Is Diagolon a joke or a threat? Or both?

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Jordan It was a handshake caught on video and that’s all. But it resulted in as things sometimes do in demands that the frontrunner in the Conservative Party leadership race disavow support from a man with links to conspiracy groups and antigovernment rhetoric. Mostly, though, Pierre Poilievre’s brief impromptu photo op with Jeremy MacKenzie, the man credited with founding the Diagolon movement resulted in Canadians asking what the heck is Diagolon? Well, Diagolon on is a joke but it’s also a gateway to some of the ugliest stuff on the Internet. The question about Diagolon is not is it a meme or is it dangerous? The question is how can something that is so clearly a meme also be so deeply troubling to the people who cover the far-right and white supremacy? How can this be both things at once? We’ll try to figure that one out today. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Peter Smith is an investigative journalist with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. Hello, Peter.

Peter Smith Hello, sir.

Jordan Maybe we could start today with Jeremy MacKenzie. Who is he? And why is it such a problem that Pierre Poilievre took a photo with him?

Peter Smith So Jeremy MacKenzie is the host of a small but growing collection of live streamers. They originally called themselves the Plaid Army. But both them and researchers generally refer to them as Diagonal or the Diagonal network. I think every election cycle we see kind of a story similar to what we have now. Doug Ford was photographed with members of ID Canada and Faith Goldie a few years ago. Trudeau has been trolled by people during meet and greets. So when Jeremy, who was the creator of this idea of Diagonal was photographed shaking hands with Poilievre, it was not very out of the ordinary as well as the reaction in the press and the public. The issue or the problem is how the leadership candidates of the official opposition and very conceivably the next prime minister of this country have since refused to put a significant amount of distance between this individual who’s incredibly conspiratorial and the head of an accelerationist community.

Jordan We’ll talk about the accelerationist community in a minute because that’s why we’re having you on but also because you’ve mentioned it and because this does seem to happen every election cycle. You know should Poilievre or Trudeau for that matter or any of these guys be expected to know who someone like Jeremy MacKenzie is when he walks in and shakes their hand? I have no idea what this guy looks like until I saw people posting that picture.

Peter Smith No, I think these are opportunities that are taken by opportunists after the fact. You know Jeremy said that he had planned it. He hopes to get Poilievre to say his name and would delight at that fact and has even indicated that there’s kind of more to come as far as this trolling goes forward. So no, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Poilievre to not have recognized him, for his staff not to have recognized him, when, as he said in his response, they’ve been shaking hands with literally thousands of people. It’s just the condemnation we wanted to see was a little needed to be stronger.

Jordan And one last question about MacKenzie specifically. He is the head of what we’re going to get into about Diagonal, but just in general, I understand he’s also facing charges. Can you unpack that for us?

Peter Smith Yeah, it gets a little muddy when we look at some of the sources of these accusations. But what we do know is that he has been charged in three or four provinces. His home province is Nova Scotia for I think it’s 13 gun-related charges, as well as charges related to a protest that took place outside of that province’s chief medical officer’s house relating to alleged phone calls and harassment. I believe there are also assault charges in Quebec that were confirmed by another reporter. And then most recently in Saskatchewan. There have been charges of pointing a gun at an individual, assault, mischief, and one other one that escapes me at the moment.

Jordan Okay, so now you’re going to have to explain this whole thing to me. What is Diagonal?

Peter Smith Well, that’s kind of the $6 million question. It’s important to understand what it is and what it isn’t. The joke is that it’s a real plot to kind of make this super state that goes diagonally across North America, consisting of what they would call the sane regions. And at this heart, this is a meme like it is a joke. What it has become, however, is both an actual and symbolic banner under which participants of this movement can rally and self-identify. You know it’s a community that has a cross-section of different individuals. They’re content creators, trolls, survivalists, and in some cases, it’s more and more extremists.

Jordan How and where did this begin? You mentioned it started as a joke, and part of it might still be a joke, but where did it come from?

Peter Smith Yeah. To call MacKenzie a leader, I think is actually a bit of a strong term. In some ways, he’s an influencer, and he brought this idea to his fandom during a Livestream. It was workshopped kind of in real time with participation from members of the audience. In his chat, he alluded to the fact that maybe they talked about it before in other places. But, yeah, it was this idea of just this region that they viewed as sharing their worldview, their ideology.

Jordan And if I asked MacKenzie to explain it to me, what would he say?

