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merri ok

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ended by ct order, cops had flyers that said arrest and 100K$ fine; there were some arrests

nobody can make me do anything [freeeedummmmbbbb!!!]

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*The Federal Government has broad constitutional powers in determining what aliens shall be admitted to the United States, the period they may remain, regulation of their conduct before naturalization, and the terms and conditions of their naturalization… Under the Constitution, the states are granted no such powers." — Takahashi v. Fish & Game Comm'n (1948)

For decades, the Supreme Court has been clear that the federal government, not the states, has the power to regulate immigration. Since 2021, however, Texas has been spending billions annually to impose its own vision of immigration policy — an effort known as "Operation Lone Star." Using members of the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety, "Operation Lone Star personnel work around-the-clock to detect and repel illegal crossings." Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has pledged to "hold the line" at the southern border due to alleged inaction by the Biden administration.

Over the years, Operation Lone Star has become increasingly aggressive. In 2024, it has brought the country to the precipice of a Constitutional crisis.

:{:{The epicenter of the confrontation between Texas and the federal government is Shelby Park, a municipal park in Eagle Pass, Texas, that abuts the Rio Grande River. In this map of the area, submitted by the federal government in a legal filing, the area of the park is defined by the yellow line and the river:}:

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Texas has seized control of Shelby Park, enclosing the entire 47 acres in razor wire and denying entry to the U.S. Border Patrol.

*Texas National Guard soldiers wait nearby the boat ramp where law enforcement enter the Rio Grande at Shelby Park on January 27, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Access to Shelby Park is important to federal authorities because it is used as a "staging area for policing and interdiction operations along the Rio Grande." This includes the use of a boat ramp in the park to access the Rio Grande.

Texas' seizure of Shelby Park and refusal to allow federal officials access have created an extremely dangerous situation. On January 12, three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near the park. When Border Patrol agents went to Shelby Park to address the situation and help other migrants in distress, guardsmen from the Texas National Guard refused to let them enter, saying "they had been ordered not to allow Border Patrol access to the park."

The legal battle between Texas and the federal government over Shelby Park began when Texas sued the federal government for cutting and removing some of the razor wire it installed along the Rio Grande. Border Patrol argued that the razor wire was putting its agents and migrants legally entitled to claim asylum at risk. Texas argued that the federal government was illegally destroying its property. The state eventually won an injunction from the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, prohibiting the federal government from disturbing Texas' razor wire. The federal government, however, appealed to the Supreme Court. On January 22, in a brief order, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government and lifted the injunction.

Texas' response to the Supreme Court order has been alarming. Abbott issued a statement stating that "[t]he federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States." Compact theory was championed by John C. Calhoun, one of the staunchest defenders of slavery. It essentially views states as "independent sovereigns" that are free to reject federal authority. It was used to justify the "nullification" of federal laws and, ultimately, secession from the union by Southern states.

As law professor Steven Vladeck notes, the specific constitutional argument Abbott is advancing makes even less sense. This is the key excerpt from Abbott's letter:

I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.

Abbott is claiming that he can simply declare an "invasion" and grant himself authority that "supersedes any federal statutes." This is legal hogwash.

Article I, § 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution declares that "no State shall, without the Consent of Congress… engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." In this case, Texas is not being invaded. Migrants, many of whom have legitimate claims of asylum, presenting themselves at the border is not an invasion. Illegal border crossings are something that occurs under every administration and does not constitute an invasion. Further, Abbott is not responding by engaging in "war." He has not invaded Mexico. He has put up some razor wire. But his actions are, according to Vladeck, "antithetical to the constitutional structure of our federal system," which establishes the supremacy of federal law.

Notably, Texas is not yet defying the Supreme Court's January 22 order. That order simply lifted the Fifth Circuit injunction preventing the federal government from removing the razor wire installed by Texas in Shelby Park. The Supreme Court hasn't yet ordered Texas to do anything.

But Texas is continuing to interfere with the federal government's access to Shelby Park, in clear violation of the Constitution and federal law. On January 23, the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), demanding "the ability to access the border in the Shelby Park area that is currently obstructed by Texas." In a January 26 response, Paxton rejected the Department of Homeland Security's request and informed the federal government that Texas will continue "to protect its southern border against every effort by the Biden Administration to undermine the State’s constitutional right of self-defense."

The conflict that Texas is creating with the federal government will almost certainly end up back at the Supreme Court. And Texas is inviting a constitutional crisis by signaling that it is prepared to ignore the Supreme Court if it does not get its way.

The new confederacy

The radical and dangerous legal theories being advanced by Texas previously provoked a Civil War and have been broadly rejected for more than a century. So, one might expect Texas to get little support from other states. That is not the case.

On January 25, the Republican Governors Association released a letter — signed by 25 Republican governors — "supporting Texas' constitutional right to self-defense." The governors write that they "stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border." They also explicitly endorsed compact theory, which was used to justify secession. "The authors of the U.S. Constitution made clear that in times like this, states have a right of self-defense, under Article 4, Section 4 and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution," the governors write. "Because the Biden Administration has abdicated its constitutional compact duties to the states, Texas has every legal justification to protect the sovereignty of our states and our nation." The letter was signed by every Republican governor except Phil Scott (R-VT).

Former President Donald Trump is also supporting Abbott. Trump called on "all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals."

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), and numerous members of Congress have also aligned themselves with Abbott. Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) said Texas should tell the Supreme Court to "go to hell." Roy was so proud of this remark, he made a special graphic for his social media accounts.

Inviting chaos

Claiming that Texas has a duty to ignore the authority of the federal government unsurprisingly attracts dangerous extremists. "A trucker convoy of 'patriots' is heading to the U.S. border with Mexico next week," Vice reports. The group, which has dubbed itself "God's Army," believes they are "on a mission to stand up against the 'globalists' who they claim are conspiring to keep U.S. borders open and destroy the country."

A fundraising effort for the group has already raised more than $113,000. "Once willing to die defending this country, now willing to die protecting my family from what this country has become," one anonymous donor wrote. The convoy is being heavily promoted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “There’s a war literally happening now for America,” Jones said.

The convoy is expected to reach Eagle Pass on February 3.

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Amid an ongoing right-wing media panic about a supposed “invasion” of migrants coming across the southern border, a group of right-wing extremists — including members with ties to QAnon, the election denial movement, and anti-vaccine propagandists — have organized a convoy and series of rallies along the southern border. The “Take Our Border Back Southern Border Convoy” has been amplified and celebrated by right-wing media and political figures as posts promoting it have spread across social media.

CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of One America News' In Focus

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CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox Business' The Evening Edit

LIZ MACDONALD (HOST): We have a new, this new news coming in. A trucker convoy is kicking off heading to the border states — we're hearing February 3 — for a multistate rally at the border in Texas, Arizona, and California. And they're calling on active and retired law enforcement, military veterans, elected officials, small business owners, ranchers to join them to rally in protest of what's going on at the border. What do you make of this? More Americans are stepping up.

REP. BETH VAN DUYNE (R-TX): Hey, don’t forget the mama bears that they’re also asking to go down there, who are seeing what’s happening in schools, where their kids are getting kicked out because they’re having illegal immigrants stay in classrooms.

Yeah, I say bring those beautiful, huge semis, those 18-wheeler bad boys down here to protect our border. They need to understand that this is not simply — you know, they can't sweep this under the rug. People are opening their eyes to it, and I hope it is a fantastic convoy, and I hope it does, you know, shed more light on it, and you're seeing people from around the country. I mean, they're even talking about having folks from Canada now come down because they see the damage that is being caused. So yeah, bring those bad boys down to our coast.

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tensions ran high during today’s Public Order Emergency Commission hearing as Commissioner Paul Rouleau ejected Freedom Convoy lawyer Brendan Miller while Miller attempted to raise issues regarding outstanding motions about the government’s redaction of documents. True North’s Andrew Lawton discusses the explosive turn in the proceedings in this live edition of The Andrew Lawton Show. Also, world leaders descended on Egypt for COP27 – or the big Sharm El-Sheikhdown. ClimateDepot.com‘s Marc Morano joins Andrew to break down the eco-virtue signalling global leaders are partaking in, and how climate lockdowns will soon replace Covid lockdowns. Also, what does Alberta’s new premier mean for Alberta’s energy sector? Alberta Proud president Lindsay Wilson weighs in.

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Stan Cox, Angry White Guys in Big-Ass Pickups

As gun sales in this country soar — another 43 million weapons bought in 2020 and 2021 alone — while the possession of military-style weaponry is normalized, whether in mass killings or everyday life, American politics, too, is becoming weaponized. If you doubt that, then you weren’t in that Comfort Inn room where, on the night of January 5, 2021, a group of Oath Keeper militiamen stored their weapons so that a “quick reaction force” could potentially transport them to the Capitol the next day.

In the end, as far as we know, none of those weapons made it that January 6th, but others certainly did, as the House January 6th committee made all too clear in its recent hearings. Worse yet, the president of the United States knew perfectly well that some of those he was encouraging to march on the Capitol to protest (or even reverse) his election loss were armed. In political terms, red states have been easing gun laws even as some blue states are cracking down. In California, which has among the nation’s strictest laws (especially when it comes to assault rifles), deaths from guns are approximately 40% below the national average — not that such figures, it seems, matter to most Republicans.

The result: an unequally armed nation at a moment where the weaponizing of our political system seems on the rise. As right-wing extremism grows and guns become ever more commonplace in American life, while the death toll from them soars, the idea that arms, not votes, might someday define the endpoint of an American election is also being normalized.

Oh, and my mistake, I forgot to include in the above description one of the ways in which this country is weaponizing big time. Fortunately, TomDispatch**regular Stan Cox didn’t. So, sit back, watch out for the smoke and fumes, and let him explain. Tom

Three Tons of Fascism with a Bull BarFuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the Earth

In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.

And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we’ve been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with “F*** Biden” flags as well.

If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don’t think that I’m just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled “petro-masculinity,” those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the “Trump caravan” that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the “Trump Trains” of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.

Long forgotten now by most of us, those hapless North American truck convoys, some of which converged on Washington, D.C., last spring, might as well have been scripted by the writers of Seinfeld. To all appearances, they were protests about nothing — other than a vague sense of grievance personified (or truckified). Still, the drivers did manage to cause serious mayhem, assaulting the residents of two capitals, Ottawa and Washington, with diesel fumes, daylong horn blasting, and bellicose conduct. They paralyzed downtown Ottawa for almost a month (and cost the government there more than $36 million). Some drivers in the cross-country U.S. convoys physically assaulted counter-protesters, cyclists, and motorists. There was one bright spot, though: one day, a man on a cargo bike got in front of a line of semi-cabs and pickups and slow-pedaled through Washington’s narrow side streets, leaving the invaders no alternative but to creep along behind him for what seemed like forever and a day.

The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning’s Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar — the steel armoring designed to protect the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he plowed ahead, driving over one woman’s ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.

Are You What You Drive?

Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters — in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today’s ads for pickup trucks — are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain’s seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today’s culture, that means a political statement, too. (With so many luxury options on offer, a new truck can also be an extravagant statement, since their average price now exceeds $60,000.)

When I was reading High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher’s classic book on SUVs, in the early 2000s,there was as yet no correlation between the supersizing of personal vehicles and political preferences. It was mostly about armoring up against crashes and crime. A few years later, when even more bloated trucks and SUVs with abundant creature comforts started being advertised as “living rooms on wheels,” they still had no strong political associations. Over the past few years, however, manufacturers have begun capitalizing on MAGA-world belligerence by pumping up the road-ruling mystique of those vehicles. On this topic, I won’t even try to match the bracing prose of Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, who wrote for Bloomberg News last year:

Pickup truck front ends have warped into scowling brick walls, billboards for outwardly directed hostility… [T]he height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck… That aesthetic can be detected not only in the raised ‘militarized’ grille height of pickup trucks, but also the popularity of aftermarket modifications like blacked-out windows and ‘bull bars’ affixed to the front end.

Some pickups and full-size SUVs now approach the dimensions of World War II-era tanks and are advertised accordingly. Ford used the term “military-grade, aluminum-alloy” five times in a single press release for its F-150 pickup. This supersizing, as well as armoring, has had predictable results. For example, in another article, Schmitt observed that:

Passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of 6,721 fatalities. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.

The politicization of big-box personal vehicles is now almost complete. By the 2020 election campaign season, few drivers, left or right, needed bumper stickers to tell the world which candidates they supported. A month before the election, Forbes summarized survey data illustrating the relationship between party affiliation and vehicle ownership. Of the models most disproportionately preferred by Democrats, liberals, and progressives, 14 were sedans or crossovers, three were trucks or full-size SUVs, and two were hybrid or electric vehicles. The Honda Civic sedan topped the list.

I’m sure at this point you won’t be surprised to learn that the vehicle preferences for Republicans and other conservatives were almost exactly the reverse of that. Of their top model preferences, 14 were trucks or full-size SUVs while only three were sedans or crossovers. None were hybrids or electric vehicles. Those with the strongest Republican/conservative associations were the Ford F-250 and Ram 2500 pickups, both weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds.

“Pollution Porn”

A couple of weeks before the 2020 election, Priti and I were cruising south along Santa Fe Avenue, the main street in downtown Salina. As we approached Crawford, we saw that a long, noisy Trump train was passing through the intersection, headed west. Decked out with flags, balloons, and other regalia, the parade of trucks stretched out of sight in both directions. When a temporary gap opened in the queue, we took a right turn toward home. In this way, our 2006 Civic hybrid (I know — too trite) involuntarily joined the procession. With a huge, flag-bedecked tailgate towering over our windshield, a five-foot-high bull bar looming in the rearview mirror, and a cacophony of horns drowning out our laughter, we crept home, where we bailed out of the parade. Though we faced no hostility ourselves, that was probably because the drivers on either side of us could barely see us.

Compared with many of the 2020 Trump trains, Salina’s version proved remarkably mild-mannered. But all such white-right parades, including the farcical “Boaters for Trump” regattas, also manage to do a remarkable job of making a relatively small number of Americans seem like a big crowd. There were far more people in Salina’s 2020 Black Lives Matter march than in that truck parade. But when you surround a modest number of people with tons of steel and aluminum propelled by loud internal-combustion engines, you’ve got an impressive spectacle in an ominous sort of way. The forests of flags only add to the fascist aura that surrounds the political use of such hulking vehicles.

Until James Alex Fields, Jr., drove his Dodge Challenger into a non-violent group of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, killing Heather Heyer, the tactic of crashing into crowds was best known as a terror tool used by Islamic State sympathizers, primarily in Europe. At the time, the means of aggression preferred by American pick-up drivers was something called “rollin’ coal.” It involved modifying a truck’s fuel system so that the driver could blast large clouds of thick, black diesel smoke from its tailpipes or smokestacks.

Often, coal-rollin’ was pure performance, a display of rebellion against anything in the culture that smacked of concern for climate change. It was, as Vocativ labeled it in 2014, “pollution porn.” But even then, under the surface was the potential for so much worse. In recent years, more aggressive drivers have taken that stunt to its logical conclusion by engulfing pedestrians, cyclists, electric vehicle or hybrid drivers, and other perceived enemies in toxic black clouds.

As Cara Daggett put it:

A lot of things are attached to fossil fuel culture because they are symbolically a part of a certain way of life or an identity. It’s no longer possible to operate in the world and not understand that fossil fuels are violent. [Rollin’ coal is] a kind of spectacular performance of power.

Psychology professor Joshua Nelson suggests that such an extravagant, showy combustion of fuel represents an attempt by white male drivers in particular to compensate for two new realities – that men like them can no longer feel they’re part of an all-powerful American clan and that what awaits us all, however hard it may be to express, however much they may want to repress the very idea, is impending doom from fossil fuels destroying this planet. As Nelson puts it:

There is nothing more possibly traumatizing (and requiring psychologically defensive operations) than potential global destruction and annihilation, especially when one is forced to consider [his] own role in this impending apocalyptic disaster.

Whether such “psychologically defensive operations” grow out of a sense of guilt, inadequacy, or something else entirely, they play out the same way — as aggression against the rest of us.

Standing Up to the Men in Trucks

One characteristic news photo from the violent conflicts of recent times — whether in Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, or elsewhere — has been of pickup trucks loaded with armed men. The U.S. hasn’t made it there — not yet anyway. But it’s hard to doubt that (thank you, Donald Trump!) ever since January 6, 2021, when so many right-wing militia members broke into the Capitol, some of them armed, we’ve been living through an attempted takeover of our country by members of one of the two major parties. And in 2022, it will hardly surprise you to know that its supporters own more guns and trucks than the rest of us.

This fits with trends pointed out by Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She’s studied the use of violence by a growing number of political parties in a wide range of countries and is now tracking America’s upsurge in militia activity, too. She recently wrote, “Even if Trump passes from the scene, the embrace of violence and intimidation as a political tactic by a faction of the GOP will cause violence of all types to rise — against all Americans.”

Ultra-MAGA elements in legislatures and the courts are already gutting our right to preserve a livable climate, ensure reproductive rights, and vote, even as they create new rights to own weapons of war and put them to deadly use. Usually, those weapons are AR-15s or other firearms, but they can also be tank-scale personal vehicles wrapped in military-grade alloy, with an armored front end.

Big trucks, aggressively driven, straddle the borderline between a democracy in crisis and a country (and world) facing a climate emergency of the first order. They guzzle fuel, spew pollution, and degrade our quality of life. With the paramilitary wing of the anti-democracy, anti-Earth GOP at the wheel, such vehicles portend even worse environmental harm to come. If the far right prevails, its politicos will choke off any state or federal efforts to phase out fossil fuels. If, using means legal or not, they consolidate their power over the Supreme Court, Congress in 2022, and the White House in 2024, they will be spewing the political version of rollin’ coal and are guaranteed to smother the possibility of climate action, probably long enough to make runaway global heating inevitable.

Keeping the anti-democracy party out of power will require massive get-out-the-vote efforts in 2022 and 2024, and record-breaking turnouts in the streets will undoubtedly be needed as well. In truth, there are many more of us than of the fascist wannabes in this country. Like the brave women in Cedar Rapids, we must neither surrender the public square to the extremists nor allow them to bestow rights on vehicles and fossil fuels while revoking rights that belong to us and to the rest of nature.

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according to a report by the San Francisco Gate, a conservative trucker convoy traveling through a Bay Area neighborhood was showered with eggs thrown by locals instead of being showered with applause.

The report notes that the so-called "People's Convoy" was formed to protest "Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ East Bay home to protest her support of an abortion rights bill," but made the mistake of traveling down a road where they were egged and taunted as they drove through, leading to some confrontations after some of the truckers stopped to get in shouting matches.

The report states, "Livestreams posted by convoy participants show police arriving to protect Wicks’ home, which eventually prompted the group to move on. It was here they made their mistake, driving onto busy, one-lane College Avenue on the Berkeley-Oakland border. There, slowed down by the usual Friday afternoon traffic, they were sitting ducks outside the Safeway. A large group of kids, armed with eggs purchased at the grocery store, began pelting the convoy."

"A few ill-advised convoy drivers had their windows rolled down, resulting in eggs splattering the insides of their vehicles. Passersby watched in confusion and amusement, with some adults stopping to cheer on the kids," the Gate's Katie Dowd wrote, adding, "Furious truckers then drove out of town, heading back on the highway toward their base in Sacramento. According to CB radio captured by the livestream audio, truckers complained about needing to wash their vehicles and seemed shocked at how poorly received they were by locals."

Watch the video below ...

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/ottawa-truckers/

OT inspired

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video of assault on biker  https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/people-s-convoy/

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ricky bobby?  https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/truckers-convoy/

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the convoy of anti-vaccine-mandate, pro-Trump, and QAnon-conspiracy activists was determined to disrupt Washington, D.C., by circling the Beltway, the 64 miles of highway that’s generally a hellscape for commuters. Organizers of the “People’s Convoy” modeled their efforts after the trucker convoy in Canada that took over downtown Ottawa and shut down the bridge connecting Ontario to Michigan, disrupting trade and business in both countries. U.S. organizers demanded an end to vaccine and mask mandates and an end to the national emergency around COVID-19 that was declared under former President Donald Trump and extended under President Joe Biden.

On Monday, the truck convoy entered the Beltway with instructions to take up two lanes of traffic. By 2 p.m., the convoy was “struggling to occupy one lane of traffic let alone two,” The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo reported. Regular traffic separated convoy vehicles as it had on Sunday. With diesel hitting $4.75 this week, driving their gas-guzzlers slowly around the Beltway seemed like an expensive effort in futility, especially since D.C. had lifted its mask and vaccine mandate and the Biden administration and Congress had. Brase stated the convoy’s demands to “end the state of emergency, end the vaccine mandates” and to hold “our elected and unelected officials accountable for their actions that led to this,”” the AFCLF representative told Cruz and Johnson. “We have a pendulum that’s swinging from ‘woke’ to ‘the great awakening’.”

Shortly thereafter, a larger group met with Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie for a “trucker round table” on Capitol Hill. The truckers and adjacent activists complained about rising gas prices, mask and vaccine mandates, critical race theory, and government tyranny, with one trucker calling on the legislators to simply stop funding the government. When one convoy member from Michigan asked how to prevent stolen elections, Gaetz repeated debunked voter fraud claims about the state.

“Michigan, where they waited, the center in Detroit, to see how the rest of the state voted to figure out how many ballots they needed,” Gaetz said. “You want to be very suspicious of federalizing elections. If we federalize elections, then we have the swamp and the Washington, D.C., Beltway telling you how to count votes in Lansing, Michigan.”

