subincontinentia

CLICK PHOTO TO LISTEN AS A PODCAST – Nothing Going on Here.

Like many of you, I’ve been glued to scenes of enormous numbers of trucks that have crossed the great country of Canada and together with thousands of protestors are presently camped out in the nation’s capital, Ottawa, to voice their dissent against the government’s health mandates. It’s impossible to know what numbers we’re talking about since the legacy media consistently plays them down to a ridiculous degree and the organizers are likely to exaggerate them. But at this point it’s pretty clear that whatever figures you believe, that it’s 250,000 trucks, that the convoy was 70 miles long, or a lot less than that, no one can continue to effectively frame this as a ‘fringe’ movement as the opposition keep trying to do.

Whatever happens from now on in, the truckers have already won. They have garnered far more support than their wildest dreams, raised 10 million dollars in only a few weeks on GoFundMe (putting aside the fact that the fundraising organization tried to fraudulently relocate the donations) and have catalyzed a movement that has now gone global. And things are still in flux. Even as I’m writing this, the premiers of the Canadians provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta have both ended their vaccine mandates. Next Monday, thousands of trucks are going to converge in Brussels from all over Europe, all inspired by the Canadian truckers. As one French friend said to me over cake and coffee this morning, “Merci au Canada.”

Who has lost? To me it’s very clear that the losers here are the Canadian government – including the opposition – and the mainstream media. It has been pretty obvious for a while now that the media has acted as little more than government mouthpieces during the pandemic, but the protests in Canada have brought a sharp clarity to this realization.

The lies are acting like supercharged photographic developer, slowly but surely exposing the outlines of the truth. Trudeau and his cronies are desperately trying to stop the film from developing, or to convince you that what you’re seeing is something else entirely.

The smear campaign against the protestors carried out by Trudeau and echoed in the media has been so obviously orchestrated to foster fear and mistrust and to further divide people, that the prime minister and his Ministry of Truth media is losing the respect, not just of his own citizens but of the entire world.

Back in 2020, Justin Trudeau was hailing the Canadian truckers as heroes of the pandemic. Now, that they don’t want to follow his dictats he calls them names. He sounds like a fanatic when he does this. Racist, misogynists, fringe, people with “unacceptable views”. He claims they are coming from a place of hate and do not represent Canada. These are scornful and hateful, and they are aimed at his own people.

Canada’s public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, claimed that some of the protestors were planning on the violent overthrow of the Canadian government. Opposition party NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, suggested that some wanted a “Canadian version of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Capitol.” The demonstrators have also been accused of desecrating war memorials and of being anti-science.

The problem for these people is that anyone with access to the internet can see for themselves who the protestors really are. The organizers hold press conferences which are shared widely online. We can actually hear the things they actually say; the words that actually come out of their mouths, not the ones that the government tries to put in them. We can use our own judgement to assess their character. We can verify their claims with supporting media. We don’t need other people with questionable agendas telling us who these people are.

Okay, let’s take these claims one by one.

TERRORISTS AND INSURRECTIONISTS: When the Twittersphere got all bent out of reports that protestors appeared to be building wooden structure near City Hall and stockpiling propane tanks and diesel fuel the reaction was predictable in light of the media conditioning. One user tweeted: ‘Why are police allowing seditionists to stockpile potential explosive devices near city hall?’

What were the protestors ACTUALLY doing? They were building a soup kitchen. Yeah, the kind that feeds people.

ANTI-SCIENCE ANTI-VAXXERS: Actually, the vast majority of the protestors are vaccinated. If you’re going with the updated definition of an anti-vaxxer as being someone against the mandates then so be it, but let’s be clear what you mean when you use that term. As for being anti-science, well actually several countries in Europe have already dropped the Covid restrictions and many more are in the process of doing. There have been dozens of studies including one recently from St Johns Hopkins showing that lockdowns were ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus and vaccine mandates were always a political, not science-based, policy. And the protest organizers actual travel with a group of scientists who have offered to debate any government representatives. I doubt anyone will take them up on it though because debating actual science is not the same as shouting orders at people and shaming them for not complying.

And we also don’t expect that tens of thousands of people gathered in an emotive demonstration are all going to act perfectly. We understand there will always be some bad apples and idiots who don’t represent the majority. But wow, it’s hard to find even those.

