How a spy from the Ram Ranch Resistance infiltrated and seized anti-vax trucker chat rooms – “What they did in Windsor, blocking an international border, that to me is domestic terrorism”

By Claire Goforth
14 February 2022

(Daily Dot) – A member of a group that trolled trucker convoy protests by spamming them with a gay porn song infiltrated and took over a private chat protesters used to communicate and strategize.

In recent weeks, truckers and people sympathetic to them have protested Canada’s requirements for truckers entering from the United States to either be vaccinated for COVID-19 or get tested and possibly quarantined. The trucker convoys converged in the Canadian capital and have also since spread to other cities and countries. The effort has attracted international attention, millions of dollars of donations, and astroturf support, while generating controversy and conspiracy theories.

Last week, a protest in Windsor, Canada blocked a vital border crossing with the United States.

A group of people frustrated with the protesters have taken to trolling them by posting “Ram Ranch,” Grant MacDonald’s song about gay cowboys, on protesters’ social media channels and group chats. They’ve come to be known as the Ram Ranch Resistance.

Last week, Teagan McLean decided to infiltrate the Windsor protesters’ Zello channel. On Monday, McLean told the Daily Dot that he accomplished a one-man coup in a matter of days. In that time, he said he was able to sow division, create confusion, and convince some of the protesters to leave peacefully before the authorities forced them to disperse on Friday.

“Joined on Monday as untrusted user and by Friday 6:30 I had full control and shut down their communication network half an hour before police moved,” McLean said.

McLean sent the Daily Dot screenshots showing him as the moderator of the channel. Tweets posted last week also reference his handle.

McLean said he was inspired by a Facebook group, Questioning Plague Spreaders In Windsor Essex, that he joined in the early days of the pandemic. For the last few years, he wasn’t active beyond reading posts. Then people started discussing the trucker protests and the Ram Ranch Resistance infiltrating protesters’ Zello channels and spamming them with a song that includes such lyrics as, “18 naked cowboys in the showers at Ram Ranch! Big, hard, throbbing cocks wanting to be sucked! 18 naked cowboys wanting to be fucked!”

“OK, well this is funny,” he thought. He hadn’t felt strongly about the protest in the Canadian capital, opining that they’d “overstayed their welcome,” but blocking the border was a bridge too far for him.

“What they did in Windsor, blocking an international border, that to me is domestic terrorism,” McLean said. Also, he said, “I was just bored.” […]

McLean says that others have reached out to him for advice on how to infiltrate other trucker convoys online.

Now he’s set his eyes on a bigger prize: the Ottawa protest.

“It was too easy to do this,” he said. “It was just comedy gold.” [more]

‘It was too easy’: How a spy from the Ram Ranch resistance infiltrated and seized anti-vax trucker chat rooms

A Porno-Metal Song About Gay Cowboys Is Disrupting the Anti-Vax Trucker Convoy

By EJ Dickson
10 February 2022

(Rolling Stone) – In a recent chat on a Zello channel titled “Windsor Convoy 2,” a group of people supporting the trucker convoy — a Canadian protest against vaccine mandates and lockdowns — started an impromptu singalong for the national anthem, “O! Canada.” “Our home and native land,” one person sang off-key, followed by another, crooning just as poorly, “True patriot love with all our sons command [sic].”

Then comes a loud guitar riff. “EIGHTEEN NAKED COWBOYS IN THE SHOWERS AT RAM RANCH,” a voice screams. They’re removed from the chat before they can continue to the next lyrics: “BIG, HARD, THROBBING COCKS WANTING TO BE SUCKED.”

Welcome to the #RamRanchResistance, a loosely organized counter-movement to the trucker convoy. The lyrics played in the chat are from “Ram Ranch,” a 2012 porno-metal classic by Grant MacDonald that ascended to meme status thanks to lyrics like, “Eighteen naked cowboys wanting to be fucked/Cowboys in the showers at Ram Ranch/On their knees wanting to suck cowboy cocks/Ram Ranch really rocks.”

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.

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. [more]

A Porno-Metal Song About Gay Cowboys Is Disrupting the Anti-Vax Trucker Convoy