Racist, hate-fueled videos promoting violence are played before the trial of alleged terror propagandists

WARNING: This story contains descriptions of racist online content targeting Jews, Muslims, the 2SLGBTQ+ community and others.

In an Ottawa courtroom Tuesday, federal prosecutors played three videos that RCMP downloaded from social media in 2020 — videos that the Crown says were shot in part by Patrick Gordon Macdonald, an alleged neo-Nazi terror propagandist who lived with his parents in the capital lives. .

All three videos depicted people wearing skull masks and combat gear carrying firearms and flags, their faces covered and blurred. All three videos asked viewers to join the Atomwaffen Division, a now-defunct right-wing extremist group that was designated a terrorist organization in Canada in 2021.

Narrators with modified voices and subtitles spread racist stereotypes and calls for violent action, while aggressive and ominous music blared at an almost uncomfortable volume – a stark difference from the otherwise calm and quiet events.

Macdonald, 27, is on trial in Superior Court. He is accused of participating in the terrorist activities of the Atomwaffen Division by helping to produce the videos and other images, facilitating terrorist activities and inciting hatred against identifiable groups for one or more terrorist entities, including the Atomwaffen Division and the neo-Nazi James Mason.

He allegedly did it in 2018 and 2019, when he was 21, including in Ottawa, the nearby city of Belleville in eastern Ontario and Saint-Ferdinand, Que., south of Quebec City in the foothills of the Appalachians.

He has pleaded not guilty. The accusations against him have not been proven.

RCMP laid the charges in 2023 after Vice News published a series of articles investigating the identity of Dark Foreigner, the screen name of someone who posted hateful images and videos online.

Videos posted to social media in 2019

One of the videos played in court Tuesday — which an RCMP officer testified was posted to a public channel called Terrorwave Refined on the social media site Telegram in 2019 — shows people wearing skull masks reading the Hebrew Bible, the Koran (the central religious faith of Islam). text), a book about philosophy and a Pride flag in a bonfire.

Between shots, text panels that take up the entire screen call on viewers to “purify the weak” before a swastika appears.

In another video posted to Terrorwave Refined in 2019, according to RCMP, hateful rhetoric written to appeal to white nationalists in Ukraine accuses “treasonous bureaucrats” of being controlled by Jews.

And in the wake of the Holocaust, it is said that the National Socialists have the “final solution for the traitors of Ukraine and the rest of the world.”

A third video posted to the channel in 2019 shows people wearing skull masks moving through a wooded area and repeatedly firing firearms.

Closer to the end, the flags of the US, Israel and Europe are shown on the ground, soaked in an accelerant and then set on fire with a torch, interspersed with shots of people with firearms storming a building in tactical formation.

The video contains an offensive ethnic slur against Jews.

“Join or hang out with the rest,” the narrator shouts. “Stay tuned shooters,” is the last text panel that appears.

OPP investigated Dark Foreigner in 2018

In addition to the videos, the court was shown the cover image of a new edition of a book written by Mason, a prominent neo-Nazi. It shows two faces: one is hidden by a skull mask with red dots for eyes and holding a gun, and the other appears to be Mason, also with red dots for eyes.

A swastika painted with stylized red blood splatters appears in the background.

Macdonald sat quietly in the courtroom as the videos and images were shown, as he has done since his trial began Monday.

Late Tuesday, the trial heard that the Ontario Provincial Police's hate crime unit investigated Dark Foreigner's online activities by recording everything they could find on a screen in April 2018.

This was before the videos were posted and before Dark Foreigner came into the public eye through Vice's reporting. The trial has not yet heard what became of the OPP's efforts.

Judge rules hate crime prof and expert

Also Tuesday, Judge Robert Smith ruled that Barbara Perry can be declared an expert witness for the trial. She is a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and director of the Center on Hate, Prejudice and Extremism.

Perry was asked to write a report for the trial on right-wing extremism in Canada and abroad, neo-Nazism/neosocialism, Atomwaffen Division, Mason (which is itself labeled a terrorist entity in Canada) and the fascist concept of acceleration. to accelerate the collapse of liberal democracy through violent racial conflict and replace it with a white ethno-state).

The Atomwaffen Division's goal was to turn communities against each other by sowing chaos and fear, and to encourage targeted violence against minorities by lone actors or “at best” small cells to evade law enforcement, Perry testified.

Mason, meanwhile, is considered the founder of accelerationism and leaderless resistance, she added. He believes in targeting perceived “losers” for recruitment — “ostracized outsiders who have no place to belong or who have grievances about their lives,” Perry said.

The process continues.