Atlas Parked
Tactical and strategic analysis of the Freedom Convoy
It is impossible for an honest person to claim that pandemic restrictions have been anything but arbitrary and capricious, given how the economic and social fallout has disproportionately landed on the working class and small business owners. Corporate big box stores received special dispensation to remain open, while independent businesses were forcibly closed and laid-off employees left to battle with overloaded, obsolescent unemployment systems. The urban zoom class retreated to coastal boltholes and subsisted on Door Dash and Amazon Prime while basking in their socially-distanced virtue, pointedly ignoring the remaining “essential” workers whose labor maintained the hidden infrastructure of civilization that made their cloistered existence possible.
The tenous “we’re in this together!” fiction finally collapsed after the videoed death of George Floyd, which set off the most destructive riots in American history. The same experts who obsessively chanted “stay home, stay safe” and criticized anti-lockdown protests pivoted to calling for mass demonstrations for social justice, and for the rest of 2020 the Racial Reckoning took precedence.
Naked political favoritism was rampant. Schools, gyms, and churches remained shuttered, while raucous block parties and disruptive sideshows proceeded unimpeded. Businesses were looted and burned in the supposed interests of racial justice, while the same officials threatening pastors with arrest for holding worship service promoted bail funds for the criminals charged with wanton destruction. People buried their loved ones over Zoom, while Floyd’s golden casket toured the country like the Ark of the Covenant, mobbed by thousands desiring communion with this Strange New Faith. All this while governments plotted vaccine passports and enforced mask and social distancing mandates, further exacerbating the contrast.
After almost two years of this anarcho tyranny, a band of Canadian truckers has ridden to the rescue. Assembling in small towns across the frozen tundra and descending on the federal capital and critical border chokepoints to demand an immediate end to biomedical authoritarianism, they’ve demonstrated the first real canny and sustained grassroots opposition.
In less than three weeks their direct action pressure campaign toppled the leader of the Conservative Party and two Ottawa Police Chiefs in a row, forced provinces to drop Covid taxes on the unvaxxed, cancel vaccine passports, and schedule the expiration of mask mandates. There are now copycat convoys in the works in several Western countries, with those foreign governments often responding by simultaneously accelerating the rollback of pandemic restrictions while moving to squelch their respective movements before they completely lose control.
This has not come without pushback from the Canadian establishment. A drumbeat of lawsuits, citations, deplatforming, character assassination by the media, hacking crowdfunding sites and doxing donors, and a steady escalation of threats by public officials has marked the Freedom Convoy from day one.
This past Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even took the extraordinary step of implementing the so-called Emergencies Act, a wide-ranging measure meant for terrorism offenses and tantamount to martial law. Along with enhanced penalties for civil disobedience, the act allows for seizing physical and financial assets, as well as forced labor for those with relevant skillsets deemed essential -skillsets such as towtruck operations, which Trudeau specifically mentioned during his announcement.
While the Coutts and Ambassador bridge blockades have been cleared, and the Ottawa occupation currently appears to be the target of a clearance operation by police, there is still some interesting lessons to take from the actions/reactions over the past three weeks.
Cadres, Ecosystems, and Pick-Up Games
I’ve spent a lot of time in this substack talking about and breaking down examples of effective leftist organizing, and comparatively little for the right wing. That’s because discussing right wing organizing is all-too-often just a list of shit that went wrong. People talk a big deal about astroturf vs organic movements, but the reality is any successful movement needs a degree of planning, preparation, and logistical support that goes more smoothly if it’s organized beforehand.
Lefties do this with a simple formula: cadres of trained, professional activists ready to harness organic groundswells of sentiment, supported and reinforced by an ecosystem of logistics and legal organizations, interacting with sympathetic media, and funded through a variety of different sources and robust channels. Yes there’s funding from corporations and foundations (Open Society is but one of many) but there’s also smaller fundraising and crowdsourcing from local community groups and events. A less well-known tactic however is the brutal name-and-shame shakedown, where red tribe individuals and businesses in blue states get coerced into donating to leftist causes:
Adams said she hopes Domaine Serene will follow through on its pledge to take concrete steps to promote social justice. "I hope the Evenstads and the rest of us in the Oregon wine community will put our hard-earned dollars toward being on the right side of history," Adams said.
