Fuck, I missed Killdozer day, so this will be slightly less impactful. Anways...
On this most sacred of days, the 20th anniversary of the Killdozer, I implore all of you to shit all over anyone who tries to ummm ackshually about Heemeyer's story. The majority of the spin on the story that claims Heemeyer was the cause of all of his own problems and that he spontaneously decided to self-sabotage until he went mad and decided to Killdoze his town largely comes from a single guy, Patrick Brower. Brower is not only someone who has made a career off the Killdozer story, but also one of the people Heemeyer was directly aggrieved with because, despite saying he was going to cover Heemeyer's story about his issues with a corrupt and abusive local government, he just conveniently never followed up on that story until it became the career-making Killdozer story much later, where he conveniently tweaked little details about the story to downplay the Grandy City Council's part in driving Heemeyer to "unreasonable action" in retalliation for their horrendous mistreatment of him over a couple acres of land.
Brower has reported a lot of contradictory information, while also neglecting or misrepresenting other information to make the narrative spicier. He turned the whole thing into a documentary, a movie, and a book and all of those things are slanted against Heemeyer so it looked like he was just an insane jackass who snapped for no good reason.
At the same time, with the Killdozer being kind of a meme and a "don't tread on me" quasi-libertarian/anarchist symbol, contrarians have come out to try and add more negative light on the story, painting Heemeyer as an unhinged asshole who was just attacking the city at random, and for no good reason, which simply isn't true. This recontextualizing of the event is done entirely in petty retaliation because they just don't like seeing their perceived enemies enjoying anything. So, they have to come up with additional spin on the narrative so they can say "There! Now you can't have any fun or talk about how local governments are full of petty tyrants!"
The Killdozer story is one that shows what happens when people in power feel like they are exempt from the consequences of their actions. When they believe they can simply bend and twist the law and the zoning codes and every little bit of pointless bureaucratic red tape to get whatever they want for themselves and their cronies at the expense of anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way. In almost all cases, these sorts of people go unpunished for their entire lives. In this one single case, someone was pushed too far and decided to take extreme, unreasonable action, and that's something to think about and remember.
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