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There’s a reason this image works. It uses a word almost everyone agrees with—equality—and then quietly fills that word with something else. The result is not an argument. It’s a substitution.
Look at it closely. The word “EQUALITY” is rendered in bright, appealing colors, layered with symbols of recognizable identity categories: disability, sexuality, gender, race, activism. Beneath it, the slogan: “hurts no one.” At the level of feeling, this is uncontroversial. Of course equality hurts no one. That’s the point of the concept. Equal treatment under the same rules is the baseline promise of any liberal order. But that is not what the image is actually depicting. The text says equality. The visual payload says something else entirely.
Equality, properly understood, is individual and procedural. It asks a simple question: are the same rules being applied to each person, regardless of who they are? It does not guarantee equal outcomes. It does not engineer results. It does not sort people into categories and adjust treatment accordingly. It holds the line at equal standing before the law and equal access to opportunity. That is why it is durable. It does not require constant intervention or measurement. It does not need to know who you are in order to decide how you should be treated.
The imagery in this poster points in a different direction. It is not concerned with individuals. It is concerned with groups. Each symbol represents a category that, within contemporary political frameworks, is treated as requiring not just equal treatment, but differential treatment in order to achieve parity of outcomes. That is the logic behind quotas, preferences, representational mandates, and a wide range of institutional policies now grouped under the umbrella of equity. That distinction matters. Because once you move from equal treatment to managed outcomes, you have to start making choices about who gets what, and why.
This is where the slogan “hurts no one” stops doing honest work. Equality, in the classical sense, really does not hurt anyone. It simply refuses to privilege or penalize based on identity. Equity, by contrast, is not costless. It reallocates opportunities. It lowers or shifts standards in some contexts. It elevates some groups explicitly. That may be justified in specific cases, but it is not neutral, and it is not universally painless. Someone is always paying the adjustment.
The poster resolves this tension through a familiar rhetorical move. It collapses the distinction. By wrapping equity-coded symbols inside the word equality, it invites the viewer to endorse a more controversial framework under the banner of a universally accepted one. The move is subtle enough that many people will not notice it, but strong enough that disagreement can be framed as opposition to “equality” itself. That is not clarification. It is camouflage.
The poster says equality. It is not. And pretending otherwise is not harmless, no matter how bright the colors or how reassuring the slogan.
You can see the tell in the composition. If the message were truly about equality in the classical sense, the image would not need to foreground identity categories at all. It would not need symbols. It would not need color-coding. The entire point of equality is that the categories do not matter when rules are applied. Here, the categories are the point. They are not incidental. They are doing the conceptual work.
None of this means the concerns associated with those categories are trivial or illegitimate. Some are serious. Some are contested. Some are overextended. All of them deserve to be argued on their own terms. But that argument has to be made honestly. It cannot be smuggled in under a word that already carries broad moral agreement.
This is the broader pattern. Take a term with a stable, widely accepted meaning. Expand or alter the underlying concept. Keep the original word. Let the new meaning ride on the old legitimacy. If challenged, collapse the distinction and accuse critics of opposing the original value. It is effective. It is also corrosive.
Words are not decoration. They are load-bearing. If we stop distinguishing between equality and equity, we lose the ability to argue about either of them clearly. And when that happens, policy follows confusion. Decisions get made without admitting what is being traded off, or who is being prioritized. That is not a small failure. It is how serious disagreements get papered over until they break.
Posted by the NDP’s Peggy Wright on X.
There is a recurring pattern in modern policy debates that most people sense but struggle to name. The argument presented to the public is not the policy that gets implemented. Instead, a broadly agreeable claim—something no reasonable person would oppose—is used to carry a far more specific and contested agenda into law. By the time the details become visible, the argument has already been won at the level that matters.
This is the structure known as the motte and bailey. The “motte” is the safe, defensible position: a statement so benign it feels almost churlish to resist. The “bailey” is the real position—the one with consequences, tradeoffs, and enforcement mechanisms. The move is simple. Sell the motte. Build the bailey. When challenged, retreat to the motte and accuse critics of attacking something obviously good.
