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White supremacist dumbass hour
68 Plays5 years ago
We’re breaking down organized white supremacy like a beat-em up side scroller – starting with the easiest baddies and moving on to the biggest and scariest villains at the end. We’ve also got a healthy dose of media criticism as we discuss the baffling decision by the Globe and Mail to platform Ezra Levant and the troubling trend of mainstream media getting played like a fiddle by Nazis.
Further reading:
Edmonton police investigating blog posts targeting LGBTQ gym
Why Are So Many White Nationalists 'Virulently Anti-LGBT'?
Lyndsey Shepherd door knocking with Heather Leung
How Ezra Levant’s Globe Op-ed Got Published
Andy Ngo: How a Right-Wing Troll Managed to Manipulate the Mainstream Media
Furries Got an Alt-Right Troll Banned From Their Convention
Resource: Confronting White Nationalism in Schools
Neo-Nazis Are Organizing Secretive Paramilitary Training Across America
Atomwaffen, an American Neo-Nazi Terror Group, Is In Canada
Police Warn that Accused Neo-Nazi Canadian Soldier Could Have Fled to U.S.
Winnipeg Free Press investigation and infiltration of The Base
Recommended
Transcript
Fundraising Drive Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney coming here and off the top with a bit of a fundraising pitch. It's September and we are still in the midst of our September fundraising drive and we've been blown away by the support. We even got a message from supporter Michael Jans that I just have to share with you. He tells me that he canceled his pets health insurance to donate to Progress Alberta
00:00:18
Speaker
Now, I don't know if that's real or not, but I did just have to share that with you. Jan goes on to say that while his healthy indoor cat will be fine, he can't say the same about our province. There are thousands of children living in poverty that's only going to get worse for them under a Kenny government that's going to cut social spending to the bone. He loves how Progress Alberta speaks truth to power, and he wants us to hold this government to account. And Michael, I just want to say thank you for your donation, and thank you for your faith in Progress Alberta.
00:00:44
Speaker
So go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons and become a monthly donor. $5 a month is our base ask. $15 a month gets you some sweet to be determined swag and $30 a month gets you a sweet new t-shirt and not just some t-shirt with the progress of a logo on it. We've got a custom design riffing on the whole on Albertin activities committee that you may have seen going around the internet recently. They're actually really cool and awesome.
00:01:08
Speaker
The goal here is 200 patrons. Right now we're about a quarter of the way there. So again, head to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons and become a monthly donor. Thanks so much.
The Threat of Organized White Supremacy
00:01:39
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're back in Treaty 6 territory and today we're breaking down organized white supremacy like a beat-em-up side-scroller video game. Think Final Fight, Double Dragon, that kind of thing. We're gonna start with the easiest, dumbest baddies at the beginning and end with the biggest and scariest villains at the end. And to do that this week, we have three amazing guests.
00:02:02
Speaker
In studio, we've got Katie Cutting, an Edmonton-based filmmaker and transgender activist. We've also got Bridget Sterling, a PhD student at the University of Alberta in education policy and a co-founder of Hate Free YEG. And on the phone, we've got Mac Lamoureux, a local boy done good. He's a senior reporter at Vice whose a full-time beat is writing about white supremacy and people who want to create a white ethno state. And I'm sure Mac
00:02:27
Speaker
We'll be just fine in a few years from doing all this. Hello and welcome everyone to the show. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for having us. Hi Duncan. Yeah, it's a pleasure. So I think the easiest jumping off point for what is tentatively titled white supremacist dumbass hour is Ryan Dean and what recently happened at Queer Flex here in Edmonton. Bridget, Katie, do either of you want to kind of just explain what happened and then we'll kind of go from there?
00:02:56
Speaker
Um, yeah. So Ryan Dean is one of the people who runs a white supremacist blog and he likes to make little posts, um, poking at, uh, basically whoever he hates that week. And this past week he made a post about my friends over at QueerFlex, um, talking about how they're,
00:03:19
Speaker
And what is QueerFlex? QueerFlex is an LGBTQ plus gym and they do a lot of training around accessibility for LGBTQ folks in the fitness world. So like very, while they're doing a lot of work and they're based in some great politics, they're also really mundane from that standpoint. These are people doing bench presses and pushups and things.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, and doing so with a little sticker on their shirt that says, what is it? Strong bodies, tender hearts. So it's a hippie gym, basically. It's great. And what did Ryan do specifically? So Ryan wrote posts essentially doxxing them and targeting them, saying stuff along the lines of Queer Flex being a training,
00:04:16
Speaker
Antifa training group. There we go. Yeah. Thank you for the wording. And as a result, they decided that they were going to close their public or their group classes for the time being, hoping to make sure that they weren't targeted because there have been a few incidents in the past with this individual showing up places and trying to be physically intimidating and all sorts of fun stuff.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, and it really represents an escalation of over the summer. I mean, we've seen lots of activity from Ryan, especially I think over the last year. But I mean, he's been pretty active locally and white supremacist circles for a while. But over the summer, we've really seen a ramping up of his targeting of LGBTQ folks in particular, he's been showing up to, you know, rallies in support of gay straight alliances in Alberta.
00:05:06
Speaker
and doxxing and harassing people who speak at those events or who appear at them and taking pictures of and harassing queer kids and all kinds of stuff that's been really kind of reprehensible and for whatever reason that's his current trajectory is harassing queer folks.
