Barbara Perry has been covering far-right extremism for around 30 years and the last five years have been unlike anything she’s ever seen.
“There’s been a dramatic rise in the visibility and sheer numbers of these groups–the vocal nature of the far-right in Canada recently is unlike anything we’ve seen,” Perry said.
Perry, who serves as director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ont., sees this rise attributed to many different factors.
One of them being Canadian denial.
“Canada tends to be very complacent about these kinds of problems and we like to compare ourselves to the U.S. so that we can feel superior,” Perry said. “We just didn’t want to have a conversation about the risk of white supremacists in our nation.”
The far-right is vast and varied, yet the connecting thread is often a simple appeal to vulnerability, through the exploitation of paranoia, such as a warning against an approaching death of the “traditional” Canadian identity and the only defense, a militant resistance.
“They’re patriots in their very distorted sense and they see themselves as defenders of the purity of the white European Christian culture,” Perry said. “The fear of losing that identity is certainly at the heart of many far-right activists.”
Perry and her team found there have been more than 300 active right-wing extremist groups in Canada.
“And you know, this week we’re learning about new ones that we can add to the list,” she said.
The government’s response to far-right groups has been slow, with the first branding of white supremacist groups as terrorists coming in 2019 with groups Blood and Honour and Combat 18. Others, including The Proud Boys and The Base, were added in 2021.
The size and number of these groups have been increasing in recent years and Perry notices a tactical expansion into mainstream spaces.
She says recruitment is often done using platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, or even simple memes are a common tactic for recruitment, slipping extremist dog whistles into unsuspecting youth.
“It’s done gradually over time, they are lead down a rabbit hole into darker and darker materials, and youths don’t necessarily have the capacity to recognize that they’re being groomed,” Perry said.
That rabbit hole is something Luke Savage, currently a staff writer at Jacobin magazine, noticed early on from the alt-right. It was a rag-tag movement spawned from anti-Social Justice Warrior (SJW) rhetoric that the far-right hitched their wagon onto.
“It very much represented the coming together of different reactionary subcultures that had formed with the help of social media: the so-called Men’s Rights Movement and PUA culture, Gamergate,” Savage said.
The pickup artist culture, better known as PUA, was formed around the premise of men seeking guidance and teaching from one central dating coach who would guide them through a playbook style to seduce women. often in a sexist manner,
Gamergate was originally a movement that began as a gatekeeping effort against the perceived erasure of the traditional gamer and quickly morphed into a hate movement against “woke” culture shepherded by leading alt-right forces.
The far-right have a habit of co-opting movements and injecting their rhetoric with varying levels of subtlety. Savage points out 4Chan, an infamous anonymous forum, as a specifically influential player in the now neutered alt-right movement.
“Chan culture, where there’s an ethos of shocking people, is a very deliberate embrace of ugliness and provocation for provocation’s sake,” he said.
“That’s clearly what drew in many people: the anonymity granted to people by the internet. It’s an excuse to be offensive, racist with at least an implicit idea that doing so is now part of a political project,” Savage said.
Although the alt-right has largely slowed down in comparison to its 2015 glory days of SJW cringe compilations and Milo Yiannopoulos, it serves as a reminder of the far-right’s ability to shapeshift into relevancy in many different forms.
A similar hijacking is being played out in the streets of Canada today, according to Sébastien Roback, researcher at the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
“At the very beginning of the pandemic, when people were advocating against masks and lockdowns, it was very much seen as an opportunity by far-right groups to capitalize and reach out to different groups they hadn’t necessarily been reaching,” Roback said.
The groups used the general panic and uncertainty to ravage a group of people that were largely unaware of what they are involved with.
“I would say the radicalization process developed from being something that was an individual being radicalized into the group to now with all the content being accessible at one click much easier to influence a larger group of people at once,” Roback said.
He points towards dark history of Canadian far-right movements dating back to the 1900s as a reminder that this is indeed nothing new.
“We’ve had the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1900s and even our own Nazi parties, so the problem has never really gone away,” he said. “But definitely around 2016 there was a perfect storm,
“The refugee crisis internationally played a big factor but also a lot of homegrown issues, and overall, just the ramping up of Islamophobic and antisemitic discourse,” he said.
In terms of solutions, Roback has a simple message.
“Be aware of the threat posed by hate groups, don’t close your eyes to it,” he said.