Protest the Government, Get Outed by the Media
Freedom Convoy supporters were abused by journalists, who are supposed to be a check on government power.
Part 1: Seizing the Excavator
Prior to driving to Ottawa to experience the Freedom Convoy protest firsthand - and well before the Emergencies Act was invoked on Valentine's Day - Brad donated $75,000 USD to the truckers. In his company's name, via the online fundraising platform, GiveSendGo. Converted to Canadian funds, the amount exceeded $100,000.
He never intended his donation to become public. But after the GiveSendGo website was targeted by left-wing hackers, the names, postal codes, email addresses, and payment details associated with tens of thousands of donors were illegally released into the wild.
A cybercrime had been committed. The victims of that crime were private citizens - not public figures. They owed no explanations to anyone. Whether they gave truckers money, and how much, wasn't anyone else's business.
Big picture, this was a David versus Goliath battle. Ordinary people, exasperated by two years of interference in their daily lives, were protesting the government. Some were behind the wheel of trucks, some were applauding on overpasses, some were donating money online. The same journalists who'd ignored numerous legitimate news stories during COVID might have exercised some discretion. They might have reported briefly on the hack and moved on.
Alternatively, they might have made a sincere attempt to understand the energy behind the Convoy in the interests of promoting peace, love, and understanding. Instead, they aligned themselves with Goliath. They re-victimized the victims. They outed, targeted, and abused ordinary people.
Delving into that hacked material with indecent zeal, the media emphasized the large number of US donations. But they left out important context. GoFundMe created a scandal when it shut down the Freedom Convoy's wildly successful fundraiser. Rather than automatically refunding the $9 million involved, GoFundMe said it would distribute the money "to credible and established charities." People were shocked. They'd never imagined GoFundMe executives might take money donated to one campaign and direct it elsewhere. Amidst public outrage on social media, the governors of Florida and Texas raised fraud concerns. Soon, GoFundMe announced all donations would, in fact, be refunded.
Americans don’t pay much attention to Canada. But after learning that plucky Canadian truckers had been thrown overboard by GoFundMe, nearly 52,000 Americans sent them cash via an alternative platform, GiveSendGo. So did 36,200 Canadians. Since the homegrown donations tended to be larger, 51% of the total dollars still came from within Canada.
Some people insist that 52k/36k donor split proves the Freedom Convoy was American-inspired and American-funded. But GoFundMe's own statistics negate this. Its president would later tell a parliamentary committee 86 percent of donors were Canadian - who collectively contributed 88 percent of the total dollars. Only after GoFundMe shut them down, did Canadian truckers attract significant American support.
The dollars involved weren’t chicken feed. In the words of a university professor quoted by the Globe and Mail newspaper: "This movement raised more money in a week than all the political parties in Canada did in the fourth quarter [of 2021] combined."
Which brings us back to Brad. On February 14th, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported that "the president of a New Brunswick-based pressure washer manufacturer" had made the largest Canadian donation to GiveSendGo. It didn't publish his name, but CBC New Brunswick did with a vengeance.
At the top of its online story there's a photo of Brad, taken from Facebook. Smiling, seated behind his desk, his blue ball cap reads "TRUMP, keep America great." On that CBC web page, readers are advised not once, not twice, but five times that "More than half of convoy donations came from U.S."
The CBC said Brad had released a written statement, yet it failed to provide a hyperlink so people could read it for themselves. After quoting Brad's belief that the Freedom Convoy "will go down in the history books of our nation," the CBC slammed him: "In fact,” it pontificated, “the protest has forced many downtown businesses to close and violates several laws." No such laws were identified, however. And as anyone who visited Ottawa during the protest knows, many of the businesses that elected to stay open did a roaring trade.
The CBC was eager to tell its readers Brad had "donated thousands of dollars to the provincial Progressive Conservatives and the federal Conservative Party since 2018." It told them he'd "posted support for former U.S. president Donald Trump" on Facebook. Oh, and back in 2009 it said, he'd "received a conditional discharge after he threatened the principal of a New Brunswick elementary school when they stopped daily singing of O Canada."
Neutral, even-handed journalism this was not. It was a hit piece, a smear job, an attempt to paint Brad as an unhinged Donald Trump disciple rather than an upstanding Canadian business person with legitimate concerns.
final installment: We’re Trying to Build a Country Here
The towel headed traitor is the only one that keeps this WEF led shit show afloat...