From MAGA Kid to Canadian Right-Wing Power Player

The day started with an awkward press conference inside the Trump International Hotel Vancouver, a new 60-storey Arthur Erickson tower on West Georgia Street.

Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric were there to launch the venture, just two months after their father’s shock 2016 election win.

It ended with two groups of protesters facing off on a chilly February afternoon in front of giant silver letters celebrating the Trump brand. Pro- and anti-Trump protesters had occupied the sidewalk all day, and as the sun set, police kept a watchful eye as the confrontation turned physical, some members of the two groups pushing against one another on the sidewalk. In the mix was a group of around eight young men wearing red hats that read “Make America Great Again” and mockingly chanting the Donald Trump slogan “Build the wall!”

Angelo Isidorou, then a 20-year-old university student, was one of the pro-Trump protesters for at least part of the day, captured in photos a few hours earlier in a red MAGA hat.

Seven years later, Isidorou is a key political player credited for taking the BC Conservatives from irrelevance to the province’s official Opposition — and, almost, government.

“We had this wild idea to take over this little party that had 100 members,” Isidorou told reporters on election night. “We did it. We rebranded it — my wife built the brand — and we made it our own.... I do think it’s a Cinderella story.”

When Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad took the stage on election night, he credited Isidorou as the architect of the party’s success.

Isidorou’s path through right-wing politics, which started at the dawn of the Trump era, can tell us a lot about the current moment in Canadian politics.

Federally and provincially, right-wing parties are on the ascendancy. According to Canadian polling results, a lot of that support is coming from young people who are looking for change. Alternative right-wing outlets have flourished on social media, YouTube and podcasts, and Canadian commentators like Jordan Peterson have been at the forefront of popularizing a pushback against liberal political conventions.

While events in the United States have influenced Canadian politics, populist homegrown movements like the convoy protests of 2022 have boosted the popularity of right-wing media. Canadian politicians have since embraced the power of conspiracy theories, limiting transgender rights and health care, and stoking fears about crime and drug use as a way to win over voters in uncertain times.

As Isidorou has gained experience running campaigns and shaping political parties, he’s faced questions about his associations with far-right figures who have built huge followings by focusing on anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ2S+ messages.

“Interaction does not equate to endorsement,” he wrote in response to a September interview request from The Tyee.

“Suggesting otherwise is a lazy guilt-by-association tactic that’s more fitting for a tabloid than serious journalism.”

Isidorou did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story, made over a period of three months in person, by phone and via email.

From his days as a free speech warrior on campus, Isidorou has pushed back against “cancel culture,” the phenomenon of people facing consequences — sometimes unfairly — for speech that some find offensive.

Let’s take a closer look at how Isidorou moved from the college free speech movement to being a driving force behind B.C.’s newest political movement.

‘Where political correctness no longer holds sway’

As a University of British Columbia student, Isidorou became a member of the UBC Free Speech Club, a group that describes itself as non-partisan and devoted to promoting “an open debate stage, where political correctness no longer holds sway.”

The club was started in 2016 and quickly courted controversy.

In its first year, the Free Speech Club sold red “Make Canada Great Again” hats on U.S. election day and protested the UBC Alma Mater Society’s refusal to approve a men’s rights club. In 2018, members of the club crashed a Sexual Assault Support Centre event.

When members of the club were challenged online, a moderator of the group’s Facebook shrugged off critics’ “thin skin.”

“Sometimes being honest means being an asshole,” the moderator wrote, according to a story in UBC’s campus newspaper, the Ubyssey. “And oftentimes having open dialogues about serious issues requires being honest in the extreme.”

Campus news stories about the club from this period don’t mention Isidorou, and it’s not clear if he was involved in those stunts. (In fact, information on Isidorou’s studies at UBC is scarce, with no reference to his time at the university or any degree on his LinkedIn page.)

