Black-clad white men stand at attention. They chant and hold crude banners with “D.E.I. IS HOW NATIONS DIE” and “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW” scrawled across them. A man screams through a megaphone about “foreign blood” and “retak[ing] our nation” while his followers intone the words “honour,” “heritage,” and “triumph.”

This scene—from a video posted to white nationalist Telegram channels—is footage of a rally held in Toronto on May 3 of this year. It was organized and executed by a collection of Canadian white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups collaborating to take their hate from online spaces into the real world.

Canadians tend to think of far-right extremism and white nationalism as a strictly American problem, adopting an “it couldn’t happen here” mindset, or seeing it as a lunatic fringe that should just be ignored. But these movements are gaining a foothold in mainstream culture, and the structure for that to happen has been in this country since its inception.

White supremacy arrived in Canada in the fifteenth century, with the first Europeans. Since then, Canada has waged a cultural and literal genocide against Indigenous peoples, including the horrors perpetrated as early as 1831 at Christian church- and government-sponsored residential schools, which were designed to strip children from their families and their culture, with the last federally run residential school closing in 1996. In 1911, the government passed an order-in-council to ban Black immigrants from entering Canada (it was never invoked). In 1921, the Ku Klux Klan formed its first Canadian chapter. In 1946, Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only section of a movie theatre. The last segregated school in Canada didn’t close until 1983.

The late 2010s brought with them the “alt-right” era, a term coined by white nationalist Richard Spencer to differentiate his views from traditional American conservatism. Originally characterized by online trolling, the “alt-right” was a random and reactionary series of chats, pages, memes, and shitposting accounts—mainly from the US—as well as a loose collection of more serious actors like the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen. Over the years, its membership has become increasingly public, participating in rallies and engaging in acts of violence in the real world. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a new iteration has emerged in Canada: Diagolon.

The Diagolon movement is led by Canadian streamer and podcaster Jeremy MacKenzie. When the pandemic measures enacted by local governments started to roll out, MacKenzie’s broadcasts became increasingly radical in response, a pattern that continues to this day. In Telegram chats, MacKenzie spouts hate speech, including antisemitic memes, rants about South Asian people, and many other slurs. He sweeps aside criticism by claiming what he said was a joke. Even the name Diagolon (taken from MacKenzie’s fictional country, made up of the states and provinces with the fewest public health restrictions during the pandemic, resulting in a diagonal slash across North America) is described as a joke. But researchers disagree with that assertion.

“I very much believe that Jeremy believes the things that he says,” says Evan Balgord, executive director at the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), a nonprofit that monitors and reports on the far right. “I do not think that this is all performance theatre.”

Balgord says these kinds of networks act as a recruiting pool for the far right. “Some of them have moved on to what we call white nationalism 3.0 models,” he says. “They’re becoming more militant.” He says they are moving away from “irony laden, extremely online” activity to meeting up in person in groups called Active Clubs. This move is taken from the playbook of American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo. It involves online groups of white supremacists and like-minded thinkers meeting in person to train under the guise of a sports club.

“They try to get together to recruit, to do fitness, to do propaganda pictures, to train in combat sports,” says Balgord. “They are talking about the inevitability of conflict and violence and speak about preparing for it.”

Balgord’s organization has tracked many of these groups across Canada, which have concentrations in Ontario and British Columbia. Some claim to have a thousand or more members, but it is impossible to tell how many people hold sympathies for their cause. The clubs sometimes visit each other, according to CAHN, 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 engage in “basic training-style military drills.” When it’s time for a demonstration or action, the groups come together, knowing that anyone showing up will have the same end goals in mind.

MacKenzie is now spearheading what CAHN believes is the largest white nationalist group in the country: Second Sons Canada. The group is a further evolution of the Active Club model. Second Sons has a strict membership policy and its own internal rules and goals. It is a self-described “men’s nationalist club” that offers “comradery and support” for men who want to feel pride in being white. In their own words: “If your friends and people around you don’t support you, maybe it’s time you make new friends.”

Second Sons now has club divisions across Canada. In May, Second Sons Canada posted a photo to its public Telegram showing members of its BC division in what appears to be a boxing gym. A user on X called Windward Antifascist reposted the photo, identifying MacKenzie alongside Surrey resident and neo-Nazi Nigel McDougall (known online as Schizo Stair Guy), a leader of the Vancouver-based Third Born Active Club. It appears that Third Born is one of many Canadian Active Clubs in Second Sons Canada’s network.

