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Globe and Mail.com
Note: 14 pages long part 1 of 3 posts.
Military Current Affairs & News
Merge with 130277
G&M article: Canada’s new far right
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadas-new-far-right-a-trove-of-private-chat-room-messages-reveals/
Canada’s new far right: A trove of private chat room messages reveals an extremist subculture
An analysis of 150,000 chat room messages paints a picture of a group that is actively recruiting new members, buying weapons and trying to influence political parties
SHANNON CARRANCO AND JON MILTON
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED APRIL 27, 2019UPDATED 7 HOURS AGO
They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in every province, in communities large and small. They gather on the internet to strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized. They are the new far right in Canada.
The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old multicultural consensus in this country.
The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.
The messages were given to The Globe and Mail by Montreal-based anti-fascists, who infiltrated the chat room in order to gather information on the far right and disrupt their activities.
The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.
While the news media traditionally avoid publishing such offensive and inflammatory material, in order to prevent giving extremists a platform, The Globe has chosen, for the sake of transparency and accuracy, to reproduce a limited number of examples of the ideas expressed in the online discussions. The selection omits the most gratuitous slurs and images, but the result is a disturbing portrait of a virulent subculture that speaks in a graphic, hate-fuelled vernacular.
The size of this particular group discussion is modest, at 180 users. But its members do more than simply engage in online talk. They meet in person, spread propaganda and encourage each other to recruit and expand the movement. They purchase weapons and discuss training. They have also attempted to join, influence and volunteer for Canadian political parties, usually adopting a restrained and more palatable guise.
White nationalism has become a growing concern around the world, especially in its extreme and violent forms. Last month’s terrifying attack on mosques in Christchurch, N.Z., in which 50 people were shot to death and 50 more injured, and which were livestreamed by the alleged killer on Facebook, ignited a worldwide surge of anxiety about the simmering threat of white-nationalist terrorism. David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said earlier this month that his agency is increasingly preoccupied by the threat of right-wing extremists.
His remarks came shortly after Facebook banned a number of people, including former Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy and Canadian white-nationalist campaigner Kevin Goudreau, for promoting organized hate. Other internet giants are also feeling pressure to crack down.
The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the upcoming election.
Regardless, it is evident that an internet-based extremist subculture has spread across the globe. What to do about it is an urgent question, both for politicians and for the leaders of some of the world’s biggest social-media companies. The group chats reviewed by The Globe provide rare insight into who and what is behind this movement, and serve as a sober reminder that Canada is among the global breeding grounds of hate.
Not long ago, the far right seemed a negligible force. In 2014, CSIS declared on its website that right-wing extremism was not a significant problem in Canada. In part, that lack of concern reflected a view of the far right as self-defeatingly fractious. Groups tended to spring up – and disappear ¬– with regularity, often destroyed by infighting. They were dismissed as an ineffectual rump of high-school dropouts who couldn’t effectively organize anything.
According to Barbara Perry, a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and a leading expert on the far right in Canada, the threat of far-right violence here is often underestimated. Between 1985 and 2015, her research shows, roughly 120 violent incidents in Canada could be attributed to far-right groups and individuals. That compares, she says, with a relative handful of incidents that can be attributed to Islamist-inspired suspects, who tend to draw far more intense scrutiny from police and intelligence agencies.
Among the most horrific examples in recent years were a deliberate attack on police in New Brunswick in 2014, in which three officers were killed; and a shooting at a Quebec City mosque in January, 2017, that left six people dead. In both cases, the men convicted of the killings had been radicalized online.
Dr. Perry says that the makeup of the far-right ecosystem has also been changing: Over the past four years, the number of groups associated with the far right in Canada has, by her count, roughly doubled, from about 120 to more than 200. According to Statistics Canada, in 2017 alone the number of reported hate crimes jumped by 47 per cent from the year before.
