“Now is not the time to be polite”: Rupa Subramanya testifies before US Lawmakers.
US House Select Committee on 'Weaponization of Federal Government' calls 4 witnesses, including Canada-based journalist.
On November 30th, Canada-based journalist Rupa Subramanya testified in Washington, D.C. to the House Select Committee for “Weaponization of the Federal Government”. Rupa was one of four witnesses to testify to the committee, chaired by Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan. A journalist for the Free Press, and periodic writer for the National Post, Ms. Subramanya has reported regularly on changes in Canadian law and culture in recent years with respect to free speech, expression, and liberty in Canada.
Her six minute testimony opened as that of a time-traveller from the future to “offer you a glimpse of what could lie ahead for America”. In the future she described, one’s skin colour might grant a relaxed criminal sentence “in the name of social justice”; one could be locked out of his or her bank or online payment system for “expressing the wrong political view”; and one could be arrested for exercising the right to peaceful protest “in the name of safety”. “Of course, I’m not a real time-traveller, I just live in Canada”, she quipped. Noting Canadians’ reputation of being “too nice”, she suggested that makes Canadians more susceptible to “the new authoritarianism, undermining the foundations of our liberal democracy”.
The weight of her testimony hung on three stories that reveal a “creeping authoritarianism” in Canada. The first, and most tragic, was that of Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto School Board Principle who was subjected to a humiliation ritual lead by a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) consultant. Such meetings, now common in corporate settings - and widely promoted across Federal communications and files - target white males as unconsciously racist, and as perpetrators of systematic injustice towards all non-whites. Mr. Bilkszto later took his own life, after a 24 year career that earned him lasting community respect. Rupa’s second warning came from the plight of an independent journalist in Montreal named Christopher Curtis who “reports on stories that do not comport with whatever the government wants them to report”. Under the newly adopted “Online News Act”, social media companies would be made to pay all news outlets for the content they publish. Instead of complying, Facebook chose to simply block all Canadian news content from being posted to their platform. This reaction to the Liberal Government’s heavy handed control over online news has choked the lifeblood for small news organizations to reach a larger audience and new subscribers, that being widely accessible Facebook and Instagram. “This is a slow death”, said Curtis, who is being forced to leave his publication in order to earn a living for his family. Finally, Rupa highlighted Danny Bulford, a former RCMP officer, and sniper in Justin Trudeau’s personal security detail. Bulford resigned instead of complying with a policy that forced Federal employees to receive the Covid-19 “vaccination”. He later joined the truck convoy protests in Ottawa, and when the Emergency Act was proclaimed, Danny, along with many demonstrators, was arrested and released without charges. Then came a “chilling” development: Bulford and his wife found themselves locked out of not one, or two, but all three of their bank accounts. Debanking, a tool of authoritarian regimes, is used as an immediate and crippling retribution for anti-regime behaviour or thought, not to mention that it occurs prior to trial or conviction of any illegal activity. “The worst part…” said Bulford is “this feeling that we are being watched, torn apart, made to feel like the much-hated other in our own country”.
Rupa’s thesis was crystal: “what is happening in Canada is the gradual suffocation of free expression. It is draped in a cloak of… inclusivity and justice, but it is regressive, authoritarian, and illiberal”. She elevated her testimony to that of a plea for action: “Do something about it. Now is not a time to be polite. Now is the time to defend, loudly, the liberties and rights that gave us the greatest freedom in history.”
Rupa Subramanya isn’t a particularly right-wing journalist, much less a confessional Christian, and yet is angling her career towards upholding free expression - a pillar of western culture under hostile attack by extreme, far-left ideologies lodged in our Federal government, and down through the mainstream assumptions in Canadian culture. She concluded her testimony at the Select Committee for Weaponization of the Federal Government with a call she hopes America will answer before it follows the dark course Canada is charting in the North: “Please keep fighting for what you know is right. Canada is watching, the world is watching.”
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