Liberals Censoring Thought: It's For Your Own Good

The federal Liberals— having time on their hands with, apparently, no vaccines to distribute— have decided that the people who brought you the Covid-19 catastrophe are the ones to decide what is permissible on the Internet. So they’re introducing a bill to promote “content moderation” 

Canadian Heritage Minister Stephane Guilbeault says that his censors will scour the worldwide web to identify Wrong Think. “Once a publication is flagged it will have to be taken down within 24 hours,” says the minister. Hey, who’s not going to trust a guy who was a director and campaign manager for Greenpeace for ten years? Or a PM who— looks at card— sorry, this column is only 800 words.

No doubt this Red Guard purging of thought will prove efficacious to Guilbault and his holy leader Justin as they try to win a majority in the next election. At this point in the festivities it might be germane to quote Orwell, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” But the irony would be lost on the zealots in Ottawa, their sheeple constituents who buy this stuff and their media acolytes who spew enviro-speak. 

They are virtuous. Only they can recognize sedition. Impure thoughts will be consigned to the trash file. Give them the power.

We have seen this media purging of WrongThink since Prince Barack of Martha’s Vineyard became president. In  just in the past week alone, two major stories that blanketed progressive media were admitted to be fake. The dead security guard at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not, as MSNBC, CNN, PBS  and others insisted, hit in the head with a fire extinguisher by rioters. He died at home later of two strokes.

Nor was there ever a Russian bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan— a canard employed widely against Trump before the election. But that is of a piece with so many bogus stories pushed by mendacious liberal media during the Trump years.

Why did you not hear of these? As Churchill noted, “A lie will be halfway round the world before truth ever gets its pants on.” It is some cold comfort that, at least, mainstream media’s  grip on a younger generation is waning. Author and psychiatrist Jordan B. Peterson notes that, in his perch in academia, CNN, The New York Times, ABC, BBC, and more “are so dead to millennials that their death hasn’t even been noticed yet”. 

For those who find solace in this, remember that these same milenials have already been indoctrinated in Critical Race Theory and BLM by fanatics in the school system.

 In the wake of the George Floyd show trial and the obsequious knee bends from many corporate, sports and entertainment many conservatives are is despair. How did so many people they once knew as level-headed and fair-minded wind up thinking AOC has anything of value to tell the world?

As the Covid-19 crisis in Canada demonstrates, few in Canada are willing to criticize the PM and (all but Conservative) premiers, because it is seen as criticism of single-payer healthcare, the binding agent in modern Canada. Given a choice between re-thinking the healthcare model that is cratering around them and two-tier healthcare they’ll choose the former all the time. Government is us. We cannot criticize us.

We have reached a point hinted at in the 1981 film My Dinner With André. Actor Wallace Shawn and theatre director André Gregory debate the mean of life. At one point Gregory recalls meeting a noted environmentalist in Scotland. Gregory tells him he is from New York City. 

“Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place” the man tells Gregory. “Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” 

He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” 

And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”

Insert Toronto for New York and the analogy makes sense. The GTA, in which I lived from 1971-98, has become a group project of its citizens, a virtue circle epitomized by its self image as a compassionate community. In the first quarter century I lived there, Toronto was assembling and discarding identities, sorting through aliases till it landed on EmpathyVille— with its film festival  TIFF, a mélange of star worship, self-reverence and radical politics, as its avatar. 

Now, to criticize CondoLand  Toronto is to criticize its citizens. (The same might be said on a lesser scale about Vancouver and B.C.’s Lower Mainland.) Forget that the people who molded this metropolis are now furiously escaping to Collingwood, Niagara and Prince Edward County— or leaving the country entirely— to escape their handiwork. To know them is to love their legacy.

There is little outrage from the remaining urban gentry at Guilbert’s thoroughly undemocratic and obtrusive censorship proposal. Like Trudeau’s approving comments about China’s method of governing, it defines Wokesters as aspiring to a higher plane of consciousness. The PM has his reply ready when Erin O’Toole asks him at the debates how far he’ll go with destroying liberties.

“Just watch me,” he’ll say.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx