While the leaders attend the English language debate, which Maxime Bernier failed to net an invitation to, the PPC leader will be spending his evening being interviewed by a member of the Plaid Army.
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Continuing to court the far-right and fringe movements over the course of the election, former MP and leader of the People's Party of Canada Maxime Bernier is scheduled to appear on a member of the Plaid Army collective’s live stream on Thursday.
Chris Burke is a musician and family photographer living on Prince Edward Island. He is also host of the East Coast Kitchen Party, a live streaming music program, and a new show titled Faith & Liberty, which features a co-host who goes by the names “Harris” and "Steve."
Chris Burke (left) and Harris (right) during the Faith & Liberty live stream. Source: YouTube.
While claiming that activists are attempting to have his YouTube channel shut down after the announcement of Bernier’s appearance, he has continued to post since then. Members of the Plaid Army are frequently the subject of bans and suspension across social channels, including YouTube, but often compensate by creating new and alternative accounts.
Burke has used his channel and streams to promote the Plaid Army, often hosting what he calls a “pre-game” ahead of a more popular stream. Usually tamer than many of his compatriots, he has diverted much of his recent content to supporting PEI’s local PPC candidates.
In a recent episode of Faith & Liberty, both hosts took solace in the fact that their “community” was forming a series of offline contacts that could warn each other “when they’re knocking on our doors for these mandatory vaccines.”
The “phone trees” are being made up of those “who are going to come and wave the charter” as well as “who are going to come and defend as necessary,” according to Burke.
Several months ago, Burke posted his acapella cover of a song often credited to the neo-Nazi group The Mannerbund, titled “By God We Will Have Our Home Again.”
Little is known about The Mannerbund at this time beyond a series of podcasts and the choir-style song making the rounds in far-right spaces. The song, which makes explicit references to blood and violence in an attempt to reclaim a homeland from “foreigners,” has become popular in neo-Nazi spaces and an anthem for Plaid Army’s followers. The Mannerbund’s podcasts openly promote white power figures, including speeches by William Luther Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries -- the hate propaganda book which coined the phrase “Day of the Rope” and inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Featuring prominently in each video -- including the neo-Nazi anthem cover -- is the flag for “Diagolon,” a fictional country the Plaid Army wants to establish across North America. The Mannerbund song has been called the “national anthem” for the secessionist fantasy, which describes the battle to retake their home -- “by blood or sweat we’ll get there yet.”
According to the hosts, the logo for the show “Faith & Liberty” was made by Manitoba performing artist and music producer known as Greg Arcade. Arcade is also reportedly responsible for creating many of the logos and graphics associated with the streaming collective.
The interview comes just days after the PPC leader gave a speech in Saskatchewan. In attendance was Jeremy MacKenzie, another more prominent member of the Plaid Army (not to be confused with West-coast PPC candidate Jeremy MacKenzie). In a video posted to his social media accounts of the speech, MacKenzie is seen after attempting to find Mark Friesen, another PPC candidate and former member of the Plaid Army. MacKenzie said in comments under the photo that he and Bernie had spent time together and Friesen is visible sitting in the background.
Maxime Bernier sits with Mark Friesen in a photo posted by Jeremy MacKenzie.
MacKenzie, 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 Centre 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.
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