Your Ward News, to be precise. And the Toronto Police Service, and the Crown, and the Attorney-General, HAVE DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THAT FOUL NAZI HATE RAG.

And many, many of us ARE SICK OF WAITING FOR ACTION.

AND WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THIS INTO AN ELECTION ISSUE, MUNICIPALLY AND PROVINCIALLY, IF SOMETHING DOESN’T HAPPEN DAMN SOON.

(Sorry for the all caps, folks, but I am so tired of waiting for these people to do their jobs.)

The CJN story is here:

“Hell just got a little more crowded,” author, lawyer and political consultant Warren Kinsella declared during a panel discussion on confronting Holocaust denial on Nov. 6.

Kinsella was referring to the death earlier this year of the infamous Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, who lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000 and founded a publishing house that issued neo-Nazi pamphlets with titles like, Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last.

The talk, which was part of the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre’s Holocaust Education Week programming, was held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Kinsella, whose 1994 book Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network is considered a seminal work on white supremacy in Canada, argued that the tactic of ignoring Zundel and his kind is dangerous.

“He wouldn’t and he didn’t go away,” Kinsella stressed, “and his foul legacy is still felt in this city and this country today.”

He showed the audience photocopied pages from the Toronto-area publication Your Ward News, which is known for publishing vitriolic content that attacks Jews, Muslims, women and other minority groups.

Kinsella and his wife have launched a private prosecution against the paper’s publisher and editor.

Pointing out pro-Hitler images in the publication, Kinsella said that, “This isn’t from Zundel’s presses. It’s happening right now … and the Toronto Police Service has done nothing about it.”

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It’s hard to keep track of political revelations in the Trump era, true.  But back in August. you may recall that The New Yorker’s award-winning political writer, Ryan Lizza, published a big story about Donald Trump’s anti-Semitic, white supremacist muse, Steve Bannon:

Bannon has become friends with Gerald Butts, a longtime political adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. They met in New York during the transition and now talk regularly. Bannon sees Butts as a sort of left-wing version of himself. Last year, as the Prime Minister’s popularity was in decline, Trudeau pushed through a tax hike on the rich, and it helped him rebound.

Bannon wants to sell the idea politically by arguing that it would actually hit left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood. Bannon is one of the few Republicans in Washington actually to consider what has long been backed up by polling: many working-class voters who support Republicans are in favor of higher taxes on the rich. “There’s nothing better for a populist than a rich guy raising taxes on rich guys,” Butts told Bannon.

PMO never disavowed that story, and Butts didn’t tell The New Yorker’s fact-checkers what Lizza wrote was wrong.  So we can accept it as the truth.

The notion that Gerald would “become friends” with a known white supremacist and anti-Semite actually broke my heart, but that’s a story for another day.  The part that really interested me was that quote:  “There’s nothing better for a populist than a rich guy raising taxes on rich guys.”

Practice what you preach, goes the saying.  So, up here in The Great White North, of course, what Justin Trudeau’s top advisor was telling Donald Trump’s then-top-advisor to do was exactly what the Trudeau Liberals were doing – they were rich guys, raising taxes on other rich guys.

They said they’d do it in their platform, and in their budget, and on the hustings, they reminded us: rich guys were going to be targeted.

The Trudeau guys are not noted for their subtlety.  If they could get away with printing a budget on a pair of Star Wars socks, they’d do it, and then they’d put it up on Instagram.  So, to ensure we didn’t miss the arc of their narrative, Trudeau dressed up as Superman for Halloween, and Bill Morneau actually likened himself to Batman.  They were the millionaire superheroes, you see, saving the middle class from millionaires less philanthropic than them.

But the details got in the way, as they always do.  Morneau’s tax changes unfairly targeted small business, not big businesses like his.  Revenue Canada said it would start going after waitresses for their tips, and retail clerks for the clothes on their backs.  And then the whole thing ended in farce, with a secret French villa, set up to avoid the reach of tax collectors back here in the colonies.

The Conservatives, being led by a remarkably unremarkable fellow who also plays footsie with white supremacists and anti-Semites, shouldn’t be benefitting from all this.  He’s a dud, a nobody who has done nothing.  But, according to not a few pollsters, now, he’s competitive.  A Forum poll, this morning, says he’s been ahead of Justin Trudeau for months – right around the time that Bill Morneau started advocating against millionaires like him.

