The Globe goes Antifa
The mainstream media is culpably ignorant of leftist violence (1200 words, 6 min.)
A “dog whistle” is a slogan that is recognized only by its intended recipients and missed by the generality of hearers or readers. It refers to a high-pitched whistle that can only be heard by a dog, and not by a person.
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.
There is a book We Keep Us Safe; see also https://progressive.org/magazine/who-keeps-us-safe-we-keep-us-safe-gen%C3%A7er-20241009/.