The “Freedom Convoy” movement, consisting of hundreds of trucks, has ground to a halt the busiest border crossing between Canada and the United States and occupied Ottawa, Canada’s capital, effectively blockading the city and disrupting daily life for most residents in the core of the city. All vaccine mandates and requirements are rejected by the convoy members. They support an anti-government discourse that is reminiscent of far-right ideology in America.
The convoy participants lack support from the general population, which is largely vaccinated. They also lack support from most Canadian truckers (90 percent) and the Canadian Trucking Alliance.
Leading U.S. Republicans like Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene have endorsed the truckers, as well as some Canadian conservative politicians. Powerful anti-democratic social media figures like Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, and Elon Musk have also supported the truckers. array of white supremacist groups. Action4Canada is one of the most powerful right-wing groups in Canada. It makes conspiracy-ridden and false claims. claim that the COVID-19 pandemic “was carried out, at least in part, by Bill Gates and a ‘New World (Economic) Order’ to facilitate the injection of 5G-enabled microchips into the population.” With the help of the social media, support for the Freedom Convoy protests snowballed globallyWith upcoming convoys being planned to the United States, France, and all 27 European Countries.
James Bauder, the head of Canada Unity, is the creator of the Freedom Convoy protests. He also launched them. Bauder believes in multiple baseless conspiracy theories and “has endorsed the QAnon movement and called Covid-19 ‘the biggest political scam in history.’” Bauder is no friend of organized labor and, as Jacobin has noted, two years ago he participated in another convoy called United We Roll that “planned an anti-union protest where convoy members threatened to dismantle the picket line and run over workers.”
Patrick King, an extreme right extremist, is another leader in the movement. according to The Conversation, once “stated that he believes the vaccine was created to ‘depopulate’ the white race.” Another convoy leader named B.J. Dichter has a reputation as a “depopulator.” spreading Islamophobic sentiments.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is a non-profit organization. reported that “The so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ was organized by known far-right figures who have espoused Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and other hateful views.”
The Ottawa protests made it clear that extremist elements supporting fascism or white nationalism are attracted by the movement. This is evident in the presence of Confederate and neo-Nazi flags as well as a lot of QAnon logos on signs, trucks, and stickers. Sources suggest that the movement has received substantial funding. over $8 millionAs of February 7, donations may have come primarily from right-leaning sources in the United States. The highest individual donations are come from American billionaires. Funding from the states has so alarmed members of the New Democratic Party that they have called it “an attack on Canada’s democracy” and have asked the U.S. ambassador “to testify before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee.
Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, has stated that this is more than a protest movement. He has the opposite. argues that “the convoy’s stated intent is to “overthrow the government.” The convoy association “with hate groups … expressing racist and anti-immigrant sentiments … could explain why the Freedom Convoy is strangely silent on labor issues facing immigrant truckers who now make up over one-third of truckers in Canada,” writesEmily Leedham Jacobin. She further notes “that many of the concerns of the protesters have little to do with workers’ rights or labor issues within Canada’s trucking industry. In fact, Convoy organizers have previously harassed workers on the picket line and ignored calls for support from racialized truckers fighting against wage theft.”
Freedom has been hijacked once again in the interests of a counterrevolution. Its purpose is to destroy government authority to protect the common interest, limit the influence on the financial and corporate elite, as well as to protect civic structures essential to a democracy. They are driving right-wing convoy movements around the world and their increasing influence shows that they are winning in the information war.
It is not just conglomerates that are subverting freedom to serve right-wing extremism around the world. From the United States to Turkey to Hungary, anti-democratic groups are reducing freedom into the realm of unchecked selfishness, a rejection or the welfare state, and a flight away from social responsibility. They are fighting against democracy.
Removed from the discourse of the common good, equality and social rights, individual freedom now aligns with the mob — positioning itself with those willing in the age of the pandemic to sacrifice other people’s lives in the name of a bogus appeal to personal rights.
Although Donald Trump was the most prominent figure in denigring individual freedom as a vehicle to embrace a fascist political ideology and the discourse about hate and violence, his endorsements of authoritarianism in support of freedom have legitimized antidemocratic acts throughout the globe. This movement has become a focal point for far-right protests around the world and has also established a large social media presence. as Politico has reported, the convoy movement has promoted the idea that “efforts to keep people safe from the coronavirus are, instead, anti-democratic restrictions on individual freedoms.”
Elisabeth Anker argues that the right wing in the United States is increasingly using the language of “ugly freedoms” to promote an “anti-democratic politics [that] threatens to overtake freedom’s meaning entirely, harnessing freedom solely to projects of exclusion, privilege and harm.” She writes:
‘Ugly freedoms’ [are] used to block the teaching of certain ideas, diminish employees’ ability to have power in the workplace and undermine public health. These are not simply misunderstood rights, or a cynical usage of the language freedom to frame bigoted policies. They are a specific interpretation of freedom that isn’t expansive but exclusionary, coercive.
This notion of “ugly freedom” is certainly applicable to the convoy movement. Lost in its neoliberal view of freedom is any notion of an “inclusive freedom” that contests authoritarian and anti-democratic modes of suppression such as the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a financial elite, the rise of the punishing state, mass poverty, the rise of war culture, ecological devastation, and the criminalization of social problems such as homelessness. Convoy protesters are silent regarding a notion of inclusive freedom — one that would argue for universal health care, expanding workers’ unions, introducing regulations that ensure worker safety and paid sick days, and the need for social and wage benefits for unemployed workers. This form of capitalism removes freedom from any sense of social solidarity and forces individuals to take full responsibility for the problems they face, even if they are not their own. Zygmunt Baman has it right. observes, existential insecurity is intensified as “individuals are now eft to find and practice individual solutions to socially produced troubles … while being equipped with tools and resources that are blatantly inadequate to the task.”
Unchecked individualism is dangerous and must be dealt with, particularly if it becomes a justification for destroying human dependency, the common interest, and support for mutual solidarity. Freedom when it is tied to neoliberal notions and individualism weakens human bonds, making it difficult to both recognize and to practice solidarity. This danger has become clear as the appeal to freedom in the convoy movement is used as a call to resistance to COVID-19 vaccination efforts and mask mandates — a tactic which is code for an allegiance to the political right. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert, adds to the position. arguing that for the most part, the anti-vax, freedom-at-all-cost movement engages in “anti-science aggression” and “is a component of authoritarian rule [cultivated by] their own cadre of pseudo intellectuals.” Hotez makes clear that the appeal to freedom to buttress an anti-vax, anti-science movement has fueled its degeneration into a “killing force.” One can clearly apply this analysis to the convoy movement.
Hotez and the other critics of anti-vax movements, including convoy protests, fail to see how neoliberalism transforms social into biographical. It further convinces individuals that they are not responsible for shaping the community’s health, safety, and democratic institutions. Supporters of the convoy movement have lost sight on the relationship between liberty, and security. the greater good. The convoy movement does not represent a struggle for freedom, but an attempt to destroy democracy under the banner of freedom.
