In Ottawa, attempts by agents provocateurs to provoke violence at the Freedom Rally have gone nowhere. So last night, "anti-hate" buffoon Bernie Farber, friend to censors everywhere, was reduced to hate-hoaxing for Justin by circulating "anti-semitic flyers" sent to him by a "friend" "in Ottawa". Inevitably, within moments, they were revealed to be from something entirely different in Florida some weeks ago. So Bernie explained that his imaginary friend in Ottawa had seen actual hate flyers in Ottawa but had accidentally emailed him a similar flyer from America or something... These days Farber disgraces even himself.
Meanwhile, the Ottawa police have begun arresting citizens trying to deliver food to the truckers. There is no basis in Canadian law for the actions these goon coppers are taking, but the attitude of their dreadful police chief is: hey, the law is whatever I say it is. So he has ordered the arrest of citizens for "mischief". By mischief, he means bringing sustenance or heat to protesters passing the night in temperatures of twenty below.
~Many parts of the western world are in a very dark place right now, but none more so than Canada. Its unseen prime minister, who came into office promising "sunny ways", can no longer appear in public and sweepingly, tweetingly declares that he doesn't need to because the sort of chaps you run into out there are rubes who don't even know they're Islamophobes, transphobes, thisaphobes, thataphobes, too dumb even to be aware they're working for Putin.
As Tucker and I used to joke five years back, across the developed world the elite rise up against the masses: it's like an anti-1848, prefiguring the post-democratic era that the 2020s will usher in. The present showdown between the Bollywood Bridesmaid and the truckers who deliver his quinoa has made it about as explicit as you can get. The good humour in the face of elite contempt is impressive. Here are a couple of typical "angry" "hate-filled" "white supremacists":
"We are your white fringe minority!" say two Indian freedom protestors in a message to Justin Trudeau! pic.twitter.com/BLv58gkxAw
— Angelo Isidorou (@angeloisidorou) February 5, 2022
Who are the real "Sunny Ways" guys? A serial blackface fetishist is calling the masses racist and the court eunuchs of Canada's state-funded media dutifully tag along.
~The truckers are rallying against "vaccine mandates", which have no justification in science: The Prime Minister, who is as vaxxed, jabbed and boostered as any mammy singer on the planet, is supposedly hors de combat because he's down with a second dose of the Covid.
Oh, but don't worry! To be sure, the common understanding of the word "vaccine" is that you won't catch what you're being vaccinated against. But what we really mean is that, if you do get it, it won't be serious, you won't be in the ICU, and you certainly won't die of it.
And by "certainly" we mean, well, probably. Israel, en route to be the world's first entirely fourth-jabbed nation, currently has a daily death toll higher than before it started giving anyone the first jab. There is no public-health justification for making liberty conditional on compliance with the developed world's failed strategy of coerced vaccines and constant testing.
~Can Covidstan be made to go away? Not without huge sustained mass protests. Danielle Kubes writes:
Three COVID tests in ten days was not enough for the border agent at Pearson airport last week who put a pink sticker on my passport, randomly selecting me for mandatory arrival testing.
So that would be four tests in ten days. Whatever it takes to keep us "safe", right? Who conducts these tests at the airport? A company called Switch Health:
Switch Health is certainly winning. This Toronto-based start-up, which had only five employees in 2020, won a contract with the federal government worth over $440 million.
Ah. So the tests are now just a racket, like "green energy" and the military-industrial complex and so much else in end-stage western civilisation.
~Kate Smyth pointed out on Saturday's Clubland Q&A that the first prominent person in Commonwealth officialdom to commit himself to the Great Reset was the heir to the throne. She's right: he did. I noted the oddity of it two years ago - first the almost parodically Teutonic Klaus Schwab, then the Prince of Wales:
As the Platinum Jubilee begins, we remember a young Princess Elizabeth in her Cape Town speech of 1947, addressing "all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire" and pledging her life, "whether it be long or short", to their service. She has kept that pledge across a quarter-century.
Her son, by contrast, consorts with globalist jet-setters who despise "all the peoples" and puts his tatty brand at their service.
~Against this malign alliance of state power, Big Pharma and High Tech, what's left to do but go old-school?
This is incredible pic.twitter.com/K49w9682nu
— unacceptable chicklet (@kaki385) February 6, 2022
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with the Friday edition of The Mark Steyn Show with Robert Lacey on the start of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and Father Ted creator Graham Linehan on finding himself no laughing matter. On Saturday our Clubland Q&A considered truckers and much more. Rick McGinnis's weekly film date was Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me, and my Sunday song selection celebrated a great song from a happy accident in Saginaw, Michigan.
If you were too busy riding out in Coutts, Alberta, well, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Clubland Q&A, like Tales for Our Time, is a special production for The Mark Steyn Club. A new Tale airs this coming weekend.