The Ideological Work of Trump’s Force Multipliers in Canada
An examination of how a Canadian minority leverages wedge issues to defend imperialist interests
Trump’s force multipliers in Canada are not all cut from the same cloth. Some are workers, but few are minimum-wage workers, let alone temporary daily labourers. Many of them have enough luxury time to keep an active daily presence in social media. Some own small businesses; some are academics; some work in conservative media; and others are politicians, whether municipal, provincial, or federal. They do not belong to the same political circles, even if they are all right-wing: some identify with the Conservative Party of Canada, or the People’s Party of Canada, or nebulous groups that do not operate in the open. Former members of the Freedom Convoy are the core of Maple MAGA, and are the most prominent online in debates about the US taking over Canada; Alberta separating from Canada, and joining the US; and in denouncing Canada for even thinking of responding to the economic aggression initiated by Trump. They do not believe Canada deserves sovereignty, and therefore it has no right to defend itself.
What I do below is to address many of their varied claims, assertions, and arguments, distilled from several key social media accounts belonging to organizations and individual online activists. I focus on select components of their most repeated arguments and assumptions.
The Alleged Demand for National Unity
Canadian right-wing opponents of Canada defending itself against the US, object to the “demand” for “loyalty” to Canada, and liken it to recent times when governments at the federal and provincial levels exhorted Canadians to show solidarity.
The main problem with this point is that there has been no demand, let alone command, that Canadians duly exhibit their patriotic loyalty and acknowledge their nationalist duties. Patriotism is not being mandated. That they feel that it is a mandate, might suggest that those making such claims have some subconscious discomfort caused by their taking a stand against their own country. They are thus arguing with a voice inside their own heads.
They also misunderstand the Canadian majority, and its more militant minority of nationalists. Canadian nationalism, pitted against the US under Donald Trump, and wholly in response to Trump’s unprovoked aggression, sprung up organically. It was not organized and there were no top-down impositions. This takes us to the next point
“Mass Formation Psychosis”
If you take the Canadian-David’s side against the US-Goliath, they are quick to turn around and accuse you of being “captured”. Apparently all it takes to “capture” some people is a mere “demand”. This is not credible political or psychological analysis. It’s just rhetoric. The fact is that Canada has long had either suppressed or overt antagonism, mistrust, and resentment toward the US, expressed in either nationalist or plainly anti-American forms. It’s not new, which is thus contrary to what being “captured” suggests. We are dealing with the heavy weight of history, and not something improvised by a politician or invented by a media outlet, only yesterday.
Opting for amateur psychoanalysis, Maple MAGA types clumsily misappropriate a number of concepts that were meant to be used as analytical tools, and not as blunt weapons or insults. Not that Mattias Desmet’s work on “mass formation hypnosis” is particularly convincing, relevant, or useful, it nonetheless furnished the anti-Covidian movement with a vocabulary.
Collectively felt anger and indignation are normal fight responses experienced by all functional social groups—they are not “hysteria”. Being angry at a particular reality, is not denial of that reality; mobilizing to counter a reality cannot mean one is oblivious to reality; acknowledging a threat when a threat is made, and intended as a threat, is not like hearing voices. In other words, nothing about the nationalistic Canadian response to Trump involves “psychosis”.
The people accusing Canadians of “mass formation psychosis,” because they exhibit patriotism, are not consistent in sticking to their own narrative, and they repeatedly undermine it. When polls come out showing that the Liberals are making the greatest political comeback in recent Canadian electoral history—that is when the “mass formation psychosis” accusation comes out. When other polls instead show the Conservatives still in the lead and on track to win a majority parliament, the “psychosis” claim is nowhere to be heard or seen.
We therefore see that the term is deployed in a partisan manner, when politically expedient. Besides being a tool of partisanship, the accusation does something else: it bestows distinction. The ones accusing others of being “caught” in “mass formation psychosis,” imply that they are better than the alleged psychotics, they reside on a higher plane of reason and logic—they are the superior people. This claim sits well with individuals who can be inordinately smug, too enchanted with their own utterances, and convinced by their own mockery to examine themselves critically.
There is another problem, however. If patriotism is a form of psychosis, then what is treason?
Reality Denial by Design
Trump is cast as the Great Punisher by some of the Canadian ultra-right. Trump has come to deliver justice, by humiliating “the Liberal establishment”. Conversely, Trudeau is the great evil—and of course because Trudeau is all of Canada (more on this later), then all of Canada must be punished. Some even resort to patronizing terms, casting the US as the parent and Canada as the child needing punishment. Even Trump’s tariffs will have a cleansing effect, magically combating “corruption” in Canada. They conveniently dismiss Trump declaring the “War on Covid”; the US’ militarized response to the coronavirus, under Trump; Trump’s much vaunted “Operation Warp Speed”; all the efforts Trump made to enforce lockdowns at the state level; his praise for using ventilators; and, his relentless championing of the very same mRNA shots that his Canadian supporters say they oppose.
Instead the Canadian ultra-right takes great pains to deny reality at every step, in real time. If Trudeau meets with Trump, in person, and is then followed by numerous Canadian Ministers and officials shuttling back and forth between Ottawa and Washington—over a period of weeks, now months—they complain: “Trudeau has not tried diplomacy”. Just one day after Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs on Canada (and all other producers of steel and aluminum), his Canadian sycophants actually complained that Trudeau was trying to provoke a trade war—yes, a trade war, initiated by Trump, with Trump breaking his agreement with Canada after just one week.
I will not call their reality denial techniques, psychosis, because it is too deliberate for that; nor is it a case of pathological liars lacking self-control. These rhetorical tactics are intentional, by design, and they mimic actual psychological warfare tactics outlined over the decades in US Army manuals.
Stuck in February of 2022
Those attacking Canadians for showing patriotism make a number of erroneous claims. First, those being attacked are the people wanting to defend their country, and thus themselves, from unjust economic and political aggression. The basic principle at work is that of self-defence—which is the very same principle invoked by those who resisted the Covid mandates. Second, self-determination and pride in self: these are also the very same principles espoused by those who protested the mandates.
Aside from choosing the wrong target, Maple MAGA narratives pick the wrong time. To be more specific: their diatribes against “Team Canada” (which is an array of parties and ideologies, from across Canada) are that “these are the same people” who supported lockdowns, the freezing of bank accounts, vaccine mandates, and the litany continues.
The problem is that they are not the same people. Very clear to everyone now, and especially to Justin Trudeau himself, is that Canadians turned their backs both on the Liberals, generally, and Trudeau, specifically. Moreover, Trudeau’s last two electoral wins were marked by his losing the popular vote to the Conservatives—it was always a small minority of eligible voters that backed Trudeau, which makes generalizations about “these people” highly problematic. By the spring of 2022, not only had most of the worst Covid restrictions begun to be brought down, but most Canadians turned their backs on getting a third shot, especially after the Omicron wave made a mockery of the vaccines. Those in the anti-vax movement cheered as the numbers kept coming out showing declining vaccination rates, across the board, not just for Covid.
Who are “these same people”? Where are they? When?
Painting a static image of a dynamic situation is always a serious mistake, and a basic one. Not only is the support of Canadian voters for Liberals in flux, so is their support for climate policies. All the main Liberal contenders are now promising more oil pipelines, and no carbon taxing. While I would not take them at their word, the point here is to note how their words are changing—dogma is crumbling.
Therefore, attacking the Canadians of February, 2022, is attacking a moving target: the Canadians that supported and reelected Trudeau, want him out; the Canadians that voted Liberal, massively moved in favour of the Conservatives; the Canadians that turned out in huge numbers for the Covid shots, stayed away in equally huge numbers as soon as the third shot came out; pro-vaccine Canadians stopped vaccinating their children; the Canadians that wanted no more oil pipelines, want more oil pipelines; the Canadians that wanted carbon reductions, want more domestic energy projects; the Canadians that want climate change to be a central focus of policy, now want economic growth to take precedence.