Voters will forgive lots of stuff.  But, to them, no sin is greater than hypocrisy.  As that pedophilic Republican Roy Moore is discovering the hard way, your personal life better reflect your public life, or else. Voters hate hypocrites.

That’s why Messrs. Trudeau and Morneau are in some trouble: they are rich guys who said they’d go after other rich guys.  But they went after the little guys instead.

There are a lot more votes on Main Street than Bay Street, as the smart progressive populists – Bill Clinton, Jean Chretien, Barack Obama – knew.  They always took care to be seen in Harvey’s and McDonald’s, and not the Ritz.

The Trudeau government is in some trouble.  It’s true.  And they’re in trouble not because they’re rich guys.  Politics is full of rich guys.

They’re in trouble because they didn’t, you know, hide it very well. And they’re in trouble because they said they’d do one thing – to Steve Bannon, no less! – and then they did precisely the opposite.

Can they recover? Sure.  But they need to smarten up.

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Get it here!

And deets about the Carleton stop below!

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Right here!

It’s a momentous fall for Warren Kinsella, the Toronto-based author, lawyer, political consultant, and veteran punk musician. This November sees both the release of his new novel Recipe For Hate, and a new album from his band Shit From Hell, titled SFH Kinda Suck. We’re excited to have copies of both to give away. Check below for details and enter now!

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Life imitates fiction, sometimes, and not in ways that you’d expect.

This week, for example, I published a book called Recipe For Hate. It’s a novel.

Without giving away the plot, I can reveal that Recipe For Hate is about fanatics insinuating themselves into positions of power and influence. It’s about radicals clashing in the streets. And it’s about some people believing that extremism can be a virtue.

Sound familiar?

As I was writing the book, I would love to say that I foresaw Brexit, President Donald Trump, and the rise of extremism on the Left and the Right – extremism that resulted in murder in places like Charlottesville. But I didn’t. 

Last week, when touring to promote Recipe For Hate, I ran into my friend Adrienne Batra, editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun. She suggested I write a column about how, nowadays, life is indeed imitating art.  
There are three reasons for the political and social upheaval we are seeing across the Americas and Western Europe. Three reasons for why our assumptions about politics have been upended.

One, the racist Right – whose leaders this newspaper has long been at the forefront of exposing, by the way – have gotten smarter. Starting with Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, far Right haters have dispensed with the Klansmen’s robes and the cross burnings. They have changed their public image. Now, they march in polo shirts and carry Tiki torches – and they offer slogans that are “pro white” and not “anti” minorities.

These racist leaders have studied, and copied, the proven PR techniques of mainstream political parties. They have presented a kinder, gentler face to the media and the voting public, and it has paid off (see Trump, Brexit, above).

Two, their timing has been impeccable. In the Seventies, the extremists railed against fluoridation and the metric system. In the Eighties, it was abortion and gay rights. In the nineties and beyond, however, the racist Right have targeted immigrants and refugees. And it’s paid dividends, in a big, big way.

It isn’t racist, of course, to oppose higher levels of immigration. It isn’t intolerant to want to debate how many refugees a country wishes to welcome.

But a variety of factors – Middle Eastern wars, Islamic extremism, severe climate change – have resulted in millions of immigrants and refugees looking for better places to live. Many North Americans and Western Europeans have grown uneasy about the immigrant wave. And that, more than any other factor, has resulted in stunning political change – from Brexit in the U.K., to the National Front in France, to Trump in the U.S. 

Thirdly and finally, the fanatics at the fringes know that solutions, these days, are pretty hard to come by. In 2017, the challenges we all face are complex, as are the solutions. So, the “alt-Rightists” and the “white nationalists” offer simple and seductive promises. They push emotional buttons, not moral ones.

And that’s why the haters are on the march, everywhere.

I wish I had foreseen all of that when I wrote Recipe For Hate, but I didn’t.

Now that Western society is being shaken to its foundations, however, all of us will be affected, in one way or another.

And that’s not fiction.

Warren Kinsella is the author of Recipe For Hate, published across North America and Europe by Dundurn Press.

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