A shooting in a Montreal Jewish grocery store. A high-speed pursuit ending in gunfire in Calgary. An MP targeted in Saskatchewan. What links them isn’t ideology, it’s the moment after, when the internet fills the silence with certainty. Matt Gurney, writer and analyst at The Line, has spent a career covering political violence and says the old frameworks are breaking down.

For decades, counterterrorism operated around three coherent buckets: Islamist groups, far-right movements, and left-wing cells. Each had a recognizable profile. Gurney argues that profile no longer holds for a growing category of attacker: someone who self-radicalizes through fractured online communities into something too incoherent to classify and too isolated to intercept.

The Montreal manifesto runs over a hundred pages and touches on antisemitism, capitalism, and sexual morality. Everyone found what they were looking for.

Topics: radicalization Canada, Montreal shooting, lone wolf terrorism, antisemitism, public safety

GUEST: Matt Gurney | http://readtheline.ca | @‌mattgurney

Originally aired on2026-06-23