Exposing America’s Radical Right-Wing Political And Religious Involvement In Canada
“Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the word,†said Mr. Harper when addressing the Council. “In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half (approximately 3%), don’t feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don’t feel bad about it themselves, as long as they’re receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.â€
“The Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of rights in our Constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary, putting universal Medicare in our constitution, and feminist rights. This distresses conservatives like myself quite profoundly, but I will warn you, it’s a widespread view, and I will always say, one that could only be maintained as long as the United States basically provide us with military protection.
The Council is described as “a secretive group of wealthy donors that has funnelled billions of dollars to right-wing Christian activists.†At its meetings, the rich and influential who adhere to the outward beliefs of right-wing evangelical or conservative Christians are able to join forces and create campaigns and projects that further their cause under a cloak of secrecy.
Off-limit meetings to the public and media create a further anonymity that is not beyond reproach. Those who are “honored†to attend receive unanimous approval from the Council’s Executive Committee. Speakers who have addressed the Council include Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush, and Justice Thomas. Alberta Economic Development Minister Mark Norris addressed the group in 2003 to discuss the Alberta oil sands.
The Reverend Fallwell was a strong supporter of Tim LaHaye, founder of Council for National Policy
“I found out that he’d done something no conservative minister had ever done before: He’s organized hundreds of churches into a political bloc. More than any other person, Tim LeHaye challenged me to begin thinking through my involvement in politics.â€
Regular readers know well Beverly LaHaye, who, with her husband Tim, founded Concerned Women For America, a radical right-wing extremist group focused on opposing homosexuality. CWA regularly issues misguided warnings about  the fall of America should same-sex marriage or the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell take hold. Last year, a top CWA leader falsely claimed that homosexuals often get syphillis, die at a dramatically earlier age, an end relationships quickly.
In a recent press release The Institute for Canadian Values (ICV), an organization supported by Fallwell, put out the following statements concerning legislation being introduced in Ontario that makes gay-straight alliances required in any school that receives public funding when students request it:
“Bullying must be combated with strong, stiff programs and penalties.  Children’s lives depend on it.  It is most unfortunate that the Premier sees bullying as an opportunity to advance his radical sex gender teaching in law.  It is egregious, with the force of law, to impose this bizarre social engineering experiment on Ontario’s children under the pretence of protecting the vulnerable.  There is no proof that forcing all schools, Public and Catholic, to teach this material and host gay clubs will stop bullying.  This guise doesn’t hold water with standard pedagogical practices.  Our schools don’t have to teach the intricacies of every element of difference to combat bullying.  Teachers don’t need a 219 page curriculum guide extolling the virtues of being short, overweight, Christian, Jewish, Muslim or any other identifying factor. They simply need to combat bullying.â€
This isn’t the only statement that has been made by the ICV concerning what Pope Benedict called “liberal family valuesâ€:
“Charles McVety, President of the Institute for Canada Values states “Bill C-389 (click here for description and debate) is a danger to our children. If ‘gender identity’ is enshrined in the Criminal Code of Canada, any male at any time will be permitted in girls bathrooms, showers and change rooms as long as they have an “innate feeling” of being female, according to Megan Leslie’s speech as she co-sponsored  the Bill.  If I then try to stop such a man from showering with my little girl at the local pool I could be in breach of the Criminal Code of Canada and could face imprisonment for two years.â€
Dr. Charles McVety, lives in Toronto, Ontario and has worked tirelessly to halt all LGBT supportive legislation. As head of the Institute for Canadian Values and Canada Christian College, an institution that is not recognized nor accredited by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, he works to continue the education of those who call themselves Evangelical Christians. Both organizations espouse the views of the evangelical that teach homosexuality, transgendered and any deviation from the “I am a girl†or “I am a boy†philosophy is wrong in God’s eyes and therefore defaces the country and religion.
