Ask A Genius 715: Truckers Be Protestin’
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re talking about the type of convoy in Canada and the emergence of Nazi symbols, Confederate flags at the protest.
Rick Rosner: We should explain what the trucker convoy is. A bunch of truckers and I think just a bunch of people who own trucks just by looking at the footage have anti-vaxxer truckers and truck owners have congregated in Ottawa, the capital of Canada to protest any mandatory shit about Covid basically. Do you have any idea how many of them are there?
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: All right, so we could probably look it up and how long has this been going? It’s disrupting life in Ottawa and I assume they’re trying to disrupt the government.
Jacobsen: Yes, CDC says there are thousands of truckers and other protesters as of January 29.
Rosner: So they’re kind of all-purpose a-holes. I’m sure that it’s a good bet that 95% plus of the anti-vaxx truckers buy into just the whole package of… It’s not fair to call it right-wing thought but it’s the whole package that comes from so-called right-wing media. I guess it’s fairer to call it right wing than to call it conservative because the current right-wing thought doesn’t have too much to do with conservativism. But anyway, its people who buy everything; they’re trumpy, no limits on guns, then Biden didn’t win the election, the whole Covid is no big deal, the vaccination is more dangerous, It kills more people than Covid; the whole fucking thing.
Well, it seems like today this stuff flourishes more than it has in the past. And so there are various angles on that. One is we don’t know much about the past as in a general sense. Our historical knowledge doesn’t run deep though in like 1939 maybe there was a giant rally for Hitler at Madison Square Garden. Maybe 1938, I don’t know. I think the US Pro-Nazi organization was called the Bund. Or else, or they may have named it something patriotic like the George Washington Society. I know they use George Washington as the back drop; a giant George Washington for their huge ass rally at Madison Square Garden. So until we declared war against Germany, there were millions of Americans who we’re pro Germany and America was substantially isolationist until Pearl Harbor happened. I just read that FDR wanted us to get into the war because I assume he believed correctly that Hitler didn’t just jeopardize Europe but he jeopardized the world and also what he wanted to do with Europe even if he didn’t jeopardize the whole world was super shitty. But American opinion, I guess was against getting into World War II until Pearl Harbor. So, I mean there has always been a bunch of kind of a-holes running around. Everything seems new to us because we don’t know history.
Two is, and we’ve talked about this a gazillion times, I say that almost every time we talk now that we’ve talked about this because we have talked about a shitload of stuff that it’s easier for idiots and demagogues to get people riled up now because It’s easier for lunatics to communicate with each other. Social media and…
Jacobsen: Fortune chat ports.
Rosner: All that shit just like that when there were only telephones people couldn’t announce themselves unless they wanted to pay for newspaper ads or leaflets or I guess give speeches on street corners. But now, anybody can announce their political intentions and look for kindred spirits and the turnover of messages. If you’re trying to recruit people to fight communism in the lunatic John Birch Society in 1957, most of your communication is going to be done via the mail. So your turnaround time between messages is going to be a week because back then you didn’t call people long-distance, that was for special occasions and it was expensive. Do people even know that anymore? That if you wanted to call outside your state, outside your area code, it costs like 10 cents a minute and that was expensive in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. So people didn’t do it except on special occasions like Mother’s Day, birthdays, your car broke down and you need somebody to wire you some money.
A couple nights ago, we talked about the bullets. The more information bullets you get hit with the more you’re persuaded. So in the time it took for one John Berger to have an exchange with another John Berger in 1958, a pair of idiots can exchange hundreds and hundreds of messages. So that’s the thing too. That it’s much easier for shitheads to find themselves.
And thing three is for the profit; information to distribution model that in 1958 newspapers were for profit. Newspapers, they had political leanings but they felt some accountability for the truth. They try to slant the truth, but they wouldn’t try to straight up just continue to bullshit you and TV news was not for profit until the ‘70s maybe. And now we’ve got all sorts of for-profit news, or for-profit pundits like Alex Jones. I guess people send him money to support his efforts to say the shit he says but also they buy his products. He sells vitamins and probably other stuff like survival kits. I don’t know, I don’t watch Alex Jones but people on the right and on the left, but more on the right saying bullshit make a lot of money saying bullshit.
So to wrap it up, you got three things that make today’s nowadays seem extra dire in terms of groups of shitheads being shitheads. One; it seems scary because we don’t remember the past and so we don’t have any way to compare it to shithead movements of the past. Thing two is ease of communication and aggregation among shit heads and three is right wing misinformation and riler-uppers make a shitload of money doing it; both from the Rubes who are being fed this shit and from rich conservatives who like a broken government among other things; a government that doesn’t tax them, government that’s ineffective, government that allows them to staff the Supreme Court.
[Recording End]
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