Inspiring! The Canadian Far-Right is Falling Apart Because This Guy Can’t Read Court Documents

Thanks to one man’s inability to read legal documents and a simple coincidence, anti-lockdown personalities are at each other’s throats; they’re making debunking videos, posting long diatribes about fake friends, and calling for boycotts of right-wing media. 

The man at the centre of the situation is Patrick King, an Alberta man involved in the Canadian far-right ecosystem for some time. King recently went viral for claims that he was responsible for lifting all COVID-19 measures in Alberta. An interview he gave about it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and celebrated across a ton of alternative media channels.

His claims are, of course, dead wrong. Regardless, they somehow forced multiple fact-checks from legit outlets, including international media organizations like Reuters and the Associated Press. They also provided us with the closest thing we’ll have to a Trailer Park Boys anti-vaxxer special, with his Canadian hockey dad drawl. (Editor’s note: For full effect, we recommend you watch the embedded tweets.) 

Long story short, King got a ticket while protesting Alberta COVID-19 regulations at an anti-lockdown rally last year and decided to fight it. He represented himself in court and tried to subpoena Alberta Health Services (AHS) to provide “evidence” of COVID-19.

In late July, the judge tossed out his case but in its response to his subpoena AHS stated it had no “material evidence” of COVID-19. King seemingly took this to mean the evidence didn’t exist and he just proved COVID was fake—he didn’t; the court docs essentially said AHS didn’t have to produce the evidence (not that it never had it) because it wasn’t relevant to King’s case. 

As luck would have it, Alberta, under Conservative Premier Jason Kenney, was starting to reel back some of its COVID-19 regulations around the same time. King took notice, credit, and a victory lap. 

“It’s not a coincidence that Deena Hinshaw (Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer) retracted all the COVID rules after my court case,” he said in a livestream. 

During his victory lap, King went on The Stew Peters Show, a right-wing online talk show. The show then posted his interview with the headline, “Freedom Fighter Court VICTORY! Ends Masking, Shots, Quarantine in Alberta!” and King’s claims quickly went viral.

Kurt Phillips, a board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network who has been chronicling Canada’s far-right for years, told VICE World News King’s claims spread far and wide.  “It was huge,” said Phillips. “It got really famous. There was even this Australian soap opera actress who was rejoicing that the King cracked the code.” 

After a wave of excitement—and demands to cover King from readers—far-right and conspiratorial media in Canada were forced to push back on King’s claims as they were demonstrably false. Rebel Media published two stories on him “debunking the hysteria,” including a story headlined “No, one Alberta man DID NOT end the lockdown and mask mandate.” It treated King gently but still said he was wrong. That was enough to start a (one-sided) war between the the right-wing outlet and King’s supporters. 

“You have to be a true believer in everything because if you question something that means that you’re not a supporter,” said Phillips. “They all have very big but also easily bruisable egos.”

King appeared to be deeply hurt by friendly media fact-checking him and he turned on Rebel Media. In his pain he and a collection of his fellow anti-lockdown influencers, including Ontario anti-masker Kelly Anne Wolfe, pushed back hard.

In one video, King addresses all the “haters” out there and calls for a boycott of Rebel Media, saying the outlet is “just trying to discredit everything I did because (it’s) jealous.” King says he contacted the right-wing journalists to “bitch them out” and calls them “stupid scumbag media.” He laments he can’t fight the journalists. (It should be noted that King often speaks in Slapshot-era hockey talk.)

“That’s the key to this, guys; we gotta go back to the day where I can drop gloves and punch somebody in the mouth for talking shit,” he says in the video.

King is also extremely offended the reporters said they didn’t know who he was. In response to his tirades, Ezra Levant, who runs Rebel Media, called him “a liar” on Twitter.

Then another blow came to King, when the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), a legal advocacy group friendly to the anti-lockdown movement, felt the need to issue a statement about King’s misreading of the court documents. They were less kind than Levant.

“The video appears to contain several inaccuracies,” JCCF wrote. “It is unclear whether Mr. King fully understands the legal process he is involved in.”

King fired back at these people, telling his followers the JCCF makes money off every ticket issued against COVID-19 activists so it has a reason for the lockdown to carry on. 

Perhaps the biggest blow came from Dan Dicks, another established figure in the anti-lockdown ecosystem, who had a heated interview with King on his show on the right-wing platform Bitchute (Dicks has been kicked off YouTube). In the interview, King walked back his statement that it’s unequivocally “not a coincidence,” but made vague promises that future documents will redeem him.

After the video was posted, King took to Instagram to call Dicks a fake friend and that people are just “all about the drama.” 

“It’s just sad that the people that are trying to tear this down are the people who you thought were your friends or people you thought were in this for the right reason,” he said. “It breaks my frickin’ heart.”

King’s fans are now turning on the outlets who are trying to debunk their “freedom fighter.” In one of their videos, the Rebel hosts plead with their audience not to “shoot the messenger” nor “accuse us of being psyops or controlled opposition.” Their pleas appear to have been ignored by commenters. 

“A majority here seem to think Rebel News is rotten,” one wrote on Rebel’s website. “Maybe it’s because you’re doing what (mainstream media) does all the time and tries to tell us how to think.”

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.