No Hate In the Hammer Reportback, Part I

Alright, it’s been three days since the No Hate In the Hammer counter-rally (and the Tower’s legal-support tattoo fundraiser) and frankly, it’s taken me this long to process the day. Or rather, to begin to process, because goddamn. This has also turned out to be a super-long post, so I’m going to split it into two parts for this week. Today’s post will be my account of the day, warts and all. The analysis of events will come later.

As I wrote last Friday, I’d intended to go down to Hamilton and participate in The Tower‘s tattoo fundraiser: I had an idea on what new ink I wanted and it was for a cause I supported; fundraising for the Pride Defenders who’ve been arrested by the Hamilton cops who’d rather go after anarchists and anti-fascists than their hate-group buddies. We arrived about fifteen minutes before the door was scheduled to open (and about thirty minutes before it actually did) and the lineup literally stretched around the corner. Before I even got in the door one of the artists was booked solid for the day. I was fortunate enough to get a 14:30 appointment time with Kevin from Community Ink Tattoos, who’d made the long trip up from London in order to help with the charity event. Shortly after I made my appointment, the other two artists were booked solid and the organizers started putting people on the wait-list. (Note to The Tower: Do more of these. Inexpensive, high-quality ink from amazing artists? It’ll take an awful lot of these events to saturate the activist market.)

With a few hours to kill, my spouse and I realized we’d be able to attend the No Hate In The Hammer counter-rally against the Yellow Vest hate group after all.

We headed down to City Hall and arrived at about a quarter to eleven. There were, at that point, no Yellow Vesters present, and several dozen No Hate folks already milling around. In fact, I’m pleased to say that the buzz in the crowd was that a contingent of Hamilton city councillors had shown up first thing as a gesture of support… and the contingent had included Hamilton’s Mayor, Fred Eisenberger.

Yes, you read that right. After months of half-measures and prevarications and sullen silence, Mayor Fred Eisenberger came out to the counter-protest. Briefly.

Now, I’ve not been kind to Mayor Eisenberger, both here on the blog and on my Twitter account. I’ve lambasted him for inaction, wrong action, tone-deafness and a silence so profound on the hate groups that he has at times appeared to be collusion with them. I have called for his resignation, more than once. And I’m not taking a word of it back, because frankly the Mayor’s response to date has been appallingly poor.

But as my friend Sean Dowling was quoted saying in the above article: “He’s going to take it on the chin, probably, but you know what? He came out. That means something to me.”

Yes, Fred deserves to take it on the chin for tardiness: he’s several months late… But! But that doesn’t mean he should stop coming out… or that he should leave before the Yellow Vesters arrived. Fred was there for a photo-op. The Mayor needs to be there for the whole day, including when the YVs work themselves into whatever passes for courage and try to swarm lone counter-protesters. He needs to see how these things play out, not just the beginnings.

So I give credit where credit is due: The mayor of Hamilton made an appearance and — thankfully — he made that appearance on the correct side. (Some of us were genuinely beginning to wonder.) It was a first step, however small, and as Dowling said, that means something. It means that the Mayor has publicly committed himself, even for something as ephemeral as a photo-op. He’s put his name to it to clearly show the city where he stands and that’s something that has been sorely needed.

The mayor was gone by the time we arrived, but several city councillors were still around. I remember commenting to my spouse about the absence of the Yellow Vesters… and the absence of any metal barricades. I actually wondered out loud if the hate groups had decided not to show for once.

If only.

We bumped into some friends, shared some hugs, chatted a bit, waved at passing cars… and that’s when a contingent of Yellow Vesters walked right through the counter-protesting crowd unimpeded. My first indication that they had arrived was when I turned around and a bearded, scruffy looking fellow approached me and snarled “You antifa faggots! Get out of here! Fuck you!”

So I responded, as one does, with something along the lines of “Fuck you too, you fascist prick, keep on walking.”

Well! Apparently calling someone a fascist is a red button word… I got flipped off, screamed at, and given a lecture — at volume! — that he’s not a fascist, you’re the fascist, he has “the right to defend his people” and so forth. I continued calling him a fascist and telling him to back his racist ass up and for a moment I thought he was going to attack me, but several people got between the two of us and the situation de-escalated.

I was later informed that my bearded friend was one Glen Robertson, who despite the fact that he wasn’t wearing his little faux-biker/bdsm-bottom vest that day — is a member of the “Soldiers of Odin.” I guess that’s why Glen got so butthurt when I called him a fascist: The Soldiers of Odin are neo-Nazis, right? Not fascists.

