Uncover - S13: "White Hot Hate" E6: 'Give them what they deserve'

Episode Date: December 26, 2021

Patrik Mathews could be facing up to 25 years in prison for U.S. firearm offences. His and others’ arrests may have destroyed the appeal of accelerationist groups like The Base — but where is the movement heading now? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/white-hot-hate-transcripts-listen-1.6226840

Hi, I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead from CBC Podcasts and the Norwegian newspaper VG. Hunting Warhead follows a global team of police and journalists as they attempt to dismantle a massive network of predators on the dark web. Winner of the grand prize for best investigative reporting at the New York festivals and recommended by The Guardian, Vulture, and The Globe and Mail, you can find Hunting Warhead on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains strongly racist language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening.

So it was January 16th, 2020, and I had been covering this removal of this homeless encampment down on Main Street. It was really cold. I'd been sitting in my car since five in the morning because, like, I didn't know what time this was going to happen. And as this was kind of wrapping up, my phone just started blowing up. I could feel it vibrating in my pocket. I checked and I had a text message from my editor who said Matthews has been arrested. You know, get back to the newsroom. And he had dropped a link to a New York Times article about Matthews' arrest. Just five and a half months after Winnipeg Free Press reporter Ryan Thorpe

had gone undercover to infiltrate the base, Patrick Matthews was arrested. The former Canadian Army reservist was charged with unlawfully entering the U.S. and the illegal purchase of weapons. Ryan made it to the Maryland courtroom when Matthews was first brought before a judge. I wasn't really sure what to expect. The proceedings about to get underway and like the side room to the court, the door swings open and you can hear like chains jangling a bit. And then Matthews gets let in.

He's wearing like an orange prison jumpsuit and he's shackled and he's got this big bushy beard back again and his hair is longer. I know that after we published the first article, Matthews, I think in an attempt to disguise his identity, shaved his face completely and shaved his head. But by this point, you know, after five, six months kind of on the lam, he looks like he did when I first met him in Whittier Park in Winnipeg. And as he's being let in, he's kind of scanning the crowd a little bit. And, you know, I swear to God, like he zooms in on me and like our eyes lock and there's like a sense of recognition there. And it seems pretty clear to me that he remembers me.

And then, you know, I think I drop my eyes to my notebook and jot down some notes. And by the time I look back, he's seated. The Patrick Matthews that Ryan knew while undercover, first on the vetting call and then during his face-to-face meeting in the park, was pretty consistent with the Matthews seated before the judge. Confident, disdainful, pretty cocky. It was like he didn't accept the legitimacy of the proceedings. He didn't seem to be taking it very seriously. He was like leaning back, reclining in his chair.

At one point, someone is reading into the court record his statement that's taken from a self-recorded propaganda video that the FBI had pulled from his laptop. And the quote from him is, derail some trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies. And as this is read into the court record, Matthews is the season finale of White Hot Hate, episode six, Give Them What They Deserve. Patrick Matthews, as he first sat in court after his arrest, may have acted like this was all a joke

But the hatred he spread, that type of intolerance, has very real consequences We need to see an evolution in the laws and the way that we deal with these groups I'd like to see a lot more education on it in the public school system. They need to be exposed. And I think when that happens, that it will become much more stigmatized to be a part of it.

Jeannie Pepper Bernstein lives in Orange County, California with her husband Gideon and two kids. She's a motivational speaker, a role she took on recently because of tragedy. I just think that it wouldn't be right for my son to have been a victim of such a terrible crime and to allow this to potentially happen to other people too. If we can try to give people some awareness of the danger in this country that is posed by extreme hate. Her eldest son, Blaze, was a bright, popular 19-year-old.

Toothy grin, an easy laugh. He was a foodie, too, an amateur chef, and he loved to write, which made him the perfect pick as managing editor of Penepetie, the University of Pennsylvania's food magazine. He had just finished the first semester of his second year, and he was really excited to come home because he had not come home for Thanksgiving. We were all very excited to see him. Everybody was excited, his grandparents, siblings.

