Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground

 Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most.   His answer was to praise the "basic dictatorship" of Red China.

This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff.   It is how he actually thinks.    It is not like we had no warning.

The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment.    This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted.   It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead.   It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead - his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever - would think this a good move.

In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine's Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest.   The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite.   His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates.   The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated.   Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government's claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on.   Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction - the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA.   There was no reasonable justification for this.   It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick.   The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.

Remember that.   The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest.    That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist.   Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as "fundamental" in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years.   Vaccine mandates - telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don't - are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet.    The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead's father oversaw.    Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom.   Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced.   In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.   

The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead's claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest.   The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer.   The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd.    This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.

Note that I said "until this week".   There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them.    This time it was violence by the state.     On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab - and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation - he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister's to give and take away at will.    Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them.    Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on  peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police.   Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas.   No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.

The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked,   The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead's disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC.   Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses.    The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence - incitement - against the protestors - and their supporters - which can be laid at Captain Airhead's feet.    It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead's intention - bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments.   The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.

His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well.   The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead's extra powers, and when Captain Airhead's new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.     

Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.   

None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone.   Even if his remarks about China's "basic dictatorship" were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership.   Whenever he praises our "democracy" by "democracy" he means "elected dictatorship".   Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars.    When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy.   He did so with a straight face.   The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free.  The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea.   A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out.   Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few  private media companies who continue to do this.   He has several times banned them from election debates - the courts had to overrule him.   Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a  free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views.   Such a media is indeed important to "democracy" in his sense of "elected dictatorship".   

When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other.   It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister - William Lyon Mackenzie King - to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister's Office into a de facto elected dictatorship.   This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King's dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn't like.    Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.

By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before.    Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will.    Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all.

Whips and Scorpions - Captain Airhead’s St. Valentine’s Day Manic Meltdown

 

In the 2015 Dominion election Captain Airhead, the son of the man who up to that point had been the worst Prime Minister in the history of Canada, was swept into the Prime Minister’s office by a second wave of Trudeaumania, much worse than the first, and he has remained in that office ever since, despite scandal after scandal and a combination of gross incompetency with massive egotistical arrogance that resembles a dark, sinister, unfunny version of the kind we associate with characters portrayed by Peter Sellers in the movies..   He was whittled down to a plurality of seats in 2019, which he just managed to retain in 2021, but with help, sometimes from the socialists, sometimes from the separatists, he has managed to cling to office.   In his hubris, which puts even that of his father to shame, he has continued to govern as if he had the mandate of a majority government – even a supermajority – in the House behind him.

 

Captain Airhead has always seemed to be more concerned about the image he projects than anything else, including the good of the country whose government he leads.   The groups he has most often sought to impress have been the young and the woke – his domestic support base – and the “international community”.   His efforts have at times failed in ways that rendered him – and Canada – a laughing stock.   Earlier this year we were given yet another example of this.   When the rest of the world was finally coming around and deciding to treat the bat flu like the normal flu and lifting restrictions and mandates, he, who had been scapegoating the unvaccinated for all the country’s problems since last summer, decided to double down instead and removed the vaccine mandate exemption for long haul truck drivers crossing the border from the United States.    This led truckers, vaccinated and unvaccinated, from all across the Dominion to head towards Ottawa in one big protest convoy.   As they approached, he hurled insults at them and then, as they began to pour into the capital, he fled to an “undisclosed secure location”, citing a conveniently timed need to self-isolate due to exposure to the bat flu.    This earned him the scorn and derision of his opponents and allies, at home and abroad, alike.    The image he was clearly projecting for all to see was that of a sniveling coward.   

 

The trucker protest has been ongoing since, both in Ottawa and other major Canadian cities.   Captain Airhead, in an address to the nation from his hiding place on the Monday after the convoy arrived in Ottawa doubled down on his insulting language and his arrogant tone but despite his efforts and those of his sycophants in the media to portray the trucker protest as a small group of astroturfed racist ideologues it was apparent to everybody watching that unlike the protests he himself supports – anti-pipeline and anti-petroleum environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matter, etc., which typically consist of professional protesters funded by far left billionaires like George Soros – this was a genuine, grassroots, working and middle class protest.    

 

It differed from the kind of protest Captain Airhead admires in one other way.    Whereas Black Lives Matter rallies broke out into riots, vandalism and looting in major cities all across North America and last year’s demonstrations arising out of wild and irresponsible allegations against the former Indian Residential Schools led to the arson and other vandalism over well over fifty churches and the toppling and decapitation of statues, the truckers’ protest has been an actual peaceful protest rather than an anarchistic riot declared to be peaceful by media fiat.   While loud and noisy, it has not been violent and destructive and, indeed, would be best described as the world’s largest and longest block party.   Where some of the spin-off protests have arguably crossed the line from expressing their legitimate complaints about the infringement of their own rights and freedoms into interfering with those of others has been the impediment of traffic across the border with the US at important commercial crossings such as the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Emerson here in Manitoba, and Coutts in Alberta.   Many have noted, however, and rightly so, that those condemning the freedom protestors on these grounds had no objection to the entire border being closed by the government to anything but supply-chain commercial transport for almost two years nor have they ever insisted that the government do anything when groups of Indians – in many cases paid environmentalist protestors claiming to be Indians would probably be more accurate - have blockaded commercial infrastructure such as highways or railroads to back up some demand or another of theirs.

