Introduction
I don’t care who you are, having an elderly woman trampled by your cops on horseback is a bad look.
Another bad look comes when it is not possible to confirm or refute reports of that poor woman’s death. As I was composing this paragraph on Saturday, there were rumors that she had died from her injuries, but no clear confirmation either way. I was able to find one story on it coming out of India (!). This would seem to indicate that information about this woman’s condition was being withheld from us for political reasons. The footage of her being trampled was horrific, but it would seem that if news about her medical condition was good, the authorities would want us to know that, and if it was bad, they would want to spin it out of sight for as long as they could.
Update: the woman was injured, but did not die. Thank the Lord. Her shoulder was dislocated, and it still seems weird to me that this news was that hard to get. And perhaps the Ottawa police might think about correcting their statement that there were no injuries.
Further update: Over the weekend, Trudeau’s flunkies in uniform cleared out the Ottawa protest, making a couple hundred arrests, and towing numerous trucks, doing so in a manner that was genuinely tyrannical. He showed that Canada is now operating on China’s social credit system, an example being the freezing the financial assets of people who donated to the convoy. Why anyone would now keep their money in a Canadian bank is beyond me. But as I believe that this show of strength means that Trudeau sacrificed a queen to take a pawn, I have changed very little of what I wrote below. In my view, he won a battle that cost him the war. Ceaușescu was tough near the end as well.
This Optics War
We need to recognize that this is an optics war, and Trudeau is losing it badly. This is a meme war, and Trudeau is losing it badly. This is a naming contest, and Trudeau is losing it badly. What I want to urge below is all about keeping it that way.
What I am talking about here is what it looks like when those in authority lose control of the narrative. This can happen in any clash between rulers and the ruled, and can happen regardless of the actual facts on the ground. It can happen regardless of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
You probably all remember the iconic photo of the young woman at Kent State, kneeling beside the body of the protester who had been shot. Precisely because they had lost control of the narrative, the authorities at that time could not simply decide that “this inconvenient photo will by no means become iconic.” They could have held a press conference, if they had wanted to, and shown us multiple photos of the rioting at Kent State prior to that shooting, but because they had lost control of the narrative, this would have only been demonstrating for us how badly they lost that control. Nobody would care about them or their photos.
As it happens, in this situation, all my sympathies happen to be with the truckers, but what I am observing here initially is independent of that sympathy. Sometimes the good guys lose control of the narrative. Sometimes the bad guys do. This time it happens to be the bad guys. Trudeau regained control of Ottawa streets. But he has no elite corps of cops who can go fetch his narrative back.
Content of the disputes aside, the structure of this confrontation maps onto Gandhi and the Brits, Boris Yeltsin holed up in his house with a nuclear superpower outside, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the segregated South, Ceaușescu against Romania, and you get the drift. In all these situations, the ones who had the upper hand bungled their use of that upper hand, and the ones who didn’t have the upper hand . . . had the upper hand. Those who had the actual power forfeited everything through the mistakes they made in the course of the showdown in real time.
And Trudeau is the poster boy when it comes to making just these sorts of mistakes. I think we should all step back a few paces and watch him go.
Because, to sum this point up, as Napoleon Bonaparte once exhorted us, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Freedom as White Supremacy
There are two situations in which those in power start saying ludicrous things, and we should pay attention to the distinction because it currently matters a great deal. In this situation, the ludicrous things being said characterize the trucker convoy as being made up of terrorists, white supremacists, cannibals, Nazis, and enemies of democracy. I made one of those items up, but only one.
One such situation would be where the authority has the whip hand, and he demands that you repeat the outlandish things that he tells you to say, and he does this because he is gaslighting you. He is displaying his control of the situation. Big Brother can demand that Winston profess his love for Big Brother. This is the way the whole COVID mania situation seemed a year ago. The establishment was flexing, and they did that long enough to develop erroneous views of their immunity from any possible blow back. They developed these erroneous views because they quit flexing for the masses, and started flexing for the mirror.
But there is a second scenario where the approved spokesman starts spouting crazy talk. That would be the case of another BB, like unto Big Brother, the case of the celebrated Baghdad Bob. As American tanks were closing in on Baghdad, he continued to serve as the bombastic spokesman of a doomed regime, telling us confidently that—even as he spoke, even right that minute—the invading forces were no kidding getting their butts kicked.
