Trucker Protest Was All A Big Media Hoax, Never Meant To Be Real

Remember that big trucker protest threatening to lock up D.C. and arrest lawmakers you may have heard about on social sites like Facebook or Twitter?

While the trucker protest yarn appealed to an angry and frustrated populace, it turns out the people who suggested they “arrest” elected officials were really just pulling the media’s leg — and that the people who pushed the story even admit it would have been a terrible idea.

The trucker protest plays on a fondness for the blue collar culture of truck drivers and their emergence on occasion as every day heroes. But the event was never intended to occur, one man associated with the trucker protest hoax says, and the aim was to just agitate and stir the pot a little more.

According to Earl Conlon, snarling D.C. with a convoy of unscheduled semis is a jerky thing to do, and he admitted to the Washington Post:

“First of all, we know it would not be right to go to D.C. to lock down the city by the Belt loop… That wouldn’t be fair to the people there.”

Gawker had a less flattering take on Conlon’s trucker protest motivations, pointing out that not only did the cause get airplay, but he did as well:

“Earl Conlon, the Georgia man who said he and a squad of other truckers were coming to D.C. this weekend to clog the roads and try to arrest congresspeople, now says his wild-eyed threats were just a bunch of baseless lies. This kind of honesty from fringe wingnuts is rare, so savor it.”

Conlon denies any actual intent to sabotage workings in D.C. in Friday, and told WaPo:

“The comments to U.S. News were designed to do one thing and one thing only: stir the feather of the mainstream media… Nothing gets the attention of the mainstream media like some sort of disastrous threat. I knew it was going to ruffle some feathers.”

So while the trucker protest is now being framed as a hoax, we can only hope that the people on social media who read the story as a true one and an actual attempt to organize don’t show up and cause a traffic hassle for the working people of Washington — even if our lawmakers on the left and right are not among them.