Allegations that led to Alec Holowka’s suicide need proper scrutiny 

Bruce Arthur, dubbed Sportswriter of the Year in 2012 by Sports Media Canada and featured in Sports Illustrated’s list of top 100 people to follow on Twitter, may sound like your average sports columnist, but there’s much more to the man than hot takes and sports. He also has a passion for hurling abuse at strong conservative women. Specifically, Candice Malcolm. 

Malcolm is the founder of True North, an independent media outlet in Canada. She tweeted out a reply to Justin Ling, a man who describes himself as a “consulting killjoy,” “perpetually unemployed” and “painstakingly uninteresting.” 

Ling had said in a Hill Times article that True North, the independent news outlet founded by Malcolm, was a “tiny start-up” from “worrying ends of the spectrum.” 

Malcolm stood up for herself and her outlet:

And this is when Bruce Arthur showed exactly why he was voted by SI as one of the top 100 people to follow on Twitter, saying to Malcolm: “You’re garbage.” 

At first, I was confused by this nasty response. But then I looked into who this guy really is. It turns out he’s the kind of guy who would imply that if you watch conservative news programs like former hockey legend Bobby Orr does, then you might be a “white supremacist.”

Slandering people and blithely calling a woman “garbage”? I think Trudeau should reconsider all of that media bailout money he’s giving the Toronto Star and Arthur.

According to today’s woke standards, Arthur—a mediocre white male—should be cancelled for typing such a reply to a female journalist. It’s the kind of thing that is condemned as “hate”—rooted in misogyny and toxic masculinity. Will that happen in this case? Of course not. You see, Malcolm is conservative and Arthur is liberal. The standards are never applied equally.

Candice Malcolm has stood up for Canadians, our freedom of speech, our servicemen and servicewomen, tackled terrorism, broken stories others only wish they could have, and has taken the Trudeau government to court for and won on behalf of freedom of the press. For a sports columnist to state that Malcolm, an obvious pillar of Canadian media is “garbage” is completely inaccurate and out of touch.

Freedom of speech belongs to everyone. That freedom should not be limited or suppressed. Arthur has the right to hurl insults at conservative women all day long if he so chooses. But it does speak to his lack of character. How we use our language is a choice we make, and this choice was, quite frankly, garbage.   

Bruce, if you want to save your credibility, take the plank out of your eye before commenting on the speck you see in someone else’s. Or, just stick to the sports highlights and leave the real work to Candice Malcolm and True North.

I guarantee that Malcolm would still defend your ability to speak freely and call her names. That’s the kind of professional she is.  

“The world is going to hell.” Every day, in every news outlet, we are bombarded with this notion. Climate change irrevocability, civil strife, increasing racism, terrorism, homophobia, and poverty. The west is in a navel-gazing spiral of negativity and self-hatred. We verbally flagellate ourselves with condemnation of our own wealth, of our carbon footprint, of our inability to fix all the problems instantly, effectively, and permanently. We are stuck in a loop of negative self-critique that any therapist would diagnose as suicidal, and in fact, suicide rates are rising. But it’s time we looked at some facts and started telling ourselves a new story. As it turns out, we don’t suck. 

One of the biggest critiques of the west is that there is rising inequality, that the poor are getting poorer while the rich keep getting richer. However, that’s not actually true. It’s a lovely narrative for those who favour wealth redistribution because the perception of injustice spurs people on to figure out how to rectify that. The only problem is that it’s untrue. Of course, there are problems, there always are, but they’re not nearly so bad as we are led to believe by popular media representations, and they’re getting better.

A recent article in The Economist shows just how off our thinking has been with regard to wealth inequity. New research confirms that the basis for this belief in increasing financial disparity is inaccurate. The claims of inequity were founded on four presumed truths. These are that the top 1% of earners have soared high above the rest of us in wealth accumulation, that household incomes have languished, that worker exploitation has hurt labour while lining the pockets of wealth capitalists and that the accumulation of assets the wealthy hold have been skyrocketing in value.

However, “…some economists have re-crunched the numbers and concluded that the income share of the top 1% in America may have been little changed since as long ago as 1960.” Unaccounted for in the analysis of wealth inequity were the changes with regard to Medicaid expansion, pension dividends that go to middle-earners, the vast underestimation of “inflation adjusted median income growth in America from 1979-2014.”

While we could always do better, the fact is, we could do much worse. It’s hard for us to believe that we are not the worst people in the worst time frame in the entirety of human history, but as we berate ourselves for being so terrible, we should take a moment to note that poverty is in drastic decline worldwide.

In a Q&A on his YouTube channel, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson notes that: “It is by no means self-evident that things are getting worse… In the last 15 years, the millennium goal for the UN was to have world poverty, like absolute poverty, that’s less than $1.50 [down] by 50% within 15 years, and that was actually reached ahead of schedule. We’ve lifted hundreds of millions of people into the middle class in the last 30 years. There is increasing inequality in the west because the working class has taken the brunt of that redistribution to third world countries. But really there’s no starvation in the world anymore, except really for reasons of misdistribution and political purpose. 

