Progressives believe in progress. Those who believe in progress believe that the human condition improves over time and is oriented toward a future that is always better and more desirable than the past (and present). Tomorrow will be better than today, and today is better than yesterday. Progressives consider themselves more civilized than people who lived centuries or even decades ago and vastly superior to people who lived millennia ago.
To progressives, today is an accumulation of all past human accomplishments, and as such, it is the best time that there has been. But they still prefer the future. This preference makes progressives indifferent to the present and contemptuous of the past. Since the future is better, they prefer living through imagined standards they cannot meet. They live in a bubble of ideas about the future they pretend to have gleaned from visionary sources.
A university-graduate progressive journalist in Canada is sure to consider herself superior to an ancient Babylonian scribe or a Roman civil servant simply because it is 2024. The notion of progress grants her this perceived superiority, a concept that Justin Trudeau exemplified in his “it's 2015” response, justifying his cabinet selection based on identity rather than ability and skill. There was no need for any more explanation. The calendar makes things self-evident, using the same gimmick through which Trudeauvian budgets address deficits.
Thus, when PM Justin Trudeau recently said that freedom of speech in Canada would only be allowed once he (and people like him) has made sure that such speech is grounded in reality, facts, and truth, not one of the journalists present asked the prime minister what is reality and what is truth?
Let’s leave momentarily aside the ridiculous proposition that any Canadian prime minister, even if he could assemble the wisest woke truth committee, could say his government will determine what truth is for the population of a G7 country. Leave aside the bananesque attitude of a man whose only professional achievement was a part-time school teaching job (Benito Mussolini was also a school teacher before becoming a thuggish trade union leader, incidentally).
The journos present took for granted that Justin Trudeau knows what truth is (because it's 2024) and that he (and people like him) will reveal it to the rest of us in due time. Was it that the journalists are people like the PM and already know the truth, so there is no need to ask about it? Modern journalists, creatures of woke progress, see no discrepancy between their truth and their leader's. Being schooled in post-modern ideology, they believe that truth is power. And since the PM has loads of power, his word is truth.
Readers may think such beliefs are rubbish, but what progressive journalists believe matters to journalism as an activity regardless of the veracity of those beliefs.
For post-modern progressives, powerful individuals hold the ultimate truth because they’re powerful. This reality underpins why contemporary progressive journalists struggle to confront those in power. In bygone days, journalists dared to ask challenging questions. In some cases, they took down governments in the exercise of their craft. Are today's progressives genuinely superior to their predecessors? Or is it merely their illusion?
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