Ottawa Police are launching a hate crime hotline Tuesday for reporting offenses committed during pandemic demonstrations following reports of violence, racist abuse, harassment and the displaying of Nazi imagery at the protests in Canada's capital....Today, the Daily Beast reports on efforts by Fox News to normalize the protests that didn't go as planned:
Demonstrators' harassment targets included a homeless shelter guard who was racially abused and a couple with a Pride flag — who were verbally abused and fled their home to stay with friends after someone "defecated outside their door," CBC News reports.
Ottawa Police said over the weekend that they were investigating the "desecration of the National War Memorial" after receiving reports that protesters had urinated on it and also the targeting of a statue of Canadian hero Terry Fox with anti-vaccine messages.
Meanwhile, some protesters have been seen waving Confederate flags and swastikas. Some have been wearing yellow stars, which Jewish groups condemned for trivializing the Holocaust.
Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner on Thursday teed up a segment on the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” by seemingly criticizing the notion that such anti-vaccine activists are “fringe,” instead claiming their beliefs have gone “mainstream.”
Moments later, the program rolled footage of such demonstrators waving flags and signs boosting the crazed far-right QAnon conspiracy theory....
One sign featured the notorious QAnon slogan WWG1WGA, which is an abbreviation of their rallying cry “where we go one, we go all.” Additionally, protesters also waved a massive United States flag emblazoned with the letter Q.
Oops.
Who could have possibly foreseen all this? Apparently, pretty much anybody who looked into the history of some of the movement's leaders.
There is a GoFundMe page that has raised more than $7 million for the trucker convoy. That fundraiser has two names on it: Tamara Lich, and B.J. Dichter.More:
Speaking to a cheering crowd at a People’s Party of Canada convention in 2019, B.J. Dichter warned listeners about the dangers of “political Islamists,” and said the Liberal Party is “infested with Islamists.” ...
“Despite what our corporate media and political leaders want to admit, Islamist entryism and the adaptation of political Islam is rotting away at our society like syphilis,” he added, according to a story written for the Toronto Star by Alex Boutilier....
A group affiliated with the convoy, Canada Unity, has produced a “memorandum of understanding” that it plans to present to Gov. Gen. Mary Simon and the Senate, and which it believes would force the government to rescind COVID-19 public health measures, or force the government to resign en masse.There's more:
... Patrick King ... is listed as a contact for North Alberta on Canada Unity’s website, which hosts the memorandum of understanding that boasts more than 240,000 signatures....
In a video posted on Twitter in 2019, King suggests that unless Canadians “get up off your as—s and demand change,” they might want to change their names to “Ishmael” or “drop a bunch of change down the stairs” and “call yourself chong ching ching chang.”
In other video footage, King can be seen repeating racist conspiracy theories. In one clip posted to Twitter by another user, King says “there’s an endgame, it’s called depopulation of the Caucasian race, or the Anglo-Saxon. And that’s what the goal is, is to depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race because they are the ones with the strongest bloodlines,” he said.
“It’s a depopulation of race, okay, that’s what they want to do.”
He then talks about men with the first names “Ahmed” and “Mahmoud” who he claims are trying to “not only infiltrate by flooding with refugees, we’re going to infiltrate the education systems to manipulate it” so there is “less procreation” which leads to “less white people — or you know, Anglo-Saxon. Let’s say Anglo-Saxon, because when I say white, all the ANTIFA guys call up the race card.”
In a Facebook Live posted directly to his page, King says that COVID-19 is “not a naturally occurring virus.”
“It’s not a naturally occurring virus, it’s a man-made bioweapon that was put out to make people sick, to push the narrative for all these jabs, is what it was,” he said.
“Because the jab is the, they want to be able to track you, follow you, know your every movement you do.”
Jason LaFace — who at times uses the name “LaFaci” — is listed as the North and East Ontario organizer for the convoy on the Canada Unity website, and has been cited in other media as the main organizer for Ontario. In photos posted to his Facebook page, which were screenshotted by Global News, he shared an image titled “Canadian politicians who are not born in Canada” and included his own caption: “traitors to our country.”
According to a screenshot obtained by Global News, LaFace posted a selfie where he wore a hat with what appears to be the initials S.O.O., which is believed to stand for Soldiers of Odin — an anti-immigrant group first established in Finland.
The emergence of the far-right Soldiers of Odin group in Canada raised concerns about the potential for “anti-immigrant vigilantism,” according to a de-classified intelligence report obtained by Global News in 2017.
None of this has prevented the usual suspects from declaring themselves members of the convoy fan club:
1. Over the weekend, Trump hailed "those great Canadian truckers" protesting mandates. Joe Rogan, Jordan B Peterson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rob Schneider also love those Canadian truckers. What's going on? https://t.co/yyH4q7hqxw
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) January 31, 2022
A group trying to plan a "Convoy to D.C." had its page shut down by Facebook "for repeatedly violating our policies around QAnon." Which I'm sure also won't deter the fanboys and fangirls, or prevent the convoy from organizing and getting saturation coverage on Fox, probably a few months before the midterms.
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