Archive for the ‘Free Speech’ Category
Two must-read articles from Karl du Fresne
Readers will be well aware that my attitude towards the MSM is that that they are, at best, shallow and useless in their reporting and “analysis”, and at worst combine that with massive ideological bias to the Left as well as the occasional bouts of outright partisanship towards, in the case of New Zealand, the Greens, Labour, or the Maori party, depending on how well each of them is doing in supporting a Left wing agenda.
The read I have on the NZ MSM at present is that, as Chris Trotter and Martyn Bradbury have often pointed out, they’ve sold their souls for capitalist money and the “neo-liberal” status quo established since 1984, in exchange for pushing every other piece of Leftist wank. I think those two gentlemen are nostalgic screamers because, at least in the environmentalist world of combating AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) they may get want they want eventually from their rather despised New Left comrades with a return of state ownership or more likely, a regulatory and tax regime that makes a mockery of the term “private enterprise”. Whether the Leftists in the MSM know where the AGW process will lead or not doesn’t really matter, but I suspect that many “reporters” do and are keen on using it to get back to the supposed Nirvana created by the First Labour Government.
As such it’s important that blogs support eachother, so here are two articles by Karl du Fresne that need as much exposure as possible:
This post deals with the steadily growing catastrophe that is Three Waters and the Health re-structuring.
Carterton District Council, one of the smallest in the country (population 9700), expects to spend $850,000 preparing for Three Waters over the next two years. The council’s chief executive says the plan has imposed an “enormous” programme of work that the council’s not resourced to cope with it. Mayor Greg Laing describes the process as “absolutely appalling”.
The Times-Age quotes the Department of Internal Affairs as saying funding will be provided to cover transition costs, but it’s obvious that councils haven’t seen any of the money and don’t know when they will. In any case, South Wairarapa’s mayor Alex Beijen, who presides over a district with a population of only 11,000 (and one that’s already financially stretched to breaking point), says resourcing will be a big challenge even with extra government money.
I laughed at one of the comments where the guy sent a Letter To The Editor concisely pointing some of the problems and found his points about rents and royalties had been excised. Standard censoring of disinformation; I don’t know why he bothered but others made the point that this why blogs and other social media (to an extent, given their own censorship) are important while the MSM dies.
The healthcare problem has been hidden by C-19 Kabuki Theatre and Three Waters but if anything it’s more frightening:
As Powell points out, “With only 40 working days to go, DHBs have no more information on what will replace them on 1 July than they had on 21 April last year when the health minister announced their abolition.” You can read his damning appraisal here.
This all sounds familiar, the same as other SNAFU’s this government has made in the last few years; ill-defined plans; falling behind schedule; last-second scrambles to do something. I really hope I and my family don’t fall sick in any way for the next couple of years.
2. The Free Speech Union meeting that earned a trigger warning from Salient
This is Karl catching up on Victoria University’s response to his talk On the threats to free speech, that was delivered a while ago at the university, courtesy of the Free Speech Union.
It seems that the students have been triggered by a speech that none of them apparently attended and have used the student newspaper, Salient, to express their outrage; Karl points out that it’s prefaced with a trigger warning advising, in bold type:
This article examines some of the racist, transphobic, sexist, and otherwise harmful content discussed at the event in question. Please exercise caution when reading.
Frightening.
You can read the sad, pathetic details of the objections to his speech and while I and a lot of other students never took much notice of such things at varsity – where the Left-wing student radicals dominated such talk via the student unions and their varsity newspapers – it’s clear that such people have much greater influence, some might say control, over their varsities than they did forty or even twenty years ago.
For me, one comment showed how far things have gone:
As a Victoria lecturer and a member of FSU (so I would prefer to be anonymous), I am sad to say this is exactly what I expect from our students. Students nowadays are extremely lazy; most of them don’t even bother to attend lectures. Critical thinking and meaningful debates are just not things under their radars. I don’t blame students but the university administration. The university administration is a bunch of failed academics who do not really care about education and research. All they care is their position and would do everything possible to pander students in order to get money from the government. As a lecturer, our constant pressure from the university is how to make students happy and get more of them, not how to train better citizens of the future.
An unexpected result of the 1990’s reforms of university is that there are a lot of people there who should not be, given their lack of brains, and that the incentives for them to go and the incentives of the universities to get bums on seats, are screwed up. Perhaps if student loans were tied directly to the universities so that they’re on the hook for payment recovery, the universities would be pushed harder to teach productive courses and “train better citizens” in real critical thinking.
