Here. Wow.

• Goldy: The “Jewspapers,” the “Jew World Order.”
• McInnes: “Jews are ruining the world with their lies and their money and their hooked-nose, bagel-eating faces.”
• Goldy: “…we need to launch the next Crusade and reclaim Bethlehem.”
• McInnes: “I’ve actually become more anti-Semitic since I’ve come [to Israel].”
• Goldy: “Feminism is cancer.”
• McInnes: “[Palestinians] keep getting extinguished by money from big Jewbags.”
• Gunn Reid: [Laughs at whatever anti-Semitic, bigoted crap the other two say.]

The people who run the Rebel are big on “free speech.” The people who fund the Rebel, however, don’t favour anti-Semitic speech. 

Not sure where all this is going. But I don’t think it’ll end well for the “rebels,” do you?

Trump refuses to shake hands with someone who, unlike him, (a) is a grown-up and (b) has grown-up sized hands.

Several hundred votes for one option. I think a consensus is emerging. 

St. Patrick’s Day.

So. When I was sixteen or something, at Bishop Carroll, Jim Keelaghan and me briefly wanted to join the Irish Republican Army. We’d wear army jackets and black armbands on St. Patrick’s Day, and darkly mutter, “St. Patrick didn’t drive all of the snakes out of Ireland.” Stuff like that. We were stupid teenagers.

And then, on a road trip to Vancouver to see and hang out with the Clash, I picked up Stiff Little Fingers’ ‘Suspect Device,’ whose cover featured a black and white photo of dozens of real, honest-to-God bombs. Released on Rigid Digits in March 1978, the graphic realism of ‘Suspect Device’ made short work of my fondness for the Provo militancy. Howling like a man facing a firing squad, Jake Burns – who lived in Belfast, and for whom Republican and Loyalist violence was much more than a theory – condemned both sides with unbridled fury: “They take away our freedom in the name of liberty…Why don’t they all just clear off, why won’t they let us be…They make us feel indebted for saving us from Hell – and then they put us through it…It’s time the bastards fell!”

BBC disc-spinner John Peel got one of the 350 copies of the first pressing, and made sure naïve romantics like me got to hear it. The most powerful political protest song ever – partly because Burns and his band could have been murdered for simply recording it. The Hot Nasties covered when we opened for 999 at U of C one night, and it quickly escalated into a mini-riot. Glorious, epic. What a song.

But Ireland – where Lisa and I have a daughter (presently) living, and to which we have many familial connections – isn’t all about The Troubles and that. It’s about fun stuff, too.

Anyone familiar with this web site will know that Against Me! is a rather big deal around the Kinsella household. ‘Black Me Out’ was our wedding song – for real. Lisa and me are seeing them tomorrow night for the one millionth time, after the anti-Trump comedy funder, and then Bjorn and me are with them on Tuesday.

Perhaps their greatest song is a story about Irishness, and is simultaneously sad and uplifting (like art should always be). With few exceptions, it is the song that has woken me up every day for more than a decade: Pints of Guinness Make You Strong.

Here it is, way back when it was Tom (not Laura) out front and Warren (not me) out back.

Lyrics are here. Sing along, and have fun today.

Evelyn sits by the elevator doors
It’s been 37 years since James died on St. Patrick’s Day in 1964
But she could not hold it against him
There were times when there was nothing she could do,
But lie in bed all day beside a picture of them together
A picture of better days

And just like James, I’ll be drinking Irish tonight
and the memory of his last work week will be gone forever
Evelyn I’m not coming home tonight!
If we’re never together
If I’m never back again
Well, I swear to God that I’ll love you forever
Evelyn I’m not coming home tonight!

In all the years that went by she said
She’d always love him
and from the day that he died,
She never loved again

And in his wallet she kept in her nightstand
an A.A. card and a lock of red hair
She kept secrets of pride locked so tight in her heart,
it killed a part of her before the rest was gone.

She said, “If I would have known just how things would have ended up
I just would have let myself die.”

And just like James, I’ll be drinking Irish tonight
and the memory of his last work week will be gone forever
Evelyn I’m not coming home tonight!
If we’re never together
If I’m never back again
Well I swear to God that I’ll love you forever
Evelyn I’m not coming home tonight!

This Saturday! Me plus a bunch of really funny people! Watch me be repeatedly mocked to benefit Planned Parenthood!

