In their continuing effort to gin up manufactured rage among their far-right cultists, right-wing leaders in the U.S. are seeing the trucker thugs' blockades in Canada as a prime fund raising cause for the 2022 mid-term elections. With the relative "success" of the anti-vaxx protests that they've co-opted, and racist dog whistle issues like critical race theory and banning certain books in schools galvanizing their base, they've turned to financing the Canadian trucker thugs' illegal activities to spur a similar movement here in time for the mid-terms.
With the backing of the Malignant Loser, Cancun Ted Cruz, Ayn Rand Paul, the Fox network and other right-wing media, contributions have been raised through crowdfunding platforms like the Christofascist GiveSendGo which has collected some $9.5 million (44% from U.S. sources) from roughly 109, 000 individual donations. A GoFundMe site set up earlier to support the trucker thugs was shut down after protests by the Canadian government that the funding was being used to support illegal activities. A major contributor to the GiveSendGo site is American software billionaire Thomas Siebel ($90 thousand), who has given hundreds of thousand of dollars to Republican candidates in the past two decades. The site itself was created by Canadian nutcase Tamara "Check Her Passport" Lich, who was a member of Canada's far-right Maverick Party, which calls for western Canada to declare its independence.
Bitcoin wingers were also getting on the thuggery, according to the NY Times:
The new site, called 'Bitcoin for Truckers,' is hosted by a cryptocurrency crowdfunding service, and had raised $946,000 as of Monday morning.
The Bitcoin campaign, which has received more than 5,000 mostly small-dollar donations, has been supported by a handful of large infusions from cryptocurrency boosters. The two biggest, with a combined value of more than $300,000 at the time they were made, were donated anonymously." (our emphasis)
The fact that these trucker blockades are unpopular with the vast majority of truckers (their livelihoods are damaged too when roads are blocked) and cause economic pain to working families and American industries forced to lay off workers may eventually come back to bite the thugs and their political and media boosters at the voting booth. But who would have thought 18 months ago that vaccines against a deadly virus would be something to oppose and profit by politically?
(Cartoon: Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer)
