accurately cites his language:

As with the earlier lab-leak example, let’s start with the first claim. International Monetary Fund figures on real GDP growth are displayed here (link on chart):

So Canada’s real GDP growth for 2024 is projected to be 1.2%, versus a G7 figure of 1.7%. Much will depend on the phrasing of Graves’ question about growth “lag[ging] well behind the G7 average”. We are certainly well behind the United States, at 2.7%, and it is hardly unreasonable to say that a growth figure 30% lower (1.2% versus 1.7%) than the G7 average is “well behind.” Graves has no basis for large epistemic conclusions about disinformation.

It gets worse if one looks at GDP per capita, which is obviously more relevant to direct experience and hence to popular opinion than national aggregates. Canadian GDP per capita lags badly, and the lag gets noticeably worse in 2015, when the current government took power:

There have been some encouraging headlines recently, and apparently we may expect a rebound in GDP growth, if not in GDP per capita, in future years. But Graves claims to be an empiricist, and cannot base claims about current facts on forward-looking projections.3 The Canadian economy has lagged badly, and anyone who tries to spin a different case could be accused of trafficking in disinformation.

Briefly examining Graves’ three other examples of “disinformation”:

• Vaccine-related deaths concealed: numerous institutions, including the media, medical and state bureaucracies, and the government in power, have invested their credibility in COVID-19 vaccines. There are significant bureaucratic incentives to minimize adverse effects, though it is difficult to know what effect this has had on reporting. This question really asks whether the respondent believes official accounts, and implicitly attributes truth to those accounts.

• The Right to Bear Arms: this is the only unproblematic factual question Graves asks, and of course anyone who said that we have such a right in Canada would be wrong.

• Climate Change Caused by Greenhouse Gases: this is a hypothesis supported by much highly-credentialed opinion, but a hypothesis is not a fact. Again, Graves is measuring conformity.

Graves’ method is to assign a score to poll responses, giving three points for each statement rated “completely” true or false (according to his beliefs), two for each rated “mostly” true/false, and one point for each skipped question. In other words, he is measuring not merely orthodoxy, but the enthusiasm of the respondent’s conformity to orthodoxy. We have come some distance from critical thought.

The Authoritarian Consequences of “Disinformation”

Graves’s “disinformation index” is misleadingly named: it pretends to measure how well-informed (or not) a population is, and by implication their intelligence, but it is really a conformity index.

The accusation of conservative stupidity has a long and it must be admitted distinguished history, going back to Lord Palmerston’s denunciation of “the stupid old Tory party,” and to John Stuart Mill’s later and better-known attack on “the stupid party.” (I once got a peer-reviewed article out of this theme4). The difference today lies in the social direction of the insult: once directed against a ruling aristocracy, it is now directed downward against a disobedient populace. Once anti-elitist, the charge of stupidity has become the weapon of a credentialed state-employed elite, an elite demanding obedience.

Graves's direction is clear, as is that of the entire disinformation industry. And it is a very large state industry, as Matt Taibbi’s Racket has shown:

Racket News

Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know

Introduction by Matt Taibbi…

Read more

3 years ago · 1176 likes · 359 comments · Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, Genève, Matt Orfalea, Matt Taibbi, and The Hunt for Tom Clancy

Graves wants to delegitimize conservative opinion. But if illegitimate or misinformed opinion can be shown to have negative, even catastrophic, social effects (from a deadly virus to democracy in danger to riots in the streets), then why not censor it, or jail those who propagate it, as the British government now does, and as the Trudeau government would like to do with Bill-63?

Indeed, why let the morons vote at all, especially if they are going to vote for the wrong parties, even for “authoritarian” or in Biden’s words “semi-fascist” parties?5 We are one step away from authoritarianism in the name of protecting “our democracy.”

The Kings and Commissars of the past claimed to rule on the basis of superior knowledge. The managerial class of the present has better graphics and a confected appearance of empirical support. Their language has abandoned theology, drawing instead from a newly constructed pseudo-discipline of “disinformation”, but the conclusions haven’t changed much.

Our rights to speak and to think freely are now under threat.

The Professor’s doctoral thesis, entitled “Sex, Sexual, and Gender Differences in Canadian K-12 Schools: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Identity, Policy, and Practice” (2011) is online here. It unintentionally tells us much about the character of intellectual activity in this country, and also about the nature of power in a bureaucratic society where authority speaks in forbidding and often rapidly mutating initialisms, even as it claims to give voice to the powerless.

Prof. Wells seems to have published no books, so his doctoral dissertation is the most substantial work of his that we have. It is a pastiche of cultural Marxist ideology (on which more below) and personal anecdote: it is intellectually derivative, and cannot even be called a workmanlike addition to empirical knowledge. It is the text of an activist, not an intellectual. On the bright side, he’ll be at home in the Senate.

Gender Ideology

Professor Wells is an enthusiastic advocate of gender ideology, which is to say the idea that people have an internal gender identity that may not match their sex, and he is a keen supporter of “gender-affirming care,” meaning hormones and sex-change operations intended to make the body conform to the psyche. He is also an indignant critic of Premier Danielle Smith’s move to end sex-change operations on minors, to keep gender ideology out of schools, and to empower parents.

The mainstream media cannot get enough of Professor Wells. Danielle Smith makes the learned Professor’s head explode, and he has become the go-to source for spittle-flecked outrage. Here he is a couple of weeks ago, judicious as always, and very on-message with “weird”, in The Globe and Mail via the Canadian Press:1

Those who see transgenderism as a civil rights issue rather than a psychological and medical question find in transgendered people the oppressed minority required by progressive ideology. The supporting stereotype of the enlightened activist confronting conservative prejudice is as flattering to Trudeau as it is to the mainstream media, and indeed to the new Senator. Those who only read the mainstream papers will find no disturbing information about the damage to vulnerable and confused young people, and will rest easy in their self-regard.

Prof. Wells met with Trudeau last February and there was no nonsense about speaking truth to power. The future Senator was smitten:2

The Scholarship of (one’s own) Identity

The professor’s doctoral thesis is dedicated to the people he studies. He writes that he was once a teacher himself, has worked on “gay-straight alliances” and related projects in the schools for some years, and wrote a master’s thesis on a similar topic. His resumé, on the website of the Prime Minister’s Office, reinforces the theme.3 Activism has been not merely a career but an identity. Like many in the ever-multiplying branches of academic identity studies, Prof. Wells studies his own identity.

