Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information

Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop: On Bad-jacketing

 Comments Off on Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop: On Bad-jacketing
Oct 082024
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

Read the full text, including visuals, online as a PDF.

Find the full text ready for printing as an imposed PDF.

Since the commencement of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, millions around the world have taken to the streets in support of Palestine against the genocidal Zionist entity. We are, globally, in an unprecedented moment of anti-imperialist mobilisation, which threatens not only the Zionist occupation but the colonial powers that uphold it.

This text was written through the summer and early autumn of 2024 from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory (so-called Southern Ontario, Canada), where people, many new to the left, have been facing intensified violence and harassment from both police and Zionists. Protests are regularly met with arrests and other attacks, which have created a climate of fear among attendees and organisers.

At the same time, that fear, combined with a disconnect from previous generations of struggle and an often-unchallenged fear of militancy, has led to practices that end up putting our comrades in more danger. This text hopes to address one such recurring issue.

what is bad-jacketing?

“Bad-jacketing” (or “cop-jacketing,” “fed-jacketing,” or “snitch-jacketing”) is the practice of accusing people of being a cop, informant, fascist, or other kind of bad actor on specious or non-existent evidence.

The term has been used since at least the 1960s, where it primarily described COINTELPRO operations that bad-jacketed legitimate members of the Black Panther Party and other organisations. It was, ironically, rumours from infiltrators consolidating their own positions that led to organisations not only isolating but, in some cases, severely beating or executing innocent individuals.

why is bad-jacketing a problem?

A 2015 text titled “No badjacketing: the state wants to kill us; let’s not cooperate” by the Twin Cities GDC, Local 14, says:

  1. At the least, it pushes away people who have, or are willing, to do work and make sacrifices for the movements.
  2. Worse, it silences entire groups by sowing mistrust within them and making discussion of strategy and tactics difficult.
  3. Very commonly, those accused of acting as informants become so alienated from their accusers that they actually become snitches.
  4. Worst-case scenario, people die. That worst-case scenario is all too common and real, and there is a famous regional history to it as well, in the case of Anna Mae Aquash, a Native American woman from Canada who had worked and sacrificed tireless for the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

Southern Ontario in 2024 is, of course, not the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Our contemporary movements do not act on false accusations of snitching by killing the accused. And while we know that the police are trying to infiltrate us and turn people into informants, the vast majority of these accusations are definitely not coming from people on the state’s payroll.

The biggest threat that bad-jacketing poses to us, here and now, is that it singles people out for state repression. Militants are more likely to be on the receiving end of these accusations, but also, anecdotally, people of colour, neurodivergent people, and anyone who “does not belong” (and, of course, people who fall into all of those categories). In doing so, the people who make these accusations in effect carry out the work of the state. They reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the outside world and push people out – often, the very people our movements are supposed to be fighting for. By pushing them out, bad-jacketing then denies support to people who are often already at heightened risk of criminalisation. It makes people into easy targets, signaling to the police that they can get away with brutalising, arresting, and jailing someone without outcry from the community.

During the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in the US, posts flooded our feeds, warning of “agents provocateur.” Decontextualised videos of police unloading bricks spread like wildfire among both far-right and far-left social media networks. Fascist fear-mongering about out-of-town “ANTIFA” inciting riots trickled down into leftist hyper-vigilance against “white outside agitators.” These warnings often ventured into the realm of conspiracy theories, where protests with unknown organisers or cop cars on fire were signs of a police set-up.

All this has had devastating consequences. The normalisation of this paranoid urge to see false flags around every corner has empowered people “on the left” to share images and openly work to identify individuals carrying out illegal actions. Contrary to what they may believe, these people’s efforts to “root out infiltrators” have in many cases now become the actual basis for the state to arrest and jail its opponents.

Beyond that, bad-jacketing leads to feelings of insecurity and distrust that can tear apart a movement – even without any real infiltrators being involved. Both online and on the ground, we can hear breathless accusations that someone at a protest is an undercover Zionist operative, often for no reason beyond that “they make us look bad.” Zionists, constantly on the lookout for ammunition against us, gladly stoke the flames. Projects like the “Shirion Collective,” a Zionist doxing campaign that claimed on social media to be training undercover operatives, see and celebrate when the left eats its own. We must be equally vigilant against these psychological attacks, which are more subtle and yet can do more damage than any one undercover’s testimony.

“professionally trained to make us look bad”
– Kristina Beverlin on Isaiah Willoughby

On October 5, 2021, Isaiah Willoughby, a Black man, was sentenced to two years in prison for lighting a fire outside an abandoned police precinct in Seattle in June 2020. Willoughby acted because of the murders of Manuel Ellis, his former roommate, and George Floyd at the hands of the police.

When it happened, Kristina Beverlin, a white woman who now wears a kufiya and a “Free Palestine” hat in her profile picture, immediately blasted out a photo of Willoughby. She tweeted that he “just tried to start a fire at the abandoned precinct” and called on “everyone in Seattle to retweet the photo of this man.”

In subsequent tweets, she stated her belief that “SPD wanted the precinct to catch fire to make the peaceful protesters look bad, after SPD had looked like monsters for days.”

It was her initial tweet that appeared in a court affidavit against Willoughby, and her photo that the police disseminated to identify him. In other words, it was this white woman’s insistence that the police wanted someone to set fire to the precinct, and that anyone who did so could only have been directed by the police, that sent a Black man to prison. Like any other white vigilante, the self-deputised liberal peace police will discipline, with violence if necessary, Black or people of colour who step out of line. Unlike any other, she does it in the name of anti-racism, with an #ACAB hashtag in the same breath.

Similarly, social media users widely disseminated photos of a white woman suspected to have carried out the arson of the Atlanta Wendy’s where police murdered Rayshard Brooks. That she was white was proof to them that bad actors with no connection to the movement were behind property destruction during the uprisings, and that without those bad actors, the protests would have been peaceful. As it turned out, the woman in question was Natalie White, who Brooks had called his girlfriend on the night of his death. Two Black men, Chisom Kingston and John Wesley Wade, were later charged for the Wendy’s arson as well. As of December 2023, White and Kingston had accepted plea deals for probation, a fine, and community service, while Wade was scheduled to go to trial.

In both these examples, the people who sought to identify state agents “instigating” at protests were ultimately the people who acted as cops. The gravity of these actions cannot be overstated – they, and we, already know that police kill and torture Black people on the streets, and prison guards do the same against their captives on the inside.

Following the May 2022 leak of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Jane’s Revenge shared a communiqué about the fire-bombing of a predatory anti-choice “pregnancy centre” in Madison. The action sparked the usual uproar among the right about “woke ANTIFA terrorists” waging war against Christianity. But rather than defend the action’s righteousness, much of the left instead occupied itself with speculation about whether cursive graffiti and a “too-neat” circle-A meant that it was a false flag. The underlying logic here was that if something looked “too perfect,” if it made the right too angry, it couldn’t possibly be real. We may talk of rioting against the Supreme Court, but no one seriously means it.

In response to the right-wing outrage campaign about Jane’s Revenge, the FBI offered a bounty of up to $25,000 for information. Days later, in January 2023, the US Department of Justice indicted two people for graffiti on anti-abortion centres in Florida, actions that were also broadcast through Jane’s Revenge. The Florida investigation eventually produced in a total of four arrests, all but one of the defendants being women of colour. Worse, the Florida 4 were prosecuted under the FACE Act, a law intended to protect abortion access. Meanwhile, an investigation that involved 11 different state agencies and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force culminated in the March 2023 arrest of Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury for the Madison fire-bombing. Though the right jumped at the opportunity to gloat, widely publicising the defendants’ photos and personal information, charges against Roychowdhury and the Florida 4 received little attention from the left. Roychowdhury pled guilty after being denied pre-trial release and was sentenced to 90 months (7.5 years) in federal prison on April 10, 2024. Three of the Florida 4, after taking felony pleas that avoided convictions under the FACE Act, were also handed down prison time on September 12 of this year, ranging from 30 days to 1 year and 1 day. Popular support may not have prevented those prosecutions, but the significance of solidarity shouldn’t be understated. Instead, much of the left’s message to militants turns out to have been: “we’ll call you feds, and when it turns out we were wrong, we’ll abandon you anyways.”

