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Politics

Maxime Bernier’s Mad Meme Express Has Left the Station

Choo-choo.
Image via CP. 

Self-appointed People’s Champion Maxime Bernier is still hard at work jerry-rigging his protest party out of the worst parts of the internet. His intellectually and morally corrupt Conservative ex-comrades have already managed to pick up a new seat in the fall sitting, but Mad Max is not dissuaded. He remains confident that the new People’s Party of Canada will be able to coax other disaffected Conservatives into raging with him against the extremely multicultural machine. Bernier knows he is unbeatable.

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What is his secret? It is easy: Maxime “Legendary Freedom Pokemon” Bernier is a master of memes.

Once upon a time, the prospect of a lone MP single-handed building a powerful nationwide political party out of nothing and seriously challenging government within 12 months would have been laughable. People would have said, “Max, there is no way you can do this.” Organizing a successful federal political party requires a lot of work from a large number of people over an enormous period of time. Even if you have a regionally-concentrated electoral base, a lot of money, a competent campaign team, and significant mass appeal—which you don’t—welding libertarians and white nationalists together seems like a self-defeating political project. Nearly as self-defeating as trying to astroturf a grassroots protest party out in the open like it’s an improv bit.

This is the sort of negativity you encounter from the establishment whenever you try to voice YOUR opinions. But thankfully those days are over now forever. We have memes now and memes are the way of the future. Those can unlock the brain-melting power of viral internet content and harness it to political purposes will be the ruler of the world.

So if you don’t think Bernier has this in the bag, you’re about to get plowed over… by the PPC train.

That’s right—pow! The People’s Party of Canada is going to smash the elitist media and dairy racketeers and seeing different cultures in public, just like the train blows up that snowbank. The narrative is as powerful as that first April Wine riff: Bernier is the Classic Canadian Content missing our crazy world of political correctness gone mad. Nothing screams “a new choice! A new party! A new beginning!” quite like a song from forty years ago and a logo made using the table function in a word processor. (That every commercial rock station in the country has also been required by law to play “Oowatanite” once or twice an hour makes this video a perfect metaphor for the politics of white resentment.)

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It’s a majestic video, and the most beautiful part is that it was a work of love from some fans. Bernier credits it to @CanadaUnited1 on Twitter, a self-described “Anti-Establishment movement, who views our national interests should take priority.” Their website highlights that “our commitment to identifying and adjudicating crimes committed before our time and in some cases during our lifetimes will be part and parcel with our full scale investigation into corruption.” I have no idea what this means but it has something to do with classic rock, Windows Movie Maker, and retweeting Faith Goldy.

Also, here’s some Star Wars, so that the warm lullaby of nostalgia awakens you into Maxime Bernier’s dreamy party of bold new ideas.

Anyway, it’s good. Low production value nonsense posted on social media by an infinite number of identical right-wing cranks so that the sheer volume of content is guaranteed to generate enough exposure and rage-engagement to drive meatspace politics is always funny. We can point and laugh because eventually someone higher up on the production-value food chain will rebuff this sloganeering with their own moderately more popular sloganeering and everything will go back to normal, because this is how politics works in Canada now. There is no punchline.

Choo-choo.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

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