And numbers tell only part of the story, says Dr. Perry. Skinhead and neo-Nazi groups comprising, for the most part, socially marginal members of society, have been supplemented by a new cohort whose recruits tend to be better educated and better off financially. They are also better organized, and are willing to embrace a range of new tactics.
George Ciccariello-Maher, an American academic and outspoken anti-fascist, told The Globe and Mail that anonymous platforms – such as the Discord server reviewed by The Globe – are part of a crucial radicalizing stage for today’s alt-right, a term he uses to differentiate the current generation of white nationalists from previous ones. “Anonymity, as we know, goes all the way from this level of basic recruitment and outreach in the alt-right, to the organizers and activists themselves,” he says.
For Dr. Ciccariello-Maher, infiltrating the communications infrastructure of the far right is an important step in stopping the movement’s rise. “The communications network,” he argues, “is an essential part of the war that needs to be carried out against them.”
In a statement, Discord said that its rules specifically prohibit the promotion of hatred, calls to violence or any illegal activity, and that it investigates and takes action against any reported violations. It added that it does not read each of the billions of messages sent on Discord every day, because it respects the privacy of its users; instead, Discord says, it relies on human and computer intelligence to bring violations of company guidelines to its attention.
TEACHABLE MOMENTS
The overarching goal for many in the Canadian Super Players chat group was the eventual creation of a white ethnostate. In the meantime, one aim was to begin slowly gaining a foothold in a range of institutions and professions, including law, education and the military.
One member described himself as a graduate student and an active far-right recruiter with a keen interest in grassroots political organization. Another said he worked in a small Ontario city at a blue-collar job where he was trying to gradually increase his “power level,” or overt racism, to convert his co-workers to his world view. A third was a middle-aged father who bragged that his teenage children seemed to be adopting his attitudes.
Yet another, who went by the online moniker Dank, described himself as a University of Toronto graduate who was now training at another institution to become a teacher. Like other members of the group, he took care not to reveal his name, but he shared an image of what appeared to be course material with the logo of Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont.
He said that at one point he was working as a student teacher at a school with children in Grades 6, 7 and 8, whose ethnic makeup was almost entirely white. “It’s the ethnostate basically,” he wrote.
Dank told the online group that he was using his position as a student teacher to influence young minds. He described one classroom scene in which the students were learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust. “In a moment where the actual teacher wasn’t in the room, I casually asked them their thoughts and opinions,” he wrote.
The children, he continued, generally saw the Holocaust as “really bad,” but one of them asked why it had happened. Dank asked the young girl, “What was the point of the train cars and the deportations if it was just to kill them all?” He then encouraged the students to look into it on their own if they were curious.
Dank told the online group that he hoped his charges would stumble upon the same sources that he did in his formative years. When he was in high school, he said, he had a history teacher who “always spoke about ‘the Jews’ and used a funny voice referencing them.” Such actions had persuaded Dank to research the Holocaust himself, which ultimately led him down a rabbit hole of Nazi-sympathetic websites.
He also said he made sure to use a discussion of Indigenous identity to explain to the children that they were white and European. One girl asked if that was racist.
“She didn’t react negatively when I told her you are European and white and there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he wrote.
“I told one kid of what Toronto is like … sometimes, not only are you the only English speaker, but you’re also the only white person,” Dank wrote.
He was adamant that the far-right movement required a presence in the teaching profession, because, as he put it: “we absolutely need to have our guys in the institutions.” He said he thought he had a good chance of remaining undercover, although he was worried about getting too close to any colleagues, lest they betray him.
“l’ll play their game and recite what they want to hear,” he said, adding that he was “acing the diversity class because I know all their narratives.”
He implored his peers: “We can’t just give over education to the people who hate us.”
RUSTY WITHIN THE RANKS
Although the Canadian Super Players forum was populated mainly by fairly young men, a handful of older participants were influential in defining its goals and strategies.
