The Convoy is Lousy With Scams — and it’s Pushing the Truckers Further Down the Rabbit Hole
When I found out about the Freedom Convoy Kickoff was in Adelanto California, I wilted — there was no way my ancient car was going to make it two hours out and back from LA without a tuneup and some backordered foreign parts. People in LA joke that that the difference between rich and poor is choosing to drive an old car and having no choice in the matter. I bought an old convertible in better days, but through a freelance career and a pandemic I’ve lost the option to trade her in. She’s paid off and I’m stuck with her for now, I’d have to watch the trucks from the sidelines and that meant taking a dive into the BoomerWeb.
To be an active Convoy cheerleader, I set about creating a fake persona. I’ve filmed at plenty of anti-mask/pro-Trump events, but recently I’m paranoid that I’ve been identified as an Antifa Agitator, partially (mostly) through my own lack of subtlety and bad improv skills. For the record, I’m not a radical leftist terrorist, I’m just a person who likes to document events like this, on both sides. At any rate, best to cultivate a proxy if I do end up at the convoy in person. I create my alter-ego: a spunky mom who voted for Trump twice. She has a moderate home, two kids, bad knees, law enforcement family, spotty church attendance, and a photography hobby. I gave her a Facebook page, a Parler account, a GMail, a fake Instagram populated with my best wedding photos and family portraits. Wholesome stuff. My hand did hover over the Purchase button for business cards, but I stopped there.
After finding the Facebook pages for the Convoy which seemed the most active, I was given rigorous vetting to gain access. (“Do you think the government can force its citizens to take experimental drugs to fight the fake pandemic? Yes/No”) I started skimming the posts and comments, which were full of well wishes to the truckers, flag emojis, pictures of kids, prayers. Nice sentiments from well-meaning people. There are also plenty of posts looking for donations. In fact, every few posts seem to be asking for money, a cross-country journey is expensive after all. With the threat of a military invasion in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, the price of gas has shot up. Lots of people are posting venmo and cashapp accounts. A few have setup GoFundMe sites, there’s absolutely no way to verify who is actually a trucker and who is sitting in an internet cafe on the other side of the world. A reverse image search of one reveals the image is from a stock site. Another, about helping a family whose house was robbed, uses a photo from a news story several years old. I move on.
Pinned to the top of the page is the official site for the Convoy https://thepeoplesconvoy.org/ which sports a large Donate Now button on its front page, this takes you to the American Foundation for Civil Liberties & Freedom. Here you can donate or if you’re feeling adventurous, you can purchase a ride with a convoy trucker for a day, a modest $5000 dollar expense. If that’s a bit too pedestrian for you, you can bid on a seat on the Operation Headquarter Bus for $250,000. A quarter of a million dollars. Fucking bonkers.
Another site being promoted is the American Truckers Freedom Fund where you can donate cash or bitcoin. Donations to the AFCLF are at least to a genuine 501c3 where your donation is tax-deductible and somewhat transparent. I poke around a bit and end up on the ATTF’s parent site — The Great American Patriot Project, a conservative PAC. You’re not donating to truckers, you’re donating to a PAC.
The Great American Patriot Project, with an address in Harrisonburg Virginia, is dedicated to finding “candidates and causes that align with the American First Movement” including candidates who are veterans. Searching the address returns two businesses: a local internet service provider and a cement factory. The ISP could just be used by the PAC and unrelated, but the cement factory is a veteran-run business that took in over $700,000 in PPP Loans from the SBA. If the PAC is run through there, that’s some mixed anti-government messaging. The company has taken in three quarters of a million tax-payer dollars in a time when most Americans will experience a yearly increase in taxes, thanks to Trump’s tax reformation. If the PAC and the cement company are indeed one in the same, they have the balls to ask the same over-taxed people for donations and then blame their depleted funds on health measures.
Also sprinkled throughout the Convoy facebook is a link to view a live stream of the Convoy meetup. I click on it, still unhappy that I can’t be there in person. That takes me to a registration page to set up an account with a free trial (pro tip: keep a pre-paid credit card with $10 on it to sign up for stuff like this so you don’t get recurring charges.) Once in, I’m taken to the Christian film streaming site, PureFlix. There is no live streaming of anything. Customer service tells me they have no control over how they are promoted but they do not have a live stream of the convoy. Looking up PureFlix on the Better Business Bureau’s site it’s complaint after complaint that people can’t close their accounts and end the monthly fees. Very Christian stuff.
Within a few days one facebook page will be overrun with the hacked admin’s account posting endless “Buy official convoy t-shirts” posts with links. Commenters get angrier and angrier, the page is completely hijacked. According to them these are Antifa trolls, and companies like Facebook let it happen on purpose but hide the real truth, silencing patriot voices.