The Professor holds a Canada Research Chair in “The Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth,” a suspiciously specific field; one wonders if it was created bespoke. The Professor doesn’t just study his identity, he makes a career of it.

Scholarship should be broadening, creating an awareness that there are (or were) other ways of looking at the world and that some of those alternate ways of thinking might have been (or even still be) valid, even true. One’s own identity is always a tempting topic, but it will be understood better by a scholar who knows of something else as well. “He who knows only England, of England knows little”: I think that was Kipling. It certainly is not Wells.

The institution of the Canada Research Chair itself serves (intentionally) to associate the name of a state with knowledge, just as at one time Regius Professorships associated the King (Regius in Latin) with learning, and just as the Trudeau Foundation attempts to associate intellect with the present dynasty.

There have been chairs in arcane things for a long time, but Prof. Wells does not hold a chair in classical etymology or metaphysical poetry. A chair in a normal field may at least in theory be held by a Socialist or a Tory, however unlikely the latter case may now be. A chair in “The Public Understanding of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth,” institutionalizes the production of high-status academic discourse, and of a high-status academic personality, on one side of a politically-designated question. It sends a message that ambitious and sophisticated people will hold progressive attitudes toward anything within a parsec of gender, even as it more directly funds the creation of large quantities of credentialized but ostensibly independent discourse justificatory of bureaucratic power.

I pointed some of this out on X (Twitter) some time ago; shortly thereafter the Professor blocked me. There was a time when academics, especially on the left, and I have known a few, relished contradiction as an invitation to argue their point, and took argument as a compliment, necessarily implying that they could hold their own. That time is sadly past; academics have become fragile, almost like bureaucrats. The anti-intellectualism of the left now takes an instrumental view of academic and intellectual activity, seeing thought and study as tools of activism and instruments of politics. Disinterested research is seen as at best an irrelevance; argument as heresy.

The Structure and Style of a Thesis

Prof. Wells’ thesis recounts the experiences of seven (7) teachers chosen from a series of 53 interviews he did in combination with his thesis supervisor, funded by the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The 53 are all described as “sexual minority or gender variant”, or SMGV, educators: The alphabet always grows, driven by factors both bureaucratic and ideological, its obscurity functioning as a kind of outwork preventing adverse commentary from those not fluent in the latest acronymic jargon.

Seven interviews seem a thin basis for a doctoral thesis, but Prof. Wells turns them into 90,000 words. The interviews emerge in two of four essays, with a 30-page introduction and a similar wind-up. Even the two essays that do discuss the experiences of teachers are preoccupied with what might be called theory talk: the interviews provide the occasion for theory, rather than material for analysis.

Wells calls his methodology “queer criticality” — he claims the coinage — which is never clearly described. Here is his introduction to it:4

The queer criticality that I develop and explore as a theoretical construct seeks to bring together and investigate aspects of critical theory, critical pedagogy, poststructuralism, and queer theory.  My aim is not to attempt to reconcile these competing theories to produce a grand narrative or proscriptive way of theorizing; rather, I intend to investigate the productive tensions that a notion of queer criticality can prompt for self-reflexive researchers when these theoretical perspectives are placed in dynamic relationship with one another (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Judith Halberstam (1998) describes this queered approach to theorizing research practice as a “scavenger methodology” (p. 9) that refuses traditional loyalty to disciplinary methods (Plummer, 2005).

The text is grammatical without being fluent or clear; it is thus representative. I have three points, concerning style, genealogy, and method.

Style

The above lengthy passage from page 5 reads like a rhetorical warm-up, and some such methodological preface, with the expected genuflections and disclaimers, is an almost obligatory part of any thesis. But any one of these sentences could be cut and pasted to pretty well any other page of this thesis. Wells is forever announcing theoretical constructs and innovative methods, without actually explaining let alone using them. The theory talk is an affectation, communicating an allegiance, as affectations often do, and also communicating a desire to sound sophisticated, but not telling us much beyond that.

The style is meretricious, its big words straining to disport its learning, even as this claim is refuted by its malapropisms: he really wants to abjure prescriptive theorizing, proscription being something the Romans did, and he means self-reflective, as reflexivity more normally refers to French verbs. The malapropisms go beyond spelling mistakes: are “tensions” in fact prompted by a “notion“, and are they really properties of the researcher, rather than a situation? The language is awkward and overwritten.

Genealogy

Prof. Wells announces in the passage above that he draws upon poststructuralism, critical pedagogy, critical theory, and queer theory (his text is full of lists). This list is more informative than he knows.

Poststructuralism was the intellectual movement sometimes called postmodernism and sometimes post-Marxism, exemplified by writers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes (some people get into angry dogmatic disputes about the precise meanings they think these terms should have, but they are often used as synonyms). Foucault is a particular favourite of Prof. Wells, and though the other two are not mentioned, Wells is also keen on deconstruction, a term originating with Derrida (whether Wells understands it is another question). All of these writers, like most poststructuralists, were within the Marxist tradition.

Critical Pedagogy is a doctrine based upon the writings of the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire, holding that teachers should teach not skills but Marxist doctrine, aiming to create not citizens, but activists. Prof. Wells calls his interview subjects and those he intends to instruct alike “activist-educators.”5 The idea that teachers should teach math, reading, and other normal subjects beneficial to the child, is not broached in his thesis. In this environment, that would be regarded as irredeemably reactionary.

Critical Theory, which Prof. Wells claims to be practicing, is at its best theory aware of its premises and also of its social position. The term contains a distant allusion to Kant’s Critiques, and a more direct reference to Max Horkheimer’s famous essay of 1937 on “Traditional and Critical Theory.” The latter defined critical theory as theory with an emancipatory purpose grounded in a Marxist understanding of power. The economics of the Marxist understanding of power have receded from view — Horkheimer was an intelligent man, and abandoned them himself — but the focus on power, seen through Marxist or para-Marxist spectacles, remains central to the multifarious critical theories of today.

