Over the years Mad Max Bernier has always liked to portray himself as a dashing hero setting out to destroy political correctness and the dairy lobby, not necessarily in that order.
And although he could be extremely irritating, he was mostly harmless.
But now that his People's Party is still staggering around in the desert barely registering in the polls he's growing desperate.
So now he's mutated into an even more deranged climate change denier, and going after 16-year-old Greta Thunberg.
Firing off one tweet after the other at her, suggesting that she's mentally ill, and a threat to people all over the world.
When in fact Thunberg is on the right side of history, it's climate change deniers like Bernier who are a threat to human survival.
And as Gary Mason suggests, his tweets should make most decent Canadians question his sanity.
In a series of tweets, Mr. Bernier, who came within a whisker of winning the Conservative Party leadership in 2017, assailed Ms. Thunberg, who has Asperger syndrome and has suffered from depression and anxiety, for being “mentally unstable” and a radical ideologue. He said she posed a threat to “our prosperity and civilisation” and suggested that if she wants to play the role of climate alarmist “she should be denounced and attacked.” He seemed to imply in one tweet that the doomsday scenario Ms. Thunberg describes in her speeches is making children suicidal.
I'm glad that Mason includes a reference to this story I wrote about yesterday.
It chronicles how it has most often been white men leading the verbal strikes against Ms. Thunberg and suggests a link between “male reactionaries” and climate change denial. The piece cites a study by two academics at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden that suggests climate activism challenges the way of life enjoyed by male reactionaries – extremists “motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism and climate denialism.”
For I don't think that you can understand where many of the dirty old Cons in this country are coming from without understanding how their views were shaped by misogyny.
And Mason is right, their disgusting behaviour must never be normalized.
What worries me more generally is that we will come to accept the type of behaviour Mr. Bernier exhibited toward Ms. Thunberg as legitimate, as fair game, as nothing more than what you see the President of the United States engaging in almost daily. Demean, devalue, shame, ridicule, taunt – anything goes, no matter how old your target is.
We must never accept this as normal – ever.
Enough is ENOUGH.
That a grown man - a Conservative Cabinet Minister & almost Party leader - could think that attacking a girl, mocking her mental health & her advocacy for climate action, is acceptable politics is brutal.— Catherine McKenna 🇨🇦 (@cathmckenna) September 2, 2019
Call it out. We are better than this, Canada. 🇨🇦https://t.co/95ydRllXir
And the good news?
There are enough crappy old misogynists in this country, to give Bernier a boost in the polls.
If that happens Andrew Scheer will have to respond.
And it will be clear that no decent Canadian could vote for either of those Cons.
Brave Greta Thunberg, one of the planet's best friends.
The whole world must obey me. pic.twitter.com/IMbo54aAcR— jon cee (@joncee10) August 2, 2019
And one of the Con's worst nightmares...
4 comments:
Susan Delacourt had another feature on this subject in the Star today. Along with Max's horrendous Twitter tirade attacking Greta, she mentions the Marxist/anarchist shit disturbers who disrupted Trudeau's appearance at the Labor Day parade enough that his security team had to remove him, and the racist heckler who ambushed Jagmeet Singh's brother. She worries that this nasty behavior is being normalized, that this is a preview of what the 2019 election and maybe subsequent elections will be like, and that the "polite Canadian" is becoming a thing of the past. I really hope not. In part I blame Trump and thus my own country (which also invented the Internet, another weapon of mass destruction if there ever was one). But Trump is more of a symptom than the cause, the embodiment of an anger that's been building for years. It's the old guard of mostly white and entirely mediocre guys and a handful of Stepford handmaids not wanting to let go of their status-quo privilege. "Rage, rage against the dying of the white."
Max is an abusive, toxic narcissist but Scheer is no better. Like Kenney, he's a stealth troll, a habitual liar, and a religious fanatic. The fact that they don't have Max or Doug's bombast actually makes them more of a threat. Sadly, as we've seen with Doug's abhorrent cuts to autism services and Trump's own Nazified war on the disabled, those with mental or neurological conditions are almost always the first to be targeted by the powerful picking on the "weak." The Cons love to mock Margaret Trudeau for her bipolar disorder and Justin for his speech patterns, his demeanor, his own struggles with depression and his tendency to show emotional tenderness rather than inchoate macho rage. Rempel's mockery of his nervous stammer was disgusting and she should have been ejected from the House of Commons if not forced to resign. Bad enough they have no respect for other people with speech impairments and obviously no respect for Justin Trudeau as a person. Like Greta, he is an "other" to them. He is an object, a thing, an "it." He is something less than human by virtue of who he is. By behaving in this disrespectful manner towards him, they don't even uphold their duties as government officials by respecting the office of Prime Minister. When someone like her or Max disgraces Parliament in such fashion they are disgracing the institutions of the Crown, in much the same way Republicans disgraced the Office of the President with their dehumanization of Barack Obama. People like that are unfit to hold elected office in any capacity in Canada and undeserving of the title, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition or "The Honourable" Member of Parliament. They belong back at the Bundestag in 1933.
The disabled are a canary in the coal mine, as Charles Adler pointed out when he shared a NYT article about the last acceptable prejudice. In the 1930s, the disabled were the first "guinea pigs" for what later became the Holocaust. It happened before and it's happening now, but hopefully enough people are aware of it to stop the worst from coming to fruition again.
One of his followers cheered someone for "running over some cyclists". Threatening violence.
Hi Jackie....I'm glad that people like Delacourt are finally wondering why our political scene is turning into a stinking swap, but what took her so long? Where are her colleagues and why are the Cons getting a free ride? As for bullies who mock the disabled, they better hope and pray they never bump into me...
Hi lagatta....yes. I still feel that Bernier is just posing as a loony right winger, many of his followers are the real thing...
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