 

Over the past couple of weeks most Canadians when asked, regardless of what they thought of pandemic measures or the truckers’ protest itself, agreed that Captain Airhead’s attitude and behaviour were only making things worse.   In the midst of calls from everyone except the most bootlicking of his supporters to deescalate the situation he seemed determined to do the exact opposite.

 

On Monday, the fourteenth of February, Captain Airhead decided to do just that and to send a Valentine to those questioning and challenging his heavy-handed pandemic policies in the form of the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act.   Technically this is the first time this act has been used, although it was introduced in the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988, not as a first-of-its-kind piece of legislation, but as an update and replacement for the War Measures Act.   Captain Airhead’s own father had been the last to invoke the War Measures Act – and the only Prime Minister to do so in peacetime.   Indeed, the thought that was almost certainly foremost in Captain Airhead’s mind as he decided to do this was that he could dispel the image of a coward he had crafted for himself by conjuring up that of his father’s handling of the October Crisis.

 

He has succeeded, however, only in presenting the image of a weak man trying to appear strong, of a little man – or potato, to borrow China’s favourite contemptuous epithet for him - trying to appear big.    The contrasts with his father are far greater than the similarities.

 

In 1970 Pierre Trudeau was dealing with a militant Quebec separatist organization that had been committing acts of terrorism against Canada since the early ‘60s.   These had been increasing in intensity.   The previous year they had bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring several people and causing a million dollars’ worth of damage.   In the crisis in which Trudeau acted the FLQ had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and then kidnapped and murdered the Labour Minister of Quebec – he was also deputy premier of the province – Pierre Laporte.   This was a situation that called for a display of government strength although Pierre Trudeau was criticized then and afterwards – justly in my opinion – for taking this to an unnecessary extreme.

 

By contrast, the people over whom Captain Airhead is throwing a tantrum have not blown anything up, kidnapped anyone, murdered anyone, or done anything remotely similar.    They have parked their trucks in the vicinity of Parliament – and several provincial legislatures – with the declared intention of not leaving until their demands are met.   Those demands, unlike the separatist demands of the FLQ, are entirely reasonable.   They are demanding that the government return to them – and to all Canadians – the basic freedoms that belong to them, that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to protect, but which the government has treated as if they were its own to give and take away as it sees fit for the duration of the bat flu pandemic of the last two years.    Since these reasonable demands translate into a reasonable objection to government overreach, piling more government overreach on top – indeed, the maximum overreach available to the government – after two weeks of doing nothing but insult the protestors, can only be seen as an irresponsible and incendiary response.

 

It is not his father, Captain Airhead has come across as resembling, so much as Rehoboam, the son and heir of King Solomon.   At his coronation at Shechem as recorded in the twelfth chapter of I Kings, Rehoboam received a delegation of Israelites headed by Jeroboam which asked him to lighten the yoke his father had laid upon them.   He asked them to come back in three days for an answer, then consulted with the wise elders of Israel, who advised him to grant the request.   Then he asked the advice of the hot-headed youth of his own generation.   They told him to make the yoke heavier instead of lighter.   Rehoboam discarded the advice of the wise elders, and heeded instead the reckless advice of the fools he had grown up with and told the delegation “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”    This went down as one of the most boneheaded moves in all the history of Old Testament Israel.   By behaving this way Rehoboam provoked all the tribes of Israel except his own tribe, Judah, and Benjamin into rebelling against the Davidic dynasty and split the formerly united kingdom of Israel into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.   Captain Airhead’s similar response to the freedom protestors is unlikely to be looked upon any more favourably than Rehoboam’s in generations yet to come.  

 

This situation in no way meets the stringent requirements written into the Emergency Measures Act for its invocation.   The protests do not “seriously endanger the lives, health or safety” of Canadians nor do they “exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it” as ought to evident from the facts that even as Captain Airhead was preparing to make his announcement the Ambassador Bridge and Coutts border blockages were being cleared by ordinary police action and the provincial premiers – with the exception of the dolt in charge of Upper Canada – were all telling him to take a chill pill, they could handle the situation, the EMA was neither necessary nor wanted.   Captain Airhead most likely believes that none of this matters, that with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s New Democrats he will be able to ram approval of the EMA through the House of Commons and get the Senate to rubber stamp it while the courts, if they act at all to hold the government accountable rather than merely defer to the government, will act too late to stop him.

 

The speech in which Captain Airhead announced this step was his most brazen one to date.   How he managed to keep a straight face while saying that this was not something a Prime Minister should do lightly, that it is not the first step, nor the second step, but the last step that should be considered, is beyond me.    Perhaps he is a better actor than I had given him credit for.  Michelle Ferreri, the Conservative MP for Peterborough-Kawartha put the question to the government in Question Period on Tuesday of what other steps had been tried first.   The “answer” from Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair sidestepped the question.   Obviously, the government did not exhaust all other means available to it before taking this step.   It did not, for example, try talking to the protestors, hearing their complaints, and negotiating.    Indeed, the only other “step” it appears to have taken has been to hurl insults, lies, threats, condescension and other abuse at the protestors.    

 

It was also mighty rich of Captain Airhead to smugly and self-righteously pat himself on the back and justify this unjustifiable power grab by saying that the people of Ottawa deserve to have their lives back.    That all Canadians deserve to have their lives back is, of course, precisely the point of the truckers’ protest.   The truckers’ protest has been going for about a month.   To whatever extent it can be said to interfere with the daily lives of the people of Ottawa that interference is insignificant in comparison with how requiring businesses to operate at a fraction of their capacity, closing churches and other places of worship, telling people that they cannot have friends over or meet with people outside of their own household other than through the internet, ordering people to wear masks everywhere, and forcing them to take a foreign substance into their bodies against their will by taking everything away from them until they “consent” has affected the daily lives of all Canadians.

