Insurgent Patriotism: The Shameless Conduct of the Ottawa Truckers’ Convoy Occupation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the February 2022 Ottawa Truckers’ Convoy signalled a new precipice in political violence that recast insurgency as a cultural expression of patriotism. While the Convoy was a decentralized movement that coalesced far-right groups from across Canada to protest COVID-19 pandemic health restrictions, it was fuelled by the shameless conduct of charismatic leaders who modelled a transgressive political power to their followers. Convoy influencers consciously instructed occupiers to engage in strategies of contamination and capture, whereby protestors in downtown Ottawa made the air thick with petrol, honked unabated, and left city streets strewn with garbage. These disruptive strategies were intertwined with viral-worthy performances of what the author calls “crude masculinity” that took centre stage as toxic scenes of unrest in Ottawa. In the Convoy’s bid to gain support among a broad swath of pandemic-weary Canadians, crude masculinity did not consistently appear as a show of predominantly white male dominance over an urban population but manifested as carnivalesque behaviour that organizers claimed was no different than a Canada Day celebration. This article assesses the nexus of unrestrained (digital and IRL) public spectacles staged by both the leaders and followers of the occupation including their collective animus toward former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who was stigmatized through hate memes and scenographic protest, and cast as a queer villain that obstructed the path of “real men” on their carbon-fuelled path to limitless freedom. It was, and continues to be, “ordinary people” and local institutions, including the civic formation of the Ottawa People’s Commission on the Convoy Occupation, who refused to cede the ground to extremists that sought to dissolve democratic norms in the name of patriotism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".