RACISTS AND WHITE SUPREMACISTS: These accusations are hardly worth the time to debunk, but I’ll do it anyway because racist is such a loaded term, but oh so easy to chuck into a situation like a Molotov cocktail. Because the only thing you can really say in your defense is no I’m not a racist. The truckers have wisely let the evidence speak for itself. Yes, there WAS a swastika waved around – and that’s utterly reprehensible – there was also a Confederate flag (Confederate flag in Canada? that was a bit weird, don’t you think?). I heard the truckers intervened pronto to get the offender to remove them, but you have to wonder who this person was. Some characters on social media were in an uproar claiming this incident meant that the protest must have been organized by white supremacists. But does this mean that? There were also Nazi flags at a number of BLM protests, but in those cases the media said things like beware the white supremacists infiltering the protests. The Canadian protestors on the other hand get no such fair play. And the beautiful thing is they don’t really care.

Protestors have also been accused of DESECRATING MEMORIALS – Now it does seem unfortunately true that some protestors danced on the tomb of the unknown soldier. Which is really a stupid and ignorant thing to do. No defense there. But dancing is not desecration, unless they were really really bad dancers. The protestors were also reported to have ‘desecrated’ or ‘defaced’ a statue of beloved Canadian politician Terry Fox across from Ottawa’s Parliament Hill.

Protestors have also been accused of DESECRATING MEMORIALS. Unfortunately, it does seem true that some protestors danced on the tomb of the unknown soldier. Which is really a stupid and ignorant thing to do. No defense there. But dancing is not desecration, unless they were really really bad dancers. The protestors were also reported to have ‘desecrated’ or ‘defaced’ a statue of beloved Canadian politician Terry Fox across from Ottawa’s Parliament Hill.

Now, I didn’t know who Terry Fox was, I had to look him up. And I was happy I did because he seems like he was a very decent human being. Terry Fox was a Canadian athlete and humanitarian. In 1980, with one leg having been amputated due to cancer, he embarked on an east to west cross-Canada run to raise money and awareness for cancer research. Obviously a brilliant guy.

The Toronto Star reported that: The figure was draped with a hockey cap on its head, a Canadian flag wrapped around its neck, an upside down Canadian flag hanging from its arm and a placard reading “Mandate Freedom” wedged under another arm.

So, I read that story completely differently from the way I was supposed to read it, I guess. To me it pointed to a couple of giddy protestors, after a couple of beers perhaps, putting the Canadian flag around the shoulders of the statue of this honourable human being, BECAUSE they admired him? Because they saw him as ONE OF THEM. Someone whom they imagined, would be ON THEIR SIDE. Later the MANDATE FREEDOM sign was replaced with another HE WILL NOT DIVIDE CANADA, even more telling of the actual intent of the so-called desecrators.

I mean, if this was someone they despised – like for example how Black Lives Matter protestors saw John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, regarded by them as a white supremacist for his treatment of indigenous peoples, the mandate protestors would probably have done what the BLM protestors did back in May 2020 as described by CBC Canada.

A handful of people climbed the monument, tied ropes around the statue and held up banners before unbolting it and pulling it down. The falling statue’s trajectory caused the head to fly off and bounce onto the cobblestones below.

Now THAT’S a fair description of desecrating a statue, even given that the decapitation was accidental. Not putting a hat on it and a flag around its shoulders like some drunk tourist. And the news story about the BLM protestors desecrating the John A. MacDonald statue had a really important sentence – It was not clear what affiliation, if any, those who pulled down the statue had with the march. Why couldn’t we apply the same kind of journalistic standard to the mandate protests in Canada? Why? Because there is an agenda to make sure you think of these people a certain way, and no other.

Why is the assumption always that these anomalous elements represent the body of protestors at large? Because they’re ALL supposed to be fringe. You can’t have the fringe of a fringe. The agenda to paint all of these people in a very negative light is crystal clear. But the labels just don’t stick because there is so much evidence that they are wrong. You have videos of Sikhs handing out boxes of samosas, indigenous tribespeople conducting blessing ceremonies, people of all stripes and ages joined together in unity. And isn’t THAT the real threat for the government? People strong and united instead of divided against one another.

The Canadian protestors might have been more or less abandoned by their elected representatives but have been adopted by anti-authoritarians the world over. These are the people who have borne the brunt of the pandemic measures, the frontline workers who worked the hardest and lost the most and have now said ‘enough’. Those privileged enough to have managed the last two years from their personal fiefdoms, have disconnected even more with the rest of society. They have suffered less economically but in many ways are more emotionally damaged, more fearful, more anxious, and far more conditioned to remain uncritical. As much as they might like to look down on the truckers and those who support them, they are consistently far less eloquent and intellectually adept. Their words are frontloaded with hate and fear and with that comes a lack of discernment and even a kind of grunting stupidity.