“People are becoming richer and more educated all the time. And we are waking up to our planetary responsibilities, and once people stop starving to death, and having to burn dirt and eat substandard food that they’ve scraped out of the ground they do start to turn their attention to things that are more aesthetic. … I don’t see an alternative [to capitalism] that has manifested itself that doesn’t have far more negative consequences. … The most successful societies by virtually any metric are the capitalist societies.”

Shocking, I know, but it’s true. The west and western culture is not the worst thing ever to happen to the world and humanity. We don’t have to wipe ourselves off the face of the earth or stop having babies just to save everyone from our wretched, horrid, greedy, trolling selves. We have actually been helping. Poverty is in decline, and along with it, our general sense of self-respect. 

It’s time to tell ourselves a different story, one that involves trying our hardest to make things better for all people, because that’s what’s really going on. People are getting tired of this same, sad story. David Byrne recently launched Reasons to Be Cheerful as an antidote to all the bad news. It collects stories about all the legit good things happening in the world, and those that reflect innovation, compassion, and cooperation between people and cultures. 

A narrative that gives us an inkling into our successes, not just our failures, would help us to push forward more than the hopeless one we are constantly being fed. One of our biggest issues is that, as things improve both in the west and worldwide, we raze the definition of success and replace it with an even higher measure.

We have lived up to so many of our goals, yet every time we attain one, we move the goal further on. It’s like we’re climbing a ladder and with every rung, we look up at the next one and see how much further away it is than the one we just climbed. This is not a call to let ourselves off the hook, we know how much work there is to do, we hear about it from every source every day. But the progress of democratic capitalism, with a healthy amount of checks on the power of the free market, is an effective tool for the betterment of us all. Let’s stop hating ourselves—what we’re doing is actually working.

Do social justice warriors have an ounce of humour left? The list of things we are allowed to talk or joke about seems to shrink every day. The latest in a long line of offence-riddled rants by activists in the outrage industry was cooked up by Shailja Patel, a real-life Titania McGrath (yes, she’s even won a slam poetry competition), who posted a tweet which started off a twitterstorm two days ago: 

“Today in white male solipsism. From the school of ‘women comedians are terrible’ and ‘non-white literatures are terrible’ and ‘hip-hop is terrible’ and ‘anything that doesn’t cater to me and reinforce my conviction that I am the center of the universe is terrible.’ We who?”

The tweet was a response to Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom), who again had responded to another tweet by Jon Becker:

What followed was Patel’s indignation at how someone dared say they found Indian food terrible. 

“(Nichols) trips over himself with eagerness to spew racist bullshit in the name of “I’m going to say something controversial tee hee.” Then chortles at the clapback: “People are tOuChY.” Why, yes, centuries of colonial slaughter, plunder, and mass starvation tend to have that effect.” She proceeded to talk about the 1943 Bengal famine, stating Winston Churchill had said Indians bred like rabbits. She said: “I guess @RadioFreeTom has never worked in a restaurant where he had to serve racist yobs all night, and be thankful for if they just insulted him, instead of killing him.”

Other presumed historical wrongs were also mentioned:  anecdotes about children, presumably of Indian descent, living in the West, throwing away their mothers’ curries for fear they would be ridiculed by their peers, or Indian students in the West walking for miles in harsh winter weather to find vegetarian food, dressed in unsuitable clothes. The list goes on. Nichols was then accused of othering, bullying, and “punching down in the crudest and ugliest way.” 

Really? Daring to state your opinion on a nation’s cuisine is “fuelling harassment” of “every South Asian call center worker, service industry or retail worker, cultural worker, student, (and) child on the playground”? As we’ve become accustomed to, in this brave new world of everything being racist, the tiniest micro-aggression can inflict the greatest of offence. Instead of tackling real issues of actual discrimination—of which there are many, even in India—Social Justice Warriors prefer to brew storms in teacups. Saira Rao weighed in too. A Democrat politician, long-time race-baiter, (or, as she calls herself, “racial justice activist,”) and co-founder of “Race 2 Dinner” (where white women “willing to set aside their white woman tears” are invited to dine with women of colour in order to be confronted with their racism), tweeted:

“Having white people trash Indian food is extremely triggering as an Indian who has been told that I smell weird, that my food smells weird and that Indians shit on the street which is why everything we are smells bad. My whole life.”

Her tweet has 72,000 likes at the time of writing, but to say that the Twittersphere was awash with only support for the aggrieved ladies I would be lying. The real Titania McGrath poked fun at the whole debacle:

“Any white man who doesn’t like Indian food is a genocidal racist. Any white man who likes Indian food is guilty of cultural appropriation and is no better than Hitler. Take your pick.”

