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That same Cohen is as close to a prominent figure as there is in the Canadian counter-jihad. He served for a time as the head of the Jewish wing of the anti-Muslim English Defence League. He worked as part of the International Free Press Society, which has been consistently hostile to Islam, and has publicly interviewed prominent anti-Islam figures, including Danish politician Morten Messerschmidt.

Cohen stopped responding to emails from the Post when asked about his relationship to Tepes and Laszlo.

Levant ignored all questions about Laszlo.

The connection between Tepes and Laszlo is important because it establishes, in case there was any doubt, that The Rebel is deeply, purposefully embedded in the controversial, far-right ideology of the counter-jihad. The explicit purpose of the Vlad Tepes blog is to combat Islam, which it describes as a “religious political and cultural system” that is “no more deserving of protection than that of Nazism or Communism with which, by the way, it shares a great deal.” The site hosts copies of one of the defining texts of the counter-jihad, a long essay called Defeating Eurabia, by the Norwegian blogger Fjordman, who argues that there is no such thing as moderate Islam.

But Laszlo/Tepes is hardly The Rebel’s only tie to the movement. The site has provided a regular platform for established counter-jihadi figures from the United States and Europe through interviews and links. Benjamin Lee, a senior research associate at the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats, has studied online counter-jihadi networks extensively. Almost every major movement figure he identified in a recent primer, including Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Gates of Vienna, Anne Marie Waters and the Vlad Tepes blog, has found a home at one point or another on The Rebel. Levant has interviewed many of them personally.

Joe Mulhall, a senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, the U.K.’s largest anti-racism charity, has seen the movement ebb and flow over the last decade. Two years ago, he thought it was mostly petering out. But the combination of the migrant crisis, Brexit, a string of terror attacks, and the Donald Trump campaign seems to have given it new life. And Mulhall sees The Rebel as a key player in that resurgence. “They’ve been doing stuff over here,” he said, “that’s really quite extreme.”

On March 22, hours after a terrorist attack on Britain’s parliament, Tommy Robinson, The Rebel’s chief U.K. contributor, appeared outside Westminster and got to yelling. He wore a black peacoat over a squat rectangle frame. His blunt hair, stubble on the sides, was edged over on top. He looked a little like a thumb.

“I’m on the reality,” he bellowed at a reporter, in a video posted on The Rebel’s Youtube page. “The reality is this is war. These people are waging war on us…this has gone on for 1400 years!”

Levant hired Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, in January to serve as the British face of his expanding empire. A former football hooligan with an extensive police record, Lennon is a well-known figure in English and European anti-Islam politics.

“Fifty thousand British Muslims downloaded a terrorist manual in our country!” Robinson screamed in the video that day, pumping his steepled hands in front of his chest. “Fifty thousand! Not 10! Not 20! Fifty thousand people who want to see exactly what you see there.” He pointed behind him, where Parliament was visible in the background. “That’s what they want. They want war! They want death! They want destruction! And we keep pandering.”

Robinson first came to prominence in 2009, when he founded what became the English Defence League in his hometown of Lutton. (“Tommy Robinson” is a name he stole from a local legend of the hooligan trade.) He soon built it into a national organization—dedicated primarily to fighting Islam—capable of drawing thousands to marches across England.

Robinson’s politics have never fit all that easily into existing boxes of radical belief. He was once a member of the openly racist British National Party, but Mulhall doesn’t see him as a racist, per se. “He’s not a white supremacist,” Mulhall said. “He is however, extremely Islamophobic.”

Like many in the counter-jihad, Robinson has often claimed that he is not anti-Muslim, he’s just anti-Islam. But Mulhall sees that as a distinction without a difference. “The evidence over the years has become overwhelmingly clear that he homogenizes the Muslim community into a single block and judges them by their most extreme elements,” he said. “His root thing is he sees Islam as an evil ideology rather than a religion.”

There’s little doubt Levant knew what he was getting in Robinson. He is perhaps the defining face of anti-Islam politics in the U.K. He’s been the subject of countless profiles and has rarely deviated from his anti-Islam message. “I’m not far-right. I’m just opposed to Islam. I believe it’s backward and it’s fascist,” he told Newsweek in an interview in 2015. “The current refugee crisis is nothing to do with refugees. It’s a Muslim invasion of Europe.”

