Ezra Levant reports from Lethbridge on the Coutts 4 truckers—five hundred days in prison without bail for alleged conspiracy to commit murder, weapons offenses, and ties to Diagalon, a far-right group led by Jeremy McKenzie, whose own firearms charges were dropped despite illegal activity. McKenzie’s role mirrors Ray Epps’ in the U.S., raising questions about law enforcement framing, while peaceful convoy protests saw no violent acts, only hoaxes like a false condo fire claim. The trial in spring 2024 may expose inconsistencies in how authorities target protesters versus leaders, testing whether justice is truly blind or politically weaponized. [Automatically generated summary]
I tell you, I've been to Lethbridge more than just about any other city besides my hometown over the last two years because Lethbridge is the closest courthouse to Coots, Alberta, where during the national trucker convoy, there was a blockade of the Alberta-Montana border.
There were also blockades of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge in Ontario, a very important economic artery that was cleared within a couple of days because simply so much trade depends on that route.
Police moved in, and what's interesting to note is they cleared that blockade without the Emergencies Act, without violence.
They just convinced the protesters to move on.
In Ottawa, the trucker convoy's center of gravity, the roads were kept open by the truckers for emergency vehicles.
All that really happened was some parking offenses and some noisy honking that was soon put a stop to by the local judge.
But Justin Trudeau was losing face internationally, so he brought in the Emergencies Act and martial law, something that you know he was itching to do for a very long time.
But here in Alberta, there was another important blockade, and it was different from the other two because Ottawa is a major city, and so is Windsor and Detroit.
But the Coots border crossing is so small you'd almost miss if you blinked it.
It's a small town, really just a saloon and a few buildings.
So there is no large police detachment right nearby.
There's no heavy equipment that you would use to remove trucks or agricultural vehicles.
And so when that became a border crossing blockade, authorities didn't really know what to do about it because they demanded and they threatened that the truckers leave, but they simply didn't.
And one dramatic day, a whole bunch of RCMP walked out in the blistering cold as if their sheer charisma would cause the truckers to leave.
It did not.
Here's footage shot by our team as part of our documentary on the subject.
Look at this standoff.
RCMP moved in this afternoon trying to break up the tense four-day border blockade at Coots, but it backfired.
And at this hour, the standoff in southern Alberta continues.
The truckers were consulting with the lawyer.
I guess the checkpoints that were the RCMP said they needed the extra guys to come here.
So the checkpoints were completely open.
And the entire convoy that were blocked by that checkpoint is now on the way here.
So the RCMP will have to deal with many, many more truckers who are on their way to support this blockage at the border.
My phone, your murder.
I don't know how they're gonna get past this, to be honest with you.
This is something I don't, I've certainly never seen before.
Freedom!
And they are blocking the highway just behind these trucks here.
Basically, like they're with their bodies, or are you talking like are they right now?
They have just moved into this area here.
Well, actually the RCMP and our peers have withdrawn a bit.
Officers were trying to force the first group of drivers to leave this afternoon when a second convoy cut off the rest of the highway bypassing an RCMP checkpoint.
The group says it's refusing to leave until all COVID-19 health restrictions are lifted.
Well, that didn't go well for the police.
And to their credit, they didn't turn violent.
They were simply outnumbered and they didn't have the equipment.
By the way, in addition to truckers, lots of farmers brought their large equipment too.
There simply was no way of bypassing it.
And no truck driver who had any thought for his future would sell out his local countrymen to appease Trudeau's RCMP.
But there was one arrest that was different.
I'll get to that in a second.
But first, let me backtrack and say that there were a lot of charges emanating from that.
And Rebel News and or the Democracy Fund has provided civil liberties lawyers in dozens of cases.
Not just for truckers.
I believe that we're crowdfunding the defense of 32 truckers.
I'll have to check the stats with our external counsel.
But also Arthur Pavlovsky.
You may recall that that Christian pastor came to the truckers in Coots to give a sort of sermon enthusiastic pep rally in the saloon.
And he was put on trial in this city and actually convicted.
The Democracy Fund is appealing that conviction.
My point is, Lethbridge is a hotbed for convoy law.
Rebel News and the Democracy Fund are representing three other truckers who are being prosecuted in this same courthouse.
They include a local town councillor and other people.
