Cancel culture is doing terrible harm to journalists, journalism and citizenship
“Gordon Clark, editorial pages editor for The Vancouver Sun and The Province, has decided to end his 35-year employment relationship with Postmedia, which he carried out with integrity and dedication. Clark held several positions at Postmedia over his successful journalism career, including columnist and opinions editor. He was a valued newsroom colleague and we wish him well with his future endeavours.”
***
The “note from the editor” that ran on the editorial pages of the Vancouver Sun and the Province on April 2, 2021, brought to a close the miserable final chapter of what had been for me a long, rewarding and mostly happy journalism career.
In September 2019, I joined the ranks of journalists brutalized by the so-called woke mob of cancel culture — the outrage cult of often leftist younger people who see racism, sexism and whatever other ism they’re currently working themselves into a froth over in every nook and cranny of society. Some of their tactics are also employed by radicals on the right.
Despite claiming to care about human rights and therefore, presumably, human beings, they often take delight in destroying people they decide are the enemy, with zero concern for fair play, due process or the truth.
Unfortunately for me, some of these deplorable people were among my supposed colleagues, who used social media and cowardly, anonymous and untrue leaks to other media to help build a false narrative that I was a racist after I chose to run, as an opinion editor, someone else’s opinion in the Vancouver Sun a little over two years ago. If you think my language is too harsh, you likely haven’t known anyone savaged by a preening online mob.
It has taken me until now to process and recover from the attacks on my reputation that ended my newspaper career. Here’s my reply to the false accusations levelled against me.
***
The first sign of trouble arrived as my wife and I were walking our dog early in the morning on Saturday, Sept. 7, 2019, in the trails of a nearby park. My boss, Vancouver Sun editor-in-chief Harold Munro called me very upset about an opinion piece that had run that day in the Sun’s print edition. He said that the op-ed by Mount Royal University lecturer Mark Hecht questioning the “dogma of diversity, tolerance and inclusion” — was being criticized on social media, including by members of the Sun’s reporting staff, as racist and that he agreed.
He told me that the paper would be publishing a public apology for running Hecht’s opinion and that he would be holding a staff meeting to discuss the matter and what would be done about it given the anger that was being publicly vented by some employees and other voices on social media.
(He had already removed Hecht’s article from the Sun’s website, a breach of journalistic ethics. The ethics guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists notes: “We generally do not “unpublish” or remove digital content, despite public requests, or “source remorse.” Rare exceptions generally involve matters of public safety, an egregious error, ethical violation, or legal restrictions such as publication bans.)
I was shocked by the reaction and the plans of Munro and — as I would soon learn — his bosses in Postmedia’s head office. I told him that we should run another op-ed countering Hecht’s arguments and any letters that arrived disagreeing with what he had written — the time-honoured way one encourages public debate and discussion in newspaper editorial pages. Munro rejected this.
The piece wasn’t racist by the definition I and most people have long used. Hecht had not argued, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Nor had he engaged in or encouraged “behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief,” another Merriam-Webster entry. Hecht also had not argued that Canada should restrict immigration to certain races or ethnicities.
I don’t think society is well served by allowing activists or anyone pushing an agenda to redefine such a fundamental term as racism, especially when their intent is to weaponize it in order to attack others.
In a canadaland.com article published as the controversy swirled, Hecht also rejected “the characterization of his ideas as racist or white nationalist, because ‘I’m talking about culture, not skin colour.’”
That’s not to say that Hecht’s op-ed wasn’t flawed, containing phrasing that was at times provocative and imprecise, including a line near the end where he wrote that we must “say goodbye to diversity, tolerance and inclusion.” I understood him to mean what he called in the essay the “dogma of diversity” — the officially enforced, uncritical belief in the concept versus diversity itself.
As well, the blunt headline placed on the online version of the piece, “Ethnic diversity harms a country’s social trust, economic well-being, argues professor,” didn’t accurately or properly capture the nuances of Hecht’s arguments.
Given some people’s reaction, you’d think I’d published Mein Kampf. And, as is so common nowadays by the fundamentally anti-intellectual outrage crowd, I’ve yet to see anyone explain how Hecht’s piece is actually racist.
However, given the uproar, shortly after we got home from our walk, I went immediately to visit a dear, long-time friend and neighbour — a black, Jamaican immigrant who holds progressive views — who I knew subscribed to the Sun and likely would have read Hecht’s piece. I wanted to hear her thoughts on whether I was missing something about the piece. We disagree on issues from time to time but are good friends and I trusted her to set me straight, as she has been happy to do on occasion, if I had erred in my decision to run Hecht’s views.
Not only did she not consider Hecht’s article racist, her chief concern was “how frightening” it was to learn that Munro, the editor of the Vancouver Sun, was censoring Hecht’s opinion and what that meant both about the Sun and the climate of political discussion and free speech in Canada.
She brought up Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidadian-Canadian author and Governor General’s Award winner who wrote a controversial yet award-winning book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, in 1994, arguing, as its back cover states, that Canada’s “policy of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on the former or ancestral homeland and its insistence that There is more important than Here, discourages the full loyalty of Canada’s citizens.”
Bissoondath argued that multiculturalism in Canada, while seeking to “order its population into a cultural mosaic of diversity and tolerance . . . nevertheless creates unease on many levels, transforming people into political tools and turning historical distinctions into stereotyped commodities. It encourages exoticism, highlighting the differences that divide Canadians rather than the similarities that unite them.”
My neighbour’s point was that Hecht’s general view that unfettered tolerance or diversity can lead to social problems and lack of trust has been stated many times before, in Bissoondath’s case by an immigrant person of colour. In other words, it’s not inherently racist to discuss problems with diversity.
In fact, I’ve since learned that diversity’s negative impact on social trust is widely accepted in academia, including within social psychology, business and political science. For example, in “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review”, a paper published in May 2020 in the peer-reviewed journal, Annual Review of Political Science, the authors found “a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies” of the 87 they examined.
That’s not to say that other research hasn’t found positive aspects of diversity, and certainly not that I’m against it, only that aspects of diversity are up for debate, discussion and research and that people should be free to do so without being slammed with accusations of racism — in my case trumped up, bogus claims.
When I got to work on Monday morning, it became clear that that was not going to happen.
***
The first problem was that Munro had run an apology in that day’s paper:
“An opinion article by Mark Hecht published in Saturday’s Weekend Review section and online contained views that do not meet the journalistic standards of The Vancouver Sun and do not represent the views of our editors and journalists.
