Lightworkers Are Running as PPC Candidates
Social media posts from People’s Party of Canada candidates running this election include references to the fifth dimension, starseeds, and a galactic federation.
Two candidates for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada have described themselves as lightworkers.
Rayna Boychuk, the PPC Member of Parliament candidate for Langley-Aldergrove, described herself as a “divine being in human form” and “a truth seeker guiding humanity to 5D”.
Boychuk has made posts on social media referring to the reader as a “fearless, powerful, multi dimensional being of god damn light [sic]”, and shared posts alleging the Covid-19 pandemic to be a catalyst for a mass awakening and an ascension. Boychuk has also made references to human beings as G-ds, writing: “We are all sleeping gods and our time to awaken has arrived. [sic]”
Chelsey Taylor, the PPC Member of Parliament candidate for Hamilton Mountain, has described herself as a lightworker and a “mindset mentor”.
Taylor has tagged social media posts with lightworking terms like “5dconciousness”, “5dawakening”, and “spiritual awakening”, and interacted with infographics about starseeds and indigo children. One account with lightworker content also includes references to her campaign in its bio and a profile picture with a PPC lawn sign.
Lightworkers and Modern New Age Spiritualism
The term lightworker (sometimes also called wayshower) is a loosely used new age religious label to describe people who believe they have a special purpose in the world, usually a divine one, and that they eventually “ascend” to become a different type of living being. Michael Mirdad, who coined the term, believes that lightworkers are literally beings created from light and that a day will come that “every Lightworker shifts from being merely a Lightworker to becoming pure Light [sic]”.
Mirdad describes the role of lightworkers as to “channel Light through each word, response, and action that comes through us”.
Lightworkers since Mirdad have argued that they possess special, innate abilities. Sometimes said abilities grow stronger as they ascend to the fifth dimension, often through a cataclysmic event.
The term lightworker is often used interchangeably with starseeds — humans with extraterrestrial ancestry, and starseeds are sometimes argued to be a type of lightworker. However, beliefs in starseeds and the use of the term “star people” predates lightworkers, and the two are not always the same. Starseed culture, along with many other new age beliefs, have recently attracted a large base of Millennial and Gen Z interest through Tik Tok.
The New Age Far-Right
Though not a new phenomenon (even the conspiracy theory of adrenochrome harvesting — a core part of Q Anon — is a modern adaptation of medieval antisemitic “blood libel” beliefs), the merge of the new age conspiritual crowd and the modern far-right has experienced a unique opportunity for a rebirth in Trump-era fringe religious sentiments.
In March, Salon reported that new age influencer Lorie Ladd referred to Donald Trump as a “lightworker in human form looking like Donald Trump”. Influential New Age conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke continue to propagate far-right media outlets, including Canadian ones that also platform Maxime Bernier.
Trans-national far-right movements cannot reach the popularity they need to while only catering strictly to Christian conservatives. The traditional trope of “The religious right” is still alive and well, and in some cases falls under the same party’s banner, but there’s also a growing contingent of both atheist and fringe religions merging with far-right political movements.
Inevitably, this means that messaging between far-right political sects often contradict. The PPC isn’t a stranger to this either. While some candidates posted new age conspiracism on social media last year, others posted objections to Christians doing yoga as it was “playing with the devil”.
Affinities for new age content and how they effect personal beliefs are not necessarily wholly independent of Christianity either. Rather, lightworkers often follow a culmination of several different philosophies that include Christianity.
Boychuk herself posts often on her Instagram with the hashtag “#144". Sometimes replaced with #144k and #144,000, the hashtag is a coded reference to other lightworkers about the supposed 144 thousand lightworkers who are supposed to ascend during a cataclysmic event — a sort of great awakening. The number 144,000 itself is derived directly from the Bible, in which it appears multiple times in the Book of Revelation.
Michael Mirdad references the bible in his lightworker blogs and books, and encourages followers to learn from the lives of both Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Specifically, Mirdad believes that knowledge imparted to Jesus was passed down from the first lightworkers, some of whom were from Atlantis.
In addition to beliefs of origins from alien races, many lightworkers believe lightworkers, and sometimes all humans, evolved from advanced prehistoric races. Conspiracies about fictional prehistoric races and continents exist on the extreme far-right as well. Long before new age religion, Heinrich Himmler oversaw an SS mission to try and uncover Atlantis as he, too, believed it may have been home to ancient race.
Hyperborea, a land from Greek mythology with a history of use in Nazi propaganda, recently resurfaced due in part to hashtags promoting conspiracies of its existence on Tik Tok.
New Age spiritualism would not be the first subculture Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party of Canada successfully co-opted, as the party’s been legitimizing Canada’s grassroots Covid-denial protests very effectively this election. Last night, Bernier himself appeared alongside the leader of a white supremacist organization on an openly racist vlogger’s livestream.
Rayna Boychuk and Chelsey Taylor have not yet responded to a request for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.
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