Adam Strashok: ID Canada, WCAI, and Conservative Politics in Alberta

On October 29, Ricochet broke a story regarding a group of men running a white supremacist website who were also active members of the Canadian military:

A Ricochet investigation has unmasked the operators of a white supremacist web store, and they're active members of the Canadian Forces. Our military says there is no violation of their code of conduct. Full story:  https://t.co/SDJhlJ68p2 #cdnpoli

— Ricochet (@ricochet_en) October 29, 2018

One of the figures profiled was this guy:

Though he was known as "Alexei Kuznetsov" his real name is Adam Strashok:

As it turns out, I had posted some photos of Strashok back on September 15 in reference to a story about Calgary members (or supporters) of ID Canada (formerly Generation Identity Canada) being caught in the act of posting racist flyers on the main campus of the University of Calgary:

While he wasn't with Jake Logan Findell on the evening of September 10 when Findell and a yet unidentified individual were caught flyering, Strashok was photographed with Findell at a Worldwide Coalition Against Islam (WCAI) anti-Muslim rally back on June 3, 2017:

He is also a fan of former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall, Doug Ford, and Jason Kenney:

It is this last link that is the most interesting since PressProgress has uncovered Strashok's links to the United Conservative Party:

NEW: Meet the anti-Semitic white nationalist who ran Jason Kenney’s call centre https://t.co/lqLDReyYya #cdnpoli #ableg

— PressProgress (@pressprogress) October 30, 2018

According to PressProgress, Strashok served on the executive of a University of a Calgary conservative club and worked as a staffer for Conservative MP Bob Benzen:

Strashok also appears to have been the leader of Jason Kenney's call center during the latter's campaign for the leadership of the UCP.

PressProgress has uncovered a litany of racist and antisemitic posts made by Strashok under his real name and a number of online handles. I invite ARC readers to read the article on the PressProgress website, but here are a few of the low lights:

Readers will also be familiar with Brad Salzberg who has appeared fairly frequently on this blog, especially in relation to his partnership with WCAI:

• Events of June 3: Anti-Muslim Protests
• Public Urination and The Fallout From The Protests in Calgary and Ottawa
• WCAI Anti-Muslim Hate Group June 25 Protest Information
• Salzberg and DeLuca Finally Respond to Vancouver Failure; DeLuca Blames CAP and SoO

How many stories like this are there going to be uncovered about the United Conservative Party and the company they keep? How long before people come to realize this is a feature and not a bug?

UPDATE: Life comes at you hard sometimes.

How many disavowals does this make?

Extreme Rhetoric Results in Political Violence: Pipe Bombs and Mass Murder

Given the events of today especially as well as the preceding days, to write that it has been a bad week would be a horrible understatement.

Robert Bowers & Cesar Sayoc.

Not immigrants who came on a caravan.
Not Muslims.
Not refugees.
Not black men who kneel to protest police brutality.
Not women angry at Kavanaugh.
Not Mexican invaders.

Angry, homegrown American men inspired to violence due to an ideology of hate.

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) October 27, 2018

On October 22, a package was found at the home of financier George Soros containing a pipe bomb. Soros has been set up as a boogeyman figure by many on the right and figures prominently in their conspiracies including funding antifa (or really any protest against Trump and his policies):

The attacks against him consistently contain antisemitic tropes. The following day, a similar package containing a pipe bomb was delivered to the home of former president Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, though the secret service intercepted the package before it arrived.

The response of much of the right in the United States was to suggest that the pipe bombs were a "false flag" and were carried out by left-wing groups. They blamed the Democratic Party, antifa, George Soros, the Clintons, and Obama. In Canada, the reaction of the groups and individuals I follow on social media followed a similar trend. For example, on the Canadian Combat Coalition page, members simultaneously celebrated the attempted assassinations and denied that they had actually occurred. It was also claimed that anyone who would be arrested was a patsy; the far right knew the "real" truth:

Aftermath of Toronto Mayoral Election: White Nationalists Attack Goldy For Ideological Impurity

I've read a lot of people who are justifiably concerned that an odious white nationalist could garner more than 25,000 votes (3.4%) and finish in (albeit a distant) third place in a civic election taking place in one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. Playing the devil's advocate, I imagine that part of this number is due to Goldy being a familiar name from her time in both relatively mainstream media (ie. the short-lived Sun News) and her time with Ezra Levant's "Rebel Media." Still, I don't blame anyone for being pretty disgusted that she would get any votes.

