Thursday marked the 100th anniversary of the commencement of

the “Monkey Trial” of science teacher John T. Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee

. It is one of many candidates for the title of “American trial of the (20th) century,” perhaps the best-deserving up until the O.J. Simpson fiasco. In some ways the Scopes trial can be seen as an early warning to judges about the warping effects of mass media attention on the courtroom, a warning that was perhaps misplaced by the time O.J. came to be tried.

Scopes was tried under a then-new Tennessee law, the Butler Act, which contained the following language:

“… it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

At the time he ran afoul of this law, Scopes was a lad of 24, freshly graduated from the University of Kentucky with a law degree and a minor in geology. He had come to Dayton, a small town dominated by high-octane evangelicalism, mostly to be the football coach, with a sideline teaching physics and chemistry classes. The school’s ordinary biology teacher was its principal, for whom Scopes had subbed in at times during the 1924-25 school year.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been combing Tennessee for the makings of a test case, an opportunity to put the Butler Act on trial. Local lawyers in Dayton saw an opportunity to inflate the renown of their town, but the principal of the school was an older married man who didn’t want to play chicken with his local reputation or risk accumulating a criminal record. That left young bachelor and outsider Scopes, a gentle 1920s freethinker who would, later in life, run for Congress in his native Kentucky as a Socialist Party candidate.

The lawyers asked Scopes if he remembered teaching evolution to the kiddies. He didn’t, but he agreed with the lawyers that you couldn’t teach scientific biology properly without including evolution, and admitted that he would have paid no mind to the Butler Act while in the classroom. According to his memoir, he even fetched the school’s official biology textbook down from a shelf to illustrate. Tennessee had passed the Butler Act without mandating any new creationist textbook — nothing of the kind yet existed — so Scopes had been required to use an older text absolutely crammed with modernist Darwinian horrors (and, for that matter, a smattering of eugenic theorizing about the duty of racial improvement).

Scopes was “arrested” in a brief act of perfunctory theatre, though he was never detained, and the stage was set for a media carnival that swallowed the town of Dayton alive. When the famous left-wing defence lawyer Clarence Darrow turned up at the ACLU’s invitation to battle on behalf of Scopes, the state of Tennessee called upon William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee and populist advocate of Christian fundamentalism.

We’ve lost awareness of how weird this was. If the Monkey Trial had never taken place, and an expert historian were asked in 2025 to name the two greatest American orators of the period, “Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan” might still be the answer you would get. Nothing of this kind had ever happened before, nor has it happened since: an actual criminal jury trial with honest-to-God mega-celebrities acting as counsel on both sides.

The trial was, we now know, a thoroughly contrived occasion for “culture war” cooked up by the ACLU and some of its friends in the American liberal establishment. In 2025 we are more than familiar with such things: anybody who has internet access would understand, would say without pausing for a second thought, that William Jennings Bryan was being “trolled.” But when the trial began it seemed that the trolling effort was bound to fail.

The judge, John T. Raulston, accepted some written evidence on the scientific evidence for evolution, but refused to allow experts to be cross-examined in court, and tried to stick to the actual issue in the case: had defendant Scopes broken the law of Tennessee? With the defence left hanging, Darrow asked if Bryan would be willing to face questioning as an expert on the text and teaching of the Bible. Bryan, who was as eager as Darrow to add some theatrical colour to the proceedings, unwisely agreed.

The result was a confrontation that has become immortal, mostly through the avenue of the oft-adapted play Inherit the Wind. (The Darrow-versus-Bryan parts of the play are quite faithful to the trial transcript. These gentlemen didn’t need help creating drama.) Darrow, who is perhaps still the archetypal American unbeliever, asked village-atheist questions about the accuracy and consistency of the Bible. Bryan became flustered, indignant and abusive, and did much more poorly in handling Darrow’s questions than any decently educated fundamentalist would now.

When the dust settled, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. His conviction was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the Butler Act; however, the amount of Scopes’s fine was technically contrary to the state’s constitution, and the appeal judge, observing that Scopes had long since moved on from Tennessee, urged against a re-trial.

