Freedom Convoy Holds 1st Press Conference, Bans Mainstream Media | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Hank Berrien.

    On Sunday, the Freedom Convoy 2022 held its first press conference with organizers Tamara Lich, Benjamin Dichter, and Chris Barber and bashed the legacy media, only taking questions from independent journalists.

    "We have all the time in the world," Dichter stated. He continued:

    This is also why we omitted certain news agencies from this press conference, including the Toronto Star and the CBC who are banned from this press conference. And the reason they were banned is twofold. First, this entire week the CBC, Toronto Star - Yahoo News were retweeting and reposting with a few others - kept putting stories out that our GoFundMe was frozen or suspended because of nefarious reasons. You know "right-wing truckers," "dangerous people," and it was hysterical, me and Tamara were talking.

    Dichter turned to Lich, "Remember one day the Toronto Star story came out that 'GoFundMe has frozen the account'?" He asked, "And I called her, and I said, 'Is everything okay?' And she's like, 'I just got off the phone with them 45 minutes ago. They're great. They're helping out. Everything's gonna be sorted out.'"

    The CBC reported on January 25:

    GoFundMe has frozen access to the more than $4.7 million in funds raised by the trucker convoy now winding its way across the country toward Ottawa in a protest against vaccine mandates. "We require that fundraisers be transparent about the flow of funds and have a clear plan for how those funds will be spent. In this case, we are in touch with the organizer to verify that information," Rachel Hollis, a spokeswoman for the crowdfunding platform, said in an email. "Funds will be safely held until the organizer is able to provide the documentation to our team about how funds will be properly distributed."

    Yahoo News reported on January 26:

    Hundreds of truck drivers protesting against the federal vaccine mandate at the Canada-U.S. border have raised more than $5 million in donations from supporters worldwide via GoFundMe, but the fundraising platform has momentarily hit pause on organizers using the money.

    "That was purely, purely just a fake story," Dichter continued. "Was that a fake story to sabotage the donations that were coming in? Probably. You see a lot of that propaganda in the media. And then when the Toronto Star put that cartoon that Jordan Peterson put up, that sort of extremism we're not gonna tolerate."

    Dichter declared, "So we know if we had invited the Toronto Star, CBC, all of these mainstream news organizations they will do what they always do. ... They'll come in with five people and they will have these giant cameras and they'll take up half the floor space and bully everybody else. That is not what this is about; this is about us coming together, talking to one another, answering any questions that you have. If we have the answer we will tell you, if we don't have the answer we will tell you 'we don't know' and just have a nice conversation with each other and go from there."

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