Front Burner - Inside Canada's alt-right forums

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Reporter Shannon Carranco got access to over 150,000 chat logs from a Canadian alt-right forum. What she found is frightening.

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Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. On Saturday afternoon near San Diego, a gunman entered a synagogue yelling anti-Semitic slurs. It was the last day of the Jewish holiday Passover. A white male adult entered the Shabbat temple with an AR-type assault weapon. He opened fire with a rifle, killing one person and injuring three others. I want you to know, this is not Poway. One message from all of us, from our congregation, we are standing together, we are getting stronger, never again. You can't break us. Just before the shooting, there was a manifesto posted in the alleged shooter's name online. there was a manifesto posted in the alleged shooter's name online.

It's a screed filled with racist and white nationalist conspiracy theories, in which the author says he was inspired by recent shootings in two mosques in New Zealand. He'd also posted a manifesto online expressing extreme white supremacist views. And a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue just six months ago. The suspect in today's mass shooting had an extensive anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish digital footprint. Today, my guest is freelance journalist Shannon Karanko. She's just published an investigation in the Globe and Mail based on 150,000 messages posted in a private far-right Canadian chat room. This is the most comprehensive snapshot I've seen into how the far right in Canada are communicating with one another. And it's proof that these kind of conversations

are happening here. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Shannon. Hi. Thanks for coming by today. So you got access to this Discord server called Canadian Super Players. And I know that Discord is an app that's popular with gamers, but it's also popular with the far right. Am I right? Yeah, exactly.

And this group claims to be a video game group. But how would you characterize what's really going on in there? So they disguise themselves as video gamers, hence the name Canadian Super Players. So from February 2017 to early 2018, about 180 of these young white men from across Canada, discussed hardcore racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, their plans to get involved and their kind of real world activities of getting involved in the Conservative parties across Canada and what kind of weapons they own, generally just talking about their hatred for minority groups. And I want to unpack that with you today, what was going on in this chat room.

But before we do that, can we talk about how you got these messages, which are private messages? I'm a student at Concordia University, and I was working for my student media. My colleague John Milton and I were approached by a group of anti-fascists who said that they wanted to share this chat room with us. So essentially, this activist group of anti-fascists infiltrated this online chat room and then they were able to collect these 150,000 messages and give them to you. Exactly. Can you give me a sense of the kind of people in this group?

Who are they presenting themselves as and what kind of things they're saying? You know, let's start with the student teacher. Yeah. So Dank, he goes by the username Dank. He is a student teacher that seems to be learning at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. In the chat room, he talks about how he is working with grades 6, 7, and 8 kids and that he was questioning kind of what they had already come to learn about the Holocaust while the teacher left the room for a few minutes one day, he kind of goes into detail about talking to this one little girl in front of the class about

why the Holocaust happened and that maybe she should look into herself to kind of see it's not all cut and dry and what we've learned in school. So essentially, he's trying to encourage these students to get on the internet and look at alternative theories to the Holocaust. Exactly. How do you know that he may be studying at Nipissing University? One of their conversations, he says that they're learning about the residential school system and that he takes a picture of his laptop screen and on the slide that he's looking at it says Nipissing University. Okay. Another member that you focus on in the piece in the Globe and Mail is a guy who calls himself Rusty in the chat room and he claims to be in the Canadian military. And can you tell me a bit about Rusty and his influence in the group?

Yeah, so Rusty was one of the few older members of the group. They really looked up to him as kind of a leader. He was very quick to offer the other users advice on women. He had extensive knowledge of firearms in one of the chats within the Canadian Super Players umbrella. It was called the Great Outdoors Chat, and it was specifically about their gun use. Which guns are best for hunting? Which guns are best for the race war? Along those lines. So there are people talking in this chat room about which guns are best for a race war? Yes. Yeah, exactly.

And what are they saying? Basically, like how to prepare for the race war, the eventual race war of what they're hoping will come of Canadian society. And Rusty, for example, what are like the views that he's espousing in this chat room? Extremely racist, extremely anti-Semitic. So he was part of the Canadian Armed Forces. He talks about being part of DART, which was sent over to Nepal in the 2015 earthquake. More than 6,000 people have been killed and more than 14,000 injured. They talk about entire villages wiped away by landslides. A combination of high population density, remote communities, poorly constructed buildings and unstable slopes.

