…but first, a word from The Incline.

A few weeks ago, I had another piece run in the Spec. This one was personal to me, as I had seen a fair amount of online chatter at the beginning of the month about how “Pride Month” wasn’t necessary anymore. So I wrote about why Hamilton especially needs a Pride Month and why we need to stand together to oppose hate.

Those of us in the queer community in Hamilton have endured a lot over the past few years. I wrote in the piece that “the spectre of June 15, 2019, still haunts us.” The violence at Hamilton Pride 2019 has never been adequately addressed and, now, as the main piece for the newsletter this week will examine, hate is even more prevalent in our community.

The online response to the piece backed me up. When Councillor Maureen Wilson (for whom I do work at City Hall) reposted the piece on Facebook, she received a torrent of vitriol. The commenters provided a laundry list of complaints: we’re too obnoxious about it, we spread disease, we are minimizing the struggles of other groups, we are disgusting, we should all be institutionalized. I did not know that Maureen had reposted the article or the hate it had earned until, later that day, I was asked how I was holding up by a friend at a party. That certainly tanked my mood.

But, as I also wrote in the piece, “Hamilton’s queer community is endlessly resilient.” We persevere because we must. We build community, we support one another, and we help out in whatever way we can, how ever we are able.

I can think of a million little ways this manifests in everyday life, but the one that really gets me is the incredible response to my humble (read: persistent) calls for donations to support my efforts at this year’s Pride and Remembrance Run in Toronto. Thanks to the incredible generosity of so many of you and of people in my life, I’ve been able to raise over $1,000 for the charities supported by the run.

To honour what this community has done and to echo the sentiments I expressed in my Spec piece, I decided to get creative. After many long hours at the Hamilton Public Library (my thanks to the endlessly patient staff who helped me along), I was able to successfully embroider a patch that I will wear in the Pride and Remembrance Run. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it will inspire me to do my best for the community I love.

My ultimate goal will be to source a more professional option as merch or to distribute as part of a fundraiser of some kind. I’ll work on a couple other options and keep everyone posted.

But thank you again for all the support. Folks can still donate if they are able and every donation over $25 entitles you to a tax receipt. If you’re interested, you can click the button below:

My mind has been on hate quite a bit lately. Sure, there was the response to my article, but I’ve also been thinking a lot about how hate is becoming more and more prevalent in the community. After an event that took place on Sunday, June 14, I decided to take a closer look at hate in Hamilton. Hate in the past, hate today, and how we can stop hate tomorrow.

The result is the following piece. It is heavy - certainly heavier than I wanted something to be at the end of Pride Month. But we have to tackle these difficult topics because ignoring them is simply not an option.

We have got to confront hate here. Because here is our home. And we all belong here.

The Hate At Home

Sometime around the holidays in 1990, a technician at a Lime Ridge Mall photolab noticed something in the pictures being developed at their shop. At first, the scenes were difficult to make out, given that the photos seemed to have been taken at night and the figures in them wore dark clothing. But, as each photo developed, the technician’s stomach began to churn. Something wasn’t right. They put in a call to the Hamilton Police Service (HPS) who sent officers around to see for themselves.

The technician believed the photos were depicting satanic rituals. That’s unsurprising, given this was the time of the Satanic Panic, a moral panic that gripped North America with fantastical tales of ritual abuse and nighttime offerings to the underworld. But, when the HPS arrived, they found something far more common and upsetting.

The photos depicted hate crimes.

An investigation was opened and, by March of 1991, the police had enough evidence for a judge to grant them a search warrant. A raid on an apartment on Mohawk Road West yielded shocking more images, as well as boxes and boxes of other horrifying items. The HPS quickly arrested a 17-year-old whom they believed was the primary figure in the photos.

But they couldn’t find the tenant who actually rented the apartment. The police placed the building under surveillance. Weeks passed without the tenant’s return. In early April, they were tipped off that he had skipped town and was hiding in St. Thomas, the small town sandwiched between London and Lake Erie where he was born and had previously worked.

Nearly a month after the initial raid, the HPS captured the fugitive photographer. With that, the police had the odd pair behind the pictures - a wayward youth and a 53-year old who, as a former teacher, should have known better.

