I got my COVID booster (my "Fauci Ouchy", as certain infantile public hand-jobbing Republican Congress critters referred to it) on Wednesday at the pharmacy department of a local grocery store (which I will never get used to), and other than my arm being a little sore the next day, I remain alive and unzombified.
Which reminded me...
One occupational hazard of living inside the Right Wing Cinematic Universe is that, after a while, you start to believe the mob's hooting is power. That if enough people cheer loudly enough on Facebook, reality itself is obligated to bend the knee. That if Ben Shapiro tweets it, if Newsmax panels it, if fifty YouTube patriots thumbnail it in red letters next to a picture of a screaming eagle, then the thing has already happened. Reality's only remaining job is to catch up.
Which brings us to the Great October 1st Trucker Strike of 2026. Remember that? Of course you don't. Nobody does. It was supposed to be huge. 50,000 truckers? A 100,000 truckers? A million?
It was supposed to be something like the 1967 haulers strike:
7-Week Strike by Steel Haulers Spreads Disruption in Industry
Or, at the very least, the 1973 wildcat trucker strike protesting the OPEC oil crisis:
When Truckers Shut Down America to Protest Oil Prices—and Became Folk Heroes
The strike started when one driver, mad as hell about the OPEC oil crisis, turned off his engine and got on his CB radio.
You know, the nation's supply chains grinding to a halt. Empty shelves. Panic buying. And truckers in their MURRICA FIRST regalia being carried on the shoulders of a grateful nation. The usual End Times porn led by faux folk heroes that has become the stock-in-trade of the right-wing media ecosystem. Day after day, the algorithm fed its addicts a steady diet of warnings and promises. This was going to show them. This was going to bring the country to its knees and prove who really keeps America running.
And then October 1 arrived.
And nothing happened.
Compare that to the People's Convoy of 2022. It was ridiculous, built on right-wing hysteria and nonsense. It was a rolling cosplay convention for people who desperately wanted to imagine themselves as the French Resistance while being interviewed by Fox News from the cab of a Peterbilt. But credit where it's due: they did understand politics as theater. They understood that television needs pictures, and that MAGA outrage always needs a slogan and a scapegoat.
So they identified their villain, planned their route, and stuck to their script. They had Republican politicians embracing them and a conservative media machine eager to turn every traffic jam into the Second Coming of Lexington and Concord.
Most importantly, they knew who they were supposedly fighting. They were against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, government overreach, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, George Soros, the World Economic Forum, and whatever else was on the grievance menu that week. The list was incoherent, but it was a list -- it told the cameras where to point, and the audience who to boo.
But the October strike promoters couldn't answer one very simple question: Who exactly are you striking against?
Seriously. Who?
The President? Congress? Freight brokers? Oil companies? OPEC? Physics? Inflation? The invisible hand of the market that conservatives used to dearly, dearly love? A strike is a show of numerical strength designed to create leverage. To exert pressure on somebody or some institution capable of granting concessions. But the rationale for this stupid idea always dissolved into a cloud of hashtags and vibes, and YouTube monologues. The "movement" turned out to be nothing more than a tantrum being thrown by people who believed that if they yelled loud enough about how mad they were, somewhere, someone would do something.
Because in this case, the only viable villain behind the trucker's suffering was...the Dear Leader. And if the villain is the Dear Leader, and everyone knows it, but no one dares say it, well, that seems...problematic.
The real lesson isn't about trucking. It's about the difference between attention and power. Modern conservatism has become almost entirely dependent on fear-mongering as a substitute for organizing. A movement that once boasted about discipline and institutions now runs on engagement metrics, where every crisis is marketed like a summer blockbuster.
The 2022 convoy attracted attention because it was designed to attract attention. It was a media event disguised as a political movement. The October 2026 strike failed to even clear that very low bar. Its organizers appeared to believe that if enough influencers posted enough videos predicting a shutdown, the shutdown would simply materialize on schedule.
But what they got was a wet fart in a kiddie pool. Freight continued rolling along. Stores remained open. And somewhere in the vast digital landfill of abandoned right-wing prophecies, beside the red wave that never came, the indictments that never came, the arrests that never came, and the secret evidence that never appeared, now rests the Great October 1st Trucker Strike of 2026.
And now a fun fact for any science fiction fans who made it this far.
Robert Heinlein's classic short story "The Roads Must Roll" was first published in June of 1940 and is frequently cited as identifying the major elements of possible future labor disruptions based on logistics and the nation's critical transportation infrastructure. Specifically, how an entire economy that comes to depend on, in Heinlein's story, a highly interconnected network of massive, 100-mph moving sidewalks means that system becomes extremely vulnerable to disruption, and its strategic workers come to have enormous leverage.
So, for your entertainment, I bring you the 1950 "Dimension X" radio adaptation of "The Roads Must Roll". Enjoy.
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