A meet-up which took place both at the home of a neo-Nazi cult member and in the field of a local high school in rural Ontario included two American clubs and one club that travelled from Quebec.
Peter Smith
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Image of the groups that gathered at Nick Bennett’s residence. Many images from Nationalist-13 use the Totenkopf—a skull worn by Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS)—to hide its members' faces. Source: Telegram
A recent cross-border meet-up of multiple chapters of a white-only neo-Nazi workout club took place in Southern Ontario, bringing together fascists from across Ontario, Quebec, and the United States.
Pictures from the event show 22 men posing on a property in Goderich, Ontario. According to posts on social media, the men represent several organizations, all openly fascist, racist, and neo-Nazi—including a member of a cult that believes white people are the pinnacle of human physical and spiritual evolution.
Nationalist-13, a group of neo-Nazis largely located in Hamilton, Ontario and made up partially of members once belonging to the Steel City Proud Boys, appear to have organized the meetup. In attendance were the Toronto Fitness Club, the Frontenac Active Club, based out of Quebec, and two United States groups: the Great Lakes Active Club and the Wisconsin Active Club.
In images woefully typical to any meeting of these groups, men in athletic gear and large gloves trade blows in a public park. The few pictures attributed to the recent meet-up took place near the Goderich Collegiate Institute, a high school that sits about an hour and a half north of London, Ontario, and surrounding parks.
Other images posted to Nationalist-13 social media came with a message to “our brother who hosted our first ever multiday event on his property.” Adding that the owner had “never been to one of our community gatherings” and “only knew a few of us” the owner offered words of encouragement to his brothers.
"The wife and I wanted to thank every one of you for coming,” the message said. “The kids and us all had so much fun. We couldn't have asked for more polite and respectful guests. You guys and gals are some of the best of the movement in Canada. I really feel honored to know you and to have the privilege of calling you all brothers and sisters. Can't wait to see you guys [in real life] again soon."
An image posted by the Toronto Fitness Club show them sparring (top) and an image of the field attached to the Goderich Collegiate Institute. Source: Red Table Collective
Efforts were made to hide the identities of participants and images of attendees typically have their faces blurred or a Totenkopf—a skull worn by Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS)—superimposed over their heads. Despite the attempts, the property where the event took place has been identified as belonging to Nicholas Bennett, a tattoo artist and former member of the now-defunct Steel City Proud Boys.
The property identification was originally made by the Red Table Collective and provided to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
Nationalist-13 sprang from a series of interconnected affiliations that began with the Steel City Proud Boys (SCPB). Some of SCPB’s members appeared in the media when they brawled with antifascists at Mohawk College in Hamilton when People’s Party of Canada founder Maxime Bernier was slated to appear with Dave Rubin in 2019.
Five people – none of them Proud Boys – were arrested by police in relation to the event, according to CBC News. SCPB eventually broke off from the Proud Boys, calling themselves Canada First and complaining both privately and publicly about the lack of overt white nationalism in the Canadian Proud Boys organization.
Before Canada’s Proud Boys allegedly disbanded in May 2021, following a terrorist designation by the Government of Canada, a self-identified elder acknowledged the breakaway group, writing that “Proud Boys wishes Canada First all the best in their endeavours to encourage patriotism in Canada. At the same time, Proud Boys want to make it abundantly clear that these are mentally ill losers who couldn’t quite cut it in a conservative men’s drinking club.”
Bennett voiced his opinion on the divide as “Captain Saturnalia,” in the fall of 2020.
“It’s not divided into American vs Canadian tho. It’s divided by civic nationalist PB and fashy PB … Canadians went more fashy tho because were [sic] being replaced faster than any other nation,” he wrote.
In 2022, CAHN detailed how these same individuals were at the centre of a neo-Nazi propaganda network on Telegram, running multiple channels sharing neo-Nazi content to tens of thousands of followers.
Nationalist-13 first emerged from the Canada First propaganda network in 2021 as a local street activism group focused on putting up stickers in a run of similar locations throughout the city. Since that time the group has evolved into something similar to an Active Club, holding regular workout and boxing training sessions in public parks. Other meet-ups have been geolocated to the backyard of Lapointe’s current residence.
The stickers include generic phrases like “white unity at every opportunity,” declarations that there is a “war on whites,” and images of Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels along with the phrase “our patience has limits.”
Other images show flyers laying out their particular goals, namely recruiting 18 to 45-year-olds of European descent living in Southwest Ontario.
“Let's make our Homeland a better place for Our Children to live."
Other former Proud Boys found in the group include Keith Ono, Gabe Costen, the one-time PB national leader Tim Kelly.
Other N13 members identified by antifascist activists include Rob Corrigan of St. Catharines, Steven Barker of Hamilton, as well as Tamara Grant—Lapointe’s partner—and her adult son, Ethan Brewer Grant.