Queer Theory is a large body of academic writing, productive of many citations, growing out of gender theory and postmodernism, and associated with Judith Butler and with the idea that heterosexuality is only considered normal because societies make it so. In other words, heterosexuality is “socially constructed.” This is a bit like announcing that bipedalism is a social construct, though I suppose that with ingenuity and motivation the case could be made. Whether the SSHRC would pony up is another question.

Queer Criticality is therefore an identity-focused re-iteration of often stale cultural Marxist ideas widespread within the academy, if not obligatory. It is congenial to the Liberal Party of Canada, a point to which I shall return.

Method

Prof. Wells announces a “scavenger methodology,” of what he later calls a "critically queer ethnography,”6 but the self-deprecation fails: scavenging is in fact all he is doing, insofar as he moves beyond abstract generalities. Of his four essays, there is no discussion of the ostensible objects of research — the experiences of sexual minority teachers -- until the third of his four essays. There isn’t much flesh to scavenge.

Ethnography is a method of studying a culture, usually another culture, through interviews and observation. Structuralist and poststructuralist anthropology looks particularly for the oppositions that a culture uses to organize itself and its mental picture of the world. This is not happening here: Prof. Wells is celebrating rather than observing let alone analyzing his subjects, interviewing them as allies for motivational and tactical advice. A structuralist ethnography of Wells’ subjects would observe that, as with this dissertation, their discourse is structured around simple and overlapping binary oppositions between open and closed, tolerant and prejudiced, inclusive and oppressive, diverse and “heteronormative”. That last term and its cognates occur 101 times (it being one of the advantages of reading PDFs that one can easily quantify a writer’s tics.)

Quite unintentionally, Prof. Wells’ dissertation emphasizes with its frequent allusions to famous Frenchmen its own second-hand, derivative character. A doctoral thesis is supposed to be an original contribution to knowledge: there is little originality here, nor anything resembling a contribution to empirical knowledge.

The Professor of Power

Foucault is admired by Wells, and cited 27 times, as is Freire (PDFs again). Foucault is best known for his history of sexuality, which Wells quotes as canon, but his most formidable work was The Order of Things (1966), which argued (to summarize a bit) that academic disciplines were political projects, articulating the agendas of power. Any resemblance to queer theory or critical race theory is strictly coincidental.

Nor am I being entirely facetious: Foucault had a point that academic life was shaped by power. Whatever the absurdities of his Marxist politics, which began with a concern for oppressed people (homosexuals, lunatics, and prisoners most notably), and ended in support for the Ayatollah, Foucault was deeply learned and also had an insurgent spirit, questioning the premises and preconditions of existing ways of thinking. In his time, he was to some extent a rebel. I doubt that he would have been comfortable with canonization, or had much patience with the reduction of his doctrines to dogma, his once-novel diction to rote incantation.

This brings us to the central contradiction of Prof. Wells’ thesis: its terminology is that of resistance, but its social position that of bureaucratic power. It is a performative contradiction: the oppositional words are contradicted by the act of their articulation from a prestigious place within the state bureaucracy.

Professor Wells bases his thesis on SSHRC (i.e. state)-supported research, and has since thrived in other state institutions, becoming a Professor and a Canada Research Chair, serving as a “diversity consultant” for the Edmonton Public Schools and on the Edmonton Police Board, and being awarded numerous baubles, including the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Medal.7 He is now appointed for life to the Red Chamber. Power is not too upset with him, and yet he will bang on about the need to subvert hegemonic power and its discourses and so forth.

It is not just that he has been appointed to the Senate by Trudeau. He has spent the past twenty years prospering within bureaucratic institutions, quite independently of Trudeau. The Prime Minister will in all likelihood be gone shortly, but those institutions are permanent, and largely independent of elected politicians. For most of the last twenty years, the elected government of Alberta (the level of government responsible for educational policy) has been in Tory hands, and yet the autonomous bureaucracy hires and promotes men like Prof. Wells, who regards conservatism and certainly Christianity as standing human rights violations. His power, or more specifically that of the institutions and the class to which he belongs, is resilient, and largely independent of the elected government.

As I wrote some time ago in Theses on Gender Ideology, the creation of a proliferating mob of oppressed minorities justifies the accumulation of power by the bureaucratic state, and in the case of gender minorities by the educational and child welfare bureaucracies. The ideology of Prof. Wells exemplifies two specific usurpations by unelected permanent bureaucracies: power is taken away from traditional institutions such as the family and the Christian churches, and an attempt is made to prevent democratically elected leaders like Premier Smith from resisting this bureaucratic expansion.

Beneath the rhetoric of resistance to power, a rhetoric the Professor no doubt honestly believes, gender ideology is the ideology of a bureaucratic imperialism steadily expanding its empire into realms previously reserved to the family, the church, and the legislature. Prof. Well’s hostility to the family and also to Christianity is honest, and is reiterated throughout his thesis (repetition is a skill set). But he professes to admire an “audacious democracy,” a phrase borrowed (with attribution) from the critical race theorist Cornel West, and repeated no less than seven times. The Professor’s version of democracy wants to take power away not merely from families and churches, but even from the elected legislature: his audacity is unafraid of self-contradiction.

Legitimation by Expertise, without the Expertise

Professor Wells will not be the first academic to grace the Senate, but we are not getting the avuncular learning of Eugene Forsey. No one will look to Prof. Wells for learned anecdotes or good-humoured repartee. We are getting a cultural Marxist ideologue, and also a deliberate insult to the people of Alberta, whom the senatorial Professor roundly despises. He has, as I pointed out above, something in common with the Prime Minister.

Trudeau like Prof. Wells lives in a world of binary oppositions, a world where the left takes the side of enlightenment, of care for oppressed minorities, and of intellectual sophistication, all opposed to the backwardness, prejudice, and anti-intellectualism both men impute to conservatives. Professor Wells, with his advanced degrees, Canada Research Chair, and record of eleemosynary activism, exemplifies these claims.

But at bottom the Professor’s claim to intellectual authority rests on his doctoral thesis, supposedly a work of original scholarship, but really containing no originality beyond that required to turn the adjective “critical” into a noun, and nothing resembling new information. We have here an ideologue of bureaucratic power, whose writing communicates little interest in ideas except as tools of activism. He is a sad comment on the state of the academy, but will be a good fit for the Liberal Party of Canada.

