Anyone who was worried that Elon Musk had turned Twitter into some sort of alt-right hellscape can relax. It is still very much a welcoming place for hysterical left-wing conspiracy theories popular among the “#IStandWithTrudeau” crowd. Lately, they’ve been obsessed with spreading nonsense about Anaida Poilievre, wife of Pierre Poilievre, being some sort of foreign agent sent to destabilize Canada, possibly at the behest of Stephen Harper.
It’s all incredibly stupid and easily disproved, but a handful of Liberal-friendlyaccounts with tens of thousands of followers, have spent the last several days pushing this narrative, or otherwise attacking Anaida Poilievre for expressing political opinions. Twitter is as littered with left-wing misinformation as it ever was.
This most recent silliness appears to have started as an argument about Twitter itself. After legacy blue check marks were removed from verified accounts that were not paying for the new Twitter Blue service, some newly checkless Twitter users suddenly became very offended anyone would pay $8/month to be verified.
As Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre still has a check mark, suggesting he is paying for the service, Liberal Twitter descended into a tailspin of pearl clutching last week.
Anaida Poilievre responded cheekily with a screenshot of former U.S. president Barack Obama’s Twitter account that showed him with a blue check.
That, of course, gave the anti-check mob hives, which was possibly Anaida Poilievre’s intent.
An intelligent woman of colour involving herself in politics is the sort of thing that liberals pretend to encourage. But, because Anaida Poilievre is a dyed in the wool Conservative in her own right, they are using the fact she immigrated to Canada from Venezuela against her.
One typical post reads, “Maybe Anaida is the real story. A Venezuelan asset pulling the strings of her PP puppet.” A reply to that post from a user with over 30,000 followers reads “I think you hit the nail on the head.” That account, which includes the hash tags “#IStandwithTrudeau” and “#teamtrudeau” in the profile also posted “How much do you wanna bet she doesn’t have Canadian citizenship either.”
Plenty of posts are calling for Anaida Poilievre to be “investigated.”
The winding road of this unserious, yet corrosive, conspiracy theory began in March when Liberal House leader Mark Holland claimed that Pierre Poilievre had refused a national security briefing on foreign interference.
In fact, no such briefing was ever offered and Holland apologized the next day, though Poilievre had said he would refuse such a briefing because it would limit his ability to talk about China’s election meddling. Despite Holland correcting the record, the belief that Poilievre refused the briefing, which was never offered, has persisted on social media.
That false view was given new life when Justin Trudeau’s Chief of Staff Katie Telford testified at committee about foreign interference. Poilievre’s comments about not wanting a briefing because it would limit his ability to speak was invoked by Liberals and Telford herself, to argue that Conservatives understand why Telford can only provide so many details.
The committee exchange was convoluted, but online criticism of Poilievre quickly morphed from the merely untrue “he refused a briefing” to the baffling “he refused a briefing because he can’t pass a security check.” That morphed again into “Anaida can’t pass a security check” because of some vaguely defined connections to Venezuela, a country she left when she was eight-years-old.
Don’t worry, it gets dumber.
A photo Anaida Poilievre posted of herself in 2014 with Venezuelan politicians and the hashtag #IDU Reception, which refers to the conservative International Democratic Union, has been seized upon by conspiracy theorists as evidence of the malevolent forces at play, and proof that Anaida Poilievre is a foreign “operative” — a spurious and entirely baseless allegation.
The IDU is hardly the illuminati. It is an organization made up of centre-right parties from around the world, such as Canada’s Conservatives, U.S. Republicans, Australia’s Liberals and Germany’s Christian Democrats. It’s a professional organization, not a grouping of Bond villains, for aligned political parties, similar to other party groupings, such as Liberal International, of which the Canadian Liberal party is a member.
Anaida Poilievre is a long time Conservative staffer, so it is an unsurprising and insignificant detail that she would be at an IDU event.
The IDU has long lived rent free inside the minds of conspiracy minded Liberals and the fact that Stephen Harper has chaired the organization since 2018 has only reinforced their paranoia, as well as their belief in the unfounded idea that the IDU is manipulating world events, including, apparently, the personal lives of Conservative leaders.
This tale of right wing global plots is quite the place to end up when the starting point was Pierre Poilievre being falsely accused of refusing a national security briefing.
Equally ridiculous is the assumption that Anaida Poilievre, who has over a decade of experience working for the Senate and House of Commons, can’t pass a background check.
Those working directly for the House, which includes those working in an MPs office, are required to undergo “background and security assessments by both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.”
Similarly, Pierre Poilievre would have had to pass security clearance when he was appointed to cabinet under the previous Conservative government.
There used to be a word for those who, without a shred of evidence, accused people of colour of being foreign saboteurs.
National Post
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