Will Bunch: 'Freedom Convoys' aren't supposed to make sense. The world can't ignore them

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Will Bunch
@Will_Bunch
What do the Canada truckers want? "Freedom," or in other words nothing. But trying to ignore that so many want to mindlessly stick it to know-it-all elites - whether closing a bridge or installing Trump - won't make this go away

So what now? My new column

inquirer.com
‘Freedom Convoys’ aren’t supposed to make sense. The world can’t ignore them | Will Bunch
Truckers and their pals crying "freedom" with incomprehensible demands occupy Canada's capital. Here's why things may get worse.
2:21 PM · Feb 13, 2022

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/canadian-truckers-freedom-convoy-ottawa-20220213.html

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https://archive.fo/TmPKw


If you’re a pro football fanatic who lives in a northern Kentucky town like Covington — with its sweeping hillside view of the Cincinnati skyline — then this weekend is something you’d anticipated for a long time: your Bengals playing for their first-ever Super Bowl victory. So it seems a perfect metaphor for America’s twisted 2020s that Kentucky’s junior senator isn’t rooting for quarterbacking phenom Joe Burrow but rather that a large convoy of smoke-belching, horn-honking semis will grind the L.A. freeways and, thus, the Big Game itself, to a halt.

“I’m all for it,” Sen. Rand Paul told a conservative news outlet last week when they asked him about talk that the so-called Freedom Convoy movement — a band of truckers and their allies who’ve occupied the Canadian capital of Ottawa and shut down key U.S. border crossings, including the massive Ambassador Bridge into Detroit — might come to the Super Bowl host city or other U.S. communities. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.”

Never mind the rank hypocrisy that Paul and his GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill were apoplectic less than two years ago when a multiracial coalition of Black Lives Matter protesters seeking the civil right of not being killed by the police decided to “clog things up” in American cities. Or that sweeping vaccine mandates haven’t been imposed on Americans to the extent of peer countries like Canada or most of Europe. This notion of big men in their big rigs and their loud if nebulous cries for “freedom” grinding the world’s democracies to a halt has captivated the American right wing and their grievance-laden cousins around the globe.

The seeming endless stalemates in the streets of Ottawa — where “Ontario Nice” officers issue vague ultimatums and stand around, in stark contrast to the riot gear-clad, tear gas-happy response you’d surely see on the American side — has created time and momentum to inspire elements of the pandemic-weary resentful working classes around the globe. (Police in Windsor did make some arrests and clear the Ambassador Bridge literally as I was writing this.)

*snip*

[PSPS]

1. An uninformed piece. The author thinks that this is all a "grass roots" movement. It isn't.