The Vancouver Sun is committed to promoting and celebrating diversity, tolerance and inclusion. Our vibrant community and nation are built on these important pillars.
We apologize for the publication of the article. We are reviewing our local workflow and editorial processes to ensure greater oversight and accountability so that this does not happen again.
We value the trust that our community and readers place in The Vancouver Sun and we are committed to continuing, every day, to earn that trust.
Robert Falconer, a research associate at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy with a focus on Immigration and Refugee Policy, has written a rebuttal piece, which appears on page A9 of Monday’s newspaper. You will also find a sampling of letters from readers here.”
I began, as I always did on Monday morning, to go through and clear out the hundreds of emails that had flowed in over the weekend into the four email accounts that I managed, including the letters-to-the-editor emails for the two papers.
What began as a trickle quickly became a relative torrent of letters condemning Munro’s decision to pull the online version of Hecht’s op-ed as well as the apology for running it in print. The vast majority of readers who wrote in said they did not view the op-ed as racist, even some who didn’t agree with it, and also that the piece raised important public issues that needed to be discussed. Some threatened to cancel their subscriptions over the company’s conduct.
Many were particularly upset that Munro had written that Hecht’s op-ed did “not represent the views of our editors and journalists.” Op-eds, they pointed out, are by their very definition not required to reflect the views of a newspaper’s “editors and journalists.”
Did Munro even understand his job? asked some readers. Did the apology and new opinions policies mean that in future the Vancouver Sun would only run op-eds that aligned with the views of the paper’s “editors and journalists?” asked others. Postmedia’s attack on free speech upset many readers, with the ratio of letters against the paper’s apology versus those that favoured it running at least 15 to 1. (I only saw two letters supporting the apology.)
***
Munro was late getting to work Monday morning. As he walked by my desk, right outside his office door, I told him that I urgently needed to speak with him. He said yes but that there was something quick he needed to do first. He went to his desk, worked on his computer for a few minutes, and then just before he called me in, an email to all editorial staff announcing a staff meeting about the Hecht article popped into my email in-box.
I wasn’t happy that he had organized the meeting without talking to me first that morning, one of many actions taken by the company over the previous few days, and in the days to come, without my input or apparent understanding of or concern about the negative impacts on me.
In the closed-door meeting, I was frank. I told Munro that I didn’t think the op-ed was racist, that it shouldn’t have been pulled, that the apology was wrong-headed and that I didn’t believe the paper had broken any journalist standards by running Hecht’s piece. The Vancouver Sun’s “journalistic standards” referenced in the apology have never been provided to me despite multiple requests because, of course, no such document exists.
It should also be noted that in running the Hecht piece, I was operating under the ethical guidelines opinion editors have used for centuries in Western liberal democracies, the essence of which can be found in the relevant sections of the former B.C. Press Council Code of Practice:
“Newspapers should defend their hard-won right to exercise the widest possible latitude in expressing opinions, no matter how controversial or unpopular the opinions may be, and to give columnists, editorial cartoonists and others the same latitude in expressing personal opinions.”
The B.C. Press Council was merged into the National NewsMedia Council in 2015. It relies on the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists, which includes in its section on journalistic “Independence” that:
“Columnists and commentators should be free to express their views, even when those views conflict with those of their organizations, as long as the content meets generally accepted journalistic standards for fairness and accuracy.”
Ironically, under the section “Diversity,” another CAJ guideline states: “News organizations — including newspapers, websites, magazines, radio and television — provide forums for the free interchange of information and opinion. As such, we seek to include views from all segments of the population.”
In my view, “all segments of the population” clearly must include people with conservative or traditional views such as Hecht, then a lecturer at a public university who I learned nearly two years later was a candidate with the People’s Party of Canada.
Given all that, I remain comfortable with my decision to run Hecht’s op-ed. I will not apologize, as some suggested I should, for running it, even if Hecht’s words upset some people. I ran it because I believed it would generate thoughtful debate and because I believe in freedom of speech.
To be blunt, I was doing my job.
In the Monday morning meeting in Munro’s office, I also pointed out to him that the reporting staff should not be commenting on pieces in the opinion section in order to maintain the longstanding ethical standard that reporters not make public their political views in order that they can do their jobs free of accusations of bias. While opposition to actual racism is non-partisan, the claims against Hecht reflected the false accusations of racism currently in fashion among critical race theory proponents of the radical left and those who push their agenda without fully understanding its ideological underpinnings or goals.
I also expressed great concern about the way some staff members were publicly trashing the paper’s decision to run the op-ed and taking other negative actions against their employer, including talking anonymously to reporters from other media outlets that led to several “newsroom in revolt” stories, not to mention unfair personal attacks on me from which Postmedia failed to protect me. I pointed out that such behaviour would generally get employees disciplined, if not fired, at most companies.
I told Munro about the many readers angry at his decision to pull the op-ed and issue an apology. He knew this as many had written to him directly.
Munro told me that the decisions to apologize, hold a meeting with staff and make radical changes to how the opinion pages would be managed in future came from head office. He said he was taking his directions from his boss, Lucinda Chodan, Postmedia’s senior vice president content. He said, for instance, that she had personally approved the wording of the apology.
Munro explained that his Postmedia superiors, including CEO Andrew MacLeod, were reacting to negative social media comments about the Hecht op-ed, particularly online claims that its publication meant that Postmedia was racist.
He said their concern was linked to the fact that Postmedia brass, including MacLeod, had been stung by an Aug. 12, 2019, article on canadaland.com, You Must Be This Conservative To Ride: The Inside Story of Postmedia’s Right Turn, by Sean Craig, who previously covered the media for the Financial Post, a Postmedia publication. I was out of the country at the time and not aware of the article — nor canadaland.com, for that matter.
The gist of Craig’s article was that ahead of the 2019 federal election, Postmedia CEO MacLeod had “tapped veteran National Post journalist and commentator Kevin Libin, considered by some at the chain to be among its most conservative editorial voices, to oversee federal and provincial political reporting and certain commentary published across Postmedia’s newspapers.”
“His mandate is straightforward: to make the papers more “reliably” conservative,” Craig wrote.
Some critics on social media falsely linked Postmedia’s new “reliably conservative” mandate from head office to what they considered Hecht’s alleged white supremacy, sending company executives into a moral panic. Munro told me that his superiors wanted to demonstrate that the company wasn’t racist.
To put it another way, it seems I was caught up in a panicky, poorly thought out corporate marketing exercise in which the company tossed aside longstanding, critically important journalistic principles of free speech and editorial independence in order to address a public perception concern.
