Yesterday, the Treasury noted that the U.S. budget had a surplus of $119 billion in January. That’s the first budget surplus in more than two years. Tax receipts are up significantly: they grew 21% in January to $465 billion, as higher employment and earnings meant a big jump in payroll taxes and withholdings. At the same time, outlays fell 37%.
I so appreciate your work in putting together these columns, especially for including references to specific information. It is seriously wonderful. We can only wish our TV "journalists" would do the same, i.e. prepare a broadcast segment and post the sources publicly on a website. I believe that would quickly reveal the fabulists among them, whatever their political persuasion.
Also, the Canadian government has lost control of Ottawa to the extreme right that infiltrated the "Freedom Convoy." Here's a substack blog with all the info:
This one you’re reading now is also where I will recount the strangest, most concerning incident I experienced in Ottawa — one that explains why I think the police have been so reluctant to act.
They know what they're up against, to be frank. Most of us don't. And at least one person is trying to tell us.
The chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the chief of a major police force isn't something that happens because you catch the most bad guys. It happens because you're good at working your way up through the power structures of a very particular institution. Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he's been signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of itself. That's a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the resources on hand.
Also, there’s this: there's another element of the protest that's nothing at all like a festival.
You may have heard reports of a secondary encampment that is well removed from the main protest sites around Parliament Hill. I certainly had. It has been described in different reports as either a logistics area or some kind of staging ground for protesters. It is a parking lot outside of a baseball diamond, RCGT Park, right next to a large Marriott hotel, and though not far from Parliament, it’s well removed from the main sites.
This site, for lack of a better term, has been fortified. There are many trucks parked in the parking lot, but some of them have been arranged to form outer walls. These walls have been augmented with wooden sawhorses and what looked to me to be stacked pallets of some kind. There was an entrance with a tent marked Reception (see photo, below). I wish I could give you a better description of the site, or tell you what was inside, but as soon as I began to approach it on foot, someone very quickly fell into step behind me. A series of others, four or five, met me before I made it to the reception tent. We chatted briefly, and I got the distinct impression that it would be way, way better for me to be somewhere else. I left.
Later that day, by chance, I found out that a friend of mine had been in town and had decided to go check it out for herself. She told me that she was able to get inside by slipping in with a larger group. Once she started taking pictures, she immediately began to be followed, and she was tailed until she left shortly thereafter. She wasn’t harmed or threatened, and agreed with my description of the residents as organized, polite, and very clear in their desire for you to leave. She had a much better view of the entire area, and reports that the perimeter was pretty secure. Where it wasn't, she said, there were small groups standing on guard. Her impression matched my own entirely: this group is disciplined, organized and on alert for outsiders.
Still, each call I made went similarly: the police are very much aware of the site, and they are very worried about the presence of a hard-right-wing, organized faction that isn't there to protest mandates and vaccine passports, but to directly create conflict with the government. This hard-right element probably includes some non-Canadians, here for the party. The broader complaints of the protesters are a cover for the group seeking open conflict. Most of the convoy protesters aren’t part of this smaller, nastier group, nor linked to it in any overt way. Many of them will think any concern about it at all is just some MSM lamestream media conspiracy.
My government and security sources do not agree. What’s happening in Ottawa, they were clear, is two separate events happening in tandem: there is a broadly non-violent (to date) group of Canadians with assorted COVID-related gripes, ranging from the somewhat justified to totally frickin’ insane. But that larger group, which has knocked Ottawa and too many of our leaders into what my colleague Jen Gerson so perfectly described as “stun-fucked stasis,” is now providing a kind of (mostly) unwitting cover to a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state — not just the city of Ottawa, or Ontario or Canada, but of democracies generally.
Some of them are ideologues, others just grifters, but they’re real, and they’re in Ottawa. Maybe not in that parking lot. I certainly didn’t get the chance to take any names. But local officials know they’re out and about, and are worried that any move they make will trigger an incident that can easily result in dead cops, dead truckers and delighted far-right agitators.