Massie decided to focus on mail-in ballots—which Trump baselessly insists was a source of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election—warning that “they may have to find some excuse to go back to mail-in ballots.”

Greene was in agreement. “The last thing you want is the federal government to be involved in your election,” she said.

Gaetz tried to wrap up the questions, joking that if the group stayed over its allotted time in the room he reserved, they would be accused of “an insurrection.”

“We don’t want to be accused of that,” Greene said. “It’s frowned upon here.”

The meeting with far-right members of Congress and the focus on the Big Lie from a convoy demanding an end to COVID-19-related mandates might be surprising to those just tuning in. But the rhetoric exhibited on rally stages and social media throughout the convoy’s two-week trek across the country and the organizations supporting the convoy have always indicated that this was never just about public health mandates.

A new report from the nonprofit research organization Advance Democracy, Inc., details the ties that three organizations supporting the effort have to the so-called Stop the Steal movement, whose massive rallies to overturn the 2020 presidential election attracted many of the same elements featured in the People’s Convoy.

AFCLF, whose representative met with Cruz and Johnson, has faced scrutiny over its connections to dubious efforts to overturn 2020 election results in Michigan. It claims to have raised more than $1.6 million for the convoy as of Monday, but it’s unclear how that money has been used.

The People’s Convoy also partnered with Freedom Fighter Nation on strategic and logistical planning, Brase, the convoy organizer, said on a Feb. 12 livestream.

“We don’t want to end up on the news for weird money stuff, we’re making sure that accountants and attorneys are handling it personally through freedomfighternation.org. They have helped set up a lot of this infrastructure. They are working with us one on one to help guide us,” Brase said.

Freedom Fighter Nation is led by Leigh Dundas, a COVID-19 and election conspiracy theorist who was seen near the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. The day before the attack, she told Trump supporters at a D.C. rally that they would be “well within our rights to take any alleged American who acted in a turncoat fashion and sold us out and committed treason, we would be well within our rights to take ’em out back and shoot ’em or hang ’em, because that is what we did when they tried to overthrow our government by way of assassinating Abe Lincoln, and it is not too good of an end for the guys who sold out our government on our own soil.” Dundas and Chris Marston of AFCLF say they are https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/04/peoples-convoy-donations-fraud-afclf Before the convoy left from California to make its way across the country, it was also supported by The America Project, an organization founded by election conspiracy theorists Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne. The organization frequently promotes election fraud claims and contributed $3.2 million to fund the 2020 election audit in Maricopa, Arizona. The group was listed as a supporter of the convoy in a Feb. 20 press release, but by Feb. 23—when the convoy began its trip andByrne announced The America Project was “stepping away” from the convoy, alleging that it had been “penetrated by the left.” The convoy—which an estimated 1,000 people committed time and money to join—doesn’t appear to be penetrated by the left in the least bit. At a Sunday night convoy rally in Hagerstown, Maryland, speakers railed against tyranny, stolen elections, and the mainstream media. QAnon conspiracy theorists ...;Christian nationalists, members of the Proud Boys hate group, and likened the rally to a “county fair,” with music, food, and speeches building community and connections among factions of the fringe right-wing.

The convoy continues its Beltway circling this week. It has yet to be as successful as its Canadian counterpart in bringing gridlock to the nation’s capital, but it has served a purpose for far-right organizers, attracting Republican star power and bringing activists from different factions of the movement together under the banner of “freedom.”

Tags: Marjorie Taylor Greene American Foundation for Civil Liberties and Freedom Freedom Fighter Nation People's Convoy

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/oan-has-been-cheerleading-and-fundraising-anti-vax-trucker-convoy-heading

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DC capitol fence for state of union. breakdowns?

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all pickups?

no lnx twt pix

Camped outside DC, uneasy truckers paralyzed by paranoia vow to stay until demands met

Image via Screengrab.

Jordan Green and Raw Story March 06, 2022

HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Thousands of angry conservative supporters of the truckers convoy rallied at a speedway in rural Maryland 60 miles outside of the Capital Beltway on Saturday evening, torn between the imperative for militant action to reject COVID measures and the recognition that disruption will likely result in legal repercussions.

Addressing supporters filling the stands at Hagerstown Speedway, organizer Brian Brase said leaders “are currently right now working on another location that when we move to puts us within just a few miles of the Beltway,” while imploring them not to go into the District of Columbia.

“They are waiting for us to show up, and it’s a trap,” [Adm Akbar], Brase said.

Brase said organizers expected to hold meetings with members of Congress at the new location near the Beltway, adding, “We will not leave until we get what we ask for.” He listed a number of demands that are unlikely to be met by the current Congress under Democratic leadership, but will likely provide talking points for the Republicans’ goal of regaining control of the legislative branch during this year’s midterm elections.

“That’s why we don’t go anywhere, sir, until they actually start to do something,” Brase said, responding to a man who shouted out that lawmakers are “liars.” “That’s why we sit there in their backyard and we wait until they legitimately drop the state of emergency, they drop the vaccine mandates, and they begin the process of bipartisan investigations… to find out the transparent version of the pandemic’s origins, and ask who is responsible for screwing this up so badly.”

From a practical standpoint, Brase urged rallygoers to extend their hotel stays in Hagerstown through Sunday night. During his speech, Brase invited supporters to a meeting at the speedway at 8 a.m. on Sunday to discuss plans for the day. The Washington Post reported late Saturday that Brase told the newspaper the convoy will circle the Beltway twice on Sunday; Brase did not mention the plan during his remarks at the speedway on Saturday evening.

The leadership of the convoy is not unanimous on the tactical decision to stay out of the District of Columbia.

Before Brase pleaded with supporters to stay out of DC, another organizer, Mike Landis vowed: “My truck with that flag will go down Constitution Avenue.” In response, the crowd broke into a chant of “USA! USA! USA!”

Leigh Dundas, an antivaccination lawyer who played a key role in assembling the convoy, also warned against going into DC in a statement issued on Saturday. On March 3, an admin for the People’s Convoy posted a statement on the official Telegram channel indicating that the group had “cut ties” with Dundas’ organization, Freedom Fighter Nation, and would “no longer be affiliated with” her. The statement also said, “We only have like-minded individuals in our organization and are continually rooting out people that do not have the best interest of the convoy in mind.”

In a statement posted on the Freedom Fighter Nation website on Saturday that appears to replicate a letter sent from Dundas to Brase, Landis and two other organizers, Dundas wrote: “Gentlemen, I feel it is my duty to reiterate to you that to the extent that you are participating in a convoy whose final destination is Washington, DC proper, the Beltway, or areas quite proximal to these destinations or roadways, you are making an immeasurable mistake. The goodwill and strength of the message that has been built will be eviscerated, and more importantly, shutting down transportation routes whether intentionally or accidentally in the Washington, DC area will undoubtedly put people’s lives in danger.”

A note attached to the statement indicated that the letter was written in the late evening of March 2 and early morning hours of March 3 “after receipt of information,” but was not sent to the organizers until March 4 — after the People’s Convoy had officially cut ties with her.

“Any escalation of a situation between the People’s Convoy (and other participants) and law enforcement agencies and/or the National Guard (should any escalation occur), could rapidly proceed to harrowing proportions, and leave a lasting stain on this movement and you gentlemen in particular,” the statement continued.

