The Decibel - The Canadians leading the far-right movement in America

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

There are a surprising number of Canadians involved in far-right politics in the U.S. Think Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, Gavin McInnes, Lauren Southern.So why are there so many? And why do Americans care about what a group of Canadians have to say? International correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe discusses the power of Canadian commentators in America’s far-right movement.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. The U.S. midterm elections are coming up on November 8th. And you may be surprised to hear that a number of key figures in America's far-right community who are trying to sway American voters are Canadian. And they have a surprising amount of influence. You have Steven Crowder, who runs a kind of a YouTube late night show that has almost six million followers. You have Lauren Southern. You have Lauren Chen, another YouTube personality. You have Jordan Peterson, who's the former University of Toronto psychologist,

who has become sort of an icon of, in some parts of the right, you have Gavin McInnes, who was one of the co-founders of Vice News and then became the founder of the Proud Boys. The Proud Boys, of course, gaining prominence through a number of things, including the presence of some of their members

in the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. Nathan Vanderklip is one of the Globe's correspondents covering the U.S., and he's been looking into the major Canadian players in this movement. This is The Decibel. Nathan, thank you so much for joining me today. You're very welcome. I just want to start by asking you, like, how did you get interested in the story? Well, I've been doing some reporting on the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S. They're important for a number of reasons. They're going to give us a sense of how effectively Joe Biden can govern going forward, as well as give us a sense of

the relative momentum of the kind of broader Trumpist movement. And I just kept running into people with Canadian connections as I was doing some of this reporting. YouTube personalities, kind of alt-right media personalities who are Canadian or have deep Canadian roots. And I just found that kind of interesting. So I thought I'd try to get a sense of what was means for how a society is best formed when it comes to how immigration should be managed, when it comes to how people who are transgender should be welcomed into society. And I mean, there's a whole panoply of elements of this.

And some of it just comes down to sort of differing definitions of what qualifies as freedom of speech. And you actually spoke to Lauren Southern, I believe, Nathan, what's she like? Lauren Southern, who is a YouTube personality who was quite prominent over the last few years. She speaks about some of the roots of her own views as being growing up in the lower mainland of British Columbia. And at one point, she describes, you know, a moment in school where she says, you know, students were separated, students of color were separated from students, from white students, and the white students were told that, look, you belong to a privileged class and, you know, relative to the other students. And she says she found this jarring

because, you know, some of the students of color came from wealthier families than some of the white students. And so she points to this as one of her moments of shaping her own political views. Okay, so that's one person's experience. But I guess I have to wonder, do these Canadian commentators, do they seem to like Canada? Yeah. Yeah, Lauren Chen lives in Canada, so does Lauren Southern. And Lauren Southern actually just moved back to Canada last year. She's been in Australia previous to that. And I asked her that, you know, why did just moved back to Canada last year. She's been in Australia

previous to that. And I asked her that, you know, why did you come back to Canada? And she said, you know, she spoke very, I guess, at some length about loving Canada. And I think it's, you know, worth perhaps putting this in context, like even, you know, what was the icon of the Freedom Convoy? It was the Canadian flag, right there's there's a lot of this that is being wrapped around a sense of patriotism what was interesting was how she phrased it she said i love what canada used to be and then moved to from there to immigration and the you know the current makeup of canada of course, has always been a changing makeup. But I think the subtext there is, you know, what color did Canada used to be in terms of the makeup of the population?

And she says, you know, her view in Vancouver at now, and I think you could extrapolate this across much of Canada, is that I don't recognize it. She said people aren't speaking English. Almost everyone is an immigrant. And she uses terms like, you know, the native population, she calls it. You don't, you know, she feels like what has changed in Canada with immigration is that it's come to a place where you don't even recognize the native population anymore. And I think it's views like this that are comments like this are part of the reason that you have seen among those who look at hate and other things that they have suggested there

is, you know, this undercurrent, in some cases, overcurrent of white supremacism that we've seen coming out of parts of the far right as well. And Lauren Chen, the other Lauren we're talking about, I believe she's a person of color. Is she not, Nathan? Yeah, she has an Asian background. She spent part of her time growing up living in Hong Kong. But I think that has probably given her an extra sense of credibility for those listening to her views. Okay. It still doesn't quite, I guess, answer my main question of, I guess, like why other places in the world have people that must think this way too, right? Like why is it that Canadian commentators, it seems to be, have been given so much attention and so much airtime by American media?

For parts of the American right and far right, Canada has become an icon of what they don't want to see. And some of the policies that they've seen in Canada have become emblematic of the politics that they want to reject. So having somebody come from Canada gives that person a degree of authority in terms of speaking about these sorts of things. I think there's also a sense among American audiences, for example, that there's a sense of validation of having others from other countries that sort of espouse these views and promote these views, that there's a feeling that this is not just an American issue, but this is a global issue.

One of the other things is, you know, when I spoke with Lauren Chen, who is one of these YouTube personalities, she's on with Turning Point USA, which is a platform for, you know, folks like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, and Senator Josh Hawley and others. She said, well, you know, Canada tends to or has tended to have a quieter, less rancorous political environment. So those who are more willing to speak out, as of course all these folks are, find it easier to stand out in Canada. And in standing out in Canada, they can gain sort of the kind of prominence that then allows them to build audience both in Canada and then in the U.S. Whereas in the U.S., of course, which is a more shouty political environment, it's harder to stand out. Okay. And I guess, are Canadians actually overrepresented in the far right movement here?

