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.
It did not go as well as they’d hoped. The reaction from locals ranged from indifferent to outright hostile, and local businesses immediately began trolling the YVs with their sandwich boards and shopfront displays. Counter-protesters and police showed up. Despite their badly-spelled signage calling for for shows of support from traffic and passers-by (some of which “wandered off” when left unattended) nobody honked.
After an hour to two the YVs — who looked genuinely disappointed that they didn’t get the community support they’d expected — left the intersection and dispersed.
Discussion in Hamilton’s anti-hate online forums has been robust. I’m of the opinion that the YV’s change of tactics represents, if not an outright victory on our end, then certainly a tacit acknowledgement that the No Hate In The Hammer counter-rallies are working. The YVs realize they can’t hold the space and look like ineffective douchebags when they’re outnumbered five- or ten-to-one, so they’re trying something new. I hope they thought that by moving away from the City Hall forecourt — which a friend once very accurately described as “a concrete canyon where nobody goes if they can help it” — they could get away from their opposition and reach out the people who obviously have to support their all-Canadian Super Patriotism™.
Yeah, not so much; in fact, most of the local people in the Crown Point neighbourhood were by all accounts irritated at the disruption. If the Yellow Vests were hoping for a groundswell of public support, they certainly didn’t get it: For some reason, normal, everyday people trying to live their lives don’t want to embrace blatant anti-immigrant racism and homophobia. (Subtle, systemic racism and homophobia, sure; Canada has its problems: I won’t deny it.) The Yellow Vesters, in their chattering echo-chambers online, seem have convinced themselves that they’re the authentic representatives of The Real Canada™. I genuinely hope it hurts when reality impinges on their delusions.
Non-violent opposition to the Hamilton Yellow Vests and their allied hate groups is working. I’m not going to call it a victory, because they’ll be back next week and the week after and so on, but now they’re responding to us… and not with their fall-back tactic of violent attacks on isolated protesters. We’ve forced them off of the City Hall forecourt, however temporarily: The Yellow Vesters are having to search for a new strategy to get their message of hate out… and the counter-protesters are developing their own tactics of resistance.
One of the things I’ve always loved about activism — good, intelligent activism — is the astonishing variety of tactics and approaches that can be taken. Over twenty years I’ve participated in broad and diverse direct and indirect actions, as well as strikes, walkouts, and so on. (I recently found the graphic below and its a super-useful explanation of activist actions… as well as being a really handy source of ideas. The source material is here, and it’s a very worthwhile read.)
The best political actions are the ones that are fun. And by that I mean fun for the activists doing the action. I’ve been at some boring fucking marches over the last twenty years. I’ve sat through some lockdowns and passed around petitions and — most recently — stood in the forecourt of Hamilton City Hall and dripped sweat on the concrete for hours. All of those actions were necessary and productive… but the ones I remember best are the protests I enjoyed. If you can organize people to have fun and feel empowered, then you get the best efforts out of your people… and that energy gets projected to the public, which can definitely help your cause.
A bunch of sullen Yellow Vesters cluttering up a sidewalk and looking like fascist caricatures of Droopy Dawg? Not so much fun. A bookstore spontaneously changing their display to make fun of the chud with the Red Ensign blocking their doorway? Way more fun.
But in researching the diverse political actions for this post, I ran across a fascinating situation out in Portland, Oregon, and I really want to talk about it.
If you follow the news at all, you’re probably aware that the Proud Boys, a violent fascist “fraternity”, has since 2017 been repeatedly rallying in Portland. Most if not all of the Proud Boys travel from outside the city (many from outside the state) to show up and disrupt the normal operations of life and pick fights with the local anti-fascists… who are growing in numbers as a result. The diversity of tactics among the Portland anti-fascist scene is educational: yes, there are masked anti-fascists armed with clubs and shields in the streets as a response to the Proud Boys’ violence in the streets, but there are also groups like PopMobPDX, who embrace “everyday activism” and whose counter-protests look more like a spontaneous street party than anything else. (PopMob were the people who handed out vegan milkshakes earlier in this summer… which emphatically did not contain concrete.)
Also, side note: We do have self-described Proud Boys among the Yellow Vesters in Hamilton, but thankfully they’re a pale shadow of the scum Portland has to suffer on a regular basis… and while Hamilton’s police and mayor are either passively or tacitly supporting the Yellow Vesters at least the Hamilton chuds haven’t gotten an endorsement from the President, as the Proud Boys have.
But what really caught my eye was the role that the local football supporters clubs. Portland is home to the Portland Timbers, a Major League Soccer franchise. Founded a decade ago, the Timbers are extremely popular in Portland, and their supporters clubs are collectively known as the Timbers Army. And even the most cursory examination of the subculture shows it’s clear that there’s a lot of overlap between Portland’s anti-fascist resistance and Portland’s soccer fans.
At about the same time the Proud Boys began their obsessive focus on Portland, the New York City Football Club started having problems with fascists and neo-Nazis showing up in numbers; this is part of the general trend of alt-right empowerment stemming from Donald Trump’s presidency. It was around then, about mid-2017, that Timbers Army members began displaying the famous three-arrow badge of the Iron Front as a sign that fascists weren’t welcome in their stadium; other supporters groups around the MLS have done the same but Timbers fans have embraced the symbol with a particularly jaunty defiance doubtlessly linked to the city’s resistance to the Proud Boys’ attacks.
