WARNING: This story contains descriptions of racist online content targeting Jews, Muslims, the 2SLGBTQ+ community and others.
In an Ottawa courtroom on Tuesday, federal Crown prosecutors played three videos downloaded from social media by RCMP in 2020 — videos the Crown contends were created in part by Patrick Gordon Macdonald, an alleged neo-Nazi terror propagandist who lives in the capital with his parents.
All three videos depicted people in skull masks and combat fatigues carrying firearms and flags, their faces covered and blurred. All three videos asked viewers to join Atomwaffen Division, a now defunct right-wing extremist group that was branded a terrorist organization in Canada in 2021.
Narrators with modified voices and subtitles spewed 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 proceedings.
Macdonald, 27, is on trial in Superior Court. He’s charged with participating in the terrorist activity of Atomwaffen Division by helping produce the videos and other images, facilitating terrorist activity and inciting hate against identifiable groups for one or more terrorist entities, including Atomwaffen Division and the neo-Nazi James Mason.
He’s alleged to have done it in 2018 and 2019, when he was 21, in Ottawa, the nearby eastern Ontario city of Belleville and Saint-Ferdinand, Que., south of Quebec City in the Appalachian foothills, among other places.
He has pleaded not guilty. The allegations against him haven’t 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 posting hateful images and video on the internet.
Patrick Gordon Macdonald arrives at the Ottawa Courthouse on Tuesday. He’s accused of participating in terrorist activity, facilitating terrorist activity and committing an offence for the benefit of on or more terrorist groups, including Atomwaffen Division, in 2018 and 2019. He has pleaded not guilty. (Francis Ferland/CBC)
Videos posted on social media in 2019
One of the videos played in court Tuesday — which an RCMP officer testified was posted on a public channel called Terrorwave Refined on the social media site Telegram in 2019 — shows people in skull masks tossing the Hebrew Bible, the Qur’an (Islam’s central religious text), a book on philosophy and a Pride flag into a bonfire.
Between shots, text panels taking up the entire screen call for viewers to “purge the weak” before a swastika appears.
In another video RCMP said was posted on Terrorwave Refined in 2019, hateful rhetoric written to appeal to white nationalists in Ukraine accuses “treacherous bureaucrats” of being controlled by Jews.
And in an echo of the Holocaust, it says 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 skull-masked people moving through a wooded area and shooting firearms repeatedly.
Closer to the end, the flags of the U.S., Israel and Europe are shown on the ground, being drenched 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 includes an offensive ethnic slur against Jews.
“Join us or perish with the rest,” the narrator screams. “Stay tuned shooters,” is the last text panel to appear.
In June 2022, RCMP officers raided a house southwest of Quebec City in connection with a national security operation targeting Atomwaffen Division, the force said at the time. It followed other raids at Macdonald’s Ottawa home and elsewhere. (Submitted by the RCMP)
OPP were looking into Dark Foreigner in 2018
In addition to the videos, court was shown the cover art for a new edition of a book written by Mason, a prominent neo-Nazi. It depicts two faces — one obscured by a skull mask with red dots for eyes and holding a rifle, and the other, appearing to be Mason, also with red dots for eyes.
A swastika painted with stylized red blood spatters appears in the background.
Macdonald sat quietly in court as the videos and images were shown, as he has since his trial began Monday.
Late Tuesday, the trial heard that the hate crime unit of the Ontario Provincial Police was looking into Dark Foreigner’s online activity by screen capturing everything they could find in April 2018.
This was before the videos were posted, and before Dark Foreigner entered the public eye through Vice’s reporting. The trial hasn’t yet heard what became of the OPP’s efforts.
Judge rules hate crime prof an expert
Also Tuesday, Justice Robert Smith ruled that Barbara Perry can be declared an expert witness for the trial. She’s a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and director of its centre on hate, bias and extremism.
Perry was asked to write a report for the trial on right-wing extremism in Canada and beyond, neo-Nazism/neo-socialism, Atomwaffen Division, Mason (who is himself labelled a terrorist entity in Canada) and the fascist concept of accelerationism (to accelerate the collapse of liberal democracy through violent racial conflict and replace it with a white ethnostate).
Atomwaffen Division’s goal was to pit communities against each other by sowing chaos and fear, and to encourage targeted violence against minorities by lone actors or “at best” small cells in order to evade law enforcement, Perry testified.
Mason, meanwhile, is considered a founding father of accelerationism and leaderless resistance, she added. He believes in targeting perceived “losers” for recruitment — “ostracized outsiders who don’t have a place to belong or who have grievances about their lives,” Perry said.
The trial continues.