August 2019 – The Hungover Pundit

Rats and Nazis

An early Friday morning on the back porch in the Niagara, the sun is rising, birds are singing, the coffee is perking, the dogs are freaking out in the backyard because they’ve cornered another damn rat… it’s a fine late-summer morning. And yes, I said rat. It’s one of those things they don’t mention on the tourist websites, but the Niagara region has a serious rat problem in its urban areas. We’ve done everything we can — short of poison — to help remediate the rat problem in our neighbourhood, and we’ve still got to be vigilant that our dogs don’t eat the filthy things, because some of our neighbours do lay down poison and a dying rat can’t outrun a husky… “secondary poisoning by rat” being just one more thing I never expected I’d be worrying about in my early forties.

Of course, literal rats aren’t the only thing we’re apparently welcoming in the Niagara, we’ve got metaphorical ones too. (And the pulitzer for most obvious segue goes to…)

Activism, Tactics and… Football?

Rather than go down to Hamilton’s City Hall this past weekend, my spouse and I took the weekend off. At a certain point you’ve got to take a breath and get some self care in… and it’s peach season here in the Niagara. There’s a narrow window when the peaches are perfect and I’ll be goddamned if Justin Long and his little coterie of fascist dipshits costs me a years’ worth of my spouse’s famous spiced peach jam.

As it turns out it, it was just as well that we didn’t go down to City Hall because the Yellow Vests weren’t there. On the advice of Duke Willis, white nationalist vlogger, they’ve apparently decided to start a series of protests around the city rather than staying at City Hall, trying to avoid the counter-protesters who by now are consistently outnumbering them. This week’s “demonstration” was at the corner of Ottawa St N and Cannon Street E, just outside the Ottawa Street Farmers’ Market.

Creeping Fascism

It’s been a busy week in Canada for those of us who keep track of far right and fascist groups in this country. On the 19th a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, Ryan Thorpe, broke a story following weeks of effort to infiltrate an organization calling itself “The Base”; a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi terror network. In that story, he revealed that one of the Winnipeg-area members of The Base was Canadian Armed Forces Reserve Master Corporal Patrik Mathews.

That The Base is operating in Canada is not a surprise, if you follow far-right monitoring groups like The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, The ARC Collective or Yellow Vests Canada Exposed. There’s been indications that Mathews has been postering and trying to recruit for this network for months. The Base’s presence in Canada, for all it wasn’t on the mainstream media’s radar, has been tracked for months online, especially by Vice reporters Mack Lemoureux and Ben Makuch. In their coverage, they reveal that The Base has been steadily ramping up their recruiting and planning “hate camps” to provide paramilitary training for their members. That one of their recruiters has turned out to be a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, though… that was a bit of a shock.

Christianity and Hate

Another week, another counter-protest in Hamilton, complete with Yellow Vest fascist fuckery on a variety of levels, including a yellow-vester attacking three anti-fascist protesters, police inaction, my being called “faggot” and “cocksucker” by one of the so-called “christian” contingent and — interestingly — Yellow Vest leader Justin Long making a speech denouncing racism and homophobia and singling out noted homophobic demonstrator Lily, in the same vein as his rambling wall of text announcement on Facebook last Friday.

Basically, being called a racist and homophobic fascist hurts his feelings and contributes to a media climate where the Yellow Vesters are viewed as fascists, so Long claims they won’t be racist anymore and everyone needs to stop being mean because that makes you the real fascists. And he can’t be a racist because he has a Jamaican girlfriend. And also American History X fits in there somewhere as well.

Insert derisive noise here.

I’m not going to bother to analyze Justin Long’s statements, because I genuinely doubt he’s sincere. And even if he is sincere, words are cheap; I’ll cling to my skepticism until I see some real action on the part of the Yellow Vests to reform their membership. And I won’t be holding my breath, even because the most cursory glance at the public pages of Yellow Vests Canada shows that nothing has changed: Their public pages are still full of racist, Islamophobic and homophobic comments, along with the usual torrent of abuse directed at the Prime Minister. God knows what the private pages are saying.

No Hate In the Hammer Reportback, Part II

In Part I of this post, I gave a detailed reportback (as the activists parlance puts it) on the No Hate In the Hammer rally at Hamilton City Hall last Saturday, August 10th 2019. In this part I’m going to do some analysis of both the rally and its position within the larger crisis in Hamilton.

To start with, a quick update: Six days after the rally and its violent, chaotic climax (or nadir, if you prefer) there’s been a lot of ongoing discussion in the community following last Saturday’s rally. Unfortunately, very little of that discussion has been optimistic. There was a suggestion, early in the week, that since so many people supporting the “No Hate” crowd have kids, that perhaps a kid’s area should be created at the counter-protest; one person even volunteered to host a “Drag Queen Story Hour”, which I consider an absolutely charming idea.

Sadly, though, the discussion quickly morphed from creating a child-friendly space to whether it would be a child-safe space… which then shifted to whether City Hall can be considered a safe place to bring children at all. And in light of previous threats and attacks against counter-protesters’ children, the fact that a disturbed white supremacist drove a bus up onto the curb to intimidate protesters, and the utter failure (or perhaps refusal) of the Hamilton Police Service to cordon off or contain the Yellow Vesters, I’m sorry to say that the general consensus is that no, the forecourt of City Hall is not currently a safe environment for children.