Sun News’s Ezra Levant really, really likes to talk about Occupy Toronto

What might be most remarkable about Sun News and its reporting on Occupy Toronto is that it can denounce the movement as irrelevant while simultaneously doing lengthy segments on it. Ezra Levant recently devoted 25 minutes to discussing the protest with Jacqui Delaney, who said all kinds of nasty things about the occupiers. Levant then did a follow up, commenting on the call-and-response tactic protesters use to amplify one another’s voices. He ignored the origin of the tactic (here’s an explanation) and instead offered that it was evidence of “cult-like behavior.” Levant’s guest John Robson chimed in with his own hyperbolic offering, stating, “I think we are seeing an outburst of rather alarming tribalism.” (The segment, headlined “Mindless Mob,” is filed under the Toronto Sun’s news section, by the by.)

For the record, the protesters took Levant’s bait and came off looking pretty silly. Of course, in the 25-minute rant, Levant said that St. James Park must be brimming with sexually transmitted diseases—he actually used the phrase “double-bag it” in reference to a female protester. In his follow up, he called the whole thing a “dirty, semen-stained, overflowing bathroom protest.” Levant and Robson’s faux-tribalism gag is so absurd that it’s tough to tell if they’re being serious or pretending to be some Tilley hat–wearing anthropologists that have stumbled upon an undiscovered tribe of hippies in an urban park—which is pretty darn silly itself.

• Mindless mob [Sun News]