Ottawa's COVID Convoy Is More Than a Nuisance - It's Engaged in Political Violence
Canada's January 6th moment has arrived
I was going to submit the piece below to the Globe, but I’m not sure they would have published it, I didn't really want to water it down, and I’m not sure it’s on brand with the other things I’ve been trying to build income streams around to try to achieve some semblance of material security and wellness amid socio-ecological breakdown (the struggle, amirite?).
As much as I love to fancy myself a very clever and serious commentator on … stuff (please love me), it’s about the hardest and least sustainable thing to get paid for out of the things I can try to get paid for, and I really need to get paid for things these days.
Food and health and student loans before … whatever this is. Not art lol.
Plus, I’ve hyper-focused most of my Saturday away on this at this point (thanks, late-diagnosed ADHD!), so I figured I might as well just resurrect this ol’ Substackery doodad and post it here instead so I can get on with the weekend.
Apologies for the long and unplanned hiatus — it’s been a year, for all of us, I know.
I do hope you find something meaningful in this piece I wrote today. I’m reasonably happy with where it landed. I’ll probably keep editing it a bit.
Maybe I’ll be back to write more :)
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Ottawa’s COVID Convoy is More Than a Nuisance – It’s Engaged in Political Violence
Like many debt-laden Torontonians working hard to afford meagre housing, I’ve seen friends leave for greener pastures, including Ottawa. I wrote this for them.
I’ve sometimes envied them, imagining what it might be like to move from the busy street I live on (70-80 decibels) to a quieter neighbourhood in a less unaffordable city.
But as my Ottawa compatriots endure another day of siege, I am now simply angry on their behalf at the abuse they’ve been subjected to and at how little protection they’ve received from the ostensible authorities.
Perhaps if there were a pipeline protest or a homeless encampment nearby the police might have found use for their funding and provided some relief from the wanton harm and illegality before things were taken predictably out of hand and trucks started looking like tanks.
Alas.
Instead, the delusional worldview of people radicalized in private Facebook groups and normalized by tiger-baiting politicians has been condensed into an endless wall of ear-shattering sound by an occupying force.
I use “delusional” and “radicalized” objectively here.
Organizer Pat King is a well-known white supremacist, according to the independent Canadian Anti Hate Network, one of a number of racists and grifters behind the “movement” that trucking associations have disavowed.
QAnon influencer Romana Didulo has also been out there for “freedom” – she claims to be “Queen of Canada” and has previously encouraged followers to “shoot to kill” over Covid19 vaccines.
Outliers you say? Fair enough. The “moderates” just want Canada’s Prime Minister tried for some nonsensical “treason” (when they’re not relieving themselves on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Where are our stalwart monument-defenders now?).
Having lost touch with reality, the occupiers are now trying to drown it out with horns.
If a riot is “the language of the unheard”, what should we make of this gleeful mandrakery by a tiny minority of commercial operators, blaring their business equipment to terrorize children, animals, families, autistics, and every Ottawa eardrum in a massive radius?
Military torturers and interrogators (including US operators) have used loud music to deny sleep, drown out thought, and break down prisoners’ sense of reality, personhood, and will. Apparently, it doesn’t take long.
The extremist organizers of the Covid Convoy, however, already live in a broken reality.
Their followers are engaged in a live-action-role-play* of chatroom conspiracy-theories and dangerous power fantasies. Desperate for meaning and belonging in a chaotic world, they are now seeking to impose their fever-dreams on the rest of us through an authoritarian auditory assault.
I would be remiss not to mention that there have also been numerous reports of physical assault by these occupiers — on mask wearing transit-users, on homeless humans seeking shelter, on people taking pictures in their own neighbourhoods, on journalists — as well as an arsonist attack on an apartment building (the attackers reportedly taped the doors shut to trap residents inside), and targeted attacks on places with rainbow flags, not to mention blocked ambulances.
Very fine people, indeed. But back to the sound of their fury.
“If you need to raise your voice to be heard, then the noise level is high enough to cause hearing loss”, notes Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.
Lawnmowers and leaf blowers will do this around 80-90 decibels. A motorcycle, at 95 decibels, can cause hearing damage after just 50 minutes. Decibels are also non-linear, meaning a sound at 20dB is 10 times more intense than one at 10dB.
Truck horns can range from 100-150 decibels, and they’ve been blasting Ottawa’s unprotected ears for a week and a half, threatening thousands of people with complex trauma and permanent ear damage.
Enough. Ya basta, cabrones.
Protest is important. Non-violent direct action is important. The Ottawa occupiers are engaged in something else entirely.
It’s time to stop indulging the polite fantasy that these are reasonable people with reasonable demands who just want a good faith and reasonable conversation.
Like all authoritarians, they are seeking to impose their reality through intimidation and force. They are an active threat, danger-close, causing abundant and demonstrable harm while nice, normal Canadians – that great majority who have tried their level best to look out for one another throughout this terrible pandemic – have been left to fend for themselves.
The Ottawa occupiers are wildly out of step with the overwhelming majority of us. They are engaged in political cause-play. They are role-playing a dangerous alt-reality, and it’s a zero-sum game.
In short, Ottawa has been beset by political violence grounded in disinformation and delusion spread through well-monetized global far-right networks. It’s past time to start recognizing it as such and calling out the politicians and pundits who have given it cover to crawl out of Internet fantasyland while propping open the Overton window.
It’s time to take seriously the well-aged warnings of experts who research the globalized far-right and the networks of disinformation and grift through which they operate.
A year ago, Canadians looked on in horror as Americans took private jets to lay siege to their own capital in an attempt to overthrow their own democracy, egged on by cynical politicians and pundits promoting Big Lies about “globalists”, “election fraud”, and COVID-19.
Canada is not immune to these lies or their consequences, and we cannot afford continued complacency in the face of their purveyors, participants, and apologists.
With Republicans now trying to protect the GoFundMe money pipeline for the Ottawa siege even as they plot the next coup attempt in the US, it should be clear that this is not simply some misunderstood group of aw-shucks truckers who just need a chance to be heard.
The ongoing siege of Ottawa is a delusional and violent assertion of power backed by a global network of disinformation-peddling far-right extremists.
It is a January 6th moment for Canada.
We have lost control of our capital and left politics-as-usual behind.
*In an earlier draft, I referred to “entitled and delusional LARPers wearing expensive truck costumes”. It didn’t survive the edits when I thought I might still aim for the Globe, but it still makes me smile so I’m footnoting it here.
**Very obviously, nothing in this piece or anywhere on this newsletter/blog should ever possibly be construed as legal advice or representative of any views of anyone other than me at this particular moment. I use this thing to sort my thoughts and maybe provide some insight or entertainment — no need for anyone to overthink it.