Saturday, December 15, 2018

Far-right Canadian Yellow Vest Reactionaries - Promoters of Violence and Conspiracy Theories, Already At Each Others' Throats

As they did last week when they unoriginally co-opted the French Yellow Vest protests (Mouvement des gilets jaunes), the far-right reactionaries organized another Saturday of protests in a number of Canadian cities. In most cases the numbers were down significantly from the previous Saturday (and even then outside Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton they weren't much to speak of). However Calgary and Edmonton still appear to have numbered in the 100s.... though even this is a bit of conjecture since many law enforcement officers were also wearing yellow safety vests:


At least some of the co-ordination for these protests is occurring on Yellow Vests Canada. 


Currently there are roughly 65,000 members of the group, though I suspect that most of those who were added, like those in the past who had been added to the WCAI group, aren't really aware of what the group is about since members could add others fairly indiscriminately. Also, before making it a closed group, there were quite a few people taking the "true believers" to task:


Tyler Malenfant is the founder and administrator of this and a few other Yellow Vest Facebook groups. It might be of interest then to ARC readers to note that Malenfant is someone who has appeared on the blog back in December 2015 in relation to his apparent connection to Students For Western Civilization, something that a number of readers noticed even before I did:


Malenfant eventually responded and his explanation for his racist and antisemitic posts is absolutely hilarious:



Malenfant claims the screen shots of his posts are fake, which suggests he expects people to believe that ARC posted fake screen shots in December 2015 knowing that in November 2018 massive protests would occur in France resulting in Canadian far-right supporters co-opting the imagery of said protests in December 2018 and that Malenfant would become an organizer in this astroturf movement... all in an effort to discredit him.

Sure or, and stay with me on this, might a simpler explanation be that Malenfant posted racist and antisemetic comments three years ago and now he's desperate to try and explain them away even though one can still see many of these posts online?

I mean, either/or, right?


One of the things that strike me as interesting is that members of the group have a very myopic understanding of who and who is not a Canadian, in that "real" Canadians agree with conservative views and "fake" Canadians don't (despite collectively representing a between 60% and 65% of the population):






Reading through the Yellow Vests Canada group that Malenfant founded and administers, one can't help but wonder at kinds of people it has attracted, for example, this guy who was charged with making threats against Prime Minister Trudeau is a member:






Evidently he wasn't the only person in the thread who got into trouble for threatening an elected official:


There's also this guy:


I don't doubt that pulling the "my taxes pay your salary so do everything I tell you" line will endear him to the police.... and it is insulting to his intelligence to ask if he could look up the information he requested online???

Still, they do seem quite confident the police are on their side, though I do have some questions about this claim:



Even after the cleaned up the worst of the threats of violence and before Malenfant closed the group, Yellow Vests Canada was filled with violent rhetoric. A fee examples:











The group is also being used to disseminate every crackpot conspiracy theory of the past 50 years:










I think I'll avoid including the QAnon posts for now since their inclusion would take forever to upload.

And not at all surprising is the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric that pervades the group and which is among the, if not the, primary reason why many of these people joined:














Over the years I've watched these groups and movements come and go, it has been an inevitable truism that eventually they break down into petty squabbling and caustic infighting. What is new about the Canadian reactionary Yellow Vest movement is just how quickly it has started:



In the screen shot above and previous screen shots posted earlier it isn't hard to see the animosity towards each other. People from the west blaming the people from the east for electing Trudeau. Arguing over removing posts encouraging violence with one side saying it makes them look bad with the other saying that violence is necessary. Political purity tests being imposed on each other for, in some cases, very minor disagreements. And of course the inevitable argument as to whom should be bestowed the mantle of "leader" in the movement:


Malenfant was one of the people who appears in the video from the protest that took place today in Toronto. Folks like Leigh Stuart and Alexander Van Hamme also appear to believe that the people they describe as"civic nationalists" plants:


This latest fad (and it really is a fad) on the reactionary right is burning pretty hot right now, but I have a difficult time seeing it lasting more than a few months since it appears in the early stages of self-immolation already and unless it continues to be stoked it's hard to see how they can continue to maintain their anger in light of the fact that Canada has already signed onto the UN migration compact and, like M103 which was for a time the Islamophobic boogeyman of note, will do nothing to change their lives in any way.

Of course I accept that I may be wrong as well, but thus far the long-term health of Yellow Jackets Canada doesn't look especially promising.
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