If Diagolon is a joke, few are laughing: A Chilliwack man’s firearms charges reopen pandemic pissing match between far-right extremists

Landon Preik’s arrest was prompted by Diagolon founder Jeremy Mackenzie whose criminal charges keeping getting dropped, a fact leading to conspiracy theories that he’s a government agent

Is 41-year-old Landon Preik a dangerous far-right anti-government extremist looking to take up arms to “liberate” the nation?

Or is he a naive victim of a “honey-pot” scheme by a real white supremacist who’s been trolling the “liberal media” since 2020 while working for the federal government? 

Weird questions, and the truth likely lies in between or elsewhere, but the case of Preik’s criminal charges has again illustrated an internal spat among Canada’s far right, some who say Diagolon’s creator is an undercover federal agent or at least a conspirator with government.

Diagolon’s founder Jeremy MacKenzie has bragged that he is the person who notified the RCMP about social media videos connected to Landon Preik in Chilliwack that referred to the “LYNX movement,” which is an awkward acronym somehow standing for “Liberate your neighbourhood. Liberation your nation.”

An investigation into Preik and the videos started on Sept. 14, 2021, according to a 2022 RCMP statement. That investigation was begun “as a result of several videos posted to social media, in the interest of public safety.”

“The videos allegedly depicted masked individuals identifying themselves as militia, anti-establishment messaging and the display of multiple firearms,” the statement said.

The supposed militia with individuals encouraging resistance with possible violence against establishment authorites were investigated a year and a half into the pandemic when tensions were high, disinformation was becoming widespread, and misinformation shared by far-right players was fomenting anger.

That culminated in the anti-government fringe movement descending on Ottawa and Coutts, Alberta, known inaccurately as the “trucker convoy” outside and the “freedom convoy” within. It was of course neither about truckers nor freedom, but about right-wing populism ranging from anti-vaxxer, anti-mandate libertarianism to white supremacy. 

MacKenzie was proudly front and centre at the trucker convoy protest, even photographed shaking hands with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre who later marched with far-right extremists connected to Diagolon on Ottawa streets.

Important explainer: What is Diagolon? 

At the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, MacKenzie was in Saskatchewan where he came up with the Diagolon. Because some of the more Conservative provinces and Republican states tended to more broadly oppose government mandates, he made up a fictitious country running from northwest to southeast across North America from Alaska to Florida including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Texas, South Dakota.

“I kind of found it amusing that there was this kind of geographical divide,” he told SaskToday in a 2024 interview in which he said he thought it was self-evident that it was all a joke. 

Of course, that was all well after the fact, which anyone would say because if it wasn’t a joke, it was sedition.

There is a well-circulated photo of men holding firearms with faces blocked out holding a Diagolon flag. A militia of some kind? No! MacKenzie claims, this was similarly a joke. It was a photo taken at a “family barbecue” with men holding hunting rifles in Viscount, Saskatchewan in November 2021.

If it was a joke, it wasn’t a funny one for conservatives and anti-vaxxers because Diagolon played a role in the use of the Emergencies Act. MacKenzie disavowed any connection to the four men in Coutts with the Diagolon flag who threatened to murder police. Again, who wouldn’t?

MacKenzie and his supporters love to repeat in 2023 and 2024 that it was all a big joke and the media and authorities have been duped time and time again. His closest supporters point to his sense of humour and his horrific tours of duty in Afghanistan, the two combining to give him a dark sense of humour to deal with the horrors he witnessed. 

“I have a superpower of being able to get under people's skin,” MacKenzie is quoted in the SaskToday article.

Aint’ no joke

In truth, MacKenzie is an anti-Semitic podcaster who says the Nuremberg Trials were a “kangaroo court.” 

He faced firearms charges in three provinces for being found with caches of real firearms. He was charged with criminal harassment of Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer Robert Strang, charges that were only dropped due to Charter delays the case taking too long to be resolved.

Getting photographed with Poilievre must have been a joke, too, since MacKenzie also targeted his wife Anaida with racist comments and threats of rape with Alex Vriend on his podcast, Vriend being a white nationalist who only in 2025 disconnected from Diagolon to, as he put it, “tribe and train.”

In Nova Scotia, 13 charges were laid after a video of him brandishing a handgun posted to Instagram led to a raid at his parents’ Nova Scotia home where police found firearms, body armour, and prohibited magazines. 

Around this time, Preik’s video in Chilliwack was investigated in September 2021 and he was interviewed three more times before the end of November, but he wasn’t arrested until Jan. 27, 2022. Multiple interviews before an arrest is not unusual, but because it came one day after MacKenzie was arrested for the Nova Scotia firearms case, this was a series of events that some close Diagolon watchers claim can’t be a coincidence.

“This is an important trial,” an individual by the name of Bryan Trottier in Quebec told me in an email on June 30 about the Landon Preik case. “The information to charge him came from a bad actor from the ‘hate group’ Diagolon. Who are an obvious organ of the security services.”

I asked Trottier how he was coming to the conclusion that MacKenzie is working for the federal government, presumably CSIS, at which time he looped in Alexandra Moore who runs the website CanuckLaw.ca, which is a website focused on legal matters since 2020 covers several conspiracy theories. Moore is not a lawyer.

“The point is that the story from MacKenzie – about ratting [Preik] out in Fall 2021 – makes no sense,” Moore told me via email. “He contacted RCMP about Preik to prevent an armed conflict. And that's a story he tells anyone who will listen.

“Jeremy MacKenzie (a.k.a. Raging Dissident) had been arrested for gun charges the day before Preik did, Jan. 27, 2022, but then immediately released. Prosecutors put no effort whatsoever into convicting him.”

Moore said that because Preik was interviewed multiple times in late 2021 but not charged, and he was only charged after MacKenzie faced serious charges, it’s a conspiracy.