You know, we had a lot of downtime. I wanted to give him a lot of space to rest because it had been such a difficult semester. This was January 2018. A few days before he was supposed to return back to school, Blaze went missing. He failed to show up for a dental appointment that I had with him. Blaze went missing. He failed to show up for a dental appointment that I had with him. Jeannie, how did you know when something was wrong? Did you have sort of like a motherly instinct at that moment, or was it just so out of character for him to miss an appointment? It was both things. It was because Blaze was really looking forward to that dental appointment because he was just about to get rid of a bridge that he had. And he was about to get an implant.

I knew he wanted to be at that appointment with me. We talked about that. And then when I got home, I found his wallet and his retainer and his contact lens case. And I knew that he wouldn't ever walk out of the house without those things unless he was planning to return very soon. I knew something was really wrong. Police searching by ground with canines and by air with helicopters. No sign of the University of Pennsylvania pre-med student. The community came out en masse to help police search for Blaze.

But about a week after his disappearance, his body was found in a shallow grave on the edge of a neighborhood park. And we just have learned that the OC Sheriff's Department and Corridor's Office has confirmed that our family's worst fears could come true, and they have positively identified our son Blaze's body today. We have had people do random acts of kindness and so many friends and family that have reached out to us. It's unbelievable what you people have done for us and our son and his memory. And our son and his memory.

Soon after, a 20-year-old man was arrested and charged with Blaze's killing. He had been a former classmate at their performing arts high school. murdered and the suspect is or was a member of a little-known extreme group of neo-Nazis called Atomwaffen. And I don't really like to talk that much about them because they're not worth our time, really, other than it's important to know that these things exist and that we need to keep our children away from them any way we can. things exist and that we need to keep our children away from them any way we can. Blaze was stabbed as many as 20 times. Orange County District prosecutors are pursuing the case as a hate crime, alleging Blaze was killed because he was Jewish and gay. It was journalist Ollie Winston working with colleagues who exposed the accused's connection to Atomwaffen Division.

They reported for ProPublica that he had been a committed member who at one point attended a hate camp in Texas. After the news broke, Atomwaffen celebrated the killing in internal chats. One member praised the alleged murderer as a one-man gay Jew wrecking crew. While Jeannie says she always knew that Blaze might encounter anti-Semitism and bigotry in his life, she never imagined a group like Atomwaffen devastating her family in the way they did. I don't know if I'd ever heard of Adam Waffen. I mean, I really probably had my head in the sand as much as everybody else here in Orange County and California in the United States at the time. I don't think that there still is a lot of very good understanding of what is really going on in our society with regards to this demographic that becomes involved in an Adam Woffin or other neo-Nazi group. Jeannie would rather talk about Blaze, not these groups.

She'd always thought Blaze was pretty exceptional. But after his death, she learned just how much he meant to others around him. He wasn't just a really smart kid and really outspoken. He also was a person that took great interest in helping people. I've received over the last three years quite a bit of email and messaging from the public, from people that knew my son and who had stories for me about things that he did for them. If he hadn't died, I don't know if I ever would have learned about the things, the wonderful, amazing things that he did. She and her husband channeled that kindness their son had inspired into setting up what they call a movement, Blaze It Forward.

It's a charitable fund to support children, LGBTQ, and marginalized groups. Being in the public eye and being able to show people that Blaze was a Jewish gay person that was going to do great things for this world. He was going to make this world a better place, and he's gone now because of hate, because of violence, because of ignorance. You can change things. You don't have to raise your kids in a bubble where they are culturally deprived. You can take your kids out and have them see this diverse world and the importance of all of us working together. We don't really have the infrastructure or the mental health care services to deal with

these young men. So things probably need to change. But the advice for parents is just, if you have not had these discussions with your kids about hate and let them know that you don't accept any form of hate in your home, then go do it if you haven't yet. But go do it if you haven't yet. The case hasn't been tried in court yet. But Blaze's murder was just one of five allegedly linked to Atomwaffen Division in a two-year stretch. Atomwaffen gives us a glimpse of where the base was potentially headed if law enforcement hadn't cracked down. And the two groups clearly have a lot in common. Those leaked internal recordings of the base reveal how they act like sister organizations.

