Lis Truss resigned as Prime Minister of Great Britain after 44 days in office, just barely edging out William Henry Harrison’s term as President of the United States. And as Simpsons fans know all too well, he had the excuse of dying a month after taking office. Truss also “died,” but in the metaphorical sense, like a bad stand-up comedian on stage.
A head of lettuce famously lasted longer than her Prime Ministership. Back on this side of the Atlantic, the newly sworn in Premier of Alberta may have a term in office that barely outlasts a ripe avocado.
Jen Gerson writes that Danielle Smith is smart, charming, and has absolutely no ability to sort good information from bad, leading her to promote pretty much every hot conspiracy theory, even the ones that contradict each other:
There's a lot to like! Smith is highly personable and charismatic. Very few individuals come away from a face-to-face meeting disliking this woman. That's what made her a good personality, a good columnist and talk-show host, and a good politician.
However, one cannot have observed Smith's career for any length of time without noting that she brings certain weaknesses to the table, as well. I'm going to venture— and I suggest that this will play out over her tenure as premier — that her most significant personality flaw is her lack of discernment. Smith is smart. She's perfectly capable of listening to people, and of processing reams of information and data — and sometimes coming to novel conclusions, or generating interesting solutions. The problem is that she has no apparent ability to sort good information from bad. This is a “crap in, crap out” problem.
The talent for knowing when a good source is providing terrible intel; or when a typically poor one has found treasure— that is the skill of discernment. Not only does Smith not have it, but she is surrounding herself with individuals whose own ideological priors are so like her own that I expect she will regularly trip into her own blind spots.
One could go back over her political and journalistic career and find this fatal flaw on display again and again, from her ill-fated decision to cross the floor to join the Progressive Conservative party; to her history of buying into medical quackery. Note some of her recent comments on cancer. And, ironically, her history of extolling the health benefits of cigarettes. We've seen several examples of her lack of discernment in the past two weeks alone.
Smith has also promoted Russian (or at least anti-anti-Russian) talking points on Ukraine. Hey, it’s not like a lot of Ukrainian-Canadians live in her province, right?
This week, Smith issued a statement on Twitter “categorically” condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, noting that in the past she had “made some ill-informed comments” on the subject and that her “knowledge and opinion of this matter have drastically evolved since that time.”
I will note that this unequivocal apology came only days after a lot of Twitter moaning on the subject in which she complained about the NDP politicizing said comments, and about the media for generating clicks on the controversy. (This forces me to note the irony of a former radio talk-show host whining about the fact that the media, uh, covers subjects that are controversial and interesting to audiences.)
The comments themselves were posted on her Locals.com site all the way back in … spring. I'm happy to give journalist Justin Ling due credit, here; a disinformation reporter, he's been digging through Smith's archives so that I don't have to. What he's found is a hell of a lot garbage takes culled from absolute shite sources, including anti-Semitic blogs.
To be clear: do I think that Danielle Smith is an anti-Semite? I emphatically do not believe this to be true. Nor do I believe that she is deliberately spreading pro-Moscow propaganda. I genuinely do take Smith at her word when she says she is entirely sympathetic to Ukraine and her people.
She just genuinely thought that Russian apologia like "NATO has advanced an aggressive posture" was a credible contrarian position to take — despite the fact that NATO is a voluntary military alliance. The (at least nominally) democratic countries that join it are doing so because they want to be there: they want the protection of the West from the hostile imperialist powers to the east.
Smith also shared a link to a Tucker Carlson clip that spread the nonsense that the U.S. was funding "secret" biolabs in Ukraine. Only a few seconds’ worth of Googling would have revealed that the biolabs aren't a secret; the U.S. does provide funding to improve labs in many different countries to help mitigate the threat of infectious disease. However, there's no evidence that any of these are conducting secret programs to create bio-weapons.
Smith has also seemed to suggest that Ukraine ought to give up its nuclear weapons — something it did back in the 1994 as part of an agreement with the U.K., U.S. and Russia. The newly independent Ukraine agreed to turn over its arsenal in exchange for guarantees of its security and borders.
Heckuva job, United Conservative Party. Right-wingers in Canada’s most right-leaning province have already gotten one NDP government elected largely through their own bungling and infighting, and might very well do it again in a few months.
The CBC has also reported (through tears, I’m sure) on Smith’s patronage of antisemitic websites:
On two occasions over the past year, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith included links in her newsletter to a blog that a Canadian Jewish Human Rights organization says is a known source of antisemitic tropes and racist conspiracy theories.
Her sharing of the blog's content was first reported by independent journalist Justin Ling.
In a statement Wednesday, a spokesperson with the premier's office said Smith condemned all expressions of antisemitism, adding "this hatred has no place in society."
In her April newsletter, Smith wrote about the possibility of a digital currency being used by central banks. She used a link from the blog while discussing SWIFT, the Belgian-based co-operative used by financial institutions around the world.
"Will it be good for us, tied as we are to the Americans?" Smith wrote at the time.
"I'm not sure yet, which is why I am following this closely. This article in the [blog site] believes the change signals the end of Western domination and that we are going to find ourselves isolated from the rest of the world."
On another occasion, she linked to the site while discussing what she regarded as misinformation online regarding the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
So, which hatemongering website is this? Um…the CBC won’t tell us.
CBC News is not naming the blog so as to not further raise its profile.
The blog, which claims to publish "analytical works on matters of history, economics and social-political issues," frequently posts antisemitic content, like one published this past Sunday.
