Canadaland And Minority Status' Shield

On Jesse Brown And Targeted Criticism

There are three things that are the reasons this site, and my online presence in this form, exists in the way it does. Chuck Klosterman, whose voice and writing style have long been the staple for what I am trying to badly imitate; Anthony Bourdain, whose famous New Yorker essay serves as both guiderails and inspiration; and Macleans circa 2008-2015. Currently a shell of its former self, Macleans was my favourite read on the internet for at least a half decade, from an incredibly precocious 11 year old through my teen years. The number of hours I spent reading Coyne and Wells and Markusoff and everyone else are innumerate.

It’s also why I’ve had a love hate relationship with Jesse Brown’s work, which is to say that I was a fan of his when he was at Macleans but have found Canadaland to be pious, overwrought, and up its own ass frequently. But I’ve always been fine with that fact – a diversity of media voices means that those shouldn’t be disqualifying, and sometimes the work can survive in spite of it. (It’s also entirely reasonable to point out that my criticisms of Brown are what people who dislike me would say, and that it’s possible my antipathy to Canadaland is a more visceral response.)

All of this is important context to the media story that’s been burbling under the radar – what happens when a media company whose readers like it for punching left suddenly are confronted by the prospect of its ire being directed at people they like? In this case, with the Canadaland Union throwing Brown under the bus. The problem is, there’s no clear explanation from anyone what Brown did wrong, except give a shit about Jewish people.

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The complaint of the Canadaland Union is simple – Brown has “published a series of misleading and targeted statements” about Shree Paradkar, the Toronto Star’s until this week internal ombud on editorial discrimination and bias and columnist on racial and social justice issues. The Union letter references a Wednesday Canadaland piece that extensively quotes unnamed Star employees who detail at length the issues with Paradkar.

Paradkar tweeted that nobody actually knows what happened on October 7^th as a way to dismiss claims that Hamas raped Israeli women. She RT’d a post calling Jewish fear “hypothetical” and blaming it on “whiteness” the same week as Montreal Jews had a synagogue firebombed. Staff, who in theory would go to her to complain about the paper not disclosing that Toronto4Palestine, a group who have organized much of the pro-Palestinian marches since October 7^th, cast doubt on both whether the Holocaust occurred and if it was as bad as Jews claim it was. Again, Star employees did not feel safe going to their ombud because her own beliefs made them distrustful.

It's pretty clear I’m no fan of Paradkar, but she’s rather secondary to what’s actually interesting here. The defence of her, both from her online fans and the implied defence from the Canadaland Union, does not ever list anything wrong with the content of the article or the tweets that precede the article. What they do is attack Brown for the very act of making a “targeted” (to use the Union’s words) statement about a woman. And that’s what’s interesting here, because this mentality is what will kill the left.

It's a mentality that gets me in shit from a portion of my readership every so often – I’ve been accused of being a sexist for variously suggesting Chrystia Freeland be replaced by Anita Anand as Finance Minister and for hating Bonnie Crombie, I’ve been accused of being a racist for attacking Jagmeet Singh – but the thing that makes me not over-read that criticism is that they’ve never attacked the substance of my point. Conditional on JT staying as leader, moving Freeland is the only available personnel move that could be seen as a reboot; my lack of support for Crombie means I’m supporting Marit Stiles in Ontario; and nobody can ever make a case for Jagmeet in response to my screeds, which proves my point.

In the same way, nobody attacking Canadaland and Brown are actually defending Shree on her merits, just that it’s “targeted” to attack her for what she’s done. It’s minority status as a shield, as a catch all protection against criticism. And it’s both offensive to the general concept that equal protection strives to achieve, that our race or gender or sexuality or gender identity or disability status should not deprive us of opportunity, but it’s offensive to think that minorities should be judged on such a curve that our minority status means we can’t be criticized when we fuck up.

The infantilization of minorities by those allegedly standing up for them is a cancer on the left. The idea that Paradkar, in the same vain as Sarah Jama, needs to be coddled on the idea that they’re members of a protected class. When Jama decided to defy her leadership, there was a similar stripping of agency, acting like Jama was the victim of something other than her own choices. Paradkar is the same. If you’d like to tweet that nobody knows who did what on October 7^th, the consequence is getting called out for it.

Seriously, go to her Twitter feed right now – it’s full of people defending her against the mean Jesse Brown hitpiece, but nobody is offering anything other than platitudes about her strength and bravery. Not a single person can explain what was misleading or wrong about the piece. Because to so many, the fact of the piece’s existence is what matters, not reckoning with the actual facts of it. Because she’s a minority, and that’s enough to make it racist and sexist to attack her.

If someone can make an actual defence of her actual actions, I’ll listen to it. But that’s not what we have, and that’s not what much of the left even advocates for anymore. As a gay man, if I was being attacked for a column and all my defenders could say is that it’s homophobic to attack me, I’d delete the column immediately, knowing that clearly I fucked up if that’s all that can be said about my work. Status as a minority, as a member of a now-protected class, is not supposed to be a shield against legitimate criticism.

A Jewish Star colleague believed Paradkar was sharing antisemitic messages, and didn’t feel safe to tell their Ombud. If that doesn’t merit introspection from either Paradkar or her vocal supporters, then they’re frauds.

We need to stop allowing the shield of minority status to stop legitimate criticism, or we will let bad faith actors get away with actual discrimination under the guise that we’ve cried wolf too many times. If we don’t stop this, we’re all be worse off for our failure.