Whatever the interested parties may say, their neofascist/identitarian/national revolutionary/anti-communist/Nazi lineage is as clear as the Stompers/Légitime Violence/Atalante connection. The tattoos, fashion statements, musical tastes, and antics of the known Atalante members give some indication of their political orientation, and their sympathies are entirely and uncontestably “neo-Nazi.”
In September, Montréal Antifasciste published an article revealing where some of the key activists in the neofascist group Atalante Québec work. The objective was, as always, “exposing the fascists to their communities, colleagues, employers, families, and neighbours, from whom they generally hide the real nature of their activities […] because the projects they are involved in in their personal lives endanger both their immediate colleagues and the general public, most particularly racialized people, Muslims, Jews, queers, and leftists.”
Breaking with its usual practice, Atalante rushed out a communiqué to respond “aux propos diffamatoires incitant à la haine contre” eux [to the slanderous statements inciting hatred against] them and to the “fausses allégations lancées contre [nos] members” [false allegations made about (our) members]. Laughably, the communiqué responds to accusations we never made and twists some we did to make it easier for them to defend themselves. In particular, it attempts to portray Atalante and its militants as some sort of community-based charity organization that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the “neo-Nazi movement” and is simply committed to “aid to families.”
If more proof is required, we’d be more than happy to oblige.
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It seems as if they “doth protest too much”
From the get-go, the communiqué is a wee bit defensive:
« Dans un premier lieu, Atalante n’est pas un mouvement prônant la haine de l’autre, mais l’amour des siens. (…) Aussi, ce que des adultes consentants font dans leur chambre à coucher ne nous intéresse pas et ne nous regarde pas. De ce fait, nous refusons toutes les accusations stigmatisantes d’homophobie qui sont lancées par nos adversaires. »
[To begin with, Atalante is not a movement that promotes hatred of others, but rather, love of our own. . . . Furthermore, what consenting adults do in their bedroom is no concern of ours, which is why we reject all of our adversaries’ accusations, denouncing us as homophobes.]
This particular clarification is odd, to say the least, as the Montréal Antifasciste article that the communiqué claims to be responding to never specifically accused Atalante of homophobia nor has any other article that we’ve published. So why the vigorous rebuttal? It makes you wonder…
The following paragraph really ought to be accompanied by a mournful violin. Atalante’s social activity in “its milieu,” they tell us, includes “distributing food,” cleaning up graffiti, and providing “aid to families,” while their political activity is limited to “postering, publicity stunts, counter-demonstrations, commemorations, philosophical education, and physical training.”
Even leaving aside the fact that the political activity in question promotes an “ultranationalist,” viciously identitarian, and xenophobic project (hello, “remigration”!), presenting Atalante as a perfectly inoffensive community organization isn’t going to fool anyone—besides, of course, a handful of naive people who are taken in by this crass attempt to whitewash the true nature of the project.
They fulminate indignantly about us accusing “them” of having “agressé plusieurs personnes racisées et parfois à l’arme blanche” [attacking numerous racialized people, sometimes knifing them]. Again, this is odd, given that we did no such thing. What we did , in fact, point out is that a member of the Québec City Stompers, Yan Barras, also an Atalante militant from day one, stabbed six people in 2007 and was sentenced to two years in prison for this violent crime. It’s also true that in the article “Unmasking Atalante,” we reminded people that the group’s entourage includes a number of individuals who have been found guilty of armed racist attacks, including Mathieu Bergeron, Steve Lavallée, Jonathan Côté, and Rémi Chabot-Brideault. While we aren’t saying every Atalante member has been involved in attacks of this sort, the regular involvement of Mathieu Bergeron, for example, in Atalante’s actions and activities is enough to demonstrate that there’s a legitimate point to be made here.
The strident indignation that runs through the rest of the communiqué about the violence of the “antifascist groups,” including the absurd claim that “far-left websites” make “de fausses allegations contre [nos] membres (…) dansle but de les assassiner socialement, professionnellement et même physiquement” [false allegations against (our) members . . . with the goal of assassinating them socially, professionally, and even physically (our italics) are also perplexing, given Raf Stomper’s numerous explicitly violent threats in more than one Légitime Violence song:
« Ces petits gauchistes efféminés,
qui se permettent de nous critiquer,
ils n’oseront jamais nous affronter, on va tous les poignarder! »
(Légitime Violence)
[These little leftist sissies,
who dare to criticize us,
wouldn’t have the nerve to face us,
we’d just stab them all!]
« Tu cours à ta perte, tu connais notre réputation.
Une lame qui te transperce, un bruit une détonation!!! (…)
Tu succombes à nos coups tu passes sous nos roues. (…)
À grands coups de matraque j’entends tes os qui craquent. »
(Anti-Rash Action)
[Play at your own risk, you know who we are. A knife will rip through you, a noise, an explosion!!!(…) We’ll beat you down and roll right over you.(…) A mighty blow with a club, and I hear your bones cracking.]
Not nazis, but…
What we find most amusing about this insufferable whining has to be the claim that Atalante’s project “n’est pas animé par une logique raciale” [is not motivated by any racist thinking], that the allegations of Nazism amount to “defamation”, and that suggesting that people in Atalante’s entourage “advocate national socialism” reflects the “totalitarian doctrine” of the antifascist movement.
The portrait of supremacist theorist Julius Evola (for whom Adolph Hitler was not radical enough…) appears between those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Dominique Venner on the wall of Atalante’s private gymnasium.
And what to make of militant fascists who deplore the alleged “totalitarian” character of their adversaries?
Be all that as it may, rather than responding to this laughable attempt at self-exoneration with the gazillionth written document, we’ll let some photos and videos from various Atalante members’ social media accounts speak for themselves.
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Ian Stuart Donaldson was the singer of the band Skrewdriver and the founder of the international neo-Nazi bonehead network Blood & Honour. Ian Stuart coined the euphemism “Rock Against Communism” to describe the galaxy of extreme-right bands with an ultra-nationalist/Nazi allegiance that were part of the “White Power” movement from the early 1980s on. Légitime Violence is heir to this tradition in Quebec, as are many of the “anti-communist” bands whose colours are often worn by members and supporters of Atalante, such as SPQR and Bronson (Italy), Brassic and Offensive Weapon (United States), In Memoriam and Lemovice (France), etc. In Canada, Blood & Honour is listed as a “terrorist entity” by the federal government.
Using the pseudonym “Neuromancer,” Alex Liberio was one of the neo-Nazis active on the Discord server and in the Iron March chatroom, as well as an engaged participant in the activities of Montréal’s alt-right from early 2017 until January 2018.
In May 2018, the tenacious efforts of Montréal antifascist militants led to the exposure of a an alt-right chatroom on a Discord server meant to serve as the launching pad for the “real-life” activities of a group of militant neo-Nazis in the Montréal area.[1] A series of articles published in the Montreal Gazette forced two of the key organizers of the group into exile: Gabriel Sohier Chaput, alias “Zeiger,” and Athanasse Zafirov, alias “Date” (also sometimes “LateOfDies” or “Sam Houde/Hoydel”). Zeiger was not only a central figure in this little Montréal-based group but was also part of an international network that developed from 2015 to 2018; notably as a prolific producer of content for The Daily Stormer website, as a moderator of the Iron March chatroom, and as a key propagandist for the explicitly National Socialist and accelerationist tendency of the alt-right movement. There is a warrant for his arrest in Québec, and he is currently in hiding. Meanwhile, “Date” (or “LateOfDies”), who seems to have been gradually radicalized, beginning in the “Pickup Artists” scene personified by the misogynist Roosh V, was a key organizer in the local and national alt-right milieu; exceptionally as a leading organizer of the pan-Canadian gathering held in Ontario in July 2017. He relocated to California in 2018, where he is comfortably ensconced in the doctoral program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, in spite of our article that exposed him and his new life.
Three other notorious militants from this little group were also unmasked by the antifascist community, including Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, alias “FriendlyFash” (or “Bubonic”) and Vincent Bélanger Mercure, alias “Le Carouge à Épaulettes” (or “BebeCoco”), both of whom participated, alongside Sohier Chaput and other Canadian far-right militants, in the Unite the Right demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11 and 12, 2017. The third, Julien Côté Lussier, alias “Passport,” who was once the spokesperson for ID Canada (an effort to legitimize the “ethno-nationalist” movement among the public at large) recently garnered attention as a candidate in the 2019 federal election in southwest Montréal. Antiracists in his riding revealed that in spite of his militant fascism, Côté Lussier is still employed by the Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.
Another extremely active member of the “Montreal Storm,” chatroom is the subject of this article–the user who went by the code name “Neuromancer;” and, as the recent leak of the Iron March forum’s logs proves, also participated in the latter under the pseudonym “iamneuromancer.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “iamnueromancer,” introduces himself to the neo-Nazi forum Iron March.
At this point, Montréal Antifasciste can positively confirm that “Neuromancer” is Alexander Liberio, a Montréal metal musician and a student of Cognitive Science at McGill University up until last year. Possibly feeling the heat after Zeiger was doxxed and the contents of the Montreal Storm forum were published, Liberio made his way down to the U.S. and is pursuing an undergraduate degree in Theology at the Holy Trinity Orthodox seminary in Jordanville, New York. His move is entirely consistent with his vision of Christianity as both synonymous with “white culture” and “inherently fascist”, and in being the best vehicle for achieving the goal of the 14 words (the white nationalist credo formulated by the neo-Nazi terrorist David Lane).[2]
Profile of Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromance Wintermute,” on metal-archives.com. NOTE: In February 2022, the band Vehemal got in touch with MAF to request a retraction and issue the following statement : “While it is true that Alex Liberio was our guitarist for a time, we were not aware of his online activities. We want to make it clear that Vehemal condemns all forms of hateful speech and actions.”
It seems that he was the president of the student council at Vanier College in 2012–2013, after which time he focused on his music and entered the Cognitive Science Program at McGill University. It is difficult to say exactly when he turned Nazi, but he complained on a number of occasions about being betrayed by a friend and being “fully doxxed” in 2016,[3] after a white nationalist intervention at a public antiracist event. Oddly, we know nothing about this alleged doxxing and can find no trace of it.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” claims he was doxxed in 2016.
We first noticed Liberio at La Meute’s “coming out” demonstration in Montréal, on March 4, 2017. He was hovering around the PEGIDA Québec contingent in the company of several individuals who were likely the original core of the Montreal Storm group, aka Alt-Right Montreal, among them, Vincent Bélanger Mercure and Athanasse Zafirov. On this occasion Liberio was interviewed by Global TV, which allowed us to put a face to his pseudonym.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” at the La Meute demonstration in Montréal on March 4, 2017.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” claims on Discord to have been interviewed by Global News.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” talks to Global News at the La Meute demonstration in Montréal on March 4, 2017.
On Iron March, Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” talks about participating in the La Meute demonstration in Montréal on March 4, 2017.
A few weeks later, on March 26, he joined both the Iron March forum and the Montreal Storm chatroom on Discord.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” joins the neo-Nazi Iron March forum on March 26, 2017.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” joins the Montreal Storm chatroom on Discord on March 26, 2017.
Uncompromising Nazi
By participating in the Iron March forum, “Neuromancer”/Alex Liberio got to rub shoulders with some of the most influential and dangerous neo-Nazis in the world, including the creator and main administrator of Iron March, Alexander Slavros, and other members of this “accelerationist” community, who went on to create the Atomwaffen Division, an underground neo-Nazi network connected to a series of murders and planned attacks. His proximity to Sohier Chaput and his willingness to engage in “real-life” activities led to his enthusiastic participation in the endeavours of the “Montreal Storm Book Club” (in Daily Stormer parlance, or “Pool Parties” as they were called by users of the alt-right forum The Right Stuff), including the ID Canada project launched by Athanasse Zafirov, Julien Côté Lussier, and others.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” follows Gabriel Sohier Chaput, alias “Zeiger” on Iron March.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” says he lost old friends but developed new friendships on the basis of a shared interest in fascism and Adolph Hitler.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” complaining that antifascists were out of line when they , because Graveland “isn’t even nazi.” protested a Black Metal festival in 2016, because Graveland “aren’t even NS/neo-nazi Black metal.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” makes a direct connection between this Alt-Right crew and ID Canada, an fledgling organization attempting to legitimize white “identitarian” nationalism in the eyes of the Canadian public at large.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” mentions the “extreme vetting” measures observed by the group Alt-Right Montreal.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” argues that 2017 is the year for members of the alt-right to meet in person (and develop a strategy to “take the White House” in 2020!)
