This week the CBC used your tax dollars to generate propaganda extoling the emergence of a social phenomenon among children that is associated with profound psychological suffering:
Regardless of your views on the transgender phenomenon, no one should be pleased that it's becoming increasingly common for children to be "questioning their gender".
Another term for "questioning their gender" is gender dysphoria. It's associated with debilitating depression and anxiety. And yet here we have the parenting expert at the state broadcaster celebrating that children are being conditioned to believe this is something they should be doing.
Despite these well-established harms associated with gender dysphoria, the only people identified here as experiencing anything "difficult" are the parent's and friends of the conflicted child. Presumably this difficulty will resolve the moment they replace concern over their loved one's depression and anxiety with the same sanguine, ideological certainty exemplified by our CBC parenting expert.
Speaking of CBC and ideological certainty:
After reading the article, I'm convinced that 'CBC Investigates' was chosen as the heading because 'CBC dispenses with maintaining even the pretense of journalistic principles to get you to equate any questioning of official government narratives with malevolence and insanity' was simply too long.
The gatekeepers of political authority use the expression 'conspiracy theory' as code for 'don't think for yourself'. Basically they are exploiting the same impulse that makes teenagers want to identify with the cool kids in school and mock the outliers.
Teens seeking the confidence-by-proxy delivered by identifying with their high-status peers will adopt the characteristics, tastes and attitudes of the clique. Those attributes are made absolute so that any indication of non conformity to sanctioned opinion instantly identifies you as a weirdo, an outsider and someone deserving of unreserved derision.
The merits of the non conforming attitudes are never explored. Neither is the merit of non conformist thinking itself. That's because the merits of the competing perspectives is never the point. Conformity is the point. And conformity is served by binary categorization. Not by thinking. 'Do you think Ryan, Ryan and Ryan is the greatest boyband ever or not? You don't? Eww, gross! Get out of our lunchroom, weirdo!'
Similarly, the propagandists for state power like Jonathan Montpetit at 'CBC Investigates' reduce everything to categories: You either demonstrate strict conformity to the official narrative on Covid and the 'vaccines' or you're wrong and bad.
The non conformist perspectives are never examined for their merit. Montpetit merely labels those who hold them as "conspiracy theorists":
"Conspiracy theorists form a significant part of the Quebec Conservative's support."
Or he pronounces them to be "discredited" and spreaders of "disinformation":
"On social media, he defends discredited doctors in the name of free speech and occasionally circulates articles from websites known for spreading disinformation, such as National File and Becker News."
Or he simply proclaims their views unjustified because the official narrative suggests otherwise:
"Poilievre, the front-runner in the federal Conservative leadership race, drew criticism last month when he briefly marched alongside James Topp, a former soldier who has refused to be vaccinated because he doesn't believe the vaccines are safe and effective, despite scientific evidence suggesting otherwise."
Or he arbitrarily equates opposition to the official narrative with opposition to "medical expertise" and something called "reigning democratic norms":
"Now, as a fall election nears, he is welcoming into the party a slew of candidates who appear to be even more radical in their opposition to medical expertise and reigning democratic norms."
The most galling aspect of this is that we're forced to pay for this crap.
Here are a few other highlights from the week in awful Canadian journalism...
Max Fawcett, Canada's National Observer:
Remember when journalists knew the difference between law and order and abuse of state power?
Justin Ling, Toronto Star, CBC, Maclean's:
So according to Justin, there are two explanations for why people don't agree with Justin: They're either wrong because they're stupid and evil... or they're wrong because they're stupid and naïve.
Justin is letting you know he's magnanimous enough to acknowledge that "both can be true".
Makes you wonder if there's any other explanation that "can be true".
I can't help but notice the option that Justin's own perspective is distorted or wrong is mysteriously left out of the equation.
To me, this is a clear demonstration of the inability of the conformist class to reflect on their own perspective. The fatal flaw in the worldview of people like Justin Ling is that they don't include themselves as a factor in how they interpret things. They take for granted that their personal view on the world and objective reality are the same. At the same time they are hyper aware of the capacity of other people to extract inaccurate interpretations of the world and still be convinced their perceptions are true. The determining factor used by Justin to distinguish a perspective that is stupid and wrong from one that is infallibly correct is whether or not it's identical to Justin's.
I found this Twitter thread to be a splendid little example of the self-confirming, self-referential thinking of the Canadian media clique:
So you have Toronto Star sportswriter/authority on everything Bruce Arthur referencing Toronto Star digital producer Richie Assaly who is referencing the CBC. This is followed by Bruce Arthur also referencing the CBC followed by CBC, National Observer, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Liberal Party communications advisor Supriya Dwivedi proclaiming that everything above is absolutely true.
