The Hungover Pundit

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.

Keeping up with Current Events

Another Niagara morning, sitting on my back deck with a cup of coffee… and I’m not sure what to write about. I wanted to write about activism, socialist theory and how direct action works, but once again I’m being overwhelmed by current events in Hamilton.

It’s been a rough week, truth be told — I woke up yesterday to find my Twitter feed showing two different accounts of homo- and transphobic harassment (later in the day a third incident was added to that total), an extended thread on neo-nazi postering and stickering across the lower city, another friend talking about the best self-defence knife to carry for when (not if, but when) they get jumped by neo-Nazis, and another friend sending me direct messages looking for emotional support because the thought of leaving their house and walking down a Hamilton street triggered a severe anxiety attack.

As I tweeted yesterday… this is what a crisis looks like.

Deplatforming Hate Speech

I had planned a quiet long weekend at the trailer with family, preferably without looking at my phone. Campfires, barbecue, mosquito bites, no wifi… the basic Civic Holiday weekend in Canada. Instead, and like the majority of people in North America, I was mesmerized by the appalling spectacle of two mass shootings in the US in under 24 hours. The first, of course, being the white supremacy-motivated domestic terror attack at an El Paso Walmart, the second a more ambiguously-motivated attack outside a Dayton Ohio bar, whose shooter had an online presence dominated by left-oriented posts but whose terrorist act seems to have misogynist and/or “incel” roots. Together, both shootings killed more than thirty people.

It’s revelatory, however, to note how the right and the left reacted to each shooter. The El Paso shooter’s racist manifesto was immediately declared a false-flag operation by conspiracy theorists who then blamed the left. When it was reported that the Dayton shooter was a leftist, the left withheld judgment until it was proven, then turned that knowledge into self-examination.

Core Concepts 6 – Anarchism

The other day I had an online interaction in one of the groups I follow: Someone trollishly interjected the opinion “Anarchists should be behind bars. How is that even debatable?” into a completely unrelated discussion of last Saturday’s incident at the Yellow Vests demonstration in Hamilton. The incident in question was a Yellow-Vest “protester” harassing, attacking and assaulting an LGBTQ+ family; including threats of abducting the family’s kids and, it has come to light, spitting on a three-year-old child. (No arrests have been made, by the way, and City Hall’s response was to advise the family not to attend counter-protests at City Hall anymore.)

But it’s the anarchists who should be unilaterally locked up, right.

So I — politely enough — challenged the guy advocating for blanket arrest of an entire ideology, and as the discussion progressed he got more and more trollish, even claiming that he “used to be an anarchist” but that “anarchists that act out their beliefs should be punished” and so forth. It was your basic “I’m a troll and it’s fun to make extreme statements to see how people react” nonsense that I try not to encourage. My primary takeaway from the interaction wasn’t that this guy could be convinced — feeding trolls for the sake of feeding trolls isn’t my bag — it was that a lot of people in the group lacked an understanding of what Anarchism, as a political philosophy, is and isn’t.

Don’t Feed the Trolls

This past Saturday, July 27th, was Chris “Helmet Guy” Vanderweide’s so-called “Rally Against Bullying” in Kitchener Ontario. It did not go as well as he’d hoped, and has been described in local media as a “fizzle.” This is because, despite the usual grandiose alt-right claims only about a dozen hate-group members attended the “rally.” Their numbers might possibly have been depressed because Helmet Guy had spent the previous week in an internet bitch-slap fight with the Nouns of Odin. In any case Vanderweide himself skipped his own rally for fear of breaking his bail conditions — which suggests to me that someone finally explained to him how bail conditions work.