Foreign support to this movement is not exactly a secret. They were waiving Trump flags, confederate flags and lots of MAGA signs were seen among the protesters. Also the movement has been publicized on Fox News and by famous right-wing people in the US, that's just normal that it would eventually lead to a lot of people in the US deciding to start donating. The simplest explanation is more likely than the conspiracy that the Canadian government had time to make up fake donations from the US.
This is a bit removed from your point about foreign support, but the flag thing appears to have been exaggerated for political purposes. The Confederate flag guy was shunned by the protestors and stood out like a sore thumb to begin with: https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1487834109678395392. (I'm not endorsing that Twitter account - it's the only link I know of to the video, and the video is interesting.)
It has also been commonly reported that the protestors are Nazis carrying Nazi flags, but this reporting is also excessively politicized. Here's a first-person account giving a completely different picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtN4VqBeCMg#t=6932.
There are hundreds of hours of livestreams on youtube showing the protests. Anyone can dip in at random and get a sense. That's how I ran across that last link of the guy talking about the swastika flag. From the livestreams it seems clear that this is an authentic and peaceful working class protest, not some far right "insurrection" (a word that has also been chosen for political reasons). The most fascinating aspect of this event is what it reveals about the class divide in Canada, and the West in general, since each country has its own version of this right now.
> From the livestreams it seems clear that this is an authentic and peaceful working class protest
I would question the "working class" bit. Most of us on HN are office workers, who don't get out much, so we tend to assume anyone who works outdoors, including driving a truck, must be working class. But remember that every trucker participating in this protest has a truck to participate in: they are either owner-operators, or participating on behalf of trucking firm. Owner-operators are petite bourgeoisie; owners of firms are capitalists. Neither are working class, in an economic sense.
Really, when we office drones say the truckers are working class, what we actually mean is that they are rednecks. They come from rural areas, they probably don't watch the same TV shows as us, and perhaps they don't even drink speciality coffee. But you can be a redneck petit bourgeois, or a redneck capitalist!
> From the livestreams it seems clear that this is an authentic and peaceful working class protest, not some sort of far right "insurrection" (a word that has also been chosen for political reasons). The most fascinating aspect of this event is what it reveals about the class divide in Canada, or the West in general, since each country has its own version of this right now.
This is actually quite disingenuous. All it tells you is the general comportment of what people are doing around those livestreaming (who are almost all clearly marked).
What you aren't seeing or being exposed to in this way are the countless complaints of harassment, death threats, and rape threats the people living in this area are facing on a routine basis, even when the person being threatened was trying to help the protestors.[1][2][3][4]
As I've mentioned in other places, there's a lot of protests in Ottawa. It's the nation's capital and it's often a symbolic target if nothing else. Ottawa's citizens are familiar with protestors. This is a whole different ballgame.
In terms of it being working class, I think that's also a disingenuous label. As you can see in this walk through of the stopped convoy, there's VERY FEW actual big rigs participating, and the people here are largely driving recent pickups.[5] These are not put-out truckers, these are anti-vax/anti-mandate people from across the spectrum, and not a lot of them.
Was there any actual violence? If not then it was peaceful. Merely being armed certainly increases the capacity for violence, but it’s not violence in and of itself.
I’m not familiar with Canadian law on the subject, so I don’t know if possession of the items in question is unlawful or if there was some other cause for the arrests.
I think it's not the worst thing in the world for there to be visual elements inspired by the 2nd Amendment. If nothing else, it puts pressure on the government and shows that many free thinkers have solidarity with Canadians.
In Canadian terms it's politically one of the most foolish things you could do. There's little constituency for 2nd Amendment style gun rights in Canada, so they'd be sawing off the limb they're sitting on. And that's apart from whether they broke the law, which would also be politically foolish since it undermines their argument of civil disobedience. I don't know anything about the facts of this case though.
The point is that many other countries should adopt rights similar to the 2nd Amendment, because it has been proven to increase civil liberties with very few downsides. Canadians who refuse to do so are more likely to be trampled by big government.
planting a 'nazi/white nationalist' in protests and then having the media focus on it seems like such a obvious tactic now that it is making me question every time this kind of thing occurs.
For example, remember the recent election in Virginia where there was a ton of media retweets of a picture of a handful of 'white supremacists' in front of the tour bus for the Republican candidate. The media made a huge deal about it and the reporter who was on the scene made all kinds of absurd tweets about things she 'overheard' them say. However it didn't take long before people found pictures of the 'White Supremacists' working for the Democrat candidates campaign. One was even driving the tour bus!
That was a almost absurdy poorly executed attempt at a political smear but it really opened my eyes to how easy it is to insert bad actors into an event - especially when you have a complicit media.
How are the complicit media organized? Is there a secret WhatsApp thread going on between the hundreds of media organizations? Who runs the organization? How do they keep it a secret?
It existed, allowed the media to work together on how to represent certain issues, it stopped existing and there is a new version that replaced it? What did I miss?
I assume you are talking about Klein's statement regarding Tucker?
Honestly the odds that was a fed are pretty high. The father had feds planting explosive in people’s mailboxes [0] and tried to pin it on some political group he didn’t like back in the 70’s. Feds were forced to confessed when one got busted doing it, quite literally red-handed.
No, but if a bunch of people flying Peurto Rican flags swarm the Texas legislature it's probably reasonable to assume that there is a degree of support from people in Puerto Rico/outside of texas.
I think that most people mean "foreign" as foreign government (such as CCP) support, not just support from middle-class Americans (and Europeans) who identify with the protests and happen to be foreigners.
And while it could be that foreign governments have donated with false identities over GSG, it is more likely that they would send in people to figure out who is really capable of moving things, and contact them with cash, tips, and resources.
(I am not commenting on the envoy, as so far have only seen it in news outlets [such as CNN & NYT on the left and Fox on the right] who have not earned my trust - so I do not know what is really happening.)
As a Canadian I absolutely count donations from foreigners in the US and Europe as foreign money and absolutely think that that should be illegal (though I have no clue as to what the current legal status of that is).
Commenting only on the flags themselves and not the protest or the hack:
Canada is not part of the USA.
Trump was a President of the USA not Canada; the Confederacy was made from the bits of the USA furthest away from Canada; and while a literal interpretation of the word “America” in the initialism “Make America Great Again” would refer to the entire continent, it is usually understood as specifically just the USA and not Canada (and definitely not Mexico or Cuba let alone the rest).
Flags are widely used as a symbol of identity. Could be an (excuse the term, I can think of none other that fits) false flag, but there’s a reason why that term exists.
Honnestly, there's a lot more people moving from Canada to the US than the reverse. Maybe there's a desire to embrace the American way (of course, the state media won't touch it!).
When hiring, we get a ton of resumes from Canada to transfer to the US but the reverse almost never happens.
I’ve just looked up the numbers, about 810k Canadian-born people in the USA (2017) and 377k US-born people in Canada (2016).
Adjusting for population sizes (USA has ~9 times the population), a random Canadian is about 4 times more likely to go south than a random American is to go north.
But there’s a reason I was focusing on just the symbolism, and that’s that I know how limited my knowledge is in this instance.
