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Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

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Technically true, but collectively nonsense

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You are here: Home / Politics / Information Warfare / Sad Trombone Open Thread: Der Peepul’s Convoy Is Fizzling Away

Sad Trombone Open Thread: Der Peepul’s Convoy Is Fizzling Away

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Leaving the day before April Fools’ Day, probably for good reason:

Three weeks after the so-called “People’s Convoy” landed in Washington, D.C., the group is calling it quits after accomplishing nothing except injuring residents and circling the Beltway.

Co-organizer Mike Landis announced Sunday night that the group would pack its things up in the coming days and drive back to California…

Landis further said that convoy-goers who remain posted up in Hagerstown, Maryland—who have experienced many freezing nights while camped out in the small town an hour and a half north of D.C. proper—will enjoy a southerly route back to California. “We’re gonna take a little more southern route, so it’s a little warmer than this,” he said.

He pledged to “come back to finish this job” in the metro area at some unspecified time, which seems highly unlikely as their crowd dwindles.

The announcement comes after lead organizer Brian Brase fled Hagerstown again over the weekend amid continued splintering within the group…

During its final week in Hagerstown, the group became increasingly desperate, with two of its medics leaving and factions emerging between those who believed the convoy was “corrupt[ed]” and those who thought it wasn’t. Morale was also dropping fast, and it appeared that the $2 million raised was drying up quickly, as organizers increasingly tightened the restrictions on how and when fuel reimbursements would be distributed to truckers.

Brase, the group’s de facto leader, had previously told The Daily Beast the convoy could go on “indefinitely.” “This is a process that we are hoping to do diplomatically,” Brase said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”

“We could go indefinitely, right now, if that’s what it takes,” he concluded. “We are not going away.”

(They are absolutely, positively going away.)


They will not be missed by the ungrateful natives:

… Amanda Moore researches the far right in the US and spent a year undercover in MAGA world. As a DC resident, she says she had little choice but to pay attention to this trucker convoy, which she covers on her Twitter account and via her Substack: “It’s literally inconveniencing my life,” she says. “If this trucker convoy was in Los Angeles or Houston, I probably wouldn’t have spent too much time watching it. But like, I walk out of my office and I run into one of these dipshits.”…

The Hagerstown Speedway became a mini-village of anti-government protesters during the convoy’s residency. Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who studies the far right, called it a “a sort of Gathering of the Juggalos for grandparents and uncles who’ve had their brains turned to taffy by Facebook.” Moore describes it as “like going to Coachella, but awful” and says that based on her own observations, which involved watching hours of livestreams the convoy people blasted out, “there’s a lot of people in that community whose political beliefs made them quite lonely within their own family unit.”

Convoy members’ initial dismay at not being welcomed by DC-area residents hardened into harebrained ideas about conducting “citizen’s arrests” or reclaiming Black Lives Matter Plaza. “I’ve heard ‘These people are evil.’ ‘These people are brainwashed,’” Moore says. “If anybody looks at them wrong, they’re like, Oh, this person is a federal agent or this person is Antifa, as if the only people who can not want you honking as you drive through a residential neighborhood are Antifa activists, right?”…

Not dead, merely… regrouping!

Newest facet of the ongoing grift:

They did make this dude an international celebrity, though!

Australian Daniel Adler would never have guessed that being a lone cyclist could turn you into an American internet sensation overnight.

That was until last week, when the 49-year-old father of two made a snap decision to place himself, and his bike, in the path of the so-called “People’s Convoy” – the trucker-led activists and Donald Trump loyalists inspired by the Canadian protests against COVID restrictions.

For weeks, out-of-town drivers in rigs, cars and campers had been disrupting the lives of Washington residents, circling the Capital Beltway – a 102-kilometre highway that surrounds the city – before zigzagging in and out of residential streets to air their varied grievances.

Adler was on his bike getting groceries when he heard their horns in the distance and decided to intervene…

Set against the backdrop of a deeply divided America, it’s no surprise that the image of a lone cyclist bringing a right-wing protest movement to a crawl on the streets of left-leaning DC was captured on video and went viral almost instantly.

Some called Adler a hero; others took to the internet to offer him free beer. His kids, Otis, 14, and Mango, 11, said their dad was “pretty cool” for intervening, while US comedian Jimmy Kimmel praised him on national TV as “a clever bicyclist” and described his actions as “poetry in motion”…

Just as well they’re taking the off-ramp — idiots were getting entirely too amped up on their own fumes:

Reader Interactions

23Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    Everybody sing!

    “They’re not only merely fled, they’re really most sincerely fled.”

    //

  4. 4.

    BeautifulPlumage

    So dumb they wet themselves instead of peeing into a bottle…(at least that beca.e one of their grievances)

  6. 6.

    guachi

    I think it’s fitting this post was bigfooted.

    A bunch of losers whose dumb protest was stomped on by far more important matters.

    Also, that Washingtonian article you linked to just brutal. Each sentence is another lol.

  8. 8.

