Alexandre Cormier-Denis once told their 30,000 followers that the 2017 Québec City mosque mass murder “symbolically represented Québécois society’s rejection of Islam,” and that ethnonationalism is the only way for sovereigntists to secure an independent Québec.
Sébastien Roback
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
After an armed white supremacist burst into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 worshippers on March 15, 2019, people across the world joined the Muslim community in grieving. But in this great tragedy, some saw great opportunity.
Among them, Alexandre Cormier-Denis, the frontman of Nomos-TV, a “web TV platform” which seeks to defend the “culture, language, religion and ethnicity” of the “French nation of America.” Reaching 30,000 subscribers on YouTube, the channel was removed from the platform on Monday, following a request for comment by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. TikTok also took action, and removed the Nomos-TV account.
In an episode of his show posted days after the Christchurch massacre, Cormier-Denis railed against immigration and multiculturalism, which he identified as the cause driving the violence.
“What happened in New Zealand is the demonstration of the bankruptcy of this model, the bankruptcy of mass immigration combined with multiculturalism which creates an atmosphere of latent civil war.”
Though he was careful not to endorse the actions of the shooter, this is far from a departure from the rhetoric usually heard on Nomos-TV. Weeks earlier, while covering the trial of Alexandre Bissonnette, who killed six in a Québec City mosque and served as a figure of inspiration for the Christchurch shooter, Cormier-Denis told his audience that the former’s actions “symbolically represented Québécois society’s rejection of Islam.”
This, in spite the fact that Cormier-Denis, much like other Nomos-TV co-hosts Philippe Plamondon and Sébastien de Crèvecoeur, have denied that Bissonnette’s murders were politically motivated, instead calling his motivations “blurry,” and stating that “no official documents have ever tied him to far-right politics.”
This is, of course, not true.
Evidence presented during Bissonnette’s trial showed he was “obsessed with Donald Trump,” and followed the Twitter accounts of figures like Infowars’ Alex Jones, Groyper troll Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, among others.
In the Nomos-TV universe, however, disinformation is a tool of choice to promote a whitewashed, made-in-Québec version of white nationalism, tailored to build a bridge between the province’s sovereigntist faction and right-wing extremism. Despite losing access to YouTube, they have vowed “to come back in force.”
Around the time of the channel’s 2017 launch, Cormier-Denis put his name forward as a candidate for a by-election in the Montréal riding of Gouin. Despite receiving only 81 votes (0.57% of ballots cast), his candidacy caused controversy due to the racist nature of his electoral signs, which showed a woman wearing a burqa with the captions “Choose your Québec” and “Canadian Multiculturalism: No Thanks.”
Electoral sign produced by Alexandre Cormier-Denis’s 2017 by-election campaign. Source: Montréal Antifasciste.
Cormier-Denis ran under the now-defunct Parti Indépendantiste (Independence Party), which had come under fire in the past for its close ties to neo-Nazism. In 2011, the now-offline antifascist blog FachoWatch reported that Sébastien Moreau, a member of the white supremacist skinhead gang “Ste-Foy Krew,” had served as the party’s president.
On YouTube, Cormier-Denis stated his view that embracing ethnonationalism is the only way for sovereigntists to secure an independent Québec.
“I myself have gone through the intellectual process of moving from civic patriotism to an ethnonationalist position, simply because it is the only one that makes any sense. If French Canadians become a minority in Québec, forget about sovereignty. It’s done.”
He goes on to specify that the label of “French Canadians” only includes some of Canada’s French-speaking population.
“Immigrants, even francophone ones, Muslims, Haitians, what have you ... They don’t give a damn about sovereignty.”
In the eyes of Nomos-TV and its hosts, “French Canadians” form a distinct race, defined by its culture and language, but also by its skin colour and ethnicity. This race, they believe, faces an existential threat in the Great Replacement -- a conspiracy theory central to the white nationalist ideology according to which the white population of Western countries is being replaced out of existence through immigration.
“The only place where there remains a real, living French culture in America, where the French Canadian race in America is still alive, really alive, is in Québec,” said Cormier-Denis in an episode centred around the theme of the Great Replacement. “Québec is the national home of French Canadians. We were made into a minority everywhere else on the continent, and it’s happening here as well… We can’t lie to ourselves, the demographic pressure will be extremely high in the coming years.”
Many hate peddlers have distanced themselves from loaded terms like “white nationalism” and “white race” in recent years, instead using more “optical” terms to define their beliefs - in this case, “ethnonationalism,” and “French Canadian race.” The aim is to make their content more palatable to non-radicalized audiences, without having to significantly tone down their rhetoric.
Throughout the channel’s contents, ethnic and religious minority groups are denounced as co-conspirators in an alliance against the “historical francophone majority in Québec.”
Jews are vilified by Cormier-Denis for their “old tradition of refusing to assimilate into the societies in which they find themselves” - a rehashed version of centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theories - while Sébastien de Crèvecoeur describes them as “useful idiots,” who are manipulated by Islamists, notably to fight against secularism legislation in the province of Québec.
In a Nomos-TV episode entitled “Hasidic Panic,” Cormier-Denis lays out his plan to address perceived demographic issues, in a faked phone call to the Israeli consulate in Montréal:
“Shalom! We have an issue with your tribalists. They don’t respect our laws, they have their own illegal schools, they eat their own kosher food, they live parallel lives.” He told his audience, adding shortly after, “Listen, we have a solution for you, it’s called remigration. We’ll pay for their flight so they return to Israel ... It’s good for you! It’ll fix your demographic issues, it’ll be extra votes for your boss Netanyahu (then Prime Minister of Israel).”
