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Oh great, the boogaloo chuds are quoting Marvin Heemeyer, the Colorado killdozer guy. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/steven-carrillo-air-force-boogaloo.html
Whether or not you’re familiar with Heemeyer, there is an absolutely chilling documentary about him that I highly recommend, called TREAD. You can currently get it through Alamo on Demand: https://ondemand.drafthouse.com/film/tread/
Having listened to portions of the Heemeyer terrorist manifesto in that documentary, I get why it appeals to other white guys angry that the universe isn’t giving them all the nice things they feel they deserve. The absolute entitlement.
And that scares the bejeeeus out of me.
And that scares the bejeeeus out of me.
Actually, there's something else I want to say about Heemeyer and his killdozer that's been on my mind all day. Kind of the intersection between this and the current conversation about policing.
Heemeyer was not stopped by the police. He built his dozer's armor to be pretty impermeable to anything Granby had (they're not a big town) and everything they tried--and they tried hard, I'm not dissing them for this--failed.
What stopped Heemeyer from killing anyone but himself ended up being a combination of dumb luck and the limitations he'd accidentally built into his own machine (e.g. he couldn't shoot a bunch of propane tanks because at the angle he was at, the dozer's ripper was in the way).
What ultimately stopped his rampage was a combination of mechanical failure of his machine, and then one of his treads getting stuck in a store basement he accidentally drove into.
All the guns and shotguns and rifles and flash bangs they had didn't do jack. Maybe the police could have stopped him before if they'd been as over armed as the LAPD. So what, every town needs to have a tank on call? That's ridiculous and dangerous.
What struck me, from the documentary and the reading I did after, was the feeling this man didn't have any real friends. Like how did no one notice that he sold everything, was living in his shop, and only bathed like once every four days because he was making a giant killdozer.
Maybe if there'd been more of a social welfare culture, someone would have noticed. Maybe if toxic masculinity didn't stop men from forming tight friendships, someone would have noticed.
Mostly I'm just saying if the options are put all the resources into buying a tank, just in case, or put the resources into building a better society so problems get noticed and addressed before they turn into armored monstrosities, I know which I'd choose.
