Benjamin Dichter, the free-thinking, radical nonconformist at the heart of Canada’s trucker protests, continues a long history of Jewish social activism
For two weeks this past February, Benjamin Dichter was thrust into the absurdist spotlight of modern political celebrity. A trucker-led convoy opposed to Canada’s digital COVID vaccine passport system had paralyzed downtown Ottawa, inspired the wildcat occupation and shutdown of several U.S.-Canadian border crossings, and provoked a quasi-authoritarian response from the Canadian government, which forcibly dispersed the protesters’ encampment, jailed the movement’s leaders, summarily froze their bank accounts, and seized, blocked, or escrowed nearly all of the estimated $20 million in non-bitcoin-based funds they’d raised. As chief media spokesman for the so-called Freedom Convoy, Dichter was the public face of one side of a shocking Canadian civic crackup. Depending on your point of view, the Freedom Convoy was either the unexpected culmination of the developed world’s COVID-era class war and a dark vision of the technocratic liberal state’s oppressive game plan, or an event that showed how easily marching hordes of ignorant and hateful populists could rise from the fringes to hijack a modern democracy. Dichter became the face of the former camp; the latter belonged to Justin Trudeau, dreamboat liberal champion and head of government of a country of 38 million people.
