The left vs the people

The left vs the people. By Batya Ungar-Sargon.

As of last night, two of the organisers of what has been, by all accounts, a peaceful protest have been arrested, giving Canada — a country that bills itself a democracy — its first political prisoners in recent memory. …

On Thursday, Chris Barber was arrested, while Tamara Lich had her personal bank account frozen and was detained on a charge of ‘aiding and abetting mischief’ — a trumped-up charge resulting directly from a naked power grab by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. …

Without one iota of evidence that the ‘violence’ of the truckers’ protests has ever exceeded honking, Trudeau broadened the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing rules, putting the striking truckers on a par with terrorists, suspending their civil liberties and allowing banks to freeze the personal accounts of anyone linked to them.

Now Trudeau is having them arrested. And on Friday morning, he cancelled a parliamentary session in which his edict was due to be voted on, and could have potentially been revoked, by the House of Commons or the Senate.

The truckers’ protest began with Trudeau smearing the truckers as Nazis and fascists — a line gladly repeated, day in day out, by reporters and pundits in the elite liberal media. It is now ending with those same elites cheering on Trudeau’s authoritarianism. …

Instead of defending the right of peaceful protest, Trudeau has tarred it as terrorism and has seized the personal bank accounts of his political adversaries.

It’s a terrifying development for a country that calls itself a democracy to use such excessive means to quash dissent. Even going by Canada’s own laws, Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act is surely unconstitutional, as it requires a ‘national emergency’ so serious that it cannot be resolved by any other means. Trudeau has not met with the truckers even once to attempt to defuse the situation, so how could he possibly know that he couldn’t resolve the emergency any other way?

Across liberal media, there has been incredulity at Trudeau’s hitherto reluctance to deploy authoritarian opposition to the protests. The same elite liberal media that, back in 2020, showed us burning buildings behind chyrons reading ‘Fiery but mostly peaceful protests’ now shows us footage of bouncy castles, community kitchens and truckers in makeshift hot tubs, while describing this as ‘insurrection by airhorn’, ‘a threat to democracy’ and ‘sedition’.

As Trudeau actually suspends democracy, America’s elite liberal media have projected that travesty on to his victims.

When did liberals become the side demanding the suspension of civil liberties? When did the left start to oppose the working class? What liberal can watch a video of a woman being arrested for organising what remains a non-violent protest and say, ‘I stand by that?’.

Too many. …

Civil liberties are apparently something only people with money deserve. If you’re working class, the government reserves the right to seize your bank accounts. Big Tech reserves the right to steal donations made to you and redistribute your money to causes it deems more worthy. Journalists reserve the right to call up private citizens on the phone and demand to know why they gave 40 bucks to some working-class truckers freezing their buns off in the Canadian winter. And rich liberals are cheering all this on, from the safety of their homes, of course.

The left is now on the side of power. Liberal media are on the side of the government and they take political dissent personally. And what leftist elites are doing with their power is setting a new standard for who deserves basic civil rights.

 

 

If you’re working class and spent the pandemic braving the plague and delivering food to their doorsteps so they could stay at home tweeting, you can forget about your rights. Whatever money you have left in your coffers is theirs for the taking. If the pandemic began with the greatest transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the rich, political power and civil rights seem to be following. The elites are sending a clear message: civil liberties are the exclusive rights of the pyjama class now. …

The past two weeks … [have] revealed how quickly support for dissent and peaceful protest evaporates when it threatens those in power. And it has told you exactly who has that power.

The Ottawa Police Chief commits to hunting down and punishing peaceful protesters for months to come (by Joanne Nova):

Even if those protestors broke no law, his job is to make sure they live in fear, and the rest of Canada knows how risky it is to speak up against government rules that most people don’t want.

Once upon a time the police were there to protect shop owners from mafia style threats.

And laws are so complex now, selectively enforced by the bureaucratic ruling class — which is how one law effectively becomes one law for them and a different law for us.

This guy knows it when he sees it: