Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin showed up Thursday at a rally in Dripping Springs, Texas, for the “Take Our Border Back” trucker convoy that’s en route to the U.S.-Mexico border, whose participants have dubbed themselves “God’s army.” NBC affiliate KXAN reports there were “mixed messages” among the speakers about the convoy’s goal—and Nugent and Palin didn’t help clear anything up in that department.
The former Alaska governor went on a classic Palin run, babbling about “every violation of our charters of liberty that’s going on right now. Article 1, Article 4, different clauses in our charters of liberty.” While there is no way to know exactly what Palin was referring to, it’s important to note that the New York Charter of Liberties, written in 1683, isn’t a part of our Constitution: It’s a predecessor document with some similarities. But wow—does she live in Alaska or 17th-century England?
After describing Nugent as “ridiculously patriotic,” Palin ceded the stage to the racist rocker, who played a loud note on his guitar and then launched into Second Amendment schtick, saying America’s problems can be blamed on “compromise bullshit” and letting “the snakes take over our country.”
He cursed a lot as well, and called President Joe Biden a “devil scum snake.”
As bizarre insurrectionist apologist and children’s book author Jack Posobiec said recently on a stage somewhere, “We don’t have Taylor Swift on our side, but you know who we have? We have Kid Rock. We have Ted Nugent. We have influencers. We have all these people—Jon Voight.”
Don’t forget Scott Baio, Kevin Sorbo—and Pat Sajak! I guess that’s just as good as having Taylor Swift on your side.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is threatening a civil war and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling against his overreach at the border, is happy to stoke this manufactured right-wing circus. It beats having to justify adding more razor wire across the Rio Grande after the recent tragic drownings of two migrant children and their mother.
Remember the manufactured “migrant caravan” border crisis in 2018? This new “trucker convoy” is a sort of variation on the theme. Having promised to enlist 700,000 trucks to create a vehicular wall on the border, the hype machine has so far raised around $140,000 and gathered about 50 trucks. That’s 50, as in five-zero.
And that number is unlikely to grow by very much. One participant claims that she quickly became disillusioned by the trucker caravan when she realized that it was made up of mostly “grifting, motherf---ing live-streamers.” Another woman in a mobility scooter says she followed the convoy for as long as she could but needed to get her “truck fixed.” She was looking for keyboard warriors to come and join the convoy—the one she can’t be at, on account of her truck not being fixed and all.
On the positive side, it looks like she was able to provide other entertainment after Nugent and Palin left.
The underwhelming trucker convoy plans to head to the border on Feb. 3 to do whatever it is they think they’re doing.
It is primary season, and Donald Trump seems pretty low energy these days. Kerry and Markos talk about the chances of Trump stumbling through the election season and the need to press our advantage and make gains in the House and Senate. Meanwhile, the right-wing media world is losing its collective minds about Taylor Swift registering younger Americans to vote!
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