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” considers Jews “satanic,” “genocidal against [our] people,” and “worthy of hate.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” to nobody’s particular surprise, is also a homophobe.
Christianity as a prized tool of fascism
“Neuromancer”/Liberio is part of a not insignificant tendency within the alt-right/neo-Nazi movement that identifies with the Orthodox Christian tradition. He makes no effort to hide his belief that Christianity is the best vehicle for Nazism.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” believes that Christianity is the best vehicle for realizing the White Nationalist credo of the “14 words.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” believes that Nazi ideology is “applied biblical law.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” explains that the Bible is the best synthesis of “Western/European/white culture and history”,(…) without which the concept of a “pan-White European race” wouldn’t exist.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” explains that Christendom “means whites.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” believes that Christianity is “inherently fascist.”
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” trumpets the merits of the Orthodox Church.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” enrolled in the Holy Trinity seminary of the Russian Orthodox Church in Jordanville, New York, in the autumn of 2018.
Alexander Liberio, alias “Neuromancer,” still attends the Holy Trinity seminary of the Russian Orthodox Church in Jordanville, New York, in 2019-2020.
The seminary’s disciplinary code stipulates that “The Seminary reserves the right to withhold a degree from a candidate when there is compelling evidence of serious moral misconduct.” It remains to be seen whether or not the seminary considers participating in a variety of neo-Nazi actions and organizations “serious moral misconduct” . . . or if the Russian Orthodox Church actually is an appropriate vehicle for realizing Adolph Hitler’s vision and that of the contemporary adherents of his ideology.
This announcement included a telephone number. Deeper research into the number turned up an announcement on a Chinese forum for an apartment sublet in Hochelaga. Not only do the photos of the apartment published in this announcement show exactly the same décor as seen in a number of videos on the YouTube channel Icon Iconium, in which we see Liberio and his rats, but we also found the e-mail address: alexander.liberio@mail.mcgill.ca.
A search for Alexander Liberio confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt his ties with the Orthodox seminary in Jordanville, New York.
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What does this mean for these nazis? And what are the implications for our communities?
From Charlottesville to El Paso, by way of the Atomwaffen Division attacks and the Christchurch massacre, the online activities of Alexander Liberio’s generation of neo-Nazis have repeatedly crossed over into real life, delivering death and terror in countries across the world. For all that, what stands out about them is how fragmented and fragile their connections were and are; it takes relatively little to disrupt and scatter the networks in the various online chatrooms. But with what consequences? New Iron March revelations have come out every day since the original leak, allowing us to see just how easy it is for “regular” white men to go about their nondescript middle-class lives as students, civil servants, hipsters, etc., while fantasising about race war and genocide, “white sharia,” and “boots on the ground.” The question that we once again face is: What can we concretely expect from these wannabe race war space marines?
In particular, we invite our readers to consider the implications for our communities if the Nazis are left to pursue their activities with impunity.
We intend to redouble our efforts to make sure that these guys can’t simply get on with their lives and continue fomenting hatred as if it’s business as usual. Above all, we will work not only to disrupt their networks but to prevent their reconsitution. The steady stream of attacks and mass murders make it clear that even if these networks are strategically precarious, the tactics they push can lead to disaster.
That said, an effective counterattack necessarily requires a far more vigorous response from antiracist and antifascist communities, a response whereby our ways and means of action reflect our desire to eradicate the Nazis once and for all and secure a viable future for all children.
[1] Discord is a software developed to facilitate vocal communication between on-line gamers. Its features, including the private nature of communication, drew the attention of numerous members of the alt-right movement, who began heavily using it between 2016 andt 2018.
[2] David Lane’s infamous credo is: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He coined this phrase while in prison for his activities with The Order, a terrorist neo-Nazi organization active in the 1980s and responsible for a number of murders and armed attacks, including the assassination of outspoken Jewish radio host Alan Berg.
[3] Doxxing is a tactic that consists of publicly releasing an individual’s personal information to do them harm in one way or another.
David Campbell is an antifascist comrade who has been imprisoned for events that unfolded at the protest of a New York City far right event on January 20, 2018.
The event, “A Night For Freedom,” was organized by the misogynist and racist activist Mike Cernovich with the participation of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and the white nationalist Canadian podcaster Stefan Molyneux. It was part of an ongoing process of consolidating an “alt lite” political scene: i.e. racist, misogynist, and full of conspiracy theories and race and gender pseudoscience, but not actually neo-Nazi.
At the protest, a brawl broke out in which a 56-year-old intoxicated alt-right man was knocked unconscious. During the brawl, a police officer, unannounced, threw David to the ground breaking his leg in two places. With no other arrests made on either side, the officer alleged that David had stalked, punched, and strangled the alt-right party attendee, and then tried to strangle the officer himself. These fabrications went on to be circulated by right-wing media which were quick to smear David as an “antifa thug.”
The initial charges were dropped after surveillance footage failed to back up any of the above allegations. However they were replaced with a more vague and heavy-handed charge of Gang Assault. Gang Assault makes any group of three or more people involved in a fight legally responsible for each other’s actions, and carries a steep mandatory minimum of 3.5 years.
After almost two years of legal maneuvering, David took a non-cooperating plea for a sentence of 18 months in a local facility in order to avoid a trial and a much longer sentence in a facility far away from his friends and family. During this period, the Manhattan DA inexplicably offered much more lenient plea deals involving only community service to a number of far rightists arrested and charged in a separate but very similar case about ten months after David. No justification for these disparate outcomes has been given by the Manhattan DA. The arresting officer in David’s case has not been held responsible for breaking David’s leg and lying about David’s actions.
A lover of language and the arts, David was two weeks away from moving to Paris to study French translation the night of his arrest. It was his commitment to antifascism and his community that brought him out to the protest that night.
“I’m an antifascist, and I’m going to jail for it. It’s a long, complicated story. In a nutshell, I was arrested at a protest against the alt-right in NYC last year. A brawl broke out, and I got caught up in it. A cop tackled me from behind, broke my leg, and lied about it. Tabloids smeared me as a thug and the DA charged me with gang assault, a vague and draconian law. […]
“It’s doubtful that any amount of public pressure can get me out of jail, but no matter what happens to me, the precedent for responding to this sort of repression needs to be set. Trump is stacking the courts, both high and low, with unqualified right-wing judges. Legislation proposing penalties in excess of 10 years in prison for those deemed antifascists, often simply defined as protesting while wearing a mask, is being regularly advanced in both state and federal legislatures. If this is what they do to me, a nerdy, normal-ish young everyday antifascist in 2019, then you can be sure that much, much worse is coming, and possibly for you—unless you make it clear now that this is unacceptable behavior from any government agency in an ostensibly free and fair society. Call bullshit on this. Even if you don’t like me, agree with me, or approve of my tactics, call bullshit on this case, for all our sakes.”
David will serve 12 months of an 18-month sentence at Rikers jail. One thing people can do to help him is to write him a letter; David reads and writes English and French, and has specifically said that he would love to receive articles in French (these cannot be cut out of a magazine or newspaper, but can be printed from the internet). Check out his support website https://freedavidcampbell.com for a guide on writing to David or other prisoners, and for more about David and his interests and thoughts.
This White Nationalist is Still Employed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
Thanks to the diligent efforts of antiracist militants and a local network of antifascist sympathizers, Montréal Antifasciste is in a position to confirm that the independent candidate who ran in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, Julien Côté (Lussier), is a longstanding white nationalist activist, an active participant in a number of alt-right (neo-Nazi) chatrooms, a key alt-right organizer in Montréal and across Canada… and an employee of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Last October 15, six days before the Canadian federal election, the CBC published an article about the independent candidate in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, Julien Côté. Until last year, Côté was the national spokesperson for ID Canada, an “identitarian” organization the CBC called “a known white nationalist and xenophobic group” that notably adheres to the “great replacement” thesis that is so very popular with right-wing extremists. (This murky theory has, among other things, motivated a number of fascist massacres in recent years, including those in Christchurch and El Paso.)
We must humbly acknowledge that we had missed Julien Côté’s candidacy until the CBC article was published. Unfortunately for Côté, however, once a national spotlight was shined on his candidacy, we remembered his role in Montréal’s alt-right milieu and were prompted to dig a bit deeper…
In the hours after the article was published, a number of social media posts from Montréal Antifasciste and other antifascists and antiracists revealed his close links with the far right,[1] which put Côté under so much pressure that he felt obliged to engage the services of Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald as “security” for the door-to-door stumping he had planned for Verdun on October 19.
It’s amusing, that after denying being a racist on every available platform, Côté saw fit to engage the services of a notorious Nazi. He probably had good reason to call for reinforcements, given the spontaneous neighbourhood mobilization to directly confront Côté and his henchman, but nonetheless his choice of bodyguard left a lot to be desired if the candidate actually wanted to sanitize his campaign.
A resident of Côté’s riding explained to us why she along with others felt it was necessary to mobilize in the wake of the CBC’s revelations:
“For us, it’s clear that Julien Côté used his campaign as a pretext for recruiting sympathizers. His phone number was on the posters, and he conducted a street-level campaign with invitations for coffee and a chat. He also infiltrated all of the neighbourhood citizen websites, and his own website invited internet users to make contact privately for a detailed explanation of his electoral programme. We moved quickly to expose Côté for what he is and limit his traction. We also contacted Montréal Antifa, because it quickly became clear that this wasn’t just a neighbourhood issue, and it was important that his activity be tracked.”
We can only applaud this grassroots initiative and gladly acknowledge that this article may well never have been written were it not for the diligence and panache of the residents who wrote us so that we could work on it together. That is exactly what a healthy antiracist and antifascist movement looks like.
From there, revisiting some of the info we had previously gathered on Côté, it was soon evident that the CBC’s revelations were only the tip of the iceberg.
A Scrubbed Twitter Account (too little too late)
On October 20, the Twitter user @Un_Migrant revealed that the @Mox_Nisi account appeared to be Julien Côté’s account. It obviously wasn’t by happenstance that @Mox_Nisi had begun to promote Côté’s candidacy with great enthusiasm… the very same day he announced his candidacy! Here’s a series of screenshots that illustrate this curious “coincidence”:
Confirming the Neo-Nazi Connection
In fact, it was no coincidence that Beauvais-MacDonald was the goon present to protect Côté from the rage of Verdun residents on October 19: if Beauvais-MacDonald represents the moronic and nasty element in Montréal’s alt-right, Côté is obviously part of what passes for the intellectual vanguard of the white nationalist movement. The two likely met in 2016 or 2017 as part of the small group of alt-right activists involved in the Montreal Storm chatroom, which included other ethnonationalists (correctly described as the most recent heirs of the neo-Nazi historical tradition), including Gabriel Sohier Chaput, aka “Zeiger”, Vincent Bélanger Mercure and Athanasse Zafirov, aka “Date”.
Victim of his own ego, Côté was the primary architect of his own demise. By tracking the digital breadcrumbs he left trailing behind him over the years, we were able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Côté (b. September 22, 1981) used the handle “Passport” in the Montreal Storm chatroom and in other private Discord chatrooms reserved for vouched members of the Canadian alt-right (self-styled “leafs”).
For obvious tactical reasons, we don’t intend to enumerate all of the evidence we’ve collected, but the sum and nature of that evidence makes for a truly impressive dossier. When we compared Côté’s avatar on his Skype account during the interview he gave to CityTV in January 2018 and the avatar chosen by “Passport” on Discord, we couldn’t help but notice that it was the same illustration, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, a Romantic-era painting by the German Caspar David Friedrich. That is obviously a truly niche reference. But it was by following a link posted on Discord by “Passport” to a video of a conference with Jordan Peterson in Ottawa, where he was accompanied by Zafirov and where he asked Peterson a question, that we were able to confirm that the voice of “Passport,” which can be heard on the audio track, is without a doubt Côté’s voice.
His participation in various Canadian chatrooms and political projects show that Côté/“Passport” is more than just a key figure in the tiny alt-right scene in Montréal; he is also part of an alt-right community that is attempting to consolidate itself nationally. Notably, he was, according to the CBC report, at the heart of ID Canada, a groupuscule clumsily modeled on European “identitarian” movements like Generation Identity. (It was to defend an ID Canada poster in Edmonton that Côté, as the spokesperson for the organization, gave the interview to CityTV in January 2018. The slogan at the top of that poster read: “You Are Being Replaced.”) But that’s not all. He was also one of the key organizers of a national alt-right gathering held in Ontario in July 2017,[2] as well as one of the organizers of white nationalist professor Ricardo Duchesne’s Montréal conference a month earlier. Côté has also attended alt-right gatherings in the US a number of times, including meetings of Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute.