One man, who went by the online handle Rusty and who described himself as an experienced member of the Canadian Armed Forces, was seen by other members as a leader and his advice on training, weapons and tactics was sought after.
Rusty told his friends in the Canadian Super Players group chat that he had joined the Forces in 2007 and trained as a field troop engineer. At the time of his 2017 postings, he said that he and his wife were living in Nova Scotia and gearing up for the arrival of triplets. He was planning to leave the army and start a new life, raising his children in an “ethnically pure” area near his family home in British Columbia.
Rusty described his time in the Forces with fondness, but also with evident disgust at what the army, in his eyes, had become: “We spend more time taking classes about how to not offend special snowflakes than we spend time training, shooting, in the field or on deployment.”
He encouraged group members to join the reserves in order to benefit from training in firearms and strategy. Several members of the group posted messages indicating they had either done so or were considering it.
A number of current and former Forces members have been tied to the far right in recent years. In 2017, Forces members who also belonged to the anti-feminist, all-male group Proud Boys disrupted an Indigenous-led protest in Halifax. Among the founders of La Meute, the largest far-right group in Quebec, are military veterans. In media interviews, Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance has admitted that extremism is present in the Forces – and has said he is determined to stamp it out.
The perils of sending racist members of the Forces into the field was starkly driven home by the scandal that led to the dismantling of the Canadian Airborne Regiment following the racist killing of a Somali man by Canadian soldiers during Canada’s deployment to Somalia in the 1990s. Rusty described his own foreign deployment in a way that suggests he was part of the disaster response in Nepal following the earthquakes there in 2015. He described the locals as “shitskins” and said he used the clothes of the dead as toilet paper.
He also described an incident in Canada in which a Jewish military colleague complained that Rusty and other soldiers were being anti-Semitic. Rusty said he responded by arranging several handguns in the shape of a swastika on the Jewish soldier’s desk.
Women could also be his target. While discussing his relationship with his wife, Rusty declared that women should have a say only in what’s served for dinner and what’s planted in the garden.
end 1 of 3
Note: 14 pages long part 1 of 3 posts.
Military Current Affairs & News
Merge with 130277
G&M article: Canada’s new far right
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadas-new-far-right-a-trove-of-private-chat-room-messages-reveals/
Canada’s new far right: A trove of private chat room messages reveals an extremist subculture
An analysis of 150,000 chat room messages paints a picture of a group that is actively recruiting new members, buying weapons and trying to influence political parties
SHANNON CARRANCO AND JON MILTON
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED APRIL 27, 2019UPDATED 7 HOURS AGO
They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in every province, in communities large and small. They gather on the internet to strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized. They are the new far right in Canada.
The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old multicultural consensus in this country.
The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.
The messages were given to The Globe and Mail by Montreal-based anti-fascists, who infiltrated the chat room in order to gather information on the far right and disrupt their activities.
The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.
While the news media traditionally avoid publishing such offensive and inflammatory material, in order to prevent giving extremists a platform, The Globe has chosen, for the sake of transparency and accuracy, to reproduce a limited number of examples of the ideas expressed in the online discussions. The selection omits the most gratuitous slurs and images, but the result is a disturbing portrait of a virulent subculture that speaks in a graphic, hate-fuelled vernacular.
The size of this particular group discussion is modest, at 180 users. But its members do more than simply engage in online talk. They meet in person, spread propaganda and encourage each other to recruit and expand the movement. They purchase weapons and discuss training. They have also attempted to join, influence and volunteer for Canadian political parties, usually adopting a restrained and more palatable guise.
White nationalism has become a growing concern around the world, especially in its extreme and violent forms. Last month’s terrifying attack on mosques in Christchurch, N.Z., in which 50 people were shot to death and 50 more injured, and which were livestreamed by the alleged killer on Facebook, ignited a worldwide surge of anxiety about the simmering threat of white-nationalist terrorism. David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said earlier this month that his agency is increasingly preoccupied by the threat of right-wing extremists.
