"Freedom Convoys" "People's Convoy" Canadian & US Trucker Protests against COVID Vaccine Mandates & Other Grievances

[MN-Skeptic]

If the truckers are going to abuse their trucking licenses to illegally occupy a city, their licenses should be revoked. Moreover, I'd like to see the police go through the line of trucks and remove the license plates on all the occupying vehicles.

[Gregg]

GiveSendGo on twitter is claiming a DDoS attack because of their trucker campaign. Others are saying it's because they have shitty security on their shitty website.
I'm also seeing calls for U.S. truckers to block access to the Superbowl. That should be interesting.

Fine, cancel their CDL licenses. How long do you think they'd put up with airline pilots parking passenger jets on runways to protest something?

[Uninformed]

The armed forces have tow trucks.

[Sam the Centipede]

The armed forces have tow trucks.

But … tanks!

[RVInit]

what would it take for me to just raise 100,000.

that would pay off all I owed and allow me to retire in the face of the school shit that is going down!

I couldn''t raise $2400US for my back rent when I was undergoing chemo.

Off Topic

I think the difference between us and the idiots that are able to raise thousands or even hundreds of thousands is that they are raising money by supporting some assinine position, such as anti-vax. And the people who identify themselves as anti-vax are happy to send them money. Anti-vax has become how they personally identify themselves and once it's a personal identity thing, that's where commitment and willingness to part with $20 or $50 comes in.

[Luke]

Raison de arizona, loving the Mark nunchucks avatar! Root Beer and Biscuit were throwing around some nunchucks at a 699th training camp event and tbh they handled the nunchuck much better than Mark. Mark could learn a lot from those wiener dogs. It might also be time for the 699th to just gently mention they might be heading to Ottawa, that should clear the place out toot sweet.

[jemcanada2]

Raison de arizona, loving the Mark nunchucks avatar! Root Beer and Biscuit were throwing around some nunchucks at a 699th training camp event and tbh they handled the nunchuck much better than Mark. Mark could learn a lot from those wiener dogs. It might also be time for the 699th to just gently mention they might be heading to Ottawa, that should clear the place out toot sweet.

They can stop at my place for doughnuts and pupperoni on the way.

I’m trying to ignore all this and pretend my country hasn’t lost its damn mind! Personally, I only know a few people who agree with the truckers. I tried to borrow some books from a library in Ottawa for a patron, but the staff couldn’t get to their libraries to send the books through interlibrary loan.

[Volkonski]

Canada truckers: Arrests as police warn of 'volatile' protesters

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60267841

Ottawa police have warned that "volatile" and "determined" protesters remain in Canada's capital after nearly two weeks of a trucker-led anti-vaccine mandate protest.

Ottawa is under a state of emergency as police have tried to contain the chaos.

Up to a quarter of so-called Freedom Convoy vehicles have children in them who could be at risk during operations, authorities said on Tuesday.

Nearly 80 criminal investigations have been opened relating to the protests.

[Volkonski]

We Sent Some American Crazy Up to Canada. You Better Believe It's Going to Rebound.
This is coming to a nightly newscast near you.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... -ted-cruz/

The reason we should pay it the closest attention is because the usual flock of buzzards already seems to be circling in anticipation down here. You could hear them crying their wounded cries when GoFundMe cut off American donations to the Ottawa hooligans. Tailgunner Ted Cruz wants an investigation into GFM’s decision. From Politico:

Politicians from former President Donald Trump to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) [Ed. Note: This is not a great distance.] have championed the nationwide protests in Canada, which began in response to Ottawa's vaccine mandate for truckers entering Canada. It has quickly escalated into a global movement incorporating a loose set of anti-establishment causes, coordinated on social media and encrypted messaging groups.
Since late January, the likes of Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee have used their large online followings to spread the word about the truckers' convoy, garnering tens of thousands of engagements including likes, shares and comments on social media posts in favor of the protests, based on data from Crowdtangle, a social media analytics firm owned by Meta, Facebook's parent company.

This is coming to a nightly newscast near you. It’s not like this country lacks for coal-rolling, cosplaying minutemen-on-wheels, and it’s not like we lack for vandalistic billionaires to fund them. And it’s not like the Republican Party has the will or desire to control them. Unless I’m wrong about all the symptoms of the prion disease that I’ve observed over the past four decades, it’s going to be impossible for the GOP to resist using this kind of thing during the 2022 midterms. It’s got everything going for it: white working-class male rage, COVID exhaustion, fossil fuels, and really big trucks going toot-toot-toot. If you’re making a revolution based on a third-grade tantrum, you have everything you need, and every other midterm election since 2008 has been a third-grade tantrum. If you can’t envision, say, a blockade of trucks around the offices of various secretaries of state, or blaring past polling places in “certain” neighborhoods, you haven’t been paying attention. That’s a big 10-4 on elections, good buddy.