00:05:26
Speaker
So this post goes up, QueerFlex shuts
Profiling Ryan Dean's Dangerous Activities
00:05:28
Speaker
down for fear of their safety. And again, Ryan Dean is, from what I understand, most of his online identities and sites and pages have kind of been mass reported and he's scurrying about trying to create new ones. But Ryan Dean is a particularly spectacular example of white supremacist
00:05:50
Speaker
And Antiracist Canada has done a lot of really good reporting on him. One post, I think, kind of describes him really accurately as just a glorious dumpster fire. He has started and or been kicked out of or been associated with
00:06:07
Speaker
eight or nine different white supremacist orgs, which kind of just speaks to how these things kind of have the half-life of a fruit fly. But I'm just going to list a few of them off right here. I don't know if any of these will ring a bell to you, Mac. But let's just list them off. We've got the Canadian Combat Coalition, an organization that he started and was then kicked out of.
00:06:24
Speaker
We've got the North American freedom fighters. He's a soldier of Odin. He's been a soldier of Odin at some point at least he's claimed to be He's a former member of the Guardians of Alberta He's part of ghost squad Canada and his coup two kind of like current projects that that I'm aware of are this Patriot pride Canada wide kind of blog and quasi news site and The hilariously named clan with a C and two ends He is he is just
00:06:53
Speaker
a failure on kind of every level. And I think he's just been around for so long that people have just run into him kind of all over town. And I know you're from Edmonton originally, Mac. Don't you have a bit of personal experience with this guy?
00:07:08
Speaker
I do, but actually I didn't get to know Ryan Dean until I moved to Toronto to take my job with Vice. He kind of came onto my radar after I did this kind of in-depth investigation into the Alberta Threepers in 2017. And he never really kind of was able to join the Threepers. He was a little bit too much of a loose cannon to join like the anti-Muslim brigade of Alberta, but
00:07:35
Speaker
So what he did in order to kind of like defend their honor, well I don't know if he did, so I'll say this, what Patriot Pride Canada-wide, which he's kind of like the sole guy behind, but again I don't know if it was for sure him, they kind of mocked up some images. I think it was a global news headline, and it was a city news headline that said that I was arrested for sexually assaulting a minor.
00:07:56
Speaker
And then they sent that around to kind of like my family. And it got back to one of my cousins, and on Christmas, one of them was like, what are you, uh, we need to talk about something. And I was like, oh, is it, uh, is it about, like, sexually assaulting a minor stuff, Andre? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, no, that's, uh, that's not, that's not correct. Uh, so, yeah, he's, uh, he's an interesting guy that I have had some run-ins with the past. He doesn't like me and,
00:08:25
Speaker
You know, I kind of look at him as like one of the goofier, the more I kind of start reporting on darker and darker things within kind of this white nationalist neo-Nazi movement, the more I kind of like view him as a sideshow, but like what he did at Queer Flex is having real impact on people, so you can't really just write people off like I suppose I'm doing a little bit with people like Ryan Dean.
00:08:48
Speaker
No, I mean, he's clearly a fuckup just as a person, but he can also be quite dangerous. He can also make people's lives a lot fucking worse, even just with his usual, just by being a fuckup. And I think something that's worth bringing up in this context is Anti-Racist Canada, the kind of online blog collective,
Gender, Queerphobia, and White Supremacy
00:09:06
Speaker
which
00:09:06
Speaker
There's a lot of good reporting on Ryan Dean, and I've seen this said other places online, too, is that he does have a history of domestic violence, domestic abuse, and that is a huge red flag when it comes to people who can possibly commit violence in the future. So I think that is something that we just all have to be aware of and that he is. It's really easy to make fun of this guy, and he is just like a
00:09:27
Speaker
Like a really stupid doofus terrible person, but like he's also got a Domestic violence thing on his on his record and that's something that we should be aware of One thing I think we also have to talk about is
00:09:41
Speaker
And this is perhaps a wider discussion beyond Ryan Dean is just the queer phobia that's kind of embedded within white supremacy, right? Like organized white supremacy views gender roles in this extremely rigid way, right? Like men and women are supposed to be doing one thing and one thing only. Yeah, it's absolutely. I mean, there's a huge amount of sexism within white supremacy, right?
00:10:05
Speaker
And it's a queer phobia, so a queer phobia comes into it because it becomes very strongly about gender norms. But we also see a very strongly ascribed rule for women that we see dating back into very early fascist movements. Women are supposed to be producing babies and caring for the home. And women are to be preserved and protected as the future of the race and all of this kind of rhetoric. So what you see is all of these things that come out of that, like tradwife,
00:10:34
Speaker
things and stuff like that, this behavior. And you do see a strong relationship between that and domestic violence as well. Domestic violence is one of the predictors for escalation for white supremacists. And if you take a look at the pattern that Ryan Dean has of targeting people, it's very often targeting queer folks and women. You don't see him often going after the biggest, toughest guys in groups. It's often trying to pick up women.
00:11:03
Speaker
queer folks or men that he perceives as, in whatever way, not as masculine as he thinks he is, right? So it becomes a sort of masculinity aspect to what's going on, and that's quite normal in white supremacist movements where you've even seen groups like Soldiers Voting in Northern Guards split over whether or not women should be involved, right, where women, the perception of whether or not women even have a place in leading movements.
00:11:30
Speaker
And Katie, you were saying your friends have had run-ins with Dean and his ilk before, right? Yeah, so both through doxxing. I have at least two other people I know quite well who've been doxxed by him in the last three months on his blog.
