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.

Think about that. There are violent hate groups meeting outside of City Hall every week, and who clearly view counter-protesters’ kids are acceptable targets. And police won’t do anything about it. Not can’t. Won’t.

I’ll get back to cops in a bit. But I want to touch on the Yellow Vests and their allied hate groups, such as the so-called “Soldiers of Odin” (or whatever noun they’re using this week), and the Canadian Nationalist Party among others. Back when they started I tried, honestly tried, to understand where the Yellow Vests were coming from and what their goals are as an organization; they started as pro-pipeline and anti-Liberal Party, but very quickly descended into anti-immigrant rhetoric, which then became anti-Muslim bigotry, and are now extremely homophobic and racist. If ever the Canadian version of the Yellow Vests (which, it must be noted, has nothing at all in common with the original Gilets Jaunes anti-austerity movement in France) cared about real social change, it has long since been co-opted by the worst, most racist and xenophobic elements in the Canadian character.

In truth, the Yellow Vesters, especially the group which frequents Hamilton, have long since abandoned any coherent messaging. Having been out to a couple of counter-protests, having followed the work that various anti-hate groups have done to monitor this movement, and especially having read leaks from their movement’s “private” Facebook forums, I’ve decided to share for the record my a considered opinion of them:

These people are scum. They are just repellent on every level: They are deeply stupid, pig-ignorant and racist as all hell. The Yellow Vests are casually homophobic in the worst way, filled with reflexive hatred towards minorities and steeped in self-entitled conspiracy bullshit. They try and justify their ignorant hostility with with half-assed attempts to drape it in Christianity or patriotism but their efforts are an insult to faith, to our nation and indeed, to drapery. They are walking advertisements for the failures of our education system — and indeed I suspect from their writing that most are borderline illiterate. Their ideology, such as it is, is entirely based on sullen resentment and xenophobia.

However, any attempt to understand their movement as a coherent set of tenets or goals is doomed to failure because they simply don’t have any. There is no logic to their thought, so don’t bother look for it: these jabbering idiots just spout out whatever half-understood slogans they can think of in any given moment to justify their ignorant hate; today’s saliva-flecked excuse isn’t the same as yesterday’s; and it won’t be the same as tomorrow’s. And if the lies and excuses don’t work, then they just turn around and call you the fascist, or the homophobe, or whatever. Arguments are wasted on these smugly obtuse pricks.

Now, I know I’m running the risk of being called an “elitist” or “intellectual” or whatever dogwhistle bullshit the alt-right uses to try and discredit people smart enough not to swallow their nonsense, so let me say that I know a lot of folks who aren’t very well educated. Ontario’s education systems — both competing ones — are poorly designed, grievously inefficient and damned near impossible to reform. I know people who never finished high school, or who couldn’t afford post-secondary education, or simply didn’t have the aptitude for the rote-learning classroom environment… and those people didn’t become fascists or fascist sympathizers. I’ve also known people holding PhDs who are hideously racist and homophobic, although by and large education tends to vaccinate against that kind of virulent ignorance.

It’s not just that the Yellow Vests are unintelligent, it’s that both physically and morally they and their allied groups are also cowards. On the moral level they simply don’t have the strength of character to look at the challenges around them and respond in a way that would require self-awareness and personal growth; they prefer to hide from reality under the rock of their own ignorance. And as for physical courage, sure, they like talk a big game online and among themselves but at street level they’ll only carry through on their adolescent posturing when their target — and there is evidence that they are deliberately targeting specific people — is outnumbered or vulnerable. The biggest and strongest of them routinely threaten women and kids, which should tell you everything you need to know about their supposed bravery and personal character.

It’s this combination of stupidity and cowardice in their membership which makes them easy marks for fascist grifters like Paul Fromm or Kevin Goudreau, both of whom are associated with and encouraging the group towards ever more extreme opinions. The Yellow Vesters are being groomed towards violence by literal fucking Nazis who are taking advantage of their ignorant gullibility and malice… and the authorities are doing nothing about it. Indeed, the Yellow-Vesters perceive the cops and city to be supporting them; their fawning gratitude to the cops and council is the servile boot-licking of lackeys who know they’d never have real authority without it being granted to them from above… which might also explain their paradoxical hatred of “government”: No one likes to be so helplessly dependent upon the charity of others. The resultant cognitive dissonance feeds into an ever-increasing cycle of resentment which has repeatedly built into violence.

I could go on for many therapeutic hours about how contemptible I find these shitheel wannabe-brownshirts, these — to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson — these vicious low-rent punks dumber than nine chickens… but it can’t all be fun and games.

In fact, there’s a risk there: It’s so easy to be contemptuous of the Yellow Vests and their fascist allies (craven, ill-educated, and badly dressed) that we can forget that they represent a real threat: Eventually one of these viciously resentful chuds is going to get his hands on a gun, or a bomb, or a twelve-ton schoolbus and take their echo-chamber rhetoric from the realm of tough-guy performative bullshit into real-life practice.

