Faith Goldy, a controversial reporter and political commentator who has been accused of being a white nationalist, has filed a last-minute bid to be the mayor of Toronto.
With nearly 100,000 Twitter followers and more than 60,000 YouTube subscribers, she is one of the highest-profile candidates in the 35-person race for mayor, alongside incumbent John Tory and former city planner Jennifer Keesmaat.
In an email interview with The CJN, Goldy explained that she decided to throw her hat in the ring after Blayne Lastman, the son of former mayor Mel Lastman and an outspoken Trump supporter, decided not to run.
“Our city has become unrecognizable to me,” she wrote. “Every day, a new headline about a shooting, stabbing or mass shooting.”
Goldy’s central campaign focus is tackling crime. She also promises to reinstate the controversial police practice known as carding, create affordable housing exclusively for millennials born in Toronto, abolish the city’s cycling infrastructure and fix potholes.
She officially filed the papers to enter the race on July 27, the last day for nominations. Joe Warmington, a columnist for the Toronto Sun, tweeted out a photo of her in the candidates’ registration line just seven minutes before the deadline. As of this writing, she had no campaign manager, volunteer co-ordinator or event planner, but was advertising those job openings on her Twitter feed.
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Goldy is a polarizing figure. She used to work for The Rebel, Ezra Levant’s right-wing news website, until she attended a major white-supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 and discussed it on a live taping of a neo-Nazi podcast. Levant fired her shortly after.
On that podcast, she hinted at political aspirations.
“I do not think it is outside of the realm of what’s possible that in the next five to 10 years – well, probably closer to five – we will have ‘alt-right’ men and women running for political office,” she said, earning applause from the crowd.
Since then, she’s been banned from both Patreon and PayPal for reciting – and later defending – the “14 words,” a Nazi slogan that’s widely regarded as hate speech. The phrase asserts that, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Goldy has repeatedly argued that the words themselves are not controversial and insists the phrase would be lauded if one were to swap “white” for any other race.
In the face of allegations of anti-Semitism, Goldy has nonetheless taken a hardline pro-Israel stance. “I have travelled to Israel, spoken with members of the Knesset and my video report from the Golan Heights remains one of the most popular in Israel Hayom’s online history,” she told The CJN. “I am on record in favour of the one-state solution, Israel’s wall, Israeli buy-cotts, Israel’s DNA testing for former Soviet Union Jews and her deportation of illegals.”
We find it disturbing that far-right and white supremacist figures are abusing the electoral process to spread their ideologies.
– Michael Mostyn
Ironically, her admiration for Israel has cost her support among neo-Nazis.
“She’s shown herself to be an unprincipled opportunist willing to spew whatever disinformation her Jewish media bosses fed her,” wrote Brandon Martinez, a contributor to alt-right.com. “If anything, we should view Goldy as a subversive Zionist infiltrator in the alt-right whose probable mission is to sway alt-righters to support Israel and drop any criticism of Jewish power.”
Michael Mostyn, the CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement that, “We find it disturbing that far-right and white supremacist figures are abusing the electoral process to spread their ideologies in Toronto, Hamilton, Mississauga and elsewhere in the province. However, we take comfort in the fact that they are all marginal figures with no realistic chance of electoral victory.”
Goldy isn’t the only mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi affiliations. James Sears, the editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper Your Ward News, is also running for mayor of Toronto, while white supremacist Paul Fromm is running for mayor of Hamilton, Ont.