You Can't Stop Organic Support

Attempts to ignore & vilify the truckers failed. Ordinary people were the reason.

Last month, journalist Andrew Lawton delivered an informative, wide-ranging speech about the Freedom Convoy. He says mainstream media’s attempts to ignore the truckers, followed by attempts to vilify them, both failed due to the magnitude of the grassroots response by ordinary Canadians.

At the 21:10 minute mark in the video of the speech, Andrew says that, after the first trucks had departed British Columbia:

if anyone saw an overpass or the side of a highway between January 23rd and January 29th, you knew that the convoy had already won…people were showing up to a highway in the morning knowing at some point trucks would be coming by and at some point they would be able to cheer. And these got larger and larger and larger. And the media coverage didn’t reflect that. The media coverage didn’t really share this at all.

Nevertheless, the momentum snowballed:

The fascinating thing about this, though, was that it didn’t matter…The money that was being raised [via GoFundMe] which was going up rapidly - and by this point it had cleared seven figures and was growing even more - had originally been to cover fuel. But then it became something that [convoy organizers] were going to extend to lodging, to food.

They didn’t need to buy food. Because every time they stopped grandmothers, notably, but people would just show up with sandwiches, with wraps, with muffins, with baked goods. People would just show up and shower the truckers with food, with money. They’d go to truck stops and just wait by the pump and anytime a truck with a Canadian flag came they would say ‘I’m gonna pay for you to fill your truck up with diesel.’

And this was an example of why none of the [media and government actions] really succeeded in stopping the convoy. Because you can’t stop organic support.

Watch Andrew’s entire speech, delivered at the Freedom Talk conference in Calgary, here.