Cry, the Beloved Truckers

God’s Army has started out looking a bit more like a lost platoon. The “Take Our Border Back” (TOBB) group, which has been claiming 750,000 truckers would make their way to near Eagle Pass, left Norfolk, Virginia on Monday with a few dozen cars and trucks, launching on their profound mission from the outlet malls. The organizers insist their numbers will grow as the convoy travels from Virginia to Jacksonville, Florida, with stops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and then Dripping Springs, Texas. Their online itinerary said there was to be a rally in Drippin’ at the HEB grocery story but the famed grocer said it had “no truck” with truckers or anyone else using their busy parking lot for events.

What the TOBB folks hope to accomplish is a bit vague. They clearly want to support the governor of Texas, who is defying federal law by ignoring a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Beyond that, it’s hard to know. The idea for the convoy appears to have originated from the mind of Pete, “Doc,” Chambers, a former military physician and a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Army, who waged a legal battle against mandated vaccines by Department of Defense. The Doc is fond of quoting scripture and explaining how the convoy will serve God by providing what can only amount to moral support because there is nothing legal for them to accomplish, unless they are bringing food and clothing in their trucks for the immigrants, who are “the least of these” the Bible suggests Christians care for, if you are into that sort of thing, which TOBBers appear to be, in word, if not act.

Doc Chambers now says he is the LTC (commanding) of a group he calls “Remnant A,” which is also from the Bible and a prominent reference in the Book of Revelation. The “remnants” remain faithful to God during tribulation and judgment. The letter “A” presumably refers to the unit that Chambers commands. In Revelation, though, remnants continue to keep God’s covenant when others lapse. The entire concept appears to suggest there are certain believers whose faithfulness to the almighty cannot be shaken and their devotion is unfaltering despite external pressures and challenges. (Hey, you think it’s easy organizing 750,000 truckers?) Even Job would be impressed.

Doc Pete sees dark things, very dark things afoot in America. In his next video below, he is swinging a rope and talking about “Nuremberg 2.0,” and he promises to round up those criminals with “this right here,” and then he raises his rope, a real “turn the other cheek” moment. I assume he means we are going to have a trial of some sort. Doc talks of “evil forces” and growing crops faster and explains that we need “food, not insects,” which isn’t exactly true because we couldn’t grow food very well without insects. It’s hard to know what to make of the commanding officer of Remnant A with his ramblings about markets collapsing and not buying anything that has been touched by the hand of corporate masters. (Dood, have you seen the Dow lately?) Kind of begs the question of what those trucks are supposed to run on since there isn’t anything much more corporate than fossil fuels.

The chance of there being 750,000 trucks rolling into Texas is about as great as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump reading the immigration bill coming over from the Senate and proclaiming, “Oh my God! This is it! We have a compromise bill that is the strongest ever passed and will deal with the problem of immigration at the border,” (not “boarder” as it tends to get spelled by the foot soldiers of God’s Army). Republicans do not want the border issue solved. They want more performative bullshit like truck convoys to bring attention to the problem and to increase tensions between a law-breaking governor of Texas and the federal government in Washington. The Speaker has the unrealistic idea that there should not even be one person crossing into the U.S. on a daily basis and he will not settle for anything less. Trump’s bootlickers can’t achieve that even if they were to build a Berlin Wall from San Ysidro, California to Brownsville, Texas, put armed guards in towers, and shoot at anyone who approaches. History has proved not even that stops desperate people.

The Senate immigration bill, which is the product of endless negotiations between the two political parties, is, in fact, the most effective to have ever been articulated. Republicans, who have been bitching about the border and immigration since before Biden took the oath of office, don’t care. Hell, in Oklahoma, just to make the case that the GOP no longer wants to solve any problem, the state’s Republican Party censured its Senator James Lankford for working with the Democrats on the issue. An Oklahoma State Senator, some jack-leg named Dusty Deevers, accused Lankford of “playing fast and loose with Democrats on our border policy.” What border policy? The Republicans don’t have one. They’ve proposed nothing for decades. But Lankford was censured by resolution of his own state’s Republican Party and ordered to “cease and desist jeopardizing the security and liberty of Americans.”

Lankford didn’t back down after all the hours he has put into the legislation over the past several months. Although details have been coming out slowly, his description of what has been cobbled together by Senators from both parties indicates there is a meaningful law available to begin addressing the humanitarian crisis on the Mexican border.

"It increases a number of Border Patrol agents and it increases asylum officers,” Lankford said. “It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals. It ends catch-and-release. It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so that people can get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard and then get returned back to their home country.”

My hope is that Democrats will use the Trump party’s refusal to fix the border as a 2 by 4 plank to whack the GOP over the head with until Election Day. This is a perfect opportunity for them to flip the script and talk about how Speaker Johnson and Trump stood in the way and refused to fix the border when given the chance. The President can campaign on that tale of intransigence and move voters who believe immigration and the border are the biggest problems facing the nation. How can the far right spend years whining about something and with a straight face ignore a chance to make a true difference? Stupid question, I guess.

Maybe God’s Army of truckers will be of great assistance, but the evidence coming in doesn’t look good. Vice News is reporting that a conspiracy theory has taken over on Telegram channels that is impeding the convoy’s success. The parade of eighteen wheelers to Eagle Pass is supposedly falling flat because critics believe it may be some kind of psy-op or false flag scheme to get the white hats arrested and cause things to blow up. The belief is that the federal government has infiltrated the convoy, or Antifa is involved, or somebody or something, and participants are in danger of being arrested on phony charges. Sounds pretty insidious and unbelievable but about a quarter of all Americans are convinced the January 6th insurrection was a government operation that used Antifa to turn it into a riot.

Feel free to weep for our country.