Mainstream journalists, inasmuch as they share the perspective which has come to dominate Western Culture, glory in its popularity among certain elites while having no idea of its inherent irrationality, no idea that it is a bias which any objective person would peremptorily dismiss with utter disdain.
“Conservative” politicians who seem poised to assume power in any Western nation, are inevitably submitted to vicious attacks in the mainstream press. Pierre Poilievre, the head of Canada’s Conservative Party, is no exception. An opinion piece in The Globe and Mail of Oct. 21 by journalist Shannon P:roudfoot, is typical. While attempting to expose Poilievre as an arrogant jerk, it simply reveals her own abject bias.
Her article focuses on a rather infamous Oct. interview caught on video in which journalist Don Urquhart questions Poilievre about the dire impact of his “populist” views. Throughout the exchange, which takes place in a B.C. orchard, Poilievre continues chewing on an apple in an obvious display of disdain for his questioner. Proudfoot’s piece indicts him both for the apparent arrogance of his behavior and his refusal or inability to answer the questions put before him. Yet while she clearly sees the interview as an example of the divisiveness caused by belligerent “conservatives” such as Poilievre, he appears to have concluded that the very nature of Urquhart’s questions was belligerent and divisive.
As I have said repeatedly throughout these blogs, “progressives” specialize in avoiding discussions of the actual merits of any “conservative” position by simply hurling insults at them. The term “populist” is perhaps the most common of these, those so designated apparently being ignorant, uneducated racists simply incapable of understanding the merits of Inclusiveness. While the liberalism that blossomed in the 60s purported to be concerned with the well-being of the common man, it has now evolved into an elitist ideology utterly disdainful of those who don’t share its sheik, neo-Marxist narrative.
Urquhart asks Poilievre about his populist beliefs, suggesting he has taken a page out of Donald Trump’s book. Poilievre asks him to define “populism” and specify just what he has in common with Trump. His response, I would suggest, was born of his conviction that the reporter’s question was implicitly insulting, affiliating him with what Leftists have come to loathe as the cancer of populism and, even worse, the specter of Satan himself, Donald Trump, while asking nothing substantial about his policies. It is Poilievre, nevertheless, whom Proudfoot indicts for refusing to answer Urquhart’s apparently reasonable questions.
She then goes on to cite an interview she conducted with the Conservative leader in which she asked him if he felt responsible for some of the hate crimes committed as a result of his beliefs. In 2014, he responds, he had received death threats in his home’s mail box as a result of journalist Steve Maher’s scathing criticism of his support for the Fair Elections Act. Was Maher responsible for those death threats, he asks, or is the Left’s strategy of indicting any critical comments lodged by “conservatives” as incitements to violence, a matter of sheer hypocrisy? The grossly exaggerated narrative that Canada’s Residential Schools were genocidal in intent, has led to the torching of dozens of Catholic churches here in Canada. Are those responsible for pushing that narrative, including multiple self-righteous journalists, academics, etc., all somehow responsible for these arsons, or is there a double standard in effect here, the Left being entitled to launch its social/political criticisms with utter impunity, while perfectly rational “conservatives” are blamed for heinous acts they never for a second intended to incite. While I have engaged in criticisms of the tenets of Islam, both past and present, I was truly saddened when a white psychopath used his truck to mow down 4 perfectly innocent Muslims in London, Ont. in 2021. My criticisms of Islam are rooted in Reason rather than Hatred. Poilievre made the very same point in his interview with Proudfoot, saying that he had never said anything with the intention of provoking an act of violence. Yet the point of Proudfoot’s Globe article is that in both his interview with her as well as with Urquhart, Poilievre had petulantly resorted to an “us-versus-them” tactic, retreating to “debate-club fisticuffs” in an effort to throw his questioners “off balance” and simply “run away.” She is, that is to say, completely unaware of the fact that the very nature of the questions posed him implied he is an intolerant, racist jerk, that in asking him to explain his “populism,” he was actually being asked to justify his abysmal ignorance.
Yes, we live in a time of radical political discord which those on the Left like to attribute to the belligerence of leaders such as Poilievre and Trump. Problem is, those simpletons given to this narrative are completely unaware that their intolerance for any point of view other than their own and their willingness to use their influence in various public domains to cancel all such dissent, is condescending, ignorant, oppressive, anti-democratic and utterly worthy of the anger it incites among “conservatives.” That people like Urquhart and Proudfoot see themselves as journalists rather than biased ideologues, is truly depressing.