Why The Rebel ditched the cause
If Rebel Media’s up pance was coming, if some event was finally going to wipe the smirk off its face, it could hardly have been more hideously appropriate than what happened over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va.
Live on the internet, Rebel personality Faith Goldy was blathering on about how intolerant the left is, and about left-right double standards in the media and in policing, and about all the other things that gladden the hearts of the Rebel’s grievance- based nihilist- conservative fans.
And then, right there in the frame, someone rammed his car into the crowd of counter- protesters she was mocking, killi ng 32- year- old Heather Heyer and injuring many others. That guy, allegedly, was 20- year- old James Alex Fields, whose high school teachers said he was obsessed with Adolf Hitler in all the wrong ways.
Fun time was over. This was, apparently, a real live neo- Nazi committing, certainly, real live murder.
At this point, Rebel Commander Ezra Levant could have steered his vessel in one of several directions. “Nothing to do with us,” he could have said, plausibly enough.
He could have set course for Alex Jonestown — Infowars, that is, the online insanity repository where America’s leading conspiracist nutbar, and fan of The Rebel, rants and raves and claims nothing is as it seems to be, including the 9/ 11 attacks ( Bush knew) and the Sandy Hook massacre ( literally didn’t happen).
A year ago I wouldn’t have thought Levant capable of it: previous Ezra regenerations viewed 9/ 11 Truthers and their ilk as primary targets for mockery and vitriol. But he’s allowed himself to be associated with that crowd for some time.
He shares with Jones a contributor in Paul Joseph Watson, who wrote a book arguing “the highest levels of the U.S. government were complicit in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” And when a lone gunman murdered six worshippers at a Quebec City mosque, The Rebel sent Goldy to the scene, who torqued the standard initial confusion over the number of shooters into a potential cover- up protecting a Muslim perpetrator.
Alex Jones think she knows what happened in Charlottesville: the Southern Poverty Law Center spent George Soros’s money rounding up some actors to play neo-Nazis.
Levant could have gone there; instead, he blinked.
“When I first heard of the alt- right a year ago, I thought it simply meant the insurgent right, the politically incorrect right … the right that backed Trump and his ‘ Make America Great Again’ style over Jeb Bush and the swamp,” he wrote in a purported “staff memo.”
“But the alt- right has changed into something new, especially since Trump’s election,” Levant lamented. “Now the leading figure … is Richard Spencer, and other white nationalists.” There were actual Nazi flags in Charlottesville, Levant noted, waxing appalled (while allowing they might have been carried by “agents provocateurs ”). That’ s “racist,” he averred, rather than “conservative,” and he would have none of it.
It is, in a word, pathetic. Spencer coined the term “alt-right,” for heaven’s sake. He has never, ever been shy about his white nationalist views. A manifesto he released before the march in Charlottesville talks of “a shared civilization” that “sprang” from the “Aryan” race, and dismisses the idea of “Judeo- Christian values” as “a distortion of the historical and metaphysical reality of both Jews and Europeans.”
“The preservation of their identity as Jews was and is contingent on resistance to assimilation,” he writes, “sometimes expressed as hostility towards their hosts.”
In an online interview, Goldy called the ideas “robust” and “well thought out.” ( She also referred to “the JQ” — alt- right shorthand for “the Jewish question,” as if her listeners would know perfectly well what she was on about.)
Levant is too smart for the surprise to be genuine. So why bail now? And why the sudden exodus of Rebel contributors — Barbara Kay, John Robson, Candice Malcolm, co-founder Brian Lilley — who have put up with so very much other nonsense?
Goldy wasn’t driving the car. Surely the anti- fascist left isn’t any more noble in their minds, or the media any less biased, because some racist committed vehicular homicide. For Trump, Jones and most Republicans, it’s business as usual.
So why is The Rebel suddenly falling into line?
It’s only a theory, but it does strike me as a very Canadian response.
We love to play at war of civilizations up here, exploding the small differences between Liberal and Conservative governments into life-and-death struggles, pretending Stephen Harper or Justin Trudeau (or both) will lead to the downfall of Canadian civilization.
It’s very diverting for partisans. And for a certain segment of the unserious Canadian right, at a time when their ( supposed) party had been kicked into opposition, the Canadian and American left’s anguish at Trump’s victory and his movement was a chance to gather strength from their opponents’ misery.
It was all going so well. Then some ass in a Dodge reminded them this is actually real life. People can get hurt. People can die.