Decades of anti-Communism totally missed the point

By now, everyone must have seen the video of Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland being accosted in the lobby of a hotel in Grand Prairie, Alta., on a visit to her home province; she was born in Peace River, north of Grand Prairie.

Freeland is quite short, even in high heels. One of her own Tweets gives her height as “5 feet 2 inches, on a good day.”

The man — identified by his own Internet postings as Elliott McDavid — towers over her. He’s almost a stereotype of an Alberta redneck — burly, heavily bearded, dressed in a tattered undershirt.

As Freeland moves towards an elevator, he unleashes a torrent of abuse, which I will take the risk of quoting verbatim: “What the f—k are you doing in Alberta? You f—kin' traitor! You f—in' b—ch! Get the f—k out of this province!”

Media coverage described him as a “right-wing extremist” and an "active organizer of convoy protests.”

Interviewed, he said he was proud of his actions.

That part, at least, strikes me as true. I’m sure he believes he has history on his side. As do all right-wing extremists.

I have argued, for years, that the primary threat to our society comes not from the left — despite American paranoia about anything remotely related to communism — but from the right.

Various friends challenge that bias. And I have sometimes wondered where it came from.

I think it came from 13 years of working directly for the church, and another 15 of working with it.

The United Church of Canada, to be specific, elects a new chief executive officer, called a Moderator, every two or three years.

Once upon a time, that position was reserved for ordained male clergy. I was there when the first lay person — medical missionary Dr. Robert McClure — was elected in 1968.

Since then, the church has continued to break new ground, electing a Black man, an ordained woman, a lay woman, an Indigenous man, an Indigenous woman, an Asian man, a gay man…

I haven’t known all of them personally, but I have considered myself a friend and confidante of at least half a dozen.

And all of those, without exception, have commented about the hate mail they received after their election. Letters filled with obscenities. Words scrawled with heavy felt pen. Letters charred over a flame. Envelopes filled with dog poo. Death threats. Assurances that the Moderator was going to hell, was taking the church to hell, or was the devil incarnate.

McDavid’s rant sounds moderate, by comparison.

One moderator — I can’t recall which one — described his secretary bringing in an envelope, holding it at arm’s length, with a tissue between her fingertips.

Always the hate mail came from conservatives.

My wife Joan supervised the office operations for the General Council held in Fredericton in 1992. Four years earlier, the United Church had decided that all members were eligible to become ministers, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Outrage still seethed.

Office staff — who had no hand in that 1988 decision — found the deluge of angry, spluttering, venomous phone calls so distressing that my wife had to get extra phone lines installed. She, and only she, answered the public number.

Some nights, she came home still shaking from the tirades hurled at her.

None of this abuse came from the left. It was entirely from conservative factions reacting against anything new that the church might be doing. Or thinking of doing.

For good reason, the far right is often called “reactionary.”

I heard from other colleagues of the similar venom they had lived through after the United Church launched its “New Curriculum” in the 1960s. The curriculum contained nothing that had not been taught in theological seminaries for decades. But it upset people’s preconceptions of what their church believed.

Even if it never had.

They did not want their preconceptions challenged.

You can debate, all you want, the definition of labels of right and left, liberal and conservative.

To me, the reactionary right is any group that refuses to accept a chink in the battlements they have built to preserve their perception of how things have always been — if only in their imagination.

Because they’re not open to reason, they can only react with verbal or physical violence.

There is no doubt in their own minds that they’re right. And therefore anyone who thinks differently must be wrong. And must be denounced. Ridiculed. And humiliated.

And like McDavid, they’re proud of doing it.