Some recruits even held dual membership. They absolutely have the same ideology and structure and they want to achieve the same types of things. And so while some people might point to the base and say, well, they never pulled anything off, again, I would underline not for a lack of trying, and two, that their comrades in arms, people that they have specifically pointed to as being of the same movement, have killed people and have attempted to pull off significant acts of destruction.

Figuring out how to combat this type of terrorism means really understanding where these groups come from, who is at risk of joining them, and why. The names of the organizations will change. The base and Atomwaffen division were gutted by media and law enforcement investigations. But like any terrorism threat, you can't respond with arrests or sanctions alone. You're fighting an ideology, an us-against-them mentality. The question now is what's happening to the accelerationist movement itself. Where is it headed? I'm Cassie Miller. I'm a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project,

where I study hate and extremism, in particular white nationalism and neo-Nazism. Cassie has a PhD in history. And you know what? Knowing your history really helps when looking at white supremacist violence. To understand this modern accelerationist movement, I'm going to take her back to the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era. People were coming back from the war to a highly militarized society. And you had created a political context where people were told that they needed to fight back against communism. And in the United States, the communist menace really took the form of civil rights activists, integrationists.

People felt like they needed to really carry on the war abroad at home. So what we saw was that this movement became more and more militarized and really more and more violent. And so you saw the growth of a lot of groups that were creating compounds where they were engaging in military training, where they were actively recruiting people who had served in the military because of the specific skills that they had. skills that they had and who were arguing that the only way forward for the white power movement was to tear down the state itself through acts of violence. And that's the only way that they could then rebuild the kind of ethno-nationalist society that they wanted to achieve. Over the next 20 years, white power activism and anti-government extremism strengthened and grew. But that confidence inside the movement evaporated after the Oklahoma City bombing. We saw a lot of changes in the far right and really a kind of collapse or demobilization within the movement.

A lot of people were rightly afraid of the fact that federal law enforcement was now taking this problem more seriously. The federal government saw it really as the primary domestic terror concern within the nation. That changed after September 11th. I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture. The federal law enforcement switched up their focus. They were almost wholly focused on foreign terrorism and jihadism. And any kind of pressure that they were putting on white power groups really fell by the wayside.

And do you see any parallels in terms of how you explained Vietnam and then what followed 9-11 in terms of the militarization of the U.S.? I think so. You know, we now live in a highly militarized society and the war on terror really put us into this period of kind of never-ending war. It also really helped to normalize and make acceptable anti-Muslim bigotry. And the normalization of those kinds of bigoted beliefs really helps to create a fertile ground for these kinds of hate groups. And who signs up to these groups should be alarming. The founder of the base, Ronaldo Nazaro, may be close to 50.

But the overwhelming majority of recruits are half his age, millennials or even younger. In the leaked vetting calls, a disturbing number of applicants identified themselves as teens who were radicalized years earlier. How old are you? I'm 17. I'm 18 in a couple months. How old are you? I'm 17. Okay. So how old are you? I'm 17.

I turned like 19 like a few weeks ago. I got into fascism back when I was like 14, 15. You know, these groups use humor as a tactic. Andrew Englund, who runs the Daily Stormer, which is a neo-Nazi website, has said that he's trying to attract boys as young as 11 into this movement and using humor to do so, saying, you know, it's all just a big joke. We're all just laughing together and using that to then slowly introduce them to these racist ideas until they start to realize that they're not so much of a joke, that this is actually the ideology that they're pushing. It creates kind of a softer landing for people to be integrated into these movements. And so that's a really explicit strategy to try and get young people involved. But also, you know, just how pervasive the internet is, and people are getting on the internet very young. And what we've seen through many, many years of research in the far right is that people are coming into contact with these extremist ideas younger

and they're becoming radicalized faster than they were in the past. And it's a movement-wide trend. Recently, the leader of another international neo-Nazi group was unmasked by an Estonian newspaper to be a local 13-year-old boy. It's easy because of the way that social media is designed, because of how these groups know how to take advantage of these algorithms to promote themselves to really slip into these extremist circles. You know, it used to be that you would have to meet someone or encounter literature in the real

world to be introduced to these movements and maybe eventually join a group. The internet has gotten rid of all of that. The Daily Stormer was just one of these online spaces. Iron March, the so-called birthplace of Atomwaffen division, was another. There are dozens of other forums where the users who post the most violent and uncompromising rhetoric rise to the top. It's called purity spiraling. It's this idea that people are going to push the most extreme ideas. In some of these spaces, people try to moderate what people say.