What’s funny in all of this, if I can be permitted to find a little humour in a mostly tragic tale, is the fantasy of Postmedia’s critics that the company’s leaders are organized or cunning enough to deliver a Machiavellian scheme. As editorial pages editor, I had never heard of Libin nor had I ever received memos about his appointment or the company’s alleged new conservative direction. In fact, apart from the ridiculous, infrequent directives from head office to write editorial endorsements for Conservative candidates during elections that neither I nor the editors-in-chief I worked for enjoyed, I never received instructions from Postmedia head office on how to run the opinion pages.
At one point, as Munro was explaining how Postmedia planned to conduct damage control, he told me that Chodan had asked if I was a “good guy” — which I took to mean a team player who would go along with the company’s strategy about the Hecht op-ed. Munro told me he had reassured her that I was. He also said that there was no plan to discipline me or remove me from my position, arguing that the mistake resulted from what he viewed as a systemic lack of editorial oversight that would be corrected.
I found that odd. I had placed the Hecht op-ed in the Sun’s production system more than a week before it ran, where it would have been handled by at least two editors in Vancouver and two others at Postmedia’s central editing centre in Hamilton, Ont., before going online or being printed in the paper.
In addition, as with the nearly 4,000 opinion pieces I had published in the nine years I had been editorial pages editor for the Province and, later, also for the Vancouver Sun, I had sent daily slotting notes, describing what I was running to senior editors, including Munro. At no point did anyone raise any concerns with me about the Hecht op-ed as it worked its way through the production process.
More baffling, Munro told me in one of our meetings that he hadn’t read it before it ran and that he rarely read opinion content before it was published. In a 10:44 p.m. tweet on Sept. 6, 2019, Munro claimed that the Hecht piece “was published before I had a chance to read it.”
That was not true. He certainly did have a chance as it had been in the production system for days and he had been sent a note about it. Certainly my previous boss, former Province editor-in-chief Wayne Moriarty, who left Postmedia when the Sun and Province newsrooms were merged, always, with rare exceptions, read all content in the editorial pages before it ran.
***
My first inclination that my time with Postmedia was possibly coming to an end came with what Munro said next. He ordered me not to run any of the significant majority of letters from readers upset with the company’s apology and its decision to remove the Hecht op-ed from the Sun’s website. He said Chodan and MacLeod wanted to “take the oxygen” out of the issue by not running anything further. (Despite that, Munro later ran another anti-Hecht op-ed, this time by B.C. NDP MLA Ravi Kahlon after he lobbied Munro repeatedly over several days.)
Postmedia’s decision to censor its readers was a particularly unprincipled move. The letters sections of newspapers are for the readers, what I have always called the original social media and have long been a forum for debate of public issues. As editorial pages editor, I always tried to balance the letters and provide a representative range of opinion, even when readers wished to criticize our coverage.
By using the letters page to prop up one, in fact minority view of the Hecht op-ed and to withhold all criticism of its actions, Postmedia had turned the opinion pages of the Vancouver Sun into a corporate propaganda leaflet and thereby misrepresented most letter-to-the-editor writers’ views.
Munro also ignored and refused to run material critical of Postmedia’s actions by former journalists such as Trevor Lautens, who worked in newspapers for 65 years, including from 1963 to 2000 in all the roles within the Vancouver Sun’s opinion section.
“Which is more reprehensible?” Lautens began a proposed op-ed that he sent to me, Munro and then-managing editor Val Casselton, which he titled, A thoughtful, gentle reflection on a Sun apology that shafted free expression. “Vancouver Sun editor-in-chief Harold Munro’s craven apology for the exercise of free expression in the paper’s printing of Mark Hecht’s Sept. 7 opinion piece?”
“Or is it the paper’s cowardly throwing raw meat to what I kindly call the New Bullies and New Bigots, cheering a major daily newspaper’s humility for expressing opinions the NBNB want permanently banished — and in this case retroactively expunged — from the media, the public forum, the academy, the public school classrooms, the social media’s chattering classes whose importance is grotesquely inflated, and finally mainstream political parties, either already onside with or panicked about offending any demographic or special interest?”
Lautens wrote it was “incredulous that several top Sun editorial staffers . . . endorsed this indefensible suppression.”
“Munro’s very language of apology — that Hecht’s views ‘do not meet the journalistic standards of The Vancouver Sun and do not represent the views of our editors and journalists’ — is the huffy-stuffy cant of award ceremonies, when media giants meet in solemn conclave to congratulate themselves.”
“No defence, no debating here of Hecht’s academically footnoted essay — noting only that his citing of Danish reaction to Muslim immigration has been widely reported and commented on. The issue is free expression, and the necessity for it to be given vigorous, regular and fearless exercise by all.”
Lautens concluded that Hecht’s piece was “watered wine compared with many of the inflammatory views” he’d run as editor.
***
As our meeting Monday wrapped up, I told Munro that while I disagreed with almost everything he was doing, and understanding that he was under orders from his bosses, I would not say anything to oppose the company’s position on the op-ed to the staff, reserving the right to speak to my family and friends outside of work, which he nodded was OK.
I didn’t attend Munro’s staff meeting, held in the newsroom about 15 metres from my desk, a few minutes after my private meeting with Munro, for three reasons: I had already heard what would be said from Munro, I refused to put myself into such a hostile environment and, thinking of my colleagues, a notion that now seems naive and quaint, I thought that if some of them were angry and needed to vent that it might be difficult for them if I attended. And as the only person left in the opinion sections of both papers after years of staff reductions, I also had a lot of work to do.
On Tuesday, I carried on with my job, including having another meeting with Munro, where I informed him that we were continuing to receive dozens of angry letters about the apology and the decision to censor Hecht. He told me about upcoming changes to how the opinion section would be run, including that I was to send all op-eds in future to him and Casselton. Near the end of the day, Casselton told me to include one of the news editors quite junior to me on the list of people to read the op-eds.
This was another bad sign, breaking down what should be a church-and-state wall between the opinion and news departments at a newspaper. Reporters and news editors should have nothing to do with opinion — not to protect opinion editors, but to protect the perceived objectivity of the reporting staff.
I realized that either the senior editors didn’t understand this important principle, didn’t care about it, especially given the low staffing levels, or were in such a panic that they were making stuff up on the fly.
On Wednesday, while continuing to insist that everyone trusted me and that I wasn’t facing any discipline, Munro warned me that he expected that some members of staff would be calling for me to be disciplined, fired or removed from my position. He said that I shouldn’t worry and that “we’ll get through this.”