00:11:45
Speaker
running into him in the streets, whether it's at rallies and actions, or whether it's him coming out to specific closed events and trying to be an intimidating physical presence, it really does seem to be that, I guess, I get this feeling that he's this kind of guy who gets obsessed about
00:12:12
Speaker
one person for a short period of time thinks that everyone needs to pay attention to that person. He's going to blow them up. And then someone else gets his attention and he'll see a news story about someone or whatever it is, and he's going to go after them, right? So he doesn't seem to have any staying power, but
00:12:31
Speaker
because his activity seems to be escalating and because we do have this history of violence against partners, it really makes me wonder like how many of these focuses until either an opportunity presents itself for violence against someone or premeditated violence. Yes, as somebody who's been doxxed by him, one of my bigger concerns is not something really premeditated in plan, but whether I encounter him in the street.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also worth pointing out that earlier this year, or later last year, I can't remember the exact date, but Ryan Dean and Tyson Hunt, former soldier of Odin, now in a Odin type guy, they staked out al-Rashid Mosque and they were harassing worshipers outside.
00:13:19
Speaker
One of them, I think one of them actually went inside and yeah, they got, I believe, visited by the cops for that, but there was never any actual consequences. Anyways, Ryan Dean, a huge fuck up, glorious dumpster fire, failure as a human being and as a white supremacist, but still, keep an eye out for him. Ryan Dean likes to hold himself up as this media figure,
Media's Role in Platforming Extremism
00:13:40
Speaker
right? And Patriot Pride Canada-wide, he kind of views as this reporting project, and it really is a kind of common trope.
00:13:47
Speaker
when you look at white supremacist figures, right? We've got Ezra Levant, we've got Faith Goldie, we've got Lauren Southern, we've got Andy Ngo, we've got these people.
00:13:58
Speaker
who have made a living, really, kind of gaming the media and creating platforms for themselves where they are, essentially mainstreaming white supremacy, Islamophobia, all these kind of terrible ideas. And it was extremely concerning to me when I saw just earlier this week the Globe and Mail giving Ezreal Avant a platform, just an entire like thousand word column to sound off. Mack, did you see this?
00:14:26
Speaker
I did, actually. Did you just see the new story in Candeland where it came directly from the Globe and Mail's EIC, who commissioned the story from as it wasn't even like an opinion editor. It was like the top guy. I literally just kind of like, before we opt on here, read the headline and like the deck of that story. So I can't talk about it too in depth, but
00:14:46
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it's kind of like a problem from the top down at a lot of these places. We just saw it kind of happen at the Vancouver Sun as well. But they've been doing it for quite a while. Yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts?
00:14:59
Speaker
I mean, I think there's some quotes here. There's some tweets from Jesse Wenty that I think went viral that I think is just worth repeating, right? Like, giving platforms to white supremacists doesn't mean you support free speech. It means you support white supremacy. And that's from Jesse Wenty. I mean, I think
00:15:17
Speaker
I think mainstream Canadian media is just wildly unprepared to deal with the rise of fascism here in Canada. This is just example number 7,000. This is a huge fucking blind spot. Hearing out the bad ideas of white supremacists
00:15:34
Speaker
is just ultimately deeply misguided. They are not interested in debate. Their ideas are abhorrent. They want to create a white ethno state and deport and genocide all brown people. What they're using when you're giving them this platform is they're using that opportunity to organize and to recruit and disrupt society as it exists. And giving them a platform to do that is the wrong fucking thing to do. And that's where I feel. I don't know how you two feel about it. Yeah, absolutely.
00:16:00
Speaker
I feel like I've had this same frustrating conversation over and over again with local journalists and how they cover white supremacist groups in the city is don't if you go to them and you ask them for a quote and you just report that straight up as some kind of balance neutral quote.
00:16:16
Speaker
First of all, you're giving them a platform. And second of all, they're not always very smart people, but they're very cunning about the way they manipulate media. And they're not going to tell a journalist the truth about what they're doing or what's going on with them. So I've been trying to talk to local media a lot about talk to the people who are impacted by this stuff. Talk about the effect that this has on people because
00:16:39
Speaker
Otherwise, yeah, you're just giving them a platform to recruit and to normalize, too, because they don't always recruit people to their groups. What they do is they kind of plant these seeds that say, well, maybe the soldiers of Odin are just a bunch of dudes who go and try to feed homeless people on the weekend. Maybe they're not really out trying to do this. And it's a longstanding strategy of white supremacist groups to do this kind of work.
00:17:03
Speaker
And I think some of it comes from media that is becoming more right wing in the country, and it also comes from this sort of false balance thing that we see around so much reporting. There's just this like lib brain mindset that just melts when faced with people who are not treating the system in good faith. And like just a couple of months ago, reporters from every news outlet, Globe, CBC, Global, CTV,
00:17:25
Speaker
Boycotted a scrum with Christian Phelan unless they let someone from the rebel into that scrum It's like no you do not stand in fucking solidarity with the rebel they are they are literally organizing working To the turf run you out of business and to destroy the entire order that you believe like politics and society should be structured around Like like you are helping them
00:17:45
Speaker
It still just blows my mind that this poisonous-lived mindset where it's like, oh, they're journalists. They're doing journalism work. I must stand in solidarity with them. It just, I can't deal with it. Well, you look at the coverage of the Yellow Vest movement over the wintertime where people were sort of in this surprise state after a few months. Oh, there's white supremacists there. And the white supremacy was there from the start, but it was covered in this bizarre way.
00:18:12
Speaker
Well, and I think you see it in the Yellow Vest, but also in the Ezra Levant piece, where mainstream media, and especially the one company we have in Canada for all of our media,
00:18:33
Speaker
essentially letting them provide watered down far right wing beliefs. And then, oh, you're going to follow them back to their platform. And you start reading the platform. And that's where the far right ideas come out.
