Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent

By Fred Litwin

From left-wing activist in Montreal and Toronto to Conservative Party campaigner in Ottawa, Fred Litwin tells a captivating coming-out story that will delight and upset right-wingers and progressives alike. There is intrigue with the Iranian embassy, a fiercely critical examination of the gay establishment in Canada, an exposé of the politics driving senior CBC managers, and a behind-the-scenes look at the conservative movement’s nasty and shadowy “counter-jihad” subculture. And a lot more.

Praise for Conservative Confidential

“This is a deeply personal and worthy book that gives real meaning to the word “courage.” Fred Litwin writes with humour and compassion about the most difficult and divisive issues in the post-9/11 world. He shows how a whole category of people – Muslims - and their religion – Islam – are being vilified as once Jews and their faith were vilified. Friendship with Litwin has greatly enriched my life.”

- Salim Mansur, author of Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism

“Fred Litwin has written a very interesting and revealing account of the swirling cultural and political currents around Ottawa’s media, academic, and political communities. This is an important contribution to a better understanding of the layers of activity that immediately surround and inhabit the federal government. It is a very good read.”

- Conrad Black, columnist for the National Post and author of Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

“Fred Litwin’s crisp and lively Conservative Confidential bravely beats against the currents of political correctness on the thorniest of topics. In particular, the book's in-depth analysis sheds an illuminating light on the intellectual sources of queer activism, fissures within the gay community, the myth of the Conservative ‘War on Homos’ and the left-wing gay establishment's betrayal of the international gay community.”
- Barbara Kay, columnist for the National Post

“An eloquent mix of the personal and the global. . . Fred Litwin's first-hand account of tensions between anti-Islamism sophisticates and anti-Islam simpletons is a small gem.”
- Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum, publisher of its Middle East Quarterly

“My unlikely friendship with Fred Litwin began long before he asked me to lend a hand in the editing of this book, and my regard for his integrity and his honesty only deepened as the chapters came in. Like Litwin himself, Conservative Confidential defies easy classification. It's a captivating memoir, but at the same time a meticulously-researched work of journalism and serious analysis, written by a gifted storyteller.”
- Terry Glavin, columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fred Litwin
• Release date: Aug 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516380817

Book preview

Conservative Confidential

Inside the Fablulous Blue Tent

by Fred Litwin

Copyright © 2015 by Fred Litwin

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of Fred Litwin

First edition published in 2015 by NorthernBlues Books

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

Edited by Benita Mehta

FIRST EDITION

Litwin, Fred

Conservative Confidential ISBN - 978-0-9948630-0-3

Dedicated to the memory of Christopher Hitchens

After 9/11, when many of my friends were questioning the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan; when so many people were wondering if Osama bin Laden was really behind 9/11; when it seemed that the mere mention of the name George Bush prompted an immediate allergic reaction; and when that ridiculous slop called Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to be in every cinema, it was calming to know that Christopher Hitchens had my back.

About the Author

Fred Litwin is a marketing and sales professional who worked nine years for Intel Corporation in England, Singapore and Hong Kong. In 1998-1999, Fred managed a team of twenty people organizing the launch of the Pentium III microprocessor in Asia.

In 2000, he founded NorthernBlues Music, a cutting-edge label dedicated to stretching the boundaries of the blues. To date, the company has released over 70 CDs, and has garnered twelve Juno Award nominations in Canada and over forty Blues Music Award nominations in the United States.

In 2007, Fred started the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa to showcase films on liberty, freedom and democracy. The Society has now shown over 100 films and also organizes book launches and panel discussions.

Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent is his first book and you can find updates and pictures at ConservativeConfidential.com.

Contents

Introduction

The World Turned Upside Down

Into the Wilderness

A New Home

Iranium

Stephen Harper’s Holy War on Homos

The Fabulous Blue Tent

You Need a Documentary for That?

My Dinner with David

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Notes and Sources

Introduction

Is Canada Run By A Gay Mafia?

That was the headline on a Vice.com article from July 5, 2013. I, Fred Litwin, know the answer to that question. The answer is. . . . no, not really. But the true story is a lot more interesting, and that story is what this book is about.

