WASHINGTON – Marc Ginsburg shakes his head.

“These kids wouldn’t know the difference between Gaza and a bagel,” the former Ambassador says.

Ginsburg, a Clinton administration appointee, is asked if those kids – the university-and-college-level ones accusing Israel and the West of “genocide,” from Toronto to Los Angeles – could possibly be coming together spontaneously. Organically.

“No,” says Ginsburg, now the head of a Washington-based watchdog called the Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW). “No way. There’s no doubt that what Hamas had in the can was prepared weeks, weeks in advance [of October 7]. They lined up a whole bunch of influencers in Europe, United States and Canada, to push this Hamas content onto mainstream social media platforms.”

Ginsburg knows whereof he speaks. The former Ambassador to Morocco has devoted considerable effort to tracking and exposing antisemitism – and the incitement of violence against Jews – with CSW. Hamas, he says, now runs a sophisticated social media propaganda effort – one that relies on popular influencers scattered throughout the West.

There is equally no doubt that those influencers – and myriad organizers, and protestors – are being paid to show up and spew Jew hatred, Ginsburg says. Money flows in through non-profits, NGOs and charities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, he adds, from Iran, Qatar and even Russia and China.

Just hours before we met, Ginsburg spoke to a congressional committee about Iran’s efforts to destabilize democracies like America’s – and the longtime Democrat applauded the tough action the Trump administration has taken against antisemitic campus agitators, often acting at the behest of Iran, Qatar and Hamas.

Says he: “I applaud the Trump’s administration’s decision to threaten the withholding of federal grants until these universities clean up their act…[The campus anti-Israel activists] are full time and very capable. These paid disruptors are being funded. Who has charted the busses and the provided them with the transportation to go out and disrupt an airport runway or an airport roadway, to stop people from getting to an airport? This doesn’t happen because a kid who’s a freshman or sophomore says: ‘Guess what? We’re going to go out to Kennedy, to Kennedy Airport. We’re going to stop every flight, every passenger trying to make a flight.’”

The agitators, who are getting bolder, have training, resources and the backing of powerful interests, Ginsburg says. An unholy alliance of Marxist-Leninists, anarchist groups and Jew-haters have increasingly come together to promote violence and enmity towards Jews, he says.

In a shocking report prepared in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric 2023 attack on Israeli civilians, CSW revealed:

• Hamas, Iran and Qatar “had a sophisticated social media plan ready to Spring” on October 7
• On Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, the anti-Israel forces worked to “generate support for Hamas [and] leverage foreign social media influencers” to assist
• While protests on university campuses and in Western streets may have “appeared organic,” they were in fact “professionally staffed and funded”
• After October 7, those extremist groups – drawn heavily from leftist, Muslim and anarchistic circles – formed a new “axis of antisemitism”

Ginsburg points to the example of one Canadian group that was recently designated as a terrorist entity by the governments of Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. Again shaking his head, Ginsberg says he and his colleagues at CSW spent years trying to convince the Trudeau and Biden administrations to act against Vancouver’s Samidoun, which was a front for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“With the Biden administration, you could’ve hit them over the head with a 2 x 4, but they were always dragging their feet…and the Canadian government was dragging its feet a lot longer,” says Ginsburg, adding: “Canada has become a petri dish for antisemitism.”

Tough words, particularly when you consider they are coming from a Democrat and an appointee of Bill Clinton’s administration. But anyone who has looked at the evidence knows that Mark Ginsberg is right.

So, will political candidates in Canada, now in the midst of a hotly-contested election campaign, heed his words?

They should. They must, before it’s too late.

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My plane from Washington landed just as Donald Trump’s tariffs were hitting. The plane was on time. So was he.

Will things be as bad as the economists are prognosticating? Well, yes. Things are about to get very bad.

**

I was in the States because we were shooting a documentary near and around the U.S. Capitol yesterday. For some of it, The film crew shot B roll of me loitering near the Canadian Embassy. At one point, I muttered something to myself, like old guys do, and one of the crew asked me what I’d said.

“Poilievre won’t ever be boss of this place,” I said. They looked puzzled. “Never mind,” I said.

In the coming days after Canadians vote, Conservative spin meisters will flood the air waves saying that “no one predicted” Trudeau leaving, Trump winning, tariffs arriving.

But, um, that won’t be true, will it?

Some of us had been saying, for months, that Trudeau would depart. Weeks before the vote, I said that Kamala Harris was losing, too. Equally, Your Humble Narrator volunteered for Harris in the U.S. and every day – every day – Trump would talk about his tariffs plan. Every day.

I wasn’t the only one making these predictions. Others did, too. They weren’t radical opinions.

