The Cultural Politics of Rebel News
The Rebel focuses on cultural issues that elites prefer to silence. That is why they won't call David Menzies a journalist. (1200 words, 6 minute read)
The arrest of David Menzies has forced the mainstream media to pay unusual and unwanted attention to Rebel News, an organization normally treated with disdainful silence. That customary silence reflects not merely a guild protecting its status, but also a desire to close discussion on cultural questions that Rebel covers and the elite media treats as closed, or ignores altogether.
The Globe and Mail deplored the arrest even as they denied that Menzies was a journalist and that Rebel News practices journalism, and their disdain was shared by the CBC, CTV, and the Canadian Press, the CP calling Menzies a “commentator” and a “personality” rather than a journalist or reporter.1 Menzies’ arrest generated so much online comment that it became impossible for the elite media to maintain its usual silence.
Here is The Globe and Mail’s Shannon Proudfoot claiming that Rebel News is not news:2
Proudfoot’s own article refutes her claim that Rebel doesn’t seek real answers to real questions: “Ms. Freeland, how come the IRGC [Islamic Revolutinary Guard Corps] is not a terrorist group?” asked Menzies, and it is a good question, given that Freeland was leaving a memorial for those killed by the IRGC. Rebel News’ founder and CEO Ezra Levant had the best answer to Proudfoot’s statement that Rebel isn’t “even advancing an ideological line of thought”:3
If you don’t think we have an ideology, then I think you’re missing it, because
pretty clearly we do.
Rebel News is a Canadian organization that maintains correspondents in most of the English-speaking world, and frequently deploys them to cover stories in other countries. Rebel reporters are now in Davos covering the World Economic Forum, illustrating my central point: Rebel covers stories the mainstream or elite media don’t want to talk about.
Here is a list of stories Rebel has covered, and the elite media as exemplified by The Globe and Mail either slighted or ignored completely:
The Freedom Convoy: The elite media, led by the Globe, reported at uncritical length the anguish of government bureaucrats in downtown Ottawa, reeling under the impact of microaggressions, while failing to interview participants in, let alone leaders of, the Freedom Convoy. Rebel was on the ground every day.
Dutch and German Farmer Protests: The Globe carries nothing on 2023 Dutch farmer protests against emissions regulations, and their only notice of recent German protests focuses on allegations of “extremism.”4 Rebel is on these topics frequently, often talking to participants.
Gender Ideology: Globe coverage of anti-gender ideology protests was thin, and completely avoided interviewing leaders, though John Ibbitson did call Chris Elston “vile.”5 Rebel by contrast actually speaks to organizers and participants. David Menzies himself has done much to report on outrageous invasions of women’s spaces (such 50-year-old men in girls’ showers) in the name of transgenderism.6
Drag Shows: The Globe’s coverage of the related issue of sexual performances in front of children follows the same pattern, as I observed here. Rebel, by contrast, covers the issue extensively, again often speaking to participants in demonstrations.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: The Globe brooks no dissent, while Rebel covers the sillier aspects of DEI with a delectation that speaks of confirmation bias.7
Antisemitic Protest: The Globe will always downplay the antisemitic character of antisemitic protest, when they don’t ignore it entirely. Such references as there are to death threats and antisemitic chants are relegated to the opinion pages.8
Church Burnings: Eighty-three Christian churches have been burned in Canada in recent years, but a search for “church burnings” on theglobeandmail.com will get much about Donald Trump, but nothing about church burnings in Canada. Rebel covers the issue extensively.9
Mass Immigration: Globe and Mail senior editor Ibbitson has called for high levels of immigration in order to defeat populism.10 Rebel News has a staff very likely more ethnically diverse than the crowd of self-hating Anglo-Saxons who write The Globe, and regularly flags the problems with mass immigration.
I began compiling this list of contested issues thinking that perhaps four or five examples would suffice to make the point. Here we have eight issues often highlighted by Rebel News, but slighted or treated as settled by the elite media, as exemplified by The Globe. It would not be difficult to keep going (censorship, of libraries and of social media would easily make two more, getting us to ten).
The point is the pattern: these are largely cultural issues, discussion of which is disdained by power in the form of The Globe and Mail. All of these issues — from popular protest, to gender ideology in its various articulations, to the racism of DEI, to Canada’s traditional Judeo-Christian identity, to mass immigration — speak of rapid elite-organized cultural change. The cultural nature of these issues is key. They represent in one way or another an attempt by power to intervene in citizens’s lives, and often in the most personal and significant ways.
The social patterns are clear: Change is rapid and insistent; skepticism is racist or something-phobic, which is to say forbidden. Change is always leftward, and attacks the liberties of the subject, while aggrandizing the powers of the state. Institutionally, change comes from state bureaucracies and from universities that serve as the think tanks and training schools of the bureaucratic state, while resistance is often spontaneous and unorganized. In class origin, change comes from the intelligentsia, and is resisted by the working and lower middle classes. Geographically, change comes from the metropole, in Canadian terms the Laurentians, and is resisted by the provinces. Change is pushed from above, and resisted from below.
It is not that The Globe, the voice of the metropolitan bureaucracy, thinks the issues I have listed unimportant. The opposite is true: cultural issues are passed over in tight-lipped silence precisely because The Globe, like the rest of establishment opinion, considers its position on these questions to be very important indeed, so important that it wants to remove them from the realm of legitimate debate. That is what is going on in the denial of journalistic status to The Rebel. The unacceptables are denied legitimacy. They are kept outside in the snow.
“They are performance artists vamping for cash and attention”, sniffs The Globe’s Proudfoot, and like all the best propagandists, she has half a point: Rebel News has no oligarchic owner, has trouble attracting the Mercedes dealers who float above my Globe and Mail headlines, has been demonetized without substantive explanation from YouTube, and gets no government money. In contradistinction to its cultured despisers, Rebel is self-funding. Their audience is all they have, and their presentation is that of a popular tabloid, or of Sheila Gunn Reid’s kitchen table, rather than that of the gray lady of Front Street. The difference in style speaks of the immense social distance between The Globe and The Rebel. It is the social distance between hegemony and dissent. And sometimes here in Canada, dissenters get arrested.
Silence is the most august response of which power is capable, observed the French philosopher Georges Bataille. The elite media, the mouthpiece of hegemonic opinion, would like to draw lines around what we may say and what we may think. That they have been obliged to break their silence, and to let the deplored name of Rebel News into their pages is evidence that their power is in decline. That is a good thing, and much to Rebel’s credit.
Globe on Dutch Farmer protests in 2023: search finds nothing (no URL available); on German farmers: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-blockade-of-german-ministers-ferry-by-farmers-sparks-radicalization/;
So good. Nothing to add. I don't read or listen to Rebel News, but they play an important role in Canadian cultural discourse, and an increasingly important one, as you say. I am very disappointed in Ibbitson. btw. I used to read the G&M every Saturday for many many years, and always found it balanced but of late, its as woke as the rest of the Canadian MSM. I always enjoyed reading Ibbitson, I though he was reasonable. But on gender, fuck me, has he drunk the Koolaid. His commentary on trans issues is inaccurate, unfair and down right prejudicial. He has genuinely beclowned himself. Rebel, on the other hand, court jesters though they may sometimes be, are the real honest actors.
I will also say your observation about these cultural matters being important to the Establishment is perfect. A you note they are SO important to them that they will not brook even simple discussion about them, let alone disagreement. Even opening these matters to discussion (opening the Overton Window in a way) is very threatening to them.