His remarks came shortly after Facebook banned a number of people, including former Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy and Canadian white-nationalist campaigner Kevin Goudreau, for promoting organized hate. Other internet giants are also feeling pressure to crack down.
The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the upcoming election.
Regardless, it is evident that an internet-based extremist subculture has spread across the globe. What to do about it is an urgent question, both for politicians and for the leaders of some of the world’s biggest social-media companies. The group chats reviewed by The Globe provide rare insight into who and what is behind this movement, and serve as a sober reminder that Canada is among the global breeding grounds of hate.
Not long ago, the far right seemed a negligible force. In 2014, CSIS declared on its website that right-wing extremism was not a significant problem in Canada. In part, that lack of concern reflected a view of the far right as self-defeatingly fractious. Groups tended to spring up – and disappear ¬– with regularity, often destroyed by infighting. They were dismissed as an ineffectual rump of high-school dropouts who couldn’t effectively organize anything.
According to Barbara Perry, a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and a leading expert on the far right in Canada, the threat of far-right violence here is often underestimated. Between 1985 and 2015, her research shows, roughly 120 violent incidents in Canada could be attributed to far-right groups and individuals. That compares, she says, with a relative handful of incidents that can be attributed to Islamist-inspired suspects, who tend to draw far more intense scrutiny from police and intelligence agencies.
Among the most horrific examples in recent years were a deliberate attack on police in New Brunswick in 2014, in which three officers were killed; and a shooting at a Quebec City mosque in January, 2017, that left six people dead. In both cases, the men convicted of the killings had been radicalized online.
Dr. Perry says that the makeup of the far-right ecosystem has also been changing: Over the past four years, the number of groups associated with the far right in Canada has, by her count, roughly doubled, from about 120 to more than 200. According to Statistics Canada, in 2017 alone the number of reported hate crimes jumped by 47 per cent from the year before.
And numbers tell only part of the story, says Dr. Perry. Skinhead and neo-Nazi groups comprising, for the most part, socially marginal members of society, have been supplemented by a new cohort whose recruits tend to be better educated and better off financially. They are also better organized, and are willing to embrace a range of new tactics.
George Ciccariello-Maher, an American academic and outspoken anti-fascist, told The Globe and Mail that anonymous platforms – such as the Discord server reviewed by The Globe – are part of a crucial radicalizing stage for today’s alt-right, a term he uses to differentiate the current generation of white nationalists from previous ones. “Anonymity, as we know, goes all the way from this level of basic recruitment and outreach in the alt-right, to the organizers and activists themselves,” he says.
For Dr. Ciccariello-Maher, infiltrating the communications infrastructure of the far right is an important step in stopping the movement’s rise. “The communications network,” he argues, “is an essential part of the war that needs to be carried out against them.”
In a statement, Discord said that its rules specifically prohibit the promotion of hatred, calls to violence or any illegal activity, and that it investigates and takes action against any reported violations. It added that it does not read each of the billions of messages sent on Discord every day, because it respects the privacy of its users; instead, Discord says, it relies on human and computer intelligence to bring violations of company guidelines to its attention.
TEACHABLE MOMENTS
The overarching goal for many in the Canadian Super Players chat group was the eventual creation of a white ethnostate. In the meantime, one aim was to begin slowly gaining a foothold in a range of institutions and professions, including law, education and the military.
One member described himself as a graduate student and an active far-right recruiter with a keen interest in grassroots political organization. Another said he worked in a small Ontario city at a blue-collar job where he was trying to gradually increase his “power level,” or overt racism, to convert his co-workers to his world view. A third was a middle-aged father who bragged that his teenage children seemed to be adopting his attitudes.
Yet another, who went by the online moniker Dank, described himself as a University of Toronto graduate who was now training at another institution to become a teacher. Like other members of the group, he took care not to reveal his name, but he shared an image of what appeared to be course material with the logo of Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont.