You can see the pattern clearly in the recent dispute over education language. The public claim is that schools should be “welcoming,” “inclusive,” and respectful of “diversity.” No serious person objects to that in the abstract. But those terms are not operating as neutral descriptions. They have acquired specific policy meanings, often tied to particular ideological frameworks, institutional practices, and expectations placed on teachers and students. When legislation attempts to narrow or neutralize that language—shifting toward behavior-based standards like “safe and caring” environments grounded in responsibility and respect—the response is immediate: the government is “removing welcome,” attacking “diversity,” harming children. The motte is invoked as if it were the policy itself. The bailey disappears from view.
Watch the Move
In a recent legislative speech, MLA Peggy Wright provides a clean example of how this works in practice. She begins with a familiar image:
“Albertans put welcome mats in front of their doors. It means ‘come on in’ and we’re glad you are here.”
No disagreement is possible there. It is a moral and cultural baseline. But then the shift occurs. A change in statutory language becomes:
“the UCP is pulling up the welcome mat from all public schools.”
A metaphor replaces the policy. The audience is invited to react to exclusion rather than examine the legislation. The escalation continues:
“Gone are the days when schools were welcoming and inclusive places… celebrating diversity and uniqueness.”
At this point, the argument is no longer about wording. It is about intent, character, and harm. The key moment follows:
“the latest amendments… would strip words like ‘welcoming’ and ‘diversity’ from it.”
This is where the real question should be asked: does removing those words remove the underlying protections, or does it replace one framework of description with another? That question is never addressed. Instead, the speech returns immediately to moral framing:
“Diversity is a strength.”
In the abstract, yes. But the dispute is not over the abstract claim. It is over what “diversity” means in policy and practice. By collapsing the contested meaning into the harmless one, the argument avoids defending the actual implications. Criticism of the policy is recast as opposition to a universal good.
“The argument people agree to is not the policy that gets implemented.”
The most revealing line in the speech is this:
“Words are important… because they set the tone.”
That is true—and it explains the entire strategy.
This pattern isn’t random. It reflects a broader shift in how language is used in politics. Words like “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “safety” are no longer just descriptive. They function as instruments. If language helps shape how institutions operate and how people interpret reality, then controlling definitions becomes a form of power. Under that logic, you don’t need full public agreement on the details of a policy. You need agreement on the framing. Once that is secured, the content can expand behind it.
That helps explain why the motte and bailey is so effective. It allows advocates to operate on two levels at once. The public-facing level is morally attractive and broadly supported. The operational level is narrower, more contested, and often insulated from direct scrutiny. When the two are conflated, consent is manufactured. People believe they are endorsing a general principle when, in practice, they are enabling a specific program.
It works because most people are not trained to interrogate language this way. “Inclusion” sounds like inclusion. “Diversity” sounds like a mix of backgrounds and perspectives. “Safety” sounds like protection from harm. The terms carry moral weight before any definition is examined. By the time someone asks what they actually entail in practice, the rhetorical ground has already shifted. Opposition can be framed as hostility to the value itself rather than disagreement with its implementation.
The cost is not just confusion. It is the erosion of honest disagreement. If every critique of a policy can be recast as an attack on a universally accepted good, then meaningful debate becomes impossible. Language stops clarifying differences and starts concealing them. Institutions drift, not because the public has clearly chosen a direction, but because the terms of choice were never presented plainly.
This is why the technique matters. It is not just sharp rhetoric. It is a way of bypassing consent. If citizens cannot distinguish between the principle they are being asked to affirm and the policy that will follow from it, then they are no longer participating in a genuine democratic process. They are being managed through language.
If you think this reading is unfair, read the full remarks below and decide for yourself.
Appendix: Full Speech Transcript (April 2, 2026)
How to read this: Watch for the shift between general claims (“welcome,” “diversity”) and the specific policy being discussed. The argument depends on treating them as the same.
