Let’s put some things aside for a moment to talk about what’s happening in Canada.
Nutshell version:
This is Canada’s Prime Minister: (tough to decide which thing to post, he’s so prolific a spewer of venom). Would you go for a beer with this man?
And Canadians have had enough. Right now there are hundreds or possibly thousands of big rig trucks blockading the central core of Canada’s capital city of Ottawa.
They got there after driving from every part of the country for a week. (Yes, Europeans, it takes a week to drive across Canada.) Their goal is to shut down the city until the government and its rogue dictator, Justin Trudeau, agree to drop ALL Covid19 mandates, from masks to jab requirements for employment.
As the enormous convoy – estimated at between 11,000 and 50,000 vehicles – was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa on Saturday, smaller rallies were held simultaneously across the country in provincial capitals (including my home town of Victoria, BC).
“What’s your exit strategy?” – a question the world has wanted to know for two years
A friend in Saskatchewan writes:
This was followed up today with:
Unnacceptable Jeremy @JeremyPynenburg
From the convoy organizers: These trucks are made to stay on the roads indefinitely, it’s cold right now but it’ll be warm soon. And we have 8 million in relief funds 🇨🇦❤️ The trucks are here to stay indefinitely 🚛 Get used to the horns 😆❤️ #FreedomConvoyCanada2022 #HONK
January 30th 2022
129 Retweets464 Likes
The Ottawa police – which numbers in the tens – issued a press release that said they’re not towing or ticketing the demonstrators. This is the latest from their media website, dated Sunday, January 30:
Throughout the weekend, the Ottawa Police Service and its partners have been actively and patiently managing a well-funded, major demonstration in the downtown core. We have seen multiple cases of disruptive, inappropriate and threatening behaviour from demonstrators.
Police are working with organizers to facilitate the safe departure of individuals and vehicles and to ensure safety.
Police are aware that many demonstrators have announced their intention to stay in place. This will continue to cause major traffic, noise and safety issues in the downtown core. We urge all residents to avoid travel to the core.
Police have avoided ticketing and towing vehicle so as not to instigate confrontations with demonstrators. Still, confrontations and the need for de-escalation has regularly been required.
Along with the safety issues, costs to businesses and social costs, the Ottawa Police continues to tally the financial costs of the policing costs which are estimated at more than $800,000 a day.
If you work in the downtown core, please plan to work from home if possible.
Please adjust your plans in the downtown core. If your children attend school in the downtown area, please check with them to see if the school is open tomorrow.
Avoid travel into the downtown core tomorrow.
I did this Twitter thread this afternoon just from my observations over the last few days:
A few thoughts:
1) The people organising this quite clearly have experience and serious training in logistics. You don’t get a result like this by just a couple of guys jumping in their cabs and taking off one night.
2) They have let it be known they intend to stay and the Ottawa police have indicated they’re ready to let them stay. How could they have planned to have a large group of people essentially camping in their truck cabs for weeks or months at a time without preparing extensively to provide for their needs? Ans: those trucks we saw rolling down the Trans-Canada with trailers weren’t running empty. They were packed with supplies.
3) They are incredibly disciplined on messaging, in a way and with a level of intelligence I’ve never seen in any demonstration organisers before. They knew with precision detail what to expect from provincial, federal and municipal government. They knew what to expect in detail from both media and agitators/counter-protesters, and people planted in the crowds to cause trouble and have a well-coordinated and clearly communicated and strictly enforced protocol for dealing with them that absolutely excludes direct personal engagement.
As soon as a suspicious or disruptive presence is identified, the legitimate demonstrators create a cordon around him, an empty space isolating him, and ONE designated caller contacts the member of the Ottawa police dept. assigned as liaison. We saw this work with the guy who was the only person there in a full face covering balaclava carrying the Confederate flag.
4) I’m told that the truckers came prepared with food, communications, medical and other types of survival supplies in a manner identical to that used by Canadian peacekeepers in war zones who brought supplies to besieged cities in the Balkans war, among others. This is, in other words, what Canadian military logistics operations looked like in Sarajevo and Mostar…
5) They have “blockaded” the centre of the city of Ottawa, but it hasn’t been random. They’ve done it in close coordination with the Ottawa city police to ensure that there is -1- space for emergency first responder vehicles to continue to operate -2- allowing space for very large groups of people on foot to continue to gather and meet and talk and walk together. That is also not accidental.
6) They’ve made very sure to respond to complaints proactively. When opponents started howling that someone had draped the Terry Fox statue with a flag they made sure there was a video of clearly identifiable trucker demonstrators carefully cleaning the statue and that it went viral.