Both his virtual and practical activity make it obvious that Julien Côté, aka “Passport,” played a primary role, alongside other known neo-Nazis, in an attempt to expand the white nationalist movement in Canada. But that’s not the last surprise he has in store for us.
The Curious Story of the Anti-Immigration Activist Who Works for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
Numerous internal sources confirmed for Montréal Antifasciste that Julien Côté is an employee of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada. Not only has Côté crowed about it on Facebook (see screen captures below), but research of the Canadian government’s Canada Gazette shows that the Public Service Commission “granted permission… to Julien Lussier… to seek nomination as a candidate… in the federal election in the electoral district of LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, Quebec.” It turns out that his full family name is Côté Lussier. It would seem that hyphenated family names are a thing for neo-Nazis.
Canada Gazette, Part I, volume 153, number 37 : COMMISSIONS, August 30, 2019
When digging a little further into Côté Lussier’s past, you can imagine our surprise at discovering that he is well-versed in dirty tricks when it comes to anti-immigration efforts.
In September 2012, he and his partner, Magdalena Baloi-Lussier (Madi Lussier, who, among other things, acted as the official agent for Côté Lussier’s electoral campaign) were removed from a list of witnesses invited to testify before a parliamentary commission on immigration when a NDP member of parliament discovered that the couple were responsible for an anti-immigrant website that espouses racist theories. According to aToronto Star article:
“Sections of the site include one on so-called ‘Chinafication’ and ‘Arabization.’ There is also a video interview with Canadian white supremacist Paul Fromm and several from a conference of the ‘racialist’ group American Renaissance.”
The archived version of the “Canadian Immigration Report” website and the content of their YouTube channel confirm the concerns of the committee members who convinced their colleagues to withdraw the invitation extended to the Baloi-Lussier couple.
As it happens, the nature of this website corresponds to another project that Côté Lussier wanted to start with his Nazi comrades from the Discord chatroom (the now-defunct website borderwatch.ca) to identify people irregularly crossing the Canada/US. Border.
Another curious link, to say the least, is that the deputy who invited them to testify, the Conservative Chungsen Leung (who, we might add in passing, was Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary for multiculturalism from 2011 to 2015), was described by “Passport” on Discord as a deputy who is “firmly on [our] side,” who “hopes that whites will develop a backbone,” and who “recognizes that [we] are a superior race.”
So, a racist who caused a controversy during official public hearings on immigration in 2012, a controversy that received substantial media coverage at the time, is still employed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada as we write this. Could it be that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, one of a number of governmental agencies responsible for regulating and perpetuating an apartheid system based on prisons for migrants and a regime of endless deportations, an organization with a history of racism, sexism, and ableism simply has a high level of tolerance for white supremacy? If you think about it for a moment, it’s not that surprising…
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It is a shame that a man like Julien Côté Lussier has been able to spend years promoting racism without being held accountable. As someone who worked for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, traveled to far-right shindigs in the United States, and occupied important positions in domestic racist organizations, he was well-placed to play a role in consolidating the fragmented and disorganized neo-Nazi milieu in Canada. It is difficult to understand what he was thinking when he decided to run as an independent in the elections, a stupid move that was bound to attract unwanted attention and provoke a strong response from anti-racists in his riding. Be that as it may, we fully intend to ensure that his poor judgement does not go to waste.
We venture that Julien Côté Lussier will regret having plastered his face on the proverbial pole.
[1] During a Q & A session on Reddit Côté was quite literally overwhelmed with embarrassing questions about his platform.
[2] This particular milieu made headlines that same year, in August 2017, when Beauvais-MacDonald and Bélanger-Mercure were identified by antifascists among a group of Québécois who travelled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to participate in a series of white supremacist demonstrations, the infamous Unite the Right rally. Gabriel Sohier-Chaput, part of the same group,was later identified as a prolific neo-Nazi alt-right propagandist, noteworthy for having re-edited James Mason’s work Siege (one of the main sources of inspiration for the terrorist Atomwaffen Division and most of the contemporary National Socialist movement) and publishing numerous articles on Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer website.
Other members of this milieu, including the main moderator of the national Discord forum and the cohost of the neo-Nazi podcast This Hour Has 88 minutes, Axe in the Deep, whose real name is Clayton Sanford, were identified the previous month by diligent Vice journalists.
Voting is not really our thing, but we do recognize that this is a time when more people are speaking about politics and policies, including many that will have a real impact on many people’s lives. This time around (not for the first time) the Conservatives are contending with a national party to their right, as Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada fields candidates across the country on a populist platform with climate denial and anti-immigrant sentiment as its key planks.
Maxime Bernier was a federal cabinet minister from 2006-7 and 2011-15 in Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party government. He ran for the Conservative Party leadership in the 2017 leadership election, and came in a close second with over 49% of the vote in the 13th round, after leading the eventual winner, Andrew Scheer, in the first 12 rounds. In August 2018, Bernier resigned from the Conservative Party to create the People’s Party of Canada. The PPC quickly latched onto fears about immigration and immigrants as key issues, alongside support for pipelines and various climate denial conspiracy theories. Indeed, while climate denial is perhaps the most prominent right-wing theme we found on Quebec PPC candidates’ social media accounts, race and racism are what have repeatedly made headlines for Bernier’s populists.
The PPC is part of a (tried and true, worldwide) phenomenon of right-wing splinter parties emerging from the main right-wing party, opening up space on that party’s right. This was done most successfully in Canada by Preston Manning’s Reform Party in the 1990s. The Reform Party emerged to the right of Brian Mulroney’s “mainstream” Progressive Conservatives in 1987 and was so successful that it displaced the PCs before re-joining them in 2000. Like the PPC today, Reform attracted widespread support from right-wing Canadians, most of whom were disaffected Tories, but also a smattering of neo-Nazis and far rightists who jumped on the bandwagon before being eventually expelled. Reform ended up absorbing the rump PC party, and rebranded itself as the “new” more right-wing Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. This in turn provided Bernier with a home for his own political career, from which the PPC has now emerged. In other words, the PPC is part of a dynamic of a section of Canadian voters pushing to the right that has been going on for decades. In a certain sense: nothing new; however, we must keep in mind that both the global and national contexts today are far more favourable to the far right, and it is not for nothing than many Bernier supporters compare his “outsider” campaign to that of Donald Trump.
While the PPC is not even close to being a Nazi or fascist party, even as he ran for Conservative leadership in 2017, Bernier was being singled out by some Canadian neo-Nazis as a potential “maverick” who could help to shake things up in their favour, much as Trump had done in the United States. They weren’t wrong – since founding the PPC, Bernier had adopted a strategy of using racist dogwhistles to try to consolidate support from the most reactionary white Canadian voters. As such, the party has become a pole of attraction for numerous far rightists hoping to either build political power or (for the more far-sighted) to move the frame of debate further to the right. Collecting selfies alongside Bernier had become a pastime for a slice of Canadian reactionaries even before media reports about neo-nazis like Alex Brisson from Huntingdon, Paul Fromm of Ontario, and members of the Northern Guard in Alberta, as well as with members of the Proud Boys, all posing with “Mad Max”.
There have been suggestions (for instance made by B’nai B’rith Canada) that Martin Masse, PPC spokesperson and architect of its public relations strategy, has been key to its embrace of the far right. Masse was owner and publisher of Québécois Libre, an online libertarian news outlet that shut down in 2016. That the PPC’s cozy relationship with racists is primarily due to the influence of one person is highly doubtful, however – rather, the PPC is positioning itself as the option-of-choice for those who find the Conservatives insufficiently right-wing.
Racism is clearly one of the most effective tools for such a strategy, witness PPC billboards and tweets against “mass immigration” and also “against antifa,” or Bernier’s diatribe about “radical Islam” being “the biggest threat to freedom, peace and security in the world today.” “The other parties are complacent and pander to Islamists,” Bernier accused, promising that “The PPC will make no compromise with this totalitarian ideology.” Bernier’s platform calls for a massive reduction in immigration to Canada, down to between 100,000 and 150,000 new immigrants per year, and almost doubling the number of “economic migrants”. He also wants the government to cut off all funding for official multiculturalism, to leave the United Nations Global Compact for Migration and to prioritize refugees who, among other things, “reject political Islam.”(About all this, one might want to check out this article in Politico magazine, that has observed that attitudes towards immigrants have become a key factor in determining which political party Canadians support.)
Such a strategy involves a balancing act. To succeed, Bernier and the PPC have to play to the crowd with lines that the far right will recognize and embrace, all the while not making themselves appear beyond the pale. Perhaps that is why Bernier was a no-show at last year’s December protest in Ottawa against the United Nations Compact on Migration. Organized by the anti-Muslim group ACT for Canada, Bernier was scheduled to speak alongside members of La Meute, Rasmus Paludan of the Danish far-right Stram Kurs political party, and Travis Patron of the (actually white nationalist) Canadian Nationalist Party, before he backed out at the last minute.
A number of media articles have revealed the far-right connections of people active in the PPC as organizers and members whose signatures were used for the PPC to attain official party status. For instance:
Darik Horn, a PPC volunteer and also security agent who has accompanied Bernier at a variety of events and media interviews, has been revealed to be a founding member of the neo-fascist Canadian Nationalist Party.
Shaun Walker, an American immigrant and organizer with the PPC in St Catharines, as well as one of those who signed for the PPC to become an official party, was revealed to have been the president of the National Alliance (a U.S.-based neo-Nazi organization) in 2007, and also to have been convicted of hate crimes at the time for violence against people of colour. Following these revelations Walker was expelled from the PPC, and Bernier claimed he had slipped through the party’s vetting process. However, it was also revealed that Bernier himself followed Walker on twitter.
Others who signed for the PPC to become an official party include Janice Bultje, a founding member of PEGIDA Canada (under the name “Jenny Hill”), and Justin L. Smith, leader of the Sudbury chapter of the Soldiers of Odin.
Unsurprisingly, a number of PPC candidates have made headlines as their social media posts past and present have come to light:
Brian Everaert, the PPC candidate for Sarnia-Lambton posted tweets that called Islam a “wart on the ass of the world,” as well as posts about Hilary Clinton and arming teachers. Bernier refused to condemn Everaert.
Kamloops PPC candidate Ken Finlayson posted on social media comparing climate activist Greta Thunberg to a girl featured in Nazi propaganda from the 1940s.
Sybil Hogg, the PPC candidate for Sackville-Preston-Chezzetcook, made a series of posts on Twitter and Facebook with anti-Islam statements within the last year, including one where she characterized Islam as being “pure evil”.
These stories are misleading, though, in that they suggest that the PPC has a few bad apples in it, whereas really the whole party is rife with such sentiments. One gauge of this, and a sign that it is intentional, is those candidates who have left (or been kicked out) when it became clear that there would be no condemnation of the far right from the upper ranks:
On September 30, Chad Hudson, who had been the People’s Party candidate for the Nova Scotia riding of West Nova, quit the party due to its racism, explaining that “I firmly believe now that I’m doing more of a service to this community by calling out this hate and this garbage than actually remaining in the race.”
On October 8, Victor Ong, PPC candidate for Winnipeg North, resigned, bemoaning the fact that the PPC “has attracted all manner of fringe, scores of conspiracy theorists and a host of ugliness from coast to coast. That’s not to mention Bernier’s embittered base, replete with ‘white is right’ ideology and (Make America Great Again) hat-wearing members.”
Indeed, a cursory examination of the Facebook pages of PPC candidates reveals that what is really noteworthy is how selective news stories about racist tweets or FB posts have been. Almost every single PPC candidate in Quebec has recently (and repeatedly) shared articles from climate denialist sources, including many with a clearly conspiratorial bent. Mark Sibthorpe, candidate for Papineau, even produced his own YouTube “exposé” revealing how George Soros is behind an international globalist conspiracy to crash economies and make money by spreading panic about climate change. Secondary to climate denial, fears about threats to “free speech” and about “mass immigration” are both recurring themes for Quebec’s PPC candidates, and roughly one in five have recently shared articles from what we would term “national populist” or far-right sources, including LesManchettes.com, the website of André Boies (the French-language translator of the Christchurch killer’s “Great Replacement” manifesto, associated with Montreal’s Yellow Vests), André Pitre’s far-right “Stu Dio” YouTube channel, and a more eclectic and sporadic mix, including Faith Goldy, Alexis Cossette Trudel, Black Pigeon Speaks, the Yellow Vests, and the highly racist “Voice of Europe”.