If that all sounds alarmist, I felt that way too. So I contacted three other sources, including one who’s superbly well placed, and ran this scenario by them. Two agreed. One suggested I’m actually being too optimistic.
So yeah. The bouncy castles and the Fuck Trudeau signs aren’t really the story here. And if you’re wondering why no one wants to act, it’s because they’re afraid of what they’ll be unleashing.
Orange County Scientology lawyer Leigh Dundas, who was one of the main organizers of anti-masking and anti-vaccination protests in the county this past year, is now working to bring the Canadian "Freedom Convoy" protest to the US. As with all Scientologists, she's crazy, but in her case she's also extremely dangerous.
Now, Dundas is leading a different kind of charge: the effort to bring Canada’s anti-vax trucker protests to the United States.
Politico first reported the involvement of Dundas and her non-profit, Freedom Fighter Nation, on Wednesday. TPM reviewed Telegram chats focused on organizing a U.S. convoy in which organizers referred to Dundas and her nonprofit as part of the movement’s leadership, saying that they are playing a role in planning upcoming rallies.
Dundas claimed in a little-noticed interview published on far-right video sharing network Rumble that she first got involved several weeks ago when a group of Canadian truckers invited her to help with their protest.
“We started working with them to identify the strategic border crossings and how we could support them from the United States side and also what this looked like,” Dundas said in the video, published Jan. 31.
Now, she and others are working to ignite a similar series of anti-vax protests in the U.S., starting with a rally planned for California’s Coachella Valley in early March that’s been promoted across several of the main social media profiles for the would-be American convoy.
Over the past two years, Dundas’ appearances illustrate the nexus of right-wing activism around anti-COVID measures, Jan. 6, and, now, the movement of truckers aimed at snarling up supply chains and bringing an end to vaccine requirements. It’s a jumble of different threads with Dundas popping up in each, promoting both conspiracy theories and her own involvement in organizing around them.
In particular, Dundas has had a Forrest Gump-like habit of popping up at COVID-related imbroglios. First in Orange County, and most recently on Capitol Hill.
When the pandemic first began, Dundas was one of a group that succeeded in expelling a local Orange County official from office over COVID mandates that, TPM pointed out at the time, were non-existent.
That’s also when Tony Ortega, a former Village Voice editor-in-chief and current independent journalist who covers Scientology, first noticed Dundas.
He cottoned on to Dundas’ connections to scientology, specifically as an attorney for what he described as a front group operated by a scientologist chiropractor. Then, in January 2021, he was surprised to receive a tip placing her outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“You stand the hell up,” Dundas said in a video of a speech she gave in D.C. around the time of the insurrection, posted to YouTube by Ortega. “Because you are far better off living a life on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees.”
Ortega told TPM that that was Dundas’s last U.S. appearance for a while. Social media posts reviewed by TPM place her in Mexico not long after.
“Right after that event, she went right down to Mexico. It seemed like she knew she stepped over the line,” Ortega added. “There’s an enclave being built by scientologists down there.”
Dundas has since returned to the U.S. She appeared at an October 2021 conference in Salt Lake City devoted to COVID denial, the Big Lie, and other issues that loom large in the QAnon universe.
In the Jan. 31 Rumble video, Dundas discussed an earlier plan for mass, anti-vax protests: a so-called “National Walkout” to be held in November 2021, meant as a general strike against employers with vaccine mandates.
That effort did not catch on. It did lead to some notoriety, after a car hit five people trying to control a protest that Dundas organized on the Golden Gate bridge in support of the walkout.
Later in the Jan. 31 Rumble video, Dundas said that the Canadian truckers reached out to her after hearing about her role in the walkout.
She likened the truckers’ movement to a 2014 episode in Thailand, where, as she told it, farmers used their equipment to bring a “coup d’etat” to an end.
“For whatever reason, god had me on the ground in February 2014 when the Thailand farmers did a similar move — they blockaded or threatened to blockade and make an island of Bangkok International Airport, as a way to bring the coup to an end,” she said. “They were having a coup d’etat. There was no definitive winner coming out of it.”
