Undercover With the Alt-Right – The New York Times

2017/09/21 Leave a comment

Good long disturbing read. Part I found most interesting is the relationship between the more and less extreme elements:

The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”

The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals. Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.

This apparent moderation partly explains why they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.” Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs. The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists.

The alt-light’s dedicated fan base runs into the millions. Mr. Watson has more than a million YouTube followers, for example, while Mr. Yiannopoulos has more than 2.3 million on Facebook. If even a tiny fraction of this base is drafted toward more extreme far-right politics, that would represent a significant influx into hate groups.

According to researchers, the key to hooking new recruits into any movement, and to getting them increasingly involved over time, is to simply give them activities to participate in. This often precedes any deep ideological commitment on the recruits’ part and, especially early on, is more about offering them a sense of meaning and community than anything else.

Intentionally or not, the far right has deftly applied these insights to the online world. Viewed through the filters of alt-light outlets like Breitbart and Prison Planet, or through Twitter feeds like Mr. Watson’s, the world is a horror show of crimes by migrants, leftist censorship and attacks on common sense. And the best, easiest way to fight back is through social media.

The newly initiated are offered many opportunities to participate directly. A teenager in a suburban basement can join a coordinated global effort to spread misinformation about Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, in the hopes of helping far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Anyone who wants to do so can help spread the word about supposed mainstream media censorship of the Muslim “crime wave” the far right says is ravaging Europe.

These efforts — a click, a retweet, a YouTube comment — come to feel like important parts of an epochal struggle. The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.

And if you’re one of those newcomers happily playing the part of infantryman in the “meme wars” that rage daily, maybe, along the way, one of your new online Twitter buddies will say to you, “Milo’s O.K., but have you checked out this guy Greg Johnson?” Or maybe they’ll invite you to a closed online forum where ideas about how to protect Europe from Muslim migrants are discussed a bit more, well, frankly. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll eventually discover a whole new political movement to join.

All of which can explain why members of the hard-core alt-right are watching the explosive success of their more moderate counterparts with open glee, unable to believe their good luck. “I’m just fighting less and less opposition to our sorts of ideas when they’re spoken,” Mr. Johnson, the Counter-Currents editor, told Mr. Hermansson. His optimism, unfortunately, appears to be well founded.

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

How we can build resilience against hatred in Canada

2017/08/22 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful advice (if Vancouver was the positive example of challenging hatred, Quebec city was the negative one given the violence of left-wing activists):

Some of Canada’s most urban centres were flooded with protesters Saturday and Sunday, from what President Trump would describe as “both sides” – those who were promoting racist, anti-immigration sentiment, and those who were opposing such hateful and intolerant rhetoric.

In Vancouver, for example, thousands of anti-racism supporters showed up Saturday to counter a rally that was planned by anti-immigrant demonstrators, essentially thwarting all efforts that were made by those who were promoting intolerance.

Protests were spawned from the disturbing events that unfolded in Charlottesville, Va. the previous weekend, where a so-called Unite the Right rally quickly turned violent when white-power demonstrators clashed with counter-demonstrators. Dozens of protesters were injured, and three people died, including 32-year-old Heather Heyer, when a vehicle was intentionally driven into a group of anti-racist counter-demonstrators.

Canadians watched in dismay as the hate-inspired violence unfolded south of the border, perhaps naïve to assume that such divisive ideologies do not – and cannot – exist in our multicultural nation. The truth of the matter is that Canada is not immune to violence inspired by bigotry and hatred.

In 2015, Professor Barbara Perry and I conducted a three-year study for Public Safety Canada on the state of the right-wing extremist movement in Canada, interviewing law-enforcement officials, community activists, and current and former right-wing extremists across the country, paired with open-source intelligence. Results from our research was shocking to many Canadians.

In short, we found that Canada’s right-wing extremist movement was alive and well: we identified over 100 active groups and well over 100 incidents of right-wing extremist violence over the last 30 years in the country. We also uncovered that the threat of the extreme right had been overlooked and even trivialized by a number of key stakeholders, thus hindering their ability to effectively respond to the radical right in Canada.

In turn, we proposed evidence-based strategies that we saw as effective in responding to right-wing extremism in Canada, suggesting that a multi-sectoral approach was needed to address hate and ensure that extremists have minimal impact on communities. This included the integration and utilization of an array of experts, such as police officers, policy makers, victim service providers, community organizations and the media.

In the two years since our Public Safety report was released, I’ve been watching very closely as hate-inspired events have unfolded across Canada and how key stakeholders have responded to such events. I’ve noticed that some of our key recommendations are being put to practice – the counter-demonstration in Vancouver is but one example. This is an encouraging sign.

