Truckers

Something is happening across the world right now, something that deserves more attention than it's getting. First, to the Netherlands, where farmers have been protesting, blockading roads with their tractors and staging enormous rallies. The demonstrations have been going on and off since 2019, when the Dutch legislature proposed a crackdown on nitrogen emissions. Nitrogen is heavily emitted by livestock and fertilizer, which means the regulations are hitting Dutch agriculture especially hard. But it wasn't until July that the protests garnered international attention. The Dutch government announced plans in compliance with a court order to cut nitrogen emissions by 50 percent.

The Canadian truckers might have been driven out of Ottawa, but a copycat protest is brewing in the United States. Cockburn hears that police are preparing for demonstrations that could gridlock the DC area, and they could start as soon as Wednesday. Honk honk! The truckers are coming to Washington — just in time for President Biden's State of the Union address next week. Cockburn has been a fan of truckers ever since he decided to see whether he could hitchhike across America using only Jim Beam trucks (he could, as it turns out). But in this case, the big riggers may be in need of a friendly correction.

At last, Canada has been freed from the menacing threat of bouncy castles. The bouncy castles first appeared in Ottawa earlier this month, brought in by the truckers who were peacefully protesting Covid restrictions and who Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later compared to Nazis. And you can understand why. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a McDonald’s PlayPlace and felt the dark night of fascism descending all around me. That people don’t bring bouncy castles to violent insurrections — that there were no bouncy castles at, for example, the Beer Hall Putsch — has apparently been lost on Trudeau, that witless king in the north, who last weekend saw in the Ottawa police to flush out the truckers like they were an occupying militia.

An op-ed in the Washington Post about the Canadian truckers’ protest tells us that the idea of freedom is “White” with a capital W and that the truckers’ belief in freedom is “a key component of White supremacy.” This is about as sensible as saying that the idea of gravity is “English” or that the Post reports the news. True, Newton’s apple fell in England and the Post looks like a newspaper, but gravity is universal. The same goes for stupidity, though that takes many forms, and for the impulse to be free, though that too takes many forms, some of them stupid. Taylor Dysart, the author of this insult to reason, is a white PhD student at private Ivy League university. Color me shocked.

Quick: what do you think when someone tries to convince you of something by prefacing their remarks with the phase “Experts say”? I think of that rude, two-word imperative of Germanic origin that ends in “You.” As Laplace said in another context, it is par expériences nombreuses et funestes that I have this almost Pavlovian reaction. The “experts,” alas, are not expert, i.e, “possessing a high degree of skill in or knowledge of” a certain subject. For proof of my contention I offer the name of Anthony Fauci or the organization that glories in the acronym CDC, that is, the Centers for Disease Control. They are both a bit like Michael Avenatti, once championed everywhere as a genius and presidential material, but now universally exposed and discredited.

We begin today in the Canadian Parliament, which has its own version of prime minister's questions. And while it isn't as entertaining as the famously unruly UK Parliament or the gem that is the Australian Parliament ("the honorable membah is a grub, Mistah Speakah!"), it can still get pretty rowdy. So it was that last week, Candice Bergen, the interim leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, rose to ask a simple question of the ruling Liberals: would they work with the truckers who have been protesting Covid restrictions in Ottawa to resolve the impasse? She may as well have been talking to a Speak & Spell. The Liberal minister Chrystia Freeland chided and patronized. She condemned swastikas and Confederate flags. What she never did was to answer the question.

Under pressure from the Canadian government, GoFundMe has decided to withhold $9 million of the funds raised by the truckers' Freedom Convoy ($1 million had already been withdrawn). Instead of automatically reimbursing the donors, though, GoFundMe is giving contributors until February 19 to request a refund. This seems unfair, since some people will lack the time, information or ability to put in their requests. Unclaimed cash is then to be donated to “established” and “credible” charities proposed by the convoy's organizers — assuming they obtain GoFundMe’s approval (we serfs need authorization before we’re allowed to spend our money). (UPDATE: GoFundMe has since announced they are "simplifying the process and automatically refunding donations.

I’ve noticed a pattern over the past few years. We saw it when Joker made over a billion dollars at the box office, despite numerous reviews and think pieces assuring us that everyone who enjoyed it was a dangerous alt-right incel. We saw it most clearly in 2016 and again in 2020 when the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump were uniformly smeared as white supremacists. To suggest any other motive was unacceptable. Racists! All of them! We saw it twice in the past week. The first of those instances is related to the ongoing Freedom Convoy protest in Canada. More on that later.