WhistlinDiesel, Direct-Action, and the Activist Youth

Redneck-tuber spurs youths and farmers to collective action, exemplifies effectiveness of direct-action tactics.

If you aren’t aware of the YouTube sensation known as WhistlinDiesel, you likely aren’t a member of the car, farming, gun, or destruction-for-destruction’s-sake communities of online entertainment. From rocket engines strapped to homebuilt merry-go-rounds, “durability testing” all manner of popular trucks and SUVs –finding a fatal flaw in the Cybertruck in the process – to wreaking havoc on boaters, fisherman, and marine law with an improvised Hellcat paddle-boat or a monster truck in the harbor, all find manner of nonsense finds a home on the channel. His astronomical growth to eight-and-a-quarter million followers on YouTube shows just how popular his brand is across the platform.

As an outsider looking in, I can understand how the energy, chaos, and sheer wastefulness of it all can come off a bit.. I don’t know.. gauche (to use an appropriately haughty phrase)?  Like how can one who doesn’t enjoy a little unnecessary horsepower, firing off a couple rounds or going bogging deep understand the appeal of this space?

On the other hand, there is just something America as hell about WhistlinDiesel and his corner of the web, the outrageous energy that flies when you unleash a few extra eagles on the strip with Cleetus McFarland & co., clean some points to start up a barn-find ’71 Plymouth with the Junkyard Digs crew, or blast a bit of tannerite on the range with DemolitionRanch. And while we won’t get into the finer details about what that may say about our society in this video, suffice it to say there is no denying the underlying trends of our national identity embodied in not only this corner of the internet, but in our long fixation with Ice Road Truckers, Mike Rowe, and all things Blue-Collar Man©; we all got a bit of that redneck in us.

There are many who see this spirit as racist, the proud self-ascription of Redneck a weird form of White pride, the reactionary right clinging to the only victimized identity they think they can claim without criticism. And I admit that the wholehearted effort to paint to poorest Whites as the “Good Ol’ Boys” of Dixie by Lost Cause spinsters and as backwards by the coal industry have been effective, but that’s the redneck we “know.” Reinforced through the likes of Cambridge Dictionary and the media mainstream. Terms like clodhopper, hick and, yokel; bigot, racist, and jingoist; clown, oaf, and bumpkin. All come to mind intuitively after long exposure to derogatory, degrading depictions in news coverage of poor Whites and exposés of the forgotten towns, hollers, and folks of (primarily) the Appalachas and Deep South.

It would be ridiculous to say that rednecks have no place in US history; the literal battles fought by these brave folks against tyrannical government at every level and gluttonous corporate conglomerates changed not only laws but charted the course for social movements across the world. Yet, most have no clue of the true heritage that underlies the classist derogative, the revolutionary spirit of American labor that has been our home-grown champion against the most powerful villains of our society for as long as workers have been commoditized.

One wouldn’t know that we just passed the centennial for the origin of the term; the anniversary of the 1921 March on Blair Mountain by an army of red kerchiefed miners after years of industry-wide violence, forced evictions, and degradation. Coal miners in West Virginia were facing real, immediate threat of violent retaliation following the gunning down of Chief of Police Sid Hatfield (yes, that Hatfield) on the McDowell County Courthouse steps. Miners responded to their own oppression, taking up arms to march on 3000 armed deputies, company police, and Baldwin-Felts mercenaries – now down one leader after the last attempt to arrest Hatfield – stationed across Logan County, WV.

Despite firebombing from planes along Spruce Fork Ridge – a favored tactic of state-sanctioned terror effective in massacring the Black community of Greenwood, OK just three months prior and which would be used against the MOVE Black Liberation headquarters by Philadelphia police some sixty-five years later – they held their own until President Warren Harding ordered four regiments into the Appalachian battlefield to restore order; they did so, the “Redneck Army” negotiating a ceasefire and withdrawing back to their encampments. Arrests and indictments followed, the vast majority of charges being dropped against United Mine Workers of America strikers and labor organizers developing increasingly non-violent means of protest.

Before them were the Knights of Labor who organized 200,000 strikers across the railroads of Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois to protest lack of pay and dangerous work conditions. Rednecks in all but name as they fought to survive robber barons who bought unskilled scabs and machine guns to smother the demands for dignity from their workers.

