Saturday Commentary and Review #86

Fake Mass Graves of Natives in Canada, 'Cancel Culture' Cannibalizing Progressive NGOs, The French Left Awakens, Paul Mason vs. Grayzone, "Untouchable" Ariel Pink

(Important Note: Many readers have contacted me, both free and paying subscribers, that emails are landing in their spam folders. This might be the result of me using the same title for every book club entry thus far for the new book that we are reading and discussing. I probably should have changed the titles and kept the same subtitle for each entry instead. Check your spam folders for emails from this Substack that might have missed your inbox. Thank you!)

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My readers do not need another lesson in how media campaigns create narratives that have little to do with reality, but that have everything to do with implementing a political agenda. Every weekend at this Substack we digest news and opinion, dissect it, and try to figure out what is right, what is wrong, and just what the intention is when they try to feed us their bullshit. The average normie is far too busy to concern him or herself with critically analyzing every piece of news that lands on their screens, whether television, laptop, or mobile device. They cannot be blamed for this for the simple reason that we are constantly bombarded with news all day long. It is simply impossible to keep up with everything, and even more difficult to try and figure out what is actually happening.

Even here in this part of Europe, where people are born with the what may be the best internal bullshit detectors in the world, media narratives are absorbed and accepted quite often. For example, many people here in Split are under the impression that white police officers in the USA are hunting down and killing young black men to the tune of thousands per year (from 2015 to 2021 the total number of unarmed Black men and women killed was 135). The people here shouldn’t be expected to know all the fine details about a foreign country, but it does colour their perceptions and shows how powerful media narratives saturate and permeate.

Mass media hysteria is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s as old as mass media itself. The difference today is the ubiquity of the news in our lives combined with the interactivity of social media. We now consume AND interact with the product itself, for better and for (usually) worse. Case in point: last summer’s hysteria over purported mass graves of Natives in Canadian Residential Schools.

The story that spread like wildfire:

This is how it all began, a year ago this week: ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. On May 28, 2021, that’s how the New York Times headlined the first of a summer-long series of gruesome “discoveries” that precipitated a descent into paroxysms of shame, guilt and rage that swept across the country.

That first story was ostensibly about 215 children whose remains were discovered in a mass grave at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School, on the grounds of the main Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior. The New York Times headline illustrates the way the story was almost universally reported.

Except that’s not what happened in Kamloops.

In the following weeks, while the term “mass graves” generally gave way to “unmarked graves,” a cascade of breaking news events purported to reveal several discoveries of what eventually added up to more than 1,300 child burials at other residential school sites across Canada. Except that’s not what happened in those places, either.

The result of the media psyop:

Still, there were protests and violence in cities and towns from one end of Canada to the other. Dozens of churches were vandalized. Several churches were razed to the ground, some of them beloved old Indian reserve churches where Indigenous communities had baptized their children and eulogized their dead going back generations.

Statues were toppled and smashed. Canada Day events were cancelled. The Maple Leaf was lowered on Parliament Hill and on all federal buildings across the country. United Nations human rights special rapporteurs called on Canada to conduct a full investigation.

The actuality:

As for the most recent uproars: not a single mass grave was discovered in Canada last year. The several sites of unmarked graves that captured international headlines were either already-known cemeteries, or they remain sites of speculation even now, unverified as genuine grave sites. Not a single child among the 3,201 children on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 registry of residential school deaths was located in any of these places. In none of these places were any human remains unearthed.

Performative Penance:

One of the most totemic images from the turbulent summer of 2021 depicted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear, kneeling at a little flag marking the site of a grave near the former Marieval residential school on the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.

Except it wasn’t a just-discovered residential school burial ground. The graveyard where Trudeau knelt was a Catholic cemetery, a community cemetery. Children and adults, Indigenous and settler, were buried there, going back generations. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, the successor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, lists nine students who died at Marieval in the century between the school’s opening and its closing in 1997.

Native bands were the voice of reason, rejecting the outlandish claims of White liberal Canadians:

Except that’s not what happened.

The Cowessess people noted from the outset that they didn’t discover any graves; the crosses and headstones had gone missing under disputed circumstances decades earlier, and ground-penetrating radar had been brought in to enumerate and pinpoint the location of each burial. Cowesses Chief Cadmus Delorme told CBC News: “This is a Roman Catholic grave site. It’s not a residential school grave site.”

