Sunday, April 28, 2019

A Window Into the Hateful Minds of Canada's Far Right


The Globe & Mail has got its hands on what they were never supposed to see - 150,000 chat room messages exchanged among Canadian rightwing extremists.

They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in every province, in communities large and small. 
They gather on the internet to strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized. They are the new far right in Canada. 
The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old multicultural consensus in this country.
The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.
The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.
Our "friend" may run cover for Andrew Scheer and his dog-whistle messaging but the Tories and their leader are not on the side of the angels.
The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the upcoming election.

EXPLORING CONSERVATIVE PARTY INROADS 
In early 2017, members of the Canadian Super Players chat group set out to make their mark on mainstream politics. Their vehicle for doing so: the leadership race of the Conservative Party of Canada.
The first candidate they rallied behind was Kellie Leitch, who was proposing screening immigrants for cultural values. When her leadership campaign stalled, they moved en masse to support Maxime Bernier. 
One person in the chat room, who went by the name of Cyrus online and who described himself as a law student, said he attended a Bernier event in March, 2017, and described the politician “dog whistling pretty hard. He mentioned western values and western civilization a lot.” But Cyrus was less persuaded by Mr. Bernier’s libertarian policies and was unhappy that he did not take a stronger stance against asylum seekers crossing the border on foot. 
A few other chat-room participants praised Andrew Scheer, but the consensus was that Mr. Bernier was the better bet. Dank, the student teacher, even expressed dismay that he couldn’t cast more than one ballot for Mr. Bernier.
It's a pretty dark look into these groups and it's pretty obvious they're not supporting the Liberals or the New Dems or the Greens. It deserves to be read in its entirety. Check out the link at the top.

8 comments:

John B. said...

It's always been the undervalued asset and the leaders of these parties know exactly what they're doing. They'll play stupid but their bean counters know for sure. In some way it's an illustration of the Canadian brand of libertarianism returning to its roots. Trump has given them the template and helped to shape the optimum conditions for this long awaited voyage home.

I've been listening to representatives of that asset for years and now they're comfortably out of the closet and louder than ever. Put that together with the libertarian money that's finding its way to their evangelists and you've got a movement that will provide the margins that could give them enough local victories to be first past the post federally. Take a look now at what they're doing on YouTube.

The Mound of Sound said...


I agree with all that. They're a menace to civil society and conservatives flirt with them at their - and our - peril.

Owen Gray said...

Deeply disturbing. These folks are coming out from under their rocks.

Anonymous said...

This is highly disturbing but when you go over to the Globe article and read thru the comments section it is full of the alt-right bots defending all of it and portending it is all ‘normal’. Just shows the size of this alt right army ready to launch a full out assault on Canadian democracy come the writ drop. The RCMP really needs to start digging in to all of these creeps. They are not benign and are responsible for bringing guys like Kenney and Ford to power. It’s all disheartening. Like a coup launched in the dark shadows and the conservative operatives know full well what is going on. How does one combat all of this? The far right is now gaining ground in Spain. It’s everywhere this dark force.

John B. said...

I agree that the sources of funding for this opinion shaping and election meddling should be investigated, but I don’t expect that the RCMP would conduct one into any matter that could involve CRAP Party operations unless, as in the robocalls matter, they had no choice but were certain they could design it to fail.

Anonymous said...

An investigation is warranted.
Should the RCMP step in to consider Scheer's funding sources, especially if he's getting piles of cash and support from the likes of the Koch brothers?
We are in deep doo if we don't do something fast and pressure our MPs to crack down on racism and international influence/lobby groups, especially from the right.

Anonymous said...

Yellow Vests Canada Exposed, ARC and many others have been digging deep for a lot longer than the Grope and Flail,

Trailblazer said...

As a young man, in the UK, I remember Enoch Powell preaching intolerance disguised as nationalism.
His views are still highly regarded within the UK.

I often found that most of the brown people haters were those that bled the states social safety net dry and were just as often the least productive individuals!

TB