Meet The Award-Nominated Country Music Singer From Winnipeg Collaborating With Antisemitic Streaming Collective

Peter Smith
Canadian Anti-Hate Network

Greg Arcade is a fixture in Winnipeg’s music scene. Curating a specific image of himself as a rebel, outlaw cowboy in distressed denim and dark sunglasses, he’s made a name for himself as both artist and producer, running his own record label and even netting a pair of nominations in the upcoming Manitoba Country Music Awards. 

When he is not on stage, the performer is the designer of a variety of logos and at least one website for a number of streamers associated with the Plaid Army, a collective of COVID conspiracy-laden, antisemitic, and racist content creators.

According to audio files by Arcade and messages posted by Jeremy “Raging Dissident” MacKenzie, the musician is the designer for MacKenzie’s website, troubleshooting in real-time when the streamer made a recent appearance on Alex Jones’ Infowars. 

Good Morning, Manitoba 

No longer maintaining a significant social media presence, Arcade said he quit most platforms in April. He continues to maintain a YouTube account where he publishes music and a Telegram channel.

“We’re living in a world of commies and patriots, there’s nothing in-between,” Arcade said to a small collection of listeners who tune into a regular morning audio stream he hosts espousing his politics and playing country music. 

The show’s introduction also featured an introduction from far-right comedian Owen Benjamin, that featured a laundry list of what Benjamin considers "lies," including mass shootings, the debunking of Pizzagate, and white supremacy. 

“Kids need 72 vaccines, lie. Fluoride in the water is to make your teeth whiter, insane lie… There’s such thing as Swine flu, lie. Me Too cared about rape victims, lie. Black Lives Matter cares about Black people, lie…  Homosexuals and trans peoples just want equal rights and don’t want to indoctrinate your children at all, lie… Jews are oppressed… Islam is a religion of peace,” and more are all denounced. 

During the morning show, and in response to a request for comment from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Arcade categorized the questions about antisemitism as “fake and gay,” and journalists writ large as demons and “dirty, filthy liars. They’re paid by your tax money to lie to you make you have a worse life.”

For his part, the singer denies any accusations of prejudice in his music or affiliations. 

“I do not judge people on their outward appearance, which, may I add, is a disgusting habit you have,” Arcade wrote as part of his response to CAHN. “You do it over and over again as you project your pedophilic power-hungry demonic gaze out upon those in the world who wish nothing to do with you.”

Saying he works with “many clients. Not just those from the Plaid Army,” there is little doubt he has more than just a simple business relationship with its members and followers. 

A recent single released by Arcade, titled “Come and Get It,” opens with an audio clip of Jeremy MacKenzie quoting the song’s lyrics. 

Arcade has taken on a leadership role as admin in the Manitoba branch of regional “bigot” groups -- the name adopted by Plaid Army fans for themselves -- directing new members to more localized private chats and reminding new joiners to follow rules about posting. 

These regional groups were started as a means to promote real-life networking among PA members and fans. Often focusing on prepping culture, an act viewed as a necessity as MacKenzie and other Plaids often speak of the inevitability of a coming civil war. 

Arcade was once more active in MacKenzie’s chats, once posting and mocking a YouTube video that attempted to present a false historical link between Jewish people and Vikings, he wrote jokingly that he does “not trust long nose tribe [sic].” Arcade included the use of multiple parentheses around the word “tricks”' in the same conversation. The parenthesis is an online trend started by the antisemitic hate podcast “The Daily Shoah” to indicate the person or concept they were talking about is perceived as Jewish and remain undetected by social media algorithms. 

Rebel With a Cause

Before deleting his social media, Arcade used Instagram to support Artur Pawlowski, a Calgary-based hate preacher, best known for his COVID-conspiracy advocacy (he recently returned from a US tour with prominent QAnon and far-right figures).

When Pawloski gained attention for ejecting a crowd of police and a public health official from his church with screams of “get out, you Nazis,” Arcade came to his defence.  

“It can be hard for you to grasp but your behaviour is that of Nazis and communists. You, pushing your masks, your vaccines, your social shame… You are no better than everything you were raised to hate,” he wrote under an image depicting the event. 

Adding, “you may hate me, but I don’t care anymore. You are wrong and I don’t need you.” 

While a response to questions about the meanings of particular songs, it was suggested that we might struggle to “understand the art form” used to craft songs like “Among Us,” which warns the listener of an enemy that “builds their might, they live among you now.” Another, titled “Accelebrate,” tells the listener to “celebrate, when it accelerates,” invoking language heard in MacKenzie’s previous streams and ideologies that see a coming collapse as inevitable.

The most popular member of the Plaid Army, MacKenzie is a retired combat veteran from the Canadian Armed Forces, has been steadfast in his opposition to lockdowns and what he views as a larger conspiracy to use vaccines and the media to seize power and disenfranchise white Canadians. 

Before the pandemic, however, MacKenzie's focus often drifted to supporting theories of secret Jewish plots, including perpetrating the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 

“I don’t actually know what 9/11 was about. Like, none of us really believed it. So, what is the real story anyway?” he said during an April 2020 appearance on another Plaid Army member’s show. “And I ended up finding Ryan Dawson and some other people, and I did not like what I saw.”

Ryan Dawson is a Holocaust denier who believes that the pandemic and the September 11 attacks were planned by “the Jews” and Israel. He is known for his documentary “War by Deception,” in which he argues the attacks were planned by a “Zionist cabal” of Israeli and American Jews working in the US government.

MacKenzie is a regular host of anti-lockdown figures on his own stream, previously sitting down with Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament Randy Hillier and protest leader Chris “Sky” Saccoccia, who himself has a history of Holocaust denial and historical revisionism. Saccoccia and MacKenzie recently had a falling out, with the latter even taking to his chat to ask why Saccoccia no longer expressed his doubts around the Holocaust.

“What happened to the based guy?” MacKenzie wrote. “How come he doesn't talk about that stuff anymore? It all fell out of his head?”

After briefly appearing on MacKenzie’s show again to talk about their particular feud, Saccoccia appeared on both Rebel News and Islamophobic streamer Kevin Johnston’s show and restated his belief that the number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust was based on religious prophecy, rather than historical research.

Other episodes from MacKenzie included him showing off his hard copy of Devon Stack’s “Day of the Rope,” a modernized version of “The Turner Diaries,” by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce. Both books commonly appear on neo-Nazi reading lists. 

In previous live streams with Matthew Murray Copeland and another vlogger in January, MacKenzie took aim at women in relationships with non-white men, and what he sees as the propaganda of interracial porn.

According to reporting by ARC Collective, on Twitter, MacKenzie claimed "You can't vote your way out of this...the only viable solutions are illegal and I'd be jailed publicly for saying them.”

In the same report, audio can be heard of MacKenzie discussing the book Day of the Rope.

When a commenter said that the book had been banned, Mackenzie stopped the conversation and said “This is a great book; what a piss off. Check this book out if you can find it.”