Peter Smith He tells you, similar to some of the things that I just said, that it’s a meme and it’s a joke. He often refers to himself as a pressure release valve for incredibly frustrated people, which he’s not entirely wrong in that regard. The rhetoric espoused often talks about the inevitability of violent outcomes that they don’t desire. But it will also result in clearing out the people that they view as destroying the fabric of Canada in our democracy.

Jordan How can you tell what part of that is a joke and what’s not?

Peter Smith Well, that is the rub, right? And that’s the cover that gets provided. Unlike more explicit organizations that have firm membership and vetting to get in, like the base, like Adam, often in the past, this is implicit acceleration. It doesn’t encourage the end. They don’t want to be on the front lines, but they see it as inevitable, and ultimately for where they believe the country needs desirable. Because, as they will often say, there is no political solution.

Jordan We’ve touched on it a few times now, but I want to make sure that we sort of has it clear for everyone who’s listening. What is accelerationism and how does it manifest in public life today?

Peter Smith Accelerationism, militant acceleration specifically, is a set of tactics and strategies designed to put pressure on and exacerbate latent social divisions, often through violence. But really anything that will hasten the collapse of society, which is again, viewed through this particular lens as inevitable, but also desirable.

Jordan Why desirable?

Peter Smith They would view society as moving so far to a point that things like elections, engaging with the public, you know the media, have all been subverted and corrupted. By who? Depends on which kind of branch of that worldview you’re subscribing to. But it’s just believed that society has gone so far beyond the point of saving that the only way is to kind of tear it down and start again.

Jordan What has the Diagolon network actually done so far? We mentioned charges against MacKenzie personally, but how much of this exists totally in the realm of memes and online discussion, and if anything about them is actually real?

Peter Smith Yeah, that’s a good question, because he’s an important figure because of his status within this community, his job or his work developing kind of the mythos that has been built around it. But the community itself is like, what is ultimately to be concerned about. There are a number of accusations, none of which have been borne out in court. It’s important to point out. Members of the community that were already known to us were arrested in Coats, Alberta. And what is alleged by the RCMP is a plot to target police if they were to try to interfere with the border blockades that were happening at the time. As you said, MacKenzie, himself is facing a number of charges in three or four provinces. And also it’s interesting because Canada has very recently become aware of this group through the reporting of mainstream media. But people who have been tracking it for much longer have had their addresses read out during streams. Activists that speak out against them have had the Diagolon symbol spray-painted outside of their apartments. There is real life as well as online harassment that takes place, and they are very clear sometimes about which community this is coming from.

Jordan What do we know and what do we not know about how seriously Canadian authorities or I guess authorities down to the United States too are taking this? That’s hard to say. A lot of the time.

Peter Smith I don’t believe that law enforcement or security and intelligence apparatuses are best equipped to deal with ultimately social or societal problems. You know all of the charges lately, as well as inset reports that have been obtained by journalists, do indicate that they are being monitored, that they are considered people of interest. It does seem like there has been a bit of a shift in how seriously this is being taken. But as I said before, none of these charges have been proven yet, so it’s hard to say what type of impact that will have. And you know guilty or innocent, the stories of these persecutions as being targeted you know by the state has already been set within their spaces.

Jordan So leaving aside the charges for a moment because none of them have been proven, leaving aside the real-life stuff, what is dangerous or troubling about the meme and joke side of it, because at a glance and to any ordinary Canadian who encounters it, that’s what they’ll be told it is, right?

Peter Smith Yeah. And as we said, they wouldn’t be wrong. That is a real subsection of this community, people who are just interested in the content. You know there is, I think, a real justification for people feeling discontent and disconnected, unrepresented by the government, by the media. And so that humour aspect is a point where you can bring people in with the irony of it all and progressively make the actual ideas more acceptable.

Jordan How does that process work?

Peter Smith More generally, it happens in a lot of ways. If you think of a kind of conspiracy culture or that whole ecosystem as a bubble or as a circle, you can enter at different points. Perhaps you believe that the World Economic Forum is slowly pushing us towards drinking cockroach milk or replacing all meat with insect protein. You know you can take that and continue to move deeper into the circle, taking more radical, more extreme ideas. Or you could stop at another point. The way that people come in and where they end up is different for every individual. Just like when people leave these communities, that path out is never set in the same way.

Jordan Regarding those theories and you just mentioned replacing meat with bugs, which is, I gather, something that’s pretty prevalent in a few of these communities. How is it possible to tell whether or not these people actually believe that? I mean, on the one hand, they can’t actually believe that extreme version of it, but on the other hand, they are incredibly critical and skeptical, to put it politely, of government.