Still, PPC candidates are not all cut from the same cloth – for some, this is their first foray into politics, whereas others have been around for a while. For instance, Ken Pereira, the whistleblower from the 2013 Charbonneau Commission, was slated to run for the PPC as one of its Quebec candidates, until he had to withdraw his candidacy in early September following his son’s arrest for murder. Pereira produces videos on André Pitre’s YouTube channel, alleging all manner of far-fetched conspiracies, including those relating to QAnon, described by Vice as “a wild theory that an individual who goes by ‘Q’ is leaking information detailing a massive secret war Trump is waging against the ‘deep state’ and an international cabal of pedophiles—and calling the 9/11 terror attacks a ‘false flag.’”
Similarly, Raymond Ayas, who writes for the Postmillenial and is active in the Catholic far right in Quebec, is running as PPC candidate for Ahuntsic-Cartierville. As spokesperson for the Association des parents catholiques du Québec, in 2017 Ayas was reported in the media defending a talk by Jean-Claude Dupuis of the Société-St Pie X and a former leader of the Cercle Jeune Nation and Marion Sigaut (close to Alain Soral in France). It might be noted that members of Atalante were reported to have been on hand at the talk to provide security.
The PPC will be lucky to win more than a couple of ridings in Canada, and may simply fizzle and die. Or it may consolidate a bloc of voters to the right of the Conservatives, making the framework of political debate in Canada even more hostile to racialised people, Indigenous people, Muslims, and immigrants. Either way, the racists and reactionaries who have gravitated around the PPC are unlikely to just go away, and some may be around for years to come; if for nothing else, that makes them worth taking a look at, and keeping an eye on.
Demonstration today (Thursday) at 6pm in front of the Turkish Consulate (1250 René-Lévesque ouest) – Facebook event
On October 6, the Trump administration announced it was pulling US troops out of northern Syria, essentially giving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a green light to invade Rojava, carry out ethnic cleansing, and forcibly resettle the area. We are calling for people around the world to engage in protest and/or disruption at Turkish consulates, US government offices, arms manufacturers, and businesses connected with the Turkish government, such as Turkish Airlines.
Since 2012, the autonomous region of Rojava has hosted an inspiring multi-ethnic experiment in self-determination and women’s autonomy, all while fighting the Islamic State (ISIS). After years of struggle, despite sustaining massive casualties, fighters from Rojava participated in liberating all of the territory that ISIS had occupied and freeing those who had been held captive in ISIS strongholds.
In an attempt to justify permitting Turkey to invade Syria, Trump has tweeted that US taxpayers should not have to pay to keep ISIS fighters detained. In fact, the US has not paid a cent to detain captured ISIS fighters; that has been completely organized by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The reality is that the Turkish invasion of Kurdish territory will create the conditions for ISIS to reemerge and resume operations in Syria and around the world. For years, Turkey has permitted weapons, recruits, and resources to reach ISIS through its borders.
Both ISIS and the Turkish invasion pose an existential threat to all the ethnic and religious groups indigenous to the region, including Arabs, Christians (Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs), Turkmens, Chechens, Alevites, and Yazidis. Many of these groups have gained a voice in their own lives for the first time, yet now face massacre at the hands of the Turkish military and the jihadists.
Turkey’s invasion of Rojava sets a new precedent for military aggression, ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of egalitarian and feminist experiments like the one in Rojava. It sets the stage for more bloodshed and oppression everywhere around the world, paving the way for ethno-nationalist autocrats like Trump, Erdoğan, Bashar al-Assad, Jair Bolsonaro, and Vladimir Putin to dominate world politics for generations to come.
For months, people in Rojava have called for international solidarity in the event of an invasion. We must bring attention to the plight of the people in Rojava and make it known that there will be consequences for this.
To keep silent is to be complicit.
We call on all people of good conscience to engage in protest and disruption at Turkish consulates, US government offices, arms manufacturers, and businesses connected with the Turkish government, such as Turkish Airlines. The Rojava Solidarity Committee Europe has joined organizers in Rojava in calling for a day of action on October 12 against the Turkish invasion; we endorse this call, and call for further actions before and after October 12.
We need to build a context for broad-based direct action as a step towards building a global movement that can make such atrocities impossible. Together, we can stop the invasion.
The following text was written by the CLAC, the IWW and Montréal Antifasciste and was distributed at the Montreal climate demonstration on September 27, 2019. It can also be downloaded to print here.
1. GOVERNMENTS WON’T SAVE US
Those who benefit from poisoning the land and exploiting people you care about won’t be reformed. They’ll make it seem like they hear your voices and occasionally put on grand spectacles to temporarily appease your anger. They’ll encourage you to channel your anxiety into pointless practices that only reinforce individualism. So while some of us compete to take shorter showers or to reduce our trash output, government officials, universities, and corporations shamelessly invest in more pipelines, host uncritical academic conferences, or fly jets to fancy meetings where empty promises are made.
The impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases on climate has been known since the late 19th century. The view that carbon dioxide affects global warming has been widespread since the 70s. Since the 80s and 90s, observations and computer models have overwhelmingly pointed to human-made activities as important factors in climate change. It’s been more than 30 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to compile information and advise world governments on how to minimize the anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change that has already claimed innumerable human lives and caused the extinction of many other animal species. This same panel now says we only have 10 years left before we reach a point of no return towards the death of this planet. Our countries are consuming the bulk of the planet’s resources. Yet here we are, asking for the same colonial governments and political class that put us in this mess to ban plastic straws and increase carbon taxes. We have been begging them for decades now. It’s time we start taking power ourselves.
2. CAPITALISM AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Capitalism is a socioeconomic and political system under which a privileged few own what the rest of us need to survive. That means the worth of sentient beings and plants is based on their ability to generate wealth. It’s the idea that land, workplaces, trees, animals, housing, and water, are to be owned privately by individuals or corporations, which gives them power to exploit these things however they want, regardless of our concerns, needs, and well-being. This economic system is why corporations are free to build fossil fuel infrastructures on unceded Indigenous land as governments use militarized police to suppress any form of resistance.
To exist, capitalism must uphold hierarchy, power, and obedience. That’s why your acts of rebellion are framed differently than their acts of systemic violence (e.g. stealing food from Walmart vs stealing land from Indigenous peoples). Our efforts towards a better future are meaningless without a radical departure from the system that made violence and destruction the normal (and legal) state of affairs.
3. COLONIALISM, RACISM, AND DESTRUCTION
To be green is to also to oppose colonialism and racism. Both of these things have everything to do with the climate crisis.
Atmospheric pollution can’t be calculated without taking into account past and present colonial realities. Our understanding of how different countries contribute to climate change must take into account historical greenhouse gas emissions, and most importantly, who profits from the destruction. Industries and empires have been built on the labor of Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. Canadian and American companies murder land defenders for minerals in Latin America and Africa, poison air and waterways in Asia, and put our trash on boats to be dumped far from our eyes.
Repeatedly in Canadian history, ecological devastation has been used as an intentional weapon against Indigenous peoples. Overhunting of bison by settlers led to famine in the Prairies in the 19th century, which was consciously encouraged by the Canadian government under John A. Macdonald as a tool of genocide to “clear the West.” Such practices continue to this day. Grassy Narrows is an Indigenous community near Ontario’s border with Manitoba; its water was contaminated by tons of mercury dumped into its water system by an upstream paper mill. One study estimated that 90 per cent of the population suffers from some degree of mercury poisoning, which can cause everything from cognitive impairments to hearing loss and emotional changes. The heavy metal can be passed from mothers to babies they carry, making it a problem that lasts generations. This is the legacy of Canadian colonialism and genocide; for many people the ecological catastrophe is already centuries old.
In so many ways, the most oppressed always pay the price for Western lifestyles and the out-of-control growth that accompanies them. Droughts, floods, and famines, are increasingly common and displaced people need new places to call home. Thus, as we fight climate change, we must also fight the system of borders that values some lives above others. We must fight the police entering migrants’ homes in the middle of the night to take parents away. We must fight the construction of a migrant prison in Laval that has kids growing up behind bars. We must fight against oil wars that leave entire countries destroyed. We must fight white-supremacy whether it takes the form of neo-fascist militias, conservative columnists, or colonial states claiming sovereignty over Indigenous land. Ultimately, we must also confront anyone who accepts any of this is without feeling profound anger. We can’t allow the most privileged people on this planet to use terms like « overpopulation » or « migrant crisis » because they are too scared and selfish to stand up to real perpetrators of the destruction of our world.
4. RESIST SCAPEGOATING AND THE FAR RIGHT
Certain groups are taking advantage of the catastrophes taking place to put their own hateful and nightmarish ideas into practice.
Following hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in 2005, white supremacist militias took advantage of the disaster to murder random Black people they found trying to survive the floods. More recently, in 2019 in both Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, neo-nazi gunmen committed massacres, killing dozens of people of color, in attacks which they explicitly framed as being to “save the environment.” All over the world, many people in the rich nations which are creating the most ecological damage are demanding tighter border controls and restrictions on immigration, often citing the need to protect natural resources. At the same time, some racists suggest that there are too many people in the world and target racialized people and people in the Global South with coercive “population control” measures. Here in Quebec, members of far right anti-immigrant groups have sometimes found themselves welcomed in environmentalist spaces and mobilizations, while the concerns of people of color and anti-racists have been simply brushed aside.
This legacy of eco-fascism must be confronted, otherwise the movement to save the planet could very easily find itself manipulated and turned into an instrument to oppress and do violence to those already most directly harmed by the catastrophes capitalism has unleashed.
5. WHAT WE CAN DO!
Reject legality, especially when laws are made by colonial states (e.g. Canada, Quebec) unrecognized by the first inhabitants of the land.
Listen to and make space for Indigenous voices in the struggle against the colonial and capitalist destruction of ecosystems.
Recognize when our struggles are being co-opted by political parties or companies to amass sympathy and capital.
Avoid political parties, non-profits, or anyone pretending to fight domination while reproducing power hierarchies.
Learn about alternative (anarchist, communist, feminist, anticolonial) ways of organizing social life.
Attack the symbols of capitalist power: banks, mining companies and multinational corporations.
Make the fight against all forms of oppression an active part of your militancy and do your part to ensure the burden of dealing with uncomfortable realities linked to climate change don’t fall on the shoulders of those patriarchy deems responsible for the role of care.
Practice consensual decision-making and cultivate consensual relationships.
Get informed, end isolation by finding accomplices within your communities, and build networks of resistance with others who are willing to stand up to power.
Only take calculated risks and practice security culture.
Oh and obviously if we’re going to get arrested, let’s make it worth it.
This flyer was written and is distributed on unceded Indigenous land and a gathering place known to he Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation as Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal).
In December 2018, Montréal Antifasciste published a dossier on the neofascist organization Atalante, tracing the group’s history as well as the trajectory of some of the individuals at the heart of the project, specifically, members of the Québec Stomper Crew gang and the band Légitime Violence. A series of follow-up articles have focused on the activities of a number of people within Atalante’s sphere of influence.
It’s September 2019, and although Atalante’s activities have slowed down a bit in recent months, the core militants show no sign of calling it a day, so we need to remind them and their entourage that we have no intention of letting up.
In order to make the social cost of being a fascist or a Nazi in our neighbourhoods and communities intolerable, the most effective tactic remains exposing the fascists to their communities, to their colleagues, employers, families, and neighbours, from whom they generally hide the real nature of their activities or use euphemisms like “nationalist,” rather than saying they are fascists. Given that they have decided to be Nazis and to persist in heading down that road, we are completely committed to seeing that they pay the consequences. History has shown us that sooner or later fascist principles always lead to violence —sometimes even genocide— targeting people from different social sectors who are already suffering more than their share of misery and oppression in so-called democratic capitalist society, and we have no intention of standing by while this history repeats itself.
By making public where various fascists from Atalante work, it is most definitely our intention to cost these fascists their jobs, because the projects they are involved in in their personal lives endanger both their immediate colleagues and the general public, most particularly racialized people, Muslims, Jews, queers, and leftists.
We think that campaigns to isolate and ostracize them and to target companies that provide them with shelter and support are necessary, both as a matter of public safety and as an act of working-class solidarity.
This is a reminder that fascists will never be welcome in the places where we live or where we work.
