(LifeSiteNews) — It’s two tales of two Freedom Convoys.
In the media, it is the worst of protests. For most Canadians it is, by far, the best phenomenon ever to sweep our country.
Every day, we see the media reports here (repeated by politicians and corporate-sponsored news across the globe) condemning the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy as a “dangerous” and “racist” display of “far right extremism.” The “giddy inchoate rage,” (whatever that is) and chaos that must be quashed, violently by military, if necessary.
The contrast is stark between the media story and what we see with our own eyes.
Here is a Top 10 list of things the media say that differ from on-the-ground reality of Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
Media Lie No. 1: The crowds thronging to support the truckers are Canada’s ‘most aggressive citizens,” hate-spewing white misogynists and racists
The media are raging against the people taking part in the trucker Freedom Convoy, describing them as a “horde of Bubbas” and Canada’s “most aggressive citizens.” Prime example: Washington Post op-ed author David Moscrov called the protest a display of “toxic authoritarianist politics.”
Moscrov, author of “Too Dumb for Democracy” (a title that gives you an idea of his regard for the little people), described the hundreds of thousands of people in the Canadian capital on Saturday where he works as a University of Ottawa professor as “driven by a generalized rage, misplaced anger about supply chain challenges and antigovernment sentiment.”
And he played the race card: “These types of groups are typically driven by attitudes, grievances and priorities of such a nature that they pose a particular risk to racialized folks and other groups that are traditionally the target of hate and violence.”
I wonder if Moscrov is talking about people like Bernadette and Anna, two of a group of Polish Canadian women who drove from Toronto to Ottawa on Thursday to bring 1,550 Polish sausages to the truckers, along with bread and buns and hundreds of Polish donuts.
“Should they request some Polish vodka, we’re very happy to bring that too,” Bernadette said.
Why did they do it? “Because we stand behind them.”
“We come from communist country, and we came here because we didn’t want to have oppression. We wanted to live in a free country, and for the last two years we’re living like prisoners,” she said.
“We are being told to stay at home. We’re told not to go to the restaurant, not to go to the church!”
“During communism times, we were able and free to go to the church. I really can’t take it anymore,” Bernadette said, adding that they’d be coming back to Ottawa every two or three days “until it ends,” God bless them.
Moscrov said Canada’s response to these Polish immigrants should be a “doubling down” on them and a “media policy of refusing to platform, humanize, or, God forbid, glorify the convoy and its members beyond the bare necessity of speaking to their existence and outlining a program for pushing back.”
Obviously, Trudeau and the media have been following this policy from the beginning. Dehumanize and push back.
So, the tolerant left in media and politics won’t tell you that the convoy is led by a grandmother with Métis heritage.
They don’t show you the faces of the beautiful Maritime children on the highway who made ham sandwiches for the truckers. Or the Quebecois girls who sent their messages to them.
They don’t show you 76-year-old Judy from Ontario who spent the day baking 10 dozen muffins for the heroes driving for the freedom she knew as a child, that her muzzled grandchildren have lost.
Moscrov doesn’t want you to meet Guy Meister from Aylesford, Nova Scotia, whose heater in his beautiful black Mac truck broke on the two-day drive to Ottawa. David Crowell posted that Guy managed to survive without gloves in the minus-30 weather in his cab without a sleeper for the weekend, until other people discovered his trouble, fixed his truck and helped him out.
Moscrov wouldn’t want you to “humanize” Guy and see these truckers as the kindhearted working-class heroes they are. Not really the sort of people to be “pushed back.”
Michael de Adder, The Washington Post’s liberal political cartoonist, tweeted a cartoon showing trucks with the word “fascism” emblazoned on the sides. I wonder if Michael might see things differently if he met Guy in a pub.
The convoy spirit is not just in Ottawa, however; it’s across the whole land and it’s infectious. The owner of a trucking company describes the reports from his truckers in the convoy who are moved to tears by the generosity and support of Canadians across the land giving free food, hotel rooms on the house, half-price fuel, welcoming the truckers with smiles and open doors and arms.
Media Lie No. 2 : It’s a “small fringe minority.”
