In Defense of Rex

Murray Dobbin picking on Rex Murphy

As usual, Murray Dobbin has a bone to pick. And as usual, it's with someone whose worldview starkly deviates from his own, and someone who has found a position of prominence from which to express it.

Dobbin is evidently so threatened by Murphy that Rabble.ca has launched the "Not Rex Contest", looking for someone they feel can counter him -- somthing of an anti-Rex.

“We’re looking for someone who isn’t pompous, occasionally uses facts and reflects the values of the vast majority of Canadians,” Dobbin muses.

“Most commentators and columnists at least occasionally refer to some facts.”

Of course, Dobbin's problem with Murphy isn't that he never makes reference to any facts -- that would be untrue. Dobbin's problem with Murphy is that he makes reference to facts that Dobbin doesn't like, and would rather were ignored.

This becomes immediately evident as one considers the content of the contest's webpage.

"Only those who actually share the values and aspirations of the majority of Canadians; who trust that a genuine democracy would actually deliver what Canadians want, who don't think it's a good idea to give corporations almost unlimited and totally unregulated power and who - unlike Rex - understand that there is no serious scientific debate about humans' role in the climate crises, need apply or be nominated," the contest webpage insists.

First off, one may want to ask the editors of Rabble who they think they are to determine the "values and aspirations of the majority of Canadians". The very idea that a website that deliberately excludes vast swaths of Canadians from participation could do this is, quite frankly, a pompous notion.

Moreover, their insistence that the anti-Rex must "understand that there is no serious scientific debate about humans' role in the climate crisis" would have to presume that there is debate.

But whether the Rabblers like it or not, there very much is a debate, now more than ever before. After all, previous claims that there was no debate relied on the idea of "settled science". Now that the climategate emails have shown us the extent to which climate alarmists have engineered the peer review process to exclude dissent, this claim has been fundamentally undermined.

Without an open and honest peer review process, the climate alarmists have no scientific consensus.

Rex Murphy has been one of the Canadian mainstream media journalists to recognize this simple, inescapable fact. And for that the editors of Rabble.ca clearly resent him very deeply.

“When Rex denies climate change, that has an impact," Dobbin says. "But a lot of people are despairing over the state of the CBC, the National in particular, and in this case Rex is sort of symbolic.”

In other words, Rex Murphy is symbolic of the failure of Dobbin and his cohorts to banish any dissenting views from the public sphere -- regardless of how desperately they would like to.

There's no better reason why Murphy should continue to be at home on the CBC: the National desperately needs someone who is willing to call a spade a spade.