The Hungover Pundit

The Proud Boys are Terrorists

I’m taking a break from physio exercises, anti-inflammatory meds, way too much time spent in MMOs and the general malaise of eleven months of pandemic self-isolation and/or official lockdowns-of-debatable-effectiveness to weigh in on this.

As of 12:30 EST today, Canada has added the “Proud Boys” to it’s official list of terrorist groups. Also designated were the Atomwaffen Division, the Russian Imperial Movement and The Base, as well as a number of Islamist extremist organizations linked to Daesh. This official designation as “Idealogically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE) terrorist entities” gives law enforcement broader powers to investigate and charge these organizations as well as more tools to take down social media presence and place financial pressure on these organizations. Buy Proud Boys merch? That’s now a crime in Canada. Recruit for The Base? That’s a crime. Share videos from Atomwaffen or RIM? A crime.

(For a detailed breakdown of the far-right groups named, I highly recommend The Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s excellent post from earlier today.)

My thoughts about this are still developing and are somewhat varied, so this post is probably going to be all over the map, but I’ve always found writing to be a useful way of processing stuff, so here goes.

Lockdown

Today marks the one-hundredth day since my family went into voluntary self-isolation in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. During January and February I’d been following the outbreaks in China and especially Italy very closely (I’m something of a news junkie) and we had been mildly concerned… but when Italy began a lockdown of its northern provinces in early March, we realized that it would be a good possibility that we’d face a similar problem.

The threat of a viral pandemic, especially one that appeared to be spread by contagious people who were non-symptomatic for the first stage of the infection, is one that my immediate family had to take seriously: One member of our household has a compromised immune system. In early March we consciously began to start stocking up on essentials.

Pride 2019 Part 8 – Conclusions

This afternoon lawyer Scott Bergman is presenting his independent review into the events surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019 to Hamilton’s city council.

As I posted earlier this week, I’ve been working through Mr. Bergman’s report, and I’ve been generally quite impressed by it. When I wrote my earlier post, I was still slogging through Part 7 – The HPS Culture, Training and Initiatives, and it was difficult going, especially as it clearly demonstrated an inherent bias against “anarchists from The Tower.”

The Tower’s organizing collective issued a response to the independent report yesterday, and it’s pretty blunt about both the shortcomings of the report – particularly the recommended responses – and pessimistic about the report’s impact on policing in Hamilton.

(Full disclosure: I am not a part of the seven-member organizing collective, although I am very much in support of and stand in solidarity with both this specific statement and with the actions and efforts of both The Tower and Hamilton’s anarchist community generally.)

And, having been so glowing in my praise for Mr. Bergman’s efforts in the early part of the report, I also have to say that I was also rather disappointed upon reading Part 8 – Recommendations.

Pride 2019 Part 7 – The Reports

For the first time in quite a while I’m getting back to the blog. I’m going to do my usual caveats: between health problems, the COVID-19 lockdown (we’re currently on day 101 of a very strict self-isolation) other projects, major dental surgery and a family crisis, I’ve let my writing fall by the wayside. I need to stop doing that, I know. Inertia is difficult to overcome when you’re in pain, and that’s an explanation, not an excuse.

Ironically, the other problem I’ve faced is that there’s so much going on in the world that it’s difficult to get started. With the coronavirus pandemic, the anti-lockdown/paranoid racist protests, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing massive reaction across the US and the world, the ongoing police violence towards protesters… it’s overwhelming. As a writer, having too much to address is often as bad as too little.

Like, where do you start?

Well in my case, I’m going to start with yesterday’s release of Scott Bergman’s Independent Review Into The Events Surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019. (The full 125-page report can be downloaded in PDF format from the criminal-lawyers.ca website, and the executive summary has been published at in its entirety at Raise The Hammer.) Mr. Bergman’s report was commissioned by the City of Hamilton to understand what happened before, during and after last year’s attack by hate groups against Hamilton Pride, particularly regarding the behaviour and reactions of the Hamilton Police Service.

Core Concepts 7 – The Gun Post

A few years ago I got involved with a local community group whose membership was quite a bit different than the left-leaning activist crowd I’d been accustomed to dealing with. Local farmers, construction workers, a couple of veterans, retirees, and so forth; your typical white, second- and third-generation semi-rural Ontario working-class types. Good people, for the most part, although I knew going in I was going to be dealing with a much more conservative group than I was used to.

But I’m not going to pretend to be someone I’m not, even for the sake of an easy time, so eventually the conversation drifted to politics and it was discovered that I was, in the parlance that a couple of the folks decided to use, a “liberal.” (I don’t describe myself as a liberal, mostly because Canada has a Liberal Party that emphatically isn’t; I prefer the term progressive.) And a couple of the middle-aged men decided to chide me for what they considered my “liberal views” must be; mostly, they harped on the “fact” that I as a “liberal” must be anti-gun. I must want hunting to be illegal. Criminals love unarmed victims. How would I defend my family without a gun, and so forth.