Cowessess elder and former Marieval student Lloyd Lerat said the depiction of the cemetery as a burial ground for residential school children took on a life of its own. Lerat told Jorge Barrera of the CBC’s Indigenous unit in Ottawa: “We’ve always known these were there.… It’s just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that’s how it happens.”

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From the beginning, the local Indigenous leaders tended to argue for careful, thoughtful and precise language. It was Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir who pointed out, after the first shocking headlines: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.”

Typical United Church of Canada Behaviour (TUCCB):

It was also that the initial “mass grave” references appeared to lend credence to a QAnon-like conspiracy theory popularized by a defrocked white United Church minister in the 1990s. Among his many baseless claims was that there was a country-wide archipelago of secret mass graves containing the remains of thousands of children murdered by priests, and behind the scandal was a vast cover-up orchestrated by Indigenous leaders, prime ministers and the Vatican.

Journalists and younger historians, drenched in Critical Theory, immediately ran with the story to denounce Canada as an inherently genocidal construct. They must have been soooo excited while doing this.

This is a very long investigative piece that goes on to describe just what exactly journalists got wrong about this story. It is an absolute scandal and it is well worth your time to read it in its entirety.

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For those of you who are not paying subscribers to this Substack, you are missing out on discussions around the subject of the capture of western institutions by ideological radicals, and just how long this state of affairs can persist. In the book club covering Watts’ excellent, excellent history “The Last Pagan Generation”, we are drawing obvious parallels from the late Roman era to today’s environment, and are trying to figure out lessons that can be applicable today. These discussions pushed me to write “Incompetence” earlier this week, in which I claim that the best and the brightest are no longer entering public service, leading to a degradation of its overall performance.

Incompetence is certainly one facet that is worthy of exploration, yet there are others too. Luckily, Ryan Grim of The Intercept has written a killer piece about how a culture of infighting is now spreading like wildfire throughout progressive (aka “woke”) groups in the USA. Will the cancellers cancel each other out? Is this how this rabid ideological wave ends?

Grim opens up with a story from the Pro-Abortion Guttmacher Institute (budget: $30 million USD):

During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what — if anything — their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape.

On June 2, one such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C., office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were “finding equilibrium” — one of the details we know because it was later shared by staff with Prism, an outlet that covers social justice advocacy and the impacts of injustice.

She talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward, Prism reported, “including loosening deadlines and implementing more proactive and explicit policies for leave without penalty.” Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings, noting that a previous facilitator had said that the last round had not included sufficient time “to cover everything.” With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.”

A generation gap:

Behind Boonstra’s and the staff’s responses to the killing was a fundamentally different understanding of the moment. For Boonstra and others of her generation, the focus should have been on the work of the nonprofit: What could Guttmacher, with an annual budget of nearly $30 million, do now to make the world a better place? For her staff, that question had to be answered at home first: What could they do to make Guttmacher a better place? Too often, they believed, managers exploited the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission, allowing workplace abuses to go unchecked.

The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.

Much like how the story of the Native Residential Schools in Canada last summer was one spearheaded by ideologically rabid Whites, so too are Whites in the USA the most zealous “when it comes to race”. I get yelled at a lot when I say that “America (by extension, the entire Anglosphere and large parts of Western Europe too) has a white person problem”. I still stand by this.

Anyway, Guttmacher fell apart:

These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year. At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn’t sugarcoat how she felt about the staff’s response to the killing.

“I’m here to talk about George Floyd and the other African American men who have been beaten up by society,” she told her staff, not “workplace problems.” Boonstra told them she was “disappointed,” that they were being “self-centered.” The staff was appalled enough by the exchange to relay it to Prism.

This is not restricted to Guttmacher, but is endemic across the progressive NGOsphere:

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021:

Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.

Purity spirals first attack outward, and then root out internal opposition. This was so incredibly predictable, but fun to watch anyway.

It’s all-consuming:

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, and then Joe Biden’s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,” the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies’ time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.

