Recently, the editors of National Review commented on the Canadian government’s recent decision to stop funding the search for the graves of Indigenous children, supposedly secretly buried at Canada’s much-criticized and now-defunct residential schools. The editors note, “In all the excavations that have been conducted, not a single unmarked grave has been found. Not one.”

The episode — which saw many Indigenous churches burned to the ground in apparent retaliation — is a world class example of the growing role of private truth in a Western society. For many people, the fact that no graves were found hardly matters. The inner “truth” of what people sincerely believe (or say they believe) absolutely triumphs over reason and evidence.

The editors also address current attempts to keep the moral panic alive:

In the last year, criticism of a “mass graves hoax” perpetrated by progressive media and academia has given rise to a small scholarly industry devoted to defending the moral panic. Researchers have counted how often headlines used the phrase “mass graves,” versus the more modest and defensible “unmarked graves.” Through a tendentious process of disqualification they find just 35 percent of newspaper stories misled readers or provided inaccurate information. Thus they conclude, preposterously, that there wasn’t any “mass graves hoax” and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in “residential school denialism.”

That is a neat trick. But it reveals the depravity at work, which is not a concern for justice, but building up a black legend, through the progressive policing of language. The mission has been to absolve the progressive state and smear Canada’s last remaining conservative institutions in the present.

“Canada Gives Up Trying to Prove the Mass Graves Hoax,” February 28, 2025

Actually, the editors understate the problem. As I noted here last year, one government strategy as of 2023, has been to try to make “residential school denialism” a crime. A particular target would be a 2023 scholarly book, Grave Error, which exposed the claims:

A book of essays by accredited scholars, investigative journalists, judges, lawyers, and independent researchers, it was published late last year by a small indie press, because, as veteran columnist Barbara Kay put it, “No mainstream publisher would have touched this book with a ten-foot pole.” It was reviewed mainly in independent media, that is, media not supported financially by the Canadian government, as Canada’s mainstream media are.

Grave Error is devastating, precisely because, in striking contrast to most media coverage of the topic, its analysis is entirely evidence-based. Thus it has, predictably, been denounced as “’hate literature’, ‘hateful’, has ‘caused harm’ and represents ‘denialism.’”

“Canada’s Residential Schools: A Saga of Journalistic Wrongdoing, September 27, 2024

The editors are right to call the episode “one of the most disgraceful moral panics in modern history.” But it would be a graver mistake to assume that it could only happen in Canada. Ask the American biologists who have been Canceled for insisting that humans are sex binary if private truth really respects borders.

The featured photo is by Marcus Urbenz on Unsplash.