Again, the charges are all minor criminal offenses, the sort of thing traditionally called civil disobedience.
Just like Tamara Leach out in Ottawa, also being crowdfunded by the Democracy Fund.
Tamara Leach wouldn't hurt a fly.
She was charged with mischief and other nonviolent minor offenses.
The government's trying to make it into a big thing and kept her in prison for 49 days.
But that was the mission of the Democracy Fund and Rebel News to provide lawyers for citizens wishing to exercise their civil liberties, even through civil disobedience, as long as it was peaceful.
But four men were arrested in Coots, not the three that we're crowdfunding for, but four others.
And the charges there were not minor offenses.
In fact, they were shocking.
And the RCMP knew this, and they were very theatrical about it.
You might recall the explosive headlines, emphasis on the word explosive, a carefully staged manned press conference by the RCMP showing the weapons that were seized as charges were laid for conspiracy to commit murder.
Here's a taste of how the mainstream media covered that.
Coots border crossing clears organizers trying to distance themselves from what could have been.
The biggest thing for me, and I think for the group, is Lex proved this was not violent.
And I want a thorough and thorough deep investigation into these gun charges.
Guns, ammo, and body armor seized when RCMP arrested 11 people in a pre-dawn Tuesday morning raid with charges ranging from mischief, weapons offenses, and conspiracy to commit murder.
Police alleging connection to an organized group said to have a willingness to use force against police if any attempts were made to disrupt the blockade.
Although RCMP have not commented on what group, these patches stood out for the Canadian anti-hate network.
Diagalon is a group that, you know, it started off as almost a joke, but has become kind of a quasi-militia with individuals engaged in weapons training.
Basically based on an imaginary country that extends from Alaska to Florida.
The anti-hate network will be watching to see how these patches play into the larger story of the arrests at Coots, saying they classify D'Agolon as accelerationists.
Who believe that by accelerating the downfall of society by way of assassinations, violent attacks, they would bring about their ethno-state.
So it's been co-opted by groups.
It's not surprising that we're seeing this in Canada.
Counterterrorism expert Mubine Shaikh says there's been a rise in far-right accelerationists in Canada.
Just last October, a former Army reservist from Manitoba, Patrick Matthews, was sentenced to nine years for what the FBI says was his role in trying to trigger a race war with accelerationist group The Base.
For Diagolon, their de facto leader is also ex-military.
And in a Tuesday night live stream from Ottawa, Jeremy McKenzie addressed the arrest.
The cops kicked the boys in Alberta.
They got arrested.
We haven't heard from them.
We don't know what's going on.
There's some rumors.
They're getting charged with some heavy sh**.
He's somebody of a concern because the rhetoric he's been using is very accelerationist.
The idea that, again, the idea of taking advantage and looking for opportunities to kind of essentially fill in the gap if there's some sort of societal collapse and kind of hoping and helping it to move along.
RCMP in Coots arrested two more people on top of those initial 11.
One for attempting to ram police vehicles and another arriving at the protest with guns.
For Shaikh, he'll be watching for more charges.
Yeah, the threat of violence and the threat or actual use of violence against government in an effort to overturn its policies.
That's literally the definition of terrorism.
And curious if the U.S. will be involved given what could have been so close to the border.
I have no doubt that to city slickers seeing that many weapons and that many bullets is terrifying, especially since they were covered in camouflage colorings.
But if you look at those, those are really just bullets and rifles that pretty much every household in the Lethbridge area has.
This is not downtown Toronto where only criminals have guns and typically have handguns.
This is rural small town Alberta.
Everyone has a rifle or a shotgun for hunting, for dealing with varmints on the farm or the ranch is part of the culture here.
So arresting men and finding that they have several guns and hundreds of bullets may be shocking to downtown Toronto and to liberal voters, but it actually was proof of nothing in itself.
Defending Civil Liberties Offenders00:14:45
But that, combined with the RCMP narrative, was exactly what Justin Trudeau needed.
And as you may recall, within a day, Trudeau had his fig leaf to cover up his invocation of the Emergencies Act, a kind of martial law that stripped people of their civil liberties, including seizing hundreds of bank accounts of peaceful protesters.
Well, I'm here in Lethbridge today to cover the trial of those four men.
However, the trial will not actually happen for nearly one more year.
The events in question were in January and February 2002.
It's now almost August 2023, sorry, 22.