***

The two had met on a downtown street in September of 1990. In an earlier life, Paul Moyer would have been spending September getting a classroom ready and easing into a lesson plan. But, for the past seven years, Moyer had been unemployed and depressed, having been fired from his teaching job due to a shoplifting charge. In the time since, he roamed the streets of Hamilton, desperate for friendship and attention. His politics and experience mentoring youth led him to seek out the company of troubled young skinheads who were, at the time, having a moment.

The year 1990 brought with it a spike in anti-Semitic incidents across Hamilton. Synagogues were defaced with neo-Nazi symbols, white supremacists plastered posters along Concession Street, and Holocaust denial literature was circulating openly in the community. As hate hung heavy in the late summer air, Moyer was eager to be part of the mob, not wanting to be left behind as he felt he had been for a good portion of his adult life. When he spotted a young skinhead downtown in September, he struck up a conversation and invited him to grab lunch.

Over burgers and fries, Moyer told the young man that he wanted to take pictures he would use for greeting cards for neo-Nazis. It is unclear why, but he badly wanted the young skinhead to be his model. And that he knew the perfect setting for his hate-fueled photoshoot.

A few weeks later, under the cover of darkness, the pair made their way into the quiet Jewish cemetery nestled behind the Royal Canadian Legion on Limeridge Road. There, over the course of a few hours, they took photo after photo among the headstones. The indignities were extensive.

They took photos exposing themselves. Posing with Nazi memorabilia. Urinating on graves. Leaving a dead, swastika-adorned bird on a tombstone.

Thinking nothing of it, Moyer dropped the film off to be developed at Lime Ridge Mall, some 500 metres away from the scene of the crime, leaving his contact information with his rolls of film just in case. Only when he learned of the raid on his apartment did he realize his mistake.

It was the photo of the bird that led the photolab technician to assume they were seeing photos of a Satanic ritual. While the police originally pursued an animal cruelty charge in addition to charges of committing indignities to human remains, that particular one didn’t stick. In the end, the pair were put on trial for a handful of indignity charges each.

***

Flexing their muscle, local neo-Nazi and skinhead groups began a legal defence fundraiser for their pals. Jewish organizations said the fundraising campaign sought donations from hate groups across Southern Ontario.

The trial of the 17-year-old did not last long. He admitted his guilt, said that he didn’t actually urinate on any grave as some of the pictures made it seem (claiming they only used coloured water), and was adamant that Moyer had directed the entire thing. Importantly, he also agreed to testify against the ex-teacher. For his part in the crime, the youth was sentenced to 18 months’ probation in November of 1991.

Moyer’s trial - one by judge alone without a jury - was more complicated. His defence first tried to claim that, by alerting the police, the photolab violated Moyer’s Charter rights. The judge quickly dismissed that claim, but did remove much of what was seized from Moyer’s apartment - boxes of neo-Nazi propaganda, recruitment materials, and white supremacist literature - from evidence after finding the police did not disclose how they obtained the information about Moyer’s apartment for the search warrant. Only later did they reveal that there had been a months-long undercover operation working to infiltrate local skinhead and neo-Nazi groups. A “reliable street source” had tipped them off that Moyer was behind the desecration. When the HPS sought the warrant, they only told the Justice of the Peace about the informant and not about the photos from the photolab. The mix-up nearly derailed the trial but, after determining a small number of the photolab pictures were admissible, the judge allowed the trial to proceed.

The youth took the stand. He told the court he had broken free from the skinhead life and was ready to start fresh. Before he could put it behind him, though, he needed to recount his actions before and during their October photoshoot. The planning. The posing. The desecration. “We weren’t going there to make happy pictures,” he told the court, “The point was to get across as much disrespect to Jews as possible.”

When it was Moyer’s turn to tell his story, he went all in for sympathy. He told the court he was a dedicated and passionate educator for 25 years. He said that he began to burn out. That he made a mistake that led to him losing his job. That, while unemployed, he lived on 74 cents a day. That he lied to his parents and pretended to work for years after being fired. That he cried when he walked by schools. That he was nothing more than a “lonely old person”. That Hamilton’s skinheads provided him with companionship.

Extenuating circumstances aside, the facts were still before the court, documented in detail by the man on trial. The judge found Moyer guilty of three counts of committing an indignity to human remains.

The Crown asked for nine months in jail.

He was given a suspended sentence - three years probation, 160 hours of community service, and psychiatric counselling. The judge in the case said he didn’t believe Moyer would commit another crime. Some members of the Jewish community were deeply upset with the ruling. The cemetery’s chair told The Spec that he was worried about copycat events, saying some skinheads would “take it they can do anything they wish and they’ll only get a slap on the wrist.”

One year later, Moyer and his new defence counsel appealed, claiming the conviction was improper. Acknowledging that the photos might have been “offensive to some people,” Moyer’s lawyer made the case that the disrespect was directed at symbols, not human remains. In a stunning decision, the Ontario Court of Appeal agreed and overturned Moyer’s conviction.

Community outcry pushed the Crown to appeal that decision, which made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada. On September 1, 1994, the justices of the Supreme Court restored Moyer’s conviction, writing in their usual riveting style that, “where monuments mark the presence of human remains, offering indignities to the monuments constitutes offering indignities to the human remains that are marked by the monuments.” The rabbi of Temple Anshe Sholom celebrated the decision, telling the Spec “this was a hate crime and any Canadian of goodwill would recognize that it is bad for us all.”

Moyer faded from view after the restoration of his conviction in 1994. There’s little information about him available online, but, by all indications, he died in Elgin County in 2023. His obituary briefly mentions his love of teaching. It would seem that, like his young accomplice, Moyer may have extracted himself from the world of the far-right.

The neo-Nazis and white supremacists he consorted with in the 1980’s and 1990’s, on the other hand, have never really gone away.¹

Now, just like in the summer of 1990, white supremacists, open fascists, and racist groups are making themselves known across Hamilton with increasing force and boldness.

Most of the hate that spreads in Hamilton right now does so online. The guardrails are off social media and accounts that call for ethnic cleansing are allowed to remain up for months, years, or even indefinitely, depending on the platform on which they post. Especially on X/Twitter, but increasingly on Meta platforms as well, openly racist content is being pushed to the forefront and has become nearly unavoidable.

But some white supremacists - usually younger, almost always male - have been taking their message to the streets in real life. Articles and exposés have provided insight into these “active clubs” (described by the CBC as a “male-focused groups that promote white supremacist ideals,” engaging in activities that “range from public protests to vandalism campaigns to social media posts”).

An extensive series in The Spec that landed in 2023 documented the resurgence of far-right activism that started generating attention just as the world was leaving the worst of the COVID-19 Pandemic behind. In the time since, Hamiltonians have become accustomed to seeing the stickers and posters for groups like Nationalist-13, Second Sons, Diagolon, and the Dominion Society on lampposts and bus shelters and benches across Hamilton.

***

The collection of groups is hard to untangle.

Nationalist-13 (or NS13) is the homegrown option. NS13 is a Hamilton-based men’s only neo-Nazi group that has become emboldened since it first appeared on the scene in 2021. They focus on physical fitness and demonstrations, seeking to rattle the city’s establishment with shocking slogans and activities before retreating from public view, often for months at a time. They claim a membership over 1,000, but no more than a handful of supporters appear at any of their events at any given time, always dressed entirely in black with masks covering their faces.

The Second Sons are similar, though are more of the Western Canadian-oriented white nationalist variety and with stronger connections to the Convoyists. Their founder, Jeremy MacKenzie, is a veteran who also founded Diagolon, the white nationalist group dedicated to forming a “diagonal” white ethnostate from BC/Alberta to Florida. The military connection explains why the group focuses heavily on “military drills” and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network has called the Second Sons “Diagolon’s Blackshirts”.

The newest entry is the Dominion Society, an organization attempting to be the more “respectable” face of white nationalism. Founded by activists originally involved with the People’s Party, the Dominion Society fashions itself as a political pressure group and has, by all indications, registered as a non-profit.

The Dominion Society has many pet projects, including the rehabilitation of the image of Sir John A. MacDonald, but its primary goal is to bring the idea of ethnic cleansing (which they call “remigration”) into the mainstream. Their explicit aim is to bully the Conservative Party of Canada into adopting ethnic cleansing as an official party policy.

