Montréal Antifasciste

On February 2, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network published an article detailing the links between Steve Labrecque, alias “Steve Rebel,” alias “Chtev,” who we’ve mentioned before , and the local NSBM (National Socialist black metal) label La Barricade, which for a number of years now has been one part of the scummy underbelly of Québec’s musical counterculture. For obvious reasons we’ve been paying attention to the tiny neo-Nazi/NSBM milieu for quite a while, [i] if only because it is close to the RAC (Rock Against Communism) scene, the band Légitime Violence, and the Québec Stompers bonehead gang, the incubator for the neo-fascist groupuscule Atalante . Our previous articles about Atalante and its sympathizers have clearly established the roots of Atalante’s key militants and their entourage in the “white power” and neo-Nazi subculture in the Québec City region, the pitiful denials of the key parties notwithstanding ; they, of course, prefer to present themselves as “revolutionary nationalists” or sanitized fascists of the allegedly more presentable Italian variety. ...

On May 4, 2018, the Montreal Gazette published the first of a series of articles exposing the identity of an important international neo-Nazi propagandist residing in Montréal, an individual only known up to that point by the pseudonym “Zeiger. ” The journalists at the daily made public the results of an investigation conducted over many months by Montreal-area antifascists to identify and expose “Zeiger,” who had long been active in the most extreme wing of the alt-right fascist movement, notably as an editor and administrator of the Daily Stormer website, widely considered the most influential international platform for neo-Nazi propaganda of the last decade. ...

Journalists recently reported on arrests in relation to online threats against Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s public health director and the public face of Quebec health policy in the context of the pandemic. These arrests bring to light the involvement of a section of the far right in mobilizations against mandatory masks, social distancing, and other measures put in place to minimize the risk of contagion in public places. [1] In a July 31 blog post , the antiracist blogger Xavier Camus reported a post by QAnon true believer Fabrice Descurninges, which included the home address of Horacio Arruda. Camus also reported – with the aid of numerous screenshots – on a similar post by Sylvain Marcoux, whom he described as a “violent conspiracy theorist.” ...

The second edition of the “Vague bleue” (Blue Wave), a marginal social movement drawing in the xenophobic and Islamophobic dregs from the national-populist milieu , took place on the 27th of July in Trois-Rivières. Since the first edition that took place in Montreal on the May 4th , Montréal Antifasciste has documented the individuals and groups that took part in the xenophobic protest, including its “security” contingent, who is little more than a collection of cranks fantasizing about beating up antifas . ...

Since the article “Unmasking Atalante” came out in December, we’ve produced two follow-up articles concerning, respectively, the “influencer” Heïdy Prévost’s and the folk band Folk You , two cultural (or metapolitical) phenomena at the periphery of Atalante. It is difficult to precisely measure the impact our work might have on the morale and activities of this neofascist group, but we have noted fewer public outings in recent months, and those that did occur appeared to involve the same small hardcore group of militants, with the exception of a recent photo-op in Montréal, where clearly every possible sympathizer was mobilized for the occasion. ...

On Saturday, December 8, around two hundred right-wing sympathizers gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to protest the “ Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration ,” which was in the process of being approved by acclamation at a United Nations conference in Morocco. After over a month of planning, the demonstration itself barely filled the space in front of Parliament and was in no way a triumph by the far right. That being said, the rally was at least superficially successful in uniting a host of far-right groups of differing ideologies to announce their xenophobic opposition to the UN compact and propagate their Islamophobic and racist views. Antifascists from Québec and Ontario, despite their clearly enunciated skepticism regarding the compact, organized to oppose the far right’s attempt to claim public space. ...