The first kind of twaddle talk is a power move, and the other kind is an impotence move—the kind of flailing that immediately precedes the sensation of drowning. Each sentence, each press release, is just one more lone kamikaze trying to sink an aircraft carrier. So Trudeau’s position is precarious. He is in the second position, and nowhere close to the first. Even though Ottawa’s streets were cleared, he is still in a precarious position.
In the early days, the progressives sought to problematize absolutely everything, and they did this because they were shooting the moon. They were making their move. Did not their computer models give them the appropriate outcomes? As the initial levels of compliance for every manner of foolishness were high, this gave them false confidence. For Uncle Ben to provide white folks with his avuncular rice was a problem. Incorrect answers on math tests, marked by an authority figure as incorrect, were displaying an intolerable whiteness. Showing up for work on time, and seeking to do a professional job, was hegemonic whiteness. Trying to be a decent citizen was white, and characterizing those who didn’t care about decency as indecent was racist. So they got you coming and going.
So now, sticking with the plan, they are trying to make a problem out of those things that bid fair to threaten their entire project. This is why your desire for freedom is now a sign of white supremacy, as per what was actually printed in the Washington Post above. The fact that you don’t want to be their slave is an indication of your support for slavery. I know, that doesn’t make any sense to me either, but that is the line they are taking.
Earlier in this game, they were Big Brother, making you affirm demented slogans, just because they could. You don’t want to be sent down to HR, do you? They have rats down there that will eat your face. But now they are turning into Baghdad Bob, threatening to turn off the sunshine and rain in Alberta if they don’t start obeying the voices of their anointed gods again.
So now Trudeau has turned into King Canuck, commanding the tide not to come in—only unlike good old Canute, Trudeau is serious.
Neil Young, Sunshine Hippy
I mentioned Kent State earlier, and the song Ohio reminds us just how buffleheaded Neil Young has become. I say “has become,” but one suspects that this may have been the problem all along, doesn’t one?
But back in the day, he could at least pretend that he was part of a heroic resistance. Now, like a petulant child, he removes his songs from Spotify because they won’t silence a dissident Rogan voice, talking about treatments for this bugbear virus.
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming
Heroic Neil, early precursor to Compliant Neil
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down . . .
The man thinks he is marginalized, but he is actually now The Man. Not sure how it happened, but we have progressives today, inspired by the likes of Neil, who believe that all their virtuous sentiments that swirl around the base of Diversity and Uplift—swirling in sync with almost all institutions of higher education, virtually every major corporation in North America, the woke military, the political establishment, and the entire entertainment industry—are sentiments that somehow make them part of the Resistance. Life is tough out there on the margins. This is the kind of thing that could make a cat laugh.
If you want to see marginalized, just put a Maple Leaf flag on your truck and drive east.
So just imagine if this truck convoy had been organized on behalf of Black Lives Matter. How many times would Trudeau have met with them by now, and how many times a day would he have apologized to them? He would have apologized for not supplying them with enough government-purchased gas for their trucks. And if the protesters in Ottawa had been there on behalf of the indigenous peoples of Canada, the First Nations, how many times do you think we would have seen Trudeau on camera, sobbing in solidarity with them?
Some might think that I am blurring a bunch of issues here, whether overtly or implicitly—Neil Young and Spotify, vaccine passports, BLM, no masks at the Super Bowl in LA while all the school kids in LA had to go to school masked up the next day, the January 6 incursion, election fraud, and so on. But no. I don’t believe I am blurring anything—these are all actually the same issue. Many streams run into the Mississippi, but all the water is the Mississippi by the time it gets to the Gulf.
And what is that Mississippi? The central issue, the driving issue, is the abyss that has opened up between regular folks and our diseased ruling class. These separate issues mentioned above, all of them, not to mention many others, are just particular instances that reveal the disdain that these swollen gargoyles have for the rest of the cathedral. I am referring to all these contessas of climate change, these sultans of same-sexy, these rajahs of racism, these moguls of mammon, these vicegerents of viruses, these potentates of public policy, these lords of lockdowns, these despots of drag queens, these magnates of masks, and these oligarchs of overweening obtuseness. I could go on, but I think it is best to stop now. I think that some of you were thinking it was time that somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
All the craziness of this last generation has resulted in a 27 vehicle pile-up at the intersection of God Is Not Mocked and Unintended Consequences. This is what we might call a worldview mashup.