Full transcript of the video (Alberta Legislative Assembly session, ~1:57 long):
“Mr. Speaker, Albertans put welcome mats in front of their doors. It means ‘come on in’ and we’re glad you are here. And welcome to our house.But now the UCP is pulling up the welcome mat from all public schools.Gone are the days when schools were welcoming and inclusive places for students, celebrating diversity and uniqueness.That’s because the latest amendments to the Education Act would strip words like ‘welcoming’ and ‘diversity’ from it.This government combed through that bill and pulled the word ‘welcoming’ out eight times.Not satisfied with making our public schools less inviting — even as they function as important community hubs for many of our communities — then they went through and chopped the word ‘diversity’ out five times.Diversity is a strength.It used to say so in government policy, in legislation. But I guess not anymore.Words are important, Mr. Speaker, and that’s because they set the tone.When those in charge are threatened by words like diversity, welcome, and sense of belonging, there’s a problem. Because this is then about ideology and politics outside the classroom, not within.Instead of focusing on reducing class sizes, hiring teachers, and ensuring supports are there for all kids who need them, we get this distraction from a bill and government intent to narrow the frame so much that there is room for only one worldview: the UCP’s.And that’s the point.Straight out of the authoritarian playbook, Mr. Speaker.But, Mr. Speaker, our kids deserve that welcome mat back. I, for one, am extremely happy to let them know that they can expect it come next election, when it’s NDP in government and UCP — not our kids — who will find themselves unwelcome.”
When people say “trans rights,” they often smuggle in the conclusion before the argument has even begun. The phrase suggests a class of basic liberties being withheld from a minority population. In most liberal democracies, that is not the real dispute. Trans-identifying people already possess the same ordinary civil rights as everyone else: to vote, work, speak, worship, associate, and live free from assault or arbitrary exclusion. The real conflict begins when contested demands are framed as rights claims in order to place them beyond criticism.
That distinction matters. A right is not the same thing as a demand for access, validation, or institutional compliance. Female sports were not created out of prejudice, but out of recognition that sex differences matter in strength, speed, endurance, and physical risk. Female shelters, prisons, and changing rooms were built on the same logic. They exist because privacy, safety, fairness, and dignity are not imaginary goods. They are concrete protections, won through long struggle, and they do not cease to matter because a new vocabulary has been imposed on the debate.
Once this is seen clearly, much of the rhetoric falls apart. If a male-bodied person demands entry into a female space, the objection is not that he lacks human worth. It is that women have sex-based boundaries, and those boundaries exist for reasons. If a parent objects to gender ideology in schools, that is not the denial of anyone’s basic rights. It is the defense of parental authority in an area of profound moral and developmental consequence. If a citizen resists compelled pronouns or refuses to treat metaphysical claims about sex as binding fact, that is not violence. It is a refusal to surrender conscience and language to activist pressure.
“When one group’s ‘rights’ require another group to surrender privacy, fairness, or conscience, the conflict is no longer about equality. It is about power.”
This is where the phrase “trans rights” does its real work. It pre-loads the moral verdict. It makes disagreement sound like oppression before the argument has even begun. Once that framing is accepted, women’s boundaries become cruelty, parental caution becomes hatred, and democratic disagreement becomes abuse. But this is not a serious use of rights language. It is a way of insulating contested claims from scrutiny by wrapping them in the prestige of civil rights.
None of this means every accommodation is unreasonable, or that every dispute is zero-sum. Ordinary civility and equal treatment in public life are not difficult standards to defend. But when one group’s claimed “rights” require another group to surrender privacy, fairness, language, or the right to maintain sex-based boundaries, the conflict has moved beyond equal citizenship. It has become a struggle over whose moral framework will rule, and whose objections will be permitted to count.
That is why the language matters. “Trans rights” sounds like a plea for equal liberty. In many of the most contentious cases, it is something else: a demand that others yield, affirm, and rearrange long-standing social boundaries on command. When women refuse that erasure, or parents refuse that indoctrination, or citizens refuse that compelled speech, they are not violating rights. They are defending their own.