In 2018, Isidorou helped to organize an event featuring Ben Shapiro, an American conservative podcaster, speaking at UBC. In a separate event, the club also invited Natalie Wynn, a liberal YouTube commentator working under the name Contrapoints, who had become known for successfully debating right-wing YouTubers.

While the Shapiro event had sparked controversy on campus, in March 2019 the club went further in testing free speech against hate speech concerns. Isidorou and other organizers invited two far-right influencers, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, to speak at UBC.

Molyneux has been described as a “far-right provocateur” who promotes “scientific racism,” while Southern has frequently expressed anti-immigration and anti-Islam views and was banned from the United Kingdom in 2018 because of her anti-Islam activities. In 2020, YouTube removed Molyneux’s channel, along with the channels of several prominent white supremacists. Both Molyneux and Southern have denied being white nationalists.

The 2019 Vancouver event was moved from UBC to the Hellenic Community Centre, then cancelled after complaints from critics who said inviting far-right speakers “promotes harassment and potential violence” against marginalized people. Members of both the Free Speech Club and UBC Students Against Bigotry, which opposed the event, said they received insults and threats.

In an interview with the Toronto Star, Isidorou said controversial speakers shouldn’t be “deplatformed,” referring to the practice of not providing publishing or speaking space to people with offensive views.

“Because then they go underground,” he said. “I want these ideas to be challenged.”

The Free Speech Club continued to attract controversy. In September 2019, Isidorou and the club were involved in a dispute with a pub in downtown Vancouver over an event deposit the pub refused to return. According to a Civil Resolution Tribunal decision, staff at the Devil’s Elbow Ale and Smoke House had asked members of the Free Speech Club to leave, claiming several members made Nazi salutes and antisemitic and homophobic comments.

Isidorou denied club members had behaved as the restaurant’s staff claimed, and said the Free Speech Club had been asked to leave because of their “politics.” The club’s president, identified in the Civil Resolution Tribunal decision as “NA,” testified that as a Jewish and gay man, he would never have stood by while his peers made offensive comments and gestures.

The tribunal ruled that Devil’s Elbow had failed to provide evidence to prove their claims and ordered the pub to return the $315 deposit plus $125 in tribunal fees.

In 2020, the Free Speech Club sued UBC for cancelling an event featuring Andy Ngo, a provocateur who was portrayed in a story by the Portland Mercury as collaborating with a violent far-right group to produce videos of clashes with anti-fascist protesters.

Egomaniacs and crazies

At the same time he was helping to organize the events featuring Shapiro, Southern and Molyneux, the 22-year-old Isidorou was becoming active in federal politics as a riding president with the People’s Party of Canada, a populist right-wing party headed by Maxime Bernier.

For a short period, Isidorou also worked as the campaign manager for Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson, who was running with the PPC in a byelection in Burnaby South.

Tyler Thompson is a conservative Christian who supports conversion therapy and opposes abortion and B.C.’s sexual orientation and gender identity resources in schools. Conversion therapy is a controversial practice now banned in Canada because of the harm it causes. Practitioners promise to “cure” people of their same-sex attraction or gender expression that does not conform to their sex assigned at birth.

During the 2019 campaign, her “Canadians first” platform, repeated calls to curb immigration, and references to the murder of a 13-year-old girl as part of that argument led to accusations of racism from constituents and her opponents in the race.

In April 2019, Isidorou publicly resigned from the party, saying the PPC was an “utter free for all” that had been “hijacked by egomaniacs,” according to a report in the Toronto Star.

In an interview with CBC, Isidorou complained the party had attracted candidates he described as “crazies.”

“We noticed that there were certain individuals attracted to the party for all the wrong reasons,” Isidorou told CBC in May 2019, identifying himself as a psychology student at UBC.

In July 2019, Isidorou was corresponding with Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, about Balgord’s concerns over the Free Speech Club’s decision to host Southern and Molyneux.

In an email, Balgord explained to Isidorou why it’s harmful to give a platform to speakers with extreme views.