Though we never had our own Third Precinct moment, left networks in Ontario fell victim to many of the same conspiratorial impulses. Reposted Instagram stories warned of “suspicious piles of bricks” left as bait near march routes and even “black blocs from Montréal” coming into town to start riots.

While, regrettably, no such riot materialised here in 2020, the bad-jacketing of the black bloc has a long history in Southern Ontario, as in other regions. A particularly egregious example came in the wake of the Toronto G20 in 2010, where liberals convinced themselves that the property damage was all an inside job and set out looking for proof. They singled out a muscular white man in combat boots and “cop-like” black pants for looking suspicious, digging up every image of him they could find. All of this crowd-sourced evidence built a convenient case for the police, who arrested and jailed the target of their suspicions.

A pattern emerges: subsequent repression draws only a fraction of the concern that the broad left had earlier put into interrogating the legitimacy of an action. This is one of the most insidious functions of badjacketing and disavowal – it aids the state project of disappearing people. Speculation about false flags, made exponentially worse by social media and algorithms that egg on endless engagement, steals away energy that could be spent preparing for the repression to come. It turns actions into abstractions ripe for every person to project their own arguments. That abstraction removes militants’ humanity from the picture, enjoining us to forget that real people, putting their lives on the line for the movement, must have lit the match or thrown the brick. The collective failure to adequately show up for each defendant and prisoner in this section – and many more not named – goes beyond a culture of disposability. It is a mass forgetting that makes each of us who partakes in it complicit in the work of the police, prisons, and the carceral state to not only extinguish our resistance but also erase our memory of its very possibility – and our memory and connection to the people who’ve sacrificed to keep that possibility alive.

when people are occupied, resistance is justified

The movement for Palestine has long been one of the most hyper-surveiled and attacked. Only when it comes to the Palestinian struggle will even the most mild, pacifist expressions of support land someone on McCarthyist blacklists like Canary Mission, extensive repositories of personal information stretching back years. It is no wonder, then, that people are – correctly – concerned about being targeted by our enemies, which include not just the settler colonial state itself but also Zionists who self-organise outside of it.

Unfortunately, this has once again meant a dangerous resurgence of bad-jacketing. In February 2024, social media posts from the “Shirion Collective” sparked mass outrage and panic among supporters of Palestine. Announcing an “Operation Global Insight,” the posts claimed to be launching an “undercover operation” in key locations such as Toronto. “Volunteers willing to wear keffiyehs and walk [masked] in these demonstrations” would “be provided an hour long basic training by one of [their] ex-Mossad team leads.” Further, “individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in [the] operation.”

Though the collective is, without a question, real, there is plenty of reason to believe that the reaction to the post was disproportionate to their actual abilities. Sensationalist claims of Mossad ties in an emoji-studded public tweet do not paint a picture of a sophisticated intelligence operation. Neither do their existing “exposés” on social media, which, despite techno-babble buzzwords about AI, are largely limited to reposting other people’s footage and open-source information that anyone with access to Google could easily retrieve. The description of walking around at protests and “law enforcement presence” suggests no actual knowledge of how Palestine solidarity groups organise or bring in new members. A few people with bad intentions joining a march of hundreds or thousands, where every angle is already recorded and streamed live on Instagram, can hardly be characterised as “infiltration.”

If that were not enough on its own, the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist research group, shared internal screenshots from Shirion’s Telegram channel that confirmed the post’s real purpose was to sow fear and distrust. One Shirion volunteer is quoted as saying:

We won’t need to do anything. They will:

  1. Tone down
  2. Police their own
  3. Maybe even beat up their own just because they think those are us

That summary of their goals succinctly re-states the risks that bad-jacketing poses to our movements.

Even before the Shirion scare, claims that someone was secretly a Zionist or cop were already commonplace. People who wear the symbols or fly the flags of the Palestinian resistance have been accused of being “agitators,” sent by Zionist organisations like B’nai Brith to make protestors look bad. Over-the-shoulder glimpses of someone’s phone or poor fashion choices have been presented as evidence that a protestor is actually an undercover. Online, Palestinians have been accused of being Zionist sockpuppets off of little more than bad feelings. And, naturally, even minor disagreements or political critiques will end in allegations that so-and-so is a fed. While, thankfully, conspiratorial crowds here have not at least yet handed over one of our own to the cops, these accusations are sometimes accompanied by calls to act against someone. In one case recently, a queer person of colour known to other attendees was followed, harassed, and filmed aggressively at a protest because someone had decided for no clear reason that they were a Zionist in disguise.

As the police continue to crack down on us, it is all the more crucial that we learn from the mistakes of the recent past. We cannot let our rightful vigilance lead us to attack our own comrades. Nor should we water down our political lines, our demands, or our tactics for fear that the media and the right will smear us – they do that regardless. It may not be possible to eliminate some, faint chance that an infiltrator is behind a resistance flag, a punch thrown at a Zionist, a brick through a window, but far more likely is that some brave person, who has chosen to more boldly and unabashedly confront this genocidal system and its supporters, is responsible. For that, they deserve our support and our solidarity against whatever repression may come, not our condemnation.

knowing our enemies

An over-emphasis on undercovers may lead to an under-emphasis on other security vulnerabilities. Rather than acting according to a one-size-fits-all checklist or, worse, reacting to threats only as they appear, it’s important to proactively identify and individually study threats in order to understand how to address them. That is to say, what – specifically – is your enemy trying to do? How do they do it? The process of answering these questions is known as threat modeling.

Accounts like Shirion, Leviathan, or StopAntisemitism are real threats, as any of their victims know all too well. But OSINT, as well as everyday acquaintances, are much likelier to be the source of their information.

Your personal Instagram or TikTok page might already give away your identity, the protests you attend, your work or school, and the identities of your friends and family members. Your employer might publicly share profiles, including photos, of all of their staff on their website. Tools like PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID allow anyone willing to pay for them to run facial recognition technology and search the Internet for a given face.

If you’re a student, a Zionist classmate could easily recognise you from criticising racism in class and look up your personal information in a school database. A right-wing former colleague could remember you for being politically outspoken at your shared workplace. Knowing the true identities of everyone at a march will do nothing to prevent doxing if, for example, that march is being streamed online, your face is exposed, and your social media is public.

what about the real infiltrators and provocateurs?

Infiltration – actual infiltration, where someone comes into our organisations and our lives, pretending to be our friend, only to hand information over to the state – should not be taken lightly. But our baseline understanding of it often takes the form of a few convenient tropes, reinforcing existing biases against militancy and justifying dismissiveness towards criticism. These tropes prevent us from truly knowing our enemies.

The late Matt Cicero wrote that:

[there is a] misconception that all infiltrators act as agents provocateurs who try to manipulate activists into taking illegal, violent, unpopular, and ineffective actions. But as Gary T. Marx points out in his theory of social movement infiltration, social movements are damaged by “opposing organizational, tactical, and resource mobilization tasks.” In other words, infiltrators suppress social movements by fomenting divisions and internal conflicts, diverting energies toward defending the movement rather than pursuing broader social goals, sowing misinformation or damaging reputations, obstructing the supply of resources (money, transport, meeting spaces), or sabotaging planned actions. Many infiltrators are thus better described as agents suppressants, who are there to gather intelligence and channel groups away from militant action. […]

Incidents of provocation can be high-profile and sensational, such as undercover police posing as members of the black bloc at Montebello. This can lead activists to paint all militant action as the work of agents provocateurs, even if there is no evidence that this is true. Conversely, because of the low-profile of most agents suppressants, activists are often unaware of their role and impact in pacifying and controlling social movements.

The spectre of the provocateur itself, then, carries out the suppressant role of “put[ting] a damper on evolving movement militancy.”