It's now almost August 2023.
And the trial is not scheduled until spring.
It's going to be a trial by judge and jury.
The jury has yet to be empaneled.
And one of the things about a jury trial is the jury cannot have preconceptions about the case.
They can't get facts from the media or other sources.
They have to get facts put through the legal process.
Why?
Because certain facts are hearsay.
Certain facts are so prejudicial that it's impossible to get a fair trial.
Sometimes in trials, entire court cases are moved to another city if the local jury pool is too tainted.
To avoid that in this case, the defense counsel have applied for and received a publication ban over some of the more lascivious details contained in part in a legal document filed by police to get the search warrant.
That document is called an ITO, an information to obtain.
It's a document shown to a judge in secret, as in the target of the search warrant is obviously not there.
Search warrants don't really work well if the person who's going to be searched gets a heads up about it.
So the documents that were filed with the court were very lengthy and contain unchallenged accusations by the police.
The trouble with that is that the defense lawyers were not there in that search warrant hearing to rebut or refute or challenge or question or criticize.
So it's a very special kind of hearing called ex parte.
In Latin that means without the other party.
There's a saying in law, hear the other side, audi alterum pardum.
It's really a fundamental in our justice system.
You always have to hear the other side.
That simply doesn't work in search warrants.
And so that is why the one-sided accusations by the police are being kept out of the public eye until the jury is impaneled.
But that means it's impossible for us to tell you the details, at least as alleged by police, about what the four men in question did.
Why were they charged with conspiracy to commit murder?
But no other truckers were charged with those same things.
They were charged with minor offenses like mischief or obstruction.
Why were these four men charged with something differently and how solid are the charges?
As we know from our own two reporters being in the smuggler's saloon for more than a week, that place was crawling with cops, not just police wearing their RCMP uniforms, but obviously undercover agents too, listening, chatting up the men.
In the case of female police officers, maybe batting their eyelashes at the men and seeing what they might say after a few drinks to show off a bit.
And that's another question.
If these men said certain things, was it their true belief?
Or were they hamming it up for police, hamming it up to look tough?
Sometimes people enlarge their stories to be a little more heroic or a little more brave.
The thing is, we can't see that information.
It's either being redacted to begin with or it's subject to a publication ban.
We cannot weigh the facts of this case until the trial begins and the facts are introduced in that manner.
That makes it very difficult and it also makes it difficult for the people gathered here to understand why this case is different in various ways, including one very important way.
These men are still in prison.
Arthur Pavlovsky and Tamara Leach were jailed for an atrociously long period of time, about 50 days each.
They were held without bail, but in the end they did get bail.
There were some conditions put on them.
They're not allowed to talk to this person or travel to that place.
But in the end, they did get bail.
It was an embarrassment for the judicial system, how long it took.
It showed that justice is not quite impartial, and it certainly looked punitive.
But at the end of the day, every other person charged or ticketed or arrested during the lockdowns was given bail.
In fact, most were not arrested at all.
Why are these four men still in prison some 500 days after arrest and staring down the barrel at another 400 plus days in prison?
They'll be in jail a thousand days before their trial.
You know, I saw news the other day that a convicted terrorist, let me say that again, not an accused terrorist, a terrorist who had her trial and was convicted and sentenced and then was let out was charged with terrorism-related offenses again and was given bail.
Canada is the country that gives bail to literal convicted, not just accused, but convicted terrorists on their second offense.
And yet these four men are still in jail.
Why?
Well, that's the trouble.
We can't tell you because to do so would be to breach the publication ban.
I was in court yesterday.
There was a preliminary matter about whether or not one of the four men, when they gave a confession to police, if they were compelled in some unfair manner to do so, the judge ruled on that, saying no, the confession was given freely.
There are preliminary matters like this that will continue on this week.
They may or may not have an important effect on the course of the trial.
It's still in the morning.
We haven't gone in and heard them yet.
But I think that we are in for a long slog.
There is an enormous amount of evidence.
I've seen some of it heavily redacted, but there were literally dozens of police involved in preparing the case against these men.
I understand that there are terabytes worth of evidence, whether it's wiretaps or police reports or just visual observations.
And it's an enormous amount to go through.
We don't know, or at least we're not able to say what's going on, and that makes it difficult for people to understand what they feel is an apparent injustice and double standard.