 

Since Captain Airhead, for all of his talk about providing local law enforcement with the “tools” necessary to end the protests, does not seem to be interested in sending the military in to support local law enforcement – credible reports, prior to the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act, indicated that he had already asked the military to intervene and had been told, essentially, to “truck off” – it is obvious that it is the extra financial powers spelled out by Chrystia Freeland after his announcement that he is after.    This should come as a surprise to nobody.   Even though Freeland, Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, has only been in the Ministry of Finance since Bill Morneau was forced to fall on the sword to save Captain Airhead in the WE Charity scandal of 2020, she and the Prime Minister have been seeking to take control over their finances out of Canadians’ hands since they came to power a little over six years ago.   As smug and arrogant as her boss, on Monday she announced that under the Emergency Act the Canadian government would be requiring crowdfunding platforms and their payment providers to register with FINTRAC and report large and “suspicious” transactions, somehow regulating cryptocurrency, telling banks and other financial institutions to review the transactions of their accountholders, giving those institutions the power to freeze the accounts of convoy supporters without a court order and protecting them against civil liability for doing so.   In other words, she and the Prime Minister gave themselves the power to utterly destroy dissenters by seizing their assets without due process and leaving them no legal recourse.   For the record, I, like all sane people, am opposed to government ever having this kind of power under any circumstances.   Not even in a real emergency – which this is not.   Not even to combat real terrorists rather than non-violent protestors.   A government that has this kind of power is not a government limited by constitution.   Nota bene, Freeland also said that the government would be introducing legislation aimed at making its new financial powers permanent.   This shows the utter hollowness of the government’s assurances that their actions under the EMA would be subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

 

On Wednesday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, presented the House with the motion that would confirm the Emergency Measures Act.   Let us hope and pray that there are many Liberal MPs chafing to get out from under Captain Airhead’s whip.   Let us hope and pray that there are NDP members left who can recognize that it would be a betrayal of an important legacy of their party which in 1970, led by the legendary Tommy Douglas, had the distinction of being the only party in Parliament to take a just stand against Pierre Trudeau’s peacetime use of the War Measures Act against actual terrorists, to follow Jimmy Dhaliwal in using martial law to crush a protest by the working class their party once claimed to stand for.   Let us hope and pray that there are enough of both who will stand with the Conservatives and the Bloc in refusing to confirm the EMA so as to send the message to Captain Airhead and his goons that their assaults on constitutional government and personal freedom will be tolerated by Parliament no longer and that they can take their whips and scorpions and stick them where the sun don’t shine.

The Year of Platinum Jubilee

 

The Lord’s Day this week, the last Sunday in Epiphanytide by the old Kalendar, was the sixth of February in the civil calendar, and the seventieth anniversary of the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter Queen Elizabeth II to the throne.  She had already surpassed Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning monarch in the entire history of the British Crown, its English and Scottish predecessors, and thus it goes without saying in the history of the Canadian Crown and the Crowns of the other Commonwealth Realms.   This marks yet another milestone as she has become the first monarch to attain a Platinum Jubilee.     Congratulations to Her Majesty!   Long may her reign over us continue to last!

 

As might be expected, the best remarks on the occasion from one of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects were those of David Warren, the former Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of The Idler, who was years ago driven out of polite journalism after its complete and total takeover by the forces of what is now called “wokeness”.   He wrote:

 

Her subjects are blessed, and have for so long been blessed, with a fine and adequate ruler. She has seen them through an incomparable ring of years and changes.

 

Not every nation of the British heritage deserves such a monarch, and indeed many have broken the royal connexion in displays of tawdry narcissism. Members of her own family have also failed her, and the governments over which she has presided have been a constant source of embarrassment. Yet Her Majesty, and the late beloved Prince Philip, have borne all these modern indignities with grace and extraordinary patience.

 

Amen!   As there is little if anything that could be said to add to such remarks I shall move on to address a question that has risen in connection with the occasion.   There has been some discussion about how to mark and celebrate the anniversary   Stephen K. Roney addressed this early last month:

 

And what has Canada planned to mark this epochal event? Apparently, an ice sculpture on Sparks Street Mall for Ottawa’s Winterlude. 

 

That almost sounds like an insult. As though her reign was written on water.

 

We can do better. Moreover, if the spring and summer of 2022 marks the end of a dread pandemic, we could all use a big party.

 

The federal government may have no time for the Queen, but it she is popular in much of Canada―in large part because the monarchy is the one thing that, historically, distinguishes us from the USA.

 

Although this was not my reason for quoting Roney, the last line deserves emphasis.   The monarchy is what has historically distinguished Canada from the USA.  Lefties in recent years would have us believe that it is our welfare state and especially our “single payer” health care system.   The former, however, was established in imitation of American innovations (in the late 1930s the Canadian government brought in a social security net in imitation of FDR’s “New Deal” in the USA, in the l960’s and 1970s, they expanded it in imitation of LBJ’s “Great Society”).   The latter, a system inferior to both the pre-Obamacare American system and the public system with free private competition of the UK and the Scandinavian countries, ought to be our national embarrassment, is too recent to historically distinguish us from the USA, and could eventually be adopted by the USA.    The monarchy is also what has historically united Canadians.   It is the single element of the Canadian heritage that unites the three traditional and historical Canadas.   English Canada was born out of the United Empire Loyalists.   French Canada remained loyal because the Crown had guaranteed its language, religion, and culture on the eve of the American Revolution.   The Crown is the other signatory in each of the Indian treaties.    It is very appropriate, therefore, that new Canadians have to swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen and her heirs to become Canadian citizens.  By doing so, they are joined to the historical, traditional, Canada by her one unifying factor, a factor the place of which cannot be taken by anything else.

