January 2020 – The Hungover Pundit

Core Concepts 7 – The Gun Post

A few years ago I got involved with a local community group whose membership was quite a bit different than the left-leaning activist crowd I’d been accustomed to dealing with. Local farmers, construction workers, a couple of veterans, retirees, and so forth; your typical white, second- and third-generation semi-rural Ontario working-class types. Good people, for the most part, although I knew going in I was going to be dealing with a much more conservative group than I was used to.

But I’m not going to pretend to be someone I’m not, even for the sake of an easy time, so eventually the conversation drifted to politics and it was discovered that I was, in the parlance that a couple of the folks decided to use, a “liberal.” (I don’t describe myself as a liberal, mostly because Canada has a Liberal Party that emphatically isn’t; I prefer the term progressive.) And a couple of the middle-aged men decided to chide me for what they considered my “liberal views” must be; mostly, they harped on the “fact” that I as a “liberal” must be anti-gun. I must want hunting to be illegal. Criminals love unarmed victims. How would I defend my family without a gun, and so forth.

Thanking Kurt Phillips

In last week’s blog I mentioned that ID Canada, an “Identarian” (read: white nationalist) group claimed to have identified the author of the important anti-fascist blog Anti-Racist Canada. The extreme-right in Canada immediately began baying for “justice” against the alleged author, claiming that his unmasking was a “victory” and the start of a “purge of antifa”… and when fascist extremists openly start using words like purge, you can bet they’re riled up.

On Thursday, January 9^th, the person they’d identified as the author of the blog spoke up. It, he said, was true. His name is Kurt Phillips, and for more than a decade he’s been tracking neo-Nazis and hate groups and sharing that information with the public.

Response to the Fifth Estate Doc

So… New Year, new resolutions. Now that I’ve got my health issues under control(ish), my computer rebuilt and my phone replaced, it’s time to get the motor running and get back to the regular writing and publishing schedule that I’ve been intending these past few months. So here goes.

On Sunday, January 5^th, the CBC’s program The Fifth Estate ran a 23-minute documentary called Confronting Hate: How Antifa is Tracking the Extreme Right. In the documentary, CBC journalist Gillian Findlay interviews a number of antifascist activists, some anonymous, some not. It’s a pretty good look at what we do and despite some short-comings I think it’s worth the watch.