Inside the online world of a Hamilton paralegal known as neo-fascist ‘Red Serge’

For years, Everett Ross Field was a man of two lives.

In one, he was a university graduate, a paralegal student and the president of student Conservative Party political clubs.

His other life was lived online, in a dark network of chat rooms, podcasts and websites, where he fomented racial hatred, violent misogyny and antisemitism.

In public, the Hamilton man became a licensed paralegal, an essential piece of Ontario's legal system. As his white nationalist alter ego, Red Serge, he claimed white people were at risk of extinction, joked about gang rapes and sought to organize firearms training for neo-Nazis.

These separate lives collided on Nov. 1, when the Law Society of Ontario, which regulates lawyers and paralegals in the province, suspended his licence for four months for having lied about his white nationalist activities.

The website for Everett Field Paralegal has shut down, and Field's public social media presence has vanished.

The social media chat room on Discord where Red Serge unabashedly used the N-word and joked about the Holocaust and residential schools has disappeared, as has a podcast where he claimed he was using his education to twist the legal system against Jews.

The digital identity of Red Serge - taken from the name of the RCMP's iconic red dress uniform - is also gone.

That wasn't enough to conceal his past. The Discord chat room was hacked and the data caught the attention of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), which launched an investigation in 2020 that identified Field as Red Serge. CAHN provided the The Spectator with the Discord data about Red Serge.

Armed with the results of the CAHN investigation, the law society again confronted Field with the digital evidence of his online life from 2017 and 2018 - which he'd originally denied when first questioned in February 2021 - and he confessed.

Field did not respond to multiple interview requests from The Spectator. However, in letters to the law society and in transcripts of interviews with the agency's investigator obtained by The Spectator, Field did not provide much of an account of his time as Red Serge, a persona he now disavows.

I had a look in the mirror, I didn't like what I saw, and I decided to change my ways," Field told the law society investigator.

Field told the law society he has only the dimmest recollection of what he had done in those years - the same years he completed his paralegal education at Mohawk College.

The booze made him do it, he said. It also stole his memory.

I think that's probably just that I was intoxicated and I was speaking out of line," he said during an interview with a law society investigator in August 2021, less than a year after he was licensed. I don't really recall too well the events. It's been years."

Field, who told the law society he now enjoys helping immigrants - people he once described in violently racist terms - also has to pay a $3,000 fine and attend three years of diversity training.

I don't post in these groups. I would never do that again," Field told the law society investigator. I have a completely different frame of mind than I did back then and I've moved on."

Field's case provides insight into how far-right and white nationalist groups organize, spread their messages and operate just outside the public's field of vision. Experts in radicalization and extremist groups say it also shows how these groups can be attractive to disaffected people from any walk of life.

I don't want to sound alarmist, but what strikes me is that you can find people who hold these views from just about anywhere," said Hazel Woodrow, the CAHN staffer whose work exposed Field as Red Serge. They can be professionals and lawyers."

The neo-Nazi video games club

By November 2017, Red Serge wanted his fellow white nationalists to leave the safety of their digital den to meet up in Hamilton for a formal Christmas party.

Students from McMaster University - where Field had earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy - and Mohawk College who are literally on board with us," would be there.

But the invitation to the Hamilton Conservative Youth Christmas Party" also came with a warning.

This one isn't official party business so it will be a lot more implicit and a lot more fun as yours truly is one of the organizers," he posted on Discord. But don't be overly fash as a few normies and subversives are bound to trickle in."

In the coded language of white supremacy, fash" is to be fascist and normies" is a pejorative used to describe those who aren't white nationalists.

Fear of public exposure was constant. Every member of the Discord group was vetted before being allowed to join the white nationalist group, including Red Serge, who told the 200 members of the chat group to be cautious in public.

Getting groups together is a good thing to a degree. Still have to mind yourself and not do anything that would put you under fire from law enforcement," he wrote on Feb. 25, 2017, on the Discord chat. If you're working in white-collar industries that demand PC attitudes, it's best to stay away from this sort of thing."

