Conservatives prove how anti-terrorist they are by mailing bomb threats

Three Concordia University buildings had to be evacuated this morning because a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens of Canada (or C4) mailed bomb threats to their facilities:

The threatening letter, purportedly from a group that calls itself Council of Conservative Citizens of Canada (C4), complains about Muslim students at Concordia.

“The suspect sent by email that he put some explosive items inside a few places inside the buildings,” said Montreal police Const. Benoit Boisselle.

“Lots of police officers are on site right now. They looked around, they did not find any suspect items,” Boisselle said.

McGill security also informed

CKUT — the campus community radio station at McGill University — was among the media outlets to receive the letter threatening Muslim students at Concordia.

“Since we will [spread] our fight to McGill too, we at C4 decided to give you a heads up of the emergency situation at Concordia University,” said the email, from someone identified as the “C4 co-ordinator.”

An official at CKUT said the radio station had shared the email with McGill University’s campus security.

Remember folks: It’s not terrorism when white people do it.

-Shiv

Irony, thy name is the Guardian

A headline from the Milo affair last week in the Guardian reads: Milo Yiannopoulos’s enablers deserve contempt – and must be confronted.

The irony? This is the same rag that keeps enabling Sarah Ditum and Julie Bindel.

So you’ll forgive me, Guardian, if I am somewhat skeptical of your seemingly newfound defense of trans people. While your writers are calling for confrontation with reactionary transphobes, I have to wonder if the other editors in your company are getting the same memo.

-Shiv

Youtube censoring educational content for trans people

A few months ago YouTube once again updated their community guidelines such that certain content could be age-restricted, and that age-restricted content couldn’t be monetized. Professional sex educators were understandably upset, as now their means of earning money was going to be denied to them. YouTube’s administrative staff seem to largely operate from America’s sex squeamishness such that even the most benign, descriptive and frankly unsexy video would be flagged. It’s not quite censorship, but it does force sex educators to volunteer their time rather than get paid for it.

Cue the institutional transphobia. Chase Ross, a transmasculine youtuber who I follow, has had vast portions of their content restricted following the guidelines update. The videos that were flagged? They were reviewing prosthesis. Not sex toys. Just implements to facilitate the health of gender dysphoric transmasculine individuals by reducing their anxiety and depression.

This seems to be operating from an aggressively transphobic, and distressingly popular, notion that anything related to transgender health qualifies as “sexual,” which plays into one half of trans-antagonists’ simultaneous hypersexualization/desexualization complex.

Much of what I do here is likewise meant to be educational. One reason I’m a lot less likely to migrate away from FreethoughtBlogs is precisely because so many other networks, in their bid to attract ad revenue, will impose restrictions upon the content they can host. And the restriction is almost always related to sexual content–again, American squeamishness (this despite the very obvious hypocrisy of what the ads on these site say. They’re very obviously trying to exploit sex. So you can sell it–if you’re an advertiser–but you can’t teach it, if you’re an educator). And the portions of my content on trans people could very well end up being called “sexual,” even if it’s as stimulating as a Donald Trump speech.

-Shiv

Wait, when did Tomi Lahren break north of the border?

Ah, nevermind, it’s just Lauren Southern.

Rebel Media host Lauren Southern is having a hard time explaining Milo Yiannopoulis’ controversial comments about pedophilia – so now she’s floating flimsy conspiracy theories.

Yiannopoulos, who resigned as senior editor of the Breitbart Tuesday, has been disinvited from delivering the keynote speech at a major conference for American conservatives, he’s had a $250,000 book deal cancelled and he’s been denounced by his own Editor-in-Chief at Breitbart after multiple videos surfaced this weekend showing the alt-right YouTube celebrity promoting controversial views on pedophilia.

In one video, Yiannopoulos says sexual relationships between “younger boys and older men” can be “hugely positive experiences for those young boys” and describes attending parties in Hollywood where he witnessed “very young” boys “having unsafe sex with older men.”

But in a pair of tweets Monday night, Southern dismissed the “moral outrage” as a “manufactured hit job” by “the establishment.”

[Edit–Mashed the publish key too soon. Oops!]

For the record, Southern’s previous appearance on Against the Grain was posing as a trans person in order to troll a teach-in that was a good faith attempt to intercept and cool down the Jordan Peterson controversy.

Yes, the same reactionary dingleberries screeching about free speech attempted to suppress actual, mature dialogue and instead focused on the protests that would soon escalate after Peterson would prove too resilient to bend to logic.

Southern would later delete both tweets – an uncharacteristic show of restraint from someone known to call her critics “faggots” and argue that Hitler was not a fascist.

But another thing remains: Southern retweeted a conspiracy theory sourced from 4Chan, an online community often associated with the alt-right, claiming a “whistleblower” had predicted the left-wing mainstream media and George Soros would team up to launch “Operation Destroy Milo” only “one day before it happened.”

Nevermind that the video was actually dug up by a right-wing blog, that the story was first broken by a right-wing media outlet owned by Glenn Beck or that the time stamp on the message shows it was published hours after media outlets first began reporting on the videos.

Alas, I mix up one fascist walking-talking-Aryan-shampoo-commercial for another. Silly me.

-Shiv

Conservatives denounce correction of Fox News’ fake news

Apparently satisfied with the amount of pearl-clutching over the national deficit, Canada’s official opposition fired shots across the Prime Minister’s bow by asking him… why his office would correct the blatantly false information about the Quebec mosque shooting aired by Fox News:

OTTAWA—The Opposition Conservatives are criticizing the Prime Minister’s Office for complaining to Fox News about a tweet identifying the suspect in the Quebec City mosque shooting as “Moroccan.”

In an open letter to Fox News Channel co-president Bill Shine, PMO Communications Director Kate Purchase wrote that Canada is “an open, welcoming country that stands by its citizens.”

She accused the tweet of “perpetuating fear and division” and dishonouring the memory of the victims of Sunday’s mass shooting, in which six people were killed.

She asked that it be taken down.

Fox News responded by deleting the tweet and saying it regretted the error.

Conservative MP and party leadership candidate Lisa Raitt says while she understands frustrations over misinformation being reported, Justin Trudeau should be focused on more important matters.

“More important matters”?

I’m sorry, the most powerful country in the world is run by a bull in a china shop and you think misinformation campaigns are “unimportant”?

The deaths of our Muslims citizens at the hands of white nationalists is “unimportant”?

Not exactly subtle.

-Shiv