Sunday, February 10, 2019

The Cozy Relationship Between Rebel Media Personalities (Past and Present) and White Nationalist Generation Identity/ID Canada

Back on July 2, 2016 a rally and counter protest occurred at Queens Park in Toronto which in and of itself wasn't especially unusual. On this day were those who were demonstrating in support of al-Quds Day. On the other side were counter-protesters including the Jewish Defence League and supporters of the then newish Pegida Canada. While this event in and of itself would have been worth looking into in more detail had I been more on the ball at the time, it was what I have subsequently learned about what was happening on the periphery as a lone individual observed and commented on the event that I now find especially interesting:



The individual observing the event is seen above commenting on 4chan which is one of the toxic cesspools found online rife with racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. The individual took a number of photographs documenting his or her presence at the event:


The posts made by the individual (highlighted in red) and others certainly conform to the vicious hatred that one would expect to find on 4chan as well:



In some cases I've included the comment being responded too and combined it with the reply.








Now if I were to post every racist thing posted on 4chan, even if I confined myself to including only Canadian posts I'd be too busy to do anything else with my day. The reason why this particular thread is compelling is because of this comment in which the individual claims to be a writer for Rebel Media as well as being on the administrative team for Generation Identity Canada:


Generation Identity Canada, now rebranded as ID Canada, was barely on my radar at the time this post was made. I was somewhat aware of the movement in Europe but was more focused on more public groups such as the Soldiers of Odin and Pegida Canada. Over the past few years however this particular "identitarian" group and the movement in general has come to occupy a fair amount of my time.

Now while regular readers are likely all well aware of who Generation Identity/ID Canada is as well as the beliefs the membership holds at this point there may be a few new readers who would like a bit of a primer:


I can't speak to the truthfulness of claims the person posting these messaged made regarding his or her involvement with both Rebel Media or Generation Identity. I haven't been able to find any video on "The Rebel's" website that match the description of what was described and the original Generation Identity Canada Facebook page has long since gone the way of the Dodo only to replaced by a new Facebook group. However, one thing that is very clear is that current and former members of the Rebel Media team have had a very close relationship with Generation Identity/Generation Identity Canada/ID Canada over the years and have spent a lot of time promoting the group (full video "Exposure Undercover: Inside Britain's New Far Right can be found here):



Current contributor Keean Bexte has what might be considered somewhat of a six degrees of separation connection to the group in that he and supporters of ID Canada run in the same crowd:



Others, such as the current contributor and pseudonymously named "Victor Laszlo" have written articles and have posted videos on the Rebel Media platform supportive of Generation Identity:


Former Rebel Media contributor Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (aka: Tommy Robinson) has written favorably about Generation Identity while working for Ezra Levant and appears to be friends with the founder and leader of the group:



And then there's Gavin McInnes, who as a former (and as of a few days ago current) Rebel Media personality interviewed the same Generation Identity leader and his partner:


By the way, there will be more information included about Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner and his partner Brittany Pettibone later in the article.

There are however three other individuals whose connection to the identitarian cause is of more relevant significance. Two of those individuals, Faith Goldy and Lauren Southern, are former Rebel Media personalities who have been extensively discussed on the blog already. The third is a current contributor who I have never discussed and am currently kicking myself for having failed to note his involvement with Rebel Media since a former member of the racist British Nationalist Party should have been on my radar.

Of the three, Faith Goldy's relationship with ID Canada (which had formerly been Generation Identity Canada) might be most fresh in readers' minds. ID Canada was heavily involved in Goldy's mayoral campaign, even running the online "store" selling Goldy swag to fun her efforts:
Goldy has also been very open about her support for the group and their members:



Today, Goldy continues to echo the Generation Identity/ID Canada rhetoric:













While Goldy's involvement with ID Canada/Generation Identity has been discussed in the most detail on these pages, fellow former Rebel Media personality Lauren Southern appears to have a closer personal relationship with the leadership of Generation Identity:






Southern is friends with Martin Sellner (and his partner Brittany Pettibone), the Austrian leader leader and founder of Generation Identity. 


He was a figure in the undercover expose of Anne Marie Waters' Ukip leadership bid who, when not knowing he was being recorded, expressed understanding regarding the "Jewish Question" in the 1920, though he suggested that the Jews were no longer the problem now that Muslims are:


In a "Dateline" documentary, Sellner's neo-Nazi past is discussed as well as a particular tactic, disrupting an event held by ideological opponents, that might have pleased another Austrian-born ultranationalist leader:


Southern has participated in a number of Generation Identity events, including the now rather infamous effort to prevent the rescue of migrants on the Mediterranean: 
Because of these and other reasons, Southern, Sellner, and Pettibone were banned from entering the UK for which there has been much crying and gnashing of teeth:



A little over a week prior to the al-Qud event in Toronto, Southern was busy promoting an interview with Sellner; the interview was published on June 22, 2016:



Even at this early stage, Southern's affinity for the identitarian cause was so well known that one of the people posting on the 4chan thread assumed that the Canadian user observing the event was Southern herself:


I on the other hand however am less confident that the 4chan user in question is Lauren Southern.

Now I would humbly submit that this demonstration alone of the cozy relationship that aforementioned Rebel Media personalities, present and past, has had with a racist white nationalist group would be a rather damning indictment. However there is one more personality that has never been discussed on this blog who sort of rounds things out a bit more:


Well, that biography sort of glosses over a few things. First, he was the far-right Liberty GB candidate contesting the seat formerly held by Jo Cox who was murdered by a Brexit-supporter linked to the American hate group the National Alliance and the British hate groups National Front and English Defence League:


Second, Buckby worked as a campaign manager for Anne Marie Waters, an anti-Muslim zealot who ran for the leadership of Ukip. He is featured in the undercover documentary "Inside Britain's New Far Right":



And third, much of that "decade in the spotlight" was as a member of the British National Party which was at one time the premier white nationalist political party in the UK:


Former BNP leader Nick Griffin and Jack Buckby
Buckby claimed to have left the BNP when he realized they were racist which must have been a real "knock me over with a feather" moment since the BNP was founded in 1982 and already had a long history of courting racists, Islamophobes, and antisemites before Buckby was born 11 years later.

Buckby has also associated himself with other infamous figures in the British far-right, including Holocaust deniers and members of the hate group National Action which has been proscribed by the government:

Buckby with Holocaust denier Bruno
Gollnisch and another National Culturist member
at the July 2012 AENM conference

Jack Buckby with neo-Nazi terrorist Jack Renshaw of proscribed National Action
He's also sort of a dick:




It then shouldn't be too surprising that Buckby is also supportive of the identitarian cause:



In fact at least one of his apparent British Generation Identity friends has ties to the violent National Action:

Generation Identity (and National Action) member Jacob Bewick
with Buckby at an FLA event in October 2017
At a certain point, one has to wonder if this is a feature and not a bug.



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1 comment:

  1. Jackie11 February 2019 at 21:30

    And the corporate Pravda North media continues to sleep on the job by not hammering Scheer on his connections to Rebel through Hamish Marshall. Bernier isn't the only far-right kook. The mainstream Conservatives have been entryists since Harper demolished the PCs. Scheer has proven he's a nasty piece of work, but the soundbite purveyors would rather obsess about -- and even make up stuff about -- Trudeau.

    I only hope both parties split the bigot vote and destroy each other in the process. The fact remains that this normalization of unapologetic white supremacism in Canada's political process is a problem that still needs to be dealt with even if they lose in the fall.

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