And then people will die. Innocent people will die. There’s already a lot of evidence that some of the Yellow Vests’ regular attendees aren’t the most stable elements on that particular periodic table: something desperately needs to be done to short-circuit that feedback loop before a tragedy can occur.

Everyone knows the tragedy is coming. That’s why people are afraid to bring their kids out to City Hall.

City Hall — or rather Hamilton city council — is going to have to deal with the fear that’s been fostered from their gross mishandling of the situation. Frankly, the Yellow Vesters should have been forbidden from holding their rallies the first time that one of their members assaulted an anti-fascist protester. Certainly they should have been banned after their members participated in the attack on Hamilton Pride in June. The ever-more-vile rhetoric and violence that they are perpetrating including — it needs to be repeated — including threats against and assaults on children are not a good look for Hamilton. And Hamilton can hardly afford to look worse these days.

The mayor and city council’s response to this issue has been abysmally slow. Some councillors — particularly Nrinder Nann, Brad Clark and Jason Farr — have been condemning the Yellow Vest protests for months, which is very much to their credit. Others, like Sam Merulla and Terry Whitehead, are either dismissive of the threat or actively blaming the victims. And as anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time knows, Mayor Fred Eisenberger has woefully mishandled the whole file from day one.

(To Hamilton City Council directly: This isn’t going away anytime soon, guys. It’s something that’s going to have to be reckoned with and let’s face it, sooner is going to be so much better for the city and all your careers than later. Hiring a consultant is only delaying the inevitable, and frankly any consultant worth his salt is going to tell you exactly what we’ve all been telling you for months: Ban the hate groups and investigate the HPS.)

Now, Fred Eisenberger, as I mentioned in Part I, did show up at last Saturday’s anti-hate rally with several city councillors, which is a very good thing. However, he was only there briefly: He came by for some photos before heading off on vacation and gave a pretty generic tweet about how well the day went, completely failing to mention any problems. I feel like this was a metaphor for his entire approach to the situation: after months of people shouting their heads off for him to do something, anything, he came out for a short photo-op and was long gone before the Yellow Vests even showed up… much less before one of them tried to intimidate the crowd with a school bus, a group of fascist thugs attacked a counter-protester, and police brutally arrested the victim before throwing him to the face-first into the concrete and locking him in an overheating police cruiser for forty minutes.

In fact, it’s the conduct of the Hamilton Police Service which is most concerning about last weekend. I wryly complained on Twitter that the “Hate Bus” driver, Martin Brousseau, got let off without so much as a ticket for illegally parking his bus on the sidewalk, and several other people have echoed me.

I was being sarcastic: a parking ticket is by no means an appropriate response to what Brousseau did. He wasn’t illegally parking his vehicle, he was pointing a weapon at a crowd of counter-protesters in an attempt to intimidate them. And when you realize that’s what he did you realize that the police response was grossly inappropriate for the situation. They should have gotten the crowd back, arrested the driver, checked the bus for weapons or explosives, and then cleared it away. Instead, they responded with a casual chat by three cops in bike shorts, followed by a handshake and letting him park somewhere else before he came back to the protest wearing body armour and carrying a metal flagpole, which he would later use to assault a counter-protester.

The police allowed the people who assaulted counter-protester Woody Boychuk to walk. While they were arresting him they left the crowd completely exposed to fascist violence, and Brousseau took advatange of it. And their treatment of Boychuk, who was locked in a hot patrol car, in August, with no air-conditioning and the windows rolled up? That’s being openly described in the community as torture; I’ve heard it described as attempted murder. In my opinion at the very least it’s police brutality. When LGBTQ+ community leaders tried to question police about the blatant discrepancy, they were rebuffed.

The Hamilton Police Service is permitting the Yellow Vests to threaten, intimidate and openly assault counter-protesters. This is something they’ve been doing for months; at least since the violence at Pride — and that violence was also something the police allowed to happen in revenge for perceived slights from the LGBTQ+ community in Hamilton. In the aftermath of Pride, police arrested a number of people from the anarchist and anti-fascist groups associated with The Tower, but only one Pride attacker, Chris “Helmet Guy” Vanderweide, has been arrested for their assaults, and even then only because of intense public pressure… and the HPS didn’t make the arrest, the Waterloo Regional cops did.

The Hamilton Police have shown at every opportunity that they are on the side of and supporting the hate groups: That’s the only conclusion that a reasonable person watching this situation can make. They arrested Cedar Hopperton for the “crime” of condemning Police inaction. They focused their post-Pride attack efforts on harassing and targeting the city’s anarchist community. And last week they arrested, brutalized and –at the very least– deliberately endangered the life of Woody Boychuk.

