79: Anti-Hate Work in Canada (w/Dan Collen, Elizabeth Simons, & Morgan Yew)
COVID has been a recruiting windfall for hate groups in Canada, with new alliances and networks forged between white supremacists, xenophobes, and ethnonationalists in the fire of accelerated conspiracism. Joining Matthew to map out this landscape are street-level anti-hate activists Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Dan Collen, a researcher with the Neuberger Holocaust Education Center's Online Hate Education and Research Project, and Morgan Yew, a video journalist and DJ from Kamloops, whose coverage of Toronto's anti-lockdown protests has been rich and revealing.We cover a lot in this one: the “irony poisoning” white nationalist recruiting tactics that target 14 year-old boys, the rogue’s gallery of extremists wreaking havoc at anti-lockdown rallies, racists trying on “sovereign citizen” pseudolaw in the courts, and their craven appropriation of Indigenous rights discourse when they lurch into “Pretendian” territory. We’ll also look at the People’s Party of Canada, and discuss why it is not very smart to write it off as QAnon foolishness.Content Warning: analysis of hateful views, including notes from a white supremacist recruiting manual that is instructing followers on how to indoctrinate children.Show NotesCanadian Anti-Hate NetworkDan Collen’s fantastic articles on Medium: dancollen.medium.comMorgan Yew’s awesome Twitter feedCanadian Anti-Semites and Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists Try New Tactic: Aligning with Indigenous Communities MediasmartsLearning for Justice | Education ResourcesWisdom2Action – Facilitate Change. Strengthen Communities.The 519- nonprofit promoting 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion serving Toronto - The 519 - Space For Change - The519Egale Canada - nonprofit promoting 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion serving Canada Home - EgaleCASSA - Council of Agencies Serving South Asians - http://cassa.on.ca/The Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre - https://www.holocaustcentre.com/Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice - https://ccncsj.ca/Timeline cleanse. Some of Morgan’s video nurturance journalism.
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Episode 79, Anti-Hate Work in Canada, with Morgan Yu, Elizabeth Simons, and Dan Collin.
COVID has been a recruiting windfall for hate groups in Canada, with new alliances and networks forged between white supremacists, xenophobes, and ethno-nationalists in the fire of accelerated conspiracism.
Joining me today to map out this landscape are street-level anti-hate activists Elizabeth Simons, the Deputy Director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Dan Collin, who's a researcher with the Neuberger Holocaust Education Center's online hate education and research project, and Morgan Yu, a citizen journalist and videographer whose coverage of anti-lockdown protests has been rich and revealing.
We cover a lot in this one.
The irony-poisoning white nationalist recruiting tactics that target 14-year-old boys, the rogues' gallery of extremists wreaking havoc at anti-lockdown rallies, racists trying on sovereign citizen pseudo-law in the courts, and their craven appropriation of indigenous rights discourse when they lurch into pretendian territory.
We'll also look at the People's Party of Canada and discuss why it is not very smart to write it off as QAnon foolishness.
Okay, so this is a rich panel discussion and I want to get right to it.
But off the top, I want to give a content warning in general terms about the parade of abject views that we'll be analyzing.
thing.
And in particular, I want to flag that Elizabeth Simons at one point reads from a white nationalist recruiting manual that is instructing followers on how to indoctrinate children.
And as a parent of two young white boys, I was shaken to the bones to hear it.
Of course, Simons also brings the medicine as well, because as we wind up the episode, she describes some of the school-level materials that she and colleagues are developing to inoculate young ears against this hateful garbage.
There's also going to be a lot of useful links in the show notes.
And I also want to just say how much I admire these three activists for sacrificing considerable emotional resources as they track and process this material, which of course is gold for researchers and policy makers who might be brave enough to do something with it.
The risk here of moral injury and compassion fatigue is very real and it can threaten the quality of people's lives forever.
So I would say that if you have the resources, please consider donating money or time to organizations like Canadian Anti-Hate Network or whoever local to your area is fighting back against those who would attack the most vulnerable.
Hello, Morgan, Elizabeth and Dan.
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for having me.
Now, I'm solo driving this episode as Derek and Julian put their feet up for the American Thanksgiving holiday.
I wanted to start with a land acknowledgement that we are on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit.
The Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and this territory is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people.
And that is for Toronto.
And today, from this territory, we're going to be taking the pulse of hate group and hate speech activity in Canada.
Digging into its roots, networks and implications.
And our beat on this podcast centers on the social chaos that's produced by the intersection of conspiracy theories and ideas of bodily and spiritual warfare.
And so, I'll be asking some questions in that zone as well, but at the same time, I don't really want to hold the tiller tightly here because all three of you are so knowledgeable and there's a lot I want to ask you.
I want to give you a lot of space to educate myself and our listeners.
And also, I might not even know the best questions to ask.
So, that said, I do have a bit of an agenda that's zooming in, zooming out.
I'm going to ask Elizabeth some big picture questions about how hate groups are defined in Canada, their relationship to U.S.
sources, and what the uptick during the pandemic tells us.
Zooming in, Morgan and Dan, I'm going to ask you about what you see in your ground-level reporting on the connections between anti-lockdown protests, right-wing politics, and conspiracy mongering.
And also, like, how exactly white nationalists are doing very strange things like co-opting the language of Indigenous rights in these times.
And then, you know, a zoom-out question might be for everyone about, you know, the recent electoral efforts of Maxime Bernier's PPC, which is shaping up to be the QAnon Party of Canada.
Are they growing?
Is mainstream political discourse paying attention?
That sort of thing.
But starting with you, Elizabeth, I have a big picture question about what Anti-Hate Canada sees out there right now and what it does about it.
So I was wondering if we could start with a mission statement and a brief intro to what you've seen develop, especially as COVID era political unrest has grown.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Matthew.
So the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which I am deputy director of, It's a non-partisan, non-profit organization with the mandate to counter, monitor, and expose hate-promoting movements, groups, and individuals in Canada.
We use every legal, ethical, and reasonable tool at our disposal, so that can look like reporting, media news stories, advocacy, networking with on-the-ground activists.
We've had a lot of success since we've We started in 2018.
So in the last year, we've discovered white supremacists in the Canadian Armed Forces, resulting in top-down policy changes, investigations, and disciplinary actions.
We've exposed white supremacist groups in Canada who were targeting youth for recruitment.
And we've created a free educational toolkit aimed at helping teachers and parents identify the tell-tale signs of youth being recruited into hate movements and teaching them how to intervene in that grooming before it's too late.
So since the onset of the pandemic, we've seen virtually every hate group movement and network in Canada really glom onto the COVID conspiracism, and not always publicly.
