Bwhite men without clothes stand at attention. They chant and hold crude banners with the words “DEI IS THE WAY NATIONS DIE” and “MASS DEPORTATIONS” scrawled on them. A man shouts into a megaphone about “alien blood” and “retaliation.”[ing] our nation,” while his followers chant words like “honor,” “legacy,” and “triumph.”
This scene from a video posted on white nationalist Telegram channels is footage of a rally that took place in Toronto on May 3 of this year. It was organized and carried out by a group of Canadian white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups who collaborated to take their hatred from the online space into the real world.
Canadians tend to think of far-right extremism and white nationalism as a uniquely American problem, adopting a “it can't happen here” attitude or viewing them as marginalizations that should simply be ignored. But these movements become entrenched in mainstream culture, and the structure needed to do so has existed in this country since its inception.
White supremacy came to Canada in the fifteenth century with the first Europeans. Since then, Canada has unleashed cultural and literal genocide against Indigenous peoples, including horrors committed as far back as 1831 at Christian church- and government-sponsored residential schools that were created to rob children of their families and their culture, with the last federal residential school closing in 1996. In 1911, the government passed a bylaw in council banning black immigrants from entering Canada (it was never enforced). In 1921, the Ku Klux Klan formed its first Canadian chapter. In 1946, Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only movie theater. The last segregated school in Canada closed only in 1983.
The late 2010s brought with it the era of the “alt-right,” a term coined by white nationalist Richard Spencer to distinguish his views from traditional American conservatism. Initially, the “alt-right” was characterized by online trolling and consisted of a random and reactionary series of chats, pages, memes and accounts with crap posts (mostly from the US), as well as a loose collection of more serious actors such as the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen. Over the years, its members became increasingly public, participating in rallies and committing acts of violence in the real world. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a new version has arrived in Canada: Diagolon.
The Diagolon movement is led by Canadian streamer and podcaster Jeremy Mackenzie. As local government responses to the pandemic took effect, McKenzie's response broadcasts became increasingly radical, a pattern that continues to this day. In Telegram chats, McKenzie makes hate speech, including anti-Semitic memes, rants about South Asian people, and many other slurs. He dismisses the criticism, saying what he said was a joke. Even the name Diagolon (taken from Mackenzie's fictional country of states and provinces with the fewest public health restrictions during the pandemic, resulting in a diagonal cut across all of North America) is described as a joke. But researchers disagree with this statement.
“I really believe that Jeremy believes what he says,” says Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), a non-profit organization that tracks and reports on the far right. “I don’t think it’s all a theater performance.”
Balgord says these kinds of networks serve as a recruiting pool for the far right. “Some of them have moved to what we call white nationalism 3.0 models,” he says. “They are becoming more militant.” He says they are moving away from “irony-heavy and highly online” activities to meeting face-to-face in groups called “Active Clubs.” This move is taken from a play by American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo. It involves online groups of white supremacists and like-minded individuals who meet in person to exercise under the guise of a sports club.
“They try to get together to recruit, do fitness, act in propaganda films, train in martial arts,” Balgord says. “They talk about the inevitability of conflict and violence and talk about preparing for it.”
Balgord's organization has tracked many of these groups across Canada, which are concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia. Some claim to have a thousand or more members, but it is impossible to say how many people sympathize with their cause. Clubs sometimes visit each other, CAHN said, but “there is no hierarchical international leadership.” Some are called “fitness clubs” or “men's clubs,” labels that make them difficult to track. They lift weights and participate in “basic military exercises.” When it comes time for a demonstration or action, groups come together, knowing that everyone who comes will have the same end goals in mind.
McKenzie now leads what CAHN considers to be the largest white nationalist group in the country: Second Sons of Canada. The group represents a further development of the Active Club model. Second Sons has strict membership policies as well as internal rules and goals. It is a self-described “men's nationalist club” that offers “camaraderie and support” to men who want to feel proud to be white. In their own words: “If your friends and people around you aren't supporting you, maybe it's time to make new friends.”
Second Sons now has club chapters across Canada. In May, Second Sons Canada posted a photo on its public Telegram showing members of its British Columbia chapter in what appeared to be a boxing gym. User X, Windward Antifascist, posted a photo identifying McKenzie alongside Surrey resident and neo-Nazi Nigel McDougall (known online as Schizo Stair Guy), the leader of the Vancouver-based Third Born Active Club. It appears that Third Born is one of many active Canadian clubs in the Second Sons Canada network.
