The common thread is too often QAnon

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/10/2020 (1429 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT does the recently foiled plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have in common with a pickup truck smashing through the wrought-iron gates of Rideau Hall and a plan to capture and execute Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

Or, for that matter, with anti-mask demonstrations, deep-state suspicions and a group that has been called this country’s “most dangerous” extremist organization?

The answer is that each was, or is, connected either directly or indirectly with the QAnon inventory of conspiracy theories and the “drips,” or bits of secretive information, dropped by Q, a self-proclaimed U.S. government “insider.”

The Wolverine Watchmen — members of which were arrested in connection to the plot against Whitmer — were certainly familiar with QAnon. A member promulgated Q conspiracies on social media, and he also used Facebook to communicate with members of another Q adherent: the Three Percenters.

Established as a racist reaction to president Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the Three Percenters have used the recent racial unrest following the police murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd to propagate a second civil war, which they call the “boogaloo.”

A June investigation by the CBC revealed the presence of the Three Percenters in this country, a boogaloo-templated group that has been known to have had a foothold in Alberta and British Columbia for at least three years.

As far back as 2018, the Montreal-based Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence was warning that the Three Percenters represented Canada’s “most dangerous” extremist organization, and Manitoba resident Corey Hurren, who drove his truck onto the Rideau grounds this past July, was part of an army reserve that identified with both the Three Percenters and Soldiers of Odin — another far-right group that took part in an anti-mask rally in Vancouver last month. Both have Q connections.

Q’s basic tenet, that deep-state forces — led by the likes of the Clintons and Obamas and overseen by billionaire investor George Soros — are attempting to take over the world but are being resisted by Trump, who is fighting a sort of holy war against them, has been invigorated by ongoing racial tensions and coronavirus measures.

The anti-mask and anti-vaxxer movements are also unknowing adherents to Q, who holds that such requirements suppress individual freedoms while symbolizing deep-state oppression.

It’s straight out of the QAnon textbook — a manual, it turns out, that is more and more being read aloud in mainstream conservatism. People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier has previously tweeted Q conspiracies, and this past August Member of Parliament Kerry-Lynne Findlay shared an alarmist video featuring Soros, a Jewish HungarianAmerican philanthropist.

That Soros so frequently turns up in Q’s hate messaging is indicative of the fact that nothing about its conspiracies are original. They’re largely lifted from the 1902 document “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — a fictitious account that claimed to record a late-19th-century gathering of prominent Jewish families who were conspiring to take over the world’s resources and establish a single, global government.

The Protocols, meanwhile, were the multimillennia product of anti-Semitism pushed to the extreme by Social Darwinism, the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair. Deepstate anti-Semitism was already thousands of years old when Nazi Germany began to live out the Protocols, and in Trump these ancient conspiracies found a new champion.

Trump, don’t forget, attacked Whitmer last month, telling a Michigan crowd that the state would be better off if it “had a governor who knew what the hell she was doing.” The Wolverine Watchmen didn’t need another invitation.

What they had, and what QAnon’s other affiliated groups have right now, is license. There are people in serious positions of power in both the United States and Canada who not only tolerate their views but accommodate them, even share or adopt them. But their conspiracies come from somewhere, and they lead somewhere, too.

The most obvious destination is that often cited in 1930s Germany. But the QAnon conspiracies can also produce contemporary, premeditated actions such as the Whitmer plot and Hurren’s apparent effort to assassinate the prime minister. They can also result in the re-emergence of diseases through anti-vaccination and mass outbreaks of COVID-19 due to anti-masking and pandemic-denial.

It’s all connected, and connected through QAnon. No conspiracy exists in isolation. When one thread intertwines with another, and then another, and another, the rope becomes all the more durable and difficult to cut.

Jerrad Peters is a Winnipeg-based writer.