The success of the truckers for freedom convoy in Canada has stunned the establishment – not just in Canada, but worldwide, who thought that through their well-worn “paint these people as extremist” tactics, they could marginalise and slur the movement out of existence.
The establishment’s marginalisation campaign, using a concerted smear offensive across all communication platforms, may have backfired to spectacular effect.
It started with the Canadian PM Trudeau, an expert in newspeak, making an announcement where he used the usual, familiar, condemnation tactics. Throwing the entire, now familiar arsenal of slurs at the truckers, he claimed without basis that they were extremists, fascists, and, well, all the rest of it.
Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 1, 2022
So you got that? “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia” says Mr. Trudeau. And you should believe him… why? What evidence has he provided, other than that they oppose his policies in relation to vaccine passports? Does that make somebody a homophobe, or a transphobe? This kind of thing was always transparent nonsense, and this is a good example of the genre.
Of course it would be helpful to Trudeau if such accusations just happened to be confirmed within days with photographic evidence, and so, sure enough, on the steps of the most expensive hotel in Ottowa, where all the government ministers hang out for their expensive lunchtime martinis, the Nazis conveniently turned up.
The Chateau Laurier is Ottawa’s most expensive hotel. It’s also an establishment political hang-out — there are always cabinet ministers and lobbyists in the hotel bar. There is simply zero chance that a trucker would stay there. This is so obviously a false flag hoax. https://t.co/vGuSoUbVek
— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) January 30, 2022
How convenient.
The Canadian parliament, at Trudeau’s beck and call, duly lined up to denounce the truckers and their supporters without ever having met or talked to them. The leader of the opposition, the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh, didn’t fail in his hyperbole. He was quick to join the chorus to see if he could outdo Trudeau in his denunciation.
The truth of the matter is far more troubling, at least for those in power.
The truckers are ordinary working class people. They are people who have to get up, leave their houses and do their work in the physical world, and they are protesting because they are not being allowed to do that.
Canadian Vlogging lawyer, Viva Frei, took a walk around the protest and the counter protest and tried to engage the counter protestors to see if they could express why they opposed the truckers.
Those conversations were quite revealing. Number one: that they (the counter protestors) buy into the media narrative that these protestors are – to use a tactic that worked very well in 2020 – all insurrectionists. That they are anti-democracy; that they are far-right; and that they might even topple democracy if they are not stopped.
It might be assumed that they think that stuff gets on the shelves in the supermarkets by magic, and that the goods they order on amazon just arrives on their doorstep without anybody actually putting it on a truck and delivering it. In this insulated world of the past two years, where people have less and less contact with the real world, the logistics and the reality of what happens in the physical world seems to be escaping lap-top people more and more.
This level of disconnect is almost feudal. Visitors to old landlord demenses in the Irish countryside can witness the fruits of this mentality, where sunken roads and delivery tunnels were designed to keep the servants out of view of the “better people.” The truckers are now in the same position as these “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and the right-thinking people need to justify their bigotry against them by accusing them of other forms of wrong-think. “Unacceptable views” as Trudeau calls it.
As Frei walked the streets and asked them, you could see their anti-trucker arguments were full of holes. They didn’t make any sense.
He asked them should the truckers be allowed continue to work without a vaccination? And this type of nimbyist upper middle class person who most likely works from home on a computer, and probably hasn’t dealt with real working people, in person, for the past two years, says of course they shouldn’t. They argue that they should be made to take the vaccine and as they start giving their argument its clear these don’t hold much water.
When he asked whether they would support the protests if they were Black Lives Matter, he received an absolute endorsement. “Yes” was the unanimous response, because they support BLM.
Meaning that they don’t really understand that the issue here is speech. It is the right to express yourself that is really in question. It’s that fundamental. It’s not a matter of sanctioned protest (usually astroturfed protest movements by the way), what is at stake is fundamentally about the freedom to think.
So again these people who are insulated from the world seem completely ignorant of the world. Their arguments show very little evidence of logical inferential thinking.
Frei asked “these are risks that the truckers are taking themselves, can they not take the risks on their own health”.
These neo-liberals argue that they have to pay for these selfish risktakers “because the unvaccinated people will end up in hospital in larger numbers.
Leave aside the fact that they are completely wrong in this oft repeated falsehood, when someone’s entire moral argument starts getting into “this costs so much” you know that they are only speaking to justify their own prejudice.
Frei asked if the public health service should refuse to pay for the care of anyone whose health crisis is a cause of their own decisions. That argument evaporated in cognitive dissonance quicker than their breath condensed in the sub-zero air.
If an obese person goes to hospital suffering with a heart condition, should we treat them? Is this a yes or a no answer? Should we make them go on a diet and get fit? Should smokers should be shown the door when they presented with lung cancer, etc? Nobody replied “yes absolutely” to any of these questions.
Nimby arguments were out in force. They claimed they were worried about the noise, that they couldn’t sleep, but the protest was not in residential areas, it was in downtown Ottowa and in strips of motorway outside the town. It appeared that noise was not a problem when they liked an earlier protest (BLM again), but they don’t like This Protest, so the noise is unbearable all of a sudden.
This is also the case with Mr Trudeau who signalled that right thinking people support establishment approved protest. He was at pains to point out that he supported BLM protests, and never condemned their penchant for burning down Wendy’s.
The scurrilous attempt to paint the truckers as racist doesn’t hold up on even the slightest investigation, because right in the middle of the truckers are many examples of First Nations people and what these leftist condescendingly call “people of colour”. An Iranian spoke about the totalitarian anti-speech regimes of Iran, and hoped not to re-live that in his new home in Canada.
Salman Sima on Twitter: “As a former political prisoner in Iran who took refuge in Canada I know what tyranny looks like. I am proud to stand with #TruckersForFreedom. “I lost my freedom once in my beloved Iran by the Mullahs, I don’t want to lose my freedom again here!”
As a former political prisoner in Iran who took refuge in Canada I know what tyranny looks like. I am proud to stand with #TruckersForFreedom.
"I lost my freedom once in my beloved Iran by the Mullahs, I don't want to lose my freedom again here!" pic.twitter.com/JFwc3QOUMx— Salman Sima (@SalmanSima) February 7, 2022
There are many more people who the Left sacralise as victim identities, who are out protesting with the truckers, and are not, surprise, surprise, being shunned or excluded.
The totally white yuppie counter-protestor, who beats their chest about unacceptable views, are the only ones who seem to see this racism. Strange that this Carribean gent never saw it amongst the truckers who he stood with.
Trudeau called this man a racist todaypic.twitter.com/BCwEqTF8Ay
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2022
What we are seeing is that all their arguments against this particular protest have been fed to them. When Frei asked them if they would go over and talk to the protesters, they declined vigourously. Frei pointed out that he had done that and that there had been no violence, and they had not been dumping in the area. They just replied that they had heard reports that the opposite was true.
In effect, they all admitted that they were under the spell of the media. These anti trucker protestors are, in fact, the victims of misinformation.