(I mean, I’d hate it if people mis-gendered me, so…)

In retrospect, there is something very problematic with this interaction: the Yellow Vesters were not being confined to a separate area, which is something that has previously occurred at these events. The police presence was actually quite minimal — perhaps a dozen officers in all, and they were mostly in bike shorts. They did not seem to be too concerned with keeping people apart, and they certainly weren’t containing the Yellow Vesters. In fact, various hate-group members, some wearing yellow vests, some not, wandered freely through the hundreds-strong counter-protester crowd, trying to start shit.

One of these, we recognized. Identified only as “Ed”, this was the scumbag who spat on the children of a friend of ours two weeks prior, trying to start a fight. He was wandering through the crowd, chain-smoking and filming people — especially children — and taunting counter-protesters. My spouse confronted him as a coward that attacks children, and he got very aggravated. He also got aggressive with her, so I stepped up. (I’m a big guy. A very big guy. And I can loom quite menacingly when I want to, and this guy had earned himself a looming.)

During the course of what turned out to be our first confrontation, I accused Ed of threatening and attacking our friend’s kids. Ed denied it, and kept insisting that he’d “always been twenty feet away” (which struck me as a curiously-specific distance — a previous court order, perhaps?) which I told him outright was a lie. He called me a queer. I called him a homophobe. He denied being a homophobe and offered to kiss me — kiss me — to prove it. I told him I really didn’t want to kiss him. He triumphantly announced that made me the homophobe.

I surprised myself a bit with how much anger I’m carrying towards these Yellow Vest assholes. We’ve been under attack for weeks and months, relentlessly, and it’s starting to build up an emotional burden that I’m starting to see we’re all having a hard time carrying. And by we I mean the LGBTQ+ and progressive community in Hamilton and the Niagara. I spent a fair bit of time chatting with my friend after his kids were spit on and a lot of that was letting him vent and talking him down a bit. Oh, and for the record, my friend is a much calmer person than I; when Ed spit on his kids he did not react with force. (If someone spit on my kids, I’d have gone absolutely ripshit. It infuriates me just to think of it… and I don’t even have kids.)

So yeah, apparently Ed thinks I’m the homophobe. He’s a fascist coward who threatens kids, but I’m the fucking homophobe. At that point I had to disengage or I’d have done something stupid. We took a few steps back, had a drink of water and waited for my hands to stop shaking, then my spouse and I moved back towards the street — just in time to see a school bus mount the curb and drive onto the sidewalk.

I’m not ashamed to admit it… in that moment I was terrified. It was almost two years to the day since Heather Heyer’s murder by a crazed neo-Nazi who drove a car into a crowd of anti-fascist demonstrators, and here’s a goddamn yellow school bus lurching onto the curb and causing counter-protesters to scatter. Thankfully, the bus stopped on the sidewalk and didn’t progress any further. I believe the most generous intrepretation of the driver’s intent may have been to block the view of the counter-protest from being seen from the road… but it also served to frighten a lot of people.

In the face of this multi-ton potential weapon… a couple-three Hamilton police officers casually moseyed over to the school bus door, knocked politely, and had a chat with the driver. I’m not being facetious for emphasis, either: I’ve never had a traffic stop that was that laid-back and easygoing. They were courteous, friendly and polite, and after thirty or forty minutes of chatting, apparently convinced the driver that maybe it might be a good idea to move it, please sir.

The driver of what has been dubbed in the media as “The Hate Bus” has been identified as Martin Brousseau, and he is not a happy person. Brousseau, a veteran, is apparently jobless, homeless and living in the bus (it has Alberta plates) which he drove across the country to Hamilton apparently in order to join in what is increasingly becoming the hate crime capital of Canada. He’s a white nationalist who has access to long guns and likes a lot of seriously violent people online.

We should all be worried about this. I’m kind of wondering why Hamilton Police aren’t.

After he drove his bus off the sidewalk and parked it on a nearby side street, Brousseau returned to the protest wearing combat gear (including an absurd number of morale patches) and bearing a sturdy metal flagpole flying an upside-down Canadian Flag. He joined up with the Soldiers of Odin contingent.

Shortly after that, I noticed “Ed” having an interaction with Hamilton Centre NDP candidate Matthew Green. I was too far away to hear what was going on, but Mr. Green ‘s body language wasn’t happy and as I watched he turned his back on Ed and began to walk away. Ed moved aggressively to follow, and my spouse and I moved quickly to block his advance, stopping him under the portico of City Hall. My spouse got there first and Ed began very aggressively taunting and yelling at her.