(The story seems to conflate events in 2014 — a planned February farmers protest that was subsequently called off, and the successful May military coup. Dundas has said she was in Thailand working on anti-human trafficking issues.)
Dundas added that it ended when “much like the Canada truck drivers,” Thai farmers drove large trucks to block off Bangkok’s main international airport.
“That was it — no more coup,” she said. “I had been waiting for anybody in a first-world country to do that over the past couple years as things got more tyrannical, and really since March 2020.”
Perhaps the media could stop adopting the moniker of "Freedom Convoy," which only serves to underscore the message of the menacing, manipulative forces behind it. "Convoy of Rowdy Anti-everything Puppets" [CRAP]... Just spitballing here...
I continually shake my head at the nerve of these angry men who act as though they are the center of the universe. Just as with the insurrectionists, they believe they are the victims therefore they are entitled to trash anything and everything like spoiled children throwing a temper tantrum! When my children were young and threw tantrums, they had times out! I’d like to see more of these immature, childish brats get the times out they’ve earned by their behavior! I have ceased being polite and not saying out loud how I feel because I might offend! Those thumb-sucking babies are putting the economies of two nations at risk because they are not getting their way. Grab them by the scruff of their necks and their belts and throw them in the time out room that has big thick bars! I’ve had it!
"Disrupting a nation’s supply chains destabilizes its economy and thereby weakens the government in power. Indeed, U.S. lawmakers know this quite well: in 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded a 26-day truckers’ strike in Chile that helped to destabilize the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown the following year by right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet."
It's critical to stop any copycat protests this side of the border! The Canadian truckers must be disassembled sooner rather than later, before the GOP mirror the movement here!
Such a great deal of information to digest! Thank you, Heather, for presenting it with your inimitable accuracy and insuppressible truth-values.
It essential that media amplifies that the vast majority of Canadians, Canadian truckers, Canadian workers, U.S. truckers, U.S. workers, and U.S. citizens oppose these protests. This is NOT a protest that has broad popular support. The constant coverage provides the wrong impression of the breadth of support. Let’s see more coverage of those opposing it.
Who are the Mother Truckers and what is their objective? As Heather and VermontGirl157 highlight, it is DISRUPTION and DESTABILIZATION. It is unbelievable that a bevy of truckers would spontaneously gather in Ottawa and spread to elsewhere in Canada and now the United States to block road ways and establish elaborate living quarters including saunas.
Independent truckers live a financially fraught life. Often they have heavy monthly payments on their mammoth vehicles and weeks of down time would be extremely costly. Heather mentions a conspiracist, James Bauder, who purportedly was an instigator of these “Freedom Convoys.” I believe that there are more sinister elements behind these organized and sustained activities that are currently disrupting a significant portion of the U. S./Canadian auto industry.
Heather mentions the 1972 26-day CIA-instigated trucker strike in Chile. As Political Officer at our Santiago embassy (1966-1969) I had insight into some CIA machinations. I believe that this strike, organized through the Alarcon brothers and financed by CIA (Nixon/KIssinger in Washington), was intended to cripple the Chilean economy and weaken the Allende government.
So who is behind the Mother Truckers, who appear to me to be a civilian equivalent of the Proud Boys and the Oath Takers? This expansive ‘vaccine protest’ does not magically spring from the head of Zeus. I urge the American and Canadian governments to follow the money and to unravel the trail of THE WHO AND THE HOW. (Does Fox News coverage provide a hint?)
I fear this disruption of American and Canadian supply chains is just the beginning of rhe anarchy about to be unleashed in the U.S. War may be closer to home than we imagine.
