National Post (National Edition)
There is exaggeration and there is just plain bitter idiocy ... If Trudeau, a one-man rainbow coalition in a well-tailored suit is a ‘white supremacist terrorist’ then Gandhi was Hitler’s illegitimate son, and Mother Teresa was an incontinent axe murderes
We have been hearing much of the new “post-fact” world of American politics, supposedly midwifed by Donald Trump’s miraculous ascension to the U.S. presidency. However, insofar as post-fact can be anything more than a cute and convenient meme for still weeping, ash-cloaked Hillaryphiles, it has been around much longer than Trump, and has surely had more virtuoso practitioners. I can think of one ex-president nearly 20 years ago, for example, who only too eagerly “slipped the surly bonds” of fact-based earth and winged his way through impeachment hearings with novelty arguments on the nature of oral sex (i.e., that it was not sex) and with even great semantic agility took issue with the meaning of our language’s most basic molecule: the verb “is.”
Trump is still an amateur in this league. Moreover, the dissociation between what is said to be and what really is, the unhinging of words from what they mean and have always meant, is no long the private garden of campaigning or office-holding politicians. Excesses of truthbending and fact-denying are equally as common in protest politics as at the ballot box, in street-demonstrations as in high office. Indeed protest politics is as plastic and factallergic, or more so, than the regular politics it sets itself against. Activists and street orators, tribunes of the social justice warrior (SJW) caste, often grant themselves a latitude with truth and facts, a licence to improvise and fantasticate, that visits mere party politicians only in their most liberated dreams.
The idea that the chants of SJWs or the wailing of fanatical enviros offer more “authenticity” than the rote recitations and talking-points parroting of legislator politicians, or that there’s more “truth” on a Greenpeace banner than in the pages of Hansard, is a delusion reserved for dedicated hermits and the terminally naive.
What was more “postfact” than that Berkeley riot/ protest last week, when the black-suited, masked protesters “argued” their vandalisms and assaults were speech, and the (aborted) speech of Milo Yiannopoulos was violence? Protest is just as much politics as usual as politics as usual.
These considerations occurred when I read in newspapers and online words spoken at a recent demonstration denouncing Justin Trudeau. A leader of Toronto’s franchise of the U.S. Black Lives Movement, Yusra Khogali, with the angry zest that only activists can mimic successfully, called our Prime Minister a “white supremacist terrorist.”
Now even in a post-fact world, it’s a exertion beyond my limits to see Justin Trudeau as a “white supremacist,” and adding “terrorist” to the chain of abuse overloads the poor neural network altogether. Justin Trudeau — him — a white supremacist?
“There are rooms to rent in the outer planets” sang our poet Purdy, and surely BLM’s Yusra Khogali has checked into the last and farthest out if this is what she believes. If some ordinary, what I have been calling official, politician were to make Khogali’s charge in a legislature, he, she, xe or xem would be out on their various gender-various ears, offered help, and placed on a pariah list forever. For there are some things so far from factbased that to give mouth to them is a signal of irredeemable intellectual distress.
There is exaggeration; there is hyperbole; there is full polemic; and there is just plain bitter idiocy. If Justin Trudeau, a one-man rainbow coalition in a well-tailored suit is a “white supremacist terrorist” then Gandhi was Hitler’s illegitimate son, and Mother Teresa was an incontinent axe murderess.
FACT-DENYING (IS) EQUALLY AS COMMON IN PROTEST POLITICS.
The thought balloon behind Khogali’s outburst probably went something like this: I have nominated myself the voice of a minority. That offers full and unbounded validity to all of my opinions, however scantily fertilized by research or facts. I am righteous, therefore, I am free to call any and everyone else whatever I choose to call them, regardless of how ugly, harsh and ridiculous the description happens to be. I’m an activist — truth and fact be damned. Ergo, Justin Trudeau, the living poster face of Everyone Everywhere Is My Brother, can be anathematized as a white supremacist terrorist.
There are many things one could call Justin Trudeau. But you could comb the over half a million entries in the print version of the full 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary and the very last three you would combine as a description would be “white supremacist terrorist,” the tawdry triplet this Toronto activist launched at him with such feverish unreality.
“Post-fact” is a purely Trump phenomenon? Sure it is. And water in an activist stream runs uphill.