Response to the Fifth Estate Doc

So… New Year, new resolutions. Now that I’ve got my health issues under control(ish), my computer rebuilt and my phone replaced, it’s time to get the motor running and get back to the regular writing and publishing schedule that I’ve been intending these past few months. So here goes.

On Sunday, January 5^th, the CBC’s program The Fifth Estate ran a 23-minute documentary called Confronting Hate: How Antifa is Tracking the Extreme Right. In the documentary, CBC journalist Gillian Findlay interviews a number of antifascist activists, some anonymous, some not. It’s a pretty good look at what we do and despite some short-comings I think it’s worth the watch.

The Fifth Estate is something of an institution in Canadian journalism. It’s been on-air for something like forty-five years, and is widely considered the CBC’s flagship investigative program. When they started promoting their upcoming documentary on “antifa” it was widely shared in both anti-fascist and pro-fascist spaces online. I made a point of watching it in realtime as it was broadcast on the CBC. I have to admit that I was concerned that, like most mainstream media, it would not present a sympathetic viewpoint towards antifascists, and would fail to adequately condemn the dozens or hundreds of violent right-wing hate groups currently active in Canada.

Having watched it, my verdict is “meh.” It wasn’t bad, but I felt it missed several important points. First, it didn’t address why antifascists feel the need to self-organize and expose fascist groups. And of course, we do this because the cops won’t. I and other anti-fascists regularly watch online spaces for groups like Yellow Vests Canada and the various Nouns of Odin and others and in those spaces the worst kind of hate speech, bigotry and xenophobia occur… not to mention idealizing violence and terroristic activities, and for whatever reason it seems like the authorities aren’t even paying attention, even when these groups make credible threats.

Recently, as a specific example, I watched members of the Yellow Vests online community calling for “patriots” to destroy of 5G network transmitters across Canada because apparently they’ll allow Chinese mind-control or rot your testicles or something. (I don’t know, the bullshit QAnon conspiracy theory garbage these idiots circulate as an assumed fact is so mind-numblingly stupid that the specifics start to blur together after a while.) However borderline crazy their motivation is, though, these are genuine threats; Some fascist nutbar is going to get so worked up by his peers that he’ll follow through on them. And the cops don’t seem to care.

By contrast if a left-wing group spoke on open forums about blowing up telecommunications infrastructure you can bet the cops would already be lubing up their elbow-length cavity-search gloves. (Not that Canadian leftists would bomb telecom towers: We’re more chain-ourselves-to-pipeline equipment types.)

In any case, there are laws against this type of thing: just this morning a neo-Nazi from Granby Quebec was arrested for violating article 318 of the Canadian Criminal Code: advocating genocide is a crime in this country, and yet we see it happening in fascist online spaces daily. The anti-hate-speech provisions of Canadian law are limited and at times ineffective, but they aren’t being enforced. They’re not a perfect tool for addressing the issue, but they exist and they’re not being used because the police apparently enforce the laws at their whim. So, yeah, my major complaint is that, while cops will go out of their way to disrupt leftist environmental and labour organizing, and especially to attack and arrest indigenous pipeline protesters, the primarily white alt-right seems to get a pass except in the most extreme circumstances. And I felt the CBC documentary should have at least mentioned that.

My other major beef with the piece is that it was critical of the practice of doxxing by the left, without also addressing the practice of doxxing by the right. When anti-fascists doxx fascists, what we do is unveil these people with hateful views and call for social ostracism; we inform their employers, we make sure that churches and communities know what kind of person they are, and so on.

When fascists doxx antifascists, they call for our deaths. They actively (and usually anonymously, the cowards) make death threats, as I’ve personal experience with over the past few months. And, as antifascists like Jason Devine (who was interviewed for the Fifth Estate story) learned, sometimes the fascists go beyond threats and physically assault and attempt to murder antifascists. And as a continuation of my complaint about the police above, it’s worth noting that even a violent home invasion and brutal assault upon Mr. Devine and his family did not result in charges against the white supremacist thugs who perpetrated the attack because he was an antifascist.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the police. Perhaps. I’d be delighted if they proved me wrong.

