Emergencies Act Hearings: Hoaxing the media

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Nov 22

The public has heard a lot in recent years, since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, of misinformation and disinformation.  The two are closely related in that they both are offerings of falsehoods.  Engaging in them was subject to the harshest penalties on social media during the COVID pandemic, namely cancellation; to the point where cancellation itself became a point of contention.  What was one scientist’s opinion or facts, was deemed misinformation by the poohbahs of social media – non-scientists who believed they knew science better than actual scientists did.

Hoaxing has to do with a physical action.  Something is done by a cause’s sympathizer to make it appear that evil was done by the cause’s opponents.  Hoaxes are common on the political left, and they are effective because they play to the biases of leftists.  When caught, the excuse is that the hoaxer was speaking to “a larger truth.”  That larger truth might be racism writ large, or sexism writ large.  And so hoaxing does not discredit the cause.  A good hoax confirms the prejudices.

It’s become clear at the hearings that within a couple of days of the organization of the Freedom Convoy, political operatives within the Liberal government began a campaign of disinformation to discredit the Convoy.  The display of a confederate flag and a Nazi flag were hoaxes perpetrated by party hirelings, and pounced on by Prime Minister Trudeau to justify his refusal to deal with the Convoy protest.  The protestor were morally execrable to left wing opinion and justifiably held in contempt.

What made the Convoy dangerous to progressive opinion was the support it had, financial and displayed on the trip to Ottawa, and that the members of the Convoy were largely salt-of-the-earth working class Canadians, owner-operators for the most part, who had paid taxes for decades – business taxes, income taxes, fuel taxes, and road taxes.  It is dangerous to the regime when the middle class gets discontented, and hence the campaign to discredit the Convoy as right-wing extremists, white supremacists, racists, and misogynists.  After all, what could be worse than a right-wing extremist?  Labelling them in this manner is an example of disinformation.

The political left has long been expert in organization.  One group supports another; networking below the radar and “fronts” are routine.  A common tactic on the left is to accuse their opponents of doing the very thing they are doing, or to dilute and pollute the meaning of a term by using that same term for a different thing.  What frightens the left the most is when a mainstream political movement adopts their tactics.  Employing the tactics of protest learned from watching the left is what the Freedom Convoy fell into.  Protesting was done this way; that is what the truckers learned, and so that’s how they went about it.  No wonder alarm bells went off on the left.

What has occurred to no one in the media, or in the Liberal government, is that mainstream Canada has been subjected to enormous pressure because of COVID measures.  People were locked down and kept from working.  They had to wear masks.  They had to get vaccinated just to go into a restaurant or stay at a hotel.  They couldn’t travel.  They couldn’t visit loved ones.  They couldn’t assemble in any numbers.  Families were kept apart at Christmas, to save grandma’s life.  People were fined for being the only person in a park outdoors or on an outdoors skating rink.  Ordinary people were being hammered by the law for doing things they used to take for granted.  It was all for saving the health care system, you understand.  You don’t want to kill grandma, do you?  The psychological pressure was enormous, and news that the measures were just guesses, not based on science, and might actually be counter-productive was ruthlessly suppressed as misinformation, just this side of criminal.  Only one position was tolerated, and no contrary opinions were entertained or aired in the MSM.  The full panoply of left wing moral force was employed to enforce progressivist ideas about social control – for the good of the masses, you understand.  But that didn’t mean that a lot of people didn’t become aware of what was being said out of the mainstream.

As I mentioned yesterday, the domestic intelligence agencies of Canada are directed against right-wing groups, characterized as IMVEs – Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists.  Extinction Rebellion, BLM, and Antifa would never get labelled like this, but Promise Keepers and The Proud Boys get the full treatment.  Never mind that a meeting of Canadian Proud Boys could be held in a phone booth.  The group Diagolon, which had I never heard of before and which has a following of perhaps 100 on Twitter were the boogey-men of the Convoy.  Guilt by association was the tactic, and when the MSM are on your side, the evil and danger of violence by the association of a group few have heard of is said to be the secret agenda of the Convoy.

The fact that mainstream Canadians were fed up with the pressure the government, provincial and federal, had imposed for two years, and the continual propaganda pressure in the MSM to the effect that you’re evil and are killing people if you don’t follow the government’s instructions and are morally evil even to express a contrary opinion had gotten to the point that people were starting to rebel.  Nobody in the MSM and the Federal government could see that.  What they saw was rebellion against their authority and to their ideas of what ought to be done and what was right.  The left can’t tolerate that.

To counteract this challenge to Liberal Party rule, political operatives organized a campaign of disinformation against the Freedom Convoy to discredit it and to destroy the threat it posed to Liberal government orthodoxy.  The Convoy had people in it who had “unacceptable views” and stories were planted in the MSM of “violent rhetoric” and threats of “violence.”  Friendly government employees willing cooperated in the campaign, offering themselves as victims of the Convoy.  Agents-provocateurs were infiltrated into the Convoy on the first weekend, in order to discredit the Convoy and create the propaganda conditions first to refuse to parlay with the Convoy, and then to destroy it when it refused to leave and demanded an audience with Canada’s elected politicians who run the Canadian government.

Soon, reports of violence and the complaints of alleged victims started filling the MSM, and any sympathy shown to the Convoy, as for example by Pierre Poilievre, were said to be examples of moral reprobation, of heartlessness towards the Convoy’s victims of their violence. The list of Convoy victims is long: the entire city of Ottawa, Chief Peter Sloly, the city of Windsor, the Windsor Police, the village of Coutts, the RCMP who might have been subjected to violence, but weren’t, the economy, auto workers, non-involved Trucking companies, and everyone who was frightened by the threat of possible violence.  The Prime Minister received death threats!  There were demonstrations at politician’s private residences, including Doug Ford and Steven Lecce (oops, scratch that last one.  That was done by CUPE.)

The Convoy was plain was just plain wrong: Canada is a democracy, and we can’t have mainstream, middle class Canadians demanding that the government of a democracy change its policies!  Especially if they’re from Alberta!!

The reports of victimhood filled the MSM, and became the basis for the “reports” the PCO was receiving and what RCMP and CSIS intelligence was picking up.  Unverified news reports in a government friendly MSM panicked the PCO who didn’t understand that the threats of violence was reverberations in the media echo chamber set up by political operatives of the government.

It will become clear today that the primary tool brought in by the Emergencies Act was the financial power to seize and freeze bank accounts.  By lying about the Convoy, the city of Ottawa got the $10 million donated to GoFundMe frozen.  But high profile arrests and the freezing of accounts is what scared people into leaving.  People who had donated in sympathy were fearful that the government would take their life savings.  It was made illegal for sympathetic Ottawans (yes, there were many people in Ottawa who supported the Convoy) from bringing in supplies like diesel fuel.  The city of Ottawa raised the prospect of seizing the young children of Convoy members on grounds of child abuse, and this raised a serious prospect of violence, which frightened the PCO.

The police didn’t ask for the EA.  Minster of Public Safety Marco “Mendacity” Mendicino inferred or concluded that that’s what they were asking for.  Never mind police request is not the criterion for invoking the EA, it’s a threat to the security of Canada as defined in the CSIS Act, but that too didn’t matter.  The government got its own lawyer to say that the plain English wording didn’t mean what it said, and so the EA could be declared if the Convoy didn’t simply disperse.  The fact that protests had been dispersed in Coutts and Windsor didn’t matter – they could return, you know!

The legislative safeguards in the EA proved useless, and shown to be nothing but a parchment guarantee.  If the government has the MSM on its side, it can ride roughshod over the law.

Hoaxing and a disinformation campaign by political operatives in the Liberal government and a friendly, unquestioning media enable the government to avoid parlay with the Convoy, and made its destruction possible.

-30-