That’s what makes the likely coming defeat of Pierre Poilievre so politically unforgivable. The Tories had time to get ready, and make changes to the strategy.

And they didn’t.

**

Getting ready is 99% of the job in politics. The Conservatives didn’t get ready. Like all conservatives, they prefer stability and constancy. But we live in a world where those things don’t really exist anymore. Hats off, Mr. Trump.

There were things that the Conservative campaign could’ve done months before the vote. Here are my top three.

**

Before Doug Ford became a regular on the American news TV circuit, Pierre Poilievre could have – and should have – done the same damn thing.

Americans have only a passing acquaintance with the pecking order in Canadian politics. For example, when they hear that you work for a Canadian Senator, they actually think it’s a Senator like one of theirs: you know, elected and therefore legitimate.

Appearing on American TV with the title of “Canadian Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” would’ve commanded Jake Tapper’s attention. And Pierre could have gone on there and told the gospel truth: “Donald Trump isn’t a real conservative, Jake. He believes in interfering in the markets, in the private sector, and in peoples lives. Real conservatives don’t do those things.”

Would Poilievre have ever done that? Of course not. But he needed to create a lot of light between themselves and Trump, months ago.

He didn’t.

**

The next thing that Team Blue needed to have done is to remember the only thing I really learned in law school. They needed to always ask them themselves this question: “What if I’m wrong?”

As in, what if they were wrong about Justin Trudeau leaving? A majority of them had convinced themselves that the former Liberal leader was an idiot and a narcissist, and he would never ever quit.

Well, there’s no disputing that he was a narcissist. But he was no idiot. He beat three capable Conservative leaders in a row, and he knew, in his tiny black heart, that the jig was up.

In 1992, when I was running the very first War Room in Canadian politics, we asked ourselves that question a lot: what if we’re wrong? We figured Mulroney would go, but we weren’t certain who would replace him. So we assigned Kim Campbell to me, Jean Charest to Marc Laframboise, and so on and so on. All of us knew every single thing all of those people had said and done going back to high school.

We were ready, in other words.

The Poilievre Tories have given us every indication that they weren’t ready for the rapid ascension of Mark Carney. At all. They let him define himself before they could define him.

The China stuff, for example. My War Room would’ve been all over that like ravenous dogs on a bone. The Poilievre Conservatives, meanwhile, treat like it’s a meme.

The memes are funny. But the subject matter is serious, too.

Again: they didn’t do that.

**

The third and final thing that Pierre Poilievre could have done was to promote the living hell out of his plan to respond to Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Because, make no mistake: Poilievre has the better plan to deal with them. In particular, he doesn’t believe that it’s good economic policy to leave Canadian energy resources in the ground. Like Carney clearly does.

If Poilievre had done that – even on the aforementioned Tapper show – it would’ve paid two big dividends. It would have shown him championing Canada to the Americans. And it would have shown him as The Guy With A Plan.

He didn’t do that, either. Like too many people – not just conservatives, he kept hoping that the tariff stuff was a bad dream that we would all wake up from.

It wasn’t a dream.

**

Nor, now, is what is happening in this election campaign. It ain’t a dream. The polls tell the real story, not snapshots of big campaign rallies. And the real story is that the Conservatives are losing.

Can they snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Yes they can. Absolutely. Just for starters, in the debates, Pierre Poilievre can say the things that I have recommended he say about Trump.

Will he? Of course not. No one ever listens to me.

Sure is good to be home, however.

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It’s another campaign down day! The parties get a break, and so do I (well, except for the Kinsellacast, coming soon). So, here instead, is more wisdom from my book The War Room – on an issue that has been rather hot, lately: relations with the political media covering Election 2025.

Journalists who write about politics – and I write this as someone who has been one, and as someone who has even taught unsuspecting youngsters how to be one — are regarded by most politicians as duplicitous, lazy, amoral confidence artists. They are seen as cynical, soulless sophists, to a one. If Jesus Christ himself were one of their confidential sources, they would burn him in a New York minute, just to get the scoop on his resurrection.

That’s not what I think, having been a journalist. But when the majority of political consultants, regardless of party affiliation, age, race, gender, or place of origin, are asked about reporters, their eyes will start to look for the nearest exit. When pressed, they will mumble something about how they have plenty of friends who are political journalists, or that there are some reporters who they trust, or that they understand that the media are “professionals” and have a job to do. But put away the tape recorder, get a few beers into them, and the truth will eventually tumble out. Political consultants (and, usually, the politicians they represent) hate political journalists. Hate ’em.