Unlike the other two groups, the Dominion Society seems to allow women to join; a small number of women featured prominently in the videos the Dominion Society took during their Victoria Day stunt in Gore Park focused, again, on a statue of MacDonald.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network notes that the groups often have overlapping membership. Leaders in one group will appear on podcasts or livestreams from other groups and there is considerable fluidity between the organizations, particularly because of how they’re structured. Diagolon is the internet-focused group that often draws people in, NS13 and Second Sons are the “muscle”, and the Dominion Society is the “respectable” political wing. But they’re all a part of the same extremist ecosystem.²

***

They are growing bolder by the day. They appear on local overpasses or in public spaces, waving their flags, calling for white people to unite or for all non-white Canadians to be deported. Their hand-painted banners call for ethnic cleansing and white supremacy and action on child sexual abuse. They fixate on the latter point in an effort to, as McMaster prof Ameil Joseph notes, mainstream their hateful rhetoric by aligning themselves with a widely supported stance. That’s part of the reason why white nationalists included themselves in the protests against AI data centres at City Hall this month. Though, on the child sexual abuse front, they seem to be using that to advance a more sinister belief; judging by their social media posts, local white nationalists are working overtime to spread the lie that queer people are all sexual abusers (which aligns with rhetoric coming out of the UK’s far-right, which has spent an inordinate amount of energy this Pride month trying to turn the public against queer parents).

Images from the CBC show fascists training at a local gym and in Gage Park. They have appeared in front of Jackson Square, in Gore Park, at City Hall. They are trying, desperately, to get under the skin of Hamiltonians. To make themselves known. To recruit more members. To remind anyone and everyone who isn’t part of the small, arbitrarily-defined “race” they have defined that they are not welcome in this city.

They appear in public, marching and chanting and being confrontational because they are trying to normalize extremism. Make it seem like calling for ethnic cleansing isn’t a bad thing. Like committing violence against your political opponents is a legitimate form of engagement. Like hate is okay. That’s exactly what Tony McAleer, an anti-hate activist who was, for years, a neo-Nazi, told the CBC when they asked him about Second Son marches happening with increasing frequency in Sudbury this year.

Their latest action happened just a few days ago. You may not have heard about it; the event did not make the local news. In fact, it was hard to get any facts about it at all. Neo-Nazi accounts on X/Twitter circulated clips from the confrontation, but the only legitimate reference to it came on June 22, when the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre, the Hamilton and District Labour Council, and Ward 4 Councillor Tammy Hwang released a joint statement about the latest effort by Hamilton’s white nationalists to bring their racism into the mainstream.

On June 14, around a dozen activists affiliated with NS13 stood out front Solidarity Place Worker Education Centre in the east end. The white nationalists were there to confront local members of the “Worker’s Alliance”, a small Quebec-based far-left organization dedicated to the theory of working class revolution against capitalism. The group, known for its provocative posters calling for class war (as well as their hardline rejection of cooperation with social democrats, mainstream socialists, and their distrust of electoral politics), had rented the centre for one of their meetings.

The NS13 crowd saw the meeting as an opportunity to confront “communists”.

From the clips they have spread on social media, it looks as though there weren’t enough members from either side to field two teams for a baseball scrimmage. Despite this, the neo-Nazis claimed they vastly outnumbered members of the Worker’s Alliance (it looked to be around 8-to-10 for the neo-Nazis).

The brief confrontation was a lot of sound and fury; the people affiliated with the Worker’s Alliance watched as the racists shouted that Hamilton “belonged to white Canada”. The neo-Nazi accounts affiliated with NS13 clipped video they took of the event together in a way that makes it seem as though they were the victors. The posts about the event on X/Twitter appear between ones highlighting the “criminality” of non-white people, the moral degeneracy of queer folks, and picturesque photos of Nazi flags in the sunset. The accounts glorifying the event remain up, as do the posts.

Hamilton has struggled with hate for a long, long time.

Like with many working class communities - particularly those that have experienced profound economic upheaval - hate groups have found fertile ground here, weaponizing the economic instability and powerlessness felt by many in the area.