We are seeing community groups ban together to spread messages of tolerance, and local, provincial and federal politicians are taking a public stance against hatred, making it clear that such sentiment does not represent Canadian beliefs and will not be tolerated. Reporters and journalists have also dedicated an increasing amount of time and energy to shed light on right-wing extremism in Canada, highlighting its complexities and prevalence. Stakeholders are now including their voices in the discussions about how we can build resiliency against hatred, which starts by raising awareness of the problem and mobilizing the public.

Some, though, are calling for the outright filtering of those who subscribe to extreme-right beliefs. Do not let them have an outlet for their negative views, the argument goes. This would mean not allowing them to hold a rally or have a website. This approach is counteractive, and perhaps irresponsible. This is a Band-aid solution – the views will still be there, and will only get stronger, solidifying radical right-wing ideologies. Right-wing extremists generally believe that the mainstream media and the broader public are systematically attempting to suppress their radical views, so prohibiting them from expressing their views will further reinforce their hateful beliefs.

We must not stay home when hatemongers are protesting in the streets. Adherents should never be able to promote hatred. At the same time, we cannot assume that silencing them is the solution.

Instead, Canadians must continue to attend their demonstrations, challenge ideas and not people specifically, and in a peaceful manner – like we saw in Vancouver this past weekend. Stand up against racism, xenophobia and bigotry by challenging adherents’ views, but do not engage with them. Most are easy to provoke, and most want to be provoked. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

Source: How we can build resilience against hatred in Canada – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

The Women Behind The ‘Alt-Right’ : NPR

2017/08/21 Leave a comment

Interesting account of women drawn into the alt-right:

Many of these women came into the alt-right initially as anti-feminists.

“They were people who felt that the feminist progressive agenda was not serving them — in some cases they felt like it was actively disregarding them because they wanted more traditional things: home, family, etc.,” she says. “And they came into the movement through that channel and then ultimately adopted more pro-white and white nationalist views.”

One of those women was Lana Lokteff, a Russian-American from Oregon who co-runs Red Ice, an alt-right media company, with her Swedish husband, Henrik Palmgren.

The couple decided to make this their cause around 2012, Darby says, when they say they saw a lot of “anti-white sentiment.” Around the time of several high-profile police shootings of young, black men, Lokteff “felt that Black Lives Matter and these other reactive forces were being unfair to white people and that then sort of spun into a conspiracy about how the establishment, so to speak, is out to oppress, minimize and silence white people.”

Lokteff, who promotes alt-right ideologies on the couple’s YouTube channel, has been persistently trolled by the men of the movement. Darby wanted to understand what attracts women to a movement that is often hostile to them.

In her piece, she quotes Andrew Anglin, who runs the (now blacklisted) neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer as saying the white woman’s womb “belongs to the males of society.” And alt-right pioneer Richard Spencer, who acknowledges that women make up a small percentage of the movement, believes women are not suited for some roles in government, reports Mother Jones: “Women should never be allowed to make foreign policy,” he tweeted during the first presidential debate. “It’s not that they’re ‘weak.’ To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds.”

According to Lokteff and other alt-right women allies she spoke to, Darby says, “It’s not that men who support the alt-right don’t like women, it’s that they see women as fundamentally different than men,” with equally important roles, which are “to perpetuate white bloodlines, to nurture family units, to inculcate those families with pro-white beliefs.”

But the growing contradiction, as Darby points out, “is that people like Lana Lockteff and other women that I spoke to are outspoken.”

She adds, “They sort of see themselves as straddling a line between the male and female norms, because they think that at this point in their movement, the more people they can bring in, the more people they can convince that they are on the right side of history, the better, and that includes appealing to more women.”

To recruit women to the movement, Darby says, the key is to stoke fear.

Asked how she would pitch the alt-right to conservative white women who voted for Trump, but are also wary of being labeled a white supremacist, Lokteff told her, “we have a joke in the alt-right: How do you red-pill someone? (“Red-pill” is their word for converting someone to the cause.) And the punch line was: Have them live in a diverse neighborhood for a while,” Darby says. “She also said that when she is talking to women she reminds them that white women are under threat from black men, brown men, emigrants, and really uses this concept of a rape scourge to bring them in.”

And while there are schisms in the aims of alt-right activists, and how best to get there, she adds, “There are some people — Lana Lokteff being one of them, Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute — who are really trying to find some semblance of civic legitimacy.”

