Digital Rage Seeded In The Comments

(Pause — inhale)

“DEPORT THEM.”

That statement is ripe fruit.
fertilized by colonial violence,
accross oceans,
watered by algorithms
and grown in comment sections.

It lives on pages like 6ixBuzz
where outrage gets compressed into captions
and pain is sport.

Every headline;
an audition for who can hate the fastest.
But, the algorithm doesn’t ask is this true?

“DEPORT THEM”
is now a game.
A pile-on.
A joke no-one has to clean up.

For a whole new generation raised on clickbait,
Truth gets edited.
Context gets cropped.
Rage gets rewarded.

Keyboard warriors flex their outrage
and find ways of flipping it into currency.
Retweets get mistaken for courage.

Violence is justified in GIFs,
in memes
and in threads.

Comments gain fuel,
the loudest cruelty gets promoted
keeping the city scrolling,
laughing at the expense of humanity.

“DEPORT THEM”
Says history without a mirror,
fear with a username,
from basement Wi-Fi
on stolen Indigenous land
in a country built on selective memory and convenient forgetting.

Turtle Island was already stewarded,
already governed,
already alive.

Colonization is the first “DEPORT THEM”.

Reservations,
residential schools
(ongoing) organized genocide,
working to erase language
erase history
erase people.
But the land never forgets.
the land reminds us of the stolen women and children.
The land reminds us of Africville,
bulldozed into memory,
paved over,
for a fuckin ‘ dog park!

We should all have rage that the family trees of those that built economies are not allowed to inherit it.

Instead we’re caught up with “wealth” on stolen land,
from the sweat and blood of stolen labour,
by displaced people
sold fake dreams,
actively benefiting
from the (28+ still active) boil water advisories.

“DEPORT THEM”
a sentence we inherited
when we forgot who paid the cost of our arrival.

Because silence is a form of agreement when the benefits keep arriving on time.

They don’t mean criminals.
They mean accents,
not “Canadian enough.”

They mean turbans,
They mean thawb’s,
Ederly on buses who don’t know a lick of English,
They mean young brown immigrants hustling to their third job,
young kids laughing in parking lots,
young kids dancing in public places,
missing their homelands and mother tongues.

They mean first-generation shopkeepers,
barbers,
Tim Hortons employees,
truck drivers,
uber drivers,
they def mean uber drivers.

They mean people whose names are (not) “hard to pronounce”.

They mean women in hijabs,
families eating outside restaurants,
families eating in parks,
international students,
they mean brown joy that refuses to shrink.

They mean everything that doesn’t look or sound like them,
everything that provokes discomfort
in someone who  jokes about “foreigners taking jobs”
or how “different” Canada was back when?.

Underneath it all
“DEPORT THEM” is how fear points without naming itself.
brown bodies,
brown tongues,
brown cultures,
brown history that refuses to disappear quietly.

So as they type
“DEPORT THEM”; now an archive of hate.

The slogan the future will remember of our time.

Aimed at the very people who;
cleaned our hospitals,
drove us to hopitals,
stacked our grocery shelves,
drove us home from grocery stores,
delivered our packages,
kept the eonomy alive through COVID,
held us up while we slept.
It’s how our governement was able to afford CERB.

Remembered as the applause
from a system that exploits,
imports,
and discards
mass immigration.
Labour
extracted from hopes promised
and then exiled.
Already carried the weight of a nation that refuses to call them family.

They type “DEPORT THEM”
without understanding that the people they target
already paid for the country’s survival.

The future will read “DEPORT THEM” as the sentence of a moment defined by fear, injustice and blatant ignorance.

“DEPORT THEM”; The slogan of contemporary Canada.

Ben Mulroney Unpacks Anti-immigrant Hate and Racism Through Punjabi Hip Hop Video Controversy

In a recent episode of The Ben Mulroney Show,
the host dives into the complicated intersections of
race,
media representation,
and immigration in Canada. 

