The Atlantic

When the Rage Came for Me

As a writer, I’ve explored political rage at a distance. The anti-vax trucker convoy brought it up close and personal.
Source: Chris Young / The Canadian Press / AP

Recently I published a book of speculative nonfiction about the possibility of a civil war in the United States. In the opening chapter, I imagine a scenario in which a carnivalesque group of far-right activists takes over a bridge and refuses to leave, provoking a response from federal authorities. My fantasy became reality recently, except not in a rural American county, as I had envisioned it, but in Windsor, Ontario. For five years, I have been studying American political rage, its sources, its abyssal depths, its vertiginous fracturing power. I thought I was studying an external phenomenon at a distance, and I was. Now the rage has come for me. The anti-vax trucker convoy has made it up close and personal.

Three weeks ago, truckers formed a convoy to protest the cross-border COVID-vaccine mandate. Last weekend, they rolled into my Toronto neighborhood,

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