BJ Dichter, Freedom Convoy spokesman, debunks the frozen GoFundMe narrative as media fabrication by outlets like the Toronto Star and CBC, confirming the account meets all criteria. He exposes alleged dystopian digital passport surveillance at Canadian borders that auto-reveals personal data and critiques Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for shifting from praise to labeling protesters racist. Analyzing the political fallout, Dichter notes the Conservative Party's center-left drift under Erin O'Toole and Maxime Bernier's People's Party lacks ground game, urging peaceful unity in Ottawa to force policy changes without falling for activist traps. [Automatically generated summary]
First off, where are you right now, and how did you become the spokesman for this freedom caravan, or, as your Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calls it, this group of Islamophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, crazy people?
Every three minutes we get a thousand, two thousand messages telling us it's up, it's down, it's up again, it's down again.
Everybody is there.
People are unfortunately a little enthusiastic and they come up with some ideas of what's going on.
But right now, as far as I know, the last I spoke to them, the funds now are held for review again.
And I'll explain what happened.
The first time the mainstream, sorry, the fake news media, it's not mainstream, started producing all these stories, Toronto Star, CBC, Yahoo News, that our funds were frozen because of, you know, extremists and right wingers and all that sort of stuff.
And I said to the team, don't respond.
I've used GoFundMe.
I know their protocols.
These are banking regulations.
It always takes seven to 10 days for a new account.
It won't be blocked.
Trust me.
And so they're going around building this narrative.
Oh, it's all this speculation of why it's blocked and it wasn't blocked.
And then we issued a press releaser once GoFundMe said, yeah, you're good to go.
You meet all the criteria.
We said a press releaser say to all the fake news media, we apologize.
Right, all right, so let's cross our fingers on that.
So in the simplest terms, now that we've all seen the videos, I'm covering it every day, it's starting even to bubble up a little bit in mainstream media, although, as you say, fake news media, it's tough to get these guys to pay attention to the right things.
What is it that you guys want?
What is the end game for the truckers and their supporters?
Now, the reason there's those two things, the mandates, obviously that's the vaccine mandates.
There's certain people who want it, don't want it.
Freedom of choice.
I'm vaccinated.
Some of our people are.
Some of them aren't.
Uh, but it's their choice.
It's not the government's choice to, you know, it's your body, our choice.
No, that's, that's not how it works here.
Right?
Apparently the other thing is the, uh, the passports is, I think you saw when I was on Tucker, I explained that these passports, according to the agent in the booth, and I don't think he was lying to me.
He said to me when I went to show him my bar code, He said, it's OK, I don't need to see it because you just pop up on the screen.
So there's there's some sort of radius that they detect all the phones that have a COVID passport on it.
And yesterday I came across the border as well.
Again, I did a quick little run yesterday.
Same thing.
This time I didn't even volunteer the passport, didn't even ask me because that apparently links to their system and all my information pops up on their screen.
And that's what you guys are going to get as well.
I mean, it's truly, it's an episode of Black Mirror with a little bit of Minority Report, some Total Recall, a little bit of The Matrix.
It's all happening right now.
Okay, so the reaction to you guys from, say, the people that watch this show
has been pretty positive.
The reaction from Tucker's audience has been pretty positive, worldwide pretty positive.
So I guess I got two on that, which is, number one, how does it feel to be in the thick of
something?
I mean, Canadians are not used to being in the thick of like a true cultural, political moment.
I mean, that's number one.
And then number two, do you think that there's gonna be real change
I mean, it seems in the last day, even though Trudeau's hiding, you know, the premier of Alberta kind of was like, oh, maybe we should give in to some of these demands.
He was sort of like, oh, I kind of wanted to do it, but now maybe they'll actually do it.
I've told this story a couple of times to people that I went behind the parliament buildings when I first arrived here.
There's a park behind the parliament buildings and there's a bridge that crosses over into Quebec.
And I'm sure Viva Fry can expand on this.
There were, it was an army.
I don't want to use that word.
That means we're violent.
There was thousands, thousands of people.
Crossing the bridge into Ontario with their Quebec flags and their Canadian flags.
Remember, separatism has always been a problem in Canada.
Together and going to meet their Albertan and Prairie truck drivers and hanging out together, giving each other hugs.
And, you know, some guys didn't speak English, some guys didn't speak French, but they're trying to, you know, figure out how to talk to each other, showing each other, you know, look, this is truck, this is horn, beep, beep.
And, you know, like it was, It was wonderful for the first time in this country's history, you got this sense of unity.
