Trudeau Style Tyranny Already in the US. By Julie Kelly.
As freedom-lovers justifiably recoil at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on vaccine mandate protesters, Americans worry the same sort of political retribution could happen here. I’m sorry to report, it already has.
The scenes from Ottawa are matched or surpassed by the images here, including thuggish cops attacking January 6 protesters with mace and explosive devices. The difference? Instead of mounted police trampling a woman, ours merely shot and killed one woman and beat up a few more.
What the Trudeau regime is now unleashing against the truckers and their supporters has been underway in America for more than a year. Using January 6 as a pretext, the Biden regime is brandishing its authority to crush political dissent. Now, it appears Trudeau and his apparatchiks are stealing the U.S. Justice Department’s playbook of power and pain.
Canadian leviathan:
The comparisons are stark. Take, for example, the words of Steve Bell, acting chief of the Ottawa police department. He told a reporter over the weekend how the government will hunt down those who stood in defiance of Trudeau’s vaccine mandates.
“If you were involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges, absolutely,” Bell said during a press briefing on February 19. “This investigation will go on for months to come. It has many many different streams from a federal level from a financial level from a provincial licensing level to a criminal code level from a municipal breach of . . . court order level. It will be a time consuming and complicated investigation that will go on for a period of time.”
Bell further promised he would hold accountable “those who took over our streets.”
US leviathan:
Rewind to January 12, 2021 and a press conference in our nation’s capital featuring Steven D’Antuono, chief of the D.C. FBI field office, who detailed how federal, state, and local law enforcement planned to capture and charge anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance. After noting that the FBI “doesn’t do easy,” D’Antuono — fresh off executing the apparently FBI-concocted kidnapping plot of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to generate bad pre-election headlines for Donald Trump — warned Americans what was to come.
“This is a 24/7, full bore extensive investigation into what happened that day,” D’Antuono said. “I want to stress that the FBI has a long memory and a broad reach. So even if you’ve left D.C., agents from our local field offices will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.”
Except the FBI didn’t knock on doors — it kicked them in. Hundreds of Americans have been awakened before dawn by dozens of armed FBI agents and military-style vehicles to capture even nonviolent protesters. FBI Director Christopher Wray declared January 6 an act of “domestic terrorism” and, as I explain in my new book, aimed government tools reserved to fight foreign terror threats against Americans on the political Right.
After January 6 defendants were hauled off to jail post-arrest, the Justice Department demanded pre-trial detention for at least 100 citizens based on the premise that any participation in January 6 rendered the accused a “domestic terrorist.” Some have languished for over a year in a political prison set aside for January 6 defendants as they await trials that the Justice Department repeatedly delays while it conceals evidence and fabricates certain charges to support the “insurrection” narrative.
Global bureaucracy isn’t supportive of democracy:
Legal fees and job losses have bankrupted families. Banks and online service providers such as Airbnb and DoorDash dropped customers simply for being charged in the January 6 investigation. GoFundMe, as in the case of the Canadian truck convoy, banned fundraising appeals for January 6 families. …
Broken men and women with no other option plead guilty to low-level misdemeanors such as “parading” in the Capitol in an attempt to end their legal torture, only to be sentenced to prison time by judges of both political parties, who then berate them from the bench as if they had committed the most heinous of crimes.
Biden, like Trudeau, refers to protesters as “white supremacists” and Nazis while hiding from his own countrymen.
The freedom tradition that runs strong in the English-speaking world comes from pre-Norman England, from the Angles and Saxons.
Uniquely in Britain it was nurtured and grew over the centuries. England had no standing army until a mere three centuries ago, because it had no land borders and thus no need of one. This meant there was no large military force constantly on hand to be involved in politics, like there was in almost every other country. When the English king needed money or troops, he had to go begging to his nobles, who extracted promises of freedom in return. Persuasion, not coercion.
Many English colonists in America complained in the 1770s that their traditional rights as British citizens were being eroded by the London Government. Their complaint was that the traditional English freedoms were under threat by government — in this case in London. (And by this time, England had a modest permanent Army.)
The American revolutionaries were fighting for traditional freedoms, preserving them form the growing leviathan in London.
By the way, the British Colonial Office learned a lesson when the Americans broke away: never impede the independent spirit of British colonialists. Henceforth, the British Government forced independence on colonies as soon as they were ready, before they asked for it. So Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and on on never had to fight for independence — the British Government thrust it upon them almost before they were ready. Even India barely had to argue and demonstrate to get its independence (though the timing was delayed by WWII).
Americans pride themselves on their tradition of freedom borne of their 1776 revolution, and the rest of the English colonies thank them for setting the example. But Americans are uniquely freedom loving? I don’t think so.
