Flanagan Wrecks

We can all agree on one thing: what the scholar, political consultant and sometime social pariah Tom Flanagan calls the Incident is a cautionary tale. A man muses in passing on the wisdom of jail time for consumers of child pornography, and finds himself the next day engulfed by a braying cyberspace mob, enduring the loss of friends, income and reputation, to a drumroll of public denunciations by people he had served. Thanks to a single video clip posted over a maliciously slanted caption, Flanagan was portrayed repeatedly as someone who had no objection to child pornography and possibly even had a taste for it himself. There has to be a lesson or two here.

But it is possible to disagree on exactly what the Incident cautions us against. Flanagan derives any number of lessons from it in his book Persona Non Grata: The Death of Free Speech in the Internet Age. Many of them acknowledge his own failings, although even more are directed to Canada’s media...