But the white nationalists aren't celebrating. Far from it.

There are of course those who remain her supporters who are angry because they erroneously believe the election was stolen from her, however there is a sizable number of her former backers who are angry that she cynically appealed to minority groups and lied about her white nationalist bona fides in order to broaden her appeal. That was evident last night when Richard Spencer, the man who claims to have coined the term, alt-right, engaged in a Twitter storm attacking Goldy:

Later, Spencer claimed that a member of Goldy's own campaign volunteers contacted him to complain about Goldy's strategy:

None of this came as a surprise as a rift had become evident during the last month of the campaign.

Ronny Cameron was among the first to attack the woman he once dubbed "the queen of the alt-right." Others followed. The most interesting criticism came from one of her most visible supporters:

Incidentally, am I the only person who thinks "Jack Tyler" looks like the love child of Baby Herman from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and Clare Quilty from the Jeremy Iron's version of "Lolita"?

In any case, "Cracker Jack" (aka "Jack Tyler") was interviewed on October 20 regarding Goldy (this was a follow-up to an October 11 interview, a clip of which appears in the video that will follow). In the video "Cracker Jack"  discusses his disappointment in Goldy and her campaign.

It is a longish video and I have edited it somewhat for time. I also include some clarifying screen shots from Goldy's Twitter page and elsewhere, a few editorial comments, and less snark than I usually add.

I mean, not NO snark. I'm not a stone after all:

Ontario 2018 Civic Election

I've been watching "Murdoch Mysteries".

Anything interesting happening? ;)

Okay, okay!

TORONTO:

Let's start with Faith Goldy. She is currently a very distant third place with 24,852 or 3.39% of the vote. On the one hand it is disappointing that many people voted for her, she doesn't seem likely to break 4% and given her name recognition when associated with "Sun News" and later "Rebel Media" perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise. It also is likely to be the high point in her political career, such that it ever was.

I'm a glass half full sort of person

Other fascists have performed much worse. Chris Brosky running under Don Andrew's Nationalist Party of Canada banner is currently sitting at 2,694 (0.37%) while James Sears of the neo-Nazi rag "Your Ward News" has an emasculating 657 (0.09%) of the vote.

HAMILTON:

Oh, Paulie.... why do you continue to subject yourself to this humiliation. Oh, I know there must be some sort of financial angle, but still, 298 (0.59%) has got to hurt.

MISSISSAUGA:

In terms of the percentage of the vote, Kevin "the Poodle" Johnston is doing the best. As of this writing he has 2,201, or 13.3% of the vote with 309 polling stations out of 692 reporting. It doesn't look however as if there was much of a serious challenge to Bonnie Crombie who is running away with the election and will win a second term so perhaps given his self-promotion Johnston was able to get people to park their vote with him?

UPDATE: Since Brosky, Sears, and Fromm are non-entities, I'll just look at Goldy and Johnston.

With 465 polls out of 692 (67.2%) reporting, Johnston has 12,877 votes, or 13.4% of the total. He had been as high at 13.6%. Given he totaled a little over 700 votes total in 2014, I admit this is a bit of a surprise. I can think of some reasons to explain some of this (name recognition, the only person other than Crombie who ran in 2014, etc) but this is still a significant number for a man who is facing hate crime charges, at least one lawsuit for (I believe) defamation, and who isn't known to be particularly truthful. Still, this might be the high point of the man's life as he faces a criminal trial in a short time.

In Toronto, Goldy 25,576 votes or 3.4% with 1794 of 1800 polling stations reporting. I had spoken with friends and suggested she had an outside chance of between 3% to 5%, though I could have seen her getting less. Given the size of Toronto even that small percentage looks like a bigger number than anyone would like to see.

Still, rather than celebrating, her allies are actually quite upset including the man who coined the term "alt-right":

You see, her former alt-right supporters aren't happy that she began aligning herself with the JDL and Meir Weinstein or with non-white ethnic groups in order to broaden her base. Given her views it was a rather cynical and ultimately fruitless effort, but it did result in the rupturing of her previous relationships as evidenced by Richard Spencer's current tweet storm:

Which isn't to say that there aren't those who dispute Spencer's perspective:

What I am interested in though is what Canadian alt-right figures such as "Cracker Jack" (aka "Jack Tyler"), other members of ID Canada, and her supporters have to say about Ms. Goldy. I'll be posting an article on that soon, but if this tweet is to be believed there is already dissension in the ranks of Goldy's campaign:

Faith Goldy' Mayoral Run Described As A Twitter Vanity Campaign By Ezra Levant

As we enter the last 24 hours before Toronto's civic election, Faith Goldy is still complaining about being hard done by the media for not covering her mayoral campaign in the way she thinks they should:

And because of this she acts like a petulant child both in refusing an offer by the media to cover her campaign....