Fox's gloating over what's happening in Canada may be premature. The Canadian response to the so-called Freedom convoy is beginning to consolidate. The Conservatives who were giving passive support have backed away, and the stories of Canadians whose lives were disrupted, who lost their paychecks, who barricaded themselves in their homes out of fear are beginning to be heard. I have way too much information to fit in to this blog. You can read that Ontario has now declared a state of emergency which will empower the government to take decisive action. I have been overwhelmed by the eloquent expressions of moral outrage by my friends. I just want to share a song composed by a Canadian musician with my fellow readers of this blog- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOC-IUV_pzk
Dr Richardson, thank you once again for a well written overview of the issues at hand. In yesterday's letter you pointed out the slanted message from the collective media (mainstream media in this message). Today, you once again pointed out the positive's from the current administrative's economic decisions and actions in your opening paragraph, yet no where in the media is this message delivered to the general public. I've been reading and watching with interest for the national coverage on the economy to point out all of these positives - yet they seem blind to them. I realize that 'negative news sells', but I do not understand why the message is being lost on the minions who don't actually read beyond the newsbits and soundbites. Could it be that's because all of our press is owned by Republican party members? Or could it be that reporters are unwilling to weigh in with some upbeat news? The 'sky is falling' inflation message is all these folks hear. No wonder Biden has such low poll ratings (who do they actually 'poll'?) How do we get the news anchors on National News to tell the whole story??
Facebook is a privatized delivery vehicle for cyber weapons of mass distraction and disruption with the goal of destabilization. Karl von Clausewitz and Tsung Tsu would both be so proud. Psychological weapons are cheap, they don’t cost your side lives, they remain deny-able, and effective. The protesting truckers don’t see the pys-op, because they are the psy-op.
How long will we tolerate an American company giving blind access to our fellow citizen’s psyches with the goal of radicalizing them, and directing them to disrupt daily life on bridges and highways, Public Health and school board meetings, election counts, gun purchases, armed protests, etc, etc?
DISRUPTIONS and
DESTABILIZATION
Why Heather, I believe you’ve uncovered the GOP “platform”
I so appreciate your work in putting together these columns, especially for including references to specific information. It is seriously wonderful. We can only wish our TV "journalists" would do the same, i.e. prepare a broadcast segment and post the sources publicly on a website. I believe that would quickly reveal the fabulists among them, whatever their political persuasion.
Also, the Canadian government has lost control of Ottawa to the extreme right that infiltrated the "Freedom Convoy." Here's a substack blog with all the info:
https://theline.substack.com/p/dispatch-from-the-ottawa-front-sloly
This one you’re reading now is also where I will recount the strangest, most concerning incident I experienced in Ottawa — one that explains why I think the police have been so reluctant to act.
They know what they're up against, to be frank. Most of us don't. And at least one person is trying to tell us.
The chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the chief of a major police force isn't something that happens because you catch the most bad guys. It happens because you're good at working your way up through the power structures of a very particular institution. Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he's been signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of itself. That's a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the resources on hand.
Also, there’s this: there's another element of the protest that's nothing at all like a festival.
You may have heard reports of a secondary encampment that is well removed from the main protest sites around Parliament Hill. I certainly had. It has been described in different reports as either a logistics area or some kind of staging ground for protesters. It is a parking lot outside of a baseball diamond, RCGT Park, right next to a large Marriott hotel, and though not far from Parliament, it’s well removed from the main sites.
This site, for lack of a better term, has been fortified. There are many trucks parked in the parking lot, but some of them have been arranged to form outer walls. These walls have been augmented with wooden sawhorses and what looked to me to be stacked pallets of some kind. There was an entrance with a tent marked Reception (see photo, below). I wish I could give you a better description of the site, or tell you what was inside, but as soon as I began to approach it on foot, someone very quickly fell into step behind me. A series of others, four or five, met me before I made it to the reception tent. We chatted briefly, and I got the distinct impression that it would be way, way better for me to be somewhere else. I left.
Later that day, by chance, I found out that a friend of mine had been in town and had decided to go check it out for herself. She told me that she was able to get inside by slipping in with a larger group. Once she started taking pictures, she immediately began to be followed, and she was tailed until she left shortly thereafter. She wasn’t harmed or threatened, and agreed with my description of the residents as organized, polite, and very clear in their desire for you to leave. She had a much better view of the entire area, and reports that the perimeter was pretty secure. Where it wasn't, she said, there were small groups standing on guard. Her impression matched my own entirely: this group is disciplined, organized and on alert for outsiders.