Roxanne Baron, the only woman in the Québec Stomper Crew, is not just some unimportant member. She is also a key figure in Atalante, having participated in almost all of its actions since the organization’s inception.
Her exact function in Atalante isn’t clear, but we know that until recently she played an important role on Instagram, sharing numerous photos of herself and her comrades carrying out actions in Québec City and Montréal, as well as, for example, at the CasaPound “mother ship” in Italy. (In fact, her carelessness on Instagram cost some of her comrades their anonymity … oops.)
A fact that is particularly staggering on a variety of levels, Baron hasn’t been shy over the months and years about repeatedly bragging about her dubious reading habits while at her place of work: the Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus. She claims that without her colleagues or the hospital’s patients noticing, she read works from the neofascist organization CasaPound, the Belgian Nazi Léon Degrelle, the fascist historian Robert Brasillach, the ultranationalist intellectual Charles Maurras, and the French antisemite Jacques Ploncard. She even crows about surreptitiously reading Nazi texts at work:
“Journée tranquille… Quand on croit que tu lis de petits romans comme tout le monde au travail”
[A quiet day… When they think you’re reading some innocuous novel like everyone else (LOL emoticon).]
We also know from her Instagram account that she has tattoos with an array of fascist images: a fasces, the symbol at the origin of the word“fascism”; a Celtic cross, a universally recognized “White Power” emblem; the inscription “le diable rit avec nous” [the devil laughs with us], a reference to the lyrics of the Nazi hymn SS marschiert in Feindesland; another inscription reading “presente per tutti camerati caduti,” a traditional Italian fascist greeting; and a mjölnir, the hammer of Thor, an image that is not explicitly racist, but which is now systematically sported by white supremacist Odinists. To put the star on top of the Christmas tree, something that is not without interest for opponents of “religious symbols” in the workplace, around her neck Baron wears a sonnenrad, a black sun, an occult symbol popular with contemporary neo-Nazis.
At the very least, it’s alarming to think of this person, who in her private life openly participates in a clearly racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic political project, working in a health services institution, where she is in daily contact with the general public, including a large number of people from different social sectors designated for elimination by Nazi ideology.
Alias “Tony Stomper.”After growing up in Mont-Laurier with his younger brother Étienne (also an Atalante member), Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau began his CEGEP studies at Lionel-Groulx, participating in the student movement during the 2007 strike. After that, he moved to Québec City, where he joined the Québec Stompers, at the time a street gang gravitating toward far-right ultranationalism. Around that time, he went to Rimouski to study to become a sailor, moving on to the Université Laval, entering a program to become a history teacher, which he soon abandoned.
On a trip to Italy, he discovered Blocco Studentesco, a neofascist student organization that is for all intents and purposes the youth wing of CasaPound. Little by little, he became Atalante’s main theorist and seems to be the author of Saisir la foudre [Ride the Lightning] under the pseudonym Alexandre Peugeot, who is also the author of several articles in Le Harfang, the magazine of the Fédération des québécois de souche.
Antoine has shown a lot more discretion than his friend Raphaël Lévesque, always taking the necessary steps to keep his role in Atalante a secret, rarely appearing at the group’s public actions and blurring his face and using different pseudonyms in his rare furtive video appearances. Unfortunately for him, a 2017 interview he gave to Zentropa Serbia (a CasaPound satellite), where he used the pseudonym “Alexandre,” made it relatively easy for us to determine his central role in Atalante.
Despite all his precautions, we were also able to confirm that he is a paramedic on the South Shore of Québec City, in the Chaudière-Appalaches region, working for the Lévis-based company Dessercom.
As in the case of Roxanne Baron, as part of his professional responsibilities, Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau, a fascist militant and a member of a violent gang, inevitably comes into contact with members of the public who belong to communities targeted and victimized by fascists.
Imagine, if you will, how it would feel to be a first-generation immigrant, a Muslim woman, or a Jew having a heart attack or some other serious health problem, and to have the first responder be a fascist theorist, an inveterate racist, Islamophobe, and antisemite. Imagine that your life depended on the care you received from an individual who unreservedly believes, for example, in the need for the “remigration” of all migrants who are not Catholic French Canadians “de souche.”
We believe that this is an unacceptable situation that violates the ethical principles and professional norms upon which the paramedic profession is itself based.
Yan Barras
Yan Barras, social worker (not a member of the professional Order of social workers)
On the night of December 31, 2006—January 1, 2007, a small group of Stompers and associates, including Raphaël Lévesque and Yan Barras, burst into the café-bar L’Agitée in Québec City, a cooperative they knew to be run and frequented by antiracist activists. In less time than it took you to read this account, the boneheads trashed the bar, and Yan Barras stabbed at least six people with an X-Acto knife, before fleeing.
In spite of the sordid nature of the incident, the Stompers drew a certain pride from this brutal attack, going as far as to reference it in the lyrics of the eponymous song “Légitime Violence”:
Ces petits gauchistes efféminés,
qui se permettent de nous critiquer,
ils n’oseront jamais nous affronter,
on va tous les poignarder! »
[These little leftist sissies,
who dare to criticize us,
wouldn’t have the nerve to face us,
we will stab them all!]
After pleading guilty to assault with a weapon, Yan Barras was sentenced to two years in prison. The judge even recommended that he receive therapy while in prison to address his proclivity for senseless brutality. When he got out of prison, Barras registered in the social work program at the CEGEP de Sept-Îles, and some might have thought that it looked like he intended to change course.
But far from changing his ways, Barras had “No Remorse” tattooed on his forehead under a death’s head devouring the three arrows that represent antifascism, and he promptly rejoined the crew of racists who would later create Atalante. Not only did Barras not distance himself from Raphaël Lévesque, the Mailhot-Bruneau brothers, and company, he has often participated in Atalante activities in recent years, as well as continuing to provoke and intimidate the Quebec City left, notably by marching with other members of the Stompers into the middle of a small abortion rights demonstration in August 2015, and more recently by joining his brothers in trolling the 2019 May Day demonstration, with one of them even giving the Hitler salute.
Today, Barras works as a “liaison coordinator” for the social reintegration company Habitations Méta Transfert Inc., in Québec City. Obviously, this places him in position of authority over a vulnerable clientele, a position he can use to attempt to recruit anyone fitting his fantasy of “a master race” or to deny services to those he judges “inferior.” You can’t blame us for wondering how many other Nazis this company might employ …
Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald. The quote is form Adolph Hitler.
Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, security guard; student at the Centre intégré de mécanique, de métallurgie et d’électricité (CIMME)
But Beauvais-MacDonald wasn’t done with the surprises! It later became clear that under the pseudonym FriendlyFash he was a very active member of the“Montreal Stormer Book Club” chat room, a small neo-Nazi social club that was attempting to organize in Montréal at the time. Beauvais-MacDonald has never bothered trying to hide his penchant for Nazism on Facebook or his other social media accounts.
As a guest on the podcast This Hour has 88 Minutes, on January 4, 2018, Beauvais-MacDonald talked about the consequences of doxxing on his daily life. He talked about how he lost one of his two jobs (as a bouncer at a bar), but that his colleagues at his other job thought it was “hilarious”:
« The other job, I work with Chinese people and they find it hilarious, so whatever. »
Despite Beauvais-MacDonald having been widely exposed and denounced in 2017, it seems that until fairly recently the company Securitas employed him as a security guard at the CIBC branch in Montréal’s Chinatown. The obvious question is whether Securitas was simply unaware of their employee’s extracurricular activities all this time (in spite of the numerous mentions in the mainstream media and on antifascist websites) or simply chose to turn a blind eye.
It is also worth asking whether his job at Securitas (a publicly listed company, we might add in passing) as a security guard has given Beauvais-MacDonald access to material or privileged information that might be useful to his neo-Nazi network.[2] What computer databases or other resources has he had access to thanks to his job with Securitas?
We’re not sure at this point if Beauvais-MacDonald still works for Securitas, however, he is currently a student at the Centre intégré de mécanique, de métallurgie et d’électricité, in LaSalle.
It remains to be seen how the school’s administration and student community feel about spending their days around this notorious Nazi.
Antoine’s little brother is another important player in Atalante and a patched-in member of the Québec Stomper Crew. Having completed a BA in animation, in 2017, at Université Laval, Étienne is Atalante’s de facto graphic artist, producing designs, logos, and posters under the pseudonym “Sam Ox.” Shortly after we released the “UnmaskingAtalante” dossier, establishing the link between him and his avatar, Étienne fell silent and deactivated all of his accounts on major professional platforms.
In spite of the “brown” stain on his CV, he seems to have found employment with Sunny Side Up Creative in Québec City.
One of the most active Atalante members in the Montréal region, Vincent has participated in numerous group activities, including most of the nighttime postering runs. Originally from Montréal’s South Shore, he kicked around the Longueuil hardcore and punk scene for quite a while before coming into contact with the bonehead milieu and radicalizing, finally embracing full-on fascism. He found himself very isolated in his milieu (he’s the son of a trade unionist!), but he seems to have found a family in Atalante.
Cyr is a butcher at Fruiterie Milano, a neighbourhood grocery store in Montreal’s Little Italy neighbourhood, where his brother also works.
The bassist for Légitime Violence, Atalante’s flagship band, Mecteau originally came out of the hardcore scene. A “first-rate” second stringer, he spends his time at cosplay, as the second fiddle in a crappy neo-Nazi band, and as a tattoo artist at his business Jhan Art.
Mecteau is one of Atalante and the Stompers’ go-to tattoo artists, which perhaps explains why, upon his return from a recent visit to Bicolline (the most important LARPing site in Québec), he found his tattoo parlour “a bit the worse for wear.”
“Svein Krampus” on Facebook. Sven Côté is a longtime bonehead from the national socialist black metal (NSBM) scene. He’s been active in Atalante since the winter of 2016, after an online radicalization that began in 2013, culminating in his embrace of fascism. A protégé of Raphael Lévesque (aka Raf Stomper), with whom he has exchanged openly antisemitic posts on social media, he has remained a loyal member of the group and has recently stopped blurring his face in Atalante’s documentation of its activities. He grew up and lives in the Basse Ville neighbourhood of Québec City. It is generally believed that Côté was among those who attacked La Page Noire bookstore in Québec City on the night of December 8–9, 2018. We have reason to believe that this attack served as a rite of passage into the Québec Stomper Crew for Côté, as he received his colours that same evening.
He is a cook at Le Fin Gourmet, a restaurant in the Saint-Sauveur neighbourhood of Québec City.
More revelations will follow…
Shutting Down the Fascists: A Task That Falls to Our Communities
Fascist militants are not just random doofuses we have some niggling differences with; they are hateful individuals who seek a new social order that involves the oppression, persecution, and elimination of millions of people. Their ideology presents a direct threat and constitutes a form of violence targeting many of us: queers, racialized people, Muslims, Jews, leftists, and numerous others.
At the same time, capitalism itself constitutes a form of violence against many of the people targeted by the far right. As anti-capitalists, we don’t recognize the authority of bosses, the state, or professional orders, and we don’t intend to leave it to them to remove the fascists from our communities and workplaces. We recognize that very often workers have to unite and take the measures necessary to force their employers to ensure their safety.
Excluding fascists and other far-right militants is a task that above all falls to the working class and to members of the public who are endangered by their presence and activities. It is in that spirit that we share this information.
Friends, it’s time we got to work.
[1] This mobilization was meant to be a show of force bringing together white supremacists, “ethnic” nationalists, identitarians, neo-Nazis, and other neofasicsts that make up the American “alt-right” current. The August 11–12, 2017, events in Charlottesville made history as a complete fiasco for the alt-right, most notably because the white supremacist James Alex Fields chose this occasion to use his car as weapon in an attack that killed the antiracist activist Heather Heyer.
[2] Just a few years ago, it was revealed that Hensel European Security Services (HESS), a security company in Germany, was providing Amazon with far-right guards to police, intimidate and abuse foreign workers in the company’s warehouses. Closer to home, in the 1980s, in Canada, William Lau Richardson, the leader of the KKK’s “Klan Intelligence Agency” was employed by the Centurion security company, a position he used to carry out operations against the left. In the 1990s, it was alleged that neo-Nazi private detective Al Overfield similarly used his access to police computer databases to provide information on antifascists to his friends in the Heritage Front, and Bryan Taylor, head of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia, used his position at ADT Security Systems to disseminate racist propaganda.