And through it all, rather than protecting the community, the HPS has taken every opportunity to encourage and empower the Yellow Vesters while simultaneously degrading, demeaning and victimizing counter-protesters. As has been frequently observed, during the Yellow Vest demonstrations at City Hall the police don’t stand between the two sides, they stand on the side of the Yellow Vests and face the counter-protesters; they are standing with the fascists. The hate groups see the gentle way that police treat them and the brutal way they treat their enemies, and they can only come to one triumphant conclusion: The Hamilton Police Service is on their side.

This is unacceptable. This is, in fact, appalling. That the police appear to be actively engaged with and supporting the fascist hate groups who are abusing and assaulting citizens in the streets would, in any normal city, a crisis of national proportions. The most generous assessment of the situation I can make is that they want the hate groups to be emboldened and attack minorities in Hamilton, presumably so that they can use the violence as an excuse to crack down on the anarchist and anti-fascist youth that they identify as a threat. The police are therefore complicit with — if not actively colluding with — the continued flood of hate crimes across the city, and it appears from last weekend’s action that the HPS is trying to deliberately sabotage City Council’s efforts to calm the situtation.

The Hamilton Police Service has failed in its professional duty and it has betrayed the public trust. There is no confidence in the community that the police will protect minorities in the face of fascist hate. None.

Some things need to happen immediately: First, Police Chief Eric Girt needs to take responsibility for the utter failure of his force’s professionalism and resign. His replacement (presumably either Deputy Chief Frank Bergen or Deputy Chief San Kinsella) needs to immediately begin an internal investigation into the conduct of police, and cooperate fully with the external investigations being conducted by the OIRPD. Action Team officer Stephen Tamm, who locked Boychuk in a sweltering police cruiser and ignored his pleas to open the windows, needs to be suspended immediately, pending an investigation into police brutality.

Most of all the City of Hamilton must call in another police force to maintain order during public demonstrations. The HPS, through malice or incompetence or both, has proven unwilling or unable to protect the public and therefore cannot be trusted in these situations. It’s as simple as that.

These need to be the first steps in a comprehensive and radical reform of the Hamilton Police Service, including rooting out officers with racist and fascist sympathies, which must lead to a broad-ranging effort of rehabilitating the HPS into an effective, trusted, and community-oriented professional police service. It’s going to be a long, painful and expensive process, but if the people of Hamilton are ever to have any trust in their police again, this is what needs to happen.

It won’t.

There are too many vested interests (pun not intended), too many bureaucratic hurdles, and too ingrained a culture of reactionary racism and homophobia. And that’s just in the police force. Hamilton’s municipal civil service as a whole is infamous for its cover-ups, backroom dealing, and toxic culture. Hamilton’s city council is almost powerless to change anything in the face of ponderous bureaucratic inertia… even if they wanted to.

So the situation won’t change. The police won’t act professionally. City council won’t ban the hate groups. The Yellow Vests won’t go away… and will in fact get more and more extreme and violent as time goes on.

And in the end I fear, as we all fear, that the fascist’s violence will escalate into murder.

To defend the community, we therefore need to organize the community. Despite genuine fears of fascist and police violence, Hamilton’s no-hate community is growing fast, vocally enthusiastic… and unfortunately rather disorganized. Hundreds of counter-protesters milling about on the steps of City Hall are great, but as my experiences last week show, there’s not a lot of structure going on. This is not a criticism of the many people coming out against the hate groups, or if it is, it’s intended as constructive criticism as opposed to fault-finding.

We need some specific grassroots community organizing around these regular counter-demos in order to be effective at resisting the growth of fascism.

First, and most importantly, we need to organize workshops training people on non-violent direct action and de-escalation techniques. As I observed last week, at a demonstration emotions can run high and tensions can spike very quickly: the correct way to react to and defuse those situations is not something that people just know — it’s a set of skills and those skills need to be taught and practised.

We also need affinity group training to maximize the effectiveness of grassroots organizing. Given the actions of the police, we also need workshops training people in passive resistance, how to be arrested properly (that’s an actual thing), what our legal rights are, and so forth.

At the community level, we should set up working groups to establish important services, such as medical support (right now I don’t think we have a street medic group in Hamilton); a media coordination team to represent the counter-protesters; an intelligence working group to keep an eye on what the YVs are planning; documentation teams to record everything the Yellow Vests and police do at these events (everything should be recorded, and there needs to be a better way to collate that information than catch-as-catch-can making requests on Twitter); de-escalation teams to keep things from getting out of hand at street level… and community-defence teams to protect the counter-protesters when things do.

In short, we as a community need to get our collective asses together and start some real tactical and strategic organization to defeat this threat. There can be no more milling around on the steps of City Hall wondering who’s supposed to be doing what and who’s protecting us from who. The threat is too great to just show up and hope. We need to leverage our most powerful tool in the fight against fascism — community solidarity.

Organize! We’re in this for the long haul — let’s make sure that our efforts bear fruit. We need to organize because the police and city hall won’t protect us, so we have to protect us. And we need to have one clear goal in sight: A safe and hate-free community for everyone.