[Volkonski]

The Alt-Right on Facebook Are Hijacking Canada’s Trucker Blockade
In Ottawa, a protest against vaccine mandates has become an international sensation. American far-right personalities are behind its online rise.

https://www.wired.com/story/ottawa-truc ... alt-right/

FOR TWO WEEKS now, truckers have brought the center of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, to a standstill. What started as a localized dispute against vaccine mandates has now snowballed—co-opted as a cause célèbre of America’s radical right-wing into a protest that reaches far beyond Parliament Hill. On the ground, hundreds of trucks and cars have blocked the streets of the city and set up a tent commune to protest against the imposition of vaccination requirements for truck drivers. On social media, videos about the protest are racking up millions of views and crowdfunding campaigns, shared by the likes of Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, have raised huge sums. Confederate flags, QAnon symbols, and swastikas have all reportedly been seen at the protest site.

Viewed from a distance, what’s happening in Ottawa seems like an organic uprising by disgruntled truckers. But the alt-right has seized on the opportunity to turn a local protest into another chapter in the unending culture war. Offline, 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated and the Canadian Trucking Alliance, which represents the industry in the country and does not support the convoy, has said most of the people in and around the protests “do not have a connection to the trucking industry.” Online, the incident has become a global sensation with supporters gathering on Facebook and Telegram in the hundreds of thousands—with many of them living outside Canada’s borders.

“The online chatter is very transnational,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at Queen’s University, Ottawa. “There are people from Brazil, Australia, and the US.” This global attention has seemingly galvanized those on the ground. While few protestors remain, policing the protest is costing an estimated CAD $800,000 ($630,000) a day. And, thanks to the backing of some of the biggest names in the US alt-right social media sphere, the protest, dubbed the Freedom Convoy by its supporters, has continued to gain momentum online, even as numbers on the ground dwindle.

The result is a strange disconnect between the offline and online versions of the protest—with many of the most successful social media posts coming from familiar figures from the American alt-right rather than the protestors. Ten videos supporting the truckers shared by Donald Trump Jr. between January 25 and February 7 have been viewed by 4.2 million people. The right-wing media machine has spun up its support for the protest, with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau calling it “an insult to memory and truth.”

[Gregg]

Raison de arizona, loving the Mark nunchucks avatar! Root Beer and Biscuit were throwing around some nunchucks at a 699th training camp event and tbh they handled the nunchuck much better than Mark. Mark could learn a lot from those wiener dogs. It might also be time for the 699th to just gently mention they might be heading to Ottawa, that should clear the place out toot sweet.

Ottawa is the home of Crusoe the Celebrity Dachshund, his sister Daphne and brother Oakley. Known associates of certain Illuminati affiliated helicopter flying wienerdogs....

Just saying.

[jemcanada2]

Raison de arizona, loving the Mark nunchucks avatar! Root Beer and Biscuit were throwing around some nunchucks at a 699th training camp event and tbh they handled the nunchuck much better than Mark. Mark could learn a lot from those wiener dogs. It might also be time for the 699th to just gently mention they might be heading to Ottawa, that should clear the place out toot sweet.

Ottawa is the home of Crusoe the Celebrity Dachshund, his sister Daphne and brother Oakley. Known associates of certain Illuminati affiliated helicopter flying wienerdogs....

Just saying.

I’m sure Crusoe, Daphne, and Oakley would be proud to join the 699th and kick some protester ass. Especially Daphne. She’s a shark!

[AndyinPA]

That kind of stuff might come back to bite them in the election. I hope.

[Gregg]

I saw somewhere that X number of investigations are ongoing, so I can only hope they're taking names of drivers and getting ready to pull their commercial driving permits. This is affecting me today, several of our suppliers are Canadian and everything from up there is pretty fouled up now.

Fuck around, find out.

[AndyinPA]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... gn=wp_main

Canadian truckers protesting coronavirus restrictions and vaccine mandates on Tuesday partially severed a key trade artery between the U.S. and Canada, threatening to further disrupt new car and truck production that already has been hampered by a prolonged shortage of computer chips.

