WOW, I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS A #BETACUCK!
Oct. 15 — Surrounded by a throng of young New Democratic Party (NDP) supporters, and with a mere hour left before the NDP’s federal policy convention was scheduled to end, I approached the microphone and made a rather bizarre request. I asked the members of the convention to vote down a student debt policy proposed by the Ontario New Democratic Youth.
This policy in my eyes did not go far enough to address the needs of students, but more importantly, the policy was worse than what was currently being proposed by the NDP. My amendment to send it to the federal council (the internal decision-making body of the NDP), with language reaffirming our commitment to forgive all student debt for everyone and eliminate student debt as a concept in Canada, passed.
There was a large cheer from the young people behind me, and people began coming up to congratulate me and thank me. It was a nice way to end my first-ever convention experience. Four hours later, a clip of me speaking posted by the University of Ottawa NDP (UONDP) would begin circulating on conservative Twitter (or X as some are calling it).
One Twitter user asked, referring to the minor speech impediment I’ve had most of my life — this was one of the nicer replies.
Another yelled at me through the digital aether. That isn’t to say there weren’t supportive comments — there were, and it’s not the first time the UONDP or its members have been the target of far-right hate, but the pure vitriol in this particular response surprised me. I was prepared for people to disagree with student debt forgiveness and elimination, and I was ready to debate them.
I could mention that student debt relief stimulates the economy and that it makes higher education easier to access for marginalized and lower-income communities, or that tuition-free post-secondary was once planned to be part of the public education system. What I wasn’t ready for was the tumult of replies calling me a ‘#betacuck’.
Reading the replies invoked a weird mix of fear and anxiety, sadness, and just the tiniest amount of glee. Fear and anxiety for the state of political discourse online and in-person; sadness because something I had been so proud of had become something to harass and insult me for; and glee, because there is an indescribable feeling of elation when a grown man insults your intelligence in a tweet riddled with spelling mistakes.
But I also realized that as a cisgender heterosexual white man, and a fairly self-confident one when it comes to my politics, the torrent of hate I was receiving was both moderate and easy to handle, compared to what some of my friends and others might have faced.
Weirdly the people yelling and screaming at me aren’t the ones I’m most upset at. They’re disaffected and angry, but ultimately meaningless. The people I’m upset at are the quiet ones, the ones, who know this is wrong but say nothing. The ones who claim to be my friends, but do nothing to stop the hate coming from their side.
