Berkeley Reduces Traffic Noise 90% With ‘Honk If You Like Trump’ Billboards

Residents have responded enthusiastically.

Berkeley, February 23 – A northern California city has found an ingenious way to reduce car horn noise by appealing to residents’ political leanings.

In a series of billboard ads located in high-traffic areas of Berkeley, the municipality’s Traffic Commission invites supporters of President Donald Trump to demonstrate their support for the chief executive by sounding their car horns. One week into the ad campaign, horn noise – the principle source of noise pollution in the city – has reached only one-tenth of its previous level, according to the Commission and police data.

Commission members attribute the achievement to a twofold phenomenon. “First of all, no one in this town wants to be thought of as coming out in favor of that fascist,” explained Libby Ruhl, the Commission’s deputy chair. “Everyone I know, and everyone they know, would rather lick a dog pile than have anyone think they harbor even one non-progressive idea. The prospect of being considered similar to Trump in any way is so horrific to our sensibilities that I haven’t heard a car horn the whole time. Anecdotally, I can tell you about some Berkeley residents who’ve disconnected their car horns entirely.”

“But there’s another level on which this phenomenon works,” she continued. “I’m not so foolish as to think there isn’t anybody around who has sympathies for the Right. But the great thing about this new campaign is that it deters those people from honking, as well. Once our people demonstrated their willingness to riot and commit violence against anyone who appears to disagree with our worldview, back when that Yiannopoulos fellow tried to speak, no one who has any conservative leanings is willing to risk that treatment by letting on that’s what they think. So we’ve covered basically everybody with this campaign.”

The Berkeley City Council had to approve the measure, given that the Commission is not authorized to spend public funds on the project, but the vote was far from unanimous. “I opposed it,” stated Councilwoman Rosa Luxemburg. “Authorizing public expenditures – from money belonging to The People – that will end up enriching some capitalist who built the billboards is not an ethical move. The right thing to do would have been declaring the billboards city government property, and only then putting up the ads.”

Residents have responded enthusiastically. “It’s underhanded and clever,” gushed an appreciative Ali Kadr, a student active in Students for Justice in Palestine. “We’ll show those Republican Zionist fascists. They’re all about suppression of free expression, but we’ll defy them.”

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