The Pierre Poilievre Sycophant Press

The Conservative leader speaks to the converted

Pierre Poilievre does not like speaking to journalists.

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, as cabinet minister, Poilievre was more than happy to ring up journalists and spar — myself included. Back then, Poilievre perfectly illustrated the paranoid media control of his bosses. The Minister of Democratic Reform, as he was then, knew his files, didn’t feel the need to rely on talking points, and was quick on his feet. If only all government ministers were like this I thought then.

Fast forward a decade and Pierre Poilievre is travelling across the country under the cloak of secrecy, refusing to tell journalists what he’s actually doing each day. Beyond the details of a press conference (where he takes just four questions from hand-picked media) and, occasionally, the location of a rally, the Conservative Party has tried to skirt journalists wherever possible.

But Poilievre has been telling some people where he’ll be. For a choice band of ideologically kindred broadcasters and influencers, Poilievre is happy to show up and make time.

On a brief Chaos Campaign, as we arrive in the home stretch of the campaign, I want to talk about the Conservative cheerleaders — who say something profound(ly stupid) about Pierre Poilievre.

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Show up at a Poilievre rally and you’re almost certain to see The Pleb Reporter, a self-styled “YouTube journalist.” When I saw him, in Kingston, he occupied a choice spot on the media riser at Poilievre’s events, holding up his video recorder to get a good angle for the Conservative leader’s remarks. (Since I saw The Pleb, per a fantastic write-up of The Pleb for the National Observer, campaign staff have been ushering him out of the journalists’ pen.)

When Poilievre isn’t talking, The Pleb can be spotted filtered through the crowd, chanting Poilievre’s slogans and insisting that the vote is “too big to rig!” He makes absurd claims about Poilievre’s rallies being the largest in Canadian history: A claim easily disproven.

But it feels true to the The Pleb, and he is emotionally invested in Poilievre in a massive way. When Poilievre hugged him at an event last year and told him to “keep up the great work,” The Pleb was over the moon. He now shares pro-Poilievre (and pro-Trump) memes and content with glee, insisting constantly that the Liberals have lost the campaign and that the Conservatives are on track for a crushing victory. See:

The Pleb is an enthusiastic meme warrior. When he came across this boomer-flipping-double-birds video, seen above, he immediately set about making it go viral. (The Carney-as-Hitler meme is, I hope, unlikely to catch on.)

The Pleb and others in the über-online right-wing rage machine have tried to make this image intently symbolic: An older generation saying fuck you to a younger one. Considering Poilievre is polling well amongst youth and getting absolutely killed amongst the older crowd, it’s no secret why.

The images are not from The Pleb himself, but rather from another strange media figure: Caryma Sa’d, a lawyer who grew a sizeable online following by documenting COVID-19 protests during the pandemic. While she initially seemed to be a progressive critic of the anti-lockdown protests, she soon swung around and has now become one of a constellation of right-wing troll videographers.

I have seen Sa’d at a number of Liberal rallies in recent days, where she and her camera man have heckled journalists and attendees (myself included.) In Peterborough, where she caught the footage of the older gentleman making a rude gesture, she was part of a gaggle of activists — including a pair of people flying FUCK CARNEY and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN flags who were yelling things at the rally attendees. Hence the fuck you from the man in the red sweater.

Never mind the context: Sa’d grabbed the photo that The Pleb used to spin a narrative, one that is now prompting people to doxx the man and remix the footage onto new platforms.

This kind of participatory media-generation is exactly what the Poilievre campaign has wanted from day one. And it’s working.

These are the hangers-on of the Poilievre campaign. Poilievre has not explicitly endorsed either The Pleb or Sa’d.

He has, however, agreed to sit down with Jasmin Laine.

Laine is, according to her Twitter, a “former award winning broadcaster who got tired of being silenced.”¹ She now broadcasts to YouTube, Twitter, and Rumble, having amassed more than 370,000 subscribers.

Her channel, which is less than a year old, can only be described as a jumble of Conservative Party talking points smashed together with all the most tin-foil-hat conspiracist innuendo. She is a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, she thinks the World Economic Forum has “infiltrated” the Canadian government, and thinks that everyone but her is brainwashed.

In a video claiming that the World Economic Forum is moving to end freedom of speech worldwide — stopped in their evil mission only by brave social media truth-tellers like her — Laine says the following:

Jasmin Laine: If there's one thing any of us who are proudly awake right now know, it's that the mainstream media, the powers that be, the globalist elites don't want stuff like this to be spoken about.

And, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. There are plenty of broadcasters out there like Laine. While I roll my eyes at the insinuation that she is a journalist or some brave truth-teller, there are certainly worse media influencers out there than Laine. Is she making people stupider? Yes. But that’s her right.

What beguiles me is that Poilievre has done the pilgrimage to Laine’s condo to sit down for a feature-length interview with the conspiratorial broadcaster.