Amarnath Amarasingam sees the message Robinson touts as being firmly in line with the larger ‘clash of civilizations’ discourse spread by The Rebel and other parts of the new far right. “They believe that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the modern world,” he wrote in an email, “that Muslims are all in it together to wreak havoc and slowly and silently take over the West from within.”

Counter-jihadists like Robinson, and others who have found a home on The Rebel, have always been careful not to advocate violence. But their work has at times helped inspire it. Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, including scores of children, boasted of having hundreds of Facebook friends in the English Defence League. His manifesto linked to and quoted several frequent Rebel guests, including Geller and Spencer.

Breivik had no formal ties to the EDL, and the group condemned his actions, but Robinson himself expressed some sympathy for his beliefs, if not his tactics, in 2012. “The blogs [cited in Breivik’s manifesto] are full of facts,” he told a Norwegian newspaper, according to a report in the Independent. “You can not yell at people because they tell the truth. You may find the truth hurts, but it is still the truth. I read the blogs themselves – they contain facts about Islam.”

(Levant calls that link, “stretching about four degrees of separation for guilt by association.” “We have never advocated violence,” he wrote. “Our criticism of Islam is in part because of its violence.”)

Robinson is far from the only Rebel contributor to preach the gospel of the counter-jihad. Faith Goldy, until Thursday, perhaps the site’s predominant Canadian star, speaks openly of a clash between Western and Muslim civilizations. “Right now, all of Europe, city by city, is falling thanks to mass illegal migration at the hands of Angela Merkel and her cronies in the European Union, not to mention several organizations funded by billionaire George Soros,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “There has been a demographic change that has brought with it a particular sort of culture—world view—and it is inferior to what was once in Europe.”

Is she talking specifically about Muslims? “That is the demographic that’s coming in,” she said, “yes.”

Goldy, whose first professional bylines came in the National Post, worked alongside Levant at Sun News. She was once an unabashed progressive and as recently as two years ago was publicly and privately much less strident than she is today. In the dying days of the Sun, she spoke to colleagues about starting her own, less extreme version of what The Rebel became, according to Coren, another Sun veteran. “She said to me ‘I’d like to set up something like Ezra is doing, but different, less raw,'” he said. “Which is pretty ironic.”

In her current iteration, Goldy has called publicly for a “new crusade” against Muslims, although she is a bit vague on what that would entail. (The counter jihad is rife with Crusader imagery and references.) She has praised the increasingly anti-democratic, nationalist governments in places like Hungary, Serbia and Poland, all of which she sees as part of a new “Slav Right” that can rescue Eastern Europe from itself. (Western Europe, she thinks, may be too far gone to save.) In other words, she buys into every part of what researchers on far right radicalism view as the core tenets of the counter-jihad.

“Do I see a clash of civilizations happening?” she said in the interview. “Yes.”

Mulhall and Hope Not Hate have been tracking The Rebel almost since it launched. They’ve watched it grow in prominence and become a core part of what they see as a resurgent, anti-Islam far right in the Western world. What they haven’t been able to decide is what exactly The Rebel is. “Do we put it under websites, or media outlets or do we put it as an organization?” Mulhall asked.

That tension gets to the core of what makes The Rebel different from other media organizations. The site is not an out and out media property. It’s more a hybrid social movement/clearing house for polemical rage. It makes money by ginning up anger on issues then asking the newly outraged for cash. Sometimes organizers do that at live events, like the M103 rally in Toronto, where they passed around buckets. But more often, every day, in fact, in they ask readers and viewers to give and keep giving, through paid subscriptions, donations to specific projects, petitions and just general support.

It’s hard to know how successful that strategy is. The Rebel is a private company and its financials aren’t public. But Levant has said the company has no major outside investors and no significant loans. If that’s true, that means The Rebel produces enough revenue already to fund its existing operations—including a new studio in Toronto, reporting trips to Israel and Iraq, dozens of staff—and pay for its significant global expansion.

Levant did not answer specific questions about the Rebel’s business model, but he told Maclean’s earlier this year that crowd-funding is the company’s top source of revenue. It would have to be, to pay for the kind of operation he has without significant injections of outside cash.

Media analysts who have looked at The Rebel are skeptical of its business model, outside of crowd-funding. A year ago, The Rebel had just under 5,000 premium subscribers, worth something like $400,000 in annual revenue according to an internal company email. According to Alexa, a site that analyzes web traffic, The Rebel’s main site remains a decided niche product, ranked outside the 2,000 most popular sites in Canada.