Scholars have tried to work out why this is the case for decades. In the late 1950’s, pioneering political sociologist Seymour Lipset posited that communities where people have lower levels of formal education, have low participation in larger community groups, and endure economic insecurity may be ideal places where authoritarian and extreme political movements can organize. The “concrete and immediate” nature of working class life - as in the idea that people who are struggling every day just to get by have little time for vague abstractions and high-minded rhetoric - Lipset speculated, means that many will seek to support and reinforce the world around them as a means of ensuring some stability.³ If a community is majority white, deeply patriarchal and unaccepting of deviations from gender roles, and centred around a dominant religion, then it stands to reason that some people may seek to bolster that narrow definition of community so that they can ensure stability in one aspect of their lives while, economically, they may not have that opportunity.

Other scholars have built on these ideas over the years. Carvacho et al. (2013) found that uncertainty tended to increase endorsement of right-wing ideas “especially among the disadvantaged” while Jost (2017) observed that, even when right-wing ideas worked against working-class people, they supported them because of the belief that the “institutions, authorities, and arrangements on which they depend are good, fair, desirable, and legitimate.” Scholars in Canada have further tried to understand the “climate of hate” here, citing things like historical normalization of bigotry that has only recently been challenged, increasingly extreme rhetoric from political leaders that “gives permission” to more extreme movements to take it further, and a general antipathy on the part of law enforcement to approach far-right groups with the same verve as they do groups on the left as reasons why hate is pervasive here.⁴

***

Hate groups and incidents are peppered throughout Hamilton’s history.

When organized labour first got involved in Hamilton’s municipal politics at the turn of the 20th Century, they brought with them the prevailing views of the time on race. Notably, Hamilton’s early labour-affiliated municipal politicians held openly racist views toward East Asian and Black Canadians. One of labour’s most flamboyant municipal leaders in those early days was local barber Harry Halford. An ardent British imperialist and firebrand, Halford was on-and-off council and the Board of Control for the better part of a decade before running for mayor in 1919. During and after his time in municipal politics, Halford used his star power to rail against non-British Europeans (once stopping a permit approval motion at council to ask about the ethnicity of the applicant) and attempting to get the local Independent Labour Party to join a pressure campaign regarding a Black man accused of having premarital relations with young white woman, saying that, if the crime went unpunished “no man’s daughter [would be safe] any longer on the city streets.” But he saved his most passionate vitriol for Chinese-Canadians, using a cavalcade of slurs and racist misconceptions on the floor of council and leading a campaign against Chinese laundries, which he called “Chinese dumps”. His blustery populism wasn’t enough to earn him the mayor’s chair in 1919 and he faded from active politics before dying in Toronto in 1946.⁵

As the years went on, some in organized labour shed their prejudice and began to actively work for equality. When a Black veteran was denied entry to a dance on the grounds of Dundurn Castle in 1948, union leader and city council member Peter Dunlop led a labour picket of later dances. The action worked and the people in charge of the dances reversed their segregationist policies.

Dunlop used the event to try to push for an official anti-discrimination policy, which would have ensured any event on municipal grounds would never allow “refusal of admission on the grounds of race, colour, or creed.” But, since Dunlop was an avowed Communist, his council colleagues turned on him. Members of council claimed that “coloured people came to [the West] for help, not the Communists,” that such a policy would “make a mountain out of a mole-hill”, and that the municipality couldn’t force equality because “tolerance will only come with evolution and education.” A more moderate member of council offered a compromise which would have set aside “certain days for white and coloured” attendees. The compromise, and the original motion, were rejected. Only the CCF and Communist members of council voted in favour. Letters to the Editor in the Spec praised council for rejecting ‘Communist propaganda’ and not falling for Dunlop’s claim that there was “racial discrimination in the City of Hamilton [which Dunlop] was unable to prove.”⁶

***

Among the most notable hate groups that called Hamilton home, it was an American organization that first really fired the city up. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, The Ku Klux Klan used Hamilton as their local headquarters. Their numbers were such that Hamilton served as the central hub for all Klan activity in Southern Ontario. Cross burnings atop the Escarpment were common occurrences, as were parades of Klan members through the city (particularly in areas where Catholic Southern Europeans had settled). The involvement of many members of the British Protestant Orange Order lodge in town prompted the organization to formally distance itself from the Klan’s activities. The city was even host to the formal headquarters of the Canadian women’s Klan organization (a photo from which serves as the cover art for this edition).