“The prevailing understanding of psychology and sociology is that changing somebody's mind only occurs under specific circumstances,” Balgord wrote. “Platforming hateful views mostly creates opportunities for further radicalization for those who are intellectually susceptible, not deradicalization.”

In response, Isidorou told Balgord he’d noticed a big difference between the Ben Shapiro event and the event that featured Southern and Molyneux.

“The Stefan Molyneux/Southern event was undoubtedly my most controversial,” Isidorou wrote to Balgord in an email obtained by The Tyee.

“In some other ways, my Shapiro event was also controversial, but that had mostly to do with the size of the crowd, and I can concede Shapiro isn't at the same level of the other two.

“I noticed this, not only in the actual content of their ideas, but also simply in the crowd that bought tickets. I cam[e] to the realization at some point that my perception of these speakers is not at all the same as the influence they have on certain individuals. There is a certain power speakers have over their fans, a power I was grossly unaware of until my issues with Maxime Bernier.”

Isidorou told Balgord that Brian Ruhe, a Holocaust denier who lives in Vancouver, “constantly wants to come to my events” and he’d banned Ruhe from Free Speech Club events. Isidorou also complained about Tyler Thompson co-opting “free speech as a means to host [an] anti-SOGI rally in downtown Vancouver.”

‘Cancel cancel culture’

Isidorou might have been disillusioned with the PPC, but he wasn’t ready to give up on politics.

By early 2021, he was a member of the board of the Non-Partisan Association, Vancouver’s oldest civic political party.

In the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, The Tyee published a story about concerns that the NPA’s board had been taken over by members with extreme views.

The story featured a photo taken by photojournalist Jennifer Gauthier from the Trump International Hotel Vancouver opening in 2017, showing Isidorou and other members of the Free Speech Club wearing red MAGA caps and making an “OK” hand sign that has also come to be associated with “white power.” The hand sign has frequently been displayed by Southern, the Proud Boys and other figures on the far right.

Isidorou refused to speak with The Tyee on the record for that story to explain why he had made the gesture, claiming an NPA non-disclosure agreement prevented him from talking.

But after the story was published, Isidorou said he’d intended the hand gesture to mimic Trump, not signal “white power.”

He’s also said the hand sign was not being used to refer to “white power” at the time he posed for the photo.

White supremacist Richard Spencer had displayed the gesture on U.S. election night in 2016 in front of a Trump International Hotel, and members of the messaging board 4chan had encouraged people to use the sign to troll the left in early 2017.

Isidorou resigned from the NPA weeks after the story was published. However, he continued to work with the party as a volunteer, including vetting potential candidates for the 2022 civic election, according to court documents.

With Noah Alter, his friend from the Free Speech Club, Isidorou started a GoFundMe page, which records $8,000 was raised to sue The Tyee for defamation. Isidorou claimed he’d been a victim of “cancel culture.”

But a lawsuit never materialized. Instead, Isidorou and several NPA board members attempted to sue Vancouver’s mayor, Kennedy Stewart, over a press release Stewart had published about the controversy. They lost the defamation suit and were eventually ordered to pay Stewart $192,000 in damages after an appeal also failed.

Affidavits from the lawsuit show the court process was a bruising one for Isidorou, then a 25-year-old living with his parents. Isidorou claimed he had initially been told that former board member Wes Mussio would cover legal costs. According to court documents, Mussio’s law firm later told the lawsuit plaintiffs they would each be on the hook for around $20,000.

Comments made by Mussio and Isidorou show that both men wanted to fight back against cancel culture.

“I won’t be ‘cancelled,’ ever,” Mussio wrote in correspondence to the NPA after losing the defamation suit. “As Angelo says, ‘cancel cancel culture.’”

‘More views than the CBC’

Since his time at university, Isidorou has had a keen interest in alternative right-wing media figures and how they’ve shaped political conversations. Commentators like Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern have developed huge audiences through YouTube videos, podcasts and social media, creating an alternative media ecosystem that functions separately from mainstream news media.