These are people who really do believe in the fundamental us versus them idea of a nefarious government who's looking to incorporate a manufactured crisis in order to usher in Some very bad things, in their view.
These are beliefs that are already aligned with their core worldviews and ideologies, and the pandemic has just served as sort of a proof positive that their beliefs are correct.
So for example, like many hate-promoting individuals who are present for the Islamophobic organizing around M103, which is the non-binding motion to condemn Islamophobia, A number of years ago, and the Yellow Vests have found new life as COVID conspiracy influencers.
So they parrot the same conspiracies about the UN, the government, the Great Replacement, the New World Order.
There really is a straight line from the, you know, even the pre-M103 to M103 to Yellow Vests to the COVID conspiracy movement.
And that's really what we're seeing now is a rebrand of a lot of these I'm wondering if you can just define the M103 legislation just a little bit more for my benefit, but also for the listeners for sure, many of whom won't be Canadian.
Sure, yeah.
So in 2016, there was a motion with the federal government to To condemn Islamophobia and it was not binding.
There was no, you know legislation or laws attached to it.
It was strictly just a wish for the government to Agree to put forth resources to studying Islamophobia, the causes of it and the effects of it that of course affect the many Muslim Canadians in the country.
Obviously we can see now, many years later, that that sort of thing is very important.
And luckily it did pass, but it was met with a lot of resistance.
So that was kind of when you saw Faith Goldie really pop up as a huge figure, Kevin Johnston, Rebel News.
Right.
And that was really their, you know, axe to grind for a long time.
So when the sky didn't fall, you know, Sharia law was not, you know, brought into every court in the land, you know.
You know, there was not this mass, you know, breakdown of social cohesion that, you know, they were claiming was going to happen.
It sort of fizzled away, right?
Then that moved into the Yellow Vest Movement, which of course was co-opted from the French.
And that grew into sort of a populist far-right Very online, but also very offline movement.
So we saw a rise in offline, real-world actions that we hadn't seen since the M103 days.
But again, it was the same players.
And then the yellow vest kind of fizzled out, and then the pandemic hit.
And that really was like, we describe it as like manna from heaven, because Here are all these people with these ideas, and they had found some popularity and some fame in those previous movements.
But here is now a crisis, which has the capacity to provide a mass radicalization and mobilization event.
And it allowed them to use the crisis in order to further their own agendas.
And that's why we're seeing so many people with maybe not even racist ideas, but people who have an issue with the government, they have an issue with, you know, how the government has handled the pandemic.
They're brought into the movement and before very long they're exposed to a lot of other harmful ideas and that's how we see that radicalization playing out.
Now we're tracking back to 2016 and presumably a little bit before but in some ways my own question about how does this explode into a perfect storm in the COVID era is kind of Johnny come lately because You know, hate groups are baked into our history.
And so I'm wondering what you would say the core historical movements are that continue to provide fuel and inspiration to today's extremists.
Like, who are the Yellow Jackets quoting out of the 1930s or whatever, if that's, you know, if that's plausible?
Well, they weren't really quoting too many people from that long ago.
It's all recycled.
Ultimately, every hate movement network is founded entirely on conspiracy.
Whether it's Holocaust denial, the Great Replacement, New World Order, or global cabal, they thread together in different ways.
Like, for example, some proponents of the Great Replacement, which was a very key factor in the anti-M103 movement and the Yellow Vest movement, some proponents of it see Jews as the culprit behind the orchestrated replacement of white Europeans, whereas others see Muslims as being behind it.
It can change depending on who you're speaking with, but the core beliefs tend to remain the same.
It's always a shadowy other that is looking to subvert and replace and otherwise do harm to the virtuous, you know, good people that don't deserve that to happen to them, which in this case, of course, is settlers, white Europeans.
Right.
So, of course, there are various factions and subsets of hate movements which manifest those beliefs very distinctly.
But what we're seeing now is really just a move away from the formal hate groups with membership toward loosely connected and very online networks.
which of course translate to real world actions and real world violence.
Well, and in those looser networks, there also seem to be looser meanings and increased difficulties in discerning what people are actually saying.
Because one question that I had about the ongoing efforts to define things like hate and hateful is that it seems like, especially in the online milieu, there's an amazing amount of irony involved with the social media practices of trolling there's an amazing amount of irony involved with the social media practices of trolling and shitposting, which always allows hate speech to It allows actors to pretend that they don't actually mean what they say.
And I'm wondering if that's an added complication that you have to deal with as you define what a hate group is and what hate speech is.
Yeah, so there's kind of two parts to the answer to that.
So in order to define what hate is in Canada, that's been done.
So the Supreme Court endorsed a very useful test called the Hallmarks of Hate in the early 2000s to determine if someone is guilty of a willful promotion of hatred or public incitement of hatred.
So there's 11 hallmarks of hate, which are concepts that hate messages must include to be considered hateful under our laws.
So some examples of what those hallmarks look like is, you know, is the person who's spreading the message or making the post Are they portraying the targeted group as predatory or innately evil?
So hate and what is hateful have been defined, endorsed, and used by our courts for a number of years.
Right.
The problem with irony is that it's used as a means of deflection.
It's also used as a means of grooming and recruitment by hate movements.
Right.
You know, that's I haven't really seen that double edge.
It's I've seen the it's it's easy for the shit poster to hide behind irony.
I didn't I didn't understand it as an induction method, too.
It truly is.
Even even before it's a method of deflection, it's a method of recruitment and grooming, especially for younger people.
So in order for, you know, for even ironic shitposting to be considered illegal, it would still have to meet those 11 hallmarks.
But a good way to understand how and why they leverage this technique is to look at the Daily Stormer.
So the Daily Stormer is a US neo-Nazi website which describes itself as an outreach site designed to spread the message of nationalism and anti-Semitism to the masses.
So Andrew Anglin, who founded the Daily Stormer, He has actually said on podcasts and appearances that they are intentionally looking to target children.
He has said that before long they will have an army of 14 year olds.
And I don't think he was that far off because their website, their messaging, it's all very much designed to bring in a younger crowd.
Looking at, you know, for example, their style guide.
So they actually wrote a style guide.
And this is, this is public.
You can, you know, people can look at it.
It's actually even, it was referenced even in, in the science versus Kessler Charlottesville lawsuit, civil lawsuit that's going on right now.
And I'd like to read just a little bit of the style guide.
And this is not to platform.
This is strictly to give people, An idea of how they leverage irony.
Irony poisoning is what we call it.
So this is what their style guide says.
The tone of the site should be light.
Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, or non-ironic hatred.
The undoctrinated should not be able to tell if we're joking or not.
There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists.
I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor.
I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists because I don't take myself super seriously.
This is obviously a ploy, and I actually do want to gas and then slur for Jewish people.