Still, each call I made went similarly: the police are very much aware of the site, and they are very worried about the presence of a hard-right-wing, organized faction that isn't there to protest mandates and vaccine passports, but to directly create conflict with the government. This hard-right element probably includes some non-Canadians, here for the party. The broader complaints of the protesters are a cover for the group seeking open conflict. Most of the convoy protesters aren’t part of this smaller, nastier group, nor linked to it in any overt way. Many of them will think any concern about it at all is just some MSM lamestream media conspiracy.
My government and security sources do not agree. What’s happening in Ottawa, they were clear, is two separate events happening in tandem: there is a broadly non-violent (to date) group of Canadians with assorted COVID-related gripes, ranging from the somewhat justified to totally frickin’ insane. But that larger group, which has knocked Ottawa and too many of our leaders into what my colleague Jen Gerson so perfectly described as “stun-fucked stasis,” is now providing a kind of (mostly) unwitting cover to a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state — not just the city of Ottawa, or Ontario or Canada, but of democracies generally.
Some of them are ideologues, others just grifters, but they’re real, and they’re in Ottawa. Maybe not in that parking lot. I certainly didn’t get the chance to take any names. But local officials know they’re out and about, and are worried that any move they make will trigger an incident that can easily result in dead cops, dead truckers and delighted far-right agitators.
If that all sounds alarmist, I felt that way too. So I contacted three other sources, including one who’s superbly well placed, and ran this scenario by them. Two agreed. One suggested I’m actually being too optimistic.
So yeah. The bouncy castles and the Fuck Trudeau signs aren’t really the story here. And if you’re wondering why no one wants to act, it’s because they’re afraid of what they’ll be unleashing.
Anne Applebaum answers the question “Why would Putin want to invade Ukraine?” with
“Because he wants democracy to fail, and not just in Ukraine.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukraine-democracy/621465/
Here's some news a little more serious. From TPM:
Orange County Scientology lawyer Leigh Dundas, who was one of the main organizers of anti-masking and anti-vaccination protests in the county this past year, is now working to bring the Canadian "Freedom Convoy" protest to the US. As with all Scientologists, she's crazy, but in her case she's also extremely dangerous.
Now, Dundas is leading a different kind of charge: the effort to bring Canada’s anti-vax trucker protests to the United States.
Politico first reported the involvement of Dundas and her non-profit, Freedom Fighter Nation, on Wednesday. TPM reviewed Telegram chats focused on organizing a U.S. convoy in which organizers referred to Dundas and her nonprofit as part of the movement’s leadership, saying that they are playing a role in planning upcoming rallies.
Dundas claimed in a little-noticed interview published on far-right video sharing network Rumble that she first got involved several weeks ago when a group of Canadian truckers invited her to help with their protest.
“We started working with them to identify the strategic border crossings and how we could support them from the United States side and also what this looked like,” Dundas said in the video, published Jan. 31.
Now, she and others are working to ignite a similar series of anti-vax protests in the U.S., starting with a rally planned for California’s Coachella Valley in early March that’s been promoted across several of the main social media profiles for the would-be American convoy.
Over the past two years, Dundas’ appearances illustrate the nexus of right-wing activism around anti-COVID measures, Jan. 6, and, now, the movement of truckers aimed at snarling up supply chains and bringing an end to vaccine requirements. It’s a jumble of different threads with Dundas popping up in each, promoting both conspiracy theories and her own involvement in organizing around them.
In particular, Dundas has had a Forrest Gump-like habit of popping up at COVID-related imbroglios. First in Orange County, and most recently on Capitol Hill.
When the pandemic first began, Dundas was one of a group that succeeded in expelling a local Orange County official from office over COVID mandates that, TPM pointed out at the time, were non-existent.
That’s also when Tony Ortega, a former Village Voice editor-in-chief and current independent journalist who covers Scientology, first noticed Dundas.
