By Olivier Jolicoeur

We were all shocked by the images of the rioters who stormed the Capitol. These events are not worthy of one of the world’s greatest democratic republic.

Trump’s rhetoric was irresponsible and certainly helped to fuel the fire, but you have to live in a parallel world to think that what happened was his fault alone. Listening to the mainstream media, Trump would be solely responsible for the events. But what about those same media and all the prominent Democrat party figures who for months described the antifa and BLM riots as “mostly peaceful”? Who for months called for violence? Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Nancy Pelosi: “I dont know why there aren’t any uprising over the country and maybe there will be.”
• Joe Biden: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
• Chuck Schummer: “It’s [antifa] a myth.”
• Joe Biden again: “Antifa is just an idea.”
• Kamala Harris: “They [BLM and antifa] are not gonna let up and they should not.”
• Eric Holder: “When they go low, we kick them.”
• Chris Cuomo: “Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”
• CNN: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”

Wouldn’t that be partly their fault? For when violence is minimized and encouraged for its radical side of the political spectrum, we should not be surprised that the other side also conceives of violence as a salutary act: “if it’s good for them, it must be good for us,” they tell themselves.

We may repeat that there is no evidence of electoral fraud, but the irregularities are very real: no postmarks or identification required for mail-in ballots, dead people voting, prohibition for Trump’s campaign representatives to be present at the counting in some states, votes arriving after election day are counted, and so on. The refusal by Democrats and the mainstream media to examine these perceptions of fraud shows that while there is no evidence of fraud, there is no evidence that it did not occur! If the media had done their investigative work and the Democrats had agreed to subject the electoral process to transparent audits and investigations, we could be sure of that.

Meanwhile, on the major networks and in the major newspapers, outrage specialists are rising up against the events, the same ones who for months have applauded and encouraged the chaos and destruction of Antifa and BLM. Rather than reporting the information and trying to make sense of it, they are filling us with the same prejudiced analyses: “Trump is a dictator,” “it’s an attempted coup,” “the democrats are the Good Incarnate,” etc.”

These media, unable to go beyond Trump’s shocking, vulgar and crude personality, prefer to call racist and backward those who don’t think according to the domga of the moment rather than seek an in-depth understanding of the situation. One imagines that everything will return to order once Biden, the empty shell of the Democrats, takes power. But psychoanalysis 101, let’s continue to repress the impulses of half of the American population and they will come back with tenfold force. Trump is not the disease, he is a symptom of it.

On our side of the border, our health bureaucracy announces on the same day another month of lockdown and a curfew. It doesn’t matter if all the research shows that lockdown is ineffective, it doesn’t matter if the curfew has no scientific basis (Quebec’s public health director himself admitted it), it doesn’t matter if the impacts of lockdown are catastrophic, listening to the mainstream media if we do as little as question these measures, it’s because we want to see the health system collapse in on itself. As if overloading the health care system was something new in Quebec.

In the old days, the mainstream media was a glorious tribute to their profession. They were the ones who exposed the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation. Closer to home, they exposed the water meter scandal, the first step towards the Charbonneau Commission. They brilliantly covered the great events of our world, presenting them to the public with rigour, accuracy and honour. Today, these media have as their enterprise the creation of an alternative reality, a parallel world. Beware whoever escapes from this new world will be a conspirator, a racist and a reactionary, perhaps even a Nazi. The media have accomplished great things in history and can accomplish much more. It is simply time to return to the world we live in and give the truth its rightful place.

Olivier Jolicoeur is a student in environmental geography at Université de Montréal. On the lookout for social and political current events, he is interested in issues that affect identity, territory and the environment, but above all, he recognizes the virtue of legitimate disagreement and debate between ideological adversaries.