Which is why we must keep our heads. We can’t wait for the cops to come sort it all out because half the rigs in the pile-up are government vehicles. Maybe more than half. And of the remainder, quite a few Canadian cops are going to be too occupied trying to figure out how to live with themselves.
No Fort Sumters
Let us return to Napoleon’s observation. Providence has decreed that the hapless representative of the entire global ruling class will be Justin Trudeau. They stand or fall with him. This is a strong indication that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
But there is yet one way that this could turn sour for the lovers of liberty, and that would be if some right-of-center idiot opens fire. The ultimate reason that the South was unsuccessful in her attempts to secede from the Union was that the South opened fire at Fort Sumter, instead of continuing to play brinksmanship. So in this showdown, there must be no Fort Sumters. This is especially important in that there don’t need to be any Fort Sumters.
Right now the protesters in Ottawa have the upper hand, arrests and all, and they have the moral high ground. Despite being removed, they still have the high ground. The elites are desperate to find some way to take away or diminish that moral authority. They are hungry for some deranged right-wing idiot to show up in a way that discredits the entire protest movement.
But as it stands right now, the reaction to the protest demonstrates just how necessary the protest was.
The Canuck truckers—may God bless every one of their furry hats—have shown us how this is to be done. They have demonstrated that potent political action can be cheerful, direct, uncompromising, potent, and extraordinarily difficult to respond to. They have been peaceful. They have not been retaliating. They have not been answering vitriol in kind. They behaved in such a way that, win or lose, they won.
The Canuck truckers—may God bless every one of their furry hats—have shown us how this is to be done.
I would like you to pause and reflect on how much mileage the bad guys (for convenience, we shall continue to refer to them as the bad guys) have gotten out of the January 6 incursion into the Capitol. Please notice that this did not happen here.
We are not done with this. There will be more. Maybe truckers will stay home for a bit. Maybe they will drive to provincial capitals, or points along the border. Maybe; the left hook will be an American convoy. I don’t know. But whatever happens, there must be no Fort Sumters.
So have I written before on how it would be imprudent in the extreme for us to take the bait? Why, yes, yes, I have. I believe you can find those musings here. Don’t take the bait.
A Brief Word of Encouragement to the Truckers Themselves
My name is Douglas Wilson, and I am a minister living in northern Idaho. I have been supportive of what you are doing since the moment I first heard of it. As the Trudeau regime has decided to try the heavy-handed approach, I thought I should try to get this brief word of encouragement to you. I have three things I want to say to you all.
First, I want to thank you. I think you may know how important your stand has been, but in case you didn’t, I wanted to emphasize it. Millions of people are looking to you with deep gratitude, and I am among them. I am really proud of you. Just as this COVID panic was a global event, so your stand for freedom has had global ramifications. It has been of monumental importance, and so I thank you. My Canadian blood thanks you.
Second, I wanted to praise you for the shrewdness of your tactics. You have made this an international issue, and you have done it without taking the bait. You have been peaceful, gracious, and uncompromising. But as the regime gets more and more frightened by the power that you most obviously wield, they are going to try to provoke you into some kind of violent or ugly reaction. That reaction would then be used against you as a retroactive justification for their thuggish behavior from the beginning. You didn’t fall for it. You didn’t do anything that you couldn’t do while singing.
Last, the fact that our secular governments have resorted to this kind of thing reveals the bankruptcy of secularism. I know that there were a number of ministers in your ranks, and there are many of you who follow Jesus Christ. The rest of you are doing a good thing, but you still need a foundation for that good thing. That foundation is Jesus Christ Himself. So as you platform men who pray for you, and who preach Jesus Christ to you, you need to know that this is not a distraction from your mission of seeing your freedoms restored. It is the only possible basis for seeing your freedoms restored. Listen to such men. Hear them out. You need your sins forgiven, just as your rulers need their sins forgiven. Our only fundamental choice is between Christ or chaos, and as you have been valiantly protesting the chaotic nature of arbitrary rule, I would plead with you to turn to Christ. Pray that your protest turn into the seeds of a genuine religious revival. Again, that would not be a distraction, whether or not it was widely reported. Crack down or no crack down, the Word of God cannot be chained. There were thousands of baptisms in the fountain at Tienanmen Square.
God bless you all.