To ultra-traditionalist Catholic Pierre Blanchette and his over 50,000 followers, anti-lockdown protesters, Protestant Christians, and even Pope Francis are pawns in a global Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
Sébastien Roback
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Source: YouTube
The pandemic has been punctuated by the chants of those fighting tooth and nail against any and all public health measures. While COVID conspiracists understandably face a steady stream of criticism, for Pierre Blanchette, a Québécois traditionalist catholic, the movement is not going far enough.
On his Youtube channel, which boasts over 53,000 followers, Blanchette routinely skewers the movement for “turning in circles” and for refusing to denounce the “true enemy” he holds responsible for the events of the last two years:
“There are many of them who are indoctrinated, who can’t even verbalize the word ‘Jew,’ because they know it’s forbidden. I say it, because it doesn’t bother me. I fear nothing and no one, except the wrath of God.”
Instead of directly calling his enemy “Jews,” he often opts for a revolving door of alternative names: the Freemasons, the “master puppeteers,” “the clique,” or even “the masters of the loft” – a reference to a since canceled but popular reality TV show in Québec.
What is consistent, however, is his list of grievances against Jewish people.
According to Blanchette, Jews dabble in slavery, “control everything that is happening currently,” are conducting a thousands-year-long war against the Catholic church, and are responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.
“Since the crucifixion of Jesus, (Jews) have worked against Catholicism and against the West, and they will never stop.”
Blanchette seemingly shares much of the COVID-conspiracy movement’s opposition to public health measures, and pictures found on his Facebook profile show him attending some of their demonstrations. However, Blanchette is predominantly critical of the conspiracy movement on his Youtube channel.
He says COVID conspiracists who refuse to blame Jews for the pandemic are “synthesis Jews,” who “think like Jews,” are obsessed with “corporal pleasures” and only oppose public health measures to “keep the party going.”
He takes specific issue with prominent COVID conspiracist François Amalega, who popularized the wearing of yellow stars at rallies to compare the treatment of unvaccinated Canadians to Jews during the Second World War. When Amalega later took a public stance against wearing them after speaking with representatives of the Montréal Holocaust Museum, Blanchette attacked him for “bowing to the masters.”
Blanchette had previously been on the record calling Holocaust education a form of “brainwashing” used to “camouflage the actions of those above us.”
“The more we talk about it, and the more omnipresent it is in the media, the more laws are put into place according to which you can’t put ... historical facts into question. You can question everything but this time period, because if you do you’re a fascist and a nazi,” he said of the Holocaust in a video found on his channel.
Blanchette focuses much of his animus towards the COVID conspiracy movement’s leading influencers, but devotes his angriest, most impassioned rants to Amélie Paul, an anti-vaxxer and self-proclaimed naturopath. Paul is the subject of a number of videos on his channel, in which he mixes his usual line of antisemitic critiques, along with more gendered attacks, calling her a “hag.”
He is also critical of Éric Duhaime, leader of the far-right Conservative Party of Québec, not due to his political stances, but because of his “militant homosexuality.” In a video found on his channel, Blanchette ponders whether someone who is “on their knees” engaging in homosexual activities can really stand up and fight for freedom.
When reached for comments by CAHN, Blanchette responded that it would be “much simpler” to summarize the statements listed in this article to him “being catholic,” though his beliefs stray far from the catholic norm.
His ultra-traditionalist interpretation of the faith prohibits him from attending mass on the basis that the church has been infiltrated by Satanists. Blanchette also regards Pope Francis as a heretic, an anti-Pope and a “philosemite,” though he consistently expresses his disapproval of Sedevacantism – a belief held by some traditional Catholics which views the current Pope as invalid.
These positions are aligned with radical traditionalist catholicism, a hateful ideology that merges traditional doctrine with the belief that Jews are the church’s ultimate enemy. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, radical traditionalist Catholics “may form the single largest group of serious antisemites in America.”
Blanchette frequently positions himself as a gatekeeper on who is – and who is not – a true Christian. Protestants, for example, are merely “Judaized Catholics” in his view. Catholics who die from suicide, as well, were never really catholic in the first place, and anyone who does not fit his narrow understanding of what it means to be a Catholic, he believes, are anti-catholic.
Much of his beliefs echo those of E. Michael Jones, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist and author, whose book “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit” is lavished with praise by Blanchette. Hailing it as “the best book he’s ever read,” Blanchette goes as far as saying he recommends the tome – which refers to the murder of six million Jews during World War II as the “Zionist Holocaust Tale” – over the Christian Bible.
Blanchette also frequently expresses his admiration for Johan Livernette, a French sports journalist turned conspiracy theorist, who has written about a “talmudo-masonic conspiracy” against the Church. When Livernette was condemned to two years in prison on charges of domestic violence, Blanchette said that the persecution of Christians in the West “had officially begun.”
When the former was freed in October of the same year, Blanchette made a video singing a song celebrating his “jailbreak.”
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