As an organization that initially emerged out of experiences activists had trying to shut down far right demonstrations and events in Montreal, Montréal Antifasciste has focused on movements and organizations that promote exclusionary beliefs and policies more drastic than the “mainstream” right-wing agenda. This is obviously not a theoretically rigorous approach, just a pragmatic one, and we are aware that there are many circumstances where it might not be appropriate. Furthermore, for reasons having as much to do with capacity as anything else, we have not publicly targeted movements that currently engage in little or no public activities in our city – for instance, the anti-abortion movement or the broader Catholic Right – even though we try to keep them on our radar.
It must be stressed – our focus is a matter of expediency, we do not suggest that it should be adopted by the left overall. We recognize that State policies (like Law 21) and practices (such as police violence and border controls), as well as broader systems of oppression, have a far greater impact than the far right does on its own. Nonetheless, we feel that small focused groups can have a disproportionate effect on wider systems, and that even when they do not they still represent a threat that must be dealt with on its own terms –that’s the task we have taken as our own.
A thorough cartography of the Quebec far right would be the length of a small book; what follows is a rough outline. Our priority will be to explain the characteristics of this terrain and identify some of the more important groups, however we are aware that there is a lot we are leaving out due to simple space constraints. We encourage interested readers to check out our website (http://montreal-antifasciste.info) for a more detailed and extensive examination.
While some of us have been active studying and opposing the far right for decades, our work as MAF has been practical, and practice has shaped both what we have been able to learn and how we have come to understand the situation. Based on this experience, we have found the core beliefs of the contemporary far right in Quebec to be:
Islamophobia;
opposition to a simplistically outlined “global system” identified most closely with the provincial and federal Liberal Parties (and personified for many people by Justin Trudeau, who is personally vilified, mocked for being a dunce, and accused of everything from being Fidel Castro’s son to supporting pedophilia and Sharia law in Canada).
belief that a process is underway by which specific groups of people the far rightists identify with (“old stock Québécois”, “white people”, etc.) are going to be replaced by people of different cultures and/or “races” (the extent to which this replacement is explicitly planned, and by whom, varies within and between groups).
Beyond these points that unite the entire far right, there are a number of differences, the most important one being between a much larger and less politically coherent body of activists who share many attributes with the “mainstream right,” and a smaller tendency with more ideologically rigorous positions which explicitly draw on historical fascism and overt white supremacy. In our work we have termed the former milieu “national populists,” whereas we have referred to the latter as “fascists,” “neofascists,” or even “neo-nazis,” as the case may be.
From what we can tell, in both their core beliefs and the political bifurcation we have described, the Quebec far right is staying true to patterns that exist across Canada.
The main national-populist organizations in Quebec are La Meute (founded in 2015) and Storm Alliance (founded in 2016). Whereas the former initially focused on opposition to “radical Islam” and the latter on “illegal immigration,” they are currently indistinguishable in their opposition to both. The much smaller and marginal Front patriotique du Québec has also played an important part in the milieu in a variety of ways; it has repeatedly raised criticisms of La Meute for being “federalist,” and at the same time several of its members or sympathizers have been instrumental in setting up far right “security” groups whose goal is to intimidate their opponents and protect their organizations. Finally, one must mention the so-called Vague bleue mobilization which occurred in Montreal on May 4 of this year, with a second one being held in Trois-Rivières on July 27. Adopting an approach developed by the FPQ, these gatherings have been organized by national populists but have brought together people unaware of the politics involved, together with far-right security groups and even neofascists. While the “Vague bleue 2” was a horrible failure (from 300 participants in Montreal, the numbers were down to 75 in Trois Rivières), the formula of organizing such events will likely be tried again.
The neofascist tendency is much “tighter” than the national-populist milieu, and there are currently only two organizations of note: Atalante (based in Quebec City and active since 2016) and the Fédération des Québécois de souche (decentralized, albeit with a hub in Saguenay, and active since 2007). At the same time, there have been a number of semi-formal and secretive political initiatives by neofascists and neo-nazis over the years; perhaps the most important recent example being the Alt-Right Montreal/Montreal Stormers group whose existence was revealed by The Montreal Gazette in May 2018. All of the groups in this tendency explicitly identify with the traditions of fascism and open white nationalism.
The National-Populist Milieu
The appearance of La Meute (and to a lesser extent Storm Alliance) signaled an important change in the Quebec far right. These were the first groups since the 1990s that were visibly able to speak to a base beyond their actual membership; in other words, they were the first groups with any real potential for growth. Groups that had been active before them –the Order of Templars, PEGIDA Québec, the Concerned Citizens’ Coalition, the Mouvement Républicain du Québec, etc. – never amounted to more than a few individuals (sometimes just one lone individual) claiming to be an “organization.” The one group that had a certain following that existed prior to 2016 – Les Insoumis – never managed to extend their group beyond the Sherbrooke area, though some members did repeatedly travel to Montreal to participate in other groups’ events. The closest thing we can see to a portent of what was to come was the “Marche du Silence” held in Montreal on September 24, 2015, against the PLQ’s Bill 52 (which was attended by Les Insoumis and certain anti-immigration activists), although various mass demonstrations in favour of the PQ’s Charte des valeurs québécoises in 2013 did serve as earlier warning signs.
The national-populist milieu contains a diversity of views on various questions, this being sanctioned by a frequently voiced desire to privilege “unity” by accepting people with different opinions, so long as they agree with the (rarely explained) “cause”. As a result, this milieu is far less coherent, but also much larger and more potentially mutable, than the neofascist right. To counter the tendency to describe all far right groups as “fascist”, it is worth going over some of the specific attributes of the national-populist milieu:
Many national populists insist they are not racist, and opposition to racial discrimination is a part of the official policy of La Meute and Storm Alliance. While this rests on the spurious assertion that “Islam is not a race,” many sincerely believe this, and this is something that distinguishes them from others on the far right. This opens the door to a situation where a certain number of people of colour, former Muslims, and Indigenous people are welcomed at national-populist mobilizations (albeit in often cringe-inducing tokenizing ways). This also makes these groups more palatable to a section of white society which may be racist but which is uncomfortable claiming this identity openly.
Significant sections of the national-populist movement are taken with homonationalist and femonationalist themes, and as such identify with an ideal of a Quebec that would remain anathema for others on the far right. “Radical Islam” and “illegal immigrants” are opposed in terms of the rights of women and LGB people (though pointedly not in terms of trans people’s rights), even in terms of “feminism.” With few exceptions, members of this milieu will claim to be for women’s rights (this is official policy on the part of both La Meute and Storm Alliance), and opposing misogynist practices is one of the most popular anti-Muslim tropes. Furthermore, there are many women active in the movement, several of whom hold positions of authority and power. At the same time, the movement remains dominated by men; besides reports of sexual assault and harassment among members, a brief survey of social media accounts shows a wide range of memes, jokes, and comments that many would consider sexist and/or sexually objectifying, and the top leadership remains overwhelmingly male.
The milieu is not united behind a single position regarding Quebec independence. While it includes few if any hardcore federalists, the spectrum of opinion ranges from hardcore support for independence (FPQ and the recently formed Parti Patriote) to a position that these questions are secondary and that both Canada and Quebec need to be defended from “illegal immigrants”/“radical Islam” (La Meute, Storm Alliance). This has been the cause of numerous conflicts between individuals, and has played into conflicts between groups, for instance with accusations that La Meute is “federalist.”
The national-populist milieu overwhelmingly considers itself sympathetic to Indigenous people, who are viewed as victims of the same system victimizing Québécois and Canadians. There is also the position, shared even by some neofascists, that contemporary movements should build upon a historic alliance between French Canadians and Indigenous people against the English. This is based on a superficial and self-serving version of Quebec history that denies any role of French Canadians in the colonization and genocide of the First Nations, parallel with an appropriative view of “all Québécois” somehow being “Indigenous” due to purported “Indigenous ancestry,” leading to a conclusion that there are no wrongs that need to be redressed, simply an alliance against the “globalists” (or the Liberals, or the invaders, etc.) that needs to be forged. Nonetheless, Indigenous individuals have repeatedly been welcomed at national-populist mobilizations, often flying the Mohawk Warrior/Unity flag for instance, and there have been multiple (failed) attempts to forge connections with Indigenous communities. It should be noted that this appears to be as superficial as it is self-serving – when faced with actual Indigenous claims of sovereignty or possession of land, many national populists quickly slide back into predictably reactionary positions.
Antisemitism is not a core value of the national-populist movement, and Jews are rarely if ever mentioned in the official pronouncements of national-populist organizations. Unlike national populists in English Canada, however, there has been no visible cooperation between Quebec’s national populists and the Jewish far right. At the same time, the conspiratorial framework developed through centuries of Christian antisemitism is transposed onto the widespread belief in a “globalist” conspiracy, common throughout the movement, for instance with Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros frequently portrayed as a sinister puppetmaster. It is noteworthy that many individuals within the milieu do harbour – and are not shy to express – antisemitic views, and more than one has “jokingly” referred to the Holocaust as an example of what should be done to Muslims and/or immigrants.
Many in the national-populist movement do not consider themselves “far right.” Some rare individuals even claim to consider themselves to be “left,” though this seems largely a disingenuous ploy to be able to pretend to “know what they are talking about” when they deride the actual left (which they claim has been taken over by Islamists, hipsters, and intersectional feminists). More commonly, they will say they are “neither left nor right” but simply “for the people” and “against corruption.” A common refrain is that the government or antifascists are “fascist” and “racist” against Québécois, Canadians, or even simply “white people”.
Members of the national-populist movement are not opposed to working with open racists or fascists. While the majority will claim “not to be racist”, they will also defend the presence of members of openly racist organizations at their mobilizations, will often share social media connections with members of such groups, and will argue in favour of “unity” against their opponents (antifascists or the government). As such, the national-populist milieu constitutes a large reservoir of potential recruits or at least allies for more explicitly far right forces. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that a stunning number of national populists, including especially people in leadership positions, “like” and follow the Facebook pages of Atalante and the FQS.)
While the national-populist movement positions itself against “the elite” and “the politicians,” it is overwhelmingly favourable to those within the State’s repressive apparatus, i.e. its soldiers and police. Several leading figures within the milieu are former members of the armed forces, and at demonstrations a point is often made of thanking the police, even sometimes engaging in pro-police chants. Groups like La Meute include former police officers, sometimes in leadership positions.
People who share these beliefs have existed for years on the margins of more “legitimate” political parties; arguably, the main development increasing their numbers has been a series of Islamophobic campaigns orchestrated from the top down by various politicians and media conglomerates since the first “debate on reasonable accommodation” in 2007. This has been an ongoing process, with a central role being played by the Parti Québécois under the leadership of Pauline Marois (2007-2014) and also by the Québecor media empire, headed by Pierre Karl Péladeau, one of the wealthiest men in Canada who himself served as PQ party leader in 2015-16. Quebecor Media Group – the largest media conglomerate in Quebec (and third largest in Canada) – provides a very big platform for right-wing propagandists such as Richard Martineau, Mathieu Bock-Côté, Lise Ravary and others, all the while delivering a steady stream of journalism stigmatizing minorities in Quebec, especially Muslims. Quebecor is essentially unaccountable, having withdrawn from the Quebec Press Council in 2010 and having subsequently sued the organization for continuing to render decisions regarding its media outlets. Added to this media behemoth are the so-called “radio poubelles”, concentrated in the Quebec City area – a type of talk radio that is tailored to a specific segment of the general population (male, working- or middle-class suburbanites between the ages of 18 and 45) and which caters to its nastier instincts, with a constant barrage of materialistic, individualistic, and sometimes violently reactionary talking points on a variety of topics, often demonizing and bullying various scapegoats, including feminists, leftists, environmentalists, students, immigrants, and Muslims. Not only have these radio stations promoted ideas shared by the far right, but they have repeatedly worked to legitimize national populist organizations, inviting their spokespeople on the air and defending their activities when these have been criticized.
Finally, the failures of the social democratic independence movement – both the declining popular interest in sovereignty, and its inability to successfully resist neoliberal austerity measures (which were in fact imposed by sovereigntist provincial governments from 1994-2003 and then from 2012-14) – created both a basis for and a vacuum to be filled by strains of nationalism that bear more similarity to the conservative nationalist movement of the 1920s than the independence movement of the baby boomer generation.
