“It’s been a nightmare here. »
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Katarina lives close to downtown Ottawa. By nightmare, she means the sound of car horns, the diesel fumes, the harassment of residents. The occupation of his city, for 21 days. Three endless weeks.
On Thursday evening, the police began to clean up the city center. It was high time.
Katarina catches her breath. Relieved, but angry. The student cannot explain how the authorities could let things drag on for so long, so scandalously.
From the very first day of the siege, she felt that things were wrong. Not at all. Under his window, there were not only ordinary Canadian families who paraded in joy and joy.
The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she shuddered at the sight of swastikas in the crowd. More so when she learned that some organizers belonged to white supremacist groups.
Searching the web, Katarina came across citizens like her who were frustrated by the inaction of the police and governments.
We felt like hate was taking over and we were helpless.
Katarina, student and resident of downtown Ottawa
So, long before the police, they decided to counterattack. In the most unique way.
“At the beginning, it was a stupid thing that we did to have the impression of disturbing” the demonstrators, explains Katarina, who refuses to reveal her true identity for fear of reprisals.
The silly thing was to infiltrate the communication channels of convoy participants – who ended up on the app Zelloa kind of modern walkie-talkie – and to play it point-blank Ram Ranch, a metal-porn song featuring gay cowboys.
On a Zello channel, it looked something like this:
“We need diesel here. Over. »
“Ten-four. Do you have enough water left? »
“EIGHTEEN NAKED COWBOYS IN THE RANCH SHOWERS…”
The sequence does not repeat itself in a well-kept diary. Let’s just say it’s…explicit. And if an army of leftist trolls bombard your channels of communication with this song, it might make you lose your temper a little bit.
Notice, that was the goal.
“More and more people joined us,” says Katarina. We realized that with enough of us, we could actually hamper their communications. »
We took control and forced them to close their channels. We pitted them against each other.
Katarina, student and resident of downtown Ottawa
This is how the Ram Ranch resistance was born.
On social media, the hashtag #RamRanchResistance has become ubiquitous. A website (ram-ranch.ca) has been created to help downtown merchants. In the streets, counter-protesters held up signs evoking the famous ram’s ranch…
Why this obscure song, of all?
First, because its author, Grant MacDonald, is Canadian. But above all “because a porn song about gay cowboys seemed perfect for trolling an openly hateful movement” towards the LGBTQ+ community, explains Katarina.
Grant MacDonald a composé Ram Ranch in 2012, to protest a Nashville radio station for refusing to play his cheerful country ballads.
The Torontonian never imagined that, ten years later, Ram Ranch would become the unofficial anthem of the resisters at the siege of Ottawa. “I am delighted, totally delighted that my song can be used to defend science,” he told the magazine. Rolling Stone.
“At first, I found it funny. It was a good way to disrupt protesters’ communications. The problem is that it pushes them to go even more underground”, observes Jennie, a Montrealer who calls herself “Resistance Cat” on social networks.
That’s a problem, she says, because trolls aren’t just out to annoy protesters and their supporters. They spy on them.
A doctoral candidate, Jennie has put her studies in quarantine to devote herself to intensive listening to the channels of the French-speaking branch of the “freedom convoy”.
For three weeks, she has been listening to dozens of channels, up to 14 hours a day. “A way, she says, of documenting a crisis of modern times. »
As the days went by, Jennie noted that the protesters’ comments had less and less to do with health measures. They are more worried – and more worrisome. “Language is violent: We are at war. We’re not going to give up. We are not going to back down. »
All this paranoia, stuck in a thousand conspiracy theories. The latest, very fresh, concerns the arrest of extremists armed to the teeth in Coutts, Alberta. Four have been charged with conspiracy to murder against RCMP officers.
The four men were themselves conspirators. Desperate, it seems, to defend their twisted view of reality. “I will die fighting for what I believe is right,” one wrote in October on his social media.
False, false and arch-false, we repeat in a loop, these days, on the chains of the demonstrators. “It’s really intense, the theory of false flag “, reports Jennie.
It was to be expected: for the conspiracy theorists, the RCMP operation in Coutts is a smokescreen. Another conspiracy by the authorities. An operation staged from scratch to allow Justin Trudeau to invoke the Emergency Measures Act…
We have not finished measuring the dangers of this online disinformation, which overflows far into the real world, to Coutts, to the gates of the federal parliament.
The theories are chimerical, but the threat they represent has never been more tangible.