The Wake-up Call

 

A disturbing picture of a man in a lot of pain has emerged regarding the driver of the car that burst into flames in front of a Trump property in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger--but the part I found very concerning is the messages left behind recovered from his electronics.

He describes his explosive journey as "terrorist attack" but a "wake-up call". Maybe in his opinion, but his pyrotechnics injured several bystanders, and the message urges potential violence:

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

This is suggesting militias be involved in an ideological purge. Pretty much the Trumpist program of firing the current federal workforce and replace them with loyalists? But the use of semis ringing the streets?  

A convoy?

The Convoy is 1/6 *ON WHEELS*

 

And that includes the uniformed officers who murdered Ashli Babbit, it includes the officers who’ve murdered countless people during red flags and all the people arrested for not masking or vaxxing. pic.twitter.com/6evTibo4Ll

— laidee🦝 (@laideeliberty) February 21, 2022

Yeah, I knew this was what was up. The trucker rebellion is another expression of regime change for democratic nations by way of really stupid bullying. They want to effect change by way of annoying us to death during a moment when actual global shit is going down. 

Like, fuck these cretins. They aren't martyrs, they are mofos asking for it and ultimately deserving of getting it.  Referencing Ashli Babbit is just another way to know they are signaling their victimhood for any justifiable penalty they experience for their cause. They hate cops and the idea of government too. They are basically asking for the wake-up call. The penalty for fucking around should be finding out. And I think these mofos should, if they really try to shut down the Beltway. It's already a cluster fuck. 

UPDATE: Yes, they really are the same folks in some cases. And have the same people funding them. And have the same politicians in the US offering moral support. And even if the attempts to logistically manage a meaningful protest are currently fraught with issues, the opportunity to fundraise off it or sell cool trucker-themed swag and the general "friends we met along the way" tribalism are, like Tea Party dos and Trump rallies, markers of the faithful having done a pilgrimage that strengthen the radical base. The point is in showing some kind of numbers and making some kind of demo that will eventually capture eyeballs in the mainstream media. 

If good press--great! If bad press--hey, lugenpresse! The way they have it figured; they can't lose.  Unless someone points out they are basically tantrum babies who were astroturfed into being a thing and are generally not great community organizers so much as drama queens who all thought they'd get medals for showing up. 

So maybe there's a lot of ways to take the air out of the tires on this one. 

Searching for Sara Carter

 

A Fox News contributor, of all the people in the world, made a very bad mistake by amplifying a viral video purporting to be of a protester trampled under the feet of the "obviously" heavy-handed and tyrannical fascist government of notoriously insane and not at all PMILF Justin Trudeau. The woman is fine. Someone threw a bike at the horse and the horse is fine. Ted Cruz left a tweet up about how terrible this was for longer than the story lasted after anyone followed up, but I guess he's okay, but like, no, everyone check in on that guy because he's been way more signifying than usual and that is generally a sign of people being not okay in his world. like is he worried about liability for stirring up the crowd at 1/6 and his reputation stinking more than usual, because wow. Nice time to notice. 

So, the reality is, the pro-trucker crowd were denied their Ashli Babbit for the time being. For what it's worth, Sara Carter eventually dropped her story and Ted Cruz deleted his Tweet, but the idea that the response in Ottawa was trampling the FREEDUMBS of the protesters will live on, because that was the idea. Asking the Fox News audience to even consider the source is probably too much. Asking Fox News itself to consider whether running with this is definitionally journalistic malpractice is stupid when you consider Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity exist.

WTF, Rubber Duck?

 

There's something rotten going on in the Great White North, but I understand it's fixing to come down to Flagtown and maybe head East to the Jersey Shore, and tangle with smokies and bears in the air and whatnot along the way. Now, if you are younger than 40, you probably have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but if you can remember where you were when Jimmy Carter was sworn in, then you know I'm talking about the convoy. 

There is a lot that is disturbing about this--the convoy doesn't represent all truckers, just a contingent of them that looks massive because trucks are massive. The convoy kind of looks a little bit astroturfed and purely political, a lot. Truckers are blue collar heroes of the open road, but these folks aren't representing concerns like the costs of people doing the contract job of hauling, the hours, the safety. They are raising a political ruckus in a way that is intimidating (a truck can be a tank in a world where vehicles have been used as weapons against pedestrians--and who knows if it doesn't harbor fertilizer or explosives?)  and now associated with racial undertones, vandalism, and right wing politics.  

What is the result of their tantrum against vaccine mandates, of all things? Fear and tension. Terror for health care workers. They are making people feel unsafe.  They are draining city resources where they turn up, and creating a nuisance. 

And the funding is damn fishy.  I get deeply skeptical when I see US right-wing pols and media glom on to things elsewhere, and when Trump weighs in and there is some dubious Go Fund Me issue afoot, I start thinking our internal saboteurs are making a test run against a stable democracy to see what might be accomplished here. I mean, take stock of what Flynn and Bannon and other Trump associates like, well, corporate Fox News, have done encouraging anti-vaxx and anti-mask protests, and how anti-mandate-ism, along with the anti-CRT (and by now, essentially anti-education/books) movement has been used against soft targets like hospitals and school boards and libraries, with the effect of often-female staffed professions like nursing, teaching, and librarians getting hollowed-out. 

The damage done by this kind of destabilizing protest well outweighs any potential rewards--I mean, like, end the vaccine mandate? Okay, so go and catch a face-full of covid, see if we care. But how messed-up is that as a goal, as goals go? This isn't about people demanding the right to catch Covid and spread it all they want. Maybe it's protest for the sake of anything at all, because of a need to feel like a part of history. To fuck it all and go be an hero. 

I get it. But just as with 1/6, if you find yourself alongside people sporting Confederate flags and swastikas, and aren't second-guessing, you are absolutely on the wrong side of shit. And this convoy doesn't seem to be about freedom, as much as it is about intimidation and warlordism--taking control of local areas and fucking up their ability to restore order. That isn't civil discourse, but terrorism. And we don't want it here in the US, either.

People need to come to their senses about a protest response, generated by internet malefactors and funded by who-knows-who, well and truly disproportionate to one's actual level of grievance, or at the very least, inspect what the true grievance is. Think about the things you are thinking about!

The idea of being a temporary outlaw might in the moment feel historic, but if it isn't about something righteous, why even venture it? If it involves abrogating others' rights, how is it noble, even? Why can we not understand how to be better citizens to one another, better neighbors, better at all? 

I'd love it if that was where the discourse was. But there is no Rubber Duck here. And if we found him, he'd be backed by wrong money and bad ideas.