Fascist Infiltration of Canada’s Military Is Growing Fast
Photo Credit: (Winnipeg Free Press / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
Consider this a note on what should be taken seriously.
We progressives in Canada often develop an inflated opinion of our country’s society, because we are usually less of a disaster than the Americans. After summer’s armed attempt on the life of Prime Minister Trudeau by a member of Canada’s own armed forces, however incompetent that attempt may have been, we progressives must destroy our national false sense of security and superiority.
From the wide conditions to the specific organization, to the potentially terrible act (which will be far from the last such violent gesture), let’s consider the roots of Canada’s radicalization.
This Was An Assassination Attempt
At 6:30 a.m. on July 2, Corey Hurren slammed his truck through the entrance gates of Rideau Hall grounds in Ottawa. He was there to attack Prime Minister Trudeau, who currently lives at Rideau Hall, while armed with four loaded guns. The mainstream media has always described this in the vague terms of an ‘attack’ or ‘attempted attack.’
But we should be honest and clear: Corey Hurren tried to kill the Prime Minister of Canada. The 2 July attack on Rideau Hall was an assassination attempt.
What makes the attempted assassin Hurren even more dangerous is that he is a member of the Canadian Armed Forces. Hurren was a decorated member of the Canadian Rangers.
What Are The Rangers?
The Canadian Rangers exist as a division of the Army Reserves, but have a specific purpose. The units were created as a Home Guard for rural and remote areas of Canada after our country joined the American effort against Japan in the Second World War. With the Japanese still invading countless islands in their conquest of the Pacific Ocean, military incursion and spying across the British Columbia coast was considered likely.
The first Canadian Ranger units were local residents of the most remote areas of west coast, Rockies, and far north. After the Japanese surrender, the Ranger units were recruited and mobilized across the northern territories to perform the same surveillance against incursion and spying from the Soviet Union. But as the twentieth century wore on, Ranger units typically went on patrol only when called for specific missions, or to help respond to medical emergencies and natural disasters in remote areas of the Northwest Territories.
What made the Rangers unique in their original form was their composition: the units were composed entirely of Indigenous people, since they were the only people who actually lived in the most remote areas of northern Canada in significant numbers. For decades, Ranger units were almost entirely Inuit, Cree, Dene, and Anishinaabeg, and so the only units of the Canadian Armed Forces whose culture was Indigenous.
What Have the Rangers Become?
As the effects of global climate change began to make the Northwest Passage relatively passable over the 1970s and 1980s, Ranger patrols, still entirely Indigenous, became important to the government’s plans to maintain its jurisdiction over Arctic territories. We should bear in mind that one of the first vessels to complete a sea voyage from the Atlantic to Pacific through the Canadian Arctic was an American oil tanker.
It foreshadowed the radical transformation of the Canadian Rangers in the early 2010s under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper expanded the Rangers: their budget increased considerably, and the force expanded its activities throughout rural Canada. Residents of remote Canada throughout the country could now join five regional organizations not only in the northern territories, but one for Newfoundland and Labrador, northern Quebec, northern Ontario, and the Prairies and Rockies.
Thanks to these changes, the Ranger organization has lost much of its Indigenous character. While slightly more than half of all Rangers remain Indigenous, forty percent of them are now drawn from white male military enthusiasts from rural areas.
One of these was Corey Hurren, who this January received one of the highest commendations for good conduct that the Rangers can bestow for his work with the Swan River patrol in western Manitoba.
Where Was He Radicalized?
RCMP investigators found letters Hurren had written where he expresses his belief that Trudeau is a radical communist who is instituting a dictatorship. Hurren’s letters apparently show his conviction that the current minimal-attendance Parliamentary sittings are the foundations of Trudeau’s silent overthrow of Canadian democracy. This repeats an anti-Trudeau talking point common on the Canadian fascist right.