But that's neither here nor there.
And that's a direct quote from their style guide.
So it gives you an idea of how they use irony poisoning, where they'll expose people to quote unquote, you know, just jokes.
And over time, people tend to absorb that material and start looking at it from a more serious lens.
And that's how we see especially children being recruited into these movements.
And in here for a bit of a lightning round so that we can get a little bit concrete with some current event figures moving out of the zoomed out landscape into who's actually on the ground.
I've got a list of people who may or may not be interesting, may or may not be overcovered or overexposed, depending upon who they're networked with.
But I think some names will be familiar to listeners.
We have Chris Sky, Sakatja, We have Kevin Johnston, who I think we just mentioned earlier, Elizabeth, you did, Ryan Dean, Tyler Russell, Stephanie Sibio, who I've covered in some pieces in Medium, Artur and David Pavlovsky, Maxine Bernier, of course, Reina Bojcik, Romana DiGiullo.
Anybody else on your mind?
Who wants to say what about these folks?
Yeah, I can speak a little bit about He has a history of Holocaust denial, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism.
At the onset of the pandemic, the Anti-Racist Collective blog exposed him as part of the LFS groups online, so he has a very lengthy background of participating in the hate ecosystem.
The problem is that he's built himself up as an influencer, and that is no doubt aided by the fact that people center him in the pandemic conspiracy movement and really look to him as kind of the temperature of the movement as a whole.
And really, it's a label that he doesn't deserve.
He's given far too much attention.
Far too much attention because there's no sort of strategic originality to what he does or because he's repetitive.
He's one person and he's bombastic and he's loud and he's obnoxious but he doesn't represent the movement as a whole.
He's one person who's looking to make his mark and make his name and he's a club chaser.
He's also widely disliked in the movement itself and so he's often falling out of favor.
And he comes and goes, but people who are observing the movement often assume that he is more connected to everything than he actually is, when I think he is sometimes only tangentially connected only by popularity.
Right.
For instance, when it comes to Ezra Wellness out of BC and elsewhere, people assume that he, because he posed with a single sign, that he is somehow involved in strategic planning for the execution of those wellness centers.
When that appears to be all that he actually did.
It's an entirely different cast of people that are responsible for that organization and its branding.
It's really interesting because the influencer status amongst this crowd seems to be a double-edged sword where there can be sort of personal gain and notoriety that also contributes to the instability of whatever movement they're trying to build.
OK, well, then we have Kevin Johnstone, who made a run for mayor of Calgary, I think, and now he's in a bunch of legal trouble and he's called in a network of help.
Is he more of a connected type of networked person, less of an influencer, would you say?
He's very connected.
So he's a longtime Islamophobic vlogger going back years.
So in 2017, he was charged under hate crime laws for putting out a call for information on young Muslims praying in Toronto schools.
He's also denied the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar on the basis of there being no such thing as Rohingya Muslims.
So that's one of his little pet projects.
In 2019, he lost a landmark defamation suit to Toronto businessman and philanthropist Mohamed Faki, who he defamed on the basis of racism, resulting in the largest monetary award stemming from online hate in Canadian history.
He's had a lot of trouble with the law in the last year.
It's actually been difficult to keep track of his court dates.
He did run for mayor of Calgary and prior to that a few years ago, he ran for mayor of Mississauga.
But he has rebranded himself as a COVID conspiracy influencer.
So he's a really good example of somebody who was around in the, you know, the anti-M103 days.
In DLOS, into the COVID conspiracy influencer sphere.
And really, his base is the same as it always was, but it has grown with COVID conspiracism.
So he's just used the pandemic as a way to Rebrand, recharge and profit as well.
Now, what about people who bring in more of the kind of QAnon content?
Like, I think, Dan, you wrote a pretty eye-opening article profiling somebody or a number of people, I think, but including Reina Boychuk.
What about her?
Well, I think Reina Boychuk was especially an interesting Sort of, you could say, a case study for the movement and where it goes into political affiliations.
Because around the time, well, during last election cycle, so a pretty memorable time, there was a lot of sort of...
Even some major media coverage and a lot of alternative media coverage about a lot of like new age idealism and a lot of the types of things that you cover and that I've learned about from listening to the Conspiratuality Pod and reading the Conspiratuality Blog being a key demographic or perhaps not a key demographic but a very easy to identify graphic in PPC's voter base.
And so I wrote a little bit about two Who actually emerged from that community and ran as candidates who were both self-described lightworkers.
And I thought it was an interesting... It was interesting to me that it was interesting to other people that lightworkers could fall under that radar.
I think there was...
There's a significant misunderstanding.
I think that conspirituality crowds are inherently like part of the left or left wing or somehow kind of immune to populist ideals and far right rhetoric.
But the reality is it's not really political sect wellness lifestyles.
I don't have to tell anyone who's a constant listener of this pod, don't necessarily fall into that one side of the political spectrum.
Right.
So both Boychuck and Chelsea Taylor were two self-proclaimed lightworkers that ran as PPC candidates.
Neither of them were particularly influential as PPC candidates.
I did see Chelsea Taylor's tweets and Instagram posts.
Kind of gain a little bit of a following in some of like vegan wellness communities that went from being Bernie Sanders fans in 2016 to being Maxine Brittany fans in 2021.
But the phenomenon of that in itself is not particularly weird and I find when you go deep down into the light working stuff as it's definitely newer to me than it is for you I'm sure Matthew It doesn't seem to be a new phenomenon, and it goes back all the way to incredibly far-right occultism from the days of the Third Reich and beyond, if I'm not mistaken.
Right, you aren't mistaken.
Now, just for the listener's benefit, let's define the PPC, especially for non-Canadian listeners.
This is the People's Party of Canada, formed in 2018, I believe, by Maxime Bernier.
Maxime Bernier was a former Tory cabinet minister who split with the Conservative Party because, of course, it wasn't right-wing enough.
um he rails against uh globe he's he's uh on on the public face he's a populist uh anti you know international trade or or or globalism uh nationalist uh but then the underside of his political organization is filled with characters like rena and and uh people who have really solid ties to white supremacy movements so maybe that's a good place to pivot to is
um you know what about maxime bernier and is his party uh networked in an effective way is it being um uh is it being dragged down by the narcissism of influencers um what what's what's What's going on with it?
I don't know if it's being dragged down by the narcissism of influencers quite yet, but it's still early on in its lifespan for a political party.
I'd say the PBC's successful appeal in the last election, they basically tripled their base, the size of their base.
I think it goes well beyond what I would call like a QAnon party, which I think is a fine kind of surface way to describe it that you did in the beginning.
But I think it's much deeper than that and just stopping it, calling it a QAnon party isn't really understanding the problem.
