“The energy on the political right has led to the spread of false claims about the protest on social media. CNN’s Daniel Dale documented several, including the assertion that 50,000 trucks had participated in the protest. That would constitute a line of trucks more than 500 miles long, which obviously didn’t happen. Numerous images have also circulated that purport to show the protest, but, in reality, show past, unrelated events… As you might expect, coverage of the protest has been far more common on Fox News than on other major cable-news networks…

“Support for the protest, particularly from the United States, constitutes something akin to foreign interference in the country’s domestic politics. If you imagine a scenario in which D.C. was rendered partially immobile by an anti-gun protest funded heavily by a concerted campaign led by prominent Chinese officials, you can get an understanding of the frustration that Canadian officials feel."
Philip Bump, Washington Post

"[There is] a barely concealed effort to portray the Canadian truckers as part of some grassroots movement of patriots who are fed up with Covid-era coercion and control, who are now taking matters into their own hands. This is, to say the least, a misleading portrait. Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated; the Canadian trade group, the Canadian Trucking Alliance, has vocally opposed the protests. Two-thirds of Canadians both oppose the protest and believe that it represents the views of a ‘small minority’ of Canadians…

“Not exactly the Braveheart-like movement of working-class heroes that [Fox News host Tucker] Carlson et al have been been keen to portray it. Nor does it seem to be the start of a Canuck version of the Tea Party, with chapters sparking off across the country in opposition to Trudeau’s heavy-handed approach to the pandemic. But the point isn’t really to pressure Trudeau to meet with the truckers, nor is it to influence Canadian politics at all. Rather, Fox is pushing the convoy as a movement to be emulated here in America.”
Alex Shephard, New Republic

“There are a couple of interesting things going on here. The first is that the American right increasingly sees itself as part of a transnational movement, embodied in its embrace of both bottom-up populist protests like the truckers, and top-down authoritarianism like what we see in Hungary or Russia. The second is that the party of ‘law and order’ has come to fully embrace law-breaking and disorder, as long as it’s performed by people the party has sympathy for…

“Just imagine if a bunch of Black Lives Matter protesters shut down half of D.C. with their vehicles, then sat on their horns for hours on end. What do you think Carlson would say about them? What sort of tactics would [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis suggest might be used to clear the area?”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post