These protests got me honkin’ like a big rig
Canadian anti-vaccine protests have capture the imaginations of the US right wing and may inspire copycat demonstrations this March
Right-wing audiences in the United States have watched in admiration since late January as their Canadian counterparts occupied streets in Ottawa in protest of their government’s COVID-19 policies. And while these protests have prompted Ottawa officials to declare a state of emergency, US right-wing media and activists are clamoring to duplicate the protests in their own country.
Across assorted social media platforms, both mainstream and alternative, hucksters have emerged to cater to the US right’s palpable lust for chaos. Some of these communities are centered on sentiment-building, amplifying and agitating digital crowds with partisan propaganda related to the Canadian protests. Others are in the process of trying to transform that sentiment into real-life action, calling a US trucker convoy to mirror Canada’s.
The broader project has earned buy-in from the modern conservative movement’s kingmakers, including far-right operatives like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon, COVID conspiracy tastemakers like Stew Peters, and elected officials including Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green and Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Fox News, the most-watched cable network programming in the US, has also come around to the idea. People vary in how explicit they want to be in endorsing a version of these protests in the US, but everyone mentioned above has publicly taken a favorable position on some form of renewed right-wing protest movement. Support from US Republicans has been so loud that Canadian officials have cautioned against “foreign interference”
Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist who researches right-wing extremism online, noted that Fox News’ February 7 primetime block contained favorable segments about the convoy in every hour of programming. Host Tucker Carlson criticized GoFundMe for removing a fundraiser for protesters in Ottawa and promoted alternative fundraisers, including one that uses Bitcoin. Carlson also described the protests as a “human rights movement.” Host Sean Hannity told audiences that night that protesters in Ottawa were fighting for “dignity, liberty, freedom, medical privacy.” Hannity and his guests equated the protests to 2020 racial justice demonstrations in the US. Host Laura Ingraham did the same in the next hour, and asserted that mainstream media was portraying protesters the same way it had the Capitol riot participants.
In other contexts, we might call this “manufacturing consent.” But I digress.
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