He cottoned on to Dundas’ connections to scientology, specifically as an attorney for what he described as a front group operated by a scientologist chiropractor. Then, in January 2021, he was surprised to receive a tip placing her outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“You stand the hell up,” Dundas said in a video of a speech she gave in D.C. around the time of the insurrection, posted to YouTube by Ortega. “Because you are far better off living a life on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees.”
Ortega told TPM that that was Dundas’s last U.S. appearance for a while. Social media posts reviewed by TPM place her in Mexico not long after.
“Right after that event, she went right down to Mexico. It seemed like she knew she stepped over the line,” Ortega added. “There’s an enclave being built by scientologists down there.”
Dundas has since returned to the U.S. She appeared at an October 2021 conference in Salt Lake City devoted to COVID denial, the Big Lie, and other issues that loom large in the QAnon universe.
In the Jan. 31 Rumble video, Dundas discussed an earlier plan for mass, anti-vax protests: a so-called “National Walkout” to be held in November 2021, meant as a general strike against employers with vaccine mandates.
That effort did not catch on. It did lead to some notoriety, after a car hit five people trying to control a protest that Dundas organized on the Golden Gate bridge in support of the walkout.
Later in the Jan. 31 Rumble video, Dundas said that the Canadian truckers reached out to her after hearing about her role in the walkout.
She likened the truckers’ movement to a 2014 episode in Thailand, where, as she told it, farmers used their equipment to bring a “coup d’etat” to an end.
“For whatever reason, god had me on the ground in February 2014 when the Thailand farmers did a similar move — they blockaded or threatened to blockade and make an island of Bangkok International Airport, as a way to bring the coup to an end,” she said. “They were having a coup d’etat. There was no definitive winner coming out of it.”
(The story seems to conflate events in 2014 — a planned February farmers protest that was subsequently called off, and the successful May military coup. Dundas has said she was in Thailand working on anti-human trafficking issues.)
Dundas added that it ended when “much like the Canada truck drivers,” Thai farmers drove large trucks to block off Bangkok’s main international airport.
“That was it — no more coup,” she said. “I had been waiting for anybody in a first-world country to do that over the past couple years as things got more tyrannical, and really since March 2020.”
Perhaps the media could stop adopting the moniker of "Freedom Convoy," which only serves to underscore the message of the menacing, manipulative forces behind it. "Convoy of Rowdy Anti-everything Puppets" [CRAP]... Just spitballing here...
I continually shake my head at the nerve of these angry men who act as though they are the center of the universe. Just as with the insurrectionists, they believe they are the victims therefore they are entitled to trash anything and everything like spoiled children throwing a temper tantrum! When my children were young and threw tantrums, they had times out! I’d like to see more of these immature, childish brats get the times out they’ve earned by their behavior! I have ceased being polite and not saying out loud how I feel because I might offend! Those thumb-sucking babies are putting the economies of two nations at risk because they are not getting their way. Grab them by the scruff of their necks and their belts and throw them in the time out room that has big thick bars! I’ve had it!
"disruption and destabilization" are the goals of the insurrectionists. Tis pathetic and criminal at once.
War in Europe...could this be?
Who are we? Putin/Trump/Kim/FOX??
Is this devolution?
I feel ever so insulated from this madness, yet it is ever-present, this insanity.
The downside of the paradise in which I get to live is the presence of nuclear weapons in the Hood Canal and the Puget Sound and on Indian Island.
Growlers have been active all day around the Salish Sea. On high alert, one would suppose.
Could the madness be stopped?
Gratitude to you, Heather, for truth and context.
"Disrupting a nation’s supply chains destabilizes its economy and thereby weakens the government in power. Indeed, U.S. lawmakers know this quite well: in 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded a 26-day truckers’ strike in Chile that helped to destabilize the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown the following year by right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet."
It's critical to stop any copycat protests this side of the border! The Canadian truckers must be disassembled sooner rather than later, before the GOP mirror the movement here!
Such a great deal of information to digest! Thank you, Heather, for presenting it with your inimitable accuracy and insuppressible truth-values.
