When a bad person supports you, what should you do?

Well, if you’re a normal human, you say you don’t want or need the support of the bad person, and you denounce and renounce them.

If you’re a politician, apparently, it’s more complicated. Apparently.

When Barack Obama’s pastor was caught saying that America was a terrorist state, and that the Sept. 11 attacks were self-inflicted, Obama dithered. The future president took weeks to renounce and denounce the pastor. When it became apparent the controversy wasn’t going away, Obama finally quit the pastor’s Chicago church, calling his words an “outrage.” He went on to become president.

A few years later, the one-time Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions. At first, Trump told media he’d repudiate Duke “if it made you feel better” – and that he “knows nothing about white supremacists.” As with Obama, when the controversy grew too big to ignore, Trump repeatedly and angrily disavowed Duke. He went on to become president, too.

Up here in Canada, there are similar examples. In 2004, former Conservative MP Randy White complained that the Charter of Rights was being “used as a crutch” by certain people – assumedly, non-whites, women and gays – and that a Conservative government would put up “checks and balances” to stop that. “To heck with the courts,” White said.

White’s comments happened just days before that year’s election, and Harper did not denounce them quickly or clearly enough. The Paul Martin Liberals would win, and Harper would not go on to be Prime Minister until much later – and after White was no longer a Conservative candidate.

In 2018, Justin Trudeau had his National Lampoon-like trip to India, which was a total fiasco. Among other things, Trudeau brought along a man who had been previously convicted of attempting to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister. When the Indian media started shouting questions at him about it at cartoonish photo-ops, Trudeau eventually realized the extent of the damage, and said “this person should never have been invited in the first place.”

But the damage was done. Trudeau would go on to lose his Parliamentary majority, and the disastrous India trip would be widely cited as one of the reasons.

Which brings us, in a circuitous route, to Pierre Poilievre.

Like many other politicians (see above), the newly-minted Conservative leader has been endorsed by – or gotten too close to – bad people. Unlike those politicians, however, Poilievre has been slow to renounce and denounce. In some cases, he’s adamantly refused.

So, there was James Topp, a Canadian Armed Forces member who – in uniform – urged his fellow soldiers to disobey orders, and never get vaccinated against COVID-19. Topp would go on to lend support to Diagolon, a white supremacist group whose members are among those arrested in February for allegedly conspiring to murder police at the Coutts, Alta. border crossing.

Not only did Poilievre not renounce and denounce Topp, he marched with him in Ottawa at the end of June, in full view of media cameras.

Shortly after that, a smiling Poilievre was photographed with a happy-looking Jeremy MacKenzie, the leader of the aforementioned white supremacist group, Diagolon. MacKenzie, who is a racist and thug, would later be arrested on a Canada-wide warrant for weapons and assault charges.

Poilievre didn’t denounce MacKenzie for the Diagolon stuff – he actually claimed he didn’t know what Diagolon was, even though the media had been asking him about it for months. Instead, he (appropriately) denounced MacKenzie for making a disgusting, despicable comment about his wife.

Then, this week, Poilievre was embraced by Alex Jones of InfoWars. On his Sept. 30 broadcast, Jones said: “We got the new Canadian leader who’s set to beat Trudeau – who is totally anti-New World Order. You look all over the world, we are rising right now.”

Jones is a bit better known. He has done so many evil, hateful things, we literally don’t have room to catalogue them all. Recently, however, he has been in the news for saying that the mass murder of children in Sandy Hook, Conn. in 2012 was “staged,” and urging his deranged followers to attack the parents of the dead children. A jury in Texas said Jones needed to pay $45 million in damages for that.

And now, Jones is singing the praises of Poilievre.

I don’t believe, not for a moment, that Poilievre supports Jones in any way. I believe he will denounce and renounce these bad people. Eventually.

The question for Pierre Poilievre isn’t what he believes, or what he thinks about these bad people, or about renouncing or denouncing the bad people.