It has long been obvious that the media is driven by an ideology dictating what issues are covered, how they are covered, and whose voices are treated as serious and worthy of journalistic attention. We all have an ideology, which is to say a worldview that tells us what and who is important and worthy of respect, or at any rate attention. Editors and journalists being human beings — if I may be permitted a hypothesis — they too are unavoidably influenced by ideology.

As one of life’s natural-born Tories, my ideology is deeply out of sympathy with the wokeness that fills the pages of The Globe. But, as a respecter of persons and institutions, for many years I credited their basic honesty. While in graduate school, admittedly some time ago, I did some writing for both major Canadian national papers (The National Post and The Globe and Mail), and that experience reinforced my view that the mainstream media, however often wrong-headed, was at least trying to be honest and fair-minded.

I have changed my mind. As the chiché has it, my view of the elite media’s honesty changed slowly, and then all at once. It has become obvious that for the elite or mainstream media, ideology prevails over accuracy: they report what is narrative-compliant, and discount or simply fail to mention what is not.

Here are three issues of which I have personal knowledge that drove me to change my view:

• The Freedom Convoy: I live and work in downtown Ottawa, on one of the streets mentioned in testimony at the subsequent judicial inquiry (the Public Order Emergencies Commission) into the Emergencies Act. I was not a vaccine skeptic, and was not paying great attention to current events when I heard honking in the street, and going outside found a joyful crowd of people and some really cool trucks. The Globe and the rest of the mainstream media, by contrast, told me that the Confederate Army was pillaging the streets of Ottawa (to summarize, but not by much). I found the convoy participants to be entirely friendly, and after the first few days not even that loud.

• Twitter/X: I read about once a week in The Globe and other elite media that Elon Musk is a bad man and Twitter/X a “hellscape” (the word seems to come up a lot) infested with Nazis. This is not my experience. I have seen very few Nazis on Twitter (though now, post-October 7, quite a few antisemites). Many of the previously banned accounts that Musk has let back on, including those of the satire site Babylon Bee, the feminists Meghan Murphy, Mia Ashton, and Amy Hamm, and the ever-voluble Jordan Peterson, are well worth following. The idea that any of them is “hate speech” is absurd.

• Protest against Gender Ideology: In Ottawa on 9 June 2023, there was a protest against gender ideology in schools organized by Chris Elston, better known as “Billboard Chris.” The Globe’s report announced, “Schools become targets for backlash against LGBTQ rights,” said nothing about the Antifa presence or Antifa violence, and only interviewed people supporting the pro-gender ideology side of the protests. Cognates of “hate” featured prominently in Globe and MSM coverage, when to my observation that emotion came exclusively from the gender ideology side. And, of course, Chris Elston is anything but anti-gay.

Symbols of the far-left terrorist group Antifa are seen here, at that Ottawa demonstration, on the black umbrellas. I saw these and many like them myself. Apparently, The Globe did not.

I attended the June gender ideology protest out of sociological interest, and deliberately wore nothing indicating allegiance to either side. I attempted to speak to people on the pro-gender ideology side, but was met with hostile stares. By contrast, Chris Elston was entirely friendly, as were other prominent critics of gender ideology like Zachary Tisdale and the invaluable Chanel Pfahl (whom I did not then know.)

I made similar observations at the large “Million March for Children” on Parliament Hill in September.

The ideological bias in the mainstream media’s coverage of emotive cultural topics, and of anything related to President Trump or Tucker Carlson, has long been obvious. But it is more jarring when concrete events, not in Washington or on the other side of the world but right in front of my lying eyes, are directly misrepresented.

It would be conceptually possible for a journalist to believe that the Freedom Convoy protesters were wrong about vaccine mandates, or that anti-gender ideology protesters were wrong about transgenderism, or that Musk was taking Twitter in the wrong direction, without flatly making things up, without ignoring inconvenient facts, and without refusing to interview people the journalist disagreed with. But this is not any longer the mainstream media’s practice.

Covering both sides is now denounced as “both-sidesism”, because the media already knows who is right, with a dogmatism secure and undoubted. This decision to abandon any attempt at objectivity or fair-mindedness has been a long time coming. The mainstream media has long been on the left. This is not new: the Nixon campaign complained about it in 1960; Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush chided them for it. But the media decided at some point in the last decade or two to abandon any attempt at fair-mindedness, and to forego skepticism for dogma. That decision is now seriously damaging the credibility of the media, and the damage to their reputation is well-deserved. But it also undermines social comity, and will do much collateral harm, even as it provokes the rise of alternate voices and venues.

For now, nothing they say can be trusted. The mainstream media can only be read as an articulation of power, telling you what power believes, or at any rate what power would like you to believe. This can be quite informative, but it cannot be read naively.

Ms. Dwivedi’s multifaceted resumé also illustrates something of the nature of power in our bureaucratic society: academic institutes, the mainstream media, and pollsters provide credentialization to political operators. A large demi-monde of experts and pseudo-experts provide legitimacy, at least in their own minds, to the ever-growing ambitions of the bureaucratic state, a legitimacy often rooted in newly confected fields of knowledge, “disinformation” chief among them.

The TVO podcast interviews Frank Graves of EKOS Politics about a “Disinformation Index” his polling organization has put together. EKOS finds that people who score high on the "Disinformation Index" are poorly informed, tend to be convoy and conservative supporters, and are misled (can you see this coming?) by Russian propaganda. A pollster’s figures will appear to be neutral, unbiased facts, and the casual reader or podcast listener may take them seriously. But go one level deeper, and this poll bakes its desired conclusions into its premises.

Graves’ "Disinformation Index" presents a set of alleged falsehoods, acceptance of any of which is taken as evidence of ignorance. The problem is that many of the supposed falsehoods are actually true. So when EKOS measures disinformation, its results will be exactly backwards.

Below are the questions used to score a person on "disinformation." Any answer, on any question, other than a hard “no” gets “disinformation” points (source here).

This poll is two years old, dating to February 2022 (in other words, to the Freedom Convoy), but TVO and the PMO’s adviser still consider it valid, or at any rate useful. An evaluation of its list of “disinformation” should of course take account of what might reasonably have been known or thought two years ago.

