Fellow Patriot: The voluntary financial generosity of supporters like you keeps our hard-hitting analysis coming. Please support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you for your support! —Nate Jackson, Managing Editor

February 21, 2022

The State Smashes the Freedom Convoy

Peaceful protesters were set upon this weekend by the Trudeau government.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

That was George Orwell, writing in 1949 about 1984. He was trying to describe a dystopian future in the imaginary superpower of Oceania. But were he alive today, he might just as well have been trying to describe the dystopian present in the very real non-superpower of Canada, where fake claims of racism and white supremacy have become the last refuge of Prime Minister Justin “Blackface” Trudeau and his fellow statist scoundrels. Little Fidel has now gone full frontal “1984” on his countrymen.

Trudeau played the “Nazi” card last week, which is a standard ploy for desperate leftists who find themselves losing an argument on the merits — in this case, an argument over continued vaccine mandates in the midst of a receding pandemic. On Wednesday, Trudeau smeared a Jewish member of Parliament — a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who’d criticized Trudeau’s failure to negotiate with the truckers and his heavy-handed handling of their protest. “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas,” he said. “They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag.”

As Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of late-‘60s revolutionaries, wrote in Rules for Radicals: “In a fight, almost anything goes. It almost reaches a point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”

Perhaps the Left’s most insidious bit of sleight-of-hand is its attempt to turn the word “freedom” into something nefarious. As state-run CBC reports:

Often associated with protests and rallies in the United States, the term has taken hold among protesters who are part of the Freedom Convoy, which rolled into Ottawa in late January and has become entrenched in the city’s downtown. For many, freedom is a malleable term — one that’s open to interpretation. That flexibility, in part, has fueled its growth among certain groups, said Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at the Oshawa-based Ontario Tech University. … It’s also a term that has thrived among far-right groups, said Perry, one of a number of experts who say the presence of far-right groups in Canada is growing.

Ah, yes, she’s “one of a number of experts” — experts who think freedom and peaceful protest have now been weaponized by right-wingers.

Indeed, we wonder if the Trudeau of just 16 months ago would even recognize today’s version. “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest,” he said Trudeau in November 2020, when he threw his nation’s support behind farmers in New Delhi, India, whose protests had gummed up area highways for a whole year. Today, though? Canadians who so much as express support for their countrymen’s Freedom Convoy on Facebook are getting visits from the provincial police.

Having failed at Alinskyite demonization, though, Trudeau dropped the gloves this weekend. As the New York Post reports: “Ottawa police attempted to clear out the remaining 'Freedom Convoy’ demonstrators on Sunday — ending a 24-day occupation of the city’s center to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates. … The convoy of trucks had caused traffic backups in the city for weeks. A total of 191 protesters were arrested and 57 vehicles were towed since police began forcefully removing them on Friday.”

Perhaps the worst expression of the crackdown took place on Friday, when mounted police trampled peaceful protesters with horses — one of whom was an elderly woman with a walker. Others moved in to help those who’d been trampled, and they were pushed back by Trudeau’s henchmen with batons.

How sadly fitting, then, that among the lasting images of Justin Trudeau’s crackdown against a freedom-loving citizenry will be those of riot troopers smashing truckers’ windows and mounties trampling old women. As Toronto-born columnist Mark Steyn writes, “The struggle going on, to one degree or another, in Ottawa and elsewhere is between a percentage of the citizenry who’d like normality back and western governments determined to maintain and tighten the ‘control.’”

How sad, too, that “normality” has become such a heavy lift, such a difficult ask, in the age of the permanent pandemic.


*UPDATED to include additional information about PM Trudeau’s crackdown on basic freedoms.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.