Greasing the Gears of the Armageddon Engine

by Frank Black

Remember how most reporters covered that Canadian Islamic separatist movement?

You know the one: It wanted to seize control of the entire provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, along with their oil fields, and create a republic with its own national borders, constitution, laws, and military. Its two main leaders accused Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government of promoting pedophilia and trying to eliminate the Muslim population of Canada; one was a “journalist” with few if any searchable publications, and the other was a former RCMP officer convicted of threatening his wife, and who ran a lobby group that posted billboards during the 2019 federal election accusing the federal government of stoking a civil war under the sway of “globalism,” which Haaretz (3/13/18) notes is a classic antisemitic dogwhistle favored by Steve Bannon. That’s the same federal election in which Trudeau took what the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation  (10/13/19) called the “unprecedented” campaign precaution of donning a bulletproof vest at one stop.

Of course you don’t remember that, because none of it ever happened. Obviously, if it had happened, every news outlet worth its ink and megabytes would have exhaustively reported on such a clear harbinger of violence and threat to national unity.

But…what if the separatists weren’t Muslims? What if they were Christian, Euro-Canadian settlers calling themselves “Wexit” (for "Western Exit"—because, given the clear success of Brexit, what rational person wouldn’t want to emulate it)?

Vice (10/30/19) exposed the racist conspiracy theories of the leading proponents of "Wexit."

So how good is the reporting that Canadian media been doing on an actual national unity threat led by paranoid, bigoted and even violent separatists? If you’re looking at Vice Media Canada, the answer is, “A good job.” Here’s how that outlet’s Steven Zhou (10/30/19) describes the situation:

Two main organizers behind #Wexit, the campaign calling for Canada’s prairie provinces to secede, have a prolific history of pushing far-right and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

Over the past year, Peter Downing, an ex-RCMP officer, and Patrick King, a self-styled journalist, have accused Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government of “normalizing pedophilia,” tolerating ISIS terrorists penetrating the country apparently disguised as refugees, and pursuing an immigration policy aimed to “depopulate the white, Anglo-Saxon race.”

The last reference is to the white supremacist fantasy of “white replacement,” also called “the great replacement” and “white extinction,” an obsession of the fascist marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us!” at the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally. GQ (6/21/19) explored how the mass-murderer at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue “wrote online that he believed [the synagogue’s Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] were working to ‘bring invaders in that kill our people,’” and that the white supremacist who murdered more than 50 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand,

described immigration as “assault on the European people,” and wrote in a manifesto that, “This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement. This is racial replacement. This is WHITE GENOCIDE.”

So how well have the rest of the media, particularly Canadian media, been reporting on an actual national unity threat led by peddlers of paranoid, sometimes violence-stoking nightmares such as “white replacement”?

On the whole, not well. The CBC’s Sarah Rieger (11/17/19), explaining that the Wexiteers are forming a provincial and federal party to run across Western Canada, wrote that Wexit leader Peter Downing ran for the federal Christian Heritage Party in 2015, but doesn’t note that article 25 the CHP’s current platform hysterically rails against the “threats” of halal meat and “Sharia Law,” which RightWingWatch.org (5/15/15) explores as yet another Islamophobic auto-repeat lie. But it’s not until the 16th paragraph she explains that the RCMP suspended Downing for threatening his wife, and the 17th paragraph before she reveals

the party has been accused of allowing conspiracy theories or other harmful rhetoric to circulate online. On social media, Downing has railed against “crybaby liberal reporters,” “communist creeps and bums in Eastern Canada” and “beta males.”

The CBC (11/17/19) allows a Wexit leader to frame the issue as "not about white supremacy" but about "Western Canadians stand up for their rights and aren't going to be pushed around anymore."

Rieger’s hyperlink is to her own earlier article (11/4/19), which doesn’t describe or quote that “harmful rhetoric,” but does note that Downing “is exploring legal options against those who have described the group as promoting white supremacist and anti-Muslim rhetoric” (despite the oft-professed love of “free speech” from the ultra-right). As Vice reminds us:

Downing insists that his movement is not racist. But a closer look at the comments made in the #Wexit Facebook groups and pages reveal racist, often violent discussions that mirror the same far-right views that Downing and King present—some comparing Muslims to termites and rapists.

If the Wexiteers were Islamic, xenophobic, would-be oil-seizing nation-splitters, and were led by a man with similar “credentials,” does anyone believe the CBC would have buried such information in the 16th and 17th paragraphs?