One of the most corrosive habits in current political discourse is the way plain factual claims get assigned a partisan label. Not arguments. Not policies. Facts. Or, more precisely, statements that point back to material reality, institutional limits, or ordinary human constraints. In theory, facts are supposed to discipline ideology. In practice, they are often treated as ideological aggression when they obstruct a preferred moral script.
That is what people are reaching for when they say facts are now treated as right-wing. The phrase is blunt, but it points to something real. In a growing number of disputes, especially around sex, gender, speech, and institutional policy, a person can say something materially true and be treated not as a participant in debate but as a moral suspect. The point is not answered on its merits. It is recoded as a signal of contamination. The speaker is no longer heard as describing reality. He is heard as choosing a tribe.
That shift matters because it changes the structure of argument. Once a factual claim is socially coded as “right-wing,” the burden quietly moves. The question is no longer whether the claim is true. The question becomes why you said it, what kind of person says such things, and who might feel endangered by hearing it. Motive replaces mechanism. Stigma replaces rebuttal. The claim is not refuted so much as quarantined.
You can see this clearly in disputes over sex and pronouns. For many people, saying that sex is real, binary in the ordinary human sense, and not altered by self-declaration is not an act of hostility. It is a claim about reality and a claim about language. “He” and “she” historically track male and female persons. Refusing to detach those words from sex is not, on its face, a partisan performance. It is an attempt to keep public language tethered to the material world rather than to inward identity claims.
“The disagreement is not mainly about politeness. It is about which reality gets public authority.”
That is exactly why the issue generates so much heat. The disagreement is not mainly about politeness. It is about which reality gets public authority. Does language track bodies, or does it track self-declared identity? Does a school treat sex as a stable feature of the world, or does it treat identity assertion as the governing fact? Those are not small etiquette disputes inflated by the internet. They are conflicts about ontology, law, and institutional power.
Canada now offers several live examples. Alberta’s Education Amendment Act requires parental notification when a student requests a gender identity-related preferred name or pronouns, and parental consent for students under 16 before staff may use them. The province says these changes are part of supporting families and setting clear school rules, with the remaining education amendments anticipated to take effect on September 1, 2025. Then, in late 2025, Alberta escalated further. Bill 9 invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield not only this school policy but other contested sex-and-gender measures from being struck down by the courts. That bundling matters. It shows this is no longer being treated as a narrow administrative disagreement, but as a foundational conflict over parental authority, child development, and the public meaning of sex.
Quebec presents the same fracture from the opposite direction, and it is ongoing now. Current reporting says a Montreal teacher is challenging the provincial policy that allows students 14 and older to change the name and pronouns used at school without parental consent. The teacher alleges she was required to use male pronouns at school while using female pronouns with the student’s parents. A preliminary hearing on anonymity and confidentiality was held on March 6, 2026, with the broader merits challenge still to come. Strip away the activist packaging and the conflict becomes plain: can institutional professionals be required to maintain two vocabularies of reality depending on the audience, and if they object, are they making an ethical argument or committing a moral offense?
The Barry Neufeld case in British Columbia shows the institutional end point of this logic. On February 18, 2026, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal issued its decision and ordered substantial damages after finding that multiple publications were discriminatory, while some crossed the threshold into hate speech. That does not prove that every factual objection to gender ideology is punishable. It does show how readily dissent can be processed through systems that move from moral condemnation to formal classification. Once that line is crossed, everyone watching understands the lesson. The risk is no longer simply that you will be called wrong. The risk is that you will be treated as a public contaminant.
This is why the familiar “both sides are just choosing different facts” formula goes soft in exactly the wrong place. The conflict is not symmetrical. One side is generally making claims about bodies, language, legal authority, and institutional procedure. The other is often demanding that those things yield to identity-based recognition norms. Dignity is real and relevant. But dignity does not erase biological category, dissolve observable sex, or transmute factual disagreement into literal violence.