I think that one of the problems is giving the justice system the benefit of the doubt is something that these people long ago left behind.
They saw how the police became political weapons during the lockdown, enforcing things that have nothing to do with the criminal law.
When police enforced unscientific mask mandates, when police enforced ridiculous six feet of separation social gathering rules, the police torched their credibility.
The justice system, which has yet to strike down a single lockdown law, a single vaccine mandate law, has simply put lost the benefit of the doubt amongst people, or at least people who are dissidents, who are contrarians, who would call themselves freedom-oriented Canadians.
They gave the lockdownists and their police enforcers the benefit of the doubt for the two weeks to flatten the curve.
When it turned into two years, their benefit of the doubt giving was long over.
And so, people here who cannot see the facts alleged against the four accused men certainly aren't willing to believe that it's a fair case.
Only time will tell when the facts come out in trial.
I'm going to go into the court and I'm going to do my best to live tweet the proceedings.
I don't think it will be very substantive.
Like I say, the trial is almost a year away.
But I'll come out and I'll let you know what I see, and then I'll give you my thoughts as best I can without stepping on the publication ban of what I think media made it.
You can see that there are some people here who are upset that Rebel News is not championing these four men.
I've had a few encounters like that.
Someone who, by the looks of them, would probably be a Rebel News supporter and probably was until recently.
They don't understand why we're not crowdfunding for these men.
And in some ways, I can't tell you that because of the publication ban.
What I can tell you is that the money raised by both Rebel News and the Democracy Fund was to defend people for civil liberties offenses, people who committed civil disobedience.
As you may know, because you may be a donor yourself, we did not crowdfund to defend people accused of conspiracy to commit murder.
Now, there is a crowdfunding page not run by us that if you want to give to these four men, you can certainly do so.
And I'm not here to tell you to do so or not to do so.
But I can explain that neither Rebel News nor the Democracy Fund will take our donors' money for men who are charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
And when the facts come out in the trial, you may see for yourself whether or not this was a wise decision on our part.
But you can see the frustration that someone who, just by the looks of them, would probably be a rebel news supporter in every other way, that they don't understand why we're not throwing our lot in with these men.
And unfortunately, it's against the law for me to tell you on camera why that is.
I'm going to go back in now, and I'll come back during a break to give you more of my report.
Oh, hi, I'm back.
It is 12:30 local time.
The court is on a break until 2 p.m. for lunch.
I should tell you that the bulk of what's been going on today is lawyers and the judge going through arcane details on the law of cracking open solicitor client privilege.
Let me explain what I mean.
An email between the Crown prosecutors and the police was inadvertently leaked or given to defense, and they looked at it.
And normally, those sort of things are confidential.
They're private.
You could even call them secret.
But in this case, it was accidentally given.
And the thing about that is the defense counsel claim that it showed misconduct by the prosecutor and the police.
That's a pretty big claim to make.
They say that after these instructions from the Crown to the prosecutor, they changed how they approached the case.
And the defense claims that they did so illegally.
So now the defense wants to crack open more solicitor-client communications between the prosecution and the police.
That is a very rare thing.
It's quite an audacious application by the defense.
I would call it high-risk, high-reward.
I suppose there's really no downside.
I mean, if the judge rejects it, the judge rejects it.
If the judge upholds that application, it would probably be a calamity for the prosecution because when people speak plainly, when they speak candidly, when they expect that their emails will never be seen by the public, they're perhaps rude.
They perhaps take liberties.
Perhaps they swear or make admissions that they would never do if they thought their publications were going to be made public.
That's the whole point of solicitor-client privilege.
It means whatever you say to your lawyer is a secret and no one else can say it.
Anyhow, I'm just trying to explain the matters that were dealt with in court today.
Now, regardless of the result, this is not the trial of the substantive case against the four men, the conspiracy to commit murder.
That trial is not until next year.
This application today is an attempt to absolutely demolish the Crown's case, though, with this preliminary matter.
Anyway, I just want to explain to you what we spent the morning on.
But there's something else very interesting that's going on here.
And you saw a little taste of that when I was doing my morning opening.
And a fellow came up to me who looks like a classic rebel.
And he tapped me on the shoulder.
And I don't remember his exact wording, but he implied that I'm a sellout and I'm just like the liberal media.
I don't think I am.