I have written about the Scopes trial

 a time or two, and I am a little sad to say that it appears to be losing its hold on the popular imagination. Partly this is because the famous people involved are no longer famous. But the culture war has also moved on from the topic of biological evolution to a surprising degree, hasn’t it? When I was a young man, and the year 2000 still lurked in the future, there was a brief vogue among religious folk for varieties of “scientific creationism” that might somehow locate the hand of God in the story of humanity. In retrospect, “scientific creationism” seems like a fatal compromise, and little is heard of it in the era of cheap DNA sequencing. You might object to the possibility that you had distant Neanderthal ancestors, but, if you care to, you can pay someone a few hundred bucks to find out 

the exact quantum

 of Neanderthal DNA in your cells.

In other words, almost everyone has accepted the premises that the Butler Act was specifically designed to condemn: man did “descend” from “lower” beasts, from primates, and if God intended for there to exist a creature in His own image, evolution seems to be how He went about it. Bryan and the Tennessee legislature believed that the Bible was literally true, and that its divine status and meaning would be annihilated by conceding any presence of mere allegory or metaphor or instructive invention.

Even today’s evangelical fundamentalists aren’t usually that fundamentalist. Indeed, in 1925 Bryan himself proved shaky on the witness stand, conceding that the six-day Creation might not have involved 144 actual hours of clock time. I daresay, even speaking as an atheist, that it seems a touch insulting to the Bible to regard it as a brute factual record or as some sort of unartful consumer-product manual.

National Post

It’s been nearly a full decade since the photograph of a dead refugee child on a Turkish beach caused the world to

stop in its tracks

and focus its fleeting attention on the 21st century’s most obscene humanitarian catastrophe. In that one picture, in an instant, the dismemberment of Syria, which by then had been underway for four years, became suddenly comprehensible.

Barely two years old, little Alan Kurdi had drowned along with his mother, Rihan, and his brother, Galib, when the overcrowded boat they were travelling in capsized en route to the Greek island of Kos on Sept. 2, 2015. Before the year was over another million refugees had boarded makeshift boats to make the journey to Europe to escape Bashar Assad’s barrel bombs, Vladimir Putin’s air force and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s throat-slitting jihadists.

As things quickly turned out, the Kurdis had been making their way to Canada. Owing to the efforts of Alan’s aunt, a Coquitlam hairdresser, the plight of the Kurdi family had already been brought to the attention of the authorities in Ottawa, so the tragedy of the boy on the beach became something of a Canadian scandal. Auntie Teema was hoping to sponsor the family but they’d been stuck in Turkey, which isn’t a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees. The approved version of events was that Ottawa’s hands were tied, so that’s why the Kurdis ended up in a rickety boat.

It was a complicated story, but because a federal election was underway the tragedy tended to be rendered as a simple moral tale. Although the refugee policies of all three federal parties were practically indistinguishable by the time voters went to the polls on Oct. 19 that year, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had most loudly championed the cause of Syrian refugees, which was enthusiastically taken up by Canadians. Refugee resettlement became central to the Liberal brand.

Even though only slightly more than half of the 100,000 Syrian refugees who eventually settled in Canada were government-sponsored, it’s still all to the good. Ottawa has spent more than $4.7 billion on humanitarian assistance for Syrians over the past decade, and

$100 million more recently

. Canada also spearheaded the dramatic clandestine rescue of more than 400 first responders of the “White Helmets” organization from Southern Syria, with the assistance of the Israel Defence Forces, in 2018.

The point is that Canada is understood as a friend of Syria in good standing, and now that the barbaric Assad regime has been overthrown — an event that ranks with the ouster of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi or Cambodia’s Pol Pot — Canada has a unique opportunity to make some diplomatic use of itself in the Greater Middle East.

Following the early lead set by Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom and the Abraham Accord Arab regimes, last week the United States finally and fully committed to lifting the sanctions on Syria that had been applied during the final years of the half-century that Syria was ruled by the savage Assad family and its Baathist mafia.

For all the unspeakable suffering of the people of Gaza and the chaos that has beset the region since the barbaric Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, in the broader scheme of things the good guys are winning. Hamas has been reduced to something on the order of one of those Port-au-Prince terror gangs in Haiti. In Lebanon, the once-invincible menace of Hezbollah has been decapitated and humiliated. Following Israel’s “12-day war” last month, the Iranian tyranny is now nearly defenceless, weaker and more pathetic than at any time since the Khomeinists seized power in 1979.

