©2021 Joseph Gage, used under a Creative Commons license
When last I mentioned the convoy that has occupied a racetrack in Hagerstown, Maryland and driven in circles around the Beltway for two and a half weeks, they had just begun to make sorties into DC proper. They’ve stepped that up a bit, but not in the miles-long streams of big rigs they’d been promising: Usually it’s just some pick-ups and SUVs and a couple of truck cabs covered in Trump/FJB flags and blowing their horns. Here’s footage a friend took of the tail end of one of these displays, which I posted to Twitter because some moron was claiming his beloved truckers would never do something like that:
I witnessed a little parade of these guys pulling this in Capitol Hill myself, and gave them the finger — I was biking in the opposite direction so I couldn’t see their reactions as I sped past. But it turns out a lot of locals have been flipping these assholes off, which is an understandable reaction to people who have come to your town for the express purpose of fucking shit up.
But the negative reaction has apparently enraged and confused these guys:
Even worse, Washingtonians have been clowning on them, most famously this cyclist who brought a convoyette to a crawl:
Then there was this:
The reaction of the truck nuts has been interesting. I have found their primary talking points to be these:
1. If you flip them off and yell at them you are an antifa soy boy trans sissy, ha ha ha we laugh at you.
2. The slow cyclist was actually helping the convoy (“But part of the convoy’s purpose is to slow roll traffic for the attention, so the bicyclist is in reality helping with that”).
3. As previously mentioned, when the convoy blocks traffic it’s really the cops’ fault for not letting them drive wherever they want. (Try that in traffic court!)
The brethren have other interesting pat responses: For instance, I’ve had a few tell me, when I complained about their obnoxious behavior in “my town,” that Washington is not my town or even my fellow residents’ town, but instead belongs to the “People of the United States,” which apparently means everyone except the people who live here, so marauders can do any old bullshit here no matter how much it bothers the people who live here, so long as it’s done in the name of Freedom. Explaining that we have a local government and police force, you will not be surprised to learn, doesn’t sway them.
They remain an annoyance for us, but really they’re their own worst enemies: Reports are coming out of the convoy camp of a wave of respiratory illness. And they aren’t attracting the popular support they’d been hoping for.
In response they’re getting meaner and crazier. One of them allegedly ran into a pedestrian who wasn’t getting out of their way fast enough. They have definitely harassed drivers on the highway of whom they disapprove. They’re talking about fucking up Black Lives Matter Plaza because — well, you can guess. And Zachary Petrizzo, who’s been doing the best reporting on the convoy, finds their High Command is now discussing “citizen’s arrests” of DC police officers and the mayor.
The Hagerstown raceway has events coming up, so the convoy has to get out of there on Thursday. Not sure what they’ll do then; I doubt they’ll be comfortable sleeping under bridges with the local homeless. Maybe the richer ones — the convoy equivalent of the upper-middle-class types who rampaged through the Capitol on J6 — will cozy up in hotels, while the poorer ones slink off home.
Speaking of January 6, local and federal law enforcement have taken the lesson of that incident and Homeland Security says they’re keeping an eye out. But as I said last time, notwithstanding the big talk about citizens’ arrests, the idea is not to attack the government now with the puny, ragtag band at their disposal, but to prepare for a future J6 Rematch by feeling out the weak spots in the city’s response-readiness, infrastructure, etc. So the feel-good rah-rah mission to use their he-man cosplay to win the hearts of normal Americans is a bust, but the success or failure of their primary objective is yet to be determined.
They want this to be 1776 all over again, yet they're defeated by three girls in a Hyundai and tossed soda. They're not even sunshine patriots.
Well, it would be fun to see them try to "arrest" cops. But doesn't DC have noise ordinances?