As further proof that the Conservative Party is marching backward, consider Andrew Scheer's and Peter Mackay's reactions to indigenous protests across Canada. Heidi Mathews writes in Macleans:
In attempts to whip up public hostility and force an end to the protests, both official opposition leader Andrew Scheer and Peter MacKay, who is vying to replace him, turned to civil-rights-era racist stereotypes. Invoking the spectre of the “outside agitator,” they sought to delegitimize the involvement of non-Indigenous protesters in order to break the bonds of activist solidarity that can be so crucial in creating the political will to address the conditions of inequality and oppression that underlie civil unrest.
The "outside agitator" meme has been boilerplate for white southern segregationists:
As then-president of the West Virginia State Bar Association, William C. Beatty put it, civil disobedience was the result of “mob action tailor made for those few malcontents who desire the total breakdown of organized society.” Often portrayed as players in a communist conspiracy, these outsiders were presented as acting not in the interests of African Americans, but to further their own ulterior motives.
That argument has been furious and false:
This outside agitator thesis was quickly shown not only to be inaccurate, but also the result of racist thinking. In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders found the “typical rioter is not an outside agitator or itinerant vender of violence,” but rather “a young, frustrated, alienated black American.” Additionally, a 1969 study of middle-class white attitudes toward African Americans in the aftermath of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles found a sharp divergence between whites who believed that the unrest was caused by communists or outside agitators, and those who believed that systemic oppression of and discrimination against African Americans, were to blame. Strikingly, whites who believed the outside agitator explanation lacked previous social contact with African Americans, suggesting ignorance and a lack of empathy for the legitimate grievances of the Black community. Unsurprisingly, this group was more likely to favour punitive measures as a response to civil unrest.
It's interesting that Dennis Prager has been invited to speak at the Manning Center Conference in Calgary. The CBC reports that:
The Calgary-based Manning Centre will feature as a keynote speaker American conservative radio host Dennis Prager — a fiery and often controversial figure who recently complained that the left has made it "impossible" to say the N-word.
"It's disgusting, it's a farce. It's the only word that you can't say in the English language," Prager said in a clip that was initially flagged on Twitter by a writer for U.S. progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America.
Prager was responding to a caller on his radio show, The Dennis Prager Show, who asked Prager why he used an anti-Semitic slur on his program but would not use "the N-word."
"The left doesn't give a damn about [anti-Semitic slurs]. That's why," said Prager, who is Jewish and who freely uses words considered anti-Semitic slurs on his program.
No one should misunderstand where the Conservative Party is headed.
Image: Democratic Underground