You say you hate Canadians—but which Canadians? When? In fact this is the constant complaint from the ultra-right: “Today you support X, but yesterday you were against it!”. That’s right…so which one is your target?
Inversion and Deflection
Some in the Maple MAGA camp misrepresent what is happening in Canada as somehow a rebellion against Trump’s return to the White House, as if there was any pretense of stopping or reversing that. It is, however, an interesting assertion for what it hides beneath it. Remembering that this camp is the flip-side or mirror image of Trudeau, then if the proposition is that Canadians are rebelling against Trump’s return to the White House, then this means Maple MAGA is identifying with the January 6, 2021, goons who stormed the Capitol. If one side wants to see Trump never return, then by default the other side wants to see him never leave.
To make ideological space for a US annexation of Canada, the ultra-right claims that Canada is already “dead”—they decided this, on their own, for all Canadians. And if Canada was really “dead,” how is it able to respond collectively to the US? Canada is then suddenly alive enough for some extremists to express desires to see it “annihilated”. They keep shifting their metaphors and similes, and the lack of consistency and analytical focus shows that they are either deflecting or flailing. They have opted for throwing everything at what they perceive to be the problem, but then they are not clear about what is even the problem: is it that Canada is alive, or dead?
The Canadian ultra-right praise Trump’s return to American isolationism and its contempt for foreign entanglements. Then one would think that they would have no problem with Canadian retaliation of such an extent that it helps to usher the US on its way to becoming an autarky. Right? Wrong. Canada is somehow wrong for further disentangling itself from the US, and thus disentangling the US from Canada.
If one claims to support isolationism, then at least pretend to be consistent—so that intellectual fraud is not so easily and immediately detected. Instead, the ultra-right directly parrots its American counterpart, by repeating this same pattern over and over again:
The US should just cut off Canada (or any other country).
Leaders of the target country respond: “OK, we’ll be seeking greater independence then”.
“But you still need us!” Trump’s minions cry.
Misdirection and Class Bias
It could be a case of reality denial, but it is more likely a case of deliberate deceit, and some of the most transparent propaganda one can find online, in other words, it is very crude and amateurish. The typical talking points include the following:
Canadians are so illiberal and intolerant for not engaging in discussions about joining the US as the 51st state. (Here there is never any answer as to why those who want to be part of the US do not just move there, without dragging the rest of the country with them when the majority are opposed—which is itself an illiberal and intolerant position.)
Trump never used the word “annexation,” so it cannot be annexation. (This is juvenile denialism. Trump spells out annexation when he talks about absorbing Canada as the 51st state.)
Trump never said it would be a military takeover, so it cannot be “annexation”. (The use of military force is not a defining feature of annexation. Trump spoke openly about using economic coercion to make Canada the 51st state, and that is annexation by definition.)
If only Canada had used diplomacy, there would be no trade war. (Trump repeatedly said there was no negotiation, no concessions, and nothing Canada could do to avoid tariffs. Canadian diplomats, in numbers, went repeatedly to the US in person. A group of all premiers was met by a junior staffer.)
If only Canada would fix its border and stop fentanyl production. (This ignores what Canada is doing and what it proved it was doing, by directly sending video evidence to Trump’s team. It also assumes that the normal response to border issues is imposing tariffs, and it buys into the War on Drugs rhetoric that such production can be totally eradicated—which has never happened in the entire history of pointless drug wars.)
These and more talking points, recited by a group of accounts pushed by Musk’s algorithm in Twitter, always find 100% of the fault with Canada. They justify all of Trump’s actions, which they blame on Canada. While defending Trump at all costs, they push for ending Canada’s sovereign independence. When taking time off, they talk about the WHO being a threat to Canadian sovereignty—without any apparent sense of their own cognitive dissonance.
