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.

Can You Feel It?

It's been building for quite a while, at least a decade, perhaps two. It's this gnawing feeling that we're losing civility. It's ever so gradually fading away.

We're moving from a society into tribes within a society. We cling to our differences both real and imagined and almost always exaggerated or inflamed.

The rift that divides us serves as a fertile breeding ground for xenophobia, racism, and bigotry of every description.

We have our tribes. Everything else is "the other," something to be viewed with hostility, suspicion, even paranoia. They are not "of us" even though we may actually agree on just about everything except a few hot button issues and even they may be exaggerated, inflamed.

I thought of this today after reading an item in The Guardian about the "Brexodus" underway in the UK.  It was about young people now choosing to leave Britain for a better life elsewhere. There were repeated comments about how Brexit has changed the British people, hardened them, made them less tolerant and more xenophobic; how Brexit has fractured British society and left old friends refusing to even speak to each other.

This, of course, is not unique to the UK. It seems to be happening everywhere across the West in varying degrees. We're certainly not immune, not really.

Imagine a Canadian senator on the lawn of the parliament buildings, half-laughingly exhorting protesting truckers to run over every Liberal in the country or the leader of one of two major political parties playing footsie with white nationalists.

Perhaps our tribe doesn't do that but don't we use that to justify embracing the divide, widening the rift? Where does that end? How do we stop it, reverse it? Do we even want some sort of reunification or do we prefer to hunker down within our camp, imagining how we'll trash the others in the next election? Do we have any sense of what's at stake as this deepens, what we might be losing?

We think of our constitutional institutions as a bulwark against extremism but are they really invulnerable? The Americans have got what they consider the most bulletproof constitutional settlement in the world, a divinely inspired gift from the Creator no less. Yet they elect a president who sees that constitutional fabric as a hurdle, not something to be respected and upheld. Worse yet, he has a Republican Congress that prostrates itself before him and stands by and lets him run roughshod over that vaunted constitution. We haven't yet seen how far his ideologically stacked Supreme Court will go in colluding with him but, let's face it, they haven't been chosen to administer justice equally.

This has happened before.  The history of authoritarianism is replete with examples of law makers transforming into law benders before turning into law breakers in service to the tyrant of the day.

Why am I so vexed at this? It's simple - we are embarking on an era far different to anything experienced in the history of human civilization. The world is becoming a place unknown to us or any of our ancestors. It will be more difficult, more challenging, more dangerous and to rise to those events will require a deeply cohesive society in which all - rich and poor, right and left, of all skin hues, religions and ethnicities - collectively shoulder the burden, mutually sacrifice for a greater good and look after each other.

Is there any other way to defend and preserve all the good things that we have? Can we hope to do that if we stand divided in camps glaring and hurling insults at each other?

I don't think the future will go well for us, especially for our youngest generations, if we don't overcome this tribalism. And, if we fail, is it not conceivable that these two camps we have today, left and right, will break down further into sub-groups that do define themselves by rich and poor, by religious faith, colour, ethnicity, geography, demography? How far does this go before tribes break down into gangs?

Optimism is hard to muster. We're not even preparing our nation and our people to meet the truly existential threat of climate change. This is not something that is thirty or fifty or seventy years off. I'm convinced we shall see the world transformed in the course of the 20s even if countries of the northern latitudes are least impacted.  Perhaps that will shake us, bring us to our senses, heal the rift. If not, then what?

The Whiny Man Baby President Goes After Theresa May

With a skin as thin as Donald Trump's it is not surprising that the Great Orange Bloat took to twitter to fire back at Theresa May for her stiff rebuke this morning. The British prime minister took Trump to task for retweeting three videos put out by the racist, anti-Muslim group, "Britain First."

A statement from No 10 said: “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.

“British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right which is the antithesis of the values this country represents, decency, tolerance and respect. It is wrong for the president to have done this.”

Decency, tolerance and respect, why the nerve of that Limey.

Donald Trump has publicly rebuked Theresa May over her criticism of anti-Muslim propaganda, opening an extraordinary diplomatic spat between the transatlantic allies.

“Theresa @theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom,” the US president tweeted on Wednesday evening. “We are doing just fine!”

The angry tirade, crowning one of the most wayward days yet of Trump’s presidency, earned a swift putdown from the US senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who met May at Downing Street last week to discuss terrorism threats to both countries. He tweeted: “PM @theresa_may is one of the great world leaders, I have incredible love and respect for her and for the way she leads the United Kingdom, especially in the face of turbulence.”

Pile On

The Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, described the retweets as “abhorrent, dangerous and a threat to our society.” He and several other members of parliament called for the state visit to be cancelled.

The Labour MP David Lammy posted: “Trump sharing Britain First. Let that sink in. The President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend of ours. @realDonaldTrump you are not welcome in my country and my city.”

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, urged Trump to remove the retweets. And Brendan Cox, widow of Jo Cox, an MP murdered last year by a man reportedly shouting “Britain first” as she shot and stabbed her, told CNN: “I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order.

“Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment of an organization that is a hate-driven organization on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics. This is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan.”

