The Far-Right, Neo-Nazis, and Racists Running For Municipal Office.... So Let's Have Some Fun With This

By this point in the evening a lot of people who monitor the far-right in Canada have noticed that Faith Goldy has submitted forms and is running for mayor of Toronto:

it appears white nationalist YouTuber and former Rebel Media host Faith Goldy has registered to run for mayor of Toronto. pic.twitter.com/3Et1lRi508

— ishmael n. daro (@iD4RO) July 27, 2018

A woman who
-got fired from The Rebel for appearing on a Neo-Nazi podcast
-was the key player in a Quebec mosque shooting truther movement
-recently promoted a 1930s book concerning “the Jewish menace”
is running for mayor of Toronto.https://t.co/US9bxet0Ol

— VICE Canada (@vicecanada) July 27, 2018

Ms. Goldy joins the long list of far-right, neo-Nazis, and run of the mill racists who have decided to throw their hat into the political ring....

.... and she is most likely doing it for the exact reasons that others of her ilk have as well:

One quick note on Goldy. After being demonetized on patron, paypal, etc for, you know, being a white nationalist, this "mayoral run" is almost certainly not calculated but out of desperation.

— Mack Lamoureux (@MackLamoureux) July 27, 2018

Already the following have announced their respective, and ultimately futile, runs for public office:

• Perennial candidate Paulie has announced he is running for mayor of Hamilton which genuinely surprised me since I thought he was still living in Mississauga.
• Kevin "Poodle" Johnston is running for mayor of Mississauga.... though even he seems confused as he had withdrawn his candidacy for mayor of Mississauga and registered to run for Ward 9 Mississauga city councilor only to withdraw his candidacy to be a city councilor and register to run for mayor again.
• James Sears, creepy as ever, is a candidate in the Toronto mayoral race as neo-Nazi and convicted murder Chris Brosky.
• Don Andrews may take another crack at mayor so long as he's the only candidate with a last name that starts with the letter "a." If not perhaps his mini-me Bob Smith will run?

Now Faith Goldy joins this august group by running for mayor of Toronto.

These people are running not because they believe they have a chance of winning, though I suppose some might have been able to delude themselves. In general they run so that they get publicity and support, albeit from the fringes, and thus more people who might be able to make donations. And of course many of them are narcissists who just want others to pay attention to them and to take them seriously.

I would prefer not to pay attention any of them, but I also can't help but think that this offers and opportunity for us as well:

ARC has run contests in the past in which our readers have either taken an existing political poster and modified it or have created an entirely new one. All of these have focused on making fun of Paul Fromm's efforts, such as the one from his 2014 campaign for major of Mississauga.

As I was pondering Ms. Goldy's entry into municipal politics, I thought that maybe we might hold the contest once again, though expand the reach somewhat.

What I am proposing is a two part contest in which the winner will be awarded $100 for creating the most informative AND political poster mocking any one of the following candidates:

• Faith Goldy, Toronto mayor
• James Sears, Toronto mayor
• Kevin "Poodle" Johnston, Mississauga mayor
• Paul Fromm, Hamilton mayor

When you have created your poster, send it to the following email address:

arc(DOT)collective200(AT)gmail(DOT)com

From those that have been sent, I and a jury will pick the best example of each far-right candidate. I will then inform those who have made the short list. These short listed posters will be published to the blog. The deadline for this part of the contest will be September 3 to September 14.

Now this is where the contestant and ARC readers will help to determine the winner.

Each poster posted somewhere within the city or ward the candidate running in will be considered as a vote for that poster. A photo of the poster sent to the above address will constitute evidence and will be counted as a vote. The designer of the short listed poster may put up as many as he or she like and any reader can do the same. Part 2 of the contest will go from October 8 to October 19.

Rules that I expect to be followed:

• Provide facts AND funny
• Nothing illegal or promoting anything illegal
• No encouragement of violence
• Nothing sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or racist

In short, feel free to be an asshole, but use some common sense and don't be a dick. Make fun of these clowns because they deserve it and because they hate being laughed at.

Because I'm spit-balling this all as I write it I reserve the right to change dates as needed to to include other information that I didn't think of initially when setting out the rules and conditions. I might also have to speak to a lawyer to make sure that this contest is legal since part of it involves some public postering.

Stay tuned for more details.

Sec. 13 Dead.... For Now

NOTE: This is a little screen shot heavy. Be forewarned.