00:18:49
Speaker
So every time you platform them, you say, oh, you give audiences this opportunity to say, oh, these people are, you know, they've got some good ideas, right? Even reading Ezra's piece, one thing that came out to me was like, oh yeah, this is written to basically rope in anyone who has a strong neoliberal upbringing and bring them in and say, hey, look,
00:19:20
Speaker
We're giving this balance piece, but really it's just a way to get people into his, oh my goodness, outlet. There's a weird prioritizing of free expression over all other chartered values that start to go on around that too, that I think even if we're having a conversation in a liberal society, why is free expression the only value that is worth defensing?
00:19:47
Speaker
Mac, you went to journalism school, I went to journalism school, what is it about journalism school that poisons people's brains? I mean, maybe not just journalism school, but the profession itself that just poisons people's brains and makes them unable to see what is actually fucking happening here.
00:20:04
Speaker
Well it's such, I mean I might not be the right guy to ask because I don't really like the people in our profession all that much. I look like there's individually I like a lot of them but like as a profession it's so fucking circle jerky.
00:20:19
Speaker
Like it just, we just love to pat ourselves on the back for kind of standing up and being like, oh no, we need to let them talk. We know better than you guys and we kind of love being the gatekeepers. Um, and I mean, sometimes we just need to shut the fuck up and realize that not
00:20:38
Speaker
free speech doesn't mean giving somebody a platform. And also, I think people need to get a lot more familiar with the idea of the Overton window, which is something that a lot of these guys are attempting to kind of push forward. When you have somebody like I believe it was Mark Hecht, or I don't know how to say his last name was in the Vancouver Sun, who kind of put out that a rather abhorrent screed against multiculturalism and diversity. When you have that,
00:21:04
Speaker
It kinda, everybody looks at it and like, that's terrible, we can't have that, but you have somebody who comes up and kinda just pushes the line a little further, but not to that extent, and everybody's gonna be like, well, you know what, it wasn't as bad as that Mark guy they ran, maybe we'll let
Journalism's Struggle with White Supremacy
00:21:17
Speaker
them run this. And they're just slowly inching it towards, in this case, further right. And in terms of why journalists' brains are broken, it's probably because it's a very,
00:21:32
Speaker
elitist profession I'm one of the only kind of people I know in this profession that kind of comes from like a blue-collar background a Lot of people are pretty well off well to do in this profession because it's really hard to make a goddamn living in it you need maybe some help and so
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah. I guess maybe that answer is it? I don't know. I wish we were better is what I would say. I think we all wish that. But it is a question that I think the profession has to reckon with and deal with as fascism kind of rises and these people continue to organize and they're in the streets and they're in our politics. The next thing I think is worth talking about is the liquid cement milkshake herd around the world. That's right.
00:22:21
Speaker
We're talking about Andy Ngo. Andy Ngo, if you're not familiar with, he's attached to, or he was attached to a website called Quelette. This is the world's kind of premier phrenology blog. He made it into the news after he was hit with milkshakes and roughed up at a rally. I don't know how you would characterize that rally.
00:22:48
Speaker
in Portland where anti-fascists and fascists clashed in the streets. He spun that incident into, I think, around $200,000 in a GoFundMe and immense amounts of news coverage, and was able to really manipulate the mainstream media into giving him massive amounts of airtime and sympathetic coverage.
00:23:12
Speaker
Where do we want to start with a figure like him? I think he's, again, broadly emblematic of what's wrong with the journalism profession and how it covers white supremacy. But Katie, have you watched his footage at all? Are you familiar with his work? I haven't really seen any of his stuff yet, no. But he honestly sounds like
00:23:36
Speaker
like a straight across replacement for a lot of other people who want to do the same thing, you know? Yeah. For me, what's what the issue is, it's not so much that he represents what's wrong with journalism is that he represents a sort of wide eyed innocent pseudo innocent pretense of being a journalist at all. Right. Like he's not like this to be really clear. It's not he's not a journalist. He produces media, but but this sort of
00:24:04
Speaker
And we see this from a lot of these sort of right-wing figures as these pseudo-journalists that are not really, and it gets used to circle back a little bit, although not to spend too much time on it. But it relates back to the claims of people like Ryan Dean or another local hero, Jeff Sharp, to be journalists or media outlets of some sort that's credible, that should get press passes, that should do all these things. So it's not really journalism, it's grifting.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Describing it as a grift is probably one of the most accurate things you can do. Speaking of pseudo-journalists, I think this is the perfect time to bring up everyone's least favorite pseudo-journalist. Someone who had kind of disappeared from public view for a while had been pretty de-platformed, but Faith Goldie is back in the news. Did everyone see this? Yeah.
00:24:56
Speaker
We live in hell. We do live in hell. Hell is us. Yeah, I did not expect to see Faith Goldie become a regular, be making regular appearances in the federal election, but one of her best friends, apparently, Justina McCaffrey, is running to be an MP in somewhere in Ontario for the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:25:20
Speaker
The Liberals dug up some video of them together and released it in advance of a campaign event with Justine McCaffrey and Andrew Scheer. And then bizarrely, just the other day, the Conservative Party of Canada was released some statement from Faith Goldie that she had had drinks with Justin Trudeau or something, and had released a video of her walking down the street with a microphone harassing him as proof. Mack, did you see this?
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, actually, in terms of, like, the video of her and Justine McCaffrey, somehow I had come across that, like, maybe a year ago, just in terms of the research, because I just do a lot of reporting on the worst fucking parts of, you know, Canada. And it was blown away when I found out that she was, like, a CPC candidate. I had no idea. And then I saw, I think it was Marion Moncef who pointed it out, and, like, just my brain melted.
