Estimates of the numbers involved vary wildly but a caravan of trucks is headed to Canada’s capital this weekend in protest of various Covid related edicts the truckers feel are arbitrary, tyrannical, and ultimately injurious to both the financial and physical welfare of Canadians. Greeted by thousands as they make their way from both east and west towards Ottawa, significantly more than 10,000 trucks are expected to assemble there with perhaps over a million gathering in their support.
But strangely, as authoritarianism has become more or less the modus operandi of the “liberal” Left and personal freedom the focus of “conservatives,” our Prime Minister chose to denounce the caravan as the initiative of a “fringe minority,” the fringe in question, of course, being on the radical right. Several commentators took up the chase, accusing those who cheered the truckers along the way of being White Supremacists, racists and possibly even domestic terrorists! Apparently concerned it might be so, Go Fund Me, the platform through which Canadians had given over 6 million dollars to finance the protest, decided to withhold those funds until further notice.
The mainstream media, as several “conservative” commentators have pointed out, would love to see Ottawa explode into violence over the weekend, thereby granting it the right to denounce the event as the Canadian equivalent of Jan. 6. Of course should that violence be provoked by Left wing extremists, they will no doubt be exonerated of any responsibility for their actions, however incendiary. At the same time efforts to disparage the character and motives of those who support the caravan are truly disgusting. Yes, Mr. Trudeau, your reference to them as a “fringe” fanatical element is disgusting. I have watched dozens of videos of those assembled roadside in support of the truckers and they without question appear to be decent, cheering, flag waving Canadians concerned preeminently with the abrogation of their personal freedoms.
The issue of what we must do to put this pandemic behind us is too complex to deal with here. But public mistrust of our medical “experts” and the draconian measures they incited among various governments is certainly justified. I have seen several videos of his Royal Arrogance, Dr. Fauci, brazenly contradicting statements he made only months earlier. The motivating impulse behind the truckers’ initiative, I would think, is their disgust with the assumption of Leftist leaders that “regular” people are just too f…ing stupid to manage their own lives. But of course that is the basic assumption of their absurd Egalitarian Ideology which literally grants governments the right to “engineer” human behavior in pursuit of their arbitrary definition of social justice.
This impulse to coerce has obviously been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. But the repercussions of the restrictions imposed on “regular” people by ruling elites who can often be found hypocritically ignoring their own mandates, would seem to be just as devastating as the disease they are designed to control. Indeed while the Science unequivocally suggests each new permutation of Covid to be less deadly than its predecessors, the drug abuse, depression, suicides, imperiled educations and financial hardships caused by Draconian government measures ought to be of equal if not greater concern to any rational being.
But the mentality that has come to dominate our “progressive” civilization is not rational. The Left pretends to be concerned with the welfare of the “common man.” While such terms are always, ultimately, meaningless, the truck drivers advancing on Ottawa and those cheering them along would seem the very epitome of what is implied by that epithet. And yet they are being vilified as fascists or, this the ultimate insult in our contemporary world, as Canadian proponents of “Trumpism.” The horror! The horror!
Consider for a moment the repercussions of a world more or less granted its freedom. Those who wish to continue to live in isolation wearing two masks every time they venture out, are perfectly entitled to do so. But ought not those millions of sensible people who wish to get on with their lives while taking certain obvious precautions, be equally free? While governments need to keep their citizens informed on both the nature of the latest Covid permutation and the most effective ways of dealing with it, are not the people entitled to have ultimate dominion over their own health and welfare?
In the hundreds of articles I have culled from “progressive” newspapers over the years, I have noted a distinct and very disturbing pattern. While their writers are ludicrously eager to hurl insulting epithets at those who do not share their Ideology, they rarely engage in any significant, real-world analysis in support their outrage. And so, for example, the fact that there are inordinate numbers of various minorities incarcerated both in Canada and the States is automatically attributed to the systemic racism of both countries and their legal systems while the actual, inordinately high rate of criminality among those groups is simply ignored! The complex realities of human behavior are literally ignored by the advocates of the Left because they do not fit their narrative.
A day or two after George Floyd’s death, Candace Owens, a Black woman, dared write an extensive expose of his career as a violent criminal. How, she wondered, could Black America in tandem with its White “liberal” supporters, make such an individual the center piece of their “social justice” movement? When, she asked, had morality become so severed from the very concept of justice? The answer, of course, is when our Culture, led by our “intellectuals,” succumbed to the simplistic Marxist notion that the human dynamic has little to do with merit or intelligence or achievement but is merely a matter of “oppression.” Quite naturally, therefore, the “social justice” diatribes that clog our daily newspapers and newscasts rarely confront the actual merits or intelligence or achievements of those under consideration. They quite literally avoid the complexities of the human condition lest they expose the superficiality if not utter stupidity of their informing paradigm.
So Trudeau, rather than acknowledging the fact that there have been some dire consequences to Canada’s handling of the pandemic which seem to have upset a significant number of Canadian citizens, with typical Leftist arrogance simply dismissed the Freedom Convoy as the project of a fanatical minority. Defending one’s rights as a citizen in this Western Democracy now apparently makes one a Fascist! Just as all Americans concerned with the integrity of their borders are apparently Racists! Just as declaring that Western Science supersedes Indigenous Superstition now apparently makes one a White Supremacist!
Such is the intellectual bankruptcy of the contemporary Left that, devoid of rational, fact-based arguments in defense of many of its positions, it frequently resorts to mere childish invective. Submit the daily sanctimonious diatribes of the mainstream media to scrupulous critical analysis and, I guarantee, you will find them to be intentionally, suspiciously superficial [i.e., ideological] in their approach to Reality.