And one, you know, Canadians are not going to like me saying this, but one inferiority complex that we tend to have in Canada is you do have that unity of what it is to be an American, right?
And for the first time, I'm seeing that in Canada.
It's absolutely amazing.
So to be in the middle of that, it's awe-inspiring.
Where do you see this going over the next couple days?
I mean, do you think that they're going to really turn around some of this stuff?
Do you think that this gets protracted?
Are you afraid that maybe they give you an inch?
I mean, this has been the thing that I've seen in the last couple days, where it's like, all right, the premier of Alberta says, okay, we'll move on some of this stuff.
And then you guys dissipate, you go back throughout the country, and then they just ramp it up again a week later, knowing that, you know, you can do this once, but you probably can't do it at this level twice.
Yeah, that's what they tried with their convoy a couple of years ago, and they were successful in basically divide and conquer, and the politicians got one faction of their convoy fighting with another faction, and then it just fell apart.
And a lot of people from out West learned that lesson, that we're not going to let this happen again.
Personally, I honestly don't see this going on too much longer.
I might be wrong.
The morale on the ground is great.
There's people dancing, meeting, people falling in love.
And so we've had some communications with the police because we do have a command center with ex-military and a couple of ex-police officers there, ensuring that we have safety protocols, emergency vehicles have passed, that they can go around things.
It was really disorganized when we got here because we were overwhelmed.
But what the police have indicated to us, they were monitoring us for several days, And they said, all right, you guys have been peaceful.
You've been great.
We know all that stuff in the media are complete lies.
Keep it up.
We are not going to act.
This is now a political issue and the government will deal with you.
The Conservative leader was forced to resign, which I had told him a while ago, I'll get you, and we did.
He was chasing Trudeau off a cliff and well, there you go.
So I don't see this going on for too... At some point Trudeau's got to realize all these countries in Europe Have abandoned the mandates.
It's the easiest win in the world for him to say, you know what?
I the people, I disagree with them.
But you know what?
The science has changed.
We're going to follow the European Union and the UK and we're going to we're going to remove all the restrictions.
I wish that were the case, but no, and I'll tell you why.
And I know Max personally.
I spoke at his first conference.
The Conservative Party, after Stephen Harper lost, decided, and I met some of those people, and I was in some of those meetings, and they said, well, we're going to go more centre.
And I said, you want to go centre?
That's OK, but on social issues.
I'm very libertarian socially.
That's great.
That's a good idea, but don't follow those guys off a cliff.
Well, they did.
So now they have to rediscover their roots and become actual conservatives.
But there's 45 MPs that voted to keep Aaron O'Toole, the bald version of Justin Trudeau.
So that's going to be a problem internally in the party.
Maxime, the problem with the PPC is there's no ground game.
The last two elections, I asked him and I'd asked his other candidates, I said, what's your GOTV strategy?
You get out the vote.
And Max always said, well, we're going to do it at the conference.
We're going to do it here.
And I asked their candidates.
They have no idea.
So if they're going to be serious about it, I think they got to dial back the grandstanding a little bit and actually do community engagement.
And they do nothing.
I mean, that's how politics works, right?
You got to get riding by riding.
And they're doing none of it.
So I don't know.
I think the strategy that they're using right now is just going to lead to back to the old liberal versus conservative.
But the question is, will the conservative party become more center right?
Will they?
With Candace at the helm?
Yes.
But she's an interim leader, and it's frustrating.
The reason I got away from a lot of this stuff is because you say to them, okay, well, use her as an interim leader, go into an election as soon as possible, and then if she wins, then keep her as leader.
But everybody turns into a bureaucrat.
Well, you know, the rules and the policy guide is she can't like screw the rules, amend, use your head, use your moral will and moral skill.
If you're anywhere near Ottawa, come down to Trudeau's truck stop right in front of his office and his parliament.
It is all peace and love.
We are going to solve this together.
It's all unity.
It's a great vibe.
Yes, people are upset.
They want change and change is on the horizon.
But we're going to do that when we stick together.
We be unified.
We don't take the bait from the leftist activists.
And we got all the time in the world.
We're going to do it.
And I think once we do, once we're successful with it, you're going to see all the provinces follow suit.
And that might, I'm hoping, will have a ripple effect in the United States, given the amount of support we're getting from our American brethren in the trucking industry.
There's a whole convoy of American trucks at the border.
I think it's not Montana.
It's another border.
American trucks draped in Canadian flags.
Would you ever have dreamed of thinking of that ever happening?
That's the type of unity that is gonna come out of this, and we're right on the cusp of a new golden age, where we all start to listen to each other.