Political manipulation tactics are working when they make you doubt what you already know is true. That was my reaction reading the National Post’s profile of Conservative MP Jamil Jivani and his campaign to “end Liberal racism.” It felt like watching someone turn a mirror upside down, then insist the floor is the ceiling and anybody who disagrees is the real problem.
This is more than an annoying rhetoric. It is a deliberate strategy built around a specific tactic called inversion. Jivani is using classic political manipulation tactics to redefine the meaning of racism, rebrand equity work as discrimination, and build his own influence in the process. The Post article seems to function more like PR than journalism, giving him a friendly platform to sell this inversion as if it were common sense.
If we want to stay sane in this kind of environment, we need to understand how these political manipulation tactics actually work.
What Jivani’s “Liberal racism” really does
At the heart of Jivani’s message is a simple move: he takes the word “racism”, which most people understand as discrimination against racialized groups, and flips it so it applies to policies created to correct that discrimination. Diversity programs. Equity hiring. Grants aimed at marginalized groups.
A clearer example helps: if a job posting encourages applicants from Indigenous or racialized communities because those communities have historically been excluded, Jivani reframes that as racism against everyone else. It sounds like a fairness argument, but it erases the real reason those policies exist. When every equity measure is labeled as racism, the word stops pointing to real harm and becomes a tool to attack anything Conservatives dislike.
This is inversion. You take a word with moral weight and a shared meaning, turn it around, and throw it back at your opponents. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” did the same thing to truth. Once you accept that every side has its own “facts,” the word fact stops meaning anything. Jivani is doing a similar thing with racism: once the definition is bent far enough, the word stops describing structural discrimination and starts describing whatever is politically convenient.
How the National Post article helps the tactic along
The Post piece is built around a friendly, personality-driven interview where Jivani can control the narrative. In my opinion, that format is doing a lot of quiet work. It presents Jivani as a smart, overachieving Yale grad with a big heart for young Canadians. That framing immediately gives him a kind of authority. It allows him to speak as if his interpretation of “Liberal racism” is simply the reasonable view of a level-headed professional.
The article gives him room to define the terms, set the tone, and shape the narrative without being challenged. There is no serious pushback on whether he has benefited from the very systems he now condemns. No exploration of how racism actually shows up in hiring and promotion. No questioning of what happens to people who depend on equity programs if they are stripped away.
Instead, the profile repeats his phrases, links directly to his sites, and quotes strategists praising his digital presence. To me, it reads more like a promotional feature, possibly even one that has been touched up by AI, than political reporting. This is narrative laundering. A party-crafted narrative is given a neutral tone, then sent back into the world looking reasonable and respectable.
When mainstream outlets launder narratives like this, they become part of the political manipulation tactics. They take extreme or misleading ideas and quietly move them toward the center by treating them as just another “side” of the conversation.
RestoreTheNorth.ca: not policy, but a funnel
If you follow the links to Jivani’s “Restore the North” initiative, you do not find detailed policy proposals from said “overachieving Yale Law graduate”. You find sign-up forms.
Petitions to “fix immigration” by blaming Liberals for bringing in too many people. Campaigns about drug use that make it sound like no programs or expertise exist. A “Free the Zyn” campaign built around nicotine pouches, presented as if it’s a major freedom issue. Calls to ‘restore’ a ‘campus tour’ that mirrors the youth-targeted, culture-war roadshows used by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are odd, because there was never a campus tour to restore in the first place. The word restore evokes nostalgia for something that didn’t exist before now.
Each page on the site is another opportunity to collect names, emails, and emotional triggers. Do you fear immigration? Are you angry about drugs? Do you feel ignored as a young man? The site is a sorting machine. It does not offer nor need any real policy to be effective. Its job is to identify which emotional buttons work on which people, and then press those buttons harder.
This is where political manipulation tactics meet digital marketing. You manufacture a sense of crisis with simple, emotionally loaded claims. You funnel people into sign-ups. Then you contact them again and again with more targeted versions of the same narrative. Over time, these tactics manipulate people’s sense of what is real and what isn’t.
Breaking down key politial manipulation tactics
Here are the main political manipulation tactics at work in this package.
1. Inversion
We already saw the clearest example: calling equity measures “Liberal racism.” Instead of acknowledging racism as a measurable, well-documented problem, inversion blames the tools designed to correct it. Those who hold power get recast as the victims, and people who face systemic barriers get reframed as unfairly advantaged.
2. Destabilizing definitions
Political manipulation tactics like this work by redefining words like racism, discrimination, or fairness to cover whatever is politically useful. One person is talking about racial profiling or wage gaps. Another is using the same word, racism, to describe a job posting encouraging applications from underrepresented groups. When two different definitions of the same word get treated as if they’re the same, the discussion can’t go anywhere. Everyone is talking past each other.
There is literally no accident here. Destabilizing definitions is intended to confuse people and make it harder for them to see what is actually happening.
3. Narrative laundering
The Post profile is a clear example of how partisan messaging slips into mainstream presentation. Instead of being treated as a political operative with a party-built marketing machine, Jivani is presented as a fresh, interesting figure with a “story” worth hearing. Like Jivani’s sites and sign-up funnels, his talking points are packaged neatly and offered to readers without context or critique.
By the time readers finish, “Liberal racism” has been treated respectfully enough that it can start to feel like just another legitimate idea, rather than what it is: a manipulative slogan designed to flip reality.
4. Manufactured moral high ground
None of this works without a claim to righteousness. Jivani presents himself as fighting for fairness and equality, even while attacking the programs meant to reduce inequality. He frames the people he targets as the real racists, positioning himself as the brave truth-teller exposing injustice.
This is how political manipulation tactics turn grievance-driven messaging into something that looks and sounds like a moral crusade.
5. Manufactured crisis
Another tactic at work here is the creation of a manufactured crisis. Ordinary policy debates are inflated into signs that the country is falling apart. Immigration becomes an emergency. Drug policy is described as chaos. Even nicotine pouches turn into a freedom issue. When every topic is framed as an urgent threat, people are more vulnerable to extreme explanations. It becomes easier to sell the idea of “Liberal racism” when the audience has already been primed to believe something is dangerously wrong and someone is to blame.
Why this matters for public understanding
Some people will say this is just politics. Everyone spins. Everyone brands. Why focus on one Conservative MP?
Because tactics like this reshape how people understand basic words and ideas. When the meaning of racism gets twisted out of recognition, it becomes impossible to talk about real inequality. When equity is reframed as discrimination, people lose sight of who is actually being harmed. When media outlets repeat and legitimize these narratives, the distortion spreads further.
It becomes easier for politicians to redirect public frustration toward the wrong targets. Harder for people to tell when they are being manipulated. And harder to have any honest conversation about what fairness should look like in this country.
We must pay attention to the language people use. We must notice when words get stretched, emptied, or flipped to suit the moment. And we must remind ourselves that if a political argument only holds up after the definitions are changed, the problem is not the definition. The problem is the argument.
