Should Bannon be banned from Munk Debates?
By nearly all accounts, except those of his loyal fans, Steve Bannon is a nasty piece of work.
He said the “women’s liberation movement” would backfire and only “pro-family” women would hold office. In 1996 he faced domestic abuse charges. His wife said in court documents he didn’t want their daughters to go to a certain school because there were too many Jewish students. He led the alt-right news site Breitbart News, known for publishing headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” Under his leadership Breitbart compared Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust.
It also featured “violent, sexist, extremist and radical political content,” according to one corporation that joined over 2,000 other organizations and companies who pulled their advertising last year. He describes refugees to Western nations as a “civilizational jihad personified by this migrant crisis.”
Surely such a toxic character shouldn’t be a featured debater in the respected Munk Debates series in Toronto? And yet, on Friday Bannon will debate conservative commentator David Frum. Bannon will argue that “the future of western politics is populist, not liberal.” Frum, a key political staffer and speech writer for former president
George W. Bush, will argue the opposite.
Since the event was announced in September, there have been calls for its cancellation. Last weekend’s awful mass murder of Jews attending a synagogue in Pittsburgh amplified the situation.
First, the federal NDP hopped on the Bannon-ban bandwagon. MP Nathan Cullen said we shouldn’t give a platform to those who spread hate. Puzzlingly, he also said “I trust Canadians to be able to reject that, but ...” Then the provincial NDP joined in, with leader Andrea Horwath saying: “We have enough divisiveness, we have enough hate being spewed everywhere unfortunately here in Ontario, across Canada, through the United States, the last thing we need is another platform for more hate to be spewed.”
For what it’s worth, here is what Munk Debates chair Rudyard Griffiths said in a statement: “We believe we are providing a public service by allowing their ideas to be vigorously contested and letting the public draw their own conclusions from the debate.”
This is not an easy question, and it’s made more difficult by the extreme positions put forward by Bannon and his supporters. But on balance, we’d argue the Munk Debates organizers are on the high road here.
Banning Bannon won’t silence him. Quite the contrary. Doing so would give him another stage on which to play the aggrieved victim whose right to free speech is stifled.
Let Bannon speak.
The NDP’s Cullen is right to trust Canadians to judge where he’s coming from. Let him shill for Trumpian populism in the bright lights.
Sunlight, after all, is the best disinfectant.
Let’s give the final words on this to Munk chair Griffiths: “In our increasingly polarized societies we often struggle to see across ideological and moral divides. Civil and substantive public debate of the big issues of our time helps all of us better understand the challenges we face as a society and what, if anything, can be done to resolve them.”
Banning Bannon won’t silence him. Quite the contrary. Doing so would give him another stage on which to play the aggrieved victim whose right to free speech is stifled.