Thursday, Linfield College in McMinnville said that Domaine Serene will be making a major donation to the college’s Evenstad Center for Wine Education for a new scholarship program to promote diversity.
Righties don’t have most of that, but what righties do have is a healthy civil community that creates the building blocks for something similar:
Here is a little secret about conservatives. While they don’t know much about community organizing, they do know quite a bit about community. Mothers who have never participated in an election day GOTV effort routinely organize multi-car carpools to get kids to school on time. Dads who would never organize an Occupy Event have led 200 cub scouts at a jamboree and gotten each one of them set up and organized in his very own tent. Across this nation in every small town, people who would never organize a protest march have prepared extensive 4th of July Parades. Kindly church ladies have set up potlucks that could feed an army, and some of the older ones actually have.
The basic organizational skills do exist on the right, they’re simply distributed differently. The trick is just tapping into them, and providing basic guidance for people that wish to get involved.
One related issue here that leads to security culture issues is righties tend to be more high-trust than lefties, and lefties living in dense urban areas have more opportunities to build preexisting friendship-based affinity groups that are harder to penetrate and disrupt. The issue with righties making political activism a pick-up game is they’re always going to be more susceptible to infiltration under these circumstances.
As for the legal, logistical, and media angle, the Convoy has made marked improvements from the baseline. They have a network of lawyers providing advice and legal defense not unlike the leftist National Lawyers Guild, however I have not heard anything about jail support or specific field legal briefings and training. Still, that’s a significant move in the right direction.
Lefties love collaborating with sympathetic media outlets and often allow them to embed with their groups during an action, I also see the truckers using this as well. Groups like Rebel News and various aligned live streamers are given preferential access to press conferences and interviews, while the legacy media is largely shut out. This not only ensures that the message is relayed accurately, it also drives traffic to those alternative outlets when curious people search out first-hand accounts from embedded journalists.
The Freedom Convoy organizers had also been publishing morning Daily Event/Status Reports that reinforce their message that this is a peaceful protest against mandates, and contain a brief analysis of the political situation from their perspective. This is a handy thing to do because it allows for coordination with different independent groups without direct communication.
The truckers have also been using designated “block captains” which seem to fulfill a roughly analogous role to that of the protest marshal. This is a good development, and indicates people are paying attention.
We did see the leftist ecosystem deployed against the truckers in several ways. Some of the reinforcement convoys were blocked from downtown Ottowa by counter protests organized by public employee unions, and there’s currently a class-action lawsuit initiated by a government employee against the convoy organizers and individual truckers, filed by Ottawa labor lawyer Paul Champ. Antifa-affiliated DDoSecrets also publicized the hacked GiveSendGo donor list, which lead to donors being targeted for harassment by journalists and leftist groups.
GoFundMe/GiveSendGo/Bitcoin
I’ve talked before about how we need to avoid using hostile infrastructure and focus on building friendly alternatives, which is why I shook my head at the attempt to initially crowdfund through GoFundMe. In hindsight, I think it actually worked out for the better in this case. They managed to provoke GoFundMe into taking a dramatic reputational hit with the ‘cancel and distribute funds to other campaigns’ bit before the blowback pushed them to offer full refunds to donors, and the Streisand effect seemed to help the subsequent GiveSendGo and bitcoin campaigns. Of course the Canadian government is now trying to seize those funds and hackers have released the donor lists, but that’s just going to further the push for resilient alternatives.
It’s not Hypocrisy, it’s Hierarchy
“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”
Leftist groups vehemently opposing a working class action that targets the free flow of trade and blockades the seat of federal government is a level of irony we haven’t seen in clown world for some time. It’s especially cutting as the Ottawa clearance operation is happening in the immediate aftermath of a massively destructive attack on a gas pipeline construction site, Church arsons provoked by a mass grave hoax, not to mention the 2020 BLM riots -none of which seemed worthy of imposing defacto martial law.
