This whole sordid incident highlights a big problem for Canadian conservatives.
The trolling and mockery of people at a Canadian cadet camp (including a teenager) by Hegseth started with posts from alt right Canadian "influencers," following a now familiar pattern.
It doesn't take these anger merchants of the Canadian right very long to figure out that there is a *much* bigger market for their bile in the United States.
The US is 8x our population, but polling suggests that the percentage of Americans who are tuned into MAGA style populism is at least 4 times greater than Canada.
So by producing content that appeals to the MAGA base, right wing Canadian content producers have a huge incentive to speak to an adjacent American market that is orders of magnitude larger than their accessible audience in Canada. That gets monetized through higher engagement numbers, and if they're really lucky, invitations to appear on MAGA media outlets that build their brand.
One way of doing so is content that mocks Canada. That appeals both to the small cohort of perennially angry hard right populists in Canada, plus the much larger number of Americans prone to believe that Canada is a socialist dystopia under the thrall of the Chinese Communist Party, etc.
The Hegseth post followed a similar pattern. Right wing Canadian quisling posts mockery of Canada, it ricochets around the US online right, gets on the radar screen of a social media staffer in the Trump Administration, and voila: a post from the Secretary of War body shaming young cadets in Vernon, BC. High fives all round!
In this case the US traction came from the "Pleb Reporter" account of libertarian live streamer Nick Belanger, who was one of the Maga North / Alberta separatist content producers given free red carpet treatment at the
@CPC_HQ Convention earlier this year.
One prominent Conservative MP (who should know better) said he was "proud to welcome these content creators, these citizen journalists who serve to uphold the truth" to the Convention.
If that is really the attitude of the Conservative Party towards these unpatriotic anger merchants, it should get used to a very, very long run in opposition.
Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. A positive, patriotic conservatism that focuses on the concerns of the broad mainstream rather than these marginal voices of division can win back the confidence of Canadians.