I went back to work in a newsroom where colleagues were either visibly hostile toward me or not willing to approach me to see if I was OK, with rare exceptions, likely to avoid criticism from the mob. “You will find that people you think are friends won’t be, and bravery will be rare,” one expert in these kinds of eruptions told me after the fact.
Later that day, Munro called me into his office with Casselton to go over a note he intended to send to staff about changes to how the editorial pages would run. He went through it point by point. I disagreed with most of it, especially a section where Munro told the staff that management would not “engage in any discussion, inside or outside of the newsroom, that may have human resources implications and does not respect employee privacy.”
I asked Munro to remove that section because there were no human resources issues, as I’d been told, so why bring it up? He insisted on leaving it in, to head off at the pass, as he put it, those staff members seeking to have me disciplined or fired.
The note went out, I left for the day and called a lawyer, setting up a meeting for the following week, mostly to learn what my rights were given the rapidly deteriorating situation at my job.
***
I woke before 4 a.m. on Thursday, having not slept very much since Saturday, and checked my work email on my laptop while lying in bed in the dark when I discovered a shocking email reply to Munro’s note to staff by Nathan Griffiths, then the most recently hired person in the newsroom. Not content to discuss his concerns with Munro privately, Griffiths blasted his email to the entire newsroom, where, of course, it was quickly leaked to other media.
It began: “Unfortunately, I was not able to make the meeting on Monday but I have been able to listen to a recording of it and have some thoughts on the meeting & your follow up email. I would like to stress that reading a blatantly racist op-ed of white nationalist talking points disgusted & infuriated me & it has been very difficult trying to work since then,” he wrote.
“I do not feel that either your published apology or explanations to staff were adequate — nor do they adequately address the the (sic) hateful racism so casually on display in our paper’s op-eds.
Griffiths, a “data journalist” who was heralded by Munro on his arrival for his previous experience at the New York Times — all seven months of it — had been at the Sun less than a year when he wrote his note.
In it he boldly complained that the “retracted article was merely the latest in a series of ignorant, bigoted & racist op-eds that have been published on our site that I found in 30 minutes of browsing.”
Thirty minutes of browsing? I guess that’s what passes for thoroughness these days, especially when you’re out to criticize a senior colleague you’ve barely spoken to, and with little apparent thought to fairness or due process.
Griffiths “found” what he claimed was a pattern of bigotry in op-eds I had run and columns I had written, I imagine by punching my name and words such as “Muslim” or “immigration” into FP Advisor, the electronic database of previously published articles in Canada.
There is a term I learned recently for what Griffiths did that is a common technique of the cancel culture cult — outrage archeology. It’s where you dig up things people have said or written in the past, looking for something to express outrage about or to signal one’s self-proclaimed personal virtue. It’s often about things that generated no controversy at the time they were said or published.
For instance, Griffiths claimed that an op-ed by Robert Hauknes, a third-generation commercial fisherman from Prince Rupert, was “racist” by raising concerns that commercial fishing lodges, often catering to foreign nationals, were allowed to fish unimpeded while commercial fishermen were barred from fishing.
Griffiths also wrote that Hauknes’ claimed that “‘foreigners’ are coming to Canada to illegally harvest salmon while on fishing tours in B.C.,” something the author did not say. His op-ed wasn’t a racist complaint about “foreigners,” as Griffiths claimed. Hauknes was raising concerns about the policies of Fisheries and Oceans. And the “foreigners” Hauknes wrote about were mostly rich, white businesspeople from the U.S. and Europe flying in to luxury fishing lodges hoping to bag record-sized salmon.
Griffiths also went after what he claimed was an “Islamaphobic op-ed supporting bans on niqabs” by Calvin White, a veteran high school counsellor from Salmon Arm, mental-health worker and author who has written opinion pieces for most of the major newspapers in Canada.
While White admits to not liking niqabs — like the vast majority of Canadians — because it oppresses women, describing his op-ed as racist entirely misrepresents his views as White, as he wrote me later, is a “thrice NDP candidate, socialist, counselor who loves all children, with biracial kids and an immigrant wife.”
Sticking to the theme of niqabs, Griffiths dug up a column I had written in 2015, years before he was hired at the Sun, which he claimed contained “logical fallacies & bigoted arguments” and “mocks & otherwise denigrates Muslim women who wear a niqab.”
Had Griffiths done more research he would have discovered that I had defended the right of women to wear the niqab in every column I’d written on the subject, even if I was critical of the cultural practice for what could be generally described as feminist reasons.
He also failed to note that I had reported in the column that various polls at that time had found between 67 and 93 per cent of Canadians were opposed to women wearing the niqab while taking the oath of Canadian citizenship, the subject of the column. Dismissing the concerns of such a large majority of Canadians simply as racist is not only ridiculous and insulting but also unbecoming of a journalist.
Another of my columns Griffiths attacked as “evidence” of my alleged racism, from 2017, was about my concerns that Vancouver — already the Canadian city with the highest population density — was getting denser, according to new census data released then, and the negative impacts that was creating.
Although the column reported reams of StatsCan data and highlighted the numerous problems of too-rapid growth — normally a left-wing concern — on Metro Vancouver, Griffiths distilled my argument to, “we are letting too many people into Canada” — a grotesque misrepresentation of what I had written.
The column wasn’t motivated by opposition to immigration or immigrants and certainly not by racism. It was concerned that “we can’t keep up with growth, from exorbitant house prices, badly crowded roads, a chronically overburdened transit system, long wait lists for medical specialists and surgery, overcrowded schools and a general over-demand on government services” — the subjects of countless newspaper stories and endless public debate.
I pointed out, citing StatsCan data, the fact that two-thirds of Canada’s population growth comes from immigration, which mostly affects Canada’s large cities. “Perhaps it’s time to ask whether having the fastest growth rate among the top industrialized nations . . . is best for Canada?” I asked.
It’s appalling that so many journalists — Griffiths isn’t alone in his woke attitude — working for major media outlets would equate a fair discussion of the appropriate rate of immigration to Canada with racism. Does Griffiths believe Canada should admit an unlimited number of people? And since the number of immigrants granted entry to Canada has varied each year over the decades, depending on need, how is it controversial to want a lower number to allow government and the private sector to catch up in providing goods and services? At another time, I might easily have argued for higher immigration.
Don Wright, the recently retired head of British Columbia’s civil services, made similar points in Rhetoric Versus Results: Shaping Public Policy to Benefit Canada’s Middle Class, an online essay published in late June 2021 by the Public Policy Forum. He has called for lower immigration rates to help Canada’s struggling middle class.
