American truckers are looking to follow the lead of Canada’s Freedom Convoy by organizing a protest against vaccine and pandemic-related mandates.
The truckers in the United States have claimed they are eyeing March 1 as their protest date, according to a “Freedom Convoy to DC 2022” GoFundMe page, with a plan to travel from California to Washington D.C. in protest of vaccine rules nationwide. The group hopes to end vaccine mandates through peaceful protests.
The movement is “a long time coming,” said Mike Landis, a trucker involved in the D.C. freedom convoy. Americans are tired of “government overreach” in the form of pandemic-related mandates.
“The presence of that amount of people that show that they are unhappy with what’s going in is a good way to hopefully get their attention,” Landis said, criticical of politicians for not following the Constitution.
Co-organizers of the D.C. Freedom Convoy Brian Brase and Jeremy Johnson anticipate that a wide range of Americans will come out to the protest to support their cause, and that the event will not be exclusive to truckers.
The protest “crosses all genders, all races, all sexual orientations, all occupations,” Brase said.
“Truckers might be standing up, but it’s not about the truckers. It’s about America.”
Meanwhile, Johnson has stated that “the government needs to really take a look at what the American people want. And they don’t want mandates.”
The American truckers are already facing issues with their protest’s organization, as the group’s Facebook page, “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” was removed Feb. 2 for “repeatedly violating [Facebook’s] policies around QAnon,” according to Facebook’s parent-company Meta.
Co-organizer Johnson, who set up the Facebook page, called this removal “censorship at its finest.”
Johnson and Landis’s personal accounts were also removed from the site due to alleged ‘QAnon ties.’
“They like to silence people that speak the truth,” Johnson said, whose personal account’s removal prompted him to contact a civil rights attorney to discuss his next steps.
Canada’s Freedom Convoy organizer, Daniel Greg, wrote at statement in favor of an American freedom convoy: “Up in Canada we stood up to tyrants and came together at the Capitol. We want American truckers to be able to reach D.C. as well. ... Mandates have been proven to only hurt people, destroy businesses and people’s lives. We need to stand together to make sure our freedoms are maintained.”
American truckers have also joined the Canadian freedom convoy, which entered its second weekend and reached Canada’s capitol, Ottawa, this past weekend.
American trucker Brain Gregg, a long-haul driver who has been driving for almost 30 years, drove from Indianapolis to Ottawa in order to support his “brother and sister Canadian truck drivers,” saying that “I support them and will support them to the very end. These mandates need to stop; they are hurting Canadian families.”
