Conservative leader Andrew Scheer just appointed one of the founding directors of the alt-right Rebel Media website to run his 2019 election campaign.
Hamish Marshall, who helped Ezra Levant launch Rebel Media in 2015, was still listed as a Rebel Media director until only a few days before Scheer appointed him the 2019 Conservative campaign chair this week.
One day earlier, the Globe and Mail reported Marshall managed Scheer’s leadership campaign from an office inside Rebel Media’s Toronto studio – when questioned by reporters this week, Scheer offered a stuttering response and abruptly ended a press conference.
Conservatives are trying to downplay Marshall’s important role at Rebel Media.
Scheer recently portrayed the founding director of Rebel Media as simply a “small business owner” while Conservative surrogaters try to convince people Marshall was only the money man at a website which, for the record, one Conservative MPs recently described as “anti-Semitic” and “white supremacist.”
Scheer himself was unwilling to go that far – following Rebel Media’s sympathetic coverage of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August, the Conservative leader would only commit to a temporary pause on interviews until Rebel Media’s “editorial direction” changes.
Yet Scheer appeared as a Rebel Media guest several times as it broadcasted blatantly racist and hateful videos, something the Conservative leader would have you believe he was totally unaware of because he doesn’t “look at every story they write.”
Scheer, they are famous for lying. Badly, at that. Of course that’s entirely consistent with previous Conservative campaigning, so this isn’t totally surprising.
Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes earned high praise from neo-Nazis and a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard when he filmed a rambling video in Israel questioning the Holocaustand suggesting “the Jews” were responsible for the Ukrainian genocide and starting World War II. McInnes also published videos on Rebel Media titled “A Nazi take on Israel” and “10 things I hate about Jews,” generating embarrassing headlines around the globe.
Goldy also travelled to Charlottesville, Virginia in August to attend a deadly white supremacist rally. Filming herself on a live stream, Goldy proudly declared that “there has been a rising in white racial consciousness” only moments before a neo-Nazi crashed his car into a crowd of people a few steps away from Goldy, killing one person.
One day after a white nationalist terror attack on a Québec City mosque that left six dead, Ezra Levant used the tragedy for a fundraising e-mail. Levant questioned whether “the mainstream media” was telling “the truth” about who the terrorist really was and, without evidence, speculated that the attacker might in fact be a Muslim. The e-mail then concluded by soliciting donations “to uncover the truth.”
Sounds like prime campaign management material.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, former Rebel Media host Lauren Southern offered a head scratching defence of fascism, a political philosophy she thinks has been unfairly tarnished by Hitler – um, sorry, what?
Oh please, the Conservatives will hire Tomi Lahren North to be their talking head, a sort of hellish Canuck version of Ann Poultergeist.
Then there was the time New York-based Rebel Media correspondent Laura Loomer, whose salary was subsidized through a fellowship from an American anti-Muslim think tank, was arrested after disrupting a performance of Shakespeare in the Park. As Loomer stormed the stage to denounce Julius Caesar’s alleged anti-Trump bias, former Rebel Media White House correspondent Jack Posobiec screamed at the audience: “You are all Goebbels! You are all Nazis like Joseph Goebbels … You are inciting terrorists!”
Sure. This is exactly the crowd I want running my campaign for global domination.
More migraines here.
-Shiv
I’m crying. This is what politics is coming to in my country in the age of Trump. Rebel Media can go to hell.
Why didn’t Canada build a Wall soon enough?
Gaaaaah, I hate that the US is showing such “leadership” by dragging down political discourse around the world. The great lowering of the bar!
Jewish critics of Israel are sometimes denounced as “self-hating Jews” by their opponents. So what does one called Ezra Levant, who is giving a platform to Holocaust deniers and other racists?
When Trump won the American election, my big concern as a Canadian was that it would legitimize the toxic rhetoric of the alt-right and we’d see it adopted by the federal Conservatives up here. This is particularly scary because it’s only a matter of time before the Conservatives win a federal election again, and as bad as Harper was, we can very well find ourselves with someone worse.