For around a decade, there wasn’t much push back from local institutions. When handed an application by the local Klan to use Stewart Park (today part of the metal recycling facilities near the Windermere Basin) for a convention and rally in late September of 1929, the city’s Parks Board made no effort to deny the permit. Nor was a similar permit denied in 1930. The Hamilton Police cleared all obstructions and allowed the group to hold a rally at the top of the Jolly Cut in 1931.

As the Nazis rose in Europe, the appeal of the Klan dimmed in Hamilton and, by 1935, they were mostly gone. As the Spec noted in ‘35, “At one time Hamilton was the centre of a Ku Klux Klan outfit, who use to very bravely burn crosses in secluded spots. After the initial thrills, people got bored,” they noted with chirpy sarcasm.

But the Klan, like many racist organizations, fixated on Hamilton’s working class and marginalized. A few years into the Depression, the Klan earned positive press after announcing a fundraising drive to collect food and clothing for the unemployed. A snapshot of their leadership shows how the organization was able to ingratiate itself with those down-on-their-luck; a local Klan organizer with the almost unbelievable name of “Upton Rainbow” was sentenced to one week of hard labour after being deemed a vagrant by a local judge.⁷

***

Overt hate groups and actions tend to surge when times are tough. Hamilton noted an uptick in neo-Nazi activity in the 1960s and early 1990s when the economy soured and the bonds between existing social groups began to fray. Moyer’s anti-Semitic photoshoot happened during a burst of white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in Hamilton as the early 90’s recession hit the city hard. As the police were closing in on Moyer and his young accomplice in 1991, local human rights organizations were sounding the alarm about a “growing national network” of which Hamilton’s racists were an integral part.⁸

The post 9/11 spike in hate events forced the Hamilton Police Service (HPS) to create a dedicated hate crimes unit for the first time in their history.

The unit was created on September 19, 2001, just four days after three local men, drunk on cheap liquor and hate, itching for revenge, burned the Hindu Samaj Temple to the ground. Their actions made Hamilton look ignorant, ill-prepared, and backward; their hate-fueled act of arson made international news, not simply because it was a Hindu temple burned to the ground after attacks by a terrorist organization claiming to be Muslim, but because it was the only destruction of a religious building in retaliation after 9/11 in the western world. The trio would not be charged until 2013, and, even then, there would be little justice. They pled guilty and received no jail time and reduced sentences, not unlike the punishment Moyer earned for his hate crime a decade earlier.

Three years later, a groundbreaking Spec investigation uncovered how close the whole case was to falling apart, thanks to an abusive, coke-and-alcohol-fueled relationship between an HPS staff sergeant and the confidential informant who identified the culprits. In their 2016 report, the Spec said that the burning of the Hindu Samaj Temple was “a vile case that put Hamilton on the map for the wrong reasons.”⁹

***

In the years since 9/11, hate crimes in Hamilton have trended up. There have been peaks and valleys, but, since the end of the COVID-19 Pandemic, they have been climbing at previously unimagined rates.

The way that hate crimes have been reported, classified, and conveyed to the public has changed, but the chart below provides a fairly accurate picture of hate crimes in Hamilton since the year 2000, based on data from the HPS, anti-hate groups, and what has been reported in the Spec.

Hate crimes tend to climb when times are tough, instability is the norm, and global events influence the local conversation. The graph and figures tend to confirm this fact.

Hate crimes fell after 9/11, but increased noticeably during and immediately after the Great Recession (2008-2010), earning Hamilton the unwanted label “hate crime capital of Canada”. Hate events levelled off in the late 2010’s, but jumped again after the 2016 United States Presidential election, once again earning the city Canada-wide hate crime attention.¹⁰

It seemed like things were trending in the right direction in 2018 and 2019 (the violence at Hamilton Pride 2019 aside). And there was even more hope when, in the early days of the Pandemic, instances of hate dropped considerably. But then in 2021, they started a climb that has continued to this day.

From 2006 (when hate crimes and instances were at their lowest) to 2024, there has been a 731% increase in hate crimes and incidents in Hamilton.

731%. One hate crime for every 1,913 residents. One hate crime every 1.23 days of the year. 37 and 1/8ths hate crimes for every one Ti-Cats Grey Cup wins.