The “Axis of Resistance” assembled by Qasem Soleimani, the godfather of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force who was liquidated by an American precision strike in Baghdad five years ago, is not yet wholly crushed. But its sharpest arrows now consist of officially-accommodated warlords in the Iraqi military and the Houthis’ Ansar Allah front in Yemen — the Houthi terrorists are like Somali pirates but with missiles, and their days are numbered. It won’t be for long that they’ll be getting away with randomly sinking ships in the Red Sea, jeopardizing $1 trillion worth of annual cargo traffic.

The region’s greatest hope and its greatest peril lies in Syria. If Canada can make some small foreign-policy contribution in the region it will be where our reputation is largely unblemished. If Canadians want to make some genuine use of themselves in this corner of the “world stage,” we could do worse than devote Canada’s limited diplomatic capacities to Syria.

Last December’s ouster of Bashar Assad wasn’t just a gut punch to Tehran and Moscow. It wasn’t just the emergence of a government in Damascus that doesn’t regard itself in a state of war with Israel for the first time since 1948. It’s not just that Ahmed al-Sharaa’s interim government is intent on a

rapprochement

with the U.S.-backed semi-autonomous Kurds of Syria’s northeast as well as close relations with the Kurds’ adversaries in Ankara, or even that the Turkish government has lately made some historic overtures to the Kurds of its own accord.

The Syrian revolution was an exhilarating, lightning-fast revolutionary emancipation of a profoundly brutalized people. Much of the country remains a landscape of broken cities and mass graves. While tens of thousands of refugees are pouring back into the country, roughly half of Syria’s 24 million people are displaced inside Syria or scattered to the ends of the earth.

The throat-slitters haven’t entirely vanished. A

suicide bomber

slaughtered least 30 people at an ancient Greek Orthodox church in Damascus last month, and diehard Assad loyalists pose a threat as well. As many as

1,500 minority Alawites

were butchered in a three-day orgy of massacres last March. Sunni militias incorporated into the new regime have been deeply implicated in the bloodbath, which was set off in the course of crushing what appeared to be a bloody Tehran-incited revolt by Alawites associated with the deposed Assad regime.

The revolutionary government has pledged a transition period to a constitutional order that would guarantee freedom of expression, women’s rights and a recognition of Syria’s ethnic and religious diversity. A formal constitution is promised within five years, to be adopted in elections for a president and parliament.

The agony of the Syrian people is not yet passed. The country remains divided, bleak and broken. But it should not require something like a shocking photograph of a dead child to persuade Canada to put its shoulder to the wheel again.

There’s hope, and Canada should make the best of it.

National Post

• Terry Glavin: Who cares what Americans think about Syria?
• Syria says willing to return to 1974 border deal with Israel

Francesca Albanese, the nominal United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories but in truth a rabid anti-Israel crusader, may be doing the world a favour.
 

Her constant illegitimate complaint that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza is becoming so tiresome that sheer boredom may awaken people to the lie.
 

Her latest inflammatory
comments
came on July 3 when she said, “
Israel is responsible for one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.”
 

In perpetrating this untruth, Albanese does an injustice to the six million victims of the Holocaust; she disregards the four million who starved to death during the Holodomor and she is willfully blind to the almost one million who were butchered and slaughtered in 100 days in Rwanda.
 

Albanese can scream genocide as much as she likes but it does not alter reality. If we must engage in a tasteless body count, then it is obvious that Israel’s actions in Gaza come nowhere near a genocide.
 

But in presenting a new
report
this month:
Forever-Occupation, genocide, and profit, Albanese has stirred the United States to action.
 

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio
announced
sanctions on Albanese and said her “biased and malicious activities” had long made her unfit for service as a special rapporteur.
 

It was only a matter of time that Albanese, like all extreme left-wing activists, concluded that the heart of the problem (in this case Israel and Gaza, but it could be any problem really) was capitalism.
 

Companies were engaged in an “economy of genocide,” said her report.
 

There followed the usual bafflegab that anti-capitalists have been spewing in some form since Karl Marx.
 

The “corporate machinery” was sustaining the “Israeli settler-colonial project”; “corporate entities” were profiting from “illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide”; the “private sector” must be held accountable, and “
international business and legal systems” had failed to uphold basic rights.
 

“Colonial endeavours and associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector,” Albanese thundered self-righteously. “Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous people of their lands — a mode of domination known as ‘colonial racial capitalism’.”
 

