COLONIALISM AND OTHER “MYTHS”:
THE REBELLION AGAINST REALITY
By Colin Thomas, theatre critic and arts writer, Vancouver, B.C.
(This piece was taken, with the author’s permission, from the October 24, 2024 edition of his excellent weekly newsletter Fresh Sheet, which we recommend. You can subscribe here, free. Of course, this was written before either the U.S. or B.C. election. – Ed.)
Linda Jeffers Coombs is an Elder of the Wampanoag Tribe
and the author of a book that is being suppressed in a Texas county.
(Photo: Emily Clark for Wicked Local)
Stories about book banning in its various forms are coming so fast and furious that I could write about a slew of them every week.
Here’s one that strikes me as particularly revealing. American writer Linda Coombs’s Colonization and the Wampanoag Story is a non-fiction book for middle-grade schoolkids. It’s about European colonization of Indigenous land and, as The Guardian reports, in Montgomery County, Texas, that book has been reclassified as fiction and relocated to the fiction shelves of the local school’s library.
This follows pressure from right-wing activists and a ruling by a citizens’ review panel. (No librarians were involved in the decision-making process.)
There’s been pushback, of course. I just signed a petition created by the National Campaign for Justice that demands school commissioners reinstate the book “to its rightful home” on the nonfiction side.
Increasingly, MAGA-style politics, with its taste for banning books – and, more broadly, denying reality – are infecting the Canadian scene.
As reported by The Globe and Mail, BC Conservative leader John Rustad, who may well become our next premier, said that his government would strike a committee to review all school textbooks and literature to ensure they are “neutral.”
Defining what books would be banned by his Conservative government, Rustad clarified that schoolbooks “shouldn’t be about indoctrination of anything, whether that’s environmental or whether that’s political or whether that’s sexual.” But, as Harrison Mooney points out in The Tyee, “Those are big adjectives, especially in light of Rustad’s history of climate denial and insistence that sexual orientation and gender identity policies in schools violate ‘parents’ rights’ and indoctrinate children.”
Denial of reality is the key concept here.
In both Canada and the U.S., that includes denial of vaccine science. Although he has walked back this position, Rustad is on record as saying that he wishes he hadn’t received “the so-called vaccine, the COVID mRNA shots.”
“When I talked to Bonnie Henry about it,” he explained, “I started to realize it wasn’t so much about trying to get herd immunity or trying to stop the spread, but it was more around shaping opinion and control of the population” – which is, of course, a flat-out conspiracy theory.
Things are exponentially worse in the States, where a huge portion of the population has become significantly detached from reality: prompted by Donald Trump and JD Vance, millions of American voters believe that immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, and hardly anybody blinks when Trump describes January 6 as “a day of love.” In self-defence, we laugh at these absurdities, but they’re dangerous.
And the seeds of denialism have taken root here. We need to stay alert because, as journalists Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev explain to host Hanna Rosin in this Radio Atlantic podcast, denial of reality is a fundamental tool of autocracy.
Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev co-host the Atlantic podcast series Autocracy in America.
Pomerantsev argues that autocrats often dare their followers to believe absurd claims, as a kind of loyalty test. For both initiators and participants, lying also becomes an assertion of power: “We can lie,” Applebaum says, assuming the position of a MAGA loyalist “We can do whatever we want. We can say whatever we want about these people, and it doesn’t affect us.”
Truth doesn’t matter anymore, Pomerantsev says, because something else does: “It’s very shocking when you see people openly choosing to live in an alternative reality. It’s not that they got duped. They’re doing that because it’s part of their new identity.”
Pomerantsev, who is a scholar of propaganda and misinformation, also offers a deeper reading. The permission structure that Trump gives his audience, he says, is that he sticks a middle finger up to reality. And “it’s very nice to give a middle finger to reality. Reality, at the end of the day, reminds you of death.” Whether or not you agree with this step in Pomerantsev’s logic, Trump’s denial of reality creates a sweeping freedom to believe what you want, as a follower, so, when a journalist shows up with facts you don’t like, “You can go, ‘Eh, f*** that.’”
There’s another angle that’s worth considering. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre speaks sympathetically about the truckers of the Freedom Convoy, a right-wing group animated by animus towards vaccine requirements. Poilievre cites these “human-rights” concerns, but he also portrays the truckers as having been driven to the brink by Liberal economic policies. Inflation is taking a toll on all of us, but is that where right-wing extremism is coming from?
In this episode of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, when Stewart floats the idea that authoritarianism wouldn’t be a threat if governments were to give people what they need economically, journalist Ezra Klein, who is one of his guests, responds: “I want this argument to be true. It is the way I want policy to work. It is the way I want to be able to respond to the threat of populism.” But, Klein says, decades of data from Europe don’t support the idea that economic inequity is the major driver. “The thing that seems to correlate,” he says, “is rapid social change, when people feel that power is shifting and, particularly, when immigration is going up a lot.”
So maybe, when folks feel like the system they know is under threat, there’s a temptation to create an “alternative reality” in which the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was the biggest in history, in which you can get a sense of power and solidarity from colluding in this lie, and in which you can silence uncomfortable truths, including the truth that the history of the U.S. – like the history of Canada – includes foundational racism.