.... or "laughing" when a newspaper perceived as left of center endorsed the front runner but the right-wing tabloid you were once associated with through their failed news channel also endorses the front runner:

That's the sort of maturity one would expect from a six year old who, after crying about not being invited to the cool kids birthday party, refuses other invitations as if she is getting back at someone.

Or, perhaps even more apropos:

Aside from a few far-right figures and some columnists, most recently and shamefully Conrad Black who is white washing Goldy's record of support for white nationalism, no legitimate journalist left, right, or center gives her a chance of winning; few expect she'll poll more than 5% tomorrow. One would think her former place of work, the far-right propaganda site "Rebel Media" might offer a few lines of coverage at least, though they too have been mainly silent. This might be one of the reasons for this particularly passive-aggressive tweet:

Well there's a rather simple reason for this. Ezra Levant doesn't think she warrants coverage because he doesn't believe it to be a serious campaign, but describes it as a Twitter vanity project aimed at increasing her profile online.

H/T to Jonathan Goldsbie of "Canadaland" who posted the links to Levant's videos on Twitter.

On August 27, not long after she announced her candidacy, Levant was asked if he would support her. His answer was no and he then proceeded to give a surprisingly cogent rationale. He suggested that it wasn't serious, was (as already noted) a vanity project, that she has absolutely no managerial experience, she's made some incredibly poor decisions, and her embrace of white nationalism as reasons that he neither supports Goldy nor will spend much time covering her campaign:

ARC had also noted that her campaign seemed primarily as a means of self-promotion and to drive traffic to her YouTube channel, a belief I think is born out by the evidence that ARC and our supporters have uncovered:

October 2018 Bits and Bites: Elections, Being Fooled By Fake Images, and Celebrating Political Violence

As we wind down the municipal election season, I thought it would be instructive to remind ARC readers that both Mississauga mayoral candidate/hate crime chargee/ narcissistic attention seeker/habitual liar Kevin "the Poodle" Johnston and his election volunteers Rick Boswick and Derek Storie (featured in the video below) are racists:

Stay classy you two.

Johnston, Boswick, and Storie were "campaigning" yesterday, and I mean campaigning in the loosest sense of the term:

How to make friends and influence people, eh?

A few provinces over to the west, the United Conservative Party of Alberta continues to have a problem in that they attract bigots as candidates:

UCP candidates keep saying racist and Islamophobic things. At this point you have to believe that this this is who they are. #ableg https://t.co/xVokh5otVE

— Progress Alberta (@ProgressAlberta) October 20, 2018

Moving back west, we take a look at what the Northern Guard has been up to:

I don't why it continues to surprise me that the likes of Nick Gallant continue to be fooled by such obviously photoshopped; one can see the bar across the "N" in an sad attempt to make it look like an "A":

Even one of the Northern Guard members was able to figure it out:

What I find funny is the initial anger from one Northern Guard member who, when he believed the flag was authentic, defended the Nazis' reputation as soldiers as opposed to the "soy boys" of antifa:

Not defending fascism = TOTALLY defending fascism.

In fact, that sort of provides a great segue.

This past week between 20 and 30 members of the Proud Boys assaulted three individuals counter-protesting outside an event in which Gavin McInnes reenacted and celebrated the assassination of a socialist Japanese politician in 1960 by a member of the far right in Japan. Those who attacked the three did so with members of the NYPD looking on. Since then some Proud Boy members involved in the attacked have been identified....

.... and some have since been arrested. McInnes claims he's working on arranging the surrender of the remaining suspects. But none of this should at all be surprising given the two years McInnes has been agitating for increased political violence and enlisting a bunch of normally useless dude-bros to carry it out:

Gavin McInnes: "i cannot recommend violence enough. It is a really effective way to solve problems." pic.twitter.com/XcWBWBkrh8

— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 15, 2018

It also shouldn't be surprising that the far right in Canada loves this: