Watching the "People's Convoy" Get Moving
A motley crew of anti-vaxxers, election deniers, Bible thumpers and white nationalists are on their way to DC. Are we ready?
Welcome back to another weekly edition of The Connector, where I focus on news and analysis at the intersection of politics, movements, organizing and tech and try to connect the dots (and people) on what it will take to keep democracy alive. This is completely free newsletter—nothing is behind a paywall—but if you value it and can afford a paid subscription at any level, please hit the subscribe button and choose that option. Feel free to forward widely; and if you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, please sign up!
According to a press release put out two days ago, American truckers inspired by Canada’s “freedom convoy” are setting off tomorrow from Adelanto, California and other parts of the country aiming to converge outside Washington, DC Saturday March 5th. Calling themselves “The People’s Convoy” they are demanding an end to “lift all mandates” so the “average American worker” can “get back to the business of making bread.” Arguing that “COVID is well-in-hand now,” the release says, “Americans need to get back to work in a free and unrestricted manner.”
These truckers are kicking off their California trip with speeches from Dr. Pierre Kory, a Wisconsin doctor and president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance who has called ivermectin a “miracle drug” and “the penicillin of COVID,” and Pastor Rob McCoy, whose Godspeak Church in Ventura County has defied mandates against indoor services since the summer of 2020. Though the People’s Convoy describes itself as non-partisan, it touts among its supporters “liberty minded lawyers” like Joey Gilbert, a Nevada gubernatorial candidate who denies that Trump lost the 2020 election and says he was present in Washington on January 6th 2021 but didn’t enter the Capitol. (Video found by the Daily Beast shows Gilbert on the Senate steps calling out to far-right conspiracist Alex Jones.)
The People’s Convoy also says it is being backed by groups like the Unity Project, an anti-school vaccine network in California allied with Moms for Liberty (a Koch network group pushing the anti-Critical Race Theory fight to school boards); the America Project, a nonprofit funded by libertarian Patrick Byrne, who helped finance Arizona’s bogus election audit; the US Freedom Flyers, an anti-vaccine mandates group of airline workers; and Robert Kennedy’s anti-vax Children’s Health Defense TV. It’s about as mainstream and nonpartisan as a Trump rally.
While some of the online activity touting this effort is undoubtedly coming from fake accounts coming from content mills and other bad actors abroad, as Ben Collins ably reported more than a week ago for NBC News, real people are clearly being drawn to its banner. I’ve watched as one public Facebook group dedicated to organizing supporters in the northeast has grown and spawned state-by-state subgroups for people managing feeder routes and the collection of donated supplies across the region.
This isn’t to say that the People’s Convoy is any more representative of “the people” than a CP-USA rally. One of the organizers of the northeast branch of the movement, Dave Kopasz, is the chair of the Massachusetts Constitution Party (a far-right third party that opposes abortion and the federal income tax and claims the US is “a republic under God, not a democracy”). He organized a busload of people to protest at the US Capitol January 6th, though he says he opposes violence. He says he and his friends aren’t placated by the loosening of mask mandates in our region; he says that the movement won’t back down until they are completely eliminated.
Alert to the danger of being kicked off Facebook, People’s Convoy group administrators have adroitly set up mirror hubs on far-right platforms like Gab, Telegram and Zello, using the much larger platform for recruitment and the smaller ones for more hard-core organizing. On Gab, whose CEO Andrew Torba proudly thumbs his nose at the Anti-Defamation League and signs all his emails with the footer “Jesus Christ is King of Kings,” the movement’s deep roots in the Christian right are on plainer view than on Facebook. For example, here’s one member of the “Freedom Convoy to DC – Northeast Route” group on Gab urging protesters to put the “Jesus Flag” on their vehicles. Don’t be afraid, just have faith, the flag reads.
While the online groups marshaling support for the convoy include plenty of trolls spreading hucksters selling mega-vitamins and other dubious schemes, they also include a swarm of people building followings by being, shall we say, helpful. For example, on Telegram, self-styled “citizen journalists” are scouting the routes heading into DC, noting. the appearance of “draconian” new steel gates that have been supposedly installed on the Chesapeake Bay bridge to be able to choke off traffic if need be. If all the Occupy movement needed to start its brief but powerful dance on the world stage was a date and a simple slogan, “Bring Tent,” these folks are planning to glamp for weeks around DC. Below is a widely circulated list of supplies that are being organized for the truckers’ use.
