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.
Someone else pointed it out, Freedom Convoy was effectively the next “States Rights” Don’t argue with them in good faith, they don’t argue in good faith themselves.
They’re the ones that cry “2A” about guns but worship the ground of Ronny Reagan who enacted gun legislation to go against the Black Panthers. This is the group that also talks about 2A and would storm the capital attacking police but calls Black Lives Matter riots and cheer when police show up. Hell, they cry about 2A when they worship Trump who said “Take their guns first, due process after.”
They talk about “Freedom of Religion” but it’s always their religion. War on Christmas, how dare they take down the ten commandments, while cheering for the guy who wanted a Muslim ban, attacked Sikhs post 9/11 because they couldn’t even get the religion they were mad at right, and want to force their religion into schools and courthouses.
They talk about freedom of speech when they scream about being able to lie, but cheer that Musk will throw people off that will actually fact check. The party of “Fuck your feelings” cries how they’re being attacked and needs protected when it’s turned around on them.
They cry about discrimination with Affirmative Action, but it’s simply the new Southern Strategy post Obama. Had a black president, racism is over, wave the flags. Oh, still helping minorities, RACISM! But they still stand with people who wave the swastika and the confederate flag and manage to say with a straight face they are not racist at all.
They made use of the social contract of tolerance, that we’re all supposed to get along as a society. They have done so by spitting in peoples faces, enacting violence, screaming epitaphs and being the worst people ever, then run back to society every time it’s turned on them.
Do not give them the good faith they ask for. Do not treat them as reasonable human beings, they are not. When they can act with basic fucking decorum that is required to be a person, then they can be treated like members of society again.
This is the brain rot you get when you think if it’s not on the news, then it’s not happening.
Turn off the propaganda machine. People are protesting everywhere.
That’s because they were a bunch of morons being led around by the nose ring… Idiots… It’s a damn shame those involved didn’t get he jail time they deserved…
Even so where are the liberal convoys?
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.
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.
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I think for the next 50 years people will be talking about MAGAs in the same way they talked for the last fifty years about Nazis
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.
My fucking dental hygenist started bitching about the dangers of 5G. I no longer felt good about her use of that X-Ray…
“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.
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…
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 freedom convoy was less about freedom and more about being an entitled selfish dick.
They were protesting against having to have compassion and empathy towards people beyond their small bubble. They weren’t fighting for people’s rights for freedom, they were protesting against other people’s rights to stay healthy and alive, it was a selfish act by selfish assholes.
People were dying because people wouldn’t take the safety precautions seriously and these assholes thought they were superheros saving the world, no, they were assholes who were used by bigger assholes to cause as much chaos as they could to undermine the faith in the system they were fearful about.
Giant fucking babies.
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.
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.
Republicans actually think they are being set free with the removal of government employees.
Yes. Clinton also gutted government departments… Over the span of seven years. Trump is doing that within less than a month and is doing so much more damage. It’s like watching someone with a gambling addiction budget their monthly income.
People ARE protesting though. And they are protesting all over the world. I think trump is the first, most hated dictator in the world right after Hitler.
Clinton’s reductions in government was like dieting and exercising for 7 years to lose weight.
The current administration is using a chainsaw to cut off the legs to lose weight instantly.
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
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 a Sinophobia distraction at the time. Why get angry at your government not doing more to protect you when you can hate China.
And it didn’t matter at the time. Our needed actions would be exactly the same … unless we wanted to start an actual war.
Now’s the time it does matter, if it wasn’t disproven. Now you can look back and try to pursue criminal action, if it were rekevant
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.
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 know RFK Jr.(or his brain worm) doesn’t seem to have any problems with the consumption of wild caught meat.
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.
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.
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