Once I start commenting in the pages the Golden Ticket is presented to me — an invite to the Convoy Zello Channel. Zello is a walkie-talkie app you can download on your phone. This is one of the main ways the Convoy is communicating. You’re invited to channels with several dozen to several hundred people and it’s a party line. The conversation is continuous and, best of all, the conversations are archived. As long as the app is on you have a record of the day’s conversations you can play back. Once invited, you are vetted by admins and deemed “Trusted.”
I listen, I give the truckers a little friendly jabbing, they tease me about living in California, I‘m in. Working around my apartment doing dishes, sorting laundry, I listen. Sometimes for hours. I’d chime in once in awhile striking up a friendship with a few. The first night, a lot of the conversation was between five individuals; two rowdy, East-coast truckers who were close friends, a third trucker with a thick Boston accent who was an acquaintance, a friendly older man who was an admin and organizer, and an older woman listening from Illinois asking questions.
The younger, rowdier trucker wanted to join the convoy but his truck was in disrepair. Rowdy needed a part for his hood but it was expensive and local shops couldn’t give him an exact replacement, he didn’t have the time or money. Everyone teased him a bit and he considered just driving it down without a hood. Between dirty jokes and hypothetical fixes, I could hear a squeaky door open and shut as he talked and boots stomp off snow on a mudroom floor. A clear memory of my own childhood, I could imagine his world.
I felt for Rowdy, this Convoy was meant something to him, it was patriotic. It was a chance to do something important and tell the government where to stick it. He wouldn’t be there because inflation ate up whatever was left over from a paycheck and backed-up supply chains meant that missing part wasn’t coming even if there was money. I don’t hate that he or any of these people are upset, it’s been a hard few years. I hate that con artists take their money with sleight of hand tricks, I hate that they paint that theft with red white and blue. I hate that they use patriotism to rob them and then tell them one person or one party is actually at fault. Greedy thieves use our flag to steal from our neighbors and then turn them against us.
I couldn’t go to Adelanto either because I also didn’t have time or parts to fix my own car, the pandemic was difficult and inflation hurts in LA too. We’re not living the same life, but we have some similar problems. How we ended up with different theories on the cause of those problems? We’ll be asking that question for years. They are sure that this is all Biden’s fault. If they can put enough pressure on him or better yet drag him out of the White House, inflation will end and gas prices will fall.
As the conversation continues, Boston reminds Rowdy that his financial woes will be over after the Great Reset and NESARA goes into affect. Illinois Gran chimes in, what is NESARA? For next 15 minutes I listen to midwest boomer get her brain absolutely melted in real time as Boston describes the financial reset that was about to happen but the Rothschilds stopped it by… doing 9/11 I guess? Rowdy piped in by tying in to the Convoy, “that’s what we’re trying to do with all this, wake people up. The Great Awakening, when that happens people are going to have lots of money in their accounts. Veterans, no more of them getting screwed, each veteran will make a million dollars a year. Cures for diseases — you know they only give us about half the cures that actually exist, when everyone wakes up there’s no more disease.”
I’m crushed. These are the dreams of people who’ve been so fucked that believing there’s a quick way to a better world is the only option. They don’t know NESARA was born out of a pyramid scheme or that Rothschilds lore is built on the back of anti-semitism. There must be a handful of people keeping us from this utopia and OAN and Facebook told me who, if only we can take them down. We have to take them down.
Rowdy and I discuss Fall of Cabal, the epic QAnon doc for a bit and he asks me where I’m from. I lie and give a deep red county not far from LA. “No shit!! You’re near LA? Do you know Salty Cracker?” I do. He’s an online idiot that posts videos I’d describe as “Waters’ World but somehow more punchable.” My uncle loves him and so do all of the pilled Uber drivers I met in Montana. “I love that guy, do you ever SuperChat him?” I say no and ask him what that is, “Oh it’s where you watch him live and you pay money to talk directly to him, like you give him a few dollars and you get to talk right to him. I do it like every night.”
I take a deep breath and say goodnight. I can’t listen to one more person get separated from their money today.
The people in this convoy have been feeling pain frustration which have driven them to take action. Into this movement has stepped every kind of opportunist and grifter, sapping the last that some of these people have. Each setback and disappointment is the fault of Antifa, BLM, Biden or other dark actors, never the con artists in front of them. They’re converging in Maryland now and when all the miles and dollars don’t pay off, I worry about who will they will blame. — Los Angeles, CA Sunday March 6th 4:30am