CBC’s failure on this file isn’t a first; as FAIR (1/10/19) has reported, “Weeks after a white supremacist murder an anti-racist protester in Charlottesville”—and about eight months after a Euro-Canadian terrorist murdered six people at a mosque in Quebec City—“the CBC (9/17/17) ran an essay denouncing ‘QTPOC supremacy’—the idea that queer, trans people of color “deserve to dominate society.” Ignoring and decontextualizing is bad enough, but spreading paranoia about marginalized people during the rise of murderous, networked, international fascism is profoundly irresponsible for a press that seeks to guarantee liberty by presenting reality.

Sometimes CBC does a far better job, as with Drew Anderson’s excellent analysis (11/16/19), whose first paragraph quotes Downing’s goal of “excising the ‘parasite of Eastern Canada,’” and by the fourth paragraph includes Downing saying, “Anybody who stands in the way of Western self-determination, Alberta self-determination, you're our enemy and we’re going to run you over,” a line reminiscent of the 2017 murder-by-car of Heather Heyer at Charlottesville.

Anderson notes that a disturbing post-election Ipsos poll (11/5/19) of Albertans revealed 33% of respondents favored separatism, and explains the parallels with Louisiana Tea Partiers whose “collective psyche” contained

a story that was outside the realm of reason, one based on emotion and perception that formed an almost-unbreakable conviction in their worldview…. You can see it in the rise of anti-immigrant groups and those labeling Trudeau a traitor. That sort of fear and anxiety, when combined with politics, can be powerful. But that power, like the story which feeds it, does not necessarily trade in facts.

PressProgress (11/6/19) explored the actual politics of "the right-wing Alberta separatist group that has enjoyed extensive media coverage following last month’s federal election."

Anderson’s piece aligns with an article by nonprofit news outlet PressProgress (11/6/19), which explains that the Christian Heritage Party, for whom Downing once ran, “advocates Canada should be governed according to Biblical Law.” (Islamic theocracy is doubleplusungood, but Christian theocracy is doubleplusgood.) Exploring what freedom warriors have in mind for women in their oily, prairie Gilead, Anderson writes that

Wexit Alberta’s platform also takes a peculiar interest in rewriting divorce laws. The group says it would “alleviate courtroom backlogs and prioritize serious criminal cases through deregulating divorce and matrimonial property disputes.” While it is unclear what “deregulating divorce” means, they elaborate that they want to remove “judicial prejudice against men in family court.”

PressProgress further explores Wexiteerian goals such as

“outlawing groups whose primary objective or effect is racial agitation, or social chaos.” In addition to cracking down on “racial agitation,” the new Republic of Alberta would also seemingly take aim at fly-in fly-out oil field workers from places like Newfoundland and the Maritimes. The platform suggests using the powers of government to maintain a “100% Alberta resident work-force.”

By asking Mount Royal University journalism professor Sean Holman for his analysis of the Wexitopians, Anderson gives readers an expert’s contextual, historical take:

We're seeing, I think, a really troubling situation in Alberta, and we’re seeing it with [the United Conservative Party provincial] government, where those on the right in this province are actively creating in and out groups in society—people who are scapegoats, people who are enemies, and people who are part of society…. That is dangerous, and Wexit is part of that.

Unfortunately, such indispensable contextual analysis is absent in Andrew Kurjata’s CBC article (10/26/19), which discusses a “Northern British Columbia Wexit” and a Western “sense of anger at Trudeau’s re-election”; the piece names Downing, and provides links to an audio clip called “Conservative voter panel on Wexit, electoral reform, and how the party should win the next election,” and another called “A conversation with the leader of the BC Wexit movement.” But Kurjata is silent on all the previously cited disturbing elements, and offers no links to audio clips analyzing and naming the extremism for what it is. Nor does his piece place Wexit in the international context of Brexit, Trumpism and white nationalism.

"It's only a matter of time before their goal becomes reality," CTV (11/17/19) reports of Wexit party leaders—citing a Wexit party leader.

Does CBC’s main rival, the CTV network, do much better? Not in Alex Antoneshyn’s CTV News Edmonton article “‘We’ll See Who’s Laughing’: Wexit Movement Applies for Federal Party Status” (11/17/19), which uncritically quotes Downing saying, “It’s a not a left-wing versus right-wing thing. The reality is that confederation does not work for Western Canada,” and that he plans to seek the Wexit party’s leadership. That article provides no background on Downing at all, or any context about the extremism of his movement.

When asked about such journalistic sins of omission, Barbara Perry, professor in social sciences at the Ontario Institute of Technology and Canada’s leading authority on hate crimes, says:

I think there is a concerted, perhaps purposeful failure to acknowledge the linkages between the Wexit movement and the far right. While there was some recognition of that nexus for [Canada’s white nationalist Yellow Vest movement], there’s a blindness to the same trend with Wexit. I don’t know that I’ve seen any references at all in the stories I’ve been reading. That’s a dangerous gap, as it allows the right to go unchallenged.

