Convoy 2022

I'm sure everyone is aware of the convoy that headed to Wellington on Tuesday. This collection of cars, campervans and the occasional truck has descended on our capital, supposedly as a protest against the vaccine mandates that our government has put into place over the last few months. On my way into work in Wellington on Tuesday I hit the motorway a little before the first of the groups of vehicles did, and was greeted with the depressing sight of a hundred or more supporters on the bridges between Porirua and Wellington, many of them holding signs created by Voices for Freedom.

On Tuesday afternoon I headed to parliament during my lunch break, and spent an hour or so in the crowd, both listening to the speeches given by faces that would be familiar to skeptics (Dr Emanuel Garcia, Dr Matt Shelton, etc), and checking out some of the signs the crowd were waving and the conversations people were having. The crowd were friendly, and apart from some weird stares (and one man with a microphone who chose to challenge me - which led to a fun conversation for a few minutes), nobody seemed unhappy that I was about the only one there wearing a mask.

However it was apparent that many in the crowd were unhappy with the amount of religious content the Destiny church staff were trying to push on everyone. Brian Tamaki was mentioned more than once, as a champion of freedom, and a speech about the life of Jesus seemed to be particularly badly received by those around me. The crowd were also unhappy with Destiny staff telling them that they would need to move their cars and be gone by 5pm, to allow commuters to get home.

Just before I left, I bumped into an old friend. I've seen her posting medical misinformation about the pandemic on Facebook recently, so I wasn't surprised to see her at the protest. But it was still a little awkward trying to have a pleasant conversation when we're worlds apart, and it was pretty obvious that I was not there to protest.

When I left Wellington on Tuesday evening, I made sure to drive past Parliament to see how many people had heeded this advice - and, unsurprisingly, it seemed that not many people had packed up and left. In fact, people had started pitching tents on the parliament lawn, and a camp kitchen had been erected on Molesworth Street.

I said supposedly when it comes to the reason for the protest, as it seems that as Destiny church faded into the background, there were no clear organisers - just a collection of groups and individuals each there for their own reasons. This is apparently making it hard for the NZ Police to deal with the crowd and negotiate with them. It's also scary that the protest includes some scary, angry groups such as the National Front and the conspiracy programme Counterspin - the kinds of people who often talk about violent overthrow of the government.

Thursday's stand-off with the Police was interesting watching, from afar via a web browser. It pains me to say it, but I found the up close and personal live streams from people like Chantelle Baker to be much more engaging and useful than the telephoto streams from the press up on a balcony of Parliament. That being said, with the amount of “corrupt media” rhetoric being thrown around, I don't blame real journalists for choosing to film from a safe distance.

One piece of news that surprised me, and not necessarily in a bad way, was that infamous psychic Jeanette Wilson was one of the 120 or so people taken away by the Police. I've since watched her last live stream before she was nabbed, and in it she was berating the Police for working for the government, as it's a “corporation” and not a legitimate authority. She repeatedly told the Police in the line in front of her that they needed to “bend the knee” to God.

One of our panel speakers from last year's Skeptics Conference, Sanjana Hattotuwa, was interviewed by Marc Daalder for a great piece on this extremist, conspiratorial element at the protest. It makes for sober reading.

On Friday evening I was in Wellington again, this time for our regular Skeptics in the Pub meeting. After our meeting, at about 10pm, two of us decided to visit parliament again. That afternoon the speaker of the house, Trevor Mallard, had ordered the sprinklers to be turned on, and the crowd had come up with some inventive ways to redirect the water, using lengths of pipe, traffic cones and trench digging. By the evening the sprinklers had been joined by bouts of rain, which have since become a cyclone. My visit was brief, but I managed to get a picture of the protesters' makeshift sprinkler solution.

Watching the live streams this weekend, and reading online, it seems that the conspiracy theories are starting to come out. I've heard that all of the violent or abusive protesters are actually Police plants, agitators who are being used to give the Police a pretext for trying to shut down the protest. And I've read that the bad weather we've had this weekend is a result of the government using its ability to control the weather. If you've heard of other weird conspiracies related to the protest, please let me know!