An "Alt Counter-Jihad"? The case of Faith Goldy. Part 2.

Introduction:

(See Part 1 for a brief smattering of thoughts and questions to think about on this topic.)

Nearly one year ago, on February 10 in 2017, I posted an essay here proposing the development (or recognition) of an Alt Counter-Jihad:

It's about time for an "Alt-Counter-Jihad".  After all, there's an "Alt Right" and an "Alt Media".  And like those latter two, an Alt-Counter-Jihad is needed to redress deficiencies in an existing order -- namely, what I call the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream".

One wrinkle I had not factored in at the time is how the "Alt Right" particularly continues to be troubled by aspersions cast upon it by many on the right, and even some who might be termed "far Right" -- and, even more strangely, by some who proudly own the "Alt Right" title.  Not only that, but this odd species of sociopolitical movement doesn't quite exist in any coherent way (not that the "Right" and the "Left" are all that coherent as sociopolitical movements, for that matter). Indeed, the various terms that have cropped up over the decades -- "far right", "far left", "ultra-right", "ultra-left", etc. -- indicate that the terminology is trying to capture some sort of reality, but can't quite get a handle on it. One little epiphany I had years ago came like a splash of cold water when I noted how the remarkable march on Washington by the "Tea Party" (the "Alt Right"of the old days) back in the late summer of 2009 had a long list of goals and grievances, but if you looked for anything directly concerned about the problem of Islam and Muslims, you would have looked in vain, when that problem should have been at least in the top 5 bullet points of their entire march.  Similarly, today's Alt Right seems to regard that problem as low down on their bucket list.  An overarching dynamic to the whole mess is that the Leftist compass point, so to speak, seems to have taken over the Center, pulling it Leftward, and as a consequence, also pulling the Right off its bearings, causing the Right to split into two or more divisions, with most of those divisions buying into the framework of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC).  At any rate, we don't need to get into the historical/ philosophical complexities of this issue (see my essay from September 2008, Left / Right / East / West / South / North) for today's theme, but it's worth keeping in mind as we continue along here.

As we observe various members of these species of right winger, we notice some of them seem to be leery of catching the "racist"-cum-"neo-Nazi" cooties of those they deem to have gone too far.  Whether those career-destroying cooties pertain to the "Alt Right" is not a simplex question.  In some parts of this sociopolitical zone, and among some individuals described (or self-described) as belonging to it, one could reasonably impute such cooties -- as, for example, with Richard Spencer. However, the problem with this is that the sociopolitical culture of PC MC, which dominates our societies throughout most of the West, tends often to exaggerate these issues, to the point of slandering as "racists" and/or as "neo-Nazis" some individuals or groups who are not veritable racists nor (most certainly) not neo-Nazis.

This slander may be outright, or it may be implied up the sleeve of an otherwise seemingly polite "disinvitation".  So now we get to the case of Faith Goldy.

Discussion:

In our Part 1, we raised the question of whether Faith Goldy is even really "in the Counter-Jihad".  Usually, someone who may be defined as such spends most of their communication & activist time on issues directly related to the problem of Islam (including the problem of Western PC MCs displaying myopia to that primary problem). In that specific regard, Faith doesn't seem to qualify. On the other hand, parenthetical statements she makes during interviews (e.g., when during her interview with Gavin McInnes, she made brief but pointed mention about the genocide of Christians in the Middle East) indicates she has more awareness and savvy about that problem than many right-wingers who are not in the Counter-Jihad orbit.

At any rate, it doesn't really matter to our theme whether or not she appropriately occupies her time on the problem of Islam, and whether or not she if she is Counter-Jihad, she is nougaty soft (i.e., insisting that the problem is "political Islam" rather than ordinary mainstream Islam and that "I am not anti-Muslim, only anti-Islam, because Most Muslims Just Wanna Have a Sandwich," etc.). What matters is how others have treated her for her "sin" of having sat down for an interview with a group deemed to have "racist" and "neo-Nazi" cooties without also making sure to level critical questions/comments back at them to demonstrate to the world that she is not of their ilk.  For these arbiters of what's Right have demonstrated their asymptotic anxiety for catching cooties defined as such, in great part, by our broader Western Mainstream suffused with Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC).  And part and parcel of that (and even worse), they have demonstrated their incoherence, if not hypocrisy, on the critical issue of Free Speech.

