There was a delightful viral video from last year featuring a “guy munching on noodles” as CNN plays behind him during the period of time last year when it became fashionable to defend burning down buildings as an act of “justice.” He takes a chomp out of a dry briquette of ramen as former CNN host Chris Cuomo says, “And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” At this point, the CNN screen behind our heroic noodle-munching meme man flashes to a simple Google search for the First Amendment to the Constitution, with a little red circle drawn around the very short text of the Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” He points over his shoulder at the text, saying, “The First Amendment. You’ve just gotta look it up.”
For a long time, people who mistake buzzwords and complexity for wisdom have been diagnosing the great problem in the world as a crisis of post-truth or an “infodemic” or a crisis of misinformation or what have you. I maintain what we have is a crisis of seventh grade civics. You see it when the meme guy knows more than the governor’s brother who got a plum gig hosting a CNN show. And you saw it recently in Canada, where an article in the Globe and Mail newspaper bore the title “Calling the Ottawa protests ‘peaceful’ plays down non-violent dangers, critics say.”
“Non-violent dangers.” Very quickly, when you start playing around with the commonsense definitions of peace and violence, people start saying things that mean the opposite of what they intend and sound sinister. According to the Globe and Mail, Ottawans are “‘seeing the images that we’re all seeing, of very right-wing extremist messages: the flags that display the swastika, confederate flags, images of a prime minister being lynched,’ [Ottawa Councilor Catherine] McKenney said. ‘I’m not sure that I would continue to call this peaceful.’” The paper adds that “McKenney, who is non-binary, said they aren’t sure they would be safe venturing downtown.” The same article, however, notes that “police haven’t reported any physical violence at the ongoing Ottawa rally against vaccine mandates and other government-imposed COVID-19 restrictions.”
Factually, everyone near these rallies has been safe, as of this writing. Canada’s biggest newspaper feels called to try to cover this up and paint peaceful protests as something they are not by changing the meaning of words — and very important words at that. The paper is also plainly lying: It quotes several sources describing the protesters as carrying a swastika, suggesting a pro-Nazi event, when the available images I’ve seen show a Canadian flag symbolically modified to look like the Nazi flag, communicating the exact opposite of what the paper says: not “we support Nazis,” but rather “the people we are rallying against, our enemies, are like Nazis.”
The Globe and Mail also quotes a Carleton professor who, on Twitter, suggested news reports must stop calling these “peaceful protests” merely because they are protests that are peaceful. “By what common understanding of the term does what we are seeing on the ground, on TV, in our social media feeds qualify as ‘peaceful protest’? Is it merely the absence of physical violence and injury? That’s not unimportant but is insufficient as a definitional threshold.” I would like to get the noodle munching meme guy on the case here. Yes, really, it is.