In fact, I think that in many ways we are Justin Trudeau's enemy number one.
He's always trying to block us, to ban us, to censor us.
I really think he despises us.
And I think in the case of me personally, it goes back a while.
I don't see how we could be accused of that, especially in this context.
Rebel News and our friends at the Democracy Fund are literally defending 3,000 people who had different lockdown or pandemic charges, including dozens of people involved with the trucking convoy.
But the one thing that I said earlier was that our offer to help people is limited to civil disobedience.
We would obviously, and God forbid may it never happen, not defend someone who committed murder or terrorism in the name of, you know, fighting the lockdowns, obviously.
And that's such an extreme example.
But a real life example is we would not use our donors' money to defend someone charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
That's just not within the scope of what we told our donors we would do.
So there's some people here who are very mad about that, who say that we should be taking our donors' money to pay for the legal defense here.
Now, I have tried to learn a little bit more about the cases here.
I've spoken to some of their legal counsel, but it's difficult to get a full read of things.
And obviously, they owe me no candor.
Their loyalty is to their own clients.
I've had, and I don't want to get into the conversations I've had with them, but it did not move the needle for me.
As in I was wondering if maybe this was a stitch-up.
Maybe they were framed.
If maybe there was nothing here, it was all politics.
I mean, who knows if they succeed in their application today, perhaps it'll be proven.
But I haven't seen anything to that effect.
In fact, I have learned a number of things that are subject to a publication ban that make me think we absolutely can't get involved with this.
But I think that people here are so dedicated to these men.
Folks' Loyalty Questioned00:08:50
I mean, obviously they're friends and family, but people who don't understand how they can possibly still be in jail 500 days later.
And they've seen the injustices wrought against dozens or hundreds or even thousands of other Canadians, and they say, this is the worst of it.
These people are still in prison.
These people need more coverage.
Now, Rebel News has covered these folks.
But I think they're mad that we're not cheering for the individual people rooting for them and funding their lawyers as we have been for 3,000 others.
And I want to be very careful about what I say because, of course, I don't want to violate the publication ban.
But I also don't want to violate the personal conversations I've had, including with one family member in the court today that was absolutely heartbreaking.
And I listened very carefully to her and what she said.
And I asked some gentle questions I put to her, some of the accusations from the Crown, and she absolutely denied them and said, in no way is this, does she recognize these charges?
Her son would never do that.
He was a good young man.
Absolutely, she's shocked by this whole thing.
She thinks it's, like, I really listened, and this woman's heart was so full of sorrow.
And imagine not being with your son for 500 days and knowing another year plus or almost another year will go by.
And so I was very moved by that.
But I asked her a couple of questions.
And I'm not going to tell you her answers because it was a personal conversation.
But let me put the questions that I put to her.
Let me put them to this larger group.
When you have a conspiracy to commit murder, that means people are united in some sort of plan.
That's what a conspiracy means.
I suppose conspiracy doesn't necessarily mean it's dark or evil, but of course in the criminal setting, it does.
So what's the network that holds these four defendants together?
What's the club or the gang or the terrorist group that, or like the hell's, are they all hell's angels?
No, not at all.
Are they with al-Qaeda?
No, of course not.
But there was something, and this came out very early in the media, that the men and some of their weapons had the symbol of a made-up joke group in Canada called Diagalon.
It's an absurd meme.
It's a joke, a prank, really.
Diagalon being this theoretical country that would diagonally go across North America and it would be this alt-right place.
And it was, I think it started as a joke, as so many goofy things do.
And The trouble is, I think people started to believe in it.
Or at least if you're going to Diagalon meetings, if you wear a Diagalon crest, if you talk about Diagalon, then maybe it's not a joke anymore.
Maybe it's actually a thing.
And so maybe these pranksters and jokesters at Diagalon created out of thin air the narrative that the prosecution here needed.
And certainly that the media needed.
Now, by the way, I'm not referring to anything subject to the publication bans here.
The Diagalon insignia.
How about unblocking me and be a good reporter?
See, this is one of the folks here.
This is one of the folks here who is rebelling against rebel news.
But could you do me a favor and do your own show and let me continue to talk to my folks?
Nathan Levine MP, member of parliament, registered as a candidate.
But he's actually not an MP.
Correct.
I'm a candidate.
Okay, so give us a break now.
