The Mohawk College Protest

I’m only publishing one blog post this week. I was hoping to do a detailed reportback of the events of the weekend — all the protests and counter protests and the 2019 Toronto Anarchist Bookfair — but in truth, I’ve been having trouble writing it. After a frustrating couple of days of starting and stopping, I’ve come to realize why: It’s difficult to write a summary when the events feel like they’re still ongoing.

On Sunday 29 September, I was one of a number of people who showed up at Mohawk College to protest a fundraiser by Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party of Canada, a far-right political party (and one which is listing ever-farther to the right). But this protest was in Hamilton, Canada’s hate crimes capitol. Whipped up by the event organizers and alt-right propaganda outlet The Post Millennial — who falsely claimed that “ANTIFA” had shut them down — the same far-right hate groups who’ve been assaulting and threatening people in Hamilton for months announced they’d be attending with the explicit intent to attack protesters.

Although the protest organizers made it clear that the protest would be peaceful, the constant barrage of online fascist threats and the Hamilton Police Service’s history of passivity in the face of far-right hate groups meant that there were genuine concerns for safety. The protesters met off campus and marched towards the event venue as a bloc in order to prevent isolated protesters from being singled out and attacked by hate groups. Despite being tailed by a group of Proud Boys and getting briefly lost in the jumble of campus buildings, the protest groups met up in front of the auditorium where the speaking event would take place.

This is the scene I witnessed when we arrived: the Hamilton Police Service stood in a line at the edge of the sidewalk. Behind them, various alt-right groups, including uniformed Proud Boys and people I recognized as Northern Guard… not to mention several people recognizable from the hate-preacher attack on Hamilton Pride and the Canadian alt-right scene generally.

There were no barriers in place, and police made no effort at all to keep the hate groups from moving through their line to taunt and harass the protesters. Eventually, as the hate groups whipped themselves up, the taunting became physical assaults. A PPC supporter in a blue jacket attacked an anti-fascist and tackled her to the ground. Another protester in a red shirt pulled the attacker off her — and then the HPS swarmed in and arrested the guy in the red shirt. The protesters attempted to block the arrest, but to no avail.

During the scrum, the Proud Boys and other hate groups loudly cheered and taunted the protesters. Police made no effort to get the situation under control and one masked Proud Boy came out from behind their line and threw a punch at a protester — namely, me. I was punched in the face not three meters from a group of police officers, and when my spouse called for the officers to arrest my attacker, she was ignored. The Proud Boy who attacked me, I’m grimly amused to say, immediately scrambled back behind the protection of the police line and spent the rest of the demo keeping as far away from me as possible while taking as many photos of me as he could.

The pattern of harassment, buildup to an attack, and police arresting the victim was repeated over and over during the course of the two-hour protest, and tensions became extreme very quickly. Bluntly, the Hamilton Police Service made no effort to control the situation and appeared to be content to allow confrontations to develop so they could selectively enforce the law. In fact, my view is that the police cooperated with and even tacitly encouraged with the hate groups — on a number of occasions I witnessed HPS officers speaking with Northern Guard members, apparently indicating protesters, only to have the same Northern Guard types get aggressive with — and often violent against the same protester. Essentially, Hamilton Police Service provided a safe area from which the hate groups could strike out of, harass and assault protesters, and then retreat to. I wish I could be surprised about it, but over the course of the summer, HPS has made it clear that they’ll work with the Soldiers of Odin, the Northern Guard and the Proud Boys to attack LGBTQ+ folks and anti-fascists.

Two other incidents stand out in my mind — First, I was attacked a second time by someone claiming to be a protester. They were behind our lines and acting suspiciously towards other protesters; when I took their photograph the person physically attacked me in an attempt to smash my phone. I was unhurt. Police did arrest them immediately thereafter, and it’s my understanding they were released without charge after the protest ended. I’m still honestly not sure what the fuck that was all about.

The second incident I wasn’t directly involved with, but witnessed firsthand. When Maxime Bernier arrived, one of his aides (bodyguards?) attacked a nonviolent protester in a Hamilton TiCats jersey without warning or provocation and a struggle erupted. (This has not been addressed in the mainstream media at all, which is absolutely bizarre to me.)

And yes, against the repeated physical assaults by fascist groups — which have almost entirely been ignored by the media — we have to weigh the alt-right’s gleeful embrace of “granny with a walker” video. So let’s address the infamous “yelling at an old lady” clip, briefly.

