Hamilton’s neo-Nazis claim to be part of the ‘fastest growing nationalist community in Canada’

From the vantage point of motorists below the bridge, the small knot of men standing on a Red Hill Valley Parkway overpass would not be a cause for alarm.

Folk. Family. Future," read the black letters scrawled onto a white canvas held by six black-clad men standing on the Greenhill Avenue bridge after a late March snowfall. Next to them, two other similarly dressed men held up a black flag marked with a white cross laid over a white circle.

All nine men wore black balaclavas to hide their identities. The flag is a version of the Celtic cross, a popular icon among white nationalists. The text on the flag, unreadable from the highway, says White Pride Worldwide." The banner's slogan represents the three Fs identifying the core ideals the men believe will eventually usher in a white ethnostate.

These nine masked men are members of a group calling itself Nationalist-13."

They are Hamilton's homegrown neo-Nazis.

And they believe their time is now.

Southwest Ontario is becoming the fastest growing nationalist community in Canada," says a promotional Nationalist-13 post on the social-media platform Telegram. It is all thanks to you who share us, and our community members who put in the work."

For much of the last year, Nationalist-13 has existed as a white nationalist community on Telegram, where subscribers to their group have grown from a handful in June 2022 to more than a thousand now.

A Spectator investigation has found the group is part of a vast network of white nationalists channels hosted on Telegram - some with less than 30 subscribers, and others with more than 70,000 - that fetishizes Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, denies the Holocaust, demeans Jews and the LGBTQ community, and actively seeks new subscribers.

These are a new generation of neo-Nazis, adept at using social media as community hubs and to spread their message.

As they get off of the more mainstream channels (like Twitter or Facebook) they limit their reach, but ultimately one of their main goals is to try and get their propaganda in front of as many eyes as possible," said Dan Panneton, director of allyship and community engagement at Toronto's Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre. So there is that good aspect to it when they go on these more decentralized, less-mainstream platforms. However, it becomes a little bit harder for professionals and researchers to actually find this material."

Beyond their digital spaces, they are also inserting themselves into the freedom convoy" networks to fan the flames of discontent and recruit new members.

It just looked like a radicalization pipeline in motion, in real-time," said Elizabeth Moore, a former member of the notorious white nationalist group the Heritage Front, who saw echoes of her neo-fascist days in freedom convoy rallies and social-media pages she visited during the height of the pandemic.

There were so many people who were willing to just overlook the antisemitism, overlook the racism and say, Well, it doesn't exist because I don't want to see it.' But white nationalists were glomming onto issues around the pandemic that a lot other of people had and just used this as an opportunity for them."

Over time, Nationalist-13 and groups like it, have crept out of the shadows and their digital dens with increasing regularity.

They are responsible for an ongoing white nationalist stickering and vandalism campaign in Hamilton, including a white pride sticker placed over the face of a Black candidate on an election billboard in Hamilton during the last municipal election.

Members proudly post their vandalism efforts on Telegram like trophies, praising it as the work of community activists."

These white nationalist networks cloak themselves in the language of social justice movements. As a play on the Black Lives Matter" movement that rose to prominence after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, this network dubs itself White Lives Matter." Within their conspiracy-theory-ridden chats, they push a hyper-masculine, Aryan ethos. In this through-the-looking-glass matrix, real men" must engage in intense physical fitness and combat-style training, all the better to breed more white children, be ready to fight non-whites at a moment's notice or survive the complete collapse of modern society.

More recently, they have escalated to public activities like the banner wave over the parkway and using public parks, like Sam Lawrence Park overlooking Hamilton, to engage in survivalist exercises. During one such event, the group of nine men photographed themselves doing a Nazi salute from the park.

It is difficult, however, to know how many people cross over from social media into real-world activities, said Panneton.

One of the ways that they operate is with these public stunts where they try and get a lot of media attention, which then makes them seem a lot larger than they actually are," he said. However, just because these stunts make them seem larger than they actually are, I don't want to underestimate the threat because these channels are reaching tens of thousands of people in some cases."

What's new is old again

Social media did not exist when Elizabeth Moore fell down the rabbit hole of white nationalism.

A troubled high school student, Moore was introduced by a friend to the Heritage Front - a group that once included former City of Hamilton employee Marc Lemire as a prominent member.

The flyer her friend gave her was Moore's entrance into a world of extremist hate - and she dove in with both feet. She authored Up Front," a newsletter, and ran a Heritage Front hotline.

She finally defected from the group in 1995. She said it was in part because of a 1994 CSIS report that labelled the group as a violent racist and extremist movement," which caused her to question the group and her own life choices. An act of compassion by Bernie Farber, then the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, helped shatter her racist views.

Farber gave a speech at Queen's University about the Heritage Front and knew Moore was in the front row. The audience included anti-Fascist activists trying to find her but Farber wouldn't identify her to the crowd.

I went away from that evening thinking, I think he just saved me from getting my ass kicked,'" said Moore. Later, when I decided to reach out to Bernie Farber, I just felt like this is a person who is principled. I'm grateful that he gave me a chance. He was very hard on me. He wasn't going to put up with any nonsense. But I definitely needed that support and that guidance to help me steer myself out of this."

Moore said the kind of material she published in the newsletter is no different than the ideas pushed by the White Lives Matters networks on Telegram. Jewish people, Black people, and those in the LGBTQ community are all demeaned and attacked. The worship of Hitler is frequent. Conspiracy theories about attempts to annihilate white people are common.

