Maclean's shoots back

Maclean's magazine has been pretty quiet about its own persecution by Canada's human rights commissions. Mark Steyn has railed against them in his Maclean's column, and Charlie Gillis did a balanced report on Canada's Complainer-General, Richard Warman. But in the main, the magazine has taken the opposite approach to that which I took, both when I was publisher of the Western Standard, and now that the Western Standard, at least as a print magazine, is gone.

I think that's because of the nature of Maclean's: it's the establishment news magazine, over a century old, and it doesn't have anything to prove, unlike our scrappy upstart did. And we were, by nature, much more of a crusading publication. Maclean's reports the news, but they don't much want to make the news.

I think that all changed with Barbara Hall's abominable press release last week, in which she condemned Maclean's and Mark Steyn for  the political crime of "Islamophobia" -- without the bother of an actual hearing into the matter. There was no caricature of the nosy censor that Hall did not fulfill; she was truly what central casting would send over if a Hollywood screenwriter requested a modern day Big Brother, straight out of George Orwell's book, 1984. I've written before that the human rights commissions are their own worst enemies when it comes to the PR war in which we are engaged. I don't think there's anything I could say that would damage the HRCs as badly as they can damage themselves. The truth about them is so abnormal, that people just wouldn't believe me -- until they hear it from the HRCs themselves.

If I were ever to have a debate against Barbara Hall, I think the smartest thing I could do, in terms of convincing the audience of the rectitude of my views, would be to give Hall all of my speaking time, in addition to her own.

It took Hall's attack to pull Maclean's into the thick of the debate. They've written a wonderful counterblaste, which you can read here. Hall's threat also elicited rebukes from the National Post, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Toronto Sun -- again, something that no partisan reformer like me could have hoped to have accomplished.

That's because, until now, I think that many people in the mainstream media -- who are, by nature, skeptical to the point of cynicism -- truly believed that the threat of bullying and censorship was limited to politically marginal writers. In other words: conservatives like Steyn and me. But Hall made it crystal clear: anyone is fair game now, and she's just gearing up. I suppose the fact that Hall is well known in Toronto, from her days as mayor, as a meddling zealot helped that city's media to take her seriously.

The good news is that HRCs won't shut up. They can't. Because they can't understand why the public -- and journalists -- aren't grateful for their attempts to politically reeducate us. They can't quite figure out why we are not ready for their brave new world where nothing offensive is ever said, a utopian future where the human emotion of "hate" is legally banished. For years -- in some cases, decades -- they have only interacted with fellow travellers. There is nothing so intellectually monochromatic as the "diversity industry". Many of them are truly stunned that anyone would have the impertinence to disagree. And of course, until now, those few dissidents who were foolish enough to present themselves, were simply hammered into submission.

But even if the HRCs were to emerge from their denial, and show uncharacteristic discipline and simply shut up, that would not help them. The genie is out of the bottle now; too many in the mainstream -- and indeed, on the left -- know about their shenanigans. The HRCs cannot turn the clock back to an era when they were free to muck about, under the radar of public scrutiny. A thousand bloggers have seen to that, and are now joined by real shoe-leather reporters, too.

And, even more than that, the HRCs have managed to plant for themselves a series of time bombs that are set to explode.

Mark Steyn's B.C. Human Rights Tribunal trial itself is a huge, yet unexploded PR bomb that will detonate in about six weeks. I'm a pipsqueak, yet the videos of my own interrogation have been viewed close to 600,000 times. I pity the HRC interrogator who has to spar with Steyn. And the Canadian Human Rights Commission, slow as always, hasn't even set a date for their double jeopardy trial of him yet.

My own case still slouches on. Though one of my complainants, Syed Soharwardy, has dropped his complaint against me, an identical complaint filed by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities continues against me. I'm ready to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Is Alberta's HRC ready for five more years of public scrutiny?

And to say the CHRC's section 13 thought crimes case against Marc Lemire has backfired is an understatement. Not only have his counterattacks blown the lid of the CHRC's corrupt tactics, such as their practise of posting anonymous, bigoted messages online, but their illegal hacking into a private citizen's Internet account has now attracted the scrutiny of Canada's Privacy Commissioner. How many more months of bad press will that give to the HRCs?

And then there's the defamation suit, filed against me and other bloggers by Richard Warman, the CHRC's former staffer, and Canada's top complainant under the section 13 thought crimes provision. That's going to be a PR nightmare for the CHRC for years. All of Warman's relevant conduct will be scrutinized -- unlike in his CHRC cases, where he is an absentee complainant, and where the tribunal has not required the CHRC and Warman to disclose all relevant documents.

Barbara Hall and friends are hoping that 2008 will be like 1984. I don't think it's going to end that way. I think that, on New Year's Eve, they'll be calling 2008 their annus horribilis.