The “inbred” comment that swayed an election
By cancelled teacher Jim McMurtry
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By Jim McMurtry
I ran in the BC provincial election and won 542 votes. Now most people who win less than 3% of the vote count likely don’t write articles about it. Yet some people have told me I did well for someone who wasn’t part of a well-oiled party machine.
A writer in the National Post opined that “Rustad and the Conservatives, elated though they are, must feel a tinge of regret” for running “candidates with very questionable past social media posts.” The allusion is to Brent Chapman, who won in Surrey South, who had referred nine years ago to “Palestinians as little inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs.”
I was disappointed that the Conservatives wouldn’t run me as a candidate, perhaps because my past social media posts are worse. The one illustrated here is an example, and it attracted 1.3 million views.
The writer P.G. Wodehouse said the shortage of humour “is due to the fact that the modern tendency is to greet the humorist, when he dares to let out a blast, with a double whammy from a baseball bat.” He added: “Humorists have been scared out of the business by the touchiness now prevailing in every section of the community.”
Trudeau said in 2014 that no anti-abortionist could run for the federal Liberals. The next year a Liberal candidate was forced to step down for the following post: “Santa has to be white! You can’t have a brown guy with a beard sneaking into your house in the middle of the night! You’d be calling a bomb squad!”
Lynn Beyak was forced to resign from the Senate in 2021 for saying positive things about residential schools. The CBC condemned her in 2017 on the basis that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report had “found physical, mental and sexual abuse was rampant, and some 6,000 children died while in care because of malnourishment or disease.”
A teacher in Abbotsford was investigated in 2020 for a lesson plan that asked students to research the positive side of residential schools. The school district told the media, “Assignments like this are not acceptable. This incident is a disservice to the district’s commitment to truth and reconciliation.”
Yet the TRC Report did indeed speak of “the positive intent with which many staff members approached their work, and the positive accomplishments of the school system.”
Nuance itself can be touchy. I lost my teaching job in Abbotsford in 2021 after news broke of a discovery of a mass grave of 215 child remains on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. One allegation was that “it was not a time to play ‘devil’s advocate’ or to have a nuanced debate or discussion on the underlying reasons for these deaths.”
Whether John Rustad should have booted Chapman from his electoral team interests me less than how difficult it is to even make it as a party candidate with any social media past – though social media is the public’s house of commons, the only place that most of us can ever voice our opinions.
Wodehouse once wrote about a boxer who had brains, “though it may be that I merely think he has because I have been talking so much of late to tennis players. Tennis players are just one cut mentally above the wallaby.”
The reaction was swift, not from tennis players but from “The Friends of the Wallaby” and “The International League for Promoting Fair Play for Wallabies.”
I haven’t been picked to run by any party since running for the federal Liberals in 2006, but one benefit of running as an independent is the ability to speak freely. In the one all-candidates meeting in my riding the other candidates answered questions about transit or school portables beginning with the word “we.” They had lengthy prescribed notes in front of them from their parties.
There was nothing they were allowed to say about transit or school portables, to say nothing of tennis players or wallabies.
This post originally appeared in the New West Times. Jim McMurtry is a regular contributor to Woke Watch Canada.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read “The law is an ass”
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Accolades to you, Jim, for taking the initiative to run for office. Since you are not part of the Lemming herd, the deck was stacked against you. Integrity does have a price and you have paid it. Just remember integrity and honesty are rare qualities that not every one posses which makes you an exceptional person. Great T- shirt.
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jim-thank you for your courage! “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” Growing up, I was always taught it’s wrong for the fanatical mob to buy into a hysterical narrative to justify, force, blame, coerce, propagandize, indoctrinate, vilify, and even kill the minority.
The truth always comes out in the end, but after the damage has been done and public interest has disappeared, just like blaming the unvaccinated or Jews for everything. Unfortunately, the charlatans and virtue signalling hypocrites have already ran away with the money.