Albanese demanded, “accountability for corporate entities and their executives at both the domestic and international levels.”
 

“This is a political economy that was always eliminatory and has turned into genocidal mode.”
 

Such accountability is all in service of Albanese’s ultimate aim.
 

“This is a necessary step to end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it,” she said.
 

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: let’s dismantle the global system, end capitalism and destroy the corporate sector. And what shall we replace it with? No doubt, Albanese and the United Nations would prefer some new world order where they are in charge.
 

No wonder the U.S. shuddered at the very thought.
 

Rubio accused Albanese of “writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC (International Criminal Court) pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. 
 

“We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”
 

He added, “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.”
 

In her report, Albanese cited genocide 59 times. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran got zero mentions. The hostages were ignored completely.
 

The report constantly referred to Post-October 2023. For instance, Post-October 2023 the Israeli defence budget doubled; there had been an increase in Israeli drone projects and there had been an increase in weapons and military technology being used in Gaza.
 

But nowhere in the report does Albanese tell us what happened in October 2023 to make all these things happen. Post-October 2023 is Albanese’s bland descriptor to hide the atrocities of October 7.
 

Albanese is a perfect fit for the virulent anti-Israel bias that permeates the UN which continually lambastes the Jewish state while ignoring the outrageous human rights abuses in other countries.
 

Her prejudices have already attracted the ire of certain nations — including Canada.
 

In a
post on X
last year, Deborah Lyons said, “As a former UN official, as the Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, and as a Canadian, I am horrified to see a United Nations Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, engage in Holocaust distortion and inversion.”
 

Similarly, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather
posted
, “Francesca Albanese has a long history of using antisemitic tropes. It is absolutely baffling to me that the United Nations condones her behaviour and does not remove her from her position.”
 

The UN
code of conduct
for special rapporteurs demands they uphold the highest standards of “probity, impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith.”
 

And yet Albanese has consistently breached that code.
 

One of her most foul and insidious practices is to link Israel with the Nazis, the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

She has
raised
the spectre of the Third Reich to smear Israel;
compared
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler;
evoked
the memory of the German death camps by referencing Gaza as
a “concentration camp of the 21st century”; has
reminded
Germany’s leaders of the failures of Nazi Germany and has explicitly linked Israel’s actions against Palestinians with a new Holocaust.
 

For this shameful conduct, the UN has appointed Albanese to another three-year term as special rapporteur. Only at the UN would a person with so much hatred and prejudice be welcomed instead of fired. 
 

National Post

• Jamie Sarkonak: The CRTC is trying to tell local newsrooms what to report. It needs to stop
• Jesse Kline: Liberals get a crash course in the importance of natural resources

It shouldn’t be the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s job to regulate the demographic composition of the people we see on television. Nevertheless, it’s become a growing CRTC priority — and a critical threat to media independence in Canada. 

The latest round of diversity measures in broadcasting was
proclaimed
by the CRTC in early June. In concluding a review of its multi-million-dollar subsidy program for local news, the regulator determined that eligible broadcasters should be given incentives to bring about “increased production of online content responding to the needs of members of equity-deserving communities, Indigenous communities, and (official language minority communities).”

Since it was created in 2016, the Independent Local News Fund has worked without diversity incentives. Broadcasters had to pay 0.3 per cent of their broadcasting revenues to the fund, which was then paid out to various small-market private TV stations to support local news reporting. 

The idea was to support local news production, and support it did: the fund collects about $18 million annually. Fund-eligible stations, CRTC-watcher Howard Law has
observed
, collectively spend about $27 million on news every year, which means that the CRTC is covering around 70 per cent of their collective news budget.

In the past, funding was doled out according to a broadcaster’s TV offerings: two-thirds of the money was granted “in proportion to each eligible station’s share of total expenditures on locally reflective news and information” in the last three years; the final third was distributed in proportion to the total hours of local news broadcast by eligible stations in the last three years. 

Now, grant calculations will include news that appears only on a station’s website — but only if the online news “relates specifically to an underserved community” within a station’s area and “portrays an onscreen representation of the underserved community by, for example, depicting its members or representatives or featuring coverage of an event related to the community.”

“This incentive is not an encouragement to migrate news content related to underserved communities from television to online; rather, it is an encouragement to increase production of content serving those communities,” reads the decision.

