We need to see far-right protesters for what they are
They may appear to be more funny than dangerous, but they are not
How do you take the threat of a white 30-something guy in a fur hat with horns attached to it, parading shirtless and claiming to be a shaman seriously? For years the farright has hid behind jokes, claiming it’s all for fun, dressing and acting in ways that are carefully selected to obscure their intent. They pick up phrases like boogaloo and wear Hawaiian shirts. Yet they stormed the Capitol building of the United States this week. Five people died.
The police, who show up in full riot gear to Black Lives Matter protests, showed up in bicycle helmets for this one, where tear gas was deployed against them. Maybe some were sympathetic to the mob, there were photos of members of the force taking selfies with the Trumpers. But I think, generally, no one took these people seriously and that was just what they wanted.
We can’t pretend this was done by lone wolves. No, this was an organized group, who planned everything out in plain sight on their preferred social media channels. And still, they got into the Capitol building.
Why are our media and our law enforcement so unwilling to take these people seriously? Is it because they claim to be patriots, they’re taking back their country, yet they seem to consist of goofy guys who look like they couldn’t organize a bake sale?
A handful of politicians have seen the real possibilities here and they play to this crowd. Trump is the first to really capitalize on them, and he was willing to ride their violence to overturn a legal election. But it couldn’t happen in Canada.
Canada is the birthplace of the Proud Boys, that strange polo-shirt wearing organization with initiation rites that include being beaten up by members of the group until you name five breakfast cereals. Oh, and you need to be involved in a violent activity against anti-fascists or leftists.
Remember the Conservative Senator who asked members of the truck convoy to “roll over every Liberal left in the country.” He was using a figure of speech, of course. No one should take him literally, particularly not the truck driver who drove through Wet’suwet’en protests in Manitoba, injuring a protester until stopped by police. We won’t mention all the people hit and even killed by cars at protests in the United States.
Or you might be inclined as a Canadian to say, this is all between fringe groups, like the hate groups who attacked Hamilton’s own Pride celebration in 2019, who were only held off by a group of antifascists. Of course, the Pride organizers had contacted the Hamilton Police Services in advance to warn about this, since a similar attack had happened in 2018 and the organizers expected an escalation.
Or we can look at the riots in Nova Scotia on Oct. 14, 2020, where 200 people attacked a lobster pound, barricading Mi’kmaq fishers inside, pelting the building with rocks, destroying one of their vans and leaving their lobster strewn across the ground. Later the facility burned in a mysterious fire. Police were present, but failed to de-escalate the situation, though there had been several incidents already which had made the potential for violence clear.
We have decades, even centuries, of propaganda on the side of white men saying that they are to be trusted. Putting up a female politician’s face as target for people to hit with golf balls is all in “good fun,” for white oilmen in Alberta. As was the golf cart that ran it down to much laughter later on. When they get into trouble, they’re all just good guys “blowing off a little steam.” We have judges who give young, white men lenient sentences talking about their “promising future.”
Years of casual racism have taught us that it’s only people with darker coloured skin who are dangerous and that if people just followed the rules, they wouldn’t get shot by the police. But somehow, the Trumpers that stormed the Capitol building walked out calmly, unharmed by police. Yet, as one commenter on Twitter said, “We’re not asking you to shoot them like you shoot us, we’re asking you to not shoot us, like you don’t shoot them.”
We need to look carefully at who really is dangerous in our society. We need to admit that just because the face of the guy holding the confederate flag looks like the lone heroes who always save the world in the Hollywood blockbusters, that doesn’t mean they are heroes. We need our politicians and our law enforcement look past the jokes and sly, knowing winks of the farright crowd and see the potential for violence. We need to be prepared, because the U.S. has just given us a really good example of what can happen when we’re not.