I have said over and over, if you treat them with kid gloves they will escalate. In California antivaxxer Shiva Bagheri has made herself famous for allegedly striking a cancer patient and protesting school children wearing masks. We know about how QAnon is going further towards the extremes with their behavior.
However it seems one Canadian woman is an example of what happens when you combine the antivaxxer movement with the QAnon extremism; you get a new variant, so to speak. More here-
Romana Didulo is prominent QAnon figure, whose followers believe she is the true head of state in Canada, Vice News reported. She has spent months promising the execution of people involved in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including doctors, politicians, and teachers, according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an NGO. She has amassed more than 70,000 followers on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, where in one recent message she demanded the arrests of people vaccinating children.
I don’t know Canadian laws. It does seem odd however that I am reading the she has promised executions for months and, uh, continues to with no repurcussions. She has spent a lot of time making threats, which I assume are illegal in Canada, but, here we are. And since nothing was done to her, she has moved onto elevating her already extreme rhetoric.
In a significantly stronger message sent over the weekend, Didulo instructed her "military" to "shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject children under the age of 19 years old with Coronavirus19 vaccines / bioweapons or any other vaccines."
She named Monday 22 November as the day "hunting season" would begin against her perceived opponents, and wrote: "Please, use airports, hospitals, schools, stadiums, and other public venues to hold and detain all traitors. They will stay there until Military Tribunal is held for each one of them until the day they are executed via firing squad or hanging."
Luckily it does not seem anyone actually did what she asked. But it is notable that the article suggests she got a large following precisely because she promised violent recriminations against what she perceived to be offenders. So what exactly is this Telegram, and why is it being used as a vehicle to create a potentially violent army of stupid?
Q: What is Telegram? What do I do here?
Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it’s super-fast, simple and free. You can use Telegram on all your devices at the same time — your messages sync seamlessly across any number of your phones, tablets or computers. Telegram has over 500 million monthly active users and is one of the 10 most downloaded apps in the world.
With Telegram, you can send messages, photos, videos and files of any type (doc, zip, mp3, etc), as well as create groups for up to 200,000 people or channels for broadcasting to unlimited audiences. You can write to your phone contacts and find people by their usernames. As a result, Telegram is like SMS and email combined — and can take care of all your personal or business messaging needs. In addition to this, we support end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls, as well as voice chats in groups for thousands of participants.
Ok. Cool. It is a messaging app and people create channels, so sooner or later she will get reported and Telegram will take down her channel, right?
Q: There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?
All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.
But sticker sets, channels, and bots on Telegram are publicly available. If you find sticker sets or bots on Telegram that you think are illegal, please ping us at abuse@telegram.org.
You can also use the 'report' buttons right inside our apps, see this post on our official @ISISwatch channel for details.
So they will take down bots and sticker sets but not channels? Do I read that correctly? Oh. Well that could certainly foster, uh, an environment.
But monitoring or not, I would think that it is illegal to threaten bodily harm against other people in Canada. I don’t know their law, however that one seems kind of universal in the western world, no?
But dig further and we find that the U.S. is apparently exporting a different kind of viral phenomena to Canada.
Many of her (Didulo’s) followers do not appear to be located in Canada, and her initial endorsements come from prominent British and American QAnon content creators. Of those in Canada, one appears to be Gabriel Proulx. Proulx is a member of the Ontario Provincial Police -- though he has said in the past he is on medical leave -- who has recently taken to appearing on conspiracy-laden live streams promoting a pseudo-legal strategy that, among other things, denies the ability of the police to enforce the law.
If society ever collapses, I predict one of the things the alien archaeologists will be most interested in is to learn is how the internet, a tool that can put information into the hands of anyone with so much as a phone and a wfii connection, existed in an era where the human race became more foolish, and more idiotic.
We can use this tool to learn literally, almost anything.
And humanity is in a fight with itself with people who want to know nothing.
-ROC
I am weak, dealing with a stretch of fatigue I have been unable to pinpoint. We continue to monitor for cancer recurrence. This is the only living my health allows me to earn and I appreciate you. My newsletter is unaffected. Sign up here to subscribe! It publishes every Wednesday and is full of original reporting, laughs, and fun!
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-ROC