Freedom Convoy hits back at mainstream media
The organizers of the 2022 Freedom Convoy made their stance clear when they banned members of the mainstream media from their press conference on Sunday.
The trucker convoy, which has sparked anti-mandate protests across Ottowa that are now entering their fourth day, barred the Toronto Star and the CBC, two of Canada’s main news outlets, from attending the convoy’s first press conference. Instead, the convoy’s organizers opened up the conference to independent journalists only.
“And the reason they were banned is twofold,” explained Benjamin Dichter, one of the convoy’s organizers. “First, this entire week the CBC, Toronto Star – Yahoo News were retweeting and reposting with a few others – kept putting stories out that our GoFundMe was frozen or suspended because of nefarious reasons. You know ‘right-wing truckers,’ ‘dangerous people,’ and it was hysterical, me and Tamara were talking.”
The mainstream media outlets, who uniformly support mask and vaccine mandates, have been openly opposed to the convoy and the tens of thousands of protestors who joined them. One of the stories run by the media corporations reported that GoFundMe had frozen the convoy’s funds. The stories did not clarify why the funds were held, intimating that it was due to disdain for the truckers’ mission.
“That was purely, purely just a fake story,” said Dichter. “Was that a fake story to sabotage the donations that were coming in? Probably. You see a lot of that propaganda in the media. And then when the Toronto Star put that cartoon that Jordan Peterson put up, that sort of extremism we’re not gonna tolerate.”
Dichter is referring to a cartoon the Toronto Star published, which showed a convoy of trucks with each one labeled “Fascism”.
“So we know if we had invited the Toronto Star, CBC, all of these mainstream news organizations they will do what they always do,” Dichter continued. “…They’ll come in with five people and they will have these giant cameras and they’ll take up half the floor space and bully everybody else. That is not what this is about; this is about us coming together, talking to one another, answering any questions that you have. If we have the answer we will tell you, if we don’t have the answer we will tell you ‘we don’t know’ and just have a nice conversation with each other and go from there.”
Dichter’s fellow organizer, Chris Barber, echoed the sentiment about coming together on Tucker Carlson yesterday.
“Canadians have come out in huge droves to support us,” said Barber. “We’ve united an entire country. Regardless of the outcome of this, we’ve already won.”
