The protests were linked to concerns over personal freedoms and government overreach. Mainly related to COVID-19 mandates and stay at home recommendations.
Supporters saw the movement as a grassroots stand for liberty against government overreach.
*edit the freedom convoy organised 3 years ago in 2022 as pointed out by commenter’s.
You have no idea how much I want to have this conversation.
I was told our rights to travel or go outside won’t return.
I was told that I would be immune compromised for taking an experimental vaccine.
Can we now get everyone to admit some people were very wrong during COVID?
A lot of things were wrong during covid. For example, I’m now convinced of the lab leak theory, having thought of it as a right wing conspiracy for too long. Polarized politics clouds our judgement on both sides. Yes, there were and are a lot of right wing loons, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong about everything.
The lab leak theory was dismissed because there was a lot of powerful people that didn’t want any serious investigation into it. China was 100% against the lab leak theory. Fauci and the CDC were also against the lab leak theory as he was directly responsible for funding gain of function research in the most likely lab, which had been widely criticised as extremely risky research.
It also makes an incredible conspiracy theory because it’s essentially impossible to prove either way at this point.
If it helps, the (main) lab leak theory was conclusively disproven back in 2020 when waste water samples from Italy in September 2019 to December 2019 showed the presence of natural precursors to Covid-19, with signatures indistinguishable from “the” Covid. Lots of people were reporting a strong ‘flu-like’ bout of illness at Christmas 2019. The idea that it leaked from a lab in Wuham in December 2019 makes no sense. Neither does wet markets and bat soup by the way - that was just good old racism.
A troublesome but mundane coronavirus of the sort that millions every year dismissed as a cold had a slight mutation and turned deadly and prolific. I think the knowledge that this can happen at any time scares people far more than the lovely little idea of it coming out of a test tube so we can blame a person or a race or a government for it, direct anger at a tangible foe rather than the fragility of biological life.
Yeah, I think ‘conclusively’ disproven or proven anything is not realistic here. Lab leak has a lot of things going for it too. Here’s just a recent example
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o
Are you referring to these studies btw? https://www.wired.com/story/flawed-covid-19-origin-theory-italy/
I’m locked out of the Wired article, but if it’s the discourse I remember, then it’s arguing against Italy as the source rather than arguing for Wuhan specifically as the source.
Finding waste water samples from Italy doesn’t prove it came from there. It does disprove the idea that it originated from someone dropping a beaker or eating a bat on a particular street in Wuhan 3 months later.
The argument here is actually that they didn’t find Sars-CoV-2, but that their controls to test against got mixed up with their samples. It doesn’t matter, really. My point is that this got political very fast and that now we may never know
“It’s like finding an iPhone in a pharaoh’s tomb,” says Worobey—you either have to rewrite history, or you have to consider the possibility that one of the archaeologists dropped their phone.
Neither does wet markets and bat soup by the way - that was just good old racism.
No, the wet markets are definitely an issue. There’s a lot of objectively unsanitary issues with these things.
Also, “lab leak” is intentionally vague. At the very least, there’s no signs in the genome that it was engineered. It’s statistically unlikely for a natural virus to have been discover, isolated in a lab, only for it to be leaked, but it’s possible, but unless the Chinese government comes forward, any claims that it escaped from a lab should be met with skepticism.
Wet market is weirdly interpreted by most in the west as meaning literally wet and inheritently unsanitary. One guy I talked to thought it meant the floating markets like the tourist trap in Bangkok.
A wet market is just the opposite of a dry market - food, drink, fresh goods. A “dry market” is clothes, furniture, devices.
There are unsanitary wet markets, but there are unsanitary Walmarts and Tescos. The western response to demand all wet markets be shut was just pure ignorance and prejudice.
And why do you think that’s MY interpretation of a “wet market” or what my “demands” are?
I knew what these things are from before covid. The problem isn’t that they’re called “wet markets”. The problem is that the much lower food sanitation standards in China. Something that I will be complaining about very soon in the US. We already RFK Jr.(or his brain worm) doesn’t seem to have any problems with the consumption of wild caught meat.