Right.
QAnon is huge and in Canada specifically, I think QAnon might even go in and out of more transnational conspiracy movements more than QAnon in the United States or parts of Europe.
But the PPC is bigger than QAnon in Canada.
And its roots prior to COVID are the same as they are now.
Even after a global conspiracy explosion, they're still a far-right populist party.
The difference this election was that they had a really incredibly effective wedge issue to use for clout.
The PPC isn't really about spiritualism or lightworking or even veganism, a lifestyle I've seen noted in coverage of its supporters.
The party was willing to cater to right-wing Canadians and wellness crowds simply because there's no real disadvantage for them to have that support.
Who else jumps out at that list that I rattled off at the beginning for you?
Do you want to speak about Tyler?
Yeah, so Tyler Russell is the leader of a group called Canada First, which since its inception has grown and segmented.
And actually, Liz's organization, Canadian Anti-Hate Network, they've done especially great work exposing both Canada First and Tyler Russell, especially Seb Robeck.
We've done some excellent reporting.
Tyler is not original at all, but he's the first one to do what he's doing in Canada and he's doing it Not to a degree of unprecedented success, but definitely to some success that's worrisome.
Tyler is a direct, basic knockoff of Nick Fuentes.
He doesn't try to hide it.
For those who are not aware, Nick Fuentes started the Groyper movement in 2017.
Which is a white nationalist movement targeted towards youth that focuses their optics mostly on over-the-top like satire, mockery, just constant degrading.
If you listen to their live streams, they're usually so overtly hateful and a lot of the jokes are about being proud.
They're just taking pride in being hateful that it ties really well back to what Liz talked about earlier with Yeah, irony poisoning.
They're really overt about it and they do make stereotypes of themselves that way.
Nick Fuentes' group, America First, he created his own knockoff called Canada First, and has specifically talked about targeting youth.
I think he might have even mentioned 14-year-olds as well.
Liz might correct me on that in his strategy to recruit.
Yeah, we actually found 14-year-olds in his chat.
Oh yeah, so Ken found 14-year-olds.
In the chat.
They target very young and they're far more extreme than I think most people looking at it realize.
I might work at the Ontario... Sorry.
I might work at the Online Holocaust Research and Education Project.
We analyze a lot of hate memes.
And Canada First has a lot of active accounts.
They put out a lot of hate memes, a lot of originals, a lot of reposts.
They intersect with other white nationalists and white supremacist groups.
They also output a lot of their own.
And it's a real problem, even just getting them from Instagram.
It's very easy to see how integrated they are and how overtly racist they are, but how integrated they are with just general non-hate memes in the world.
Okay, so we have a rogues gallery.
There are many different types of networks at play.
I have a couple of questions about themes that I find very difficult to understand.
A number of sources that you all have pointed me towards is that are using this delusional sovereign citizen ideology that is now surging in popularity and...
And so I'm wondering, when did this start crossing the border from the US and does it carry the same racist overtones and purposes?
And has the Canadian legal system formally engaged with any of this stuff?
So Canada has always had a problem with the freemen on the land or sovereign citizen movement going back like decades.
There have been sovereign citizens and freemen on the land, you know, posting to Stormfront, which is a kind of an old Like past era, like White Supremacist Forum, you know, it's grown since the pandemic onset.
So an example would be British Columbia's David Lindsay, who's a fixture and organizer in the Kelowna anti-lockdown movement, as well as he is quite influential in the Vancouver anti-lockdown movement.
And he's friends with, like, longtime neo-Nazi Paul Fromm.
You know, they've appeared together numerous times at lockdown events.
So while sovereign citizenship and the freement on the land ideology may not be characterized as racist on its face, they will often be fellow travelers with neo-Nazis sharing the same kind of conspiratorial and adversarial worldview.
So they do find common cause in that respect.
And there even have been some examples of neo-Nazis and white nationalists using pseudo-law in the Canadian court system.
So there's a number of examples of pseudo-law being attempted in the Canadian courts.
And of course, it fails every time.
But a good recent example, I would say, would be Travis Patron, who is the leader of the Canadian Nationalist Party, a federally registered political party that is overtly neo-Nazi and overtly white nationalist.
And Travis Patron is currently facing charges for hate, promotion of hate, as a result of a complaint from my organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, as well as charges of assault.
So when he was in a number of his court appearances this past year in Regina, he actually tried to employ pseudo law as a way to either avoid charges or get out of jail or whatever he wanted to do.
He just outright said, you have no jurisdiction over me.
I remember there was an incident where he went to, I think it was A government building?
It was a while ago, we did write about it, but he went to a building and he tried to enter it, and it might have even been CBC, and they kicked him out, and he was chased down the street by the police, and the police were trying to detain him, and he just said, you have no jurisdiction over me, I refuse to be questioned, and just ran away, and they let him go.
Right.
So they do try to use the law, and for the most part they're very unsuccessful, but there have been times where, you know, Travis Petronas is a good example where a few times the police have actually just let him go without anything further because he's attempted it.
Yeah, I can kind of hear the Flintstones' feet slapping the ground as he's running away.
But it's a very strange kind of position to take for somebody who forms a legitimate political party within Canada and then also says that they're a nationalist.
I'm wondering, like, Um, you'd have to conform to some law.
Uh, I suppose you'd have to, but maybe, maybe I'm looking for a sense where there is none.
Well, he, he wants to write his own laws.
So like for, you know, one example is he wants to, he's, he's created his own court, for example.
He has sent us cease and desist written from his own personal court.
He wants to implement tribunals that he oversees.
So it's easy to laugh at, but it's a dangerous concept.
And Travis Patron is kind of a bit of a joke in that respect, but he's just one example of somebody within the heat ecosystem using those arguments.
There are so many examples of people using those arguments.
And it's not new to Canada.
It's actually quite old.
But a couple of years ago, Patron was not a pseudo-law sovereign citizen.
That only changed with the pandemic.
You know, so he's an example of that kind of being incorporated.
Yeah, I mean, I'm wondering whether, I mean, you say that it's a dangerous concept, and I'm wondering whether, does it come into play as sort of like a last line of defense when these guys are up against the wall, or do you envision a time in which Sovereign citizen ideology could be widespread enough that, you know, a kind of right-wing general strike or, you know, anarchism would be something that would be easier to organize.
No, I don't think it's ever going to be widespread to get to that level.
There are other more prominent threats, I think, rather than the sovereign citizen.
Ideology.
And I suppose also, yeah, Elizabeth, you could also just run away when you get the warrants, right?
Like you could run away, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I could run away saying I do not consent to contract or whatever, whatever it is that they say.
You know, like it's again, like it's very easy to laugh at the quantum grammar and the thumbprints and whatever.