“The obvious conclusion one can draw is that Jeremy ratted on him in January 2022 in order to get himself released. It stands the ‘public hero’ narrative he tells on its head. He's just a prison rat.”

PP dragged into it

While the populist anti-government rally known as the “freedom convoy” was embraced by Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre hoping to have red meat for his base and their “Fuck Trudeau” stickers, Poilievre might have made a mistake embracing Diagolon who turned on him. 

PP was recorded by mainstream media and members of a far-right group marching through Ottawa on June 30, 2022. He walked side by side with James Topp who appeared on MacKenzie’s podcast a month prior.

Poilievre never apologized, and MacKenzie later threatened his wife Anaida with gang rape.

The narrative embraced by Trottier and Moore exchanging emails with me is that Jeremy Mackenzie and Diagolon is akin to Grant Bristow and the Heritage Front.

Bristow was employed by CSIS and co-founded and infiltrated the white supremacist group Heritage Front. Bristow was involved for six years, later exposed by a Toronto Sun reporter as being as much contributory as infiltrative. 

I asked Trottier which of these two is the situation:

Is Jeremy Mackenzie the new Grant Bristow, i.e. a CSIS agent, Diagolon is fake, Heritage Front-style? Or Diagolon isn't fake but Mackenzie is just a rat, rolling over on his own community by calling the RCMP about Preik and the LYNX video to get his own firearms charges dropped/lessened.

Trottier responded that “both are true.”

“Diagolon is as real as Heritage Front was ‘real.’

“Diagolon likely started off organically, but MacKenzie was rolled to report on [the trucker] convoy. He was busted for 20-plus firearms charges days before convoy and released on a promise to appear with no statutory conditions, which is absolutely unheard of. Two days later he was at convoy.”

Trottier claims he knows about “prosecutorial and police malfeasance” that resulted in MacKenzie’s charges being dropped because Trottier himself was the complainant to police about MacKenzie’s cases in Saskatchewan and Quebec. 

“His walking free was a fait accompli in both sets of charges, (and the Nova Scotia one to boot) and there is ample proof for anyone who cares to look.”

I pointed out that all this is shoddy inductive logic, going from A to B and concluding C, but Moore and Trottier are adamant about the conspiracy.

Ezra Levant even got on board.

Is the right eating itself?

An obvious rift in the far right in Canada is when pro-war, far-right populist pro-Zionists are faced with extremists who are also anti-Semites.

Enter Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant, one of the former, who heard news of the anti-Semitic MacKenzie having weapons charges dropped. Levant was in Lethbridge in July 2023 for a pre-trial hearing for four men accused of planning to murder police during the Coutts border blockade in 2022. When news of the charges being dropped against Mackenzie broke, Levant shared three words on Twitter: “He’s a fed.”

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) covered all of this extensively, from Diagolon and MacKenzie to Preik to Levant, summing it up most aptly in an Aug. 3, 2023 posting on its site with the headline: “Far-right fighting itself over accusations Diagolon leader is a ‘fed.’” 

MacKenzie responded within 24 hours. 

“So, Jew supremacist media is slandering me with fed jacketing?” Mackenzie wrote on Telegram.

CAHN explained that “fedjacketing” is a term used in activist communities to describe a false claim that someone is working with authorities.

Levant said the four men from Coutts whose trial he was covering are Diagolon followers who started to “live-action role-play” Diagolon’s message, which MacKenzie has claimed was a joke to troll the liberal media. 

Where Rebel Media and Diagolon might agree is that the concept of Diagolon is a joke that was then used by the federal government as a justification for the invocation of the Emergency Act during the trucker convoy. This was the position of Andy Lee, a Rebel freelancer, and is “a narrative that MacKenzie and Diagolon also embrace,” CAHN stated.

It’s all very confusing and bizarre, but that’s the rabbit-hole problem you get into in the conspiracy theorist community. If you don’t believe in science, if you believe the government is evile, and that nothing is a coincidence or simple correlation, and if the threads are all connected, good luck not going crazy trying to decide who is trying to control the world and ruin your life. 

Insert puppet-master meme here

I asked Trottier about the CAHN article on this topic discussing the Levant-MacKenzie spat.

“They are both grifters, but Ezra is right about Jeremy being a fed.”

As for Moore with her CanuckLaw.ca site, she along with Trottier are convinced by one anecdote or another that MacKenzie is either a CSIS agent or a paid consultant.

“The sheer amount of evidence, both concrete and circumstantial, that Mackenzie and his hate propaganda operation are at very least State-adjacent is very concerning, and arguably the bigger story here in contrast to a kook making videos with improperly stored long-guns,” Trottier told me, referring to Preik in Chilliwack as the “kook.”

MacKenzie has indeed engaged in ongoing behaviour, including holocaust denial and illegal firearm activities, but he keeps skating away from criminal charges. In fact, as of June 2024 all charges against MacKenzie have been dropped or withdrawn, according to the SaskToday article.

In response to my above question if MacKenzie is the new Grant Bristow and Diagolon is fake or if he’s just a rat, Moore says it’s closer to the former.

She also points to his multiple arrests, including for firearms that didn’t go anywhere. 

“While not definitive proof, it's interesting that such a public target keeps slipping away. As for the ‘jokes’ about gang-raping Anaida Poilievre anyone else would have been charged.”

Moore points to the concept of “honey-potting” which is akin to the homicide investigator’s Mr. Big scheme, using a fake big player to lure in small or mid-level offenders.

“None of the Diagolon top guys actually work, but they always have money to travel. Donations must be huge,” Moore told me. 

“We can argue all day about how strong any of this is, but there are warning signs people should take note of.”

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Paul J. Henderson
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