The statement authored by Dundas on the Freedom Fighter Nation is also attributed to Ray Alexander, who is described as a “former Naval commander.” According to a footnote attached to the statement, Alexander “did briefly continue onward volunteering his time as the advance team (between Wednesday evening and this Friday morning), in an effort to transfer the baton smoothly on the logistics and venue-sourcing front.”

Adding further confusion about the alleged differences that led to the parting, Dundas’ personal assistant, Maureen Steele, has remained involved with the convoy, and spoke at the rally at Hagerstown Speedway on Saturday evening.

Josh Yoder, an airline pilot who has been speaking at the nightly rallies held by the People’s Convoy, also cautioned against going into DC.

“I can tell you that right now as I speak there are traps being laid in DC,” Yoder said during the rally on Saturday evening. “I’ve been on the phone today with federal agents in DC. And I am pleading with all of you: We cannot go into the District of Columbia. It cannot happen. They are telling me anyone who comes in there with the convoy is probably going to be detained. There’s going to be big problems. I’m asking you: Please keep this peaceful. Keep it law-abiding. And do not go into the District of Columbia. I’m begging you.”

Organizers are also worried about bad actors within their own ranks. On Saturday afternoon, right-wing provocateurs Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were kicked out of the speedway grounds after trying to mobilize people to go to DC that day.

“Right now we need to stand together even more than we have this entire journey,” Brase said during the rally on Saturday evening. “It starts with policing ourselves. There are many here tonight that probably shouldn’t be here, if you know what I mean. Those of you that are here that fall in that category, you know exactly who you are. But guess what? So do I.”

With COVID restrictions easing as case counts drop, the complaints voiced by convoy participants have expanded into a full panoply of conservative grievances, including anger about inflation, opposition to government overreach in general, and lack of faith in President Biden’s leadership on foreign policy.

In a segment for former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast, a trucker identified as “Stan” said the convoy participants want to go back to an earlier time that was somehow more free.

“Things that have happened in this country in the last year — we just want to go back to the way it was before the COVID stuff,” Stan said. “Personally, me, I’d like to go back before 9/11, the Patriot Act. Things like that. It’s just very tyrannical type stuff. It’s government overreach. And that’s what we’re all about. Sure, the mask things and the shots and all this, they’re the… easy thing to talk about, but it’s all the other things behind the scenes…. We have freedom. They’re trying to take it away, and we’re gonna stop ’em. We’re gonna take our freedom back to where it was before.”

Following the speeches at the speedway, supporters retreated to the parking lot where they prepared to unfurl a giant American flag. The air was charged with anger and celebration as a row of rigs revved their engines and blasted their horns, with fireworks streaking into the sky. Supporters facing the rigs enthusiastically waved signs and chanted, “Let’s go Brandon,” a euphemism for “F*ck Joe Biden.”

Near the entrance to the speedway, a young man held up a cell phone and filmed the scene, exclaiming, “There must be thousands of people here. This is what it looks like when America stands up.”

Vehicles were scattered around the parking lot in random configurations as rallygoers held cell phones aloft in the dark to record the spectacle. A volunteer directing traffic at the entrance yelled angrily at a van driver attempting to leave the premises and at a man driving a flatbed truck who was attempting to turn into the driveway. Both failed to heed directions before eventually yielding. Pickup trucks sped down National Pike, a two-lane highway, with flags fluttering in the wind, as pedestrians carefully picked their way along the shoulder packed with cars.

A young man from a truck called out, “F*ck you, Biden!”

It was a cheerful greeting to compatriots, albeit strangers, and the throng of people walking to their cars responded in kind, hooting in agreement.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/convoy-protesting-mandates-in-lansing-mi-leads-to-embarrassing-outcome/

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an 2 22 me

One dark-money conservative group that was developed to fund efforts challenging the outcome of the presidential election pivoted its financial efforts to support the trucker convoy, per a new report published by The Daily Beast.

By Wednesday, February 23, the American Foundation for Civil Liberties and Freedoms (AFCLF) had raised a total of $464,731 for what is protesters have billed “the People’s Convoy.” In recent days, the group's fundraising amount has tripled and is expected to continue to increase in the coming days.

The far-right group, which previously focused on raising funding to push former President Donald Trump's false election claims, has stated that “100% OF THE DONATIONS GO TO SUPPORTING THE CONVOY!”

“Convoy up, America — the donate button is going toward the funding of the ride to Freedom: we are going to take back our country for ourselves and future generations!” the group's website says. The group explained that donated funds will “reimburse fuel and hard costs of the trucker,” as they noted that “the fund is being handled by volunteer accountants and overseen by a law firm.”

Since the group is categorized as a non-profit structured under section 501(c)3 of the tax code, the AFCLF has the advantage of getting the best of both worlds: tax-deductible donations, which would be considered "gifts," and the ability to conceal the identity of its donors.

When The Beast contacted AFCLF chair Chris Marston, it asked him another of critical questions about the funding along with who would qualify to receive it. However, according to The Beast, Martson offered no solid answers saying “everything came together too quickly to establish rules.”

“Trucker leaders are on finance committee to determine where needs are but methods depend on the nature of expense,” Marston said via text message. “This all came together too fast to have pre-determined rules so we set up a committee with Lawyer, account, and trucker oversight.” [sic]

Martson went on to add that a lot of the group's planning efforts are still undetermined.

“We don’t have agreements with truckers on destination plans,” Marston explained. “We are supporting fuel, food, signage and basics for their journey,” he said, adding that the organization “coordinated with local authorities along the path to be cooperative.”

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btb can't happen here 2 cdn gave origins in longtime alt rt in BC ?  prev tries fizzled? // all manner of wingnuttery conspiracy theories on signs

followup said orig rw leaders now fronted by  (2 in some org? lawyers?]

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/twisted-and-warped-maga-republicans-fears-justin-trudeau-more-than-vladimir-putin-conservative/

wingnuttery c owen no twt

'Twisted' and 'warped' MAGA Republicans fear Justin Trudeau more than Vladimir Putin: conservative

Alex Henderson February 22, 2022

At a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin appears likely to invade Ukraine, many right-wing media outlets — from Fox News to the Daily Wire to Breitbart News — are vigorously defending Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán while arguing that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the real authoritarian. Trudeau’s unforgivable sin, according to the MAGA far right, is enforcing vaccine and testing requirements for people entering Canada from the United States.

Conservative Daily Beast opinion writer and Never Trumper Matt Lewis, in a February 22 column, compares the MAGA movement’s views on Trudeau versus Putin — arguing that the American right has truly gone off the deep end when it considers Trudeau the enemy but defends Putin.

“If you want to understand someone’s values or worldview,” Lewis writes, “take a look at who and what provokes outrage and who and what evokes sympathy. The cognitive dissonance inherent in much of the American right can make such an examination problematic. That’s because some of the most prominent voices on the right today view Vladimir Putin as a misunderstood victim. Meanwhile, they cast Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an authoritarian strongman.”

Lewis goes on to offer specific examples, noting that the Daily Wire’s Canace Owens tweeted, “STOP talking about Russia. Send American troops to Canada to deal with the tyrannical reign of Justin Trudeau Castro.”