Thus this theme occupies an area of overlap or intersection, so to speak, between the ordinary Alt-Right and the Counter-Jihad.  These two movements are not synonymous, though they do share a lot of thoughts and feelings.  Both tend to be attacked by the broader Western Mainstream (itself pro-Leftist on most issues), and one sees various individuals from both finding common cause, admiring each other, and sometimes working together.  However, if you take a Jordan Peterson, for example, admired by all who are opposed to the SJW/Black Lives Matter/Gender Fluidity movement and similar Leftist shibboleths, and do a search on what he thinks about Islam, you come up with very little, compared to his obviously greater concerns for the aforementioned social issues.

Speaking of Jordan Peterson, he's one of the three individuals who punished Faith Goldy for her "sin".  The other two are Ezra Levant and Gad Saad.  (Others I don't know about may also have punished her for this or may have supported the Three Horsemen in their punishment of her; I haven't spent an inordinate amount of time researching this nor plunged into the Twitterverse to find out.)

What happened?

Up until late summer of last year, Faith Goldy was happily pursuing her career as a reporter/journalist for Ezra Levant's alternative news media venue, The Rebel Media. I began to become a fan of hers rather late, a little less than a year ago, as I began to notice links to YouTube videos of her reporting on Levant's venue, or sometimes individual videos of her being interviewed or simply speaking to the camera in her infectiously hyperventilating, scintillating way.  Back to late summer of last year: When an event involving the welter of "far Right" issues was scheduled to happen in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August -- the "Unite the Right" rally --  she decided on her own to go down there and cover it with a camerman. (She emphasizes in a recent interview that she did this on her own, and was not sent there by her day job, The Rebel Media.)  Part of the reason for a journalist to cover an event like this was the opposition it would likely attract from far Left groups, such as Antifa -- mainly a European phenomenon, but since Trump and the consequent mass neurosis of anti-Trump hysteria, increasingly active in the Americas -- along with other motley individuals and groups out of the amorphous nebula of the Left -- SJWs and Black Lives Matter, etc.  And related to this, the likelihood that the Mainstream Media, besotted as it is with PC MC, would not be able to cover the nuances fairly or intelligently.

At that event, Faith was on the very street where the vehicular homicide happened, a terrible incident that catapulted this particular rally from just one of many to the top of the world headlines -- particularly as the driver of the car was "far Right" and the female victim who died was part of the Leftist protest, thus feeding into the broader Western Mainstream's PC MC bias against anything too right-wing.  After that startling tragedy, Faith was invited to be interviewed by one of the voices of those who had organized the "Unite the Right" rally, The Daily Stormer.  Wikipedia is, as usual, of no help in matters like this; its article on this voice tags it as "neo-Nazi" but provides no evidence for the tag (other than a New York Times article and a Los Angeles Times article, both of which do the same thing).  So I thought I'd check out the main site of The Daily Stormer for myself. What I found there was precious little that was anti-Islam per se, but a lot of stuff fixated on race and Jews, with indications here and there of a Real-Problemer worldview.  One story, headlined --

"The Government Just Shut Down! IT’S WALKING DEAD OUT THERE MAN, FIND A PLACE TO HOLE-UP!"

-- is a long essay on a relatively normal hiccup in American government (a shutdown of funding while partisan bickering consumes Congress), whose prose woven by the creator of The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, is a clever mixture of cheeky, seemingly self-deprecating sarcasm about a Mad Max Apocalypse -- which plays up going over the top so that the reader is disarmed into thinking Anglin is kidding around -- with warnings essentially serious about such Real-Problemerism.  That, and the frequent sprinklings on various postings there of words like "Kike" and imputations of Jews controlling the Mainstream that needs to be revolted against, would I suppose put The Daily Stormer in or near the general vicinity of the ballpark of "neo-Nazi".

