Truckers have done this before ~ UPDATED

 

I don’t usually link to articles at National Review Online, as many contributors have too often veered off course for those with conservative values.  However, today, Michael Brendan Dougherty puts the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Canada in an historical perspective, and it may be cause for a bit more optimism.  Here’s a start:

When you look up at Canada and see truckers — most of them independent owner-operators of their rigs — suddenly coalescing into a powerful protest movement, making the government afraid, complaining of inflation, and getting condemned by the Teamsters, you have to realize it’s all happened before.

Truckers have done this before. Throughout the 1970s, trucker strikes in the U.S. led to snarled traffic for days and weeks in the American Midwest. Truck driver J. W. Edwards felt squeezed by the ongoing energy wars, which were raising gas prices, forcing truckers to stop constantly to only half-refuel, and cutting into what was a modest, but steady, living. Edwards stopped in the middle of I-80 in Pennsylvania, got on his CB radio, and started explaining to other truckers listening in that he’d had it. Within an hour, hundreds of other big-rig drivers joined him, idling their vehicles and putting Pennsylvania’s main interstate into paralysis.

Over the next few days, truckers shut down traffic across ten states, trying to flex their muscle and let the federal government hear their anger on the policies of fuel rationing and reduced speed limits that were costing them their way of life. Along the way, there were confrontations with police and the National Guard. Soon independent truckers began forming political groups, such as the Unity Committee, that could be present at negotiations with the Department of Transportation, or the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, which directly challenged the Teamsters, which at the time had over two million members. Deals with the government were cut to get the trucks moving again, but further strikes of independent truckers took off in 1979, again over speed limits and on the Carter administration’s preference to allocate diesel to farmers over long-haul truckers.

And now it’s happening again.

. . .

Full article is here.

UPDATE 4:15pm:  Conservative Treehouse reports:

Ontario Comrade Doug Ford Promises to Crush the Rebellion,
Declares State of Emergency,
Announces Unilateral Orders
 to Target Noncompliant Truckers with Arrest,
$100k Fines and License Revocation

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