Activist Greg Greene ponders trucker protests and rumors of trucker protests and tweets, “IDK — if I were a government planning a foreign military adventure that NATO disdained, keeping two alliance governments somewhat diverted by ‘convoy’ protests might seem like a useful ploy.”
If not one to organize from scratch, then to exploit.
On the dark web, someone is exploiting it, Ben Collins finds:
“When we see really effective disinformation campaigns, it’s when the financial and political motives align,” said Joan Donovan, director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media. Some activity is normal political organizing even if instigated by fake accounts (NBC News):
The details of foreign interference come as anti-vaccine protesters, pro-Trump groups and QAnon supporters have shifted their full attention to making trucker convoys a reality on American roads. Anti-vaccine protesters, some of whom are truckers, have clogged roads in Ottawa for more than a week, demanding the Canadian government remove mask and vaccine mandates.
American far-right groups on Facebook, Telegram and the voice chat app Zello have aimed to replicate the demonstration in cities across the United States. People have passed around flyers in group chats urging truckers to stop traffic at this Sunday’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles, but the groups have found a three-day window to be too short for sufficient mobilization.
Although there are some, it is not just truckers in these discussions, Collins adds in a tweet thread, but “a massive amalgam of followers of major QAnon and antivaxx influencers.”
“There’s a misconception that every participant in these chats is a trucker, but that’s not true at all. It’s really anybody who’s been a part of these movements who’ve been waiting for an excuse to do something — QAnon, anti-vaccine, sovereign citizens,” said extremism researcher Sara Aniano, who recently published a report on QAnon’s growth after Jan. 6 for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, a London-based nonprofit group. ”This feels like the culmination of everything that’s happened since Jan. 6th.”
Social media-based foreign interference in domestic politics first came into public view in the aftermath of the 2016 election after researchers found that Russia’s Internet Research Agency was conducting an elaborate influence campaign across American social media sites in an effort to support candidate Donald Trump. Since then, foreign social media interference has been tempered by efforts by major social media platforms to crack down, though various influence operations are still frequently identified.
Donovan, of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, said Vietnamese spammers specifically sell what they call “Nick” accounts at scale, which are credible-seeming Facebook accounts that moderate high-profile groups.
Once purchased, the accounts and the groups they run can be used for any purpose, from selling T-shirts to executing a foreign influence campaign.
Hard to tell which is which.
Conversations have moved from general discussion about convoy protests to planning for long-haul car trips before wandering into “Q and elites drinking baby blood.”
“They are happy enough to see a neighboring liberal democracy paralyzed by right-wing extremism,” Brian Beutler wrote Friday, “and downright giddy about the thought of replicating the chaos here, given who the president is right now.”
Aside from the protests themselves, Beutler nailed what really drives them:
Underlying all the brazen lawlessness and antisocial conduct on the political right is an implicit threat, especially unsubtle among far-right men, to make the country ungovernable if they don’t get their way, let alone if they face any kind of consequences for their actions.
They are aided further in this hostage-taking approach to civic life by non-trivial levels of support among law-enforcement officers, and a general passivity among liberal leaders, who often convince themselves that any exercise of liberal power will be met with a larger opposite backlash. That is: they’re scared. The anti-democratic right thrived in this climate throughout the Trump years, and is testing the limits of impunity now that he’s out of office.
When democracy isn’t going your way, try politics by tantrum.
I’ve long said that the right is fully prepared to burn the place to the ground rather than let browner and more liberal Americans than them govern it democratically. If they don’t get their way, they’ll murder their beloved, “Banks of the Ohio” style.
Or with a little foreign help, perhaps, Banks of the Dnieper.
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