The convoy of anti-vaccine-mandate, pro-Trump, and QAnon-conspiracy activists was determined to disrupt Washington, D.C., by circling the Beltway, the 64 miles of highway that’s generally a hellscape for commuters. Organizers of the "People's Convoy" modeled their efforts after the trucker convoy in Canada that took over downtown Ottawa and shut down the bridge connecting Ontario to Michigan, disrupting trade and business in both countries. U.S. organizers demanded an end to vaccine and mask mandates and an end to the national emergency around COVID-19 that was declared under former President Donald Trump and extended under President Joe Biden.
On Monday, the truck convoy entered the Beltway with instructions to take up two lanes of traffic. By 2 p.m., the convoy was “struggling to occupy one lane of traffic let alone two,” The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo reported. Regular traffic separated convoy vehicles as it had on Sunday. With diesel hitting $4.75 this week, driving their gas-guzzlers slowly around the Beltway seemed like an expensive effort in futility, especially since D.C. had lifted its mask and vaccine mandate and the Biden administration and Congress had lifted their mask mandates.
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Despite failing to disrupt Washington’s roads, members of the convoy were rewarded Tuesday with meetings with Republican members of Congress.
People’s Convoy co-organizer Brain Base and a representative from the American Foundation for Civil Liberties and Freedom, which has partnered with the People’s Convoy, met with Sens. Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson. Brase stated the convoy’s demands to "end the state of emergency, end the vaccine mandates" and to hold “our elected and unelected officials accountable for their actions that led to this," according to Sara Aniano, a researcher of far-right rhetoric who has been following the convoy. The conversation also swung into QAnon rhetoric.
"This really is a spiritual war, and we've awakened a lot of people across the country,” the AFCLF representative told Cruz and Johnson. “We have a pendulum that's swinging from 'woke' to 'the great awakening'."
Shortly thereafter, a larger group met with Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie for a “trucker round table” on Capitol Hill. The truckers and adjacent activists complained about rising gas prices, mask and vaccine mandates, critical race theory, and government tyranny, with one trucker calling on the legislators to simply stop funding the government. When one convoy member from Michigan asked how to prevent stolen elections, Gaetz repeated debunked voter fraud claims about the state.
“Michigan, where they waited, the center in Detroit, to see how the rest of the state voted to figure out how many ballots they needed,” Gaetz said. “You want to be very suspicious of federalizing elections. If we federalize elections, then we have the swamp and the Washington, D.C., Beltway telling you how to count votes in Lansing, Michigan.”
Massie decided to focus on mail-in ballots—which Trump baselessly insists was a source of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election—warning that “they may have to find some excuse to go back to mail-in ballots.”
Greene was in agreement. “The last thing you want is the federal government to be involved in your election,” she said.
Gaetz tried to wrap up the questions, joking that if the group stayed over its allotted time in the room he reserved, they would be accused of “an insurrection.”
“We don’t want to be accused of that,” Greene said. “It’s frowned upon here.”
The meeting with far-right members of Congress and the focus on the Big Lie from a convoy demanding an end to COVID-19-related mandates might be surprising to those just tuning in. But the rhetoric exhibited on rally stages and social media throughout the convoy’s two-week trek across the country and the organizations supporting the convoy have always indicated that this was never just about public health mandates.
A new report from the nonprofit research organization Advance Democracy, Inc., details the ties that three organizations supporting the effort have to the so-called Stop the Steal movement, whose massive rallies to overturn the 2020 presidential election attracted many of the same elements featured in the People’s Convoy.
AFCLF, whose representative met with Cruz and Johnson, has faced scrutiny over its connections to dubious efforts to overturn 2020 election results in Michigan. It claims to have raised more than $1.6 million for the convoy as of Monday, but it’s unclear how that money has been used.
The People’s Convoy also partnered with Freedom Fighter Nation on strategic and logistical planning, Brase, the convoy organizer, said on a Feb. 12 livestream.
“We don’t want to end up on the news for weird money stuff, we’re making sure that accountants and attorneys are handling it personally through freedomfighternation.org. They have helped set up a lot of this infrastructure. They are working with us one on one to help guide us,” Brase said.
Freedom Fighter Nation is led by Leigh Dundas, a COVID-19 and election conspiracy theorist who was seen near the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. The day before the attack, she told Trump supporters at a D.C. rally that they would be "well within our rights to take any alleged American who acted in a turncoat fashion and sold us out and committed treason, we would be well within our rights to take 'em out back and shoot 'em or hang 'em, because that is what we did when they tried to overthrow our government by way of assassinating Abe Lincoln, and it is not too good of an end for the guys who sold out our government on our own soil." Dundas and Chris Marston of AFCLF say they are working together on the People’s Convoy.
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Before the convoy left from California to make its way across the country, it was also supported by The America Project, an organization founded by election conspiracy theorists Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne. The organization frequently promotes election fraud claims and contributed $3.2 million to fund the 2020 election audit in Maricopa, Arizona. The group was listed as a supporter of the convoy in a Feb. 20 press release, but by Feb. 23—when the convoy began its trip and stated it would not go into D.C. proper to disrupt traffic for fear of a “false flag” operation—Byrne announced The America Project was “stepping away” from the convoy, alleging that it had been “penetrated by the left.”
The convoy—which an estimated 1,000 people committed time and money to join—doesn’t appear to be penetrated by the left in the least bit. At a Sunday night convoy rally in Hagerstown, Maryland, speakers railed against tyranny, stolen elections, and the mainstream media. QAnon conspiracy theorists like Ann Vandersteel, Christian nationalists, members of the Proud Boys hate group, and Trump loyalists who were at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were all in attendance. Terry Bouton, a historian at University of Maryland Baltimore County who attended the convoy’s Sunday night, likened the rally to a “county fair,” with music, food, and speeches building community and connections among factions of the fringe right-wing.
The convoy continues its Beltway circling this week. It has yet to be as successful as its Canadian counterpart in bringing gridlock to the nation's capital, but it has served a purpose for far-right organizers, attracting Republican star power and bringing activists from different factions of the movement together under the banner of "freedom.”