The reality is the post-1968 New Left has increasingly become a movement less about economic issues, and more one that caters to narcissistic identity questions and the effete virtualized urban class. Since the left broadly controls the institutions and the administrative state, this is explains why the Biden laptop story was suppressed while the GSG donor information was not, and why the hacker (Aubrey Cottle/Kirtaner) doesn’t seem to be concerned about any legal issues from his activities. The friend/enemy distinction in practice means that the state gives permission for aligned private actors to commit acts on its behalf, whether it’s hacking donor lists, the police withdrawing to allow antifa to attack right wing demonstrators, or tech companies deplatforming dissidents. This clouds the issue for those that still put too much weight on the public/private distinction.
Soft Power, Hard Power, and Hybrid Power
The existing Western Order is a voluntary system largely built upon soft (co-optive) power and rule of law; even big tech and banking is largely more about soft than hard power, because their entire basis for existing is reliable and transparent flow of money and data. These are things we take for granted domestically, but they're huge things for projecting foreign influence; this is why hybridizing them into instruments of hard (coercive) power is not only clumsy and inefficient, but ultimately massively destructive to maintaining the system. Ending the trucker convoy in this manner is ultimately forcing Trudeau to torch the legitimacy that the Liberal Democratic system depends on to survive.
Industry Consolidation and Just-In-Time logistics apply differently
Both the virtual and real economy are subject to factors that create a degree of sector consolidation, however attacks via the virtual economy and attempts to close off chokepoints are ‘leaky’ in a way the real economy is not, given how low the bar is to route around system disconnection and the degree of coordination required for it to have any effect. The GFM cancellation led to the GSG campaign and bitcoin donations, which the Canadian government responded to by declaring an emergency and seizing control of their entire financial system in a attempt to stop it. The issue is that while disconnecting/blocking individuals can be an effective tactic, it is not one that scales well and is massively disruptive.
The real economy is different in that widespread coordination is not needed to close off chokepoints, and the virtual economy doesn’t have truly effective tactics to respond. All the lawsuits and frozen bank accounts in the world won’t move a truck blockade if the truck drivers refuse to move, or if the tow truck drivers refuse to tow them. Trudeau admitted as much during his emergency act announcement, when he openly admitted that he needed the legal power to compel Canadian towing companies that were refusing to assist the government.
Both the virtual and real economy are littered with chokepoints, but ultimately the advantage goes towards those that interact with and control the real, and Trudeau’s actions reinforce that. Taking unprecedented action against the financial system, drafting tow truck drivers, and importing police from different provinces is not the action of a western nation secure in its power or the loyalty of the people that control and maintain the machinery of modern society. Only a relatively small number of people are needed to create a bank run in a fractional reserve system or block critical infrastructure, whereas a virtual economy blockade falls apart with the first defection or alternative pathway. Advantage RealChads, disadvantage Virtualcucks.
Regardless of how the Convoy protests end, they have revealed vulnerable pressure points and areas of weakness in modern society. The smart people on both sides are watching and learning, and I expect to see evolved tactics based on the lessons learned of the past three weeks down the road. Like I keep saying:
Before you get too depressed, let me finish this section by presenting you with a simple question: have any of the underlying forces that drove first the rise of the TEA Party, then the MAGA movement, been fixed or even addressed? No? Then we’re not done here, not by a long shot.
Let me end on this important note from the previous substack linked above:
To understand these people and what happened(and why it’s going to happen again), you have to understand a simple formula: in a society of plenty, status games are paramount; in a post-industrial information economy, status goes to those best able to manipulate abstractions; the more focus on optimizing for manipulating abstractions, means the highest-status (and most influential) individuals often have difficulty modeling tangible reality. They convince themselves certain things are not possible, then have no realistic way to respond (other than rage) when those very things prove inevitable. This is where they’re weak, remember that.
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Great insightful article! Thank you.
Very insightful. Looking forward to more.