He said that at one point he was working as a student teacher at a school with children in Grades 6, 7 and 8, whose ethnic makeup was almost entirely white. “It’s the ethnostate basically,” he wrote.
Dank told the online group that he was using his position as a student teacher to influence young minds. He described one classroom scene in which the students were learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust. “In a moment where the actual teacher wasn’t in the room, I casually asked them their thoughts and opinions,” he wrote.
The children, he continued, generally saw the Holocaust as “really bad,” but one of them asked why it had happened. Dank asked the young girl, “What was the point of the train cars and the deportations if it was just to kill them all?” He then encouraged the students to look into it on their own if they were curious.
Dank told the online group that he hoped his charges would stumble upon the same sources that he did in his formative years. When he was in high school, he said, he had a history teacher who “always spoke about ‘the Jews’ and used a funny voice referencing them.” Such actions had persuaded Dank to research the Holocaust himself, which ultimately led him down a rabbit hole of Nazi-sympathetic websites.
He also said he made sure to use a discussion of Indigenous identity to explain to the children that they were white and European. One girl asked if that was racist.
“She didn’t react negatively when I told her you are European and white and there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he wrote.
“I told one kid of what Toronto is like … sometimes, not only are you the only English speaker, but you’re also the only white person,” Dank wrote.
He was adamant that the far-right movement required a presence in the teaching profession, because, as he put it: “we absolutely need to have our guys in the institutions.” He said he thought he had a good chance of remaining undercover, although he was worried about getting too close to any colleagues, lest they betray him.
“l’ll play their game and recite what they want to hear,” he said, adding that he was “acing the diversity class because I know all their narratives.”
He implored his peers: “We can’t just give over education to the people who hate us.”
RUSTY WITHIN THE RANKS
Although the Canadian Super Players forum was populated mainly by fairly young men, a handful of older participants were influential in defining its goals and strategies.
One man, who went by the online handle Rusty and who described himself as an experienced member of the Canadian Armed Forces, was seen by other members as a leader and his advice on training, weapons and tactics was sought after.
Rusty told his friends in the Canadian Super Players group chat that he had joined the Forces in 2007 and trained as a field troop engineer. At the time of his 2017 postings, he said that he and his wife were living in Nova Scotia and gearing up for the arrival of triplets. He was planning to leave the army and start a new life, raising his children in an “ethnically pure” area near his family home in British Columbia.
Rusty described his time in the Forces with fondness, but also with evident disgust at what the army, in his eyes, had become: “We spend more time taking classes about how to not offend special snowflakes than we spend time training, shooting, in the field or on deployment.”
He encouraged group members to join the reserves in order to benefit from training in firearms and strategy. Several members of the group posted messages indicating they had either done so or were considering it.
A number of current and former Forces members have been tied to the far right in recent years. In 2017, Forces members who also belonged to the anti-feminist, all-male group Proud Boys disrupted an Indigenous-led protest in Halifax. Among the founders of La Meute, the largest far-right group in Quebec, are military veterans. In media interviews, Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance has admitted that extremism is present in the Forces – and has said he is determined to stamp it out.
The perils of sending racist members of the Forces into the field was starkly driven home by the scandal that led to the dismantling of the Canadian Airborne Regiment following the racist killing of a Somali man by Canadian soldiers during Canada’s deployment to Somalia in the 1990s. Rusty described his own foreign deployment in a way that suggests he was part of the disaster response in Nepal following the earthquakes there in 2015. He described the locals as “shitskins” and said he used the clothes of the dead as toilet paper.
He also described an incident in Canada in which a Jewish military colleague complained that Rusty and other soldiers were being anti-Semitic. Rusty said he responded by arranging several handguns in the shape of a swastika on the Jewish soldier’s desk.
Women could also be his target. While discussing his relationship with his wife, Rusty declared that women should have a say only in what’s served for dinner and what’s planted in the garden.
end 1 of 3
