Canadian Conservative Party leadership hopeful and presumptive front-runner Pierre Poilievre trades in wacky, YouTube-esque politics. His messaging coddles and encourages conspiracy theory types. He’s running a faux populist campaign, flirting with a dangerous and disaffected cohort whom he can’t possibly ever satisfy — and really shouldn’t try to. But on he goes, fueling noxious, reactionary anger and resentment. This rancor caters to conspiracies that trade in tiny slices of reality, mutating mundane facts into wild fantasies that are far more complicated and absurd than the problems they purport to explain.

One of Poilievre’s targets is the World Economic Forum (WEF), the global nongovernmental organization whose infamous gathering in Davos, Switzerland stands for the struggle between the ruling and worker classes. Poilievre has said that, as prime minister, he would ban ministers and government officials from attending. He has tried to tie former Conservative cabinet minister and leadership contender Maxime Bernier to the WEF. This was perhaps an attempt to prepare a strategy to win over voters from Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada, a bizarre and toxic upstart counter movement to traditional conservatism.

Poilievre’s railing against the WEF is so cynical and transparent that even the Toronto Sun called him out for it, with columnist Brian Lilley pointing out that “[Former Conservative Prime Minister] Stephen Harper wouldn’t be considered good enough for a Cabinet position in a government led by Pierre Poilievre.” Harper, of course, attended the WEF.