The Never Trumper adds, “Or consider Fox News host Tucker Carlson, my friend — though we disagree profoundly on politics — and former boss. Carlson isn’t outraged over what is happening to Ukraine, but found time last week to bash ‘strongman’ Trudeau as ‘the dictator of Canada,’ while saying that ‘Canada canceled democracy.’ There’s also Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says Trudeau has gone ‘full dictator.’ And J.D. Vance, celebrated author and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, who recently declared that he ‘doesn’t really care what happens to Ukraine.’”

Lewis injects some humor into his column, noting that Marty McFly — the time-traveling Reagan-era teenager Michael J. Fox portrayed in the 1985 fantasy film “Back to the Future” — would be shocked to see so many Republicans fawning over a former KGB agent. Indeed, back in the days of Madonna, Run-D.M.C. and Duran Duran, Reagan Republicans railed against the Kremlin nonstop; now, MAGA Republicans consider Putin and his ally Orbán people to be admired.

“If the 1985 version of Marty McFly transported to 2022,” Lewis writes, “it would be impossible to explain to him why so many conservative Republicans are willing to look the other way on Russia invading a sovereign nation, while they simultaneously blast Canada for imposing consequences on protesters blocking traffic…. To be clear, Putin is a former KGB agent and an actual authoritarian. He literally kills and imprisons his critics. And don’t forget the little matter of 100,000 of his troops massed on the Ukrainian border.”

Lewis adds, “Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau is the elected leader of a free nation. He took action to restore law and order [and GNP!] after three weeks of truckers blocking traffic and generally disturbing the peace.”

The conservative Lewis has spent plenty of time bashing the left, but he has been a blistering critic of former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. And he wraps up his February 22 column by stressing that MAGA Republicans are as “warped” now as they were when Trump was still in the White House.

“If you find someone willing to defend Vladimir Putin for threatening to invade and kill his neighbors, while simultaneously calling Justin Trudeau a ‘dictator’ for shutting down a lawless protest after three weeks, you have found someone who either is intellectually dishonest or has a warped sense of reality,” Lewis warns. “If you thought the gaslighting would end with Trump, you were wrong. The American right is getting in the habit of calling evil good and good evil. It’s a truly twisted and perverse perception of a dangerous world, and the scary thing is, it’s catching on.”

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an 2 22 OT origin

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/ottawa-truckers/

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an 2 22 edit bd

On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.

On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”

Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.

His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.

Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.

Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”

Then there is this part:

Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.

“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.

Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.

He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.

Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?

His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:

They become isolated (or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and

They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).

A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.

What you're describing is collectivism, no?

The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."

But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.

Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?

Ideally, yes.

Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.

The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.

That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.

That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."

The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?

One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.

In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).

I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.

For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.

I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:

Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success, you’re going to sacrifice things along the way. There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.

A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.

He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.

I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).

But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.

A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.

I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying that if Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.

Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.

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MRC BS:

In an eye-popping opinion column, Univision’s chief newsroom editor displays his contempt for the Canadian trucker protest and further clarifies the deep-seated institutional biases at the nation’s largest Spanish-language media outlet.

Daniel Morcate’s blast at the truckers, titled “Canada’s convoy of death,” reads like a conservative parody of what an apologist for totalitarianism might write about the trucker protest in Ottawa. Morcate’s role at the network makes the column all the more troubling. Per Univision insiders, Morcate has the final editorial say over the scripts read on Univision’s national newscasts. Morcate has held this role for over two decades, with the exception of a brief tenure as News Director at Univision’s Miami affiliate WLTV-23 during the Lee-Coronell Reign of Terror which, per insiders, ended in his ouster and return to the national news desk subsequent to a newsroom revolt.

We have most frequently looked at Jorge Ramos’ opinion columns, which is appropriate given his position at Univision and stature within the rest of corporate media. But Morcate’s role merits examination of his columns as well. This, after all, is the thinking of the man who oversees the scripts that are read to millions of viewers on a daily basis- published with Univision’s approval.

We made sure to archive the column, lest Univision try to nuke it like they did Maria Elena Salinas' unhinged rant after Jorge Ramos got himself thrown out of Donald Trump's press conference in Iowa in 2015.

Because it is impossible to pick and choose which portions of this wildly incendiary opinion column to highlight, again- published with Univision's consent, we have translated it from the original Spanish and posted it below in its entirety, as published on February 14th, 2022 (emphases ours).

Canada's Convoy of Death

By: Daniel Morcate

The truckers' protest that paralyzed Canada's borders with the United States is said to be on the way to becoming an international strategy. It already affects France, Australia, New Zealand and apparently threatens to spread to some regions of our country, such as New York. The Department of Homeland Security has sent a warning to law enforcement. That is why it is worth doing a brief analysis so that it is understood that, although it bears the attractive name of "freedom convoy", it was born rather as a nihilistic death rattle of uncouth and obscurantist right-wing radicals, such as those who wage a war without quarter against health precautions since the coronavirus pandemic began.

The Canadian protagonists of the protest are mainly people who don't mind getting infected with covid, much less infecting others- even members of their own family. Some belong to a minority of truck drivers who have refused to be vaccinated in a country where more than 80% of citizens have been vaccinated, including nine out of 10 truck drivers. And they had lost all the legal and political battles in their fanatical aspiration to refuse vaccination or observe pandemic restrictions. Well-meaning people, of course, have joined the campaign, monkey see monkey do, to display their weariness from the endless fight against the coronavirus.

If you look closely at footage of the protest, you will see Confederate flags from the racist South of the United States as well as neo-Nazi symbols. In fact, the Canadian media report that 60% of the funds raised by the protesters come from our country. The funds were collected online. And to a large extent far-right American media and politicians – like Fox News and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky – are energizing the movement, not caring that it has cost an estimated $300 million a day in trade between the two neighboring countries, which in turn has exacerbated consumer product shortages and jeopardized thousands of jobs in the United States and Canada.

In their radicalism, the rebel truckers are not only opposed to getting vaccinated as required by a Canadian government mandate announced in mid-January. They also demand the lifting of all covid restrictions and the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

But in order to make their demands, they have placed themselves outside the law and the rules and regulations of one of the most stable and efficient democracies on the planet. They denounce as "arbitrary" the decisions of a legitimately constituted government, which they can question in the media, the courts and the ballot box. In reality, what is arbitrary is that for weeks they have obstructed public roads, threatened the safety and health of their Canadian compatriots and harmed trade between two nations whose governments were elected by popular will and who are subjected daily to the scrutiny of the free press and of public opinion. Their protest is an obscurantist fury similar to the one we have suffered from the beginning of the pandemic in the United States and in other countries.

The freedom that these angry protesters claim is none other than the freedom to get sick and infect us with covid. Whether they are entitled to the former is open for debate. But they definitely have no right to the latter. Their reckless attitude evokes that of the Spanish fascists who, in the midst of the Civil War, were guided by the slogan "long live death". Faced with this insane proposal, we must put forward exactly the opposite idea, that our lives and the lives of others have an intrinsic value that is worth protecting. That is why we must bet on health and observe the health precautions suggested by medical science and common sense; and support leaders who are guided by the same principles.

Canadian authorities have begun to break up the protests with ultimatums and arrests. For this they have the support of the Biden administration. But the siege of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, continues. We do not know how successful the extremists may be in spreading their obscurantist poison. But it cannot be ruled out while the pandemic lasts, with its aftermath of infections, deaths and economic volatility. What we do know is that extremists are fueled by a dangerous nihilistic morbidity that, in Canada at least, has only infected a small, ill-tempered and vociferous minority.

