I mean Right.. whoops...
The angry, radical right
Lawrence Witko doesn’t actually want Justin Trudeau dead, he swears. Nor does he really want to kill all Muslims, moderate or otherwise, or hope for the mass killing of Palestinian children. “I hate violence, period. I don’t want to have to be ranting on like this,” Witko says.
In the physical world, Witko is a 65-year-old caretaker and erstwhile corrections officer who may well abhor violence and love carpentry. Online, though, it is a very different story. For roughly a year, Witko has been posting commentary to the Facebook page of Never Again Canada, a stridently pro-Zionist website that has become a hotbed of anti-Trudeau and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Witko is among the page’s most prolific contributors.
“Trudeau and his precious [wife] Sophie are both liars and teach their children to be the same way. Mark my words on the wall, this piece of s–t will turn on his own and be as treacherous as Sadam [sic] Hussein was to the Iraquis [sic]. Trudeau has to go—one way or another, he has to go . . . Lock n Load . . . ” Witko wrote on the Never Again Canada Facebook page on Dec. 10. Muslims, he wrote in a typical post, “are a useless, diseased race of subhumans who are bent on destroying Western society. Witko says he was visited by the RCMP about two weeks after his “Lock N Load” post, though he wasn’t charged with anything.
He was first drawn to Never Again Canada for what he calls “the truth”: that the country’s left-leaning federal and provincial governments, along with its mainstream media, have purposefully minimized the threat of Islam to Western civilization. Witko, like many of the roughly 25,000 people who have “liked” the page, believe the Muslim threat has escalated considerably with the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in October. At the very least, they believe Trudeau is doing radical Islam’s bidding by allowing Muslims into his government and, with the Syrian refugees, into the country he governs.
Such commentary has long been relegated to the more pungent recesses of the Internet and online commentary sections of news publications—and it remains there, for the most part. Yet politicians on both sides of the spectrum acknowledge that hateful and at times violent commentary has, in the words of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, “become a little more socially acceptable now.”
It became such a concern for Brian Jean, the leader of Alberta’s populist Wildrose Party and the leader of the province’s official Opposition, that he stopped his relentless criticism of the province’s left-wing NDP government long enough to ask his Facebook followers to stop threatening to murder Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
“Over the last few days, I’ve seen far too many hateful and even violent social media posts directed toward our political opponents,” Jean wrote in a Facebook missive two weeks before Christmas. “This needs to stop. These kinds of comments cross all bounds of respect and decency and have absolutely no place in our political discourse. This is not how Albertans behave.”
Jean says he felt compelled to go public after being struck by the number and nature of the threats against Notley. They began, Jean said, shortly after the Notley government introduced a farm safety law that extended compensation rights to farm workers. Bill 6, as it is known, sparked demonstrations from Alberta farmers, who worried it would prohibit them from hiring temporary labourers and recruiting volunteers.
“I’ve never had to do anything like this in my political career,” says Jean, a 12-year veteran of federal and provincial politics, of his note. “There was open hatred and actual threats of life. I even got threats myself after I posted the message. It shows the level some people will go to. It’s not helpful. It absorbs the importance of the discussion itself.”
The RCMP, meanwhile, has seen an uptick in threats against Trudeau, according to police sources. “It’s somewhat expected, because Trudeau is anathema to right-wing extremists, and right-wing extremists tend to be the most explicit and reckless of those who make these kinds of threats,” says a former member of the RCMP’s threat-assessment group, a national security unit that safeguards domestic and visiting political leaders, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he remains a member of the RCMP.
Much of the rhetoric comes from a range of online groups whose ideologies vary as much as their popularity. Pegida Canada and Canadian Defence League, for example, are offshoots of European anti-Islamic groups. Others, including Separation of Alberta from the Liberal East, have specific Canadian political goals. Others still are Zionist in nature, including the Jewish Defence League and Christians United For Israel. With its 25,000 followers, Never Again Canada looms large.
The Never Again Canada Facebook page first appeared in mid-2014. The group, such as it is, bills itself as an “organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, propaganda, terror and Jew hatred in Canada . . . Hatred is like cancer, the more you don’t treat it and ignore it, the worse it gets.” Its page, often updated several times an hour, is almost uniquely dedicated to criticism of Justin Trudeau—sometimes referred to as “Justine”—and Islam. (“Never Again” is an apparent reference to the slogan of the Jewish Defence League, the U.S.-based militant Zionist organization, which has a chapter in Canada.)
The commentators on Never Again are a hodgepodge of Zionists, former and current military, Christian militants, the occasional white nationalist—an irony, given that the white nationalist movement isn’t typically very charitable toward Jews—and many anti-Muslim types like Witko and Larry Langenauer. A 67-year-old small business owner, Langenauer says he began posting on Never Again’s Facebook page four months ago.
