My open application for the position of senior editor of National Post's opinion section

You need me!

I come with a cat.

Dearest National Post Editorial Board:

I write to you with great interest in applying for the position of senior editor for your newspaper’s comment section. I am pleased to see that you are hiring for this position. Frankly, I don’t know how you’ve come this far without an editor — the work of a number of your writers should never have been allowed to flourish without even a cursory glance by an editor.

Any editor with an ounce of self-worth would, upon first glance, simply not publish them. Any editor with a sense of shame would feel crushing embarrassment at admitting to editing their work and — instead of printing out a copy, setting it on fire, putting the ashes in a radioactivity-resistant container, and, before burying it in a deep pit, debating the ethics of putting something so toxic into the environment and considering how best to label such a container so future generations millennia later would know not to open it — sending it to the press.

An editor might consider the editorial consistency between your — soon, our — tough-on-crime stance and your insistence on publishing the counterfactual ramblings of convicted fraudster Conrad Black.

An editor might have asked Adam Zivo: Did a judge actually rule that drug use in playgrounds is allowed? Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain? I’m being serious, I need to know so I don’t have to make an embarrassing correction in the future, so I’ll ask one last time — did the judge rule that people can use drugs in playgrounds? An editor would have, even after interrogating Zivo, double-checked the decision, and found, in paragraph 100, the following: “I reject the submission, however, that the application before me is to permit PWUD to use drugs ‘nearly wherever they want.’” If only you had an editor!

An editor might have noticed that you’d already had to correct this before publishing this same claim yet again by Chris Selley.

An editor similarly might have asked: If the comments Zivo is writing about were behind closed doors, then why is he linking to it in a public YouTube video posted by the people who hosted them? This might have saved your newspaper another embarrassing experience.

But there are certainly other instances that did not receive corrections in which your newspaper’s comment section could have benefitted from an editor — any editor at all — looking at your writers’ work.

Tristin Hopper’s documentation of our so-called “activist” Supreme Court of Canada is replete with ill-considered logic and factual errors, particularly making outlandish, unsupported statements about life imprisonment both in Canada and around the world, and claiming that the right to strike is rare (it isn’t), and that only Canada has recognized the right to strike as an extension of freedom of association rather than as an explicit provision. (Sorry, Finland, Belgium, Iceland, Netherlands, and Norway, you aren’t real.)

In another rather embarrassing instance of absent editorial oversight, Hopper believes the turnout at one annual march for Israel outweighs the sustained turnout of thousands at other rallies for Palestine over the last nine months, apparently forgetting a poll commissioned just days earlier by your own publication showing twice as many people agreed than disagreed that Israel is committing genocide.

Surely, if Hopper’s work had an editor who worked at the newspaper, this disconnect would have been caught.

I could go on, but I’ve hit the end of my free articles, and I can’t bring myself to agree to the $3-a-month offer your website is currently pushing.

But together, we can build an outlet worth at least $4 a month.

Together, we can make a newspaper that subsists on more than hate clicks and feeding the ideology of our hedge fund overlords and white nationalist founder.

Together, we can fire Hopper. We can put an end to Zivo’s column. We can pretend Black’s leadership of the Post was nothing more than a fever dream. We can try to forget that Rex Murphy was ever more than a collection of syllables and hair.

Thank you, and I look forward to making you proud.

Sincerely,

Dustin Godfrey