One of Canada’s More Prominent Politicians Is Sharing QAnon YouTubers

Credit to Author: Mack Lamoureux| Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2019 17:10:59 +0000

Maxime Bernier, one of the more prominent conservative politicians in Canada, is now sharing videos created QAnon YouTubers.

In case you luckily aren’t aware, QAnon is a massive and ever-morphing conspiracy theory that revolves around Donald Trump operating a secret war against the elites. Many have started to liken the community built around the conspiracy to that of a cult.

Bernier just barely missed being the leader of the Conservative Party last year, and subsequently started his own party, the People’s Party of Canada. Since the inception of the party, the politician best known for his obsession with dairy lobby groups, and leaving sensitive government information around his Hells Angels connected girlfriend has been driving deep into the heart of conspiracy country.

The People’s Party of Canada has been inundated with controversies, mainly focused around frequent accusations of racism. Recently, a prominent party executive in BC was alleged to have sent emails that said the party should remove people of colour from positions of power, and a PPC Twitter account shared memes focused on the debunked and racist science of phrenology. This isn’t even mentioning Bernier’s frequent fights with media, and loud dog whistles for the Canadian far-right.

Now, the leader of the People’s Party has decided to drive the people deep into one of the biggest conspiracies of the modern age by sending them towards a prominent QAnon YouTuber.

“Must watch video by Amazing Polly @99freemind if you are preoccupied with rising threat against free speech in Canada,” tweeted Bernier on Thursday. The bio of the Amazing Polly’s Twitter handle, which Bernier linked to, reads, “This is the Great Awakening WORLDWIDE…. *Super Elite* 🇨🇦🇺🇸 #Qanon #WWG1WGA #MEGA.”

The Amazing Polly is explicitly a QAnon YouTuber. The video Bernier shared featured the QAnon hashtag #GreatAwakening and many of her videos namedrop Q, the eponymous centre of the conspiracy. The description of her channel further hammers this home.

“Our entire culture is narcissistic & we are all being thought-reformed through Global psychological warfare and trauma programming….” the description reads. “I make videos about QAnon drops.”

Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, said that he’s come across the Amazing Polly before and described her as a “full on QAnon follower.”

“QAnon, besides being fundamentally detached from reality, does untold damage to the lives of people who follow it,” Views said. “It’s disappointing that any politician would implicitly endorse someone who promotes something so harmful.”

The Amazing Polly has a pretty good following as well, she has 90,000 subscribers on YouTube and her content has been seen almost 6 million times. Some of Polly’s most watched videos are “Q Decode” videos with titles like “Calm Before the Storm – QAnon No Coincidences” and “Trudeau Swamp Global Connections – QAnon Dig.” The embedded video which welcomes users who click on her profile is a QAnon video entitled, “Avenatti, Geragos, NXIVM, Smollett connected! Which Swamp Creature is NEXT?”

A large portion of Bernier’s fan base are users who have a rather large distrust of the media.The particular video that Bernier tweeted out isn’t heavily focused on QAnon but includes her talking about how the recent situation with Vox and Steven Crowder is a “technological false flag,” and how globalists are conspiring to take away free speech.

The majority of the video is focused on proving how Alexander Bissonnette and Brenton Tarrant are not conservatives. She does this by mainly going through Bissonnette’s Facebook likes showing how he likes things like Pizza Hut and Jack Layton, not far-right pages and saying that Conservative MP Michael Cooper proved the Christchurch shooter “was a lefty.” At the end of the video, the conspiracy theorist endorses Bernier.

“You gotta vote PPC, you gotta vote Maxime Bernier, he’s the only one talking about this that makes any sense,” said Polly.

In recent byelections the PPC weren’t able to capture any seats but did manage to pull in over 10 % of the vote in a Vancouver-area riding.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter .

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/rss