Mr. Roney is right that an ice sculpture is an insufficient tribute.

 

My own humble suggestion is that Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee be celebrated with a new edition of a book that was first published early in her reign and which has been out of print for years.   The book I refer to is Freedom Wears a Crown.   Its author was John C. Farthing, the son of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing who served as the Anglican Bishop of Montreal from 1909 to 1939 (this is not a case of senior and junior – the son’s middle initial stood for Colborne).   Farthing was an academic man, who studied first at McGill – interrupting his studies there to fight in the First World War - then at New College, Oxford, before returning to McGill as faculty to lecture in the Political Science and Economics department chaired by Stephen Leacock.    Later, after a ten-year hiatus from academe spent in philosophical reflection, he would teach younger scholars at the Bishop’s College prep school in Quebec.  

 

Farthing began writing the work for which he would be remembered at a time when the world had been radically shaken up by the two World Wars and had realigned itself into two camps of nations – the one led by the United States of America, the other by the Soviet Union – which were engaged in what James Burnham called a “Struggle for the World”.   This conflict is known as the Cold War because the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers – a legacy of the Second World War – made a direct “hot war” between them an unthinkable option.   This was the world situation when the young Elizabeth acceded the throne, and the situation to which Farthing spoke.   The two sides of the conflict represented rival political and economic ideals.   The United States represented capitalist republicanism, the Soviet Union represented socialist totalitarian democracy.   Farthing in his book reminded Canada – and the other realms of the British family of nations – that her and their heritage was an alternative to these.   It was also, he argued, a superior alternative to these, because it was not drawn up on paper by some armchair philosopher or political scientist, but had emerged naturally and organically, from the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom that had forged and tested it.    This heritage was that of the Westminster System of Sovereign Crown-in-Parliament.

 

Farthing did more than just argue that the Westminster System was better at guaranteeing personal freedom – he distinguished between this and “individual liberty” - than American capitalist republicanism and better at securing the common good than the Soviet system.   He also discussed in detail how this heritage had been threatened in the famous constitutional crisis known as the King-Byng Affair of almost a century ago.   It was not, however, as students who are taught what Donald Creighton dubbed the “Authorized Version” – the Liberal theory of Canadian history – learn, the Governor General, Lord Byng whose actions posed the threat, but those of Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.   King had asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at a time when it had taken a recess before voting on whether to censure his less than a year old government because of a corruption scandal.    By refusing, the Governor General exercised in his vice-regal capacity the reserve powers of the Crown to prevent the Prime Minister from evading his accountability to Parliament.    The Governor General reminded King that he had remained in office after the last Dominion election under unusual circumstances – he had not won the plurality of seats, that had gone to Arthur Meighan’s Conservatives, but with the additional support of the Progressives, had been allowed to continue in government on the stipulation that Parliament would not be dissolved until after Meighan had been given a chance to form an alternative government.   King resigned, Meighan was given the chance, his government was immediately brought down in a confidence vote, automatically dissolving Parliament, and in the ensuing Dominion election King lied to the Canadian public, presenting himself as the champion of Canadian sovereignty over her domestic affairs, and the Governor General as having acted inappropriately and at the behest of the Imperial government in London.   In fact, as King’s letter of resignation to Byng demonstrates, King had asked Byng to consult with London before making his decision and had been told that there was no need because his constitutional duty was clear – a Prime Minister was not to be granted a dissolution under such circumstances.   The Canadian public accepted King’s story, however, and returned him a majority government.   By his success in deceiving the public, Farthing argued, King and his Liberals had undermined in practice the Crown’s reserve powers, and in doing so had undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown and Parliament, a dangerous step towards the subversion of the Westminster System and the turning of Prime Minister in Cabinet into a form of elected dictatorship.   Farthing’s understanding of this historical event – that Lord Byng was in the right and Mackenzie King in the wrong - is clearly borne out against the “Authorized Version” by the historical paperwork, as noted above.   It had previously been championed by Eugene Forsey, who had studied at McGill with Farthing under Leacock, and joined the latter’s department as faculty the year that Farthing departed, in his doctoral dissertation which was published in 1943 under the title The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, another book that might be considered for re-issue in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.   Farthing’s interpretation of the larger significance over the event has been borne out by subsequent history in which Prime Ministers – especially Liberal Prime Ministers, and especially Liberal Prime Ministers from the far left of the Liberal Party, whether it be the Marxist far left of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or the “woke” far left of today – have tended to treat their office as that of an elected dictator. 

 

When Farthing died in 1954, two years into the reign of Her Majesty, his manuscript required editing.   His friend Judith Robinson, a well-known Toronto investigative journalist and author during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, polished off the manuscript which was published in 1957 by Toronto’s Kingswood House.

 

Farthing’s book has been out of print for quite some time and younger generations of Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the case for why the institution of monarchy is the most important symbol of our freedom.   Freedom stands and falls with traditional institutions, especially monarchy.   The freest countries in history, with one or two exceptions, have been monarchies.   Totalitarian police states have been republics.   Farthing’s book was a great contribution to the explanation of why this is the case. What better time to bring out a new edition of his book than now, when we are celebrating a record-setting milestone in Her Majesty’s reign at the end of two years of suffering under a particularly arrogant elected dictatorship of the type he warned us about, one that has treated our constitutionally protected freedoms as if they were the Prime Minister’s to take away from us as he sees fit?   Had our elected leaders – Prime Minister and provincial premiers – and their health officers, followed the example of Her Majesty in her address to the Commonwealth of almost two years ago and adopted the tone she set – one of encouragement, endurance, and sympathy – instead of the tone of scolding, nagging, bossing, bullying, condescending and scapegoating they have employed for the last two years – they would not be facing the protest demonstrations from fed-up truckers and other Canadians all across the Dominion that we have been seeing for the past two weeks.  

