DEMOCRACY DIES IN OTTAWA
and East Palestine.
Did any of us really think that truth would save us? That even as lie after lie about the trucker convoy was batted away under oath, we had reason to hope the commission would be an honest broker? That millions of convoy followers would be exonerated, set free from Prime Minister Trudeau’s ugly accusations that fuelled the City of Ottawa’s hysterical response? Racist. Misogynistic. Dangerous anti-vaxxers unworthy of both citizenship and the freedom to protest.
Trudeau set a narrative early with dishonest and self-serving rhetoric intended to frame the convoy and scare the mostly liberal-voting, laptop class who reside in our capital, conscripting them into his holy war against anyone who questioned the vaccines. You see, for the leaders who went all in on a shot that was neither safe nor effective, pushback could not be tolerated — especially from the blue collar crowd.
Terrified locals saw only what the Prime Minister had trained them to see — big galutes, dripping in diesel and roaming Bank Street, spewing stink and virus.
And worse, the truckers weren’t just anti-vaxxers, they were disobedient. They’d broken free of the Covidian narrative and were having fun, perhaps the real threat.
The PMs preemptive psyop succeeded with the support of legacy media, amplifying Trudeau as if they worked for Pravda. No wonder Ottawa residents, its mayor and police chief acted like scared college freshman requiring a safe space, away from all the terrifying microaggressions that come from honking and Canadian flag waving. Yes, it was loud, but that ended at some point. Commission evidence from locals about their trauma bordered on the absurd - an Ottawa version of Harry and Meghan as portrayed on South Park.
But that’s what propaganda is about. It lures us away from our authentic reactions to ridiculous things, encouraging us to play along with the notion that it was appropriate to invoke the Act over a noise squabble and to pearl-clutch over an inconvenient sleepover.
I wasn’t surprised when the commision defaulted to a dishonest and manufactured, middle of the road assessment, that exonerates the government and more importantly, flattens the hope of all who believed — if only for a while, that we could get our country back.
Never forget, the protests were over vaccine mandates and began when both the efficacy and safety were seriously in doubt. Surely, that is the issue that should have been weighed against the jackboot of the state. The medical merits of the convoy’s actions were not the purview of the commission - part of a C-19 public policy bait and switch.
Because it burnished Trudeau’s personal brand, the Liberal government and woke public health took a different stance over the George Floyd protests in which protesters actually did commit arson and people were killed. Not to mention violating public health guidelines — citizens had been told to stay away from large groups.
Canadian health officials are not suggesting people avoid protests, but they are stressing the importance of hand sanitizer and masks. With physical distance being nearly impossible in some of these settings, rally-goers may have to find other ways to try to keep themselves safe.
Legitimate protest is in the eye of the beholder. Trudeau took a knee for a movement becoming known for violence, property damage and threats but he lowered the boom on an event with none of those features. I debunked the fake arson claim against truckers through a source six months ago.
Here’s Trudeau on June 6, 2020.
As someone old enough to have seen commission reports come and go, let me remind you of the Kennedy assassination Warren Report, single-gunman lie and the lauded 9/11 Inquiry that concluded no one was guilty or responsible for the series of blunders that permitted the attack. The late Professor Benjamin Demott excoriated the 9/11 commission so perfectly, I finally understood that despite the thing with feathers settling in my chest, a soothing balm for the elites was all Justice Paul Rouleau was ever going to give us. That was his job. Demott’s critique is called Whitewash as Public Service and was the cover story on Harper’s Magazine in October 2004. It’s behind a paywall but I found it elsewhere:
The plain, sad reality—I report this following four full days studying the work—is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises.
It can’t tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points. The Commissioners’ immeasurably valuable access to the principals involved offered an extraordinary opportunity to amass material precious to future historians: commentary based on moment-to-moment reaction to major events. But the 567 pages, which purport to provide definitive interpretations of the reactions, are in fact useless to historians, because a seeming terror of bias transforms query after commissarial query—and silence after silence—into suggested new lines of self-justification for the interviewees.
In the course of blaming everybody a little, the Commission blames nobody—blurs the reasons for the actions and hesitations of successive administrations, masks choices that, fearlessly defined, might actually have vitalized our public political discourse.
