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It wasn’t until last month that coal rolling turned into a flashpoint in America’s perennial culture wars, thanks to a Vocativ article unearthing the inevitable online subculture, or “pollution porn," as the author describes it, that has emerged around “coal rollin' diesel.” As it turns out, there are literally thousands of Instagrams, Tumblr posts, Facebook groups, and sweet truck memes dedicated to rolling coal, not to mention endless YouTube videos with names like “World’s Sickest Coal Rollers” and “Prius Repellent.”It’s that last one that has really lathered up progressive hysteria. With the help of this post from Slate’s David Weigel, coal rolling has morphed from gearhead gimmick and occasional road-rage weapon into some kind of far-right political protest, akin to bringing an assault weapon to Chipotle or camping out at Bundy Ranch. “The motivation,” Weigel wrote, “is roughly the same one that gets people buying guns and ammo after mass shootings.” Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall chimed in: “Not sure I've seen much that better captures the cultural moment than this,” he wrote in a blog post. The liberal blogosphere uniformly agreed, albeit more shrilly: Coal rolling, their argument goes, is just another right-wing fuck-you to Barack Obama, environmentalists, and the actual environment.
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