What’s been going on in Canada’s conservative movement, and inside the Conservative Party, will surprise a lot of Canadians. What’s been going on inside the Left will come as a shock to a lot of people, too. And what’s been going on inside the gay leadership will probably even astound gay people. What the big city media has been up to — particularly the corporate management of the CBC — is downright disturbing.

This book is about all those things, and more. There are intrigues with the Iranian embassy. There’s the serial fabricator Michael Moore. There’s the vulgar American loudmouth Ann Coulter, there’s the decrepit counterculture guru Noam Chomsky, and there’s a particularly obnoxious right-winger named Pamela Geller you’ll meet in an entire chapter on the nasty counter-jihad subculture within the conservative movement.

There are also the twists and turns of my own personal journey. The story opens on Sept. 11, 2001, and I bet the way it unfolds, and the way it ends, will cause a lot of people to say: hey, that’s my story, too.

But some people will not be happy with this book at all, so it’s probably best to start with some trigger warnings.

If you’re a Conservative you might find the last few chapters upsetting. I don’t know if they will make you angry but if you are looking for a safe space, just read the first half of the book. It’s because of the first half that a lot of progressives will be even angrier with me, so my advice to them: If you’re the daring sort and you think you can handle the odd micro-aggression here and there, then read all the way through.  If you stick it out, you might actually end up liking the last chapters.

Consider this book as a kind of coming out story. Coming out is something I’ve had to do my entire life. When I finally came out as a gay man in the early 1980s, it was a daunting task, but it turned out to be far easier than I expected. Coming out years later as a conservative proved far more vexing.

It would be hard for most people to imagine how lonely it was to be gay when I was a boy.  As my hormones raged in high school in the 1970s, I found myself completely isolated. I always knew I was different. My friends couldn’t stop talking about girls, and since I really had absolutely no interest, I was just silent. I’d always try to change the topic — movies, television, or hockey — but that only takes you so far. The conversation would inevitably come back to girls. I would just go back into my shell and feel incredibly awkward.

There were no gay characters on television or in the movies. There was really no gay anything. Every time I saw a cute boy, I couldn’t say a word. I even had to be careful about noticeably turning my head. As recently as the 1960s, when I was in my early teens, homosexual acts were offences under the Criminal Code, and gay people were further liable to be considered criminal sexual psychopaths and subjected to indefinite prison terms. In 1959, the RCMP set out on a national investigation to identify homosexuals in Canada, with a particular focus on the federal civil service. A 1960-61 report found 560 federal employees who were believed to be gay. The next year, another 300 federal employees were added to the list, along with 2,000 homosexuals who were employed outside the federal civil service. By the following year, the RCMP had enlisted the support of local police force morality squads. In 1964-65, there were 6,000 homosexuals in RCMP files. The number rose to 7,500 in the next year. By 1967-68, the RCMP had accumulated 9,000 files on suspected homosexuals, one-third of whom were federal employees.

To aid in its mission, the RCMP developed the Fruit Machine, which tested pupil dilation when showing individuals pictures of naked men and women. If the pupil dilated when showing pictures of the same sex, then that person would be deemed homosexual. As word got out that the RCMP was testing people, it became very hard to get people to take the test. Even if you were straight, a false positive could destroy your career.  A report on file with the Canadian Museum of History estimates that at least 100 employees lost their jobs as a result of the machine’s testing.

Homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized in Canada until the Trudeau government changed the laws in 1969, but long after that, Canadian society was still hostile to gay people. In the 1970s, many newspapers, including the Toronto Star, had a ban on gay advertisements, and gay people were prohibited from even entering Canada. Gays could not serve in the military until 1992. Gay bookstores were continually harassed and fought continual battles with Canada Customs. Gays were bashed, and gay teenagers routinely committed suicide. Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, gay bars and baths throughout the country were raided by police and hundreds of gay people were arrested. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, but the Canadian Psychiatric Association followed suit only in 1982, and the Province of Alberta only in 2010. Doctors in Alberta reportedly billed for treating homosexuality in more than 1,700 cases between 1995 and 2004.

Coming out as a Conservative in the first decade of the 21st century, a lot of my friends treated me like I was crazy.  I faced a wall of disbelief. How on earth could you be a Conservative? You’re gay, people would tell me — as if all gay people think the same way. I was told I suffered from false consciousness. I never lost a friend by coming out as a gay person, but I lost friends coming out as a Conservative. As recently as July 2014, a longtime friend in the music industry said it was time for us to totally part company. He was upset that I had been critical of Barack Obama. The basic disconnect between [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper’s moralistic smugness and that fact that you’re gay is a mystery I simply can’t fathom.

