Rand Paul's Dream Of A Super Bowl Clogged Up By Anti-Vax Truckers Fails To Materialize

It's nice to have dreams.

Last week and the week before, the word on the street, or at least on right-wing social media profiles and from the Department of Homeland Security, was that a whole bunch of American anti-vax truckers, inspired by their Canadian counterparts, were going to overwhelm the Super Bowl, or something.

GOP Senator Rand Paul, in particular, was very excited for this, suddenly awakening a great, long-dormant love for civil disobedience, which he has notably opposed any time Black Lives Matter activists have so much as breathed in a manner someone might find mildly inconvenient.

Asked by The Daily Signal about his thoughts on the convoy and the potential for it to spill over into Los Angeles, home of Sunday's Super Bowl, or into the nation's capital, Paul said Thursday that "it'd be great" if the anti-mandate, truck-inspired protests popped in the United States to "clog things up."

"I'm all for it," Paul, a longtime opponent to masking and vaccine mandates, told the conservative media outlet. "Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates."

The mandates are about crossing borders.

To be clear, there is no time-honored tradition of Rand Paul himself being a big fan of civil rights — or at least the part of the Civil Rights Act that barred racist restaurant owners from refusing to serve Black people.

Republicans in general have been very upset about civil disobedience for years, particularly any civil disobedience involving the blocking of traffic. Several Republican state legislatures have attempted in recent years, some successfully, to make it legal to run protesters over if they are blocking one's way. I suppose that was their   big takeaway from Charlottesville. 

But this trucker protest? They love this traffic-blocking, soup kitchen trucker protest. In fact, it's almost as if it was never actually "the principle of the thing" after all.

Alas, it looks as though if the truckers did show up, they did not show up in numbers large enough for anyone to notice.

"I think they ran out of time," Welton Chang, whose Washington-based firm, Pyrra, has been following online talk about the plan to protest the Super Bowl, said Saturday. He also cited the lack of consensus around whether the marquee sporting event was an appropriate target.

A Reuters review of social media has also found little support for a Super Bowl plan.

There was scant mention of a Super Bowl protest on TruckersForFreedom, a popular Telegram channel devoted to sharing news from the protests in Canada and abroad, for example.

A partner channel purportedly devoted to the Super Bowl rally just had a single poll surveying participants on whether they planned to participate in a Super Bowl protest; the overwhelming majority of the 8,000 users who voted said they couldn't come.

Well that is just shocking.

To be clear, these truckers are not being banned from trucking entirely, they're just not allowed to cross borders without being vaccinated, which is pretty much par for the course when it comes to crossing borders anywhere these days.

[ Reuters / CNN ]

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