00:26:17
Speaker
But yeah, then I saw the recent kind of, I think it was Warren Kinsella who put it out and that Trudeau took, you know, Faith Goldie up for drinks and some sort of chateau in Ottawa, I don't know, some sort of fucking bourgeois fucking bar, but
00:26:36
Speaker
It's kind of weird, and then the CPC essentially tweeted out, we'd love to see you fact check this for us. It's, you know, it's not good optics to be using Goldie as a source, if I'm going to be completely honest. It's such a strange move to me. Like, I think they thought it was going to be like a little bit of like a gotcha clapback, but it doesn't look good for them. I don't believe.
00:27:00
Speaker
No. No. I mean, not only does it not look good, it is just actually bad. That's the term I was going for. Faith Goldie is not to be trusted in any way. She is a pure political operative who will say and do anything to make any kind of point.
00:27:22
Speaker
And so, yeah, it is seriously fucking uncool that she has been inserted into our federal election campaign for some fucking reason. And yeah, we live in hell.
00:27:36
Speaker
I mean- I was in Toronto and we just got over her running for fucking mayor here. And now we're just right back into having her inserted into some sort of election. And it's not like this election was fun to begin with. It just- it brought it down to like from like negative 420 to like negative 469. It's just terrible.
PPC and Far-Right Connections
00:27:56
Speaker
The whole rest of this podcast is mostly just like the connections to the federal election between white supremacists and conservative parties.
00:28:02
Speaker
No, producer Jim brought this to my attention today, but... Lindsay Sheppard, not Laura Southern. Oh, Lindsay Sheppard, not Laura Southern. Sometimes I confuse them. I'm bad about that. They're both of their names. Start with L. I don't know. Lindsay Sheppard was door knocking with CPC candidate Heather Leung, who herself is an extremely problematic candidate and has said some pretty nasty and violent anti-LGBTQ plus things.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, Lindsay Shepherd is also connected to this federal election campaign and also connected to the Conservative Party Canada. Not even the fringy PPC, People's Party of Canada, Max Bernier bullshit, but the actual potential governing party of this Canada, of this country, has both Lindsay Shepherd and Faith Goldie attached to it.
00:28:57
Speaker
I was extremely unpleased when Jim told me about this, but yeah, this is the world we live in. It's the worst timeline. So I do want to bring up a little bit
00:29:09
Speaker
of something to brighten our day, and that's Andre Demise flipping off PPC members or activists, whatever they were, outside of the debate and telling them to get in a car crash. I think we all just have to raise a glass and stand in solidarity with Andre Demise. He fucking rules, editor of McLean's.
00:29:30
Speaker
It made me quite happy to see that. That's actually the perfect response. Media, if you're ever looking for what to do when accosted by Nazis, tell them to fuck off. Get in a car crash.
00:29:49
Speaker
The the PPC that we would be remiss to not be doing this segment on the federal election and white supremacists and not be talking about the PPC perhaps my like Favorite story to come out of the PPC in the federal election is the candidate who was kicked out of the party outed from the party for Because he asked Max Bernier to denounce racism Yeah That's the wrong way right like is the opposite what should be happening
00:30:19
Speaker
Well, and the guys that he's leaving in there, it's not like he's leaving in just normal to-do candidates. He's kind of keeping in, like, people who believe in the Illuminati and that, like, you know, as my story came out today that have, like, doxxed a Muslim activist and called him a terrorist. Um...
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah, the guy was running for the PPC, so I'm sure he was a little bit of a tool to begin with, but if he's asking you to denounce racism, he's probably one of the sharpest tool in the shitty shed, I guess he would call this guy. Are you telling me that the PPC is not sending their best?
00:30:57
Speaker
I don't think the PBC is sending the best. So you have written a bit about Billy Joyce, a PBC candidate in Cape Breton. Why don't you delve into this? I would even call him Ryan Dean-esque character. He's not as
00:31:15
Speaker
Pseudo-violent as Ryan Dean I would say he seems to be just kind of like a little bit of like a sad sack YouTube conspiracy theorist But like what he's going on about is fucking wild Before I get into the crazier stuff like of course He's like because all of these guys are like virulently anti Muslim virulently anti immigration and all that and
00:31:39
Speaker
Um, but like we're to the point where that's almost boring to talk about, which is like a pretty depressing fact of life. But the one interesting thing like, the thing that makes him stand out is I went through a few of his videos and like, he was talking about how he broke down Justin Trudeau's speech that he gave.
00:32:00
Speaker
During his father's funeral and was talking about how he was kind of giving some ums and stuff how you would normally Talk when you're nervous and how that means he was kind of glitching in and out because the Illuminati was controlling him via mind control because they thought he was gonna kind of out his pedophilia and
00:32:18
Speaker
Uh, in the same video, he talked about how the Order of Canada, because it has six sides and resembles the Star of David, how it's satanic, how the Ottawa logo, because it kinda has three sixes, looks like 666. This was just one video, the guy has almost 200, and he's like, real into QAnon, he's really into like, some of the wildest shit out there. Uh, and I believe my story came out on the same day they dropped this guy for asking him to denounce racism.
00:32:47
Speaker
And I reached out to the PPC several times, and they were just quiet. They would not talk to me about this guy. And then he came at me on Twitter, which is always fun. But yeah, like, they're running some interesting folks, shall we say.
00:33:03
Speaker
Can I just say one of my worries is, though, that they've now been given a place in the official debates. And if you take a look at the CBC's story about that, they talk about the riding level polls that gave them entry into the debates. And there are several ridings in Canada where the PPC actually has a potential of winning. That should worry all of us.
