Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Source: Facebook
Arriving nearly two hours late to his own event, COVID-conspiracist Chris “Sky” Saccoccia launched into an expletive-laden rant while visiting Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
A crowd of gathered hopefuls expecting to see the somewhat diminished anti-lockdown influencer in person stood for around two hours, based on comments from supporters on related live streams. Other people stepped up to talk in Saccoccia’s place.
When the wayward headliner did arrive, a band was playing as a few hundred people waited under umbrellas and a small gazebo.
Saccoccia had planned to appear in Nanaimo’s Maffeo Sutton Park overlooking the city’s harbour at 2 pm. A notice did go out about an hour before the event warning followers of a channel he maintains on an encrypted messaging app that he would be tardy, but it did not slow a tide of people that washed into the park to take part in the protest.
“We will be late. Don’t show up at 2. More like 3:30, you have been warned,” he wrote under a poster advertising the “Chris Sky No Vax Pass Tour.”
After spending a period of time in his vehicle, the bleach blonde Saccoccia emerged. Telling those who came with him he is “going to fucking lose it” after hearing the band was planning to play another song.
And lose it he did.
After taking control of the microphone, it took several statements from Saccoccia before the crowd appeared to take notice of his displeasure.
“I don’t know what the fuck you people think this is, this is a fucking war against your fucking children. They are coming to inject them with a poison. They are taking your jobs, they are taking your houses, and how do you respond?” he told the crowd, smashing his sunglasses on the floor. “You spend one or two hours a week freedom fighting by coming to listen to a fucking band.”
Adding that “each one of you should be ashamed of yourselves,” he calls the gathered protesters a “bunch of fucking pathetic children,” which included the multiple actual children visibly seated in front of the crowd.
“None of you deserve this merchandise,” he says, pointing to the “Just Say No” sweaters he hawks at his events.
While arguing with individuals in the crowd, Saccoccia beckons some to come forward and shout it out with him, while others are pushed back by his supporters.
“The fact of the matter is I’m right and you’re wrong and you’re upset because you don’t have the fortitude to admit it,” he said without a hint of irony as some people pointed out that he was the one who had shown up late.
After the rally, those still in attendance followed Saccoccia to descend upon a local Canadian Tire to shop in defiance of mask mandates. Social media posts about the incident claim 100 protesters attended.
Saccoccia boasted that he drove 6,000 km to be on the island, traversing the country as part of his tour. Making several other stops in BC before the hostile speech in Nanaimo, an event the day before saw him appear in Victoria.
There he spoke after a collection of others, before he was told to wrap up his speech by an organizer as they readied themselves for a march.
“If you really want me and you really want to help yourselves, why can’t each and every one of you show up to Nanaimo tomorrow?” Saccoccia told the crowd, adding just after, “and I promise you won’t have to wait hours and hours and hours to hear me speak.”
A History Of Anti-Blackness & Antisemitism
The outspoken Saccoccia quickly found an audience in his rise to prominence, one that forgives, ignores or supports multiple bigoted and racist beliefs -- including Holocaust denial and debunked, anti-Black race science.
Originally featured in an interview with Ed The Sock, the ARC Collective was the first to take note of Saccoccia’s membership in a variety of far-right Facebook groups, including posts supporting The Great Replacement theory in the now-defunct Yellow Vest Canada group.
Saccoccia managed to secure a fairly impressive following of people to his cause. His verified Instagram account reportedly had 250,000 followers until it was shut down on the platform. The company told Vice World News, this was due to his spreading of “harmful vaccine misinformation and content promoting widely debunked hoaxes.”
Many of his statements fall in line with a variety of other statements from Saccoccia that focus on long-standing conspiracies of undue Jewish influence and power throughout the world. While in some comments he would make sure to indicate that his problem was specifically “Zionist Jews” and the state of Israel, that does not stop him from casting anyone of the Chosen People as complicit in the plot.
In other posts he quotes Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying on the United States for Israel during the 1980s, about how Jews should not be given high-security clearances.
In the comments section of the same post, he takes it a step further.
“The Khazar Zionist banker fake Jews had no problem sacrificing the Jews in WW2,” he wrote. “They will have even less of a moral dilemma to destroy all the Jews in Israel if they believe it will give them more wealth/power/control.”
Other posts accuse Jewish people of drawing swastikas and writing hate messages “all over New York,” because they “don’t have any real enemies they simply do it themselves,” and closing by calling it the “Jewnited States of America.”
Seemingly having never met a conspiracy theory he did not like, he also blames Zionists for pushing for legalized pedophilia, “just like out ‘Wynn’ in Ontario.” In January 2015, he blamed the Charlie Hebdo massacre on Israeli intelligence agents. He also pointed to a hostage situation the following day, citing the fact it took place in a kosher grocery store as all the proof he needed that this was a plot to draw France into the war in Syria.
Despite stepping in to host an episode of InfoWars, appearing on live streams with the openly Islamophobic Kevin Johnston and the antisemitic Plaid Army -- before he began feuding with the streaming collective -- Saccoccia appears to have toned down his rhetoric since his rise to nominal notoriety.
After an article by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Rebel News even brought him on and offered a chance to explain some of the posts mentioned in the story, going as far as to cite the reporting in their story’s graphics package and focusing on his Holocaust denial.
Before storming out of the studio, Saccoccia stated that he believed the total number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was created to align with a biblical prophecy.