Really quite atrocious
The world gets sillier with each passing day.
The ridiculous creature you’ve just watched is now the head of a new part of the US Department of Homeland Security, the Disinformation Governance Board.
What a coincidence that this announcement comes just days after Elon Musk buying Twitter and the Liberal world setting its hair on fire as a result.
The Department of Homeland Security is setting up a new board designed to counter misinformation related to homeland security, with a focus specifically on Russia and irregular migration. The board will be called the “Disinformation Governance Board,” and will be headed by executive director Nina Jankowicz.
And there it is right out of the gate, “irregular migration”. So we won’t be able to say “open borders” any longer? Or “illegal aliens”, (even though that’s the legal term) without the ban hammer coming down, or worse.
I’m going to call it the Ministry of Truth from here on because that’s entirely appropriate.
Ms Jankowicz herself writes:
Now that I’ve got it: a HUGE focus of our work, and indeed, one of the key reasons the Board was established, is to maintain the Dept’s commitment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, & civil liberties.
That sounds like exactly the opposite of what this board is designed for. It’s purpose will be to stamp out information that the Biden administration doesn’t like, censor any thoughts that run counter to the MSM narrative of the day, and “fact-check” points of view deemed “inappropriate.”
The thing is that she herself is a peddler of disinformation as, for example, the 2020 claim that Hunter Biden’s business records were a Russian plant. In fact she was still pushing this as of March 2021.
Amazing how all those “natsec experts” were completely wrong, although that’s being generous as I think they just flat-out lied: they’ll probably gets jobs working for her at the Ministry of Truth. Hmmm… DGB… that acronym rings a bell.
It was the claim that it was Russian Disinformation that was the actual disinformation — partisan Democrat Deep State disinformation. As the new Disinformation Czarina, she should, of course, be eager to apologise for her previous disinformation. What are the odds?
I see some back-peddling going on with the Biden Administration now claiming that work on this started on Trump’s watch in 2020. Oh really? When during 2020 did this “work” begin? What exactly was that “work,” of which the current bureau is a merely a “continuation”? Did Trump ever hear about it? Did the Trump administration ever appoint an Executive Director of a Ministry of Truth?
Actually it’s fun to imagine the Liberal world’s reaction if Trump had done this. It would have made the Musk meltdown look like nothing.
But then something like this was always on the cards with the DHS. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks twenty years ago I figured that President GW Bush would tear down the CIA, FBI and other “intelligence” agencies that had so clearly failed and then re-build them into something fit for purpose. But instead, as a typical Moderate, Centrist Right Winger – the sort who loves Big Government almost as much as the Left does – he simply created yet another giant bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security and draped it over the top of the existing failures, supposedly to tie them together better.
Claims from the Right and Left that making the National Security state even bigger posed future dangers to the freedom of Americans was ignored in the heat of 9/11 emotions. The Right – admittedly mainly Libertarians – saw it as just another example of how bigger government creates bigger problems in the future, mainly because it further empowers those who love state power for its own sake in controlling individuals. The Left had traditionally felt uneasy about the NatSec state – until recently it seems, now that there’s a chance it can be weaponised against Right Wing enemies.
As silly as Ms Jankowicz appears, this is deadly serious. That joking meme of GW is no joke when you read official shit from the DHS like their March 2021 report, ‘Internal Review of Domestic Violent Extremism.’:
A March 2021 unclassified threat assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Department of Justice, and DHS, noted that domestic violent extremists “who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.”
The assessment pointed to newer “sociopolitical developments such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence” that “will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] [sic] to try to engage in violence this year.”
This is what DHS is now all about, exactly as its critics predicted two decades ago, and this new Board is simply another drawing back of the covers to reveal the machinery underneath. What’s next?
It’s probably easier going after “domestic violent extremists” than after the people that were originally supposed to be the focus of DHS: people like Nidal Hassan, Omar Mateen, Fahreed Skyhook and his concubine and at least a dozen or so other attackers as well as plots that were only foiled by sheer dumb luck rather than by the DHS/FBI.
It’s appropriate to leave you with this interesting article: Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis? The short answer is no!
Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”
Meh – I couldn’t leave it on such a grim note, so here’s the original silliness, featuring what is generally agreed to be one of the worst fake accents on film, courtesy of American actor Dick Van Dyke as a Cockney chimney sweep.
Cancel Kulture and the tools it uses.
And one of those tools has been Twitter.
Here’s one way that Cancel Kulture can be made to work, and has worked on a number of people, especially in show business.