Trump does indeed seem to be in some free fall mental meltdown. The guy is unhinged. When you couple his mental instability with his astonishing ignorance and impulsiveness, we, the world, have got a very dangerous loose cannon on the deck.

How the Leader of the Free World Became the Leader of the Global Right Wing.

AmeriKa's president, Donald Trump, will not be the leader of the free world. He will, however, be the leader of the global right wing. Across Europe, the radical right is embracing the next US leader as one of their own. Donald Trump validates their ugly bigotry, racism and xenophobia. He is one of them. It's no accident that he's also warmly received by the radical right Netanyahu government in Israel.

In the Middle East, the strongman thugs who rule with iron fists in the post-Arab Spring era couldn't be happier.

He will be a bit of both but radically different, too, predicts Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser with the Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, who has discussed the future of the region with Trump’s advisers in recent months. Trump’s chief priority, he said, will be to fight the Islamic State, while outsourcing the rest of the region’s security to Russia and to Arab states.

Words like “moderate” and “democracy” won’t feature in a Trump administration’s Middle East vocabulary, he added. “We are now engaged in realpolitik.”

For the region’s strongmen, most of whom had fraught relations with the Obama administration, that is welcome news. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi have hailed Trump’s election as a chance to reset their badly frayed relationships with Washington.

Hold onto your hats. With ideology this rancid driving AmeriKa's foreign and military policy, we could be in for a very sharp and wild ride.

Will Trump Embolden Bigots in Canada?

Yesterday we read Kinsella's post about a white power, Alt.Right handbill posted in his neighbourhood. Today we have an account from CBC Ottawa of a woman, Anna Maranta, a rabbi no less, who awakened in the early hours of Tuesday morning to find a swastika and the word "kike" spray painted across the front door of her Glebe home.

"I went to bed a little later than usual and woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30, and as I was walking back to my room coming down the hall I saw a reflection on my front door, which is a glass window door, that kind of startled me," she said.

"I knew right away it was a swastika."

Rabbi Maranta raised the obvious concern:

"It's one thing to be marching down the street and be yelled at from the sidelines," she said. "This is somebody who came onto … my property, onto a lit porch, somebody who knows my routine, and so it's likely somebody … I know in this neighbourhood, and that hurts me even more."

Maranta believes the election of president-elect Donald Trump could be related to the racist graffiti on her door.

"My first thought is that this is an example of what happens when you allow somebody who is in a position of power to speak openly racist, bigoted, misogynistic language and don't censor [it] in any way," Maranta said.

"It allows other people to express their feelings, to express their hatred, and to feel like they've been given permission to do so because no one has effectively silenced that."

Is this an early glimpse into an AmeriKan contagion creeping across our border? Maybe, maybe not. That said we have to treat it as a threat not just to targeted people of colour, immigrants, Muslims or Jews. It's a threat to our society, to what in part distinguishes us from the sometimes narrow, intolerant bigotry that now seems to flourish elsewhere whether in the US, Britain, continental Europe, South Asia, the Middle East - pick a corner of the world. If we don't want that ugliness in Canada we have to choose to reject it. We have to get serious about hate crimes and reinforce minority protections. We have to realize that America can no longer be our beacon which means we can no longer outsource our economic, military and foreign policy to Washington. We have to chart our own course something we once were pretty good at doing when we had this leader named Trudeau.

Eisenhower saved his departing speech to warn Americans of the dangerous rise of what he termed the "military industrial complex." The warning went unheeded and that complex as it was in the 50s has metastasized throughout American society, the US economy and the nation's body politic. What will Obama have to say as he vacates the premises for his successor? He's given hints in statements during his farewell tour of Europe.

Barack Obama has warned of a "rise in a crude sort of nationalism" following the Brexit and US presidential votes.

Speaking in Greece on his final foreign trip, he said: "We have to guard against... tribalism built around an 'us' or a 'them'."

He said the US was painfully aware of the danger of divisions "along lines of race or religion or ethnicity".

Mr Obama said the UK's vote to leave the EU and the US vote showed that people generally were now "less certain of their national identities and place in the world" and that had produced populist movements both on the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald, has a report on how Trump's victory has traumatized school children, especially kids of colour, in the United States.

Anti-Semites for Trump.

He's earned the fulsome endorsement of the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, and its Imperial Wizard. He's pretty much the candidate of choice for all manner of American extremists and bigots. He's their guy.

Among Trump's cadre of supporters are America's anti-semites. It seems they love The Donald.

She had seen her face superimposed on the body of a concentration camp inmate. She had been called "a slimy Jewess." She had been told she "deserved the oven." One anonymous individual had electronically harassed her for 19 hours straight.

Things got so bad that Bethany Mandel, a 30-year-old freelance writer in Highland Park, New Jersey, decided one afternoon last spring to drive to a nearby gun shop. A mother of two small children, she now keeps a .22 in her home.

What had she done to provoke so much vitriol? She posted some messages on Twitter drawing attention to the fact that Donald Trump seemed to have a lot of anti-Semitic supporters.

