Journalism or Demagoguery?

The three articles I am going to cite from The Globe and Mail of Feb. 26 were all designated as “opinion pieces.” This would no doubt be used in their defense as something other than objective journalism. But the sheer bias, the arrogance and ignorance manifest in each of them, is something “conservatives” have to endure on a daily basis in this country. The writer of each piece is of course utterly unaware of his or her bias, each clearly wondering what the hell the Freedom Convoy and its tens of thousands of Canadian supporters had to be upset about.

In the opening paragraph of her article, Robyn Urback refers to the “feral” rage evident on the streets of Ottawa which led some protesters to “spit in the faces of journalists” because they apparently “were seen as collaborating in their ongoing oppression.” Such incidents, not terribly violent though certainly unacceptable, were rare though Urback disingenuously uses them to characterize the entire crowd. At the same time I find her her lack of self-awareness regarding the source of that rage remarkable inasmuch as I no longer watch or read 90% of the mainstream media because of its relentless, political bias. Later in that same paragraph, tacitly admitting the fact that 99% of the protesters were smiling and singing our national anthem, Urback refers to the “crude type of glee” that seemed to have infected the crowd. So the few who turned nasty were little more than animals [i.e., “feral”], but so also were the thousands who showed no inclination to violence whatsoever, their glee being of that crude, ignorant, degenerate kind typical of “conservatives.”

In her article Beverley McLachlin declares the Freedoms which the convoy and its supporters purported to be defending were problematic: “Freedom from what?” “Freedom to do what?” And beyond that, “Where do my freedoms end and the freedoms of others begin?” In a later paragraph she states succinctly: “Freedom is not absolute bur subject to reasonable limits.”

I agree. But were rational criteria of Law and Order applied to the rampages of B.L.M. throughout the U.S. in 2020? Have the Indigenous disrupting the lives of the people in Caledonia, Ontario, for a couple of decades now been subjected to “reasonable” restrictions? Have the environmental radicals who have illegally disrupted various energy projects throughout North America been subjected to the sort of martial law we saw invoked in Ottawa? Of course not! While I cannot say for certain, I would wager heartily that McLachlin has had little to offer on the violations to the Rights of Others perpetrated by any of these darling projects of the Left.

In a display of idiocy I have come to expect from Andrew Coyne, he attempts to defend Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act by asserting it did not give the government the right to seize private bank accounts but rather “it was the police, not the government, and they could only freeze them.” I fail to see the difference between freezing and seizing. Nor, I would contend, does it much matter who precisely has put an end to my economic freedom! At the same time the “Act” allowed authorities to keep people like Tamara Lich behind bars without bail though she had no criminal record whatsoever, the threat she posed to the government apparently far outweighing the threat to the general public posed by the myriad of felons released buy our legal system every day of the week.

Coyne refers to the crowds in Ottawa as a “group of half-crazed anti-vaxxers.” This is a brazen lie. The vast majority of the truckers and their supporters had in fact been vaccinated. What they wanted to discuss were certain aspects of the almost two year lockdown that seemed arbitrary if not hypocritical, some “elites” appearing to be exempt from strictures to which others were vigorously submitted. Of course our P.M. refused to even talk to them!

In his opening paragraph Coyne cites “the weirdly distorted perspective” of the convoy’s apologists: “The minor imposition of vaccine mandates was painted as a nightmarish assault on liberty.” I have been alone with my computer for two years now but to Coyne that is just a minor imposition. I know of several folks who died in nursing homes with extremely restricted access to their kids while drug and alcohol abuse, depression, suicides, have all skyrocketed since the lockdown began, but all such issues are, apparently, mere minor impositions.

Coyne admits there were valid arguments against invoking the Emergencies Act. “The best was that the circumstances did not meet the stringent definition of an emergency set out in the law.” This is an objective fact to anyone not crippled by bias. Yet a couple of sentences later Coyne disingenuously suggests it’s all a “matter of opinion!” Doing his very best to minimize the outrage of Trudeau’s brazen abuse of power, he points out that the police, including those mounted on horseback, were more than circumspect in dealing with the crowds. Yes, a few people were injured but in general, he proudly declares, the police showed little tendency to violence. What he fails to mention is that they had little cause to do so inasmuch as 99% of those they were dealing with were PEACEFUL!

Trudeau demonized the truckers and their supporters as a bunch of racists, misogynists, fascists, etc. Video evidence clearly shows racial and religious minorities were present in the crowds. And what the hell does misogyny have to do with any of this? But as mindlessly stereotyping those who disagree with them has become compulsive to those on the Left, none of the “journalists” cited above took Trudeau to task for his ignorant pronouncements. Indeed Urback engaged in the same sort of “logic,” using a spitting incident to indict tens of thousands of flag waving patriots as “feral.” In the same way the mainstream media seized gleefully upon the presence of a Swastika in the Ottawa crowd, failing to so much as consider that the owner of the flag in question might be declaring not his own political affiliation but the fascistic tendencies of our beloved Prime Minister, you know, the guy who said he likes the way the government of China gets things done!

The political situation in the West is so much more complicated than our “progressive journalists” are prepared to admit, yet the vast majority of them pontificate sanctimoniously day after day with nary a hint of awareness that they are in fact brazen Ideologues who long ago ceased to be interested in anything approaching the Truth!