The single-minded focus on the agent provocateur often goes hand-in-hand with a short-term view of state repression as having only two main goals:

  1. Criminalising individuals in order to take them off the board while making an example out of them; and
  2. Smearing the movement in the media, stigmatising it to the public, by associating it with criminality.

But as Cicero describes, the state is additionally engaged in a long-term project of suppression and counter-insurgency. The police cannot arrest every dissident – but they don’t need to jail us all to successfully maintain the colonial order. The central goal of counter-insurgency is to preserve legitimacy and control.

To that end, some further goals of state repression include, but are not limited to:

  1. Exploiting existing tensions in the movement in order to sow discord and distrust;
  2. Defanging the movement by discouraging forms of action that exceed accepted norms of protest; and
  3. Collecting intelligence to inform repressive operations, for the purposes of criminalisation and suppression.

We should examine the issue of infiltration with all of these goals in mind. David Gilbert says, “[t]here is no simple litmus test to differentiate sincere militancy from provocation or honest caution from suppression.” The same extends to the search for infiltrators more broadly. Most of the time, the only truly conclusive proof that someone is a police infiltrator comes from seeing the evidence against you that they’ve handed over to the state after you’ve been charged. That isn’t of much help – by the time you have those court documents in your possession, the damage will already have been done. That is assuming that the information they collect ever goes to court at all. RCMP documents from the G20 suggest that there may have been as many as 12 undercover officers. Far fewer than that were ever exposed by name, and the remainders’ identities may never be known.

People who’ve experienced the profound betrayal of finding out that someone they knew was an undercover or informant often end up drawing conclusions that are diametrically opposed from one another. But a common thread persists through most of their takeaways: there are few ways to prove for certain that someone is a cop, and many ways that the hunt for infiltrators itself instead undermines our work and furthers the state’s goals.

Accordingly, we should turn our energies to proactively building a security culture that protects us from both infiltration and other security threats. Much has been written on this subject already. In short: solid security practices should mean that an undercover cop is prevented from gathering meaningful information even if we do not know who they are, and that security risks are dealt with regardless of whether an individual is specifically acting on behalf of the state. If you do everything right, a plainclothes still won’t know who among the bloc smashed that ATM, even if they saw it happen with their own eyes.

As the ever-green “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” reminds us, many of the greatest threats to our movements may not officially collaborate with the police either. In the Toronto anti-fascist scene alone, multiple people accused of misogyny and sexual violence/gender-based violence later went on to renounce the left, consort with their former opponents, and attack (verbally, physically, and with legal threats) their former comrades. None of those people, to our knowledge, were undercover cops, nor were they secretly fascists all along. Looking for a non-existent smoking gun to show that someone was lying about their identity would – and did – only delay people from taking necessary action against them when the myriad of other red flags should have been more than enough.

naming our enemies

The epidemic of bad-jacketing is inseparable from the problem of peace policing. Many organisers advocate for a policy of de-escalation at all costs, even in the face of potentially deadly violence from police and Zionists. They speak of “agitators” who disrupt and “escalate” “peaceful protests” – a nebulous euphemism that they apply to both the Zionist who shows up with a knife and the militant who comes prepared to fight back.

We should be clear: our enemies are not “agitators.”

Our enemies are the police, who brutalise us and lock us away to enforce settler colonial order. Our enemies are Zionists and other white supremacists, who assault and harass us in the streets, and stalk and threaten us in our everyday lives. Our enemies are politicians and other establishment liberals, who carry out colonial and imperialist genocides, here, in Palestine, and around the world, all the while crying crocodile tears about a so-called humanitarian crisis that they created. Our enemies are legacy media institutions, who smear resistance as terrorism and mobilise support for each of these attacks.

We must take care to differentiate between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and to distinguish between enemies and potential friends. Too often, we see organisers reject co-strugglers in order to appeal to liberal institutions that will never be on our side. They may frame the conservative path as the only strategic option, rejecting open support for armed struggle, militant direct action, and anything else that would create “bad optics.” Disagreements from co-strugglers are treated as threats worse than that of liberal media, who we must appeal to for sympathy, or Zionists and cops, who we must appease for our safety.

When our enemies attack us anyways, these organisers pin the blame not on the perpetrators but on the co-strugglers who deviate from their line. They forget that to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing. Our enemies do not strive for unity with us, knowing that ours is an antagonistic contradiction, knowing that our collective liberation requires their annihilation. It is better that we, too, abandon any notions of conciliation and recognise our enemies as enemies.

For all these reasons, we urge people to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. Abandon the euphemisms and name our enemies. When we struggle through our differences, let us do so with a shared understanding of what we are for and what we are against.

by every means necessary

Not only is bad-jacketing dangerous, it is disempowering and demobilising. It forecloses entire realms of possibility, insisting that we limit ourselves to the same set of legal, non-violent tactics. It threatens state violence against people who do not comply with those limitations being imposed upon their actions. Many people cannot take the risk of arrest. But something being risky does not make it impossible. Just because some of us cannot act does not mean that no one should.

While its meaning is sometimes lost, respecting a “diversity of tactics” means refusing to impose non-violence upon our co-strugglers and declining to condemn those that destroy property or take up arms. As a group of autonomous UCLA students writes in the wake of vicious assaults on their encampment:

We have noticed a trend of the desire to appear peaceful for the media taking precedent over the right of protestors to self defense, mirroring the world’s response to Palestinians’ right to self defense in the face of blatant fascist attacks and eliminationist violence.

We cannot allow our resistance movement to demand obedience over safety in the same way as western imperialist forces against the colonized.

Without drawing false equivalence with a people living under active bombardment and military invasion, the liberal urge that leads people to denounce burning precincts or fake clinics as “giving police an excuse to crack down” is the same that denounces the Palestinian resistance for “giving Israel an excuse to destroy Gaza.” We must refuse any invitation to distance ourselves as the “good,” “peaceful,” “innocent” ones. Instead, we affirm the right of Palestinians and all people to resist colonial domination by any means necessary.

We would remind our co-strugglers, too, that our enemies do not care about the truth, and they have no conscience. We see this in the viciousness with which the police enforce an unprecedented ban on overpass protests in Toronto, where people rallied on the sidewalk to wave flags and chant. We see it in the eagerness with which a long list of electeds, including the Prime Minister himself, leapt to denounce a protest of a Jewish hospital that never happened. We see it in the adamance with which Zionists call the very existence of Palestinians a terrorist threat against them, no matter how young, no matter how innocent, no matter how non-violent. Right-wing propagandists will fabricate scandals out of thin air, and the establishment will happily take up their version of the story. Even if each and every one of us swears to turn the other cheek to our assailants, as long as we challenge the colonial status quo, in our enemies’ eyes, we will never be peaceful.

Another path is possible, and the movement to Stop Cop City sets a powerful example. In February, a journalist asked spokesperson Mary Hooks of Vote to Stop Cop City whether organisers condemned arsons of police vehicles. She answered:

Hell no. No. Not at all, And to be honest with you, Atlanta deserves more than that. Real talk, they’re lucky, this city is lucky, this country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all.

But some of us, we cannot take that risk. And those who can, bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows, I’ll sit with my lighter and be like, damn. […]

We need every, every means necessary to deal in the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care, no, and I would imagine my comrades would say the same. No, not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every quote-unquote proper, democratic process.

The movement’s aboveground and clandestine elements are two parts of a whole. Both are necessary for our victory.