This phrase “small fringe minority” has become an international joke. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first used it to describe one of the largest nonviolent protests in history and then the phrase was echoed by tax-funded media. The government-subsidized CBC has consistently downsized the convoys and the gathering, reporting that on Saturday, January 29, a mere 8,000 people were in Ottawa.
The size of the crowd that converged in Ottawa in the sub-zero temperatures on the weekend was, as the video shows, easily in the hundreds of thousands. It also does not include the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who stood on bridges, spilled out alongside the highways across the country, or escorted the truckers part of the way.
The main artery of the “fringe” Freedom Convoy from the west was estimated to be 75km long, smashing the world record by a multiple of 10. It could be seen from outer space. That didn’t count several other convoys, from the east, and north, feeding into the nation’s capital.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t small, or fringe. The media’s blatant lie about the world’s largest convoy and Canada’s largest-ever protest elicited laughter across the globe.
“It would appear that the so-called ‘fringe minority’ is actually the government,” Elon Musk tweeted wryly.
It would appear that the so-called “fringe minority” is actually the government
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 30, 2022
The fringe minority also broke fundraising records, drumming up more than $10 million in donations on its GoFundMe page in a little over two weeks. That’s a lot of support.
Media Lie No. 3: The Trucker Convoy is led by white supremacist males.
Even if the people are gullible, the leaders of this trucking chaos are criminal, according to the media. None of the media have shown the courage to feature the woman who sparked the convoy, its crowdfunding organizer, Saskatchewan-born Tamara Lich, a calm, Métis-blood mother and grandmother.
The media has described Lich’s affiliation with the Maverick Party in Alberta in tones as though this was akin to ISIS involvement. But the Maverick Party, which seeks “greater fairness and self-determination for western Canadians,” is popular with a broad base of prairie and mountain westerners who feel alienated from Ottawa’s high taxation and left-leaning city politics.
Listen to Lich’s words and decide for yourself whether what she says is kindling hatred of any kind.
“We are here out of love for our families, our communities, and our nation,” Lich told reporters Thursday. “These past two years of COVID-19 mandates have divided us.
“Our movement has grown in Canada and across the world because common people are tired of the mandates and restrictions in their lives that now seem to be doing more harm than good.”
Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Norway, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland have removed all COVID mandates and restrictions, Lich added, and her convoy is calling on Canada to follow suit.
Not a word of racism, or misogyny there. Just unity and a demand for the right to be free of the most draconian COVID restrictions in the world.
It’s hard to see in the convoy’s unity manifesto below or the group’s “Memorandum of Understanding” what so makes the liberal media seethe.
Media Lie No. 4: The Freedom Convoy is all anti-vaxxers
An inconvenient fact for the media is that many in the throng they hate are vaccinated. The media apply the slur “anti-vaxxer,” to wave away anyone, including doctors and scientists, who question any government or public health demand in the endless “emergency.”
No doubt, many Canadians in the protest got the shots because they thought it was right and they “trusted the science.” Others, because they were pressured to take warp-speed injections in order to work, fly on a plane, attend college or go to their kids’ game. Many ordinary Canadians chose not to.
The truth is, vaccinated and unvaccinated are standing together against the government and vaccine passports.
The zealots are the people who refuse to recognize the science. Here’s Matt Starr, a Canadian father with a heart condition. He said that his cardiologist and GP endorsed his medical exemption from the shots, which are now known to have caused thousands of cases of serious heart inflammation, myocarditis and pericarditis. Does that make him an “anti-vaxxer”?
Starr was given a QR code to participate in society, but the YMCA refused to recognize his doctor’s decision and wouldn’t let him attend his daughter’s basketball game. Just “following the science.” He might not have supported the truckers before, but Starr’s sure on board now.
Media Lie No. 5: The Freedom Convoy put the city in disarray and disrupted the lives of locals
Well, this is sort of true. Irony of ironies, however. The media echo the views of Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, the man who has led the most harmful and least effective business-bankrupting, mental-health damaging, life-disrupting COVID lockdowns in the world.
“People have to move on,” he said. “Let the people of Ottawa live, let the businesses open up.”
