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.
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.
Not everyone is thrilled with “Ram Ranch” being adopted as the inspiration for the movement, though. Gennie, who tracks French- and English-language Zello and Telegram channels and goes by the name Resistance Cat — and also asked that her last name be withheld for her safety — thinks the song is funny, but is uncomfortable with many of MacDonald’s songs about black men, such as “Love My Black Bros” and “Black Cock Gang.” (MacDonald refutes this, saying such songs have been “misconstrued”: “Love and dignity and respect is what my music stands for,” he says.)
Yet “Ram Ranch” has prevailed as a clarion call for resistance, though other vulgar sounds have been introduced into the chats as well. “The ranch guys are finally gone, but it’s about freaking time, I’d have shut that off,” one person is heard saying in a clip from a chat, immediately followed by a robotic voice saying, “Welcome to the cum zone, only cum inside anime girls, quivering clit, double-jointed pussy, fresh balls.”
Since then, the movement took on something of a life of its own. Noelle, a counterprotester who has been livetweeting the Zello chats who goes by @NoelleNarwhal on Twitter, created the #RamRanchResistance hashtag last week as a way for people to share information; since then, she says, she has seen countless Ram Ranch memes and GIFs, as well as “Welcome to the Ram Ranch” signs popping up at convoy counter-protests. “It’s not an organized effort at all. it’s just taken on a mind of its own,” she says. “It’s just a bunch of people annoyed with whats going on, and felt like they could do something.” Another #RamRanchResistor created a website, ram-ranch.ca, linking to downtown organizations that have been impacted by the trucker convoy as well as charities aiding indigenous people. People have even taken to Tinder to match with convoy protesters, set up meet-ups with them, and direct them to the Ram Ranch.
There’s an undeniable element of juvenile humor to the movement, echoing the actions of leftist trolls in the United States who infiltrated Stop the Steal groups last year, rebranding them to “Gay Socialists for Trump.” Yet it has had the effect of disrupting the trucker convoy supporters’ communications (Noelle says three Ottawa convoy channels have been shut down on Zello as a result of Ram Ranch organizers), as well as collecting valuable information on some of their organizing efforts.
Katarina, for instance, used the #RamRanchResistance hashtag to spread the word that anti-vaccine and anti-mask mandate protesters were planning on gathering outside a school in Windsor, Canada, to organize a walkout. And Gennie has been tracking the French-language arm of the convoy to document the shifting tone of the protests. “At first I found it funny to cover what was happening [on these channels],” says Gennie. “But the more I started listening, the more I started hearing people using homophobic language, using racist terms. As time went on, you could see the protesters showing their true colors.”
She has identified many protesters with links to the far-right and white nationalist movements within Canada, as well as individual business owners in the Quebec area who are funneling money into the convoy. She has also observed the language within the chats getting more aggressively militaristic, phrasing that has shades of the internal discourse leading up to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 within the U.S. “There’s a lot of, ‘We are soldiers, we need to hold the line,’” she says. “I wanted to document it. Because you never know where these things will end up.”
First and foremost, however, Noelle says, the goal of the #RamRanchResistance is simply “to annoy the truckers. And then for them to go home and leave the people of Ottawa alone.”
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