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Category: Asch Experiments
Author: Holly Revollàn-Huelin
Date: July 21, 2025 — 5 min read
This article examines a Facebook comment by Sylvia Benoit through the lens of the Asch Conformity Experiments, revealing how emotional outbursts can mask deeper efforts to control public discourse. Her demand that truth be handled through private messages and phone calls isn’t about accuracy—it’s about preserving the local narrative and silencing contradiction. In communities where group identity trumps open dialogue, even simple facts become dangerous. Read More...
Category: The Local Paradox
Author: Holly Revollàn-Huelin
Date: July 19, 2025 — 6 min read
Following a staged photo-op with SSHRC-backed researcher Nick Mercer, Newfoundland’s local resistance to industrial wind development fractures into infighting. This editorial unpacks how federal consultants exploit emotional divisions to construct curated opposition narratives, neutralizing dissent while capturing optics. Drawing from Van Assche’s "Local Paradox" theory, it reveals how narrative control replaces real governance in vulnerable communities. Read More...
Category: The Local Paradox
Author: Holly Revollàn-Huelin
Date: July 18, 2025 — 4 min read
This is a closer look at how federal consultant Nick Mercer embedded himself in a local resistance movement and used a single photo-op to manufacture the illusion of dialogue, trust, and consent. Framed in smiles and solidarity, the image was anything but neutral—it served as a calculated piece of policy theatre, transforming grassroots opposition into optics that support Newfoundland’s top-down Net Zero agenda. Read More...
Category: The Local Paradox
Author: Holly Revollàn-Huelin
Date: July 15, 2025 — 4 min read
A federally funded academic study led by UPEI’s Dr. Nick Mercer is quietly collecting local narratives in Newfoundland’s Port au Port region— one of the most outspoken communities against Net Zero industrialization. Disguised as grassroots consultation, this project taps into federal SSHRC grants and local activist groups to legitimize future development plans under the banner of "community research." This editorial exposes how story-gathering is being weaponized as policy justification—and how locals, unpaid and unguarded, may be surrendering more than they realize. Read More...