“Most people thought that their worst critics were their competitors, and they’re finding out that their worst critics are on their own payroll,” said Loretta Ross, an author and activist who has been prominent in the movement for decades, having founded the reproductive justice collective SisterSong.

How much of this backstabbing is sincerely ideological? How much of it is a cynical power grab in a highly-competitive environment? Want that guy’s job? Denounce him for sexism. Want her job? Accuse her of centring white people, despite her being black.

This is funny:

“Maybe I can’t end racism by myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable,” one former executive director said. “People found power where they could, and often that’s where you work, sometimes where you live, or where you study, but someplace close to home.”

And even funnier:

Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story. (One executive director noted that their group’s high-profile association with a figure considered in social justice spaces to be problematic had gone from a burden to a boon, as the man now serves as an accidental screen, filtering out activists who’d be most likely to focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization’s mission.)

Maybe the answer is in hiring a few people who are so toxic that they scare off these potential troublemakers so that these groups can turn back to actually trying to achieve what they set out to do in the first place? Think about it: a position filled by a guy who is only there to make racist jokes in the office. Is this a feasible solution to the problem plaguing these progressive organizations?

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“Oh look, Niccolo wants to discuss French politics again.”

DAS RITE!

The soc-dem left has taken a vicious beating across the European continent this past decade, effectively disappearing in certain countries like Hungary. One would think that a left wing resurgence in a country as important as France would get a lot more attention and support in the English-speaking world that is dominated by a media that tilts in that direction.

The problem is that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the wrong kind of leftist. Anti-NATO and anti-Imperialist to the core, he stated this past week that he would grant Julian Assange French citizenship, an act of opposition towards the Atlanticists that have dominated French politics since Chirac left the stage almost two decades ago. He is also anti-systemic, meaning anti-EU. He is therefore “a problem” for the western liberal consensus. Christopher Bickerton paints us a picture of a man who has managed to unite the French left despite all the obstacles that were in the way:

Many had written off the French Left, associating its fortunes with the now defunct Socialist Party. But the decline of the PS has been accompanied by the emergence of a more radical Left, one whose candidate — Mélenchon — came within a few hundred thousand votes of reaching the second round of the French presidential election last April. By contrast, the socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, won less than 2% of the vote, not even one tenth of Mélenchon’s total.

Unlike Corbynism in the United Kingdom and the squad in the Democratic Party in the United States, Mélenchonisme as a political force stands outside of the political mainstream. Its emergence came through the creation of new parties — first the Parti de Gauche in 2008 and then La France Insoumise (LFI) in 2016.

And unlike the UK’s Corbyn, Melenchon has managed to become the dominant force opposing his own country’s right and centre.

The collapse of the Socialists opened the door for Melenchon:

Mélenchon saw, in 2005, the potential for a new sort of political movement: outside of the French party system, mobilising around ideas of equality and social justice, rooted in disaffection with the country’s main political currents. Something stirred in 2005 and Mélenchon understood it.

Politics is a long game and opportunity finally came with the disastrous socialist presidency of François Hollande. Hollande’s victory owed much to the anti-incumbent sentiment that prevailed in France after five years of Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande’s principle contribution was to avoid making any slip-ups in the televised debates. This left Hollande weak from the outset and his presidency ended in derision and farce. The image of a soaked François Hollande, struggling through a prepared speech as rain ran down his glasses and face, became a running joke, as did photos of him escaping on a scooter after a night with his mistress. The PS’s fateful performance in the 2017 presidential elections, where its candidate Benoît Hamon won just over 6% of the vote, led to the party’s forced sale of its iconic headquarters on the Rue de Solférino. The LFI was left as the de facto opposition to Emmanuel Macron in the National Assembly.

His constituency:

Established in 2016 as an election vehicle for the presidential election the following year, its broad range of legislative commitments reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of its electoral base. This runs from the remnants of the PCF’s industrial working class votes to the vast majority of the country’s Muslim population, as well as urbanised intellectuals and France’s many neo-ruralist converts. The LFI is a flexible organisation, in tune with the individualism of the present.

You could find many of his supporters out and about during the Gilet Jaunes demonstrations that engulfed the whole of France until recently.

The second round of parliamentary voting takes place tomorrow. We will see just how close he and his allies come to denying Macron and his party a majority.