 

Happy anniversary Your Majesty!

God Save the Queen!

The Convoy and Captain Airhead

 

For those in the Dominion of Canada who still actually believe, as opposed to paying mere empty lip service to the idea, that freedom is a basic human good the legal protections of which must not be jettisoned in a state of emergency, the events of the preceding week have been most encouraging.   Indeed, as can be seen in the Monday column “We Are All Canadian Truckers Now”, by Dr. Ron Paul, the long-time Congressman from Texas who throughout my life time so far has been by far the most consistent advocate of personal freedom against the encroachments of government to have served as an elected representative in the federal government of our southern neighbour, they have inspired freedom lovers outside of our borders as well as within.

 

As you are undoubtedly aware, for the past two years most governments around the world have been trampling all over the basic freedoms of the people they govern.   The justification offered for all of this was the pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in March of 2020.     A new flu-like virus, related to the SARS virus of twenty years earlier, had passed from bats to humans, either through a wet market or experimentation in a laboratory, and had caused an epidemic in Wuhan in China late in 2019.   Early in 2020 it had begun rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world.   Even then, the information necessary to respond rationally without panicking was available.  We knew that the people most at risk were the same people who are most at risk from any circulating disease – the really old and the really sick, although the danger to them was a bit more severe with this one.   We knew that while it could produce an intensively painful form of pneumonia, most people who contracted the virus would survive it, with many experiencing only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.   Our governments, however, told us that because the virus was spreading so rapidly, our hospitals, emergency rooms, and intensive care units were in danger of been swamped, and so they were going to order us all to stay home for two weeks, to go out only for “essential” purposes like buying groceries or medicine, to close our businesses if they were not “essential” as the governments defined “essential”, and to worship and carry out all social interaction online.   We were told that we would need to do all of this to slow the spread of the disease – to “flatten the curve” – in order to prevent the swamping of the health care system.   Very few seemed to notice the obvious problem with this – that if the health care system were swamped it would recover, that if hospitals, emergency rooms, and ICUs were burdened beyond their capacity this would not mean their ultimate irrecoverable failure and destruction, and that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to treat everything else as expendable and sacrifice it all to prevent a temporary flooding of the health care system.

 

Since our governments were allowed to get away with this unprecedented and tyrannical experiment at containing a respiratory disease – previous generations of mankind knew better than to arrogantly think they could do any such thing – they kept on doing it for the last two years, imposing restrictions and lockdowns every time there was a spike in the number of people testing positive for the virus.   When vaccines were invented for the bat flu virus in less than a year and given emergency authorization for use things got worse rather than better.   Our governments had been telling us that the strategy of restrictions and lockdowns would need to continue until vaccines were available.   Since the lockdown strategy was itself new and experimental, and was clearly causing more harm than the virus itself – as even our public health officers would admit in moments when they were relaxing restrictions rather than tightening them – and no one had been able to develop a vaccine for this kind of virus in the past this was highly dubious, to say the least.    When the vaccines were available, instead of saying “you should all return to your lives now, because we have vaccines to protect you from the virus if you want them” our governments began taking measures to coerce into being vaccinated those whom they could not persuade to be vaccinated voluntarily.

 

This took the tyranny to a whole new level.   While their telling us we could only “worship” online, could only meet with members of our own household, etc. made mockeries out of our freedoms of religion, assembly, and association, these attempts to coerce us rather than convince us to accept an inoculation, were an outright assault on our basic right to the security of our persons.   Our governments do not want to pass laws telling women they cannot have abortions on the grounds that such laws would violate a woman’s right to bodily autonomy even though abortion involves the deliberate taking of the life of another human being.   Euphemistically, those who support this status quo refer to this supposed right to have an abortion as a woman’s “reproductive rights” or her “right to make choices about her own reproductive health”.   Yet these same people seem to have no problem with telling everybody - men, women, whatever - that he must have a newly invented substance that has not yet completed its clinical trials injected into his body.   They claim to respect that whether a person does so or not is his choice.   Then they turn around and tell him that if he does not choose the way they want him to choose they will take away his right to participate in society until he makes what they say is the “right” choice.    This mobster-like bullying, of course, is itself a reason why refusing these demands is the morally right decision and complying with them is the morally wrong decision.

 

While we have not experienced this tyranny in its worst possible form here in the Dominion of Canada – our sister Commonwealth Realms of Australia and New Zealand have had it much worse – we have had to take it in combination with the insufferable arrogance of our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.     This is rather the opposite of Mary Poppins’ old line about how “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”   Captain Airhead has outdone himself in the realm of arrogance – a truly spectacular feat – when it comes to the vaccine coercion, for he has turned it into a form of scapegoating that makes it look like he was sitting around reading Mein Kampf and thinking something to the effect of “hey, you know, this guy gained tremendous public support by talking this way about the Jews, a disliked minority, maybe I should try the same with the unvaccinated.”   Except that the thought as it formed in his own mind would have been much less coherent.  Captain Airhead does not have the capacity for extended rational thought even of such a perverse type.   Captain Airhead began telling Canadians in the last couple of waves of the bat flu that these waves are all the fault of the unvaccinated.   Since the vast majority of Canadians were vaccinated – the vaccination campaign had been a record-breaking success - he was in effect telling Canadians “your vaccines won’t work unless everyone is vaccinated.”   Rather than admit that his pandemic and vaccination policies had been a failure from beginning to end, he opted to taking an utterly stupid position in order to blame his failure on people he thought he could get away with abusing, in the hopes of turning the hostility of Canadians fed up with all this pandemic nonsense onto them.    For weeks, he and his sycophants in the media, have been telling us that Canadians are increasingly frustrated with the unvaccinated, and trotting out polls ostensibly saying that most Canadians would support even more draconian measures being taken against the unvaccinated.

