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Every day is day of some great culture war battle, or anniversary of some great past battle.
And this day is no different.
This day is Tyrone Day. The Road King Day.
Tyrone always wanted to drive big car, but he couldn't, because he was born as poor Black man. This made Tyrone very very sad.
One day, when Tyrone was, as always, walking on foot while watching rich whites in luxury cars whizzing around, he had enough. Tyrone pulled his gun, carjacked Lamborghini from some white swine and went on joy ride.
The grand joy ride, the greatest ride in Tyrone's life. Tyrone revved up the car to the max, the pigs had no chance to catch him. Until Tyrone crashed the car and killed himself.
Everyone remembers Tyrone, everyone sees him as heroic freedom fighter against racism and oppression.
When every Black man becomes hero like Tyrone, the white pigs will pay for all their crimes and Black people will be finally free.
Yes. this uplifting story really happened. Even in the case it hadn't happened exactly as described here, it is real and will continue to inspire all of us.
Rest in power, Tyrone.
In case other people were unfamiliar with the actual story, the link is to a tweet about Richard Russell, a white guy who worked as a ground service agent at an airport. In 2018 he stole an airplane and flew around in it for a while before eventually fatally crashing.
Supposedly people online called him the hashtag-SkyKing at the time, both because he displayed a surprising level of proficiency with the aircraft and because he became some kind of right-wing/white-nationalist talking point.
The theft appears to have been nonviolent; Russell had access to airplanes as part of his job. So personally I'd compare this to something more like a valet taking a customer's car for a joyride than a carjacking.
The reason it became a talking point (more among memers I think, more than the online right generally and certainly not the white/ethnats) was that he did a barrel roll, and when ATC suggested he might be able to get a piloting job after landing the plane, Richard replied "Nah, I'm a white guy". The fact that he was interested in seeing whales and crashing the plane away from people to hurt also meant his actions didn't get tainted by public safety or terrorism discussions like GP's hypothetical Tyrone example would have. Instead, he came across more like a sad guy with a screw loose rather than a resentful loser, a normal-ish guy ground down by life (and to at least some extent DEI), and a member of the lost generation Compact Magazine wrote about in its description of a different industry.
I'll caveat that the ATC discussion there should be treated in the same way that someone trying to talk down a suicidal person would be: well-intended, but not necessarily honest. Post-Colgan Air, people are routinely excluded from commercial aviation and sometimes even package transport careers after flubbing a couple checkrides. And while some of that's unfounded, events like Pinnacle Airlines 3701 have increasingly pressured mainstream aviation companies and even test flight services away from cowboy pilots.
There's a steelman that getting genuinely into paid aviation pilot work is either for the rich or the lucky: without a scholarship or increasingly unavailable courier work, you're looking around 5k USD for your private pilot's license and 100k USD to get to your ATP, at the low end, and the ATP doesn't guarantee even competent pilots will get an aviation career at all. If HR is looking for something separate from capability, that gets to some dark places quick.
But it doesn't help this guy.
Any kind of paid aviation work has to be a certain degree of lucky as they will screen out people who can't see and such, but for folks with good eyesight and general aptitude every single branch of the US military (except for maybe Space Force?) will pay you to get good at flying, and then you can take those skills into the private world with (hopefully) a solid track record (although based on what I've heard that in recent years the prime airlines may be trying to hire fewer military pilots, so it might be less of an EZ career path now than in the past.)
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I remember a similar reaction to the "Sky King" 20 years ago to the Killdozer guy, though, who caused quite a bit of damage.
To corrupt politicians' property. It's hard to be mad at that. It's like when lefties were vandalizing, and celebrating the vandalization of random Teslas, but if the cars were the personal property of Elon Musk.
Or so goes the story.
It's been a while since I saw the story, but at worst all you can say it was people he had some sort of a grudge against. Their properties were quite separated, and he targetted them specifically. It wasn't a random rampage.
I'll push back a bit further. My libertarian instincts predispose me toward any anti-Kelo-style actions, but there's a reason he's the unstated and undesired punchline for this piece. He went after the buildings of people he had a grudge after, but his grudges involved every dispute he'd ever had on topics ranging from enemies of his defunct newsletter to the widow of a mayor he'd fought with to people who'd just approved construction of a business he didn't like. Even for property rights perspectives, he's a shaky exemplar: one day willing to sell his entire business and the next citing a lack of assistance on a utilities line as a deep violation.
The revisionist take has its own faults -- there's a big effort to portray his firearms collection and attempt to hit propane tanks as murderous rage, and neither really holds up to serious examination -- but the pop history portrays him as a lot less schizophrenic than the deeper discussion.
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Fair enough. I'm just wary of framing the victims of vandalism as uniquely deserving. That's just a story that's told and accepted too readily in many places.
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I’m fairly certain though that Black men who hijack luxury cars, to the extent that such a phenomenon exists, are usually violent criminals with a long record and do not believe that DEI policies are keeping them from having a career as car drivers. This doesn’t apply to Russell.
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