Tag Archive: Andrew Scheer

What #LavScam means, in five points

It’s been going on for more than a week, now, and the outlines of it are already seen.  Five ways in which it is leaving, and will leave, an impact:

  1.  Indigenous people.  I am the proud father to an amazing indigenous young woman; I work with First Nations across Canada.  I am disgusted by what Justin Trudeau did, and is doing, to the amazing indigenous leader named Jody Wilson-Raybould.  Indigenous people do not trust Trudeau, now, and they’re saying so.
  2. Women.  The sexist and condescending way in which Jody has been treated – and still continues to be, as seen in this morning’s Star, and last week in the Canadian Press and Global News – is repellant.  It is noteworthy that the Liberals who are paying tribute to Jody are almost all women – include ones in Trudeau’s cabinet.
  3. The Liberal Party.  This web site attracts four million visitors a year.  On social media, like Twitter, I get about a half-million “impressions” daily.  That’s a fair number of people – and I can tell you that many of my readers are Liberals.  They are telling me they are disgusted by Trudeau and his PMO – and shocked by how badly they have handled this mess (eg. sending out the clueless Justice Committee chair to say Jody didn’t deserve to be in cabinet because she didn’t speak French – which will be a big hit in English Canada).
  4. The Conservatives.  Andrew Scheer knows this is his moment, and he has seized it.  The Tory leader hasn’t looked this determined, this focussed – and frankly this Prime Ministerial – since he became his party’s leader.  Gone is the smirk, and there’s an undeniable gravitas to the guy, now.  For his party, PMO’s attempts to destroy Jody Wilson-Raybould represents an opportunity, too – it allows them to address the allegation that they are indifferent to women and indigenous people.
  5. The New Democrats.  Jagmeet Singh is going to win that by-election in B.C. – because B.C. is sickened by what has been done to Jody.  Meanwhile, his colleague Nathan Cullen has been simply extraordinary in prosecuting the case against the Liberal government – and it will reveal itself in the polls, soon enough. And a rise in NDP fortunes means a drop in Liberal support, always.

Will Justin Trudeau lose the election? It’s too soon to tell.  But the poll I’ve heard about suggests strongly the answer is this:

Yes.

 


Column: faithlessness

Ah, ye little Faith.

Not that little, actually.  She’s tallish, slouching near the doors at Sun News Network, chain-smoking.  Smirking.

“Troll with a tan,” someone at the erstwhile network said about her. Uncharitably, but not inaccurately.  That indeed seemed to be the whole package: a suspiciously deep, orange-ish tan, and the sleeveless Fox News mien.  That’s it.

When she first appeared on Sun News, they’d hand her a microphone and tell her to go stand somewhere and pretend to be a reporter.  She’d slap on fake eyelashes the size of bats – and then she’d fire off words and sentences like a speed freak running an auction.  She was terrible.

In time, she’d slow down her delivery, reveal a bit more décolletage, and start sharing her views on-air.  Around the ill-fated right-wing network, it was pretty difficult to sound extreme: for many, fanaticism was the lingua franca.  But Faith Goldy – with figurative snakes slithering thorough her veins, and a clutch of metaphoric maggots in the spot where a heart should be – sounded extreme even to the extremists.

When Sun News slipped beneath the waves, however, no one was surprised to see her clutching at Ezra Levant’s dinghy, the S.S. Rebel.  The rightist trolls – living in their mom’s basement, pawing at their tiny gonads through their Avengers jammies as they eyeballed Faith’s clips on a continuous loop – loved her.  They positively ached for her. Faith was the one they wanted to marry, at a ceremony with lots of Wagner’s Rienzi, Die Meistersinger playing, and possibly an officiant from the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake.

But even as the rebels sought to curry favour with the so-called alt-Right, publishing columns titled “Ten Things I Hate About Jews” and doubting the Holocaust in commentaries, Faith Goldy went further.  She was more of a race-and-religion rebel than anyone at the Rebel.

The breaking point came in Charlottesville, which she was sent to cover for Ezra’s online lunatic asylum – where she’d be seen doing a stand-up not far from the woman who was mowed down by a white supremacist.  That terrible week, Faith appeared on the pro-Nazi Daily Stormer, opining that there was a need for a rise in “white racial consciousness.”  She also proclaimed that National Socialist types have “robust” and “well-thought-out” ideas on “the Jewish question.”  Levant, a Jew and no anti-Semite himself, finally fired her.

After that, Faith abandoned all pretense of restraint.  She was fully alone, piloting in dark, dark waters.

She started reciting The Fourteen Words, the credo of neo-Nazi terrorists in the Order – “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”  She went on someone’s show to promote a book about “the Jewish menace” – a book which calls for “putting an end to their unnatural, parasitic existence.”  She advocated for pedophile Milos Yiannopoulos, simply because she was encouraged by his brand of foul racism.  She tweeted “the future is Far Right.”  David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, took notice and commenced cheerily retweeting her stuff.  So did other lowlifes.

So, is Faith Goldy a neo-Nazi?  Who knows.  She certainly counts many Hitlerites among her friends and followers, doesn’t she?

Which naturally leads us to another question, one more relevant:  is Faith Goldy someone with whom Canadian political leaders should be seen?

Because they were, they were.  Lots of Conservative MPs – mainly male ones – scurried to get themselves photographed with Faith, for precisely the type of selfie about which they regularly criticize Justin Trudeau.

Faith’s biggest catch, in this regard, was one Andrew Scheer, aspirant to the Conservative throne.  At their February 2017 love-in, Faith pronounced that she was “so honoured and so blessed” to be elbow-to-elbow with Scheer, and the two chatted amiably about free speech (all for it), parental leave (for), and property rights (ditto).  At one point, Scheer suggested the two of them go duck hunting together.

Seriously.

Scheer gave at least two other interviews to Goldy’s Rebel network.  The fact that his campaign guru helped to found The Rebel may have had something to do with that.  Who knows.

But it is his congenial relationship with the vile, rebarbative Faith Goldy – and that of his fellow Conservative caucus members – that is likely to come back and haunt him.  What, in the immortal words of Jay Leno, was he thinking?  Is it ever wise to get chummy with a white supremacist, as Faith Goldy indisputably is?

No, it’s not.  And Andrew Scheer will be hearing and seeing more about Faith Goldy and her ilk, as his party edges ever-closer to an election.