Deets here!

To wit:

Donald Trump – the combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, racist, sexist, fascistic Human Cheeto – showed all of us that Campaigns Don’t Matter.  You can run a really shitty one, like he did, and still win.

But.  But one thing, and it is deliciously ironic.  It is schadenfreude on a scale heretofore unseen in politics.  It is frigging beautiful.

You can see it in the decisions of federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii, issued late last week – but particularly in the must-read decision of Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu.  In it, Judge Watson threw out Trump’s second (allegedly kinder and gentler) executive order seeking a Muslim ban.  And he did so by relying upon the words of Donald Trump himself.

Judge Watson dismissed the Trump regime’s claim that a court would need to probe the Unpresident’s “veiled psyche” to locate religious animus. Jusdge Watson would have none of it.  Repeatedly, he cited Trump statements that were helpfully found in the pages of the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general.

“There is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Said he: “A reasonable, objective observer would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavour a particular religion.” 

The general consensus, now, is that the short-fingered vulgarian – per Canadian Graydon Carter’s now-immortal phrase – will continue to be hoisted on his own petard.  As he labours to render the United States of America an Aryan Nation, Donald Trump will continue to lose in court.  That is now very clear, to every legal scholar and constitutional expert.

I’m honoured to host. Tickets are going fast, here. It’ll be an amazing night!

Not good.

That’s what Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes said on a video, found here.

Here’s some other things he said:

• “God, [Jews are] so obsessed with the Holocaust. … I don’t know if it’s healthy to dwell.”
• “I felt myself defending the super-far-right Nazis, just because I was sick of so much [Holocaust] brainwashing.”
• “…much less than six million [were murdered in the Holocaust] and they starved to death and they weren’t gassed.”
• “[A man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine was caused] by Jews. That was by Marxist, Stalinist, left-wing, commie, socialist Jews.”
• “[WWII was caused by the Treaty of Versailles, which was] disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals.”
• And, as noted, “I’m becoming anti-Semitic.”

I don’t think there can be any doubt those statements are unambiguously anti-Semitic, but in case you have any doubt, they were enthusiastically promoted – and celebrated – by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and America’s current neo-Nazi leader, Richard Spencer:

Around the same time McInnes made his statements, another Rebel Media person, Lauren Southern, abruptly left the organization.  Southern also counts Spencer and assorted neo-Nazis and white supremacists among her fan base.  There is a lot of speculation online that she is more aligned with the National Policy Institute’s Richard Spencer than with Rebel Media’s  Ezra Levant.  Personally, I don’t know if that’s true: I have never watched any of her many (many) videos.

Now, am I fan of the Rebel web site? Full disclosure: not really.  That’s particularly the case after Rebel’s Faith Goldy defended a far-Right pedophile in a bizarre effort to slime me for, um, being critical of pedophiles.

Anyway.  Ezra and I have a long, long history.  We’ve slammed each other, we’ve sued each other, we’ve gone after each other.  When Sun News Network started up, Kory Teneycke asked us to enter into an armistice, and so we did.  It’s held ever since, and I’ve been content to let other people fight with Ezra.  Been there, done that.

And I will give Ezra credit for this much: one, he built the Rebel thing from the ground up, and he has turned it into a significant player in the Canadian media universe.  It’s not a news service, not by a long shot – it’s simply a web platform for Right-wing and far-Right-wing opinion – but it’s not inconsequential.

Two, Ezra is not an anti-Semite.  Not just because he’s Jewish – Ezra has been more critical of other Canadian Jews than Jim Keegstra, Ernst Zundel and Paul Fromm put together.  He’s not anti-Semitic because, basically, he’s not anti-Semitic.

So what, then, is he doing keeping the likes of Gavin McInnes on the payroll?  What is the truth about alt-Right heroine Lauren Southern and her speedy departure?  Is Rebel Media so free-speechy that it will now give an uncritical platform to Holocaust denier rhetoric?

Some say all this means the end of Rebel Media.  Personally, I doubt it.  They seriously underestimate Ezra Levant.

But it’s all deeply unsettling, and pretty off-brand, too.  When Ezra Levant is prepared to play host to the likes of Gavin McInnes, spouting anti-Semitic filth, well…it’s not good.

For him.