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an 2 22

no twt

Economist Paul Krugman: anti-vax truckers view ‘freedom’ as the right to harm others

A "Freedom Convoy" protest by anti-vaxxers in Ottawa, Canada on February 4, 2022, Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson February 16, 2022

The “Freedom Convoy,” an alliance of anti-vax truckers who have been loudly protesting against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s COVID-19 vaccine requirements for crossing the border into Canada, have been praised and celebrated on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has a very different view of the "Freedom Convoy" and other far-right anti-vaxxers, who he argues are equating “freedom” with a right to inflict harm on others.

In his Valentine’s Day column, Krugman slams the “Freedom Convoy” for clogging up U.S./Canada border crossings and creating painful traffic jams in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.

“On Sunday, the Canadian police finally cleared away anti-vaccine demonstrators who had been blocking the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, a key commercial route that normally carries more than $300 million a day in international trade,” Krugman explains. “Other bridges are still closed, and part of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is still occupied. The diffidence of Canadian authorities in the face of these disruptions has been startling to American eyes.”

Krugman continues, “Also startling, although not actually surprising, has been the embrace of economic vandalism and intimidation by much of the U.S. right — especially by people who ranted against demonstrations in favor of racial justice. What we’re getting here is an object lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about ‘law and order.’”

The economist/columnist goes on to point out that the Teamsters, who represent truckers in both the U.S. and Canada, have “denounced the blockade” — noting that many people who helped the “Freedom Convoy” clog up the Ambassador Bridge weren’t actually truckers.

“This isn’t a grass-roots trucker uprising,” Krugman emphasizes. “It’s more like a slow-motion January 6, a disruption caused by a relatively small number of activists, many of them right-wing extremists. At their peak, the demonstrations in Ottawa reportedly involved only around 8000 people, while numbers at other locations have been much smaller.”

Krugman adds, “Despite their lack of numbers, however, the protesters have been inflicting a remarkable amount of economic damage. The U.S. and Canadian economies are very closely integrated. In particular, North American manufacturing, especially but not only in the auto industry, relies on a constant flow of parts between factories on both sides of the border. As a result, the disruption of that flow has hobbled industry, forcing production cuts and even factory shutdowns.”

Thanks to the “Freedom Convoy,” Krugman complains, professional truck drivers who couldn’t cross the Ambassador Bridge had to look for other border crossings and “wait in long lines.”

“Any attempt to put a number on the economic costs of the blockade is tricky and speculative,” Krugman writes. “However, it’s not hard to come up with numbers like $300 million or more per day; combine that with the disruption of Ottawa, and the ‘trucker’ protests may already have inflicted a couple of billion dollars in economic damage. That’s an interesting number, because it’s roughly comparable to insurance industry estimates of total losses associated with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd — protests that seem to have involved more than 15 million people.”

Krugman emphasizes that the vast majority of BLM protests were peaceful in 2020, whereas the “Freedom Convoy” seems to take pleasure in causing harm.

“The BLM demonstrations were a reaction to police killings of innocent people; what’s going on in Canada is, on its face, about rejecting public health measures intended to save lives,” Krugman writes. “Of course, even that is mainly an excuse: What it’s really about is an attempt to exploit pandemic weariness to boost the usual culture-war agenda.”

Krugman adds, “As you might expect, the U.S. right is loving it…. Recent events have confirmed what many suspected: The right is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing ends.”

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2 22

in the weeks after the January 6 insurrection, the Washington Post published a disturbing piece that hinted at how everyday Republicans had come to embrace the politics of terrorism. In Oklahoma City, the Post noted, the memory of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing has become a flashpoint, as both Republican politicians and ordinary citizens bully anyone who tries to draw a line between Timothy McVeigh's crime and Donald Trump-incited storming of the Capitol. The link is obvious, however. Both crimes were committed by white nationalists who refuse to accept a multiracial democracy — but woe on those who say as much in Oklahoma. When Oklahoma's Department of Education shared information from the bombing memorial linking McVeigh's attack with the domestic terror attack on the Capitol, their Facebook page was flooded with vitriol.

"How in the world is this even remotely the same as the Oklahoma bombing??!!!" one teacher wrote. Another derided the education department as the "Oklahoma Dept of Socialist Indoctrination." An angry dad clashed with other parents who argued that McVeigh's radicalism and the anti-government rhetoric at the Capitol were "the very definition of the same context."

One angry Oklahoman even shared the right-wing slogan about the "tree of liberty" needing to be "refreshed" with "blood" in the comments, seemingly unaware that the same phrase was on the T-shirt that McVeigh wore the day he murdered 168 people.

This incoherent insistence on treating McVeigh's insurrectionist violence as somehow different than the Capitol rioters illustrates an ugly shift that's happened in Republican politics since 1995. Back then, most Republicans rejected the view that a white nationalist is entitled to commit violence to protest democratic outcomes he doesn't like. Now, McVeigh's ideology is the mainstream view in GOP politics. Sure, they rarely come right out and say it. But this insistence on minimizing the Capitol riot and continuing support for the man who instigated it — Donald Trump — speaks loudly enough. And ugliness in Oklahoma City in the days after the 2021 insurrection demonstrated that this pro-insurrection view was fixed on the right within days, if not hours, of the event itself.

We see this, as well, in the celebratory attitude that right-wing media — especially Fox News — is taking towards the Ottawa trucker blockade.

As Zack Beauchamp of Vox notes, the uprising that brought that part of the Canada-U.S. border to a standstill and has terrorized the city of Ottawa "is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated." It's a group of right-wingers who "are angry because they have lost" and are trying to gain by force what they cannot through democratic means. And yet, it's become a cause célèbre on Fox News, causing comically overwrought claims like it's "the single most successful human rights protest in a generation."

Fox News doesn't like the blockade despite its widespread unpopularity — they support it because it's unpopular.

As with the January 6 insurrection, the trucker tantrum is viewed by right-wing media as a model for how the embittered white conservative majority can impose its will without getting public support. Both the insurrection and the trucker tantrum are a far-right minority expressing a belief that they entitled to rule, no matter what. And while the Ottawa demonstration has so far not been as violent as the January 6 insurrection, it is still about using force — by taking the economy hostage and intimidating the residents with the threat of violence — to obtain what conservatives cannot gain fairly.

This shift from being anti- to pro-terrorism among Republicans can really be traced back to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management(BLM) and his sons' subsequent 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. That's when a group of far-right extremists, led by brothers Ryan and Ammon Bundy, seized control of a visitor's center at an Oregon national wildlife refuge, spouting a bunch of incoherent demands that amounted to a belief that a democratically elected government had no right to pass laws restricting the right of white men to wreak as much environmental damage as they damn well pleased. The fight quite literally started because the occupiers didn't believe the government had a right to convict two men who had set fire to federal lands to protest not being allowed to graze their cattle there.

The occupiers were domestic terrorists, trying to obtain through violence what they couldn't through fair engagement in politics. But while Republicans formally condemned the violence, they were also tripping over each other to validate the asinine complaints of the occupiers. Multiple GOP congressmen even drew on arguments that came from fringe authoritarian writers who believe in things like turning the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Even more troublingly, the occupiers were found "not guilty" at their trial, suggesting that by October of 2016, enough Republicans were pro-terrorism enough to make it impossible to put together a jury to convict in a case that should have been a slam dunk. So that Trump was able to cobble together enough votes the next month to win the electoral college should not, in retrospect, have been a surprise.