Maybe this book will help unravel the mystery.  Maybe there are a lot of things that this book might help shed some light on. That’s my hope, anyway.

One

The World Turned Upside Down

Sept. 11, 2001

The phone rang at about 8:45 in the morning. It was my friend Janet Fiabane. She told me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

I was at home in Ottawa and I’d just finished breakfast. I was headed upstairs to my home office when she called. At first, I thought maybe a Cessna had accidentally hit one of the towers. I’d known that in the 1940s a plane had hit the Empire State Building and several people had died.  Maybe this was the same kind of thing.

It took about 15 or 20 minutes of checking in with the news on the internet before it became obvious that something really big was happening. I can’t recall exactly what it was — the second plane hitting the other tower? — but I hurried downstairs to the living room to watch it all unfold on television. I was transfixed.  I couldn’t get up from the couch. At about 10 o’clock, the South Tower fell. I sat there in disbelief. People were being murdered right before my eyes.

The North Tower fell about a half hour later. The smoke billowed. People were running away. What would happen next? Nobody knew.

No matter which channel I turned to — CNN, CTV, CBC, ABC, CBS, NBC — nobody had any idea what had really happened. No one seemed able to get a grasp on the totality of what was going on. What expert or talking head could they turn to? 

I was silent most of day. I called my office in Toronto — my record company, NorthernBlues Music. I exchanged a few words with my office manager Pamela Brennan about how horrible it all was. I called a few friends. Have you seen the news? What could one say? Every now and then I’d managed to get up from the couch, dash upstairs and check my office email and then run back downstairs again so I wouldn’t miss anything important.

I’d lived in New York for more than six years, between 1985 and 1991, and I worked on Wall Street. I was worried about two close friends. Barry Godin lived on Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and worked at a bizarre movie-prop warehouse in midtown Manhattan. Judd Silverman was an aspiring playwright who lived in Brooklyn, but he worked in the financial industry, sometimes in the Wall Street district, and it wouldn’t be unusual for Judd to be in the World Trade Center or at least in the vicinity.

I’d heard on CNN that the telephone circuits were clogged so I probably couldn’t get through if I tried and they probably wouldn’t be home anyway, so I sent them emails. I was relieved when I heard back from them both quickly. They were okay. Barry ended up doing a lot of volunteer work at Ground Zero helping the police and fire crews.

When another passenger plane was flown into the Pentagon, and then another plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, I was paralysed. I ended up on the couch all day. There was no way of knowing if or when something big might happen again and I couldn’t take my eyes off the television. I could barely bring myself to make lunch. The hours ticked by. It was everything I could do to make myself some dinner.  It made me wonder if I should have a television in the kitchen.

What justification could anyone ever use for such a monstrous attack? How could anybody take credit for what had happened? Who could even think of such a crime?

Right from the start, there was speculation linking the atrocities that day back to Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network. I’d never heard of Al-Qaida, or if I had, I’d forgotten. I was dimly aware of bin Laden, probably from the time then-President Bill Clinton bombed what turned out to be an innocent pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden’s direction of bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I was also aware of the Al-Qaida attack on the destroyer USS Cole in 2000 as it lay at anchor in Aden Harbour in Yemen. But I had no idea the terrorist threat was anywhere near as grave as it turned out to be.

There were so many questions and so few answers, but one thing I figured was certain was that this was a time to stand with the United States. Over the next few days it was encouraging to see people all over the world come together and reach out to Americans in their time of grief.

In New York, the courage of the police and the firefighters really stood out. Christie Blatchford had travelled to New York to cover the story for the National Post. I clipped her story and I still had it years later. They were unyielding, and yet not stupidly stoic; I cannot count the number of times I saw firemen or police officers wrap their arms around one another or clamp big hands to one another’s shoulders, and often saw tears behind goggles once or twice streaming down grime-covered cheeks. They were affectionate and tender with each other, but strong and fierce in their resolve.