"I define Rothschild Zionism in its present incarnation, as the amalgamation of Wall Street (global Jewish banking mafia families) and the Israel Lobby, along with their affiliated organizations, agencies, think tanks, spy networks, corporations, and agents," the post reads.
In other words, the CBC is reporting on a potentially important story but insists on leaving out a crucial part of that story, and I think this does news consumers a disservice.
There are many explicitly antisemitic websites out there, but the sites that disguise themselves as “legitimate” news and commentary pages, where you might have to dig in a little to find the Jew-hate, might be more pernicious.
At first glance, a website like “Veterans Today” or the Montreal-based “Centre For Research on Globalization” looks kind of inoffensive and mainstream if you didn’t already know about it. Iran’s PRESS TV copies the look of other 24-hour news channels so well you might have to watch or read for a while until you find them denying the Holocaust. The hatemongers don’t always parade through the streets carrying torches.
It’s not hard to find blatant antisemitism and conspiracy theories on these websites - see the “Rothschild Zionism” stuff quoted by the CBC - but I think it’s important to know if the new Premier of Canada’s wealthiest province just stumbled upon a site without initially realizing how awful it was, or if she was looking for something like www dot hitlerwasright1488 dot com.
Justin Ling, whose reporting the CBC cited, does name the website on his own substack page. I’ve never heard of it, but the author of the “digital currency” article takes me way back to a time when 9/11 conspiracy theorizing was more prevalent on the anti-Bush left instead of Republican Congresswomen.
In an April newsletter entitled “Is there Going to Be a Central Bank Digital Currency? Almost Certainly,” Smith looks at the effect of the United States kicking Russia off the SWIFT payment system.
Smith points to an essay which suggests that such a currency shift “signals the end of Western domination and that we are going to find ourselves isolated from the rest of the world.”
The essay she links to is written by French conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan — author of 9/11: The Big Lie, which argues that, surprise, Bush did it. Meyssan makes the case that U.S. sanctions are illegal and unjustified. The whole post is slavishly complimentary to both Russia and China, but I think this one sentence sums up Meyssan’s point very well:
The Ukrainian affair shows that Moscow does not seek to take power in Kiev and occupy Ukraine, but to push back NATO and fight the Banderites (the “neo-Nazis” according to Kremlin terminology). Nothing but very legitimate, even if the method is brutal.
Meyssan’s essay was republished on a blog site called Algora, which Smith links to directly. Algoa is, in a word, very antisemitic.
Even if you were to take a cursory scroll through this one essay, you would likely notice the list categories on the sidebar: One of the most popular, with 77 posts, is “It’s All About Jews.” The website features some stunningly blunt Holocaust denialism and anti-Jewish content, including the assertion that “world jewry on March 24, 1933 declared war on Germany.” Another post, entitled “For Its Security and Survival, China Must Understand Rothschild Zionism,” proclaims “China is not the enemy. China is a friend. Humanity’s enemy is the international banker.”
How Smith wound up on this website is a mystery for the ages.
But however she got there, she kept coming back!
Smith also linked to Algora in February, when she posted a rundown of “FAKE NEWS Stories Coming out of Ukraine.” (The post largely just goes over pro-Ukraine misinformation that popped up from idiots on Twitter, and was being published in the early weeks of the war — misinformation that was being constantly corrected by the mainstream media and often Kyiv itself.)
Ling understandably doesn’t link to the Algora blog, and I couldn’t find it through a Google search, so I don’t know if it would strike the reader as explicitly antisemitic at first glance. But it doesn’t look like the hatemongering was hard to find.
And Smith visited the site more than once. She might not be antisemitic herself, but at the very least she is tolerant of antisemitism when it’s coming from her team.
To be fair, there’s a lot of that going around these days, and not just from Conservative governments.
The Smith affair is about many things, including people lacking the critical thinking skills needed to distinguish reputable news sources from conspiratorial trash, turning a blind eye to bigotry, and rising to power by narrowcasting to your base instead of trying to appeal to as many segments of the party or the electorate as possible. (I’d say many of the people who signed on to merging the venerable center-right PC Party of Alberta with the populist Wildrose Alliance are wishing they could have a do-over.)
But it also illustrates exactly what I feared as Donald Trump rose to power in 2015 and 2016, taking over the GOP and ultimately assuming the Presidency, spreading hatred and conspiracy theories along the way.
The political Overton Window in Canada is several degrees to the left of the United States (our “mainstream” range is somewhere between the US and Western Europe) and right-of-centre Canadian politicians have rarely been as doctrinaire as their Republican Party counterparts, as much as Liberals and New Democrats insist otherwise.
But there’s always going to be some cross-pollination from south of the border, which is why the leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party is an AOC stan and why Canadian Tories are usually at least pulled along in the GOP’s wake.
I first heard about QAnon from some people I met at a Conservative Party event, and now we’re starting to see people who share the MAGA worldview (Make Alberta Great Again, in this case) assume positions of leadership. We Canadians have sleepwalked ourselves into thinking we’re somehow immune from the virus of populist “national conservatism” that’s infected Western democracies, not realizing it’s been incubating this whole time.
Good observation about all hatemongers *not* carrying torches in the streets. And if the 'national populist' virus wreaks as much damage north of the border as it has here, you have my condolences.
'Narrowcasting to the base' now being the apparent modus operandi on both sides of the border, no telling how long the 'Overton Window' will last before someone throws a brick through it.