We do not yet have the hate crime figures for 2025, but they should be released by the HPS some time in July of this year. There is little expectation that they will go down, though. Indeed, we may crack 300 reported hate events for the first time in recorded memory.

When the HPS began providing detailed information regarding who was the intended target of a hate crime, the figures became even more shocking. Since 2019, there has been a 57% increase in hate crimes targeting someone’s religion, a 313% increase against someone’s race (with Black Hamiltonians the most targeted), and a mind blowing 500% increase in hate crimes and incidents toward queer and gender diverse Hamiltonians.

It is hard to hear sentiments like “hate has no home in Hamilton” when the reality for historically marginalized people is very different. It is hard to accept that fuzzy sentiment when hate crimes are rising with unparalleled speed and when white nationalists engage in military drills and improve their physical fitness and stage confrontational events in public places.

It’s hard to accept when the conditions that enable and embolden the far-right are not being addressed. People are isolated. Isolated by the way we have planned this city. Isolated by the instability forced upon them by a broken economic system. Isolated by the virtual platforms we have been forced to turn to for human connection. Isolated by insecurities in their lives. Isolated from themselves.

Isolated, scared, and uncertain, people turn to the far-right with its easy solutions and people to blame. They see community and a purpose and stability when, before, they had none. They see themselves being part of a righteous crusade, not just some frightened, lonely young man.

They put on their black hoods, stand on streetcorners, and give their Roman salutes. Civic leaders condemn the actions, but take few steps to address the root cause of why people join these movements to begin with. That inaction leads to more boldness, more open hate, and more hate crimes committed against those “othered” by the mob.

The instinct, when seeing the lack of action and the hate crime chart trending in the wrong direction is to pick up and leave. Why stay someplace when that place is filled with so much hate? Why not pack everything up and, as Kath Weston observed in the 1990’s, “get thee to a big city”?

But fleeing to greener pastures is not an option for some. It is not a desire for others.

***

As I noted at the onset, I have been thinking a lot about I personally navigate hate in this city (and had been doing so long before the online backlash to my Spec article). Indeed, much of my adult life has been spent thinking about my place in this city and how I can best protect myself and the people around me from the hate I know is present here.

Moyer’s hate crime in 1990? Happened three months after I was born and a few blocks from where my parents and I lived at the time. Dundurn Park where dances were segregated? In my old neighbourhood and a place I still run through on occasion. Solidarity Place where neo-Nazis held their demonstration? A place where I’ve sat through a great many meetings.

But this is my hometown and a place I have no desire to leave. Three generations of my family have called this place home. We’ve lived here, loved here, thrived here, suffered here, and died here. Here matters.

So in thinking about hate in Hamilton, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the principle of do’ikayt. Translated from Yiddish, it roughly means “hereness”. It was a core philosophy of the Jewish Labour Bund, the political and social organization that fought for the rights and dignity of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe in the early 20th Century. The Bund stood in firm opposition to the Zionist movement and used the idea of do’ikayt in contrast to the Zionist ideal of dortkayt or “thereness”. They would stand and fight here, not aspire to bring the struggle there.

The Bund’s idea was that Jewish people should be free to live, work, and thrive as equals in the places they lived. The goal, they believed, should be equality alongside working people of all backgrounds, not self-imposed exile. The Bundists who advanced this idea were still proud of their unique heritage, their distinct culture, and their language (in many ways, the Bund was a key player in keeping Yiddish alive through tough times), but knew that the struggle for the rights of working people meant standing with others as equals. The artist and writer Molly Crabapple has boiled the essence of do’ikayt down to “here, where we live, is our country”, which is consequently the name of the book she wrote on the history of the Bund.

Last year, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor made the case for “a modern-day universalization of that concept [do’ikayt].” Writing in The Guardian, the pair defined this as “a commitment to the right to the ‘hereness’ of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move.”¹¹

That, I would argue, is how we should approach hate here.

Hate exists in Hamilton. It has always been with us. But, over the past few years, it has been growing and thriving.