Listen to Isaiah Willoughby speak in his own words on Kite Line Radio:

kitelineradio.org/tag/isaiah-willoughby/

Support defendants and prisoners from the George Floyd Uprisings:

uprisingsupport.org

Contribute to the Florida 4’s commissary and find other ways to support through the Anti-Repression Committee of South Florida:

linktr.ee/sfl_arc

more on peace policing

“ACAB Includes Peace Police: Three Report Backs from Palestinian Solidarity Actions” (November 2023) on Archive.org, online at archive.org/details/acab-includes-peace-police-en-print-8/page/2/mode/2up

“Peace Police are Police: How Protest Marshals Sabotage Liberation and Protect the State” (December 2023) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2024/03/11/peace-police-are-police-new-zine-classic-image/

more on security

“Confidence. Courage. Connect. Trust. A proposal for security culture” (November 5, 2019) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2019/11/05/confidence-courage-connection-trust-a-proposal-for-security-culture/

“Doxcare: Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment” (August 26, 2020) on CrimethInc., online at crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment

The Threat Library by the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/threat-library/

“Threat Modeling Fundamentals” by Håkan Geijer on Riot Medicine, online at opsec.riotmedicine.net

more on infiltration

Fuck the (Hamilton) Police, online at fuckhps.noblogs.org

“Infiltrated! How to prevent political police from undermining grassroots solidarity” (May 1, 2017) in Briarpatch Magazine, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/infiltrated

“Living among us: Activists speak out on police infiltration” (July 1, 2011) by Tim Groves, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/living-among-us

“Stop Hunting Sheep: A Guide to Creating Safer Networks” (2011) on Sprout Distro, online at sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/security/stop-hunting-sheep/

“The G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges and How They Came to Be” (2012) on the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/resources/#toronto-g20-main-conspiracy-group

“Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” (Spring/Summer 2010) by Courtney Desiree Morris on Incite! National, online at incite-national.org/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/

Anti-Repression Talks #1: Preparing for Physical Surveillance

 Comments Off on Anti-Repression Talks #1: Preparing for Physical Surveillance
Sep 272024
 

From the No Trace Project

he No Trace Project is launching a new initiative, the Anti-Repression Talks, to encourage discussion of surveillance and security issues within and between informal anarchist networks, on an international level. We believe that many anti-repression practices are more powerful when they are carried out across a network, rather than only by specific affinity groups.

The Anti-Repression Talks will be a series of sessions, each on a different topic, and each lasting three months. During a session, participants are encouraged to form local study groups with people they trust to discuss the topic of the session — we provide resources and discussion points to help kickstart those discussions. At the end of a session, an international online chat takes place, where participants can anonymously meet to discuss their thoughts and findings. After a session, its findings are published on the No Trace Project website, including any materials contributed by study groups and a summary of the online chat.

The first session, Anti-Repression Talks #1, will address the topic of preparing for physical surveillance and will take place in October, November, and December 2024, with the online chat taking place on January 4, 2025. The findings will be published here.

Physical surveillance

In the past decades, the surveillance capabilities of State actors have greatly diversified, thanks in part to new technological developments such as video surveillance, mobile phones and DNA sampling. Despite this, physical surveillance — the direct observation of people or activities for the purpose of gathering information — is still widely used by State actors, in particular in cases where other surveillance techniques are not effective. Our Threat Library references examples of the use of physical surveillance against anarchists.

We believe that the State is likely to use some degree of physical surveillance in contexts where high-impact anarchist direct actions are being investigated — for example in a city where an arson recently took place and the news of the arson has been posted on anarchist websites. We also believe that in many contexts, anarchists do not sufficiently prepare for the risk of physical surveillance. Preparing for physical surveillance isn’t straight-forward, it requires developing a specific skill set, but it is possible, and it is the only thing that will help you if cops are tailing you on the way to a sensitive meeting or action.

Local study groups

We encourage participants to form local study groups to discuss the topic of the session, from October to December 2024. During the session, if they wish to do so, study groups can send us any materials that they deem relevant to the discussion. We will add such materials to the session findings where other groups will be able to see them.

We recommend that study groups read the following resources:

  • The zine Measures Against Surveillance for an overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by police in urban areas, with examples from Germany.
  • The book The Theory of Covert Surveillance for a more comprehensive overview of the physical surveillance techniques used by private investigators (and most police agencies), with examples from the United Kingdom.
  • The book Surveillance Countermeasures for a comprehensive overview of physical surveillance countermeasures: surveillance detection (including counter-surveillance) and anti-surveillance. Once you understand the logic of the enemy’s physical surveillance techniques, we highly recommend this book to start learning countermeasures that you can apply in your life and projects.
  • Other resources can be found on our website.

And we suggest the following discussion points, which we encourage study groups to supplement with their own:

  • From the recommended resources, what have you found difficult to understand or apply?
  • How can we support each other in developing and practicing physical surveillance countermeasures?
  • If you detect physical surveillance, which activities or projects would you want to continue and which would you want to put on pause? If you stop meeting with your friends to prevent the surveillance operation from mapping your social network, how can your network help you feel less isolated?
  • If you detect physical surveillance, how can you communicate this to your network in a way that doesn’t alert the surveillance operation that they have been detected? How can such communication happen in a way that doesn’t bolster paranoia?

International online chat

An international online chat will take place on January 4, 2025. It will be open to anyone, so we ask that you do not share any identifying information or discuss anything that you wouldn’t want to see published. It will be limited to text messages (no audio or video). Discussions will be held in English, with live translation available to and from French and Spanish — please get in touch if you are able to help with live translation in these languages or others.

For instructions on how to join the chat, see here.

Final Statement of the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival

 Comments Off on Final Statement of the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival
Sep 272024
 

From the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival

After 18 years of incredible anarchist theatre, the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival collective has decided to stop producing the festival.

We want to thank all the artists, volunteers, former collective members and the public who attended, for their generous contributions and support.

This was an all-volunteer festival with no government or corporate sponsorship.

We will gladly assist other anarchists who would like to mount another festival.

The FITAM collective

Montreal Summer Reflection: Liberalism, Its Counter-Revolutionary Dynamics & Peace Policing

 Comments Off on Montreal Summer Reflection: Liberalism, Its Counter-Revolutionary Dynamics & Peace Policing
Sep 162024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

The summer of Montreal came crashing into full force as the encampment movement bloomed across university campuses around the world. For many of us, it was the first time being apart of something bigger than us, challenging the status quo and experiencing a level of violence both from the institution and state. Even with all of this, and the many strides that were made, the connections that were made, we aren’t without fault and mistakes.

As I write this, I made the conscious decision to submit this piece anonymously both because of fear of being tied to the encampment movement and because of organizational entities that deemed themselves as leaders, who made existing within the camps an increasingly hostile environment. I believe the act of anonymity will allow a more honest reflection.

Liberalism & Counter-Revolutionary Dynamics:

What sets our tactics apart from liberals isn’t simply a matter of “diversity of tactics” that many of us might believe, but rather a fundamental disagreement on how material societal change occurs.

Liberalism promotes change through established institutions and democratic processes, it advocates for reform, with the current existing system that we spend so much of our time protesting and resisting against. The liberal agenda hopes to stabilize and improve the current system rather than overthrowing it.

Contrasting this with our tactics of militancy and a framework built on direct action, we reject the premise of incremental approaches and reform. We are in favour of immediate and significant upheaval, we are driven by the belief that freedom will only come through material radical change. I.e. real disruptive protests, strikes and economic sabotage to name a few.

It’s liberalism that attempts to convince us that the rule of bourgeois law and so-called “democratic institutions” are worth engaging with.

When in reality these rotten, immoral institutions are what brought the indescribable suffering of Palestinians, these institutions are the very tool that finances and supports genocide.

The summer has left a mark of a revolutionary zeal that ought to be put to use. It’s liberalism that comes to us with empty fluffy words, that come to us in the form of three to four letter orgs, these are the entities that attempt to delay us and prevent us from the kind of radical shift that has been needed within the global north since ’48.

We will not be convinced that this system is worth saving. We have no intention to reinforce structures that exploit us and our comrades around the globe by coming to a negotiation table. We have no intention in saving this system, our intention is to overthrow it by any means necessary, exactly what has been asked of us by the resistance in Gaza.