At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness of earnest, well-informed public debate. And the wariness is rooted, clearly, in a conception of the nature of citizen virtue that (1) strips the critical instinct of its standing as essential equipment for the competent democratic mind, and (2) finds merit in the consumer credulity that relishes pop culture and shrugs off buyer-beware warnings.
The ideal readers of The 9/11 Commission Report are those who resemble the Commission itself in believing that a strong inclination to trust the word of highly placed others is evidence of personal moral distinction. As the Report’s project becomes ever more visibly that of sanctifying equivocation and deference, the Commissioners retreat ever further from evaluating the behavior of which their interviews and research nonetheless allow brief glimpses—behavior on which fair judgments of character and intelligence could and should have been based. Issues of commitment and responsibility are time and again reconfigured as matters of opinion, or as puzzles of memory, or as pointlessly distracting “partisan” squabbles. See, here it is again, says the Commission’s undervoice. People differ, of course.
But of course. And they believe with the utmost sincerity in their own account of events. And they are all honorable men and women. Little can be gained, therefore, by assessing, weighing, in the end pronouncing this position—this version—superior to that. Reader, given our shared probity and undoubted concern for the future of the Republic, let us think process and structure, forgoing Blame Games. Let us look to the future. We need to move on.
DeMott is describing the worst kind of scam, one designed to dispense with both anger and query by concluding that everyone is a little bit wrong. This manipulation is as dangerous to democracy as a hand grenade. And as meaningless as Justice Rouleau’s report.
Why did an old cynic like me hope for a an honest result? For this I blame Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who pulled us from our C-19 despair and for a while, back into a Canada we understood. I’ll never forget our conversations from the road. Now I feel homeless again. Tamara and I recorded a deep conversation this morning that is running tomorrow night.
Our Prime Minister and his evil, bank-account-freezing henchwoman are seen around the world as having sold out our country to a globalist agenda. So awful are they, that writer Chris Bray, my brilliant friend in California, wrote a scathing rebuke of the commission outcome. It was inspired by his dying father’s courageous fight for life. I learned a new and important word.
I have more things to say than I have the time or the patience to work through, at the moment, but I see in my father the opposite of what I see in the state of the world. The shamefully pusillanimous Paul Rouleau says that he reluctantly concludes a frightened government was justified in treating peaceful protest from citizens as a wartime-equivalent threat, freezing bank accounts and dragging people to jail. Remember that Justin Trudeau responded to the Freedom Convoy by vanishing, withdrawing from Ottawa and speaking in Parliament on Zoom. A global leadership class is somehow distinguished by its tendency to prefer teleconferencing to the pain and danger of meeting human beings in person. And to gesture at a whole argument without taking the time to make it, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Lord help us.
The amount of weakness, cowardice, and moral debility in the world has become dangerous and unsustainable. Strength and directness leak out of it like it’s punctured. I watch my father try to stand up as his body dies and he refuses to participate. I know him: He’ll die trying.
There’s a lot of that going around. You’ll hear more of it on my latest podcast exposing the truth about how the working people of East Palestine, Ohio now live in an environmental sacrifice zone.
Two nights ago, while on his way to dinner, the world’s worst Transportation Secretary tried to not answer a reporter’s questions by taking her photo. Dude, you answer to the media. To her.
Pete Buttigieg finally headed off to flyover America where factories were closed by McKinsey — his former employer, and family neighborhoods are contaminated by fentanyl and deadly chemicals.
Hal Bray died yesterday morning and I have it on good authority this brave and honourable man was still trying to stand up.
Stay critical dear friends.
I know! How on earth did some of us think that the report would be weighty, genuine, a truth-teller of objectivity? That it would examine the incredible shortfall of government and call it out?
Look forward to hearing your talk with Tamara Lich.
the truckers protest was the only good thing to happen in the past three years. what trudeau did to them was disgusting, then again HE is pretty disgusting.
i had sent $100 through givesendgo which was stopped and eventually returned to me. i called doug ford's office and left a message calling him a petty thief for stealing my money.
he couldn't get his grubby hands on my bank account because i am a US citizen but what happened was so frightening to me because it could easily happen here.
my BF and i moved our retirement money into a self directed IRA and bought some farmland.
the decision was hideous. there was clearly no justification for the war act. but, sad as it is, the truckers ignited hope in the world, they set wheels in motion and things are happening. it ain't over yet.