The instant messaging platform has over 350 million users worldwide. From its 2015 launch, Discord has been a popular home for gamers. Since then, it has been the platform of choice for a spectrum of users - from Canada Vaccine Hunters to a forum to create artwork using artificial intelligence.

Nearly from the start, however, the ability to create by-invitation chat rooms, anonymous pseudonyms and nearly untraceable voice chats, made Discord popular among extremist groups, including white nationalist networks, said Wilfrid Laurier University religion and culture professor Amarnath Amarasingam, who researches extremism and radicalization.

Discord tried to weed out extremist groups on the platform by targeting group names, Amarasingam said. But to get around that, they strategically selected" names that did not bespeak their true purpose.

In early 2017, the closed group called Canadian Super Players (CSP) was created on Discord. The need for a white ethnostate, rape, antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Black racism were the group's core discourse.

The Spectator has reviewed digital records from the CSP group, but it is not clear who invited Red Serge.

In his law society interview, Field claimed he did not remember joining CSP. He was on Discord to goof off and play video games." He said an unknown person just added him to a group he knew nothing about.

Especially early on with Discord, it would pop up and it would just be like Oh, you're in this group now,' and that's what really happened to me."

Yet from his first post, Red Serge is comfortably familiar with the coded language used in neo-Nazi circles.

Hello, hello. Is this the chat with the TRS goys," Red Serge wrote in his first CSP post on Feb. 15, 2017.

Goys" is Yiddish slang to describe a non-Jew and is frequently used in anti-Semitic circles to label oneself as not being Jewish. TRS" is another white nationalist phrase referencing The Right Stuff," an infamous American neo-Nazi online forum run by a prominent member of the CSP group.

Red Serge regularly used this coded dialect in thousands of posts. The secret language they used ranged from well-known racial slurs, including the N-word, to arcane abbreviations used as slurs for Jews, Muslims, Indigenous people and women.

Sometimes, however, Red Serge made his point in plain and overtly racist English.

In its ruling, the law society rejected Field's assertion he did not know what CSP was.

Countless posts by (Field) reveal that he was aware of the true nature of the CSP Discord and that he was an active participant in his own vetting and in the vetting of others who were initiated."

A community to call home

Everyone has a dual identity. At least that is how it seems from Steven Joordens' view of the human brain.

I like to say we're actually two individuals at the same time," said Joordens, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. In every one of us there is a much more primitive part of our brain in what we call the limbic system. It's where our emotionality is."

Then there is the brain's frontal lobe, which is responsible for rational thinking and decision-making.

And while people might want to regard themselves as rational actors, it is often the limbic system, a critical component of a person's well-being, that rules the day.

It is that part of the brain which craves a connection with others that helps explain why some people, even the well-educated, join extremist groups, Joordens said.

He said online communities are very attractive to those who are disaffected in some way, from mental health and trauma issues, to anxiety and depression.

They can provide the positive reinforcement that stimulates the limbic system.

A lot of these people are seeking community in a strong way because they have social anxiety and they're uncomfortable with face-to-face interactions. And this is a safe way for them to feel like they're getting what they need," he said.

To be accepted in these spaces, Amarasingam and Joordens said, one need only parrot their ideology. Even if a person only has a dim awareness of white nationalist ideas, the sense of community found in these networks can result in someone internalizing their values.

While Field told the law society he suffers from self-esteem problems exacerbated by drinking, it is not clear what motivated him to join a white nationalist network. He said his memory is hazy and the law society did not pursue questions about his activities prior to 2017.

Woodrow of CAHN said CSP built camaraderie among its members by exchanging savage insults. The worse the insults, the better in a funhouse-mirror version of team building.

Vetted members did meet in person, but Woodrow said it is not clear if some of their claimed activities - including harassing racialized people, racist postering campaigns or amassing guns - were real or acts of braggadocio to impress their fascist friends.

Podcasts and other breadcrumbs

In Field's law society testimony, he portrays himself as a troubled, often grossly inebriated student who stumbled into white nationalist circles.