The angry, radical right - Macleans.ca
The angry, radical right
Lawrence Witko doesn’t actually want Justin Trudeau dead, he swears. Nor does he really want to kill all Muslims, moderate or otherwise, or hope for the mass killing of Palestinian children. “I hate violence, period. I don’t want to have to be ranting on like this,” Witko says.
In the physical world, Witko is a 65-year-old caretaker and erstwhile corrections officer who may well abhor violence and love carpentry. Online, though, it is a very different story. For roughly a year, Witko has been posting commentary to the Facebook page of Never Again Canada, a stridently pro-Zionist website that has become a hotbed of anti-Trudeau and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Witko is among the page’s most prolific contributors.
“Trudeau and his precious [wife] Sophie are both liars and teach their children to be the same way. Mark my words on the wall, this piece of s–t will turn on his own and be as treacherous as Sadam [sic] Hussein was to the Iraquis [sic]. Trudeau has to go—one way or another, he has to go . . . Lock n Load . . . ” Witko wrote on the Never Again Canada Facebook page on Dec. 10. Muslims, he wrote in a typical post, “are a useless, diseased race of subhumans who are bent on destroying Western society. Witko says he was visited by the RCMP about two weeks after his “Lock N Load” post, though he wasn’t charged with anything.
He was first drawn to Never Again Canada for what he calls “the truth”: that the country’s left-leaning federal and provincial governments, along with its mainstream media, have purposefully minimized the threat of Islam to Western civilization. Witko, like many of the roughly 25,000 people who have “liked” the page, believe the Muslim threat has escalated considerably with the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in October. At the very least, they believe Trudeau is doing radical Islam’s bidding by allowing Muslims into his government and, with the Syrian refugees, into the country he governs.
Such commentary has long been relegated to the more pungent recesses of the Internet and online commentary sections of news publications—and it remains there, for the most part. Yet politicians on both sides of the spectrum acknowledge that hateful and at times violent commentary has, in the words of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, “become a little more socially acceptable now.”
It became such a concern for Brian Jean, the leader of Alberta’s populist Wildrose Party and the leader of the province’s official Opposition, that he stopped his relentless criticism of the province’s left-wing NDP government long enough to ask his Facebook followers to stop threatening to murder Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
“Over the last few days, I’ve seen far too many hateful and even violent social media posts directed toward our political opponents,” Jean wrote in a Facebook missive two weeks before Christmas. “This needs to stop. These kinds of comments cross all bounds of respect and decency and have absolutely no place in our political discourse. This is not how Albertans behave.”
Jean says he felt compelled to go public after being struck by the number and nature of the threats against Notley. They began, Jean said, shortly after the Notley government introduced a farm safety law that extended compensation rights to farm workers. Bill 6, as it is known, sparked demonstrations from Alberta farmers, who worried it would prohibit them from hiring temporary labourers and recruiting volunteers.
“I’ve never had to do anything like this in my political career,” says Jean, a 12-year veteran of federal and provincial politics, of his note. “There was open hatred and actual threats of life. I even got threats myself after I posted the message. It shows the level some people will go to. It’s not helpful. It absorbs the importance of the discussion itself.”
The RCMP, meanwhile, has seen an uptick in threats against Trudeau, according to police sources. “It’s somewhat expected, because Trudeau is anathema to right-wing extremists, and right-wing extremists tend to be the most explicit and reckless of those who make these kinds of threats,” says a former member of the RCMP’s threat-assessment group, a national security unit that safeguards domestic and visiting political leaders, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he remains a member of the RCMP.
Much of the rhetoric comes from a range of online groups whose ideologies vary as much as their popularity. Pegida Canada and Canadian Defence League, for example, are offshoots of European anti-Islamic groups. Others, including Separation of Alberta from the Liberal East, have specific Canadian political goals. Others still are Zionist in nature, including the Jewish Defence League and Christians United For Israel. With its 25,000 followers, Never Again Canada looms large.
The Never Again Canada Facebook page first appeared in mid-2014. The group, such as it is, bills itself as an “organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, propaganda, terror and Jew hatred in Canada . . . Hatred is like cancer, the more you don’t treat it and ignore it, the worse it gets.” Its page, often updated several times an hour, is almost uniquely dedicated to criticism of Justin Trudeau—sometimes referred to as “Justine”—and Islam. (“Never Again” is an apparent reference to the slogan of the Jewish Defence League, the U.S.-based militant Zionist organization, which has a chapter in Canada.)
The commentators on Never Again are a hodgepodge of Zionists, former and current military, Christian militants, the occasional white nationalist—an irony, given that the white nationalist movement isn’t typically very charitable toward Jews—and many anti-Muslim types like Witko and Larry Langenauer. A 67-year-old small business owner, Langenauer says he began posting on Never Again’s Facebook page four months ago.
The angry, radical right - Macleans.ca
Lorrie Goldstein Verified account @sunlorrie 