“There seems to be a reluctance to challenge the arguments for growing immigration levels. Perhaps that is because they have been repeated so often, they are generally believed to be true,” Wright wrote.
“At least in part, however, it is because the promoters of large immigration numbers are quick to label as racist, parochial or small-minded any questioning of larger immigration numbers. Canada needs, however, to be a little more nuanced in its thinking than just accepting that more is always better. The question of what the optimal level of immigration should be over time is a legitimate question of public policy debate.”
***
Griffiths concluded his note by sanctimoniously telling Munro that he hoped that “moving forward the op-ed pages would reflect the voices of B.C. that are underserved, that are ignored & that face discrimination every day.”
It should be noted that none of the columns and op-eds that upset Griffiths as “racist” had ever been identified as such to me by anyone over the years, either by colleagues or readers. And his suggestion that the editorial pages had ignored marginalized “voices” within B.C. was, to be frank, utter bullshit.
During my time as editorial pages editor, I ran countless op-eds by members of the LGBTQ community, multicultural and poverty groups, native leaders, environmentalists, leftist think tanks and other progressive groups, as well as works by scientists and researchers on all manner of academic subjects, including raising concerns about climate change. With one exception from a child-poverty group that submitted a too-similar op-ed to one recently published, I don’t recall ever turning down the kind of op-ed Griffiths claimed was under-represented in the newspapers. And certainly, the “underserved” voices and issues he raised concerns about were also frequently covered by the news department.
His 30 minutes of research before publicly condemning my work as racist also failed to note columns I’d written against racism or in defence of multiculturalism. I twice defended the right of Chinese merchants in Richmond to display Chinese-only signs in their windows, a not very popular opinion at the time, expressed horror at a racist attack on a young Muslim woman on a transit train and denounced a white supremacist rally at Vancouver city hall in 2017, in which I wrote that such people hold “ignorant, despicable and hateful views” and that, “Like many people, I’ve been heartbroken in recent days about the racist protests and violence south of the border.”
***
Griffiths’ email — sent to the entire staff, done knowing that I would see it and the responses to it by others — was the final straw. Finding myself struggling, I contacted my doctor.
My GP examined me, listened to what had happened and how it was affecting me, and signed me off on an indefinite medical leave. I never went back. Leaving aside the very real and very negative impact on my mental health, as my wife said, there was no way I could ever work again with long-standing colleagues who had betrayed me and acted so unjustly and unprofessionally. Nor could I continue to work for Postmedia, which abandoned long-established journalistic principles in its panicked reaction to the Hecht op-ed and, through bungling and inaction, helped create a brutally toxic workplace.
But the hits had only started.
***
Veteran crime reporter Kim Bolan, thanking Griffiths for his “detailed and thoughtful note,” began organizing a committee of reporters to meet with Munro over the direction of the opinion pages, apparently not understanding how inappropriate it would be for reporters to involve themselves with the opinion pages. In May, Bolan was given a lifetime achievement award by World Press Freedom Canada for “her long-time work in the pursuit of press freedom,” according to a Sun story. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.
Stephanie Ip, then a digital content editor, recorded the Monday staff meeting led by Munro, according to former colleagues. Months later, a recording of that meeting was obtained by the left-wing website The Tyee — although, to be clear, I do not know who leaked that recording or if it was Ip’s — to produce the third of three articles it felt necessary to write about alleged racism in the newsroom. She was also among those who signed up for Bolan’s committee, according to a department-wide email, and was involved in a petition demanding changes to my one-person department, several newsroom sources have told me. Curiously, she remains to this day a union shop steward.
Ip’s behaviour, while disappointing (I’d once given her a handmade wooden spoon for Christmas I made as a friendly thank you to her for bringing baked treats to the newsroom) wasn’t surprising. Some months before the Hecht brouhaha, I’d gone up to her to discuss an issue that I frankly now can’t recall but I will never forget her reply. She told me, and not in a friendly tone, You’re an old, white man — you couldn’t possibly understand.
Setting aside the arrogance in telling a senior editor who’d been a journalist longer than she’d been alive that they couldn’t “possibly understand” something, or being so unprofessional as to say such a thing to a colleague (condemning my age, ethnicity and gender) in a workplace, imagine if the roles were reversed.
Not that the thought would have ever crossed my mind, nor of course that I’d ever have said it, but imagine how Ip would have felt and reacted if I’d told her, “You’re a young, Asian woman — you couldn’t possibly understand.” She would have been off to human resources in a flash, and rightly so.
That exchange sums up the woke crowd very neatly: Ip hit the trifecta of being racist, sexist and ageist in one sentence and saw nothing wrong with it, nor did she ever apologize. But when I ran an op-ed by a university lecturer in the opinion section as an opinion editor, not even something I’d written, she joined a mob in attacking free speech and me.
***
But there was more. Fueled in part, no doubt, by the outrage being expressed on social media by some of my colleagues, a petition calling for me to be fired was quickly launched by long-time left-wing activist Sarah Beuhler, now a digital campaigner and political strategist with the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, but formerly a member of Occupy Vancouver and a campaign manager for Vancouver’s Coalition of Progressive Electors civic party. I’m not the first person she’s gone after, having used another online petition in 2017 to demand the firing of then-B.C. Liberals’ communication director Emile Scheffel, and even, reportedly, earlier using social media to denounce fellow activists she disagreed with.
The petition launched against me was filled with ignorant, cruel comments by miserable leftists who had no idea who I was or what I believed but casually sought my professional destruction, thereby harming my family, for publishing what they considered some sort of Orwellian thoughtcrime.
The union local I’d paid dues to for several decades, Unifor local 2000, also got in on the outrage circus, with secretary-general Jennifer Moreau using the local’s Twitter account several times (without consulting other members of the local’s executive) to denounce Hecht’s op-ed, including calling it “racist propaganda,” and that the local “is investigating to find out what happened and how this racist column actually made it into print” — as if the union had any role in such an investigation.
Moreau, who broadcasts herself to the world on her Twitter account as a former reporter, feminist and climate activist, also tweeted that “ALL members deserve fair representation, and we take that duty VERY seriously, which is why we’re not rushing to judgment on this.”
Despite “not rushing to judgment,” in the same tweet she called Hecht’s piece “racist propaganda that cites a right-wing think tank best known for spreading anti-Muslim misinformation.” This was a reference to the Gatestone Institute, a conservative think tank described as anti-Muslim by those on the left.
I hadn’t heard of the institute before reading Hecht’s op-ed but I did have a quick look at its website before processing his piece for publication. It appeared to be similar to B.C.’s conservative Fraser Institute.