On June 26, Sec. 13 of the Human Rights Act cease to exist. As our friend BCL noted however there is no reason why Sec. 13, which was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court, can not be brought back by a more enlightened government in the future. In the meantime the good folks at the now moribund Free Dominion have decided to post (a now rare) comment to celebrate the demise of Sec. 13:

It it isn't surprising that Connie would give props to Marc Lemire as Free Dominion had been on the forefront of the effort to rehabilitate Lemire's reputation, characterizing him as a free speech martyr. In fact, they went beyond this and engaged in a little bit of historical revisionism. Not only did they deny his role in the leadership of the Heritage Front from 2001 to 2005, they have all but denied that he had any significant history with the hate group. We have attempted to show them the error of their ways, but it seems they have decided to believe him rather than us. But then they aren't the only ones who have tried to help Lemire cover up a very shady past. Ezra Levant, in two interviews with Lemire, asked about the Heritage Front and did not challenge this response:

Uh, the Heritage Front uh, was active back in, uh, the the 90s and I was a young kid at the time. I had some, uh, interest in some of the things that they were doing in particularly thing like uh opposition to employment equity, things like reducing immigration. So I uh, listened to some of what they were about, and uh, I went away from it. I mean I was involved with them peripherally in my teenage years.

Well, that is partially true, as these articles indicate he was active with the Heritage Front in his teen years (he would have been 18 at the time of the 1993 photo and 19 when they were published):

Keegstra's Death: Relic of the Past Responds

That James Keegstra did not die on June 12 when the news became public, but in fact died 10 days earlier, is telling. The name Keegstra was still mentioned occasionally by the likes of Fromm when he rambled on about Sec. 319 and about free speech in an abstract way, but the man himself had been largely forgotten, drifting into obscurity soon after his final sentencing hearing in 1996. Even his contemporaries appear to have forgotten about him and it seems that few even attempted to remain in touch with the man they, at the time, lionized and rallied around.

Of his contemporaries, many like John Ross Taylor, Doug Christie, Wolfgang Droege, and Martin Wiche have died. Others like John Beattie, Don Andrews, and Ernst Zundel have yet to acknowledge Keegstra's passing, in part because they have shied away from their more colorful past (Like Beattie, who is running for Deputy Reeve in Minden, Ontario) or couldn't be bothered to care.

Such is the nature of the White Nationalist movement.

But at least one of those infamous old relics from the past has decided to make a rare appearance. Terry Long, like Keegstra, disappeared not long after of the Canadian branch of the Aryan Nations' he lead collapsed. Last we heard he was living in Ontario, but he does periodically pop up from time to time. He ran for office under the Doug Christie-led Western Canadian Concept Party. We know that it was Long whom Todd Conroy (former BC Volksfront leader) had been visiting when he got into a near fatal motorcycle accident. And we know that he still keeps up on the state of the movement, as we copies of emails sent by Long to some of the more contemporary members of the movement dating to the 2000s. So while he might not be active anymore, he certainly hasn't changed his views. And when Keegstra died Long (eventually) decided to break his silence as well.

Actually, Western historians generally agreed that the number of Jews who died in Auschwitz numbered between 800,000 and 1.35 million since at least 1961 and the Soviet numbers had been long discarded, but why should we expect revisionists like Long to be accurate?

Paul Fromm also got around to posting a eulogy of sorts, but we aren't sure that yet another one of Paulie's  self-promoting missives is really all that necessary here.

While Keegstra's obscurity is telling, it is also fitting. And so is the fact that his remaining contemporaries will eventually follow him, some likely sooner than others. Ernst Zundel is 75, Long has to be at least in his 70s,  and Don Andrews is around 72. John Beattie, someone who sounds to be in the early stages of dementia, is in his early 70s (UPDATE: Beattie is 72) and Paul Fromm in his mid 60s. Another 10, 15 years....

There will come a point when these men too will shuffle off their mortal coil and their names forgotten. We find this fact to be a comforting one.

Lemire Cries Uncle

We figure we'll go right to the source in this one:

Marc Lemire throws in the towel

It was only a matter of time after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld civil law controls on hate speech as constitutional in the Whatcott case, but Marc Lemire has finally admitted that his parallel attack on the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibition on Internet hate-speech (s. 13) has been gutted (‘please ignore my legal arguments found at paragraphs 84-115 of my previous Federal Court of Appeal factum’).