So this is the voice or venue which, at the time of the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, after the tragedy that culminated it (and no doubt during the media firestorm that ensued), asked Faith Goldy to sit down for an interview, and she complied.  As she points out in one of her subsequent interviews (after she was punished by her own colleagues & those who otherwise would be on her side), she was under no obligation, being the subject of the interview, to make sure she criticized her interviewer in a show of virtue-signalling. Faith also articulated a good argument for why journalists should be interested in social phenomena like this, because it reflects a growing trend among disaffected white men in America, and it would behoove us to try to understand their grievances rather than continually barrage them with hostile denunciations, which would tend to cause them to "fester" (her word) and get worse in their alienation.  Journalists who shine a light on them, then, would be doing a double service: educating the public about this (in an intelligent descriptive analytical way, rather than through demagogic demonization which has become the norm in the Mainstream); and perhaps also helping to slow down or even reverse the "festering" which such demonization only exacerbates.  As a preparation for her investigative reporting of this rally, in fact, Faith said in one of her subsequent interviews that she prepared by taking time out (four months) to read extensively (and video-watch) materials written (and taped) by these various groups of the Alt Right who were going to take part in the "Unite the Right" rally. She wanted to try to understand them by their own words, rather than exclusively relying upon our Mainstream media to tell us what to think.  One would think this is a normative virtue in journalism; but alas, it seems to be rare in our time.

The first I heard of all this, it was mentioned by a civilian commenter who posted on a Jihad Watch article by Robert Spencer's colleague, Christine Williams-Douglass, which featured her interviewed by Ezra Levant.  At the start of that interview, Levant defines his position and the position of his venue, The Rebel Media: 

...a member of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a woman of color who was active in race relations was fired by Justin Trudeau because she was a critic of radical Islam. Now, she is a promoter of Islam in the sense that we are and Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah and Saleem Mansour -- that is, an Islam that coexists with the West, a patriotic democratic liberal Islam, progressive Islam, critical of political Islam…

It couldn't be clearer from these words that Ezra Levant is remarkably soft on Islam (virtually as bad as Daniel Pipes); and of course his interview subject, Christine Williams-Douglass, unsurprisingly agrees with him on this. Indeed, Levant goes on to praise her for her recent book which enshrines the hope she has (hopes which she hopes the Counter-Jihad and the West will have) in the Reformer Muslims showcased in that book (see my discussions about this).

As I said, a commenter in the comments thread to the above Jihad Watch article pointed out in passing that Ezra Levant had recently fired Faith Goldy, which made me go "Huh...???"  So out of curiosity I investigated further, and found a few interviews Faith had done after that. One can also find videos of Ezra Levant -- and the other two who also threw her under the bus (Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad) -- explaining in solemn tones why their pusillanimity is virtuous, if the readers can stomach such nauseating displays of cowardly sanctimony.  Essentially, Levant dropped her from his show like a hot potato because she had become radioactive -- merely because of that interview she gave to The Daily Stormer and because she failed to level critical questions at her interviewer.

After that happened, when she was interviewed by Gavin McInness, she didn't go on a counter-attack against her former boss, Levant, but remained gracious, telling Gavin she has enormous respect for Levant and that he “is the only guy in the game [in Canada] when it comes to speaking right wing common sense in the media sphere”.  Similarly, when speaking directly about Jordan Peterson, who subsequently "disinvited" her from a colloquium about free speech (oh, the irony!), she had mostly kind words for him as a sort of mentor she had admired for years.  In elliptical ways, though, she made allusion to the elementary error Peterson and the other two made -- putting "pragmatism" above "principle".  The pragmatism in this regard being, essentially, fear of catching the cooties Faith Goldy might have -- cooties which, if "caught" would supposedly damage the movement (whatever that movement is -- apparently not a movement based on the principle of "free speech").

In his official statement on this, Jordan Peterson. looking academically rumpled and gravely dapper, comes off as shameful when you pause for a nanosecond to think of the Orwellian irony to which he's evidently oblivious:

“…but I believe that she failed in her journalistic responsibility; and as a consequence of that, she became too hot a property for – and not just for us… and…. well… that was the reason for the decision.”

By the way, note that curious part where he says "...and not just for us... and... well...".  It's almost as though he was about to reveal who else had wanted Faith Goldy removed from the Free Speech panel, but at the last moment decided to withhold their names.

Faith's response to the whole brouhaha:

“So my understanding is that they thought I didn’t ask enough questions during an interview in which I was the one being interviewed. Now riddle me this [she said, with a delicious tone of sarcasm]: Okay, so we’re having an event about Free Speech, and I get pulled for not using my speech correctly… I don’t know… I don’t know… I’m not looking for a fight, but all I have to say, I’ve really tried to diminish a lot of the flames that have erupted in the wake of this decision to disinvite me from the event. But that being said, not all the Masses are asses: This irony, this hypocritical stance is not lost on the wise audience that… frankly belongs to Jordan Peterson. And we do have a bit of a Venn diagram there, not wholly, of course. It’s not lost on them. It’s this business of “never meet your heroes” etc. Look, these are strange times and all of us are going to have our feet held to the fire, and the question is, are you about principle, or are you about pragmatism? And I heard a LOT of use of the word ‘pragmatism’ when those gentlemen were offering up their answers to the young man who posited why I was not included in the redux version of their Free Speech panel.”

