The distorted "freedom" of the truck convoys: "A huge number of Americans want a dictatorship"

[marmar]

The distorted "freedom" of the truck convoys: “A huge number of Americans want a dictatorship"
Salon talks to "The Next Civil War" author Stephen Marche about why Jan. 6 was like the first WTC bombing

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 24, 2022 6:00AM


(Salon) The Republican-fascists and other "conservatives" have convinced themselves and their followers that freedom is the same thing as license.

Real freedom involves a sense of responsibility to others, obligation to the common good and respect for reason and the truth. Moreover, as historian Timothy Snyder presciently warned in 2017, "to abandon facts is to abandon freedom" and "post-truth is pre-fascism."

License is a belief that one can act without consequences — and that any attempts to limit that dangerous behavior and its negative impact on others is some type of "tyranny" or "dictatorship" or "oppression." This crude and debased version of "freedom" as embraced by fascists and other members of today's right wing and "conservative" movement also emphasizes the importance of force and the ability of the powerful to force their will on the less powerful with impunity.

.....(snip).....

In a recent essay at The Atlantic, journalist and author Stephen Marche described his experience in Toronto as it was besieged by the neofascist "anti-vaccine" "freedom" convoy.

He explained how:

Now the rage has come for me. The anti-vax trucker convoy has made it up close and personal.

Three weeks ago, truckers formed a convoy to protest the cross-border COVID-vaccine mandate. Last weekend, they rolled into my Toronto neighborhood, near Bloor Street and Avenue Road. I went down to bear witness to the spectacle. The scene was not surprising to me: The same sort of people I'd seen at Donald Trump rallies and prepper conventions were there, with their hollowed-out faces intimate with pain, and their perpetually misspelled signs, and their sense of belonging to a community of the excluded. I confess that they disgusted me. I found myself stopping several people on the street and telling them to go home, that they weren't wanted here.

The truckers want "freedom" from mandates and have called for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign. They won't achieve either of these goals, so what they're doing now amounts to disruption for disruption's sake….

.....(snip).....

Charlottesville will play a large role in any history written about the Age of Trump and how America's democracy crisis escalated to where it is now with Jan. 6 and perhaps even a second American Civil War and right-wing insurgency. How are you making sense of that moment as a huge type of "what if?" in this unfolding American story?

Charlottesville was the moment where the Trump administration was shown to not be just a nastier version of Reagan. The Trump administration was actually involved in hard-right politics.

The United States is now being forced to confront not just racist, or not just so-called country club Republicans, but people who actively want a white state, to create something that is very different than what the United States of America currently is. January 6 as I see it was like the first World Trade Center bombing. It is a type of pre-echo of what's to come. On January 6 they were taken by surprise at their own success. The next time they will be much more organized and much better armed. I think all of these things are building into a blossoming hatred that is continuing to grow. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/24/the-distorted-freedom-of-the-truck-convoys-a-huge-number-of-americans-want-a-dictatorship/

[sop]

1. Excellent article.

"The same sort of people I'd seen at Donald Trump rallies and prepper conventions were there, with their hollowed-out faces intimate with pain, and their perpetually misspelled signs, and their sense of belonging to a community of the excluded."

"People who actively want a white state, to create something that is very different than what the United States of America currently is. January 6 as I see it was like the first World Trade Center bombing. It is a type of pre-echo of what's to come. On January 6 they were taken by surprise at their own success. The next time they will be much more organized and much better armed. I think all of these things are building into a blossoming hatred that is continuing to grow."

[keithbvadu2]

2. Those millions of republicans want an authoritarian gov't but they mistakenly think they will be the

Those millions of republicans want an authoritarian gov't but they mistakenly think they will be the few thousand elites actually in charge.

Those millions are useful tools for those who will actually be in charge.

One poster called it a 'new social feudalism age'.

[PortTack]

3. Huge number....sure

[RussBLib]

4. some US citizens might want a dictatorship here

... as long as T**** is in charge, but I would guess that there are fewer of them than during WW2, when quite a number of Americans backed Hitler and the Nazis. It's the nature of a free society where you are free to support lunatics if you want, but you better submit to the will of the people when they soundly reject your bad ideas. Right now, we don't even have that here.

[appalachiablue]

5. White nationalist Christian ethnostate is the aim, obvious & real danger

A White ethnostate is a proposed type of [State (polity)|state] in which residence or citizenship would be limited to White people, and would exclude non-whites, such as black people, Asian people, and Native American people. In the United States, proposals for such a state are advanced by White supremacist and White separatist factions such as Ku Klux Klansmen and Neo-Nazis whether through claiming a certain part or the whole of the country to have a White majority.

Historically, Australia attempted to establish a Whites-only state through restrictions on non-White immigration and the social assimilation of Aborigines in its White Australia policy. Apartheid-era South Africa made an attempt by pushing the non-White population into areas known as Bantustans through various means, including deportations and racial segregation, with the aim of establishing separate states out of the resulting ethnically cleansed areas, the largest of which would be a White state.

Proposed white ethnostates:

- North America

Historically, as well as in modern times, the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho and a portion of Montana) has been proposed by many white supremacists as a location for the establishment of a White ethnostate. This Northwest Territorial Imperative was promoted by Richard Girnt Butler, Robert Jay Mathews, David Lane, and Harold Covington, alongside the White supremacist terrorist organization The Order, the Neo-Nazi Christian Identity organization Aryan Nations, the White power skinhead group Volksfront, and the Northwest Front, among others. The Northwest Territorial Imperative also has loose overlap with the Cascadia independence movement, which also seeks to create an independent republic between the Northwest and parts of Northern California in the United States and British Columbia in Canada. Some in the far-right use the term American Redoubt to describe a similar migration to the Northwestern United States]

Other areas have been looked into as sites for a potential white ethnostate by certain groups, most notably the South and the self-proclaimed "Southern Nationalist" League of the South (LS) given the region's history of secessionism and once being an independent nation known as the Confederate States of America (1861–1865). Another example is Billy Roper's Shield Wall Network (SWN), a neo-Nazi organization located in Mountain View, Arkansas which seeks to build a "white ethnostate" in the Ozark region and is affiliated with other separatist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK); the Knights Party, located near Harrison, Arkansas; the League of the South (LS); and the National Socialist Movement (NSM) of now-defunct Nationalist Front. Conversely, the Ozarks have been a "hotbed" for adherents of the Christian Identity movement including the Church of Israel and various members of the Christian Patriot movement who have set up paramilitary training camps to prepare for a coming Armageddon. The defunct neo-Nazi organization Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), led by Matthew Heimbach, also sought to create a white ethnostate called "Avalon", built upon the ideological principles of Nazism, various strands of European fascism such as Legionarism and British Fascism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

- South Africa

After the end of apartheid, some Afrikaner nationalist organizations, including Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, started to promote the idea of a Volkstaat that would be created in the Western Cape region.

Historical attempts at creating a white ethnostate...

More, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_ethnostate

[lees1975]

6. This is coming from a small, uneducated, minority of social misfits and narcissists

They have big trucks but small support. Call out the tow trucks, making money trumps everything else.

[wnylib]

7. With gas prices going up even higher

thanks to Adolf Putin's invasion of Ukraine, those truckers headed for DC will find the trip more expensive than they planned.

Hope they get stranded in the desert.