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Comment by jeromegv | Hacker News Reader

Foreign support to this movement is not exactly a secret. They were waiving Trump flags, confederate flags and lots of MAGA signs were seen among the protesters. Also the movement has been publicized on Fox News and by famous right-wing people in the US, that's just normal that it would eventually lead to a lot of people in the US deciding to start donating. The simplest explanation is more likely than the conspiracy that the Canadian government had time to make up fake donations from the US.

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This is a bit removed from your point about foreign support, but the flag thing appears to have been exaggerated for political purposes. The Confederate flag guy was shunned by the protestors and stood out like a sore thumb to begin with: https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1487834109678395392. (I'm not endorsing that Twitter account - it's the only link I know of to the video, and the video is interesting.)

It has also been commonly reported that the protestors are Nazis carrying Nazi flags, but this reporting is also excessively politicized. Here's a first-person account giving a completely different picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtN4VqBeCMg#t=6932.

There are hundreds of hours of livestreams on youtube showing the protests. Anyone can dip in at random and get a sense. That's how I ran across that last link of the guy talking about the swastika flag. From the livestreams it seems clear that this is an authentic and peaceful working class protest, not some far right "insurrection" (a word that has also been chosen for political reasons). The most fascinating aspect of this event is what it reveals about the class divide in Canada, and the West in general, since each country has its own version of this right now.

Honestly the odds that was a fed are pretty high. The father had feds planting explosive in people’s mailboxes [0] and tried to pin it on some political group he didn’t like back in the 70’s. Feds were forced to confessed when one got busted doing it, quite literally red-handed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

> From the livestreams it seems clear that this is an authentic and peaceful working class protest, not some sort of far right "insurrection" (a word that has also been chosen for political reasons). The most fascinating aspect of this event is what it reveals about the class divide in Canada, or the West in general, since each country has its own version of this right now.

This is actually quite disingenuous. All it tells you is the general comportment of what people are doing around those livestreaming (who are almost all clearly marked).

What you aren't seeing or being exposed to in this way are the countless complaints of harassment, death threats, and rape threats the people living in this area are facing on a routine basis, even when the person being threatened was trying to help the protestors.[1][2][3][4]

As I've mentioned in other places, there's a lot of protests in Ottawa. It's the nation's capital and it's often a symbolic target if nothing else. Ottawa's citizens are familiar with protestors. This is a whole different ballgame.

In terms of it being working class, I think that's also a disingenuous label. As you can see in this walk through of the stopped convoy, there's VERY FEW actual big rigs participating, and the people here are largely driving recent pickups.[5] These are not put-out truckers, these are anti-vax/anti-mandate people from across the spectrum, and not a lot of them.

[1]: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottaw-tow-truck-op...

[2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/moo-shu-ice-cream-empl...

[3]: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/unruly-protesters-prompt-earl...

[4]: https://globalnews.ca/news/8594809/covid-freedom-convoy-otta... -> Multiple sources in first paragraph.

[5]: https://mobile.twitter.com/Gray_Mackenzie/status/14929139048...

> From the livestreams it seems clear that this is an authentic and peaceful working class protest

I would question the "working class" bit. Most of us on HN are office workers, who don't get out much, so we tend to assume anyone who works outdoors, including driving a truck, must be working class. But remember that every trucker participating in this protest has a truck to participate in: they are either owner-operators, or participating on behalf of trucking firm. Owner-operators are petite bourgeoisie; owners of firms are capitalists. Neither are working class, in an economic sense.

Really, when we office drones say the truckers are working class, what we actually mean is that they are rednecks. They come from rural areas, they probably don't watch the same TV shows as us, and perhaps they don't even drink speciality coffee. But you can be a redneck petit bourgeois, or a redneck capitalist!

Peaceful? I think news of armed militants amongst the protesters will soon be commonplace, like today's arrests of this heavily armed cadre:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-blocka...

Was there any actual violence? If not then it was peaceful. Merely being armed certainly increases the capacity for violence, but it’s not violence in and of itself.

I’m not familiar with Canadian law on the subject, so I don’t know if possession of the items in question is unlawful or if there was some other cause for the arrests.

> I’m not familiar with Canadian law on the subject

That's the crux of this - their weaponry was way out of line according to Canadian law.

I think it's not the worst thing in the world for there to be visual elements inspired by the 2nd Amendment. If nothing else, it puts pressure on the government and shows that many free thinkers have solidarity with Canadians.

In Canadian terms it's politically one of the most foolish things you could do. There's little constituency for 2nd Amendment style gun rights in Canada, so they'd be sawing off the limb they're sitting on. And that's apart from whether they broke the law, which would also be politically foolish since it undermines their argument of civil disobedience. I don't know anything about the facts of this case though.

The point is that many other countries should adopt rights similar to the 2nd Amendment, because it has been proven to increase civil liberties with very few downsides. Canadians who refuse to do so are more likely to be trampled by big government.

planting a 'nazi/white nationalist' in protests and then having the media focus on it seems like such a obvious tactic now that it is making me question every time this kind of thing occurs.

For example, remember the recent election in Virginia where there was a ton of media retweets of a picture of a handful of 'white supremacists' in front of the tour bus for the Republican candidate. The media made a huge deal about it and the reporter who was on the scene made all kinds of absurd tweets about things she 'overheard' them say. However it didn't take long before people found pictures of the 'White Supremacists' working for the Democrat candidates campaign. One was even driving the tour bus!

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/10/29/busted-multiple-part...

That was a almost absurdy poorly executed attempt at a political smear but it really opened my eyes to how easy it is to insert bad actors into an event - especially when you have a complicit media.

How are the complicit media organized? Is there a secret WhatsApp thread going on between the hundreds of media organizations? Who runs the organization? How do they keep it a secret?

There is / was a secret group of journalists called JournoList. The original was shut down and there is now a new one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList

If you had read the entirety of that article, you wouldn't have posted it as an example.

It existed, allowed the media to work together on how to represent certain issues, it stopped existing and there is a new version that replaced it? What did I miss?

I assume you are talking about Klein's statement regarding Tucker?

>The simplest explanation is more likely than the conspiracy that the Canadian government had time to make up fake donations from the US.

Isn't it convenient how all contradicting evidence is dismissed by evidence-free conspiracy theories?

https://www.wired.com/video/watch/why-you-can-never-argue-wi...

And the evidence from the leak is fully testable and falsifiable! You could literally just email people who donated and ask them.

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