Loading ...COFFEE AND COVID
LATE TODAY…SO MUCH GOING ON I MISSED IT . JEFF , LIKE SO MANY COVID WATCHERS IN THE WORLD IS VERY IMPRESSED WITH EXTRORDINARY “ORDINARY” CANADIANS
“As you know, not only have I been covering pandemic news every single day, but also I’ve been personally involved in many domestic protest events. The Canadian Truckers have captured the world’s attention in a way that nothing else has to date has done.
The Flight of Trudeau is an analogy to how the official defenses of mandates have also fled, just like a Canadian prime minister sneaking out of the capital in his jammies. True, the capital still stands, nothing has officially changed, but the immense weight of public opinion has soundly defeated the official narrative without any casualties.”
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*THE TRUCKERS’ VICTORY IS A METAPHOR* ?
? The UK Independent was one of the many reporting that Canada’s jaunty blackfaced Prime Minister, facing a trucker convoy, retreated, decamped, and fled to an undisclosed location. In other words, he bravely ran away. The Independent’s headline was “Justin Trudeau and Family Move to Secret Location as Canada Trucker Protests Spark Security Fears.”
Meanwhile, international attention continued to grow all day yesterday, exciting millions and generating social media commentary unlike anything I can recall since the start of the pandemic. Granted, I don’t swim in Twitter’s pro-lockdown fever pits, but the ratio of positive interest seems to far outpace negative reactions among regular folks. There appears to be a widespread sense that the Freedom Convoy is punching far above its weight; people are attributing significant meaning to the protest that is profoundly different in character and substance to the respondes to other, prior protests.
As you know, not only have I been covering pandemic news every single day, but also I’ve been personally involved in many domestic protest events. The Canadian Truckers have captured the world’s attention in a way that nothing else has to date has done.
I’ve been thinking about it, a lot. And I’ve been thinking about the poltroon Trudeau, who apparently didn’t even consider using any political solution that involves interacting with or even confronting the truckers in any way. First I watched him dodge public appearances using a ridiculous pretense — exposure to a “case,” which any of us could claim — then within hours he decided to stop dodging and just threw some underwear into a briefcase and got out of Dodge. The way Trudeau is handling the situation does not look like effective government. It smacks of panic. The optics are just politically awful and so, very weird.
Then I got it. Trudeau is a metaphor.
The Convoy was, intentionally or not, perfectly orchestrated to engineer a sense of intensifying excitement. Unlike the one-off events, the truckers’ protest has played out in slow motion. As the truckers rolled along, day after day, driving from one side of Canada to the other, more and more folks began to focus on it. It was different and engaging, because Canada has been one of the most egregious examples of loony lockdown policy, because the Canadians hadn’t really pushed back so far — they are culturally handicapped — and because of its immense scale; fifty thousand trucks stretching for almost fifty miles. That’s a lot.
But, I think, the escalating excitement was in the wondering; wondering what would happen when all those trucks arrived in the capital? Would they shut Canada down? Would it be peaceful? Would it turn into a January 6-style crackdown, as many media members hope, with all the truckers rounded up on trumped-up domestic terrorism charges, or would the government be forced to acknowledge the people’s preferences? Would Canada’s supply chain survive the arrest of that many truckers? And, how would the Corporate Media handle it? Could they play ostrich forever?
You have to admit it was a great story. The nature of the protest, stretching as it did over days, gave the story time to develop, to spread, and to garner the world’s attention. One influencer I follow tweeted that she never expected to be spending her days refreshing Twitter minute-by-minute to follow the Convoy story in real time. She’s not even a Covid influencer. The whole world was watching, breathless in anticipation.
Then the truckers arrived in Ottawa. And the government ran away.
Wow! It boosted the event’s energy even higher. Nobody saw THAT coming. Nobody expected the Canadian government to abdicate the capital and essentially begin ruling in exile. Trudeau’s response seems so … feckless and irresponsible and inept. I mean, the government had most of a week to prepare … something. Anything. But this? This fearful fleeing appears utterly unplanned, a knee-jerk response, at best. And it signals profound weakness.