Source: The Women Behind The ‘Alt-Right’ : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The Trickle-Up Theory Of White Nationalist Thought : NPR

2017/08/19 2 Comments

Good analysis of some of the more educated white nationalists and how they provide the intellectual underpinnings for the more blatant antisemitism, neo-nazism and racism seen as Charlottesville:

Jared Taylor was not in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. But Taylor, one of the leading voices for white rights in the country, says it was clear what really happened at that rally.

“Anyone who wishes to speak in the name of whites is subject to the heckler’s veto,” said Taylor, founder of the white advocacy website American Renaissance. “There would have been no violence, no problems of any kind if people had not shown up as counterdemonstrators, many of them wearing helmets, wielding batons, wearing shields, shouting for the death of the demonstrators. … This is not something that was provoked by the presence of racially conscious whites. It was something that was provoked by people who hate any white person who has a racial consciousness.”

Two days later, President Trump, in one of his most controversial press conferences to date, described the events — at which hundreds of white protesters gathered for the so-called “Unite the Right” rally and after which a white nationalist sympathizer drove his car into a crowd, killing a counterdemonstrator — in a similar way.

“Let me ask you this,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “What about the fact that [counterdemonstrators] came charging, with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. … You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on another side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say it right now.”

Taylor is among a group of educated, white-identity advocates who, critics say, normalize the ideas of white supremacy by couching them in language that doesn’t sound overtly racist. In doing so, those critics say, people like Taylor, authors Kevin MacDonald and Peter Brimelow, and “Unite the Right” organizers Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer sanitize racist tropes to make them palatable to a broad audience, including the upper reaches of the political mainstream.

“I think that it’s true that ultimately a lot of these ideas travel all the way from the farthest fringe of the political world, ultimately to the very top in some kind of form,” said Mark Potok, former editor of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s journal monitoring extremism.

The white protesters in Charlottesville came, among other things, to contest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. They were there, Taylor said, “to pursue their destiny free of the unwanted influence of others. This is not a hateful thing.”

Some wore swastikas. Others carried torches and Confederate flags. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, made a speech. Videos from Friday and Saturday show marchers chanting: “Jews will not replace us!” and “blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan. Later, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. allegedly drove a car into a crowd, killing counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer.

Taylor called Heyer’s death “a terrible, murderous act” that “no one would defend.” He said he is not associated with “Unite the Right” and didn’t agree with the decision some people made to wear swastikas. As founder of American Renaissance, which he says is among the “many websites and organizations that speak in the name of whites,” Taylor claims that there is no place for bigotry or hate in his ideology.

But the ideas that people gathered to defend over the weekend — that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and should remain so; that white people face an existential threat by becoming a racial minority; that there are biological differences among racial groups that make some more intelligent and others more prone to criminality — those are ideas that Taylor has been working to legitimize for decades.

“All of these characters, Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, say they’re terribly opposed to violence and, of course, would never engage in that kind of a thing,” says Potok. “Well, that’s very nice and very fine and the words are very pretty. But the reality is that these people provide the ideological foundation for people who are not so careful in what they say and do. People who are actual terrorists.”

Potok and others say that Brimelow offers such an ideological foundation with his book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, and his website, VDARE, where he says he’ll publish “anyone who has anything critical to say about immigration, environmentalists, progressives, etc.”

On Saturday, Brimelow published his own take on the events in Charlottesville, calling it a “remarkable torchlight procession.” He has published articles by fellow white-rights advocates Spencer, Kessler and MacDonald.

Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League once described MacDonald as the country’s “foremost anti-Semite, next to David Duke.”

MacDonald is the editor-in-chief of The Occidental Observer and a former professor who left California State University, Long Beach, after coming under fire for his controversial writings. He is also one of the directors of the American Freedom Party— an anti-gay, anti-feminist political party that supports deporting any American who became a citizen after 1965.

MacDonald is celebrated among neo-Nazis for a trilogy of books he published in the 1990s that trade in some of the most pernicious stereotypes about Jewish people, all under the guise of researching their evolutionary biology.

The difference between Duke and MacDonald, Mayo said, is that Duke was largely ostracized from mainstream society for his public racism, whereas MacDonald’s work was bolstered by the credibility of his university position.

MacDonald, she says, “couches his anti-Semitic views as legitimate intellectual inquiry. That’s something that might make him more acceptable to people.”

It’s hard to put numbers on how many people Taylor, Brimelow, MacDonald and others like them reach. The Internet provides a degree of anonymity to those who visit their websites. Membership in hate groups, Potok estimates, numbers around half a million people. But include those who believe that “the United States, as well as a lot of European countries, were created ‘by and for whites and ought to return to being that,’ ” he adds, and “you’re looking at a group of several million people, if not more.”

