Canadians like to think of themselves as more rational and less prone to extremes than their neighbours to the south. When the so-called Freedom Convoy — practically a roadshow of conspiracies — rolled into Ottawa earlier this year, some commentators ascribed the phenomenon to runoff from American politics. But conspiratorial thinking is concerningly prevalent among Canadians, many of whom believe in theories involving powerful cabals orchestrating secret plots to dominate the world.
Indeed, Canada has historically punched above its weight in the production of extreme and fringe thinkers. And many of the subjects of conspiratorial thinking prevalent today were developed in part by Canadian conspiracy theorist William Guy Carr. Active in the interwar and postwar periods, he developed and integrated various strands of conspiratorial thought into a grand narrative that he proselytized widely from his Willowdale home — and that continues to inform conspiratorial thinking around New World Orders and global cabals today.
Carr, born in 1895 in Lancashire, England, served as a navigating officer on a submarine during the First World War. He claimed to have become acquainted with Bolshevik conspiracies at age 12, when “two revolutionary missionaries” unsuccessfully attempted to indoctrinate him into the cause. His subsequent investigations into various communist plots led him to conclude that Canada would “play a most important part in the third, and last, stage of their Long Range Plans for ultimate World domination.” According to Carr, that’s what motivated his choice to settle outside Toronto after the war’s conclusion.
Carr established himself as a respected local figure during the interwar era, writing several successful books about his wartime experiences and maintaining an interest in veterans’ affairs by managing the Poppy Fund’s industrial department. In 1937, he received the Coronation Medal for his work with veterans, and King George VI accepted three of his books during the 1939 Royal Visit. During this period, Carr regularly spoke about his anti-communist theories with well-connected organizations such as the Canadian Club. During the Second World War, he was sent on lecture tours by the Canadian Navy and stationed in Nova Scotia and Labrador, where he wrote Checkmate in the North: The Axis Plan to Invade America, about an alleged Nazi plot to take Canada. According to a glowing 1945 profile in the Globe and Mail, Carr retired from the navy after the war as a full commander and went on to assist the provincial government with publicity, planning, and development issues, receiving the nickname the “Admiral of Queen’s Park.”
Segment on The Agenda, March 9, 2022
After the war, Carr organized and presided over the National Federation of Christian Laymen. In a letter to a potential supporter, Carr describes the NFCL as a “strictly non-political and non-denominational” organization intended to “unite the efforts of all sincere Christians” against “the men who secretly direct the World Revolutionary Movement” and to “convert people who have been deceived into believing in atheistic materialism.”
In practice, the NFCL acted as a publishing house, speakers’ bureau, and pressure group, organizing cross-country speaking tours to warn Canadians about dastardly communist plots such as water-fluoridation, which Carr called the “devil’s poison.” The NFCL published a variety of far-right conspiratorial works, including the Carr-edited newsletter News Behind the News, which historian and journalist Pierre Berton denounced in the Toronto Star as a “little hate sheet.” In 1955, the NFCL published Carr’s Pawns in the Game, in which he synthesized various threads of paranoid thought into a grand (and convoluted) conspiracy theory that he dated as far back as Jesus Christ. That year, he put out Red Fog Over America, which claimed to document several Soviet spy rings in Canada.
The NFCL also sold the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (despite its widely publicized 1921 debunking), along with literature by notorious conspiracy theorists including Eustace Mullins, Frank Britton, and Father Denis Fahey. It hoped these works would form the basis of network libraries around the country.
Despite its national ambitions, the NFCL was a small organization with limited impact, and Carr would be a forgotten figure if not for his contributions to conspiratorial thinking and what sociologist Colin Campbell has called the cultic milieu. Although ideas of a shadow establishments and secret plots were not new, Carr helped update older frameworks for the modern age.
Carr, who drew from Nesta Webster, Léon de Poncins, John Robinson, Augustin Barruel, and the Taxil Hoax, melded various existing anti-Masonic, anti-Illuminati, anti-globalist, anti-Zionist, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and antisemitic theories into one millennia-spanning plot for a one-world government orchestrated by the “World Revolutionary Movement.” This WRM, in league with the Illuminati and the “Synagogue of Satan,” was waging “an exact replica of the struggle Lucifer and his followers put up for control of the Universe” — a struggle that, Carr said, would culminate in a Third World War and global domination.
Canada, being a point of interest for Carr’s WRM, plays a prominent role in his output. In various publications, he claimed that: Canada would serve as a “Belgium” to America in the coming Third World War; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation actively promoted the one-world government; the Canadian army was riddled with communists; and the Illuminati was undermining Canadian morality and morale through pornography. In a 1946 letter to the Globe and Mail, Carr warned of a communist “sphere of influence” in the northern hemisphere that they could use to “roll the red fog of revolution and atheism down over the rest of the world.”
He saw that influence manifested in local events and figures. For example, Carr argued that communists had orchestrated the 1932 Kingston Prison Riot to induce sympathies for imprisoned Communist Party of Canada leader Tim Buck, and he reserved particular ire for Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, whom he thought was either an agent or a patsy of the WRM.
Carr was obsessed with fantasies of Jewish global conspiracy. Even for his time, he was notably bigoted: folklorist Bill Ellis points out in Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media that his works “are not paralleled even in the most virulent of anti-Semitic documents from the first part of the century.” According to Carr, the global conspiracy had orchestrated the First World War to Bolshevize Russia and the Second World War to establish Israel — both claims that relied on antisemitic myths of Judeo-Bolshevism and Zionist world control.
