A journalist called Catherine Porter took her nine year old daughter to a “Jobs, Justice and Climate” march in Toronto. While there the child had a conversation with Ezra Levant. Ms Porter gave her account of that conversation here: My daughter’s run-in with Ezra Levant at her first protest. She made Levant out to be a big bad bully. Her account appeared in a respected newspaper, the Toronto Star, and although Levant’s reply giving his own, very different account of his dialogue with the little girl was published, by the time it appeared the narrative had been settled and it was only his word against hers anyway.
Yes, of course I made that last bit up. This is the twenty-first century, you know. You know even if Catherine Porter does not. Naturally Ezra Levant made sure to get the whole thing on video and was able to conclusively – and amusingly – demonstrate that Catherine Porter’s account deviated from the truth in numerous ways. The weird thing is that she cannot have been unaware of the camera. Levant is a lawyer who has had numerous run-ins with leftists and he insisted on getting Ms Porter to state to camera that she gave permission for Levant to speak to her daughter. Incidentally, one of the details her account obscured was that it was Ms Porter who called Levant over to talk to her daughter and she who asked for the encounter to be filmed. He was initially quite reluctant to debate with a child, rightly fearing that Ms Porter Senior intended to set him up for propaganda purposes.
Why on earth did she write as she did in the Toronto Star? Good grief, it’s not as if potentially embarrassing encounters routinely being filmed at rallies as a defence against misreporting is something that only came in last month. Did she think Levant would just accept being slimed like it was 1999?
Hat tip: Bishop Hill
The collectivists have been liars since, at least, time of Plato (indeed since the start of humanity).
And their lies are anything but “noble” – Natalie is right to use the word “slimed”, that is what the collectivists do. They slime people with their lies.
Can modern technology be used to expose the lies?
I hope so – but I fear that only a minority of people will see the truth (the internet, including search engines, has been moved to the left – by organised action).
As for “Jobs, Justice and Climate”.
If people believe that C02 emissions are a danger – then they should support deregulating nuclear power (which would not reduce safety – quite the contrary) which would enable a lot more (and cheaper) nuclear power stations to be built.
What they would NOT support is more taxes and regulations – which would destroy the very “jobs” they claim to support.
As for “Justice” – these evil folk actually support “Social Justice” (the sworn enemy of justice), the doctrine that all income and wealth rightly belong to the collective and need to be “distributed”.
There are those who never let the facts interfere with the narrative (NYT anyone?).
They should stop themselves from breathing, or, if they lack the principled courage, put on 4 stones of fat as a ‘carbon sink’.
“SJW’s always lie”
The collectivists …
Not wishing to drag up old threads but it should be noted, as in the earlier discussion about Mussolini and Keynes, mixing up the shades of the political spectrum, there is nothing wrong with collectivism per se, right, left, authoritarian and liberal, it is the manner in which collectivism is enabled. Ms Porter is clearly of the opinion that (her) collective ideologies need to be forced on others, coming from her “moral superiority” and all that, ironically she mentioned “fighting the nazis”, yet her methodology is firmly in the fascist/communist corner of the chart.
These people need to be outed as “big lie” authoritarians, not withstanding their lack of scientific credentials and regardless of the nature of the debate, and Levant went quite a way into that discussion, just didn’t finish it off, not wishing to smack down mommy in front of her kid, and it wont be the first time leftists have used children as political shields.
Can you imagine the fear Ezra must have felt.
Toronto has a world wide reputation for being a city of complete fucking wackos. ‘Nuff said really.
Toronto global warming fanatic: Someone terrified of the prospect that Canada will one day be a temperate zone, capable of growing unfathomable amounts of nutricious natural food.
“Respected” and “newspaper” should never be used as modifiers for the publication known as “The Toronto Star”.
“Ezra Levant made sure to get the whole thing on video and was able to conclusively – and amusingly – demonstrate that Catherine Porter’s account deviated from the truth in numerous ways.”
Heterosexual males, “beta” and higher, on you way to college….take note.
As someone who grew up in Toronto, I can confirm that the Toronto Star (aka “The Red Star”) is really not a respected newspaper. It nonetheless works well for lining birdcages and paper mache.
