National Post (National Edition)
Then the mob came
THE SMEAR CAMPAIGN THAT TOOK DOWN A PROMISING POLITICIAN
What happened to Caylan Ford 20 months ago, when she was running as a candidate for the United Conservative Party in Alberta, should terrify anyone thinking of running for public office. What has happened to her since should worry the rest of us.
Now, she is finally fighting back. After her candidacy was ended by false accusations that she is racist and a “white supremacist,” she's suing those she says defamed her, including the Alberta NDP, the CBC and the Toronto Star. Anyone concerned about the polarization of our political discourse should be rooting for her.
Ford was the kind of candidate parties dream of: a Mandarin-speaking former federal foreign affairs adviser; a campaigner for persecuted minorities with a master's degree in international relations and another in human rights law from Oxford; a documentary filmmaker; and a locally raised young mother of two. She won a competitive nomination and was poised to defeat the incumbent NDP justice minister in Alberta's May 2019 election.
Then, less than a month before election day, with a must-win seat in jeopardy, the NDP's attack machine went into action. An anonymously sourced article in Press Progress, a pro-NDP news website, reported that several years earlier in a private Facebook conversation, Ford had “complained `White Supremacist Terrorists' Are Treated Unfairly,” and “echoed white supremacist rhetoric.” Within minutes, the NDP called on her party to remove her. Under pressure to be a team player, and with little time to react, Ford withdrew rather than cause a distraction. By the next day, it was national news.
Ford knew the hyperbolic claims were not true. She had every reason to believe that, once the storm of the election had passed, she would be clear to tell her side of the story. Fair-minded people would be able to read the full record, the truth would supplant her opponents' lies and she would be able to move on with her life and her career. That this has still not happened, that she still has not been given a platform to tell her side of the story and try to clear her name, is why her story still matters.
Ford's resignation did not end the attacks. A CBC headline a few days after stated as fact that she had made “white supremacist comments,” and the leader of the Alberta Liberal party decried her “white supremacist values,” which he said “will sicken decent people across this province.”
The few radio interviews she did to defend herself were quickly pulled offline at the first sign of online pressure and legal threats. As she learned, the news cycle may move on, but the internet doesn't forget. Almost two years later, the NDP's lies stand as the official record and Ford is effectively unemployable. She can't even venture onto social media without almost immediately being denounced as a Nazi.
Press Progress relied on quotes from an anonymously provided Facebook conversation from 2017. It cited four short excerpts out of what Ford says, and the anonymous source admits, were tens of thousands of words of serious discussion covering a wide range of topics.
No one else besides the source has seen the conversation, including Ford, since 2017. We can't even know for certain if the quotes were accurate and no one, including Press Progress or the media who wrote about it, can prove it because the source now claims to have deleted the conversation, and has gone to court to oppose Ford's attempt to get the original data from Facebook.
Even if we accept the decontextualized excerpts at face value, they tell quite a different story than the sensational headlines. Did Ford really say white supremacist terrorists are treated unfairly, as Press Progress had claimed? No. She had been discussing the most effective
ways to fight radicalization, including white supremacy, which in prefatory comments she called “odious” and “perverse.”
Specifically, she wrote: “When the perpetrator is an Islamist, the denunciations are intermingled with breathless assurances that they do not represent Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, etc. And there is a great deal of soul-searching — we ask ourselves in earnest what radicalized these people, how can they be directed to more productive and healthy paths …
“When the terrorists are white supremacists, that kind of soul-searching or attempts to understand the sources of their radicalization or their perverse moral reasoning is beyond the pale. And anyone who shares even some of their views (e.g. wanting strong borders and immigration control), while rejecting the more odious aspects, is painted with the same brush. … You just don't have the same attempts to separate the violent terrorists from the wider community of belief.”
In other words, Ford contrasted earnest and constructive attempts to disassociate Islamist radicalization from mainstream Islam with the counterproductive tendency to portray white supremacists as part of a
spectrum of conservative opinion. She thinks this is a problem. Many experts in fighting radicalization would agree.
And had she really “echoed white nationalist rhetoric”? Hardly. She had, as noted, called white supremacy an odious and perverse ideology. But when her then-friend asked for her feelings on Europe's “demographic replacement” — that is, the effect of high levels of international migration to compensate for low birth rates and an aging population — she expressed sadness at the potential for violence and inter-ethnic strife, as well as the loss of local cultures and diversity under the homogenizing pressures of globalization.
Ford recalls that she and her then-friend (himself the son of Ismaili immigrants) had used the phrase “white peoples” while recognizing that it was imperfect shorthand, and that earlier she had said it is not a term she would use herself. She also recalls explaining why she thought that essentializing people by race was unhelpful and even immoral.
But, never thinking her private words would be scrutinized out of context, she used the term in this sentence, which her former friend anonymously leaked: “I am somehow saddened
by the demographic replacement of white peoples in their homelands — more in Europe than in America — partly because it's clear it will not be a peaceful transition and partly because the loss of demographic diversity in the human race is sad.”
The missing context is key: Ford had previously said that this was imprecise language she didn't endorse herself. She also remembers expressing sadness at the loss of other ethnic and cultural traditions, whether as a result of the assimilation and subjugation of Indigenous peoples in North America, or in the Tibetan plateau. Her former friend or Press Progress left out those parts of the conversation.
If Ford erred, it was in not using scare quotes or another way to mark her distance from the terms “demographic replacement” or “white peoples.” But this was a long private conversation carried on over several weeks between two people using mutually understood terms. One cannot expect the scrupulous repeated qualifications of formal public writing. She certainly never expected her words would be scrutinized out of context by people not party to the conversation who had never met or spoken with her, and used to destroy her career.
It's certainly possible that
Ford's explanation might not convince everyone, but the problem is that she has never even been given that chance. That is the injustice of cancel culture: it silences its targets and blocks the ears of those who have rushed to judgment; it is a one-sided star chamber prosecution that proceeds swiftly and ruthlessly.
The NDP's campaign to distort her comments into something far more heinous — conflating the use of the public policy term “demographic replacement” with neo-Nazi demagoguery about a “great replacement” conspiracy — was transparently cynical. There was nothing in Ford's career defending persecuted minorities (see her documentary on Falun Gong slave labour in China) to support that extreme inference.
All the benefit of the doubt should have weighed in Ford's favour, but once the smear was out, it was too good to check. The CBC and most other media outlets displayed no more scruple or skepticism over cherrypicked, dubiously sourced quotes than the Twitter mob.
I didn't know Caylan Ford before the mob came for her. I reached out after, because it seemed few others had. Having met her, I can say that, if she is a white supremacist, then I'm a Bolshevik. Alberta and Canada could have used her experience and her thoughtful voice. Our politics is coarser and dumber without her.
She deserved better than the ochlocratic injustice of social media and we, the public, deserved better than the careless credulity of many mainstream media outlets. Until that wrong is righted — in court, but more importantly in the court of public opinion — her fate will give good men and women a reason to shun politics, and our society will be the poorer for it.