MacDonald said the organizers of Saturday’s rally had misstepped; that the swastikas and other Nazi symbols should have been banned. “Because that stuff is never going to appeal to a wide swath of white Americans,” he said. “It’s simply not. And you’re in a political arena. You have to do what’s possible and what sells. And so you have to be very cautious about that kind of thing. And I don’t think the organizers were.”

But as for the basic message from “Unite the Right,” MacDonald was on board. The marchers on Saturday were trying to convey “that whites should be able to have their own identity and a sense of their own interests like anybody else,” he says. White people in the U.S. may not be ready to accept that message now, he adds, but they will be in the future “as whites become more and more of a minority in the coming years. So I think we’re ahead of the curve.”

On that last point, MacDonald and Potok meet.

“We’re seeing the continuing normalization of these ideas,” Potok said. “I think there is a real kind of conveyor belt we have seen develop over the last few years, and even the last few decades.”

Ideas start in a tiny radical fringe group somewhere, he explains. And then they travel to larger and more moderate groups — but still outside the political mainstream.

“And then they are picked up by the Drudges of the world, by the Breitbarts of the world, by those kinds of websites and ‘news organizations.’ And within, it seems, minutes, they will then be picked up and exploited by certain politicians … It is terribly important not only to have people like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow providing a kind of ideological foundation, but also critically important, I think, to have people like Donald Trump, who are essentially helping to mainstream and normalize these ideas.”

Accusations that Trump has been flirting with far right ideology have dogged him since before he was elected. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from people espousing white nationalism. He said multiple times that he disavowed the support of Duke and other white supremacists who endorsed his presidency.

But the president has been widely criticized since Saturday — by both detractors and supporters — for his responses to the events in Charlottesville. He first condemned the violence “on many sides,” then gave a more direct rejection of racists, “including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” but then followed that with even more controversy.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Trump clarified what he meant by “all sides.” And it sounded remarkably similar to something MacDonald said over the phone on Monday afternoon.

Here’s MacDonald on Monday:

“I’m not from the South. I understand they have a history and a heritage, and they don’t want to just throw it all out. But that’s what we’re going to see. And it’s not going to stop with General Robert E. Lee statues. It’s going to continue with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, all those people, because they owned slaves, they will eventually be removed, I think. It’s just the beginning.”

And here is Trump on Tuesday:

“Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee. … So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

Source: The Trickle-Up Theory Of White Nationalist Thought : Code Switch : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

The Rebel’s fast running out of friends. Better late than never, I suppose.

2017/08/17 Leave a comment

Great column by Susan Delacourt:

It’s been a remarkable few days for political penitence.

Just as Donald Trump finally got around to disavowing neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (it only took him two days), the founders of Rebel Media in Canada also decided that now was the time to make a stand against racism.

Ezra Levant, one of those founders, declared that Rebel Media would have nothing to do with the alt-right, while Brian Lilley simply walked away from the online outlet, saying he could no longer put up with “a lack of editorial and behavioural judgment, that left unchecked, will destroy it and those around it.”

Was anyone else reminded of that scene in Casablanca where the police captain pronounces himself “shocked, shocked” to learn there’s gambling going on at Rick’s — just before the croupier hands him his winnings? Did it truly take Levant and Lilley this long to become troubled by the thought that that their online outlet — a bizarre spinoff of the defunct Sun TV — might be whipping up hatred toward other races and cultures?

While it’s good to see MPs like Michelle Rempel and Lisa Raitt distancing themselves from the racist strain of modern conservatism, one really has to ask the question: Why now? Shouldn’t the last straw have come long before now — say (just to pick an example out of the air), when one of Rebel’s commentators, Gavin McInnes, went off the anti-Semitic deep end during a trip to Israel last spring?

Perhaps we should be relieved that events in Charlottesville this weekend are axing the connections between mainstream conservatives and the racists in the base. But a lot of damage had been done before last weekend, too. It’s a shame that the disavowals can’t be retroactive.

In one of her Twitter posts on Monday, Rempel stated: “Flirting with or giving a wink and a nod to Nazism and white supremacy for clicks and likes is disgusting.” Yes, that’s definitely true today. It’s been true for a while, actually.

Reminds me of another Casablanca quote: “Welcome back to the fight.” Once upon a time, conservatives and progressives could agree that racism was a blight on society and democracy. Now it’s a wedge issue. Worse yet, it’s a business model.

The worst kind of politics cuddles up to racists to get votes. The worst kind of business makes a profit from hate. Make no mistake: Rebel Media has been flirting with both practices for some time now.

