The GOP and the far-right are cheering on the prospect of a “freedom convoy” in the U.S., which is expected to depart from Coachella Valley in Southern California in early March and snake its way across the U.S. to Washington, D.C.
The “freedom convoy” movement started in Canada in late January, in response to a new mandate requiring truckers crossing over the border from the U.S. to get vaccinated. While the protesters’ core issue is still, ostensibly, COVID-19 mandates and restrictions, the movement has ballooned into a grab bag of populist, anti-government, and anti-establishment grievances, rolling in nebulous complaints about “tyranny” and lack of “freedom.”
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The Canadian movement has already sparked a wave of copycat anti-vax “freedom convoys” around the world, from Australia, to New Zealand, to France, Finland, and Israel.
But in the U.S. the prospect of a mass anti-government mobilization comes with its own set of security concerns due to the ongoing deep divisions and routine political violence since the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which the GOP recently deemed “legitimate political discourse.”
The Department of Homeland Security recently affirmed that the U.S. remains in a “heightened threat environment” due to “an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories” and individuals who “seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest.”
The website, “Convoy 4 Freedom 2022,” which is intended as a central online hub for the movement, says the current plan is for “freedom convoy” participants to rally March 4 in Coachella Valley and then set off for Washington, D.C., two days later. They haven’t identified which route they’re planning to take. Some hopeful participants met up in person last week in Southern California’s Huntington Beach to discuss their plan of action, according to local videographer Vishal Singh.
All the fervor around COVID-19 protections comes at a time when many Democrat-controlled states, including New York, California, Connecticut, and New Jersey, are relaxing mask requirements in light of declining hospitalizations and waning Omicron transmission rates.
In early February, Facebook booted the “Convoy to D.C. 2022” page from the platform, after saying they’d discovered some of the group’s admins had ties to QAnon. This prompted an outcry by conservative media, who accused Facebook of censoring the freedom convoy movement.
The movement then re-emerged as a chaotic web of affiliated channels on Telegram, creating opportunity for the white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and neo-Nazi groups who are already active there to piggyback on their momentum. In some of the public-facing Telegram channels, users with QAnon or neo-Nazi references in their handles have been chiming in on freedom convoy channels. (For example, one person with the numbers “88” in their screen name—a signifier for “Heil Hitler”—reminded the “Aryans” in the channel to do their push-ups.) Others have become paranoid. “We have spies and hackers taking over and running groups,” wrote someone with the screen name ‘LJ Wolf.” “Please do not publicly air information about routes and drops and please stay as anonymous as possible.”
“It seems there are a lot of bots and cryptocurrency lures in here,” wrote another. “I’ve got a few [private messages] from strangers and then an immediate invite to their crypto chat.”
Support for a U.S. convoy surged so quickly last week that plans quickly turned chaotic, with different organizers stating conflicting dates for the convoy to get underway. One contingent of activists was pushing to get going in Los Angeles this past weekend with the goal of creating havoc around the Super Bowl, a loose plan that got a big boost when Yahoo News got ahold of some DHS documents mentioning it. There was a ragtag group of protesters outside the stadium in Inglewood, but the convoy failed to materialize.
A network of groups and event pages dedicated to organizing the convoy to D.C. also quickly respawned on Facebook. But many of those have since been axed by the social media company after NBC reported that some accounts promoting a trucker convoy in the U.S. were linked to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania, and other countries.
Additionally, TD Bank froze two accounts that had received donations for the trucker convoy in Canada. And, in yet another blow, the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, which helped raise $8.7 million for the convoy, was hacked on Sunday night and the personal details of all 92,000 donors were published online. The hack revealed the majority of donors to the Canadian convoy were actually Americans.
Despite these setbacks, the movement continues to gain support from mainstream GOP personalities all the way to the far-right fringes, including many who peddled 2020 election conspiracies and backed the “Stop the Steal” movement, which led to the violent riot at the Capitol.
MAGA activist Amy Kremer, who is the chairwoman for “Women for Trump” and was recently subpoenaed by Congress for her role in Jan. 6, tweeted her support last week for the truckers who had encircled Canada’s capital city of Ottawa.
“The eyes of the world are upon you & we stand with you,” Kremer wrote. “Hold the line for #Freedom.” In another tweet posted the previous day, she urged the trucker convoy in Ottawa to “Hold the line.” This mantra was familiar. “Hold the line” was a hashtag used by Stop the Stealers, including Kremer and her counterparts, in the run-up to Jan. 6.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is selling T-shirts that amend his usual slogan, “I (heart) Tucker,” to “I (heart) Truckers.”
On Friday, Infowars declared Feb. 11 as “the day the attempted global government COVID power grab officially collapsed” as part of its breathless wall-to-wall coverage of the convoy.
One video by the far-right outlet VDARE, posted to Gab, asserted that “anti-system sentiment is rising among the very people that the system depends on,” and pondered whether “trucker populism” could forge the way for a “new North American nation.” White nationalist “groyper” Nicholas Fuentes also expressed his support for the movement. “Hey listen up zoomers put down the tide pods & honk for FREEDOM” he wrote.
The movement’s also been watched closely by the Proud Boys, who have spent the last year attempting to gain legitimacy and establish coalitions around hot-button political issues, such as COVID-19 vaccines. They’ve been routinely promoting and resharing videos and posts by “Freedom Convoy” Telegram accounts.
Some organizers have talked about taking the I-10 cross country, which would mean cutting across Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida. But that route doesn’t seem to be confirmed just yet. It’s also not clear how disruptive it’ll be. The Canadian convoy movement snarled traffic, and in some cases, was associated with ugly, offensive behavior, like public defecation, harassment of locals, and waving the occasional swastika or Confederate flag. For days, they blockaded the Ambassador Bridge, a key border crossing linking the U.S. and Canada, resulting in trade bottlenecks. (The bridge has since reopened, after Canadian police moved in to make arrests on Sunday). In an ominous development, on Monday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta announced that they’d arrested a small group of heavily armed hardcore convoy protesters who were prepared for a violent showdown with law enforcement. Police seized 13 long guns, handguns, body armor, a machete, high-capacity magazines, and a lot of ammo.
It remains to be seen whether the current momentum and support for the convoy to D.C. will be sustained for another two weeks. Previous attempts to hold large-scale protests since Jan. 6 have crumbled amid infighting and fears that participants could be getting snared in a federal “honey trap.” But it’s striking how the language being used by some organizers and participants in the convoy movement bears an eerie similarity to that used in the run-up to Jan. 6.
“They have pushed fear with the arrests and detainment of our citizens who protested on Jan 6 of 2021 after we watched an election being stolen,” wrote a man who described himself as an active-duty U.S. Marine on the Convoy 4 Freedom 2022 forum. “They have slowly and methodically dismantled our right and freedoms, they are destroying our constitutional republic. They are ushering in the new world order in which we will indefinitely lose everything!”
