On Crop Circles and Canadian Conservatives
An exercise in misinformation and the eye of expertise.
Let me start with a gargantuan understatement: things are a bit political here in Canada.
We have a cantankerous neighbour to the south and a cleft asshole here by the name of Pierre Poilievre, keen on repeating the Yankee playbook.
So things are a bit, we’ll say, tense.
Recently, and completely out of character, I have launched into some tirades on Facebook. Gnashing my teeth at anyone too blind to see that it’s completely batshit to support someone like Pierre and having a right-wing, Q-anon psychopath for premier in Alberta is a skidmark on our entire country’s gotch.
Folks don’t appreciate it too much, and that’s okay with me.
I couldn’t help it. What I kept seeing over and over was hateful, dog-whistling for right-wing lunacy. These were the same assholes who were protesting vaccines while I walked into the chemotherapy ward during COVID when my daughter was fighting for her life.
Fuck Trudeau flags, now just printed into Fuck Carney flags. Same assholes, different flag supplier. How incredibly original, it’s almost like you’re too stupid to find a proper cause—you just need any Liberal, a flag (which you’ve desecrated), and a set of truck nuts. Say “woke” a couple of times and voila, you’ve got yourself a platform.
Yet, my old friends and teachers would maintain that’s not what they are saying at all—that this is just conservatism.
Every time they post Jordan Peterson, Rebel News, or make assertions about “government censorship” with no proof, every time they tell you that we are sliding into a more violent society (we are not, under any measure) and we need more law and order (we don’t)—they are lying to you.
You might not spot it right away, but they are.
This is the thing with expertise at some level, the layperson may have no idea they are doing something harmful or backing a hateful ideology. The uninformed will dig in twice as hard to avoid the piercing facts of an expert. Using political aikido to roll out of the way of facts, substituting it with whataboutism.
How can it be that two groups of people see two completely different things in the same picture?
Some of it is surely psychology, some of it ingrained bias, and a lot of it, frankly, boils down to a trained eye and expertise.
Let’s use crop circles to demonstrate.
Crop Circle Chicanery
Recently, I have been doing extensive research, conducting interviews, and writing about a crop circle incident in Saskatchewan. Watch this space in the coming weeks for our release. The crop circle incident occurred 25 years ago, before the days of smartphones, drones and GPS in-your-pocket.
So, it makes for an interesting investigation that uses 35mm photographs with no metadata, spotty news coverage, and even spottier forum posts from ufologists.
During one of my conversations with a former teacher, they off-handedly commented that they wouldn’t know how to estimate the crop circle sizes and damage. They were a retired schoolteacher.
I was shocked, as I knew that there was certainly enough reference material, even in a single photograph from the newspapers, to estimate this quite easily.
Quite a pretty formation, isn’t it? But how big is it, and how is it oriented?
Let’s mark out what we can observe.
Here we see what appear to be swathes of crop, laid out in an even pattern. With quick Google searches and a text to a former farmer, we find that the average swather header was about 25-30’ across at the time.
We see tire tracks leading into the crop formation.
We see another set of tire tracks that appear to be much deeper, with wider tires, most likely from a tractor.
We see a shadow cast in the grooves of the unseeded portion. Saskatchewan is in the northern hemisphere, so the direction of the shadow casting should be north. By reorienting the picture until these shadows point north, you’ll be able to get a better idea of orientation.
So, if we know the swathes are about 30 feet apart, we can start to use some of the circles to estimate their size. For example, if we estimate the midpoint of two swathes with a circle overlapping, we can take a pretty good guess.
I estimated the circle was 26 feet in diameter since the distance between the two red lines would be roughly 30 feet.
Further research found that I was wrong, but I was close. Crop circle researchers measured it to be 24 feet in diameter. So I was close, with nothing more than a single photograph, Google, and a few texts to a farmer.
Neat, right? I hope my teacher reads this and realizes these are all techniques he would have taught me in high school math, I’ve just added some expertise to its application.
It is the identical technique you can use to pinpoint exactly where members of the lunatic fringe, Diagolon, were having a shooting party in 2021.
A non-trained eye might see some dudes in a field.
I see the shadows drawing across the frame, the church in the background, the elevation change in the hills and the wood fence. I notice the colour of the landscape, which would show green grass where they stand, and a dry field behind. At the time, I could pin them right to the spot where they were standing, using only a sun angle calculator and Google Maps.
I also see a black flag associated with a group of armed, hateful men and women.
Do you remember a time when people waving guns around with facemasks and a black flag used to have CSIS show up at your door?
I do.
Or was it only because they had brown skin and spoke Arabic?
What if that black flag the Diagolon fellas held had the Seal of Muhammad and the Shahada on it?
These right-wing nuts are the same crew, the same people, with the same messaging that started with anti-vaxxing and convoy bullshit, now attempting to propel a useful idiot into the prime minister’s spot in Canada.
Purebloods.
Don’t tread on me.
Liberty or death.
These are not nice people. I know because I took some of these pictures myself. I have witnessed assaults, not just by them but by the police too. This is what extremism looks like, folks.
It’s a lot more convenient to look the other way when it's a bunch of white, good old boys, right?
Look hard enough, and you’ll see their symbols everywhere around Poilievre.
Decrying fake news or some “liberal bias” should perhaps be done after you lace your shoes up real tight and head down to a protest with your camera. Go have a look at where your political ideologies really come to clash. Have a look at who supports Poilievre most vehemently. Those are the folks you are aligning with every time you post some hateful shit on Facebook about Carney or scream “Fuck Trudeau” when he’s not even prime minister anymore.
Keyboard warriors, indeed.
So, I’ll ask you heading into this Canadian election season: do you see a hateful group of armed men that support Pierre Poilievre still to this day and that he in return supports back?
I do.
Just because you don’t doesn’t mean you’re right.
It just means your eye hasn’t been trained for it.
Great column Justin. I’m finding the same thing in groups on FB and LinkedIn. There seems to be a real lack of media literacy, even amongst very educated people.