MRC’s Toto Pushes Right-Wing Narrative About ‘Canadian Fascism’

Christian Toto — the movie critic who really wants to be a right-wing pundit — began his July 29 Media Research Center column by complained that Bill Maher isn’t fully buying into his preferred right-wing narratives:

Bill Maher makes a living mocking political elites, but he has major gaps in his Beltway knowledge.

For example, he admitted last year that he still believes President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. That’s despite the Mueller Report finding no evidence of such collusion and major investigations concluding the same.

We know even more today how Hillary Clinton concocted the faux scandal and various government bodies doubled down on the lies.

Maher didn’t know the truth, in part, because he likely ingests a steady diet of Mainstream Media misinformation.

Of course, it’s not a “faux scandal” that  the 2016 Trump campaign met with Russian operatives dozens of times, or that then-campaign manager Paul Manafort gave internal polling data to another Russian operative, or that Russia rooted for Trump to win in 2016. But those facts are inconvenent to Toto’s narrative, so he won’t bring them up. Anyway, this was all just a setup for Toto to hype how Maher was “schooled” by right-wing influencer Jordan Peterson about “Canadian fascism”:

Maher broached the subject with this week’s “Club Random” guest, Canadian professor and Daily Wire contributor Jordan Peterson. Maher, knowing his guest’s native roots, brought up a “dumb” quote from Trudeau about the truckers who protested the country’s pandemic policies.

Maher paraphrased Trudeau’s quote with shock.

“We have a vibrant democracy here in Canada and we value protests… but when you use protests to object to the policies of the government I think you’re going too far,” Maher said.

“What the f*** is protest for except to object to the policies of the government,” Maher added, laughing.

Canadian truckers rebelled against the nation’s draconian lockdown measures which impacted their livelihoods and, as we learned later, had little actual science behind them.

Neither Peterson nor Toto mentioned that the fact that, as one analysis noted, most Canadians supported the country’s measures to combat the spread of COVID, and that the trucker protest was little more than a right-wing temper tantrum in which protesters were calling for civil war. When the truckers occupied the streets of the capital, Ottawa, area residents were threatened or assaulted, and fences were torn down around the capital’s hallowed Tomb of the Unknown Soldier so protesters could dance on it.

Toto hyped how Jordan stated that the Canadian government “seized the bank accounts of 200 Canadians.” But the accounts were not “seized”; they were frozen because they were used to help fund the increasingly unruly protests. Most of those accounts were unfrozen after the protest ended. We doubt that Toto would consider government efforts to quell rioting after the death of George Floyd to be “fascism.”

Toto continued uncritically quoting Jordan:

“I can’t imagine a politician doing anything more inappropriate than that … No trial. No real investigation,” Peterson said before adding how Trudeau even blamed MAGA Republicans for allegedly funding the protests.

“It’s completely preposterous,” Peterson noted. “Why would MAGA Republicans foment dissent in Ottawa? Even if they knew where it was, which they don’t, why would they?”

Maher laughed through those comments.

In fact, American right-wingers did help fund the Canadian protests, and high-profile right-wing U.S. politicians like Ron DeSantis and Ken Paxton aligned themselves with them. But, again, those are inconvenient facts that don’t mesh with Toto’s preferred narrative, so they were ignored.

Whatever happened to all people sacrificing together to work toward a common good, such as trying to reduce spread of a deadly disease? Toto didn’t say anything about that either.