They wail about Canadians booing the US anthem at sports events in Canada—this has been another of their key talking points, about how “classless” Canadians are for booing an aggressor. When directly rebutted, they switched to confusing messenger with message: thus the anthem is not being booed, but rather the singer. “What a disgrace!” they shout in feigned outrage. Perhaps they would have been happier with Canadians parking their trucks in the singer’s driveway and honking their horns for, let’s say, about a month.
This Maple MAGA sliver of the Canadian right claims that it was opposed to the lockdowns and mandates, because of all the businesses that were shut down and the jobs that were lost. Then what about Trump threatening to produce the exact same outcome with a trade war? They go silent on this question. Did they stop caring about workers? Did they ever care? Were workers and their jobs just useful for a rhetorical scoring of points? How many funding campaigns were started by the anti-mandate camp to support workers who had been suspended without pay, or fired, and suddenly found themselves unable to meet their living expenses? Many millions of dollars were found, very quickly, to support the Freedom Convoy—but I know of no crowd funding campaigns that were organized to support suspended and fired workers.
Many of the more vocal ultra-right characters tend to enjoy inherited wealth, with endless free time on their hands. Of those that I personally encountered, I cannot remember meeting one that had an actual job. In fact, they detested and resented workers for “not doing their own research” and submitting to vaccination—as if people working all day long, or even extra long during Covid, had all this bounty of time to sit at their laptop from sunrise to midnight. “Go live in the country,” they preach, “grow your own food,” and “live off the grid”—this is the advice being given by rich kids to hard working Canadians, as if most workers had the means to do any of those things. I even found one advising people to “move to Florida,” for which you need to be able to invest a minimum of US $1.5 million in order to reside permanently. Rest assured: workers matter for nothing to these people, they are mere cannon fodder, and far more than they are for the “Liberal establishment”. (For more on the class biases of such groups, see this article.)
Among the wealthier, activists-at-leisure, what sympathy did they show for workers who felt forced to succumb to vax mandates, and who then suffered devastating health consequences? Often, they laughed at them. They gloated, as if it was a personal victory to see them suffer. In one group they repeatedly joked about taking their 4x4 vehicles and driving over the victims’ graves in the cemetery.
What would explain some becoming such monstrous sociopaths? Many things, among them: imitating the tyrants they opposed, thus becoming like them. However, one explanation has to do again with class bias: they felt superior to the victims. They “did their own research,” so they were better than those who devoted all their time to the struggle to make ends meet and look after their families. One thing to know about such groups is that they are home to Social Darwinists, and for them the vaccination campaign was an obviously welcome exercise in eugenics, where the unvaxxed would win the unofficial “Darwin Awards”.
We are the Victims—Now You Must Pay
The members of the vax-resisting ultra-right are now perennial victims, consumed by a grudge that is distorting everything they think and do. They recall how Trudeau (but we need to add: a host of Conservative and right-wing provincial governments too) antagonized a minority in Canada who refused to get the shots. Everything is reduced to what happened during 3/11. That experience is the experience by which to measure and frame all other possible experiences. The result? Having suffered under 3/11, they are now ready to suffer even more because of Trump, but will blame it on Canada.
This attitude is a specifically Canadian ultra-right problem, because nowhere else that I know of—including the US—did those harmed by 3/11 stop being proud of their country, nor did it stop them from being ready to stand up for themselves. The ultra-right, anti-vax quarter of Canadian politics fills its chest with pride about standing up to one thing, and then caves on the next. How does one explain such an obvious contradiction? Because it was always about Trudeau alone. Everything they did was with the thought of sticking it to Trudeau, including their gratuitous and opportunistic venture into “health freedom”. That is the only way one can explain their standing tall for themselves in one instance, and then advocating mass surrender in the next.
Canada’s ultra-right, Maple MAGA crew of defenders of fascism and advocates of oligarchic totalitarianism, have a simple message for Canadians: lay down and surrender. What presumably inspires their preferred response to the US, is the same response their Freedom Convoy had when the police cracked down: to sit down and get beaten to a pulp. One has to worry about followers who are masochists, and leaders who are sadists, because as Erich Fromm warned long ago this is exactly the authoritarian character structure that flourishes in situations such as Nazi Germany’s.
