{"id":39818,"date":"2017-08-18T05:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-08-18T09:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39818"},"modified":"2017-08-17T10:18:19","modified_gmt":"2017-08-17T14:18:19","slug":"rebel-commander-ezra-levant-calls-retreat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/rebel-commander-ezra-levant-calls-retreat\/","title":{"rendered":"“Rebel Commander Ezra Levant” calls retreat"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the National Post<\/em>, Chris Selley<\/a> recounts the sudden changes in staffing and editorial policy at Ezra Levant’s mini media empire:<\/p>\n

If Rebel Media<\/em>\u2019s uppance was coming, if some event was finally going to wipe the smirk off its face, it could hardly have been more hideously appropriate than what happened over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va.<\/p>\n

Live on the internet, Rebel<\/em> personality Faith Goldy was blathering on about how intolerant the left is, and about left-right double standards in the media and in policing, and about all the other things that gladden the hearts of the Rebel<\/em>\u2019s grievance-based nihilist-conservative fans.<\/p>\n

And then, right there in the frame, someone rammed his car into the crowd of counter-protesters she was mocking, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many others. That guy, allegedly, was 20-year-old James Alex Fields, whose high school teachers said he was obsessed with Adolf Hitler in all the wrong ways.<\/p>\n

Fun time was over. This was, apparently, a real live neo-Nazi committing, certainly, real live murder.<\/p>\n

At this point, Rebel Commander Ezra Levant could have steered his vessel in one of several directions. \u201cNothing to do with us,\u201d he could have said, plausibly enough.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Levant could have gone there; instead, he blinked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first heard of the alt-right a year ago, I thought it simply meant the insurgent right, the politically incorrect right \u2026 the right that backed Trump and his \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019 style over Jeb Bush and the swamp,\u201d he wrote in a purported \u201cstaff memo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the alt-right has changed into something new, especially since Trump\u2019s election,\u201d Levant lamented. \u201cNow the leading figure \u2026 is Richard Spencer, and other white nationalists.\u201d There were actual Nazi flags in Charlottesville, Levant noted, waxing appalled (while allowing they might have been carried by \u201cagents provocateurs<\/em>\u201d). That\u2019s \u201cracist,\u201d he averred, rather than \u201cconservative,\u201d and he would have none of it.<\/p>\n

It is, in a word, pathetic. Spencer coined the term \u201calt-right,\u201d for heaven\u2019s sake. He has never, ever been shy about his white nationalist views. A manifesto he released before the march in Charlottesville talks of \u201ca shared civilization\u201d that \u201csprang\u201d from the \u201cAryan\u201d race, and dismisses the idea of \u201cJudeo-Christian values\u201d as \u201ca distortion of the historical and metaphysical reality of both Jews and Europeans.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I haven’t closely followed the adventures of Ezra and his Rebel Media organization, so the sudden rash of departures (Brian Lilley and Barbara Kay, in particular) caught me somewhat by surprise. I don’t use Rebel Media<\/em> as a source, but I have<\/em> linked to non-Rebel Media<\/em> articles by Lilley and Kay, and probably other contributors outside that affiliation. I had noted the organization’s dedication to “afflicting the comfortable” — almost always those on the political left — without much corresponding “comforting the afflicted” to balance it out. Explicitly abandoning the Richard Spencer wing of the alt-right is probably a good move, but it may have come too late to prevent the alt-right taint from permanently damaging their brand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the National Post, Chris Selley recounts the sudden changes in staffing and editorial policy at Ezra Levant’s mini media empire: If Rebel Media\u2019s uppance was coming, if some event was finally going to wipe the smirk off its face, it could hardly have been more hideously appropriate than what happened over the weekend in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28,53],"tags":[1079,457,351,99],"class_list":["post-39818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-media","category-politics","tag-altright","tag-fascism","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ame","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39818"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39820,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39818\/revisions\/39820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}