The background to this is that even before the SCC’s decision in Whatcott, Justice Mosley of the Federal Court reached the same conclusion in October 2012 and upheld both the finding that Marc Lemire had violated the Human Rights Act by posting online hate and that section 13 was constitutional as per the Supreme Court’s previous findings in their 1990 Taylor decision. Lemire’s appeal of that decision is ongoing and both Lemire and the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) filed supplementary legal briefs following the Whatcott decision.

Mr. Lemire caves on the now legally (even more) entrenched facts that civil controls on hate speech are reasonable limits on freedom of expression, are justifiable in a free and democratic society, and are a pressing and substantial objective to avoid the serious damage caused as history has shown. Reading bumps on people’s heads to know what their intent was is still out. Hatred and contempt as narrowly defined by the Supreme Court in Taylor have been properly interpreted by human rights tribunals.

What’s left? Not much. Weak arguments that the Tribunal was right and the Federal Court wrong that severance of the financial penalty provisions was the appropriate remedy to any concerns about them. This, despite the fact that the SCC in Whatcott specifically engages in severance of an obsolete and unused descriptive portion of the hate law to bring the Saskatchewan legislation into constitutional compliance (and modern parlance). Scrambling for a twig to latch onto after that but it’s clear the jig is up. 

Lemire’s factum is here. The Canadian Human Rights Commission’s factum in response is here. 

Lemire’s appeal was always frivolous and now following the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Whatcott, I believe it’s just vexatious. The shame is that by not seeking their costs against Lemire for continuing his appeal after the SCC has put the issue to bed, the CHRC is de facto enabling this waste of taxpayer money. All this, because Mr. Lemire wouldn’t mediate a settlement if a cease and desist order was on the table.

In the end, I think it’s safe to say that despite sharing an interest in disseminating homophobic hate propaganda, Bill Whatcott is waaay off Marc Lemire’s Christmas card list. This one, for instance though, would be quite funny.

Thanks Bill Whatcott for making this all happen. You sir are a superstar!

Mr. Warman seems more whimsical than we are in his choice of "funky music."

We're more inclined to gloat:

Blast from The Past: Nationalist Party of Canada and the Western Guard

UPDATE 3 (replacing UPDATE 1): Never mind. :)

A little while ago we spoke of our interest in documenting the rise and fall of the Heritage Front (and yes, Grant Bristow and CSIS play a significant role in that history, "Narrow Back"). We have received some information and photos, but we thought we would take this opportunity to remind our readers that we would still like your help.

Some of the information we have received actually goes WAY back. Those who know the history of the Heritage Front are aware that it was created by disaffected members of Don Andrews' Nationalist Party of Canada. Nationalist Party members Droege, Bristow, and Lincoln founded the Heritage Front soon after they returned from Libya after attending the the twentieth anniversary celebration of the invitation of the Gaddafi regime, as they felt that the Nationalist Party was no longer an effective means of pursuing their goals. In that sense, the Nationalist Party (according to their own family tree) might be thought of as the Heritage Front's daddy:

Hmmm, we guess then that the Western Guard would be the grand daddy and Paul Fromm's Edmund Burke Society would be the great grand daddy.

All Is Quiet In "White Nationalist" Land: Part III

We've twice (here and here) alluded to something rather odd happening on the Blood & Honour forums (as opposed to the Blood and Honour International/Combat 18 forums). Given that three of their own have been accused of and arrested for a series of assaults in Vancouver, one might expect something about this would be discussed on their website.

And there was a thread created to discuss it. Briefly. So briefly we didn't get the screen shots before the thread "mysteriously" disappeared.

Well, it really isn't all that much of a mystery. Shawn Macdonald, one of the men accused in the series of assaults in Vancouver, is also a moderator on the forums. It appears that he, or someone acting for him, made the offending thread disappear. This is evidenced by the last time Shawn logged in to the forum:

Martin Weiche of the Canadian Nazi Party Dead

Well, another of the old guard of the Canadian racist movement has died. Martin K. Weiche, member of the John Beattie led Canadian Nazi Party (Weiche would later go on to lead what must have been the tiny Canadian National Socialist Part) died on September 2.

Part II: And How Does the Extreme Right React to Jack Layton's Passing? Exactly How You Would Expect

 
In our last article, we discussed briefly the reaction of those one might consider to be "mainstream" conservatives to the news of Jack Layton's death. Those reactions seem to range from sincere admiration for a respected adversary to general douchebaggery. However we didn't discuss the reaction of those we cover on this blog.