For an allegedly “anti-Muslim” group, it sure lists a large number of Muslim writers and scholars on its website, “such as the prominent journalists Amir Taheri; Khaled Abu Toameh; President of the American Islamic Forum M. Zuhdi Jasser; Salim Mansur; and Raheel Raza, among others,” as former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in a defence of the institute in 2018.
“Many of Gatestone’s articles are, in fact, pro-Muslim — advocating human rights and civil liberties for all Muslims, including Palestinians and Iranians,” he wrote, noting that if accusation of Islamophobia against the institute sound familiar to those of us who lived through the ‘thought police’ of the McCarthy era, it is because they are so similar.”
“Blaming an organization for those who read or circulate its material is McCarthyesque defamation. Attributing to an organization all the views of those who are invited to debate controversial issues is McCarthyesque demonization.”
I also quickly noted a trend among those who criticized Hecht — and me for running his op-ed. They nearly always listed his use of Gatestone’s research but never noted it was just one of five studies he cited. The others included work by academics at Harvard, Otto von Geuricke University and the World Values Survey, a 40-year-old “international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world,” according to its website.
“The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies.”
In other words, not exactly institutions of racism or white supremacy but of course that didn’t fit the narrative of the outrage mob.
***
While people are free to believe what they wish, even if poorly informed, journalists have a higher duty to be knowledgeable, balanced and fair, which is why I was so gutted by how some of my colleagues behaved. But the worst offender was David Beers of the Tyee, a left-wing website established by him with start-up money from the B.C. Federation of Labour.
He started the website after leaving the Sun in 2001 after a tumultuous three years where he had worked in management as a features editor and then as a freelance columnist, according to the late Shelley Fralic, the retired Sun executive editor and columnist who told me the story a few weeks before her sudden death in May 2021.
Beers had been hired and championed by then-Sun editor-in-chief John Cruickshank before he departed in 2000 to become vice-president of editorial at the Chicago Sun-Times. Fralic said that she and other senior editors who ran the paper after Cruickshank’s departure didn’t view Beers with the same enthusiasm, something Beers has acknowledged publicly.
Beers has maintained over the years that he was fired, but Fralic said the paper simply stopped taking his freelance column, in which he is described at the bottom as a “regular contributor to the Sun” or a “Vancouver writer” — typical descriptors for freelancers. Fralic said she dropped his column because it was too costly and, to her mind, not of enough interest to Sun readers.
I have to say I enjoyed one of Beers’ columns, his Oct. 6, 2001, defence of Hedy Fry, then-secretary of state for multiculturalism and the status of women, who had been attacked by then-federal NDP leader Alexa McDonough and then-conservative Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day for, as Beers wrote, sitting “silently through a fiery speech critical of the U.S. government delivered by (University of B.C.) professor Sunera Thobani to a cheering crowd of 500 fellow feminists.”
McDonough and Day called for Fry to be fired, which Beers said “pushed us a step closer to McCarthyism. And I don’t use that term loosely.”
Beers, defending Thobani’s right to say things such as “U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood,” argued that in calling for Fry to lose her job, her critics were taking the view, “You’re either with us or you’re against us.”
“One has to wonder, now that all the huffing and puffing is dying down, whether any of it served to bring us closer to defeating the enemy out there. Or whether it really was about manufacturing an enemy within.”
Beers, a frequent critic of the Sun and the mainstream media in general, wrote three pieces alleging racism in our newsroom after the Hecht op-ed. They were what I consider unfair, personal attacks on me by a writer who has never met me nor interviewed me. I wasn’t alone in that assessment; several of his Tyee readers made similar comments.
One reader, who went by the handle “Political Ranger” in the comments section under Beers’ first article on Sept. 11, 2019, called his piece “the most abhorrent piece of yellow journalism I have seen in a long, long time, perhaps ever, not least because of its complete capitulation to Orwellianism.”
Another reader, “WesNelsonBC,” said:
“Very disappointed in this article. What started as an analysis suddenly evolved into a hatchet job attacking one specific individual. There was no analysis as to how the decision by Clark to run this opinion piece was out of line with Munro’s direction that ‘he wants to make more space on the op-ed pages for a wide range of voices.’
“As the article states, Clark’s job description is ‘facilitating conversation in the public interest on the pages of two newspapers reaching tens of thousands of local citizens.’ How can he do this if [it] is only acceptable to publish opinions is (sic) support of immigration?”
“I believe there are many Canadians who would consider themselves to be centrists that are concerned about how many immigrants (particularly with different cultures and beliefs), can be integrated and how fast that can be done . . . how do we address these issues if it is unacceptable to include opinions that we might find offensive? I thought we were a country that values Freedom of Expression; lately that right seems to have been replaced with some new Freedom from Being Offended!”
Tyee reader, social worker and film producer Alex Sangha said he was “surprised” by the information Beers presented about me.
“I have never met him and I do not know him, however, he published three op-eds in The Province that I wrote about legalization of the sex trade, domestic violence in the South Asian community, and universal health care. I am a gay South Asian male. I am not sure if Gordon knew that or if he even cared.”
I did and I didn’t — of course.
Shocking, at least to my notions of journalistic ethics, Beers replied in the comments section to “Political Ranger’s” accusation that his article was “the most abhorrent piece of yellow journalism.”
He wrote — remarkable for someone who has taught feature writing at the University of B.C. journalism program — that in running the Hecht piece, the Vancouver Sun, and presumably me, “forfeited” his need to engage with us before producing his articles. In forfeiting “engagement,” he forfeited fairness and the journalistic obligation to seek the truth by hearing from all sides.
This was also clear from the subsequent stories, where he simply regurgitated the nonsense written by Griffiths as if it represented a fair assessment of my views.
By his third piece, written in June after some snake at the Sun leaked a recording of the September staff meeting, Beers further twisted my words by writing: “Clark had previously written that Muslim women who wear the niqab are ‘being jerks’ and a worsening quality of life in the Lower Mainland was due to too many immigrants.”
What I had actually written, which no one expressed any concern about at the time, was that the very small number of Muslim women who wished to wear face veils — a cultural, not a religious tradition — while taking the oath of citizenship in Canada “were kind of being jerks” given how upset the vast majority of Canadians felt about it — a very light jab in a tabloid column.
Keeping in mind that a huge majority of Canadians, according to polls, opposed the wearing of niqabs at citizenship ceremonies, as I reported, it certainly wasn’t a racist attack on the women because they were Muslim. I don’t like the niqab, like most Canadians, as I view it as oppressive of women. I wrote the piece, not out of a hatred of Muslims or any particular interest in the niqab, but because the issue was in the news and therefore topical for a daily newspaper columnist. Hell, I even consistently defended in columns their right to wear them.