But like, you know, there was an example of a police and an active police officer, an OPP officer who is Very close with Christopher James Pritchard out in BC.
He was one of Canada's most prominent separate citizen influencers.
And Christopher James Pritchard supported the With a complaint, like an investigation that he was going through with the OPP because of an incident in which he employed pseudo-law to combat, you know, other officers on the job who were trying to get them to leave a playground.
So, you know, and they signed their paperwork in red blood thumbprints and they, you know, it's all very like, I, Gabriel of the Pru family and, you know, they're because the cop's name is Gabriel Pru.
And so, you know, we have incidents where police are some police officers are actually buying into this.
And while that may seem absurd on its face, that's actually fairly in line because police also think of themselves above the law.
Right.
So it's very much, you know, we're seeing it now kind of in institutions and we're seeing it now kind of People who are in positions of power propagating these ideas and giving people the false sense of hope that they're actually going to work and in the courts, which is it's not going to happen.
So that is, in some ways, as you say, it's easy to laugh.
Something that is really not a laughing matter and is extraordinarily confusing and abject, I'd say, is this other theme that I think we've seen emerge amongst White nationalist movements and extremists who begin to actually appropriate the language and symbology of First Nations peoples and reparations movements and autonomy movements.
Can you describe how that works?
I don't know how to describe how it works exactly, but we witnessed it explode in Alberta in October.
Well, Pat King and Ryan Dean and others, Johnny Ranger, occupied the Alberta legislature grounds.
This was well covered, predominantly on Twitter, not very well covered in any form of mainstream media, but it included the co-optation of First Nations issues and individuals who had made strange claims to To Canada themselves.
And they got... It tied a lot of people together into a mess that was very hard, if not impossible, to untangle.
And I think put one woman, Nancy Skaney, at risk because for days she wasn't sleeping, she wasn't eating, she wasn't drinking while she was in a teepee.
Oftentimes being live streamed by Pat King or others indicating that she wanted to leave for literal days and then on live stream you would witness things like a phone call come in from somebody convincing her to stay and while this was happening, Pat was being gifted things like a medicine bag, an eagle feather, He started to dress in traditional clothing.
He was given a drum that he, you know, he didn't possess any rhythm with it whatsoever, but he would try to participate and put on a good show.
And it was disturbing because people in the community, I think that they saw his popularity online, 17,000 followers roughly on Facebook as being a good platform to get out their message.
And so in comments amongst First Nations people across Canada, we were witnessing people excuse why they were aligning with a racist, why they're making common cause with a well-known racist.
And it had a lot to do with just You know, seeing his platform as a means to reach more people and seeming to not care about or not fussing enough about what his platform is normally built on, which itself is often pro-pipeline.
He's spoken extensively against the Wet'suwet'en people out in B.C.
and he He comes and goes from this, but he's... I think this is loosely connected to the Sovereign Citizen Movement in that, you know, they do identify First Nations sovereignty as a desirable outcome of partnership.
And so this comes and goes, like we witnessed over the course of months leading up to October, far before this, and a crisis kept getting averted.
Where, for example, First Nations people would be invited to speak, or it might be held on First Nations, like on a residential ground.
And those things would get cancelled at the last minute, or people wouldn't go up to speak, or percussionists wouldn't perform.
But something happened in October that changed all of that.
It was really disturbing to witness, and I think we're still watching that play out.
I don't know that we've really seen a resolution to it.
I think there's some additional context, too, when it comes to Pat King.
Another person was with him when this was all going on, and his name is Ryan Dean.
Ryan Dean and Pat King are white nationalists.
Pat King himself, involved in Yellow Vests and other activist movements, he has outright said that The Anglo-Saxon blood is the strongest bloodline.
And he's talked about the Great Replacement.
He's talked about how Muslims are coming to Canada to replace white Canadians.
And he's denied the Holocaust.
He's challenged how many Jews died in the Holocaust, which is a form of Holocaust denial.
There's years of history with Pat King and his hateful rhetoric.
And Ryan Dean has a history with multiple biker-style hate groups.
So starting out with, you know, Soldiers of Odin, moving to Wolves of Odin, the Klan.
He actually stalked and harassed a mosque in the Edmonton area a couple years back, was in the news for that.
And he's also a well-known figure going back a number of years.
So the fact that these people can feel that they can walk into, you know, a space where that, you know, Demands respect and treat people this way and co-opt this language and co-opt these ideas is really disturbing.
And it doesn't start or stop with them.
I mean, Kellyanne Wolf is, I believe she's still Pat King's girlfriend and she's She's an influencer in the anti-lockdown movement.
And she is, she claims to be an ambassador for the Anishinaabeg, Saluti, and Métis Indigenous Nation, or ASMN.
Courts of law have told ASMN that they are not a legitimate nation.
They are not claimed.
They are not accepted.
They are a pretendian nation who are very conspiratorial and very much part of the anti-lockdown movement.
The leader of ASMN has actually organized and spoken at rallies.
The fact that the far right co-ops this sort of language is really not new.
It's always been a problem.
The fact that they look at language regarding nationhood and sovereignty and they identify ways in which to steal that for themselves because they feel like it's going to make it palatable and make it more accessible for them to do so.
They see people being more willing to hear it from our First Nations peoples, at least, you know, on the surface.
We all know how it really plays out in reality.
Right.
But they're looking to manifest that same kind of result.
And so by doing so, they co-opt the Indigenous struggles and language.
So that's not terribly new.
In fact, the CNP, the Canadian Nationalist Party, A number of years ago, they had a Métis organizer working with them.
And this Métis organizer, his name was Frank, I forget his last name, but he's in Manitoba.
And he actually said that the CNP, the Canadian Nationalist Party, who is a neo-Nazi, white nationalist party, was the answer for the First Nations people.
Because it would bring about the change that they really needed.
You know, so there's a long history of this sort of very confusing, very absurd, on the surface, on its face, you know, support and alliance.
But really, when you just scratch the surface, it's very self-serving.
You know, to the extent that there are these instances of First Nations people being drawn into anti-state conspiracy theory networks,
I mean, it's so confusing, but it just occurs to me, and I just want to refer to Morgan mentioning this in one of our conversations, that it doesn't seem like there would be any real way of addressing confusions like that beyond legitimate and robust conversations about reparations with regard to First Nations history in this country.
Yeah, I would still say the same thing.
When we look to these communities, vaccine hesitancy or whatever, and only want to address that one surface topic, we're missing All of the causes for for hesitancy or anti-government sentiment that emerges from generations of trauma.
