‘The Nazis were right’: What the leaders of Canada’s biggest ‘nationalist’ group really want

WARNING: This story contains distressing content, including racist, violent and antisemitic language.

The leaders of the country’s biggest white nationalist group believe that “the Nazis were right,” that a violent “race war” for Canada’s future is underway and that non-white people should be deported en masse “at gunpoint,” according to an analysis by the CBC’s visual investigations unit.

Second Sons Canada calls itself a “men’s nationalist club” dedicated to “health and fitness, camaraderie, activism and friendly support for those who share our values.” Official posts on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and X show men gathering to train or to demonstrate, promoting the slogan “remigration now” and celebrating veterans and Canadian history. 

But in compiling hundreds of transcripts from podcasts and livestreams posted by Second Sons Canada’s leadership — and hosted on major platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Rumble — CBC uncovered that the group’s official online presence reveals little about the true nature of the organization.

Its leaders welcome neo-Nazis into their ranks, call the official statistics of the Holocaust the product of “propagandists,” use racist slurs and say Canadian politicians should be executed.

Richard Moon, an expert in Canadian speech laws and professor emeritus of law at the University of Windsor, told CBC that several of the statements in these podcasts and livestreams would constitute hate speech under Canada’s Criminal Code. 

Steven Rai, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says the difference between the group’s social media posts and the statements in its podcasts is calculated.

“This is a very deliberate strategy on their part to draw a broader range of supporters into the movement,” said Rai.

Leaders of growing ‘nationalist’ club praise Nazis, say ‘race war is here’

Among the key policy priorities for the group is “remigration,” in which non-white people would be removed from Canada. 

In a video published by the group covering a November demonstration in London, Ont., Alex Vriend, the vice-president of Second Sons Canada, describes remigration as a set of policies that include giving people options to self-deport and create new rules to prevent abuse of Canada’s immigration system.

On his personal podcast, dubbed the RageCast, Second Sons Canada president Jeremy MacKenzie describes remigration as a violent, possibly deadly undertaking involving weapons. 

“I think ‘remigration’ sounds too nice. ‘Rounded up,’ ‘forced out,’ bye-bye,” he said in a September 2025 podcast episode.

“Give me some guys and some weapons and we’ll f—king get rid of them,” MacKenzie said in a June 2024 podcast episode. “We’ll take them up … ‘Get in the truck. You’re going to the airport.’ ‘Make me.’ ‘OK’ – bang! ‘Anybody else not want to go to the airport? … I only had to shoot one, see? Easy.’”

The use of the term “remigration” is an example of Second Sons’ strategy to produce sanitized official communications that mask its true goals, said Rai. 

“Remigration for Second Sons is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing,” he said. “The remigration language is interesting because it’s meant to make ethnic cleansing, which is a concept that shocks people and horrifies them … sound almost benign.”

Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which tracks and studies far-right extremist groups, said Second Sons has grown significantly since its inception last year. He said they have become the “predominant” white nationalist group in Canada.

“Back in October 2025 alone, Second Sons Canada claimed that they had approximately 2,000 people sign up for Second Sons,” he said. “And their agenda, quite explicitly, is ethnic cleansing in Canada.”

Negative or violent statements directed at people with Indian heritage in particular were common in CBC’s review. In one podcast episode, MacKenzie called on police to conduct deportations of Indians “at gunpoint.”

Second Sons’ leaders say a race war isn’t just looming – “the race war is here,” Vriend said in a livestream from October, referring to the group’s martial arts training and military-style drills.

On the social media platform X, MacKenzie has repeatedly urged supporters to arm themselves.

Second Sons has never praised Hitler or the Nazis in its official posts but its leaders’ statements on personal podcasts and livestreams are a different story.

“The Nazis were right to support their own people; the Nazis were right to imply that Germany is for the Germans,” Vriend said in a March 2024 livestream. 

