“Freedom Convoy” truckers aren’t first, won’t be last fed up with government control

You know, in the age of COVID when so many things seem weird. One of the most interesting, and I think most unexpected has been the truckers who have been basically demonstrating in Canada and who instead of getting sympathy out of the government have gotten a level of hostility that amazed me. 

I was affected, I guess, in part because when Jimmy Carter was president, and I was a freshman congressman, we had a Tractor Cade that tractors that came from all over the country. 

You can’t believe what a mess it was, cuz you know, tractors are pretty big, and they’re slow, and they were just rumbling down the road. People had to go around them, and they ultimately ended up in Washington and the huge number of tractors all over Washington in 1979, but it didn’t occur to anybody to be hostile and to be angry. 

Canadians who I think of normally as pretty go along, get along people, the Canadian government is kind of going crazy.

The mayor of Ottawa has said that these people are, you know, terrible, and that they’re hateful, and that they have to be stopped. 

“Having a trucker protest against vaccinations and against masks, it’s the height of irresponsibility.”

His police chief was apparently a total thug, has been out there a little bit, like the police chief in Birmingham back during the civil rights era who made a name for himself by using police dogs to attack demonstrators. 

Well, this guy’s gone out and said, if you give these truck drivers food, if you provide ’em with gasoline, if you do anything to make their life easier, we’re gonna arrest you. And it’s kind of an effort to starve them out, not to talk to them. 

I mean, the truckers don’t like wearing masks, and they’re trying to communicate they’re against the government dominating their lives, and their action of government has been to get more hostile, more angry, more determined.

I think the compounding effect, they, they don’t particularly want a lot of them for health reasons, for religious reasons. Just outta personality reasons don’t want to get vaccinated. 

And so there’s this very intense sense that the government is imposing on them. 

And by the way, we’re now learning that a lot of the things the public health people told us just weren’t true. They had no scientific basis and represented sort of a sociology of power of people who want to impose themselves on the rest of us. So, I think it’s fascinating.

It’s beginning to happen around Europe. 

There’s talk about having truck drivers come to Washington in March. It’d be interesting to see how the Biden administration handles that. 

And I think there’s just a tip of an iceberg of everyday folks who are just sick and tired of being told by the government how they have to behave, in personal ways down to what they put in their body with vaccinations, what they put on their face with masks, how they have to deal with their children.

And of course we’ve had these at least two recent examples, one involving Stacey Abrams, the candidate for governor in Georgia, where every single child in the class who by the way are not at risk, but every single child of the class had a mask on. And she didn’t, the only person in the picture without a mask was the adult who’s the one person at risk. 

And just a reminder of the hypocrisy of the elites who are powerful and who believe that they should tell us how to behave, but they’re not necessarily gonna behave the way they tell us.

Something we learned when Governor Newsom went to the football game and was surrounded by people without any masks shortly after he had dictated that every Californian had to have on a mask, but, of course, he was governor, and, therefore, he was above his own rules.

So this is a fascinating time. It’s gonna continue unraveling. The truth is, starting with Denmark, country after country is going to drop all sorts of public health requirements, cuz it turned out they weren’t true, they weren’t necessary and they didn’t do any good. In fact, they did a lot of harm and that’s what we’re faced with.