So when people say facts are treated as right-wing, the point is not that truth literally belongs to one side of the spectrum. The point is that in a culture saturated with moral performance, inconvenient facts are often recoded as partisan because it is easier to stigmatize them than to answer them. A factual claim that disrupts the script is no longer processed as description. It is processed as dissent. And dissent, under current conditions, is increasingly treated as a character defect.
Facts do not have a party. But when facts obstruct an ideological narrative, that narrative will often brand them right-wing and move straight to motive-policing. That is not a sign that the facts have changed. It is a sign that too much of public discourse has become allergic to reality when reality refuses to flatter the creed.
References
Government of Alberta. “Supporting Alberta students and families.”
https://www.alberta.ca/supporting-alberta-students-and-families
Government of Alberta. “Protecting youth, supporting parents, and safeguarding female sport.”
https://www.alberta.ca/protecting-youth-supporting-parents-and-safeguarding-female-sport
Global News. “Montreal teacher challenges policy for trans students to hide identity from parents.” March 6, 2026.
https://globalnews.ca/news/11719392/montreal-teacher-trans-students-challenge/
British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. Chilliwack Teachers’ Association v. Neufeld (No. 10), 2026 BCHRT 49. February 18, 2026.
https://www.bctf.ca/docs/default-source/for-news-and-stories/49_chilliwack_teachers-_association_v_neufeld_no_10_2026_bchrt_49.pdf?sfvrsn=2d847803_1
Online discourse is exhausting for a simple reason: certain words are used not to describe reality, but to end the conversation. The label does the work. The argument never has to.
“Fascist” is one of those words.
In current usage, it often functions as a moral airhorn: you’re beyond the pale; you’re dangerous; you’re not worth debating. It gets tossed at people over ordinary ideological disputes about sex and gender, about speech norms, about state power, about immigration, about education. Sometimes it’s malice. Sometimes it’s a sincere attempt to name something authoritarian using the most nuclear term available. Either way, the practical effect is the same: “fascist” becomes a conversation-stopper rather than a description.
That’s why definitions matter. Not because language never evolves (it does), but because political language has consequences. When a term carries a freight of historical evil, using it casually is not “rhetorical adaptation.” It’s moral inflation. Moral inflation does not stay rhetorical for long.
Fascism isn’t just “authoritarian”
Start with what fascism is not.
Fascism is not merely “oppressive, dictatorial control.” That’s too broad. Plenty of regimes are oppressive. Plenty of dictators are brutal. If “fascist” just means “authoritarian,” it becomes a synonym for “bad,” and then it means nothing at all.
Fascism is a historically specific modern political project. A workable definition, tight enough to guide usage and broad enough to cover the main cases, looks like this:
Fascism is an authoritarian mass movement aimed at national rebirth, organized around the leader principle, hostile to liberal constraints (pluralism, due process, free speech), willing to use intimidation or violence against opponents, and committed to subordinating institutions to a single national story.
Notice the “mass movement” piece. Fascism is not only what the state does; it’s what a mobilized public is trained to do for the regime. It does not merely punish dissent. It cultivates a moral atmosphere in which dissent feels like treason, contamination, sabotage.
Economically, fascist systems often preserve nominal private ownership while subordinating markets, labour, and industry to regime goals through state direction and corporatist control. That’s not the essence, but it’s part of the recognizable package: the economy exists for the national project, not the other way around.
History: what it looked like when it was real
Words should cash out in the world.
Historically, fascism is anchored in early 20th-century Europe, most centrally Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. They differed in important ways, but the family resemblance is clear: politics becomes a spiritual drama of national humiliation and promised restoration; the leader becomes the embodiment of the nation; opposition becomes illegitimate by definition; and coercion becomes normalized as “necessary” for unity and renewal.
The methods are recognizably modern: propaganda, spectacle, the disciplining of media and education, the weaponization of law, the tolerated use of street-level intimidation, and the steady narrowing of permissible speech and association. It’s not merely “the government is strong.” It’s the fusion of power with myth, enforced socially and legally.
