Iowa Rep. Steve King has endorsed a candidate in the Toronto mayoral race. The candidate he’s backing? A “white genocide” conspiracy theorist who was fired from a Canadian far-right website for appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast.
Faith Goldy, an excellent candidate for Toronto mayor, pro Rule of Law, pro Make Canada Safe Again, pro balanced budget, &...BEST of all, Pro Western Civilization and a fighter for our values. @FaithGoldy will not be silenced. https://t.co/uqkeaUjm7i
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) October 17, 2018
The candidate in question, Faith Goldy, won’t win the race to run Canada’s largest city — she’s currently polling at 1.5 to 6 percent of the vote, far behind the frontrunner, John Tory.
But in King’s endorsement of Goldy — a white supremacist candidate running for office in a foreign country — the longtime Republican Congress member is once again wandering blithely into the world of white nationalism and outright racism.
Who is Faith Goldy?
Before she threw her hat in the ring for the Toronto mayoralty in July 2018 (and before she started crashing mayoral debates she wasn’t invited to because she hasn’t followed the rules), Goldy was a fairly prominent figure in conservative media in Canada.
Until August 2017, she worked as a journalist for the Rebel Media, a far-right site founded in 2015 that took its inspiration from Breitbart. Goldy, Gavin McInnes — formerly with the Rebel and founder of the nationalist fight club the Proud Boys — and the site’s founder, Ezra Levant, were laser-focused on the purported dangers of Canadian immigrants who are practicing Muslims, urging Canada to create a “firewall against Shariah creep.”
From the National Post:
Under Levant, The Rebel has become a global platform for an extreme anti-Muslim ideology known as counter-jihad. It’s a far-right fringe theory founded on the belief that Muslims are deliberately invading the West, biding their time, then overtaking communities and imposing Shariah Law.
The website also hired one of the major promoters of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (who then plagiarized from Unite the Right leader Jason Kessler), and Levant has appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars show.
But Goldy apparently went too far, even for Ezra Levant and the Rebel.
“The Jewish Question”
In August 2017, Goldy attended the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, after reportedly being told not to do so. In Periscope posts from the event and in an interview with alt-right figurehead Stefan Molyneux, she defended the rally’s organizers, praised white supremacist Richard Spencer, insulted the counterprotesters, and marveled at the “rising” of “white racial consciousness” she witnessed.
Faith Goldy of Rebel Media thinks the Nazis have "robust" and "well thought out ideas" about the "JQ" (Jews) pic.twitter.com/XOfRFq4u6N
— PeterNorway (@classiclib3ral) August 13, 2017
On Spencer’s “manifesto” for the rally, she told Molyneux:
It was 20 points around which they could all just rally: everything from race, the JQ [Jewish Question] — which is of course, is something the alt-right spends a lot of time talking about — economics, women and sex, globalism. And they just had a few sentences under each discussing their stance. And I think it’s kind of interesting because of the fact that there has been some, there certainly are some points of contention within the alt-right. Some people who spend more time, say, focusing on the JQ, some people who are, you know, more respect women as opposed to, like, anti-feminists to the point of being, let’s say, anti-woman to a degree.
The “Jewish Question,” or “JQ,” is common parlance for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, as the term stems from the phrase “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” a reference to the Holocaust.
According to Levant, who is Jewish, Goldy’s decision to go to Charlottesville was a mistake that could have been forgiven. But then news broke that Goldy had appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast from the Daily Stormer website.
The news was a disaster for the Rebel, which was already reeling from a backlash from conservative Canadian politicians over the site’s soft handling of Charlottesville. And though Goldy apologized for going to Charlottesville (sort of), her appearance on a neo-Nazi podcast was too much for Levant.
In a video posted to the site to announce Goldy’s firing, Levant said: “I saw the news that she went on a podcast from the Daily Stormer, and it was just too far. So we said goodbye.”
Since her firing from the Rebel, Goldy has wholeheartedly embraced the white supremacist far right, focusing on a “white genocide” ideology that purports white people to be an endangered species because of immigration and “diversity,” in her terminology.
For example, she recited the “14 Words” on an alt-right podcast in December, saying afterward, “I don’t see that that’s controversial. Is that bad?” The “14 Words” — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — originated with white supremacist David Lane, who murdered a Jewish radio host in 1984 and wrote the “White Genocide Manifesto” (which includes the phrase) while in prison.
In April, Goldy went on another far-right podcast and promoted a book (For My Legionaries, written by Romanian fascist leader Corneliu Codreanu in 1937) that advocated for the “elimination of Jews” and “putting an end to their unnatural, parasitic existence.” She described the book on the podcast as being “a little bit edgier” than some of the other books she recommended.
While she later attempted to retract her endorsement by saying that there was a “disturbing line” in the book she just hadn’t gotten to yet, she had apparently not noted that the table of contents included a section called “The Jewish Problem.”
Faith Goldy has retracted her endorsement of an anti-Semitic book claiming she was unaware of “a disturbing line later in that book.” Meanwhile, the book’s table of contents: pic.twitter.com/OVTKU1w1E3
— Sean Craig (@sdbcraig) April 4, 2018
In short, as the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe wrote on Wednesday:
Goldy doesn’t deal in principled protectionism, opposition to lawless immigration, or capitalist conservatism. No, she believes the world’s population, resources, and space are a zero-sum game, and that the growth of non-white communities is tantamount to white genocide.
So why did Steve King endorse her? Because King and Goldy share the same white supremacist ideology.
Steve King and Faith Goldy, together forever
As I wrote in June, Steve King’s racism — from retweeting neo-Nazis to, yes, endorsing white supremacists for offices in countries in which he does not reside — isn’t a particularly well-kept secret:
King keeps a small version of the Confederate flag on his desk. (Never mind that Iowa was a Union state during the Civil War.) In 2008 King said that if Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency, “The radical Islamists, the al Qaeda ... would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.” He later explained that they would supposedly do so because of Obama’s middle name.
In 2016 King filed an amendment to block efforts to place the image of abolitionist luminary Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill: He criticized “liberal activism on the part of the president that’s trying to identify people by categories, and he’s divided us on the lines of groups.” And in a 2017 interview, speaking about upcoming demographic changes whereby nonwhite Americans would surpass white Americans in population, he said, “I will predict that Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens.” (During that same interview, he recommended right-wight strategist Steve Bannon’s favorite and extremely racist book, The Camp of the Saints.)
Daily Stormer writes that @SteveKingIA is "basically an open white nationalist at this point," calls him "our guy" : https://t.co/IZjTMz45bY
— Jason Noble (@jasonnobleIA) March 13, 2017
(On Wednesday, King explained his retweets of white supremacists by saying that he would retweet the devil if the devil said he loved Jesus.)
While many mainstream conservatives have condemned both King and his endorsement of a “flagrantly racist and anti-Republican candidate,” the Republican Party itself has done absolutely nothing.
I reached out to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office and was told that asking about King’s endorsement of a white supremacist candidate in Canada was a “political question” and thus should be directed to Ryan’s political team.
For the record, King isn’t the only Republican figure to fete Goldy. Rudy Guiliani, President Donald Trump’s attorney and a former GOP presidential candidate, was photographed with her in September.
An honour to meet with America’s Mayor while on the campaign trail.
— Faith J Goldy (@FaithGoldy) September 25, 2018
I can’t wait to become Canada’s Mayor!
Just like Giuliani cleaned up the streets of NYC, our tough on crime playbook is going to run illegal guns & gangs right out of Toronto!#FaithForMayor#BlueLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/usI59ypWmD