International Jewish “money barons” and the Rothschild family figure prominently in this plot, which apparently had its origins with the Pharisees. Carr used The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in support of his thesis, claiming that the document spelled out an ancient plot that had been revitalized by the Illuminati at a Rothschild-organized meeting in 1773 and that the use of the term “Goyim'' throughout actually meant “Masses.” In Pawns in the Game, Carr republished and discussed Our Race Will Rule Undisputed Over the World, a fabricated speech (attributed to the non-existent Rabbi Emanuel Rabinovich) that detailed the coming Third World War.
Carr insisted that he was not personally antisemitic and that he distinguished between the “Synagogue of Satan” and Jewish people as a whole. The idea of fake Jews operating as the Synagogue of Satan, which originates from the Book of Revelations, has historically been used to justify a swath of discriminatory and violent actions against Jewish communities. One of the most infamous examples is the Khazar origin myth, which postulates that Ashkenazi Jews have no real connection to the Biblical Israelites. Carr treats the myth as fact in the second chapter of Pawns.
Carr’s rabid anticommunism fit neatly into the wider Cold War milieu, particularly after the 1945 Gouzenko Affair raised anxieties about Soviet spy rings in Canada. Pawns in the Game sold half a million copies and went through several printings, helping Carr influence both those on the fringe and people who held influential positions: Red Fog Over America could be found on Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s bookshelf. In the 1950s, Watson Kirkconnell, the president of Acadia University and the “Father of Canadian Multiculturalism,” joined the virulently anti-communist Freedom Association of Canada, which sold Carr’s books. In 1956, the NFCL sent copies of an anti-fluoridation pamphlet titled The Devil’s Poison to all sitting members of Queen’s Park; the previous year, Social Credit Party of Canada MP John Blackmore had approvingly waved a copy of Pawns in the Game around at the House of Commons. Blackmore also gave two radio speeches in which he claimed, citing Carr as his source, that some Canadian banknotes featured a demonic visage behind Queen Elizabeth’s head.
Carr was happy to associate with fascists. After the war, he corresponded with former National Unity Party of Canada leader Adrien Arcand and became a close associate of fellow NFCL member and hatemonger Ron Gostick. The NFCL sponsored numerous speaking engagements for both men at which they sold Carr’s work alongside The Protocols. Gostick and Carr’s relationship was close enough that politician Allan Grossman actively lobbied to undermine their influence when they began making inroads with Eastern European diasporic communities. Gostick later organized the Canadian League of Rights, which sold Carr’s work long after his death. Holocaust denier, CLR member, and school-teacher James Keegstra was reportedly an enthusiastic fan of the material they sold. During his 1985 hate-promotion trial, Keegstra cited Red Fog Over America as an influence on his belief in a global Jewish conspiracy; his students’ notebooks contained claims that were traced to Carr.
According to Carr’s FBI files, he sent copies of Pawns in the Game to both J. Edgar Hoover and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A subsequent FBI review of his work found it to be “fascist and predominantly anti-Semitic.” Although a number of Americans wrote to the FBI asking for comment on the reliability and accuracy of Carr’s work, the agency steadfastly refused to answer their inquiries (but it did kindly send interested parties a package of anti-communist literature in return).
Carr died in Ontario in 1959, but his ideas live on in different strains of right-wing conspiracism: Bill Ellis has described Carr as “the most influential source in creating the American Illuminati demonology,” while the philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff emphasizes Carr’s central role in widely disseminating anti-Masonic conspiracies. His work continued to be published posthumously by fringe presses, notably by the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review’s Noontide Press. Carr’s beliefs about the Illuminati influenced John Birch Society founder Robert Welch; Tim LaHaye, author of the evangelical blockbuster series Left Behind, reportedly read at least one of Carr’s books. Passages from televangelist and unsuccessful presidential nominee Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order are clearly inspired by Carr. In the widely read 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper attempts to sanitize The Protocols by removing “goyim,” just as Carr did. Carr also influenced notable conspiracy theorists including Gary Allen and David Icke, and the infamous neo-Nazi Tom Metzger.
Carr’s influence is as sprawling and complex as his grand conspiracy, and his Manichean, apocalyptic worldview remains common today in circles preoccupied with premillennial and dispensational ideas. Concerns about the “Great Reset” and other COVID-related conspiracies gravitate around one-world government theories, and more extreme elements connect the imagined schemes yet again to Satan and his minions (Jews). Carr was far from the first to link communism to Jews, but he played a role in further developing and disseminating the antisemitic canards and conspiracy theories that plague contemporary discourse. Far-right conspiracists dress Judeo-Bolshevik myths in the guise of “Cultural Marxism”; followers of the self-proclaimed Queen of Canada espouse New World Order and Illuminati-related conspiracy theories. The Khazar myth and ideas of fake powerful Jews continues to find articulation today in conspiratorial circles that support the invasion of Ukraine, while the Synagogue of Satan is used in QAnon spaces and by other antisemitic extremists.
In 1959, Pierre Berton, writing about Kirkconnell’s political associates, including Carr and Gostick, wondered “how anti-fluoridation gets mixed up with racial bigotry, anti-U.N.ism, incipient fascism and other twisted causes.” Conspiratorial thinking is a distorting lens that both hardens existing beliefs and normalizes proximal ones. Extreme beliefs can be made familiar when packaged alongside real anxieties, and the frameworks that Carr developed spoke to fears prevalent during his times. Modern conspiracies that are spreading among Canadians are accepted because they speak to real beliefs and fears — and in turn exacerbate existing bigotries and societal fault lines. Carr’s conspiracism was a Canadian development, and it reminds us that Canadians are fully capable of incubating and exporting their own paranoid thoughts.