While the U.S. convoy’s grievances are a little broader than its Canadian counterpart, the core goal remains fixed upon ending lockdown mandates members believe have helped to upend society.
They were also upset with rampant government spending, unbridled inflation widening the national wealth gap, Big Tech censorship, swelling authoritarianism, corporate corruption, so-called cancel culture, what they see as legacy media outlets lying to advance specific agendas (e.g. alleging Canadian protestors engaged in widespread violence), and a political class that seems wholly unaccountable for past misdeeds.
Source: https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2022/03/what-ever-happened-to-the-u-s-peoples-convoy/
Yeah, but those were over the right to infect others, to spread disease, harm and even death. Why should I be inconvenienced when all those don’t affect me
/s
The Convoy being a rights movement was a skin-deep excuse for what it actually was. It did not take long at all before it turned into a general anti-vax fascist movement that saw significant funding and support coming up from the US.
Right. Don’t forget how Republicans injected into schools that “my body my choice” that their kids shouldn’t be forced to get vaccinated, and then overturned the abortion laws the next minute. Fuck I hate those people.
Right! My body my choice, but some how abortion laws don’t follow this logic? Some serious mental gymnastics .
My dentist tried to bs me with this stupid convoy. He claimed that Trudeau picked up the phone ‘do you know who he called? Antifa’. I laughed in his face and found a new dentist.
“Why won’t he just hear the concerns of the people calling for his death!!”
Not to mention all the restrictions they were complaining about were put in place by the provinces. Ironically it was a Conservative premier in Ontario’s case.
Or it was the US. Truckers couldn’t enter the US without vaccination, which is not the Canadian government’s fault.
And the US who had vaccine rules for people coming in to their country. Yet the kkklownvoy protested Canadas govt over it.
I had a specialist doc a while ago who started out criticizing trump. But within five minutes was legitimately arguing that Charlie Manson would have been our greatest president and that it wasn’t too crazy for someone to only want to live with people “just like us” (both white) and that “them” really were a problem.
Like, I’m used to conversations taking a hard right turn, frankly I look like what white supremacists wish they look like, so I get it often.
But I just did not see that coming after she started out shit talking trump
He’s even losing the (relatively) wealthy and (absolutely) crazy racists now. That’s his bread and butter…
My fucking dental hygenist started bitching about the dangers of 5G. I no longer felt good about her use of that X-Ray…
The Freedom Convoy was as much about personal rights as the Civil War was about state’s rights.
Well said, there’s even a deeper layer: Ask the question “states’ rights to do what?” (A: slavery). The same can be asked of the freedom convoy: “personal rights to do what?” (A: infect and kill others with a highly contagious and dangerous disease). Their exercise of personal rights in the way that some people did, should have been prosecuted as goddamn manslaughter. Same for covid denying government officials in many countries
I’ve stopped asking about States Rights to do what, they just sidestep it. I just ask them about the confederate constitution.
Article I, Sec. 9(4), Article IV, Sec 2(1)(3), Sec 3(3) (I’ll give a hint, it’s where the CSA federal government outlawed states enacting laws to outlaw slavery. States Rights my ass)
If I get the sputtering boat of “butbutbut” after that it’s what are the secession declarations of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
At that point either they really didn’t fucking know… I grew up in the South and I was an adult before I knew a lot of these, it certainly isn’t in the education system I’ll tell you that… but if it isn’t the really didn’t know category, then they’re as much a lost cause as their myth.
They never really protested any rights, they were doing a performative demonstration showing them to be a part of the conservative crowd.
None of them ever gave a fuck about not spreading a deadly disease. Fuck them
Each of those losers would be pro-Canada becoming a state. Fuck the ultra rw.
It was also timed by the organizers to be around when covid restrictions were already going to be getting lifted, so they could claim a victory while collecting donations.
Related story, basically the hardest I laughed during covid.
Being a good Vancouverite, when those convoy fucks wanted to parade around and honk at hospitals, hundreds or thousands of us with bikes got in their way and kept them away from the hospitals.
