- Unmasking Atalante (December 2018)
- Chasing Atalante (September 2019)
- Debunking Atalante (December 2019)
Atalante Québec’s militants and sympathizers : Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, Mathieu Bergeron & co., Heïdy Prévost, Folk you! & Légitime Violence, Louis Fernandez & Baptiste Gilistro, Laurie Baudin, La Barricade & Misanthropic Division, Quentin Pallavicini I, Pallavicini II : la Taupe, Yannick Vézina
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In December 2018, Montréal Antifasciste published a dossier on the neofascist organization Atalante, tracing the group’s history as well as the trajectory of some of the individuals at the heart of the project, specifically, members of the Québec Stomper Crew gang and the band Légitime Violence. A series of follow-up articles have focused on the activities of a number of people within Atalante’s sphere of influence.
It’s September 2019, and although Atalante’s activities have slowed down a bit in recent months, the core militants show no sign of calling it a day, so we need to remind them and their entourage that we have no intention of letting up.
In order to make the social cost of being a fascist or a Nazi in our neighbourhoods and communities intolerable, the most effective tactic remains exposing the fascists to their communities, to their colleagues, employers, families, and neighbours, from whom they generally hide the real nature of their activities or use euphemisms like “nationalist,” rather than saying they are fascists. Given that they have decided to be Nazis and to persist in heading down that road, we are completely committed to seeing that they pay the consequences. History has shown us that sooner or later fascist principles always lead to violence —sometimes even genocide— targeting people from different social sectors who are already suffering more than their share of misery and oppression in so-called democratic capitalist society, and we have no intention of standing by while this history repeats itself.
By making public where various fascists from Atalante work, it is most definitely our intention to cost these fascists their jobs, because the projects they are involved in in their personal lives endanger both their immediate colleagues and the general public, most particularly racialized people, Muslims, Jews, queers, and leftists.
We think that campaigns to isolate and ostracize them and to target companies that provide them with shelter and support are necessary, both as a matter of public safety and as an act of working-class solidarity.
This is a reminder that fascists will never be welcome in the places where we live or where we work.
Roxanne Baron
Roxanne Baron, practical nurse
Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Québec)
1-418-525-4444
[email protected]
https://www.facebook.com/HEJQc
Roxanne Baron, the only woman in the Québec Stomper Crew, is not just some unimportant member. She is also a key figure in Atalante, having participated in almost all of its actions since the organization’s inception.
Her exact function in Atalante isn’t clear, but we know that until recently she played an important role on Instagram, sharing numerous photos of herself and her comrades carrying out actions in Québec City and Montréal, as well as, for example, at the CasaPound “mother ship” in Italy. (In fact, her carelessness on Instagram cost some of her comrades their anonymity … oops.)
A fact that is particularly staggering on a variety of levels, Baron hasn’t been shy over the months and years about repeatedly bragging about her dubious reading habits while at her place of work: the Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus. She claims that without her colleagues or the hospital’s patients noticing, she read works from the neofascist organization CasaPound, the Belgian Nazi Léon Degrelle, the fascist historian Robert Brasillach, the ultranationalist intellectual Charles Maurras, and the French antisemite Jacques Ploncard. She even crows about surreptitiously reading Nazi texts at work:
“Journée tranquille… Quand on croit que tu lis de petits romans comme tout le monde au travail”
[A quiet day… When they think you’re reading some innocuous novel like everyone else (LOL emoticon).]
We also know from her Instagram account that she has tattoos with an array of fascist images: a fasces, the symbol at the origin of the word“fascism”; a Celtic cross, a universally recognized “White Power” emblem; the inscription “le diable rit avec nous” [the devil laughs with us], a reference to the lyrics of the Nazi hymn SS marschiert in Feindesland; another inscription reading “presente per tutti camerati caduti,” a traditional Italian fascist greeting; and a mjölnir, the hammer of Thor, an image that is not explicitly racist, but which is now systematically sported by white supremacist Odinists. To put the star on top of the Christmas tree, something that is not without interest for opponents of “religious symbols” in the workplace, around her neck Baron wears a sonnenrad, a black sun, an occult symbol popular with contemporary neo-Nazis.
At the very least, it’s alarming to think of this person, who in her private life openly participates in a clearly racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic political project, working in a health services institution, where she is in daily contact with the general public, including a large number of people from different social sectors designated for elimination by Nazi ideology.
Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau
Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau, paramedic
Dessercom
1-418-835-7154
https://www.dessercom.com/nous-joindre/
https://www.facebook.com/dessercom/
Alias “Tony Stomper.”After growing up in Mont-Laurier with his younger brother Étienne (also an Atalante member), Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau began his CEGEP studies at Lionel-Groulx, participating in the student movement during the 2007 strike. After that, he moved to Québec City, where he joined the Québec Stompers, at the time a street gang gravitating toward far-right ultranationalism. Around that time, he went to Rimouski to study to become a sailor, moving on to the Université Laval, entering a program to become a history teacher, which he soon abandoned.
On a trip to Italy, he discovered Blocco Studentesco, a neofascist student organization that is for all intents and purposes the youth wing of CasaPound. Little by little, he became Atalante’s main theorist and seems to be the author of Saisir la foudre [Ride the Lightning] under the pseudonym Alexandre Peugeot, who is also the author of several articles in Le Harfang, the magazine of the Fédération des québécois de souche.
Antoine has shown a lot more discretion than his friend Raphaël Lévesque, always taking the necessary steps to keep his role in Atalante a secret, rarely appearing at the group’s public actions and blurring his face and using different pseudonyms in his rare furtive video appearances. Unfortunately for him, a 2017 interview he gave to Zentropa Serbia (a CasaPound satellite), where he used the pseudonym “Alexandre,” made it relatively easy for us to determine his central role in Atalante.
Despite all his precautions, we were also able to confirm that he is a paramedic on the South Shore of Québec City, in the Chaudière-Appalaches region, working for the Lévis-based company Dessercom.
As in the case of Roxanne Baron, as part of his professional responsibilities, Antoine Mailhot-Bruneau, a fascist militant and a member of a violent gang, inevitably comes into contact with members of the public who belong to communities targeted and victimized by fascists.
Imagine, if you will, how it would feel to be a first-generation immigrant, a Muslim woman, or a Jew having a heart attack or some other serious health problem, and to have the first responder be a fascist theorist, an inveterate racist, Islamophobe, and antisemite. Imagine that your life depended on the care you received from an individual who unreservedly believes, for example, in the need for the “remigration” of all migrants who are not Catholic French Canadians “de souche.”
We believe that this is an unacceptable situation that violates the ethical principles and professional norms upon which the paramedic profession is itself based.
Yan Barras
Yan Barras, social worker (not a member of the professional Order of social workers)
Habitations Meta Transfert inc.
1-418-649-9402
[email protected]
On the night of December 31, 2006—January 1, 2007, a small group of Stompers and associates, including Raphaël Lévesque and Yan Barras, burst into the café-bar L’Agitée in Québec City, a cooperative they knew to be run and frequented by antiracist activists. In less time than it took you to read this account, the boneheads trashed the bar, and Yan Barras stabbed at least six people with an X-Acto knife, before fleeing.
In spite of the sordid nature of the incident, the Stompers drew a certain pride from this brutal attack, going as far as to reference it in the lyrics of the eponymous song “Légitime Violence”:
Ces petits gauchistes efféminés,
qui se permettent de nous critiquer,
ils n’oseront jamais nous affronter,
on va tous les poignarder! »[These little leftist sissies,
who dare to criticize us,
wouldn’t have the nerve to face us,
we will stab them all!]
After pleading guilty to assault with a weapon, Yan Barras was sentenced to two years in prison. The judge even recommended that he receive therapy while in prison to address his proclivity for senseless brutality. When he got out of prison, Barras registered in the social work program at the CEGEP de Sept-Îles, and some might have thought that it looked like he intended to change course.
But far from changing his ways, Barras had “No Remorse” tattooed on his forehead under a death’s head devouring the three arrows that represent antifascism, and he promptly rejoined the crew of racists who would later create Atalante. Not only did Barras not distance himself from Raphaël Lévesque, the Mailhot-Bruneau brothers, and company, he has often participated in Atalante activities in recent years, as well as continuing to provoke and intimidate the Quebec City left, notably by marching with other members of the Stompers into the middle of a small abortion rights demonstration in August 2015, and more recently by joining his brothers in trolling the 2019 May Day demonstration, with one of them even giving the Hitler salute.