Peace Policing:

What has been a common reoccurring protest method, something that is not unique to Montreal, is the role of Yellow Vest/Protest Marshals. What was originally supposed to be a shield between protesters and police, has now become the first line of offense FOR the police. Myself and many others have witnessed the way yellow vests work in unison with police by giving out protest routes beforehand, controlling the way protesters express their anger and to maintain the dominance of a unelected hierarchal leadership to a specific organization. This past summer, all that the yellow vests have had to offer us is the strangling of enthusiasm, effectiveness and the inability to exhaust police resources correctly.

Orgs and groups who use this method of crowd control offer no protections and no culture of de-arresting. What the yellow vests accomplish is creating an environment that allows the job of the police be done for them. These protest marshals actively sabotage efforts of escalation in the hopes that playing by the rules will have their movements be seen as more “legitimate”. Yet, when has any demand been delivered by legitimacy alone? The mere act of standing against genocide has left a sour taste in the mouths of our enemies, is this who we must legitimize ourselves to?

I will close this section off with questions I have yet to find answers to. Who do the yellow vests protect when their back is to the police as they face the crowd? Who do they represent when they pull people off of sidewalks and pick up the trash cans that were thrown on to the ground, snuffing out our ability to move freely, and who do they mirror when they deicide how we protest?

Closing Off:

These past months have put us in an incredible position, one where we can reorient ourselves not to be stagnant. The movement must come together from many different fronts, where we can stand united not as a single banner but rather a mosaic of resistance, where the final blow against those who stand against us be laid.

My comrades and soon to be accomplices, there is no shortage of work.

With everything we know now, with all the mistakes that have been made, let us embark in the next part of this act, and may we be better equipped to handle whatever is thrown at us.

Frontenac Active Club: The Militants behind Québec’s Neo-Nazi Revival

 Comments Off on Frontenac Active Club: The Militants behind Québec’s Neo-Nazi Revival
Sep 132024
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

On December 8, 2023, the RCMP announced that they had arrested two Ontario residents, Matthew Althorpe and Kristoffer Nippak, and laid a number of charges against them stemming from their activities in various neo-Nazi projects in Ontario. In the first instance, the two men were charged with “participation in the activities of a terrorist group,” namely the Atomwaffen Division, an organization classified as terrorist in Canada. In its press release, the RCMP also mentioned two lesser-known projects: the Terrorgram Collective and Active Club Canada. The former is described as “a group of Telegram channels that share neo-fascist ideology and that produce and share manuals on how to carry out racially-motivated violence.” The Active Club is described as follows:

The Active Club Network are decentralized cells of white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups, which are active in many U.S. states, with multiple chapters in other nations, including Canada. The network was created in January 2021 and it promotes mixed martial arts to fight against what it asserts is a system that is targeting the white race, as well as a “warrior spirit” to prepare for a forthcoming race war.

Active Club Canada, of which the two defendants are members, sees itself as a regional hub of the Active Club international network.

On December 1, shortly before the arrests, Vice News published a detailed exposé by freelance journalist Mack Lamoureux on Kristoffer Nippak and his key role in the Active Club network in Canada, particularly in the Ottawa region. In his article, Lamoureux mentioned a regional chapter in Québec, but, until now, this local group has not been the subject of close scrutiny. This article aims to fill that lacuna by shining a light on the core of the Frontenac Active Club (FAC), currently the main “militant” neo-Nazi project in Québec.

On December 9, 2023, Frontenac Active Club activists defend their Active Club Canada comrades after their arrests, calling the charges against them “fabricated political accusations.”

What Are Active Clubs?

Actives Clubs constitute a decentralized network of local groups rooted in white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. They represent a renaissance of the “white nationalist” movement (sometimes referred to as White Nationalism 3.0), picking up where the white power currents of the 1990s and 2000s and the alt-right movement of 2016–2020 left off and promoting a structure with no formal leadership. The origin of the movement is generally attributed to American militant Robert Rundo, who previously founded the Rise Above Movement (RAM) in California, in 2017, when the alt-right was at its zenith. RAM’s stated purpose was to physically attack enemies of the white nationalist movement.

Robert Rundo, founder of the Active Club network.

In line with this, the main activity of the Active Clubs is training in various martial arts techniques in preparation for the coming race war, deemed inevitable based on a perceived “white genocide,” effectively the deliberate replacement by means of “mass immigration” of the majority-white populations by non-white populations in Western countries (orchestrated by a nebulous elite generally presented as a cosmopolitan “international Jewry”). Active Club members unreservedly subscribe to this “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and are deeply rooted in contemporary neo-Nazi counterculture, for example, worshiping Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, as well as advancing a negationist interpretation of the Holocaust and World War II. They are, of course, steeped in a violent imaginary imbued with antisemitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia/transphobia and a visceral hatred of inclusive and egalitarian social movements—both liberal and radical—which are generally sweepingly categorized as “communist” (hatred of communism is a consistent reference point and a core value).

There is evidence of an Active Club presence in thirty-three US states and at least twelve countries, probably more by the time you read this. According to Vice News, there are at least eleven local Active Club chapters in Canada, including the FAC, which is based mainly in the Greater Montréal Area.

Despite his legal setbacks, Robert Rundo remains an emblematic figure in the movement, and Southern California still seems to be its epicenter, with a gathering of Active Club chapters expected there in August 2024 (the first such event was held in San Diego in August 2022). Rundo has his finger in a number of pies, including distributing Will2Rise (W2R) clothing, whose colors are often worn by Active Club members as a nod to their mentor.

This Active Club Telegram account links to the Will2Rise and Media2Rise projects, both hosted by Robert Rundo.

Where Does the Frontenac Active Club Come From?

The Frontenac Active Club was formed in early 2023 (the Telegram channel was created on February 16) and is the direct descendent of the local White Lives Matter (WLM) group, which we wrote about in 2022. One of the group’s two leaders mentioned in that article, Laval’s Raphaël Dinucci, would become the mainstay and motive force of the FAC. Dinucci immediately forged links with the movement’s Ontario chapters, while gathering a core group of five or six militants who formed what is now the FAC.

The Frontenac Active Club Telegram channel was created in February 2023. It now has nearly eight hundred subscribers.

We know that the FAC still maintains virtual links with other Canadian Active Clubs, notably with the group that was the subject of the RCMP raids, as well as with southwestern Ontario group Nationalist-13 (13 = AC, for anti-communist).

The Frontenac Active Club is close to the Southern Ontario–based white supremacist group Nationalist-13. Front and center, Raphaël Dinucci.

The hand signal that Frontenac Active Club members like to reproduce, the Kühnen salute, is a neo-Nazi sign of recognition.

The group’s activities are centered in the Greater Montréal Area, with its members scattered across the south shore (Saint-Hubert, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), the north shore (Laval), and as far away as Lanaudière (Rawdon). There also seems to be a handful of members/sympathizers in the Québec City area, but they hardly constitute a section as such, since their activity last year was limited to stickering and a few social outings in the Capital.

Most of the Frontenac Active Club’s activity in the capital city consists of putting up stickers and taking photos. Here, Raphaël Dinucci poses in August 2023.

A quiet outing at Taverne Urbaine 1500 in Québec City in December 2023.

To foster the racist and misogynistic fraternity spirit that underpins the movement, membership in the FAC is limited to white men.

The group’s Twitter/X account was created in April 2024. Raphaël Dinucci also has a personal account.

(This platform, under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk, has [re]become a safe space for neo-Nazi and supremacist individuals and groups, reversing the previous administration’s purge. It’s also a space where misinformation and hate speech have free rein, with virtually no countermeasures, to the degree, in fact, that it seems pointless for us to maintain a presence there.)

What Do They Do?

True to form, FAC members train quite regularly in martial arts—unevenly from member to member—usually in a public park near you, particularly on the outskirts of Montréal (Longueuil, Laval). Their other main activity is to showcase themselves on their Telegram channel, posting group photos documenting their activities. Last April, members of the core group photographed themselves posing after a workout in Mackenzie-King Park, in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, across the street from a synagogue and a Jewish school and a stone’s throw from the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Frontenac Active Club members training in Mackenzie-King Park, in the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district, Montréal, April 22, 2024. From left to right: Mathieu Grenier, Martin Brouillette, Shawn Beauvais Macdonald, and Raphaël Dinucci.

Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, whom we had suspected was in contact with the Active Club, turned out on this occasion, confirming our suspicions. There’s nothing to indicate that Beauvais MacDonald had been a regular member of the group before this year, but it’s clear that neither he nor his cronies have any problem with the baggage he brings with him. Indeed, recently, Beauvais MacDonald appears to have taken on an increasingly central role in the group, representing it in a friendly boxing tournament against the Nationalist-13 Nazis and providing his personal contact information to people who want to get in touch with the FAC.

Shawn Beauvais MacDonald and Raphaël Dinucci wearing t-shirts from Robert Rundo’s Will2Rise project in April 2024.

The appalling ignorance of the group’s members is matched only by their extreme fetishization of a cult of the body that clearly reflects the toxic masculinity traditionally imposed in far-right circles. Overall, the FAC seems like nothing more than a social club for Nazi rejects, with its members organizing weekend nature hikes (Mont Gorille, Laurentides, or Montagne Noire, Lanaudière, for example) or a game of badminton at Laval’s Carrefour Multiport, generally followed by a beer at some nearby bar.

Frontenac Active Club nature outing on May 14, 2024. Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, center, face not obscured.

Martin Brouillette and Mathieu Grenier of the Frontenac Active Club sparring in November 2023.

Posturing and sparring on Mont Royal, July 2024. Center, Shawn Beauvais MacDonald.

Raphaël Dinucci holding his group’s flag during an outing at Mont Gosford, in the Eastern Townships, in June 2023.

Along with its physical activities and ostentatious social media presence, the group also hopes to raise its profile around the city, taking a page out of the WLM playbook and heavily stickering in Greater Montréal and several other localities, including Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, home of FCA member David Barrette.

A Frontenac Active Club sticker in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, where David Barrette lives, in May 2023.

Frontenac Active Club militants are particularly fond of this sort of staging, where they hold up a group sticker somewhere. In this case, Bromont in May 2023.

Another Frontenac Active Club sticker in Montréal’s Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie district in November 2023.

As for public mobilization, Raphaël Dinucci and David Barrette had the curious idea of showing up at a demonstration against drag queen story hour and the queer and trans community, in Sainte-Catherine, on April 2, 2023. It didn’t go well for either of them; Dinucci was beaten and then arrested by police, while Barrette was charged with assault (dropped last spring). In a similar vein, FAC activist Martin Brouillette sent explicit threats to the organizers of the « Nous ne serons pas sages » demonstration last March, under his pseudonym “Martin Leblanc.” He failed to follow up on his threats.

David Barrette, aka “NatSocSiD,” or here “SuperFrenSiD,” boasts of his “exploits” on the Discord platform, in the wake of Frontenac Active Club members’ intervention on the sidelines of a transphobic demonstration in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.

David Barrette, aka “SuperFrenSiD,” recounts his trials and tribulations in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.

David Barrette, aka “NatSocSiD,” recounts his setbacks on the Undernet platform.

Martin Brouillette, aka “Martin Leblanc,” explicitly threatens the organizers of the “Nous ne serons pas sages” event in March 2024.

A June post on the group’s channel shows member Mathieu Grenier in France, hanging out with nationalist militants from the Marseilles region.

Where Does the Frontenac Active Club Fit in the Far-Right Ecosystem in Québec?

Whether under the Active Club banner or its previous moniker White Lives Matter, it’s clear that this small core of neo-Nazi militants hopes to carve out a niche in Québec’s far-right milieu.

The FAC falls, first and foremost, within a North American white nationalist and neo-Nazi tradition, representing the most radical fringe of the alt-right and its historical predecessors. It also draws upon key North American conspiracy theories (“White Genocide” and the Great Replacement), including embracing the moral panic around freedom for sexual and gender minorities. It’s worth noting that WLM/FAC activists were spotted protesting when the Covid health measures were in place, and then from spring 2023 onward were found on the margins of transphobic activities organized by the usual suspects from the local complosphere. The FAC also maintains links with the Canadian Active Club network, including, as noted earlier, the neo-Nazi groupuscule Nationalist-13, and with the Diagolon network, primarily on Telegram in the latter case. During its recent “Canadian tour,” Diagolon stopped in Montréal, where its members fraternized with the boys from the FAC.

The Frontenac Active Club and the group Nationalist-13 recently took part in a friendly neo-Nazi boxing tournament. Note that Shawn Beauvais MacDonald is described in this publication as FAC’s “champion,” with his Telegram account listed as the group’s contact.

Militants from the Frontenac Active Club and Nationalist-13 got together in Ontario during the week of August 5, 2024.

Frontenac Active Club militants had the opportunity to fraternize with members of the Diagolon network in Montréal on August 3, 2024. Shawn Beauvais MacDonald appears to have become a key member of the group, speaking here in the first person.

FAC members also flirt with “arrow-sash” fascism. For example, they have participated at least once in the horrifying “Saint-Jean de la race,” organized by Alexandre Cormier-Denis’s ethnonationalist Nomos-TV propaganda channel. For the past few years, these festivities have taken the form of a Nomos live transmission on June 23, followed by an intimate fascist-fest. Raphaël Dinucci was present at the 2022 edition in Québec City (at Bar Le Duck), hanging out with members of the neo-fascist group Atalante and Sylvain Marcoux’s neo-Nazi Parti nationaliste chrétien (PNC),with whom FAC has been on friendly terms since the WLM days. We have good reason to believe that Dinucci was also present at this year’s edition of the Nomos Saint-Jean event, held for the second year running in Montréal at Lux Média, André Pitre’s “reinformation” project. (Beauvais MacDonald made an appearance last year.)

The key thing is that these neo-Nazi “militants,” who imagine themselves playing a leading role in an imminent race war—as white race crusaders, obviously—are an integral part of the far-right ecosystem in Québec. Although they remain relegated to the margins, they unquestionably play a role, if only as a foil for other far rightists who can take the opportunity to portray themselves as “less worser than.” While they may not be united on every issue, it’s important to understand that all the groups and currents mentioned in this article and in other recent Montréal Antifasciste material (from the Nazis 3.0 of WLM/FAC through the Nouvelle Alliance ethnic nationalists to the transphobic conspiracy theory adherents, the Nomos cryptofascists, and the wacky national socialists of the PNC) occupy a specific space in a single ecosystem, where they tend to reinforce each other.

It’s also important to remember the key role played by certain figures in the mainstream media (need we even name them?) in normalizing the far right—by repeating as often as possible that it simply doesn’t exist.

Who Are the Frontenac Active Club Hard Core?

Group photo of the Frontenac Active Club taken in Martin Brouillette’s Rawdon garage in January 2024. Left to right: Martin Brouillette, Mathieu Grenier (kneeling, “Free Rundo” t-shirt), David Barrette (standing behind Grenier), Steven Khazanov, and Raphaël Dinucci (front, “HTLR” t-shirt).

Raphaël Dinucci

Telegram: @Raph131
@adamm1313
Address: 5346 Pauzé, Laval QC H7K 2M5

Raphaël Dinucci is most likely the founder and primary mover of the FAC. He first appeared on our radar in 2022 as co-administrator of the White Lives Matter Québec Telegram channel, using the pseudonym “Whitey,” alongside Yannick Lachapelle, alias “Nord-Est.” Together, they formed the hard core of that short-lived group.

Raphaël Dinucci’s known Telegram profiles.

Raphaël Dinucci’s current personal Telegram profile.

From the outset, Dinucci has distinguished himself by his intense activism, particularly on the streets of Laval, which he covered with stickers and graffiti.

We understand that this silly little goof turned twenty-three on July 22, 2024.

When the article titled White Lives Matter: Neo-Nazi Project Has a Québec Franchise came out in March 2022, Yannick Lachapelle disappeared into thin air, and Dinucci found himself alone. We know that he went about building links with Ontario members of WLM and the Active Club, and that’s when he had the idea of upping his game and founding the FAC.

