Do you think if the relatively tiny sponsorship didn't happen, the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened? I specifically talked to protests needing sponsorship, and in the case of the current occupation the bloated GFM -- funded by the far-right in the US who have achieved such a bucolic utopia of governance they now want to export it -- spurred on the participation. It legitimized it. This was nothing before everyone was chomping at the bit to get their slice of a big pie.

"How do you think people were fed? Where did they sleep?"

They literally slept in fields and went days with negligible food. In Ottawa protesters are sleeping in hotels and in $600,000 sleeper cabs running 24/7 and are eating like kings. They have built various facilities including a sauna. They are treating it like a fun vacation. What a shocking contrast.

All of this makes the other reply to you simply incredible.

I think his point is that only well-off people, who can fund themselves, should be allowed to protest. Poor people, who can't support themselves protesting, should have no right to do that.

"And as the other response mentioned, demonstrations were in fact funded in the past"

You think this is a retort. Amazing.

"Getting all defensive and outraged is one way to avoid an answer"

Demanding an answer out of someone, especially when they've spoken directly to the topic repeatedly, and then announcing an imagined, projected hypocrisy, is an unbelievably ignorant, boorish tactic. I might just say a troll tactic. Did you learn this from Tucker Carlson? It has absolutely no place on HN.