Rebel YouTube videos do have a significant audience. They’ve been viewed more than 245 million times. But not all of those clicks represent cash. The best way to make money on YouTube is with ads, especially pre-roll ads that run before the content, according to Ken Doctor, a leading online media analyst. But a review of scores of Rebel videos reveals that only a small fraction of them have any ads at all.

Taylor Owen, an assistant professor of digital media and global affairs at the University of British Columbia, believes a very small organization might be able to sustain itself on a YouTube audience of The Rebel’s size. “I mean, you can make money if you’re an individual person and you have that,” he said. “It’s still really vague and not really well known, but I bet you’re making ten grand a month or something like that if you have a couple million followers.” The Rebel has about 840,000 YouTube subscribers. “But that doesn’t sustain a media organization, right?”

So if The Rebel is in fact growing the way it is, without any outside investment, it is likely doing so thanks mostly to its innovative model, which asks a motivated audience to give and give again to keep the Western world afloat.

There is another possibility, which is that, despite Levant’s claims to the contrary, The Rebel is, in fact, funding its growth in part through outside investment. Levant has cited Breitbart, the American alt-right news hub, as an inspiration. And Breitbart survived and thrived in its early days thanks in significant part to a $10 million investment from Robert Mercer, a far-right American billionaire. Re-aggregated Breitbart stories are a regular staple on the Rebel.

On Thursday, Press Progress, a left-wing advocacy group, reported that Levant received funding in 2015 from the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank with a long history of hostility toward Islam.

However, if you take Levant at his word and accept that The Rebel Media is primarily self-funding, then from a purely business standpoint, what he’s built is impressive. Making money online through journalism is extremely difficult. Doing that without the massive scale of a legacy organization like The New York Times or the huge capital available to a venture-funded startup like Vox is even harder.

At the root of that success is a business structure that looks more like a political campaign than a traditional media outlet. And the architect of that system is a man with deep ties in Canada’s mainstream conservative movement.

The Rebel uses political organizing software—a platform called NationBuilder—to organize and monetize its audience. (It also sells access to its email list.) The man who implemented that system is Hamish Marshall.

A longtime member of The Rebel board, Marshall is also the person most responsible for making Andrew Scheer the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He’s now running Brian Jean’s campaign for the leadership of Alberta’s United Conservative Party.

Marshall, Scheer’s campaign manager, has tended in the past to downplay his involvement in The Rebel. In an email this week, he said he has been “wrapping up (his) involvement in The Rebel since May” and has “never been involved in any content or editorial decisions.”

But you can’t really separate The Rebel’s content from its distribution and monetization. The business doesn’t exist without its donation model, the one installed by Marshall, and that model relies on a steady stream of outrageous content to drive fear and push participation.

The Rebel also isn’t the first time Marshall has worked with Levant. As of this spring, he was on the board of For Canada, Levant’s non-profit organizing arm. He worked with Levant on the Ethical Oil project, which sought to promote Canada’s Oil Sands. He represents, in several ways, the perfect encapsulation of The Rebel’s remarkable balance between the mainstream and the farthest edges of the fringe.

The Rebel produces and promotes content that is by any definition extreme. According to Alexa, the five sites it most resembled as of July 19th in terms of audience included Pamelageller.com, Jihad Watch and the Daily Stormer, an openly white supremacist, neo-Nazi forum. (The Daily Stormer has since fallen out of the top five, possibly because the site no longer has a .com domain.)

It has moved into offline activism, through Robinson’s British street protests and McInnes’s Proud Boys. But for all that, it has also long maintained a significant presence in Canada’s conservative movement.

Scheer has done several one-on-one interviews with The Rebel, including one after his victory, and one in December with Levant. He twice listed The Rebel as one of his go-to news sources, both during and after his leadership campaign. He hired Marshall, at the time one of three Rebel board members and perhaps its most important business cog, to run his campaign.

After Charlottesville, those ties may be fraying. This week Conservatives and contributors both began to distance themselves from the site.

Scheer himself was scheduled to address The Rebel with the National Post on Thursday. But at the last minute he backed out of the interview. Instead, a spokesman issued a statement saying that “until the editorial directions of The Rebel Media changes, he would not grant the (The Rebel) any more interviews.” He didn’t address what was different about The Rebel now, or how it had changed from May, when he was happy to call it go-to-read. He didn’t answer questions about Marshall, or his ties, or whether they ever came up during the campaign.

