As ill-conceived cries for attention go, Maxime Bernier set a new standard this week, placing teenage climate crusader Greta Thunberg in his crosshairs as a “mentally unstable” merchant of panic.
If it was political oxygen Bernier was looking for, he didn’t get much. In his blue-sky bullying of the Swedish schoolgirl, the People’s Party of Canada leader called for Thunberg to be “denounced and attacked,” noting she is “not only autistic, but obsessive-compulsive, eating disorder, depression and lethargy and she lives in a constant state of fear.”
Thunberg’s response to Bernier’s eight-part twitter rant: crickets. She made clear two days earlier in a one-size-fits-all message that she would not feed the trolls, reasoning, “When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning!
“I have Asperger’s and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And — given the right circumstances — being different is a superpower.”
However difficult it may be to distinguish child from adult in this particular episode, it’s fascinating to peruse how their respective followers battled it out in the aftermath.
Bernier, for his part, rephrased his fury two days later, stopping short of an apology but acknowledging a misfire, saying his ire was intended for the adults in her company and not their 16-year-old “pawn.” Again, Thunberg, if she even noticed, remained stoic, fixing her attention instead on the still-unfolding devastation wrought by Hurricane Dorian.
Elsewhere beneath Bernier’s thread, a wide range of Canadians from across the political spectrum weighed in urging quarantine, albeit for varying reasons. Many of Thunberg’s fellow climate-crisis workers saw it as a simple case of science-versus-ignorance: “Ignore him,” they said. And some Conservative supporters came to the same conclusion, arguing that an unnoticed Bernier is the ideal Bernier, in order to minimize any vote spillage from Andrew Scheer’s campaign to defeat Justin Trudeau.
“Bernier is just dying to have a public pissing match with Scheer, who is the only leader Max is really running against, and Scheer won’t give him the satisfaction,” argued one commenter, adding the hashtag #Trudeaumustgo. “Far smarter to ignore him as anyone would do to a fringe party.”
Kingston-based political scientist Brandon Tozzo weighed in with “A friendly reminder Maxime Bernier is a troll attacking Greta Thunberg for attention and clicks. Ignore him. Ignore the PPC. In a few months it probably won’t exist.”
Others said sure, go ahead and engage — but do so with mockery and ridicule. Don’t provide the satisfaction of a serious response.
Others still admitted they were getting pushback “from our side” against engaging with Bernier. Canadian researcher Gerald Kutney, who has wielded his PhD in chemistry like a blinding blade of science in a relentless twitter campaign against climate denialism, decided to fight onward on behalf of Thunberg and the peer-reviewed facts she espouses. “Ignoring propaganda and abuse on twitter does not make it go away,” he said.
It all brought to mind an earlier episode from the ancient days of this 21stcentury platform — November 2012 — when the then-fledgling digital startup BuzzFeed started getting serious about covering U.S. politics — and decided a good place to start would be to get all of Twitter to unfollow Donald Trump.
Yes, a full four years before Trump was elected, BuzzFeed created a bot account — @BuzzFeedPSA — in a public-service effort to auto-police Twitter, urging people “not to engage” with a man then regarded by many as a highly entertaining/ridiculous political sideshow. This was just after Trump had abandoned his effort to prove Barack Obama was born elsewhere and long before anyone had an inkling Trump could go anywhere.
And it failed, of course. Because most of Trump’s followers — 1.3 million then, 69 million now — saw no reason to surrender the sheer fun of the sideshow. BuzzFeed? More like BuzzKill.
Fast-forward nine troll-laden years and the response to this week’s Bernier eruption shows awareness — if not wariness — that engagement itself risks elevating the attacker. “De-platforming is a form of direct action,” one wrote.
For Bernier, who came within a whisker of seizing the Conservative nomination from Scheer before jumping ship to carve out a new party along nativist, libertarian ground, it’s beyond infuriating. As the election writ nears, there appears no new source of political oxygen, apart from ranting anew. As the week unfolded, Bernier’s ire shifted to the upcoming foreign-policy edition of the Munk Debates, which was itself embroiled in a campaign warning that Trudeau’s disinterest in participating is bad for democracy. “Stop lecturing us about democracy when you refuse to invite me,” Bernier fumed.
Bernier’s supporters view the exclusion as political correctness run amok. Yet it is the same dynamic that saw Elizabeth May’s Greens on the outside of debates looking in, year after year, as they built the party into what it is today. If this week’s polling averages are any indication, Green supporters now outnumber Bernier’s PPC by as much as 10-to-1.
In the meantime, there’s always Twitter.
– Mitch Potter is a reporter and feature writer based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites
