The Sixth Estate

The last week has been very educational for those who believed the mainstream media might have a few shreds of integrity left. The ridiculously contrived attacks published in serious papers against the NDP — that they plan to nationalize the entire economy in accord with a secret constitution, for instance — make the Jack Layton rub-and-tug affair look positively credible in comparison. One of my chief enemies, Lawrence Solomon, takes the cake though. I wondered who would be the first in the mainstream media to actually take the past several years’ worth of apathetic, anti-democratic propaganda to its logical extreme and actually tell people not to vote. Well, that long watch is over. Solomon wins!

Here’s Solomon, demonstrating a remarkable combination of cynicism and paranoia that makes him entry number one on my new blacklist of media commentators too idiotic to reason with (to be followed shortly by Ezra Levant, the Patron Saint of Chainsaws):

The higher the turnout,… the less legitimate the government…

The moral high horsers, in fact, are often cynical opportunists who are trying to manipulate people into the ballot booth. The chief manipulators are left-leaners and their favourite targets are youths, whom they believe are likelier to vote for their left-leaning causes and candidates. Although the manipulators pretend to be non-partisan, they often have an ideological agenda.

Yes, those left-wing scoundrels, telling people to vote! No one is stopping the right-wing “moral high horsers” from getting out the vote, mind you, so where exactly are they? Elsewhere Solomon suggests that if you’d really like to just kick back with a cold beer rather than vote (literally), “more power to you.” Which is true, I suppose. But then he explains that you especially shouldn’t vote if you are not well-informed, which is a preposterous claim coming from someone who claims that there is no climate change and that radiation is good for you.

Notice the two messages coming together here. First, Solomon says there’s no point voting because “doing so is futile” — there’s only “a one-in-a-trillion chance of being the deciding vote.” This is an interesting argument that only applies to you if you think that nobody else takes Solomon seriously. And some people do vote — including Solomon himself, by the way — so when the young socialist-driven youth hordes stop voting, his old grey male vote will count double. Frankly that’s reason enough for me to drag my young, naive, uninformed, easily manipulated young butt down to the polling station — the thought that Solomon alone should be trusted with that sort of power is chilling.

Second, Solomon manages to seriously argue — simultaneously — that the youth are being driven to vote because socialists are “manipulating” them into voting left-wing, and that the get-out-the-vote crowd isn’t telling people what to vote for (“exhorting them to become informed,” as he puts it), so that the polls are being flooded by uninformed youngsters who haven’t made up their minds who to vote  for or why. He actually says the only real reason for a young person to vote is to “stop the high taxes that cause youth unemployment to soar.” Don’t tell me what I’m voting for, you traitorous anti-democratic imbecile. The fact that you have 30 or 40 years on me obviously hasn’t made you any wiser when it comes to voting, if your determined head-in-the-sand approach to climate change is any indication.

Incidentally, Solomon’s byline now bills him as the head of the Urban Reconnaissance Institute. Don’t be fooled: this is just another front organization underneath his usual digs at Energy Probe. Which, apparently, is now championing the privatization of sidewalks as the next best solution for, well, everything that’s wrong in modern cities (but especially food carts). He says it’s time governments got out of “the sidewalk business,” which would be a bit rich even coming from the Fraser Institute.

I started with a bolded quote from Solomon, which I’m going to repeat now just to emphasize my argument:

The higher the turnout,… the less legitimate the government.

Fuck you, Solomon. And fuck you, National Post, for cheapening our democracy with this elitist garbage. Just so you’re aware, I don’t click on the ads on your site. I encourage everyone I speak to not to, also. Please hide this nonsense behind a Rupert Murdoch-style paywall so that we don’t have to pay attention to you anymore.