(In a brief interview on Friday, Scheer reiterated he would not be granting interviews to The Rebel going forward. He ended the interview–he had to catch a plane — before answering any follow ups. )

Levant, though, had bigger problems. On Tuesday, Barbara Kay, a regular contributor (and a National Post columnist) announced she would no longer appear on the site. John Robson, another Post columnist cum Rebel contributor, did the same. Brian Lilley, who co-founded the site, said he quit entirely on Monday. (Levant says he fired Lilley last year.) On Twitter, Lisa Raitt, now the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, praised Lilley’s decision, though she stopped short of condemning The Rebel.

As the week went on, the trouble continued. On Thursday, Caolan Robertson, until two weeks ago, one of the site’s U.K. correspondents, posted a video online titled “Why I left The Rebel.” In it, he played recordings of what he said was Levant offering him “hush money” to stay quiet about details of The Rebel’s business model. Robertson also slammed The Rebel’s petitions and campaigns. “The Rebel takes its money from ordinary hardworking people,” he said. “But, it also quietly takes a lot of money from less ordinary, more wealthy people.”

Levant responded with his own post claiming Robertson and another man had blackmailed him.

But for The Rebel, the trouble wasn’t over. On Thursday night, after it came out that she had appeared on a Daily Stormer podcast, Levant fired Goldy. News broke earlier that day that Gavin McInnes was also leaving the site. Not even the Rebel’s cruise was safe. The company hosting the November event, where fans would have mingled with Goldy, Levant and others on a Caribbean cruise liner, cancelled the reservation.

It appeared for all the world like The Rebel was unraveling at the speed of the never-ending news cycle; a new disaster seemed to come with each refresh of the Twitter page. But on Wednesday morning, before the blackmail allegations, the racist podcast and even the cruise, Levant played the crisis down. “Our supporters are fine—they aren’t following this media party mania,” he wrote in email sent at 3:15 a.m. “It’s complete fake news—it’s just our competitors and our ideological opponents having their Two Minutes (of) Hate. That’s fine. We have some problems—as always—but they’re not from our customers.”

If The Rebel does collapse, it wouldn’t be the first reversal for Levant. His career has been a series of stops and starts, of envelopes pushed and pushed until they toppled over the edge. So even if The Rebel goes away, it’s hard to imagine he will. “He may have reached the tipping point. He’s gone so far,” said Coren, his former colleague. “But, famous last words. Maybe (he’s) at the beginning of something bigger

For Conservatives, that is a problem. Because whatever else he’s doing, Levant is also doing this: He’s calling the question. He’s forcing people to pick a side. The axis of right wing politics in the Western world has shifted. And the Conservatives are headed for a reckoning. The party at some point will have to decide where it stands, on Trumpism, the new nationalism, and the explicitly anti-Muslim sentiments that are riven through both, the same sentiments The Rebel pushes on its site, around the world and right here at home.

Late in the M103 rally in Toronto, Levant shifted focus from free speech and Islam. He turned to cutting down the mainstream media, a frequent target of his ire. At one point, he jabbed toward a group of reporters from Vice Media, including one wearing a hijab. They were standing against one wall in a cavernous room, within steps of the nearest seats.

Dimly lit, they were hard to see. But as Levant carried on, as he mocked and needled and bashed away, more and more in the crowd began to stand. They turned. “Fake news!” they yelled. “Do your job.” It made for an arresting tableau. At a rally thick with anti-Muslim sentiment, the crowd, some just metres away, hurled abuse at the only visibly Muslim woman in the room.

Two weeks before that rally, a rally where the very idea of Islamophobia was denied, a man walked into a Quebec City mosque and murdered six people in the middle of their prayers.

****

Nothing The Rebel did this week, as Conservatives and contributors edged away, was substantially different from what it had done two months ago, or six months ago or last year. The message was always there.

So ask yourself: What changed? Why did they really walk away?

Think of this story as a parable. Ask yourself what it means, about where you live and who matters, who getsto matter in 2017.

Ask yourself: Where could this go?

National Post, with files from Marie-Danielle Smith

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Liberal MP Iqra Khalid as a cabinet minister.

Ezra Levant publicized though he did not reveal the fact that Jonathan Kay ghostwrote Justin Trudeau’s memoirs. Incorrect information originally appeared in this piece.

The Post regrets the errors.