BeePBot writes fiction, bad memories of Menzies and other crazy beliefs of the hard right
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I enlisted the help of BeePBot, my own personal imaginary AI writing assistant, to create a short sci-fi story about how cool Ottawa would be if we started making all the right decisions.
No legal writing to share this week and if I were you I'd enjoy the break because it will be over very soon.
When I said last week that people on the extreme right believe in very weird shit, I was not kidding. PressProgress caught up with the man behind the petition sponsored by Leslyn Lewis (who, as a former leadership contestant is part of the shadow cabinet and very much on the short list of people who'd likely be a minister in a Poilievre government) and, well...
Porter told PressProgress that his concerns with the United Nations centre on his belief that the intergovernmental organization consisting of 193 member countries “wants to dominate and control every individual’s life on the planet.”
“The whole agenda, the central bank digital currency, you’re going to eat bugs and like it, you won’t be able to travel more than 15 minutes from where you live,” Porter said.
“If they get what they want, it would be the elimination of a majority of the population and those that would remain would be slaves, and they would be repeatedly injected with mRNA injections to change their DNA so they lose their humanity and they are different creatures.”
The problem here isn't that some weirdos believe in incoherent nonsense. It's that a senior member of the Official Opposition helped bring it to Parliament. And nobody in that party's leadership thinks it's worth denouncing. That means it's OK to say they're endorsing it and no amount of rude apple munching will make me change my mind.
Menzoid
In my misspent middle-age, I was for some months stuck on live television every morning with David Menzies, for a show called, if memory serves, Menzoid Mornings. It was about ... what you'd expect. His schtick, as far as I can figure, is to bumble around asking questions that are just this side of dumb and then play minsunderstood victim when people react by telling him he’s wildly inappropriate.
And that was on the good days. One morning his “joke” was to go through the ideal Valentine’s Day from a dude’s point of you and there was, in there, some too-thinly veiled references to a blow job. And when I mean too-thinly veiled, let me remind you that we were on live morning network television and that I had made it very clear beforehand that I would not consider joking about blow jobs on morning television for reasons I trust I don’t need to belabour.
He also had a habit of calling transgender people that bad T word no decent person uses, when he wasn’t describing them as “castration fetishists.” I always pushed back, not that it did anything. Once I had to make it very clear to viewers that under no circumstances should they disguise themselves as police officers and walk on the street because there is such a thing as section 130(1) of the Criminal Code and I don’t recommend testing its limits in the context of a “joke” inspired by some loud guy on TV.
In short, we didn’t get along and I quit a while later because, gah. When Sun News folded he found a very natural place with Ezra’s Rebel and, well, I guess it's a good enough match. Certainly they appear to be making lots of money from people who like those kinds of antics. Whatever.
Anyway, getting arrested and then fundraising the dickens out of it isn’t new for this guy. I wasn’t present at the latest altercation and reasonable people I follow who’ve watched it came to differing conclusions. I’m not going to take position on whether the cops were justified to arrest him (briefly) this time. I’m just going to share the list of the previous times this has happened to him — and point out, as many have done before me, that he was arrested twice for bothering Conservative politicians so maybe just maybe Poilievre could pipe it down some.
This list was put together by the awesome David Akin, whose newsletter you totally should get:
- Dec 2023: Menzies arrested at a liquor store.
- Dec 2021 : Menzies arrested at a Trudeau event.
- Sep 2021: Menzies arrested at a Patrick Brown event in Brampton ON
- July 2021: Menzies arrested at an event hosted by CPC candidate (and later CPC deputy leader) Melissa Lantsman
- June 2021: Rebel News reporter (Menzies) charged by Peterborough Police
- April 2021: Montreal police arrest David Menzies
- Sep 2019: Conservative Party of Canada has Menzies arrested/removed from an Andrew Scheer campaign event.
If this is making you yearn for a time when politicians were at least reasonably civil, you're not alone. The death of the NDP's Ed Broadbent underlined how far we've gone, in the wrong direction I mean, since his day in active politics.
En français
Excellent article dans le Journal de Québec sur les supporters de Poilievre dans les régions moins urbaines (je dis ça pour être polie) de l'Alberta. À lire pour comprendre la culture de cette région.
À Sudbury de plus en plus de commerçants, aux prises avec des sans-abri qui utilisent les abords des magasins et restaurants pour dormir, érigent des clôtures qui, franchement, donnent froid dans le dos. Je comprends et sympathise avec les commerçants. Ce n'est pas leur rôle de remplacer les programmes publics qui, visiblement, ne répondent pas à la demande. Dans l'Ontario de Doug Ford, qui s'amuse à déléguer la prestation de services publics à ses entreprises favorites, ce n'est malheureusement pas surprenant.
