Thread by @ARCCollective

1. Today @antihateca published this story by @misterEpete which is probably one of the best investigative and undercover journalistic efforts I have ever had the fortune to witness.

https://twitter.com/antihateca/status/1514299822689370117?s=20&t=aV5w-foUBYadl3UKHOEUCw

2. For years while running the blog I tried to crack the Hammerskins but was never really successful in doing so.

Today @misterEpete cracked that nut.

3. The story in many ways has its origins during the summer of 2019 when Pegida held another of their hate rallies which resulted in a major incident at the Eaton's Centre.

anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2019/06/ron-ba…

4. Among those who attended were these two individuals wearing t-shirts and hats of the neo-Nazi Canadian Nationalist Party.

5. We really started looking into these two when they appeared on John Beattie's YouTube channel as guests.

6. So who is John Beattie?

In the 1960s he founded and led the Canadian Nazi Party.

7. He later formed the British Peoples' League, organizing a neo-Nazi festival in 1989.

jta.org/archive/neo-na…

8. In any case I wrote about him with some frequency on the blog because despite his age and suffering from Parkinson's he was still active in the movement and still viciously hateful.

anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/search/label/J…

9. Beattie introduced "Odinson" and "Top" at the time who discussed the events that took place in Toronto during the Pegida event as well as the counter-protest.

10. We couldn't figure out the names of the two men at the time, but we never stopped trying.

We knew that we would eventually learn those names, but we didn't expect it to happen quite in the way it ultimately did a couple of years later.

11. So fast forward a couple of years. @misterEpete is working undercover on a story involving the Active Club (I won't repeat his fantastic work) and meets people to be vetted.

It was then that we learned that the Action Clubs was a Hammerskin recruitment effort.

12. And guess who was doing the vetting?

Things always seem to come full circle.

13. We subsequently learned that these people have been around for years. The Hammerskins were much less public than the Aryan Guard or Southern Ontario Skinheads were. This might be why they lasted longer.

14. In their chats we saw that some of their history goes as far back as the Heritage Front as members recall the movement of the past.

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18. We even get a John Beattie (and Ernst Zundel) reference including a part where "Troy Odinson" (Troy Miles) says he checks in on Beattie once in a while.

19. I'll get back to the chat again shortly, but one of the people who was present to vet @misterEpete was a guy who we later learned was Ryan Marshall.

20. Back in 1997, Marshall and a number of other neo-Nazis were arrested on charges related to a protest against Roma refugees.

Initially the only photo of him I could find was this grainy photo I saved from the ARA Toronto website.

21. However this past weekend I remembered my digital copies of "On the Prowl" which was the ARA Toronto magazine. Perhaps there were some photos there?

I found two articles, one from the Spring and the other the Fall 1998 editions. And in the Fall was a new photo.

22. So I was pretty proud of myself... until a friend managed to find his elusive social media presence and we learned that images that were not a quarter century old existed.

23. I mean, thank you for the confirmation Ryan (time stamp at 0:06).

24. My friend also found this which is most interesting:

canlii.org/en/on/oncj/doc…

25. Now as I've gotten to my 25th tweet I'm going to stop here for now and continue momentarily.

26. Oh, forgot to include this group shot of the Active Club taken from their Telegram page with Marshall on the (ironically) far right.

27. Now moving on to the West Coast, and what I had originally thought would be unrelated, I and another member of @antihateca had been looking into this fella whom learned was named Josh Bruce.

Images taken from Instagram and one of his then many FB profiles.

28. By the way, if Josh wants to know how we figured out his name, it was with this photo he posted.

29. We knew that he was involved in a leadership position with the short-lived Northern Identity, a group that splintered from ID Canada.

30. But it was his later association with Vinland Battlewear that became of significant interest to us.

31. It was through Vinland Battlewear that Bruce was connected to Jesse Rankin.

32. Which means that there would also be a connection with former Aryan Guard/Blood & Honour member Bernie Miller (first photo) as well as Shawn MacDonald and Robertson de Chazal and as such the Hammerskins.

33. Small world, eh?

And as @misterEpete learned, Josh Bruce is the Active Club recruiter in British Columbia.

34. So let's get back to the chat for a bit.

If anyone is still interested in the #OttawaOccupation and evidence that right wing extremists were involved, here are more receipts.

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37. However the part of the chat that I personally find the most interesting, in part because it hits pretty close to home, is this one regarding a banner drop in Calgary that took place some time in February.

38. Now I can't be absolutely certain, but the only banner drop that took place in Calgary that month I'm aware of was when members of the Folkish Resistance Movement did this.

39. That certainly does answer some questions if that is the case and provides a very nice lead regarding who it might be.

And as readers already know my now, we are both patient and relentless.

40. With that I will note that the Hammerskin article isn't the last one. There will be more.

You probably also realize the danger that @misterEpete put himself in for this story. He did this so that you all will be safer.

For that he is owed by all of us a debt of gratitude.

41. Correction. Marshall wasn’t at the vetting. Immel was.

https://twitter.com/ARCCollective/status/1514377257363537920

42. I had been planning on discussing a few other members/participants of the Hammerskin's Active Club project. Some aren't people whose names would jump put.

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46. And others...

However this guy does stand out from the rest.

47. Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald was in Charlottesville and the shield he carried appears to have been used later by the man who murdered Heather Heyer.

48. He was/is also a member of the Quebec based hate group Atalante as well as participating in rallies and marches organized by Le Meute.