National Affairs by Claire Hoy — Perpetual screamers and ‘inclusiveness’

March 27, 2017 · 0 Comments

It was the late Australian actor Leo McKern who said: “It is easy to believe in freedom of speech for those with whom we agree,” an observation which seems to become more prescient every day.
Just last week, for example, Toronto lawyer Danielle Robitaille’s planned keynote address to the campus’ Criminology Students Association of Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, was cancelled because a group of student critics had organized events to disrupt her speech.
In the Senate, some senators and a myriad of outsiders, continued calling for the resignation of Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak for a speech in which she said that despite the appalling side of the controversial residential schools experiment from the last century, it was not all bad and most of those involved actually were trying to do some good.
Also, in the little-noticed NDP leadership contest, Manitoba MP Niki Ashton — who prides herself on being the furthest left of all the candidates — was accused — dare we say it? — of the apparently horrible crime of “cultural appropriation” for using a Beyonce lyric in her leadership bid announcement and — as you’d expect from a dedicated far-left wingnut — immediately apologized to the Vancouver cell of Black Lives Matter.
And so it goes.
The perpetual screamers — whose very existence seems to hinge upon unearthing racist, sexist, etc. outrages (or what they deem to be outrages) — do all this in the name of “inclusiveness,” which is to say they believe that everything and everyone should be included equally in society except, of course, for those things and people they disagree with. Which, given their extraordinary sensitivity to even a questionable glance in their direction, pretty well includes most of society except their own small but loud compatriots.
The good news on this front came to us by way of Dani Reiss, the CEO of Canada Goose, the high-end Canadian coat company which went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week, prompting the inevitable protest by PETA. Reiss — God bless him — said his company does indeed use duck and goose feathers in some of its’ down-filled parkas and coyote fur in the hoods of some parkas and — God bless him — will continue to do so responsibly. PETA, as it has done in many instances, announced it was buying a chunk of shares in the company so it could speak up at annual meetings. Bully for them, with the obvious emphasis on “bully.”
Indeed, bullying — which the left will be the first to claim is unconscionable — is the main target of groups who exist to deny the right of anybody else to say anything not approved by their own internal censors.
In the aforementioned case of lawyer Danielle Robitaille, for example, the reason she couldn’t possibly be allowed to speak is that she was part of the defence team of disgraced CBC star Jian Ghomeshi who, in the eyes of zealous feminists, was apparently not allowed to defend himself from charges (which were dismissed after a full court hearing) which could have seen him doing jail time. After all, Ghomeshi is a man, which apparently is all the proof the screamers need to determine the fact that he was guilty as charged and anybody who helped him escape his due punishment cannot be allowed to upset the tender folks studying criminology in Brantford.
Then, of course, there is the apparently unforgiveable faux pas by Senator Beyak, a member of the Senate’s Aboriginal Peoples committee, for acknowledging the horrible harm done during the residential school system, and saying they “must be addressed,” but also arguing there was also an “abundance of good” which has been totally overlooked.
Rather than go with the flow — and distort what really happened — Beyak dared to say that many of the men and women who taught in that system were “kindly and well intentioned . . . whose remarkable works, good deeds and historical tales in the residential schools go unacknowledged.”
No, no. She can’t say that. Everything about them is horrid. Everybody involved was a heartless beast. Any thoughts — let alone actual statements — to the contrary must be muffled. Period. End of story.
And finally we come to Ashton and the phoney “cultural appropriation” argument. To suggest somebody has to be of a particular culture to quote somebody is, how shall we say this, beyond stupid.
Yet, there are groups out there doing just that and, as Ashton sadly demonstrated, there are those “leaders” in society who are only too happy to go along with such nonsense. hoy