Yep, the boneheads have something to say too.

There is a belief that one can measure the worth of a person by the respect that his or her ideological opponents has for that person. In all likelihood, this was intended to apply to ideological opponents who are mainstream and here Jack fares very well. However, we at ARC believe that one can measure the worth of a person by how hated that person is by the most vile, loathsome elements of our society.

Heritage Front in the News Again: Libya Connection

When the people of Libya rose up revolt some months ago, there were very few people who defended the Gaddafi regime. One of those who did defend Gaddafi was Ian Verner Macdonald who, as we wrote about soon after he made his statement in defence of the tyrany in Tripoli, has a very long association with racist extremism in Canada and helped to facilitate a meeting of Canadian racists with the the Libyan government in the late 1980s.

We wrote about the links between the Libyan government and Canadian racists, as well as the fact that the experience in Libya in large part led Wolfgang Droege and others to found the Heritage Front. Now the msm has decided there's a story here as well:

Gaddafi’s ‘Libyan Friendship Society’ with Canada’s racist movement

Stewart Bell  

May 28, 2011 – 9:00 AM ET | Last Updated: May 27, 2011 7:54 PM ET 

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been a lot of things during his more than four decades in power: coup leader, revolutionary, nuclear proliferator, dictator — and friend of the Canadian racist movement. 

Libyan agents began forging ties with the leaders of Canada’s extreme right in the late 1980s. Twice, the Gaddafi regime brought delegations of Canadian “white nationalists” to Tripoli, where they were feted and given cash. 

“The common ground was the hatred of Jews,” said Grant Bristow, who went on one of the trips in his capacity as an undercover Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent. “That was the basis of the relationship.” 

The Libyan support for Canada’s racist right is a reminder that long before Col. Gaddafi began his brutal crackdown on the Libyan opposition, triggering a NATO military intervention, he had been an international menace, fomenting violence and unrest. 

Even in Canada. 

In 1987, the Libyans invited the Nationalist Party of Canada to send a delegation to an event marking the first anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Tripoli, said the Toronto-based party’s longtime leader, Don Andrews. 

President Ronald Reagan ordered air strikes on Col. Gaddafi’s compound after Libyan agents bombed a German nightclub, killing American servicemen. The dictator survived but his adopted daughter died.

“I knew they needed the white faces for Libya’s one-year celebration of the Reagan bombing,” Mr. Andrews said in a recent interview. “I knew we’d be used as propaganda but I thought, ‘Sure, why not. We don’t mind that.”

Based out of a house in east Toronto, the Nationalist Party was Mr. Andrews’s latest far right group. Before that he had headed the Western Guard. “White People,” read one of his flyers, “Canada belongs to us.” 

He said the Libya trip was mostly just a free vacation in the desert but the Nationalist Party also opposed “foreign aggression,” such as the U.S. air strikes. He sent a delegation of 13 to Tripoli. The Libyans paid for the trip and gave the group US$700. 

Two years later, Mr. Andrews was invited to send another delegation, this time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the coup that brought Col. Gaddafi to power. Mr. Andrews sent Wolfgang Droege, the co-founder of the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. He had just been released from a California prison. Also on the trip was Mr. Bristow, who was posing as a racist while he spied on Mr. Droege. “We sent 17 the second time,” Mr. Andrews said. 

In an interview, Mr. Bristow called it “the great Libyan adventure.” The Libyan government paid for everything. He said Mr. Droege saw the trip as a chance to lobby Col. Gaddafi’s regime to fund the Canadian racist movement. 

“Droege was hoping to set up a long-term relationship with the Libyans,” recalled Mr. Bristow, who now lives in Alberta under the name Nathan Black. “He was looking at maybe there could be some stable, substantial movement funding from the Libyans.” 

As documented in Warren Kinsella’s 1996 book Web of Hate, the delegates flew to Rome and then to Malta, where they boarded a ship to Libya. “We got taken off the boat and moved to a place that we jokingly referred to as Camp Gaddafi, which looked like it was a foreign worker type compound for oil workers or something,” Mr. Bristow said. “It had a swimming pool, almost like guest villas.” 

The Nationalist Party delegates visited the Tripoli market and the ancient Phoenician trading post at Subratha. They toured the house bombed by U.S. warplanes, which had been converted into a museum. 

“There wasn’t exactly a lot to do,” Mr. Bristow said. “It’s not like the Mai Tais and Margaritas were aplenty there. It would basically be your Mormon version of the all-inclusive.” 

