Why the coverage of the trucker protest should worry all Canadians

The observations about the form of bias in question, as well as the observation about (lack of) dissent within the party, are really just minor details of a wider picture.

The root cause is that hyper connectedness has reduced cultural and intellectual diversity among the vast majority. I don't say that as a positive or negative, just as a fact. By "cultural and intellectual diversity", I mean that the more a particular topic is featured on social media, the narrower of a spread the opinions on that topic become. (Intellectual diversity in the sense of what topics are discussed has exploded, however. I'm part of a massive online group dedicated to discussing changes in zoning and public transit. Imagine that 30 years ago.)

This goes beyond politics too. I could write an essay about how games like MMORPGs are fundamentally different now that there's hyperconnected communities that distribute high quality information on playing optimally, and how game design has in turn responded to this. Effective use of reddit or discord or a wiki has essentially merged as part of the gameplay now for a very large percentage of users. The hyperconnected social internet fundamentally changed how we interact with ideas, from gaming to politics.

I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence.

We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry?

They will wonder if those folks also came to be known as these things the way they did. As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims.

There is a high price to pay when you decide to cry “wolf” over fascism in a political situation like our own, where the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide.

Is there a name for this argument? I find myself making this same argument often, in a variety of situations. Something like "Failure to Consider the Externalities of Wrongful Accusation", but more succinct?

E.g., if a group uses a statue to promote their cause -- probably specifically because people care about the subject -- is it fair to complain that people don't like it? As if they are entitled to positive attention for associating themselves with the statue, but somehow should be exempted from the negative attention? It makes no sense.

More laughable is the suggestion that it's unfair to believe protesters are associating themselves with Nazism when they use the swastika as a protest symbol. Maybe they just think it's a cool symbol, like sewing kid in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode?

And the complaints about the narrative sound like a guy aggrieved that gravity is trying to hold him down! Narratives will emerge from a movement (unless it's simply ignored). That an unfocused movement with disparate groups/motives/goals, without strong leadership won't produce and sustain a focused, favorable narrative seems like a foregone conclusion. If your movement doesn't craft the dominant narrative, then someone else will. Can you really expect them to craft just the one you wanted? That's hopeless.

I think this guy is yelling at the clouds.

    Tamara Lich and B.J. Dichter, neither of whom are truck drivers, are currently listed as the organizers of the GoFundMe page. Dichter was a late addition, only added this week. 

    Lich, born in Saskatchewan, now hails from Medicine Hat, Alberta, where she served as an organizer for Yellow Vests Canada, a regional coordinator for the separatist Western Exit or “Wexit” movement in Alberta, and now as the secretary for the Maverick Party – another separatist movement and fringe political party. 

    Attending and boosting Yellow Vest events starting in 2018, Lich social media posts from the time show her, in one moment, calling out some hateful rhetoric within the movement, while also posting Islamophobic articles of her own, like conspiracies about the “Muslim Brotherhood” operating in Canada. 

    Dichter’s website shares The Quiggin Report, and Dichter himself shares similar Islamophobic sentiments in public. In 2019 he claimed that “Islamist entryism” is “rotting away at our society like syphilis.” 

    “[The Conservative Party of Canada] is suffering from the stench of cultural relativism and political Islam,” he said during the first PPC conference held in Gatineau, Quebec. “It is suffering from the stench of extremism that same way in third-world countries suffer from extremist groups, separatist groups, communist guerrilla factions, paramilitaries, organized crime, and more.” 

> Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests [1980's peace movement] by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or the most radical protesters and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed and was mocked by the mainstream press, who depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of its support.

...

> And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being. Let me rehearse the kinds of sloppy reporting we are seeing here:

They're not just Canadian values and not really authoritarian. Contest for power is and has always been the primary function of the political. Politics is the business of deciding who orders, the fact that someone does is not in question, and a bunch of peace protesters or truckers had never any meaningful impact on anyone. The internal party politics of whoever is holding power is what matters. That goes for private companies or governments regardless of how often they talk about participation or inclusion or whatever else.

So the actual observation here is that it isn't really relevant whether you're for or against the trucker cause, but and the author seems to agree, the only effect that the trucker protest has is that it makes them look exactly like what they're being caricatured as.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html