The catastrophe was made so much worse. And so he actually shares photos on the chat of his time in Nepal where, you know, taking photos of the Nepalese people who had lost everything, lost their homes and their loved ones. The country was devastated by this earthquake. Yeah, this awful earthquake. And he posts pictures of these people and just like, he talks about using the clothes of the dead to wipe his bottom. He was just extremely racist in how he spoke about the people that these Canadian soldiers were supposed to be helping.

What does the Canadian military have to say about this? Are you able to identify who Rusty is? Yeah, so we weren't able to identify Rusty. When we asked for comment from the Canadian military, of course they said that they're totally against any racism or extremism in the military. You believe that Rusty, or this man posing as a guy named Rusty, was in Nepal because of the photos from Nepal that he was posting in this chat room. Yeah, exactly.

Can you give me a sense of who else is in this group? It's a pretty wide range of men. They're all white men. No women were in the chat that we know of. They range from university students. I think we had one high school student. But most of them were between 18 and 25, 30. A lot of them come from middle class families. A lot of them come from middle-class families. A lot of them say that their parents are liberals. They talk about not fitting in at school, finding these niche groups where they were accepted. And like, you know, the free speech movement or the white identitarian movements throughout Ontario, you know, they're all pretty like regular run of the mill Canadian dudes.

Right. Or I should say people who are identifying themselves as such. Because I suppose it could be anybody behind these online names. So that's an argument that we've heard a lot. And some of these guys post 20 to 50 times, but most of them are posting like thousands of times, like sometimes 20,000, 30,000 times throughout the chats. Yeah. And so you really get a good look at who some of these people are from them describing their home life and their families and what they had gone through that day, the photos that they share. It really became like a pretty intimate space for these guys to talk about the problems that they're having in life

with women or in school or their families. We absolutely believe that the content within the chats is reputable. We'll be back in a second. Discover what millions around the world already have. Audible has Canada's largest library of audiobooks, including exclusive content curated by and for Canadians. Thank you. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. What is it that these guys want? What are they talking about most of the time? They want a Canadian white ethnostate. They don't believe that women should have really any rights other than just like staying at home and cooking and being a good wife and mother.

And so they talk a lot about like how they're going to achieve that, you know, and some of them think that it's going to be the collapse of society as we know it. And then some of them are a little more practical and think that getting involved in mainstream conservative politics is the way to go. Can you tell me more about that? A lot of these guys talked about kind of local, conservative, provincial politics. During the last conservative party leadership race, a lot of them volunteered for their local writings. So at first they started to rally behind Kelly Leach, and then they seemed to move en masse to Maxime Bernier. And so a lot of them talked about how that Bernier was going to be kind of their savior, our guy, they called him our guy, which is like a kind of friendly term that they use.

And why did they say this about Maxime Bernier? They felt that he had the kind of policies that they were looking for on immigration and on firearm gun laws, firearm laws in Canada. Okay, and I should say, you know, Maxime Bernier, of course, has argued that there should be immigration reform in this country. Can we just have a pause and going back of what we did in the past and being sure that we have an immigration system that is sustainable for our country? And he's not a proponent of stricter gun laws.

These chats, they predate the creation of his party, the People's Party of Canada. But he has said that there is no room for racists in his party. What did he say to you about this chat room? We tried to contact Maxime Bernier about four or five times and we never heard back from him. Okay. The people on this server, they're also talking about how to make their views more palatable for a wider audience. Am I right? Mm-hmm.

And how is that happening? So these guys know that what they're saying on this chat is pretty extreme. And they understand that their views are pretty extreme from an outside lens to the majority of the Canadian population. Right. They call us normies, right? Yeah. We're normies. Yeah. To try to seem more mainstream, they very clearly mask their views when they're in public, whether it's in a classroom or with their families and friends. But they'll kind of slowly show people who they come to trust more and more kind of

hardcore neo-Nazi stuff. One example I'm thinking about that I read in your piece was one of the users asking the rest of the group to refrain from using symbols. Yeah, yeah. So especially after Charlottesville, you know, Charlottesville was a huge blow to their movement. The rally originally meant to protest the city's decision to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, but it quickly turned to chaos. It was a weekend of street battles and stark displays of racism exploding into a deadly act of domestic terror. Tonight, we examine the hateful groups that now appear to be banding together. Before Charlottesville, they really thought that they were gaining numbers and gaining respect

in the mainstream media. And then after Heather Heyer was killed... The young woman who was killed when a neo-Nazi drove through a crowd of people in Charlottesville. Yes, yeah, a crowd of counter-protesters. As you know, Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer was struck down by a vehicle while exercising her peaceful right to speech. They tried to kill my child to shut her up.

