Foreign money funding ‘extremism’ in Canada

> First they start off with Right Wing Extremists. Then they move on to foreign actors

Both can be true.

democracy, right?

The fact that this comment is being downvoted enough for it to have turned grey is why I never post about civil liberties on hacker news, who wants to lose karma? I guess I will do my part today and ask people to upvote reasonable posts like this so that perhaps chilling effects on speech will not increase through negative karma feedback loops.

This is a series of lies and smears, and regurgitation of some bad state propaganda.

What's 'tiring' is the debunking of this petty form of manipulation.

In fact, these misrepresentations represent a kind of 'Rainbow of Misrepresentations' almost like a case study in all the ways one can lie with a few facts.

If the 'trucker protest' is 'white supremacists' then BLM was organised by mass murderers intent on overthrowing the government, after all 25++ people died, and sections of cities were occupied by armed people who used violence against police and emergency services to keep them out and form their own government.

Now I don't believe that narrative to be true (and I don't support the trucker protest at all), but that's the implication of your misrepresentations.

Some of your stated bit of evidence are presented in this regard, completely out of context, effectively regurgitating state propaganda.

The first example illustrates this: "13 guns seized". Well guns are legal in Canada, and common in the West. That people had weapons in their trucker cabs isn't evidence of anything. 'Possible conspiracy to commit murder' is tantamount to someone saying something to their buddy in anger. There are no charges and probably won't be. Your misrepresentation is tantamount to taking a random thought by someone, and using that as though it's representative of anything.

The statements about foreign donations is largely irrelevant.

The characterisation of 'illegal militias' is a total fabrication on your part. You don't get to decide what is illegal and not. Taking an oath is likely not illegal. But more importantly, this is a pretty small group of people.

The characterisation of 'attacking school children' is a lie on your part (strong words) - you've attributed the actions of a completely random people to 'the protestors' - and, you've aggrandised the nature of the confrontation. In reality, someone, somewhere walked by a couple of people wearing masks and told them they shouldn't be wearing masks. First, that has nothing to do with the the protestors, and second, someone telling other people not to wear masks hardly qualifies as an 'attack' on 'schoolchildren'.

“The Ottawa trucker protest is rooted in extremism, a national security expert says” - this is an editorial characterisation, one rooted in an easily debunked falsehoods. Some protestors had upside down Canadian flags with swastikas - which is their crude attempt to denote that 'Trudeau is a Nazi'. Some of them wore gold stars, as if to empathise with the victims of the holocaust. While both of those actions are crude and frankly stupid, neither of them are fascist or antisemitic. Calling someone a Nazi does not make you a Nazi - just the opposite. Empathising with victims of the holocaust is probably offensive, but it's definitely not antisemitic - again, just the opposite.

Imagine calling the Prime Minister a Nazi, and then the next day in the press, they're telling people you support Nazism? How absurdly Orwellian is that?

Again your 'Pat King' statement is a canard. I'm 100% certain that among the millions of BLM protestors, probably one of them supported using violence against police! Would that be a stretch? Maybe not?

If you want to get a realistic picture of who the actual protesters are, get on TikTok and check into one of the many live streams. You'll see mostly regular, working class people, you'll probably hear a lot of anti-vaxx statements, some loud, boorish talk, but otherwise violence.

In fact, if we stop perpetuating lies and ideology, and have comprehensive look at the protests, you'll see that there were very, very few arrests due to any kind of violence, and that the more offensive activities involved urinating on a public monument, and putting signs, a flag, and hat on a monument.

Furthermore, we take a break from perpetuating misinformation from the wayward corners of bubble ideology, we might learn some very nuanced things about the protests. For example, while the party most likely to be supported among the protestors is the PPQ (Right Wing Populist), the other party which has the largest cohort of anti-vaxxers is ... drum rolll ... the Green Party! Shocking, but is it really? Most of my colleagues who are 'anti tax' are of the 'hipster / organic / accupucnture / natural therapy' type. One of them doesn't allow plastic in their homes. I have no idea what their voting intentions are, but they're probably not 'far right flag voting voters'. They fit the green profile.

Moreover, your slander betrays the fact that 1/2 of Canadians sympathise with the protestors [2]. Do you really believe that 1/2 of Canadians are going to support a fundamentally Fascist / White Supremacist movement? Hardly.

So let's stop with with the ideological bubble-thinking, and stop perpetuating bits of information if they are not actually representative of a group or movement. Let's be a bit critical of narrative driven information sources and try to get a broader sense of what's going on.

The truckers are generally leaderless, Tim Horton's drinking, working class, angry people. Their understanding of Nazism comes from at most a second viewing of 'Inglorious Bastards'. They're loud, ignorant, generally anti-vaxx and that's not good, but that doesn't make them evil.

[1] https://www.macleans.ca/society/typical-vaccine-hesitant-per...

[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/8610727/ipsos-poll-trucker-convoy...