For years now, we have been told how successful the Canadian right-wing social media influencer pundit critics are.
They told us during the Convoy how popular these yahoos were -- because look at all the money they raised. They told us how everybody just hates Trudeau because he's so woke and he doesn't appreciate how Canada has such awful problems and is really broken. They told us how everybody just loves Poilievre's three-word Verb-The-Noun policies and these are just what the country needs.
And we believed it!
Though we kept on fighting the good fight, we progressive lefties still found ourselves wondering if maybe we actually were just out-of-touch elitists who didn't have a clue about what "real" Canadians really wanted.
And we wondered if we should just try harder to pay attention to these social media influencer pundit critics, maybe we should start watering down our unpopular lefty ideas so they would like what we were saying.
Because one thing did seem clear -- that millions and millions of "ordinary" Canadians obviously loved what the Canadian right-wing social media influencer pundit critics were saying, because look how much money these guys are making! Look how many page-views they were getting! Look how many subscribers they had!
This week we found out it was all a lie.
We already knew about a few things, like conservative politicians buying subscriber lists for their social media posts, and bot-farms sending out tweets to support right-wing politicians. We already knew about Russian hackers trying to distort the news.
But this week we found out that so-called popular right-wing social media influencer pundit critics in Canada and America -- bunches of them, whole channels of them! - were just shills for Russia.
And well-paid ones at that.
They were actively trying to undermine democracy and our democratically-elected leaders by lying to us, by creating "content" lies that could be amplified by politicians and also by legitimate media, so that people would believe it.
The Pitchbot gets the tone of this betrayal exactly right:
In this Ohio town, it was tradition: Latin mass, biscuits and gravy at Bob Evans, and then down to the old Russian content factory to make six figures trashing America’s democratic institutions. But now the woke mob wants to take all that away.
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) September 5, 2024