In some respects, Ms Mandel's story has become a familiar one. She is among hundreds of Jewish journalists who have been the target of anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.

You're known by the company you keep which is a word to the wise for the Trump supporters who keep leaving comments on this blog. You're backing a dangerous deviant, a guy who attacks women, credible women, who accuse him of the very conduct he's caught boasting of. 

It's Like The Good Old Days of Reform, All Over Again.

Mr. Speaker, I Rise on a Point of Fodder

Preston Manning's legacy might just be his relentless efforts while Reform leader to keep the bigotry in his caucus under wraps.  Those who were too obvious to be ignored were sometimes shown the door although it did have to be pretty outrageous.

But we all know there's plenty of them still around even if they have been trained to bite their tongues.  Every now and then one of them stumbles to remind us. The latest is "Lardass Larry" Miller.

In a conversation with a caller to CFOS in Owen Sound, Ont., Mr. Miller said he was baffled by a court’s decision to strike down the Harper government’s ban on wearing face coverings during citizenship ceremonies.

“I’m so sick and tired of people wanting to come here because they know it’s a good country and then they want to change things before they even really officially become a Canadian,” said Mr. Miller, the MP for Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound.

“Like, frankly, if you’re not willing to show your face in a ceremony that you’re joining the best country …. if you don’t like that or don’t want to do that, stay the hell where you came from.”

“I think most Canadians feel the same,” he said. “That’s maybe saying it a little harshly, but it’s the way I feel.”

Sometimes you just gotta speak from the heart and tell it like it is, eh Larry?

America's Disgusting Descent into Its Darkest Past

It's happening again. America's radical right is on a racist rampage that could, unless it is checked forcefully and rapidly by their own side, usher in a return to the vilest side of America of the past.

Color of Change is sounding the warning about Tea Party racism reaching into the top echelons of the movement:

"...yesterday, one of the Tea Party's biggest leaders proved the NAACP's point. Mark Williams, the public face of the Tea Party Express, attacked the NAACP as a "racist" organization, and said "they make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever."3,4 He went on to write a blog post implying that Black people don't like to work or think for themselves, that we depend on welfare, and that we want to benefit from White people's tax dollars so we can have a widescreen TV in every room.5 Sadly, we're not exaggerating.

If Tea Party leaders want to have any credibility on race, they need to start by kicking Mark Williams out of their movement. If they refuse, it will be clearer than ever that Tea Party leaders accept and rely on racism as an integral part of their approach to politics.

You can help us take the first step. Please join us in challenging Tea Party leaders to reject Williams' statements and remove him from his position at the Tea Party Express. And please ask your friends and family to do the same. It takes just a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/teaparty/?id=1846-947344

The NAACP was absolutely right in calling out the tea party, and we applaud them for doing so. The NAACP has a history of combating racism and seeking a more just country for all Americans, and their action was a demonstration of that commitment.

While some of us want to brush the Tea Party off as fringe, the reality is that they are attempting to build political power, and it's important that they not embrace the kind of racism that Mark Williams represents. Of course, if they choose to do so, then it's important to make clear to all Americans that they are a home for racism and bigotry.

The racism we've seen within the Tea Party movement is dangerous — it's the promotion of a hateful agenda under the guise of political empowerment. Forcing the hand of Tea Party leaders is important if we want to prevent bigotry and hate from driving mainstream political conversations, and worse, public policy."

What begins in America oozes north soon enough and with Harper's fundamentalist radical rightwing there'll be plenty of Tea Party sympathizers. There's no room in my Canada, none at all, for this sort of scum.

And our increasingly idiotic cousins south of the line seem startled at the return of the Black Panthers.

Here's Another Surge - the Ku Klux Klan Rides Again

You can blame it on the times, I suppose. Gay marriage, the immigration problem, that thing with the Islamists, globalization, any number of reasons but the outcome is the same - there's a resurgence being staged by the Ku Klux Klan.

According to the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Klan membership is up - somewhere between 5,000 and 8.000 in some 180 chapters. Worse than that, however, is that the Klan is getting much more active and is spreading into new territory with new chapters in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that, "...it is the increase in activity, including rallies, recruitment drives, and distribution of racist literature, and the partnering with skinheads, neo-Nazis, and other kinds of hate groups, that civil rights groups find troubling.

"As it did from its founding, the KKK views itself has having a religious dimension. Members see "lighting" a cross as a symbol of faith. Today, Christian Evangelicals are much more likely than mainstream Protestants or Roman Catholics to believe that "newcomers threaten traditional American customs and values," according to the Pew Research Center.

"It is this trend in attitudes that the Klan hopes to use in recruiting new supporters among those opposed to US immigration policies and practices, according to Klan leaders and expert observers.

"'While we generally think of it as a white supremacist organization, the Klan at its peak was virulently anti-immigrant, particularly with regard to Catholic immigrants, Irish, and southern European,' says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

"But, he adds, 'The whole nature of hate group membership has changed with the advent of the Internet. You can take bits and pieces from whatever group you like without necessarily becoming a card- carrying member.'"