Thursday, May 26, 2022

The Great Forgetting...

AngerGroomers
'RThemVille


The following is a wee bit of recent shite posting....errrr... 'anger grooming' from a fine fellow named Jeff Ballingall and an organization called 'Canada Proud' that he founded:




Which brings us to the lede of an opinion piece written by Conservative party operative Melanie Paradis that was published last week by the Globe and Mail:
A month before Canada was first rocked by COVID-19 in March of 2020, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney leveraged his meteoric popularity and organizational mastery to endorse Erin O’Toole for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. This week, he joined Mr. O’Toole on the pyre of discontent.

The ouster of a conservative heavyweight like Mr. Kenney should serve as a stark warning: The anger out there is so much bigger than the political establishment thought. People have a lot of reasons for being angry, many justified, but what matters is what’s being done with that anger and where it’s going to go.

We’ve been groomed for anger for the past decade. Social media algorithms incentivize outrage. Media outlets churn out clickbait. And bad actors like Russia and China use the long arm of the internet to run elaborate thought scams on Canadians, leveraging our distrust in the media, our governments, and even each other. This has all been bubbling under the surface for years, but during pandemic lockdowns, this toxic brew boiled over as anger and isolation collided with conspiracy on a mass scale...


Hmmmm...

The following is from a Postmedia story written by Brian Platt a couple of years ago, titled "Creator of Popular Conservative Ontario Proud Page Joins Erin O'Toole Campaign Team":
Erin O’Toole has signalled he will make aggressive digital messaging a feature of his bid for the Conservative leadership with the appointment of Jeff Ballingall, founder of Ontario Proud and other influential Facebook pages, to oversee his digital strategy.

Ballingall has made a name for himself over the past few years in pioneering the use of Facebook to spread conservative messaging, often through viral posts that don’t require any ad spending. The Ontario Proud page remains his best known effort, with nearly half a million followers, but he also runs Canada Proud (192,000 followers) and B.C. Proud (82,000 followers). In addition Ballingall co-owns The Post Millennial, another conservative website that’s gained a strong online following...

{snip}

...O’Toole has pulled together a full campaign team with a wide range of experience, and will be formally launching his leadership bid soon, campaign sources said....Fred DeLorey, a veteran organizer who also ran O’Toole’s 2017 leadership run, is the campaign manager. The campaign chair is Walied Soliman, a key figure in Patrick Brown’s successful 2015 Ontario PC leadership bid and the Canadian chair of global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.

Melanie Paradis, Jim Burnett and Dan Mader are deputy campaign managers, and all have worked on numerous federal and provincial campaigns. Tausha Michaud, who worked for O’Toole on Parliament Hill, will be the campaign’s principal secretary. Laura Kurkimaki, a former issues manager in Stephen Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office, will be a senior advisor...

The point here is that Conservative party operatives like Ms. Paradis thought they could ride a hateful base that they helped build to electoral Valhalla without consequence.

But now that that very same base is turning on a number of them and theirs, operatives like Ms. Paradis are suddenly doing their best to bamboozle us into forgetting the active role they played in the base building and the anger grooming.

We should not let that happen.

And the proMedia in this country should not be aiding and abetting in the great forgetting.


_______
Importantly, the anger grooming cuts both ways... For example, if you look at the comment thread below the original 'Canada Proud' tweet shown above you will see that it has folks yelling at  each other from both sides of political chasm about something of little or no consequence.



.

4 comments:

Graham said...

Right on Ross. Good catch and thanks for making the connection for us.
I don’t always know what they’re up to but I know they are up to no good.

RossK said...

Graham--

If you read Ms. Paradis' piece in the Globe you will see that she blames Russia, China, the algorithm, our distrust in media and how the blackface incident broke the fairness equilibrium.

All of which is bad enough.

But then, near the end of the piece she writes the following:

"We are indulging the dangerous fantasies of people lost in their Facebook feeds instead of acting the way serious people who want to govern a G7 country should act."

Why is this that quoted sentence craven in the extreme?

Because the business/influence peddling model of fine folks like Mr. Ballingall is built almost entirely on building/encouraging/wurlitzering the very 'dangerous fantasies of people lost in their Facebook feeds' that Ms. Paradis now (apparently) decries.


.

Graham said...

Yes, exactly. And they know it and they should be held accountable for any wrong doing because someone bet the farm on it.
I do wish we would act more reasonably, responsible and mature as a country. Plus some fun.
I’ve read that during the con leaders debate last night Ms. Lewis was going on about the WHO conspiracy and how Canada was in danger of surrendering our sovereignty or some such thing. Not to mention all the bunk PP goes on about.
They are quick to be offended, they do to others what they claim not to like and they twist alternate facts and made up plot lines that have little basis in reality.
It’s getting very elephant’s party like. I’m hoping the more typical, older style conservatives can dump the reform contingent or make a new party of cooler, saner heads. Id like the nut jobs to be on their own so all can see them for what they are and probably how few there really is.

RossK said...

I dunno Graham -

I think the old guard/'tories' have been marginalized since the rise of Mr. Manning and all that followed. And now there is the concern of the bleed of the base to the PPC was already evident in the 2021 numbers and would likely increase further if, say, Mr. Charest won the CPC leadership and Mr. Poilievre was pushed out.

It really does seem that they've put themselves between a rock and an increasingly reactionary hard place which, of course, Ms. Paradis is trying to convince everyone is not their own fault.