Talk to your own audience, and I wish you good luck in your approach.
Thank you very much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Rebel, Rebel, everybody.
All right.
So there are some folks who are very upset about things, and that's one of them.
He calls himself an MP.
He's not.
And listen, I understand why people are very upset about things.
And it's because these men have been in prison for more than 500 days.
I don't exactly understand that fellow's beef, but there are some real edgy contrarians for whom Rebel News is not rebellious enough.
Now, I'm not sure if they've crowdfunded any money at all.
I'm not sure if they've done anything.
I've been to this courthouse, I don't know, a dozen times over the last few years.
So many times they've actually accredited me as an accredited journalist here and let me sit at the front row.
I really have been to Lethbridge more than just about any other city in Canada.
And in fact, in the background, you can see behind me is Arthur Pavlovsky.
His back is to me.
He's talking to a crowd.
I've been to this courthouse a half a dozen times for Arthur alone.
So I'm not quite sure what Rebel News could be doing that we're not doing other than funding the defense for these people, which we will not do because it's outside our scope.
But I think I know what animates that guy.
I mean, I think he wants to get some of our audience, and I think he wants some of our reputation that we built up over eight years.
And that's fine.
I mean, that's the nature of the internet.
He wants to be an influencer.
It's a bit weird that he calls himself a member of parliament when he's not.
But what I'm sensing here is that people who are desperate for justice and don't understand what's going on have reached out to this Diagalon group and their kooky leader named Jeremy McKenzie.
Now, Jeremy McKenzie had a reputable past in that he served our country in the Canadian Armed Forces.
And that should be mentioned every time his name is referred to.
But he has set up an explicitly racist organization.
I think it's as a joke.
But he's gone beyond a joke to really providing the missing glue for those on the left who would accuse conservatives and populists of being terrorists.
And it's my belief, and we'll see if it's borne out in trial next year, that the four men here, they were, there's a phrase in the internet, LARPing, L-A-R-P, live action role-playing, that they were sort of pretending to be in the Diagalon, and they got the patches, and it wasn't really a thing, but it was a pretend thing, almost like Dungeons and Dragons, except for one day in Lethbridge, and in Coutz, Alberta, their make-believe came true.
And they weren't just talking tough about Diagalon.
There actually were cops everywhere.
And so, you know, some of the evidence, and again, I'm not referring to anything learned through publication ban material, but the firearms and the bullets, which is fairly normal for country people and rural folks in small town, suddenly they're transformed from being, oh, that's just a country boy and his rifle and bullets, to, oh, there's a Diagalon patch there.
This is part of some uprising revolutionary war.
I guess what I'm saying is Diagalon, which is a fake joke, because of course when it comes to hatred, demand exceeds supply.
That's why there's so many hoaxes about racism and so, because the media narrative needs it.
But Canadians just aren't hateful.
Canadians aren't violent.
There was not a single act of violence in any of the convoys other than the RCMP shooting our reporter, Alexa Lavois.
But the Diagalon gave that to the media.
It proved that there was a right-wing hate group out there that we had to be scared of.
And Jeremy McKenzie loved it.
He loved being on TV.
He loved being the star.
He loved being an important person.
He loved being edgy.
But the thing is, everything he got out of it was at the expense of truly contrarian, truly worried people who are scared about the state of the country.
And it's my theory, and again, I'm not basing this on any secret documents, but it's my theory, based on what I've learned about the men and what I've seen in the media, and frankly with my conversations with one of the family members, that these young men actually went too far into Jeremy McKenzie's scheme, weird, fake group.
And so the police and the prosecutor said, uh-huh, that's the conspiracy.
That's the connection.
That's the group.
They're not Hell's Angels.
They're not Al-Qaeda, but they are Diagalon.
And for all of those who thought it was just a joke, now it's very real.
Capitol Guns Revealed00:03:47
And look, we have guns and bullets.
And normally those would just be country boys, but no, no, that's Diagalon.
And I was shocked to learn yesterday while I was literally sitting in this court, it came up on my phone, a news headline, that that same Jeremy McKenzie, the head of Diagalon, the most hated right-wing alt-right group in Canada that is a talking point for every left-wing journalist and politician, he just had a bunch of firearms charges against him dropped.
I mean, he was on video with illegal, restricted firearms, pointing them at people.