On the day of the revolutionary celebrations, a problem emerged over what to wear. The Libyans wanted the delegates in uniforms but Mr. Droege refused. “Droege said, ‘No, we’re not going to wear some sand n—ers’ uniform,’ ” Mr. Bristow said. “He said it’s not going to happen.” 

In the end, the Canadians agreed to wear the uniforms, which were simply green pants and t-shirts. But the dispute exacerbated a rift in the Nationalist Party, and Mr. Droege began planning to form his own breakaway group. 

Mr. Droege was souring on Libya. He had been unable to meet any officials to solicit funds, and he was troubled to learn that Col. Gaddafi was supporting Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. “This made the regime anathema to him, from a racist ideology point of view,” the Security Intelligence Review Committee wrote later in a report. 

The main event was held at the Tripoli stadium. “It was your usual contingents of people with a variety of uniforms on from various Third World banana republic-type countries,” Mr. Bristow said. “You know, the Congo and places like that that sent some army people to march through the stadium in solidarity of Muammar, some speeches and that kind of grand spectacle.” 

Before the delegation returned to the ship for the voyage back to Italy, a Libyan agent gave them $1,000. It was a disappointing outcome for Mr. Droege, who had envisioned a lucrative financial pipeline. “It didn’t work out the way Droege wanted it to,” Mr. Bristow said. 

But even that meagre Libyan donation soon evaporated. On the return flight from Rome, the plane stopped in Chicago, where Mr. Droege was arrested for violating his parole conditions, which prohibited him from entering the United States. 

The Libyan money paid his legal fees. Mr. Droege was escorted to the border and returned to Toronto. Within days, at least partly because of what happened in Libya, he formed his own racist group, the Heritage Front. 

Mr. Droege continued to talk about getting money from the Libyans, and wanted to identify Libyan agents in Montreal so he could sell them information on Jewish groups in Canada. But it never happened. 

Penetrated from the start by Canadian intelligence, the Heritage Front collapsed and Mr. Droege became a full-time drug dealer. In 2005, Mr. Droege was murdered by a delusional addict named Keith Deroux. 

And with him died what Mr. Bristow called the Libyan Friendship Society. But he does have one memento, a photo he took of Mr. Droege standing next to a policeman in Malta.  

“We thought it was very funny, the only time when Droege was ever really friendly to a cop.” 

National Postsbell@nationalpost.com

We have the feeling that the mere mention of Grant Bristow will drive our friends at Free Dominion to distraction, as they are convinced that the entire Heritage Front affair was a creation by CSIS to discredit the Reform Party and to push a social engineering agenda:

 

 

We've sort of given up trying to convince them that they're wrong (we don't doubt that they will learn that the hard way in the end). However, it might be instructive to take a look at one of the early meetings of the Heritage Front. The following video (thanks to the kindness of the CJC) is a commemoration of terrorist Robert Mathews and features not only Wolfgang Droege's introduction of the speakers, but also Paul Fromm who continues to be a figure in the Canadian racist movement (in the first video, Fromm begins speaking at the 10 minute mark after the woman representing the Women for Aryan Unity and a young man from a group calling itself the Canadian Alliance, and begins the video in Part II). We think this will turn out to be one of the earliest public meetings of the Heritage Front to be published online, dealing with an event that took place about a year after the Libyan experience.

Droege was killed in 2005. Fromm is still a significant figure in the Canadian WN movement. Perhaps our Free Dominion friends might wish to discuss whether the Heritage Front was entirely a CSIS operation with Paulie?

Marc Lemire Edits His Own Wikipedia Article.

Oh, Marc.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens once noted that, “there are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it." And Mark, you're ability to conceal your vanity is abysmal.

Over the last number of years, Mark Lemire has been editing his own Wikipedia entry using the user-name, "Veritas-Canada." It has always been transparent that Lemire and V-C were one in the same. As Veritas-Canada, Lemire attempted to expunge any links to newspaper articles, B'nai Brith and Canadian Jewish Congress reports, and any other sources connecting Lemire to groups and individuals associated with the far right, as well as the fact he was the last leader of the Heritage Front. As a result there has been an ongoing edit war on the Marc Lemire article since late 2006.

Well, it looks like Veritas-Canada wasn't getting the job done so Lemire called in some reinforcements.

Oh, did we say "call"? What we meant to say was that Lemire CREATED reinforcements in the form of sockpuppets.