He does come across as a little forceful at times in that video. I probably would have slowed it down a little and given the mother more chance to talk. He didn’t really have to enumerate *all* the petrochemical products on her person, complete with pointing, to make his point. He might at least have kept the daughter on his side that way.
That said, he’s totally right. These people suddenly look very weak: they have nothing, no principled stand, no good ideas, no knowledge. All they have is the force of the state. And they might find that it is fickle.
Also Thailover owes me a new keyboard. And I just got this beautiful new laptop, too.
Mr. Ed: yes, just as one might say, while considering a pit of vipers, “I agree, we should investigate it, and you go first.”
(Wish I could remember the actual quote! Probably lots of variations; I think it has whiskers.)
People are capable of quite astonishing amounts of self deception and self serving editing of their own memories. I don’t think Catherine Porter is consciously lying here. At least not much, and certainly not much more than many/most people do when telling stories of what happened to them. Parts of Ezra Levants rebuttal strike me as pedantic. No, the little girl didn’t exactly say ‘you’re being mean to my mom’ but that is clearly what she meant. Porter is recalling the exchange from memory and it doesnt seem like a particularly gross distortion to me, by ordinary standards . It IS sloppy journalism but not malicious slander I think.
Why did she write what she wrote?
Because she’s a legacy-media journalist, of course; she’s used to having the last word on everything and making sure the little people don’t answer back.
As far as she’s concerned, it still is 1999.
“I don’t think Catherine Porter is consciously lying here.”
Of COURSE not, It’s micro lying. She doesn’t even realize she’s lying.
It’s such unrealized lying that’s been instilled into her by a sense of privilege. The systematic institutional reinforcement of such a “lying culture” can ONLY be addresses by diligent re-education, mandatory exposure to reality based truths, and if necessary, physical removal from the atmosphere that enables such behavior, WITHOUT access to disingenuous evidentiary, or experiential denial crutches.
See what I did there?
Money quote from Ms Porter’s article:
“And two, why waste this precious time arguing? You can do that every day on the subway. The whole point of coming here was to be surrounded by like-minded people.”
There’s is the SJW ‘protest’ experience in a nutshell – not out to change anyone else’s opinion, but only to have your own opinions reinforced by ‘the madness of crowds’. It’s an NFL game for luvvies – you get to hang out with a bunch of people who all think exactly the same as you, and cheer for the exact-same things.
I love the way that she refers to her daughter’s ‘first protest’, the way that doting parents used to talk with pride about their child’s ‘first communion’, a rite of passage in their imposed faith tradition.
It’s amazing how much of the ‘social justice’ movement apes organized religion, with its anointed saints, sacred totems and inviolable creeds.
llater,
llamas
Nice one llamas, indeed, it has been said that Socialism is a Christian ‘Heaven on Earth’ heresy. The socialist mindset is awfully like the nuttier German Anabaptists of the 16th Century.
Quite true, and one might add: editing of their (our) true intentions, to make them conform to their (our) moral vanities.
But — speaking of intentions — the issue here is not whether Ms Porter lied consciously or as a result of self deception: the issue is, in Ezra’s own words, that “she wasn’t just using her daughter as a prop at the protest, she was using her daughter as a prop for the newspaper too!”
To the SJW (RBF)* crowd all y’all not me *are* props.
*Rat Bastage Fascists
or
Fascist Rat Bastages, whichever flows better at the mo.
The only thing amazing about this is that the Red Star’s public editor publicly excoriated Porter for this. That’s the first time in Levant’s long career of successfully baiting leftists that this has occured.
Porter’s article is par for the course for the Star, and a good example why the Sun is so successful despite not being read by all the right-thinking people in Toronto.
For non-Torontonians, Toronto has 4 papers, two are local-oriented, the high-brow and very left-wing Star and the populist and mildly right-wing Sun (complete with Page 3 girls, now on the back page), the other two are nationally oriented, the venerable Globe & Mail, founded by one of the country’s founders and read by business & political leadership (the Globe & the Liberal Party of Canada share a founder and thus both are the establishment’s respective paper & party) and the mild-right National Post, youngest of the 4 papers and founded by the ever-controversial Lord Black.