The Zombie Apocalypse that Wasn't.
About that Abacus poll. . . and a true story about the Canadians leading a lethal global network of conspiracy theorists who never seem to get noticed in this country.
. . . And then the story just seemed to disappear. If the story were true, why did it vanish after a couple of news cycles? Shouldn’t we all be taking this a lot more seriously?
In my National Post & Ottawa Citizen column this week I took notes on a panic that seems to be forever bubbling belowdecks in certain in-crowd circles as it burst into national headlines the other day.
It’s not news that weirdos are doing weird things these days, and it’s fair to criticize the Conservatives’ bitcoin caucus for giving the appearance of encouraging weirdness. But there does comes a point when it might be a good idea to calm the hell down and try and get the facts right.
Here’s a fun fact: Apparently, a single percentage point separates the more eccentric wing of Poilievre’s support base from Canada’s NDP voters on the question of Bill Gates implanting chips in our brains or something.
Those of us in the journalism trade with a low tolerance for bullsh*t need to do a better job of recognizing bullsh*t when we see it. This will allow us to avoid the necessity of calling bullsh*t when we see it in our own newspapers. Which is the sort of thing that could get a person into trouble. As I have experienced first-hand lately.
Examples from last week, in the National Post: Millions of Canadians Believe in White Replacement Theory: Poll. And the Toronto Star: ‘Kind of Terrifying’: Numbers Show Racist Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory Has Found Audience in Canada. That’s the way a June 12 Abacus Data poll was reported. Here’s Abacus’ own headline: Millions Believe in Conspiracy Theories in Canada.
You’d think Canada was just a single truck convoy away from annexing the Sudetenland. You’d think 11 million Canadians had succumbed to the elaborate racist mumbo-jumbo that captivated the character Tom Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. You’d think 37 percent of Canadians were devoted to the the amazingly creepy doctrine known as White Replacement Theory.
My take this week: If the story is true, millions of Canadians are afflicted with exactly the same fascist derangement that drove white supremacist Brenton Tarrant to massacre 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand three years ago. In a similarly live-streamed replication of the Christchurch atrocity last month, the lunatic Payton Gendron slaughtered 10 people in a Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, N.Y., using a weapon with the words “White replacement theory” written on it.
Happily, as it has turned out, there is in fact no evidence in that Abacus poll to suggest that 11 million Canadians are deranged in these ways. There’s no evidence in the poll data to show that even 11 Canadians are that crazy. Sorry, no hordes of racist zombies roaming the streets for you.
Anyway, the story just seemed to disappear.
Except not quite. It’s already burrowed into the brains of certain bigshots who should know better, or maybe they do know better and they’re just not letting on and they have reasons for wanting the brain worm to crawl into everybody else’s ears and stay there. I’ll have more backstory on all this on the far side of the paywall below. Speaking of which:
There are crazies out there alright. After my column appeared online I heard from serial journalist-botherer Brad Salzberg, founder of something called the Cultural Action Party of Canada. “Nice apologist rant per inevitable transition to white minority” is the way he described it. “Low birthrates, elderly population, mass immigration, abortion all a big coincidence, eh?” In my brief response to him I resorted to foul language.
The thing is, there’s much in those poll results that does offer evidence for a deepening disaffection and distrust among “native-born” Canadians with the way things are going. And that is something worth paying attention to.
The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. Federal cabinet ministers lie through their teeth and get away with it. Inflation has reached levels unseen in decades, and a Conference Board of Canada survey shows 78 percent of Canadians expect inflation to exceed the Bank of Canada’s target of two percent over the next three years.
It’s getting harder and harder and harder just to find a place to live. And it’s getting harder and harder and harder to know what the hell is going on.
I mention in passing in my column, for instance, that the Trudeau government’s “Immigration Levels Plan” proposes to drawing 430,000 newcomers to Canada each year. This is the highest level of immigration in Canadian history, and we’re already sustaining a higher immigration rate than any other G7 country. No conspiracy. It’s just how we roll.
Even so, are “native-born” Canadians going mental about rising immigration numbers? No. Here’s a poll from the reliable Angus Reid Institute showing the recent trends. It’s from last year, after Ottawa announced its plan to jack up the numbers even higher:
The Angus Reid poll shows that the “immigration numbers are too high” cohort is concentrated in Conservative country. That may be because the “immigration numbers are about right or aren’t high enough” cohort is already cornered by the NDP-Liberals. Who knows.
Then there’s the fine print of Ottawa’s “policy.” Add to the mix the work permits from the massively loosened-up Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the International Mobility Program (110,000 to 120,000 people), and then this summer’s planned arrival of international students (270,000) in July and August. This is what you get. “All told, we could see 520,000 or more people getting permanent residence, as well as seeing their study and work permits take effect over the course of this summer.”
