Beyond his job as a freelance process server in Toronto, thirty-five-year-old Josh Chernofsky didn’t have much going on in the spring of 2019. But over time, he’d developed a rapport with one of the security guards at the University Avenue courthouses. They’d chat about this and that, often about security work; Chernofsky had once been in the industry himself. One day in May, the guard said there were going to be some protests in the neighbourhood on the weekend. Of what nature, he didn’t know. Chernofsky decided to take a look.

As he made his way to the protest on the Saturday, Chernofsky cut down a side street. The first thing he noticed as he drew near: there were a lot of police vehicles. He then saw people wearing matching black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts. He vaguely recognized it as the Proud Boys uniform. I thought that was just an American thing, he said to himself. Beyond the group’s US origins and some sense that it was ideologically conservative, he didn’t know much about it. He just thought it was a “men’s group.”

At the rallying point, two crowds were facing off across the street from one another. “On one side, there were all these people in black, covered up, masked, yelling, shouting, swearing—just sounding very obnoxious,” he remembers. On the other, he saw people with Canadian flags and no masks. “They all seemed very happy,” he says. “I guess that’s what attracted me to that side.”