Specific towns and regions have also had their own personalities and issues which have encouraged the development of the national-populist milieu. For instance, in the Côte Nord, an individual like Bernard “Rambo” Gauthier was able to parlay his image as a tough “man of the people” into a pole of limited but real political influence, with which he popularized Islamophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment, framed in classic terms such as «Moé sauver des étrangers au détriment des miens, ben y’en est crissement pas question! On est assez dans marde comme ça pour en rajouter!», etc. Most famously, the city council of the small town of Herouxville made a decisive intervention in early 2007, passing a racist “code of conduct for immigrants” that played on stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Muslims, implying that they needed to be told not to engage in misogynistic practices such as stoning women and genital mutilation. (The municipal councillor behind the Herouxville resolution, André Drouin, was later active in the Canadian far-right group RISE Canada and for a while associated with the openly fascist Fédération des Québécois de Souche, which, following his death in 2017, eulogized him as a “courageux combattant” in the pages of its magazine Le Harfang.)
Despite this sordid context, it was only in 2016, in the context of the political campaigns of both Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, and following the establishment and growth of La Meute, that this amorphous milieu started becoming conscious of itself and first began really attempting to act as a movement. A fateful turning point was the January 29, 2017, massacre at the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre, where Alexandre Bissonnette entered the mosque, shooting and killing six people, and injuring numerous others. (While this was clearly an Islamophobic attack, Bissonnette himself was not a member of any group.) The Quebec City mosque massacre was the most important factor pushing the far right to a new level; activists felt under attack as police launched investigations of hate speech on the internet, and many of their fears became focussed on Motion M-103, a non-binding private member’s bill condemning Islamophobia that had been proposed the previous December. For many, it felt like a “make it or break it” situation.
2017 was a year of rapid growth for this movement, and organizations repeatedly took to the streets, further elevating the profile of both the groups and their political concerns. While this represented a big step forward for these groups, a look at the numbers involved shows that they remained incapable of mobilizing on anywhere near the same scale as larger social movements, including the radical left:
March 4, in a national day of action against Motion M-103, almost 200 far rightists rally in Montreal, while in Quebec City over 100 people join a demonstration organized by La Meute (that same day roughly 100 people marched in Saguenay, and in smaller numbers similar forces came together in the cities of Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke).
April 23, “Un Peuple Se Lève Contre le PLQ” demonstration organized by the Front Patriotique du Québec brings together over 100 far rightists in downtown Montreal.
May 28, approximately 50 people march in an anti-PLQ demonstration called by the Front Patriotique du Québec in downtown Montreal.
July 1, approximately 60 people, including members of La Meute, heed a call by Storm Alliance to gather at Roxham Road, at the border near the small town of Hemmingford, to “monitor” irregular crossings and intimidate refugees, whose numbers had increased dramatically following anti-immigrant measures by the new Trump administration (their protest was met with a boisterous counter-protest organized by the Montreal group Solidarity Across Borders, which stopped them from achieving their goal of gathering directly at the crossing point).
August 20, in Quebec City La Meute brings out a range of far rightists for a demonstration against “illegal immigration”; after being holed up in an underground parking lot for several hours thanks to antifascist demonstrators, 200-300 La Meute members managed to take to the streets for a silent demonstration.
September 30, Storm Alliance holds its largest border protest to date, with over 100 people gathering at the Lacolle border crossing where a refugee camp (by this point empty) had been set up over the summer. They were countered by more than 100 anti-racists from Montreal and nearby border communities.
November 25, in Quebec City a joint Storm Alliance/La Meute demonstration “to support the RCMP” and against “illegal immigration” attracts a broad range of far rightists, including an organized neofascist contingent; in all 300-400 people participated.
December 15, despite the fact that TVA has retracted the story, dozens of people demonstrate outside a Montreal mosque that the Islamophobic news network had falsely accused of having women road workers excluded from a worksite.
(It should be noted that all of the above mentioned mobilizations included crews of neofascists, as well as numerous individuals clearly sympathetic to overt white supremacy and neo-nazism.)
National-populist demonstrations continued throughout 2018. Once again the Front Patriotique du Québec managed to bring together a wide range of over 100 far rightists (on April 15) for a demonstration against the Liberals, and Storm Alliance and La Meute continued to cooperate, holding a joint demonstration at the border on May 19 against “illegal immigration,” and mobilizing people to attend a larger June 3, 2018, rally at the border organized by Toronto white supremacist Faith Goldy. It should be noted that in 2018 Quebec national-populist organizations also mobilized to travel to Ottawa for two demonstrations organized by groups in English Canada:
February 18, 2018, at a demonstration organized by the Chinese Canadian Alliance, a group that seemingly formed solely to respond to a false accusation that made headlines earlier in the year, that an Asian man had torn the hijab off of a Muslim girl in Toronto. (It should be noted that subsequent documents released by La Meute suggest that the group may have received $5,000, almost half its annual budget, from the CCA in exchange for this support.)
December 8, 2018, at a demonstration organized by the group ACT! for Canada, against the United Nations Compact on Migration; this demonstration was noteworthy for the presence of a wide range of far rightists, including open white supremacists and neofascists from ID Canada, and the Danish far right politician Rasmus Paludan.
Despite these examples, and unsuccessful attempts by La Meute and Storm Alliance to establish functioning chapters outside of the province, activities of the Quebec national-populist movement have been distinct and largely separate from (though not hostile to) similar political movements in English Canada. (Depending on how things go, Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada may alter this situation somewhat, as the PPC has welcomed national populist individuals into its ranks across the country, bringing them into a shared pan-Canadian framework.)
At the same time, following a period of rapid growth from 2016-18, the national-populist milieu has suffered from burnout and internal difficulties. Its flagship organization La Meute has repeatedly been wracked by crises, and numerous key activists have dropped out citing personal concerns and frustration with the inability of the movement to grow beyond its present limits. Within two years of founding the organization, both La Meute’s founders (Eric Venne and Patrick Beaudry) had left or been expelled in two separate incidents amidst claims of financial malfeasance – although whether a matter of actual fraud or simple incompetence was never established. Then in November 2017 the organization was faced with multiple revelations of sexual assault, including complaints regarding La Meute council member Éric Proulx who was eventually expelled.
In June 2019 La Meute experienced another setback, as most of the group’s leadership (reportedly over 35 out of 40) resigned en masse just prior to the Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebrations following a failed attempt to oust “spokesperson” Sylvain Brouillette, who had served as the group’s de facto chief since Beaudry’s expulsion in September 2017. Members complained that Brouillette refused to share responsibility or information, even though he was obviously incapable of fulfilling all of the tasks required of him. A specific point of contention was his failure to provide financial information in a timely manner, which had led to an indefinite delay in establishing La Meute as a non-profit organization. Brouillette managed to reassert himself within a week and many of his rivals posted videos and photos on Facebook of their destroying their own La Meute flags and memorabilia in protest. While the dust has yet to settle, at the moment it seems that many of the group’s key members may now have opted to join Storm Alliance.
Opposition from antifascists has been a factor in undermining these groups; for instance, La Meute’s last attempt at a “large” demonstration was on July 1, 2018, in Montreal, with less than 150 people attending, and hemmed in (on the hottest day of a nasty heat wave) by a variety of groups from the Montreal left. Following this fiasco a number of people publicly resigned from La Meute, and it switched to far lower profile activities in the Montreal area (leafleting and “mobile demonstrations” that amounted to a few people driving around with signs on their cars). Indeed, there are several examples of far-right organizers pointing to the antifascist opposition when they have stated that they are “taking a break” or stepping back permanently.
The high rate of burnout amongst national populists and the fractious political conflicts within their organizations (often involving accusations of financial malfeasance, sexual harassment, and dictatorial power tripping) also points to one of the characteristics of this movement: for many key players, this is their first experience with political activism. This also partially explains the apparent buffoonery that runs through these groups as well as some of the errors they have made (both tactical and organizational), which their opponents sometimes mistake for stupidity.
Finally, it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of national-populist groups’ activities take place on social media. While the nature of social media and the broader Internet can lend undue importance to certain people and statements, it remains essential in order to understand the development of this activist milieu and the prevalence within it of completely unfounded and untrue beliefs. The social media echo chamber (especially Facebook) reinforces the worst prejudices and the more ludicrous conspiracy theories, laying the basis for a fairly “inexpensive” political (re)socialization, in a way that would be much more difficult to realize otherwise, for instance in person. Furthermore, social media facilitates the distribution and normalization of hateful rhetoric, enabling people to take content and share it within their network as if it were something they had come up with themselves, rather than being the official position of an activist organization.
Within this digital terrain, certain figures have carved out a niche for themselves as “independent journalists”, playing on the increasing skepticism towards anything that is “official” or “mainstream.” A number of online “newspapers” have been established which specialize in recycling sensationalist (and often simply untrue) stories and conspiracy theories – while their fortunes wax and wane, important examples would include The Post Millenial (run by Catholic far rightist Raymond Ayas), Les Manchettes (run by André Boies, who translated the Christchurch spree killer’s manifesto into French) and Le Peuple. These supplement a larger number of video-bloggers and Facebook users who regularly post “live videos” for their followers – perhaps the most important of which would be André Pitre and Ken Pereira, who produce regular videos detailing various conspiracies for Pitre’s youtube channel. (It is worth noting that both Ayas and Pereira are running as candidates for the People’s Party of Canada in the upcoming 2019 federal elections.)
The Neofascists
Alongside the national-populist milieu, but by no means completely separate from it, exists a much smaller number of people with a more rigorous worldview. Drawing explicitly on fascism, white nationalism, Roman Catholic traditionalism, and in some cases on neo-nazism, we refer to these networks as neofascist or fascist.
There are two main poles of the fascist movement in Quebec.
On the one hand, there are people who came out of a number of youth subcultures, and who have often engaged in street violence and other forms of criminal activity, as well as the kinds of cultural activities associated with “underground” or independent music (organizing shows and parties, going on tour, putting out zines). International connections and local organizing was often facilitated if not modeled on these activities, both cultural and criminal, with likeminded activists around the world. This pole dates back to the 1980s in Quebec; by the 1990s members were engaging in numerous acts of violence and intimidation against the left and against racialized and queer people, including several murders. While at a certain point the main scene in question would have been skinheads, more recently one would also have to mention black metal and neo-folk in terms of cultural spaces targeted by neofascists and white supremacists.
The second pole of the Quebec fascist movement can trace its lineage back to the 1920s, however it is a broken tradition with many stops and starts, and which since the 1980s has generally been modest to the point of secrecy. This pole consists of individuals who culturally situate themselves almost as the opposite of the rowdy skinhead pole, who are intellectually and often religiously motivated to support fascist and white nationalist political activism. This tendency was last publicly organized around the Cercle Jeune Nation (1980-90), some of its adherents have also been active in Catholic traditionalist circles, for instance the Société Saint-Pie X, while some have found a home in the right wing of the Quebec nationalist movement. Due to their more respectable (and more privileged) social position, individuals from this pole have a real material interest in being circumspect about their beliefs. That is not to say that they are inactive, however.
Over the past twenty years, there has been a rapprochement between these two poles. While both Atalante and the Fédération des Québécois de souche were started by white nationalist skinheads, for instance, neither one is by any means limited to that milieu today. This organized core also benefits from the sympathy of a larger number of individuals who are sympathetic to fascist and neo-nazi ideas, even if they may choose not to be politically active at this time.
In parallel to this, a more clearly neo-nazi pole seems to have formed over the past few years around the Montreal area, piggybacking on groups based primarily on the Internet like The Right Stuff and the Daily Stormer; due to the secret nature of this group (organized largely in hidden chat rooms and forums online), it could provide a comfortable home to both individuals who aspired to create a political movement IRL, and a number of lurkers, prior to being severely disrupted by antifascists in 2018.
The formation of a national-populist scene in Quebec has provided the neofascists with an opportunity for outreach. While some neo-nazis, for instance those around the Alt-Right Montreal scene, may deride the national populists as “boomers” and express wanting to have nothing to do with them, the existence of a large milieu nonetheless creates both the political space and practical occasions (such as demonstrations) where they can meet and make their own connections. The year 2017 in particular was remarkable for the way in which neofascists repeatedly managed to make a claim to legitimacy within the broader far right. If on March 4, members of Atalante demonstrated separately from La Meute in Quebec City, and implicitly criticized the latter while winking at the left with their banner (which read, “Immigration –The Reserve Army of Capital”), in Montreal members of Alt-Right Montreal were in the thick of it, joining with La Meute and Storm Alliance, and engaging in physical clashes with antifascist counterdemonstrators. Eight months later in Quebec City, Atalante and the Soldiers of Odin staged their own dramatic entrance into the November 25 national-populist demonstration after having taken the ramparts opposite the smaller antifascist demonstration. It is worth mentioning that as they entered the broader demonstration, the neofascists were met with applause from La Meute and Storm Alliance members, many of whom “liked” their Facebook page and congratulated them on social media in the days following.