In 2020, Isidorou tried out becoming a right-wing media commentator himself, making 24 episodes of a podcast called Cancel This that was produced through the conservative Canadian website the Post Millennial.

Isidorou explained what he’d learned about political communications on a Jan. 6, 2023, appearance on a podcast hosted by David Parker, the leader of the hard-right, socially conservative Take Back Alberta movement.

“What I realized at some point last year is that politics really is downstream of culture,” Isidorou told Parker. “And we can do all the door knocking we want, we can do all the phone banking that we want — ultimately what the left is so good at is creating narrative and creating stories, and we don't do that.”

Isidorou was on the podcast to promote Vancouver Is Dying, a YouTube video documentary made by his friend Aaron Gunn.

Gunn is a political commentator from Vancouver Island who makes YouTube videos on subjects like free speech on campus, pipelines and problems with Canadian health care.

Vancouver Is Dying included footage of vulnerable people in the city’s impoverished Downtown Eastside, where fatal drug poisonings are common. The video presented the view that measures like prescribing pharmaceutical alternatives to street drugs to try to curb the death rate had actually caused more drug use, addiction, crime and disorder. It’s a conclusion that has been rejected by many drug policy experts who say that to save lives, both harm reduction measures and addiction treatment are needed.

The video racked up millions of views online and was released shortly before a Vancouver civic election in which crime and safety fears were top concerns for voters.

“In a perfect world, the role of journalists is to report the truth, and it's just not what's happening,” Isidorou told Parker. “It's quite incredible that documentary, put together with like a rinky-dink budget, gets more views than the CBC.”

Using the example of the 2006 Al Gore documentary about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, Isidorou told Parker that right-wing parties need to embrace the strategy of telling stories to win over voters through their emotions.

“I'm not saying that we should exaggerate things... what I'm saying is that voters are emotional,” he said. “People want stories. We're no different from the caveman sitting around the fire talking about the story.”

In an interview with Rubin in June 2021, Isidorou talked about his experiences as a university student trying to stand up for the liberal value of free speech and later being “slandered in the media.”

In response, Rubin said those university experiences are pivotal for many young people who find themselves rejecting left-wing politics after encountering progressives who are “liberalism on steroids, they were screaming all the time and everyone they were against was a racist and a bigot.”

“The leftists have become the hysterical, authoritarian ones,” he said.

(Both Rubin and Southern would later be caught up in a Russian disinformation scheme. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice released an indictment alleging that Tenet Media, a YouTube and TikTok channel that Rubin and Southern both joined as contributors in 2022, was actually funded by $10 million from the Russian government. Southern and Rubin have both claimed they knew nothing about the scheme.)

In the summer of 2024, Isidorou, by then the BC Conservatives’ executive director and campaign manager, was excited to promote leader John Rustad’s appearance on Peterson’s podcast and YouTube channel. Peterson, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto, has over five million followers on X and over eight million subscribers on YouTube and has written several bestselling books.

“One of the greatest thinkers of our time and the next Premier of British Columbia,” Isidorou posted on X. “It’s time for common sense change!”

Rustad appeared on Peterson’s show on Sept. 2, where he said he wouldn’t tolerate cancel culture. “Cancel culture only works if you allow them to cancel you,” he told Peterson. “You just have to stand up and say, ‘Take a hike.’”

Carmen Celestini is a lecturer at the University of Waterloo who studies religion, extremism, conspiracy theories and politics in North America. She said Peterson has been able to tap into a cohort of young men who have been frustrated with feminism and critiques of toxic masculinity and who often believe that women and minorities are now unfairly getting the jobs and social status that men enjoyed in the past.

“We have these moral panics, like the so-called groomer moral panic, this idea that they’re being attacked and can't speak and can't engage and that is feeding into this constructed victimhood that they're creating,” Celestini said.

