Eli Schuster
The Interim

In the bad old days, when communists ruled Eurasia from the Elbe to the Bering Sea, dissidents were forced to meet in clandestine situations and copy banned Samizdat literature, either by hand or on unreliable mimeograph machines. Today, individuals who dislike the Western world’s culture of death employ a more high-tech means of commiserating, spreading opinions and information and speaking truth to power: the internet and what some have called the “blogosphere.”

Popularized just a decade ago, the world wide web has done wonders for spreading the pro-life and pro-family messages. Canadian social conservatives (“so-cons”) today have a dizzying array of websites at their disposal for news and activism: Campaign Life Coalition (www.campaignlifecoalition.com), REAL Women of Canada (www.realwomenca.com), Focus on the Family Canada (www.fotf.ca), the Family Action Coalition (www.familyaction.org), Free Dominion (www.freedominion.org), and LifeSiteNews (www.lifesite.com), to name only a few.

LifeSite’s John Henry Westen told The Interim his site’s “official mandate is to educate and activate” and to provide balance and a more accurate coverage on culture, life and family matters than is often given by other media. LifeSite began as a news service in 1995 and went online two years later with the help of Steve Jalsevac.

“With the mainstream press providing inaccurate, biased and poor coverage of issues related to life, faith, family and freedom, we felt it was necessary to give voice to life and family concerns across Canada and indeed the world,” said Westen, noting the site receives about eight million hits every month, and its stories are reproduced online by over 65,000 websites.

While large, professional-looking websites have been around for some time, the sudden appearance of “weblogs” or “blogs” – small, personalized websites – has already altered the political landscape in the United States. “The cancellation of CBS’s The Reagans, the mixed public reception received by Richard Clarke’s Bush-bashing book, the Swift Boat veterans’ controversy, and of course, the revelation of how CBS’s Bush memos were fakes, all would have played out differently, or not played out at all, in a pre-blog age,” said Brian Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives, in a recent media interview.

Anderson added that the internet has given the American right “at least four major gifts:” it has “massively increased” the amount of right-of-centre opinion and analysis and made it much more difficult for traditional media outlets to get away with political bias. The internet has given right-wing arguments a chance to be heard before elite opinion has formed, made “an incredible amount of local knowledge and expertise” readily available to the public, and has empowered the political left’s web presence. “This has hurt (the Democratic party’s) chances nationally, since most Americans find that worldview offensive,” noted Anderson.

Pro-life and pro-family Canadians have noticed these trends and enlarged the blogosphere in this country. “I suppose that I started blogging because it was an outlet for my political frustrations,” said “Michael Dabioch,” a Toronto-area blogger who operates under a penname, to The Interim. “I am a proud, working Canadian, but I was seeing my country morph into a quasi-socialist state before my eyes. Homosexual marriages, huge taxes, abortion on demand, anti-American attitudes, a military in shambles, unprecedented government corruption, an ever-expanding state and significant erosions of individual and property rights,” said Dabioch, whose opinions can be found at www.dabioch.blogspot.com. “I think blogging can have an impact on mainstream thinking and this has an impact on political decisions.”

Kate McMillan, the publisher of www.smalldeadanimals.com (the name comes from a fringe humour page she used to publish on her regular website), told The Interim she started her blog because “I’m one of those people who yells at the radio. Blogging is like yelling at the radio, except that the radio can hear you.”

Asked if there is a “typical” or “average” so-con blogger, McMillan replied that she might be the wrong person to ask, as her own social conservatism stems from reason rather than faith. “I’m more libertarian than social conservative,” she said. “My social conservatism is pragmatic – I’m an atheist. I see so-called ‘conservative moral values’ as anthropological and evolutionary – a framework that has developed that best protects and encourages the extended family structures that create stable communities. Organized religions recognize that truth – they do not create it.”

McMillan admits that blogging hasn’t had a big impact on the Canadian political scene so far, but is just beginning to get information “into the stream that the Liberal mainstream media party tries to downplay or ignore.” She told of a recent incident in which a friend of hers mocked the Texas Air National Guard record of U.S. President George W. Bush. “I happen to have done quite a bit of blog surfing during the U.S. election, and knew the facts pretty well,” she said. “I was able to refute the standard canards – that he jumped ahead of the line, that he didn’t serve his required hours. It was interesting to see the look on my friend’s face – he’s a lawyer, and the expression was, ‘Oh. Maybe there’s more to this than I’ve been told.’”

Both McMillan and Dabioch are regular contributors to The Shotgun (www.westernstandard.blogs.com), a blog established by the Alberta-based Western Standard magazine, which is considered friendly to both libertarians and so-cons. The Shotgun receives “between 5,000 and 15,000 unique visitors a day,” according to publisher Ezra Levant. (Interim editor Paul Tuns also contributes to The Shotgun).

Asked about the Shotgun’s purpose, Levant candidly told The Interim “the mandate of the Shotgun is to help the Western Standard make money,” although he added that it also allows staff to interact with non-subscribers and deal with news that breaks between its fortnightly print editions.

Levant argued that “blogs, especially of the conservative variety, fill in the gaps left by the mainstream media, which is at best tone-deaf on social conservatism, and at worst hostile or censorious.”

While Levant said that “newspapers will never die, just as books will never die,” he sees a fragmented media market emerging. “We believe the Western Standard, for example, is an example of a niche market magazine that will eat away at the bland monolith called Maclean’s. We happen to believe that this conservative ‘niche’ in Canada is actually huge and underserviced.”

While the Shotgun is often credited with establishing an unfiltered dialogue between libertarians, so-cons and others, McMillan sometimes wonders if its participants use the forum to talk at each other instead of engage in a real give-and-take debate. “I’ve been giving some of my (pro-same sex ‘marriage’) libertarian friends some grief for complaining about the so-cons in the Conservative party and their opposing position on same sex ‘marriage,’” she said. “I’d give my socially conservative friends the same advice – this is not the time to quibble over details. For once, have the foresight to recognize that the best place to hash out our differences isn’t in policy convention, but in government.”

That is more likely as conservatives of all stripes can get their messages out to people directly through their websites and blogs, without it being spun and ridiculed by the mainstream media.

Eli Schuster is a Toronto-based freelance writer and publisher of www.grumpyyoungcrank.blogspot.com.