7) They’re incredibly precise in their messaging, responding instantly and transparently to accusations without the least sign of apology. Organizers have at the same time maintained strict communications discipline, not giving interviews to corporate media while remaining visible for people on the ground a personal basis, and carefully choosing their own outlets, cf: this interview with @glennbeck
8) They got well ahead of any possible efforts to shut them down through the cops, anticipating attacks. The Ottawa city police force is ridiculously tiny, so busloads of reserves have been brought in from Toronto. Then they were standing around with nothing much to do. So, when the truckers saw that the cops had a ridiculously long walk to use the washroom, they moved portable toilets over for them. Yesterday it came out that someone offered horse hay for the police horses. This was brought in the trucks – so they knew they’d be needing it…
9) All this tells me that -1- this has been meticulously planned by professionally trained experts in logistics, but the kind of training you pretty much can’t get from the private sector – the people doing this are ex-military – and -2- they’ve got a bigger plan than just to park a bunch of trucks along Wellington street and honk and have a street party for a weekend. They brought enough supplies to be there for weeks. They’ve set up canteens and services in the streets that have been blocked off. These are people who really know what they’re doing.
They’re only talking to the people they choose to talk to. One of whom was @glennbeck.
Glenn Beck @glennbeck
Canadian Trucker Freedom Convoy spokesman @BJdichter tells me why this protest has gotten so massive: “It’s more than just truckers. EVERYBODY is fed up.” #FreedomConvoy2022
January 28th 2022
566 Retweets1,683 Likes
“EVERYbody is fed up.”
And they don’t just mean in Canada…
There is now not the least doubt in my mind that it isn’t a coincidence that #freedomconvoy2022 has gone global in the same week.
Avi Yemini @OzraeliAvi
#BREAKING: Australian truckies from across the country, inspired by their Canadian counterparts, are heading for the capital in protest of mandates. FULL STORY: ConvoyReports.com
January 30th 2022
10,686 Retweets33,815 Likes
Rebel News Australia @RebelNews_AU
Happening now: Convoy at the doors of Parliament House in Canberra. ConvoyReports.com
January 31st 2022
3,413 Retweets11,016 Likes
10) If the trucks are already rolling in Australia, there’s NO WAY it was a spur of the moment idea. The Australian summer is every bit as difficult an environment for logistics as the Canadian prairies are in winter. You don’t do a thing like this on a moment’s notice.
11) Last point is that the memes are key. The whole thing is a kind of massive, national prank, and a damn good one. It reminds me of that old university engineer joke of leaving a running VW bug in the dean’s office (or as it happened in real life, the time the UBC engineering department suspended a VW Beetle from the Lionsgate bridge in Vancouver.) I think the only country in the world this could have been cooked up is Canada, knowing exactly how it would be taken by the rest of the world.
The expressions of amazement that the “placid” “peaceful” Canadians have finally cracked and are doing this frankly hilarious response, that has filled the world with hope, like a beam of sunlight bursting through the smokes of Mordor, IS EXACTLY THE MESSAGE. “The Canadians of all people” are actually the only people in the world who have it so deeply embedded in their national character to laugh at themselves, and their leaders, AND their own suffering that they could turn back the glooms of hell with laughter.
The Memes are a massively important part of the demonstration – and a lot of people are realising that the dark nightmare they’ve been in – the deep sense of despair that has been enslaving the WHOLE WORLD for two years, has suddenly started to lift.
We are waking from a nightmare and remembering that the world is good. That people are strong and free that the grim misery of the Upside Down is not the world we have been given by God, and we don’t have to live in it. We can just say no. We are already free.
It’s Canada’s “secession of the plebs” – a mutiny of the working class.
One thing the organisers have demonstrated beyond question is their mastery of message-control and the use of broadly dispersed, decentralised communication power the internet provides. the organiser, Ben Dichter, told Glenn Beck that they stayed ahead of the censorship-happy Big Tech platforms by a clever diffusion of communications. They used hashtags that spanned multiple platforms, and didn’t settle into one Facebook group or Twitter page.
And they know something our enemies don’t seem to grasp: that the one thing the demons can’t stand is to be laughed at. Joy, fun, a sense of humour and irony are like lighting a candle in a blacked-out room: “et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt”.
Carl here talks about the trucker revolt as a clear example of the Secessio Plebis – or, “That time the Roman Empire’s lower classes just got up and left town, letting their rulers shift for themselves for a few days.”