00:33:27
Speaker
Like that's, you know, it's like you said, like you get kind of tired of the over and over again hearing about how messed up these guys are. But the fact that unlike, you know, some of the other wing nutty extreme parties in Canada, the fact that they've been able to document that they have their polling at 25 to 35% in some writings should be deeply alarming to all of us.
00:33:50
Speaker
And I think this actually points to like a little bit of a larger issue. I don't know if issue is the right word, but within the white supremacy movement where these people are really good at organizing. If you look throughout the years at
00:34:08
Speaker
the movements in the US and in Canada, they work really, really well within the confines of bureaucracy. And so, like you say, it's terrifying to think that, yeah, these people have a chance.
00:34:24
Speaker
And one little ounce of legitimacy that they've gotten from now being included in this debate is they're going to leverage that. And just I think very similarly to what happened here in Alberta with
00:34:41
Speaker
I guess you could call the PCs, the former PCs, moderate right compared to the UCP now. You're going to see a similar move in federal conservative politics, too, whether it's this election or the next. It's coming.
00:35:00
Speaker
The only way to stop it is to de-platform it now. But the PPC is only going to push the CPC, the Conservative Party further right. I don't see any way that their gravity doesn't affect the discourse, the politics, Overton's window, however you want to frame it. This is what you're saying.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So the longer these people exist and have platforms, the further and further to the right we're going to go. And it just opens us up to five years from now, well, centrism is going to look at the far right and go, oh, that's not so bad.
Deplatforming as a Strategy Against Extremism
00:35:40
Speaker
And this question of deplatforming is, I think, essential to our chat today, right? Like, there is just example after example of deplatform working. Right? I mean, what about Milo? Tell us about Milo.
00:35:56
Speaker
Oh, I think it's really amazing. You've watched Milo Yiannopoulos go from having a massive platform with millions of viewers and bringing in tons of money on his Patreon and stuff to now.
00:36:12
Speaker
His latest thing, he has fallen down and down and down the ladder. He showed up at the Straight Pride event, which was a bit of a ridiculous thing. But now he's been kicked out of a furry convention. He's down to the level of trying to get into furry conventions to spread his message. And he's even getting kicked out of there. So I just think it's a good example of when you are so deplatformed that even these very niche communities
00:36:38
Speaker
are saying yeah yeah don't get get out you're you're not welcome here like i think it's
00:36:44
Speaker
It shows it, it works. Faith Goldy being run off Facebook, Proud Boys being run off Facebook, Lauren Southern being run off Facebook, I think as well. And most of those people have been run off Patreon as well. Yes, when we as a society decide that we do not want these people to have a platform, we can decide to take that platform away. And it's not a question of free speech. They can go and say and write it on the street corner and say whatever the fuck they want.
00:37:11
Speaker
But but you know the answer is to Maybe the answer is to put the furries in charge They are pretty awesome. Maybe that's what we do. I'll follow the furries we do Yeah, hail to the furries agreed Best wolves of Odin blog. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'll throw that in the show notes
00:37:34
Speaker
And Lemuret as well, the furries who overtook Lemuret, the far right group in Quebec, they overtook their Facebook page because they were the first ones. And now Lemuret is a furry page.
00:37:48
Speaker
You love to see it, I believe is the phrase there. I think we're standing for furries here. Yeah, we stand for furries, especially furries against fascists and Nazis. Yes, not the Nazi furs. No, I'm sure they exist, but they're just much less prevalent in the movement, maybe.
00:38:06
Speaker
But one of the final things I think we've got to close out with, Mac, is the scariest motherfuckers that are kind of out there right now, and that is the base.
Domestic Terrorism and Military Infiltration
00:38:19
Speaker
The way that the base has kind of entered mainstream Canadian discourse is through this
00:38:25
Speaker
a Canadian soldier named Patrick Matthews. Can you kind of walk us through that story as well as kind of his connections to the base and just why they are so scary as an organization? You sure you don't want to talk about furries? Well, let's close with furries. Let's come back to furries again. But people do need to know about this because it is fucked up. So essentially, the base was a group that
00:38:53
Speaker
me and a colleague named Ben McCue first started taking notice around the summer of 2018 and we saw that they were kind of trying to do this thing that was unique within like the extreme like the most right-wing neo-nazi groups online which is a very very fractious ecosystem was that they were trying to unite them and we thought this was really interesting and like
00:39:17
Speaker
one-of-a-kind and actually quite scary so we were able to actually get ourselves inside the groups sort of
00:39:26
Speaker
inner workings we were able to get into their chat groups into like kind of their organizational structure and we did this big article investigative article last November and since then they started going quiet for a couple months but then they started ramping up again and going really really hard and they started putting up posters all over and one of the places they put up posters was in Winnipeg
00:39:49
Speaker
And they kind of put up an email on there and a local reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, a man named Ryan Thorpe, who should get all the credit in the world as a journalist. He did an amazing job. He was able to kind of pass the vetting, as Ben and I did a while back.
00:40:09
Speaker
talk to the founder on the phone and then actually organize a in-person meetup, which was something that I've never been able to do. And there he met up with a man who we would learn is Patrick Matthews, who is a Canadian army reservist.
00:40:26
Speaker
And now these groups are accelerationists. These are people that kind of want terrorist activities to accelerate a race war in which the whites will then kind of seize an ethno state. What they believe, because as I said they're trying to unite the most extreme right, kind of varies here and there. But the main thing that separates these people from kind of like
00:40:49
Speaker
I guess like the Ryan Deans and like the other people of the world is the fact that they're kind of taking terrorism very, very seriously. They've been linked to actual murders. Adam Waffen Division, which is a very similar group, was linked to five murders in 2017 alone. And they've been linked to kind of targeted bombings, like attempted targeted bombings of synagogues.