And so I think to be sincere with any marginalized community, I think it would require addressing some pretty broad and longstanding systemic issues that I think no government is ever going to embrace pursuit I think it would require addressing some pretty broad and longstanding
And so I think that all these marginalized communities will just simply continue to sort of grow in distance from each other and from access to information that might otherwise cause them to take an interest in getting vaccines or whatever.
and And of course when it comes to these movements also co-opting their language and seeing these vulnerable populations.
There's a growing interest.
There's just a concerning amount of overlap that I think I'm witnessing right now and I don't know what to do about it except to show compassion and understanding to those that I know who are affected and to not blame them.
It's not their fault.
Morgan, I'm going to ask about that general reporting attitude in a bit.
Elizabeth, I wanted to follow up on a word that you mentioned that is extraordinarily interesting.
You use the word pretendian.
Can you say a little bit about what that means?
Yeah, so pretendians are individuals, typically settlers, European Canadians, white Canadians, who will co-opt and adopt Indigeneity, so indigenous identity, in some cases names, they'll claim false membership to an unrecognized nation.
And it's often used to kind of deflect from accusations of racism.
It's also used to engender credibility and goodwill from those that they're looking to engage with.
You know, Kellyanne Wolf is just a perfect example of that, of somebody who is white, is settler, and she claims to speak for an entire nation.
But then at the same time, she'll say anyone that's born in Canada is Indigenous.
So, you know, in some cases, they will, you know, we've had cases of academics who have, you know, pretended to be Indigenous in order to, you know, for, you know, career ambitions.
Then you have people like Kellyanne Wolf, who pretend to be Indigenous in order to gain clout and credibility.
So there's all different kinds of ways that people do it and reasons why, but it's exceptionally harmful for Indigenous peoples who are, you know, still fighting and struggling to have their cultures recognized, and they're still very much under the systemic oppressive thumb of the state.
To have to suffer through that.
So Dan, I just turned 50 and in the 1980s I grew up here in Toronto watching Ernst Zundel spread Holocaust denial, which I know is in your wheelhouse of study.
And it really seemed like there was little that anyone could do about it.
And so I'm wondering if you can pull on that historical thread a little bit to see if we can find connections between that era and our own.
You know, do you think that if the legal system had had more tools to My view is that the internet sure changed a lot of things.
that we wouldn't be quite as far along as we are now?
Or did the internet change everything?
What's your view? - My view is that the internet sure changed a lot of things.
Traditionally, the creation of hate propaganda, like that that Zundell and many others like Tim use, was more of a risk-taking process.
Both design and print were processes that carried some weight for the generations immediately before myself.
This meant typewriters, written content, some limited budging for printing, time and manpower dedicated to distribution, Or someone willing to host you on the radio waves, someone willing to host you on television, like these are all problems that Sandow and his groups had to do.
For design propaganda, a more parallel comparison to the hate memes of today that I studied, that it's also meant a lengthy design process.
For modern hate groups, because of desktop publishing and eventually because of social media, it's a lot easier to produce decentralized propaganda, including Holocaust denial, but not limited to.
So at the Online Hate Research and Education Project, we're analyzing memes not just conveying an incredibly diverse field of Holocaust denial, but memes promoting hatred towards any identifiable group, actually.
Sometimes, like in the hours following the Rittenhouse trial verdict last week, the memes we're looking at are created and shared within like an hour of news breaking.
Right.
It's way more streamlined than hate propaganda promoted in Zendel's day, and others before him in the internet era.
Others before the internet era.
It's also more diverse because the memes can be made for particularly extremist circles like a particular telegram channel, a closed network, a private group.
It doesn't need to be accessible to the general public.
Sometimes, depending on the network, these channels are almost entirely occupied by already radicalized individuals, so both the memes and the written propaganda can include all sorts of community-specific references.
Yeah, I mean, I do think what I remember about Zundel was, I don't know what the construction helmet meant, but there was certainly something about him standing there with a sandwich board and pamphlets in his hand that was, like, statuesque.
Like, he had to be there in public.
There was no anonymity.
There was no hiding.
And what a different world.
And it kind of brings me to my next question, which is, you know, there's a number of COVID denialists in the current protest movements that we're seeing, including people like Stephanie Stanfield, who compare vaccination mandates, for example, to the Holocaust.
You know, and I've got these two thoughts about this, like obviously it's horrendously offensive, it has to be named as such, it's also totally absurd, and about as historically literate as any kind of inflammatory BS that floats to the top of the internet garbage heap.
So where are we at when antisemitism is also just like lazy internet trash that some take seriously, But others frame as a joke.
We have already been introduced by Elizabeth to poisoning irony, so I know that's a factor here, but it's very difficult to pin down what the actual meaning and the gravity is, I think, of some of this imagery.
Yeah, it's an excellent question, and I think To start off the bat, I think Holocaust minimization can be both those things.
I think it can be really terribly offensive and also lazy internet garbage and pretty ridiculous on the surface.
Offensive and absurd.
Unfortunately, though, there's a very real danger to the absurd.
A single tweet, whether it's a single Holocaust meme, or even a single conspiracy blog on YouTube downplaying the Holocaust and maybe co-opting genocide, certainly won't have the same impact on everyone that was well-educated in Holocaust history, especially because the comparisons presented are generally a terrible misrepresentation of reality.
But it doesn't mean it doesn't cause real damage.
Any diminishing of the facts of the Holocaust can still open up the door for serious discourse, downplaying or even ultimately endorsing the Holocaust.
I think this is a huge part of the reason why Holocaust education today remains incredibly important.
It needs to even adapt to accommodate for that level of irony that you were just talking about.
Those layers that you need to be able to get through.
And I've actually been thinking a lot about kind of like different layers of How far deep you go through extremist rhetoric.
And at the very surface, I think there's the most ridiculous, what we see, minimizations of the Holocaust.
Especially, these were really popular in like the early days of the anti-mask revolution in Canada.
Right.
Where a lot of people would like stores that would make you wear like a bracelet or something to go shopping.
People would instantly jump to Holocaust comparisons.
And there was never, you know, a lot of fact-checking involved.
The kind of communities that this spread, unfortunately, very far.
And in that short period of time, even just since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I've seen certain individuals in the anti-mask, anti-lockdown movement go from minimalizing it there and then in those specific circumstances to mark their own plate, to just making outwardly blatantly wrong statements about the Holocaust and really indulging revisionist history About the holocaust that is is profoundly anti-semitic.
Yeah, and it also occurs to me that you know when you're talking about I know that this is your beat is is holocaust education and awareness And it seems that as the memes are able to recycle like literal black and white imagery from a liberated camps that suddenly those images are
completely abused and emptied of meaning because the facts of the sort of analogy are so obscure or so distorted.
And so it seems like a real problem in education would be how to preserve a sense of gravity around the topic that has turned into a kind of pornography.