They want to be acceptable towards mainstream audiences, so they don't want to be too explicit in their racism or too explicit about using violent tactics. But in a place like Iron March, which was supposed to be a place to develop the purest form of fascism, they actively encouraged people to push for the most extreme solutions. In the race to one-up each other and prove themselves to be the most committed, is it really a surprise that online conversations become real-world dangers? Patrick Matthews would talk about this in court, claiming that's how he became radicalized.

He told the judge, I tried to fit in with people and you adapt to their beliefs. It was, quote, like a competition who could be more extreme. And then he said, he took it too far. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell.

I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Turn right into the parking lot and arrive at your destination. Well, let's see. We are an hour and a half.

We're very early. Arrived. It's a gorgeous fall morning, late October. The sun is just coming up as we arrive at the Maryland courthouse. There's one other car in the parking lot, another media outlet. And, yeah, we're an hour and a half early because there's barely any room in the courtroom. You think there'll be, like, room for, like, two people? Two plus overflow.

Right. Okay. Well, at least it's a nice morning in Maryland. Okay, we're really early. But we both want to make sure we get to see Matthews in the courtroom. For me, it's the first time I've laid eyes on him. About four months earlier, he surprised everyone by changing his plea to guilty.

Y'all gonna set up up here? Okay. Yes, I'm going into the courtroom, but I can put it in my bag and turn it off. Oh, okay. Yeah, well, yeah, you can do that. In Matthew's plea agreement, both sides accepted the following facts. He had been a member of the base. He had crossed the border illegally. He had attended that October 2019 hate camp. And he had been building an assault-style rifle. But the charges he actually pleaded guilty to were, in the grand scheme of things, considered minor.

Firearm offenses and obstruction of justice. That last one was for smashing his cell phone and dumping it in the toilet during his arrest. In U.S. federal law, there is no stand-alone offense for domestic terrorism. To be charged with terrorism, it has to be international in scope, like connected to ISIS or some foreign group. But if a crime was committed with the intent to, quote, promote an act of terror, like intimidating the public or influencing the government, a judge can give a stiffer sentence. It's what's known as terrorism sentencing enhancements, and a sentence of three years behind bars could become 25. To support his argument that Matthews was trying to terrorize, the prosecutor submitted a video that Matthews self-recorded in 2019.

These people make us out to be evil incarnate. They want bad guys so bad they can have it. We'll give them bad guys. We will give them white supremacist terrorists if that's what they want. Give them what they want. Give them what they deserve. Then there's this clip where you can hear Matthews talking to Brian Lemley Jr., his roommate and co-accused. Might as well go to jail for something good. Might as well do some damage to the system. No offense to the legal prowess of the prosecution,

but they had a lot of material to work with. Matthews and Lemley talking about the violence they hoped would further their cause. And all the evidence the FBI seized from their apartment. A night vision scope for a rifle. A ballistic calculator for a deadly accurate shot, fatigues, and an exhibit bag so heavy with ammunition, the prosecutors struggled to lift it from the table. It was clear Matthews and Lemley were prepping for something, but what exactly? We don't have to reveal that we are national socialists.

But we just have to reveal to these patriots, etc. Yeah. We're the good guys. We're here for you. We're on your side. Yep. And we fucking killed the fucking government, which is the fucking enemy. Thereby, we are helping the acceleration.

Well, yeah. And just, we can't really live with ourselves if we don't get some like blood on our hands. How bad would you feel if there was a battle of

Richmond and you weren't even fucking there? Those voices you're hearing, it's Matthews and Lemley with an undercover FBI

agent, the same one they met at the Georgia hate camp. And the battle of Richmond? That was the pro-gun rally to be held in Virginia's state capitol in January 2020, the ideal opportunity to create chaos and spark a race war.