After blocking streets in the capital Ottawa for 10 days, the truckers brought their anti-government blockade to the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, with the city of Detroit.

Each day, $300 million worth of car and truck parts, agricultural products, steel and other raw materials flows across the bridge, according to Flavio Volpe, president of the Auto Parts Manufacturers Association in Toronto.

[sad-cafe]

what would it take for me to just raise 100,000.

that would pay off all I owed and allow me to retire in the face of the school shit that is going down!

I couldn''t raise $2400US for my back rent when I was undergoing chemo.

yet these idiots raise all kinds of money for degererates for treasonous shit like this.......

maybe we need to find some kind of thing the "flock" will flock to like all the cons

[tek]

Seriously, it is time for the FO part of FAFO.

[Kendra]

Canada's public safety minister hits U.S. Republicans supporting the Ottawa trucker protesters: "We're Canadian. We have our own set of laws. We will follow them."

"It is certainly not the concern of the Texas attorney general as to how we in Canada go about our daily lives."

[jcolvin2]

The Alt-Right on Facebook Are Hijacking Canada’s Trucker Blockade
In Ottawa, a protest against vaccine mandates has become an international sensation. American far-right personalities are behind its online rise.

https://www.wired.com/story/ottawa-truc ... alt-right/

The alt-right might be making a lot of noise now about the convoy, but it was originally promoted by an odd hacked FB account stolen from a woman in Missouri:
https://www.grid.news/story/misinformat ... ic_january

The entity behind some of the largest Facebook groups supporting the protests is an unknown person or persons who used the Facebook account of a Missouri woman. She says her account on the platform was hacked and stolen.

The account launched a handful of Facebook groups for the protest, all between Jan. 26 and 28, before the trucker convoy reached Ottawa. With a combined following of more than 340,000 members and more than 7,500 posts, the group names were variations on a theme: “Convoy to Ottawa 2022,” “Convoy for Freedom 2022,” “Freedom Convoy/Ottawa 2022 for Canada,” “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “2022 Official Freedom Convoy to Ottawa.”

***

The groups were disabled Monday afternoon as Grid was reporting this story. Facebook did not immediately respond to questions about the hacked account. “We continue to see scammers latch onto any hot-button issue that draws people’s attention, including the ongoing protests,” Margarita Franklin, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said in a statement to media outlets on Monday.

The descriptor for the "Convoy for Freedom 2022" also happens to be written in Bangla (the script for the Bengali language) apparently by a company in Bangladesh:
https://twitter.com/PobudaTanya/status/ ... 5158148103

Outside bad actors stirring shit, just like the election bots.

[Volkonski]

[filly]

Does anyone here have any ideas about resolving this?

I watched the CNN report yesterday about this and they interviewed a dude in the cab of his truck in Ottawa. He said he had 4 kids and was losing hundreds of dollars a day by sitting in the blockade instead of, you know, working. He claimed to be fully vaxxed, but against his will. Anyway at some point these people will run out of funds unless they are being funded by somebody. In the meantime, enormous economic damage is being done to the US and Canadian businesses and economies. Which is, of course, the entire point.

So I was thinking about how to resolve this, but the options seem untenable: let these people do whatever they want (which is unclear) or use a massive LE or military operation to clear them out. Are there other options?

[bill_g]

Let's not forget that the very presence of BLM marchers in any city across the country was described as terrorism by the Right.

[filly]

Let's not forget that the very presence of BLM marchers in any city across the country was described as terrorism by the Right.

Yes, but how does this get resolved?

[tek]

Start arresting drivers, revoking operating licenses, revoking vehicle registrations, and impounding vehicles.

Also, if there are trucks there owned by other-than-the-drivers, start putting pressure on the owners. Maybe EXTREMELY careful customs inspections at the border for their other trucks.

IMHO, of course.

[raison de arizona]

Let's not forget that the very presence of BLM marchers in any city across the country was described as terrorism by the Right.

Yes, but how does this get resolved?

It's already been mentioned, but the method I see working is suspending their license for a period, say two years. Maybe they don't care about their current earnings, but will they care about future earnings? If they don't want to drive their trucks, then they shouldn't be truck drivers anymore. Enough is enough. The towing companies won't tow them because they are afraid of losing their relationships with trucking companies, well, go after the trucking companies next. Trucking companies that aren't willing to sign on and are in support of the blockade should lose their licenses as well. My understanding is that over 90% of truckers are vaxxed and are ok with the rules, so although we are talking about losing a significant portion of capacity, is it so much that it couldn't be absorbed?