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Paul Mason is a British journalist who has worked for the BBC and Channel 4 and is at present causing a furor among the left in the UK and beyond. This ex-Trotskyite and wannabe Labour Party candidate is being accused of working with UK Intel operatives to shut down left wing media that does not toe the line on interventionist foreign policy.

Specifically, the left-wing anti-imperialist publication, The Grayzone, has published a series of emails from Paul Mason that were leaked to them and that are quite damning. The Grayzone is one of the publications that Mason allegedly wants to shut down on the basis of “disinformation”.

On June 7th, The Grayzone revealed how British journalist Paul Mason planned to wage all-out war on anti-imperialist and left-wing academics, activists, campaign groups, independent journalists and media sites – and particularly this outlet.

Since the conflict in Ukraine erupted, Mason has aggressively assailed any prominent figure calling for a diplomatic resolution or opposing NATO escalation, authoring columns advocating for government censorship of facts and viewpoints he perceives to be insufficiently anti-Kremlin, and demanding “state action” against media personalities that oppose NATO expansion.

Since The Grayzone revealed that Mason has also been operating through covert channels to sabotage his leftist targets, a question lingers: is the British celebrity journalist purely a freelancer, building a clandestine informal coalition of fellow travelers to undermine and ostracize his perceived enemies on his own initiative, or are his activities influenced by shadowy state actors?

An answer lies in leaked private communications between Mason and Amil Khan, chief of intelligence contractor Valent Projects, in which the pair propose individuals to invite to an anti-Grayzone summit, where this outlet’s “relentless deplatforming” and a “full nuclear legal” assault to “to squeeze [it] financially” was to be plotted.

In the email, Mason can be seen asking Khan to invite a “friend” from the Foreign Office, who “may be the same as my friend” within the department. He clearly did not want to name his friend “without permission.” Such obfuscation implies his government contact’s role – and thus their identity – is top secret, to the extent it must be protected by default even from an intelligence agency-adjacent, veteran government psy-ops contractor like Khan, who maintains links with the National Security Council.

In his correspondences with Emma Briant, a self-styled academic propaganda expert, Mason is far less guarded. On April 7th, he shared his elaborate “networks of influence” map with Briant, cautioning that “obviously this is confidential.” He added that he “offered it to Andy but he’s not getting back to me.”

Mason was referring to Andy Pryce, the head of the British Foreign Office’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development (CDMD) unit, which was founded in April 2016 to “counter-strike against Russian propaganda.” In 2020, he moved to London’s Mission to the EU (UKREP), to serve as its its Head of Public Diplomacy. It seems likely he now serves in the Foreign Office’s newly-founded Counter Disinformation Unit – an apparent rebrand of the CDMD.

Mason even put together an infographic:

It is therefore chilling that many of these same elements appear in Mason’s manic “mind map” of his enemies on the UK left, which can be seen below. Even more disturbing is the likelihood that such smears might spell out intended targets in the working blueprint for a malicious information warfare operation.

This is another long investigative piece, so I will leave you to it and allow you to make your own conclusions regarding this affair. I hope to be speaking to a person allegedly targeted by Mason very soon.

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We end this weekend’s Substack with a look at musical artist Ariel Pink. Once a darling of the Pitchfork set, he has run afoul of the current political and social culture dominating America by having the temerity to disagree with certain shibboleths (HOW DARE HE?), relegating him to the status of an “untouchable”.

Rosenberg’s career collapsed when he attended the January 6, 2021, rally at the White House, an event which he has been at pains to explain is distinct from the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol several hours later. Amid a media fury, Mexican Summer, his label and owner of most of his discography, announced they had dropped him. An appearance to plead his case on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, along with harassment allegations from an ex-girlfriend, sealed Rosenberg’s ostracism. He can no longer tour, for fear that venues will be boycotted and that promoters will refuse to work with him. Longtime friends and collaborators vanished. Ill-wishers have photographed Rosenberg and his wife, Lyndsie Earle, in their neighborhood and posted their stalker images on social media. Earle says her husband has received “hundreds of death threats” since January of 2021. Just going out in public carries potential consequences. “I’ll go somewhere and people tweet about it immediately,” Rosenberg told me.

His most popular song:

Click here to read the rest.

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