Do you have a friend or loved one who believes they can get out of paying parking tickets, child support, or even criminal charges, because they鈥檝e pledged allegiance to an obscure Scottish lord?
I鈥檓 not kidding. This is a (stupid) thing that people actually believe.
Last month, an Alberta judge dubbed it the 鈥淢agna Carta lawful rebellion scheme.鈥� Supposedly if you pledge yourself to the service of Lord Craigmyle of Invernesshire, then in a burst of legal magic, you鈥檙e exempt from all the laws of Commonwealth nations!
It鈥檚 bunk, of course. The scheme is the latest in a 20-year string of pseudo-law scams, started in the early 2000s by 鈥渄etaxing鈥� gurus who claimed magic loopholes in the law could save you from paying Revenue Canada. A lot of people got penalized, a few went to jail.
You鈥檇 think that would be the end of it. But things just keep getting weirder, and each mutation of these schemes sucks in new victims/proselytizers.
Many people 鈥� potentially millions in North America 鈥� are no longer connected to reality as we know it. They鈥檝e suffered reality damage, and it鈥檚 not clear if they can be healed.
The biggest recent example is the QAnon conspiracy, which is making headway in Canada 鈥� the man who crashed into the Rideau Hall grounds with a small arsenal had shared QAnon memes.
What is QAnon?
It鈥檚 nuts, is the short answer. It鈥檚 about a cabal of Deep State/Democratic Party/Hollywood celebrity folks who control a giant secret international pedophile ring and are addicted to a hormone called adrenochrome that they harvest from captive children, and it all has to do with pizza emojis and the Pixar film Monster鈥檚 Inc.
Really.
The details are so outlandish that you鈥檇 expect only a handful of tinfoil hat wearers would believe in QAnon and its spinoffs.
But after some high profile threats and attacks, Facebook recently took down some QAnon groups. Specifically, it took down 790 groups, restricted another 1,950 groups, 440 pages, and more than 10,000 Instagram accounts.
Estimates for membership in the key groups range as high as a million people. Even if people belong to multiple groups, we鈥檙e looking at hundreds of thousands of people with some level of belief in QAnon.
It used to be if you had an insane conspiracy theory, it cost money and time to promote it. Now the most credulous fraction of the population is available for free courtesy of a Facebook page, a Reddit thread, a YouTube channel. We鈥檝e created tools for connection, and those same tools allow people to create, support, and reinforce dangerous delusions.
This is not a column that has a neat ending, I鈥檓 afraid.
QAnon is a self-generated, leaderless cult with adherents across the world.
Some of them will act on their beliefs, violently. Even if it鈥檚 only one per cent, one per cent of a million people becomes a real threat.