Some characteristics of the neofascist tendency include:
Opposition to democracy and belief in “natural law”;
An acceptance of violence as a necessary tool for political change, and a glorification of violence in itself as a virile, warrior-like attribute;
A belief in race and nation as key categories of human existence, while the way in which these relate to each other (equal but different, or in a hierarchy, or in a state of war) and the explanation for them (genetic vs. cultural) can vary;
Antisemitic; at best they hold that Jews are a negative influence on the nation, at worst they adopt the full-blown conspiracy theory of Jews constituting an enemy race that needs to be exterminated;
Unanimous in their homophobia and transphobia;
Islamophobic, however with the qualification (often explicitly made) that Muslims are being used by Jews (or “globalists”) to destroy the nation/race;
Overwhelmingly male, with an openness to political misogyny; feminism is sometimes described as a Jewish trick;
Most neofascists in Quebec are in favour of independence and are opposed to Canada which is seen as an occupying force, though this is not a position held by all.
Compared to the national populists, the neofascists have much more developed and important connections in Europe and the United States, and can in fact be said to belong to an international political and intellectual movement. Members of Atalante, for instance, have strong connections to the Rock Against Communism scene, and have also drawn directly on their connections with the Italian neofascist movement CasaPound, borrowing both elements of discourse (rhetoric that connects anti-immigrant sentiment with anti-capitalism, etc.) and mobilizing tactics (charity initiatives exclusively for “old stock” citizens, etc.). The FQS for its part frequently includes interviews with intellectuals from outside of Quebec in its magazine Le Harfang. One thing that sets the Quebec scene apart from neofascists elsewhere in North America is the predictably greater place that European movements have held in its worldview. For instance, whereas the Alt Right in the United States represented the first introduction of certain texts from the European New Right into the American far right, these ideas have been familiar to many Quebec neofascists since the 1970s and 80s.
Looking Forward
The increase in far right activity in Quebec over the past few years can be traced back to a number of factors external to the movement, some of which are international in scope some of which are specific to our situation here: the “War on Terror,” the social media-driven internet, the 2008 financial crisis, the multiple failures of the left wing of the Quebec independence movement, and the Trump presidency, to name just the most obvious.
We don’t expect the process driving this growth to slow down, in fact we expect there to be future “jumps” in a bad direction, as the global financial and ecological crises hit impending tipping points. That said, for the immediate future we predict that the bifurcation of the far right described in this article will continue, with a much larger movement with a wider range of views continuing to expand, and that this growth will also benefit smaller more rigorous organizations with more radical political aspirations. At the same time, these movements are part of a dynamic that is itself pulling the entire political debate in a certain direction, normalizing certain ideas, and legitimizing “less radical” measures; the election of neoliberal populists across Canada, including here in Quebec with the CAQ, speaks to this reality.
Quebec is not an anomaly: today the far right, consisting of national populists but with a strong neofascist current, have a real impact on the political balance of power throughout not only Europe and North America, but has actually been elected to state power in three of the BRICS as well. Contending with the far right and learning how to (re)build new radical liberation movements that can operate and win on this terrain is the task facing us today. Given capitalism’s global crisis, failure to do so would have grave consequences from which we might never be able to recover.
Comments Off on Dozens of so-called Quebec “patriots” join forces with Canadian neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists to demonstrate against immigrants in Lacolle
On August 24, 2019, a small anti-immigrant demonstration was held at the Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle border crossing. The event was coordinated by the Groupe de sécurité patriotique (GSP, literally translated as “Patriotic Security Group”) and supported by an assortment of far-right fanatics, including a well-known neo-Nazi who traveled from Ontario with other Canadian ultranationalists to team up with our local “patriots.”
These demonstrators, who obviously adhere to an alternative version of reality rooted in various conspiracy theories (including the so-called “great replacement” of the Québécois/Canadian/Western/White populations by means of a “mass immigration” plan that is supposedly orchestrated by the “globalist elite” at the UN; this is the exact same racist theory that inspired the Christchurch and El Paso mass murderers), had called for a gathering at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle in order to denounce the arrival of immigrants and “illegal” refugees into Canada[i].
A failed mobilization
The August 24 rally was first called by Lucie Poulin, a key organizer with the Parti patriote (Patriot Party), which is currently trying to gather enough signatures to run in the 2019 federal election. The Patriot Party is a far-right, nationalist group in Québec which was present at the recent Vague bleue (Blue Wave) mobilizations, but whose relationship with the Vague bleue organizers has since then taken a turn for the worse following a public freak out from Poulin. Not surprisingly, the Patriot Party’s main issues are opposition to “mass immigration” and “anti-Québécois racism.”
The far-right mobilization on August 24 remained mediocre, despite the announcement made by Robert Proulx, leader of the Groupe de sécurité patriotique (GSP), that his group endorsed the initiative and would be present to ensure its security.
The day after the event, Robert Proulx – discomfited and on the verge of depression – published a video in which he expressed a negative appraisal and overall disappointment with the mobilization. Not once did he address the presence of a well-known neo-Nazi by his side all day…
Groupe de Séurité Patriotique’s chieftain, Robert Proulx, best of pals with Kevin Goudreau, the neo-Nazi leader of the Canadian Nationalist Front.
Dubious new acquaintances…
Among the approximately 40 people who gathered at the border was a small contingent of Canadian “Yellow Vests” from the Toronto and Hamilton areas, as well as Peterborough’s neo-Nazi activist Kevin Goudreau… who was even invited to take the microphone a few times!
“I’m proud of my heritage; we’ve been here for 400 fucking years. And we don’t need, these fucking… god-dam fucking ragheads (sic) coming here and telling us how to live our life. Our heritage, our homeland. (…) We’re not immigrants. We did not immigrate here. We built this country, from garbage, from nothing.”
Just before, Johane Voyer – presented as the GSP’s head of media relations – made a long speech as delirious as it was disjointed:
« (…) We are Storm Alliance, Les Gardiens du Québec, La Meute… We are Atalante, name it… EVEN, we are the antifas! (…) »
(…) Our political elites want to make Canada and Québec an overpopulated country of immigrants. (…)
Trudeau, among others, between 2019 and 2020, if he is re-elected, he wants to bring in a million. (…) Canada has the highest immigration rate in the world. We are forced back. Mass immigration, refugees, crossing on behalf of a third country, supposedly legal or illegal asylum seekers (sic). For at least 15 years, this country has accepted twice as many immigrants as the United States, and four times more than France. That means between two and two and a half times per capita (sic). If that is not the assimilation of our people, then what is it?”
“There is not a single francophone left in Manitoba anymore.”
The vociferous Michel Malik Ethier, who has previously been mentioned on this site on various occasions, pointed to the UN as the main enemy of the Québécois people:
“It’s the UN that is pushing Trudeau to do that. Trudeau uses a weapon called ‘multiculturalism’ to attain his globalist ends. The remedy, the antidote to that, is what I see before me: it is patriotism. That’s why they want to destroy nationalism altogether. Whether it is Quebec nationalism or Canadian nationalism, our nationalism is a poison for Trudeau. (…) Trudeau, leaving the door open to any migrant, puts us in danger.”
Following the example of Voyer and other speakers, Ethier then inexplicably decided to address the dozens of protesters in English. It would normally be surprising to see so many Quebec patriots demonstrating under a gigantic maple leaf and speaking in English to reach out to Canadian ultranationalists –but for these so-called patriots, the defense of “the people” and of the national territory against the imaginary threat of “mass immigration” now seems to take priority over the aspiration to national independence for Quebec!
Robert Proulx, aka “Bob the Warrior,” the leader of GSP, took the microphone next to defend the group’s practice of dressing up as fake soldiers in military surplus gear to “defend” these ultranationalist protests. True to his habit of lying compulsively, he began by saying that GSP has “ensured security at protests” for five years, even though the group has only existed for a year (at most), and even though Proulx himself only began appearing at La Meute’s protests in 2017. Once full of shit, always full of shit…
“What really hurts is to read comments on Facebook saying that we look like ridiculous dumbasses dressed in military gear.”
Donald Proulx, of the Patriot Party, followed with a series of dubious statistics on “the assimilation of Francophones”:
“[The Francophone nation across Canada] In 1766, we were at 99%; we can say that things were going very well at that time. (…) Today, we are talking about being down to 20%. With massive and illegal immigration, it will continue to drop much more quickly. (…) Nationalist parties are taking off in Europe right now. We need that kind of politics here, and it should have started at least 15 years ago. The Patriot Party is going to be there, not just at the federal level, we are going to be there at the provincial level, and we are going to target the municipal, we are going to be everywhere.”
A discrete opposition
A discrete antifascist mobilization remained in proximity to, but separate from, the demonstration all day long, observing the bigots from a distance. It was decided on the spot not to engage in a direct counter-protest – given the circumstances, it was better to simply leave them with the rope they needed to hang themselves!
Lucie Poulin and Robert Proulx both boasted about their close collaboration with the police in their respective video reports on the event, stating that the police closely escorted them throughout the day. Police officers were even seen joking and socializing with the bigots.
Complicity in Lacolle
Most of the demonstrators took several hours to reach the border crossing at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, but for some, the trip was much shorter.
André Lafrance, a municipal councillor for Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, was present at the rally. Far from dissociating himself from the racists, he joined the small crowd and even published a photo album of the day accompanied by raving commentary.
It also seems that the racists’ meeting point, IGA Dauphinais, was not chosen by coincidence; the owner of the IGA and the attached shopping center went above and beyond to accommodate the rally, and the protesters were warmly welcomed –both in the parking lot and, after their protest, in the mall restaurant. We are observing a clear pattern, here, and will pay greater attention in the future to this preoccupying complicity in Lacolle.
The infighting continues…
After the fiasco that was the Vague bleue (Blue Wave) in Trois-Rivières, the small national-populist milieu currently rallied around the GSP has just proven that its members are no better than their rivals the Gardiens du Québec (Guardians of Quebec), considering that they went so far as to give a nice platform to a well-known neo-Nazi!
For the record, before the small rally on the 24th, Lucie Poulin had already stirred up drama in the milieu by attacking both John Hex (the main organizer of the Vague bleue) and Storm Alliance for not having immediately endorsed her initiative. Her criticism was then echoed by Robert Proulx and Sylvain Lacroix of GSP, who were still frustrated at having been told by the organizers of the Vague bleue not to come out to the event’s second edition wearing paramilitary outfits (hence Proulx’s comment above). In response, Éric Trudel, the leader of Storm Alliance, stated that “the Stormers” would no longer return to the border, stressing that the individuals behind the demonstration on August 24thare those who are always stirring up shit within the movement.
Speaking on behalf of La Meute, an organization in crisis and full of hypocrites, Wolfric Oullet (dictator-in-chief Sylvain Brouillette’s right-hand man) took a moment to criticize former Meute members and “dissidents” who joined or endorsed the demonstration: “You gang of fools are not worthy to bear our name and wear our colors after having burned them and with what you are now doing with them. Shame on you all, you gang of imbeciles.”
What we are currently witnessing in Quebec is a rise to the surface of all the most pathetic elements of the far-right, in a context where the two main organizations active in recent years – La Meute and Storm Alliance – are withdrawing. All kinds of individuals, a little less skillful and more frank in their racism, are taking advantage of this withdrawal to put themselves forward.
A situation to keep an eye on.
[i] The Lacolle border crossing has become a priority gathering area for the far-right in its opposition to immigration. A large number of migrants cross the border at Roxham Road, close to the Lacolle crossing, to flee an increasingly repressive situation in the United States. Since the Trump regime has refused to renew various agreements allowing people to remain in that country legally, people come to Canada in the hope of finding refuge here. However, because of the hypocritical and deadly “Safe Third Country Agreement,” migrants are denied refugee status if they show up at a regular border crossing. This is why they are forced to cross at an irregular passage. Roxham Road has become one of the most important (and most famous) of these crossing points.
Rather than recognize the situation at the border for what it is – the tip of the iceberg of a global humanitarian crisis fueled by imperialist wars, ecological destruction, and racism – far-right organizations cling to the issue of what they call “illegal immigration” to attract media attention and stir up racist sentiments and behavior. It is important to note that according to the Quebec Bar Association, there is no such thing as “illegal immigration”; it is not a legal category. The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is just a word trick meant to suggest that refugees are doing something wrong or are criminals.
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