So you're suggesting they were peacefully protesting, not blockading an entry point? To what extent can a protest go before the public has the right to force it to stop? Does blaring so many horns continuously so that residential apartments are subjected to 100dB indoors count as peaceful? How bad does it get before the police are allowed to take whatever steps necessary to stop it?

And before you say anything about BLM, recall than many thousands of people were arrested last year during those protests, and there were plenty of rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings.

I'm always amazed at the extent people will go to absolve their own tribe from responsibility while accusing the other side of doing the same thing.

Personally I abhorred the violence in downtown Portland last year and I'm glad they finally stopped. I think the police need to dial it back a little in many cases, but I want them to be able to put a lid on the ability of protesters to destroy the lives of innocent people. And I think January 6 was an insurrection, but of course it was. I find all of y'all kinda annoying :).

It's really weird how from my defence of peaceful protest you've totally pigeonholed me and are now diverging onto BLM and Jan 6. It's weird.

>their own tribe

This is the problem in your thinking. These 'tribes' you worry about aren't real. It's an artifact of twitter, of terrible reportage, of lazy journalism and muck-slinging that puts lots of different typs of people in one box because that makes it easy to pick out the craziest of them and and say that they're all like that.

By and large the protesters were/are just normal people who want to be able to get on with their lives and accept the risks they're comfortable with. They spend all their life in their trucks, alone. They interact with maybe 5 people per week, if that, but they're forced to get a vaccination whereas grocery clerks who interact with 5 people every 15 minutes aren't. Most of them already have the vaccination but it's the principle, dammit. And they're sick of journalists and twitterati calling them - and everyone else, for that matter - nazis because a few lunatics showed up to the protest with nazi flags and got kicked out. It's boring that the media keep falling for this shtick. Every single time. You have a group of normalish people with normalish goals and all of a sudden some crazy fucker pops up with a nazi flag. You eject them but then all you hear on the news for the next month is 'nazi truckers...' It's just shit reportage. Utterly shit lazy yellow journalism.

When you finally realise that people just want to be left alone and not slandered and tarred with labels they don't deserve so much of this pointless infighting will go away. But then the media would have nothing to report on.

> And they're sick of journalists and twitterati calling them - and everyone else, for that matter - nazis because a few lunatics showed up to the protest with nazi flags and got kicked out. It's boring that the media keep falling for this shtick. Every single time.

At least this time the provocateur remembered to iron out the creases on the flag he bought brand new for the occasion. It happens so frequently and so reliably that one can’t help but wonder if the media malfeasance is more than mere laziness. Honest errors are not always biased in one direction.

>wonder if the media malfeasance is more than mere laziness

Of course it is. The modern media is absurdly woke and out of touch with reality and pretty much without principle either.

The trucker convoy was a perfect example of a modern working-class struggle and the media lined up to portray them as anything but.

I remember literally reading in some op-ed words along the lines of 'the truckers are not the working class, they are the modern bourgeoise; they do not work with their hands but merely direct from padded comfort the toil of their mechanical slave.'

It would be funny if it didn't actually affect things.