Start with the politics. For an example of just how far some conservative politicians were willing to go to woo racist votes, take a look back to not so long ago — earlier this year, in fact, when Rebel Media was holding rallies against the anti-Islamophobia motion introduced in the Commons after the Quebec mosque massacre.

open quote 761b1bAppeals to the head and heart may not work on those who have calculated that there’s big money to be made in whipping up intolerance. Hitting them in the wallet might work better.

It is completely defensible in a democratic society to disagree with government motions in the Commons. But some of the stuff being uttered at these rallies was absolutely vile and racist — so disgraceful I wouldn’t repeat it here in this column.

Faith Goldy, the same Rebel Media personality who was at the Charlottesville rallies last weekend, was whipping up the crowd at a Toronto rally last February, mocking critics who called the rally racist, even as one woman in the crowd seemed moved to give a Nazi salute. No kidding. You can check it out on the Torontoist website, which called the rally “bonkers” and “chilling.” (Look at the raw video coverage and you might agree with that appraisal.)

I don’t recall much contrition from Rebel Media back then over that flirtation with Nazi symbolism, nor any official disavowals from many voices on the right at the time either.

In fact, Rebel Media was seen by many as an player to be cultivated during the Conservative leadership race. At that same Toronto rally, held at Canada Christian College, leadership hopefuls Kellie Leitch, Chris Alexander, Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux came to address the audience. Not one of these candidates acknowledged the racism elephant in the room.

“It’s good to be in a room with severely normal people,” Leitch actually told the crowd. None of these would-be Conservative leaders won the race, of course, though Lemieux and Trost, combined, did remarkably well with their armies of anti-abortion advocates.

Andrew Scheer won the leadership. His campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, was listed as a director on Rebel Media’s federal incorporation records. At a pro-Trump rally held on Parliament Hill, long after Scheer’s victory, Goldy proclaimed Scheer to be one of “our people.”

Perhaps it’s Scheer’s influence reining in the racism at Rebel Media now. One would think that anyone who wants to be prime minister in Canada wouldn’t want to be carrying that kind of baggage during the next campaign.

Optimists believe Trump’s approach to politics is still toxic here. Cynics might suggest that the business model for racist media outlets is crumbling. Is that why Levant and Lilley needed to clean up Rebel Media’s act?

As iPolitics’ own Bea Britneff has been reporting, an anonymous outfit called Sleeping Giants has been aggressively campaigning to stop firms from advertising on Rebel Media.

That’s a very good thing, because — and it’s sad to have to say this — the best way to fight the spread of this online toxin is to go after the money that fuels it. Appeals to the head and heart may not work on those who have calculated that there’s big money to be made in whipping up intolerance. Hitting them in the wallet might work better.

Rebel Media has been making serious money and gaining serious ground abroad. Take a look at this excellent piece by Jason Markusoff in Maclean’s from a few months ago, which shows how Rebel Media has been expanding its international reach by making its message ever more outrageous and unhinged.

The most lamentable thing about Rebel Media isn’t just what its commentators have said. It’s that it has shown there is a considerable market for racism in this country — money to be made, careers to be built, from sowing hate and intolerance.

So here’s the good news: The experiences of the past few days suggest the market has reached a limit. Or so we hope.

Source: The Rebel’s fast running out of friends. Better late than never, I suppose.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Does Canada take the threat of far-right extremism seriously?

2017/08/17 Leave a comment

Worth noting the contrasting assessments:

Yet the outburst of deadly racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend is not without parallels in Canada. Recent estimates suggest there are dozens of active white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups across the country.

They advocate everything from biological racism to anti-Semitism to radical libertarianism. Members of groups such as the Heritage Front, Freemen of the Land and Blood and Honour have been charged with dozens of crimes, including murder, attempted murder and assault.

Roughly 30 homicides in Canada since 1980 have been linked to individuals espousing some form of extreme right-wing ideology.​ 

But the pattern of right-wing extremist violence in Canada is too inconsistent to merit being prioritized over the threat posed by Islamic extremists, according to two former members of the security establishment.

“I do think right-wing extremism is a national security problem, but we’re not devoting the resources to it because we don’t need to,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS analyst who now runs a security consulting business.

“I have seen nothing to suggest that they pose an equally dangerous threat as that posed by Islamist extremism, which in and of itself is still a fairly minor threat in Canada.”

The limited national security resources devoted to right-wing extremism is also based on a belief that such groups are fractious, ideologically incoherent and engage mainly in lower-level crime such as robbery or graffiti, said Stephanie Carvin, a former national security adviser for the Canadian government.