Hurren is not the first member of Canadian Army Reserve units to have become radicalized into white nationalist terrorism. Patrik Mathews, an affiliate with American neo-Nazi terror organization The Base, disappeared from his Manitoba home to join his US colleagues in planning the murder of progressive activists and a terrorist attack on the Virginia state legislature during a Richmond gun rights rally. His first court date to answer charges related to their planned massacre is in January.
An Infestation of Naziism in Canada’s Military
Radical white nationalist and fascist extremists have so thoroughly integrated into American military and police units that our self-centred Canadian superiority can make us complacent. Civil war in the military is a problem ‘down there,’ but not here in Canada, where it is civilized. But Hurren and Mathews in Manitoba are not the only terrorists or sympathizers in the Armed Forces.
Erik Myggland and his ex-spouse Jodi Myggland are Rangers in B.C. who have been under surveillance for their central role in a network of Three Percenter and Soldiers of Odin affiliates throughout the Rangers and other Army Reserve units. The RCMP has monitored them for four years, watching Erik Myggland continue to build these terrorist networks of Canadian soldiers and reservists while serving as a Ranger today.
The infiltration of fascist and racist extremists into the Canadian military is so severe that one of Canada’s leading human rights groups has called for a more intense investigation and uprooting of these terrorists and their supporters. Rabbi Meyer May, Executive Director of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, met with Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan to demand more determined action against the threat of a white nationalist coup rising from the Canadian military.
A Canadian organization literally founded to hunt Nazis and bring them to justice has called on our government to purge this fascist infestation from its military before they organize well enough to topple our democracy. Hurren’s assassination attempt is a sign of their intense rage, and we must neutralize this threat to our democracy.
Social Networks that Thrive on Rage and Anger
The last thing Corey Hurren did before racing to kill Prime Minister Trudeau was share a conspiracy that Bill Gates and other elites had planned COVID-19 to purge millions from the global population on the Facebook and Instagram accounts for his business. Erik and Joni Myggland regularly posted memes and videos accusing Prime Minister Trudeau of fascism, communism, and child trafficking.
Canadians are subjected to the same forces of fascist radicalization as Americans. Some of the chief radicalizers, the organizers of Canada Proud and Ontario Proud, were central strategists of Erin O’Toole’s victorious leadership campaign for the federal Conservative Party. Many regular readers of The Canada Files surely have friends and acquaintances who have adopted increasingly far-right ideologies and conspiracies as they spend more time on Facebook.
Widespread controversy over the Trump campaign’s use of Facebook advertising in the 2016 election, especially its rapacious data mining, put the platform in hot water as encouraging far-right radicalization. Mark Zuckerberg then led the company’s “pivot to privacy,” which saw them de-emphasize corporate brands and advertising in users’ experience, in favour of posts from family and friends, and groups where people could discuss common interests.
We have seen now, by looking at the social network, that this shift has actually been rocket fuel for radicalization, fuelling a massive explosion in public devotion to conspiracism and fascism. The QAnon Grandpa has rapidly become a terrifying stereotype, based on the experiences of tens of thousands (and surely more) across the United States and the world whose elderly and aging parents screaming vile anti-Semitism and deranged conspiracies about Hillary Clinton and John Legend leading the mass rape and butchering of children.
The conspiracy, which includes much material about a secret American legal code from the sovereign citizens movement (itself prone to lethal violence), has already inspired multiple acts of child kidnapping. The conspiracy has since inspired a new church organization that amps the intensity of the radical Christian extremist movement that has fully captured Republican Party politics under President Trump.
No Complacency! Fascists Out Now!
Fascists have not progressed nearly as far as they have in America, where extremists and rapists kill at will at a famous military base, and one of the largest city police forces openly supports extremists’ attempts to kill Black Lives Matter protestors.
We Canadian progressives all too often believe that it can’t happen here, because it has already happened in America. But our armed services suffer from the same poison of fascism, racism, and terrorism. The only difference between ourselves and the Americans is that we still have opportunities to root out the terrorists before it requires a civil war.
The government of Canada must not waste this opportunity. When it passes, it will be gone forever, and we too may descend into civil war.
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