Hello again, Fringe Minority Reader!
First of all, thank you for taking the time to read my article about Jeremy Mackenzie. Those of you who shared it with others may enjoy hearing (as I did) that through your sharing the piece even found its way to Jeremy’s own incarcerated ears, and made him smile.
Thanks to Substack’s Comments feature and to you Readers who made use of it, its clear that one thread that needs to be addressed in the tangled mess that is Jeremy Mackenzie’s current situation is the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN). Taking a closer look at this organization, I think we need to have a more serious conversation about it.
Incidentally, the word “conversation” breaks down as “con” (Latin for “with, together”) + “versa” (Latin for “turn”). So, the literal meaning of “conversation” is “to turn together”. I mention this for three reasons:
Looking into institutional funding mechanisms can make your head spin
As a society we’re getting slack about how we use words and may need a course overcorrection all the way back to Latin roots
If we’re aiming to find our way out of this mess, we’re better off choosing a direction that could produce this result
So, CAHN: Who are they, what do they do, and who funds them to do it?
Founded in Toronto in 2018, the Canadian anti-hate network (CAHN) is a non-profit organization made up of an ad hoc group of academics, journalists, and persons regarded as legal experts and community leaders. Their board is comprised of six members with Bernie Farber acting as its chair.
CAHN’s stated mandate is to “monitor, research, and counter hate groups by providing education and information on hate groups to the public, media, researchers, courts, law enforcement, and community groups”.
One way to conceptualize CAHN would be as sort of a national “neighbourhood watch”, working diligently to uphold societal peace. Another way would be as a modern-day faction of witch-hunters.
witch-hunt
also witch hunt (wĭch′hŭnt′)
n.
An investigation carried out ostensibly to uncover subversive activities but actually
used to harass and undermine those with differing views.
At the core of the choice is how one determines what a “hate group” is. CAHN defines it as one that “as demonstrated by statements by its leaders or its activities, is overtly hateful towards, or creates an environment of overt hatred towards, an identifiable group as defined in the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act, and/or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms”.
There was a time in my life where I could have read that and thought, “yeah, that makes sense”. From my current vantage point, it all sounds rather vague. What qualifies as a demonstration of “overt hatred”? Somebody yelling “I HATE YOU” at an identifiable group as defined by Canadian law? Somebody going on a TV talk show and asking “Do we tolerate these people?”.
Even more nebulous is the expression “an environment of overt hatred”. What does that mean? If you’re going to base your mandate in Canadian laws, shouldn’t your definitions be more precise?
CAHN doesn’t seem to think so. If the lines don’t already seem blurred, CAHN and the legacy media outlets to which they “provide information” make interchangeable use of the term “hate group” with other terms like “far-right” and “alt-right”. These designations will always evade any actual meaning because all they refer to is a position relative to something else; in this case, the ever shifting “left” and “center”.
With no clear boundaries around what can be called a “hate group” CAHN seems to feel comfortable stretching its arms far and wide to envelop just about anyone in their embrace.
Here are a few examples of who CAHN considers to be part of Canada’s “hate groups”:
CAHN vs. Jeremy Mackenzie
In my previous article about Jeremy Mackenzie, I completely missed the connection with CAHN. Luckily, Tammy Robert did not. Robert has spent countless hours researching Jeremy Mackenzie, his relationship with CAHN, and even interviewing him from jail.
As Robert’s article shows, you need only type Jeremy Mackenzie’s name in the search bar on CAHN’s website to verify that CAHN has had this man in their sights for a while now. The many articles they’ve published about Mackenzie frequently refer to the content of his livestreams, indicating that CAHN has them under active surveillance.
Looking back over legacy media coverage of Mackenzie, whenever a source of background information is cited, that source tends to be CAHN. If you’re still reading MSM and hadn’t noticed this before, you will now.
CAHN vs. Faith Goldy
CAHN has also focused fiercely on Faith Goldy since 2018. Goldy is a political commentator who reported for The Rebel Media (now Rebel News) until 2017 , and ran as a Toronto mayoral candidate in 2018.
In August 2017 Goldy covered the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, an event so politically charged that she released a video to address the blowback she received for reporting on it.
Shortly afterwards, she gave an interview about her coverage of the rally on The Daily Stormer podcast, which led to her firing by Ezra Levant .
Not only did CAHN run hit pieces on Goldy, they also convinced Bell Media to refuse to run her ads during the 2018 election and filed an official complaint about her campaign finances in 2019.
A full analysis of Faith Goldy’s story is beyond the scope of this article, and I’m not here to judge what anyone is saying but to defend their right to say it. I do think it’s worth noting similarities in the way CAHN “reports” on both Goldy and Mackenzie because they point to a modus operandi that CAHN has kind of trapped itself into.
