"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
— Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance
"One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you."
— Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots Are Made for Walkin’"
For several years, I was mightily impressed with the work of Spencer Fernando, an investigative journalist with the National Citizens Coalition. His conservative affidavit was impeccable, his insights always penetrating and engaging, his disinterment of the lies and deceptions of the liberal left unsparing, and his willingness to take chances with his reputation an act of considerable courage.
True, his paragraphs consisted annoyingly of a roll call of single sentences, much like the articles of his apparent role model Victor Davis Hanson, under, presumably, the effort not to task his readers’ faltering patience, this being the age of digital skim-and-glance. But he remained one of the few journalists who did not shy away from telling the truth, no matter how unpalatable.
I had noticed recently that his acrid and penetrating articles tended to grow muted, even fence-sitting and worse. Something had begun to change. “You've likely noticed,” he announced, “that I've shifted to a more restrained rhetorical style as I seek to inform and find areas of common ground rather than engage in personal attacks and foment division.” I scarcely recognize him now. Spencer Fernando seems like someone who is imagining that he is Spencer Fernando. At times, he seems to me like someone who belongs in an ABBA song.
He has recently posted a puff piece titled “Am I supposed to pretend I hate Mark Carney?”, eschewing the temptation to commit “performative outrage,” that is, “putting narrative before facts,” which is “not a game I am willing to play.” Clearly, it was a game he was more than willing to play for many years, but all that is now a thing of the past. Spencer has seen the light. He has grown discrete.
The problem for any impartial reader is that what he calls “facts” are nothing but a species of “narrative,” as he appears to have gleaned from Carney how to lie without a trace of erythrophobia. This is what he believes is prudent and abstemious rather than forensic. “I have sought to apply this thinking to Prime Minister Mark Carney,” he says, and cites an article from The Telegraph that, he feels, exhibits a shameful example of performative outrage.
It’s a lazy attack, he claims, since as Governor of the Bank of Canada, “Carney should be credited for Canada's strong recovery from the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.” The recovery was not all that strong, but its limited success, as Michael Bliss points out in Right Honourable Men, was owing to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s day-to-day management, keeping Carney in check. As the Toronto Sun puts it, “Harper slams Carney for taking credit for Flaherty’s work” — the work Carney “didn’t do in the financial crisis.” “Carney’s ‘experience’ isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.” I don’t know where Spencer gets his information, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
Next, Spencer informs us that Carney was right to warn the U.K. “about the economic damage that would be done by Brexit, and that Conservative government is being blamed for weak UK growth.” Britain’s problem today comes from Keir Starmer and the Labour Party that has accelerated the immigrant crisis and the financial deadfall. However, according to people who should know, such as former prime minister Liz Truss, former U.K. Conservative minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, and others, it was Carney’s insistence that ESG policies should be put in place that left Britain in an economic mess, its pension funds devastated by BlackRock Asset Manager which, as Robert Kiyosaki at Smart Investor’s Guide warns us, steers people to lose money on purpose. (This is why Dutch pension funds just fired BlackRock from a $17 billion mandate.)
“From the perspective of getting clicks and reposts,” Spencer writes, “the easiest thing for me to do would be to go along with the 'Carney is worse than Trudeau' rhetoric. But that would be unfair to you, the reader, because it would be untrue, and you deserve objective information rather than torqued narratives.” This is utter nonsense. He then asks us to consider the following checklist of ostensible facts, most of which are sheer brummagem.
- Carney eliminated the consumer carbon tax.
[No, he did not. He merely moved the carbon tax into the industry sector, where it remains hidden but will impact the consumer with analogous cost.] - Carney hit the NATO 2% target immediately.
[No, he did not. He merely indicated that it was in the books for later next year, paid for with more borrowed money. It’s a pledge, not a given.] - Carney has expressed support for lower immigration levels.
[Yes, but no. He has expressed support, but has not done a thing to carry out his promise. Canada is swamped with immigrants, legal and illegal, eating us out of house and home, creating wage suppression and job displacement. There is not a single sign of expulsion or decrease.] - Carney ensured Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had a chance to win a seat as soon as possible by rapidly calling a byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot.