Today, Barras works as a “liaison coordinator” for the social reintegration company Habitations Méta Transfert Inc., in Québec City. Obviously, this places him in position of authority over a vulnerable clientele, a position he can use to attempt to recruit anyone fitting his fantasy of “a master race” or to deny services to those he judges “inferior.” You can’t blame us for wondering how many other Nazis this company might employ …
Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald. The quote is form Adolph Hitler.
Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, security guard; student at the Centre intégré de mécanique, de métallurgie et d’électricité (CIMME)
Securitas (CIBC bank in Chinatown, Montréal)
**It is very possible that he has not worked there for several months or that he only works part-time shifts.**
1-888-935-2533
[email protected]
https://www.facebook.com/Securitasjobs.ca
https://twitter.com/Securitas_Group
Centre intégré de mécanique, de métallurgie et d’électricité (CIMME)
1-514-364-5300
https://www.facebook.com/cimmelasalle/
https://twitter.com/csmbcimme
Commissaire : Joanne Bonnici
Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald has often been mentioned on this site. He gained notoriety in August 2017, when he was sighted among the group from Québec that went down to Charlottesville to attend the Unite the Right rally.[1] Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that at that point he had held a key strategic position in the La Meute hierarchy for several months; specifically, he managed the “anglophone” section of the Islamophobic organization’s Facebook page.
But Beauvais-MacDonald wasn’t done with the surprises! It later became clear that under the pseudonym FriendlyFash he was a very active member of the“Montreal Stormer Book Club” chat room, a small neo-Nazi social club that was attempting to organize in Montréal at the time. Beauvais-MacDonald has never bothered trying to hide his penchant for Nazism on Facebook or his other social media accounts.
Following a far-right demonstration in Québec City in the autumn of 2017, he began to appear with increasing frequency around Atalante, participating in several of the fascist groupuscule’s actions, including postering campaigns, food distribution runs, and other activities meant to increase Atalante’s visibility in Québec City, Montréal, and Ottawa. It quickly became clear that Beauvais-MacDonald had become an active Atalante militant, and he remains so today.
As a guest on the podcast This Hour has 88 Minutes, on January 4, 2018, Beauvais-MacDonald talked about the consequences of doxxing on his daily life. He talked about how he lost one of his two jobs (as a bouncer at a bar), but that his colleagues at his other job thought it was “hilarious”:
« The other job, I work with Chinese people and they find it hilarious, so whatever. »
Despite Beauvais-MacDonald having been widely exposed and denounced in 2017, it seems that until fairly recently the company Securitas employed him as a security guard at the CIBC branch in Montréal’s Chinatown. The obvious question is whether Securitas was simply unaware of their employee’s extracurricular activities all this time (in spite of the numerous mentions in the mainstream media and on antifascist websites) or simply chose to turn a blind eye.
It is also worth asking whether his job at Securitas (a publicly listed company, we might add in passing) as a security guard has given Beauvais-MacDonald access to material or privileged information that might be useful to his neo-Nazi network.[2] What computer databases or other resources has he had access to thanks to his job with Securitas?
We’re not sure at this point if Beauvais-MacDonald still works for Securitas, however, he is currently a student at the Centre intégré de mécanique, de métallurgie et d’électricité, in LaSalle.
It remains to be seen how the school’s administration and student community feel about spending their days around this notorious Nazi.
Étrienne Mailhot-Bruneau
Étienne Mailhot-Bruneau, graphic designer
Sunny Side Up Creative
1-418-522-8541
[email protected]
https://www.facebook.com/SunnySideUpCreative/
https://twitter.com/sunnysideupcrea
https://www.instagram.com/sunnysideupcreative/
Antoine’s little brother is another important player in Atalante and a patched-in member of the Québec Stomper Crew. Having completed a BA in animation, in 2017, at Université Laval, Étienne is Atalante’s de facto graphic artist, producing designs, logos, and posters under the pseudonym “Sam Ox.” Shortly after we released the “UnmaskingAtalante” dossier, establishing the link between him and his avatar, Étienne fell silent and deactivated all of his accounts on major professional platforms.
In spite of the “brown” stain on his CV, he seems to have found employment with Sunny Side Up Creative in Québec City.