In his YouTube talks and books, Peterson has taught that societies work best when social hierarchies are maintained, and he’s encouraged his followers to look back to the past to more traditional societies for inspiration. In Peterson’s world view, order is masculine and chaos is feminine, and his prescription for much of what ails young men — including perpetrating mass murder — is to enter into traditional heterosexual marriages.

“What’s the motivation of these pathological guys who are out there bolstering up the feminists?” Peterson asked podcaster Joe Rogan in 2017, after a long explanation of how women traditionally chose men for their strength, moral qualities and power. “They don’t compete... they compete as allies, let’s say. Very sneaky.”

Peterson and other commentators who make up the “manosphere” online have provided a place for this young men’s movement to find connection and community.

“They could talk about this perceived injustice that they were facing in society and how to resist against it and how to rise up,” Celestini said. “And so that became not just about individuals; it became for all of manhood or of the nation itself. And that's where politics becomes such an important part of this.”

A scan of Isidorou’s X account also shows him interacting with other figures who are offering guidance to young men. In May 2022, Isidorou posted a photo of himself with Abbot Tryphon, the leader of a Russian Orthodox monastery in Washington state. Tryphon has made statements in support of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Kyle Rittenhouse, a young American man who was found not guilty of murder after shooting three men during a protest against police violence.

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, has studied the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, of which Tryphon is a leader. She said there’s been a trend of young, right-wing men being drawn to the church in recent years.

“These are men who already come to the Orthodox church with a predisposition towards right-wing or far-right politics, and they believe that those far-right or right-wing politics will be upheld in the church,” she said. “They also tend to bring with them a very pro-masculine, pro-natalist bent.

“They think that that is part of the church tradition: they see that the church only ordains men, they think of it as very patriarchal, and that's just quite appealing in a moment when a lot of young men feel sort of left out and disillusioned with the way society is going.”

Isidorou wrote that his retreat with Abbot Tryphon helped him “learn to confront trauma, overcome vanities and aim to be a stronger and more disciplined human.”

In another post that featured a photo of Tryphon holding a replica gun at a museum in Montana, Isidorou said young men are “being attracted to Christian Orthodoxy because they are in search for a greater meaning and understanding of the universe and our place in it. I also think it’s because we have badass gun-wielding Priest-Monks like my very own Father Tryphon.”

As with the young men being drawn to the Russian Orthodox Church, Peterson draws fans who are searching for meaning in life and want to learn from someone they see as a great thinker.

But his content has a dark side: just weeks before Peterson interviewed Rustad about B.C. politics, the YouTube commentator published an hour-long interview with Tommy Robinson. Robinson is a far-right, anti-immigration activist from the United Kingdom who has been accused of inciting violent riots in England and has been charged with terrorism offences. Since the interview aired, Peterson has continued to repost messages from Robinson’s X account to his 5.6 million followers.

Isidorou has also said on X that he’s watched hours of content from Southern, whose videos present a relentlessly dark view of immigration and Muslims and repeatedly warn that the existing populations of countries like Ireland will be replaced by immigrants. (Isidorou has said that his frequent replies to Southern on X don’t indicate support for her views.)

Celestini said the videos point to a popular conspiracy theory called the “great replacement” that is rooted in racist fears of immigration.

“It is based on the fear that white people are going to be replaced by immigrants and western civilization will be destroyed,” she said. “That is a very powerful conspiracy theory in Canada.”

Isidorou has repeatedly said he does not hold racist views, often drawing on his family history to respond to questions about why he frequently interacts with far-right figures like Southern.

“My mom’s family in Smyrna (now Izmir),” he wrote on X on Sept. 8. “Only one of them survived the Turkish perpetrated genocide and pogroms. I’ll take lessons from no one on bigotry, racial supremacy, and identity based violence.”

He’s also called on “Western Conservatism” to “embrace immigrant voters.”

“They often share in the values of traditionalism, ambition and a hope for prosperity,” he wrote after the Nov. 5 U.S. election, which saw an increase in support for Donald Trump among Latino men despite his promise to target illegal immigrants with mass deportations.

