Just about a century ago, on October 15, 1925, the Picton Gazette ran a short notice, FIERY CROSS BLAZED NEAR TOWN RESERVOIR.

“The fiery cross denoting activity of the Ku Klux Klan blazed forth from the hill south of the town. It was noted a little after 11 p.m. and burned until after midnight.”

Just last week, another lynch mob formed on local Facebook community pages in response to two events at the Picton Main Street Tim Hortons. In one, reported on in this issue, a Tim Hortons manager was fired after a 17-year-old employee complained the manager had suggested that she marry her brother for immigration purposes. The young woman was allegedly offered $15 -20,000 to cooperate.

In another, the husband of a fired Tim Horton’s employee was picketing the property with a sign that read, “Terminated my wife then banned me cause I’m white.”

Comments in various threads expressed racial hatred, fear of immigrants, and suspicions of all kinds about a formerly beloved neighbourhood institution, Timmies. “Thank god there are still some whites working there,” noted one.

“Is this when we play the song ‘try that in a small town’, grab our pitchforks and torches and chase them outta town? Let me know because I’m down!” said another. For a moment I was hopeful of some irony. But no.

“Time to deal with stuff the old fashion way,” suggested another, whose profile shows he was born in this millennium.

“Just find out where he lives and make his stay in this country very uncomfortable … legally of course … protest in front of his house, etc,” chimed in another. “Get ’em all deported too.”

The general tenor of the conversation can be summed up in a couple of one-liners: “Every last one of them should be deported.” And, “stay County Strong boys.”

I checked my calendar to see if this was not, in fact, 1925.

Despite the oft-repeated caveat, “this is not a post about race,” the story gets its traction from the fact that the family that owns and operates the Picton Tim Hortons is East Indian. That detail brings together  several hot-button topics: the temporary foreign worker program, which apparently steals our jobs; racial inter-marriage, which steals our women; and immigrants in general, who are stealing our country.

Lamenting the lack of mainstream media coverage for race-inflected County crime, many commenters suggested Rebel News might come to amplify the hate.

Rebel News. “News from the people for the people,” as one commenter put it.

It’s worth noting that Rebel News has failed repeatedly to meet the standard of a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization. To obtain this designation, a news outlet must demonstrate it produces original news, regulated by professional ethics around fact checking and representing multiple points of view. For the record, the Picton Gazette is QCJO designated.

Rebel News applied in 2021 for QCJO designation. The CRA rejected the application on the grounds that less than 1 percent of its content is actually news. Most of it is misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is when a claim is false. Disinformation is when a false claim is made deliberately.

Rebel appealed the CRA decision and was turned down again. In 2023, it appealed to federal court. The court ruled in 2024 that what Rebel News passes off as news coverage “was not based on facts, nor were multiple perspectives actively pursued, researched, analyzed, or explained by a journalist for the organization.”

Rather than report the news, Rebel likes to create it. Like its hate campaign against Tim Hortons — which it calls “Singh Hortons” — now here in our town. Much of the rhetoric cycling through the local Facebook groups can be traced back to this campaign.

Summoned by Matt Monroe, the uncle of the young woman in question, Rebel came running. A video it posted to its YouTube site features an extended interview with Mr. Monroe. He represents the facts of the story — until interviewer Tamara Ugolini launches into leading questions like, “at what point did you notice that this Tim Hortons started to shift gears, where it was no longer that old-stock Canadian heritage-based franchise?”

At another point, Ms. Ugolini notes, “you can now get a serving of immigration fraud alongside your double double.” 

The interview went far beyond the local story, and Mr. Monroe’s unfortunate niece, and deep into the land of Pierre Poilievre’s immigration-hating defenders of an imaginary White Canada.

Ms. Ugolini supplies lines like, “Labour Market Impact Assessments [LMIA] could subsidize this Tim Hortons and other small fast-food chains.” She repeatedly asserts that such LMIAs “allow for the employer to receive federal government funding to hire temporary foreign workers.”

The Canadian Press investigated claims posted on X and TikTok about Canada’s foreign worker programs. It found, “while some employers are eligible for a wage subsidy when hiring immigrant newcomers under certain provincial or federal programs, these programs are also available to citizens and of temporary duration.” 

The Canadian Press could find no current wage subsidy programs available exclusively to immigrants – all are also available to Canadian citizens. It is not, as Ms. Ugolini states, “federal government funding to hire temporary foreign workers.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Ugolini also manages to get Mr. Monroe to weigh in on crime rates. “Crime has skyrocketed here,” he says. “A lot of Canada is not safe anymore and it’s just every day on the news, there’s carjackings, there’s home invasions, there’s robberies, there’s fraud investigations, there’s rapes and pedophilia and everything going on.”

“Every day on Rebel News,” he probably should have said. Rebel News profits from spreading fear and hatred, especially of immigrants to Canada. Its existence depends on it.

Crime in Canada is down across the board: nationally, provincially, locally. Stats Can shows crime in Ontario has dropped over the past five years, including in Kingston and Belleville. Retiring staff sergeant John Hatch’s 2024 year-end report showed Prince Edward County has had just one murder in the last seven years. Mischief and break-and-enters were at or near seven-year lows.

Rebel News, with its interviews and videotapes, its fact-free “reporting,” turns to social media to amplify lies and disinformation. It came to Picton to turn an unfortunate episode into propaganda for a hate-filled agenda. On X, Rebel News links its Picton video to a petition demanding “Net Zero Immigration.”

Fake news, hate news. It’s all bad news.