And the same goes for farm workers, Americans organizing and striking against violent corporations and their paid-off sheriffs, chiefs of police, and legislators in the 1960s and ‘70s; unions like the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the contemporary United Farm Workers Union), the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, and United Auto Workers who joined together to challenge first the Delano grape growers, and then the unscrupulous, post-Hoffa Teamster’s Union bosses who used lawsuits, guns, and (again) bombs to crush the NFWA’s efforts to organize field laborers and their families.

It makes sense that the core of Redneck identity today centers around the lives of the truck driver, welder, miner, mechanic, fisherman, and farmer; that those same workers who have been forced time and time again to strike against sociopathic CEOs and corporations just to get paid money instead of company scrip, to educate their children instead of sending them to work or simply keep a roof over their heads, are some of the strongest community-aid groups in the nation to this day.

Following the Norwich City police impounding his tractor from school parking, 13-year-old Braedon Baker took to social media, asking one of his favorite YouTubers, @WhistlinDiesel, to post about the farcical situation as a meme. While he was perhaps just looking for a laugh at the idea that his tractor-spreader combo risked the safety of his fellow students (as stated by the Norwich Schools Superintendent), the response of the public upon WhistlinDiesel’s post about the matter pushed things into motion beyond what anyone could have expected; the organizing capacity of the supposed redneck, the upstate farmers of the state, shown in prime example.

First, the influencer organized a call-in campaign, mobilizing his millions of followers across multiple platforms to swamp Norwich Police telephones with requests to return the tractor and apologize for the unnecessary confrontation with Baker. When he realized that wasn’t going to work, the mobilized base took a more direct approach, organizing the first Tractor Day at Braedon’s school the following Monday and offering $500 to any who drove a tractor there in protest of the reactionary tendencies of the city administration.

While we can have a discussion on paying for participation in activism – and we should at some point – this is also just sort of the norm for influencer-related events. These individuals have vast war chests which, when desired, can be aimed at a social cause they care about just as well buying used police cars for the Summit Racing 2.4 Hours of LeMullets or a jet engine for a monster truck. And, we can’t just act like George Washington wasn’t bringing kegs to the voting booth to get votes, so who cares?

Something as seemingly meaningless as a tweet led to pushback against both the police and the school district, a group of people who would otherwise be viewed derogatorily as lowly rednecks, hillbillies, and farm bumpkins coming together overnight in a locally-grown, nationally championed effort. It created a frenzy of back-pedaling by police and school officials who, after lying or at least misleading about the legality of driving tractors on roads, pivoted to safety concerns, changed tact and instead compromised with the aggrieved Baker family and their supporters. The compromise was notable, the provision of on-campus tractor parking for students from the surrounding agricultural communities, the instatement of a Tractor Day in remembrance of the event, and the promise to develop a new agriculture lab in the local middle school.

That is what I wanted to talk about, the organizing and mobilization capabilities within communities of farmers and miners and mechanics and rail workers, the response influencers can generate when they authentically connect with the revolutionary core of American Labor. For that is what we saw here, an organic effort by a few people to right an injustice which, while insignificant in almost all ways to the general American public, was representative of the unnecessary use of force by those in authority.

When Braedon drove the tractor, manure spreader affixed for grabbing lumber after school, he had a reasonable right and expectation to some sort of compromise on the part of the school regardless of whether he had asked permission or not. He was, afterall, using it for work, the chore a necessary part of the daily lives for much of the community. To instead simply utilize force, denying Baker of his property and hard-earned wages, the time and additional labor of his family, rather than coming to some other outcome, is as astonishing as it is indicative of the view these actors have of Baker and his people.

For I can see it no other way than as it is, the use of force over negotiation, an attempt to subjugate and silence rather than meet and understand. To those who had the distinct privilege of being Black or Brown or other in any way in school, who were blessed with the challenge of administrators and teachers who saw you as little more than a potential problem based solely on where you came from or who your folk were, this is all too familiar.

The truth of the matter is that no matter where you come from or who you call your own, we are all the same when placed against the nigh-unassailable force that is Capitalism and all its maleficent demagogues. Whether Redneck or Brasero, foreman or mineworker, nurse or short-order cook, mechanic or construction worker, there is only one enemy that seeks to consume us all.

Demands which the protestors didn’t even have in the opening days were not only produced by the school, but agreed to freely in an effort to soothe the ruffled feathers of the local agricultural communities. A small, insignificant moment in history has built a new ag-center in a school; a family in the future, who has no idea about Baker and his Farmall, will benefit years in the future. I hope that the outcomes of this event are long-term in even more profound ways, that the community built around a little kerfuffle over a tractor turns it into an example for all of how, within mere days, direct-action can create real change for you and your neighbors.