Well, guess what? You just magnified her. Yeah, they really felt that their movement had been, they received a huge blow to the movement. One of the main creators of the chat, Slug2, kind of sent a PSA message to everyone saying, Hey guys, listen, we would like to refrain from sharing, you know, Nazi symbolism outside of the chat. We're not changing any of our views, but we want to seem a little more mainstream to the public now. And this is happening in Canada, in this Canadian chat room. Yes. I want to talk to you about what Discord might be doing here, where this chat originated from.

A few weeks ago, Facebook expelled some white nationalists, including some Canadians like Faith Goldie. In a statement, Facebook says there's no place on its platform for individuals and organizations who spread hate, attack or call for the exclusion of others on the basis of who they are. There's been a lot of pressure on these tech companies. And so what is Discord saying here? In our correspondence with Discord, they say they have no tolerance for neo-Nazi organizing. They also say that Discord relies on human and computer intelligence to kind of sort out these white supremacist neo-Nazi groups from organizing on their site, on their application.

Why do you think it's important for us to know what's going on on these message boards? There are 180 people in this group. It's not thousands, although I would posit that, you know, 180 people is also not a small group. Yeah. And so it's important to keep in mind that there's 180 of these guys on this chat. Almost all of them are associated with other fascist or white supremacist groups throughout Canada. I think it's important for the public to know about this because this is a huge issue, not only in Canada, but around the world now. Canadians don't seem to realize that this is also in our backyard. We hear a lot about the States.

to realize, you know, that this is also in our backyard. We hear a lot about the States. Again, this is kind of the first cross country group that we've really looked at. And these guys are dangerous, you know, and they talk about wanting to hurt people and wanting to kill people. And they post photos of their firearms and their guns and their knives and videos of them at the shooting range. And these are not a bunch of high school nerds behind their keyboard. These are like young men who are getting involved in our political system and wanting to change Canada. A couple of years ago, CSIS dismissed the far right in Canada. They said it's not a significant threat.

And you just talked about how we've seen the rise of these groups across the Western world, the recent attacks in New Zealand, the shooting over the weekend in the United States. What is CISA saying now? They're recognizing that it is an issue. You know, we interviewed Barbara Perry, who's an expert on the Canadian far right. Dr. Perry said that the amount of these far right groups in Canada has roughly doubled in the last few years. You know, we have about 200 of them that we know of. Yeah, that's scary. You know, when it's on the upswing, as we see now, you know, they're sort of feeling their strength and they want that to grow and to expand. So those are the times when you're likely to see them sort of not step back from the ideology,

but step back from that real blatant displays of the symbols. And it's only growing. Dr. Perry said that in 2017, the amount of reported hate crimes jumped 47%. And of course, we know that in that spike, the groups that are disproportionately targeted are Muslims, Jewish people, and the Black population. Thank you so much for your work on this. It's impressive. It's also brave. And I hope that you will come back on the show.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. So I just want to mention that we reached out to Maxime Bernier for comment on this story. And at the time that we recorded this podcast, we had not yet heard back. We also reached out to Nipissing University about the user who said that he was a student teacher and who appeared to be studying at the institution. They said that they're looking into this matter and that they would take action to reinforce that there is no room for bigotry, intolerance or racism at Nipissing University. And another thing I want to note, since we're talking about the rise of far-right groups here, just last week, a report in Alberta found a 78% spike in hate crimes in the province from 2014 to 2017.

The report, it looks at six types of extremist groups currently active in the province, including Al-Qaeda-linked groups and insuls. We did an episode on this group last week. You can find it in our feed. The report found there were several white supremacist groups operating in Alberta and noted that they've attempted to use more sanitized versions of their rhetoric to attract new members. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

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