QAnon Canada: quieter, subtler

QAnon in the U.S. has taken on the militaristic quality of a religious crusade with Q as the prophet and Trump as the Messiah.  In Canada, the response has been more muted.

image: National Post

QAnon has been wildly successful and expanded beyond what the apocalyptic prophet Q intended. The identity of Q is speculative s/he could be the online avatar of the American pig farmer Jim Watkins or someone connected to Watkins. Supporters are called “Anons.”

The success of QAnon has been its skill in connecting unrelated ideologies into a tangled narrative.

QAnon has brought together incoherent groups into a big-tent scheme, complete with flowcharts of the “theoretical functional relationships” of the supposed cabal of pedophiles that is operating an international child sex-trafficking ring, and a Sephirot Map of the Pharaonic Death Cult. British writer Hari Kunzru explains the appeal of QAnon:  

“Yet despite its incoherence, there is, in a strictly aesthetic sense, something sublime about it, or at least about the experience it is trying to represent, the experience of scale and complexity, of a world that is beyond the capacity of the human mind to apprehend (Harper’s magazine, January, 2021)”.

At the gut level of QAnon is a primal fear that children are being murdered and trafficked for sex.

This gnawing primal fear is not new. The groundwork for QAnon was laid in a 1980s book titled Michelle Remembers. The book sparked the “Satanic Panic” —the belief that Satanists were hidden among us, abusing and murdering children. One sensation case took place In Martensville, Saskatchewan, where nine people were charged for being members of a satanic pedophile ring. One man was eventually convicted of sex-related charges, but no such satanic ring was found.

QAnon in Canada still has the sex trafficking of children angle at heart but is subtler. The organizer of the QAnon Canada Facebook group is a mild mannered auto-glass repairman in Elliot Lake, Ontario. Blain McElrea told Walrus magazine that his passion is “an information project” that builds bridges between truth seekers. His inclusive vision of QAnon’s prompted him to start subgroups for religious devotees, New Agers, and UFO-believers.

“Basically, all of the bad things that the New York Times says about us—I am making sure that I’m not plugging into any one of those negative labels that they’re talking about,” said McElrea.

QAnon Canada is quieter, softer. Marc-André Argentino at Concordia University has discovered a new phenomenon he calls “Pastel QAnon.” It evolved from lifestyle influencers, mommy pages, fitness pages, diet pages and alternative healing. The pastel-coloured websites express pro-Trump, racist and anti-Semitic views.

Canada’s Anons are community leaders. In the Maritimes, a yoga teacher interrupted her Instagram feed to post a four-minute lecture to her more than 1,400 followers about a coming mass spiritual awakening—after COVID-19 is revealed as a distraction—and how the satanic cabal is about to be overcome by Trump, who belongs to the “team of light.”

McElrea had 4,000 members in his QAnon Canada group before Facebook shut it down. When I tried to find it, the following message popped up on Facebook:

“This search may be associated with a dangerous conspiracy movement called QAnon. Experts say QAnon and the violence it inspires are a significant risk to public safety.”

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Trump’s big-tent coalition of the deluded

President Trump has assembled a ragtag rabble of misfits into “Trump’s Army”.

Trump’s Army storms the U.S.Capital. Image: Los Angles Times

The disgraced president was able to unite marginalized groups in a way no other president has done. Believers in alien abductions, the Deep State, QAnon, the Proud Boys and the Illuminati all found a home in the White House.

Trump brought those on the fringes of society to prominence. Not only did he elevate these groups, he embodied their alternate reality. He epitomized a deranged mentality.

Political commentators struggled with Trump’s brand of leadership at first, calling it populism –an appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. It’s now clear that Trump’s leadership defies historical labels.

I could never figure out whether President Trump was delusional or a liar. Did he really believe the untruths he was telling or was he purposely telling untruths? Now I realize that the truth doesn’t matter. What seems important to me –whether something is true or not- is inconsequential. For Trump’s Army, the truth is a trifling matter of little importance.

It’s a rare moment in American history when an alternate reality has gripped the nation in a big-tent coalition of the deluded.

Trump’s Army is nowhere on the political spectrum of left and right. Sure, Republicans were seduced by visions of power but right-wing issues such as abortion, small government, low taxes were not key to Trump’s win. Delusion was the key to his success.