Yep. That’s what this is about. All the inconvenience ends when you let the people of Canada live, when you let their businesses open up.
The inconvenient truth for media: The government has closed the businesses in Ottawa, not the truckers. The government is refusing to recognize Charter Rights and Freedoms of its citizens, not the truckers.
Besides that, not all Ottawa residents feel invaded by the convoy. Some are overjoyed. It’s a matter of perspective, as this Ottawa resident’s tweet illustrates:
As an Ottawa resident, it’s so bizarre watching this thing unfold. Local news, city council are all “end of days, chaos and call in the army” but my Mom’s groups on Facebook are baking muffins, making sandwiches, sharing videos of singing protestors and doing trucker crafts 🇨🇦
— Tracey Wilson (@TWilsonOttawa) February 3, 2022
Media Lie No. 6: The protesters are violent
There are endless scenes, captured on film, from Ottawa that show the peaceful nature of the protest: truckers playing hockey in the streets, truckers making pizzas, people holding hands singing “We are the World.”
Supporters of the Freedom Convoy hold hands and sing “We Are the World” outside Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Footage by @PuffinsPictures pic.twitter.com/yBGy0d8VKu
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 2, 2022
Police on the ground testified to the peacefulness of the event.
In fact, the only crime happening seemed to be coming from counter protesters, like this lady in a mask, hurling eggs at trucks. Mild anyway.
Media Lie No. 7: Protesters are begging for food from the local homeless shelters
Reports that protesters had descended in the capital and showed up at a food bank downtown, harassing workers, demanding food and assaulting a homeless man spread like wildfire through the mainstream media.
The convoy denied any involvement in the incident, which was never confirmed. Police reported later that there had been no arrests in the city on the weekend and officers on the scene confirmed it was a peaceful, nonviolent protest, despite its size.
The media reported that the shelter, Shepherds of Good Hope, had since been “overwhelmed” with donations; they failed to report that a big bulk of those donations have come from the protesters themselves, as this video attests:
Media Lie No. 8: Freedom protesters defaced a statue of a national hero.
Terry Fox is a beloved hero to Canadians, especially to anyone over age 50 who remembers him, a 22-year-old cancer warrior who tried to run across the country, after having one leg amputated. He had to stop when the cancer spread, but his courage lives on.
Some protesters at the Freedom Convoy draped a statue of Fox in Ottawa in a Canadian flag, put a MANDATE FREEDOM sign in his hands, and a maple leaf ball cap on his head.
It was widely reported as a ‘defacing.’ Compared to other protest acts on statues like the decapitation of a statue of Queen Victoria at Every Child Matters protest, or the toppling of a statue of our country’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, during a BLM protest that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved, it’s mild. You can take a Canadian flag off Terry Fox; it’s a little harder to resurrect a statue you’ve pulled down and spray painted.
Some see it as disrespectful, however, so protesters removed the props and have been standing by the Fox statue since, making sure it is not touched again.
Media Lie No. 9: Truckers were irreverent to war memorials
It was difficult to find any evidence identifying a trucker “dancing” or “urinating” on another beloved memorial, the grave of the unknown soldier, as the media widely reported. There was a video circulating of a reveling young woman standing on a memorial. No one joined her.
There were also many other protesters’ signs honoring veterans, reminding of the price they paid to secure the freedoms we have lost.
In any case, the convoy’s support of those who fought for our country and liberty has been clear. Their GoFundMe page states that, “Any leftover donations will be donated to a credible Veterans organization which will be chosen by the donors.”
Media Lie No. 10: It was orchestrated by Russia
We’ve heard in Canada that our very organic, grassroots millions-strong movement dominated by trucks, flags and cardboard signs made on kitchen tables was “a Jan. 6 insurrection” funded by Trumpists in America. We’ve heard it was orchestrated by the “far right.” But the most hilariously absurd accusation came straight from the CBC, of course: Canada’s Trucker Freedom Convoy was instigated by Russia.
CBC TV Suggests Russian Actors Are Behind – One News Page VIDEO
It hardly needs comment, but if anyone is colluding in lies it is our media, our politicians and the other elitists who profit from the COVID ordeal never ending.
