It’s been a tough week for the white nationalists. First, a little over a week ago, I published a piece unmasking where the Frontenac Active Club had been training, unbeknownst to the gym’s owners. Quick reminder for the uninitiated: active clubs are a growing problem in Canada. These groups of white nationalists “focus on physical recruitment and combat training in preparation for eventual violent confrontation,” according to an internal government report, first reported on last week by CBC News. I also got my hands on a copy of it. That report also said that “compared to other countries, Canada appears to have a disproportionate number of Active Clubs, with more than 30 of the nearly 200 known global chapters existing in Canada.” So that’s…something. Anyway, with the help of Elizabeth Simons from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, I also identified Giulio Zardo, a then-coach at the gym, as a member of this active club. The former Olympian had given the group access to the facility outside of normal business hours. According to the owners of the gym, Zardo hid the true nature of the club from them. After we published the investigation, the gym’s owners took swift action to address the issue, ensuring Frontenac Active Club no longer had access to their facility. They also fired Zardo. Then Zardo and Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, a guy who openly calls himself a Nazi and is also a member of the Frontenac Active Club, showed up in person to my boyfriend’s show at a small local music venue. They stared me down until I acknowledged them, then tried to intimidate me about my work, asking when the next story was coming out and dropping the name of a gym I used to go to, implying they’d stop by sometime. Clearly the fact that I had unmasked them made them a little upset. But I won’t stop – and neither will the folks at the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, whose researcher Hazel Woodrow just dropped the first story from a huge investigation identifying people who used the white supremacist dating site called “White Date.” See, in late December, a badass hacker in a pink power rangers costume shut down the dating website live on stage in Hamburg and published the users on a public interface called okstupid.lol. Believe it or not, 86% of the users of White Date were men. Shocking. Anyway, Anti-hate has dug into this leaked information to unmask Canadians using the white supremacist dating site. They shared their findings with CBC News, which had been doing a parallel investigation, but I want to give her her full credit here: Hazel has identified more than 190 Canadian users of this website on her own. One of those users, whose name anti-hate and CBC News published earlier this week, is Royal Canadian Air Force Major Tristan Armstrong. CBC News published some other names of users of this website this week, too, including our friend Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, who once again, tried to intimidate me last week. (Ladies, can you believe he’s single?) Anyway, as I already mentioned, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s Hazel Woodrow has identified nearly 200 Canadians on this website. And today, Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, is joining me on the show to talk about all of this.. It’s going to be a good one. -------------------------------------------- CANADIAN ANTI-HATE NETWORK Website: www.antihate.ca Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antihateca BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/antihate.ca ---------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE ✨ Substack: rachelgilmore.substack.com Patreon: patreon.com/rachelgilmore Twitch: twitch.tv/rachel_gilmore YouTube: YouTube.com/@AtRachelGilmore Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/5uP73DlOq5hVf5zlPadObD?si=3e49f0a371734d55 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bubble-pop-with-rachel-gilmore/id1796286766 TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@rachel_gilmore Instagram: www.instagram.com/r.gilmore/ BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/rachelgilmo
