Monday, January 31, 2022

Truckdrivin' perspective

The far right has been trying to claim truck drivers as their people for the last dozen years or so. Remember the million trucker ride to Washington to protest "Obama <mumble, mumble> we're not racists!"? Since then, there have been regular trucker protests in Australia, Canada, and the US and they have all been embarrassing failures. They are still failures.

Not long ago, someone noticed supply chain chaos, inflation, and shortages caused by Covid and started pushing the idea that they were all the fault of Biden's policies, although they couldn't say which policies and how they did that. Now, those same people are calling for trucker strikes, led by Canadian anti-vaxers, which will cause supply chain disruption, inflation, and product shortages because... freedom? 

Because all of the other trucker protests have been failures, they are pointing to some images of the current Canadian protest as signs of how great their movement is. I have to say, these trolls have learned how to manipulate the media. They are packing areas around the home offices of the Canadian broadcast media and national monuments to get the best photo ops. They have dim-witted, has-been comedians like Rob Schneider expressing amazement that their caravan stretches from Ontario all the way to Manitoba, a province it shares a border with (one truck can stretch that far). 

The most generous estimate of the number of drivers involved is on half of one percent of the licensed commercial truck drivers in Canada. It's a stunt, and a fraudulent one at that. Any news out let that treats this story as anything other than an expose of the sad lengths the right will go to to lie to us is nothing more than, in Lenin's famous phrase, useful idiots.

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