Calgary neo-Nazi group claims responsibility for hanging racist banner over Macleod Trail

Wild Rose active club, part of a decentralized network of militant white supremacists, said they hung a banner containing a phrase experts call a “key mantra" of the movement.

A banner bearing a phrase coined by one of America’s most famous white supremacists hung over a busy Calgary street one August weekend.

The image popping up around the internet is the only thing that remains. And that might have been the point.

The banner that hung over Macleod Trail used a phrase penned by white nationalist and convicted felon David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the phrase, known as the 14 words, “a rallying cry for militant white nationalists.”

White nationalist social media channels that claim to be in Alberta shared the images on Aug. 8. The originating post appeared to come from a nascent group called “Wild Rose Active Club” with a quote from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Those images and posts are then used as recruitment propaganda, according to one man with inside knowledge of the modern neo-Nazi movement.

“They’ll put these (banners and stickers) up and then they’ll take an image of them, and that image can live online much longer than the sticker,” Peter Smith, researcher and investigative journalist with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said.

“So you can have one guy put up 100 fliers in a small town, you take the 10 best photos and then suddenly — as far as the world is concerned or anybody looking who’s interested — you have a presence in small-town Alberta or you have a presence in Saskatchewan and you have a presence in Manitoba.

“It could be one guy on a road trip, but the image of that presence is created.”