Practically, it means that news stations that receive these grants will have to factor, to some degree, the subject of the news into coverage decisions. Should a station send its sole evening web reporter to cover the equity-deserving diaspora festival that brings in CRTC funds, or the non-diverse car crash that won’t? The city council committee meeting, or the barbecue at the local mosque? The CRTC has no business trying to inject itself into these newsroom calls.

The fund recipients that will now have to ask these questions include 15 Global News stations, three Jim Pattison Broadcast Group stations (in Medicine Hat, Kamloops and Prince George), Newfoundland’s NTV, Hamilton’s Channel Zero, Victoria’s CHEK-TV, Lethbridge’s Miracle Channel, Thunder Bay’s CKPR-TV, along with several Quebec channels owned by RNC Media and Télé Inter-Rives.

The CRTC framed this as a simple measure of compliance with the law. The Broadcasting Act, prior to 2022,
stated
that the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect the “multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society.” After 2022, this language was intensified with the passing of the controversial Online Streaming Act;
now
, the system should “support community broadcasting that reflects both the diversity of the communities being served, including with respect to the languages in use within those communities and to their ethnocultural and Indigenous composition.” 

There was a time when this merely meant that Canadian broadcasting should allow for multicultural programming; yes, Canada had language rules in broadcasting, as well as Canadian content requirements, but the CRTC wasn’t concerned about ethnic scorekeeping. In 2013, the idea of even mandating regional content quotas was
considered
by the regulator to be an infringement of journalistic independence. 

That all began to change under the Liberal government, however. The Liberals don’t control the CRTC directly, of course, but they do decide who the commissioners are and what the broadcasting laws say. They can also step in if the CRTC takes its mission widely off course, as it’s been doing for the past few years now.

In 2022, the CRTC
imposed diversity quotas
on parts of the CBC’s programming budget to “reflect contemporary Canada” — i.e., to achieve the regulator’s preferred demographic balance. 

Among other requirements, the CBC was required to spend 30 per cent of its budget line for English commissioned TV programs on diverse producers (the quota will rise to 35 per cent next year). A smaller quota was applied to the French side (which will reach 15 per cent next year). This was a direct, propagandistic intrusion by the regulator — and really, the Canadian government — into the editorial realm. 

In 2024, the CRTC began collecting a five per cent government cut from the revenues of international digital streamers operating in Canada — Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc. — which
functionally
became a diversity tax. The CRTC used the funds to advance its evergreen goal of equity, with payouts going to the
intensely diversity-oriented
Canada Media Fund, to media creators who checked diversity boxes, and to the Independent Local News Fund, which has now been absorbed into the CRTC’s DEI machine. 

The CRTC has seen a whole lot of mission bloat in this last decade, and we continue to pay for it. Literally. The
staff headcount
at the regulator’s office rose from 450 in 2016 to 733 in 2025 — an increase of 63 per cent. And as it piles more regulatory requirements onto the companies it supervises, they have to hire more people in turn. We can assume any related bills are passed on to subscribers.

Are we getting any extra value out of this? No — in fact, it seems to be making the media landscape worse.

National Post

• Jamie Sarkonak: CRTC diversity quotas trample journalistic independence at CBC
• Jamie Sarkonak: Your rising Spotify bill is paying for the Liberals’ diversity agenda

Watch the full video directly below.

Was journalist Travis Dhanraj too “bold” for the CBC? On Monday, Dhanraj’s released a scathing

resignation letter

accusing CBC’s leadership of failing to achieve journalistic balance and engaging in tokenism.

His lawyer, Kathryn Marshall, claims CBC did not want him booking “

conservative voices

” on his show, confirming sentiments many Canadians have long suspected about the mostly taxpayer-funded public broadcaster.

Dhanraj’s ability to attract high-profile conservative guests set him apart, but CBC’s internal politics and ideological bias — which is evident in its leadership and coverage — likely stifle any chance of reform, argues political strategist Anthony Koch, in an interview with the National Post’s Terry Newman.

Despite the fact that there are journalists at the CBC with integrity, Koch sees little hope for change at our national broadcaster under the current government, especially after the Liberals promised to increase the broadcaster’s funding.

• Julia Malott: I am the wrong kind of transwoman for CBC. Travis Dhanraj made me a regular
• Chris Selley: We’ll thank Travis Dhanraj for ‘pulling back the curtain’ on CBC News