While we’re at it, do Beers and others who think like him believe that Muslims or members of any races can’t be jerks? Or that no cultural practices can be condemned without accusations of racism? Would he accuse someone of racism if they criticized honour killings, cliterectomies or child marriage?
Then there was his false claim that I’d written that “worsening quality of life in the Lower Mainland was due to too many immigrants.” This is the line that really shows that Beers was more interested in the “hatchet job” described by one of his readers than fair journalism.
Anyone reading my column without an axe to grind would have understood that I was concerned that too-fast population growth was creating problems in the Lower Mainland. I only mentioned immigration being the source of that because, well, it was true, as Statistic Canada data I cited in the column revealed.
Beers twisted my words further by claiming that I had blamed “immigrants,” leaving the false accusation that I didn’t like newcomers to Canada as individuals, or immigration in general, as opposed to the size of permitted annual in-migration.
How do I know that’s what he meant?
In his first article on Hecht in September, Beers sneered: “It is safe to say that Clark does not spend his work days roaming neighbourhoods of the Lower Mainland meeting immigrants to understand the value they bring to our society — and to find new, non-white voices to run in his pages. Sources at the Sun said many days Clark can be found on the premises watching CNN for hours, conversing with whomever might wander by about Donald Trump and U.S. politics.”
Safe to say? As someone who grew up in Vancouver and who, since childhood, has always had friends from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, who has filled numerous volunteer roles supporting diversity and racial equality and who, before journalism, was a leftist activist, mostly concerned then about U.S. imperialism in Central America and the nuclear arms race, Beers could not have been more ignorant, irresponsible, insulting or wrong.
And he should get back to his “sources” — cowards from my old newsroom — who claimed I spent hours watching Trump on CNN, leaving the impression that I was a MAGA supporter. In fact, I took a coffee break once a day with a transgender friend from another department, where we watched Trump’s daily actions with horror. And, I’m sorry, but is Beers actually criticizing a working journalist for watching the news on his coffee break?
I’ve expressed my disdain for the former U.S. president in numerous columns, had Beers bothered to look, including commenting on Trump’s “latest vulgar remarks about women”, noting how “how unfit Trump is to be president” and mentioning the “cretinous bullyboy’s vile ramblings.”
Maybe Beers is sensitive about perceived criticism of immigrants because he is one. He moved to Vancouver from the Bay Area of California in 1991 when his wife Deirdre Kelly was hired as an education professor at the University of B.C., where her research includes gender studies, media and democracy and social justice.
Whatever. Perhaps I protest too much. Let me just say that I’m one of millions of Canadians who isn’t going to be lectured to by an American about racism.
***
What happened to me in the fall of 2019 wasn’t the first or last time a journalist would be attacked by the cancel culture cult. As many people know, the nearly identical fate befell James Bennet, the guy who did the same job as me at the New York Times in June 2020 after he ran an op-ed from a sitting U.S. senator that young reporters on staff didn’t agree with, claiming, poor things, that it made them feel “unsafe.”
Unsafe? Seriously? I wonder how the 2,095 journalists and other media workers killed around the world since 1992 (and many thousands more before then) while bringing people the news, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, would feel about someone claiming to be “unsafe” from reading something they didn’t agree with while sitting in a cushy Big Apple newsroom? We need to reject the totally false notions of the new generation of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” that they are harmed by words or by people who express ideas they do not share.
The Times’ millennial publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, blamed “a significant breakdown in our editing processes” for the alleged error in running the op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who argued that Trump should use troops under the Insurrection Act to put down rioting following the murder by police of George Floyd.
Problems with “editing processes?” Where have we heard that before?
Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, also resigned in June 2020 after an article headlined, Buildings Matter, Too, about damage to buildings by Black Live Matter led dozens of his staff to walk off the job in protest.
New York Times columnist Bari Weiss resigned the next month, saying in a public resignation letter that Times’ management had failed to correct “unlawful discrimination” and a “hostile work environment” by woke colleagues and that her “forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.”
“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” she wrote.
Esteemed New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil and the CBC’s Wendy Mesley were forced out for using the “n-word” in ways that were clearly meant to inform, not insult.
These are just a few of hundreds of similar stories of cancel culture from within the media, the arts, universities and elsewhere.
***
In a recent show available on YouTube, the comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher described the cancelling of people by the woke cult for what they write or say.
“This is called a purge,” he said. “It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia. How bad does this atmosphere we are living in have to get before the people who say cancel culture is overblown admit that it is, in fact, an insanity that is swallowing up the world?”
While cancelling anyone for an alleged thoughtcrime is destructive, it has a uniquely critical impact when it’s done to journalists, especially by colleagues, because of the devastating effect it has on free debate within a democracy and the damage it does to the public’s view of the media. It harms our democracy, both in not allowing different views to be heard, which is an assault on people’s ability to be citizens, but also in destroying critical debates that are needed to find the best policy solutions to society’s many problems.
Treating other citizens as enemies because you don’t like something they expressed is totalitarian. You don’t win respect for your point of view or promote improved conditions of dignity for oppressed groups by attacking or seeking to destroy other people with whom you share a neighbourhood, country or planet. The worst moments in history result from “I’m right, you’re wrong” thinking. Besides, attacking people for their views, especially by working to end their ability to earn a living for them and their families like McCarthyites, is unlikely to convince them that you’re right.
While journalists may feel great ideologically preening to each other in the progressive bubbles of safety that used to be called newsrooms, they do themselves no favours by turning off the roughly half of readers who do not think as they do and who want newspapers and other media to present a wide range of views.
Postmedia journalists, in particular, can’t financially afford to lose readers by failing to serve Canadians with a wide range of views.
The company reported a $66.1-million drop in revenue for the year ending August 31, 2021, a 13-per-cent decline to $442.3 million from $508.4 million in 2020, according to its year-end financial report. It also reported assets of $276.2 million against liabilities of $415.9 million — a nearly $140-million deficiency.
And all that despite receiving $63.3 million from taxpayers under Ottawa’s Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy for companies hurt by the pandemic and an estimated $9 million to $11 million a year in federal and Quebec tax credits.
Falling revenue is part of a decade-long trend; the company reported $1.02 billion at its first year end in 2011 after acquiring its media assets from Canwest.
***
So what should be done?
