61-Year-Old Mailman Lands Gyrocopter on Capital Lawn to Bring Attention to Political Corruption
April 15th, 2015This incident is only hours old and media are already starting the character assassination routine on Doug Hughes. I haven’t looked into the message yet in detail, but here’s the Civilist Papers website in case you want to look at it without the media spin treatment:
Via: Tampa Bay Times:
Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Ruskin, told his friends he was going to do it. He was going to fly a gyrocopter through protected airspace and put it down on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, then try to deliver 535 letters of protest to 535 members of Congress.
The stunt seemed so outlandish that not even his closest friend thought he would pull it off.
“My biggest fear was he was going to get killed,” said Mike Shanahan, 65, of Apollo Beach, who works with Hughes for the Postal Service.
After 21/2 years of planning, Hughes came hovering low over the buildings of northeast D.C. about 1:20 p.m., like a distant bird. He rounded the Washington Monument a few minutes later, flew straight up the expanse of the National Mall and brought his small craft down right in front of the Capitol, where he was quickly surrounded by police and surrendered without incident.
The flight stunned police, Secret Service and witnesses. Authorities briefly shut down the Capitol as a security measure. The incident brought out dozens of reporters and cameras from national media outlets — exactly what Hughes had hoped for. Hughes, who sees himself as a sort of showman patriot, a mix of Paul Revere and P.T. Barnum, wanted to do something so big and brazen that it would hijack the news cycle and turn America’s attention toward his pet issue: campaign finance reform.
“No sane person would do what I’m doing,” Hughes told the Tampa Bay Times in the weeks before he took flight. He was doing it, he said, because the United States is “heading full-throttle toward a breakdown.”
“There’s no question that we need government, but we don’t have to accept that it’s a corrupt government that sells out to the highest bidder,” Hughes said.