Hate needs to be addressed, primarily by providing people opportunities to connect with their neighbours and reducing the economic strain on working people. Local leaders can tone down the rhetoric by not conflating the social disorder we see around us with Hamilton’s status as a “sanctuary city”, not dehumanizing their political opponents as “barbarians at the gates”, and not nickel-and-diming local cultural institutions and groups that want to provide residents with places and events that bring people together. We need to build stronger, more diverse, more accessible neighbourhoods, provide resources to groups that bridge cultural divides, and offer this city’s youth something meaningful to which they can aspire.

But we must always remember that here, where we live, is our city. All of us, together.

We all deserve to live in this city with equality, dignity, and hope. And this means that, while we address hate, we must also build up our own communities. As we tear down the foundations that support hate, so too must we build up the foundations underpinning our own unique communities. Queer Hamiltonians, Hamiltonians of Colour, members of different faith groups and cultural communities and people from across the spectrum of gender diversity - all of us are part of this city. Celebrating each other and the amazing things we all bring to this city is a profound way to support hereness in Hamilton. We all have a place, and that place is here.

Hamilton is home. But the hate at home is making this place worse. It is our job to tackle the hate that festers here. To pull prospective recruits back from the edge, to provide a better path, to isolate and hold accountable the malicious diehards. And it is our job to be ourselves, unapologetically, right here.

If the slogan “hate has no home in Hamilton” is to be anything more than a slogan, we have to work at it. When we come together as a community - an inclusive, caring, open community - we can do anything. So that’s our job. Now let’s get to work.

1  _{Hamilton Spectator archive stories used for this section: Feb 13, 1991; March 8, 1991; April 5, 1991; Nov 7, 1991; March 27, 1992; March 28, 1992; May 8, 1992; June 17, 1992; August 3, 1993; August 17, 1993; September 2, 1994.}

2  _{Canadian Anti-Hate Network. “White Nationalism in Canada: Organized, Emboldened, and Growing.” antihate.ca, October 30, 2025 - Link.}

3  _{Lipset, Seymour Martin. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism.” American Sociological Review 24, no. 4 (August 1959): 482–501. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089536.}

4  _{Carvacho, Héctor, Andreas Zick, Andrés Haye, Roberto González, Jorge Manzi, Caroline Kocik, and Melanie Bertl. “On the Relation between Social Class and Prejudice: The Roles of Education, Income, and Ideological Attitudes.” European Journal of Social Psychology (Bognor Regis) 43, no. 4 (June 2013): 272–85. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1961; Jost, John T. “Working Class Conservatism: A System Justification Perspective.” Current Opinion in Psychology 18 (December 2017): 73–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.08.020; Perry, Barbara, and Ryan Scrivens. “A Climate for Hate? An Exploration of the Right-Wing Extremist Landscape in Canada.” Critical Criminology (Richmond, B.C.) (Dordrecht) 26, no. 2 (June 2018): 169–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9394-y.}

5  _{Heron, Craig. Lunch-Bucket Lives : Remaking the Workers’ City. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Between the Lines, 2016, p. 417 - 415; Hamilton Spectator archive stories used for this section: May 19, 1916; March 20, 1920; Jan 2, 1920; Nov 19, 1946.}

6  _{Shadd, Adrienne L. The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway : African Canadians in Hamilton. Toronto: Natural Heritage Book, 2010, p. 244; Hamilton Spectator archive stories used for this section: July 22, 1948; Sept 1, 1948; Sept 4, 1948.}

7  _{Shadd 2010, p. 214-217; Hamilton Spectator archive stories used for this section: March 12, 1925; Feb 18, 1927; Jan 3, 1928; Aug 13, 1929; Sept 3, 1929; Sept 16, 1930; Sept 23, 1931; Oct 16, 1931; April 27, 1935.}

8  _{Legislate ‘Hate’ Halt Rabbi Asks, Hamilton Spectator, April 10, 1964 - Spec archive link; Rick Hughes. “Skinheads feared linked to national network” Hamilton Spectator, March 9, 1991 - Spec archive link.}

9  _{Hamilton Spectator archive stories used for this section: Sept 17, 2001; April 12, 2002; Sept 10, 2005; Sept 10, 2011; Nov 28, 2013; May 28, 2016.}

10  _{Hamilton Spectator archive stories used for this section: June 15, 2010; April 27, 2018.}

11  _{Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. “The rise of end times fascism” The Guardian, April 13, 2025 - Link.}