Canada's Convoy, Part 3: The Road to Ottawa-Political Targets of Violence & Paid Protestors
Facebook Groups used to promote the convoy occupation were traced to a company in Bangladesh.
April - May - June 2020
In April, 2020 there were already gatherings and protests by people who were spreading misinformation, arguing that COVID was a hoax.
Close to that time, armed militias in Michigan had stormed the state legislature.
There was a growing spread of misinformation, which was going mostly unchecked.
Incident at Rideau Hall - July 2, 2020
Cory Hurren, 46, drove from Swan River, Manitoba to Ottawa, then drove his truck through the gates of Rideau Hall, the residence of the Governor General, where the Prime Minister and his family were living. Curren was charged with 22 offences, including threatening to cause death and bodily harm
The Toronto Star Reported that:
“After initially reporting that the suspect was non-threatening and just wanted to “speak” to Trudeau, Global News released a report detailing a two-page note Hurren is alleged to have had with him. The Star has not been able to independently verify the content of the note.
According to Global, Hurren said he feared Canada was turning into a “communist dictatorship” under Trudeau, and that the suspension of Parliament during the COVID-19 pandemic was preventing government accountability.
Just minutes before the truck crashed through Rideau Hall gates, one of Hurren’s accounts reposted a COVID-19 conspiracy theory, “Event 201.” Event 201 was a tabletop exercise run by Johns Hopkins University in 2019, envisioning how the world would react to a global pandemic. But conspiracy theorists have seized on it, as well as its connection to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to suggest without basis that COVID-19 was planned.”
The note also reportedly expressed fears Hurren, a father of two who runs a popular sausage making company called Grindhouse Fine Foods, wouldn’t be able to get back on his feet after the pandemic ends.
“I still don’t necessarily see this as an ideologically-motivated attack. Just because you believe in conspiracy theories doesn’t mean that’s why he ended up doing what he did,” said Jessica Davis, a security consultant and former CSIS analyst, in an interview with the Star.
“His motivation really does seem quite mixed. And that’s pretty common these days. Gone are the days, and I don’t even know if they really existed, where we had individuals who were motivated to conduct violence just for a single reason, just because personal motivations or just because of political motivations. I think now we’re seeing that bleed over between the two.”
While it is laudable to treat Curren as a human being, his case is being treated in isolation from people who are actually pushing these conspiracy theories for profit or political gain.
This failure here is to see that the individual has been radicalized by consuming misinformation and disinformation. The genuine economic suffering of someone who is going through loss does not justify their mistaken beliefs.
Links to foreign sources of disinformation
In addition to social media, there were also high-profile attempts to influence public opinion, like the fraudulent “Great Barrington Declaration” which was paid for by a right-wing think tank in the U.S. to recommend letting the virus rip and letting “herd immunity” take hold - which is not how herd immunity works.
Many of the signatures supporting the Declaration was a fraud - and its ideas were reckless: “The Infectious Diseases Society of America issued a statement denouncing the Great Barrington Declaration, calling the herd immunity strategy to COVID-19 “inappropriate, irresponsible, and ill-informed.” A similar statement came from 20 public health organizations that say the declaration is “not grounded in science and is dangerous.””
2021: Pre-planning the Convoy Occupation: A Movement Built on a Stolen Identity and Bots from Bangladesh
That summer it was clear that the convoy was already getting prepared, based on social media videos shared by Pat King. In one video in August, he threatens “real bullets” and says that people have no idea what is headed their way.
The Convoy was not spontaneous grassroots organization. It was organized by the same people who had organized the convoy in 2019. They were politically connected, and were advised by Brad Wall, the former Premier of Saskatchewan.
It’s also clear that it was planned for months, with stolen FB accounts starting groups filled with fake profiles from Bangladesh.
Grid.news reported that:
The account launched a handful of Facebook groups for the protest, all between Jan. 26 and 28, before the trucker convoy reached Ottawa. With a combined following of more than 340,000 members and more than 7,500 posts, the group names were variations on a theme: “Convoy to Ottawa 2022,” “Convoy for Freedom 2022,” “Freedom Convoy/Ottawa 2022 for Canada,” “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “2022 Official Freedom Convoy to Ottawa.”
Facebook groups are organized by administrators. Grid found that the only administrator account for these groups belonged to the Missouri woman. Reached briefly by phone on Monday, she said her account was hacked and she was not involved with the groups.
“Someone stole my identity on Facebook,” she said. “I don’t know how they [did] it.”
Further, the Facebook Groups used to promote the occupation were traced to a company in Bangladesh.
“In an interview with Grid after this story first published, Ahasan said Saikot told him he charged the equivalent of $23 per day to promote Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, and indicated that he worked with organizers of the protests in Canada on the Freedom Convoy Facebook groups… ”I asked about whether [he was] contacted by someone in Canada,” Ahasan said. “He said ‘Yeah.’”
A Grid analysis of the more than $8 million contributed to the Ottawa organizers’ GiveSendGo convoy campaign as of Thursday revealed most of the tens of thousands of donations were made anonymously and were for amounts of $100 or less. The largest recorded donation, for $215,000, had a note that it was “processed but not recorded.” GiveSendGo did not respond to inquiries from Grid.
Of the more than 80,000 donations we reviewed, donors did not enter any name to appear publicly on about half of the transactions. Dozens of donors included references to specific right-wing movements based in the U.S., like the QAnon acronym WWG1WGA (for the group’s slogan, “Where We Go One, We Go All”).
In another channel devoted to the Canadian convoy, a Telegram user posted, “It is not Trudeau’s choice to step down or to attempt to stay. It is the decision of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Frankly, the WEF cannot afford for Trudeau to step down. If he falls, Biden falls, Australia falls, New Zealand falls and all of Europe falls. Then the rest of the world joins in.”
Second, they had an incredible explosion of “earned media” in the US, with high-profile content spreaders like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Theo Fleury and Bill Maher sharing disinformation based on far-right conspiracy theories on social media, HBO and Fox. Tucker Carlson was another talking head whose far right disinformation was a major source.
Former US President Donald Trump praised the truckers in a speech January 29.
There are plenty of other protests in Canada, on really important issues that never get this kind of attention. Real issues, not ones based on misinformation.
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