Vermonters participating in the nationwide People’s Convoy, inspired by the recent Canadian truckers’ protest to oppose COVID-19 restrictions, are gearing up to depart Wednesday.
Organizers aim to convene in Lebanon near the interchange of Interstates 89 and 91 and have planned supply drives and flag waves at various overpasses and rest stops along the highways, according to Facebook groups and events advertising the protest.
Chuck Strobel, who runs Strobel’s Service Station in Ascutney, said “a few people” have dropped off donations for the truckers this week and over the past several weeks. The donations include “non-perishables” and other “stuff they can use,” such as batteries, Strobel said.
A Facebook group organizing the Lebanon meet-up states the local purpose of participating in the national phenomenon.
“Our goal is to muster as many convoy participants as we can in VT,” wrote the organizer, Fatima David Conant, in a post. The group also seeks to “organize associated support teams to facilitate a smooth and safe trip from and through VT via overpasses and truck stops.”
A Facebook group with over 180 members and a nearly 250-member group on the messaging app Telegram have sprung up in preparation for Wednesday. How many people — truckers in particular — might actually show up is impossible to know.
Conant — who sometimes uses her maiden name Orogi and has lived in the Upper Valley towns of Plainfield, Cornish and Strafford, according to online records — wrote via a Facebook message that she doesn’t have “that data.”
Asked about the convoy, Vermont State Police spokesperson Adam Silverman wrote in an email that “we’re aware of the plans, and as always we are prepared to respond to any calls for service from the public,” but troopers “would not otherwise engage with people who are legally driving through the state.”
On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced the deployment of almost 700 unarmed National Guard members — including about 100 from Vermont — in preparation for the nationwide convoy’s expected arrival in the D.C. metro area next week.
The so-called Freedom Convoy in Canada began in late January when trucker convoys across several routes convened in the capital of Ottawa. There, they were joined by pedestrian protesters with the goal of ending COVID-19-related mandates generally and vaccine requirements for truckers more specifically.
That protest shut down border crossings and forced the Ottawa mayor to declare a state of emergency and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to invoke Canada’s Emergencies Act, which restricted protesters and stymied their funding.
Recently, some Vermonters have rallied to show support for the Canadian movement.
The American iteration of the convoy departed Southern California on Thursday, with an estimated 100 large trucks and 500 cars participating so far.
Conant stressed in an email that the convoy “is an apolitical, leaderless effort on the part of people seeking freedom that the constitution (sic) upholds.”
Although the convoy originally organized around ending mask and vaccine mandates, many of those requirements have since been dropped across the country. Yet the fervor to assemble remains, even without the original impetus.
“It is my belief that this is not just about medical tyranny & mandates,” Conant wrote, “but also an entire shift worldwide into a collective consciousness to have freedom, some refer to it as ‘the great awakening.’ ”
The “Great Awakening” may refer to an element of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In QAnon doctrine, the Great Awakening is a second coming-like event with President Donald Trump as the messianic figure who banishes his enemies — such as President Joe Biden — to Guantanamo Bay and exposes the maniacal string-pulling of the so-called deep state.
Plans distributed in the People’s Convoy — Northeast Route Facebook group, which has 80,000 members, show several states’ convoys convening in Montgomery, N.Y., the night of March 2.