I have spent my adult life trying to understand the machinery of oppression. I didn’t just wake up an anarchist; I was radicalized by the realization that the systems we are told will save us—capitalism, the State, the “polite” Left—are actually designed to consume us.
For years, Naomi Klein was one of the people handing me the blueprints to that machinery. She taught me how to see the “Shock Doctrine,” how to spot the branding of empty politics, and how to look into the “Mirror World” to see our shadow selves.
That is why the last few weeks have been so heartbreaking. We are watching a real-time collapse of intellectual integrity in the Canadian Left, and the silence from our heroes is deafening.
The Betrayal of the Intellectuals
I recently wrote an Open Letter to Naomi Klein because I couldn’t stay silent while she stayed silent.
The NDP has disqualified Yves Engler from its leadership race. They didn’t do it because he is a danger to the public; they did it because he is a danger to their comfort. Yves represents the messy, loud, disruptive reality of anti-imperialism—the kind that screams about dead Palestinian children while politicians try to eat their gala dinners.
Naomi knows this. She wrote the book on how elites protect themselves. But now that her husband, Avi Lewis, is the heir apparent to the party leadership, she has nothing to say about the rigged game that is clearing the path for him. She is protecting the dynasty she should be dismantling.
The Bureaucracy of Silence
This isn’t just about one candidate. It is about how institutions use “safety” as a weapon. I’ve been digging into the mechanics of this purge. As I detailed in Lucy Watson and the bureaucratic purge of the NDP leadership race, the party is using HR language to sanitize politics. They call confrontation “harassment.” They call disruption “unsafe.”
They have set up a secret tribunal—nameless judges in backrooms—to decide who gets to speak for the working class. This is “administrative violence.” It is the polite face of authoritarianism.
The Theology of Disruption
It is fitting that this is all happening at Christmas.
If we strip away the Coca-Cola branding and the capitalist consumption, the story of Christmas is a story of anti-imperial liberation. It is the story of a brown family living under military occupation. It is the story of a child born into homelessness because the State (the Census) forced them to move, and the economy (the Inn) had no room for the poor.
Jesus was not “safe.” He was a threat to the status quo. Herod didn’t try to kill Jesus because he was a nice guy preaching love; he tried to kill him because Jesus represented a rival kingdom—one that uplifted the poor and cast down the mighty.
If Jesus showed up to an NDP convention today, yelling about the vipers and the hypocrites, overturning the tables of the lobbyists, do you think Lucy Watson would let him run?
Absolutely not. He would be disqualified for “harassment.” He would be told his tone was “divisive.” He would be banned for making the Romans uncomfortable.
Why I Am Making a Scene
I have been writing about this for a long time. Back in 2016, directly after going to a speaking gig of Naomi’s in Quebec, I wrote about Non-Violence that Looks Like Violence, arguing that when the State destroys homes and poisons water, that is violence. Resisting it—even loudly, even disruptively—is self-defense.
We are currently living under the thumb of a Mark Carney-style governance that prioritizes banks over people, and the NDP is shrinking into irrelevance because they refuse to offer a real alternative. They want a “Negative Peace”—the absence of tension. They want a Silent Night.
But I don’t want a Silent Night. I want the noise of liberation.
I am writing these columns because I refuse to let them hide their corruption behind polite procedure. I refuse to let the “Left” become just another brand management exercise for the elite.
We need to shatter the mirror. We need to open the gate. And if they lock it, we need to tear it down.