[No. This is standard practice.] - Carney's budget is likely to reduce the size of the public service.
[No. Carney has promised to cap, not actually cut, the service. The words seem to be used interchangeably. According to the Ottawa Citizen, we will have to wait to see if Carney will be keeping his promise to cap rather than cut public service jobs. Nor has the prime minister released a budget to begin with, which he has deferred, as did Trudeau more than once.] - Carney is taking national defence seriously and making it clear that Canada intends to build up the military.
[No. Carney has just botched the F-35 deal with the United States, at enormous expense in both funds and trust.]
Spencer indicates that “Immigration needs to be addressed quickly and effectively. The criminal justice system is short on justice and too easy on criminals. He must do far more to address the horrific rise of antisemitism in this country.” Carney has done none of these things after more than half a year in government. In the midst of Canada’s pressing troubles, Carney decided it was time for a vacation.
There is no doubt that Carney is a serial evader when it comes to the incontestable. As the Toronto Sun mentions, he was proud to have helped Paul Martin, a previous finance minister and prime minister, balance the budget — when he never worked with Martin at the time. He said he was not involved with moving his Asset Management firm Brookfield’s HQ to NYC — when he voted for the move. According to the National Post, “he lies chronically, casually and recklessly” — about his extensive holdings, his conflicts of interest, and the contents of a Rolodex of fibs. His is a posture that violates every canon of administrative protocol and decent manners.
In any event, we learn, “to say that Carney is worse than Trudeau is simply false. It becomes nearly impossible to acknowledge positive changes or to give credit to those who act in a good-faith effort to address areas of public concern.” No, Spencer. Carney does not give the impression of someone who acts in good faith. As Canada’s First Minister, he is Trudeau 2.0, far worse than his feckless and infantile predecessor, since he is in dead earnest. His credentials as a national bank manager, CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, and founder of GFANZ prove, it appears, that he really is a serious fellow.
Spencer concludes that he is “not going to pretend I hate Mark Carney. I'm not going to pretend he's some sort of radical. And I'm not going to pretend he's worse than Trudeau. I will judge him on the merits, and share that judgment with you in as objective and reasonable a way as possible.” Extrapolating from Spencer’s last years of political commentary, he was precisely the sort of radical he says Carney is not — except, of course, from a completely opposite political perspective. So, what happened?
My wife and I have discussed the strange turn of events, the loss of another honest, no-nonsense, trustworthy observer of the current political scene. What might have caused it? There’s certainly a lot to be said in terms of both public recognition and financial reward in hanging a left, and many of our former friends have done precisely this.
Related: Canadian Voters Get What They Deserve
There is also the problem of the wife a man finds himself taking to his bosom. A once-very close friend of ours, a brilliant poet, an excellent thinker, and a strong conservative proponent, married a lovely but dominant woman. Within a short time, he moved from Montreal to Canada’s literary capital Toronto, took a job as an editorial assistant with a prominent socialist magazine, and became a vehement stalwart of the Left, a passionate feminist, and a rather virulent standard bearer for his new political religion.
We put it down largely to the wife — and recalled our once favorite thriller writer, Daniel Silva, who wrote wonderful, conservative-themed novels featuring Israel, the complexities of the country’s involvement in international affairs, and the adventures of his lead character, Gabriel Allon, who eventually became head of the Mossad. Silva gradually switched allegiances. He became a progressivist adherent of the J6 travesty and an obvious enemy of Israel-ally Donald Trump. In his last book, there is no mention of Israel, and Gabriel Allon reverts to his other metier as an art restorer. It turns out that Silva is married to a woman who works for CNN.
Maybe we are wrong. Maybe these are all functions of a sudden rethinking of political postulates. But I doubt it. Whether it is objectively the case or not, I now regard my ersatz friend who betrayed his lifelong convictions, along with Daniel Silva and Spencer Fernando, who did the same, as literary Babbitts who found where pelf and rep reside, who never managed to transcend the quodlibetical idiocy of, say, Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” and who took up with women whose boots walked all over them.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member