Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Ezra Levant is not having a good month

Supposedly Faith Goldy was fired from Rebel Media
because she was interviewed by an even 
more extremist media outlet, Daily Stormer

LINK TO THE ORIGINAL TWEET
While I was in Canada last week it seems that the leading alt-right media outlet in Canada Rebel Media, created by Ezra Levant, has been melting down, not only because of blowback from Charlottesville and Rebel's connection with alt-right wackos (I discussed its promotion of Milo Yianoppolous, Gavin McInness and Jack Posobiec a couple of months ago) but because of alt-right in-fighting and blackmail.

First the Charlottesville blowback. 

In the hours and minutes leading up to that moment, however, (Faith) Goldy had spent her live Periscope broadcasts rationalizing the rally organized by white nationalist Jason Kessler — an “extremist” to whom the Rebel once paid the revenues from a video that contained material plagiarized from him — and complaining about what she saw as the unfair treatment of the alt-right by authorities. In particular, she expressed the (wildly incorrect) view that American police are more generous toward Black protesters than white ones. 
Goldy — a proponent of the concept of “white genocide,” who thinks that most Jews are “giant Democrat-donor losers,” and also believes there should be a new Crusade to expel Muslims from the Holy Land — was a popular presence at the event, occasionally interrupting her broadcasts to oblige selfie requests.
The Rebel tried to distance itself, suddenly, from the alt-right as Vice reported here, but it was not enough and too late. The Norwegian Cruise Lines cancelled the Rebel's cruise (another Levant cruise was written up by The Walrus recently) and Canada's Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer has (finally) distanced himself from Levant. Anti-racist Canada has a whole handy list right of various controversies right here. And now this:
The move to disable The Rebel’s domain comes after Silicon Valley firms like GoDaddy Inc. and Google disabled the domain for neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, forcing the website offline. Cloudflare, which hosts caches of websites, also terminated their relationship with the website for its political content. The Daily Stormer was also denied hosting by a Russian service provider following an attempt to relocate the domain
However, even more interesting is the way the far right is turning against him, in part because of a blackmail story.
Ezra Levant, co-founder of right-wing Rebel Media, has had a lot of bad days recently. In a dramatic video released on August 17, the Canadian activist/lawyer/vlogger detailed the sordid saga involving a former employee who had allegedly been blackmailing him with threats of releasing sensitive information unless he got paid off. “And I don’t really know how to say it, other than to just say it,” said Levant. “And I can’t believe it, but here goes. I’m being blackmailed. I’m being extorted.” 
The alleged blackmailer is 22-year-old Caolan Robertson, who Levant had hired to work with one of his star reporters, British anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson. Levant’s emotional mea culpa was in response to Robertson’s August 17 video in which he announced that he was leaving Rebel while also levying some serious charges of financial impropriety and editorial ineptitude against his former boss. As it turns out, Robertson had been secretly recording all of his conversations with Levant. He’s got Levant talking about the “hush money” he’ll pay his employee.
Nobody seems to know exactly what Levant was being blackmailed over. My money is on something to do with Levant's (I suspect) closeted homosexuality. The two men Levant accuses of blackmailing him are a gay couple. Levant mentioned they were a couple and said "but I don't care about that." I should think not since he was a promoter of the career of Milo Yiannopoulous and even provided a video of Milo and Gavin McInness french kissing because (they claimed) they wanted to upset conservative Muslims.

It's thanks to Rebel Media that my impression of the Canadian right is that it's about 50% gay. 

Many have observed that Levant can't be anti-Semitic because he's Jewish. But as many on the alt-right seem to be figuring out, Levant is involved in right-wing media mostly to fleece the gullible rightwing extremists through a variety of methods. Anybody who spends any time examining the career of Levant will quickly realize he has no personal integrity.

One of things that seems to really annoy the right-wingers is that Levant was shown to be creating a fund-raising campaign to pay for the legal bills for the idiot who jumped on the Public Theater's stage - even before she jumped onto the stage and was arrested. I blogged about it in June.

Mike Cernovich, incredible asshole who promoted Pizzagate, defends Rebel Media.

Gerry Butts, political advisor to Justin Trudeau, tweeted his take on the Levant meltdown.