 

While behaving in the aforementioned disgusting manner, this increasingly petty tyrant turned on the very people he had held up to us as heroes – to the extent he was capable of holding anyone other than himself up as a hero – at the beginning of the pandemic.  On top of vaccine passports – those vile “show me your papers”, Mark of the Beast-style cards/QR codes that limited access to pretty much everything except grocery stores and pharmacies to the vaccinated – he began adding vaccine mandates where he could, and pressuring the provinces to add them where he had no jurisdiction.   One of the very first vaccine mandates to be widely brought in across Canada restricted work in the field of health care to the fully vaccinated.   Thus, those “front-line” nurses and other health-care providers, lauded as heroes two years ago, were told that unless they took a shot that they were not persuaded was in their own best interests to take, they would be out of work.   When many opted to lose their jobs rather than submit to this bullying and tyranny, the effect of the vaccine mandate was obviously to increase the pressure on the health care system rather than decrease it.    Now Captain Airhead has imposed a vaccine mandate on long-haul truckers crossing the border with the United States, either in collusion with the Biden administration or prompting the latter to do the same in retaliation.   His government has also dropped hints that it is looking at a similar mandate for inter-provincial transportation.      Two years ago Captain Airhead was telling Canadians to thank truckers who did not have the option of staying at home and were “working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked”.   Now he was telling them their services were not wanted unless they allowed him to dictate their medical choices.  This is what has prompted the long-overdue backlash we have been seeing over the last week.

 

Early last week, or the last day of the week prior to last if you wish to be precise, convoys of trucks set out from British Columbia heading towards Ottawa.   By the end of the week, similar convoys from every province of the Dominion were joining them.   As this armada of trucks descended upon the capital, everywhere they went supporters turned out in droves to cheer them on.   It was dubbed the “Freedom Convoy” and its purpose was quite straightforward.   It was a protest demanding the repeal, first, of the cross-border vaccine mandate for long haul truckers specifically, second, of vaccine mandates in general.   Many of the truckers, like all salt-of-the-earth type decent Canadians, also want Captain Airhead to step down.

 

About the middle of the week Captain Airhead dismissed the convoy with the sort of language we have come to expect from him.   He said “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa are holding unacceptable views that they’re expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, rights, and values as a country”.    The best way to answer that is to quote Luke Skywalker from the movie The Last Jedi (2017) as saying “Amazing.  Every word you just said was wrong.”    To briefly parse the latter part of Captain Airhead’s remarks, obeying government orders to stay apart for two years is the opposite of being there for each other, there is no such thing as “the science”, science, sans definite article, is a tool to be used and not a leader to be followed which real scientists would be the first to tell you, and agreeing to government measures that limit to the point of eliminating your and your neighbour’s freedoms of assembly, association, and religion and bodily autonomy helps destroy rather than ensure our rights, freedoms, and values.   It is the first part of the remarks, however, that are of most interest to us here.   It was apparent already on Wednesday when Captain Airhead said this and is unavoidable now that the convoy of truckers is a sizeable representation of a much larger segment of society and anything but “small” and “fringe”.   As for their “unacceptable views”, the only views that the truckers espouse as a group are that it is wrong and unacceptable for the government to be telling people they need to take a foreign substance into their bloodstream and punishing them if they don’t do it.    Prior to the pandemic, this was the consensus viewpoint in the free world.   As recently as last year Captain Airhead espoused those same views himself.   He opposed vaccine passports and mandates into the spring of 2021 calling them “divisive” and saying that this is not how we do things in Canada.   His complete flip-flop on the matter occurred at the time that Canada was emerging from the particularly harsh lockdown of winter-spring 2021, provinces were introducing vaccine passports, and they were polling well as they seemed to offer, to the vaccinated at least, a return to something resembling the normal.   It was around this time that Captain Airhead, faced with a Parliamentary order to hand over un-redacted documents regarding the dismissal of a couple of scientists from the virology lab in Winnipeg, documents he was so desperate to keep out of the hands of Parliament that he sued the Speaker showing his total contempt for Parliament and unfitness to serve as Prime Minister, was contemplating asking for a dissolution of Parliament and a new election.   When he ultimately went the latter route, arrogantly thinking he would be handed a majority government – the election, which nobody else but him wanted, restored the status quo ante – he tied his future political prospects to mandatory vaccination.    What arrogance, what hubris, what chutzpah to declare that his having abandoned his opposition to mandatory vaccination less than a year previously made that opposition into “unacceptable views”!