The fact that much of this is a reaction to divisive forces unleashed by the Trudeau regime, cannot be denied or diminished. It would be impossible to expect full national unity in the best of circumstances, let alone after the worst of circumstances. Indeed, had the advocates for national unity really been interested in unity, they could have at least tried some form of acknowledgement for the harms they did during 3/11, starting with formal apologies. By never doing any such thing, that opened the door to the kind of reaction I address next.
Canada is the Government
Opponents of any response or retaliation against Trump assume that “Canadian nationalism” equals “Team Canada” equals “Team Trudeau”. For them, everything revolves around Trudeau, or the Liberal establishment. Given that Canadians are still tending to prefer the Conservatives, it clearly does not follow that to oppose Trump means supporting Trudeau and the Liberals. What dominates in Canada is very simple binary thinking, where things are sorted into neat little dichotomies ready to generate visceral contempt. Non sequiturs are the order of the day, because the point is to attack, not to make any sense.
The more nuanced positions evade almost everyone. For example, that one can be a Canadian nationalist, and never once call for “unity”. One can also be a Canadian nationalist, and have nothing to do with any political party at all—in fact, that might be the only viable route. One can be as much on Team Panama, Team Greenland, Team Mexico, Team Gaza, as on Team Canada—all at the same time. In fact, one can be an anti-imperialist without having any personal relationship whatsoever with a country under attack. If Trudeau says he is against American bullying, well good for him, and thanks for endorsing our position even if so late—and that is largely his business, it has no bearing on what I would think or do. Wanting to defend what is one’s birthright—one’s citizenship, one’s country—need not suggest that one is “proud” of one’s country. I can even be ashamed of my country, but not for that does it follow that I agree with handing it over to Donald Trump for free.
But then we come to a series of fallacies. One of the notable ones is that a country is its government. This might be a distinctly Canadian fallacy because, as I mentioned above, nowhere else in the world did people’s suffering at the hands of the authorities during 3/11 lead them to deny their nationality, their country’s nationhood, or to lose the will to defend their country—which is always bigger than any one or a series of governments.
Another logical fallacy is that someone who is wrong about one thing, must therefore be wrong about everything. If that were true, we would all be wrong, and only wrong, all of the time. Liberals in Canada could be wrong about everything during 3/11, and still be taking the right position against Trump—a position that, by the way, is enshrined in international law.
Speaking for All of the Unvaccinated
One of the problems I had from very early on with the Freedom Convoy, was the leadership. Where did they come from? Who were they? Which organizations that defended the right to refuse the shots were in communication with them? What was their agenda? What was their strategy?
At present, ex-leaders and spokespersons of the former Freedom Convoy are active in Twitter, denouncing Canadians for “disrespecting” the US anthem; condemning any moves by Canada to defend itself; and generally repeating all of Trump’s talking points as if they were factual truths.
As this approach has earned them scorn, they have tried a different approach: bringing back up everything that was unjust and wrong about the Canadian Covid response, and re-introducing memories of the Freedom Convoy. They hoped to shame Canadians into silence—but this backfired, horrendously. In response, other Canadians are raining down torrents of invective on the heads of the Freedom Convoy, trashing it like never before, and framing the leaders as “the traitors they always were”.
This is a tragic outcome. Standing and presuming to speak for all those who refused the shots—which includes myself—and then marshalling all of us into the corner of Trump and annexation, is an unforgivable and gross act of betrayal and misrepresentation. They are now damning not just the Freedom Convoy, but all of the Canadian health freedom movement (whatever that may have been). They have succeeded in turning the Freedom Convoy into a grotesque object to be reviled by all, punched down deeper in the trash bin of history.