A practical threshold: not one trait, a cluster
If you want to use “fascist” responsibly, you need a threshold. Not a single feature, a cluster.
The label starts to become warranted only when several of these are present together:
- Leader principle: politics organized around a singular figure or party claiming a unique right to rule.
- Myth of national rebirth: humiliation plus promised restoration demanding unity and purification.
- Anti-pluralism: opponents treated as enemies, not fellow citizens.
- Suppression of dissent: legal, institutional, or social narrowing of speech and association.
- Propaganda and spectacle: mass emotional mobilization replacing open contest.
- Normalization of intimidation: harassment, threats, “consequences,” or violence used as political tools.
- Institutional capture: courts, schools, media, and professions bent into ideological instruments.
This is also how you keep your head when the internet offers you cheap clarity. If someone is merely wrong, stubborn, rude, or convinced, that is not fascism. If someone wants stronger regulation, that is not fascism. If someone defends free speech, or argues about sex and gender, that is certainly not fascism by definition. Those are disputes inside ordinary politics, however heated.
A concrete misuse: the pattern in miniature
Here’s the move you see constantly:
A person says, “I think compelled speech policies in workplaces and schools are a mistake.”
The reply is not, “I disagree, because…”
The reply is, “Fascist.”
What did the label accomplish? It converted a claim about policy into an accusation about moral essence. It implied the speaker is not merely mistaken but dangerous; not merely wrong but disqualifying. Once you have categorized someone as a “fascist,” the next steps feel justified: deplatforming, professional punishment, social exile, denial of hearing.
Maybe the labeler was “just venting.” Maybe it was “good-faith hyperbole.” But hyperbole has downstream effects. It trains the audience to treat coercion as civic hygiene.
Symmetry: this is not a left-only sin
And yes: the right does its own version. “Marxist” becomes a synonym for “liberal.” “Communist” becomes “anyone who wants a program.” “Groomer” becomes a sloppy club for any disagreement about education. “Traitor” becomes shorthand for “opponent who won.” Same mechanism, different tribe: labels as argument-substitutes and permission structures.
If we’re going to complain about language used as a weapon, we don’t get to only notice it when it hits our side.
Why this matters beyond the internet
The problem isn’t just vibes on social media. Label inflation spills into institutions.
When terms like “fascist” become casual descriptors, workplaces and professional bodies begin treating contested political disagreement as a safety issue. Media narratives start pre-sorting dissent as extremism. Politicians learn to substitute moral denunciation for persuasion. The public learns to fear argument and love punishment.
The final irony is that this habit corrodes the liberal norms that make pluralistic society possible: the expectation of disagreement, the discipline of evidence, and the moral restraint of not treating opponents as vermin.
A better standard
Here’s the rule I’m adopting: I’ll reserve “fascist” for cases where I can point to the cluster. Leader principle, anti-pluralism, suppression, intimidation, institutional capture, mythic rebirth. Not merely the heat of the dispute.
When I mean “authoritarian,” I’ll say authoritarian. When I mean “illiberal,” I’ll say illiberal. When I mean “coercive,” I’ll say coercive.
Definitions aren’t pedantry. They are the line between argument and excommunication, a public safety measure for language. “Fascist” should be a diagnosis you can defend, not a mood you can perform. If we flatten every disagreement into fascism, we train ourselves to crave punishment instead of persuasion, and we teach institutions to treat dissent as contamination. That habit does not protect democracy. It rots the muscles that make democracy possible, and it turns politics into a brawl we will eventually call governance.
Collin May has published a long, ambitious essay in the C2C journal (Hearts of Darkness: How the Left Uses Hate to Fuel its 21st Century Universal Imperium) on cancel culture, “hate” rhetoric, and the modern left’s moral posture. It is broader than I would write, more philosophical than most readers will tolerate, and occasionally overbuilt. But it names a pattern that matters, and one I return to often here: once “hate” becomes a universal accusation, institutions stop persuading and start policing.
