A trucker protest in Ottawa, initially over vaccine requirements, has inspired copycat demonstrations and attracted the hearty support of right-wing figures across the United States.
There will be copycat protests in the United States, of course. I assume DC will be overrun leading up to the State of the Union address.
Ain’t nothing a half dozen big bulldozers can’t take care of in a day or so.
When you don’t have the numbers you need to make more noise. A political movement based almost solely on ressentiment seeks political leverage as it can: getting out in front of a definable program goal may seem an odd logic but it is a logic none-the-less.
Like most things political though, after assessing who wants power, it is wise to ask who profits. Qui bono, eh?
In the least surprising twist to this story, the protests have been a magnet for the usual cast of characters occupying the United States’ right wing.
Our right wing never misses an opportunity to attack democracy here or abroad. I don’t think it’s as much ideological with our right wing leadership as an opportunity for further grifting as well as a path to future political power (which will facilitate the theft of tax dollars).
Taking credit for this crap is a sweet and putrid new low for these characters.
What next - the French!?
This has gone beyond a protest and looks more like a blockade. If there was public support for this, its evaporated.
Copying Canadians for these people is like leaping on their own ball bags.
Conversations about a copycat protest across the southern border are happening online; whether that energy will make the jump to the trucks and streets or fizzle out in the endless Pong game of the right-wing echo chamber is still unclear.
Not very interested in these self-dramatizing louts but I do love a good classical reference, so brava @Kate_Riga24, for drawing a perfect metaphor from out the mists of antiquity.
This is one case where I would like to see the black bloc douchebags have a run through there. Those rigs are expensive and there’s a lot that can go wrong with them.
I wonder what the insurance adjuster would say if you said your tires were slashed and headlights broken while parked in an intersection near the Parliament building.
They won’t be able to get close to the Capitol. No trucks permitted.
Hey Canada, do you really want to be MORE like the tenants living in the floor below?
The way traffic works in the greater D.C. area, you could go weeks of a stand-still protest without anyone noticing that it was something other than the normal gridlock.
I’m listening to the start of Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll while playing this video. I thought it was the background track - so perfect.
I’ll just note that this “protest” is awfully convenient timing for a distraction of a key NATO ally who always plays in the sandbox with us right at the same time that some russkie dude wants to take over some random Eastern European country.
Not that russkie folks from 55 Ulitsa Savushkina could possibly have anything to do with agitating for and spinning this up into existence.
I’ve seen two schools of thought on that. Lots of Canadians are pretty chill and acknowledge the differences we have in some ways but broad similarities in others. Others find us more or less permanently scandalous and barbaric as a culture, even if as individuals many of us are very nice. I got this routine from an interviewee in Montreal once long ago and I could have sworn she was coming on to me a little as an individual, mind you, even as she as going on about how dreadful I was as a member of the group. Little bit of cognitive dissonance if you’ve ever been in that situation. 
Oh, goody! Now they’re affecting America, we can respond with force with full self-defense justifications.
Biden, if you’re listening, just one or two overflights and a couple bombing runs from the Air Force would put this to bed.
Or have the Coast Guard cutters open up from offshore on them.
Lots of options on the table.