Peter Smith Yeah, absolutely. One, I would say I definitely believe that some of them subscribe to those beliefs. They will point to examples in media, and examples in policy, that oftentimes appear to back this up. There was a cricket farm, I believe, that opened in Ontario recently that became the target of a series of conspiracy theories because they were producing crickets for animal and human consumption. Lots of stores now do sell cricket flour whereas these are just kind of interesting market alternatives to some people, they are proof of a real conspiracy to others. It’s the same thing with the charges like these. Prosecutions by the state, justified or not, will cement these persecution complexes within the community that are seen as evidence of the tyranny that they’re hoping to oppose. And you know it is true that governments use movements like these to push policies through and demonize people who have real criticism. You know that’s just not what we see from this community, though. It’s like a good faith engagement with different policies.

Jordan How fast is this community growing? I know because I’ve asked this question to other folks. How much of that has to do with the pandemic accelerating?

Peter Smith I don’t want to say exclusively, but the pandemic has been a massive factor. There’s been kind of a few moments in my research that I’ve noticed real explosions of popularity. One was when Jeremy went and was like an almost one-man protest outside of Dalhousie University when Omar Khadr was speaking. The second one for that was the pandemic. Really lots of people were inside. It’s an engaged community that not only wants to get people together in online spaces but encourages them to meet up in real life. And yeah the pandemic really exacerbated people’s feelings of discontent. People need an outlet, that pressure release valve that MacKenzie talks about. And if you view the world through a certain lens, you know this is a place where you can feel welcome and find that solidarity, find that community and also find an enemy.

Jordan What should Canadians who are learning about Diagolon for the first time this week know about the big picture that surrounds this stuff and what should they understand about it?

Peter Smith Look, I’ve covered Diagolon pretty extensively. Obviously, it’s something that I feel is a concern, but it is just one subsection of a very large movement that we have seen grow over the past two or three years. Over the course of the pandemic that we saw in 2019 trying to stage similar actions like the convoy that we saw this year. They are finding common causes with one another and they’re having an incredibly successful street movement unlike we’ve seen in the past few decades. That mobilization, that kind of boots on the ground and inspires people to, again, not engage in a way that could change the system meaningfully in a way that would be beneficial to them or within the bounds of how our democracy works. But this very populist, outsider, sometimes insurrectionary method of dealing with politics.

Jordan What do they actually want? If you ask them, I’m sure as a joke, they would say we want our own independent diagonal country stretching down the middle of North America. But what does MacKenzie actually want? What would they be satisfied with? What’s their goal?

Peter Smith That’s a difficult question. I think the most serious answer you would get would be a republic representative democracy, similar to what they have in the US. Ultimately though, it’s a social movement that fuses progressive politics, LGBTQ rights as subversive, as socially subversive and as a kind of plot against our democracy or our society. The western way of life. You know, the community will often say that it is not racist, but it is a pro-white or pro-white society. They don’t really have firm political goals. And what we’ve seen certainly this year with the convoy and kind of the subsequent action since then is, I think, them trying to figure out what it is exactly they would like as they gain more support.

Jordan What will you be watching for with regard to them over the next several months?

Peter Smith So there has been kind of a well-reported targeting of journalists, specifically female and racialized journalists in Canada. I don’t want to lay that at the feet of Diagonal exclusively, but you know the response to this from their figures has been to remind its viewers that the media’s cancer, that whatever hatred they’re receiving, they deserve. So you know people within the community who are very interested and very vocal about pushing that forward and that narrative is what really interests me because I think that is the one that has the most potential for an individual to eventually take some type of action.

Jordan That’s a troubling way to end this conversation. Thank you, Peter.

Peter Smith Yeah, I’m not fun at parties.

Jordan We have a history of guests like that. So we appreciate your time.

Peter Smith You as well, sir. It’s been a genuine pleasure.

Jordan Peter Smith of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. That was The Big Story. For more, you can head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can take our listener survey here if you would like. We really appreciate all those of you who’ve done so, so far. It’s not too late for the rest of you. Click that big survey button at the top of the page. It will only take ten minutes. You can also talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us [click here!] and you can call and leave a voicemail and say whatever you like. Phone number is 416-935-5935. You can find this podcast wherever you like to get them. And if you’re in an app that lets you write and review, you can make sure you do that too. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page