00:41:12
Speaker
And so what happened when Ryan Thorpe did this kind of investigative series of stories with the Winnipeg Free Press about Patrick Matthews and the base was that kind of everything blew up for this Matthews guy, this master Corporal Matthews, and he was kicked out of the army. And last we heard, his truck was found about a kilometer away from the US border.
00:41:41
Speaker
this was a couple weeks ago and he's been missing and we don't know where he is i mean like we know that uh in the state to the south ben and i know that they're the base is active there but you know also they could find his body in the woods or it could be something like that we don't know where he is but it is
00:41:59
Speaker
It's not great that he's missing at this moment. This group takes the apocalypse and the training and everything very seriously. They're very much about guns, they're very much about bombs, they're very much about sabotage.
00:42:16
Speaker
Um, they host these things called hate camps, which they go and they practice kind of paramilitary style training. They share kind of chemical and bomb making weapon tips. They pass on manuals that you can't really get online. And they kind of plan, plan stuff out.
00:42:34
Speaker
And what these guys are really pushing for is something that comes from this book, Siege, which kind of makes like the Turner Diaries look like fucking Clifford the Big Red Dog. It pushes for lone wolf terrorist activities, which is kind of what we've been seeing within like, I'm not saying that like the guy in Christchurch was a member of this group, but like that's kind of lone wolf terrorist activities, trying to accelerate something, right?
00:43:04
Speaker
Um, and that's what makes these guys so frightening, is like, it could just be one member, it could be the group, they could... could just be one... Most of them could be kids that are fucking larping, but one of them could be a sick person and then walk into a Quebec City mosque and kill six Muslims, you know? It's... they're very... as somebody who covers this, they're very, very scary.
00:43:25
Speaker
And we have to take them very, very seriously. Yeah. I mean, whenever when you first broke that story, I mean, I was extremely concerned. And this Patrick Matthews, this this reservist, I mean, and one of the most troubling things is just how embedded they seem to be within the military and police as well. Right.
00:43:42
Speaker
And we found, uh, Adam Waffen member, actually another reservist in Nova Scotia, not too long ago. Um, which Adam Waffen, as I mentioned, is kind of a sister brother, sister group to the base. So we found it's, it's more than once they've been found within the CAF. Yeah. Can we keep talking about furries? I told you, I told you, man. I know. All right. It's dark. I mean, I could keep going on with these guys.
00:44:13
Speaker
No, no, I think that's enough information for the audience out there. Enough information for me, anyways. But I think this is just the, like...
Canada's Global Influence on Hate Movements
00:44:23
Speaker
The broader question that I think Canada has to reckon with is that like comedians or bitumen, honey, beaver pelts, Canada's one of the world's leading purveyors of hate, both online and offline, right? When you look at Stephen Mullina, Lauren Southern, Faith Goldie, Ezra LeVant,
00:44:49
Speaker
Lamut, Soldiers of Odin, Threepers, you know, the base, Atomwaff, and these groups. They are...
00:44:56
Speaker
here in Canada, they are strong, they are organized. Like Katie was saying, one of the most frightening things is just how good they are at organizing, how much time and effort they spend at both going out and recruiting new people and building bonds within their own movement, and that this is a problem we need to fix. This has mostly been a media-focused conversation, and I think that's quite fair.
00:45:21
Speaker
Mac is a media person, Progress Alberta does a lot of media work. And there are a whole host of anti-fascist tactics that are out there, that are effective, that are available. That's not necessarily what we want to go over here in the final five, 10 minutes of this podcast. But just know that those resources and those people exist out there. But when it comes to the media side of things, again, de-platforming these people.
00:45:50
Speaker
Again, going back to the silliest and most ineffectual example at the beginning, but Ryan Dean is whack-a-mole with he keeps creating new accounts, but he's just so clearly odious and so obviously hateful that if 20 people report him to whatever blog spot or Twitter or whatever, he just gets canceled.
00:46:12
Speaker
Well, I think media is an important piece of the conversation. I also have concern about the legitimization within our organizations that allows people to get credibility in the media. Like, Mark Hackett wouldn't have gotten that column in the Vancouver Sun if he wasn't...
00:46:27
Speaker
teaching at Mount Royal University, right? Jordan Peterson would not have the platform he has if he was not a professor at U of T, like these things are within our universities. We see ID Canada and groups like this organizing there. And so like I think we also like we have to address how media
00:46:43
Speaker
believes these people, but part of that is the credibility that they've gotten within these institutions, right? Whether it's within our universities, Canadian forces, police organizations, all of these, right, is that deplatforming is about more than deplatforming in the media. It's about addressing where these things take place in all of our institutions. And that's one of the reasons that Canada is such a big exporter of it. It's more than just the credulity of journalists. Definitely.
00:47:10
Speaker
So I think where I kind of want to end this off on is like, who should we be following? Who should we be supporting?
Supporting Anti-Fascist Efforts and Journalism
00:47:17
Speaker
Especially on the media end, like who's doing the work? I mean, I'm going to throw out a couple of names, but let's just popcorn style this here. Like I think Anti-Hate Canada and Evan Balgord is doing really good work. I look at Yellow Vest's Exposed and their various platforms that they're on, they're doing really good work. You got any names, Mac?