Yeah, and I mean fighting minimization, diminishment, and appropriation of the Holocaust and other genocides is incredibly important to that.
Actually, Morgan and I were talking once.
He was following a conspiracy rapper.
I can't remember where they were based, and it was a white rapper, and they made an album or maybe an EP, I guess, about COVID music, Morgan, can correct me on this if I'm wrong.
It was probably Tyson James.
It was likely like a red-pilled rap album.
It was the one that used as a cover a photograph from the Tuskegee experiments.
Oh, gosh.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's ringing a bell.
Yeah.
And I guess Morgan found this one guy who, it was just an album about, you know, it was an anti-lockdown, anti-mask, COVID truther album.
And just blatantly on the cover without a lot of context was a Photoshop filter and a little bit of edits made to, I think it was a Getty Images photograph of people being lined up for the Tuskegee experiments.
For those who don't know.
In a slight Fash Wave style.
Yeah, in a slight Fash Wave style.
The Tuskegee experiments, by the way, for those who don't know, it's not my field of expertise, but it was a genocide towards, I think, particularly black men in the South, where people were told they were getting immunizations, vaccinations, where they were really getting a controlled syphilis virus that ended up killing a lot of the patients.
So it's not the kind of plight you can compare getting a COVID vaccination to.
And I know a lot of these people really do believe that the vaccination is some type of controlled population.
population control.
Uh, but it's as very, like the Tusstegi experiment is a very specific plight to a very specific people and it's horrible.
And there needs to be an element of seriousness to that that can only be conveyed through historical education.
Morgan, on the educational front, your videography reporting from protest, uh, events is like extraordinarily patient.
Uh, it gives a lot of insight into the motivations and values of protesters who hold some pretty hateful views.
Um, right.
What are your best practices for this?
Because I imagine you have to walk a fine line between understanding, humanizing, framing, but then also avoiding handing over the microphone.
Yeah, thanks for the question.
I would say when I first started, I didn't have best practices.
I didn't know what I was doing at all.
I kind of backed into it, I would say.
learned the hard way about who I was talking to, the kinds of subject matter I was running into, the problems I would likely run into, and essentially how to protect myself.
And if it weren't for organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and many anonymous anti-fascist researchers that I met on Twitter, I think I would have been in a lot more trouble than I got myself into.
But from an inspirational standpoint, what really drew me out there to cover that stuff was, for one, the lack of coverage.
I had previously actually been covering advocacy coverage of different kinds of protests, including land back, encampments, housing issues in the city of Toronto.
And I wasn't publishing anything because honestly, I was just working on my craft, I guess.
I didn't yet really have a formula.
And for whatever reason, there was one day where I was biking past a protest.
It was a Muslim protest against the republishing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
Right.
Around, I guess, the end of 2020.
I think it was in fact October 31st.
And it was my first intersection with the anti-lockdown movement because It was located at the northeast corner of Bloor and Yonge, and the anti-lockdown march, which was full of people who were dressed up in Halloween costumes, they were traveling eastward to go down their usual southbound route of Yonge Street.
And while that was happening, after I had finished asking older gentlemen questions about how they felt about the republishing of those cartoons, I could just hear the screaming and loud music, a lot of it terrible pop music, off of the back of pickup trucks from the caravan of what at the time was a more unified anti-lockdown rally.
A lot of breaks occurred throughout the movement since then, but at that time a lot of the major players were still participating.
I think a lot of individuals from distinct hate groups were still also prominent figures at those gatherings.
They stopped going maybe January, February.
But anyway, I witnessed a lot of hateful rhetoric, slurs directed at the Muslim gathering, who were all masked, by the way.
They had They had marshals who were carefully instructing participants to clear pathways for pedestrians.
They were extremely respectful of the public.
They were careful to not impede any kind of traffic whatsoever.
They had a hard deadline for when they were going to stop.
They obeyed everything.
And across from them were people like Lily Moussa and others who were holding up a sign that was severed in three pieces.
to protest against those Muslim individuals.
And so that was my first intersection with them.
And it drew a lot of questions, but I just simply didn't understand what I was seeing, you know, because there were, of course, the predictable Trump flags, QAnon flags.
It was my first interaction with the Lion Canada.
Yeah, I just didn't know what I was witnessing so I started going out and inspired by other groups such as Unicorn Riot out of America because I'd spent a good portion of the beginning of the pandemic consuming long-form content and coverage of the George Floyd protests, watching those first nights of
Buildings being burned and individuals from Unicorn Riot doing what I thought was really amazing, on the ground reporting, interviewing individuals inside of burning buildings, outside of them, etc.
And just really witnessing that historical moment.
And that's sort of what brought me out.
When it comes to your question about best practices, I think I only learned best practices by doing it the wrong way.
I wouldn't really recommend my style.
There's a danger to humanizing those individuals, especially when those individuals would actually harm friends and communities that those individuals are part of, whose safety is also my concern.
This includes Muslim communities.
There's a lot of anti-trans rhetoric, you know, anti-blackness, etc., not to mention all this pretending business.
And so I've been happy to do it, but I see my work, while it takes the form of reporting, I think its truer form is maybe something more resembling tools and maybe close investigative conversations with individuals from within the movement that is hopefully more beneficial to researchers.
Because the fact is, when I publish material and when some of it actually reaches an audience, I don't really think it's reaching people in the way I would hope for it to.
And so I actually find I get better value out of more private dialogue about content.
I just don't know that... I don't know how to present this stuff in a way that isn't sensational, you know, because people are prone to laughter.
They want to laugh.
When judging this movement, people tend to reach for, I think, a lot of ableist judgment themselves.
There's occasionally a eugenic side to The way that people wish death upon people that participate in these movements, I think, in really mean-spirited ways that largely go unchecked.
When it comes to Chris Saccaccio, who earlier was brought up, you know, people constantly talk with his teeth.
They talk with the fact that he misses leg day.
They talk about how short he is, you know?
There's all of these other judgments being lobbed, but usually the core issues are not actually actively being discussed.
It just feels like we're chasing this unending stream of his actions.
And engaging in unending sort of back and forth of...
psychological analyses and projections and outrages.
I've seen people talking about Chris Guy in an ableist way, and I've seen the protesters being, you know, labeled as being mentally ill and so on.
It doesn't work.
Even though, like when I go through your feed, it seems like you are doing the best you can to just bear witness to, I remember this moment with you're interviewing Stephanie Sibio at City Hall, because she's there to disrupt a vaccine clinic.
You know, she's been hurling insults at healthcare workers and parents, and you're holding up a microphone and she's weeping about, you know, how her menstrual cycle is being disrupted by vaccines that other people are getting.
There are people who are going to just laugh about that.