Okay, so we’re blocking an arterial and some convoy fuck is screaming at us about how, in his words, “we’ve got to protest smarter.” He then finally realizes we have been politely letting non convoy cars through the lane next to him, so floors the accelerator and aims for that lane. But, he didn’t shoulder check and slammed right into a car in that lane in front of a cop. So for the next however long we got to point and laugh while advising him about the merits of shoulder checking and how he needed to drive smarter.
Gotta love when an asshole causes a 100% fault car crash with no injuries.
Good job, glad everyone was safe
The Convites are a special breed of abject morons who couldn’t recognize authoritarianism if it hit them in the face. They were manipulated by Russia to do their dumbass protest, enabled by the cops (OPP and OPS were fucking worst than useless) and fueled by MAGA conspiracies.
You are looking for common principles and shared values, but MAGA was only looking to seize power for itself, or at least some rich people who are part of it.
Don’t be shocked. This is basic manipulation and greed. It really is that simple. And the MaAGA crowd is disproportionately bigoted, so they get to hate who they hate more.
almost like everything a fascist says is a lie, and the things they accuse you of are just what they’re getting hard about doing to you.
but that would be absurd.
They were useful idiots
The Freedom Convoy had Russian money funding its media campaign.
The problem for leftist organizing always really comes back to the fact that capitalists are the ones in power, and that they overwhelming prefer fascism to a social democracy. There’s no billionaires funneling money into 50501’s pockets to organize a mass turnout. It’s the same reason the Tea Party was so successful while similar attempts on the left were not; their primary campaigns were well funded by the Koch bros.
Gates and Saunders could fund them. Maybe they’re not as liberal as people think, eh.
I for one ascribe the blame to at least 40 years of pseudoscience – neoclassical economic theory [1] – pushed by neoliberal economists. These same neoliberal economists are often backed by the rich (fuck you “Chicago School of Economics” [2]) . For decades they have pushed this narrative of “government bad” and “private sector” good. Taxing the rich only means you punish the people you want to help (middle and lower socioeconomic classes). This pseudoscience gave birth to the godawful economic policy of “trickle down economics”.
Decades of:
- defunding public services (by both parties, by the way) to make way for tax cuts for the wealthy
- middle class wage stagnation (ie, take for example the minimum wage and sub-minimum wage for tipped employees)
- decimation of union participation and subsequently power to labor
- cheap money backed by the faith of the US govt and given to the ultra wealthy as a means of extracting wealth from the people – see private equity
Want to know why many people are easily manipulated? They can’t afford the same lifestyle as their parents. Drowning in debt to greedy capitalist pigs. Years of this cycle and once the algorithms detect this, you can be easily turned into cannon fodder for the ultra wealthy.
“hey bro, your life is shit because immigrants took yer job!! Govt trying to inject microchips into you! Join the FrEEdOm CoNvOy!”
Get us into fighting a culture war against each other, when we should be banding together and fighting a class war.
Fuck the billionaire class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics
Look no further than Dr Ian Lee from the Sprott school of business at Carleton. That guy is a massive apologist for big business and sees everything through the eyes of profit. He’s on every week making excuses for stores and wanting to negotiate with Trump, the guy who wants to take over our country.
It formed because of a group of people manipulated into a protest for “our rights”.
Neither the people participating or the ones driving the propaganda ever gave two shits about anyone else’s rights.
They’d support a law requiring everyone be a fan of their favorite sports all team, because it doesn’t negatively effect them and since it aligns with their established beliefs it’s the “right” decision for everyone else anyways.
This is how “for the greater good” can do great evil and why writing off people who commit monsterous acts as monsters is fucking stupid.
We need to understand why they do this shit so we can explain to them why they shouldn’t.
What fucked us over is the only other option we’re neoliberals. They can’t talk about fixing real problems because they’re paid to ignore those very problems. So instead they try to make Dem voters think of it like sportsball too.
The problem is at best Dem voters aren’t maniac fans like Republicans. We’re the home team fans who hate our own team and wish anyone else was calling the shots. It’s like we were cursed to be born in Cleveland and LeBron James already moved away
THE GREATER GOOD
As a Clevelander, who’s used some of those same talking points…are you making a padody of me? You following me around?
