Hate - the Buzzword of the Week for Bullies

The 1 Million March 4 Kids was yet another perfect opportunity for misrepresentation and name-calling.

Wow, what a week. You know someone is losing the argument when the name-calling begins. I wrote about the 1 Million March 4 Children last week with great anticipation and it looks like it went off pretty much as planned. What a great testament to ordinary Moms and Dads. I said it before and I'm now more convinced than ever that this is only the beginning.

I love it when a plan comes together.

- Hannibal Smith

The protest spanned 77 cities in every province across the country, and despite their clearly stated mission and goals, every level of government that made a statement (municipal, provincial, and federal), came out condemning this protest as hateful and bigoted.

The goal of the protest was simply to stop the schools from misinforming and confusing kids with strange cult-like ideas known as “gender ideology”:

• Everyone has a gender identity which overrides biology,

• If you don't feel like you fit, you might be born in the wrong body,

• And other nonsense…

This last country-wide protest, though smaller was basically a reincarnation of the Freedom Convoy in the sense that it was a genuine ground-level, grassroots, inclusive protest. Just like the Freedom Convoy, it was a perfect representation of every racial, cultural, and religious demographic in the country, though to listen to the mainstream reports about it, you'd think it was a bunch of white supremacists. The counter-protesters, by contrast were mainly middle-class white folks and unions (for whatever that's worth).

This protest also spawned the latest reincarnation of the government and media misinformation machine, promoted by the country's most powerful unions and the usual suspects on the far left.

The main criticism I've been hearing all week about these particular protesters is that we shouldn't believe what anything they say or trust what’s on their official website because their critics know what they really mean - and it's baaaad…

Remember back in the day when someone could make an assertion or state an opinion and people wouldn't immediately assume they were threatening genocide? Those days when a mother’s concern for her child was not met with violent mobs accusing her of hate-speech?

Those would have been great days. Admittedly it's entirely possible the above argument would've ended with a sword sticking out of someone's heart, but still, gotta love the language.

I've been bewildered at the outright refusal by so many to believe that these thousands of parents have anything but the best interests of their kids at heart, and the over-the-top eagerness to assume they’re out there specifically to curb-stomp the less fortunate.

It's as if these people just can't conceive that anyone could possibly feel so strongly about something without hating those who disagree. Perhaps this is because they themselves are unable to do that. By the way, this is the very definition of “tolerance”, a word we hear so much about from these same people who seemingly have no concept of what it really means.

The main push in this march was to keep the SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) curriculum out of schools (so far it's officially only in BC and Alberta), but another of the motivating factors of the protest is of course our schools’ policies of not informing the parents if their child decides to change genders or pronouns in school.

There is no private school in the country that would even think about letting their students change names or genders behind their parents’ backs. The parents would rip their kids (and their money) out of there so fast, the principal wouldn't know if he was a man or a woman. The only reason public schools think they can get away with it is because most parents simply don't have the option of taking their kids out. Even so, over the last few years, homeschool enrollment in Canada has doubled. This is partly due to the effects of our pathetic pandemic response, but also undoubtedly to this gender-cult issue.

Another big “mic-drop” argument I've heard a lot this week is the old “Well, look at those terrible people you're aligning yourself with. Don't you know that there may have been actual Nazis at that protest?!” I don't know if there were any Nazis at that protest, but evidently there was one in our House of Commons two days later. At least he wasn't protesting Justin Trudeau…

Anyway, this is another argument (about the possibility of Nazis) that shows the battle is already lost. This is known as a logical fallacy. Not only is it a strawman argument where they attempt to flip the script and focus on something completely irrelevant, it's also a guilt by association fallacy. So it's like, two logical fallacies in one. I found this one kind of amusing given that in Toronto, the Marxists were out in the streets counter-protesting and shouting:

Who's schools? OUR SCHOOLS!

Whose kids? OUR KIDS!

You'll want to see what that one looked like.

Last I checked, our schools and our kids definitely did not belong to the Marxists.

I'm not about to make that same stupid argument that because the Marxists were there, now we know that all the counter-protesters were actually Marxists. It is a bit telling though, that it was the proletariat protesting what's basically a Marxist ideology, namely that the state knows better than they do how to raise their children. On the other side were the government and its labour unions.

Just an observation.

Alright, so maybe I am making that argument, but it's not because the Marxists were there. It's because the loudest voices on that side of the argument were already Marxist in nature before the obvious Marxists showed up.

Now, you may agree with the Marxists, and that's fine - it's still a relatively free country. Don't let the fact that this ideology is responsible for tens of millions (possibly hundreds of millions) of deaths⁰ get you down. You gotta do what ya gotta do, right?

It was interesting to note that although we were told this was an anti-LGBT march, there were still many lesbians on the side of the marchers. So there's that beautiful cross-section of our country again - normal people wanting normal stuff for their kids.

Sue-Ann Levy said it well:

Let me be clear. I am not queer. I am a lesbian. I find the former term hateful and pejorative – like faggot or dyke.

That is a huge part of the takeaway from Wednesday’s 1 Million March 4 Children.

Most gays like me – conservative or liberal – just want to live their lives and not shout their identity from the rooftops as many queer activists feel the need to do.

We also agree with letting children be children and disagree with the concept of ramming pronouns and gender identity down the throats of kids as young as five!

It’s absurd and bordering on abusive.

So much for the “anti-LGBT” trope.

The problem is that most people (including most gays and lesbians) didn't even know what this protest was about, other than what they heard from our elected officials and the news media.

What we heard as soon as this protest was announced was that it was against LGBTQQIP2SAA++ (did I miss anyone?) and it was transphobic and it was white supremacist and it was rooted in hate. In fact if you were to go about counting the number of times the word HATE was thrown at this group from all these sources over the last week, I'm sure you'd still be counting. Hate was truly the buzzword of the week. And it's also a buzzword of the weak because it's about the only criticism they had and it's a pretty weak one at that.

The thing about using words like hate and fascist and transphobe is that it's expected that everyone will automatically just stop and agree with you because they sure don't want to be associated with that side. And it works. It works because most people are too lazy to dig for the real story. They'll believe the first thing they hear, or the thing they hear the most. Add to that the fear of being lumped in with the hateful, or the racist, or the whatever-phobic and most will tend to think it's just not worth the struggle.

From what we saw this last week, it looks like there are enough concerned parents in this country that really do think it's worth the struggle and they're not going anywhere. I’m well aware that there are many different versions of how “successful” this protest was, and honestly I don't care which ones you believe. The fact that this happened at all is already a win because it has brought this into the open and made it that much easier for others to get on board. It still baffles me that in a country like Canada, a movement of parents looking out for their kids inspires the kind of retaliation and pushback, and hateful rhetoric that it did.

There is something wrong with the world, and as a father of two teenagers in public school, I have no intention of shutting up about this, regardless of the opinions of well-meaning individuals. If you happen to be a parent with kids in the public school system, I'd strongly advise you to not be quiet about this either.

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