If you’re attacked by cancel culture, fight back. Each case is different and I’m not here to tell anyone what tactics are best for them. But two things are key, in my view. If you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t apologize just because some people are upset. And if someone has maligned you, tell the world that their accusations are wrong, as I am doing here. You need to stand up for the fairness principle for yourself and for others.
If you’re a reporter or other journalist involved in reporting, shut up. While you are entitled to your opinions in private, it is unprofessional to share them in public, particularly concerning politics, as it undermines the public’s confidence in your work. Leave opinion writing to opinion writers. You harm your and your employers’ reputations with readers, many of whom don’t hold your political views, and who only buy your journalism for fair, balanced newswriting. Don’t insult them by telling them they need to think like you.
When you prattle your political opinions in public on Twitter or other social media, or describe yourself as some sort of activist, you discredit yourself in the eyes of people you might interview with different views, who may not trust you, as well as with readers who will view your work as slanted. You can’t be an activist and a reporter — you need to pick. Those are the rules and they haven’t changed.
If you employ reporters, crack down on cancel culture behaviour by your staff by setting clear rules against public displays of personal politics, especially on social media. Also, watch for bias in their work. I’ve noticed a growing trend in recent years — something I mentioned to other senior editors many times — of political stories being run without opposition comment, usually when the opposition is on the right, or even a customary “could not be reached for comment,” showing at least an attempt to achieve balance.
With editing staff cut to the bone, and the constant rush to get stories online, articles aren’t being checked as well as when I was a young reporter for things that have been missed. But this is no excuse for lack of balance, which erodes reader confidence in your work and also lowers the quality of the reporting by failing to share a wide range of thoughts about a given news event.
Media companies, like all firms, also have a duty to protect employees from attacks from colleagues, especially when they go public with their complaints, often damaging the psychological and physical wellbeing of people under attack. Journalists who join outrage mobs hurt the reputation of media companies.
They should be disciplined or even fired to make it clear that such behaviour won’t be tolerated. If a concern arises, the only fair way to deal with it is within the company by the appropriate people, not in public through a mob conducting some kind of Maoist exercise of ideological purity, like young people during China’s cultural revolution.
Keep in mind that freedom of the press is one of the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It cannot be free if everyone in a newsroom is told what and how to think.
Finally, be kind and fair if you see a colleague under attack. Be brave in standing with them in facing intemperate, illiberal attacks. (I will be forever thankful to those former colleagues — they know who they are — who reached out to make sure I was okay.)
Even if you don’t agree with something someone has said or done, or they have made a mistake, don’t let that define them for you. People are complex and making assumptions about their motives is a fool’s game. Turning people into enemies in your mind might feel good in helping you to define yourself as a “good” person within the “good” group or asserting power over others, as too many on the left and right now do in our polarized times, but it’s an awful, vicious thing to do to someone and may come back to haunt you.
If you build a society that casually allows the cancelling of people, as George Orwell, Arthur Koesler or Hannah Arendt warned, one day the victim might be you. History is filled with examples. U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reckless attacks on the left during the anti-communist frenzy of the 1950s that resulted in blacklisting people out of work is one story with which young modern progressives should become better acquainted. In some ways the attacks are worse now, with social media and the Internet allowing rushed, unfair and widespread accusations against people to remain permanent stains on their reputations that are virtually impossible to have removed.
Plus — and this is particularly problematic for journalists — having a closed mind eliminates your opportunity to consider other points of view that might reveal some truths if you didn’t instantly reject them for ideological reasons. As a reporter, you have a duty to remain open minded and fair in reporting different perspectives in news stories.
Speaking as someone who was so far to the left as a young person that my mother feared I might sneak off to Central America and get shot in a revolution, keep in mind that people’s political opinions can shift over time as they gain life experience. With age comes the ability to see nuance. That’s just a fact, something young people need to understand. You’re not even close to being the first generation to oppose racism or homophobia so stop acting like it.
Don’t be so swelled with your own certainty to become disdainful of older people, who may have thought more like you when they were your age. If you live long enough, you may be surprised that you start agreeing with them. Are you right now or will you be correct in the future?
While cleaning up my garage one day since I left the papers, I came across a bunch of lapel buttons I’d collected in my teens and early 20s before I became a journalist. They included such slogans as “Redheads for Choice,” “Refuse the Cruise,” “Central America is Spanish for Vietnam,” and “Free Nelson Mandela.”
The one that made me laugh was “Nazi Punks — Fuck Off,” referencing the 1981 Dead Kennedys’ song opposing violent racist skinheads within the punk subculture. Frontman and lyricist Jello Biafra screams sarcastically in the song, “Ten guys jump one, what a man!” before warning that when fascism comes “You’ll be the first to go . . . Unless you think!”
While woke culture types clearly aren’t Nazis, their hate-fueled tactics to destroy those with whom they disagree have lots in common with any of the anti-liberal groups throughout history who oppose debate and seek to impose a single orthodoxy on society. Consider the renewed horror unfolding in Afghanistan, especially as it affects women and girls. That kind of behaviour must remain anathema in liberal democracies who became and are great because of the liberal principles currently under attack.
My fellow citizens who engage in cancel culture are being lousy Canadians and, like others who think like them throughout the West, must be firmly opposed if we are to maintain a society that operates on the principles of free speech, fairness, the rule of law and reasoned debate. If you don’t agree with something someone has written, use your intelligence to explain how they are wrong and offer your view, don’t engage in devastating ad hominem attacks, especially the current trend to instantly seek a person’s professional destruction, doing tremendous harm to them and their families. Do not, as is the trend these days, so casually label people as racists, which is a terrible and destructive thing to call someone.
Anne Applebaum, the author and staff writer at The Atlantic, painted the “grim” future if cancel culture is allowed to continue to thrive in an excellent Aug. 31, 2021, essay.
“Foundations will do secret background checks on their potential grantees, to make sure they haven’t committed crimes-that-are-not-crimes that could be embarrassing in the future. Anonymous reports and Twitter mobs, not the reasoned judgments of peers, will shape the fate of individuals. Writers and journalists will fear publication. Universities will no longer be dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge but to the promotion of student comfort and the avoidance of social-media attacks,” she wrote.
“Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defence, the right to a just trial — even the right to be forgiven — will wither.”
Is that really the world we wish to build? I certainly hope not.
Gordon Clark was employed as a daily newspaper reporter, editor and columnist for 36 years, including stints at the Vancouver Sun, the Prince George Citizen, the Edmonton Journal and The Province. He holds a degree in history from the University of B.C., where he got his start in journalism on The Ubyssey student newspaper.
