It’s one of my favourite photos from the Canadian trucker protests that erupted in early 2022 as PM Justin Castrudeau cracked down ever more harshly on them to enforce C-19 vaccine mandates…

The Canadian government has threatened to freeze the bank accounts of protesting truckers…[]..And now, the Trudeau government is using emergency legislation to cut even people who are indirectly involved with the truckers’ protest — such as those who donated to them — from the financial system.

Threatened? They actually did it…

De-banking has increasingly been the weapon of choice for Western governments as they’ve expanded it from its original purpose of tackling organised crime to now tackling any opponent that opposes them, ranging from people like Nigel Farrage in Britain to the people that billionaires like Mark Andreesen work with in Silicon Valley.

But those people are rich and connected so they could survive. For truckers, not so much, and when they objected even more against this totalitarian bullshit they encountered accusations of being uncaring White Privileged scumbags from all quarters of privileged society, including the MSM with cartoons such as this comparing them outright to fascists:

Plus this even more disgusting comparison:

The thing is that the Trucker Protests worked, and not just in terms of Sikhs sarcastically reflecting back the critics own toxic stupidities:

Within 1 month the trucker convoy had effected a hostile overthrow of the Governments of Alberta and the official opposition, the Conservative party of Canada – from pro to anti- lockdown – and crushed the moderate wing of the conservative movement…Within 2-4 months all domestic restrictions were gone and within 8 months even the pantomime of international restrictions didn’t exist, Canada had fewer covid restrictions than the US.

The thing is that this fact represented a threat to TPTB and so they had to play it down. Nevertheless it laid down yet another marker in the wake of the 2016 Brexit and Trump elections:

The greatest possible threat to them is that the mass of the Suburban and rural Middle-class: Flyover country, the Petite Bourgeoise, the small business owners, the farmers, the truckers, the Kulaks… The greatest possible threat to the regime is that this mass will realize its incredible power both in coordination, logistics, and initiative… And that it will overthrow the governing class of Bureaucrats, Regulators, Lawyers, DEI Administrators, and leaches who’ve gotten rich surviving of their tax cattle who actually work and produce things.

All of this is class warfare, the real one, but not as crude as the one Karl Marx imagined. Inspired by the trucker protests a guy called N.S. Lyons, who has a Substack newsletter called The Upheaval, took a crack at defining the modern version with Reality Honks Back:

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively…Many (though not all) of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to frequently be either fairly solidly middle-class skilled tradesmen, relatively successful small businessmen, or land-holders (e.g. farmers, ranchers, real estate entrepreneurs) who are often actually relatively well-off. It is the character of their work that seems to shape the common identity and values of each side of the class divide more than income.

I recall being admonished on this point a few years ago by Psycho Milt about how if you owned anything, even a small business, you really weren’t a member of the Working Class, and while that might be technically true from a Marxist perspective it’s not much help in explaining recent political ructions in the West. Lyons reckon his Physicals/Virtuals take also explains the growing gender divide, although after the 2024 election I reckon it’s more a married/unmarried divide.

As for those Virtuals…

The Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence. In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

An argument that has been made increasingly by many people trying to explain Brexit and Trump, showing up often in posts I’ve done about the Professional Management Class. But for all their power the PMC have a fundamental obstacle in their way:

The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world. The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts.

Heh. I recall SF movies along those lines. And of course this fits perfectly with the “Virtuals” way of operating – information control of the narrative, which is why they also believe that women can have penises and men can have vaginas. It’s not all cynicism; they really do believe a lot of shit because that’s how they navigate the world, a virtualisation of everything, which allows facts as well as arguments to just be reframed. That’s why the Canadian species couldn’t cope with the realities of Trucker’s protest and pushed further into things like de-banking – a very virtual effort that had frightening effects in reality, like turning the class warfare hot.

There’s also a part of this elite class that George Orwell spotted almost a century ago in Britain, and whose observation forms the title of this article, Sandal Wearers and Sex Maniacs, where the writer looks at the Brexit vote and fallout, starting with writing of his long-ago, minimum wage, summer job in a sawmill and the encounters between the varsity boys like him and the Working Class who were there permanently:

One day, the philosophy student signed his own social death sentence. He brought with him a container of sushi, and a crisp copy of the Guardian. This was the social equivalent of urinating in the kettle. A regular snatched the broadsheet from the pile, and laid it out on the table before him. He leafed through the pages as an archaeologist would the Book of the Dead. He concluded: “There’s no fucking tits in this.” From that day, the philosophy student was known as “Weird Kid.”
…
One afternoon, a team of us were busy stripping packages on a conveyor belt. Weird Kid, situated on the end of the belt, had a brain wave. He hooked an industrial container to the end of the conveyor belt. Magic! Rather than pile onto the floor, the packaging collected itself. One of the jail boys witnessed this bout of invention. His raised eyebrows said he was impressed, yet his hands which promptly ripped away the bin, said otherwise: “You think you’re fucking management, now, do you?”

To be fair that’s British Working Class; I don’t think an American Worker would respond like that.

Even so, the writer speculates that Weird Kid, after graduating, would have fully been part of the Guardian world and be utterly puzzled that the Working Class would vote to leave his beloved EU, or embracing the successful campaign that the newspaper with “no tits,” supported to remove them from the preferred newspaper of the factory boys, the Sun, and banning smoking in pubs that they’d be horrified to be seen in, confirming another of Orwell’s observations:

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form, is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. 

Which was funny back in the 1930’s but not once those classes began to do things to the economy that had once been held to be only what the very rich would support:

Back in the 1990s, the clever ones and their linguistic thimble-rigging turned the economy into a gameshow, and our culture into a talk-show. Stripping workers of decent jobs became “outsourcing.” Employees became “human resources.” In 2008, the excrement communed with the fan.

This had already been heating up class warfare to the point of eruption for two decades before Trump arrived on the scene in America to become the strangest symptom of it:

[I]t’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements.  And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.
…
“Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.” That’s right. It’s class war masquerading as something else, but people have seen through the mask.

That was written in 2019 and all the elites did was repeat the abuse in 2020, as well as all the other culture war stuff around abortion, trans rights, plus the ever-present threat of White Supremacism that those Sikh truckers were mocking in the photo above. The cherry on top was that on the economic front the elites, the “virtuals”, also remained fanatically focused on pushing globalism and now joining it with Net Zero.

All that heated magma needs is a crack to get to the surface. In 2024, those cracks have appeared all over the world.