Why is Keean Bexte trying to cancel people for LGBT comments?

Activist journalist Keean Bexte calls himself a conservative, and he has built his brand over the past several years at independent outlets such as The Rebel, The Counter Signal (which he founded in 2021), and recently partnered with Candice Malcolm of True North News to create Juno News. His recent reportage, however, has him competing with Press Progress and other mainstream media outlets to apply LGBT purity tests to political candidates.

On April 15, Bexte published an “exclusive report” at Juno News, detailing crude comments made by Liberal candidate Ryan Turnbull and several unnamed friends back in 2008. According to Bexte, Turnbull use the term “fagotization,” and Bexte cited a Facebook caption “followed by a thread of comments that mock gay men [calling them “perverse”] while blending crude innuendo with verbal abuse targeted at the gay community.”

Bexte called for Turnbull’s resignation, both in numerous posts on social media, including after Turnbull issued an apology, and in a fractious debate with a Hill Times reporter prior to the English leaders’ debate. According to Bexte, Carney must drop Turnbull, as the comments are “a test of how seriously Mark Carney takes his relationship with the LGBT community … Keeping him would be a statement – one that could define Carney’s standing with LGBT Canadians for years to come.”

Reading Bexte’s story without knowing where it was published, one might be forgiven for thinking it was released by Press Progress, a far-left outlet that specializes in combing the social media profiles of political candidates to identify anything that might be construed as heresy by the LGBT movement. Bexte, however, apparently feels Press Progress could use some help from the conservative alternative media in their self-appointed task as LGBT censors and is doing the same.

Turnbull’s comments – especially their graphic and crude framing – are obviously gross. But watching the alt-media subject candidates to LGBT struggle sessions in order to demand resignations, retractions, apologies, or simply to prove that they are hypocrites is a self-evidently stupid, left-wing game. I genuinely never thought that a “win” for the “independent press” would be claiming the scalp of a political candidate for homophobic Facebook comments 16 years ago.

Unless, of course, Bexte genuinely cares about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s relationship with the “LGBT community” (his words). In that case, Bexte is clearly an opponent of Canadian social conservatives, many of whom are presumably the target audience of the publications he writes for.

Indeed, Bexte’s passionate crusade brings up a number of critical questions. Does Bexte – or Juno News, for that matter – think that anyone who has condemned the LGBT agenda in terms currently considered offensive (as any observer of our culture surely knows, this is a constantly moving target) should be ineligible for public life? How about a Catholic priest quoting the Catechism on homosexuality? What if a former pastor ran for office (several have), and a sermon in which he referred to homosexuality as “perverse” surfaced? In Bexte’s view, should that candidate “resign” in “disgrace”?

Aside from Bexte’s obvious partisan leanings and the targets he selects for his performative activism, it is difficult not to see how he is not doing the work of the CBC or Press Progress – he’s just driving the speed limit. His litmus test on the LGBT agenda appears to be the same, unless this story is an insincere work of partisan hackery. If it is that is the case, Bexte would do well to consider the fact that the litmus test he is applying to Ryan Turnbull is usually used on social conservatives simply for opposing the LGBT agenda or stating the traditional Christian view on homosexuality.