New Yorkers came together. The world watched, and it was great to see Canada step up. More than 75,000 Canadians signed up to give blood. Two hundred and twenty-four passenger planes were diverted to Canadian cities like Halifax and Gander and 30,000 stranded Americans found temporary homes here in Canada.  In those first few hours and days, Prime Minister Chretien said all the right things. He made sure that Americans knew that Canada was with them all the way.

On the evening of Sept. 11, President George Bush — I hadn’t exactly been a fan of his and I’d rooted for Al Gore in 2000 — seemed to have found his voice. His short speech was strong and quite moving. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was similarly inspiring. He didn’t just sit around in an office. He was right there at the centre of the action. The tone he took in answering the press was right and proper. He gave every impression of being totally in control. By rallying New Yorkers, he rallied the country. Bush’s bullhorn speech to emergency rescue workers at the site was just two minutes long but it packed a wallop. He got it just right. He knew how to talk to the firefighters, the police officers and everyone else trying to pick up the pieces.

Prime Minister Chretien proclaimed Friday, Sept. 14 a national day of mourning in Canada. More than 100,000 people crowded Parliament Hill. Police had planned for only about 15,000 or 20,000, but people just kept on coming. The main doors of the American Embassy on Sussex Drive were piled high with flowers, trinkets and messages.

But then something strange happened. A little more than a week after those crowds on Parliament Hill, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, singling out several countries for their support. He thanked Britain, South Korea, Australia, Egypt and France, but unfortunately he left out Canada. It was a minor slip-up — the president’s speechwriters had forgotten to mention Canada, and by the time they remembered it was too late to change the speech. But to a lot of Canadians, it was a snub. An insult. An unconscionable affront. The news media busied itself with hand-wringy accounts of Canadian sensibilities having been once again offended by something an American president had said or done, in this case having not said and not done. It was embarrassing. Something strange was going on.

I’d been away from Canada for nearly 17 years. I left in 1983, spent a year travelling the world, worked in New York City for more than six years, then in England for three and a half years, then nearly six years in Singapore and Hong Kong. When I finally settled down in Ottawa in 2000, it was weird, reading stories in a Canadian newspaper I’d never read before (the National Post) about a Canadian political party I’d never heard of before (the Canadian Alliance). But I’d grown up in Montreal, went to university there and in Kingston, and I’d started out my career on Bay Street in Toronto, so it didn’t take long to re-adjust. Not long after I moved to Ottawa I took up my passion for music. After backing the folk label Borealis Records, in March 2001 I started up my own NorthernBlues label. Things were moving along nicely. I had no idea that my life would soon take a different kind of course altogether. I didn’t know it then, but that morning in September was the turning point.

Like everyone else I knew, I was shaken to the core that morning. How could anybody fly planes into buildings like that? What kind of monsters were these people? What kind of ideology would counsel the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent civilians? Whoever the perpetrators were, what kind of hatred had taken hold of these people?

My instincts told me to turn to the Left for answers. Although I’d built a career from investment analyst and venture capital consultant to a position as a division manager for Intel, the world’s leading manufacturer of computer chips, I’d always been a man of the Left. I was a precocious kid from a liberal Jewish household in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce — when I was 12, I held a firm view favouring Paul Martin Sr. in the 1968 Liberal Party leadership race because he was strong on foreign policy. But I got swept up in Trudeaumania like everyone else. That was the year before my father died.

After high school, I passed on Vanier College because I figured it would be overrun by cliquey Jews from upscale Hampstead, and chose Dawson College instead. It was a long bus ride and five subway stops away, but everything was taught from a socialist perspective. I loved it. The Sociology of Leisure and Sport taught us about the racism in professional sports. Propaganda and Advertising taught us about how corporations tell lies. In Children’s Literature, we learned how to recognize the ways that children’s stories serve the ruling class. I remember learning about how multinationals had ruined making meals for families by having all these newfangled processed foods. World Politics finally gave me an anti-American view of what was going on. It was all of a piece with the times. It was great.

Despite my socialist leanings, I decided to study business, mostly because my brother-in-law Ron Levy had earned an MBA from Wharton in Philadelphia, and so I wanted one too. I always thought that at least socialists would want well-run factories. The Sir George Williams campus of Concordia University in Montreal had a really good business school, so that’s where I went. The Commerce department was housed in a building next to the YMCA on Drummond Street. But it was a good school. From there I went to Queens University in Kingston, where I got my MBA.