“The violence that results [from right-wing extremist groups] tends to be dealt with more at the police level than the national security level,” said Carvin, who teaches courses about security and terrorism at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“If you just look at the sheer number of cases of individuals who are foreign [jihadist] fighters, or potential foreign fighters or returnees, it still outweighs the potential actors on the far right.”

A dangerous oversimplification?

As recently as January, just days before the deadly shooting at a Quebec City mosque, a threat assessment based on input from Canada’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies determined there was “no indication that right-wing extremists pose a threat to migrants.”

CSIS’s own website says the threat posed by the extreme right has “not been a significant a problem in Canada in recent years. Those who hold such extremist views have tended to be isolated and ineffective figures.”

But the Quebec City shooting, which police believe was carried out by an individual holding anti-immigrant views, raised questions about the accuracy of the security establishment’s estimation of right-wing extremism.

James Ellis, a Vancouver-based terrorism scholar affiliated with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS), said it’s a dangerous oversimplification to portray the majority of far-right groups in Canada as too disorganized to pose a serious threat to national security.

“You’re essentially taking your eye off the ball,” said Ellis, who until recently maintained the Canadian Incident Database, which tracks acts of terrorism between 1960 and 2015.

“The data suggests that right-wing extremism is certainly on par if not exceeding the threat from Islamic terrorism cropping up within Canada itself.”

Source: Does Canada take the threat of far-right extremism seriously? – Montreal – CBC News

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , , ,

Alt-right vs. Antifa: How a political clash is turning the Internet into battleground

2017/06/10 Leave a comment

Disturbing trend towards vigilantism:

The four men charged after a self-styled “Canadian patriot” and far right provocateur was allegedly beaten and robbed in Ottawa on Saturday will appear in court later this month, but that’s not enough for Kevin J. Johnston.

“We need a name. We need an address. We need a phone number,” Johnston urges his followers after posting video on his Freedom Report website that shows a photo of a man Johnston claimed instigated the attack.

The call for online action is a nasty tactic of the increasingly volatile conflict between the far right and the far left that’s playing out in Canadian cities. Opponents on the left (the ‘Antifa’ for anti-Fascist movement) say they’ve received death threats and been the victims of “doxxing” — having personal information published online — as retribution from the far right or “alt-right.”

One man Johnston targeted is Kevin Metcalf, a member of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, who says he was at the Hill protest as an observer, shooting pictures and video of people at what was billed the “Million Canadian March.”

Johnston posted a video Tuesday showing Metcalf’s picture and called him “a coward, domestic terrorist and stalker of women.”

“If you see this man, you have to assume he is armed,” Johnston told his followers. “We have to get this guy behind bars, people. Get him behind bars now.”

Metcalf says he was on Parliament Hill conducting interviews around 11:30 a.m., the time it’s alleged Johnston was assaulted in Confederation Park. He says he’s considering legal action against Johnston over the online video.

“It’s concerning. I’m certainly taking precautions,” Metcalf said Wednesday. “I’ve received death threats before but since he published the video it’s increased exponentially.”

As an advocate for free expression, Metcalf has attended a number of rallies like Saturday’s march on Parliament Hill, which drew an eclectic mix of about 300 to 400 people, including groups such as the far right Soldiers of Odin and Jewish Defence League of Canada. Though billed as a pro-Trump rally by the American alt-right website Breitbart, the Ottawa demonstrators’ wrath was aimed at the Canadian government’s anti-islamophobia motion, M-103, as well as issues such as carbon taxes and Liberal spending.

Does freedom of expression cover someone such as Johnston, who rejects being labelled as “far right” but wants the Qur’an banned in Canada and has called Liberal MP Iqra Khalid an “islamic terrorist”?

“It’s a tough landscape to negotiate,” said Metcalf, who describes himself as being left-leaning personally. “There’s a protective right in Canada for free expression. At the same time, we recognize the important role that counter speech plays in fostering public discourse. So when people show up and say ‘Hey, you’re a bunch of racists. We don’t want you in our community, that’s also free expression. That needs to be supported and protected.”

Like the Million Canadian March demonstrators, Saturday’s counter-protest drew a mix of social justice advocates, including black-clad, balaclava-wearing members of a group calling itself Anti-Fascist Action. Metcalf said many of the counter demonstrators are “college-age, white and of relative social privilege” who track right-wing groups’ activities. They’ve taken to wearing masks to protect themselves from “doxxing” and online attacks, he said.