The morning after the Fifth Estate documentary aired, the white supremacist group Identity Canada claimed to they’d identified the anti-fascist behind one of the blogs featured in the documentary, the Anti-Rascist Canada Collective. ARC Canada has been a mainstay of the anti-fascist scene in Canada for well more than a decade; the organizer of the blog has uncovered dozens of violent fascists and neo-nazis over the years. (In fact, anyone writing about anti-fascist work in this country, myself included, is virtually required to link to the blog, the coverage there has been so extensive and long-running.) ID Canada immediately called for “patriots” to “administer justice” to the blogger, whether or not they’d truly confirmed his identity.

I’m pretty sure from context that “administer justice” is a euphemism for “political murder.” Certainly a lot of the commentary in right-wing spaces seems to back that interpretation up.

Whether or not they’ve got the right guy – and with alt-right chuds, their accuracy isn’t necessarily of the best – their reaction to the claim of outing ARC Canada clearly demonstrates not only why anti-fascists are correct to mask up and protect themselves, but also why they’re in danger in the first place: The hate groups have chosen death threats and promises of violence, and sometimes — more often than should be tolerated — they follow through.

Think about that for a minute.

More mildly, and somewhat more amusingly, many hate group members announced that they’d get this guy fired from his job. I’m not sure that tracks… he’s going to be fired for exposing secret neo-Nazis? How does that work? Hell, if a bunch of fascist scum came to me and told me one of my employees had spent his free time over more than a decade painstakingly identifying and exposing their comrades in hatred… well, I’d give the guy a fucking raise.

This falls back into the false equivalency narrative that the alt-right desperately tries to promote: the notion that “AntEEfa” is somehow as bad or worse than the fascists. The truth is there’s no equivalency between exposing a Nazi and being one. And they know it, even if they try to convince themselves and everyone else otherwise. Cognitive dissonance is where the modern fascist lives. If you’re a Nazi and you’re exposed, then yes, you’ll probably lose your job… because nobody wants the stigma of employing a Nazi. And the chuds know it. They just can’t admit it.

Once again, if I find out a company knowingly employs a Nazi, or a Proud Boy, or a Noun of Odin or any other white supremacist or homophobic or Islamophobic bigot… then I’m not giving my business to that company. Period. And I’ll let the company know why I won’t give them my business.

But let’s acknowledge that there’s a huge gap between saying “I’ll take my business elsewhere” and threatening violence, even (or perhaps especially) if its covered up in dog-whistles like “administering justice.” And I don’t feel that the Fifth Estate documentary drove that point home hard enough. Antifascists are doing hard, dangerous work exposing these dangerous groups and their violent membership. And we shouldn’t have to. These groups should be treated as the dangerous terrorist breeding grounds that they are, and dealt with accordingly by the authorities for the protection of us all.

But of course the authorities don’t seem to work like that, do they?

Still, The Fifth Estate’s coverage was reasonably balanced. I can be critical of how they handled certain subjects or where they chose to place or not place emphasis, but overall I think they did a mostly unobjectionable job. It’s not going to ingratiate them with the right wing extremists, though: I don’t know whether or not they thought it was going to be some great exposé on the evils of the “antEEfa terrerists”, or whether they interpret the slightest amount of balance as “left media propaganda” (it wasn’t) but the amount of noise and fury in right-wing forums the last couple of days has been… well, entertaining isn’t the correct word, but it’s certainly been enlightening.

And I hope that this is the beginning of a trend by the mainstream media to start looking at the problem of right-wing hate in this country, because it’s largely been ignored. And if that means those media outlets are going to be asking “but who are these anti-fascists anyway?” then I can live with that. Because the truth is simple: We’re normal people putting our asses on the line to protect ourselves and others from right-wing hate.