Running down the seven bullet points:

1. The lab-leak theory of COVID origins was always credible. Even two years ago, it was known that COVID came from Wuhan, China. Many places have markets, but not so many have institutes of virology. We were told that the lab-leak theory was a conspiracy theory, but as I wrote some time ago, an accident in a lab is not a conspiracy: right there rhetoric outran logic. The lab-leak theory is now widely accepted as true, but will still get you 3 disinfo points.

2. That COVID deaths were exaggerated is easy to argue, given the obvious fact that most people who died with COVID were elderly and also had other medical problems, and the equally obvious fact that there were incentives to attribute deaths to COVID.

3. The #TwitterFiles and associated reporting show government agencies doing their best to manipulate social media in a pro-vax direction. The #TwitterFiles emerged since this poll, but official manipulation of social media has long been obvious, as the notorious Hunter Biden laptop of 2020 story made clear. As with point 2, the authorities were selling a story.

4. I am not a doctor, and have no opinion on Ivermectin. But saying that will get a disinformation point, though not answering this question at all will (uniquely) avoid getting any such points.

5. I have no opinion on infertility, except to say that new technologies often have unintended consequences (Google Thalidomide), and that expressing doubt will get you another “disinformation” point or two.

6. It was insisted that COVID vaccines could not alter DNA. There are now studies indicating that mRNA might alter DNA. These reports were fact-checked by the Associated Press as false. Except that the AP’s own fact check quotes a study’s author to the effect that more studies are needed about mRNA behaviour in real life, outside a petri dish (second last para: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-vaccine-sweden-study-986569377766). “We don’t know” is not the same as “it can’t happen.” This study came out six months after Graves’ poll, but again, expressing doubt will get you a disinformation point.

7. Logically, if vaccines were as completely effective as the authorities predicted (or hoped), it would not make a difference to a vaccinated person if someone else carried the COVID virus. But logical thought will get yet more disinformation points.

In other words, doubting official talking points gets you a high "Disinformation" score. Thinking for yourself makes you a rube lacking critical thinking skills, and probably a conspiracist too, in the view of EKOS Polling, as amplified by TV Ontario, The McGill Centre on Technology, Media and Democracy, and the Prime Minister's new communications advisor.

EKOS will be able to point to empirical research and sophisticated statistical methodologies (big words and fancy equations are at hand), and the polls and the methods will all be valid, except that the answers deemed false are in fact true, or at any rate arguable. From a foundation of inverted premises comes the desired result, purporting to show that those Graves, Dwivedi, and their employers dislike are fools in need of reeducation.

This is the world of Supriya Dwivedi, who promises to fight disinformation and conspiracy theories, while actually pushing quite a bit of both, and all in the name of "democracy." It is also the world of regime media, and of state ideological institutions such as the McGill Centre on Whatever and "Democracy." Theirs is a version of "democracy" where obedience is demanded and doubt considered anti-democratic.

The intended direction is obvious: the internet needs to be censored, and control will be imposed, “because democracy!”

The dodge is obvious to anyone who looks under the hood and asks what this “disinformation index” actually measures. I simply Googled “EKOS disinformation index”, to see the questions EKOS uses. Their lab-leak “misinformation”, now widely thought true, jumped out at me, which moved me to go down the remained of the list, giving myself a score of about 15, which means that I am very “disinformed.” But most TVO listeners will not do that, and will accept the pleasant conclusion that people they already despise are fools.

The censors of the managerial elite are obviously pleased with the results, which explains why they are still recycling a two-year-old poll. Along the way, the old Russia-elected-Trump assertion is thrown out, along with the newer Russia-backed-the-Freedom-Convoy line. If one accepts the EKOS finding as an objective result, the effect is to re-validate those cherished falsehoods.

The left has a large armoury of pseudo-academic Institutes, Centres and Foundations for the study of Large Abstractions and Dangers to Democracy, often credentialized by the name of a well-known university, the whole creating a specious illusion of serious research and deep thought. Most are state-funded in one way or another, and duly reach conclusions useful to the bureaucratic state. Those conclusions vary little, and are duly recycled by ideologically aligned mainstream media outlets, this propaganda coming to its natural resting place in the Prime Minister’s Office.

But when you scratch the surface, the premises fall out, and disinformation emerges as little more than skeptical thought.

It would be easy to accuse the Globe and the others of hypocrisy, but that isn’t really the problem. A hypocrite fails to live up to his principles; the problem here is that The Globe’s position is fully in accord with its real principles, if not quite the ones a naive reader might attribute to them. Their real position is that journalists must be somewhere on the left, working for progressive change. Those who fail to conform are right-wing rage merchants, undeserving of the respect and certification due to journalists.

This insertion of a demand for ideological conformity into journalism is not peculiar to The Globe. The presumption that ideological allegiance is a necessary part of the profession is pretty standard at the party training school once known as Ryerson. It is reflected in the silence on Menzie’s arrest from those who now step forward to denounce that of Morin, including Amnesty International, Journalists [do they mean Reporters?] without Borders, PEN Canada, and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

The establishment looks a long way down its nose at the always fund-raising reader-supported Rebel News. The Globe’s claim that Rebel News journalists are not journalists rested on the assertion that they are not asking questions or seeking information, a strange reaction to an arrest immediately preceded by Menzies’ asking Freeland a pointed question about Canada’s policy towards Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. As I argue here, The Globe’s real problem was that Rebel News covers important cultural issues The Globe would prefer not to discuss:

The problem was one of boundaries, and Rebel News transgresses (and not in a good way) too often.

Ms. Morin is indigenous, and this clearly forms a large part of her identity. It certainly formed a central part of The Globe’s story. For the hegemonic ideology, our society consists of a diversity of oppressed groups, and respect is awarded on the basis of one’s place in a complex hierarchy of intersecting oppressions. But even here ideology rules: indigeneity has not earned Tamara Lich any slack from the mainstream media, nor has her skin colour helped Leslyn Lewis. On the contrary, dissenters are seen as aiding the oppressor, and are treated with particular reprobation.