“Jews in Judea, Algerians in Algeria, and Haitians in Haiti. Québec, what is it? It’s the national home of French Canadians.”
Cormier-Denis has said entire neighbourhoods of his native Montréal have been “colonized” by Hassidic Jews, who he believes have taken control of municipal institutions. A devout Christian, he takes personal offence with the use of the term “Judeo-Christian” when discussing so-called Western values, as he “doesn’t know if Jews belong to the nation.”
In an open letter about “Israel, Jews, and Québec” from 2020, Cormier-Denis explains that unless they convert to Christianity, he prefers for Jews to be “in Jerusalem,” rather than “trafficking kosher wine” in Québec.
“How many Jewish politicians, journalists, artists, truly participate in Québec’s society? Very few, in truth.”
Cormier-Denis wrote that remigration of Jews to Israel would be pragmatic, “as it would coincide with Israel’s demographic objectives, all the while ridding us from the excesses of the Hebrew sects which, in any case, never really belong to the nation.”
Remigration, the policy Cormier-Denis advocates for, involves the forced deportation of all non-European descending communities back to their “home countries,” whether or not they have ever lived there -- the same policy advocated for by Atalante, a violent neo-Nazi skinhead gang.
This remigration would be “a sort of voluntary aliyah - or not”, he goes on to add, using the term used by many Jews to describe immigration to Israel and alluding to the potentially coercive nature of his policy.
Atalante’s leader, Raphaël Lévesque, appeared as a guest on Nomos-TV after being acquitted of criminally harassing a Vice Media journalist who had written about his group. While interviewing Lévesque -- who also fronts a neo-Nazi punk band and has previously been convicted of drug trafficking -- Cormier-Denis describes the acquittal as “great news for the nationalist camp.”
Raphaël Lévesque (left) and Alexandre Cormier-Denis. Source: Youtube.
“We should all be happy with this result,” added the host, who concluded the interview by asking Lévesque to give his listeners instructions on how they could join the group.
Before going off-air, Lévesque also gave Cormier-Denis an award for “excellence in nationalist media.”
Alexandre Cormier-Denis (left), Philippe Plamondon (centre), Sébastien de Crêvecoeur (right). Source: YouTube.
While lead anchor Cormier-Denis is arguably the channel’s most recognizable figure, Philippe Plamondon, who co-founded Nomos-TV with Cormier-Denis, is second in command. Alongside him is Sébastien de Crèvecoeur, he hosts “Culture et Société,” where the pair share their views on “culture wars” issues.
After the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children were found near a number of residential schools across Canada, Plamondon argued that there were no “horrors in the residential schools,” and likened the criticism levelled towards the Catholic church to “ethnomasochism” and “Québec-bashing,” due to the province’s religious heritage.
Conversely, Plamondon has been comfortable using the word “horror” to describe the 2SLGBTQ+ community: “The LGBT lobby is probably the loudest, the whiniest, the most aggressive of all political lobbies representing minorities. It’s certainly the most aggressive, the most anti-tradition, the most anti-heterosexual...We’re dealing with horrors here.”
Plamondon, who has called Islam the “world’s most criminogenic ideology,” described mass murders targeting Muslims as “the trees that hide the forest of the horrors committed by migrants across the Western world.”
Alexandre Cormier-Denis and Philippe Plamondon previously collaborated in founding the non-profit Horizon Québec Actuel. The organization is described by Montréal Antifasciste as a Québec satellite for Front National, a French far-right party founded by a convicted Holocaust denier, which has since rebranded as Rassemblement National.
Cormier-Denis (left) and Plamondon (far-right) with Marine LePen (center-left), then-leader of Front National and current leader of Rassemblement National. Source: Montréal Antifasciste.
Sébastien de Crèvecoeur is a French immigrant to Canada who studied philosophy at a Grande École, an elite French academic institution, before moving to Montréal.
In an episode of his show “Culture et société,” which he co-hosts with Plamondon, he argued the “14 words” - arguably the most recognizable white supremacist slogan - is not racist or offensive, calling it “legitimate.”
“Sure, it might have been co-opted by neo-Nazis or whatever, but we have to stop and ask ourselves, what does this sentence say that is so shocking?”
Far from being “co-opted” by neo-Nazis, the 14 words were written by David Lane, an American white supremacist and domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 190 years in prison after participating in the murder of a Jewish radio talk show host.
According to antifascist researcher Xavier Camus, de Crèvecoeur has also endorsed the actions of white supremacist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 (mostly teenagers) in two separate attacks on July 22, 2011. In a series of comments made on a Facebook post showing Muslims praying in the streets, de Crèvecoeur allegedly described Breivik as the “solution” to what he perceives to be the problem of Islamisation.
“The solution, we know what it is, and it’s a blond Norwegian man who gave it to us.”
After another user asked him to clarify whether he was joking, he doubled down.
“Absolutely not. If I were in power, I would give the police the order to shoot them. The only difference is I would make it an action under the symbol of public order, and not as an individual’s disorganized violence.”
When reached for comment, de Crêvecoeur denied any wrongdoing, calling Islamophobia “a concept without relevance” and told CAHN the concept of “hate” is “null and void” in politics, as politics does not “legislate on feelings.”
Nomos-TV previously took donations through its website using PayPal. In a response to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the payment processor said it does not discuss individual accounts when reached for comment, but Nomos' PayPal link is currently listed as "ineligible to receive donations."
Alexandre Cormier-Denis and Philippe Plamondon did not return multiple requests for comment.
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