 

The Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday and Captain Airhead fled the city saying that he had come into contact with the bat flu and needed to self-isolate.   Then on Monday, after a weekend in which the truckers and their supporters had expressed their opposition to the vaccine mandates and other tyrannical pandemic measures without burning buildings down, looting stores, toppling monuments, or otherwise behaving like the kind of protestors Captain Airhead embraces and supports, Captain Airhead announced that he – triple vaccinated as of earlier that month – had tested positive for the bat flu, and that he would be speaking to the nation about the trucker protest.   When he gave his address, did he say “boy, I was wrong, I got all my shots and I still came down with the virus, maybe I should humble myself and talk to these truckers, who represent a lot more Canadians than I thought”?  

 

Hardly.   He doubled down on his insults, his arrogance, and his claims, obviously debunked by the fact that the most recent wave of the bat flu driven by a variant that infected more people in just over a month than previous variants had in a year producing a situation where, by contrast with previous variants, almost everyone has either had the bat flu or knows someone who had it, came after a record-breaking supermajority of the populace had been fully vaccinated, that vaccination is our only way out of the pandemic.   He said that “Canadians at home” were “watching in disgust and disbelief at this behaviour, wondering how this could have happened in our nation’s capital after everything we’ve been through together”.   He said this even as the results of the Angus Reid poll conducted over the weekend, results that showed that majority opinion in Canada had switched away from support for his policies to wanting all Covid restrictions lifted – the position of the truckers – were being released.  He spoke of those who “hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless”.  This was hardly typical of the behaviour of the demonstrators – were it otherwise the evidence would be all over the media – and is mighty rich coming from someone whose policies have ruined small businesses across the country while benefiting large multinationals, driven people into homelessness and destitution, and made life exponentially harder for the homeless (strict capacity limitations on homeless shelters and the closing of public spaces have, throughout the pandemic, corresponded with the winter months).   Wearing his “Mr. Tough Guy” mask, he declared that “we” – he should have used the singular, as that is what he meant, but he is not smart enough to recognize that holding the office of Her Majesty’s Prime Minister does not give him the right to use the royal “we” and that having lost his majority government in 2019, failing both then and in 2021 to win even a plurality in the popular vote, and now having lost majority support for his policies he should not presume to speak for Canadians in general – “would not be intimidated”.   His conveniently timed need to self-isolate in a non-disclosed secure location speaks rather loudly to the contrary.  “We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans” he said.   Whereas protestors whose causes he has embraced over the past couple of years have toppled and beheaded statues, burned down churches, and committed real acts of vandalism, what he refers to here is the placing of a removable sign on the Terry Fox memorial.   As for the dishonouring of the memory of our veterans, I would say that the last two years of him trampling all over the freedoms those veterans fought for is far more dishonouring to their memory than a few protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

His focus, however, was on smearing the protestors with accusations of racism.  A few weeks ago, a clip of him giving an interview prior to last year’s Dominion election re-surfaced, in which he accused the unvaccinated of being “racists” and “misogynists” and asked whether Canadians should “tolerate these people”.   This dehumanizing language brought upon him vehement condemnation, at home and abroad, nor did the hypocrisy of the person of whom photographic – and video – evidence of his having worn blackface – and on one occasion full body brown skin makeup – on at least three separate occasions surfaced in the 2019 Dominion election calling other people “racists” go without notice.   Whereas accusing opponents of “racism” and “sexism” is a standard progressive tactic in Captain Airhead’s case there appears to be a personal element to it.   Knowing that he is guilty of not living up to his own progressive ideals – and, indeed, falling short of them in ways that are truly spectacular, as you can see by asking yourself how many people you know who have worn blackface even once – he projects his guilt onto others, in this case onto the unvaccinated he was trying to scapegoat and otherize in a manner reminiscent of Hitler, more often onto the country of Canada prior to his “enlightened” premiership.  

 

In his speech, he concentrated on such things as the single person at the rally carrying a flag bearing the symbol that his own father reportedly wore on his jacket while dodging the draft to fight in the war against the regime whose emblem that symbol was.   Since nobody has been able as of yet to locate the person who brought this flag to the protest nobody knows whether he did so as an expression of agreement with the ideology the flag represents or, perhaps more likely, to make the statement that the Prime Minister’s actions resemble those of the regime that flew that flag.   Either way, it is obvious to everyone – and I suspect this includes Captain Airhead and his sycophants, as much as they claim otherwise – that the person with this flag represented nobody at the rally but himself.   Another person at the rally carried the flag of the states that attempted to secede from the United States seven years before Confederation.   Progressives maintain that this flag is as objectionable as the first mentioned through a tortured reductionism that reduces all the differences that had been driving the two regions of the United States apart for a century prior to that to a single racially sensitive issue.   Within living memory – indeed, quite recent living memory - that flag was a universal symbol, not of racism, but of rebellion, employed as such even in countries with no discernable connection to the history, culture, and issues pertaining to the conflict that produced it.   This notwithstanding, the fact that the other protestors were filmed objecting to its presence clearly demonstrates that this person too, whatever his intent, did not speak for anyone but himself.  

 

What many people may not realize is that in any large size protest against progressive policies there will always be one or two people with symbols of this type.   Progressives themselves make sure of this.   While in some cases it is a matter of outright infiltration – a progressive activist, or a government agent provocateur will join the protest and do or say something to bring opprobrium upon the protest as a whole - it also has to do with the way progressives a) introduce policies that are unjust to certain whites – working class whites, middle class whites, prairie farmers and other rural whites – but not to others such as journalists, academics, and technocrats where their own white supporters can be found, b) proclaim any backlash against such injustice to be “racist”, “white supremacist”, “white nationalist” etc., in the hopes of radicalizing the backlash so that c) they can point to the symbols of such radicalism, when they inevitably appear in larger protests against progressive policies that have nothing to do with racial issues whatsoever as a means of smearing the entire protest.