May’s most useful contribution is not just the complaint (“cancel culture exists”) but the mechanism: “hate” stops being a moral description and becomes a category that pre-sorts who may be argued with and who may simply be managed.
That is the issue.
Not whether hatred exists. It does. Not whether some speech is vicious. It is. The issue is what happens when “hate” becomes the default label for disagreement, skepticism, refusal, dissent, or plain moral and factual judgments that cut against elite narratives.
At that point, the term stops describing and starts doing administrative work.
You can watch this happen across the institutions that shape public life: media, HR departments, professional bodies, universities, bureaucracies, and the expanding quasi-legal space around speech regulation. The sequence is familiar. Someone raises a concern about policy, ideology, language rules, school programming, medical ethics, public safety, immigration, religion, or sex-based rights. Instead of answering the argument, the institution reframes the speaker. Not wrong—harmful. Not questioning—spreading hate. Not participating in democratic friction—a threat to social order.
That move changes the rules of engagement. A wrong claim can be debated. A “hateful” claim can be quarantined. Once a claim is reclassified as harm rather than argument, the institutional response changes with it: less rebuttal, more restriction.
This language matters because it is not only moral language. It is managerial language. It justifies deplatforming, censorship, professional discipline, reputational destruction, and exclusion from ordinary civic legitimacy. It creates a class of people whose arguments no longer need to be answered on the merits. It also trains bystanders to confuse moral panic with moral seriousness.
May explains this through a large historical and philosophical genealogy. Fair enough. I am less interested in the full genealogy than in the practical result in front of us. In plain terms: the rhetoric of “hate” is often used to centralize authority in institutions that no longer trust the public and no longer feel obliged to reason with them.
That is one reason trust keeps collapsing.
People can live with disagreement. They can even live with policies they dislike. What they do not tolerate for long is being handled—being told their questions are illegitimate before they are heard. Once citizens conclude that institutions are using moral language as a shield against scrutiny, every future statement gets discounted. Even true statements are heard as spin.
And then the damage compounds. If “hate” is defined so broadly that it includes dissent, genuinely hateful speech becomes harder to identify and confront. The category gets inflated, politicized, and cheapened. Meanwhile, ordinary democratic disagreement becomes harder to conduct without professional or social risk.
That is not a confident free society. It is a managerial one.
Canada is not exempt. We have our own versions of this habit: speech debates reframed as safety debates, policy criticism recoded as identity harm, and public disputes (including over schools, sex-based rights, and even routine civic rituals like land acknowledgements) routed through tribunals, regulators, HR offices, and media scripts instead of open argument. The details vary by case. The mechanism does not. This tactic is not unique to one political tribe, but it is now especially entrenched in progressive-managerial institutions, which is precisely why it has so much reach.
The answer is not to deny hatred exists, or to become casual about cruelty. The answer is to recover civic discipline.
Name actual incitement when it occurs. Enforce existing laws where there are real threats, harassment, or violence. But stop using “hate” as a catch-all for disfavoured views. Stop treating condemnation as a substitute for evidence. Stop teaching institutions that the way to win an argument is to disqualify the speaker.
May quotes Pope Francis on cancel culture as something that “leaves no room.” Whether or not one follows his full historical argument, that phrase captures the operational problem.
A liberal society cannot function if citizens are only permitted to disagree inside moral boundaries drawn in advance by bureaucrats, activists, and legacy media.
The test is simple: can a claim be examined without first being moralized into silence?
If the answer is no, that is not moral confidence. It is institutional insecurity backed by power.
That is the pattern worth naming. And that is why essays like May’s, even when they overshoot, remain worth reading.
References
Collin May, “Hearts of Darkness: How the Left Uses Hate to Fuel its 21st Century Universal Imperium,” C2C Journal (February 16, 2026), https://c2cjournal.ca/2026/02/hearts-of-darkness-how-the-left-uses-hate-to-fuel-its-21st-century-universal-imperium/. (C2C Journal)
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