While MacKenzie and his cohort claim they are non-violent, the phrase “Merciless war is coming” doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. MacKenzie has faced numerous charges, all of which have been withdrawn or resolved, including charges for allegedly pointing a firearm at someone, which were stayed in 2023, after he agreed to a peace bond.

Active Clubs aren’t the only threat from the far right that Canada is facing. There are many different sects and levels of extremity to these groups, what Balgord calls a “network of content creators and their audiences” making 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 that the so-called “Freedom Convoy” of 2022 was the linchpin for many creators to build their audience from “different movements” that wouldn’t have had anything in common before COVID-19.

“A consequence of the pandemic was how it brought all these people together over a singular issue,” he says. Amarasingam says that everyone, from “Q-Anon types” to anti-vaccine pundits and from members of Diagolon to alternative-medicine activists, ended up in the same camp. Many content creators who railed against COVID-19 protocols gained massive followings because of the interconnection of fan bases. Once pandemic restrictions were lifted, creators started shifting the goal posts to “broader culture war territory,” according to Amarasingam, including protesting trans rights, bodily autonomy, and the general existence of the LGBTQ+ community. “I think some of them truly believe it, and I think others recognize that it’s a flashpoint issue that they can also capitalize on and potentially bring new members in,” he says.

The global far right has created its own media sphere, one they brand as the “new alternative” to the mainstream. While some of this content only reaches a niche audience, other ideas have become main talking points for Canadian politicians: whether it’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre talking on right-wing pundit Jordan Peterson’s podcast about “authoritarian socialism,” Premier Danielle Smith’s push for an anti-trans health care bill in Alberta, or social media posts from Bryan Breguet, failed Conservative candidate for the BC provincial general election, comparing climate change and “wokeness” as equal existential threats. Rhetoric that used to be relegated strictly to online spaces is making more appearances in the mainstream.

Amarasingam says this is part of the attack “from both sides” that is normalizing anti-Muslim and anti-immigration beliefs, antisemitism, and homophobia in the general conversation. While extreme far-right speakers will use language that is glaringly hateful, those with a more subtle approach will couch the same ideas as a political viewpoint. Gradually, political speech is aligning closer to goals of the far right. With the rapid degeneration of much of the content moderation on social media, far-right rhetoric is spreading faster than researchers can accurately track.

Brad Galloway works for the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism in Ontario and has spent most of his career de-radicalizing members of the far right through organizations such as Life After Hate. He says that, due to the lack of content moderation on platforms like X and Facebook, when it comes to online extremist groups, social media has become a “hot bed” for far-right recruitment. The groups are evolving and learning the new rules; they know what “jokes” they can make without getting kicked off a given platform. “It kind of pushes people down this river,” he says, “to different pockets of the internet where they find actual groups doing recruitment.” Galloway says that there is a direct correlation between people feeling that they can espouse this ideology online and people feeling that they can act on the ideology in public.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement to The Walrus that they don’t “comment on or investigate movements or ideologies,” but that “violent extremist ideologies have become more active over the past several years, and the RCMP is aware of ideologically motivated violent extremist groups which are active in Canada.” Some researchers say that it is probably a good thing the RCMP doesn’t look into ideologies alone, because what can be used against one side can be used against the other in the future.

Balgord at CAHN has a formula that he uses to decide the level of danger an extremist group represents. He multiplies the size of the group’s audience by the extremity of its rhetoric. So, while groups like Diagolon might be fringe, the extremity of their actions and language makes them a threat. The inverse is true of the Christian nationalist movement, whose groups harass school board meetings and protest outside of abortion clinics. They may not always use overtly violent language, but they reach a wider audience. Researchers at CAHN say that the Christian nationalist movement is training people to be “political operatives” in a “generational project” to gain power. The rhetoric they spout has real-life 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 associated with the far-right political activism group We Unify—an organization with ties to the Freedom Convoy, that uses phrases in their content like “reclaiming the future”—gets elected as member of the legislative assembly for North Island in BC. Neither development is as visually sinister as the men at the Toronto gathering, but that is the point.

Richard R. Goode is a multimedia journalist living in British Columbia. He can be found online (@richard_r_goode) on most social media sites.