A Deep Dive into WLM Toronto Member Andrew Benson

This past July I was doxxed.

Well, not really.

You see I had actually been doxxed in January 2020, but WLM Toronto appeared to have believed they got a "W" on this.

You have probably seen WLM flyers posted in a number of cities in Canada and the United States at this point. The movement wants people to believe they are a significant group but the reality, with a few exceptions, is that most cells are composed of no more than half a dozen to a dozen members who bravely hide their faces because, you know, they are really proud of what they do.

WLM Toronto is perhaps one of the more pathetic cells in North America as illustrated what they believe to be successful events:

This is just sad!

And perhaps even more sad is that they hitched their wagon to Paul Fromm as well.

This event was in response to CAHN's school toolkit for educators. I responded to the 
criticism leveled at CAHN for including the Red Ensign in the section on hate symbols
in a Twitter thread. Also, having a racist group here using the flag sort of made our point.

For example they supported Fromm during his most recent failed mayoral campaign:

In turn, Fromm promotes them as fighting for the preservation of the white race.

Or something like that.

To be clear, WLM suggests that the Holodomor was perpetrated by Jews as evidenced by the ((())) around Bolsheviks:

So who are WLM Toronto?

While the good people with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network have managed to figure out who a number of the members are, I want to focus on two specifically:

The first person was easy to identify since he didn't make any effort to conceal his identity.

Gus Stefanis is an early member of the Canadian Nationalist Party. When founder and leader Travis Patron was arrested and charged, in two separate cases, of assaulting two women as well as hate crime charges (convicted in both cases), Stefanis took over the leadership, though the party subsequently lost official status.

The other person posting as "Kievan Rus" who might as well not even try to conceal his identity since it was obvious who it was from the moment I saw him even with his mask:

So, Andrew Benson has a wee bit of a history that has been outlined on this blog for well over a decade:

Benson was a member of a number of hate groups in Toronto:

He eventually made his way to Calgary where he became a member of the Aryan Guard (which was later "patched over" to Blood & Honour":

However he soon defected to a splinter hate group that believed the Aryan Guard wasn't violent enough, Western European Bloodlines (WEB), two of whose members were later convicted of murder:

Hell, he is still sporting the WEB tattoo as of November of this year:

And if you've wondered, while he moved from Calgary back to Toronto some years ago, he is still an antisemitic and Islamophobic jackass:

Benson is one of the administrators on the WLM Toronto chat Telegram page where he is a pretty prodigious poster:

Lately his focus is on the war in Ukraine where he has taken on a definitive pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia point-of-view:

This position is echoed on his Facebook profile:

Of some interest however, Benson held the polar opposite position a few years ago when he attended numerous pro-Russian rallies after the annexation of Crimea and was a supporter of Vladimir Putin:

Now, people change their views all the time. For example, Andrew Benson claimed to be a Troskyite in his early 20s:

Thing about Benson is that he tends to shift his views fairly frequently and whom he aligns with.

Benson seemed to disappear not long after Robert Reitmeier and Travis Sturrup were arrested on murder charges. However he soon re-emerged as a small government libertarian:

But he soon started to gravitate to what some have characterized as the "alt-light"...

...as well as the "alt-right":

Benson also continued to hang with the old-school bigots, 

the occasional mainstream-ish politician,

 and your run-of-the-mill grifters:

So, what's the point of all this?

I guess one thing to note is that what is old is new again. Andrew Benson has been in the movement for almost two decades. While there are some that will come and go, for a lot the movement because their life and the key component of their identity.

The other take away is that, despite their claims to being a "master race" or fighting to prevent the "extinction" of Europeans, it is all a façade to cover for their own inadequacies of which they have many.

In short, Andrew Benson should be a cautionary tale for anyone who might be attracted to the ideology that has, for all intents and purposes, destroyed his chances to have a normal and fulfilling life. This is it for him and that I can't think of many things more pathetic than this.