CBC uncovered hundreds of instances of antisemitic speech from MacKenzie and Vriend, ranging from conspiracy theories to slurs — including frequent use of the N-word and terms for Indians — and disparaging comments about the Holocaust.

“I think the Holocaust is f—king hilarious and I refuse to elaborate, because it’s illegal,” MacKenzie said in an October podcast episode.

While commenting on Canada’s laws around Holocaust denial, Vriend said in a livestream that same month that official statistics of the death count of the Holocaust were “given to you by, basically, propagandists.”

Vriend even says Second Sons has “national socialist” — i.e. neo-Nazi — members.

“We are not a national socialist organization, although we do have national socialist members. I’m not going to lie about that,” he said in a livestream last month.

Vriend said he was “very happy and proud” that Second Sons Canada recently merged with a group known as Frontenac Active Club, a neo-Nazi fight club based in Montreal.

Frontenac AC is led by Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, who explicitly calls himself a Nazi in X posts from this year. He frequently criticizes what he calls “Jewish supremacy,” and in one post, he wears a shirt bearing an image of Hitler, wishing happy birthday to “Europe’s greatest son.”

“When you forge a relationship with someone like [Beauvais-MacDonald], it’s pretty crystal-clear that you are willing to accept some of the most noxious members of society into this group,” said Rai.

Still, on personal livestreams, MacKenzie and Vriend are careful. 

“When you’re talking about these things, it has to be, one, spoken about as in a hypothetical of what should happen or, two, what you would do if you had political power and you were using the state to enact these kinds of things,” Vriend said in a September stream. 

If the group does gain political power, Vriend has said, “I’m totally down for executing [politicians], like, legitimately, after they face a fair trial for their f—king treason.” 

CBC reached out to all three men for comment, but none responded.

CBC uncovered one instance where Vriend, the group’s vice-president, laid out the group’s strategy for its official communications aimed at recruitment.

In October, Second Sons mounted several demonstrations outside CBC offices in Regina and Ottawa, holding signs that read “CBC Hates White People.”

In a livestream following the event, Vriend called the demonstrators “professionals” who were “there to deliver a message and produce a piece of propaganda to be disseminated online.”

Vriend also elaborated on how that post — the group’s most popular ever on Facebook, with more than 19,000 likes — brought in interested supporters who might not understand the true aims of the group. 

“There are guys within the club … who have their normie friends coming up to them and be like, ‘Check these guys out, this is awesome,’ which means we’re gaining traction,” Vriend said. “OK, that’s good, but also there’s a lot more to what we’re about than hating CBC, so maybe you should do a little bit more research into our positions before signing the application.”

Rai said this was an interesting case of a “deliberate recruitment tactic” and that Second Sons sought to have a “somewhat friendly and professional face” in contrast to their personal livestreams.

Richard Moon, the law professor at the University of Windsor, suggested that Jeremy MacKenzie’s statement about remigration at gunpoint is an example of hate speech.

“To talk about anybody in that way, indicating that you’ll be willing to use violence and support violence to remove people who are non-white from the country, I don’t think there’s any question that would constitute hate speech under the Criminal Code,” said Moon.

He also said Vriend’s comments about the Holocaust constitute hate speech.

CBC News reached out to several major platforms that host MacKenzie and Vriend’s shows — all of which state that they ban hateful or discriminatory remarks targeting specific groups — to ask about Second Sons’ rhetoric. 

Rumble and Spotify removed some of the episodes flagged by CBC, saying they violated their terms of service. Amazon said that it was reviewing MacKenzie’s podcast. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. 

Methodology: CBC’s visual investigations team used automated code to download all available podcast and livestream episodes hosted by Jeremy MacKenzie and Alex Vriend from 2024 and 2025. The material was transcribed using the AI tool Whisper and queried for keywords using NotebookLM. The resulting clips were transferred into spreadsheets by reporters and manually verified for content and context by listening to the material.