A man calls the neighborhood station to warn the police that a murder will be committed: they will have to recover the body of Liberal MP Marwah Rizqy.
Posted at 2:53 p.m.
How did we get there ?
How to explain this violence, these threats, this ferocious hatred which poisons the Quebec political climate?
Thursday morning, Marwah Rizqy accused conservative leader Éric Duhaime of “channeling hatred and anger” with the aim of entering the National Assembly.
The day before, the MP had argued that “several people in recent years have experienced frustration with the pandemic. Maybe he has wires that touched. »
Maybe so, indeed.
There are many sons who touch each other, for two years. Enraged people throwing stones at Justin Trudeau, others threatening to hang François Legault, others chasing Jagmeet Singh, insulting him copiously…
All these people have one thing in common: they are disconnected from reality. Convinced that politicians are driven by the worst designs, they feel invested with a mission.
Last week, Canadians got chills when they saw video of a man yelling at Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. But in his twisted reality, this man saw himself as a hero.
It is no coincidence that the police advise candidates to wear bulletproof vests during the election campaign. She knows that the online madness is increasingly spilling over onto the streets.
It is enough for a conspirator to decide to turn into a vigilante, like the armed American who burst into a pizzeria in Washington in 2016 to free the child prisoners of a network of Democratic pedophiles…
Just Tuesday, a radio station in Quebec offered its listeners an 18-minute segment on pizzagate, presenting this absurd conspiracy theory as a very, very likely reality. “It is true that it is suspicious in green joual”, commented the host.
The era of post-truth, we have both feet in it.
So many dumb theories are circulating on social media – and now on the radio – that many of us can no longer distinguish this toxic talk from objective, verifiable and verified facts. There is no longer a common conception of reality.
In the United States, millions of Americans believe that Donald Trump had his election stolen. They firmly believe in it. Thousands of them violently stormed the Capitol to right this injustice. A few lost their lives. Dead for a big lie.
In Quebec, we are not there yet… but we are getting there.
For the first time, in our country, a political formation is courting the vote of the conspirators. And it works.
Nearly 50% of voters who say they want to vote for the Conservative Party adhere to conspiracy theories, revealed this summer a study by the UNESCO Chair in the prevention of radicalization and violent extremism.
Half of Eric Duhaime’s potential voters would therefore be more or less conspiratorial. It is enormous. And not at all reassuring.
Two weeks ago, M.me Rizqy has drawn torrents of hate online after he suggested Mr Duhaime clean up his candidates. One of them compared vaccination to rape. Several others shared misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media during the pandemic.
To date, the PCQ has dropped only one candidate, Jessica-Victoria Dubuc, who had crossed the line by writing on Facebook that several “should be shot”, including “Bill Gates and his clique of globalists”.
The candidate had crossed the limit set by Éric Duhaime: hate speech. Apart from that, in the name of freedom of expression, the Conservative leader lets his candidates say just about anything.
***
Shortly before the start of the campaign, Mr. Duhaime submitted to the microphone of Paul Arcand that his training did not have the monopoly of the “cracked”. That is.
Not all PCQ candidates are stuck in a parallel world. Many oppose health measures on principle and not because they see it as a plot.
The fact remains that we have never seen, in Quebec, so many candidates from the same party sharing such an altered vision of reality.
As we know, the PCQ is largely based on the anger and frustration generated by the health restrictions imposed during the pandemic.
But this party is also based on the lies relayed by those who believe that this pandemic is only a pretext used by the “elites” to bully the people and deprive them of their freedoms.
And that, in the current climate, is dangerous.