Dinucci takes a selfie for the Frontenac Active Club’s Telegram channel, quoting Belgian Nazi Léon Degrelle.

Detail of Raphaël Dinucci’s tattoo: a wolf figure superimposed on the Tyr rune.

Dinucci appears in almost every photo of FAC activities and is in charge of public relations for the group, whether getting together with members of the Drummondville-based PNC or attending the various editions of Nomos-TV’s aforementioned annual “Saint-Jean de la race,” a major gathering of the fascist far right in Québec.

As mentioned above, he was present at the rally in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023, with David Barrette and Sylvain Marcoux (PNC), where they unfurled a banner reading “Sales pédos hors du Québec” [Dirty Pedos Out of Québec], which was torn out of their hands after a few seconds.

He lives with his father in Laval.

David Barrette

Telegram: @NatSocSiD
Address: 863 rue Saint-Jacques, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu

David Barrette has been a hyperactive keyboard neo-Nazi for years, primarily under the handle @NatSocSiD (he has several others) on numerous virtual platforms, including Telegram, Discord, and the Undernet chat network’s #Montreal IRC server. He’s also active on YouTube, BitChute, TikTok, and several other platforms. He was a member of the WLM group in 2020 and, along with Dinucci and other sympathizers, naturally transitioned to the FAC at its inception.

Ladies, who’s going to be the lucky one?

His activity and involvement with the FAC are limited by a chronic ankle injury. However, this did not prevent him from accompanying Raphaël Dinucci on an “in real life” adventure in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023, which resulted in his arrest on assault charges (withdrawn last March, for reasons unknown to us). We believe these legal setbacks have dampened his enthusiasm for political activism, but he remains very close to the FAC’s core group.

David Barrette finds himself in a sticky situation in Sainte-Catherine on April 2, 2023.

David Barrette lives in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and works in Montréal for the information technology company Globotech Communications, which specializes in Web hosting. The information we have gathered leads us to believe that he uses his privileged position within this company to clandestinely host neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites and services on the company’s servers.

Profil Instagram of David Barrette, alias NatSocSiD.

Barrette’s employer would undoubtedly be interested to know about his employee’s extracurricular activities and may even be interested in scrutinizing the servers under his supervision.

Globotech Communications :

sales@globo.tech/support@globo.tech / abuse@globo.tech / NOC@globo.tech
Telephone : (514) 907-0050 or 1 888-482-6661
(Note that Barrette receives messages requesting support and is likely to filter them; it is, therefore, advisable to write to several addresses to ensure that the message reaches the appropriate people.)

Martin Brouillette

https://www.facebook.com/martin.brouillette.7/
Telegram: @M_clean
Address: 5900 chemin Bélair, Rawdon, QC, J0K1S0

We first got wind of this sinister character last March, when Nous ne serons pas sages—a grassroots group formed to counter the anti-LGBTQ backlash and the CAQ government’s so-called “Comité des sages”—contacted us to share violent and hateful threats received from a certain “Martin Leblanc.” The latter said he wanted to “meet up” so that he could “remove pedophiles and trans people from this world,” and that he would “meet them on Fullum” (the location of the Committee’s demonstration). In another equally violent message he said he was “a fascist, violent, ready to clean house,” and that he had “already spit on Jews and gays” and would like to “continue [his] journey.”

We easily found a “Martin Leblanc” on Telegram (“My Ancestral Calling” channel), with a profile whose white supremacist character leaves no doubt (Hitler homage, etc.). His profile photo shows him in a gym with walls that are lined with neo-Nazi symbols and a flag from the FAC; this is the same gym seen in some of the photos posted by the group on its own channel.

Martin Brouillette in his private gym in his garage at his Rawdon home. À noter, le tatouage d’un faisceau (symbole du fascisme) sur sa nuque et l’arrière de sa tête.

Martin Brouillette in his private gym in his garage at his Rawdon home.

Martin Brouillette boasts that he built the gym in his garage during the pandemic.

This profile enabled us to find his real name, Martin Brouillette—his Facebook account has the same profile photo as the Telegram account of “Martin Leblanc.” On it, he bluntly describes himself as a “fascist” in his bio. (By the way, Facebook’s bots seem less and less able to recognize neo-Nazi or white supremacist posts or even to note profiles that spell out “fascist” in plain text and display hateful content. All of this goes undetected in this AI Brave New World).

Martin Brouillette’s Facebook account.

Photos posted by Brouillette on his Telegram channel tell us that he trained at a private martial arts club in Saint-Charles-Borromée (Joliette), whose managers were evidently unaware of his activism (see the update below). In the same way, we were able to determine that his private gym, where he invites his fascist buddies to roll around on the floor, is located in his garage on chemin Bélair in the municipality of Rawdon.

Martin Brouillette, a member of the neo-Nazi Frontenac Active Club, poses at a private martial arts club in the Joliette area.

Martin Brouillette, a member of the neo-Nazi Frontenac Active Club discreetly displays his colors inside a private martial arts club, unbeknownst to the Sensei and other club members.

Update: Following the publication of this article and the steps taken to contact the managers at Karaté Kanreikai Joliette, we have been assured that they have taken the necessary steps to exclude Martin Brouillette from the dojo for good. This decision is to their credit.

Shawn Beauvais MacDonald

Telegram: @FriendlyFash

Holy fuck! to use a well-worn phrase. This drunken idiot is actually involved in every wrong thing, so much so that at some point the other Nazis will have to realize that he’s toxic, and that everything he touches turns to shit. In any case, he has no notion of operational security, and his trivial Nazi life is an open book, which sooner or later exposes his equally trivial comrades. What could we possibly say about this piece of shit that we haven’t already said a hundred times?

As noted, since 2023, we’ve suspected Beauvais MacDonald of playing some role with the FAC, whether a key one or on the margins, but we had no proof. Last April, however, he began posting photos with the group on his Telegram account, after which the group decided to make him a poster boy on its own Telegram channel. Recently, he has been an increasingly central figure in the group. It’s worth noting that his arrival on the scene coincided with the jiu-jitsu training session outside of a synagogue in Montréal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood mentioned above.

Shawn Beauvais Macdonald is now, quite literally, a central figure at the Frontenac Active Club.

Shawn Beauvais Macdonald poses with Frontenac Active Club comrades in Montréal in July 2024.

Incidentally, it seems that Beauvais MacDonald has recently become even more of a loose cannon. We’re told he’s been seen more than once threatening members of the public who recognize him (whom he obviously presumes are the famed “antifa”). What’s more, he seems to have hooked up with young Sandrine Girardot from Châteauguay, who gained public attention last March for painting hateful graffiti in that town, including on the building she lives in. She has also posted a series of completely insane publications and videos on her social media accounts, the latter showing her and Shawn Beauvais MacDonald verbally assaulting passers-by with invectives and racist and homophobic insults in various neighborhoods and in the Montréal metro, as well as shouting their admiration for Adolf Hitler and throwing ridiculous Nazi salutes.

When we publicly reported this neo-Nazi tryst, Beauvais MacDonald responded with explicit threats:

It’s as if we asked a conversational robot to produce a threatening message dripping with toxic masculinity, as one would expect of a forty-year-old steroid-driven neo-Nazi salivating over an obviously mentally fragile twenty-three-year-old woman.

Mathieu Grenier

Mathieu Grenier uses the alias “@matthewattic” on Telegram. We don’t know much about him, apart from the fact that he has red hair and was once involved in Montréal’s (very short-lived and essentially virtual) Proud Boys group. He recently took a trip to Marseille, where he socialized with local fascists.

Steven Khazanov

Khazanov uses the alias “@stvjms” on Telegram. He lives on Montréal’s South Shore and has participated in several FAC activities over the past year.

His profile picture on Telegram shows him training in the outdoor facilities of Parc de la Cité, in Saint-Hubert. He resides at 3133, rue Ovila-Hamel, in Saint-Hubert.

