What you need to know about white nationalist group Second Sons

White nationalists are recruiting across Canada and their presence in Kamloops last weekend is their most high-profile showing yet.

More than a dozen men who showed up in Kamloops with white masks and wearing all black. They’re members of the Second Sons, a white nationalist group that purports to have chapters across the country including one tied to Penticton and Kamloops.

The message in Kamloops was, on the surface, a call for Tk’emlups to excavate suspected graves from the former Indian Residential School, but a UBC political science expert said it’s unlikely that was their true reason for haphazardly marching in the city.

“They definitely don’t care about the Indian Residential School,” UBC professor Terri Givens told iNFOnews.ca. “I think that was kind of a dog whistle. It was meant to garner attention.”

They wore all black with white masks in Kamloops and carried a banner that read “Got bones?” It was one of several other banners Second Sons members have taken to different Canadian cities.

In Kelowna they held a banner over Highway 97 describing fentanyl as a chemical weapon and in Ontario cities the banners called for “remigration”, appearing to cater their message to the city they’re in.

One of the group’s public-facing members, Derek Harrison, spoke in a recent livestream in reaction to the Kamloops march and the numerous condemnations that followed. From Ontario, he said he wanted to join the BC march, which suggests he knew it was planned, so not a spur of the moment action.

He also said Second Sons isn’t exactly concerned with First Nations issues.

“Second Sons doesn’t want anything to do with fighting the natives… We want blood and soil nationalism,” he said, using a Nazi Germany nationalist slogan.

iNFOnews.ca reached out to Second Sons to comment on its Kamloops appearance, but no one responded.

Givens at UBC said the presence of white nationalism in Canada is nothing new, but there’s a burgeoning wave as anti-immigration sentiment grows across the country.

The Kamloops event was more than likely an effort to drive recruitment, she said.

Second Sons is a so-called active club with men joining what Givens said is like a fraternal support group, appealing to men, often white, who feel disenfranchised.

Their promotional videos show men hiking, sparring and camping, but the active club model is a frequent recruiting tool for white nationalists across the continent. The organization is an off-shoot from Diagalon, a group that promotes Canada as a white ethno-state and strives to deport non-white immigrants.

Just who is part of the Kamloops or Okanagan groups isn’t known because they hide their faces with masks when in public or blur them in photos.

Dante Tomada, who leads a Kamloops support group for men, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the members who showed up last weekend were locals.

“They’re in our community, guaranteed they are, all the way back to when we had the Proud Boys in Kamloops,” Tomada of the Modern Man Family Project said.

He said he was not aware of any of the local members, but he expected they might gravitate toward organizations like Second Sons out of a need for community, rather than solely because of their political views.

“They’re just looking for a place to say, ‘I’m accepted for who I am,’ and sometimes that takes us down the wrong path,” Tomada said.

Second Sons’ numbers in Kamloops and the Okanagan aren’t known, but they may be connected with another group called “Two Lakes Men’s Club,” which is mainly based in Penticton.

The active club has boasted on social media channels as having a busy year “working towards the preservation of our nation in the Okanagan Valley” and a growing roster, coupled with a video montage of masked men hiking and holding flags.

Kamloops RCMP Supt. Jeff Pelley said police are investigating the group and he called their local staging a “cowardly” intimidation tactic.