The Department of Justice under Barack Obama had been slow and cautious in its response to the occupation, fearing another debacle like the Branch Davidian fire in Waco, TX in 1993. Instead of storming in, they let the occupiers feel safe enough to actually leave the property for a media event, where they were then easily captured on an open highway. It was a decision heavily criticized at the time, with lots of people rightfully pointing out that people of color who commit acts of terrorism don't get the kid glove treatment. Others, including myself, defended the feds, arguing that the fact that only one person died in the process justified the strategy. Now I'm beginning to doubt that view.

It may be that Democrats just need to get stiffer spines when dealing with right-wing bullies and terrorists, even when doing so means the right will react with violence. As Brian Beutler of Crooked Media argued in his newsletter last week, it's reasonable to worry that the utter failure of the Department of Justice to arrest Trump or his allies for their many crimes "is driven by fear" of a violent backlash. Certainly, Trump has been using intimidation recently, promising pardons for people who commit violence for him and demanding ugly reactions from his followers if he does face a consequence.

But this failure of nerve on the part of Democratic leadership is going to screw us all over in the long run. As Beutler argues, the system "can't function if one side gets a hostage-taker's veto over the rules of fair play," and without imposing real consequences for crime and violence, "he public will just grow desensitized to right-wing tactics or, worse," even start to sympathize with the hostage-takers and violent terrorists.

We see this in the shift in GOP circles from 1995, when McVeigh's villainy was indisputable, to our modern time, when people who share McVeigh's views and stormed the Capitol are described by the Republican National Committee as merely engaging in "legitimate political discourse." The RNC did walk that lie back a little bit, but notably only for the people who got arrested. That only underscores the validity of Beutler's argument: Consequences matter when it comes to public opinion.

The ongoing failure of Democrats to bring the hammer down on the ringleaders of the coup signals strongly to the public that the coup was no big deal — and indeed, opens the door to arguing that the coup was justified. Republicans are walking right through that door right now.

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allende pinochet general? strike?

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no lnx

Court empowers police to break anti-vax bridge blockade in Canada

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams February 13, 2022

As Ontario's premier on Friday declared a state of emergency over an ongoing trucker-led protest that has paralyzed commerce and transportation at a key crossing on the U.S. border, a judge in the Canadian province granted an injunction aimed at breaking the blockade.

According to the Windsor Star, Ontario Superior Court Justice Geoffrey Morawetz granted an injunction requested by the city of Windsor and the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association in order to resume the flow of traffic and commerce at the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit—the busiest international crossing in North America.

"The overwhelming evidence is that there is a complete blockage of the bridge, which you have conceded cannot be tolerated," the judge said. "It therefore follows, does it not, that there has to be some form of order?"

"We're dealing with millions of dollars of damage each and every day," he added.

[x?]

The injunction is set to go into effect at 7:00 pm local time. Almost immediately after the ruling, police notified the "Freedom Convoy" demonstrators "that it is a criminal offense to obstruct, interrupt, or interfere with the lawful use, enjoyment, or operation of property."

"We are providing notice that anyone blocking streets or assisting others in the blocking of streets may be committing a criminal offense and must immediately cease further unlawful activity or you may face charges," an officer announced. "You could be arrested if you are a party to the offense or assisting others in the direct or indirect commission of this offense."

Also on Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency over the protests, announcing he will "convene cabinet to use legal authorities to urgently enact orders that will make crystal clear it is illegal and punishable to block and impede the movement of goods, people, and services along critical infrastructure."

"Fines for noncompliance will be severe," said Ford, "with a maximum penalty of $100,000 and up to a year imprisonment."

The nationwide protests were launched on January 22 by truck drivers who oppose Canadian and U.S. mandates requiring them to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 if they want to cross into the United States. Unvaccinated truckers have the option of quarantining for two weeks.

The protests have since expanded, and now include people opposed to pandemic countermeasures such as mask mandates, lockdowns, and temporary bans on large gatherings. There is also a significant white supremacist presence at the demonstrations.

The Canadian Trucking Alliance, a nationwide association of truckers, says the protests do not represent the vast majority of the nation's truck drivers—90% of whom are vaccinated—and that many of the demonstrators are not truckers and "have a separate agenda beyond a disagreement over cross-border vaccine requirements."

The "Freedom Convoy" protests have garnered widespread right-wing support in North America—including from former U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right members of Congress and the media—and beyond.

On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that "if you joined the protests because you're tired of Covid, you now need to understand that you are breaking laws. The consequences are becoming more and more severe."

[vid?]

"We've heard you," he added. "It's time to go home now."

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its going dn? 2/11/22

every consp theory repped; reddit 300 ppl ~; now unions organizing ~

100 kids bouncy castle mostly white men, sorta Occupy style de-central org; [diffues thru dwntown so hard for cops or ctr protest ] lotta pickups

POC atacked/harrassed, wht ppl in masks too

indig and BLM in cda always have cop snipers on rooftops, massive quick brutal arrests // 1/6 ?

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mothertrucker

an 2 22

Canadian officials have a message for US Republicans hyping anti-vax protests in Ottawa: Butt out

Sen. Ted Cruz (Screengrab)

Alex Henderson February 08, 2022

In Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, anti-vax truckers have been protesting a Canadian law that went into effect on January 15 and requires truckers entering Canada from the United States to show proof that they have been vaccinated for COVID-19. And far-right Republicans, from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to Sen. Ted Cruz to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, have been pandering to the United States’ anti-vax fringe by praising those truckers in Ottawa.

Some Republicans have been donating to their cause. But Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a message for those Republicans: butt out.

During a debate in the Canadian Parliament, Trudeau explained, “Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives. It has to stop.”

Trudeau stressed that the border restrictions will not last forever.

“Canadians trust science,” Trudeau declared. “A few people shouting and waving swastikas does not define who Canadians are.”

Other Canadians who have been critical of the anti-vax protests in Ottawa range from Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson.

In a letter to Trudeau, Watson complained, “What was initially described as a peaceful protest has now turned into a siege of our downtown area.” And Mendicino, obviously referring to Republicans in the U.S., said, “We need to be vigilant about potential foreign interference.... Whatever statements may have been made by some foreign official are neither here nor there. We’re Canadian. We have our own set of laws. We will follow them.”

Although former President Donald Trump is not an anti-vaxxer — he said he has received a COVID-19 booster shot and has encouraged others to do the same — he took offense at Trudeau’s comments, calling the Canadian prime minister a “far-left lunatic” and saying that he has “destroyed Canada with insane COVID mandates.”

According to the Associated Press, there have been incidents of violence in connection with the raucous Ottawa protests.

AP reporters Rob Gillies and Tracey Lindeman note, “Steve Bell, the city’s deputy police chief, said a person from Ohio was arrested in connection with a threat against Ottawa police headquarters. Meanwhile, Ottawa police were investigating a fire at an apartment building that was apparently set by protesters. Matias Munoz said residents of the building south of Parliament Hill were already at their wits’ end Saturday night as the noise of the protest blared through their homes for the ninth night in a row. When he came downstairs Sunday morning, Munoz said the carpet and floor were charred, and there were blackened fire-starter bricks strewn across the lobby.”

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