How many of these people are actually going to show up in the next two weeks? If one online poll done among the members of the northeast truckers Facebook group is any indication, most of the people hopping on its bandwagon are armchair warriors. They’re expressing support, not putting their bodies and property on the line. But the truckers’ occupation of downtown Ottawa and stoppage of traffic across some major US-Canada trade routes shows that a relatively small but determined and well-organized group can quickly seize a nation’s attention.
According to the People’s Convoy press release, the movement “will abide by agreements with local authorities, and terminate in the vicinity of the DC area, but will NOT be going into DC proper.” The U.S. Capitol Police have announced that they are aware of these plans and “will facilitate lawful First Amendment activity.” Additional fencing is going up around the Capitol in advance of President Biden’s March 1st State of the Union speech. As I’ve written on Medium, I hope the protesters are welcomed into Washington as long as they stay peaceful and leave their trucks parked elsewhere. It remains to be seen if that is their intention.
For context on the Canadian freedom convoy, I recommend Jeet Heer’s piece in The Nation, titled “A Working Class Uprising in Canada?” He argues that while it came from the far-right and was mainly funded by well-to-do conservatives from the US, it succeeded in attracting the support of workers who feel economically marginalized and hurt by the pandemic. Governments need to do more to offer relief and a path forward, otherwise the stress and anger these people feel will continue to be harvested by conspiracists, racists and Christian nationalists.
—Bonus links: “There’s a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers,” by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, and “What the Left Can Learn From the ‘Freedom Convoy’,” by Emma Jackson in The Breach.
Tech and Organizing
Two emerging platforms that I’m keeping an eye on: Unified and Civitech’s CampaignOS. Here’s the quick and dirty on each. Unified, which isn’t in public beta yet, is aiming to be a social network for organizers and activists. It’s an outgrowth of Blue Squad, which Shion Deysarkar and some friends built after 2016 to help people mobilize their existing social networks. What intrigues me about Unified is that it’s aiming to center individual organizers, rather than campaigns, as its primary users. As I’ve written here before, the Democratic political tech ecosystem mainly develops sophisticated tools for organizations and campaigns, not individuals and communities, who we assume will just use consumer products like Facebook or Slack. Unified could change that.
Civitech, which is further along in its development, having been used in 2020 to help groups engage millions of voters to register and voter by mail, is hard at work improving its CampaignOS management dashboard. I got a glimpse of what they’re working on recently and I was quite impressed by how they are going about integrating district-level voting data and information about a district’s ethnic and racial breakdwon along with tools for managing volunteers and donors and for cutting turf and walk lists. I don’t think anyone has yet built a unified view into individual voters, donors, supporters and detractors that is easy for campaigns to use and integrates well with the voter file and fundraising tools that most campaigns use. Civitech’s Campaign OS could change that. Worth noting: Jeremy Smith, the founder of Civitech, is a co-founder of Unified.
Bonus link: Libby Falck on digital organizing as if volunteers mattered.
Odds and Ends
—Attend: NYC’s annual School of Data, a festival for civic tech geeks, is gathering online and in-person this coming March 5-13. Sign up here.
—Attend: If you’re going to South by Southwest, Unified (see above) is hosting a full day of panels and networking nearby on March 11.
—Attend: On March 1st at 7pm, hosted by the Gotham Center for New York City History, I will be in conversation with Daniel Soyer, author of the engrossing new book, Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy. You can register for the Zoom link here.
—Apply: The (tentatively named) Reimagine Politics Foundation is looking to hire a director, or maybe a co-director, based in Europe.
End Times
RIP Paul Farmer. A great tree has fallen.
I am now writing regularly for Medium as part of their contributing author program. If you enjoy the mix of topics that I cover here, then please sign up to be a Medium member. Here’s a “friend link” to a recent post about the dangers of alt-tech.