Cranks Clogging the Courts and Q Commandeering Culture Can’t be Considered Coincidences

Between the anti-vaxxers, the anti-taxers, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the box office being blown away by The Sound of Freedom, there’s little doubt that Western culture has entered a golden age of kookery.

It’s tempting to blame the internet, which is surely an infection vector. A wholesale gutting of the institutions that used to practice journalism has also contributed. People are hard wired to seek information that makes their experiences make sense. In the absence of professional newsrooms covering politics, markets, and current events, amateurs fill the vacuum, and the quickest way to a following is to tell people what they want to hear.

Abbotsford, B.C. residents Jason and Nadia Zimmer, along with daughter Taliyah, very much wanted to hear that they were heirs to a kingdom from the moment the government created their birth certificates. As the Zimmers’ recent petition to the BC Supreme Court explains, their “entitlement certificates,” which supposedly matured when they reached the age of majority, were recently redeemed with Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, along with the requisite notice to the Finance Ministry in BC, and the Lieutenant Governor.

When the Zimmers’ redemption notice didn’t cause Freeland to produce the proceeds of a security that this particular crank lore purports to have been deposited on their behalf at the Bank of Canada upon their birth, the Zimmers filed the suit to make them cough up the bread.

Predictably, BC Supreme Court Justice Gary Weatherill rendered a judgement that described the Zimmers’ petition as:

“…nothing but incoherent, unintelligible nonsense devoid of any viable claim or cause of action known to the law. It is supported by equally incoherent and unintelligible affidavits. It is, by any measure, frivolous and vexatious to the extent that it can be struck without further analysis,”

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gary Weatherill

The Zimmers’ nonsense and its ilk has been grouped into a category called “pseudolaw” with a few dozen other flavours of court petitioners who use legal-sounding gibberish to tell courts that they don’t have any authority over them, and also have to give them whatever they want under the direction of some superior divine or natural authority.

Readers inclined to torture themselves with the specifics of this collective delusion and understand what Canadian courts are doing about it can read the reasons of Alberta Justice J.D. Rooke in Meads vs. Meads, but we don’t suggest they’ll gain any insight. The Zimmers’ petition, taken at literal face value, tells us everything we need to know: they were seeking the proceeds from the redemption of their entitlement certificates.

Pseudolaw was popular in Ireland in the early 2010s, as a burst real estate bubble put a great many Irish homeowners on the wrong side of foreclosures.

Declaring a nation’s courts subservient to common natural law and one’s self a sovereign freeholder has never got anyone out of a bank foreclosure as far as we know, but it’s easy to see how the stunt might appeal to a foreclosee’s sense of justice.

With the economy on a real-estate driven boom, some mortgage broker came by and pointed out to some working stiff that their monthly housing payment could either contribute to their own home equity, or the landlord’s home equity, and sold them on taking out a mortgage, buying a house, and extending the bubble. Then, suddenly, because of something to do with the securitization and re-sale of that mortgage, and the collapse of a market for related collateralized debt instruments that nobody can properly explain, the house is worth less than they paid for it, can’t be rented out for anywhere near the mortgage payment, and the bank that sold them on this swindle still wants their money.

It doesn’t seem fair because it isn’t fair. And the disaffected, who aren’t likely to get any satisfaction from traditional channels, become easy pickings for Crank Chiefs looking to build a following.

Any kind of modern crankery with a respectable number of followers is usually driven by some kind of guru who tells credulous people what they want to hear. They put the time and effort into building a devoted following for the same reasons any cult leader does: money, power, narcissism, sex… But in a post-truth political world, crank constituencies are large enough to add up to electorally relevant voting blocks, creating an added incentive to herd economic and social losers, and crank them up.

Alarmed by having to take these kooks seriously, square journalists like to do exposés about crank gurus and their dangerous, misleading ideas, complete with guest experts on extremism, who are clearly frustrated by their chosen field of study, and deserve to be, but aren’t wrong. The product always reads like someone trying to put out a house fire with a supersoaker, because there will always be a line of crank gurus ready to step up to the pulpit as long as there are flocks of people who believe in their souls that they’re being screwed.

There was no public backlash against campaigns undertaken to vaccinate against polio in the 1950’s and 1960’s, despite the initial polio vaccination campaigns producing alarming and actual side effects out of the gate. The pharmaceutical manufacturers tracked the problems down to a bad batch, made the adjustments and the work continued. There were detractors, but they were never able to gain critical mass, because they had little to offer. People wanted their children to get the vaccine, because they didn’t want their children to get polio, and had good reason to believe public health officials were out to deliver that outcome.

Polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk and his employer the University of Pittsburgh made no attempt to patent the vaccine, enabling the start of vaccination drives immediately after its invention. US pharmaceutical companies earned from manufacturing and distributing the vaccine, but not from the IP, which was never patented.

By contrast, patents on the COVID-19 vaccines, developed with no small amount of government investment, generated billions in revenue for Pfizer and Moderna, and hundreds of millions in dividends for their shareholders, thanks to government mandates that everyone get stuck with it on the taxpayer’s dime. Twice.

As employment cratered, and Wall Street went berserk behind several trillion in freshly printed money, people with reasonable questions about why we’re doing this were told to shut the hell up and take their medicine. If they didn’t understand, they were too dumb and never would.

The average 1950’s person didn’t understand the biology and epidemiology behind the polio vaccine, either. But the public institutions of the time had performed in a way that established a certain amount of goodwill among the public they served. So had private institutions like pharmaceutical companies and the news media.

There’s plenty of goodwill left among the people that government institutions are in a position to tell what they want to hear. Increasingly, those people are landlords, the business community, and the professional managerial class. The trouble is: there are fewer and fewer of them all the time.

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Information for this briefing was found via CBC, Deutsche Bank, and the sources mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.