Ricochet, the progressive and supposedly oppositional magazine for which Ms. Morin works, is (inevitably) government-funded. Like a host of leftwing sites — The Tyee, The National Observer, Rabble.ca — Ricochet is in the contradictory position of claiming to be scrappy, independent and oppositional, while in reality subsisting at the pleasure of the state, and on the taxpayer. That reality is not entirely integrated into the self-image of these journals. It is not that they think anything wrong with being on the public payroll (their sense of entitlement is authentically held), it is that they do not see, indeed cannot see, that they serve a purpose within the larger complex of institutions dependent upon the bureaucratic state. They are oppositional, but only up to a point, as Waugh’s Lord Copper might say.

Ricochet claims to be “public interest journalism,” and I don’t doubt that Rebel News sees itself in the same light. Both are activist organizations, which does not necessarily preclude useful journalism. The Economist began as an offshoot of the Anti-Corn Law League, and it would be easy to give more (if less august) examples of journals that pursue a political purpose. A sense of crusading purpose can be motivating.

It used to be possible to pick up a serious paper of record with some confidence that, human foibles and editorial quiffs aside, it would present some kind of credible summary of the state of the world this morning. Those days are over: I still see nothing in The Globe about the protests of European farmers, though they are very keen to tell us about those (less widespread) against the German AfD. We have come back to a situation resembling that of the nineteenth century, when journals had explicit political commitments, and they need to be read in that light.

But the situation contains a structural asymmetry: the left speaks from a position both hegemonic and state-funded; the right is entirely outside the institutions, self-funded, and reliant on the kindness of devotees. Both sides imagine themselves oppositional, the difference being that the right actually is oppositional, while the journals of the left function as farm teams for the mainstream media. Claims to oppressed status are validated by the occasional arrest, admittedly not a pleasant experience however brief, after which the leftist journalist goes back to work somewhere in a large universe of state-adjacent and usually state-funded organizations that produce credentialized journalism.

There is a central and resolved contradiction, an element of false consciousness, within the minds of the leftist media. They think themselves oppositional, speaking truth to power (an inevitable cliché), when in fact they are controlled opposition, telling the state stories it is ready to hear, making demands power regards as legitimate, demands power is often not unhappy to accede to. After all, most of the left’s demands seek an expansion of the state, and the state bureaucrats who run granting agencies find such demands to be entirely reasonable.

By contrast, Rebel News and other populist sites and independent journalists raise issues the establishment wishes to keep closed. They often tell the state that it should shrink, which is definitely beyond bounds. The basic asymmetry, the essential difference, between right and left, populist and para-Marxist, is the contrast between real opposition and controlled opposition. The real opposition will never be Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations, will never get state funding, and when they get arrested, the hegemonic institutions will turn up their noses. But we know who they are, and respect them for it.

The rest of this article leaves the Regius Professor of Misinformation behind, and examines the roots of Tucker’s immense popular following (so many call him Tucker that it feels artificial to call him by other than his Christian name). How does this preternaturally youthful man, with his chinos and blazer and his high-pitched laugh, almost ostentatiously unprepossessing, fill hockey arenas?

The answer lies partly in Tucker’s talent for the English language. He is an excellent writer. But above all the answer lies in the fact that he gives voice to authentic popular feelings about rapid and radical change pushed from above. The mainstream media has been captured by the elite left and refuses to speak for, or even to address, the populace it despises. This leaves half the population to Tucker, who does great things with his opportunity.

I observed in a recent article that, “Tucker Carlson is said to be an extremist, but until about half an hour ago most of his views were pretty mainstream.”1 So the much-

repeated idea that Tucker is “far-right” will not do. It is at best a statement about the limited range of acceptable dinner-party opinion, the accusation unintentionally emphasizing the fact that elite opinion has moved so far to the left that once-normal views now appear far-right.

It is the content of those once-normal views, now execrated as “far-right”, that explains the loyalty and the enthusiasm of Tucker’s audience. Below is a transcript of Tucker speaking to Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black in Edmonton last week. These remarks were extemporaneous, and all the more impressive for it. I have not seen them quoted elsewhere. They summarize the meaning of “Make America Great Again,” among its supporters. As Tucker makes clear, he knows Trump closely and knows and shares Trump’s views. A link to the video is here (transcription mine, starting at 02:40):

Trump is not a radical, at all, and Trump’s vision for America — this is an informed assessment of Trump — Trump's vision for America is like Studio 54, 1978 [laughter]. I'm serious, Trump really loved the America he grew up in, he really loved it, and he means it, loved the people who lived there, he loved its traditions, weird little customs, its idiosyncrasies, and that's kind of what he wants, he doesn't want a brave new future of new things, he wants to return not to antebellum America, but to like 1980 America.

And it's kind of hard to argue why that's bad.  And that's not a revolutinary agenda, nor is it a counter-revolutionary agenda.  It's a return to normalcy, and the phrase "Make America Great Again" means return it to a period not so long ago, when everyone was enfranschised, and everyone had rights, but everyone was roughly, not everyone but most people, were sort of united in a sense of common purpose and culture, they were Americans, and they knew what that meant.  We don't have that anymore.  And that's Trump's vision.  You may not think that's possible, you may not think that's even virtuous, to want that, but if you think that's a grotesque hellscape he's describing, you're the freak, not him!

Tucker’s style is important: the words are direct, the grammar clear, the cadence regular, accumulating meaning and resonance with each added clause. The one idiosyncratic word points very appropriately to unusual and affecting things, and the word is defined, unobtrusively, before it is used. Humour (“Trump’s vision for America is like Studio 54 [in] 1978”) deals deftly with the fact that in 1978 Trump’s world was that of Studio 54, and not of Peoria. The transition to “traditions, weird little customs”, communicates affection for a world Tucker’s listeners know and value, the world of Peoria in 1980, a world many of them (us) remember fondly.

An allusive glance forward to a brave new dystopia and another back to a racist past frame the America that we treasure: normal people with real jobs, with white picket fences and barbeques, people who loved their country. America in 1980 was a pretty solid place, and some of us at any rate recall it like yesterday. Open spaces, opportunity, good fun, and fast cars at the Dairy Queen on a hot summer night: Normalcy.

The idea of normalcy is key to Tucker’s description of Trump’s appeal, and commands recognition from Tucker’s followers and Trump’s voters. Normalcy was not that long ago, and in that time when it was morning in America, everyone was enfranchised and everyone (necessary concessions aside) shared a common sense of nation and culture. Two points stand out: everyone counted politically and everyone shared a sense of cultural unity. That sense of belonging has been damaged by a series of rapid and radical cultural changes that no one was ever asked about and none of us ever voted for.