Thus began my second interaction with Ed, which went even worse than the first. I stepped between my spouse and him and told him in no uncertain terms to back the fuck off. He got in my face and started calling me a liar for claiming he’d spat on kids, and warned me that the cops were on “our side” and that I was spreading lies and so forth. I lost my temper and got right back in his face and gave him a full-throated roar of invective along the lines that he’s a coward, and a fascist didn’t want him here. Ed declared that I was “just believing the lies from that hangover guy’s post!”

And I replied “Motherfucker, I wrote that post.”

Heh.

That’s when two Hamilton Police officers showed up and interjected themselves between me and Ed. Which, in hindsight, was probably just as well. I told them to “take care of their boy”, to which one officer responded in a flat, emotionless tone that would have done credit to a Central Casting one-line extra “He’s not our boy, sir.” My spouse responded with a scornful “Then tell him that.” We walked away, but I have to admit I couldn’t resist throwing a last bit of advice to them over my shoulder — “You best get his fascist ass back to his friends.”

It would seem they took my advice — Ed was politely but firmly escorted over to the Yellow Vests contingent on the east side of the plaza, where he attached himself to organizer Justin Long and kept filming everything in sight.

At this point, I took a few moments to calm down and realized that I was being much more confrontational with these pricks than I had originally intended. Some deep breaths, some water, and then some socializing, well back from where the Yellow Vesters were congregating in the shade (seriously, Hamilton, plant more trees in front of City Hall.) We chilled for about an hour, gave pats to various dogs that had been brought out, met some old friends and made some new ones. Eventually I calmed down.

If you haven’t been to a protest, especially a confrontational one like this, then it’s sort of difficult to explain how high emotions can run and how fast things can get heated. It’s super-easy to get wound up and from there to make serious mistakes, both tactical and strategic… especially when dealing with the kind of smugly ignorant chuds that support the Yellow Vests. The long, long summer of having to deal with their ignorant hate and self-congratulatory bigotry has worn away a lot of my patience and self-control… but thankfully I’ve got enough experience at demos to identify when I need to calm down and take a step back. Usually.

I ran into an old friend from high school and we had a chat, and during our conversation they recommended a good restaurant not too far from the Tower. (These kinds of casual and positive interactions , scattered among the confrontations, are a semi-surreal feature of almost every street demo I’ve ever been to.) My spouse and I began to talk about getting something to eat, when I noticed a commotion near the curb. So I wandered over.

That’s when I met “Lily”, who is something of a feature at the Yellow Vests protest in Hamilton. Lily is a vicious, hateful homophobe and (it turns out) super racist. She carried a sign at last week’s protest stating that “Homosexuality is Killing White Race” and she also assaulted a counter-protester at that protest. (No charges have been laid.)

I approached Lily with my phone in hand… and before I said a word she turned to me and shrieked “You suck little-boy cocks! You suck little-boy cocks! You’re a pedophile! Baby-boy fucker!” This was at the top of her lungs, I might add.

So I replied, somewhat surprised, “I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re a pedophile! Sex-ed makes you gay faggot! You have to admit it! Admit your stepdad molested you! Admit it! That’s why your asshole bleeds! You fucking homos, you ell-gee-bee-cues! Your stepdad fucked you! Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus!”

Wow. I’m used to a lot of fucked-up abuse from these people, but that was seriously over the top. In fact, it was so over the top that my reaction, in the moment, wasn’t to get angry but to laugh. So I replied, “Actually, I had a pretty nice childhood and in any case mum never remarried.”

This triggered another round of frothing, obscenity laced homophobia with scattered calls to repent, stop the sex-ed curriculum and make myself “godly”. It was so over-the-top I tried to derail it by starting a dialogue, so I said “Hey, look, calm down a bit. What’s your name?”

And that’s when the weirdest part of the interaction happened.

She immediately stopped ranting when I asked her name, broke eye contact and cringed. And I mean cringed, like a beaten dog. She just shut up and folded in over herself. It was such an abrupt and bizarre change in her body language that it was like dealing with another person.