Because “hate group” is so hard to define, it makes it easier for CAHN to smear whoever it wants but at the same time, difficult to prove their assertions. “Hate” is essentially a feeling, and one that both Goldy and Mackenzie deny holding towards any identifiable group as outlined in Canadian law. How can CAHN convince us otherwise?
In the absence of anything approaching what might be called evidence, CAHN has to get creative. They draw connections between the person they are targeting and another person or group that has already been discredited.
For Goldy, the “connections” include her being interviewed by The Daily Stormer (a site which has effectively been scrubbed from the internet, making it difficult to hear the other side of the story), being interviewed by the Krypto report (that is itself “associated” with The Daily Stormer), and the fact that David Duke tweeted her video coverage of Charlottesville.
For Mackenzie, CAHN likes to link him with anyone or anything from protestors at Coutts, AB in February 2022 (some of whom are still incarcerated while none of whom have been found guilty of anything), to Maxime Bernier, to books he’s held up during his livestreams.
This old strategy known as guilt by association is a logical fallacy employed to discredit an argument or a person based on an association with a demonized person or group.
The intent in employing this strategy is generally to persuade people not to bother looking into the argument. CAHN seems to have a penchant for it, as it’s actually difficult to find anything they’ve written about anyone that does not make some connection, however tenuous, to something or someone “unacceptable”.
The danger in using fallacies like guilt by association (aside from producing weak arguments) is that when you stretch the truth too thin, at a certain point the lie shows through.
CAHN vs. Rebel News
Goldy’s former employer, Ezra Levant, got into his own battle with CAHN in April 2021, when CAHN deputy director Elizabeth Simons tweeted that the shooter in the March 2019 Christchurch mosque attack was incited to commit violence by Rebel News. With no evidence to support this claim, Simons took the tweet down and eventually apologized.
CAHN was also caught spreading misinformation during the Ottawa Freedom Convoy protests in February 2022, when Bernie Farber tweeted about an antisemitic flyer being circulated among the protestors. The flyer he tweeted pictures of was from Miami.
In response to Simon’s tweet in 2021, Levant took to Twitter to launch an attack on CAHN. In it, he asserted that the organization received $268K from Justin Trudeau “explicitly to defame conservatives”. The $268K is real, but is it only conservatives that CAHN is attempting to brand with the moniker of “hate”?
CAHN vs. Women
In her in-depth article How The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is Policing Thought Crime With Your Tax Dollars, Eva Kurilova uncovers CAHN’s systematic targeting of Canadians who advocate for the rights of women. In CAHN’s view, these groups and individuals are “transphobic”, “TERFs”, or otherwise engaged in “anti-trans hate”.
For example, Kurilova points to Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar), a “non-partisan, single issue, and not an explicitly or implicitly radical feminist organization”… that is “willing to work across party lines”. According to CAHN, they are “one of Canada’s largest TERF groups”.
Other advocates of women’s rights who have found themselves at the centre of CAHN hit pieces include:
Raine McLeod, founder of Alberta Radical Feminists and Alberta Women’s Advocacy Association
Linda Blade, president of Alberta Athletics and co-author of Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport
Kathleen Lowry, University of Alberta associate professor of anthropology who was dismissed as the department’s chair of undergraduate studies in 2020 for her views that gender identity does not trump biological sex when it comes to policy decisions
To reach the conclusion that all these people are “conservative”, one would have to shift the definition of that word to include anyone who accepts the existence of biological women.
CAHN vs. Children
In June 2022, CAHN announced its new “toolkit” for students and educators, which they describe as “specifically focused on responding to hate-motivated targeting and recruitment of students”.
In fact, the majority of the articles published on CAHN’s website since late August 2022 have focused on attacking people who have raised their hands to question the encroachment into classrooms of things like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Sexual Orientation and Gender Ideology (SOGI).
These include CAHN’s articles on:
Chris Elston, a father of two girls who travels through the US and Canada wearing billboards to raise awareness about the harms of gender ideology and medical gender transition of children
Frank Spiegelberg, paramedic and Canadian co-ordinator for Parents of ROGD Kids
Chanel Pfahl, an Ontario teacher who appeared at one of Elston’s protests
Shannon Boschy, candidate for Ottawa school board Trustee election 2022
Blueprint for Canada, a platform which seeks to improve education and respect for parental rights while “removing extremist ideologies from the classroom”
Kurilova’s article is an excellent piece of investigative journalism and I highly recommend reading it, not least for her explanation of CAHN’s connection to its defamed American counterpart, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The one thing about it that I find incomplete is the information around CAHN’s financials. Both Kurilova and Levant lead their stories by drawing attention to CAHN’s institutional funding, and understandably so. Alerting Canadians to where our tax dollars are going is a good way to get our attention, and I agree that these things are important to know.