But the defense argued these isolated clips were not proof, certainly not evidence the men were intending to carry out a terrorist attack. There were hundreds of hours of recorded conversations while they were under surveillance. They argued it was aspirational rather than operational talk. The defense also claimed the undercover coaxed and goaded them into saying these things. Besides, they said, Matthews and Lemley had been drunk most of the time. Lemley's lawyer also challenged the seriousness of the Battle of Virginia plan. He said his client and Matthews had apparently changed their minds shortly before they were arrested. They'd planned

to attend a training camp in Michigan instead. The lawyer pointed to this exchange between the undercover and the two men. How can you do that if you're going to Michigan? Because that's a hell of a drive. Right now we're eschewing the Virginia plan for the Michigan plan because the way that it looks like to me is that the government is going to wait out until these protests die out. They're going to pass the real meat and potatoes after the 20th. But I certainly don't want to be in the crowd.

And I certainly don't want to be storming any buildings with a bunch of retards. Here's the thing. In any criminal case, it's easy to be swayed by one side or the other. And in this case, there were so many plans, so many discussions, it can be tough to pin down a clear picture. For instance, there were conversations about assassinating Virginia's Speaker of the House. They looked up her home address,

and when they couldn't find a good sniper position, they considered how to kill her on her route to work. But another time, they concocted a harebrained scheme to break mass shooter Dylan Roof out of prison. At one point, they mused about how they could get an armored vehicle to ram the gates. We'd be like, there'd be like a fucking selfie picture of like, me and like us masked up being like, the face would be known as the guys who broke out Dylann Roof.

Judge Theodore Chuang was ensuaded by arguments that Matthews' crime was just talk. He concluded Matthews and Lemley were serious, specific, and calculating in their discussions, adding they were not wide-eyed neophytes pressured into acts by the undercover. And he ruled that the terrorism sentencing enhancements would apply. Before Matthews was sentenced, his father Glenn took the stand and made an emotional speech. His voice broke when he talked about his son's

compassion for animals. He said what he'd heard in court was, not the son I know and love unconditionally. The good thing is the Pat I know is still here. Me and my family will never give up on him. We will never stop loving him. Then Matthews stood. He dramatically flipped his hair, now long past his shoulders, from his face. He said it was a mistake to flee Canada. And when it came to his racist rhetoric and the extensive prepping, Matthews claimed, I tried to be the best friend I can be, but I picked the singer Michael Bublé. Matthews said, Can you just give us your name and who you're representing?

Yeah, I'm Joe Balter. I represent Patrick Matthews. What did you make of the sentence? Well, we're disappointed. We had asked for a sentence of 33 months, which was at the bottom of the guideline. And the judge was balancing a number of different factors, which he's supposed to do. But we're disappointed the sentence didn't end up at the low end. but we're disappointed the sentence didn't end up at the low end. Matthew's got nine years. That's on top of the nearly two years he served pre-trial,

largely in solitary confinement. We asked to speak to him through his lawyer, but never got a reply. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. The U.S. attorney, Eric Barron, will be speaking, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. The U.S. attorney Eric Barron will be speaking, and then FBI's SAC Thomas... A small podium was set up outside the courthouse for statements. A line of blue suits walked somberly forward. Good afternoon.

We're here because of the conclusion of an important federal criminal matter. These men sought to divide our community based on hate and through acts of violence and terror. They collected and assembled weapons and ammunition, trained for acts of violence, vetted others for their cause, and attempted to recruit like-minded extremists. Now let me be clear, we do not investigate and prosecute individuals for their beliefs, however hateful. But we do prosecute violence and threats of violence and we hope today's sentences deter others from such actions. Matthew's mother, Kim,

who had come from Manitoba for the sentencing, also spoke to reporters. No one wants to be in this position as a mother, but I know I am a changed person for it. I have so much compassion for anybody that gets into trouble. You know, and he certainly got in trouble. Nazero, where the fuck are you? As Matthew's mom evoked the name of the base's founder, she looked around as if genuinely looking for an answer, then continued.

And we need a middle person, just like when you have an undercover person that goes in there to cultivate and try to get them to do more. Why not hire somebody good and try to steer them where they've fallen in a place where they shouldn't be? He's innocent. You know, there's so many young men under the ages of 27. They're not mature at 27 and under.

