Who Is Jeremy Mackenzie, and Why Is He In Jail Right Now?

Like many Canadians, until recently I had never heard the name Jeremy Mackenzie. Today most Canadians still don’t know who he is. This is understandable since as a vocal opponent of covid measures, Mackenzie has been heavily censored by the big tech companies.

But Twitter jail is not quite the same as actual jail; for one thing, the latter costs Canadian taxpayers a lot more. While Mackenzie faces the same censorship as everyone else these days, he also appears to be the target of a concerted effort to not only silence him, but to isolate and smear him as well. I’ve compiled some information in case you want to decide for yourself.

So, who is Jeremy Mackenzie, and why does he currently reside in a Saskatchewan jail cell?

Jeremy Mackenzie is a Canadian Armed Forces veteran from Nova Scotia, a comedian, and a founding member of the People’s Party of Canada. After serving in Afghanistan, he retired from the CAF and started a podcast that is equal parts political commentary, comedy, and ranting.  He goes by the handle “Raging Dissident” (formerly “Raging Humanist”) on social media channels, and also streams with friends as “Plaid Army”.

I first heard the name Jeremy Mackenzie in connection to Diagolon, which is essentially a fictitious country borne of Mackenzie’s observation, during one of his podcasts, that there are two distinct mentalities currently existing simultaneously in North America. One of them is geographically concentrated in a diagonal line from Florida to Alaska.

Despite literally being a meme, Diagolon came to be a used as a key argument for the Canadian government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in February 2022 after patches resembling those made by Diagolon community members were found at the blockades in Coutts, AB. Legacy media ran with the story of Diagolon being a “far-right extremist group” even as it became excruciatingly obvious to anyone who bothered to look at their website that it was a joke.

In point of fact, that was part of the joke: Mackenzie and his friends knew full well (or at least strongly suspected) that nobody from the MSM would bother to look.

While humour and podcasting are not yet crimes in Canada, Jeremy Mackenzie was arrested on September 28th 2022 in Nova Scotia, on charges laid July 18th by the Saskatchewan RCMP. The charges are assault, pointing a firearm, use of a restricted weapon in a careless manner and mischief, following an incident in Viscount, Saskatchewan that had occurred in November 2021.

At first glance the charges sound bad and if Mackenzie has truly done anything wrong, I think justice should be served. However, there are a few things about this case that I find curious. First of all, Mackenzie was denied bail on October 7th. Even David Zegarac, who was charged with assault with a weapon after he drove a van into a convoy protest in Winnipeg in February 2022 injuring four people, was granted bail.

Also, if these charges are so serious why did it take from November 2021 until July 2022 for the RCMP to lay any charges at all, and a further two months to make Mackenzie’s arrest? With hours long podcasts multiple times per week, it’s not like the man was in hiding.

With no further information about Mackenzie’s recent charges to be found, I decided to investigate further to answer the question of why he continues to be detained. Here is what I’ve found:

In February 2020, Mackenzie appeared in a video making a statement outside an event where Omar Khadr was speaking in Halifax. Mackenzie was living in Halifax at the time. He objected to the Canadian government awarding a 10.5 million dollar settlement to Khadr in 2017, and had gone to the event to voice his opinions.

Personally, I have vague memories of the case and of feeling in agreement with the government. Thinking back, I don’t remember hearing any other sides to the story, at least none that good lefties like me (at the time) would have considered in any serious way.

As it turns out, Mackenzie was not alone in his point of view even though he feared back then that he might be. In the last ten minutes of his interview on The Strong and Free podcast from January 12th , 2022, Mackenzie tells of having received, the day after the Khadr event, around 1000 messages from Canadians who felt the same way he did.

Presumably, connections between like-minded individuals ensued. Could Mackenzie’s role as a galvanizing figure among Canadians who disagree with certain government actions have anything to do with his current incarceration?

I’m not sure, but what is clear is that the frequency with which Mackenzie makes headlines has accelerated in 2022, specifically following the onset of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa at the end of January, 2022. This article from February 15th 2022 goes into painstaking details about an incident that took place on January 10th, when “the RCMP became aware of a video posted on social media which showed two males in possession of firearms”.

The writer goes to great lengths to report every possible detail around an evening where no shots were fired, and nobody was hurt. Was it a slow news day, or the beginning of a targeted campaign to introduce Jeremy Mackenzie into the minds of Canadians as a dangerous public enemy?

According to a statement from Mackenzie’s letter to the Canadian Senate written sometime after this arrest and before he was arraigned on 13 firearms related charges in May 2022, all of his firearms were obtained legally and stored in compliance with the Canadian Firearms Act.