And talk about the bad politics of it all: they have successfully provoked widespread condemnations of the former Freedom Convoy and its leaders, at the same time that the behemoth of all lawsuits still makes its way through the courts, the one brought by citizens of Ottawa. If the courts are downstream of politics and culture—a line we heard repeatedly during 3/11 in Canada—then the leaders and followers are likely looking at being permanently bankrupted as they try to pay $300 million in compensation. Now they have almost guaranteed their defeat in this class action lawsuit, simply by fanning the flames of public rage. Being “unvaxxed” will now be equated with treason—how dare they put people in this position.
For Trump Only, All is Forgiven and Forgotten
It is striking to see the lack of consistency, which reveals a basic lack of honesty. On the one hand, Trudeau and other Canadians are denounced for the harsh measures imposed under the pretext of Covid—nothing is forgiven or forgotten by members of the former Freedom Convoy, Maple MAGA, and the Canadian ultra-right generally.
On the other hand, when it comes to Trump, all is forgiven and forgotten. That includes:
Trump repeatedly praising the mRNA vaccines, and congratulating himself for ushering them in via Operation Warp Speed;
Trump making it his priority to slash restraints on drug development and greatly accelerate FDA approval rates for new drugs, despite mounting adverse events;
his pressure to rush Covid vaccine development, which prevented the FDA from collecting additional safety data, thus directly imperiling the lives and health of people in the US and around the world;
dismissing any safety concerns about the Covid shots;
Trump subcontracting leadership to Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he rewarded with a Presidential Commendation;
not just implementing and championing lockdowns, but also enforcing them at the state level (especially in the case of Georgia);
Trump blasting Sweden for not locking down;
signing the CARES Act, which directly led to increased inflation and debt, and economic decline;
authoritarian rule that led to the financial disaster that was Operation Warp Speed; and,
militarizing the Covid response, by turning it into an official war effort.
“But Trump never mandated the vaccines” his defenders in Canada point out. Trump never had to: his term in office ended as the shots just started to be rolled out. In addition, Trump was not aware of any opposition to the shots, thus any mandate would have been redundant in his mind: “When I was president, we had no, people were not fighting the vaccine. Incredible. Everybody wanted it. Everybody wanted it. There was nobody saying we don’t want it”.
Of course the most extreme, and extremely absurd defence of Trump’s imposition of Operation Warp Speed was that it saved Americans from being put into FEMA camps. Deluded followers of “Q” tout this—enough said.
Self-Defence
First you advocated for the right of people to defend themselves against mandates. But now you turn around and insist that nobody else has the right to self-defence, when it comes to imperialism. Some of these people believe Canada is both “spineless” and yet wrong for standing up to the US. It would take some exceptional imagination and skill to resolve this contradiction, and Maple MAGA does not have either.
Having previously wrapped themselves in the Canadian flag, many of these people on the right now resent those who carry it. “It’s cool to be Canadian again” is how one person described his feeling of being in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy, but now that has completely changed. It is now wrong to be Canadian.
I think the politics of distinction are at work here too: only the discerning, all-knowing, superior minority has a right to claim self-defence and nationhood. They thus complain when Canadians do not stand up for themselves, and then complain when they do—thus Canadians are always the losers, no matter what they do.
Such positions are gaining no traction at all with the wider Canadian public. Those holding such positions seem to now take pleasure in being marginal, which they might be confusing with being special, a cut above the rest (but living at the bottom of the political barrel).
And it’s all a great pity. Finally we have arrived at a point where the Canadian mainstream accepts that we must defend ourselves, that the dignified position is to fight against unjust impositions. We have a real opposition to imperialism, which is always the major threat to any country’s freedom and democracy, as none of these can exist under foreign control. It’s a pointless loss too, for the Canadian right-wing, because once Democrats are in power again in the US, Maple MAGA will be the first and the loudest to protest any closer ties between Canada and the US—and once again they will be sidelined as opportunistic hypocrites. The smarter approach would have been to create a coalition now to cement basic principles of dignity, integrity, and freedom as the basis for a new Canadian charter.