They seriously not. Pat had paid for his bills and he had a job. But he made poor decisions based on his age and feeling vulnerable, and he lost his support system. And I'm really sort of angry a little bit with the reporter, Ryan Thorpe. You know, if he would have had some compassion for him, and he didn't, you know. And I know there's a lot of people that are thinking the same as I am, and I'm a Winnipegian, and, you know, you're on my turf, man.

And if I see you, you know, I want to tell him what he did was slightly wrong, you know? But don't you think journalists have a role to play? Have a right to ruin people's life? No. Ryan knows Patrick Matthews' family are not fans, to say the least. They blame him for all of this. As the last of the reporting was done, we drove away from the courthouse. I know it's still early to kind of process, but do you think it was a fair sentence? Yeah, I don't know,

because like my instinct as a reporter is to be like, well, it's not the job of journalists to adjudicate, you know, these sorts of issues. That's a matter for a jury, for a judge, for the court process. The judge, you know, he kind of laid it on's a matter for a jury, for a judge, for the court process. The judge, you know, he kind of laid it on the line where he's like, you're lucky the FBI shut the shit down a couple of steps before it actually got worse and more real

because then, you know, you would be looking at, like, mandatory life. More sentences soon followed. The three base members from Georgia pleaded guilty to membership in a criminal gang and conspiring to murder targets they believed were Antifa activists. Jacob Catterley, only 19 when he was arrested, was sentenced to six years. Cell leader Luke Austin Lane was sentenced to 13. It came out in court that he'd talked about killing his own dad, Tom, and while in jail, he reportedly defaced the walls with swastikas.

And Michael Haltebrand, the third member of that crew, was given a sentence of 20 years, in part because he'd brutally assaulted a fellow inmate while awaiting trial. These sentences come at a time when the FBI is devoting more resources to investigating militias and white supremacist violence. And that's changed the landscape. At the SPLC, we do a census of hate groups every year, and we found that they actually fell between 2019 and 2020 from 940 to 838.

Cassie Miller again from the Southern Poverty Law Center. And while it's about an 11 percent decline and it might suggest that the far rate is maybe weakening, I don't think that's the case. And what I think the decline in groups really signals is they're just adopting new organizational tactics. It's not a decline in the threat that is posed by far at extremists. It just means that people are less inclined to join formally organized groups and are really kind of operating within more widespread online communities. really kind of operating within more widespread online communities. And so in some ways, the movement has become more decentralized. And, you know, we've seen lone actor terrorists go out and commit mass acts of violence over the last several years. And that is very much a product of this movement. You know, the shooter in El Paso and Poway in Pittsburgh, they are all connected to the same movement that produces Atomwaffen and the base. There's really a fine line between sowing fear and appreciating a threat.

The investigation into the September 11th attacks resulted in what's known as the 9-11 Commission Report. It read like a tragic novel and even became a bestseller. There's a sentence from it that always stuck with me. The most important failure was one of imagination. We couldn't fathom that type of destruction, even though the warnings were all there. Sometimes it's a singular story, large or small, that can set the course of your reporting career. For Ryan, it's very likely the Matthews case.

His investigation into Matthews may be done, but he's just starting to dig into the wider movement and watching where this heads you know i i would like to think that i wasn't naive before i knew about like the far right movement i knew it existed i knew that there was hateful people out there i perhaps didn't understand like the depths of hatred that you know when was in this, on the interior of this organization and like documenting their internal discussions, just like the sheer level of, of hatred was disturbing. And it's one thing to know it exists and it's another thing to see it up close. White Hot Hate was written and produced by Ashley Mack and me, Michelle Shepard. Our associate producer is Kim Kasher with production support from Sarah Melton. Additional reporting by Ryan Thorpe.

Mixing and sound design by Danelle Cloutier and Julia Whitman. With technical assistance from Laura Antonelli. Thank you. Additional material for this episode from ABC and CBS News. Special thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press. For CBC Podcasts, our senior producer is Chris Oak and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. And Leslie Merklinger is senior director of CBC Podcasts. like to thank Simons and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, David Hoffman, Joshua Fisher-Birch, and the CBC Reference Library. And in remembrance of my dad, Ron Shepard, who was a big supporter of a well-constructed sentence and investigative journalism.

If you enjoyed this series and want to help new listeners discover the show, please take some time to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at CBC Podcasts. Thanks for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.