The alternate reality of Trump’s Army is outside the material world. It consists of far-right conspiracies such as QAnon which alleges a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump. It proposes that Wayfair Furniture (a real company) was involved in a sex-trafficking ring involving children.

Antifa is a convenient straw man. Trump set up Antifa as a dangerous organization with the intention of defeating it. He can revel in the glory of defeating something that never really existed.

Illusions will die hard in the Republican Party.

After Trump’s Army invaded the Washington Capital last Wednesday, some Republicans had trouble processing it. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was convinced that Antifa infiltrated the march. She went on Fox News and said “A lot of it is the Antifa folks.” Palin said she had seen some “pictures” that convinced her.

The big tent of fringe groups is fundamentally unstable. Eventually, real events happen that can only be dealt with people with a grip on reality.

The only way Republicans can gain control of the White House is by returning to their appeal to the right end of the political spectrum. By appealing to Trumps’ Army, Republicans risk losing the White House again.

Trump’s Army still poses a real danger.

An internal FBI bulletin warned that more violence is being planned: “Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols from 16 January through at least 20 January, and at the U.S. Capitol from 17 January through 20 January,”

If Republicans condemn Trump’s Army, they risk losing the fringe element. Good riddance, I say. If they continue to feed the Army’s mania, they risk sending America into a civil war that pits the zombie-like Trump’s Army against rational citizens.

Shared delusions in Lee Creek and the USA

It’s amazing when two or more people share the same delusion. You have to wonder how that’s possible.

image: The Victor Voice

Look at what happened in Lee Creek. Police were called to the small community on Shuswap Lake where they found two men barricaded inside a house, firing guns at imaginary creatures. The men were relieved when the police arrived because they were surrounded by hundreds of wild animals. They told their detailed observations with police:

“They described in detail having seen cougars kill deer and moose in the front yard,” said Sgt. Barry Kennedy in a news release. “They reported seeing the cougars drag the dead deer and moose up into the tree canopy, where the dead animals were purportedly still hanging. They also believed there was a pile of dead bears in the backyard (CFJC Today, Nov. 25, 2020)”

Well, you might say, we all share a reality of the world we consider to be true. It’s the only way societies can function. Who’s to say what reality is true and anther delusional?

That’s the beauty of the scientific method: investigate and gather evidence.

Police found no piles of bears and concluded that the two men were suffering from a “health crisis.” Their shared reality was a delusion.

In the U.S., and Canada to a lesser extent, millions of people share the perception that the COIVD-19 pandemic is a political ploy. Jodi Doering, an emergency room nurse in South Dakota, told CNN of patients who refused to believe that they were dying of COVID-19. They preferred to believe that it was lung cancer or pneumonia because COVID-19 didn’t exist.

“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’ And when they should be… Facetiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred,” said Doering.

Why would someone die of COVID-19 believing that it doesn’t exist? Well, their president told them so. The Outgoing President (OGP) said that after the election over, the virus would simply disappear. You see, the pandemic is just an election ploy by the Democrats.

Where is the evidence to support that claim?

If the RCMP were called to the emergency room in South Dakota, they would be justified in concluding that the COVID-19 deniers were suffering from a “health crisis.”

It’s all part of parallel information machine. In one of the parallel tracks is the news covered by reporters whose job it is to dig up the facts and investigate claims. The alternative track to the news is the opposite; I’ll call it “swen,” news spelled backwards. What would be facts in the news is conjecture in the swen. What is an investigation in the news is a conspiracy in the swen.

Swen has a magical quality to it. You can bring truths into existence just by saying they are so.

Look at what happened when a supporter of QAnon tweeted that Wayfair Furniture was involved in a sex-trafficking ring involving children. Bingo. It was true. Believed by millions.  It was even circulating in Kamloops social media circles.

QAnon, itself, became swen after a mysterious one or more people said it was true.

What the QAnon believers of the Wayfair swen is a fiction within a fantasy. The fantasy is that QAnon is an underground network of Democrat pedophiles. The fiction is that Wayfair is selling children, not furniture.

Like parallel lines, these parallel realities will never meet. One of the “gifts” of the internet is that millions of swen believers live in a delusion totally foreign to news followers.

There aren’t enough RCMP to round them up.