A group of American truckers are seeking to import a Canadian movement to protest against vaccine mandates, with thousands of members on social media pledging to bring the demonstration to Washington DC next month.
In Canada trucker protests have been linked to the far right and caused days of disruption in the capital, Ottawa, as well as in a border town in Alberta.
US organizers operating a Facebook group called Convoy to DC 2022 quickly gained more than 100,000 members and announced a convoy next month. But the Facebook group was recently removed by Meta.
“We have removed this group for repeatedly violating our polices around QAnon,” said a spokesperson for Meta, referring to the QAnon conspiracy movement that has sprung up in rightwing circles and often promotes antisemitic tropes.
Organizers of the convoy say they are demonstrating strictly against vaccine mandates, which they consider unconstitutional, and deny any affiliation to QAnon. “None of us are QAnon supporters or followers or anything like that,” said Jeremy Johnson, an organizer and one of the group admins. “We didn’t even have anything like that posted on our personal pages.”
Johnson said his personal Facebook along with those of two of the other organizers were also removed for violating QAnon policies, despite his own disavowal of the conspiracy movement. He has appeared on the conservative channel Fox News since the ban, telling the Fox & Friends show: “They like to silence people that speak the truth.”
Since being banned on Facebook the organizers of the convoy have moved to Telegram, where more than 28,000 have joined. The Guardian has reported on the rightwing exodus to alt-tech platforms like Telegram.
In Canada, the protests have attracted far-right protesters, organizers and fundraisers. They have driven to Ottawa where some reportedly defaced statues and carried swastika flags. A separate trucker convoy has also blocked a border crossing into the US in the Alberta town of Coutts. Police in Ottawa recently warned they might have to call in the military to disband the protests.
But some organizers in the US say far-right and far-left groups are not welcome in the group. “We don’t condone it or want it there. On either side,” said Brian Brase, one of the organizers. “All races, genders, sexual orientation, ethnicities, legal status are welcome,” said Brose. “This isn’t conservative or liberal.”
Johnson said the convoy was about Covid-19 mandates, which they believe are unconstitutional, and not about the efficacy of vaccines or Covid-19 denial. “We’re not against the vaccine. We don’t want anybody to be discriminated against because they choose not to get the vaccine,” said Johnson.
This month the supreme court’s conservative majority blocked a mandate from the Biden administration that would have required businesses with more than 100 employees to compel their staff to get vaccinated or provide a negative Covid test weekly.
However, the court allowed a more limited vaccine mandate that affects about 10 million healthcare workers at facilities that participate in federal Medicaid and Medicare programs.
But groups that monitor the far right in the US are concerned about the planned protest.
“The far right uses big public events like this, particularly around Covid denial, as an opportunity to normalize their presence as well as an opportunity to recruit new members,” said Devin Burghart, executive director of Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights. “There are examples in Canada where the far right came out in droves.”
Burghart said the far right seizes on vaccine hesitancy and Covid-19 denial, with legitimate healthcare awareness efforts outmatched by the sheer size of misinformation campaigns. “It’s very hard these days to draw a bright line in the Covid denial space that is dominated by conspiracy thinking and far-right ideology,” he said.