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He also is the current national chairman of the organization known as Christians United for Israel, where he works with Pastors Hagee, Fallwell, Caldwell and the current president, Gary Bauer, who was past-president of the Family Research Council and former chairman of The Campaign for Working Families.
Even though he currently heads up a so-called “college†his educational background is rather questionable. Dr. McVety attended the University of Toronto for only two years, before he left without a degree. He transferred to the Canada Christian College, which was started by his father, where he graduated with a B.A. and M.A. later garnering an honorary doctorate from the St. Petersburg State University in Russia. The College offers degrees in Theology that include Bachelor’s and Master’s programs, with concentrations in Religious Studies, Music, Israel Studies (Christian Ambassador to Israel), Business and Communications. They also have a specialty in Christian Counselling that includes the ability to gain a doctorate within the field.
The Canada Christian College, states that it has a mission to educate young men and women the Bible, which is the word of God, “the only rule and standard according to which all dogma should be judged.”While this is a respectable mission, it seems to fly in the face of reality. According to their website they require that all students bring themselves in line with the mission and principles of the college which includes the following:
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Obey Jesus’ commandment to His disciples (Jn. 13:34-35) echoed by the Apostle Paul (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 8, 13) to love one another.
Yet their founder works advocating for resolutions and legislation that undermine the very principle to love your neighbour and to show respect for others. It is also interesting to note that the College works hand in hand with the Canadian College of Christian Counsellors. This association, that bestows upon itself the ability to accredit and license these counsellors, is nothing more than an extension of the arm of the ever incestuous christian right. Within its ranks are many who advocate for anti-gay therapies. The current head of the CCCC, Dr. Clarence Duff, holds degrees from Liberty University and has lectured extensively at Christian universities throughout the United States. He has close ties to the Fallwell family as well as other right wing theologians and idealogues.
These organizations are growing within the borders of Canada and are directly fueled and perhaps even funded by these hate groups. Under the direction of those who have fought a battle against the LGBT community and progressive ideals, they are learning and avoiding many of the same mistakes they have made before. Their rhetoric while strong and unnerving to many, is striking a chord with simple people who are battling between staying faithful to a God they have been taught to love since birth and the ideals that are inherently Canadian, including that, ‘“the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.â€â€™
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In an interview with The Guardian, one of Donald Trump’s former senior advisers stated that the word he is getting from people he has spoken to is that they want the former president to be put out to pasture after the poor midterm election results for Republicans weeks ago.
According to John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, it’s time for the GOP to move on from the former president if the party wants to reclaim the Oval Office in 2024.
Bolton, whose tenure serving under Trump ended acrimoniously, told the Guardian’s David Smith that there are a multitude of reasons to put Trump in the rearview mirror, but the impact that the former president had on GOP fortunes in the midterms seems to be the final straw with many conservatives.
“There are a lot of reasons to be against Trump being the nominee but the one I’m hearing now as I call around the country, talking to my supporters and others about what happened on 8 November, is the number of people who have just switched Trump off in their brain,” Bolton explained.
ALSO IN THE NEWS: Trump’s new Mar-a-Lago scandal proves why aides want him to stick to a teleprompter
Elaborating, he continued, “Even if they loved his style, loved his approach, loved his policies, loved everything about him, they don’t want to lose and the fear is, given the results on 8 November, that if he got the nomination, not only would he lose the general election, but he would take an awful lot of Republican candidates down with him.”
“There’s no doubt Trump’s endorsement in the primary can be very valuable to a candidate in the Republican party. But relying on that endorsement or trumpeting yourself as the Trump-endorsed candidate is poisonous in the general election. So if you actually want to win elections, Trump is not the answer,” Bolton continued. “William F Buckley [the conservative author] once had a rule that in Republican primaries he supported the most conservative candidate capable of winning the general election and, under that theory, Trump loses.”
The Guardian’s Smith notes that Bolton “… joins Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, attorney general William Barr, UN ambassador Nikki Haley, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and onetime ally Chris Christie in a growing rebellion among alumni making the case – overtly or subtly – that Trump has become an electoral liability.”