Vincent Cyr, butcher
Vincent Cyr, butcher
Fruiterie Milano
1-514-273-8558
[email protected]
https://www.facebook.com/FruiterieMilano/
One of the most active Atalante members in the Montréal region, Vincent has participated in numerous group activities, including most of the nighttime postering runs. Originally from Montréal’s South Shore, he kicked around the Longueuil hardcore and punk scene for quite a while before coming into contact with the bonehead milieu and radicalizing, finally embracing full-on fascism. He found himself very isolated in his milieu (he’s the son of a trade unionist!), but he seems to have found a family in Atalante.
Cyr is a butcher at Fruiterie Milano, a neighbourhood grocery store in Montreal’s Little Italy neighbourhood, where his brother also works.
Jean Mecteau
Jean Mecteau, tattoo artist
1-418-265-5222
https://www.facebook.com/jhanmecteau/
1709 rue Bergemont, Québec
The bassist for Légitime Violence, Atalante’s flagship band, Mecteau originally came out of the hardcore scene. A “first-rate” second stringer, he spends his time at cosplay, as the second fiddle in a crappy neo-Nazi band, and as a tattoo artist at his business Jhan Art.
Mecteau is one of Atalante and the Stompers’ go-to tattoo artists, which perhaps explains why, upon his return from a recent visit to Bicolline (the most important LARPing site in Québec), he found his tattoo parlour “a bit the worse for wear.”
Sven Côté
Sven Côté, cuisinier
Restaurant Le Fin gourmet
1-418-682-5849
https://www.facebook.com/LeFinGourmet/
https://www.instagram.com/lefingourmet_qc/
“Svein Krampus” on Facebook. Sven Côté is a longtime bonehead from the national socialist black metal (NSBM) scene. He’s been active in Atalante since the winter of 2016, after an online radicalization that began in 2013, culminating in his embrace of fascism. A protégé of Raphael Lévesque (aka Raf Stomper), with whom he has exchanged openly antisemitic posts on social media, he has remained a loyal member of the group and has recently stopped blurring his face in Atalante’s documentation of its activities. He grew up and lives in the Basse Ville neighbourhood of Québec City. It is generally believed that Côté was among those who attacked La Page Noire bookstore in Québec City on the night of December 8–9, 2018. We have reason to believe that this attack served as a rite of passage into the Québec Stomper Crew for Côté, as he received his colours that same evening.
He is a cook at Le Fin Gourmet, a restaurant in the Saint-Sauveur neighbourhood of Québec City.
More revelations will follow…
Shutting Down the Fascists: A Task That Falls to Our Communities
Fascist militants are not just random doofuses we have some niggling differences with; they are hateful individuals who seek a new social order that involves the oppression, persecution, and elimination of millions of people. Their ideology presents a direct threat and constitutes a form of violence targeting many of us: queers, racialized people, Muslims, Jews, leftists, and numerous others.
At the same time, capitalism itself constitutes a form of violence against many of the people targeted by the far right. As anti-capitalists, we don’t recognize the authority of bosses, the state, or professional orders, and we don’t intend to leave it to them to remove the fascists from our communities and workplaces. We recognize that very often workers have to unite and take the measures necessary to force their employers to ensure their safety.
Excluding fascists and other far-right militants is a task that above all falls to the working class and to members of the public who are endangered by their presence and activities. It is in that spirit that we share this information.
Friends, it’s time we got to work.
[1] This mobilization was meant to be a show of force bringing together white supremacists, “ethnic” nationalists, identitarians, neo-Nazis, and other neofasicsts that make up the American “alt-right” current. The August 11–12, 2017, events in Charlottesville made history as a complete fiasco for the alt-right, most notably because the white supremacist James Alex Fields chose this occasion to use his car as weapon in an attack that killed the antiracist activist Heather Heyer.
[2] Just a few years ago, it was revealed that Hensel European Security Services (HESS), a security company in Germany, was providing Amazon with far-right guards to police, intimidate and abuse foreign workers in the company’s warehouses. Closer to home, in the 1980s, in Canada, William Lau Richardson, the leader of the KKK’s “Klan Intelligence Agency” was employed by the Centurion security company, a position he used to carry out operations against the left. In the 1990s, it was alleged that neo-Nazi private detective Al Overfield similarly used his access to police computer databases to provide information on antifascists to his friends in the Heritage Front, and Bryan Taylor, head of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia, used his position at ADT Security Systems to disseminate racist propaganda.
