At noon today, September 15, on the Free Keene Youtube, you will get my full and complete thoughts on this subject in video form. You can watch it at noon, EST, here: https://youtu.be/i_jLNPALnTw
For those who missed the news, my car was vandalized by a hater or group of haters. I woke up Sunday morning to the car detailer I’d hired to detail the interior (as an aside, she accepts cryptocurrency!) having texted me, informing me that my tire was flat and needed to be checked. That’s weird, because I have tire pressure sensors on each tire, and they alert me when the pressure is low, but I figured I ran over a nail or something.
No, that wasn’t the case at all. I saw a large, badly-drawn dick painted on the side, knife marks in the canvas, and a flat tire. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered the puncture marks. My first reaction was laughter, but, as the reality dawned on me that someone had come onto my property and vandalized it, I became sad. A lot of my friends were angry; I wasn’t.
Then the rumors began that I did it myself. I get where people are coming from. False flags are everywhere. People are mailing themselves hate mail. There was the Smollett thing. Most people are full of shit, and they claim to be victims for a moment in the limelight. So I understand people’s skepticism. So here is the full 4.5 hours of when I arrived home and when the sun rose, making the vandalism clearly visible.
I had approximately 2 hours before I had to be at work. I began talking about it in our local Telegram groups, and Ian came out to photograph it. We also went through the video at 16x speed, but realized that we were going too fast to capture anything that would have happened. So, when I got home from work, I was joined by two friends (coincidentally both named Matt). As I hung up additional security cameras and fielded phone calls and interviews, they awesomely worked hard to remove the graffiti, and they were 100% successful.
After this, we reviewed the camera footage.
Nothing.
What you see is what we saw. I got home from work and sat in my car a while. There were a lot of urgent messages that I had to tend to. Keeping in mind this was Saturday night / Sunday morning, so this was immediately after the news of my nomination as the sheriff candidate went national, and then international, and I was at work through all of it, so I couldn’t process most of what was going on. I barely had an idea of what was going on, only that it was big.
Then I went inside. And that was it. Nothing else happens. I’m sure if someone time compresses the video, they’ll find the front passenger tire slowly going from “inflated” to “flat” over this 4 hour period, because the presence of multiple knife marks (most of which didn’t even pierce the outer layers of the tire, much less fully penetrate it) suggests that the person may have just barely punctured the wall. I don’t know. All I know is that the tire pressure sensor monitor was not beeping at me, and it didn’t drive strangely. Then I was home, and the next day it was flat.
It makes sense that I wouldn’t see damage on the passenger side when getting off work. Parked on the street, I approach my car and go to the driver’s side–as everyone who owns a car does. It doesn’t occur to me or anyone else to look at the passenger side unless the passenger side is exposed to them. Because I was parallel parked on the side of the street and approaching from the driver’s side, I didn’t see anything odd. And my tire pressure sensor monitor would have beeped like crazy–not to mention how badly the car would have driven–if the tire had been flat.
Whatever.
That’s the totality of what I know about it. A Saturday night, parked on the side of the street–it could have been literally anyone. At any rate, it didn’t happen here. However, on this same night, by sheer and evidently unrelated coincidence, I happened to have my “Fuck ’em both 20” sign and my “Elect Nobody” sign stolen from my yard. So I’ve put cameras on those, too. You don’t really know where the flaws in your security system are until you have to, and that happened with the signs. Then again, identifying someone stealing a sign out of my yard was not a major priority, but I did not know how hindered the night vision on my cameras was when I left on the porch light, or how it barely captured my Mitsubishi at all.
So the mystery of why they didn’t touch my other car is solved: my other car wasn’t there when this happened. This didn’t occur on my property. That’s good, but I’ve still beefed up the security.
People have asked why there is a GoFundMe for it. I totally understand that, too. So let me explain.
I do have insurance on the vehicles. However, claiming vandalism with my insurance company requires me to go to the police. I imagine the police are not very much disposed to assist me on anything right now, and that’s just a glaring flaw in the entire system. I’m also running a campaign about exactly how the police shouldn’t be contacted for minor things like this, so…
Even if I did claim this through insurance, without the need of a police report, this would have done nothing but cost me money, with deductibles and all that.
Then today I received the news from Wells Fargo that, after a year of me being a wonderful customer, they have frozen my accounts and are closing them. I’m not going to lie–the money that I had to cover something like this is in those frozen accounts, and I now cannot access them. Is this a coincidence, after international media covered my sheriff campaign? Who knows. Wells Fargo cannot be reached for comment.
Historically, my campaign has not accepted donations except in cryptocurrency and gold. That may have to change. I went to order t-shirts earlier today, before Wells Fargo contacted me, and discovered the card was declined. “That’s nonsense,” I thought, but I lacked the time to deal with it, as I was also on the phone doing an interview and about to take the punctured tire off my card. “I’ll evaluate it later.” It turns out that I didn’t need to, because as I was standing in the lobby of the tire place I went to (good on them for not asking me to wear a mask!), Wells Fargo called and unceremoniously told me that they were closing my account and my funds are inaccessible.
Well, well, well. If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.
Indeed.
I knew that there would be consequences from what I’m doing. There shouldn’t be property damage, closed bank accounts, stolen signs, and all this other BS because of it, but people sometimes find themselves unable to simply express their opinions. C’est la vie. I wish they would try it, though. It beats inflicting harm on others.