In the last decade, the bureaucratic state and its minions in the Biden administration have decided that the United States is a problematic nation with a shameful history, that there are many sexes and a spectrum of genders, that radical racial theories should be taught in the schools, that border security is racist, that crime is not an important problem, that a President the bureaucrats didn’t like should be smeared as a Russian agent, that those who protested Biden’s election should be jailed, and that anyone who dissents is a semi-Facsist MAGA extremist who shouldn’t count. Tucker does not need to recite the litany because his listeners are well aware of it.

The America of white picket fences and Buicks and barbecues, the America loved by MAGA and by Tucker, was for the left — the freaks as Tucker calls them— a patriarchal hellscape, and probably racist too, and the freaks are doing their considerable best to destroy it. Tucker can see that and describes what he sees with clarity, humour, and with an ingenuous, uncontrived charm, his very normality a stylistic reproof to the freaks.

The freaks believe in a para-Marxist eschaton, an ideal future of perfect equity, and without dissatisfaction. The old Marxist slogan, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” will need updating to replace gendered pronouns, but the promise of an ideal society without conflict and without inequality remains. You will own nothing, consume little, and be happy, or maybe just have enough fentanyl to get along. The freaks are very angry with anymore more ambitious.

The two visions are radically opposed. One is an impossible utopia the pursuit of which leads directly to an over-administered hell; the other existed not so long ago and was actually pretty good. In pursuit of its perverted eschaton, the left has used its recently acquired state power to effect radical cultural change, producing immediate evils in pursuit of a vision alike impossible and repulsive.

The social roots of the two visions could not be more different, as popular patriotism faces ongoing and multidimensional attacks from an elite intelligentsia. Left and right are terms comprehensible enough, but upper and lower capture the power imbalance better: The elite left despises the popular right. We are under attack from above, and Tucker sees that.

The view of the populace taken by the left is patronizing in its essence, and authoritarian in its consequences: if the people are too stupid to know their own interests, or too distracted by anger and resentment, then why let them make their own choices? Why let them vote at all? Why not just fix the election for their own good, or import more malleable voters, if the state already knows that citizens are idiots?

In the seventeenth century, Sir Robert Filmer saw the people as children in need of government by their wise father, the King. Locke took the opposite view that each would know best his own interests, and pointed his Two Treatises of Government squarely at Filmer. Today’s elites have replaced the king with an enlightened bureaucracy staffed (not coincidentally) by themselves, but their disdain for the citizenry remains, as do the authoritarian implications of their disdain. But they are less honest than Filmer, who at least did not have to pretend to respect the people that he and his King patronized.

The left cannot avoid this accusation of false consciousness with its authoritarian implications: to recognize that the American or the Albertan people may know their own interests better than the leftist elite would entail an abandonment of valued parts of the elite’s para-Marxist ideology. The abandonment of the idea that America (and Canada too) was in essence a patriarchal hellscape would entail the abandonment of the elite’s eschatology, and with that, the freaks would lose their purpose and the justification of their power. Much easier to call Tucker a racist, and they control enough newspapers to convince themselves that they must be right.

Unlike his critics, Tucker does respect the people he addresses, and he loves the country they love, the America he speaks of with unfeigned affection, the America the bureaucratic left is so aggressively destroying. Unlike his critics, Tucker knows that people don’t like being bossed around, especially by moralistic fussbudgets who transparently despise them, fussbudgets who too much enjoy their power, the same freaks who so regularly get so much so wrong, who not quite unintentionally destroy everything they touch.

Most people know who respects them and who does not, and have common sense enough to remember where they have been, and to see where they are being taken. Tucker articulates with great skill what we already know, and that is why Tucker attracts the loyalty of his audience, and the anger of the freaks.

Hegemonic opinion struggles to understand Carlson, and struggles even harder to understand his appeal. The standard talking point is that he lies in order to enrage, and thus to generate views or clicks, and yesterday, like clockwork, University of Alberta Professor Timothy Caulfield appeared in The Walrus with an article entitled, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Tucker Carlson.” Running down a list of Carlson’s supposed lies, Caulfield concludes with an attempt to understand Carlson’s audience, whose size and enthusiasm so disturb elite opinion. On the facts, Caulfield is almost uniformly wrong; of Carlson’s appeal, he is simply uncomprehending.

Caulfield is a former Trudeau Foundation Fellow, a Canada Research Chair, and a member of the Order of Canada. He is the voice of the state, and wants you to know it. In another society, he would be Sir Timothy Caulfield, KCMG, OBE, Regius Professor of Something Grand. Here, the honours system of the Ottawa state has bestowed upon him such marks of favour as it has available; thus credentialized he dutifully appears as an authority in the official media.1 He’s the guy in the explainer, adjudicating the disputed facts, calling the ones he doesn’t like conspiracy theories, and telling you what the authorities want you to think.

His venue is equally august: The Walrus is a bien pensant literary magazine, overlapping at many points with The Globe and Mail and the CBC, full of CanCon stars like Margaret Atwood, and funded by governments, foundations, and corporations looking to burnish their cultural image and their nationalist credentials. These people despise Carlson, and Caulfield is their man.

Caulfield runs down a list of four italicized statements that he attributes to Carlson, claiming that each is false, and appends outside the italicized headings two more ostensible falsehoods, one about Dominion Voting Machines, the second a supposed admission of lying from Carlson himself. Caulfield does not provide references for most of these statements, but I am a frequent listener to Carlson’s shows, and they sound credible, though none come from his Calgary or Edmonton talks. Clearly, Caulfield has been preparing his invective for some time.

Six Assertions Caulfield Claims Are Lies

1. Carlson says “white supremacy is a ‘hoax’: The problem is one of definition: for Carlson as for most normal people, “white supremacy” names systems of explicit racism such as that in the old Jim Crow South. But for left-wing academics like Caulfield, “white supremacy” has a new meaning derived from academic Marxism, and more precisely from the Marxist feminist bell hooks (upper case is a bourgeois affectation) of which more here. In its new sense, “white supremacy” names the social system of the United States (and Canada) today. Caulfield is pleased to remind us that the U.S. has a history of white supremacy, but Carlson is obviously right that talk of “white supremacy” in its commonly understood sense is today absurd. White supremacists do exist, but don’t get out of their mother’s basement much.

