The politics of anger and misinformation: we ignore it at our peril

From 2016 to 2020, I hosted a morning show on a Toronto talk radio station.

Very early on in the concert, a fairly discernible and then predictable pattern emerged: Other hosts on the station would promote unsubstantiated conspiracy theories or blatant misinformation, such as that Justin Trudeau is a globalist controlled by George Soros or that a non-binding motion to condemn the Islamophobia. would criminalize all criticism of Islam. Then, when the morning show didn’t follow the same rhetoric, I would see a huge increase in volume and vitriol in my email inbox.

One of the more graphic rape threats I received during that time involved burning my clitoris once I was gang raped. That morning, he had corrected a false notion circulating in conservative circles, and backed by colleagues at the station, that Canada’s signing of the UN Global Compact for Migration would mean that Canada would no longer have jurisdiction over its borders or sovereignty to determine its territory. immigration goals.

It has now been documented that there was a coordinated campaign poison the discourse around the pact by pushing misinformation specifically on immigration and border issues. And it worked. Conservatives in Canada repeated the campaign unsubstantiated talking points and around the world, the debate over the pact reached such a point that the coalition government in Belgium effectively collapsed.

Misinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they live only online. They spill out into the real world and impact very real people. And when disinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theories are directed at groups of people who are already on the receiving end of hate, unsurprisingly, the hate experienced by those groups tends to increase.

After the last federal election, one thing that became very clear was that much of our legacy political media seemed unwilling or unable to report on the very real threat posed by politicians using disinformation and conspiracy theories as part of of his political stunt. to attract voters.

The People’s Party of Canada (PPC) won just over 800,000 votes in the 2021 election, more than double its share of the vote in the 2019 election. Admittedly, not all CPP voters are outspoken white supremacists, but there were Clear links between the PPC and extremist groups that were largely ignored by legacy media. For example, columns Y news coverage also failed to acknowledge that the PPC chairman accused of throwing gravel at the prime minister in the 2021 election campaign had explicit and well-established links to the white nationalist movement.

what people are reading

Rather than engage in substantive discourse on the information ecosystem and political environment that allowed Maxime Bernier, a Harper-era cabinet minister and near-leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, to descend into a fanatic pushing the theory of conspiracy, our political talk classes chose instead to focus on righteous outrage, denouncing the importation of American-style politics into our Canadian sphere.

Then came the “freedom convoy”. Suddenly, white journalists regularly found themselves on the receiving end of deranged tirades and threats of violence for reporting basic facts, similar to what their Jewish, Muslim, and BIPOC colleagues had experienced for years. There was a glimmer of hope that collectively we would begin to take these issues more seriously.

That was short-lived, though, as most of the legacy political media reverted to its natural quiescent state of being willfully blind to the conspiracy-theory-laden fury in this country and the politicians who encourage it, all under the pretext of objectivity coupled with a healthy dose of normalcy bias.

Bernier has failed to secure a single seat for his party in the last two federal elections, so it’s easy to dismiss him and the PPC as outright shunned by the Canadian electorate.

It will be much more difficult to do so once Pierre Poilievre officially leads the Conservative Party of Canada in September. Poilievre is an enthusiastic and unapologetic peddler of conspiracy theories about the world economic forum. As NDP MP charlie angus and CCP parliamentarian Michelle Rempel Garner As I have pointed out, there is a very real danger in incorporating conspiracy theories about a secret elite cabal that controls the country.

There are many fundamentally good and decent Conservatives, both inside and outside the official party apparatus, who are uncomfortable with the direction their party is taking. However, there is no indication that a Poilievre-led CCP feels the need to tone down its rhetoric. The party will effectively become a better financed, more organized and more conventional version of Bernier’s PPC.

It’s easy and even tempting to scoff at that notion. But that is deliberately ignoring what has happened to conservatism in many places, including here. When conservatives point out that Poilievre is the person best placed to lead the party, they are not wrong. He very much embodies the core foundation of today’s CPC: angry, aggrieved, and willing to say anything, as long as he immerses himself in Libs in the process.

The revelations from the January 6 committee hearings in the US should serve as a stark warning to Canadians about what happens when conspiracy theories and misinformation are fed into the political establishment. Downplaying or even placating this kind of rhetoric poses a fundamental danger to democracy itself. The sooner Canada realizes this, the better off we are.

In the meantime, I hope Canadian columnists will tell us that we should consider ourselves lucky not to be in the same boat as the Americans. After all, our conservatives only actively animated Y supported the people who were trying to subvert Canadian democracy did not really try to subvert it themselves.

Supriya Dwivedi is director of policy and engagement at the Center for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University and is a senior adviser to Enterprise Canada.