Montreal journalist Nora Loreto, no stranger to the power of right-wing mobs (FAIR.org, 4/25/18), explains that the dangerous error most journalists make is treating the Wexiteers “as just another interest group,” and that journalists aren’t

reporting on what it actually takes to form a new country: some kind of demonstrated collective identity and culture that isn’t solely tied to a specific industry. If they’re oil industry boosters, they should be reported like that, and not like a legitimate movement for sovereignty from Canada. All the mainstream outlets are doing a terrible job with Wexit, but especially TV outlets, who actually go to their meetings and report on their crowds to make it look like they have momentum (even though far more people are engaged and active in other movements, like the anti-climate change movement in Edmonton, for example).

Loreto’s last point is well-taken; when Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg spoke at Alberta’s provincial legislature in Edmonton on October 18, as many as 5,000 Edmontonians marched along with her, whereas on the same day, anti-environmentalists mustered only a few dozen (one of who spent much of his time shouting “F--- Greta!” at the top of his lungs not far from where I was standing).

Anti-fascist organizer Daryle Lamont Jenkins criticizes New York Times coverage (10/16/18) of the Proud Boys: "These people want to cause real harm to the rest of us, and in order for people to understand that, you just can’t rely on what they themselves say about that."

Daryle Lamont Jenkins, the lead organizer and investigator at the US anti-fascist group One People’s Project and its media arm Idavox, warns reporters everywhere against underreporting:

The controversy around how the New York Times has covered Gavin McInnes and his Proud Boys stands out the most. It comes from what was seen by critics as a fluff piece written by Alan Feuer, who is writing a book about fighting between antifa and Proud Boys. I am not sure of his political leanings, they look to be center-left, but I don’t think that’s the issue. The issue is you can’t be reckless about this. These people want to cause real harm to the rest of us, and in order for people to understand that, you just can’t rely on what they themselves say about that.

So how can reporters do better? Jenkins says research is the key, because “the biggest problem that I have always had over decades is how all the information about the [extremist] group that they report is from the group, with [few or] no other sources.” He also notes that even diligent investigators may face an editorial buzzsaw, as with a reporter he knew who “actually quit a newspaper because, despite all the information about how dangerous [an extremist] group was, the editor killed the story for some reason.”

In the interests of public safety, Perry insists that media must expose the links between “camera-friendly” fronts and the extremist movements behind them, and must also critically discuss

what the consequences of those links are, especially in terms of legitimating the right’s platforms. Media must also deconstruct the narratives that the movement creates, not just report on them without question. It is this uncritical approach—disguised as “balanced journalism”—that must be challenged.

There’s an old journalistic proverb advocating skepticism: “If your mother says she loves you…check it out.” Since the Wexiteers are nowhere near as cuddly as anybody’s mother (except perhaps Grendel’s), it should be easy for reporters to question their claims, and yet few do. As Loreto explains:

Rather than assuming that these groups are grassroots and spontaneous organizations, we need to know: who is funding them, what connections do the leadership have with other known groups, and are they making money on this? If a journalist is unsure, there is a community of activists and writers who will be able to help answer these questions.

Ryan Thorpe of the Winnepeg Free Press (8/16/19) went undercover to infiltrate a neo-Nazi group in Manitoba.

So which other US and Canadian reporters are contextually reporting on the extremist movement? “It is very easy to say who is doing a good job with reporting, because they have definitely stood out,” says Jenkins. He also praises

Luke O’Brien and the work he has been doing at Huffington Post, Kim Kelly, who not only writes for Teen Vogue and the New Republic on the issue, but has even organized an anti-racist metal show in January, and scores of others who make reporting on fascism their beat. So much so, that they are targeted for physical harm (at least online) by terrorist groups like Atomwaffen.

“The Winnipeg Free Press and Ryan Thorpe have been doing good work, too,” says Loreto. “In Montreal, there [is] a group of journalists who have been consistently writing about the far right whose work has appeared in the Montreal Gazette and the Globe and Mail.” Not only have they “worked with anti-fascist organizers to help unmask and identify who is behind the worst of the far-right/fascist online world,” those reporters have also “exposed the fact that many of the global movement’s most important figures are Canadian.”

The imperative during our current crisis is clear. Reporters have a responsibility to help readers understand, not simply the disconnected facts of today, but how those facts are dramatically connected to powerful and sometimes dangerous forces at work last week, last year, and last century. Failing to do is worse than refusing to pull the emergency break on the train hurtling towards disaster—it’s actually greasing the gears of the Armageddon engine.