BuzzFeed News

Stringer / Reuters Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant holds this week's copy of the magazine that contains cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad, in his office in Calgary on Feb. 13, 2006.

It’s easy to assume that the ongoing implosion of The Rebel is good news for those who aren’t fans of its race-baiting Muslim-anxiety content. (Goldy often ranted about the threat of "Islamic terrorism" on her show, On The Hunt.) On one level, it is: Maybe a media company whose entire diet is dedicated to stories like “Nice Try, BBC: Niqabs Are Not Normal!” or “In defense of of ‘racist’ jokes" can’t really thrive (at least in Canada). But many of its contributors will inevitably end up working at other outlets — or already do. Whether Americans know it or not, many of their foremost fascists, like their pop stars, are coming from Canada. (Does the language we’re using to describe The Rebel seem a little soft? That’s because Canadian libel and slander law is much stricter than it is in the US. The Rebel often toes this line in their coverage since they function in a Canadian legal context; this piece, then, lives in that same context.) Levant was able to build his media company into a success partly because he has a long history in Canadian media, not just as a former Reform Party of Canada stunt coordinator and a former newspaper columnist, but as as someone who aligns himself with at least one tenet of Nazism until it didn’t serve him well. (Years ago, Levant began using the term lügenpresse, a German word that means "lying press,” a slur Nazis used when talking about non-Nazi media.) He's also the same person who suggested that Muslim immigrants in Europe were causing a rape crisis in Sweden and an uptick in anti-Semitism in Denmark. But don’t worry — he went on a “week long fact-finding trip to Europe” in 2016. In 2010, he joined Sun Media — the now-defunct owner of several conservative Canadian tabloids — as a columnist and later, in 2011, as on-air talent for Sun News Network. Sun TV, as well as Levant’s show, The Source, skewed very far right, often delving into important topics like whether Calgary, Alberta’s first (and only, and current) Muslim mayor was “an anti-Christian bigot” or how “the phrase 'gypsy' and 'cheater' have been so interchangeable historically that the word has entered the English language as a verb: 'He gypped me.'” Sun News imploded at 5 in the morning in the dead of winter in 2015. It had no ratings and no money, and the federal broadcast regulator was not keen on giving it a spot on Canadian basic cable. That same year, Levant launched The Rebel. Levant’s link to mainstream journalism helped legitimize what he was doing with The Rebel, even if the content was often offensive or alienating. Under the guise of claiming he was counterbalancing the liberal media, Levant was able to bring on writers and contributors who were young and hungry, but also ones who were older and established, with recognizable names in Canadian media. He was even able to get access: Andrew Scheer, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party (the party of opposition to Trudeau’s Liberals), appeared on The Rebel earlier this year, where he and Goldy chatted about duck hunting on her show. Levant tended to go after correspondents who were young, were in tune with youth culture (even if that culture was racist), knew how to troll, and were ready for a fight. They gave The Rebel a kind of twisted sex appeal.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images The alt-right leader and former cofounder of Vice Magazine Gavin McInnes attends an Act for America rally to protest sharia law on June 10, 2017, in Foley Square in New York City. Members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, right-wing Trump supporting groups who are willing to directly confront and engage left-wing anti-Trump protesters, attended the event.