These messages might be largely unchanged, but they have a broader reach than in the 1990s. A Heritage Front newsletter had a limited audience and its distribution was hampered by printing and distribution logistics. Social media doesn't have to contend with those issues.

As a result, a member of a group in Hamilton can have a global reach. And in the digital realm, they are more than willing to work together to spread their ideology and attack those they hate. The pages often share members and posts among White Lives Matters groups from across North America and Europe.

For example, on May 10, the New York City-based Anti-Defamation League tweeted about the anniversary of a massive 1933 book-burning event in Nazi Germany. The tweet caught the attention of one of the White Lives Matters Telegram channels with more than 12,000 subscribers and cross-posts with Nationalist-13. This channel, called The Western Chauvinist" urged its members to go to the Anti-Defamation League Twitter page to let 'em know their friends at the Western Chauvinist send their regards." Responses to the tweet became a litany of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying posts, including posts attacking the trans community.

Finding a Nazi-friendly home on Telegram

There have been attempts to establish white nationalist communities on the largest social-media platforms, including Facebook, but they often get shut down. Even in the near free-for-all of Twitter, neo-Nazi accounts are being banned.

In April, for instance, after owner Elon Musk abandoned Twitter's verification system and reactivated accounts that had been shut down, a newly restored white nationalist account posted a portrait of Hitler on the late dictator's birthday, calling him the most lied about man in history."

The post was viewed nearly two million times before Twitter suspended the account again.

Unable to get a lasting foothold on the big platforms, white nationalists have sought out social media with weaker moderation policies. Discord, popular with video gamers, became one such platform. In November, the Ontario Law Society suspended the licence of Hamilton paralegal Everett Ross for his neo-fascist activities as his alter ego Red Serge" on a Discord channel.

In 2021, Discord began shutting down white nationalist channels on its service. Telegram, however, is not making steps to combat neo-Nazi content on the platform.

Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn did not answer questions from The Spectator about the White Lives Matter networks on the platform or neo-Nazi channels like Nationalist-13.

In an email to The Spectator, Vaughn wrote that Telegram is focused on privacy and free speech, including speech that we do not agree with."

Because of this, our platform is used to organize pro-democracy protests and spread ideas under oppressive governments like those in Iran, Hong Kong and Belarus."

Threats of violence can be banned if reported to Telegram, he wrote.

There are few barriers to finding neo-Nazi channels on the platform. They are not in plain sight, but nor are they far from it. Some have a perfunctory security process to access the channels, which includes not using a real name or photo as part of a Telegram account - all designed to keep the network anonymous to allow its members to spread hate free of consequences.

The Spectator investigation originally accessed the White Lives Matter networks through a Facebook link. Once in the network, groups like Nationalist-13 are readily available.

Moore said she was able to navigate her way from freedom convoy" Facebook pages, which are not white nationalist in purpose, to more insidious content easily. Some of it was posted by members of groups, while other times, groups with a more extremist bent are recommended by Facebook's algorithm. Eventually, a pathway to overtly racist material pops up.

There has always been some overlap with far-right ideas but now it feels like all of that just completely collapsed into like this one big, far-right, gelatinous mass," Moore said. You go into these groups that are supposed to be convoy focused and you've got flat-earthers spouting off and you've got people talking about New World Order conspiracies and someone else spouting off anti-trans stuff. It's all there."

Within the networks, which remain largely anonymous, no leaders are identified, making them different from the Heritage Front or past white nationalist groups that had identified hierarchies.

This decentralized movement is what anti-hate expert Barbara Perry of Ontario Tech University called the post-organizational era of the movement."

We're seeing many more unaffiliated individuals coming to the movement, consuming those narratives, whatever they might be, and pouring them back online as well," said Perry. So they're engaging with the movement and not just affiliated with a particular group."

It also makes it harder to pin down when someone might commit a violent crime, she said.

The killer in a recent mass shooting at a Texas shopping mall, for instance, posted photos of his Nazi tattoos and white nationalist iconography to a Russian social media platform before the shooting. But there is no information that he belonged to an active neo-Nazi group.

Perry said it is a mistake to consider these kinds of people lone wolves" because they don't have formal ties to a specific group.

I call them networked individuals because if you think about some of the mass murders that we've seen associated with the far right in the last few years, they've been individuals acting on their own, but mobilized by the broader movement," she said.

The White Lives Matter networks provide subscribers with a near-unending supply of conspiracy theories about imagined threats to white people, templates for white nationalist propaganda and stickers, videos featuring Nazi imagery, an index of white nationalist reading materials, and instructions on how to be a neo-Nazi activist. No one has specific marching orders, although most provide an email address to begin a vetting" process to be accepted for in-person meetings.

Masks, digital or made of cloth, have thus far protected the members of Nationalist-13 from being identified. They remain careful to camouflage who they are and exactly where they have been.

In photos posted to Telegram, the group's administrator says they are active in Southwestern Ontario," and don't identify the cities, streets or parks they have been to.

But a Spectator analysis of dozens of photos has identified some locations, like Sam Lawrence Park, and shows the group is principally based in Hamilton with some activity in Brantford.

Hamilton police say they are aware of the group and an investigation into the vandalism campaign is ongoing.

The Spectator received no response to a message sent to the Nationalist-13 email.

Tomorrow: Read the first part of the Metroland investigation Hate Rising

-With files from Sebastian Bron

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