00:47:38
Speaker
One of the names that I kind of wanted to say was a guy named Robert Evans who he's a he's actually a former cracked writer But he's been doing really really good work on conflict journalism both in Syria and in the States And he just released a free audiobook called the war on everyone which kind of traces fascism and white nationalism and white supremacy throughout kind of Western
00:48:01
Speaker
Society to kind of show how it's a long lasting things. It's not something that just kind of popped up with Trump And that the kind of terrorist and Nate and terroristic nature to it isn't new And it's just a really good informative free listen that I would highly recommend Yeah, actually, it's one of my I loved that. I mean also found it. I found it terrifying but also adored it. It was so good. I
00:48:28
Speaker
I think the anti-racist Canada blog definitely needs a big shout out. I know I definitely leaned on it for researching this blog, and they've been going for a long ass time. That's the respect to everyone involved in that project. I also think, broadly speaking, you just gotta support your local anti-fascist organizers. People who are getting people out to meet these people in the streets are just doing
00:48:53
Speaker
hard ass work and you need to be nice to them and recognize them and buy them dinner and do all of the things that need to be done. Broadly speaking, being anti-fascist is good and correct. Not being anti-fascist means that you are in fact a fascist.
00:49:11
Speaker
Go ahead. Sorry, I want to shout out to one other really fascinating podcast that is not really explicitly about the far right, but I think is doing some good work in understanding the roots of some of these things, which is a pod called Know Your Enemy that really explores sort of the history and legacy of right-wing thought that if you kind of want to understand where these groups are coming from and what motivates them, it's a fascinating listen. Kind of academic, but super good.
00:49:36
Speaker
I think kind of on the trail of making sure you're supporting your local anti-fascists is also support your local community initiatives and make sure that they know that you want them to be outwardly anti-fascists.
00:49:52
Speaker
The more of these community orgs that we have that are coming forward and saying, no, this white supremacist movement is not okay, the less of an issue it will be for them to then turn around and try to dox people like Queer Flex. If all of the orgs in a given city are openly Antifa, you can't point to one and say, oh,
00:50:20
Speaker
They're so, so left leaning, right? No, I agree. I think I would say support. You can probably go out there and find a journalist in probably every city that's doing kind of similar work to what I do. Omar. Oh, I'm going to fuck his last name up terribly. Omar. Is that right?
00:50:42
Speaker
Mosley. Yeah, he's doing fantastic work in Edmonton and you're gonna find like Ryan Thorpe in Winnipeg. Whereas a whole media is pretty shitty, you're gonna find some younger journalists that are actually pushing it and doing really well. And it's not, I'm in that position and I'm in a pretty privileged position when it comes to kind of anti-fascist reporting.
00:51:04
Speaker
But it's not that easy to do it at a local paper So if you have that guy in your city, you should or girl or them just you should support them for sure Agreed. All right. I think that's a fantastic place to wrap it up Bridget how can people find you online? How can people support hate-free YEG? What's give give us the details? I
00:51:26
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Well, you can find hate-free YEG all over social media. Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And we've got a website that lists some of the orgs that have signed on to us. So yeah, so check us out, hate-free YEG on Twitter or Facebook, Insta and hate-free YEG.com. And then you can find me personally on Twitter at Bridgette Sterling.
00:51:52
Speaker
Awesome. Katie, where can people find you online? Do you have anything to shout out as well? Yeah. So best way to find me is either Katie Cutting or Lazy Kitten Productions on Facebook. I am on Instagram at the laziest kitten, but I'm barely ever on Instagram. So hit me up on Facebook. You can also email me. We'll get that in the show notes.
00:52:14
Speaker
And I do want to give a shout out to two orgs that are doing some amazing anti-racist work here in Edmonton. Shades of Color and Rarika Now. I've done quite a bit of work with both of these organizations and the people who are running them are amazing. They deserve all of the love in the world and honestly they are
00:52:42
Speaker
They're doing a lot of community work internally while they're also fighting racists, so huge shout out to them. Check them out, support them. One thing I do want to plug is, because I'm a big nerd about doing things in schools, because I'm in education policy, is a really cool toolkit from the Western States Center called Confronting White Nationalism in Schools. We know a lot of this stuff is happening among
00:53:10
Speaker
especially among young men who are getting radicalized and pulled into this stuff. And anything we can do in our schools to resist is really, really helpful. So if you're in education or if you care about kids and you want to talk to people at your child's school, check it out. Awesome. And Mac, how can people find you online? How can people support your work?
00:53:30
Speaker
Uh, yeah, you can find me on Vice.com or just on my name, uh, Mack Lamoureux, M-A-C-K-L-I-M-O-U-R-E-U-X. Uh, I'm probably going to be tweeting mainly about the Oilers for the next eight to nine months, but every now and then I'll probably put in, you're a Flames fan, go fuck yourself. Uh, but every now and then I'll be putting in some of my stories and stuff like that. I'm a Raptors fan, come on.
00:53:53
Speaker
Man, I'm the only Torontonian in this podcast right now, so. Awesome. Okay, that is almost wrapped it up. I mean, I definitely have to do my final closing bits here. If you do like this show and you want more people to listen to it, we really appreciate it. If you would leave a review, if you can tell your friends, text it, share it, email it. Word of mouth is really the best way to get the word out and to build audience.
00:54:18
Speaker
Again, just straight up text your friend. If you like this podcast and you're listening to it right now, be like, yo, friend, listen to this podcast. It's really good. It's also September, which means we are in the middle of a fundraising drive. We are looking for 200 patrons. That is 200 people who can kick in at least $5 a month so we can keep this podcast and our email newsletter and all of the other things that Progress Alberta does going.
00:54:41
Speaker
So if you have the ability to help out there, go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card, sign up for a little monthly contribution. We would really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, hate mail, things you think I need to hear, I am on Twitter at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at progressalberta.ca. Thanks to Cosmic Fama Communist for the amazing theme. Thanks for listening, and goodbye.
00:55:11
Speaker
you