Ezra Levant: Canadian Hero

Ezra Levant

I'm thinking now I may have been conned by official claims that the Danforth mass shooting in Toronto was not a terrorist attack.

I think Ezra Levant was first on the case, pointing out that the shooter's obviously Muslim name was not immediately released, and then released at effectively the same time as a “letter from the family” explaining that he was severely mentally ill. And the letter was suspiciously slick, as if written by some PR flack. When this is pointed out, it does look as though the authorities themselves were colluding to convince the public that it was not a terrorist attack.

Such a deliberate misdirection of the public would be entirely within the traditions of the British civil service. Broadly, the British civil service has always considered it their duty to mislead the public if this seemed to be in the best interests of the state and of public order. Witness the recent suppression of the existence of rape gangs in parts of Britain.

So why wouldn't the Canadian public services have the same ethos?

You don't want public panic. You don't want lynch mobs attacking local Muslims. Most of all, you don't want people thinking the government does not have everything under control.

Levant wanted to know where a crazy person got an illegal gun, and where did he learn to shoot it so well? He looked like a soldier.

Another good question. This is generally a problem with attributing such mass killings to mental illness. Severe mental illness, mental illness severe enough to plausibly cause such an outburst of violence, would also be disabling. It is hard to make any long range plan and pull it off if you are hallucinating and delusional. Granted that the killer had “mental health problems”; as do just about all mass shooters. But these “mental health problems” do not themselves explain what happened.

Reports are that the killer regularly met a large group of people in an area near his apartment. Maybe twenty people. Something like a gang. He worked at a grocery store, and neighbours and co-workers said he was friendly and always seemed cheerful.

Not very disabled socially. Severe mental illness is generally alienating from others; that's why psychiatrists used to be called “alienists.” This level of social contact does not tally with a severe “mental illness.” Other, that is, than the “personality disorders”: psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism, borderline personality, antisocial personality etc. Which are now called “mental illnesses.” They can be very social. And serial killers invariably have them. But these are not really mental illnesses as commonly understood; they pretty much amount to simply being a habitually bad person.

Where did he get the gun? Now it turns out that his brother's apartment was raided by police just last September, and they turned up 33 guns. So that one's not hard to figure. But the fact that his brother was hoarding 33 guns really does suggest that something organized, and not mental illness, was behind the attack. There was some gang activity going on. It does not help allay suspicions, either, that ISIS has taken credit for the attack.

On top of that, the police found 43 kilos of the drug carfentanil in the brother's apartment. This is an extremely potent drug, apparently, that can be sold like heroin on the street.

However, the quantity found is almost absurdly large for that purpose: enough not just to get the entire population of Canada high at once, but to kill them all at once with an overdose. Seems that supply and demand are out of kilter here.

And there's the thing. Carfentanil is powerful enough to be an effective chemical weapon even in very small quantities. It is recognized as one, and has been used as one. And this is actually the simplest explanation for such a huge quantity being found along with 33 firearms: a terrorist attack was being planned. They had a WMD, in the middle of Toronto, and were all ready to go. Hit a subway station, hit the Eaton Centre. The brother somehow managed to inadvertently expose himself to the drug and went into coma, the cache was discovered, and little brother was left to undertake plan B.

This time, we were lucky.