Three weeks after the so-called “People’s Convoy” landed in Washington, D.C., the group is calling it quits after accomplishing nothing except injuring residents and circling the Beltway.
Co-organizer Mike Landis announced Sunday night that the group would pack its things up in the coming days and drive back to California.
“So what I want to know is, what do you think about heading to California?” Landis asked, to the crowd’s delight. “Sounds like a great plan,” one convoy-goer yelled back.
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Landis further said that convoy-goers who remain posted up in Hagerstown, Maryland—who have experienced many freezing nights while camped out in the small town an hour and a half north of D.C. proper—will enjoy a southerly route back to California. “We’re gonna take a little more southern route, so it’s a little warmer than this,” he said.
He pledged to “come back to finish this job” in the metro area at some unspecified time, which seems highly unlikely as their crowd dwindles.
The announcement comes after lead organizer Brian Brase fled Hagerstown again over the weekend amid continued splintering within the group.
“I am not running away,” Brase said in an attempt to convince the crowd Saturday night.
Convoy organizers didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Sunday night.
Over the past three weeks, the convoy has struggled to gain traction with lawmakers in Washington. The group met only with Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and a handful of House Republicans while never brokering a meeting with a single Democratic lawmaker despite attempts to do so.
From claiming that average D.C. residents who flipped off truckers during their never-ending Beltway loops were agents of “antifa,” to being hilariously trolled by a single bicyclist and eventually getting a permit swatted down by the U.S. Park Service, the convoy kept stepping on rakes.
“Six antifa vehicles! Six antifa vehicles,” one trucker yelled over the CB radio on March 16 while the convoy circled the Beltway and annoyed commuters as its presence triggered Metro PD to close exit ramps. “Keep your heads on a swivel!” another trucker chimed in.
During its final week in Hagerstown, the group became increasingly desperate, with two of its medics leaving and factions emerging between those who believed the convoy was “corrupt[ed]” and those who thought it wasn’t. Morale was also dropping fast, and it appeared that the $2 million raised was drying up quickly, as organizers increasingly tightened the restrictions on how and when fuel reimbursements would be distributed to truckers.
Brase, the group’s de facto leader, had previously told The Daily Beast the convoy could go on “indefinitely.” “This is a process that we are hoping to do diplomatically,” Brase said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”
“We could go indefinitely, right now, if that’s what it takes,” he concluded. “We are not going away.”
