Trucker Strike Viral Kayfabes
Imagine if Social Media influencers put their platforms to work on specific issues, rather than harvesting clicks by peddling in Vaporware?
Posts on certain quarters of social media over the weekend were awash in ‘news’ about a looming trucker strike that was going to CRIPPLE NYC!
MAGA SUPPORTS TRUCKERS!
What seems to have started this latest iteration of a small group of ideologically motivated truckers social media steering wheel holders is yet another battle in The Regime’s Lawfare War against Donald Trump.
A New York judge ordered that former president Donald Trump pay $355 million — and temporarily banned him from doing business in the state where he made his name — after finding Friday that he inflated his net worth by billions to dupe banks and insurers over the course of a decade.
Trump, 77 — who has repeatedly claimed that the case is a politically motivated “witch hunt” — will be barred from serving as an officer or director of any company in New York for three years, under the ruling from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.
Engoron also issued a two-year New York business ban against Trump’s two eldest sons and ordered them to pay $4 million each.
I understand that powerful forces are at work, and have been for some time, to attack your democratic choices, and have launched a multi-front assault against the former President. That is not in question, and I am quite sympathetic to those concerns.
That said, and what is of interest to me, and the number of people who always contact me when some supposed action by truckers is about to take place, is the utter emptiness of the noise, which has dominated social media feeds, and those parts of normie media who clickfarm as a strategy of remaining solvent.
Just a few weeks ago, we saw ‘news’ of a convoy of 700,000 trucks headed to the Rio Grande in some kind of protest movement meant to shore up the state of Texas in its fight with the Feds over the migrant invasion at the border.
700,000 trucks?
That is what, approximately 17.5% of all trucks in America?
From what I can gather about this fellow Chicago Ray, whose original video ‘went viral’ and started all of this chatter, he’s just another regular trucker, who, like perfectly bumping a dock on the first try, seems to have struck the algorithmic gold which eludes so many of the rest of us. Good for him, and I hope he enjoys the temporary glow, something of which I myself am familiar -
The problem here is that Mr Ray’s claims, which are then amplified and repeated by ‘Social Media’ influencers, end up becoming the disinformation that the loonier sections of Liberal Media are always going on about.
As Craig Fuller noted above, most trucker ‘protests’ in today’s age amount to nothing, and there are any number of reasons for that being the case.
Mr Ray and his friends might halt a tiny percentage of deliveries to NYC, at the top end perhaps numbering in the triple digits.
A drop in a very large bucket -
https://www.msllegal.com/blog/delivery-truck-traffic-in-nyc-heavy-and-getting-heavier/
According to the New York Department of Transportation (“DOT”), approximately 97,000 trucks and commercial vehicles cross NYC boundaries each day, including at least 25,000 moving to and from Manhattan.
In order for Mr Ray and his fellow Trump supporting truckers to even crack one percent of NYCs daily truck deliveries (and this doesn’t count all of the materials dropped off in the wider downstate/New Jersey area, these stats are only for the city) they would have to convince 970 trucks/truckers from making their deliveries.
Something tells me we won’t ever get a count on that; mostly because it isn’t going to happen.
One of the many reasons for this is that the trucking industry in 2024 isn’t your grandpa’s trucking business; in many sectors of the industry and various parts of the country, those who drive it are a prime example of the diversity that our progressive friends are always harping about. From the Minneapolis Somalians, to Strong Solo Sergey of the Chicago based Eastern European “White Volvo” Mafia, the Armenian and various other offshored or offshoring Brokers, to the massive influx of Sikhs into the business, and all of the usual Central Americans, the make-up of today’s trucker is not nearly as old and white and Conservative as it once was.
(Progressives also like to make noise about human trafficking, and the fact that many of these truckers are brought here under dodgy arrangements, including indentured servitude, seems to go unnoticed.)
If you’re a recent arrival from the Punjab, and your work visa depends on you doing what you are told, are you going to heed the call of Chicago Ray and not make your scheduled delivery? Do you even know who Chicago Ray is? I almost qualify as terminally online and I’d never heard of him til yesterday.
Are the Peurto Rican trash haulers and Polish container Slavs and Somali freight guys really concerned about legal maneuvering within the Imperial Court?
Seems doubtful.
We also have to consider the retention problem in trucking, which has begotten many a scam to finance the training of so many new drivers every year, one of which is the internal credit programs offered at certain CDL Mills.
When you start off your ‘career’ in trucking in hock to the company you drive for in the sum of 7 to 10k, and the interest rate on that would make the credit card companies blush, well, you do what you are told.
And then there are guys like these, whom represent a very large percentage of the native born trucking population -
Over and above lack of buy-in from wide swathes of the trucking industry, not every trucker protest is the same. Some have had great success - the OG American oil price protest in 1973 which spawned movies like Convoy, Australia’s Razorback Mountain Blockade, and the most successful and inspirational populist uprising of recent times, Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
In the last two years we have seen many people appropriate the term ‘Convoy’ for various of their protests, which, like this one with NYC seems headed towards, will result in a whole lot of nothing.
The Freedom Convoy was successful because of a specific set of circumstances around an extremely contentious issue that ultimately was not about the truckers. Attempting to borrow pale imitations of the Freedom Convoy template and apply that to other more narrow issues is not going to produce the same result, ever.
The next time you hear about a ‘truckers protest’, especially if you hear about it from some social media influencer who has hundreds of thousands of followers because of exposed cleavage, blonde hair, or a feed that is 99% partisan politics shrieking for either Team, it is most likely a fantasy, and doomed to failure.
For once, ‘fact checking’ is not some smarmy bullshit from dishonest political hacks, but a legitimate suggestion that you ought to check in with subject matter experts.
But I’m sure most of my readers knew that already.
Yep, when I first saw that video of Ray? A dude I never heard of spew his lame ass speech in his truck I was thinking yeah right. I know a lot of OTR drivers. Many of the drivers I know support trump. I talked to a few of them. All of them said never heard of this bullshit, never heard of this dude. They need to make ends meet. The dude says even companies are in on it, really. More BS. It's not gonna happen. You nailed it when you called them steering wheel holders.
Dude, you are a culture warrior. Warrior would be in italics if I could. Nice call.