HANNAFORD: How ‘fascist pancakes’ sabotaged ‘live and let live’ — the radical tactics poisoning discourse

What's the matter with people? That's not just an expression of disgust. There is something wrong with how enraged people get over differences of opinion.Not that it's new. Since 2016, we've all witnessed Trump Derangement Syndrome. But it's not going away, and it's here in Canada: the sheer lack of grace in the face of disagreement, or any sense of live and let live. As for the dictum attributed to Voltaire (probably wrongly), "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” forget it. For example, Premier Danielle Smith is as pleasant a person as you're going to meet in politics. Even if you're disagreeing with her, she's calm, gracious, and hears you out.Yet, at her pancake breakfast last week, a pair of activists pushed past the crowd, demanded answers about Alberta’s AI data centre policies, and one of them delivered the line now echoing across social media: “F*ck your fascist pancakes.”.WATCH: 'F*ck your fascist pancakes' .Security removed them. But the video went viral because (I have chosen to think) that most people thought nobody — a woman especially — could be so damned ignorant, and had to see for themselves. (Yes, a little old-fashioned of me, but society has not been improved by women becoming as crass as men.).Yet amazingly, within hours, the Alberta NDP decided to own it. MLA Janis Irwin was advertising a breakfast with “regular pancakes only, no fascist ones here,” and federal NDP MP Heather McPherson was sipping from a mug printed with the same crude slogan.The right response would have been for NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi to say something along the lines of, "We have profound differences with Premier Smith, but we shall resolve them through debate and the ballot. These people speak for themselves, not my party."However, that is the current state of political discourse. A community breakfast becomes fascism. Maple syrup is now an instrument of tyranny. Disagreement over industrial policy is treated as moral contamination so pure that it justifies screaming obscenities at a premier over a stack of flapjacks.You have to wonder whether these people even know what a fasces is, or why a fascist would respect it.But there is a reason why things have gone the way they have. Saul Alinsky wasn't the first person to figure out that hate was easier than argument. Still, when he published Rules for Radicals back in 1971, he taught a whole new generation of activists how to do it, how to stop arguing ideas and start destroying people..The relevant rules are straightforward: don't attack the idea, condemn the person who believes in it. That way you don't have to know anything or be able to defend a point of view; you just have to be able to scream. The opponent is no longer a citizen with a different view of energy policy or data centres, but a “fascist.” All you have to do is scream. In fact, polite disagreement is betrayal. Rage follows disagreement, as night follows day.So, the pancake episode is pure Alinsky. The activists did not engage the substance of Alberta’s AI strategy. They turned the premier into the target, personalized the conflict around her, and polarized the situation with the most extreme language available. The subsequent meme-ification by elected New Democrats completed the circuit: the insult is repeated, celebrated, and converted into a badge of tribal belonging. What began as a policy dispute ends as a purity ritual..This is why so many people today seem permanently enraged by politics. The rage is not primarily about the size of government or the location of data centres. Do you really think people who scream obscenities at a BBQ can discuss a complicated, nuanced argument?No. The rage is the predictable response to a culture that has decided disagreement itself is violence. When your neighbour’s vote, or even the breakfast she attends, is framed as collaboration with fascism, the emotional temperature has nowhere to go but up.Friendships fracture. Family tables become battlegrounds. (COVID-19 showed how easy that was.) Online conversations collapse into loyalty tests. The person who once argued about power generation is now treated as a moral contaminant.This is what's happened: personal attacks are easier than debating. They require no evidence that the alternative policy works; they only require that the opponent be made into an allotrope of pure evil..The media and activist ecosystems, meanwhile, reward the performance with their attention. Social platforms amplify the shame. Once that script is running, you get down to where we are today. The Right thinks the Left is wrong, the Left thinks the Right is evil.We need to stop.The cost is higher than bruised feelings or ruined breakfasts. A society that can no longer tolerate good-faith disagreement loses the capacity for self-correction. Problems that require trade-offs get converted into moral crusades. The person who asks for data is accused of bad faith. The person who notices complexity is accused of cruelty. Rage becomes the substitute for results.It doesn't have to be this way. Politics has always been rough. What is new is the systematic conversion of disagreement into personal annihilation. Alinsky wrote the playbook for radicals who believed the ends justified the means. Large parts of the culture now treat that playbook as ordinary civic hygiene. The result is a public that is exhausted, suspicious, and quick to anger whenever someone votes the wrong way or even just offers a pancake.The alternative is not naïveté. It is the deliberate recovery of the distinction between a bad idea and a bad person.You can reject a policy without declaring its advocate an enemy of the human race. You can ridicule a stupid argument without trying to destroy the human who made it. That older discipline — hard on ideas, restrained about character — used to be the price of living in a free society with people who do not share your priors. It is still available.The only question is whether enough people are willing to stop playing the Alinsky game long enough to reclaim it.Until then, expect more fascist pancake outbursts. The script is working exactly as written.

HANNAFORD: How ‘fascist pancakes’ sabotaged ‘live and let live’ — the radical tactics poisoning discourse

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