Mythology does not record whether Trojan priestess Cassandra took grim satisfaction in the vindication of her ignored warnings. I don’t. But I must say “I told you so” when events confirm my claims of some dangerous pattern in public affairs. Including from just last week about widespread disastrous resistance to systematic thought in Canada, from free speech to free trade, unleashing bad policy from muddled theory. Maybe Sean Feucht could sing about it… but not in Canada.
In case you had never heard of Cassandra, sister of Hector, she was gifted with prophecy, but cursed with never being believed. “Don’t take in the wooden horsey thing, it’s an obvious Greek trick,” she said, and the city burned.
In case you’d never heard of Feucht, and I certainly hadn’t, he’s a MAGA-Christian rocker, a weird fusion, who just had a bunch of events in Canada cancelled because our governments import censorship in a rickety free-speech frame, risking conflagration here.
Especially because, as I also said last week, when our governments crush dissent in the name of toleration, “what they don’t do is attempt to demonstrate how these exceptions are compatible with their reasons for supporting free speech.” And when they do, you’re torn between scorn and pity.
Thus, in commenting on the desire to shut down Feucht’s event, the mayor of Montreal’s office said, “Freedom of expression is one of our fundamental values, but hateful and discriminatory speech is not accepted in Montreal and, as in other Canadian cities, the show will not be tolerated.” So you can say anything she likes, or pay a hefty fine.
One senator said, “No one is stopping Sean Feucht from hosting his shows in Canada, despite his criminal record. He has no Charter right to have his shows hosted at public facilities, which must be safe and discrimination free spaces that uphold community standards. Don’t believe the martyrdom.”
As columnist Robyn Urback retorted, “Public spaces are subject to the Charter. So this is backward.” In free societies, it’s private spaces that can choose who to admit based on private preferences. It’s the government that must not discriminate.
Here it does, and weirdly. For instance, a Montreal church faces a hefty fine for hastily scheduling a Feucht show sans-permit following hasty censorious cancellation of a Quebec City performance. Yet unpermitted pro-Hamas protests and prayers routinely block city streets in Montreal and nobody gets fined or even moved along.
Columnist Jamie Sarkonak snapped, “Feucht’s mistake was not singing in Arabic.” But the medium isn’t really the message here, while the scary revolt-of-the-elites double standard is a subject for another day. Today we’re deploring their complete failure to realize what free speech is for.
The issue here, crucially, is not whether you like Feucht’s message, his tunes, or his hairstyle. It’s whether you genuinely think that if a few dozen Canadians hear him set to music, say, his claims that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz “go to churches that are synagogues of Satan,” they will lurch out into the streets chanting “synagogues of Satan… synagogues of Satan” and start attacking real synagogues like… uh… Hamas supporters.
The authorities apparently claim to justify their cancellation of six shows nearly nobody knew about for “safety” reasons. But this rationale badly compounds the offence because, like the old Soviet regime, it seeks to make us complicit in their hypocrisy.
They know. We know they know. They know we know they know. And we know they know we know they know that nobody’s afraid his fans will start a riot after being lashed into some frenzy by his tunes and oratory. If anyone’s going to react to his performance violently, it’s his critics (at least one did), so the authorities are giving legal sanction to extralegal violence and calling it protecting the public.
Or worse. Because as also noted last week, John Stuart Mill’s unsurpassed argument for free speech is (1) an unpopular idea might win the debate, (2) if the conventional wisdom wins, an articulate defence of it makes us understand and love it better, and (3) public exposure is the best way to crush bad ideas. When our authorities deny all three, largely unexamined, they make us complicit in their even uglier contempt for our hearts and minds, their vision of Canadians as a mob of ill-disciplined bigots who must be kept sedated and bound.
Incredibly, it gets even worse. As Mill also Cassandra-ed, if you suppress bad ideas, they will fester in the dark, including by wrapping themselves in Wells’ martyr’s cloak. As Feucht is now plausibly doing, thanks to the very Canadian authorities who, given any coherent faith in us, themselves, or both, would surely have considered giving him a platform the best imaginable way to discredit his ideas.
Bad ideas cause bad policy. No really. Guys, please listen. DO… NOT… OPEN… THE… GATE… TO… THAT… HORSE…
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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