Taking over the Conservatives

In 2021, Isidorou was working on his friend Aaron Gunn’s bid to become leader of the BC Liberals. But that October, Gunn was disqualified from the leadership race over past comments denying that the gender pay equity gap exists and saying that systemic racism is a “myth.”

“I always bug him, I say, ‘You were too early with the populism,’” Isidorou said in a July interview with Mo Amir, the host of the podcast This Is Vancolour.

“Because he got disqualified, and then you had the trucker convoy right after, and you had Pierre [Poilievre]. A lot of what Aaron was saying was too early.”

The disqualification led Isidorou and a group of other young conservatives to take over the Conservative Party of BC in spring 2022, joining the board at the party’s March general meeting.

While Gunn was initially part of the effort to take over the Conservatives, he ended up joining the federal Conservatives as the party’s candidate for North Island-Powell River.

The new board included a mix of former political staffers, federal and provincial Conservative members and a socially conservative former Reform MP.

It also included Lindsay Shepherd, who, like Isidorou, had fought back against cancel culture at her university. Shepherd was reprimanded in 2017 after showing a Jordan Peterson video to a Wilfrid Laurier University class she was teaching.

Shepherd was heralded in publications like the National Post as a victim of repressive university policies around free speech. After an investigation, the university president said Shepherd had not violated any rules and publicly apologized to her.

But she was later criticized for her decision to invite Faith Goldy, a Canadian commentator with white supremacist views, to campus, and for appearing on the podcast of Quebec white supremacist Jean-François Gariépy.

Today, Shepherd writes for the Canadian right-wing site True North.

In recent social media posts, Shepherd has said she doesn’t accept the findings of unmarked graves investigations at residential schools; called for immigration to be reduced by 95 per cent; questioned why a Muslim holiday is included in a children’s book as a holiday celebrated in England; and said white people are being discriminated against in the labour market.

Shepherd received the highest number of votes to join the B.C. Conservative board at the 2022 annual general meeting, according to a story in Northern Beat. Isidorou received the second most votes.

‘We’ve created something totally new’

As the B.C. election campaign approached, some party members’ ideas about cancel culture would be tested as several candidates’ questionable views came to light.

At first the party did remove candidates like Jan Webb and Stephen Malthouse for their views on vaccines and COVID-19; Damon Scrase after his anti-LGBTQ+ social media posts came to light; and Rachael Weber for pushing an outlandish conspiracy theory. (Scrase is now a researcher with the Conservative caucus.)

After the party’s centre-right competitor BC United folded in August, more and more questionable comments and social media posts came to light — including from party leader John Rustad, who’s expressed skepticism of both climate change and vaccines. The BC NDP focused much of its campaign on attacking the Conservatives over their candidates’ and leader’s comments.

But the bizarre and offensive comments did little to dent the party’s popularity with voters: polls showed the Conservatives running neck and neck with the BC NDP as election day approached, and when the final results came in, the party had secured 44 seats.

In a post-election interview on Amir’s This Is Vancolour podcast, Isidorou dismissed complaints about candidates’ comments, which included anti-Muslim racism and denial of residential school abuse.

“This was a pretty hard-core election when it comes to moral purity and pearl-clutching,” he said.

“I feel as though, were this 10 years ago, a lot of these controversies would have been more effective.

“I think they’re not as effective now because people are far more emotional over issues that are acute to them, whether it’s the cost of living or whether it’s the guy outside with the machete that chops someone’s hand off,” he said, referring to a violent attack that happened in downtown Vancouver on Sept. 4 and became a touchstone for public concern over crime and safety.

Isidorou told Amir that attempts to paint the B.C. Conservative party as “evil” had failed. Instead, he said, the party drew support from voters in the Indo-Canadian community in Surrey and the Chinese Canadian community in Richmond, as well as people in the 18-to-34 and 35-to-55 age groups.

“I, as a 27-year-old, hate the stereotype that conservatives are old white guys in suits,” he said. “And we’ve created something totally new.”