Faces of Protest
Views of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa
How do you know when you are doing what is right?
I was asked this by a man who was in Ottawa during the past week. This man has been observing, talking to people, documenting what he sees, and he is doing some soul-searching. He has seen real people, thousands of them, showing up to protect their freedoms and the freedoms of their fellow citizens. He has seen them being good to one another, friend and stranger alike.
But how to reconcile what he has seen with what we are told that others are seeing in the same place, at the same time? The Freedom Convoy, as presented by most of the media, is characterized by violence and racism, selfishness and hatred. Can both visions of reality be true?
In considering an answer, I thought first of epistemology: How is it that we make claims of truth? On what basis do we know what we think that we know?
There is much to say on the topic, but the shortest answer I can muster is:
Make observations of the world.
Posit all of the possible explanations for those observations (hypotheses) that you can.
Seek falsifying evidence for your hypotheses: try hard to prove your hypotheses wrong.
Repeat.
In service of this, I suggest that you find Viva Frei on rumble or YouTube, and watch some of his livestreams. He has been doing them while walking around Ottawa, specifically around Parliament Hill, the center of the Freedom Convoy, inviting anyone he sees to talk with him about what they have experienced there. He’ll talk to anyone, and does so, hour after hour after hour. It’s enlightening.
On his Monday, February 7th, livestream, for instance, one thing that was said to him, at 13:16, was this:
“Personally, overall here I’ve seen nothing but love, respect, gratitude. There’s been hugs. So many hugs I can’t even count.”
This is information. Hours upon hours of comments like this, in fact, comprise evidence against the hypothesis that the Freedom Convoy is violent and full of hate.
What Viva Frei is doing is a kind of participant observation, of ethnography, even. He is describing a culture as it emerges.
So too, is Dan Aponte engaging in a kind of citizen anthropology. For the two weekends that the Freedom Convoy has been in Ottawa thus far, Dan has spent time on the street, photo-documenting the people he sees there.
On Saturday, February 5, Dan took portraits of many dozens of people whom he met in Ottawa. He will be sharing those photographs, along with his subjects’ names and perhaps some other information about them, in the days and weeks to come; as he does so I will link to those posts here. In the meantime, here are just eighteen of the people whom Dan took portraits of, in Ottawa, on February 5, 2022.
I present them without further comment.
Find more of Dan’s work here.
Thank you, Heather. I am Canadian and will be going to Ottawa to ILLEGALLY hand out cookies (the Ottawa Police have said it's illegal to give food to the truckers). Beautiful faces, beautiful people. Take a look at how this old man was assaulted and arrested for honking his horn. We're hearing that Justin Trudeau will be invoking a telecommunications BLACKOUT to block people from witnessing more of this when they arrest the truckers.
https://twitter.com/MaretJaks/status/1491015842997633026
First off, I'm enjoying the amount of attention that Viva Frei has been getting! I've been watching his Sunday podcast with Robert Barnes for more than a year at this point. It's a very good case study of someone who, for all intents and purposes, was a bit naïve to the goings on of COVID who then really criticized a lot of the narrative that has been happening these past few months.
One thing that I've noticed, which has left me truly disheartened, was the viewpoints of the counter protesters. I've not only seen displays of love, community, and peace from the actual protesters, but that any criticisms or castigations that they have of the COVID narrative have all been targeted at the powers that be. Whether it's members of parliament, Trudeau himself, or any medical agencies the criticisms were always targeted at the higher institutions of power.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the counter protesters, who's constant reassertions that the vaccines are "safe and effective", that everyone must do their part to get vaccinated or else they will never get their freedoms back, have all been targeted at both the protesters and the truckers. Instead of launching their attacks at the powers that be, they have instead focused their attentions on their fellow citizens, in particular ones who have kept the livelihoods of millions of Americans and Canadians going long before any notion of vaccines were available.
The most obvious example of this includes the rampant flags and signs from posters of "Fuck Trudeau" or "Let's go Brandeau" seen in all of these livestreams. Whether we find these objectionable or unsavory, there's not doubt that the criticisms are being launched at a man who holds the highest power in Canada.
But what about the counter protesters? Constant signs suggesting that these freedom protesters are white supremacists, that they are terrorists who have occupied Ottawa in a manner akin to what we saw on January 6th here in the US. Also, let's not forget the creative signs stating "honk if you have little dick energy".
At a time when the narrative seems to be collapsing all across the globe, and that people are starting to attack those in power, I find it so disheartening to see those who have been so deeply entrenched within the COVID narrative justifying their actions of attacking their fellow man and defending the likes of politicians and pharmaceutical giants over attempting to empathize with these truckers and attempt to make sense of the situation at large.
I think this week will be a real turning point in how Canada moves forward with their draconian policies, and here in the US we should either look to what's happening as a sign of hope or as a warning sign for what's to come here.