Medical records he submitted to the law society - reviewed by The Spectator - say he suffers from depression and anxiety, and that alcohol can deleteriously impact a person's memory. His medical issues and drinking are offered as a reason why he was on the Discord channel.

I really have nothing to substantiate that he is, was, or ever could be incapacitated," said law society investigator Peter Stehouwer, according to a law society transcript of his interview with Field.

Digital records show Red Serge's activities extended beyond the CSP group and showed a person digging deeper into the neo-Nazi rabbit hole.

In September 2017, some eight months after joining CSP, Red Serge published a column, complete with footnotes, on a white supremacist website. It outlined his belief in the decline of white Canada," and the demonization of European culture.

Red Serge's column contains a pointed defence of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister whose legacy has come into criticism in recent years because of the history of residential schools. Red Serge wrote that Macdonald's detractors are attacking white identity on behalf of the aboriginal peoples."

He ended the column claiming his eyes were opened to the plight of my ethnic group" by two infamous white nationalist writers.

The column mirrors the mission statement of a now-defunct student club Field was part of at McMaster University called The Macdonald Cultural and Historic Society," which wanted to preserve a Canadian identity carved out by Macdonald and people of European decent. Field was photographed posing beside a portrait of Macdonald during one of the group's events in 2019.

At least one of the group's organizers made a string of anti-Semitic Facebook posts in 2019. The university's student union stripped the club, rebranded as The Dominion Society," of its funding and official status because it did not disclose alleged links to white nationalists.

He also appeared on the white nationalist podcast This Hour has 88 Minutes" - the number 88 being a reference to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, used twice to signify heil Hitler" - where he provided political and legal commentary.

In his 2021 law society interview, Field said he was on the podcast accidentally - that someone recorded his commentary during a CSP voice chat on Discord and then published it.

I would suspect that if that was analyzed by anybody, they would find that I was probably quite intoxicated," Field told the law society. Maybe slurred speech or whatnot."

However, in recordings of the explicitly racist podcast, Red Serge is an active participant and introduced as a special guest during the show's opening. Red Serge speaks clearly and doesn't slur his words. It was on the podcast that Red Serge said he was twisting the legal system against Jewish people.

Despite his warnings to his friends about protecting their identities in the real world, Red Serge got sloppy, making references to offline life.

Woodrow, of the anti-hate network, said Red Serge also referred to the etymology of his real name, announced he was from Hamilton, disclosed his schools, clubs and his field of study, and posted photos of his family's Hamilton acreage.

Woodrow followed those breadcrumbs, cross-referencing them with public documents and social media posts, from Red Serge to Field.

The anti-hate network published Woodrow's findings on its website in 2020, prompting the law society investigation.

In its ruling, the law society said its jurisdiction was limited because the evidence of Field's activities as Red Serge happened before he was licensed as a paralegal in 2021. So Field was only punished for initially lying about being Red Serge in 2021, which the law society found to be dishonourable."

In a letter to the law society and his interview with the agency investigator, Field said he is in counselling and his girlfriend is monitoring his drinking.

I know that the comments I made were wrong. However, I also know that through education, addressing my internal biases and living anti-racism in my practice, I can become a better person and a better professional," Field wrote.

Radicalization experts like Amarasingam said unless the root causes that drive people into the arms of white nationalists is addressed, there will be more people finding their way into CSP-like groups.

Going after social media platforms is ultimately a fruitless game of Whac-A-Mole" as groups change names and platforms, and users adopt new online identities, he said.

I'm quite worried about the next two years, for example, with (former president Donald) Trump running for office, with Twitter in the state it's in, with a whole lot more conspiracy-minded individuals coming out thanks to COVID," Amarasingam said.

I'm not hugely optimistic about what that's going to look like. But I'm hoping through targeted interventions and a different kind of public messaging and having more personal conversations with people, that it will have some impact."

Grant LaFleche is an investigative reporter with The Spectator. Reach him via email: glafleche@torstar.ca