    Betsy

    Like I keep saying. Trumpers use vehicles — trucks and boats and convoy rigs — instead of having real demonstrations, because they don’t know how to organize and have people do tabling sign-ups and such, — but mainly because at their lame-ass protests they can’t produce more than a few dozen or a few hundred actual bodies, so they have to surround each individual  with room-sized or house-sized objects to make their numbers and presence look far bigger.

    This also helps with not having to talk to journalists, or other people who might ask hard questions, because you’re separated from them  by a layer of steel or fiberglass, and you can zoom away if you feel vulnerable or threatened, which is the usual mental state of Trumpers, after all.

  10. 10.

    Jerzy Russian

    But like, I walk out of my office and I run into one of these dipshits.

    I appreciate Ms. Moore’s effort to keep the word “dipshit” in circulation as an insult. It is one of my favorites.

  11. 11.

    bbleh

    Can’t help but wonder whether the various sanctions imposed on Russia might have disrupted their stream of likes and retweets and taken the wind outta their sails.

    “Wait, what? What happened to my followers @PatriotUSA1 through @PatriotUSA250?”

  12. 12.

    SectionH

    @guachi:  I read Adam faithfully, and others elsewhere on that and related issues. But truck convoys clogging Interstates is a thing – they thought they could do it in DC? Suuure. And if those assholes think they can interfere with traffic here, where the trucks are clearing at Otay Mesa, they have no idea.

  13. 13.

    SectionH

    I’ve driven some largish diesel trucks in my time, so I have a great deal of respect for the skill it takes, even if I can’t imagine doing it, to drive a giant one. But I’m also very knowledgeable about how to mostly drive from various places in SoCal to at least places within a day’s drive of the East Coast with almost no Interstate involved. Because I really hate the asshole semi drivers. And, yeah, most of them need to do their jobs.

    I can make some guesses to DC, but too out of date. There’s some serious ridges to climb…

  15. 15.

    Ruckus

    @craigie:

    It takes effort to be this stupid.

    Nope. They come by it naturally. Now if you mean it takes effort to act this stupid, then possibly. But likely not, once again they come by their stupid honestly, they earned it the old fashioned way, born with it, just never attempted to be any less stupid than the stupid they were born with.

  16. 16.

    Ruckus

    @SectionH:

    I’ve driven a 73 foot rig across country. Once. Wasn’t all that bad nor did I run across too many assholes. Didn’t run over any either. (Trucker humor) It wasn’t as bad as it looks but then I wasn’t doing it every day, week in week out. That I bet would get old rather rapidly. The most fun was learning to back up in a truck stop between 2 rigs, in the dark, without hitting anything. If you think it’s easy, watch Y Tube videos about idiot truck drivers. Any way…. I’ll be eternally grateful if I never, for the rest of my days, every drive another truck. I think I have a good shot at that.

  17. 17.

    lowtechcyclist

    Living to the southeast of DC, these loons were something I occasionally heard about, but didn’t see a one. This quadrant – outside the Beltway, between U.S. 50 and National Harbor – is all but invisible to people. Not just to people coming from outside the area, but to people living in northern Virginia, Montgomery County, and DC proper as well.

    That’s not a complaint.

  18. 18.

    Central Planning

    @NotMax: or, with apologies to Monty Python:

    Brave Sir Brian ran away.
    (“No!”)
    Bravely ran away away.
    (“I didn’t!”)
    When danger reared it’s ugly head,
    He bravely turned his tail and fled.
    (“I never!”)
    Yes, brave Sir Brian turned about
    And gallantly he chickened out.
    (“You’re lying!”)
    Swiftly taking to his feet,
    He beat a very brave retreat.
    Bravest of the brave, Sir Brian

  19. 19.

    emmyelle

    I don’t know. It’s impossible to conclude that they accomplished nothing if they never laid out clear objectives.

    Maybe their goal was to make complete asses of themselves and open themselves up to mockery, scorn, and humiliation. If that is the case they accomplished their goal.

  20. 20.

    Ken

    factions emerging between those who believed the convoy was “corrupt[ed]” and those who thought it wasn’t

    I can’t help but read this as “those who weren’t skimming a slice off the top, and those who were.”

    As for the plan to take a more southerly route for warmth, the forecast for the southern tier includes high wind warnings and tornado watches. Probably best they aren’t pulling trailers.

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    “DC Trucker’s Lawsuit” (sic) tweet with the truck with no wheels on the trailer is exactly as expected from these clowns.

    (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  22. 22.

    MelissaM

    “After accomplishing nothing”?!?!? They accomplished buying fuel and paying the region’s fuel taxes so they could whine about being flipped off while blocking traffic! I’d like to see a report of how much they put into the economy out there.

  23. 23.

    Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)

    @Ruckus: “You must have taken great pains, sir. You could not possibly have been born this stupid” – Dr. Samuel Johnson

    I don’t know whom he was addressing, but this comes to mind whenever I read about the GQP and such dimwits.

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