James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.Permit me to share a confession — not one born of guilt, but of a long-suffering heart. I, a seasoned newshound with a nose for nonsense, now find the daily news cycle nearly unwatchable. Not for lack of stamina, but because the rickety scaffolding of truth that once held journalism upright has collapsed under the weight of its own duplicity.Once upon a time, the media were adversaries of power. Today they are its stenographers, whispering sweet falsehoods into the ears of an unsuspecting public. The latest chapter in this Orwellian fable? The crescendo of manufactured outrage over Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza. Yes, Israel — the only nation in the Middle East that could be accused of too much restraint..EDITORIAL: Of course young white men hate the Left—It hates them.Our prime minister, ever eager to preen on the world stage, now channels the sensibilities of Brussels more than those of Brooks, Alberta. He joins the chorus of UN elites and European functionaries who condemn Israel for withholding aid from Gaza, even as over 94,000 trucks of humanitarian supplies have rolled in, many of which end up not in the hands of starving children, but in the tunnels and bunkers of Hamas..The mainstream media, wielding emotive imagery like weapons of war, has become a theatre of the absurd. Photos of emaciated children — often misattributed, occasionally fabricated — flash across our screens, divorced from context, untethered from truth. If the Allied forces of World War II were held to today’s standards, Churchill would be tried at The Hague, and Hitler would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.“In war, moderation is madness,” said Machiavelli. And yet Israel, in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocities, has demonstrated a restraint that no Western democracy — including ours — would dare attempt. Just recall how our government reacted to honking truckers and bouncy castles in Ottawa..FLETCHER: Why B.C. is surrendering Crown land, cancelling environmental reviews.Let us speak plainly. It is Hamas, not Israel, that withholds aid. It is UNRWA, not the IDF, that refuses to coordinate with the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It is the Western press, not the oppressed Gazans, who distort and dramatize for clicks and ideology. Even the Wall Street Journal, no bastion of reckless hyperbole, in an opinion piece recently acknowledged this grotesque inversion of truth..So why does this matter to us — Albertans, Canadians, citizens of a supposedly free democracy? Because truth is the oxygen of liberty and lies are the currency of tyranny. You cannot have one without suffocating the other.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who knew something of tyranny, wrote shortly before his arrest: “Live not by lies.” He didn’t demand martyrdom or revolution. Just that people stop repeating what they know to be false. Courage, he argued, starts not in the streets, but on the tongue..BERNARDO: Forget the gun ban rhetoric, the numbers tell the truth.Jordan Peterson — who has paid his own price for defending truth — once sat with Dr. Simone Gold, whose refusal to parrot the orthodoxy of the COVID priesthood cost her dearly. Their conclusion? Speak the truth. Or at the very least, don’t repeat the lie.And Andy Andrews, in his stark little book How Do You Kill 11 Million People? reminds us that history’s great evils were not merely the work of tyrants — but of ordinary people willing to believe them..Today, the lies are legion. That men can be women and vice versa. That a cloth mask at your dinner table saved lives, but a pew at church endangered them. That a rushed, politicized vaccine was “100% effective.” That carbon taxes will tame the weather. That "the science is settled” — as unscientific a phrase as one can muster. And my personal favorite: that your government loves you, and you should let it do your thinking for you.We are asked not just to believe these absurdities, but to repeat them. To affirm the fiction and wear it like a virtue badge. But this has a cost — not just to the intellect, but to the integrity of democracy itself. When truth is driven from the public square, democracy is not long behind..NAVARRO-GENIE: A recognition of Palestine: The pre-announcement of political performance .Which brings us to Alberta — and the newest lies on the press conveyor belt. That we can’t make it on our own. That we need Ottawa. That the independence movement is sour grapes. That if the right party wins next time, everything will magically fix itself. That this is still the Canada we grew up in..Let us call these what they are: pacifiers for the docile, lullabies for the naive. Alberta was never truly welcomed into Confederation as a partner — merely tolerated as a resource colony. We see it every day in the sneering condescension of Laurentian elites and the coddling of Quebec, no matter how disruptive her tantrums.And then the final myth: Alberta is landlocked, therefore independence is impossible. False. Alberta is landlocked because of Confederation. Our access to markets is blocked not by geography, but by policy. An independent Alberta would be free to negotiate trade corridors and pipelines. And if cooperation fails, we’d have the one thing Ottawa fears most: leverage.So what now? Do we keep nodding along, or do we resist? Do we keep playing polite while the institutions we built are weaponized against us? Or do we, at long last, rise?Because truth — though inconvenient, unfashionable, and often costly — is the only thing that can save us. If Alberta is to be free, if democracy is to survive, we must stop repeating the lies. Not tomorrow. Not next election. Now.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.
