Freedom Convoy Got Its Air Taken By The Ram Ranch Resistance....,

rollingstone |  The term “Ram Ranch Resistance” initially stemmed from Canadian counterprotesters entering chats organized by convoy supporters on Zello, a push-to-talk walkie-talkie app somewhat similar to the voice chatting platform Clubhouse. According to Katarina, a PhD student at a university in Ottawa and one of the leaders of the #RamRanchResistance (she requested that her last name be withheld to avoid being doxxed), it all started with counterprotesters going into the truckers’ Zello channels to get information about their organizing.

Anti-mandate protesters are holding a twitter space “emergency meeting” in response to the state of emergency.

One who was at the Windsor/Detroit border blockade tells a story of how their communications were infiltrated, leading to organizational collapse...

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) February 14, 2022

Katarina says that life in Ottawa — particularly in the downtown area, which is home to many low-income and unhoused populations — has been hell since the trucker convoy. The city’s mayor has declared a state of emergency, and life for Ottawans has largely come to a standstill. “We’re watching destruction of property, harassment, people getting up in locals’ faces and telling them to take their masks off,” she says, adding that there have also been reports of assaults from locals in the area. “And there was this huge gaslighting by the media. [Everyone was saying], ‘Well, they’re just protesters. It’s just a peaceful protest.”

“We noticed a lot of inaction in Ottawa and throughout Canada. There wasn’t anyone fighting back,” Katarina says. “Our leaders and police force weren’t helping. We could see a huge disconnect between what was happening to people here, versus what we were seeing on the news and what our police chiefs were actually saying.”

Out of frustration, leftists in Canada started trolling Zello channels by blasting the song “Ram Ranch,” both as a play on the Dodge Ram insignia of many of the trucks downtown and as a subversion of the channel’s patriotism (the artist who recorded “Ram Ranch,” Grant MacDonald, is Canadian). “It’s a deeply conservative belief system infiltrating our city,” says Katarina. “And when we played this song to jam their communication, they’d get extremely angry because it’s an explicit and LGBTQ-friendly song.”

When reached by phone, MacDonald, a Toronto-based recording artist, says “Ram Ranch” was inspired in part by Rodin’s Thinker and in part by a Nashville radio station rejecting his LGBTQ-themed country songs. “It was to get back at the homophobia of Nashville. That was the whole foundation,” he says.

After it first went viral in 2016, someone on Discord requested he do a sequel. “At first, I was like, that’s like Pink Floyd putting out Dark Side of the Moon 2,” he says. “But I figured if George Lucas can put out Star Wars 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, I can put out ‘Ram Ranch 2.'” In total, he has now written 541 versions of “Ram Ranch” (including one recorded in his condo just yesterday afternoon), as well as songs titled “Cum God” and “Prince Harry’s 12-Inch Cock.”

MacDonald says he found out about the new life his song was taking on when his nephew texted to say people were playing it in Ottawa. “I kept saying, ‘Oh my God, I hope it’s not the truckers,'” he says. He has since seen streams of “Ram Ranch” on Spotify climb to the few hundred thousands. “I’m just elated, totally elated that my song could be used to stand up for science,” he says.