If you turn the Convoy protest into a military metaphor, the truckers won without firing a shot. They must be careful now; the Flight of Trudeau is also an invitation to lawlessness, which would justify a strong response. But if the truckers are patient and deliberate, and don’t give the government an excuse, they can occupy Ottawa the same way the ridiculous CHOPpers occupied Seattle’s downtown.
The Convoy is the reverse opposite of the CHOP/CHAZ, but the political outcome could be similar. The CHOP was ultimately shut down because violence rapidly got out of control in there (duh). Even in hyper-liberal Seattle, the permissive occupation of a few city blocks by lawless outlaws led to massive political dissatisfaction with the local government that still festers.
On the other hand, the Convoy protest is comprised of productive citizens; some of the most productive and “essential” citizens around. Maybe even more so than healthcare workers, who, after all, depend on truckers for medical supplies. They aren’t occupying the capital by force; the capital was handed to them. They aren’t barring police and emergency services; the truckers are working with the officials. They aren’t deranged losers spouting radical political slogans, no matter how the media tries to portray them; they are solid, essential workers with coherent messages.
The Flight of Trudeau has already damaged the Canadian government’s political image, just as the CHOP/CHAZ damaged the loony lawmakers who let it happen.
But there’s an even bigger picture. The Flight of Trudeau is a metaphor for how ALL governments are responding at this point in the pandemic, this political demilitarized zone between Narrative 1.0 and Narrative 2.0. It’s this: the governments are out of excuses for the mandates. The mandates cannot be justified, explained, or rationalized. Not any more. And the governments aren’t even trying very hard.
I have pointed out before how the anti-mandate position is now supported by a panel of courageous, well-credentialed intellectuals and scientists supporting: the Malones, McCulloughs, Battacharyas, Kulldorffs, Korys, and Coles. But who are the similar scientists supporting the pro-mandate position? They’ve run away, fled, decamped, just like Trudeau. Where is the data supporting injection mandates? Vanished, dried up. In case you haven’t noticed, all the news about injection efficacy is bad these days, even if the bad news is tentatively and cautiously expressed and qualified. There are no real injection success stories. Even fake news ones.
To beat a dead beagle puppy, name one country that is a good example of a successful vaccination strategy. I dare you, name it. Israel? Canada? Britain? Ireland? China? The U.S.? Europe, where mandates are falling faster than Moderna’s stock price? There isn’t one, and if there were, that’s ALL we’d be hearing about.
The Flight of Trudeau is an analogy to how the official defenses of mandates have also fled, just like a Canadian prime minister sneaking out of the capital in his jammies. True, the capital still stands, nothing has officially changed, but the immense weight of public opinion has soundly defeated the official narrative without any casualties.
Similarly, our government is still pushing mandates, but they aren’t defending them, not really. Sure, that babbling idiot Fauci is still peddling jabs, but more and more he looks like a huckster on an island. And not even Fauci is trying to justify boosters, explaining that they are still “gathering data.” Even Pfizer’s CEO has jettisoned booster talk. In other words, they’re not answering questions about the justification for more jabs. Not defending them.
If you think about it, this government, the government that has championed jabs for over a year can’t just throw in the towel, not all at once. Not without admitting it was wrong, which is NEVER going to happen. It has to retreat slowly, carefully, secretly, sneaking out of the building without anybody noticing. We don’t know for sure WHY it’s stopped defending the jabs, why the narrative has shifted, not yet; it could be election-year politics, it could be bad news about adverse events, it could be something we don’t even know about. Something like what Dick Cheney called, “the things you don’t know that you don’t know.”
But we can learn a lot from watching how they ACT. Trudeau fled instead of defending his position. The government isn’t defending mandates.
What happens when you don’t defend something that’s under assault?
Have a blessed Sunday, and I’ll see you all back here tomorrow for more.