 

In this case, Captain Airhead’s efforts and those of his controlled media have failed on a truly grand scale.   The protest was too large and too obviously racially and ethnically diverse – predictably so, considering that what the media dubbed “vaccine hesitancy” is more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups – for Airhead’s remarks to be taken seriously by anyone with an iota of intelligence.

 

Captain Airhead, his fellow progressives, and their media spokesmen have spoken of the trucker protest as a threat to Canadian democracy.   Many supporters of the convoy have said, by contrast, that it is democracy in action.   In a way both are right and both are wrong.   What we have actually been seeing is two different understandings of democracy come to a clash.   There are many different ways of understanding democracy.   In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, there was a form of direct democracy, in which the democratic assembly, consisting of all corporate members – citizens - of the city, voted on every public matter.   In most societies with a form of democracy – and all complex societies with a form of democracy – that democracy has been representative democracy, where the citizens vote for representatives, who then form the government.   Republican governments such as that of our neighbour to the south are a representative form of democracy.   The House of Commons in our parliamentary form of democracy is also a representative form.   Populism, in which a grass-roots movement forms – often behind a charismatic leader – to make demands of the government is another form of democracy.

 

Captain Airhead’s understanding of democracy is an extremely corrupt perversion of representative democracy.   It is basically that every few years there is an election and whoever wins the election, at least if it is a Liberal, can then do whatever he wants until the next election, constitutional limits on his powers be hanged, because he is the choice and voice of the people. The truckers protest is populism in its best possible form.   The popular movement is not demanding that anything be taken away from anybody else, merely that what was stolen from them – and from every Canadian – their basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion and above all their right to reject with impunity the demand that they take a foreign substance into their body – be returned immediately.

 

Note the perspective of this writer.   I am not positively inclined towards democracy as an ideal.   I love and support my country’s traditional governing institutions, including our reigning monarchy and our democratic parliament, but with parliament I insist upon this distinction – I love and support it because it is a traditional governing institution and thus one that has proven itself over the ages and not because it is democratic.   Indeed, I belong to that “small fringe minority” of people with “unacceptable views” who agree with the consensus of the pre-modern tradition, classical and Christian, that democracy is the worst of all forms of government not the best, reject completely the modern liberal idea that legitimate government authority is that which is given to the government by the people (John Locke’s attempt to argue this against Sir Robert Filmer in his Two Treatises failed – even his fellow utilitarian liberal Jeremy Bentham could see that Filmer had the better of the arguments - and was thoroughly rebutted by the Rev. Charles Leslie, who demonstrated in his The Rehearsal that the legitimate authority of Parliament came through the Magna Carta from royal charter, not popular consent) along with the liberal idea that the individual person’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property come with the individual person into society from a pre-social state of nature (because there is no such thing as pre-social state of nature – society is part of man’s created nature – the rights of life, liberty, and property are real and bestowed by God, not the deistic God of Locke, but the True and Living God of Christianity), and hold in utter derision and scorn the modern equation of democracy with freedom (except when democracy is defined as self-government, and explained not in terms of the constitution of the state but the concept of subsidiarity – that the every decision should be left to those most locally competent to handle it rather than centralized in the state) because history clearly demonstrates that the size and intrusiveness of government grew exponentially after the modern heresy of popular sovereignty caught on and that governments that see themselves as the “voice of the people” have far less respect for those people’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property than kings who hold their authority by hereditary right and sacred oath.   (1) Recognizing these neglected truths does not incline one to much sympathy with populism.

 

These are exceptional times however.   Modern liberalism, in rejecting the ancient consensus that democracy was the mother of tyranny, believed that legal and constitutional recognition and protection of the rights of minorities was sufficient to guard against the problems the ancients had seen in democracy, which Alexis de Tocqueville summed up in his concept of the “tyranny of the majority”.   They failed to foresee the day when a professed liberal – the leader of the Liberal Party, as a matter of fact – would loudly espouse the rights and protections of “minorities”, but understand by that term “people of certain skin colours”, “women” (over 50% of the population), “people of certain ethnic and national backgrounds”, “people of certain religions”, “people of certain sexual orientations” and “people of certain gender identities”, while despising completely minorities in the sense the original liberals intended, the dictionary sense, of numeric minorities.   For all of his empty talk about protecting “vulnerable minorities”, Captain Airhead has felt completely free to dehumanize, otherize, scapegoat, and stir up hatred against those whom he has been unable to convince to voluntarily take a bat flu vaccine, because they are a numerically tiny fragment of the population.   The “unvaccinated” are the true “vulnerable minority”.   Mercifully, what we are seeing in this populist truckers protest, is not the kind of demagogue-driven mob action that has been the historical norm for populism, but Canadians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, coming together to send Captain Airhead the message, loud and clear, that he does not speak for them, and to demand that government start respecting the basic freedoms of all Canadians once again.   This is a cause most worthy of our support.

 

God save the Queen!

God bless the truckers!

 

(1)   This week began with Royal Martyr Day, the anniversary of the death of a godly king who was murdered by religious fanatics who, having gained control of Parliament, believed that they had the right to do whatever they want.   King Charles warned that those who in their fanatical belief that they were the voice of a popular sovereignty went to war against his rights as sovereign king, would not hesitate to trample over the rights of anyone else.  Those who deposed him proved him right on this during the mercifully short-lived Cromwellian Interregnum, as did those who followed their example – the Jacobins in France in the 1790s, and the Communists, beginning with Russia in 1917 and spreading from there to about a third of the world in the last century before their collapse.