Running in reverse: Channel 19 year in review, part 3

Find Part 2 of this review via this link.

September | The Utah Trucking Association’s sitting president was seen in daredevil form jumping a Class 8 Freightliner, and retrofit/upgrade grants from the California Air Resources Board were coming too little, too late for most owner-operators. Reports surfaced on the dog-eat-dog climate of enforcement of CARB’s regs when a spokesman revealed just who the Board’s biggest tipsters are — drivers and truck owners.

Driver Toby Bogard’s 1,000,000-lb. weight-loss challenge, a competition among drivers meant to highlight and spur on good health in the industry, got under way to great fanfare. Owner-operator Gary Shade’s “Hotshot Chronicles” book on expediting saw release — it’s a great read, balancing business and lifestyle topics well. 

Early in the month, during a meeting among Overdrive editors in Tuscaloosa, Ala., someone or other passed me their phone, which showed the “Truckers to Shut Down America” Facebook page with tens of thousands of “likes” and a bevy of posts that trafficked generally in anti-government rhetoric, conspiracy theories and not-so-theories. I’d already written administrators of the page after noticing its clear virality (the result in part of commentator Glenn Beck’s picking up on the page and mentioning it during one of his Blaze broadcasts) and having heard calls from truckers near and far for a wide industry shutdown for years. No administrator ever wrote me back, but I managed to locate them via a radio show on the online Guerilla Media Network that had hung its hat on the page’s cause.  

I then reported on details emerging from the page when it was shut down and sprung up under a different name, “Truckers Ride for the Constitution,” and with an associated website, ridefortheconstitution.org, that no longer exists. (The Facebook page and its 200,000-plus followers after the Ride became a not-very-active promotional organ for the GMN.) Ride for the Constitution organizers were trying to harness whatever support they may have had among actual truckers at that point, which they ultimately continued by injecting a trucking-specific list of grievances into the effort.

From the get-go, though, it was clear that “the Ride,” the common shorthand that developed, did not have trucking issues at its heart.

To this day, one of the truckers involved in the event from early on, driver Earl Conlon, insists it was not about trucking but bedrock constitutional issues. As Conlon commented under this story just last week, “The trucker convoy was about standing up for our Constitution! A statement to government to obey the constitution. If government obeyed the Constitution they would not be getting away with the laws, regulations, etc that they are putting in place.”