Source: Alt-right vs. Antifa: How a political clash is turning the Internet into battleground | Ottawa Citizen

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

How the alt-right weaponized free speech

2017/05/03 Leave a comment

Refreshing and needed historical perspective on the free-speech movement and its co-opting by the right:

Indeed, Berkeley’s far-right agitators routinely invoke the memory of activist Mario Savio, the standard-bearer of the FSM, going so far as to declare themselves “the new Free Speech Movement.” This, while boasting of the endorsement of America’s highest office: “The more abuse and harassment we suffer,” warned the Berkeley College Republicans in a joint op-ed following Yiannopoulos’s cancelled appearance, “the more controversial speakers we will invite to campus. We proceed fearlessly because we know we have the president of the United States on our side.”

Indeed, in February, President Trump implicitly threatened to withhold federal funds from the university for failing to cater to Yiannopoulos who, amid the renewed controversy involving Coulter, has announced a comeback, sensing an opportunity to regain status and rehabilitate his ego—not to mention, profit mightily.

“We will give out a new free speech prize—the Mario Savio Award—to the person we believe has done most to protect free expression at UC Berkeley and its surrounding area,” proclaimed Yiannopoulos in promoting Milo’s “Free Speech Week.” “Each day will be dedicated to a different enemy of free speech, including feminism, Black Lives Matter and Islam.”

This co-opting of Savio’s legacy is a calculated provocation, one that his son Daniel calls “some kind of sick joke.” Savio led the FSM to victory in ending all restrictions to political activity on campus, which included the rights of orators from all political perspectives. “Rather than ban speakers he disagreed with, Savio debated them, whether they were deans, faculty, the student-body president, or whoever,” wrote Robert Cohen, author of Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. “And this was the spirit not only of Savio but of the FSM, which had an almost Gandhian faith that through open discourse anyone had the potential to be won over” to a cause.

Savio was a veteran of the civil-rights movement, and as Cohen details, “sought to convince the editors of the student newspaper there that their use of the term “n—-r” in the paper was hurtful and irresponsible … Savio did not deny students had the right to print what they chose, but asked that they reach out to their black classmates and reflect on whether in the future they could be more thoughtful about the impact their words had on the campus community.”

The FSM’s quest was decent and honest—it was about engaging in open, rigorous debate and the exchange of ideas, no matter how inflammatory or loathsome, with a goal of making progress. What’s happening now isn’t about discussion: it’s pure political tribalism. People like Coulter and Yiannopoulos aren’t brought to campus to contribute substance—hearing either speak for a few minutes quickly puts lie to claims of their brilliance. They are skilled antagonists who can reliably incite backlash from a perceived enemy; they are, as Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian describes, the “outcome of a grotesque convergence of politics, entertainment and the internet in which an empty vessel can thrive unchecked by turning hate speech into show business.”

Where trauma, real or perceived, has become a sort of morbid currency in some circles of the left, often used to justify unworkable demands of individuals and institutions, the self-described “politically incorrect”—adults who consider childlike behaviour to be heroically subversive—are in the grievance trade. Because each provocation inflates the value of a carefully-crafted persona, victimhood is actively—and ironically—sought; they prey on the vulnerable, ridicule targets of well-documented discrimination, then cry persecution when met with resistance.

While it’s vital to uphold and protect the right of all speech on campus—even the most abhorrent rhetoric from the ranks of the alt-right—it’s crucial to identify this new game being played and, as Savio desired, critically judge “whether the speech … is really free, or merely cant.”

And it matters that influential voices, while rightly demanding institutions uphold free speech norms, explicitly make that distinction.

Source: How the alt-right weaponized free speech – Macleans.ca

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

When faced with Trump’s extremism, the media falter: Macdonald

2016/11/29 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Neil Macdonald:

It’s warming and bias-confirming to browse quotes about the importance of journalism to democracy. Thomas Jefferson said he’d vastly prefer newspapers without government to government without newspapers.

Napoleon said four newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

But others saw into the reality most journalists know well, and live daily.

George Orwell noted that “anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” Noam Chomsky characterized the media as the guard dog of the establishment, rather than the watchdog.

And Norman J. Ornstein said just the other day that the mainstream press, “behaving like a battered spouse,” is knuckling under to the new president-elect, normalizing extremism, rationalizing boorish thuggery, “thinking ‘Maybe it’s us…we should be nicer to him.'”

Ornstein, a left-leaning resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has been on a Twitter tear since Nov. 8, adding his scorn of the media to that of Donald Trump’s legions.

Righties have long despised what they call the “lamestream media,” preferring, somewhat like the hard left, to swim exclusively in their own pool, eagerly consuming the demagoguery of websites like Breitbart, arguably the choice of “white nationalists” once led by Steve Bannon, Trump’s new chief policy adviser.

There, they are reassured that Hillary Clinton is a criminal, that blacks are responsible for the treatment of blacks, that leftists are conspiringagainst Christmas, and so forth.