And, you know, on a personal level, it doesn't make sense to have that reaction.
It's not going to understand where she's coming from any better.
At the same time, if you spend a lot of time trying to understand where she's coming from, and you do that humanization work, the content of the messaging, the actual...
The danger of the disinformation can get lost.
It's a really sort of tangle, and it's strange to figure out what would be the best way, but I certainly appreciate what you've done in terms of helping me understand as a researcher what's behind the motivations of people in the line there.
I'd like to say one thing about that.
Hopefully I'll be able to keep it short.
Right.
I think part of the problem with producing coverage that goes public is that we make these individuals sometimes headlines or we broadcast their personalities out to the public who largely just don't care about what brought them to that moment to begin with.
But all these individuals are someone's friend or family member.
And so when I go out and I'm talking to these individuals, you know, a lot of them are old enough to be my parents' age.
And so I...
I try to put myself in the position of if I were a third party watching my own content, I would hope that if they were interviewing my own parents, that they would show that person some dignity and respect, even if they disagree wildly with their claims.
And that's sort of where I come from.
We all need to pursue our own kind of social reparations with our family and friends, ultimately.
Like, I think that's something we're really witnessing and not really reckoning with through all of this.
Rounding up everyone, Elizabeth, Dan, and Morgan, where is this all going?
What do you see happening next?
Dan, can we start with you?
I wish I could end on a high note.
Where it's ending is direct action, especially at this point where the pandemic is winding down.
Direct action is the new norm.
Organizing on social media and rallies are a means to recruit anything that's kind of the beginning strokes to a movement are gone now.
A lot of the movement has faded.
Those who, you know, some people have abandoned, got vaccinated from from these crowds.
But the people that were in it for the far right or the people that were recruited to the far right extremist movements that are part of it all along are still going to be there.
And we're seeing The Rittenhouse verdict last week was a really bad sign in looking at the more extreme sects.
A lot of them are calling for action.
They see it as vindication to commit street violence.
In Canada, of course, we're a little bit safer as our gun culture is not quite the same.
We don't have exactly the same Issues and cultural norms that they do and of course we have very different gun laws.
So in certain instances we have a little more safety there, but in terms of broad ideologies, the movement is pretty much the same.
It's transnational and direct action is going to get more abrupt and more overt in my opinion.
I get this image of there being an old guard of conspiracy-based white nationalist extremist groups that have had a huge recruitment bump that has been like a whirlwind and has hoovered a bunch of people.
into their sphere.
And then it's a question of how they're going to retain those people, like who is going to maintain their interest.
Are there ways in which that data is tracked with regard to how various telegram groups have grown and how sustained their audiences will be over time?
A big part of the work that we do with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network is monitoring and infiltration.
So we tend to go into the dark spaces that no one else wants to.
And we tend to stay there for a very long time, very long periods of time.
And what you're saying is correct, that there is kind of an old guard that is looking at new opportunities and new ways of recruitment.
So the reality is that it's not going away.
What's been tried so far is not going to work.
Your standard policing is not going to work because we can't rely on law enforcement to handle the problem because they're just not going to.
Law enforcement historically does not really pursue hate-motivated charges or hate crimes themselves.
And people are very uncomfortable going to the police.
So we can't police the issue.
You know, every time they give out fines, these people wear them as a badge of honour.
So tickets, the same thing.
As an organization, we want to see legislation put forward, but it has to be done the right way.
So right now, there's many conversations and many discussions being had about how that would look and what we could do to stem online hate from a legislative perspective.
But key right now, I think, is two things.
Education, and we need to confront it.
We need to start looking at getting critical thinking, media literacy education into all of our schools to complement anti-racism education.
We need to start looking at ways to counter them because since the onset of the pandemic, there's been no real counter.
We haven't seen people show up to tell these people that what they're doing is not acceptable.
And that has got to change.
You know, we've got to start seeing people show up.
Would you go so far as to say that, you know, along with diversity, inclusivity training in school settings, that some kind of online hygiene or You know, understanding extremist recruiting curricula would be helpful.
Absolutely.
Is there anything in the works like that?
I mean, certainly there's a lot of organizations and working groups that tackle the anti-racism side of things.
Right.
But in terms of how to identify and intervene when kids are being groomed, not really.
And so we've actually produced an online toolkit which we're launching within a month, which does address that and does give tips and guidance and actual I have a nine-year-old son.
There's a five-year-old as well.
to handle that and how to approach that from an educator or parent, peer administrator and concerned community member perspective.
I have a nine-year-old son.
There's a five-year-old as well.
And, you know, I can well imagine that at the age of 12, if somebody gave a presentation saying, okay, so this is an example of poisoning irony in a social media feed, that would be so this is an example of poisoning irony in a social media feed, that
And I suppose it would just be a matter of, you know, figuring out how to infiltrate the public school bureaucracy to figure out, you know, how to bypass whatever political objections there would be.
It's not easy.
Right, exactly. - Exactly.
Yeah, like, I mean, it's been a challenge to try to get the stuff into the school.
So we're hoping that our toolkit will start that conversation.
There are other, there are organizations like Media Matters, who do great work putting out research and tools and guides for for educators to kind of incorporate how to identify, you know, for example, when hate sources are being used in homework and what to do about it and how to, you know, incorporate media literacy and online literacy, online hygiene into their curriculum.
So there's a lot of organizations that are doing great, great work, but it has to be consistent.
And that could probably be a whole other episode.
Morgan, you did so much to help this panel come together.
That could be a two-hour conversation.
Absolutely.
I will store up all of my emotional resources for that.
And we will set a date.
Because I think that would be really useful.
Morgan, you did so much to help this panel come together.
I want to thank you for that.
But what's your last word going forward as to where you feel this is all going?
And what would you love to see?
And also, oh, I'm going to ask all of you just to send your favorite educational and activist resources so that I can put them into the show notes.
But Morgan, what are your thoughts?
I would love to see more people adopt better allies to their friends and neighbours and to align with groups' concerns and to find ways of showing solidarity beyond just simply posting simple memes or whatever.
There's a lot of deeply affected communities that have only increased over the course of the pandemic.
So apart even from anti-lockdown protests and stuff like that.
I mean, I'm really oftentimes more interested in supporting other actions, showing solidarity with others that I think We would do well to maybe lose some of the focus on these lockdown groups and focus actually on where harm continues to be done.
I'd like to add that and also thank the many people who keep us safe.
Thank you, Elizabeth and Morgan and Dan.
It's been really informative.
I really appreciate the work that you all do and the lucidity and care that you bring to it.
This is going to be really useful for a lot of people.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Matthew.
Thanks for bringing it all together.
Thank you.
Happy to be here for this Canadian takeover, the Conspirituality Talk.
