It has been more than a year since
Ricochet published a piece linking a UCP staff member to an overly racist online military surplus store:
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| Adam Strashok (left) with former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall |
The story of Adam Strashok turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole in that it exposed the the light of day a rot withing Alberta conservative campus political groups tying some members to white supremacist groups such as ID Canada or, in the case of Keean Bexte, an employee of Ezra Levant's Islamophobic and conspiracy driven Rebel Media:
Not long ago I started to look into other members of Alberta campus conservative clubs primarily in Calgary one of whom has become of primary interest
due to his current status as a staff member of Jason Kenney's UPC (it should be noted that Strashok also worked for the UCP and Bexte endorsed Kenney while a member of the Calgary Conservative Club and has used his position as a Rebel Media personality to promote Mr. Kenney and his government):
I'm thinking that this might perhaps warrant a future article?
In the meantime I thought I would cover material that I hadn't included in the previous articles from last autumn.
We know that Strashok posted on social media using a few different pseudonyms in addition to his real name. Two of those names were highlighted in the Ricochet article. He used the pseudonym "Alexei Kuznetsov" primarily on Facebook but he also posted on the Vibrant Diversity channel on Discord as "Guynumber7" where, thanks to the Discord leak, we were able to find gems of wisdom such as these screeds:
Strashok wasn't a prolific poster in this channel (perhaps more from a yet unreleased Discord channel will one day be added to the leak) but the same can't be said for the person who advocated for his membership:
"Adrien Arcand" (the user having named himself after the Quebecois fascist leader of the 1930s and 40s) is one of two known pseudonyms used by Jake Logan Findell on social media (this one was used on both Discord and Twitter) who has been discussed on ARC:
We had been told that Findell was not a member of the Calgary Conservative Club and may not have even been a university student. Even if he didn't he was very much an associate of that particular group:
Let's get back to the "Adrien Arcand" pseudonym Findell used on various social media platforms. Note please that I will be bouncing back and forth between Findell's Twitter and Discord posts:
Findell appears to have been closely following the Fireforce Ventures story, particularly the focus on Strashok. In fact Findell was angry at the UCP when a Twitter user supporting Bernier's PPC suggested that people like Strashok had no place in the party (though subsequent evidence supports the contrary view):
Findell not surprisingly didn't always feel this way:
Not long after ARC helped break the story concerning Keean Bexte's own involvement with Fireforce Ventures, Findell responded to a Tweet by the NDP defending the online military surplus store:
Findell's sarcasm seems disingenuous in light of this post on Discord concerning a brick and mortar store in Calgary selling Nazi paraphernalia:
In another discord chat he seems to know exactly what both the Confederate and Rhodesian flags represent:
In fact Findell is quite a fan of flags:
The next month Findell posted this in response to criticism leveled at Fromm whose use of the Red Ensign has tainted the flag and a half-hearted disavowal of Fromm by the Proud Boys:
And of course we can't forget his affinity for Generation Identity/ID Canada iconography:
Having looked at Findell's activities online is seems fairly evident that he has likely been responsible for a significant amount of the far-right materials found at the University of Calgary:
And while I can't say for certain that he was directly involved in this effort....
.... he was certainly associated with people who probably would have.
Other revelations are also quite interesting:
We do now know that Findell was responsible, either on his own or with others, for a spectacularly clumsy effort to defame Calgary-based antifascist groups. At this time a fake Facebook profile was created that fooled no one except for the credulous far-right such as Never Again Canada who, by coincidence, are mentioned in this recent article, "
Inside the hate factory: how Facebook fuels far-right profit":
Findell has a great deal to say about Jews too, including this representative sample:
As such we probably shouldn't be especially surprised that he followed the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Findell spent much of the next three days retweeting the days' events:
He did find the time to post his own witty retort directed towards an opponent of the event:
Then this happened:
Findell didn't comment on the murder of Heather Heyer by one of his fellow travelers directly on Twitter, though he did continue discussing the event and how poorly the racists were treated:
On Discord, Findell posted this:
I understand that discussing Findell now more than a year after he was exposed by the blog might be seen as less relevant, however Findell can be seen as a bit of a case study of the kind of person who is attracted to this movement. It also helps to remind our readers that despite their claims, people like Findell are racists who celebrate their hatred when they think no one can see it.
Suffice it to say I think exposing Jake Findell and people like him to the light of day continues to serve the common good.
