The Convoys Are Coming [No. 094]

It’s been a minute and I wanted to come back with something light-hearted and fun. So, today, we’re going to talk about the Canadian conspiracist truck convoy, the impending U.S. version of this thing (that I hope I’m wrong about!), and how social media and influencers are helping drive it.

So, just a refresher: the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” consists of truckers and various support agents using their big rigs and pickups to physically block off the Ottawa capitol and key border crossings with the U.S. And I mean, you know that anytime the word “freedom” is attached to an event or “movement,” white grievances are about to get AIRED THE FUCK OUT.

The “Freedom Convoy” is ostensibly protesting a new piece of Canadian legislation that requires unvaccinated Canadian truckers to isolate for 2 weeks upon returning from the U.S. Unvaccinated foreign truckers aren’t allowed in the country. There sure has been a lot of attention given to these anti-vax protesters while *checks notes* 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated.

To nobody’s surprise, the movement’s leaders and organizers are some combination of the following list: racists, xenophobes, conspiricists, QAnon believers, and more. They’re anti-labor and boyyyyy do they not believe in science. Or the government, obviously. And look: there may be some convoy sympathizers who have a simple, narrow desire to protest vaccine mandates—a position I largely disagree with but one that people can certainly voice their opposition to! But it’s pretty very clear that this movement was built opportunistically by its leaders, laundering far-right ideology into public debate about mandates. This is the right on-ramping sympathizers and adjacents to a bigger platform.

This truck blockade strategy is likely to be employed in the U.S. in the near future. At what scale or frequency remains to be seen. How DHS and other authorities preemptively plan for them will be interesting. But you know an American version has the potential to be even more stupid, more media-able and potentially dangerous than the Canadian variety. In practice, U.S convoys will look like a Trump 2024 x Let’s Go Brandon/Stop The Steal x QAnon x Conspirituality (see below) collaboration. The merch will absolutely suck. And while the venn diagram for those four groups isn’t a perfect concentric circle, there’s enough overlap and the possibility that these convoys make the circles tighter. Fun!

Again, I hope I’m wrong. I hope none of this comes to fruition.

Given my personal and professional interests, I’m looking at two things, specifically: how social media/platforms serve as key organizing spaces. And influencers. Not just far-right influencers who you’d obviously expect. I’m talking—takes deep breath, exhales—health and wellness influencers.

Turns out, a lot of them are very vocally supporting the convoy on social media. From Rolling Stone:

Influencers publicly supporting the convoy, which started in protest against trucker vaccine mandates and has left the country’s capitol city of Ottawa immobilized for the past 11 days, is the natural culmination of the wellness community’s increasing convergence with anti-vaccine or Covid-denying conspiracy theories, all in the name of supporting personal freedom and bodily autonomy. Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a gradual yet palpable shift in the wellness community toward conspirituality, a portmanteau of “conspiracy theories” and “spirituality” constituting a mélange of woo mysticism and distrust toward the mainstream medical establishment, with a healthy dose of libertarianism thrown in for good measure. This strain has infiltrated all corners of the wellness ecosystem, from natural childbirth influencers to yoga teachers on Instagram.

Back to these protests being literal vehicles for far-right ideology. In the U.S., you get the sense that the right is looking for a January 6, 2.0, the next wave of “action” and participation for a grieved movement, whether people are more “yes, let’s do an insurrection” or more “well, you know, they do make some interesting points and also I’m against the government.”

I hope to god a convoy—or whatever happens next—has less violence and vitriol, and that they don’t physically storm into federal or state buildings again, but that’s what these angry, privileged people love to do. With guns. Who knows if we’ll see one, big, massive convoy in LA or NYC or Dallas, or if this will be an aggregate thing with convoys all over.

Organizers in Canada have been painstakingly trying to frame the convoys as non-partisan and about peaceful action and, of course, freedom. They’re working on better PR after January 6th. They’ve taken learnings and applied them. That seems to be working to some degree in Canada and you can expect U.S. organizers to try to frame their convoys similarly.

It’s a “we the people versus the elites” kind of thing rather than a “we want to arrest members of the government” or “COVID was purposefully released from a Chinese lab reduce the population of white people” thing, even though that’s what several of the Canadian movement’s leaders are perpetuating.

And this is why white health and wellness influencers are so important here. They have massive, built-in, wildly loyal audiences that are willing to trust their every word. From the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, here’s Rachel Moran, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public, a research institute at the University of Washington that looks at mis- and disinformation:

Those kinds of accounts are the most nefarious in a way. They’re really good at building trust with people, especially these glamorous white women who fit what we deem to be attractive. Maybe you trust their advice about what workout gear you’re gonna wear, and you build this parasocial relationship with them, and then they’re suddenly sharing this information about vaccine misinformation. And you’re more inclined to believe it because you have trust in them.

So, as these stupid-but-very-real convoys potentially start to hit stateside, let’s see what kind of new (white) voices and new (also very white) audiences start yelling or tooting horns as they try to play prosecuted martyrs in a system literally designed and governed for them.

For more on the topic, check out this piece about the wellness-to-white supremacy pipeline.

Be back soon, maybe with something actually more light-hearted. But also maybe with thoughts about these dumb convoys.

(I hope I’m wrong about it all.)