Is this kind of the normal number of people, I guess, that you would see involved in this kind of thing? Or are there actually more Canadians than we would expect to see? Some would say there's an overrepresentation of Canadians. These things, I think, are very difficult to quantify, but there's a couple of indicators that you can look at. There are scholars who track, they try to count the numbers of far-right groups. And those in Canada say they have tracked about 300. Those in the U.S. say they have tracked about a thousand. And of course, that's about a three to one ratio. And in population terms, the U.S. is just about nine times bigger than Canada.

So that would suggest an overrepresentation. We've had other indicators, too. You know, audience numbers. So Stephen Crowder, for example, has a global audience, but he has said that just about 10% of his audience on that platform is Canadian. So you have a fair amount of Canadian involvement in some of these areas. So why are there so many Canadians in this movement? I mean, that's a difficult question to answer, but time zones are easy. Accents match in general. I mean, the same reason, I suppose, that you've seen, you know, Canadians generally do reasonably well in other parts of the U.S. media landscape. You can point to a number of folks who have become prominent on the right and the far right in terms of rejecting some of what he espouses in some of his politics.

We'll be back after this message. So Lauren Southern has around 60 million views on YouTube and Lauren Chen pulls in even more at 80 million views. Both of their audiences consist of a lot of Americans. In a way, Nathan, this seems kind of like the brain drain that we hear about with other professions where, you know, Canadians head to the States just because there's bigger opportunities there. I guess that's kind of what this is. Of course, that's an element. Yeah, of course. I mean, if you want to grow a YouTube audience, there are limits to how big that audience

is going to be if all you do is focus on Canadians and try to build Canadian listeners and viewers and that sort of thing. You know, ambitious Canadians in media have for a very long time seen the US as the ticket to a much larger, more prominent, more influential platform. I mean, Steven Crowder has almost 6 million subscribers on YouTube. I mean, these are really potent audience sizes, especially when you can compare them with the sort of audiences that the broadcast nightly news brings in. We're starting to see those numbers being rivaled. Yeah. The next big American political event is, of course, the midterms, which are coming up on

November 8th. And this is where voters will be choosing their federal and their state representatives as well as a bunch of other political positions. So what can we look out for, Nathan, in terms of how these Canadians will be using their platforms during the midterms? Well, in some ways, it's very direct. So, for example, Lauren Chen and Lauren Southern will be co-hosting election night coverage on a platform called Odyssey, which is kind of like a YouTube style, except for less moderated. I mean, I think you can probably think of it a bit like the truth, what truth social is to Twitter, Odyssey is to YouTube. Earlier in the summer, we saw Jordan

Peterson speaking with Republican leadership in Washington, D.C. And Peterson himself will actually be doing a couple of events in Arizona, which is a pretty key battleground state on the day the night before and the night of the midterm elections themselves. And even Lauren Chen did a recent episode looking at, you know, individual races in the U.S. So, you know, you've had kind of fairly direct involvement. And I'm wondering about like the policy issues or the platform issues, I guess, that are being talked about as well. Like when you spoke with Lauren Southern, you also spoke with Lauren Chen, I believe, as well. Coming up on the midterms, like what are the big policies

or the platform issues that they're pushing? Well, I mean, I think a lot of what you've seen, and my colleague Adrian Morrow just wrote about this as well, as far as just the centrality of some of these culture war issues in the United States. And those are some of the things that you've seen be central to a great part of the American right and far right. These issues about the sorts of rights effectively that transgender people should have, particularly transgender minors. These issues about what should and should not be considered legitimate content for libraries. Issues, of course, about abortion. issues about the role of government and sort of large media corporations

in sort of both in free speech and misinformation and the balance in those areas. So all of these issues have become really kind of central to the political battles that are being shaped in the United States. Late last week, there was this bizarre attack on the family of U.S. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. And it turns out that the alleged attacker is Canadian, as discovered by our colleagues at The Globe, Adrienne Morrow and Mike Hager. Nathan, what do we know about what actually happened there? Well, we're told that the suspect, of course, these are all allegations, nothing's been proven in court, that the suspect sort of entered Nancy Pelosi's home in the early hours of the morning, 2 a.m. ish, and appeared to be searching for Nancy Pelosi herself, shouting, where is Nancy? Where's Nancy? And Nancy Pelosi was not there at the time. Her husband, Paul, was. Her husband is 82 years old. This the accused is 42 years old. And so there was a struggle that involved a hammer and resulted in the suspect being arrested and Mr. Pelosi being hospitalized and put in a surgery for a skull fracture and

serious injuries to his right arm. The interesting part for Canadians is that the suspect grew up in Powell River in BC.C., has not been here for quite some time, but nonetheless has sort of those Canadian connections. And what do we know about the suspect's online activity? Yeah, well, we know that, you know, for example, Mike Lindell, who I've referenced a couple of times, the MyPillow CEO who has been an ardent supporter of Donald Trump and one of the kind of election denier leaders, you know, he, the suspect had spoken on social media, reposted claims by Mike Lindell, had spoke about other elements that have been sort of popular in sort of the far right, these QAnon theories, talking about Donald Trump and others, and sort of really sort of engaged with some of that conspiracy-minded

far right politics that has become increasingly prominent in the United States. And does this tell us anything, I guess, about the broader issues of Canadians in the American movements? I suppose what it tells us is that some of these political currents that we're seeing of a profound skepticism in government and a skepticism that is turning into hostility, a feeling of needing to fight back because there's a sense of rightly or wrongly of being oppressed by government. All of those things that these are not just things that we see taking place in the United States. Some of these same undercurrents of dissent are present in Canada. And in fact, in some cases, as we're seeing, have some roots in Canada. And so I think it's incumbent upon all of us to sort of, I think,

be clear-eyed about where parts of the Canadian population see themselves in relation to society, in relation to the political environment here as well as in the United States. Nathan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. You're very welcome. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show.

Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.