If you go to the CBC website and search “far right,” you get 2,457 hits. If you search “far left,” you get 219, less than nine per cent that number.

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William Watson: CBC obsesses over the far right. But what about the far left? Back to video

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Incidentally, you get exactly the same totals if you use a hyphen, i.e., “far-right” and “far-left,” which means the CBC search engine is hyphen-blind — though I doubt it’s any other kind of blind, given the corporation’s devotion to identity politics. If you search “far out,” by the way, you get 329 hits, 50 per cent more than for “far left.”

At CBC, clearly, they’re much more worried about the far right (and the far out) than the far left.

That’s hardly surprising. But it is peculiar, isn’t it? We should be equally worried about extremists of the left and right, shouldn’t we? It’s not right-wingers who are trying to extort policy changes out of university presidents by camping out on their lawns and promenades or who are taking over downtown London every weekend with pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel marches that disrupt the lives of tens of thousands of Britons and foreign visitors.

And this business of left and right is so subjective. The natural thing would be to assume political preferences, however hard to quantify, would be normally distributed, i.e., in a bell curve. Most people are in the middle but, yes, some are far from the average — though equally in both directions.

If you’re in the middle of a normal distribution (sitting atop the bell curve, as it were), you look out and see equal numbers of people on the left and right, all the way out to the extremes. (Clowns to the left of you, jokers to the right, as a 1972 song put it, but equal numbers of both.)

But if you’re in the left-hand side of the distribution yourself, as the CBC clearly is, then the “far” left isn’t really that far from you. It’s in your neighbourhood, close by, just adjacent to you. So you don’t think of it as “far.” They’re just fellow lefties who have carried their enthusiasm to excess (possibly forgivable excess, you may think). At least their hearts are in the right place. On the other hand, as far as you’re concerned, most of the right is so distant from you ideologically that it might as well be on Planet Mars.

What does it take to be “far right” in the CBC’s eyes? You worry about too rapid immigration. You think public policies should be, as we used to say, “colour-blind.” You are concerned that rule of judges is supplanting rule of law. You think the police need to be tough on crime. And of course, all of these views, if you hold them too strongly, qualify you as racist as well as far right.

Now, as objective circumstances have changed — as immigration has soared, identity rules become pervasive, crime risen and a generation of activist judges rewritten our laws — there’s a problem: more and more people are beginning to have these concerns. The “far right” is getting bigger and bigger and pulling the centre toward it. Even Justin Trudeau’s government now wants to slow the immigration flow. Or at least it says it does.

On the other hand, in CBC’s eyes you’re not really an extremist politically, or at least not a hurtful one, if you think: the police should be largely defunded; men should be free to declare themselves women and vice versa, have that declaration honoured in all areas of life, and have any attendant surgery or medical treatments paid for from public funds; people should be guaranteed a generous income whether they work or not; and anyone anywhere who can get themselves to this country has a basic human right to become Canadian. And so on.

We also hear a lot about the far right’s willingness to overthrow democracy. The threat to democracy is the beating heart of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, though its pulse grows fainter by the day: The Economist newspaper says he has only a one-third chance of winning.

The storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, made clear that Donald Trump himself is a scoundrel who will go to extremes to suborn democracy. If the election is close, as seems likely in an evenly divided electorate, and if Biden should win, it’s not hard to imagine both legal and extra-legal attempts from Trump supporters to overturn the results. Trump’s aversion to losers and losing — though he’s a many-time loser himself — means he will never admit defeat.

But we hear less (from CBC and others) about how the left (both centre and far) will react if Trump does win in November. In 2016, a national “Resistance” began just a few days after the election. (History’s best-known Resistance, of course, was by the French and others against the Nazis.) The anti-Trump Resistance involved protest marches — against the result of a free and fair election — but also pushback against the new administration within the federal bureaucracy. Remember the famous 2018 op-ed from “Anonymous” in The New York Times: “I am part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration.”

Eight years later, it’s not far-fetched to think the left, especially the far left, is planning more drastic measures. Could we please have some good investigative journalism about that?

Financial Post

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