He was transporting guns illegally.
He wasn't just a guy who had guns.
For example, some of the guys in here, I know for a fact, had a PAL license.
They had guns, sure, but they were completely legal.
I don't know if there were some illegalities, but I know they had a license.
This Jeremy McKenzie is transporting guns illegally, having illegal guns, pointing guns at people.
Like he was doing a whole whack of things.
Isn't it odd that the leader of the Diagalon isn't in jail for 500 days, but these pawns on the chessboard are in jail for 500 days.
I tell you, it sure looks like a Fed to me.
Looks a little bit like in the United States, Ray Epps.
Do you know who I mean?
He was the guy who was exhorting everyone to storm Capitol Hill on January 6th.
Here's a reminder of Ray Epps.
We need to go into the Capitol!
Into the Capitol.
No!
Peaceful!
Zed!
Fed!
Zed!
Fed!
Zed!
Zed!
Fed!
Tomorrow I don't even like to say it because I'll be arrested.
Well, let's not say it.
I'll say it.
All right.
We need to go in to the Capitol.
Face Fed posting?
We need to go into the Capitol.
I didn't see that coming.
Okay.
We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are.
It's that direction.
He's spread the word.
All right.
No, Dave, but one more thing.
No.
When we go in.
Are we going to get arrested?
We don't need to get shot.
Are you going to arrest us all?
Is it absurd to say that Jeremy McKenzie is the Ray Epps of Canada?
Certainly not absurd.
A generation ago, you might recall that CSIS actually created a hate group called the Heritage Front.
And a CESIS agent named Grant Bristow led it.
The man who actually led Canada's most notorious hate group was working for the government the whole time.
He was creating hate.
Even back then, supply did not meet demand for hate.
And so many people profited off that.
Well, during the convoy, it was the most peaceful thing I've ever seen.
It was led by people like the saintly Tamara Leach.
All those truckers in Ottawa, crime went down.
The only crime that was reported were hoaxes, like that one where they tried to claim a trucker was trying to burn down a condominium.
It turned out not to be true.
So demand exceeded supply.
And Jeremy McKenzie and his diagonal was on everyone's lips for be careful, these are vicious, alt-right neo-Nazis.
People Love Rebel News00:02:51
And I think that the four guys here, this is my theory, I think they believed it.
I think for them this Dungeons and Dragons role-playing became real.
And I think that Jeremy McKenzie is the reason that these charges were laid and that these men are in prison.
And he may be the reason that they are convicted.
He gave the prosecution what they were missing.
He gave them the connection.
He invented the fake Hell's Angels, the fake Al-Qaeda.
And what an irony, what a coincidence that the day these men have their hearing is the day the prosecution just decides to drop those charges against the boss of the diagonal.
It's a bit curious, isn't it?
Well, we live in a world of skepticism and contrarianism.
You saw that guy who calls himself a member of parliament or an MP or whatever.
He's really mad at me.
I don't know exactly what he's mad at, but people are mad.
And I'm mad too because I think that our justice system is not as just as it could be.
I've been at this court and I've seen convictions for things that violate the Charter of Rights.
I think that so far not a single court ruling in this country has struck down any meaningful lockdown law or vaccine mandate.
I think that when I went to law school, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was considered a sacred document.
And yet when it comes to real life, it wasn't so.
Our Supreme Court still hasn't bothered to spend a minute on anything, any of these matters.
But at the end of the day, I still do believe in the justice system.
I think it's in trouble.
I think it has been brought into disrepute.
I think it is losing the support of people, certainly in communities like Lethbridge and Coots.
But I think even now, it's the best system we have.
That doesn't mean that Rebel News is going to provide lawyers for people accused of conspiracy to commit murder, but it does mean that we're going to report the facts as we see them, as we're allowed to do, as far as we're allowed to under publication ban.
I think I'm going to end the show today because by the time the next part of the hearing continues and then the time zones will miss the show for tonight, I really don't think anything astonishing will happen.
These are pre-trial hearings almost a year before the court date.
It's interesting in there.
A lot of people love Rebel News.
They've seen us at this courthouse probably, I don't know, 10 times.
But there are some people who love the Diagalon, who love Jeremy McKenzie, and who believe that, well, who believe that terrible wrongs are going on.
We'll see who's right in a year's time when it all comes out of trial.