People are beginning to look into the sources of support for the occupation of Ottawa. What they're discovering is deeply troubling. David Climenhaga writes:
The evidence of American interference in the attempt to overthrow the recently re-elected Liberal government with truck blockades supposedly protesting provincial vaccine mandates is compelling.
The paw prints of malign actors like former Trump administration ideologue Steve Bannon are all over the occupation of Ottawa by the “Freedom Convoy” and disruptions of other Canadian cities and transportation corridors by far-right rent-a-mobs.
Journalist Sandy Garossino, a lawyer and expert on the Canadian charitable sector, calls the $10.1 million raised by convoy protest organizers’ GoFundMe campaign in the two weeks before the crowd-funding site suspended it Friday “extremely suspect.”
“If you think there’s something extremely fishy about the GoFundMe ‘Freedom’ campaign, you’re onto something,” she wrote in the National Observer.
For one thing, she said, “the campaign’s donation pattern is wholly unreliable. To any knowledgeable observer just looking at the data itself, the irregularities are a five-alarm fire.”
And among right-wing loudmouths in the United States, the trucker convoy has become a cause celebre:
Former U.S. president Donald Trump and his eponymously named son both pumped the protest, as did billionaire Elon Musk.
In a statement, the elder Trump called Canada’s prime minister “far-left lunatic Justin Trudeau who has destroyed Canada with insane COVID mandates,” showing a remarkable level of ignorance for a former head of state about Canadian jurisdictions, the reliable neoliberalism of Trudeau, and the current undestroyed state of the Dominion.
Apparently also unaware that Canada is a sovereign country, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and state officials in Virginia and Louisiana vowed to investigate GoFundMe for not handing the cash donated by U.S. supporters to the law-defying rent-a-mob.
Well, to give DeSantis his due, he’s probably right to say American donors should get back the money now permanently frozen by GoFundMe — if only to help Canadian authorities identify who those donors were.
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the notorious white supremacist and QAnon follower, called GoFundMe “corporate communists” and said “they should be arrested” for interfering with the right of Americans to fund insurrection in Canada.
Right-wing American media personalities also piled on. For example, according to Fox News bloviator Tucker Carlson, “there’s no more fearful despot than Canada’s prime minister.”
The American Disease has made a mess of Central and South America. They must not be allowed to do the same to us.
Image: The Medium
