Mark Carney, Canada’s new Prime Minister, recently held his first press conference from which the conservative Rebel News Network was banned. This was hardly a surprise inasmuch as the Trudeau government had repeatedly spurned the network as a hateful disseminator of far-right lies. I subscribe to The Rebel and see its various commentators as rational, intelligent human beings from whom I rarely hear anything that is “hateful.” My advice to Carney would be that if questions levelled at him are truly rife with racism, misogyny, etc., why not use such opportunities to expose the vileness of your political opponents? Were I in politics I would welcome the opportunity to expose the absurdity of statistical mandates based on Identity, the superficial notion that if 20% of a population is Purple, then 20% of those in every “privileged” realm of society ought also to be Purple. Yes, questions from the Woke who simply ignore the realities of Human Nature would be welcomed in my press conferences!
Of course the Liberal Party’s attempts to silence Rebel News is but one example of the disgusting, authoritarian “cancel culture” that the Left has normalized here in the West over the last few decades. If you disagree with “progressives,” you are a Hater, pure and simple. I would hope that Mr. Poilievre, should he become our next Prime Minister, would reinstate Free Speech as an absolutely essential element of any healthy Democracy. At the same time, while I understand his anger with those who tried to silence him over the last few years, I am appalled that Mr. Trump seems to have succumbed to the same urge to “cancel” those who object to his policies.
Karoline Leavitt’s recent appearance on the Stephen Colbert show was truly spectacular. As Trump’s Press Secretary, she responded to Colbert’s relentless attacks with courage and intelligence. Yet her insistence that A.P. and Reuters had been banned from Trump’s press conferences because they were perpetrators of “misinformation,” smacks of the same anti-democratic dementia typical of the Left. Allow your detractors their voices, Mr. Trump, countering the inanity of their criticisms with the simple common sense of your policies. If you are unable to do so of course, those policies may in fact need to be altered. That’s how Freedom of Speech works in a healthy Democracy!
While I do not agree with Leavitt’s characterization of alternative points of view as “misinformation,” she does seem to me a wonderful, articulate defender of conservative values. The ladies of The View obviously do not agree. Indeed the relentless mockery to which they submitted her on a recent episode illustrates why this Blog is called The Politics of Hate. The View, that is to say, is a perfect example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the contemporary Left. Such will be the topic of my next discussion.