By Tim Bousquet
This item originally appeared as VIEWS in Morning File, April 29, 2024
Richard Starr points to Pierre Poilievre’s recent visit to our provincial border:
Last Tuesday, as he headed east across the New Brunswick/Nova Scotia border Pierre Poilievre stopped to chat with a gaggle of carbon tax protesters parked alongside the highway. He told the group – some of whom brandished flags defaced with “F—k Trudeau” along with their “Axe the Tax” placards – what they wanted to hear. According to the Leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lies and everything he has said about the carbon tax “was bullshit from top to bottom.”
It was subsequently reported that some of the participants in the convoy camp were against more than the carbon tax – vaccine mandates and trans rights for example.
Starr uses that as a jumping off point to details Poilievre’s outright lies about the pharmacare and dental care programs. If you at all care about the truth, please read it.
And while Starr doesn’t further comment on the crew at the border, they’re worth another look. In particular, the association of the protesters with the so-called “Diagolon” group, founded by Jeremy Mackenzie. The RCMP described the group as follows:
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies view Diagolon as a militia-like extremist organization. Mr. Mackenzie described Diagolon as a community of his fans and explained that law enforcement has labelled it an extremist organization because he has been critical of the RCMP. He also attributed the negative perception of Diagolon to work done by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which he described as not credible. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, on hearing his testimony, responded with an affidavit in which it described Diagolon as an extremist organization with antisemitic and Islamophobic tendencies.
As I understand it, Mackenzie says he came up with the word “Diagolon” as a sort of inside joke. Under this telling, it refers to a distribution of like-minded thinkers across the geography of North America, from the U.S. south to the American midwest to the far-right enclaves in Idaho and Alberta. I have no reason to doubt this creation story.
But I’m struck with the resemblance to the German far-right movement called Querdenken, which is often translated as “lateral thinking” or “thinking outside the box,” but sometimes as “diagonal.” Querdenken and Diagolon share the same general political viewpoint, although Diagolon hasn’t become involved in electoral politics. (I don’t know if Poilievre’s visit amounts to an endorsement in one direction or the other.)
In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein dives deeply into the strategies of what she describes as Querdenken-inspired diagonalist appeals from Steve Bannon, a strategy that attempts to pull into the movement people formerly associated with the left, counter-culture types, anti-vaxxers, and the like.
The Diagolon name itself could be completely coincidental, but whether the association with Querdenken and Bannon is explicit or not, it is helpful to think of them as of a kind.
