The Patriot Post® · The State Smashes the Freedom Convoy
“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.
WATCH: Close up of peaceful protestors in Ottawa protesting mandates being trampled by the mounted unit.
— K2🍁🚛 (@kiansimone44) February 18, 2022
Yes, this is Canada in 2022. pic.twitter.com/I776GdTIwe
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.