The question is this: Why do the bad people keep coming back?

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The female Member of Parliament, a former cabinet minister, looked afraid. She was pale.

She was describing sitting alone in a Winnipeg hotel room, months earlier, reading debased threats from an animal hiding behind a fake name. She was terrified, the MP said. The man said he was going to do sickening, monstrous things to her.

“It was horrible,” she said.

We were at a Toronto restaurant, that night. It got quiet. So I recounted how, before social media really got going, I had received a message from a guy who promised one of my sons would be raped and murdered.

With us at the restaurant was someone I was then involved with. This woman and I were shortly thereafter threatened with being “bludgeoned to death” by a Toronto-based neo-Nazi.
So, the three of us talked about the social media-based hate. We shook our heads.

We said something needed to be done about it.

Whenever you pursue these threats, whenever you do something about it – these dark words about rape and hangings and murder – it doesn’t always turn out the way you’d like. The police, the prosecutors, they say they can’t do much. They’re too busy. Or whatever.

For example: when I found the guy who threatened my nine-year-old son, the police visited him, but they didn’t charge him. I don’t know why. In the case of the neo-Nazi, the one who wanted us bludgeoned to death, I had to privately prosecute the case, because the police and the Crown wouldn’t do anything.

When it finally got before a judge – Ontario Court judge Dan Moore, remember that name, because I sure do – the neo-Nazi was let go, scot-free. (The neo-Nazi was later convicted of promoting hate against women and Jews by another judge, however.)

Sometimes, you win against the monsters. But those wins are few and far between. In the case of the MP, the man who had made the threats – a man who had once tweeted at my colleague and friend Lorrie Goldstein, “get in the oven, @sunlorrie Nazi Jew” – was convicted of criminal harassment and uttering threats. But those sorts of results seem to be the exception, not the rule.

Which leads us to Pierre Poilievre, and the clear threat recently made against his family. A white supremacist in Nova Scotia said he wanted to sexually assault Poilievre’s wife, Anaida. He now says he was “joking,” but that’s how these extremists operate now – when they go too far, they claim they were “joking.”

I won’t name the white supremacist, because that’s one of the things he wants. Diagolon, the group this man leads, favours creating a homeland for the like-minded, stretching from Florida to Alaska, in a diagonal line (thus the name). Diagolon is anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and militant. It is called “accelerationist” — meaning, it wants accelerate a race war and anarchy.

Diagolon promotes the Great Replacement Theory, which mainly asserts that there is a Satanic conspiracy to replace whites with non-whites. It also promotes material that served as the inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, when a neo-Nazi slaughtered 168 men, women and children. And some of its members were arrested in Coutts, Alberta in February, and charged with plotting to kill police.

We know all this stuff about Diagolon and its leader, mainly, because Poilievre has been photographed with him, and has marched in Ottawa with Diagolon enthusiasts. When those things happened, Poilievre attracted a lot of unhelpful news coverage, but it certainly didn’t impede his march towards the Conservative Party leadership.

The Poilievres have been obliged to hire security because of past threats. And the Mounties are now reportedly looking at the vile threat against Anaida Poilievre.

In a statement, Pierre Poilievre denied knowing anything about Diagolon until “about a month ago.” That’s a little hard to believe, because he and his campaign were questioned by the media about the Diagolon dalliances as far back as July. That’s important, but certainly not as important as the hatred to which Anaida Poilievre has now been exposed.

So, the RCMP will investigate. Maybe they’ll charge this despicable bastard, maybe they won’t.

In the meantime, our downward descent into the abyss will continue. The death threats, the promises to rape, the urgings to kill oneself. Nothing will change.

Not until police and prosecutors get better training, and more resources. Not until social media owners decide to join the human race, and turn off anonymous accounts.

Wonder why our politics has become so ugly? Wonder why we are getting fewer and fewer good people to run for office? Wonder why society is getting more and more divided?

Ask the MP. She’ll tell you.

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