The Freedom Convoy co-opted Indigenous symbols to equate Covid measures with genocide

Evidence

Because ours is a doppelganger politics, a simple rejection of what is feared is insufficient—there has to be a mirroring, a mimicking, a pipiking. So, in addition to the snow forts and airhorns in Ottawa, the Freedom Convoy also had a peace pipe and a tepee (denounced by three local Algonquin chiefs). Some of the convoyers waved orange EVERY CHILD MATTERS flags off their trucks—seemingly not in recognition of the Indigenous children who were raped, tortured, and killed in residential schools and whose remains were still being uncovered, but rather in reference to their own children, who, in the ever-escalating diagonalist discourse, were facing what some demonstrators called a “second genocide” as a result of having to wear face masks and being expected to get vaccinated. This Mirror World equivalency had been building for months: within two weeks of the discovery of the first unmarked graves, a group of white anti-vax moms started selling orange sweatshirts and other items declaring COVID 19 IS CANADA’S SECOND GENOCIDE. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 868

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Mirror World thesis elaborated in earlier chapters: right-wing populism metabolizes left-symbolic repertoire by mirroring, not just rejecting it.
• ADDENDUM: The orchestrated co-optation of injustice symbols echoes ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ in that both trace symbolic borrowing as identity/political signaling.