///

So as not to hinder our investigations, we have chosen not to include all the information we have in this article. We do, of course, continue to collect information on active members of the Frontenac Active Club. If you have any information about these or other individuals connected with or involved in the group, please write to us at alerta-mtl@riseup.net.

Rad Pride 2024: How a Night Demo Defeated the SPVM in the Village

 Comments Off on Rad Pride 2024: How a Night Demo Defeated the SPVM in the Village
Aug 252024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Sunday, August 10th was the second annual edition of Rad Pride. Over 250 people gathered at Papineau metro, pink balaclavas mingling with black bloc and our gayest demo attire. Under the rallying cries of “No pride in genocide” and “Queerness is resistance”, the march set off down Sainte-Catherine. Now, a couple weeks later, we want to offer a look back at this evening from a tactical perspective.

On Side Banners

The conflict between reinforced side banners and “side cops” has become a mainstay of combative Montreal demonstrations. Montreal’s reinforced banners are banners with a wooden frame, held by screwed in door-handles, used to protect against riot cop charges and hits by police batons. Over the summer, with terrasses and crowds often obstructing the sidewalks, the cops have apparently received orders to enter the street alongside marching protesters. It is essential to show the cops that this provocation is a grave error. A multiplication of reinforced side banner teams may be one of the best responses, but where these teams position themselves and how others in the crowd complement them are important to consider.

At Rad Pride, a single reinforced side banner took a position at the front, left corner of the march, and it rapidly escalated into a confrontation. After side cops began pushing the banner and banner holders refused to yield, cops ended up squeezed against a low terrasse wall. They began striking people with batons. One demo participants’ flagpole was used to strike a cop in the head from behind the banner. Unfortunately, the position of the side banner at the front made it easy to cut it off from the rest of the crowd, and with enough pepper spray and baton blows, the group around the side banner had to disperse in a chaotic melee that flipped several tables on a terrasse and led to two arrests.  

The decision to not move the reinforced banner with more fluidity led to entrenched positions by both anarchists, on one side of the banner, and police, on the other. A tug of war ensued. In such a stubborn situation, one side will be pushed back and have their position compromised. It may have been possible to flank the police on all sides as cops concentrated their forces on pushing back the banner. But without the determination, numbers, or abilities to use entrenched positions to our advantage, we will often benefit much more from encouraging a reinforced banner to move with more freedom, not committed to any specific place in the demonstration (especially the front or back where it is the most isolated). This approach complements one of the main advantages of street fighters versus an enemy as powerful as the police – the ability for militants to attack and retreat, to use the element of surprise, dispersing and reforming.

A Headless March

The SPVM might have hoped that the attack on the front of the march would result in the whole crowd dispersing, but they had a long night still ahead of them. More experienced protesters improvised a new front banner team, encouraged the crowd to stick together, and quickly looped back onto Sainte-Catherine.

It was evident that the SPVM wanted to avoid the PR nightmare of tear-gassing crowds of party-goers in the Gay Village during Pride. Since these crowds were heavily concentrated on Sainte-Catherine, the demo was able to avoid dispersal by staying on that street. On multiple occasions, riot cops formed lines blocking our way forward and to the south; each time, rather than turn north off Sainte-Catherine, the demo turned on its heels and reversed, with multiple banners able to swap in as the new lead.

This game of ping-pong gave demonstrators multiple occasions to take action against the handful of targets along our route. Windows were smashed at RBC, BMO, a Remax office, and Starbucks. The latter was attacked repeatedly on at least three separate passes of the crowd. After the early clash, it took the cops close to half an hour to re-establish flanking side units, showing us that an openly confrontational element in the crowd can function as a diversion, creating space and time for groups oriented more towards destruction.

As the night went on, the vibe became increasingly more festive. Towards 11pm, the demo had become a dance party of still over a hundred people, as a line of fully-geared riot police looked on. Making a laughingstock of the authorities is a calling card of successful mass resistance movements throughout history, and we certainly shouldn’t write off the potential of making the SPVM in particular look ridiculous. The night’s victory was topped off when the riot cops retreated and returned to their vans, and the crowd sang “We Are the Champions”. 

This type of conclusion is simply extremely rare for destructive demonstrations in this city. It is the result first and foremost of the determination and fearlessness of participants.

Reportback on the Disruption of Fierté Montréal’s Corporate Parade

 Comments Off on Reportback on the Disruption of Fierté Montréal’s Corporate Parade
Aug 172024
 

From the F.A.G.S.

On Sunday, the F.A.G.S. and its queer and trans accomplices disrupted Fierté Montréal’s corporate, Zionist, colonialist pride parade.

We gathered at 1pm in drag bloc outfits and makeup in the spectator zone at Place Ville Marie. Nearly a dozen cops with SIS armbands mobilized to surveil our gathering, as clearly a group of queers at pride protecting each other from COVID is cause for suspicion. At around 1:30pm, towards the beginning of the parade, we took to the street as Helem, Mubaadarat, and Independent Jewish Voices’ Queer for Palestine float passed by. By marching behind their float as part of the parade for a short while, we managed to sooth the fears of the anxious piggies.

After briefly marching, we stood in place and deployed an extra-long banner to begin dispersing and disrupting the parade and deliver a speech on Fierté Montréal’s corporate pinkwashing. After this, we communicated with the members of the AGIR float behind us, allowing them and several other community floats pass and continue parading, before blocking the Bubly sparkling water float.

We continued marching and zig-zagging backwards through the parade, largely evading police intervention and briefly blocking various floats tied to Zionist corporate interests. Floats and contingents in solidarity cheered us on and raised their fists as we passed. A small contingent carrying Zionist flags approached. We attempted to block them by rapidly deploying a second extra-long banner, but police brutally pushed us to the side of the road and stole our banner.

As cop presence began to escalate, we decided to switch directions and march back towards the front of the parade, following and protesting the Zionist contingent. After halting the parade several times on our way back towards the front, we stopped at Jeanne-Mance and René Levesque. Here, we blocked the entire back portion of the parade, where almost all complicit floats were located.

During this time, police, Zionists, private security and Fierté marshals attacked and insulted us while bystanders cheered us on and chanted with us. Autonomous members of the Helem, Mubaadarat, and IJV contingent came back to join us after their successful and poignant die-in disruption. Other members of the community responded to our public call for support. Our numbers were boosted to around 150 demonstrators.

As pigs multiplied and donned their riot gear, as prisoner transport vehicles arrived, as Fierté begged us to allow their corporate parade to continue, as Zionists threw projectiles at us, as the hot August sun beat down on us, we stood our ground.

As cops shoved us, pulled us, hit us with batons, tried to steal our materials, threatened us, and brutalized us in front of a crowd of our fellow queers, we remained steadfast and defiant.

We blocked the parade at Jeanne Mance for nearly an hour before police and class traitor Fierté marshals worked together to redirect the parade to the other side of the median.

After the parade went by on the other side of the road, we marched down René Levesque chanting slogans against pinkwashing and police. The vast majority of bystanders cheered us on, while certain bystanders shouted racist vitriol at us, showing their true colours as Zionist, capitalist, colonialist white cis men. We eventually dispersed into the Metro. No arrests were made.

Though we didn’t manage to cancel the parade outright, we consider this action successful.

We blocked corporate floats long enough that many of their potential spectators further along the parade route left out of boredom. We showed queer bystanders and the media that police are not afraid to brutalize queers during a pride parade. We reminded the world that pride started as a riot against the police, not as a parade sponsored by corporate interests. We showed that as queers of conscience in Tio’tià:ke, like in Tkaronto, the Coast Salish territories colonially known as Vancouver, and elsewhere across Turtle Island and around the world, we will not accept a genocide in our names.

Fuck pinkwashing
Fuck Fierté Montréal
Fuck the police
No justice
No peace

Photo: @the_purple_line

War on Landlords

 Comments Off on War on Landlords
Aug 132024
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Those who make a profit off misery deserve nothing less than an open war.

War on landlords, power to tenants.

Seen in Sillery (Quebec City).