And with that, she (or Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind Titania) nailed it. This is really what we’re being told now. This is Critical Race Theory in action. White supremacy means we’re all complicit in a system of structural racism, and there’s no way out, according to the believers. Even your food preferences are signs of white supremacy. Nuance and humour are dead, and you have to pick sides.

Speaking of Hitler, Rao is outspoken on her hate of Israel. She’s called all Jewish Israelis “combatants,” accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and called UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson a “notorious racist.” This is the height of far-left, woke activism: denouncing everything white people do and say, while also hating Jews, and claiming all people of colour are helpless victims and need protection from insensitive remarks about their cuisine. Her world view is so black-and-white that anyone who veers from her script is outright evil. Five-year-olds are frankly better at arguing their case than she is. 

Of course, saying you don’t like someone’s food is not especially polite. It’s what we teach our children not to do. Hardly anyone would insult someone’s food at a dinner party, but as adults we’re still allowed our preferences.  If you tell me you think Norwegian food is bland on Twitter, I couldn’t care less, although I am Norwegian. You’re probably partially right. Jamie Oliver, the British chef, is famous in Norway for mocking our goat’s cheese—a sweet, fudge-like brown cheese made from whey—when he visited the country back in 2008.

I think most Norwegians forgave him without throwing a tantrum saying he was the product of his ancestors’ colonialist past or something in that vein, but then this was before identity politics took hold and we all got along, more or less. It was simply brushed off as a bit impolite. And so it should be. Someone’s opinion of a type of food shouldn’t be noteworthy. Tom Nichols’ opinion on curries should not outrage anyone. He’s a professor of national security affairs and author with 287,000 followers on Twitter, not because he dislikes Indian food, but because of his academic merits.

In Britain, we love Indian food, but someone not liking it doesn’t need to be clamped down on from so-called anti-racist activists . Chicken Tikka Masala, once hailed the UK’s favourite dish, was recently beaten into the number two spot by another curry,  the creamier Chicken Korma. I doubt Indians, in the UK or in other places, care whether a man on the internet thinks Indian food is terrible. I might cook a curry tonight.

While our culture obsesses over manufactured identity-based crisis after crisis, I say there’s a real crisis of value—we need to see it and understand it.

It’s a kind of crisis not seen by others but felt only to deeply by the person trying to figure it out. We’re told our value comes from an imaginary ranking system that consists of how we identify, in the amount of followers we have or how well we fit into a protected group. These lies have distorted our sense of value not only in how we see ourselves but our ability to see others as well. 

The beast that runs society, social justice, has distorted the value of humanity. And so, a restoration of equality and individualism, an acknowledgement that my value is equal to yours because we’re both human.

Every person on this planet possesses unconditional value. It’s that simple. We can discover our own value through faith. Jesus was the greatest equalizer. Who else spent time with lepers, the outcast and the rulers of the day, yet placed them all on the same scale of equality? Imagine the state of our world if everyone did that!

Unconditional value is instilled into each individual the moment they are conceived; that’s a pretty big deal when you think about it. In the eyes of God, every person is equal, no matter how “bad” or “good” society perceives them of being. Religious or not, there’s a lesson to be learned here.

The removal of Judeo-Christian values from our society has produced a state of confusion. It’s interesting to watch people place others on a value scale. Usually, their conclusions are determined on someone’s social media, degree of victimhood, or professional status. But what we’ve created is an ecosystem to figure out where we lie on the scale that we created. Why? Because we want to figure out a way to feel just as valuable as those that we place value in. 

Society has rendered humanity less significant than at any point in western history. Today’s religion is all about debasement. Humans being described as a plague, is not only disturbing but devastating. The root of these types of views stems from a denial that men and women were created in God’s image.  

Still don’t believe me? Well, here’s some more food for thought, how does one explain the highest rates of suicide, depression, self-harm and anxiety ever recorded? These issues have plagued my generation.

By focusing on identity groups, we undervalue a person’s worth. Fighting for “justice” and “equality” when we still do not see each other the right way will only lead to a vicious cycle of cancel culture and shaming. Whenever you distort the original form of a foundational element, you destroy the beauty of everything that is built upon it.

So where do we start? How do we develop a culture that isn’t so fixated on identity? We start in our own lives, we start to value those closest to us—genuinely. Through this lens, we no longer root causes in an issue’s superficialities but from a source of truth. That truth is an understanding that God instilled in us the same worth as he placed within kings and beggars. When we see our value as genuine regardless of position or the things we hold as status symbols, we start to see, act and treat others differently.

Your value isn’t found in another’s words or the level at which you perform but rooted in the God that made you. He made you for purpose, for a reason and he decided that you, of all people, would bare a uniqueness this planet has never seen before. True identity isn’t achieved through the demeaning of others or being part of a special group that strokes your ego, but the understanding that we all bleed the same and each one of us were given the same amount of value as the other, no more, no less. 

Our culture is currently backwards. We don’t need to “find our identity” first, we need to understand our value first, take personal responsibility, and then do unto others as you would have them do unto you.