2. Carlson says “vaccines didn’t work”: Caulfield presents a set of figures to the effect that vaccines reduce mortality rates, and that may be so. But it is also true that COVID vaccines were not as effective as advertised, and do not prevent transmission as we were told. Much would depend on context and surrounding modifiers, not provided by Caulfield: Carlson would be correct to say that COVID vaccines do not work as advertised.

3. Carlson says there are secret US biolabs in Ukraine: No less a source than Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland has said that there are biological laboratories in Ukraine, that the U.S. is involved with their management, and that there are concerns about their security given the current war.2 The word “secret” is here carrying too much weight. Strike it out, and Carlson is right.

4. Carlson says “white men created civilization”: Civilization comes from the Middle East, and for the past five hundred years the most advanced civilization on earth has been that of Europe, a fact that Carlson knows but that the left wants us to be ashamed of. Caulfield says that Carlson’s statement, “doesn’t even deserve a reality-adjusting debunk,” but again Carlson is right, with perhaps a concession to China along the way, unless Caulfield wants to suggest that Middle Eastern men are not white.

5. Carlson admits to lying, says Caulfield: In a discussion with the popular podcaster Dave Rubin, Carlson admitted that, like all human beings, he lies sometimes, but does his best to avoid it. Caulfield is being disingenuous: this is an admission of human frailty, not of regular, deliberate, or politically functional lying. Caulfield is cherry-picking words rather than listening to the whole minute: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tucker-carlson-fox-news-dave-rubin-b1919738.html.

6. Carlson disbelieved Dominion Voting Systems allegations he made publicly, says Caulfield: Caulfield cites internal Fox News documents, alleged to show that Carlson lied. But here is Carlson on-air, via Megyn Kelly, on 19 November 2020, dismissing Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s Dominion allegations, the ones Caulfield alleges he pushed on Fox (start at 08:10):

Carlson’s on-air views agreed entirely with those in Fox documents, except for being a bit more polite. Caulfield is one of many to get this one wrong. What with Fox News, a lawsuit, a big settlement, and Carlson fired by Fox, the congenial conclusion is very pleasant and refuted only by the facts.

Caulfield’s Confirmation Bias

I have run down six alleged lies, and on each Caulfield is wrong and Carlson right. This sits uneasily with Caulfield’s self-comportment as the voice of empirical reason, fighting the forces of darkness and right-wing Fox News conspiracy-theory misinformation.

Caulfield has some misinformation of his own, and I’ll stick to two brief examples. Tucker, he says, “has called transgender people ‘a cancer on the country.’” Professor Empirical doesn’t give the full quotation, but Google did: “The ideology [of transgenderism] leads to the castration of children and therefore it's bad. It's a cancer on the country.”3 Pronouns have meanings, even today, and “it” is an ideology, not a people.

The professor of misinformation didn’t read more than the first line, which was obviously too confirmatory to move past.

A second example of misleading claims from Caulfoild is his citation of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the effect that hate groups are growing in number. The SPLC numbers among these groups Moms for Liberty (which wants gender ideology and pornography out of schools), and the conservative Family Research Council. They have also named Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Carlson himself as hate figures, calling Carlson “anti-democracy,” an absurd claim I disassemble here. The SPLC is not a reliable source, but does point to the circular and self-referential character of leftist discourse about “hate.”

As I argued in the earlier post, the transparently polemical nature of the SPLC’s claims will undermine its credibility over the long term, while in the short term providing validation for people like Caulfield who need to cite a putatively neutral expert factory (Leslyn Lewis’ wonderful term). Confirmation bias afflicts us all, but the left’s large universe of foundations, NGOs, universities, journals, and activist groups is so big, well-funded, and well-credentialled that they are particularly prone to it, and here Caulfield unintentionally exemplifies the problem.

The Pleasures of Polemic

Carlson’s supporters present a problem for Caulfield, who — credit where it is due — attended Carlson’s Edmonton event, along with 8,000 others. Caulfield’s answer, buttressed by academic links, is primarily psychological, with a side of patronizing superiority:

It involves everything from social media echo chambers to a lack of critical thinking skills to vulnerabilities created by fear, anger, mental health challenges, and/or economic stress. And, of course, ideologically fuelled confirmation biases play a significant role. We all want “our team” to win.

So half the country is motivated by fear and anger, with a superadded charge of stupidity. The reference to economic stress alludes to the old Marxist concept of false consciousness: the idiots won’t follow me, they are too benighted to know their own interests.

Caulfield’s problem is unintentionally exposed by his rhetoric: seeking to strike a note of cool, academic, fact-based analysis, he often slides into angry clichés: “alternative facts, “post-truth poster boy,” “spewing lies,” “pants on fire,” “fact-free pontifications,” are but a representative selection. Caulfield cannot decide if he wants to write a polemic or an analysis.

A good polemic can be a pleasure, though perhaps not of the most edifying kind. That is one reason why I enjoy Tucker (and now that I am enjoying him, I’ll drop the surname). The CBC, he says, tells him constantly that, “I’m a racist, because I drive an SUV and I’m not trans.” Tucker offers in those twelve words more authentic perception than anything Caulfield writes, and is wickedly funny too.

Alinsky was right that power hates being mocked, and Tucker knows that: “I look forward to your mockery of the people who misrule you,” were his concluding words in Edmonton.

Readers of The Walrus will not notice Caulfield’s misadventures with facts, and his angry rhetoric will give them the pleasures of a confirmatory echo chamber. But his, and their, spittle-flecked incomprehension will remain. It is the incomprehension of class hatred and also of class fear. As we have learned, the fears of an elite with a police force and a banking system can be dangerous.

In my next post, I shall leave the Regius Professor of Misinformation behind, and look further not at Caulfield’s errors but at Tucker’s appeal.

29 January 2024: Part 2 up:

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Glenn Greenwald

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Self-anointed "fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false con…

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4 years ago · 1225 likes · 1122 comments · Glenn Greenwald