“Now, where do I go to get my reputation back?” So reads a famous paraphrase of public official Raymond Donovan, who expressed the sentiment after his high-profile 1980s acquittal on fraud and grand larceny charges. As is virtually always the case, it’s easier to be cleared in a court of law than in the court of public opinion.
This is especially true when the media are intensely interested in covering damning charges against you, but almost totally uninterested in covering your exoneration.
This could come to mind with the further debunking of a vicious anti-Christian racial hoax, one that led to “retaliatory” 2021 church burnings in Canada: The claim that “mass child graves” were discovered at Catholic and Protestant residential schools for Indian students.
Even at the time, as I related in my essay “Churches Burn in Canada Based on Blood-libel Myth,” those with eyes to see knew there was no actual evidence of mass child graves. This didn’t stop The New York Times from writing in June 2021, in what commentator Andrea Widburg calls a “representative article,” the following:
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
In late June, the remains of 751 people, mainly Indigenous children, were discovered at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, a Canadian Indigenous group said.
The discovery, the largest one to date, came less than a month after the remains of 200 people, mostly children, were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former boarding school in British Columbia. In July, the Penelakut Tribe in British Columbia said it had uncovered about 160 undocumented and unmarked graves.
But this was fake news. As Widburg points out, “It’s only when you dig a little deeper into the essay that you realize that, as of the time of its writing, no graves at all had been discovered. Instead, ‘ground-penetrating radar’ discovered anomalies. Not bones. Anomalies.”
“The BBC also hid the ball, reporting about the hundreds of graves found on school properties, only to admit about halfway through the essay that the ‘graves’ were found using ‘ground-penetrating radar,’” Widburg continues. “This BBC story reflects the same pattern of accusation, followed by the admission that no actual bodies have been located. A Wikipedia chart reveals that all the recent ‘grave’ findings were made using radar, not shovels.”
Yet there’s more. Canadian Indian sources told us in 2021 already that at least some of the graveyards were merely community cemeteries in which people of all ages were buried; this isn’t surprising, as churches sometimes will have adjoining cemeteries.
But, hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good narrative, right — even when your lies lead to the desecration, damage, or destruction of close to 70 Christian churches? Note that June/July 2021 — the period when the Times piece ran and the media generally were fixating on this story — was also when the church attacks occurred. Does the term “instigation” apply here?
This said, the investigators finally did do some digging, and they found something.
Nothing.
As The Post Millennial reported last Saturday:
Chief Derek Nepinak of the Minegoziibe Anishinabe said the excavation of a Catholic church on the site of a former Manitoba school found “no conclusive evidence of human remains.” The lands the church is found on have been referred to as “mass graves” by outlets in the mainstream media.
In a video on social media, Chief Nepinak said that a specialized team of archeologists [sic] that work with the police were not able to detect any “evidence of human remains” under the Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church which is the site of a former residential school in Pine Creek.
Again, though, this outcome is precisely what the earlier evidence pointed to. This didn’t deter politicians from posturing, propagandizing, and contributing to the anti-Christian frenzy. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for example (relevant tweet below), called the anti-Christian prejudice “understandable.”
Yet Trudeau was mild compared to other pseudo-elites, who sometimes actually called for churches’ destruction. Then there’s Pope Francis, who seems to read the mainstream media more than the Bible and who apologized based on the wild, unproven allegations (tweet below).
Moreover, even as the mainstream media now report on the failure to find human remains, the propaganda and anti-Christian agitation continue. They cite the aforementioned Chief Nepinak, a left-wing activist who can be seen pushing the school-abuse narrative while wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of brutal, murdering communist revolutionary Che Guevara (who died like a coward begging for his life). If, however, the media actually did some digging and interviewed, let’s say, Cree playwright Tomson Highway, they’d learn their persistent claim that 150,000 Indian children were forced to attend the residential schools is false: Many parents wanted their kids to attend the institutions, and some of the children will say their years at them were among their lives’ best. Or the media might cite late female chief Cece Hodgson-McCauley, who was certain that some fellow Indians were leveling false abuse claims for money.
This said, there surely was some abuse; anytime massive numbers of children go through any system over a century’s course, this is inevitable. There’s also little doubt that enough excavation will produce some children’s remains. Remember that child mortality in general was high during much of the history in question, especially since this includes the Spanish flu epidemic (1918-’19), which claimed many young lives. Also note that some deceased kids had to be buried on-site because there wasn’t always the money to ship their bodies home.
None of this matters, though. What does, writes Widburg, is “that the left was able to make political hay out of the anomalies and will be sure to downplay or bury the truth (in a non-anomalous media grave, of course).”
But as they do this, perhaps all should ponder a question a commenter under Widburg’s article posed: “Maybe the leftists can take us to the gravesites of the aborted fetuses they discard?”
Now, there’s a genocide to investigate.
Addendum: For those interested, commentator Matt Walsh posted a video (below) about the mass-graves hoax.