How are we going to find places for all these people to live without making the housing crisis even more catastrophic than it already is? That’s the sort of question that grinds people’s gears. That, and the sense that Ottawa doesn’t really have an immigration policy beyond, ‘like, hey, whatever,’ and the growing realization that Immigration, Citizenship and Refugees is a broken bureaucracy.
Just ask those thousands of Afghans we promised to rescue. It’s like nobody’s in charge. Same deal with the Canadian Border Services Agency.
To wit, Zain Haq: Brazenly ignores and violates the terms of his student visa, gets convicted and jailed for criminal contempt, gets fined for blocking rail lines, and he’s got five outstanding warrants on mischief charges. It’s not until after all this that the CSBA lets it be known that they’d like a word with the guy. Haq is one of the leaders of that outfit that has somehow failed to stop-old growth logging by shutting down rush-hour traffic and sitting down on congested bridges and blocking access to ferry terminals. Haq is in the crowbar hotel now, apparently.
Meanwhile, the property industry is now pretty well the lynchpin of Canada’s economy. Household debt, real estate fees and flipping and speculation and the construction of overpriced condos is a massive economic sector that is leaving “native-born” Canadians unable to afford to have kids. So we need to encourage more immigration, the thinking goes. And that makes it even harder to find a place to live.
Especially if you want to have kids, or you’re a poor student and you need to live near campus. And round and round it goes:
You want disturbing poll results?
In Canada, the public’s trust of government (53 percent) and the news media (52 percent) have declined wildly in recent years. “Around two thirds of Canadians believe journalists and reporters (61%) and business leaders (60%) are purposely trying to mislead them, with government not far behind (58%),” according to most recent surveys undertaken in the Edelman Trust Barometer.
You want global conspiracy theories that wreak havoc on foreign policy debates and the public’s understanding of what’s going on in, say, Russia, or Syria?
Meet the Canadians Eva Bartlett and Aaron Maté. They’re world famous. Except in Canada.
You thought the Truckists were bad?
Although entirely unnoticed by the Canadian news media, the dirty work Bartlett and Maté have been doing has been well-known to European disinformation monitors for years. While the UK Guardian last Sunday reported on a major new investigation into their network, I haven’t heard so much as a peep out of any Canadian newsroom.
Often inspired by and directly aided by the Kremlin’s disinformation operations, Bartlett and Maté are at the fulcrum of a crew of highly-skilled professional liars of the “anti-Zionist” variety who have “managed to distort the facts, endanger people’s lives, and cast long shadows of doubt over policy debates on Syria; in some cases, stalling political action by the international community when it was sorely needed,” according to the report, Deadly Disinformation: How online conspiracies about Syria cause real-world harm.
Maté poses as “a Canadian journalist and a reporter.” His main conduit is the Grayzone, a newsroom-simulacrum that specializes in atrocity denial and propaganda on behalf of Russia, Venezuela, Iran and other torture states. He’s a former producer for the insufferable Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! show and a contributor to The Nation. This allows him the patina of “progressive” credibility, despite his appearances lying on Russia’s behalf as a guest of the far-right Fox News’ shouter Tucker Carlson.
Bartlett’s agit-prop journalism was a mainstay of Middle East “coverage” by the hipster Toronto webzine Rabble (a “progressive” version of Ezra Levant’s “Rebel” TV) before she moved on to the Kremlin’s RT propaganda platform and other ventures. The fact-checkers at Snopes devote an entire essay-length exposé of Bartlett’s lies on behalf of Syrian mass-murderer Bashar Assad, here. Apart from the labour unions paying for Rabble, its website is “made possible in part through the Government of Canada,” whatever that means.
Lately engaged on the Kremlin’s behalf to tell lies about Ukraine, Bartlett has worked with Maté in a dizzying array of pseudo-news platforms, gone-viral Youtube videos, Twitter and Facebook accounts, blogs and other methods to traffic in the most lurid and toxic pro-Assad and pro-Putin propaganda. This is not child’s play.
It’s an order of magnitude more destructive than Truckist ramblings on Reddit channels. According to the authors of the Syria Campaign’s Deadly Disinformation report: “Policymakers we spoke to said that disinformation attacks on Syria have enabled anti-asylum policies, harassment and abuse of humanitarian workers and frontline responders, encouraged normalisation of the Assad regime, and emboldened Russian president Vladimir Putin to employ the same tactics in Ukraine.”
Now, about those imaginary zombies and the news media’s approach to them. . . paying customers only beyond this point.