The media uses words like “toxic” and “dangerous” to describe these protestors while the protesters talk about “non-violence”, “unity”, “community” and “hope.”  They talk, in short, about all good things. They do not spew hate for hate. Videos of protestors holding hands and singing “Oh Canada!”, and clearing sidewalks of snow have circulated far and wide on social media. My favourite banner of all was HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. Think about that for a moment. What a beautiful sentiment.

But no matter what they do, they are assumed guilty of the most heinous crimes of wrong-think and wrong-doing. This leads to the most bizarre communications from on-high such as Ottawa mayor Jim Watson tweeting, “It’s disturbing when you see the protest turning into what looks like some kind of fun carnival, where they’ve got bouncy castles, and hot tubs, and saunas.”

THAT’S disturbing to him?? He must have become apoplectic when they started feeding the homeless. This is the craziness where detractors have to resort to comments like this because they can’t find any evidence of terrorism or any of the rest of it. They’re not blowing up buildings, they’re blowing up bouncy castles. Run for your lives!

It is evident that the organizers are in this for the long haul. They seem un-phased by the hate they are receiving from their government, from the media, and from certain sectors of the public. They are asking that the government sit down across a table and speak with them. They ask this very calmly and rationally. It’s so refreshingly old school. A good old fashioned sit-down dialogue to resolve human conflict. How civilized. And to be willing to sit down with a man who has does nothing but run away and demonize them – Classy.

What Trudeau does not understand, along with some of his peers across the Atlantic, is that when a government uses hate-speech against its own people for peacefully expressing disagreement with its policies, people start to ask questions like: WHO DO THESE PEOPLE THINK THEY ARE?

The legacy media in Canada, the United States and much of Europe are in lockstep with Trudeau’s misinformation campaign against the protestors which is revealing of a global agenda. In the US, especially, where the MSM is mired in the warring bi-nomic language of MAGAstan vs. WOKEistan, very little light is getting through the murk. In this worldview, you’re either a true Covidian double-mask-wearing vaccine/boosting fanatic or you’re a racist ignorant dangerous (and don’t forget selfish) science-denier. But for those who know that this is actually not reality, it is as clear as the ever-lengthening nose on Mr. Trudeau’s face, that we are being lied to on a really astonishing scale. ‘Do we tolerate these people?’ he asked referring to the protestors, but perhaps the more pressing question is how long will the people tolerate such intolerant leadership?

Not for long, it seems. We are seeing stirrings of political discontent even within Trudeau’s own party. Liberal MP Joel Lightbound (now that’s a name I can get behind) had this to say:

I saw an interview with what seemed to be a very kind grandmother who demonstrated for her grandkids. She looked and sounded nothing like a white supremacist.

Mr. Lightbound (okay I DO like saying that) makes mention of others in the party who are fed up with the divisive politics and who think the government should take a more positive approach. Now isn’t that refreshing, sane and compassionate?

These times are really pushing us all to learn, to come to our own conclusions based on the evidence before our ears and eyes and based on our own critical thinking because if these events teach us anything it’s that we can no longer trust the sources of information that we used to rely on for the truth, or at least SOME truth. And this is not just Canada. This is a global movement. You see, the Canadian protestors do not represent a ‘fringe’ – they represent a global tide that is coming in fast and is going to swallow up the fanatical, the unkind, and out of touch.

But the lies are backfiring. In fact, THE MORE THEY LIE THE MORE WE SEE THE TRUTH. We can see a lot of people who look and sound fed up with two years of mandates producing very questionable results, trying to stay warm, playing impromptu ice hockey games, with lots of camaraderie, singing and dancing – and plenty of colourful woolen hats and more Canadian flags than you can throw a moose at. (They’ve also been called ‘traitors’ which again doesn’t work because its obvious to anyone – whether you agree with them or not — that these people LOVE their country).

This movement also is very revealing of what millions of people are feeling around the world now, that they have no political representation anymore. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have become  more or less meaningless as political descriptors, and are perhaps only useful to describe which hand you use to write with or directions to the post office. Political homelessness is becoming the new normal. And this could be a really good thing because it might signal the possibility of real and meaningful change.

This movement is removing the masks to reveal a mean-spirited authoritarian elitist agenda that has permeated the political class and has lost its reason and its humanity – having long ago abandoned the interests of ordinary working people it makes not bones about despising them; a political class, in this instance, that has no problem distorting the facts to ensure a continuous barrage of character assassinations, while studiously avoiding the reality of the breadth and diversity of the movement that is, by every meaningful measure, peaceful, reasonable and humane.

The truckers have already won. Why? Because the more that the government and media lies to us, the clearer we see the Truth – heading towards us all, like a convoy of gleaming silver semis down the highway of history.