The association with “the footy” and anti-fascism is a time-honoured tradition in Europe, and at some point I’ll probably do a whole post on the history of it — including the current incarnation of that tradition, the Football Lads & Lasses Against Fascism, or FLAF — but at the moment I’m staying with Portland.
The Timbers Army is arguably the biggest team supporters group in the MLS. It’s certainly the loudest and boldest in the American soccer scene… and one of the most inclusive. Since it’s inception as the Cascade Rangers back in 2001, the Timbers army (and especially the Rose City Riveters, the supporters group for the Timber’s NWSL sister-club the Portland Thorns) have been unabashedly pro-diversity, multi-ethnic and especially pro-LGBTQ+ and trans-supportive. Adding anti-fascist to that list of admirable qualities was a natural fit.
Another aside, and a caveat: I’m not neutral in this situation, dispassionately reporting on a curious state of affairs; since discovering the Timbers Army subculture while researching Portland’s anti-fascist scene, I’ve started watching Timbers and Thorns games and very much enjoying them. I especially like the supporters’ subculture, and I tweeted as much over the weekend… and garnered a welcome from the fans so enthusiastic that it actually sort of overwhelmed me. I honestly did not expect this weekend to include finding a new sport to follow, two soccer teams to support, and my apparent adoption, via Twitter, by an entire fanbase. So yes, rather to my surprise, I’ve become a Portland fan myself, insofar as a complete noob like me can be considered a fan. (In fact, my spouse, in a somewhat bewildered gesture of support for my new passion, has already purchased me a Timbers hoodie as a birthday gift.)
But back to the anti-fascism… and enter the Major League Soccer administration. Apparently concerned at the prevalence of Iron Front and other anti-fascist symbols in the stands, in March the MLS banned the display of “political symbols” on banners, specifically mentioning the Iron Front logo. The Portland Timbers front office supported the ban, stating that the logo had been “co-opted by antifa” (which is a ridiculously like saying the semi-colon has been “co-opted by grammar”) much to the anger of the fans. The ban does not apply to pins or t-shirts, but only to displays of the Iron Front’s three arrows large enough to be seen in the background on television… because Lord knows you can’t alienate potential ad revenue.
Last Friday, the Timbers Army staged what I, as an activist and twenty-year connoisseur of political actions, consider to be a particularly clever and poignant protest against the League’s decision: They were silent.
The Timbers Army tradition has always been to make as much noise as possible; a raucous, riotous celebration of sound. Screaming, cheering, smoke-bombs after goals, Timber Joey wielding a chainsaw to slice slabs off a tree trunk… fellow Timbers fans assure me that it’s a spectacle that has to be seen firsthand to believe. But for the first thirty-three minutes of last Friday’s match — against the Timbers’ perennial rivals the Seattle Sounders, no less — the fans (of both clubs) stood in the stands and said nothing. No banners, no drumming, no tifo, no chants, no cheers… just a low rumble of white noise for a symbolic thirty-three minutes in honour of the original Iron Front, which was suppressed by the Nazis in 1933. And then as the clock ticked over the thirty-third minute of gameplay, the stands burst into a joyous rendition of Bella Ciao, the old Italian anti-fascist anthem.
Fucking. Brilliant.
This extraordinary act of protest was supported by the Portland Thorns during their Sunday match against the Chicago Red Stars. Team captain Christine Sinclair arrived for the game wearing a shirt emblazoned with the Iron Front emblem, and the Rose City Riveters displayed a number of banners condemning fascism and the suppression of anti-fascism. (It’s worth noting that the NWSL does not have an equivalent ban on “political displays”, this stricture is unique to the MLS.)
Bear in mind, this protest isn’t about telling fascists to fuck off out of the footy, this is about the right to tell fascists to fuck off out of the footy. I think it’s pretty clear from their history that Portland’s soccer fandom is not a place where fascists are welcome and it’d take a bold — or very stupid — fascist to try and make a stand in Providence Park. But the Portland fanbase recognizes something that I really wish everyone would grasp: Fascism must be resisted, period.
Fascism is not a “political opinion” because fascism isn’t just another political viewpoint in the spectrum of political viewpoints. Fascism is a philosophy that some people are worth less than others, that some are expendable, and ultimately if fascism is allowed to take root, it will inevitably lead to the massacre of those it deems expendable. Inevitably. There is no such thing as non-violent fascism.
Anti-fascism is a philosophy that opposes fascism because it recognizes that fact, and suppressing anti-fascism — or falsely treating it as morally equivalent to fascism — only emboldens and empowers fascists. This is why opposition to the growth of fascism in our communities — whether that community is the literal streets of Hamilton or Portland, or the more symbolic spaces of football fandom — is an absolute necessity. If the fascists win, people like me will die on a massive scale. It’s as simple as that, so we must resist by whatever means necessary… and by as many means as necessary, too.
So get creative with it.