Or, as someone put it on Twitter: “Don’t ____ with the people who bring you food.”
Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec
HONK HONK HONK HONK I’ve been watching these livestreams like crazy – the honking only gets better #HonkHonk Live from Ottawa Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzGiDDKdphJ0GFvEd82WfYQ/joinyoutube.com
January 31st 2022
156 Retweets705 Likes
I admit the whole business has cheered me up beyond measure, and that’s a hell of a lot more important than it sounds. I asked a friend of mine who lives in the prairies, who’s also following it how he feels now, any different from last week? “Yeah. I have been gloomy about the worldwide political prospects for a long time. Years now. There didn’t seem like there was any hope at all of breaking this monopoly on the messaging or the globalist oligarchy’s plans. And now I feel like I’m waking up from a bad dream.” We all seem to be waking up out of a kind of dark trance, like people held under a spell of gloom and sadness and fear for a long time.
It’s the jokes. The gloriousness of this amazing prank. The genuine delight that anyone would just do this, would just stick two redneck, working class, gloved and calloused fingers up to the soft-handed, thousand-buck-suited shysters who’ve been lying to us for two years. But at the same time that they’d do it so intelligently, so ready and capable of responding to the attacks that would inevitably come.
We’ve been told for so long to be afraid, to take everything as seriously as possible, to hide and not talk to anyone. And this has been the message from both the left and the right; the Left said to be afraid of the virus and now the “unvaxxed” and the Right has said to be afraid of authoritarianism, government lies and tyranny.
This weekend we realised that both are paper tigers.
The joke’s the thing: #HonkHonk!
Apparently some hapless snowflakes who live in Ottawa complained on Reddit about the honking from the trucks:
I think one of them made the mistake of saying, “We just want our lives back!”
Yeah, sweetheart, so do we!
So I spent most of the night last night retweeting hilarious memes and jokes responding to the whininess. There seems to be a contingent of jokers on Twitter having a literal blast #honkhonk-ing at each other:
Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec
It is not enough to be pro-honk. One must be actively supporting the honk.
January 31st 2022
751 Retweets6,945 Likes
VAERS Lives Matter @chuglibtears
@JackPosobiec You’ve gotta honk at the darkness til’ it bleeds daylight.
January 31st 2022
1 Retweet3 Likes
Curmudgeon Supreme @authentic_mikep
@JackPosobiec Honk, Honk, Honking on Heaven’s Door.
January 31st 2022
2 Retweets4 Likes
Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec
Honk against the dying of the light
January 31st 2022
173 Retweets1,860 Likes
The Canada geese started showing up in the memes around 1 am:
January 31st 2022
79 Retweets320 Likes
The romance of the trucker: Bugs Bunny, Han Solo and Robin Hood
Why was it one of the smartest possible ideas to use truckers, even apart from their unprecedented access to transport and free movement? Why were they the perfect choice, from a cultural, meme-perspective? Because they’re the trickster, loner heroes that can’t be stopped. Tough and willing to endure suffering to stay free, but will often surprise the dismissive and suit-wearing with their intelligence.
There’s even a Trope:
Truckers as a cultural symbol are all but legendary heroic figures, archetypal for the modern world. They’re the tricksters and jokers who literally roll under the radar, communicating by CB networks that only initiates can use.
In the 1970s there was a string of films portraying truckers as a kind of brotherhood of the highways, lone heroes defending the little guy against the Man and against the thugs and chaos that lurks out there beyond the borders of our bubble-cities – everything from lawless biker gangs to lawless corrupt cops.
The legends of the truckers put them in the category of Robin Hood, bringing food and supplies on the wild highways that form the connective tissue between our outposts of civilisation, but that are not themselves in any way “civilised”. They’re on their own in a dangerous wilderness with only each other to depend on.
No power in the verse can stop them
Culturally speaking, truckers are (literally) street-smart, savvy and tricky. They’re Bugs Bunny, a seemingly defenceless creature perpetually outwitting, running rings around the well-equipped-with-guns hunter Elmer Fudd. They’re Han Solo, Mal Reynolds and the Bandit, running any freight they can get, legal or not, under the noses of the Big Bad Boring Authoritarians – the Galactic Empire; the busybody officials of the Alliance and sinister evil of the Blue Sun corporation; sheriff Buford T. Justice – laughing at all of them. They’re the people who won’t be bullied, but who also won’t bully anyone else.
And they don’t bow. They don’t quit. They don’t let the Man tell them how to live.
They’re free.
Source: Hilary White