Liftoff

Why now?

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. . . Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.

- from George Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” in Polemic, May, 1945.

No, I’m not bolting from what some people call the MSM to start a wildly contrarian Substack page owing to some class of righteous contempt for the dishonesty of newspapers. It’s just that friends have been telling me to get some sort of a newsletter going for years, and right about now seems either the best time, or the worst time, so what the hell.

The thing is, in my “beat,” there’s just so much tectonic shuddering underway at the moment that I can barely cover any strange armada that’s steaming towards the outer docks, let alone cover the waterfront. That’s not the fault of the editors of the newspapers I write for.

This newsletter will either make my job easier, or more difficult. I don’t know, but I’m launching now, anyway.

We’re once again living in a moment crowded with what our friend Eric Blair called lunatic beliefs. The ascendancy of digital media and its encirclement of the globe was supposed to make it easier to know what was going on out there, and yet it’s “harder and harder to discover what is actually happening.” This newsletter is my contribution to the work of making it easier. Especially for those of you willing to cough up $5 a month, but in any case do subscribe. I picked Substack because it seemed the easiest way to pull this off, so don’t hate me for that (my friend Shannon Rupp has helpfully directed me to this, which explains why everyone is so mad at Substack all the time).

I’ll be filing at least weekly, probably at least twice weekly. Depending on how much is breaking, maybe even daily.

There are reasons for the current craziness across the Anglosphere that involve the “crisis of epistemology” you may have heard about. It’s been a concern of mine for a while. It’s no concidence that the crisis tracks with the global retreat of democracy, now in its 16th year. I’ll try to explore the reasons in this newsletter, but The Real Story isn’t just going to be my own personal commentary page.

What I hope to provide, especially for paid subscribers, is occasionally breaking news and some of my own commentary, but mostly deep background and analysis and the insights available from my sources, informants, comrades and friends. In that circle I count Afghans, Chinese democrats, Ukrainians, Syrians, Uyghurs, Iranians, Ahwazis, Hongkongers, Israelis, Kurds, Latin Americans, Tibetans. . . and Britons, Australians and Americans, and of course Canadians. The Real Story will also be informed by front-line activists, researchers, intellectuals, and leaders of the solidarity movements in the diaspora communities of the Anglosphere.

I’ll also explore the home ground, and the more of you buy a sub, the more time I’ll have to look into what it means to be truly at home, and why it is that so damn few of us these days can afford one.

I launch this at the denouement of the Truckists’ “occupation” of Ottawa, our common understanding of which has been particularly occluded by lunatic beliefs. Canadians appear to be speaking at least two mutually unintelligible languages, and I don’t mean English and French.

At the hour of the day I’m kicking this off it’s almost certain that a full-blown war is about to break out in Europe. The unambiguous aggressor here is Vladimir Putin, who possesses the distinct advantage of having so enfeebled the “West” with dezinformatsiya over the past decade or so that there exists among the Anglosphere’s intelligentsia “a genuine doubt” about what has been actually happening on the borders of Ukraine and within the Russian-occupied regions of that poor, brave, half-abandoned country.

And that’s just dezinformatsiya for you. Xi Jinping’s imperialist hubris has been permitted free reign in Canada for so long that it is not unreasonable to wonder out loud whether Beijing’s compradors are so deeply embedded in this country that it’s too late to have them dislodged. It’s certainly too late for many Chinese-Canadians to talk about them out loud, for fear of the worst kinds of retribution being visited upon their families back in the old country.

I’ve tried my best to chronicle the phenomenon - the billions in dirty money invested in real-estate boltholes, the absurdly generous influence-peddling operations Beijing’s United Front Work Department continues to run in Parliament and in the foreign-policy establishment, and the terror the UFWD wields over Chinese diaspora communities across the country. This newsletter will allow me to continue the effort to shine some light on this state of affairs, and to highlight the work of my (too few) colleagues who are devoted to journalism of that difficult kind.

For all the moaning about the news media these days (indeed about half of Canadians express a profound distrust of “mainstream” journalists) the work of conventional, robust journalism is simply getting harder to do.

The United States has lost roughly 1,800 newspapers over the past 20 years - something like a fifth of its print press corps. Canada’s news media landscape has lost something like 450 newsrooms since 2007. Sometimes, half-empty “ghost papers” are left behind. Sometimes, there’s just nothing there anymore.

The space occupied by the mainline news media is increasingly taken up by a constellation of digital platforms that includes Moscow’s RT News and Beijing’s Global Times and CGTN cross-pollinating in galaxies of shadowy pretend-journalism disinformation sites intent upon throwing democracies off balance. The Covid epidemic killed off scores of English-language news operations, and the Xi regime is mobilizing a vast propaganda infrastructure to take every advantage of the pandemic in a hybrid strategy of intensified propaganda and information control in lockstep with aggressive, Russian-style disinformation.

And all this is happening at a time when a “radical postmodernism” so regnant in the universities’ social sciences departments, and so apparently ineradicable in polite society, had already “problematized” the very idea of truth quite effectively. It’s a big part of how The Left rendered itself incapable of offering any effective defence against the fact-inventing, vulgar demagoguery of Trumpism.

And now here we are. It’s not so much that the truth doesn’t matter anymore out there. It’s that in large measure, it doesn’t matter that the truth doesn’t matter. The norms and institutions forged over decades by peer review, humility, fact-checking, good-faith debate and the evaluation of truth claims against objective evidence, verification and replication have been replaced with ideological rigidity, speech codes, Twitter-induced outrage spasms and a heavily-enforced consistency with “narrative.” The social & intellectual mechanisms that have long served to transform disagreement into knowledge are in tatters.

Probably the truth is discoverable. It’s my hope that this newsletter, in some small way, might help subscribers figure out what it is. And if you buy a subscription you’ll have me working for you in that effort.

So here we go. Allons-y.