It’s a cartoonish view, one cheered on by Trump himself, who liked to goad crowds at his rallies against the reporters following him, complaining media outlets were deliberately ignoring his popularity, even as they did just the opposite.

Fear of audience

Ornstein, though, is relentlessly grinding his fist into a vulnerability that mainstream reporters know actually exists, but which they seldom acknowledge. My craft is often corporatist, hopelessly bourgeois, genuflects to power and, ultimately, fears its audience.

Anyone who requires proof of that need only review the unhinged media madness after 9/11; suddenly, anyone who opposed invading Iraq was pro-terrorist. Entire cities in Iraq were populated by terrorists. Patriotic correctness eclipsed the political correctness, and George W. Bush quickly brought most of the national press corps, whimpering, to heel.

Now that Trump has been validated by a minority of American voters (Clinton won the popular vote by at least two million votes, roughly the population of America’s largest city), the collective critical faculties of the media are faltering again.

Ornstein is right; extremism is being either ignored or glossed over. When a group of “alt-right” white supremacists held a celebratory party in a Washington restaurant to celebrate Trump’s victory, ending the night with Sieg Heil salutes, it was treated as a bad-apple one-off, even though Trump never proactively disavows his support from the extreme right.

“It is SO politically correct,” Ornstein tweeted sarcastically after that episode, “to frown on Nazi salute, overt antisemitism, and rank racism.”

Source: When faced with Trump’s extremism, the media falter – CBC News | Opinion

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Is the Mainstream Media Normalizing Neo-Nazis? – The Daily Beast

2016/11/23 1 Comment

Valid criticism:
The Los Angeles Times stands criticized for normalizing the white supremacist National Policy Institute, after a tweet that read, ‘Meet the new think tank in town: The ‘alt-right’ comes to Washington.’

When the Los Angeles Times’s social media team tweeted a link to a story about last Saturday’s celebratory post-election gathering in Washington of racists, anti-Semites, and white nationalists, the reaction—at least by some—was collective outrage.

“Worthless @latimes covers resurgent neo-Nazi movement as if it was a new boy band,” one of dozens of aggrieved readers tweeted after the paper touted the story on the benignly yet deceptively named National Policy Institute with the cheeky tweet, “Meet the new think tank in town: The ‘alt-right’ comes to Washington.”

“This tweet by the @latimes is beyond offensive,” liberal radio host Roland Martin posted on Twitter. “Calling these white nationalists a ‘think tank’ is atrocious.”

Another critic, actor Adam Shapiro, who was in the cast of Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobsbiopic, objected to the respectful attention the Times’s coverage of the conference accorded National Policy Institute president Richard Spencer, who is credited with coining the term “alt-right” for his fellow twenty- and thirty-something clean-cut millennials who would rather not be tagged as xenophobic thugs.

“WTF?! Why are you glamorizing this guy, @latimes? This is not a think tank. It’s a hate group,” Shapiro tweeted in response not only to Lisa Mascaro’s story—which quoted Spencer as hailing “the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard”—but also to an accompanying video in which the telegenic and articulate white nationalist was given four unchallenged minutes to reasonably explain his dream “to influence politics and influence culture” to restore white people of European descent to unquestioned power and social dominance, adding, “I think we have an amazing opportunity to do that with Donald Trump.”

Another tweeter, technology reporter Jack Smith IV, posted: “What ‘normalization’ ACTUALLY looks like: the @latimes running straight uploads of Richard Spencer sermons without qualification.”

In fairness, Mascaro’s story—which eventually carried an altered headline, dropping the “think tank” idea in favor of “White nationalists dress up and come to Washington in hopes of influencing Trump”—did point out that “the formally dressed men more resembled Washington lobbyists than the robed Ku Klux Klansmen or skinhead toughs that often represent white supremacists, though they share many familiar views.”

But unlike more unsympathetic accounts of the gathering in The New York Times and The Daily Beast, it made no mention of partygoers, including former MTV host Tila Tequila, jubilantly giving the Nazi salute and engaging in other less than democracy-friendly behavior.

Still, the LA Times story also quoted Heidi Beirich, of the anti-hate group nonprofit, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as warning against the “mainstreaming” of pernicious ideologies that the National Policy Institute represents.

“I don’t want anything to normalize the National Policy Institute,” she told The Daily Beast. “I think there has been a tendency in the press to not understand what the alt-right is—which is white supremacy. And I think we’re letting haters basically rebrand themselves to sounds less threatening—and that is very disappointing. I worry about that.”
Source: Is the Mainstream Media Normalizing Neo-Nazis? – The Daily Beast

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Newer posts →