I don’t like to use words like “crazy” or “mentally ill” when dealing with fascists and other hate-groups. For one thing most of these bigots tend not to be crazy, just deeply stupid and pig-ignorant. For another, it stigmatizes the mentally ill, and I know and care about many people who struggle with mental health issues and who are emphatically not racists or homophobes. But in Lily’s case — another counter-protester helpfully supplied her name — I have to wonder. Her homophobic ranting is so unhinged that even other Yellow Vesters have tried to shut her up. (Seriously, there’s video of it.)

At that point an officer stepped between me and her — there was plenty of room — and suggested everyone move back from the street. I was a bit shaken by Lily’s ranting and by her abrupt shift in gear, so I didn’t argue, I just stepped back.

Look: I’m not a mental health professional, so my opinion is strictly informal… but I don’t think Lily is okay, and I don’t think interacting with hate groups is helping her at all. If she has people out there that care about her, please, get her some help. Don’t enable this behaviour. She’s going to hurt someone, or herself, or both.

(Quick aside, it’s been reported this morning that Lily is hanging out with violent neo-Nazi Kevin Goudreau. That’s exactly the kind of thing which anyone who cares about her well-being should discourage.)

At this point it was almost one o’clock in the afternoon and things seemed quiet, despite the Yellow Vests’ numbers climbing to about two dozen people, and my spouse and I agreed that we should get some food into us before returning to The Tower for my tattoo appointment. We drove up to the Hearty Hooligan, the vegan restaurant we’d been recommended, and ordered lunch.

At about the same time my nachos were arriving at the table, my friend and fellow-Wobbly Woody Boychuk was assaulted by the Soldiers of Odin and other Yellow Vesters. Boychuk, a well-known local anti-fascist activist, had been leaving the protest as we had done assuming that things were pretty much over. Unlike us, however, he didn’t leave as part of a group, and with a shout of “get him” three or four fascist cowards swarmed him.

The main instigator of this assault is the frequent Yellow Vest attendee (and Pride attacker) known locally as Confederate Shirt Guy, for his habit of wearing a t-shirt bearing the Confederate battle flag. He has been tentatively identified as the same person who runs a Facebook account under the name “Jack Smith“, and he is a violently homophobic fascist with a serious hate-on for “antifa”, which apparently means everyone further to the political left than him. From his facebook page it appears that he deliberately targeted Boychuk for the assault, which he seems to have been planning for some weeks or months.

Worse than that, however, is what came next. Police intervened in the assault… to arrest the victim. The attackers themselves were neither arrested nor charged, much to the glee of the Yellow Vesters who posted a video of their vicious triumph to Facebook.

The police threw Boychuk facefirst to the ground, choked him, dragged him away and locked in him a patrol car for forty minutes. The patrol car itself was parked in the sun with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning off, and by the time they were taken to the police station he was suffering from heatstroke. He has since been charged with a number of offences — including assault and resisting arrest — and released on a promise to appear.

While police were arresting Boychuk, it should be noted, the entire contingent of officers at the event moved away to put him in the police car. Without a police presence, “Hate Bus” driver Martin Brousseau decided he was clear to assault a female counter-protester, slamming into her repeatedly and throwing her to the ground. This counter-protester reported the assault on social media and when people began suggesting she should press charges, she replied that she was too afraid to do so… because she feared that the HPS would provide her personal information to her attacker. (She has since deleted her entire social media presence, presumably also out of fear.)

We learned of Boychuk’s arrest and the accompanying violence when my spouse and I arrived at The Tower for my tattooing, and we joined in a couple of discussions about it. There was, I’m sad to say, a palpable air of exhaustion in the room: These attacks have been going on for so long and with the Hamilton Police Service’s tacit support that the news a comrade had been busted didn’t really garner much excitement; Rather, there was a weary sort of collective sigh and then a very pragmatic effort to making phone calls for legal support.

I got my ink and an aftercare briefing (it’s not my first tattoo, so it was pretty cursory) we thanked everyone, exchanged some hugs and then headed out to attend my niece’s birthday party.

That was the day. It was long, hot and both physically and emotionally exhausting. It was great to have hundreds of people out in front of City Hall, especially the mayor and city council. However, the actions of the Hamilton Police Service, especially the brutal and obviously vindictive arrest of activist Woody Boychuk, pissed any hard-won community goodwill down the city’s metaphorical pant-leg.

This has been a long post, so I’m going to wrap it up. In Part 2 of this post later this week, I’ll comment more on my considered opinion of the Yellow Vests and their allied white supremacists and hate groups; the fallout for City Hall; the apparently out-of-control Hamilton Police Service and various other points.

Oh, and here’s a picture of my new ink:

Update: Part II is now up.