You can read more here.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
News
Trump’s Dinner With Kanye Also Included a Former Aide Accused in Pay-for-Pardon Play, and White Supremacist Fuentes
Donald Trump‘s dinner earlier this week with antisemite Kanye West and holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes may also have included two other right-wingers, hinted at by the former president himself.
After Axios‘ reporting confirmed that Fuentes had in fact had dinner with Trump, Trump issued a statement saying, “Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”
But later, on Friday afternoon via his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote a defense of the dinner with an expanded guest list.
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
As The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman noted, Trump did not denounce his guest’s extremist beliefs.
“Three of his friends,” according to the far-right wing website Breitbart, apparently includes Fuentes, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and former Trump 2016 aide Karen Giorno.
Breitbart states, “two people who say they were at the dinner on Tuesday evening–Yiannopoulos and onetime Trump aide Karen Giorno–have publicly stated that Fuentes was in fact at the dinner with West and Trump.”
“’Nick attended the dinner and sat across from the president. I sat to the president’s right and Ye to his left,’ Giorno said in a statement to podcaster Tim Poole’s website Timcast,” Breitbart reports. “‘The president was by himself for dinner but invited Ye to meet some people on the patio.'”
Politico reports Giorno “confirmed to Politico that she was also at the dinner with Trump, West and Fuentes,” but does not mention Yiannopoulos as a dinner guest.
Referring to Kanye West by his new name, VICE News adds: “Ye, who has been been on an antisemitic spiral in recent months, announced he is going to be running for president in 2024, and Yiannopoulos is his campaign manager. He claimed that he asked the former president to run with him as his vice-president. According to Ye, the dinner involving the billionaire, the rapper, and the white nationalist devolved into screaming and derogatory epithets.”
Yiannopoulos is the former Breitbart editor who became disgraced after saying, “I think in the gay world some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life-affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men.” Earlier this year U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene came under fire for hiring, as an intern, Yiannopoulos, even after he appeared to support sexual “relationships” between boys as young as 13 and older men.
Karen Giorno, The New York Times reported early last year, “had access to people around the president, having run Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida during the 2016 primary and remaining on board as a senior political adviser during the general election.”
“In July 2018, Ms. Giorno signed an agreement with Mr. Kiriakou, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, ‘to seek a full pardon from President Donald Trump of his conviction’ for $50,000 and promised another $50,000 as a bonus if she secured a pardon,” The Times reports.
Kiriakou is John Kiriakou, who The Times identifies as “a former C.I.A. officer convicted of illegally disclosing classified information.”
On what appears to be her Instagram page, Giorno has photos of herself with numerous Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Flynn, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida attorney general Ashley Moody and several other top Florida elected officials, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, and Sarah Palin, among others.
News
Trump Claims He ‘Knew Nothing About’ the White Supremacist Antisemite Who He and Kanye West Dined With at Mar-a-Lago
Donald Trump and Kanye West had dinner at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night and the disgraced artist who goes by “Ye” brought a guest, the white supremacist, antisemite and “America First” and “Big Lie” purveyor Nick Fuentes. Now the former president is claiming Fuentes was a guest of West, and he knows “nothing” about him.
“Trump’s direct engagement with a man labeled a ‘white supremacist’ by the Justice Department, one week after declaring his 2024 candidacy, is likely to draw renewed outrage over the former president’s embrace of extremists,” Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu report.
Axios notes that in a video West posted to his recently restored Twitter account, he says, “Trump was ‘really impressed’ with Fuentes because ‘unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he’s actually a loyalist.'”
“Ye, who has lost major sponsorships over his anti-Semitism and recent far-right associations, has said he wants to run for president in 2024,” Axios adds. “The rapper claims Trump started ‘screaming’ at him at the dinner and told him he would lose — ‘most perturbed’ by Ye asking Trump to be his running mate.”
Swan says Trump issued a statement in response to his reporting, claiming he does not know Fuentes.
“Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago,” Trump’s statement says, an apparent attempt to minimize his dining with two racists and antisemites. “Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman observes that Trump’s “statement does nothing to denounce that background, including Holocaust denialism, or even acknowledge it.”
Trump first claiming West just wanted to see Mar-a-Lago, but immediately after calling it a “meeting” is notable, given that West has since suggested he is running for president.
Axios importantly adds that “Fuentes first gained notoriety after attending the white supremacist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in 2017,” and, “Trump was heavily criticized at the time for his response to the racist violence.”
Journalist Jeff Sharlet is the executive producer of Netflix’s “The Family,” based on his books that exposed the secretive Christian right organization of the same name. The Family, also called The Fellowship, hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Its members were involved in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.
Sharlet warns this is an “inflection point.”
“Trump dinner with Ye, at this point, is a major story,” Sharlet tweeted. “But with Nick Fuentes? That’s an inflection point even for a former president already committed to fascism.”
Journalist and activist Elad Nehorai tweeted: “Never let a single right winger or Republican claim they care about Jews after this. Fuentes openly praises Hitler. He is a Holocaust denier. He is one of the US’s most dangerous white nationalists. Trump hosted him & not one Republican had said a word.”
Attorney and former Republican Ron Filipkowski, who tracks and reports on right wing extremism, says Trump’s statement “reminds me of the time when Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was in the WH in Dec 2020 and said he was just there to check out the Christmas decorations.”
Tarrio told ABC News last year he “got invited to the White House Christmas decorations tour through ‘Latinos For Trump.'”
READ MORE: ‘Standard Bearer of Trumpism’ Marjorie Taylor Greene Bridges White Nationalism and the GOP
Top national security attorney Brad Moss mocked Trump’s claim about the Mar-a-Lago dinner.
“Trump legal team: MAL is a totally secure place where we can be trusted to store classified records,” he tweeted. “Trump PR team: Security at MAL is so lax that a raving white supremacist can just crash Trump’s dinner party with Ye.”
Indeed, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman commented, “It’s not the central issue with meeting with Fuentes, but the fact that people can show up unvetted and meet with Trump at his club is part of what alarmed the DOJ about his retention of government records, including classified material, when he left office.”
She also posted a screenshot from her book, relevant to Trump’s embrace of the two racists and antisemites. She quotes him saying, “A lot of these people vote,” in relation to “Trump’s refusal to condemn David Duke’s support forcefully in early 2016.”
Related: from CONFIDENCE MAN, Trump’s refusal to condemn David Duke’s support forcefully in early 2016. “A lot of these people vote.” pic.twitter.com/BcsX7pXKbb
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 25, 2022
The AntiDefamation League (ADL) in a 2021 report wrote, “Nicholas Fuentes is a white supremacist leader and organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP.”
Some of Fuentes’ antisemitism has been documented by ADL.
“Fuentes has made a number of racist and antisemitic comments under the guise of being provocative and ironic,” ADLs report states. “For example, he has referred to Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh as ‘shabbos goy race traitor’ because he works for Jews (Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, runs the Daily Wire). On a livestream episode, Fuentes ‘jokingly’ denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven. On May 24, 2021, Fuentes participated in a debate on right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones’ InfoWars with Robert Barnes, a man described as a ‘constitutional lawyer’ who has legally defended both Jones and Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. During the debate, Fuentes made numerous antisemitic remarks, including, ‘I don’t see Jews as Europeans and I don’t see them as part of Western civilization, particularly because they are not Christians.'”
Fuentes is strongly pro-Trump, as West alluded to.
“Fuentes promoted election fraud narratives and encouraged his adherents to participate in nationwide ‘Stop the Steal’ protests,” according to ADL.
This article has been updated to include Jeff Sharlet’s remarks.
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Trump’s Dinner With Kanye Also Included a Former Aide Accused in Pay-for-Pardon Play, and White Supremacist Fuentes
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