On a summer night in 2019, Winnipeg Free Press journalist Ryan Thorpe met with a stranger in a city park. Ryan was nervous: he had gone undercover, pretending that he too was interested in ‘saving the white race,' and hoping to join a secretive group calling itself The Base.
Soon, Ryan uncovered that the stranger in Whittier Park was Patrik Mathews, a Canadian armed forces reservist who was trying to establish a neo-Nazi extremist cell in the Manitoban capital, and had formed sinister plans for violence and destruction abroad...
This series follows the extraordinary case of Mathews through Ryan's first-hand experience and perspective as an infiltrator - while host Michelle Shephard, veteran national security reporter, explores the rise of neo-Nazi accelerationism: the ultra-violent and racist movement that hopes to seize control, after creating chaos.
This is a part of an investigative trilogy exploring three different strands of the radical right in North America and around the world, called “Red, White and Blue”.
October 27, 2021