Because it is a brief clip: It’s 25 seconds of completely out-of-context video recorded by a known neo-Nazi propaganda channel and disseminated on the internet by Russian troll-bots and alt-right grifters. Is it a good look for the anti-fascist protesters? No: I’m not happy the incident occurred and when the community meets for a debrief it’s my intention on calling it out as problematic behaviour. I’m also going to keep pushing the Hamilton anti-hate community to self-organize training on how to keep focused, nonviolent and calm at demonstrations (especially ones as chaotic as the Hamilton Police Service encouraged this demo to become.)

But for online trolls to push a narrative of false equivalence, claiming anti-fascist “terrorism” while Proud Boys and PPC staff were assaulting protesters is — and I’ve chosen to be polite — disingenuous at best. Frankly, the “granny grift” is just the “concrete milkshake” thing all over again: a wave of manufactured outrage online by people who don’t actually give a shit, they just see an opportunity to dunk on anti-fascists.

As with the concrete mildshake hoax, I’m frankly not impressed by the performative outrage of the alt-right — If you’ll scream bloody murder online over a 25 second video of shouting protesters shouting “Nazi” at an old woman but you don’t have a problem with Proud Boys punching people in the face, then clearly you’re not participating in the discussion in good faith. (It’s also worth noting that, less then 48 hours later and just down the mountain, a woman at the Jackson Square Mall suffered racially-motivated harassment; where is the far-right’s outrage regarding that?)

Fascists gonna fash. It’s what they do. That being said — and this is going to piss some folks off — I’m also unimpressed by the reflexive reaction by some of our protesters and organizers who are now publicly claiming the shouting kids “weren’t with us” or “weren’t really antifa”.

Don’t do that. Don’t throw people under the bus. Some protesters on our side fucked up, yes, and therefore by extension we fucked up too. We need to own it. We need to learn from it. And ultimately, we need to fix it. But we can’t only show solidarity when it’s convenient, and we can’t compound our mistakes by stabbing other protesters in the back. The Tower issued an excellent statement today calling for solidarity in the face of the alt-right’s pushback and reminding us all that, while the grift is temporary, self-inflicted rifts within the community are what will last. And in case anyone is wondering, driving wedges in the anti-hate community is absolutely the goal of this far-right propaganda blitz.

Don’t let them have it.

The demonstration went on for two brutal hours, and the situation got more and more out of control as the evening progressed. I’ve been an activist for twenty years and I’ve stared down the business end of more riot lines than just about anyone I’ve ever met, so let me speak with the voice of experience: The two hour demonstration at Mohawk College was the single most chaotic, uncontrolled and stressful protest I’ve even been at. The complete and utter failure of the police to control the violent fascist groups — indeed, the apparent collusion of the police with these groups who publicly stated their intent to commit violent acts ahead of time — is absolutely appalling. It’s only a matter of time before police inaction — if not tacit support — of these groups will spur them to greater levels of violence.

The demonstration ended with the protesters moving out as a group back to our meetup point. This was an explicitly self-defensive action. It was very clear that the police would not stop groups like the Proud Boys from physically attacking stragglers in the streets — and indeed, several of them followed our march with the apparent intention of doing do — so we moved out as a group. This disciplined allowed us to get everyone out safely.

There are genuine criticisms that need to be made about how the protesters handled this situation and I intend on making them, possibly in another blog post. I’ve called for changes in the ways the anti-hate activist community in Hamilton operates before, and I’ll repeat those calls now: we need to be better trained and organized in certain key skill-sets, especially on how to de-escalate dangerous, tense and potentially violent situations… since it’s abundantly clear that the Hamilton Police Service has no interest in doing so. Two or three trained de-escalation teams would have made an enormous difference to how the demonstration went, as a specific example. Even a couple of workshops over a couple of weekends would represent a vast improvement.

It’s time to start organizing on that front.

This has been a bad week for a lot of our community — emboldened by their perceived victory, the alt-right are engaged in a concerted campaign to harass and threaten anti-fascists online. I’ve personally received a number of threats from anonymous cowards taking advantage of the alt-right’s manufactured outrage. My only response to that is to stand strong and resist the urge to flinch from it. Despite the “granny grift” online, our efforts demonstrated to the entire country that the PPC is supported by — and gives shelter to — the absolute worst elements and individuals in our country. One PPC candidate quit in disgust the next day, citing the violence towards protesters at Mohawk as a partial cause. An all-candidates event at the University of Guelph has been cancelled, with organizers specifically citing fears of violence by the PPC candidate’s supporters and condemning the PPC’s platform as “really a thinly veiled attempt of pushing white supremacy.”

As rough as the demonstration was, and as hard as this week has been, we’re winning. More and more Canadians are recognizing that the PPC is promoting a racist, anti-immigrant agenda that is being gleefully supported by alt-right and fascist hate groups. My message to both protesters and the alt-right is the same: The grift won’t last. Standing against the spread of fascist hate groups will.