1. Over the weekend, Trump hailed "those great Canadian truckers" protesting mandates. Joe Rogan, Jordan B Peterson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rob Schneider also love those Canadian truckers. What's going on?
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1487608620883738627
2. As @CarlBeijer usefully points out, there's a history of the hard right trying to mobilize truckers, usually unsuccessfully: a 2013 anti-Obama protest (30 trucks) & a 2021 Australian one (2 trucks). carlbeijer.com/p/truckers-sit… 
3. As compared to those early fizzles, Canadian protest is relatively successful: generously maybe 1,000-1,500 trucks & 10-15,000 protestors. But that's piddling compared to other Canadian protests. 2019 climate protest had 1 million across country & 500,000 in Montreal.
4. There are more than 300,000 truckers in Canada; the maybe 1,000 or 1,500 who drove trucks are a small minority (and many, as it turns out, aren't truckers). 20% of Canadian truckers are South Asian, but protest was overwhelmingly white. So not a truckers protest.
5. Simply on the level of political optics, protest - rich with scenes of confederate flags & swastikas (only sometimes used ironically) as well buffoonery - was an embarrassment to right-wing pols who hoped to co-opt. Conservative pols ended up having to distance themselves.
6. Yet for all its small size & clownishness, protest is surely sign of a new wave of far right activism feeding off broader public weariness at pandemic. Trump's endorsement not an accident. Its likely to be replicated. @NoLore & I break it down jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-thos…
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