Although Mackenzie and his associates claim to be nonviolent, the phrase “Ruthless war is coming” does not leave much room for interpretation. McKenzie faced numerous charges, all of which were dropped or resolved, including charges of allegedly pointing a firearm at someone, which were suspended in 2023 after he agreed to a peace bond.
Activist clubs are not the only far-right threat Canada faces. There are many different sects and levels of extremism within these groups, what Balgord calls “the network of content creators and their audiences” that make up the loose fabric of the far right.
Amarnath Amarasingam is an Associate Professor at Queen's University who researches terrorism, radicalization and extremism. He says the so-called “Freedom Convoy” of 2022 has become a linchpin for many writers to build their audiences from “different movements” that would have had nothing in common before COVID-19.
“The effect of the pandemic is that it brought all these people together to solve one single problem,” he says. Amarasingam says everyone from “Q-Anon types” to anti-vaccination experts, from Diagolon members to alternative medicine activists have found themselves in the same camp. Many content creators who spoke out against COVID-19 protocols have gained huge followings through interconnected fan bases. Once pandemic restrictions were lifted, Amarasingam said creators began shifting their targets into “broader culture war territory,” including protesting transgender rights, bodily autonomy and the general existence of the LGBTQ+ community. “I think some of them really believe in it, and I think others understand that this is a hot issue that they can also benefit from and potentially attract new members,” he says.
The global far right has created its own media sphere, which it calls a “new alternative” to the mainstream. While some of this content reaches only a niche audience, other ideas have become major talking points among Canadian politicians: be it Conservative leader Pierre Poilevre's talk about right-wing pundit Jordan Peterson's podcast on “authoritarian socialism,” Premier Danielle Smith's call for an anti-trans health law in Alberta, or social media posts by Brian Breguet, the failed Conservative candidate in the British Columbia general election, comparing the change climate and “awakening” as equals. existential threats. Rhetoric that was once relegated exclusively to the online space is increasingly appearing in the mainstream.
Amarasingam says it's part of an attack “from both sides” that normalizes anti-Muslim and anti-immigration beliefs, anti-Semitism and homophobia in the general conversation. While far-right speakers will use overtly hateful language, those with a more nuanced approach will present the same ideas as a political point of view. Gradually, political speech is moving closer to the goals of the far right. With much content moderation on social media rapidly degenerating, far-right rhetoric is spreading faster than researchers can accurately track.
Brad Galloway works at the Center for Hate, Bias and Extremism in Ontario and has spent much of his career de-radicalizing the far right through organizations like Life After Hate. He says the lack of content moderation on platforms such as X and Facebook when it comes to online extremist groups has made social media a “hotbed” for far-right recruitment. Groups develop and learn new rules; they know what “jokes” they can make to avoid getting kicked off a certain platform. “It kind of pushes people down the river,” he says, “to different corners of the Internet where they find real recruiting groups.” Galloway says there is a direct correlation between people feeling they can support that ideology online and people feeling they can act on that ideology publicly.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement to The Walrus that they “do not comment on or investigate movements or ideologies” but that “violent extremist ideologies have become more active over the past few years and the RCMP is aware of ideologically motivated violent extremist groups that operate in Canada.” Some researchers say it's probably good that the RCMP isn't all about ideologies, because what can be used against one side could be used against another in the future.
CAHN's Balgord has a formula he uses to determine the level of danger an extremist group poses. He multiplies the size of the group's audience through the harshness of its rhetoric. So while groups like Diagolon may be fringe, the extremity of their actions and speech makes them a threat. The opposite is true of the Christian nationalist movement, whose groups have harassed school board meetings and protested outside abortion clinics. They may not always use overtly violent language, but they reach a wider audience. CAHN researchers say the Christian nationalist movement is training people to be “political actors” in a “generational project” to gain power. The rhetoric they spew has real consequences, as can be seen in Alberta with the suppression of sexual orientation and gender identity, inclusive sex education. Or when someone like Anna Kindy, who has been involved with the far-right political activist group We Unify—an organization affiliated with Freedom Convoy that uses phrases like “rebuilding the future” in its content—is elected to the North Island legislature in British Columbia. None of the events look as ominous as the events at the Toronto meeting, but that's the point.
