How a Twitter Campaign Took Down an ‘Ultra-Nationalistic’ Music Festival
Credit to Author: Mack Lamoureux| Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2019 20:24:04 +0000
At first glance, Musicfest 4 Vets seemed like a pretty good thing.
The festival, whose proceeds were going to veterans, was set to take place over the July 20th weekend on some Quebec farmland just outside Ottawa. They had a great headliner, Canadian punk darling Bif Naked, and said they had several sponsors providing attendees with food and booze. The tickets ranged from $15 to $25 for a one day pass and $50 for a three-day pass. If you were a veteran you got $10 off. Nice, right?
Then people saw who was organizing the event, including its ties to the Canadian far-right.
The festival was flagged to Yellow Vests Canada Exposed (YVCE), a group that spends time analyzing the Canadian far-right. One person with YVCE, who spoke to VICE using the pseudonym Liz, said once she started looking it wasn’t long before she was down the rabbit hole.
She found out the event was organized by members with deep roots to the far-right, with Eric Brazeau, a cofounder of the Quebec ultra-nationalistic group Northern Guard, working as the public face of the event. While the group claims not to be racist, Northern Guard is obsessed with immigration, demonizing Islam, and has had leadership connected to white nationalism. Brazeau himself told VICE, in 2017, that there were “too many immigrants” in the country and we can’t allow any more. Brazeau isn’t in a far-right group at the moment, but he still has deep ties to the Northern Guard and others within the movement.
The event coincided with a Canadian Combat Coalition (C3) anti-immigration rally in Ottawa. C3 is an anti-immigration group in the same vein as Northern Guard. This double booking wasn’t a coincidence as Dan Dubois, the leader of the C3, made clear when he pushed the time for the rally back to accommodate those attending both the anti-immigration rally and the Bif Naked concert.
“There were going to be hate groups and hate group adjacent in that rally and at the festival,” said Liz. “It was basically going to be an all-encompassing, ultra-nationalist, patriot group hoedown.”
To hammer home that this was no ordinary music festival, it was promoted almost exclusively in far-right spaces (Facebook and YouTube.) While you couldn’t find a radio ad or something in a local paper you could see it in a Facebook live stream hosted by a top-hat wearing Q-Anon conspiracy theorist, short Youtube videos, or shared repeatedly in a Yellow Vest Canada page. Liz said, while she didn’t know if it was intentional or not, Brazeau created the perfect environment for recruitment into far-right groups.
“If you’re coinciding your event with a hate group rally, which is bringing in folks and hate groups from all around the country, and then you’re topping that off with a concert which is aimed specifically within those circles,” said Liz. “I feel like it’s it’s a perfect environment to recruit new people and persuade those who are on the cusp of joining.”
Yellow Vest Canada Exposed took to Twitter and amplified what they found. They, along with a contingent of their followers, started contacting the bands billed to play and the sponsors of the event. It wasn’t long until bands started dropping out including Bif Naked.
“It was only made aware by those with keen eyes that this event was not what we were pitched to play, and we would have turned this down without a second thought had we known the history and organization and people behind this event,” Naked told VICE.
“Many of the bands, like me, have pulled out of the show. I am a person who stands with refugees, who is anti-hate, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, anti-Islamaphobia, and this should be clear to all, that love wins in the end. Always.”
The Twitter and Facebook page of Musicfest 4 Vets was deleted and the next day, in a live stream with a Canadian conspiracy vlogger, a defeated sounding Brazeau said that all but six bands had dropped out after the online campaign.
“I still have some bands and we’re trying to see what we can salvage out of this but most of my bands pulled out,” said Brazeau. “… They ran this big campaign tweeting at all every sponsor I had and all the artists that I had until everyone started dropping.”
VICE reached out to Brazeau for comment but never heard back.
The event hasn’t completely collapsed it’s but a shell of what it once was. Liz said that since the festival is being held on private land it isn’t possible to get it shut down fully. She fully expects that something will occur on the weekend of July 20, it will just be far more muted than the original plans.
“It’s probably going to turn into like a cash at the door and a one day thing as opposed to a ticketed three day event.”
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