It's amazing to watch journalists in the hermetically sealed bubble of the Canadian media establishment reference each other as proof that their partisan professional group-think is inarguably correct.
What examination of the awful state of Canadian journalism would be complete without mentioning Andrew Coyne?
Both Andrew and Max Fawcett shared this unintentionally humiliating article from the Washington Post:
It's genuinely embarrassing to see Andrew endorse such a cringeworthy article. And it has nothing to do with whether or not you like Trump.
It has to do with the fact that confident men just don't feel the need to go around making public statements about how it's 'those guys over there who are insecure about their manhood! Not me!'
It's far more plausible that the opposite is true: Insecure, weak men demonstrating obsessive, irrational hatred of Trump because he makes them feel timid, submissive, conformist and underachieving by comparison.
But that wasn't all that Andrew chose to expose about himself over the last week.
Radio broadcaster Greg Brady tweeted his concerns about the absurdity of the University of Toronto yet again holding student's education ransom in exchange for taking more doses of Covid 'vaccines'.
Coyne's response showed him to be a callous zealot who is unaffected by reason.
Here is Brady's tweet:
Andrew responded to Brady's well reasoned, fact-based assessment with what is fast becoming his trademark narcissistic certainty. He blithely dismissed every rational concern out of hand and recommended students just do what he thinks they should do:
"Or they can just get the shot." It's as simple as that Greg. The answer to all of the valid concerns you articulated is just replace your point of view with Andrew's. Andrew has no problems with coercing other people's kids into taking medications they don't need or want and that have the potential to harm them in order to finish their education. Therefore neither should you or anybody else.
Still, since he's treating this like it's no big deal, I'd like to ask Andrew which medications he was forced to take in order to complete his university education.
I'm guessing he was never put in that position as a student.
And finally we have a splendid example of the media's capacity to compartmentalize reality:
In the article from Global News, Professor Gerold Schmitt-Ulms of the Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Disease offers frank acknowledgement of how self-interest drives fraudulent activity in the scientific community:
“It is neither new nor surprising that a small number of individuals in the sciences resort to fraudulent activity because the short-term gain, measured in research funding or career advancement, can be considerable.”
So why characterize this report from Global News as an example of Canadian media engaging in 'compartmentalization'?
Well Psychology Today defines compartmentalization as "a defense mechanism in which people mentally separate conflicting thoughts, emotions, or experiences to avoid the discomfort of contradiction."
The journal says this uncomfortable state "is called cognitive dissonance, and it’s one that humans try to avoid, by modifying certain beliefs or behaviors or through strategies like compartmentalization."
The cognitive dissonance we're seeing from the media here is glaring.
For the past 2 1/2 years Global News along with the rest of the Canadian media establishment has admonished the public to regard scientists as enlightened beings of unimpeachable moral character and integrity. Canadians were encouraged to assume that people working in a field of science could be motivated by nothing but benevolence and a selfless pursuit of truth. Their proclamations were to be understood as absolute fact. When they migrated from merely advisory roles to unelected directors of public policy we were to perceive this as the natural order of things. Heretics who questioned the wisdom of any of this were met with scorn and derision... 'What? You think you know better than scientists?' Instead of trusting our capacity as rational adults to make our own judgements about what we were being told and ordered to do we were instructed to 'trust the experts!'
In other words, at no time did Global News or any other mainstream media source say anything about it not being "new or surprising" that the small group of people we just handed control of our society to have been known to engage in fraudulent activity for personal self-interest.
They are happily broadcasting this critical perspective of the scientific community in this one context while treating it as the ultimate taboo when it came to Covid, mask efficacy, lockdowns and the 'vaccines'. We can chuck 'climate crisis' in there as well as somehow preternaturally immune to this "neither new or surprising" fraudulent activity in the sciences.
Here's a couple other tidbits from the article worth noting and comparing to the rollout of the Covid 'vaccines'.
The allegedly falsified research identified the protein amyloid beta as a cause of Alzheimer's.
The article reports that "it’s hard to ignore that the only Alzheimer’s drug that has come to market in North America is a treatment that targets amyloid beta."
The article also states that "Aduhelm, a drug developed by Biogen, recently received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration despite little clinical evidence that it benefits those who suffer from Alzheimer’s. The drug was controversially fast-tracked through the approval process in order to further amyloid beta research."
Any of this sounding vaguely familiar?
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