In sum, Faith Goldy's reaction to her punishment was a class act in its overt presentation, while deftly she communicated between the lines the violation of the principle by those Three Horsemen who are supposed to stand eminently for that principle -- which should outrage us all in the Counter-Jihad (when it does not just make us depressed with dismay).

Links:

Faith Goldy & Gavin McInness 

Faith Goldy on Free Bird Media

Faith Goldy on No Bullshit 

P.S.:

In the second video linked above, at 9:20 forward (though my transcription below begins before that to introduce the context, at just shy of the 8:00 mark), Faith articulates a sound critique of the slimy Gad Saad (whom I've called "vaguely fishy" and have had occasion to mention previously), one of the three stalwart Alt Righters who decided to gag her free speech in the interest of the principle of ... "correct" free speech:
  
“Before the Unite the Right event I had probably about 4 months in which I really undertook a very serious study of the Alt Right to get familiar with, you know, the bigwigs, to start reading... their literature, see what their movements and all their different bifurcations and etc., and [what] all the offshoots of their umbrella really were. So I went there as a responsible journalist -- who, by the way, didn't see a single Nazi armband or 'Seig Heil' in the Charlottesville proper area.  And everyone said, "That's a tacit endorsement" because I didn't disavow an entire group of people, largely young white men who feel disenfranchised in society, who feel that they've been told because they're male and because they're whites they're not allowed to have an opinion and indeed succeed, etc., in society... because I said... you know... some of these guys might be onto something, maybe we should talk to them, air out some of this dirty laundry, not just keep on pushing them to the gutter where they're going to fester -- that all of a sudden it was a tacit endorsement.  Today's politics have become so cartoonish in the way Left and Right have become, that we've forgotten all about nuance. So I'm not going to apologize for studying these things, I'm not going to apologize for saying, yes, there is some intellectualism that has occurred on the Alt Right, and I'm not -- guess what -- because I say that The Daily Stormer has the right to free speech, it doesn't make me a neo-Nazi! Because I don't believe in everything that the ADL proclaims as decree, does not make me an anti-Semite. And to this point, because Gad Saad, his own personal follow-up video to the footage that you released, I have to say: it was something else!  "Faith Goldy means nothing to me" -- then... proceeds to spend 13 minutes talking about me...  casts all of my audience as anti-Semites, and then says basically "don't show me who you are, show me who your friends are" -- guilt by association. Well Professor Saad: The fact that I was about to share a stage with at least two panelists who I understand are of the Jewish religion -- is that guilt by association? Am I all of a sudden pro-Jewish, a Zionist? Because all of a sudden the logic begins to break down, and I will say this to Gad Saad: He might not be aware of this. Okay, first point: Israel is a religious ethno-state. I support them as a religious ethno-state. In fact, I've argued on the record, in being in favor of the one-state solution. I love the wall in Israel: They understand demographics; that's why they don't naturalize millions of Arabs within the West Bank, because in 15 years they would be outnumbered and there would be a whole bunch of Arabs being elected to the Knesset. And I'm all for Israel's borders and self-determination... In fact, my clip [in] which I articulated my one-state solution became probably my most viewed clip in all my journalistic history -- tens of millions of people have watched that, and indeed, dare I say I'm a household name in Israel. So I find this business to be beyond insulting, but just ignorant. And how dare he get up there and say, basically, "Bring on the Jew-hating Faith... a Jew-hater by association..." It's okay to be Jewish! It's okay to be Christian! By the way there's some Christophobic nonsense going on on his comments of that YouTube video as well...  But I have to say, I'm getting a little sick and tired of the victim card, I'm getting sick and tired of being told it's not okay to be a certain type of people, and if you say "it's just okay, not great, not better than" -- then all of a sudden that makes you a supremacist of some sort. ... All my life people have called me 'Islamophobic', 'homophobic', 'transphobic' -- now it's 'anti-Semite' and 'racist' and a 'white supremacist'.  Bring it on. Your names don't scare me. All they are are code words for 'heretic' -- and you're darned right I'm a heretic when it comes to this modern, sick political culture that we're in right now.”


Amen, sister.





See Part 3...