Toronto’s weekly anti-vax rabble were out in force again this Saturday. I stumbled upon them by accident. My wife and I had run out to get a few groceries. When we reached the corner of Church & Bloor, we could see flashing lights in the distance and realized that it was police blocking an intersection to accommodate the protesters. So, with the march approaching, we split up at Yonge Street, my wife running down to the Asian grocery store and me running west to the marchers. I stopped in the middle of the street and let them flow around me as I shot, which worked fine until I was confronted by a big “Thank you Truckers” sign that stretched across the entire street. I stepped out of the way and shot people from the side, sometimes stepping in front of them to shoot a sign.
General impressions:
• The protest seemed utterly oblivious to current events. Putin has mobilized a force of at least 150,000 troops, probably more, and they have invaded Ukraine. Setting aside the semantic niceties that certain denialists insist upon, Putin has declared war. Meanwhile, these entitled pukeheads march on the streets of Toronto declaring themselves freedom fighters against the tyranny of masking protocols and vaccine mandates. The apparent disconnect from real world events is stunning. Are they ignorant? Are they disrespectful? Or is something else going on here?
• Related to this was a sign I photographed: “Segregation is worng & immoral.” Spelling issues are endemic in this crowd and I could make a tidy fortune offering copy editing services. Perhaps more problematic is the word “segregation” which draws a false comparison between the Jim Crow south and the oppression of these poor marchers. They have a curious notion of freedom (which lacks a corresponding notion of responsibility) and oppression (which lacks a corresponding notion of empathy). As with spelling errors, false comparisons are endemic in this crowd.
• It was only on Thursday that Putin made a speech as an announcement/justification of his invasion order. In it, he spoke of the need to denazify Ukraine on the grounds that it was committing a genocide against ethnic Russians on Ukraine soil, most notably in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Ukraine president, Zelenskiy is Jewish and lost family to the Holocaust so it seems a stretch to claim that a country which elected him by an overwhelming majority would simultaneously be overrun by Nazis. Still, Putin’s claims conform to a far-right conspiracy narrative rife with antisemitic and white supremacist tropes. For background on the Russian Christian nationalist narrative, I commend a piece in the Guardian by Jason Stanley. Putin’s narrative bears striking similarities to Trumpism and it comes as no surprise that Trump and the far right of the Republican Party stand with Putin in his offensive.
• While it seems plausible to suggest the anti-vax marchers are simply oblivious and then to ask that maybe they give it a rest just for this week out of respect for the people of Ukraine, these people may not be oblivious at all. I saw a young woman draped in a Canadian flag, wearing a red MAGA baseball cap and (zooming in close) a button: “Pure Blood.” There is a nexus between these anti-vax marchers, Trumpism, and Putin’s claims about genocide. It is of a piece with a more general white supremacist narrative. The alleged threat to the people of Donetsk and Luhansk isn’t military so much as it is dilution through mixing with impure Ukraine blood. So Putin will liberate them from the greatest threat of all: that they should become less Russian. As improbable as it might seem, he believes most Russians won’t notice that his rationale is a variation on a theme by Hitler.