Furthermore, he asserts that his arrest in mid-January was politically motivated retribution for his outspoken criticism of the RCMP’s conduct during the 2020 Portipique massacre, and that ever since one of his videos amassed close to 750K views he had been under RCMP scrutiny. I have no way of confirming any of this, but it would explain how the RCMP “became aware” of the video from January 10th; a salient detail curiously glossed over in the otherwise long-winded article.

In March 2022, Mackenzie was once again arrested and jailed overnight following a protest against covid measures, this time along with his girlfriend Morgan Guptill (aka Morgan Mayhem). The charges this time were mischief, criminal harassment, and a new charge introduced during the pandemic, that of “intimidation of a health professional”.

Guptill now seems to have become a target herself. In September 2022, she was jailed for four days following a mysterious accusation of having stolen $69.10 worth of gasoline from an Irving station, an incident of which she has no recollection and for which there is no proof.

Her Twitter account is currently suspended, but she posts regularly to her Telegram channel (@MorganMayhem) and has shared many other-side-of-the-story insights in her interview on the Atlantic Underground podcast from October 6th, 2022.

Two of the most important things I’ve learned in the past two years are:

1. to thoroughly question EVERYTHING before coming to any conclusions and

2. to double check-in with myself whenever I’m having a strong emotional reaction to something somebody somewhere said.

I say this now because far and away, the incident that seems most connected, at least time-wise, to Mackenzie’s September 28th arrest is a tweet from Pierre Poilievre that appeared seemingly out of the clear blue sky on September 26th. Poilievre tweeted about “becoming aware” of a discussion Mackenzie had been part of, in which Poilievre’s wife had been threatened.

To be sure, the tweet was alarming. But how did it come to be tweeted?

As it happens, two days before Poilievre’s tweet, another twitter account had posted a brief clip of the exchange to which Poilievre was referring. Poilievre’s twitter account was tagged in that post, and it was also re-tweeted by Global News reporter Rachel Gilmore with the comment, “I hope she (Anaida Poilievre) is okay. No one should ever have to hear themselves spoken about like this”.

At this point I am wondering why, if Gilmore thinks nobody should have to hear themselves spoken about this way, she took it upon herself to elevate the incident by blasting it out to the Twitterverse.

In some ways it’s handy that she did, because now it’s possible to go and verify the source of the information Poilievre was referring to (which Poilievre neglected to do at all) and make the call for yourself whether Mackenzie’s comment was or was not meant as a threat. I would rather see the exchange in its entirety before making any final judgments, but alas, Gilmore did not provide a link to the whole video.

As to the question of whether or not the subject of rape could or should ever be deemed humorous, I’m not an expert comedian so I’ll just refer you here to George Carlin.

Because that really isn’t the point. The point is that an elected official is publicly accusing a Canadian citizen of making a threat, and members of the “official” and social medias are acting like a choir of deranged parrots.

Every article I’ve seen on Mackenzie’s September arrest refers to the Poilievre tweet, even while mentioning that the arrest is not in connection to the tweet. None of them reference anything from the one response Mackenzie had time to type out on his Substack before his arrest on the 28th.

Another salient point here is that what may otherwise have ended as a stillborn joke heard by about 50 people had the opportunity to be reborn as a matter of national interest. Of course, Mackenzie is responsible for his own words. But who is responsible for the midwifery involved in rebirthing them into the public imagination?

To my mind, it was Poilievre who did the most damage to his wife, not Mackenzie. If someone had spoken similarly about someone I love, I would surely have been upset too. But would I then have tweeted it out to the whole country, putting my loved one, an innocent bystander, at the center of this kind of awkward attention?

I can’t help but wonder what purpose this tweet served for Poilievre. Could it have anything to do with Mackenzie’s connection to the People’s Party of Canada? If I were strategizing on behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada, driving a wedge between PPC supporters by smearing Mackenzie at this moment might seem like a good way to garner more support for Poilievre.

In any case, taken together the timing of all these pieces is certainly interesting. The Emergencies Act inquiry in Ottawa has begun, and whether or not Mackenzie would have been giving testimony there, he would most definitely have been providing informative perspectives via his podcast - perspectives we will surely not be hearing from the MSM parrots - were he not still sitting in jail in Saskatchewan.

Whether in the end you like what Jeremy Mackenzie has to say or not, my hope in writing this is that you’ll continue to defend his right to say it. This is the only way that Canada stays free.

To find Jeremy Mackenzie et all:

www.diagolon.org

www.ragingdissident.com

Telegram/Rumble/etc etc

@RagingDissident

@PlaidArmy

@MorganMayhem