Rob Corrigan from St. Catherines pic.twitter.com/J83tfUZadb
— Johnny Fondue (@Eatsfood2) April 24, 2024
Beyond his old affiliations, Bennett calls himself one of the “Occidental Templars” of the Church of Aryanity (CoA), an extremely esoteric and bizarre religious sect that embraces a combination of Christian and occult beliefs to create a “race first religion exclusively for White Aryans.”
Picture of Nick Bennett posted in a private group chat. Source: Telegram
The CoA was founded by American neo-Nazi Aaron Barrett Chapman, who claims to receive a series of visions from the belief system’s central deity and views the Christian and “Jewish god,” as akin to Satan. CoA adherents are active in multiple neo-Nazi and white nationalist organizations across North America, like Patriot Front, Active Clubs, Clockwork Crew, Asatru Folk Assembly, the Golden State Skinheads, and the Goyim Defense League.
Some members refer to themselves as “anti-Abrahamic,” delineating between a “true Christ” and a “judeo” Christ. The Church of Aryanity nonetheless draws from a slew of Western mystics and figures popular in the crossover between the occult and the far-right.
The CoA was initially exposed in an article by the SoCal Research Club, an antifascist research collective. There are several known Canadian members of the CoA. Ben Mockler, a member of the Ottawa branch of the Active Club, was also a member of the church before falling out with Chapman.
The other groups from the Goderich meetup exist as three separate entities but organize themselves using the model of the Active Club, created by white nationalist Robert Rundo as a decentralized collection of all-white clubs that train in martial arts and disseminate radical and violent political ideologies.
While Rundo was arrested and extradited back to the United States for rioting charges, his movement has continued without him with chapters emerging across Europe, many US states, and Canada.
CAHN exposed that Active Club Canada was being used as a recruiting front for individuals associated with another international neo-Nazi organization, the Hammerskin Nation. We also found that Patrick MacDonald, better known as Dark Foreigner, was a member, while reporting by Vice News (RIP) determined that one of the lead organizers of the Active Club Canada was an Ontario man, Kristopher Nippak. MacDonald, Nippak, and a third man, Matthew Althorpe, were arrested by the RCMP and are former members of the Atomwaffen Division—a since disbanded neo-Nazi organization designated as a terrorist entity by the Government of Canada.
After the arrests of Nippak and Althorpe in December 2023, the public social media presence of Active Club Canada was deleted. While some have been revived, being run by the administrator of a small neo-Nazi web forum in Alberta, the only Active Club still using its original social media handle was the Quebec branch, the Frontenac Active Club.
A message on Telegram reports that members from the Great Lakes Active Club and the Wisconsin Active Club travelled to Canada to attend the meeting.
“It was an opportunity to showcase the growing unity of this movement, and the strengthening of our bonds as nationalists,” the Toronto Fitness Club, another white-only workout club in attendance, wrote online. “The time for nationalists to unify and organize is here, and if current events show us anything, it's that this process needs to happen, and it needs to happen now. The momentum is with us, it is with our people.”
Frontenac Active Club (FAC) and several of its members were exposed by Montreal Antifasciste, an anti-fascist activist and publishing organization focused on Montreal and Quebec. Besides working out in public, propaganda production is the primary focus of the FAC.
Montreal Antifasciste identified Raphaël Dinucci, of Laval, as a frequent and active participant in FAC’s organizing. He frequently appears in their propaganda, though with his face obscured.
Image posted to the Frontenac Active Club Telegram channel (left) and an image used by Raphaël Dinucci on his social media (right). Source: Telegram
Dinucci has been active in Church of Aryanity chats since at least 2022, posting hundreds of messages that include antisemitism, racism, and endorsements of multiple other Active Clubs and far-right organizations.
He also was the recipient of a tattoo from Bennett, who affixed a Norse Tiwaz rune to Dinucci. While Norse symbols and runes are often used by the far-right, they are not inherently hateful.
Image of Raphaël Dinucci’s tattoo by Nick Bennett. Source: Red Table Collective
Shawn Beauvais-Macdonald, a man much more well-known in Quebec far-right activism, has developed himself into a visible face of FAC. With a long and turbulent history in Quebec’s far-right scene, Beauvais-Macdonald recently posted pictures of himself attending the Montreal meet and greet for Diagolon’s “Terror Tour,” a cross-country series of live performances put on by influencers from the white nationalist Diagolon community.
Image shared by Shawn Beauvais Macdonald (right) taken during a Diagolon event with streamer Alex Vriend (left). Source: Telegram
In 2018, according to Montreal antifasciste, he stormed the Montreal VICE office to intimidate journalists with the neo-fascist group Atalante.
The year before, Beauvais-Macdonald also travelled to Charlottesville to participate in the Unite the Right rally, which saw a massive gathering of neo-Nazi groups descend on the city, and culminated in a white supremacist murdering a counter-protestor with his car.
This story was updated to more accurately identify some members of NS-13.
The $44 million lawsuit against the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the government, and banks failed to show any evidence of CAHN involvement in a (non-existent) wide-ranging conspiracy.
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