When our national media don't like where a narrative is going -- as in anyone assuming Joe Biden is an eager participant in Hunter Biden's influence-peddling -- they repeat a mantra about "no evidence." Biden's critics have "no evidence" of a Joe-Hunter corruption connection.
But when they like a narrative -- like arrogant white imperialist Catholics in Canada were so hostile to "Indigenous peoples" that they committed a genocide -- somehow, no evidence is required. The wilder, the better. In 2021, a Native Canadian tribe claimed that "ground-penetrating radar" found 215 bodies near a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Within a week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags across Canada to be flown at half-staff for all the allegedly murdered children.
American media outlets like NPR forwarded wild allegations from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, staining the reputations of two "public broadcasters." Based on unsubstantiated allegations of a mass grave in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Chief Jason Louie of the Lower Kootenay Band proclaimed, "Let's call this for what it is. It's a mass murder of Indigenous people."
Then Chief Louie really spread the smear brush. "The Nazis were held accountable for their war crimes. I see no difference in locating the priests and nuns and the brothers who are responsible for this mass murder to be held accountable for their part in this attempt of genocide of an Indigenous people."
From there, Murray Sinclair, the former leader of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on harms that residential schools inflicted on Indigenous children from the 19th century to the 1970s, wowed the press by claiming the body count could be 15,000 to 25,000. That number was based on what? It didn't matter.
Well, it did matter, since what quickly followed was a vicious round of vandalism and arson that damaged or destroyed 68 Christian churches in Canada.
Fast-forward to Aug. 31, when the New York Post reported no actual human remains have been found in Canada, despite the "mass graves" hysteria. A Native Canadian tribe excavated 14 sites below Our Lady of Seven Sorrows church in Manitoba and found exactly zero corpses. That initial finding in Kamloops? There have still been no excavations, only the "ground-penetrating radar" guessing of "anomalies" in the soil. How could journalists spread a panic with no physical evidence?
Truth lost, and retribution crowded out reconciliation. The word "hoax" is in the breeze. Justin Trudeau looks like the leader of QAnon-ada.
In 2014, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League wrote about a "mass graves" hysteria in Ireland around a claim that 800 bodies were found outside a home Catholic nuns used to operate near Galway. There, too, the Catholics were equated with the Nazis committing a Holocaust. There was no mass grave. But people are all too willing to believe the worst about priests and nuns and their easily assumed Catholic collaborators in heinous crimes.
There's a word for this. It's "prejudice," defined in the dictionary as "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience."