Hegemony, "Hate", and the Freedom Convoy

The Media attributes "Hate" to those whom it dislikes

The mainstream leftist media (to repeat myself) told us a thousand times that the Freedom Convoy was racist, fascist, Nazi, pickled in “hate”. The evidence for this normally points to swastikas and Confederate flags supposedly flown by the Freedom Convoy. There is no other evidence, aside from second hand allegations.

The Public Order Emergencies Commission report (here) baldly stated that there were hate symbols displayed by the Freedom Convoy, citing “residents,” thus illustrating the centrality of the very expansible concept of “hate” to the discourses of power.

I am a resident, and saw none of these hateful symbols. In this age when everybody has a camera in their pocket, there should be numerous pictures. As it is, only one Nazi flag, and two confederate flags have been photographed. The rest of this article identifies what is known about these flags, in order to highlight the obvious fact that the surrounding narrative exists because of ideological need, and without evidentiary foundation.

The idea that displaying a flag, however hateful, is a crime, let alone justification for a national emergency, is problematic. In my view, if someone is a Nazi, it might be good to know, as we could then stop taking them seriously. But that is another argument. My concern here is with the police evidence, or lack thereof, of Nazis.

Accusations of fascism or Nazism are common, and in this case more than usually ridiculous. Anyone who thinks the Freedom Convoy was Nazi must believe that Nazism was all about small government and citizens’ rights. There are, as Jordan Peterson has rightly pointed out, no Nazis of any significance in Canada.

But the media has an ideology to propound, and is not deterred by common sense. I have found evidence of three — count-em, three — such flags. One was a swastika. It might be thought to be making a mountain out of a molehill, and an old molehill at that, to delve into the matter at this late date. But the mountain was with us before the Freedom Convoy, and is here still; the Freedom Convoy has become a symbolic issue, and its calumniation has had its effect. The real story here is not how, or in whose hands, one flag got to a protest. The real story is the media, its ethics and its ideology: the real story is the concoction of a story about that single and still not fully understood event. That media story — that the Convoy was fueled by hate and adjacent to Nazism — was prefabricated and ready to go before a single truck entered Ottawa. It has now congealed into official history.

A Need for Nazis

The Ottawa Police have only been able to come up with ONE — count-it one — charge of inciting hate in (supposed) connection with the entire Freedom Convoy (Ottawa Police Service report to Public Order Emergency Commission, p. 34). So “hate” incidents were thin on the ground. And that one is from three weeks after the Convoy left town.

That one hate charge — a Nazi flag — was in fact not connected to the Freedom Convoy, as it was charged on 12 March 2022, 3 weeks after the Freedom Convoy had dispersed under police attack. The 12 March event featured a Montreal man with no connection to the Freedom Convoy, and was covered by the media here. But the Ottawa Police needed hate crimes, and not finding one in the Freedom Convoy, they used an event that occurred three weeks later. Did none of the 100 lawyers attending the Rouleau commission not notice the date of this offence, or did most of them, too, need a hate crime?

The Ottawa Police were able to find, several months later, the woman who danced on the lower step of the war memorial (whom they charged with no crime, inappropriate dancing not being a crime, yet). From this, it is obvious that the police have invested considerable investigative resources in tracking down every possible Convoy-related incident. Had the police found any additional swastika flags, they would have trumpeted the fact, and hunted down those carrying them.

The “known racist hateful flag” (press release argot uses as many words as possible) spoken of by the police on 12 March 2022 is here, from a Reddit post:

The most notable thing about it will be obvious to any student of the Second World War: the swastika is backwards, at least from one side, and likely printed through the fabric. Real Nazi swastikas bend in a clockwise direction.

Now consider the following picture of the swastika that did appear briefly, and was much discussed, during the Freedom Convoy:

The swastika also bends in the same wrong direction. Obviously whoever flew it knew little about Nazism, from which one might infer that it could have been a member of the Liberal Party, or indeed of the mainstream media.

Two flags contain the same error. It is reasonable to think that they came from the same vendor. The police arrested the March 12 man, and could easily find out where his flag came from. Has CSIS, which produced so many documents about “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism,” and which monitored the Convoy so closely, done so?

IMVE (there is always an acronym) was of such interest that it is probable that CSIS did determine the identity of this famous “Nazi”, if that is what he was. But at the Emergencies Inquiry, David Vigneault, the Director of CSIS, refused even to say whether CSIS knew who he was.¹ It is possible that CSIS does not know, and is embarrassed by the fact. Anyone who has worked in the federal bureaucracy will not dismiss out of hand the possibility of incompetence. But this is a matter of high leadership interest, so it is more likely that CSIS does know. Had the Nazi guy been a convoy supporter, that would have been the government’s desired answer, and it would have appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail. The Ottawa Police would not then have had to pad their report with hate incidents from a later time. The other alternative, that it was in fact a plant, is therefore more likely, though not certain.

These are the men with the (attempted) Nazi flag on the first day of the convoy:

Their faces are plainly visible, reinforcing the points above (are the police/CSIS incapable of facial recognition?). From his hat, one of them seems to have been a fan of Harleys (though it wasn’t me.) Neither is that young, and both look pretty solid. They do not look like losers fresh from mother’s basement. The leis are bizarre for Ottawa in January, and may have been some kind of signal, evidence of malice aforethought. This was not a lark.

But what is most suspicious is that there is but one picture of these men. It shows them on a stairway off Wellington Street, next to the Chateau Laurier (Ottawa’s most prestigious hotel), Wellington being the main site of the protests. Had their swastika appeared on Wellington, there would have been numerous photographs. But there are no such photos. The swastika was flown long enough to be photographed, and not carried out into the crowds on Wellington. In the crowd, the Nazi flag would have been noticed and denounced; there might well have been an altercation, and the men carrying it identified. The evidence is circumstantial but cumulatively suggests that these men wanted to create a photograph, and also wanted not to be identified. Circumstances suggest a plant.

The Globe and Mail, to take a prominent example, duly went all-swastika all-the-time, printing ruminations on the meanings and history of the swastika, and anguished accounts of the experiences of people who cherished their imagined trauma, clearly without seeing any such thing. They saw what they wanted to see; the press published what it wanted to report.

Confederates on the Brain

Similar considerations pertain to the two — count-em, two — Confederate flags photographed. One was a Confederate flag on someone’s truck. Alexa Lavoie of Rebel News tracked him down — the license plate was visible — a feat apparently beyond the mainstream media. As with Nazi flags, it is more than probable that CSIS or the police also identified the man, as they too can trace license plates. Had the driver actually been an extremist, had his identity helped the desired narrative, he would have become front-page news. But it turned out that the Confederate truck driver was an Ottawa area man for whom the Confederate flag is a symbol of personal independence, with a nod to the 1970s TV show Dukes of Hazard. So this was not the KKK. To echo Peterson’s point about Nazis, there is no KKK in Canada.

The second instance of a Confederate flag occurred on Parliament Hill. A still photo of a Confederate flag with a truck on it was endlessly reprinted, most notably in the Globe and Mail. Even articles about tangential or unrelated topics, such as the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, could resist that narrative-validating photo. But the video tells a different story. In it, the crowd rejects the Confederate:

https://markfproudman.substack.com/publish/post/110689494

The man with the flag obviously does not want to be identified. No one else is wearing a full-face balaclava in that unmasked crowd. One wonders why none of the media present asked him who he was or what he wanted to represent, except that one doesn’t really wonder. They had a narrative, and here they had a confirmatory photograph.

There were other flags connected to hatred and mass murder flown during the Freedom Convoy, but those were flown by counter-protesters, and the media, like the politicians, had no complaint about the hammer and sickle:

The media, like most of the “woke” left, has only one attitude to dissent (Marxism does not count as dissent). Dissent cannot be other than evil, and evil takes one form. In part, this is testament to their simple mindedness. Wokeness, an ugly but serviceable term for the hegemonic ideology, has such a complete dominance of our intellectual institutions that journalists are unfamiliar with dissent, and have no experience engaging with it. For them, dissent threatening to their world-view cannot be well-intentioned. Popular dissent, such as that of tens of thousands of Canadians cheering from highway overpasses and coming to Ottawa, is particularly threatening. It was was denounced as “hate”, when anyone who spent 30 seconds on Wellington Street during the Convoy would have seen, and experienced, only emotions of a quite opposite kind.

The allegation of “hate” tells us nothing about the Freedom Convoy, but a lot about the leftist media and its mental categories. Their prefabricated ideology existed before the Freedom Convoy; it remains hegemonic afterward. And it remains a standing danger to our civil liberties, as the state’s violent reaction to peaceful protest a year ago demonstrated. And as the continued legal persecution of Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber should remind us.

Added 15 April 2023, further evidence here:

Hegemony and the Freedom Convoy (2)

1. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-27-November-21-2022.pdf, pp 122-123.