The resurfacing of a Punjabi music video by the late Sidhu Moose Wala
comes at a time
when anti-immigrant
and anti-South Asian sentiment in Canada
increases exponentially. 

Online platforms like 6ixbuzz,
which once branded themselves as Toronto’s “voice of the streets,”
have become notorious for amplifying divisive narratives.
By selectively posting videos of Desi youth,
often problematically framed
to highlight cultural differences
And reinforce stereotypes
rather than celebration.

6ixbuzz has fueled a comments section rife with xenophobia, stereotypes, and outright hate.

One recent example
was a clip of Punjabi international students dancing at Yonge-Dundas Square,
which went viral
not for its joy
but for the torrent of racist backlash it generated.
Instead of being read as a youthful expression of culture
in one of the world’s most diverse cities,
the video became a lightning rod for complaints about immigration,
“overcrowding,”
and the alleged erosion of Canadian identity.

The comments revealed how quickly cultural moments of pride can be twisted into platforms for resentment and rage-baiting.

This environment mirrors the dynamics Dr. Cheryl Thompson and Ben Mulroney describe: racialized art and expression are too often stripped of context and weaponized,
feeding the rise of anti-immigrant hostility in Canada’s digital public square.

The episode, titled “Punjabi video sparks rage baiting online amid Canada immigration woes”, uses the resurfacing of a Sidhu Moosewala music video from seven years ago as an entry point to explore how cultural expression is often misrepresented and in some cases, weaponized against marginalized communities.

Joining Mulroney is Dr. Cheryl Thompson,
Canada Research Chair in Black Expressive Culture & Creativity,
who brings critical perspective to the conversation.

She highlights how media often strips cultural works of their historical and artistic context, reframing them as political threats
or moral failings
when produced by racialized artists.
In this case, a Punjabi hip hop video has become the focus of online outrage,
refracted through ongoing debates about immigration and Desi identity in Canada.

Hip hop culture, in particular, has long been subjected to distortion in mainstream discourse.

What was born as an expressive tool for marginalized voices 
has repeatedly been vilified, 
criminalized, 
or taken at surface value 
without an understanding of the deeper cultural narratives it conveys.

Mulroney and Thompson situate this latest controversy
within a broader tradition of cultural misinterpretation.

They point to works like Jay-Z’s Decoded,
where the rap icon painstakingly unpacks his own lyrics
revealing layers of metaphor,
symbolism,
and cultural commentary
that are often lost on audiences who read hip hop literally.

Jay-Z argues that rap should be analyzed as poetry, not police evidence.

This act of decoding
transforms hip hop from a scapegoat for social problems
into a powerful archive of cultural memory,
resilience,
and critique.

The same framework applies to Desi artists navigating the Canadian media landscape. 

Moosewala’s video,
now retroactively weaponized in online debates,
was originally an artistic reflection of community struggles,
aspirations,
and identity.
But divorced from context,
it becomes a vessel for rage-baiting headlines
that feed into anxieties about immigration
and demographic change.

By situating this controversy within a lineage of cultural misrepresentation,
Mulroney and Thompson underline the need for nuance
in how Canadians engage with racialized art forms.
To understand hip hop or Punjabi music videos
is to understand the communities from which they emerge,
not to flatten them into fodder for political fearmongering.

The real danger is in flattening these works into single narratives: “violent,” “foreign,” or “un-Canadian.” That flattening not only distorts the art, it fuels racism and feeds an outrage economy designed to divide.

Mulroney’s call to action is simple,
and it requires effort:
pause before reacting,
seek out the full story,
and immerse yourself in the cultural context before believing
or reposting
clips online.
Practice critical thinking.
Refuse to reward rage-bait with lazy clicks.
Support creators who contextualize
rather than caricature.

In short:
do the work.
Don’t be lazy.
Art is richer,
communities are deeper,
and truth is always more complex
than the comments section.

Stay informed!