WARNING: This story contains distressing content, including racist language.
A former neo-Nazi says white nationalist groups often raise local issues in an effort to gain legitimacy, promoting extremist ideas and trying to recruit new members in the process.
Tony McAleer, now a Vancouver-based anti-hate activist, spoke to CBC News after Second Sons Canada's two recent northern Ontario visits.
“It’s nothing new. It’s about covering yourself in the cloak of respectability and it's part of an overall strategy, which has been around decades, called ‘mainstreaming,’” he said.
McAleer spent 15 years in white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups as an organizer for the “Aryan resistance movement” before leaving in 1998. He chronicles his story in the 2019 book The Cure for Hate.
On its website, Second Sons Canada describes itself as a “Canadian men’s nationalist club.”
But according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Second Sons is a members-only organization for white men that's inspired by militant white nationalist groups in other countries.
Second Sons recently drew criticism from elected officials following their appearance last month at a Sudbury memorial dedicated to people who have died from drug overdoses. The group had previously appeared in communities including Halifax and the Niagara Region.
While at the Crosses for Change memorial at Paris and Brady streets, Second Sons members installed a two-metre-high cross and, in social media posts, blamed the overdose crisis on newcomers. The group's cross has since been removed.
“Countless Canadian youth are being killed by [fentanyl] that is being marketed here by foreign criminal cartels, but you'll never see any of our politicians lift a finger about it because there's nothing here to virtue signal about,” reads a caption to a photo posted to the group’s Telegram.
This past winter, the group was in Cochrane, where members attended a rally on safety concerns along Highway 11 and raised a sign using inflammatory language, blaming newly immigrated truck drivers for highway deaths.
“The Ku Klux Klan in the ‘70s and ‘80s participated in the Adopt a Highway program in the United States, where a civic organization adopted a stretch of highway and cleaned the litter on it,” McAleer said.
“They didn’t do that because they wanted to see clean highways. They wanted to do that as a way of getting their name out and adding an air of respectability to an organization that most people thought was pretty obnoxious and vile.”
CBC News has sent multiple emails to Second Sons Canada asking specifically for comment on their activity in northern Ontario, but has not received a response.
Brad Galloway, co-ordinator of Ontario Tech University’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, said the beliefs expressed by Second Sons fit “within white supremacist or far-right ideology.”