But looking more closely into CAHN’s financials (to the extent that that’s possible), the amount of public funding they receive doesn’t quite add up to the totality of their influence.
It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what CAHN’s operating budget is or how much money they’ve received from Canadian institutions. They collect donations through their website, and most of the details around their institutional funding sources are obscured.
That said, and as everyone has already pointed out, CAHN received $268,400 directly from the federal government in October 2020 through Heritage Canada’s Anti-Racism Action Program. $268K is nothing to sneeze at and certainly makes for a good tweet, however I think it’s significant that this program had a budget of $35 million. Furthermore, it’s part of a larger government project, Building a Foundation for Change: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, with an overall investment of close to $100 million. The federal government’s Budget 2022 has earmarked $85 million to launch a new Anti-Racism Strategy and Action Plan on Combatting Hate.
If anyone out there has the time and skills, I’d love to know where all that money is going/went.
Kurilova also points in her article to funding CAHN received through the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in their 2021 National Convention report, but doesn’t go into details. I eventually found it on page 234, where CAHN is recorded as having received $2,500 in 2019. As Canada’s largest union, CUPE has an operating budget in the hundreds of millions.
In June 2020, CAHN received part of a $1 million donation from BMO Financial Group for “organizations in North America to support social and racial justice, and inclusion”. While only four organizations were listed as recipients of this donation, it was not specified how much each organization received. We can only guess.
Also only a guess is how much money CAHN received in a start-up grant from the SPLC.
The only other grant CAHN received that I’ve been able to verify came from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF). In early 2021, the CRRF announced the recipients of its Community Mobilization Fund, a one-time $300,000 investment supported by a $60,000 donation from Sun Life. Out of a total of 173 applicants, 22 were chosen as recipients. CAHN squeaked onto the list of finalists with an awarded sum of $6,000.
Here’s a breakdown I made so you can see how the funds were divvied up:
CAHN may well be the loudest bunch of ideologues in the country, but unless there’s something I’m missing, it looks to me like the bigger issue is that they don’t really need much money to do what they do. Even $268K doesn’t go very far when split between at least six board members, not to mention the contributors they pay to do things like attend and report on counter-protests.
Something I find even more chilling than CAHN getting paid by the government is that there are ostensibly people out there who will do CAHN’s work for free. In any case that’s what CAHN believes. Their “get involved” page presents many tips on how to monitor and infiltrate “hate groups”, get other people’s events cancelled, and otherwise participate in the twisted kind of “open-source intelligence” network that lies for its truth as a matter of course.
In a nutshell, CAHN can be understood as an organized, well-connected faction occupying a corner of influence in a feedback loop that is strangling human consciousness. They likely don’t require an enormous operating budget themselves, having established direct links to legacy media outlets who are paid to repeat what they say verbatim without doing any due diligence.
On the other side of the feedback loop are the people who are already primed to HEAR the messages that CAHN is transmitting because they are trapped in the same ideology. This includes people who work in police services and government, who (based on testimony from the ongoing Emergencies Act Inquiry) seem to rely on legacy media for their information.
This might not be something that many people want to hear, but anti-hate isn’t the underlying cause of our problems, but rather the effect (meaning the manifestation in the physical plane) of a pretty messed up collective consciousness. Don’t get me wrong, I am very much looking forward to the day when CAHN is fully exposed for the fraud that I believe it is.
But if truth is really what we’re after, we’ll eventually have to move beyond belief and into the realm of knowing. Clearly, I don’t have all the answers. That said, I hope my thoughts here can help move the conversation in a constructive direction.
Rumours about the demise of Daily Stormer are greatly exaggerated
https://dailystormer.in/
I hadn't seen a true piece of investigative journalism in quite a while, thank you Lisa. For the longest time I've wondered what was it about "hate group/speech" that got a certain part of society frothing at the mouth. Hateful acts being covered by the Criminal Code and our Johnny-come-lately law enforcement (whose motivation for the job would deserve separate attention itself) leave only words and whatever power they potentially carry, mainly that of influence. Hate itself requires two states of mind in order to come to life, so to speak, anger and disgust. On the other hand obssessed witch-hunters à la CAHN seem to be driven by a resentment fueled ideology. Whereas anger eventually burns itself out, resentment seems to feed itself until put out by something external to it. When you combine that resentment (in all likelyhood caused by constant feelings of inadequacy which never go away if you're not willing to do something about it) to a strong sense of moral superiority i.e. arrogance, Evil is born. Now you can see why those witch-hunters tend to become an independent secret police to any ideological tyranny. They work for free as their hunger for vengeance can never be satiated nor trusted as they are uncompromising. All tyrants are paranoid and they all seek to eradicate dissidence first, hence why Jeremy's troubles are far from over, then they go after their own secret police whom they do not trust either. When Evil is in charge, Paranoia rules😉