In the past couple of decades or so, relationships between politicos and hacks – never easy to begin with — have deteriorated rather dramatically. Statistics do not lie, generally, and the statistics tell the story. In a Brookings Institution study called Campaign Warriors: Political Consultants in Elections, American University professors James Thurber and Candice Nelson reveal the results of a survey that was, in part, about consultants and reporters. Thurber and Nelson conducted two hundred in-depth interviews in 1997 and 1998 with the principals in a number of major U.S. political consulting firms, and found that political activists are “full of negativity” about the news media.

Nearly 70 percent of political consultants, for example, rated the job that journalists do as “poor” or no better than “fair.” It did not matter what party the consultants were affiliated with, the vast majority regarded reporters as stinkers. Only 1.5 percent described journalists as”excellent.” (This works out to be approximately three of the two hundred consultants interviewed, in case you are wondering.)

The older the consultant, the worse his or her views of the fourth estate. Wrote Thurber and Nelson, “Political consultants who have been around longer develop more concrete attitudes toward the media. The experiences or run-ins they have had over the years may have reinforced their beliefs about journalists.” Reporters and editors in search of a silver lining in this statistical storm cloud may point to one statistic: Thurber and Nelson found that only 30 percent of the consultants polled had actually worked for a media organization. Ipso facto, most political flak catchers cannot be expected to understand the doings of political hacks.

But not so fast. Employing awkward sentence structure, the pair of academics note, “Not only were the consultants who had worked in the media not more likely to rate political journalists more favourably, they actually gave more negative ratings. Seventy-five per cent of those consultants who had worked for the news media, compared to 65 per cent of all other consultants, rated today’s political journalists as fair or poor?” Of all the consultants consulted, 50 per cent said journalists were, in fact, getting worse.

Concluded Thurber and Nelson, “Considering the evidence … the results are striking. Political consultants dislike the media … [They] do not like political journalists.” Political consultants must, however, accept one immutable law of nature. They are bound together with media people in perpetuity, metaphorical groom and bride in a diabolic marriage without end. One cannot properly exist without the other. Political consultants need reporters to tell nice stories about the candidates they wish to elect and, naturally enough, unpleasant stories about their electoral opponents. Political reporters, meanwhile, need consultants to provide them with the stories that sell newspapers and boost ratings.

Disliking journalists is a waste of time, in my opinion. I think most journalists are professionals, and – most of the time — they do a very good job. You need them, and they need you.

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Pierre Poilievre is winning with his rallies. Mark Carney is winning with the pollsters.

What’s really happening?

Well, Greg Lyle is an old friend. He has a poll out with his Innovative Research Group. Full disclosure: Greg and I helped start a certain consulting firm that shall not be named.

He left before I did to start his own very successful polling firm. (More disclosure: I left when I found out that some there were secretly helping out Big tobacco.)

Anyhow. Greg has a poll out and it shows the Tories ahead by one (1) point. This will be a cause for great celebration among some Conservatives, but it shouldn’t be. They were a point ahead on election day in 2019 and 2021, as well. And they lost those.

Well-attended rallies notwithstanding, Team Blue just are not where they need to be. The debates have therefore become very important indeed.

Now, those of us in the media like to go on and on about the tremendous, life-altering importance of so-called “defining moments” in debates. But, honestly, those don’t happen very often at all.

I’ve gotten Prime Ministers and Premiers ready for debates, many times. The strategic objective is always simple. It’s two things: have your issues dominate, and look and sound like a leader.

In the Liberal leadership debates, Mark Carney was clobbered both times by Karina Gould, an articulate MP half his age. He had never run for high public office before, or participated in a debate like that, and it showed. He was the proverbial fish out of water.

Being the boring and pedantic technocrat has worked for him when the contrast is with Donald Trump, however. Trump is like a Tasmanian devil on Benzedrine. In that frame, Carney just needs to look like an adult who has a basic understanding of economics and logic.

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Since I was a kid – since this day in 1972, in fact, when I started writing a daily journal – I have always taken note of April 4, and said to myself:  “April 4.  Dr. King.”

Today, more than half a Century ago, Martin Luther King was murdered by a racist in Memphis.  Dr. King was a giant of a man, the one whose message continues to resonate across the decades, because racial hatred continues unabated.

He was the one who first said that “anti-Zionism” was, in fact, just plain old anti-Semitism.  Worth remembering in these dark post-October 7 days.

I was a kid, and my family was living in Dallas when he was assassinated. I remember it; I remember how scared we were when he was murdered, how it seemed like the end of decency, and the start of something terrible. It was, too.

So. It’s April 4, so many years later, and here is some of his most remarkable speech.  Surveying the racists who still crowd the public stage in the U.S., I don’t think we will see the likes of him again.

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