It essential that media amplifies that the vast majority of Canadians, Canadian truckers, Canadian workers, U.S. truckers, U.S. workers, and U.S. citizens oppose these protests. This is NOT a protest that has broad popular support. The constant coverage provides the wrong impression of the breadth of support. Let’s see more coverage of those opposing it.
Who are the Mother Truckers and what is their objective? As Heather and VermontGirl157 highlight, it is DISRUPTION and DESTABILIZATION. It is unbelievable that a bevy of truckers would spontaneously gather in Ottawa and spread to elsewhere in Canada and now the United States to block road ways and establish elaborate living quarters including saunas.
Independent truckers live a financially fraught life. Often they have heavy monthly payments on their mammoth vehicles and weeks of down time would be extremely costly. Heather mentions a conspiracist, James Bauder, who purportedly was an instigator of these “Freedom Convoys.” I believe that there are more sinister elements behind these organized and sustained activities that are currently disrupting a significant portion of the U. S./Canadian auto industry.
Heather mentions the 1972 26-day CIA-instigated trucker strike in Chile. As Political Officer at our Santiago embassy (1966-1969) I had insight into some CIA machinations. I believe that this strike, organized through the Alarcon brothers and financed by CIA (Nixon/KIssinger in Washington), was intended to cripple the Chilean economy and weaken the Allende government.
So who is behind the Mother Truckers, who appear to me to be a civilian equivalent of the Proud Boys and the Oath Takers? This expansive ‘vaccine protest’ does not magically spring from the head of Zeus. I urge the American and Canadian governments to follow the money and to unravel the trail of THE WHO AND THE HOW. (Does Fox News coverage provide a hint?)
I fear this disruption of American and Canadian supply chains is just the beginning of rhe anarchy about to be unleashed in the U.S. War may be closer to home than we imagine.
"in 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded a 26-day truckers’ strike in Chile that
>>helped to destabilize the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende<<,
who would be overthrown the following year by RIGHT-WING dictator General Augusto Pinochet. "
Aye.
->WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND<-
Now? Russia and China are funding efforts to destablize American Democracy, and, it is working.
Fox's gloating over what's happening in Canada may be premature. The Canadian response to the so-called Freedom convoy is beginning to consolidate. The Conservatives who were giving passive support have backed away, and the stories of Canadians whose lives were disrupted, who lost their paychecks, who barricaded themselves in their homes out of fear are beginning to be heard. I have way too much information to fit in to this blog. You can read that Ontario has now declared a state of emergency which will empower the government to take decisive action. I have been overwhelmed by the eloquent expressions of moral outrage by my friends. I just want to share a song composed by a Canadian musician with my fellow readers of this blog- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOC-IUV_pzk
Dr Richardson, thank you once again for a well written overview of the issues at hand. In yesterday's letter you pointed out the slanted message from the collective media (mainstream media in this message). Today, you once again pointed out the positive's from the current administrative's economic decisions and actions in your opening paragraph, yet no where in the media is this message delivered to the general public. I've been reading and watching with interest for the national coverage on the economy to point out all of these positives - yet they seem blind to them. I realize that 'negative news sells', but I do not understand why the message is being lost on the minions who don't actually read beyond the newsbits and soundbites. Could it be that's because all of our press is owned by Republican party members? Or could it be that reporters are unwilling to weigh in with some upbeat news? The 'sky is falling' inflation message is all these folks hear. No wonder Biden has such low poll ratings (who do they actually 'poll'?) How do we get the news anchors on National News to tell the whole story??
Facebook is a privatized delivery vehicle for cyber weapons of mass distraction and disruption with the goal of destabilization. Karl von Clausewitz and Tsung Tsu would both be so proud. Psychological weapons are cheap, they don’t cost your side lives, they remain deny-able, and effective. The protesting truckers don’t see the pys-op, because they are the psy-op.
How long will we tolerate an American company giving blind access to our fellow citizen’s psyches with the goal of radicalizing them, and directing them to disrupt daily life on bridges and highways, Public Health and school board meetings, election counts, gun purchases, armed protests, etc, etc?
Facebook is a “Groundhog Day” Trojan horse!