It’s quite simple: you just reach back into the past of that person, find something that’s “problematic” by today’s standards – problematic is a great word in that it’s not a direct attack but implies that a problem exists with the target of the word – and use that standard combined with a gathering wildfire of outrage on Social Media, followed by the MSM, to force the target into groveling apologies, most of which don’t work, the target gets de-platformed anyway.
This is what happened to Oscars host and comedian, Kevin Hart, three years ago. That was the end of that high profile job, and pretty much his career. The same stunt has been pulled on nobodies as well, like the young woman who lost her university place when a former high school classmate published an old Tweet of her celebrating getting her drivers licence at the age of 16 by repeating the line of a famous rap song (all the rage with her generation at the time) that included The Word That Can Get You In Trouble (unless you’re a rap artist).
Recently it was tried against the famous American comedian Steve Martin, because of a forty year old sketch he’d done on Saturday Night Live. Stephen Green at PJMedia takes up the story:
“Steve Martin” briefly trended on Monday after Silver Age Television tweeted the anniversary of King Tut’s debut on SNL. It trended because some zero-humor wokester forced it to trend. But only briefly. Mediaite did its best to generate heat with this headline yesterday:
Steven Martin’s ‘King Tut’ Sketch from 1978 Sparks Twitter Debate on Cultural Appropriation.
Steven Martin? Anyway, as the story made clear, there wasn’t even so little as a “Twitter debate.” The worst Mediaite could find was two barely-critical tweets by a couple of low-follower Blue Checks.
The Twitter Outrage Machine was cranked to life, then almost immediately ran out of gas. Maybe it’s because Twitter spent Monday outraged about the Elon Musk buyout and didn’t have time to worry about Martin.
Excellent news, but how did that little wokester actually get “Steve Martin” to trend in the first place, lighting a spark as it were?
“They do it,” Dice explained, “to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. Twitter manually inserts a topic on the list. People see the topic and think everyone is tweeting about which “caused” it to trend, so people *start* tweeting about it, and *then* the issue goes viral.”
Easy peasy. Japaneasy.
Oooo. Is that racist? Or culturally inappropriate?
Well anyway, after delving into yet another aspect of the grim, toxic underbelly of the politically correct Left, have a laugh at Steve Martin’s original sketch:
To Tweet or not to Tweet?
I don’t use Twitter except as a casual consumer. Which is to say that I don’t have an account there and even in the wake of Musk’s takeover I’m not likely to get one because I have no desire to be sucked into a world of simplistic takes based on “arguments” limited to 280 characters, followed by a thousand toxic responses.
I’m also well aware of the fact that the Leftist groups who have dominated Twitter in recent years have found themselves shocked and surprised when the real world matched up not at all with their Twitter world, from Brexit to Trump’s 2016 win to the smashing success of the Tories in former Labour seats in the last British election. This has led a number of Centre-Leftists to get stuck into the Twitter Left as being deluded idiots who’ve screwed themselves.
So Twitter is not a representative sample of politics, even at the activist or political-tragic level, let alone the voters, and as a result the Right should not be getting too excited about their suddenly increased freedom to speak on the platform.
However, it’s clear that Twitter is important, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing the Leftie meltdown that we have witnessed in the last 48 hours. It’s also clear that something has changed, as noted yesterday by one of our readers:
Twitter has changed dramatically over the last 24 hours. Lots of high profile people that I didn’t know were there (had been shadow banned) just popping out onto my feed.
Well, well, well…Big conservative accounts reporting tens of thousands of followers being added to their accounts!!
Hmmm,…. My guess is that Twitter is turning off the suppression software and preparing to hide the evidence.
In the meantime the “Liberal MSM” world in the USA continues to lose its mind about this issue:
Of course YouTube and the others remain as they are so we’ll see how long it takes before that link goes dark. It took YouTube only a few minutes to demonetize Cole and Savannah LaBrant’s 38-minute pro-life documentary after its initial posting. Instagram followed suit shortly thereafter.
There was probably some “hate speech” involved, otherwise known as disagreeing with “liberals.”
Let the meltdown begin! (UPDATE)
Ooooooo…….. Mummy, mummy…the pain. The pain…
I don’t usually cover “breaking news” because that’s not what blogs are for, but this news is just too delicious to ignore.
Twitter sells out to Elon Musk – Twitter Press Release.
Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.
I’ll stay away from the beach today because of the risk of a tsunami of Leftist tears.
Meanwhile, from one of the alternative sites to Youtube (Alphabet’s favourite Stasi source), Rumble, is a little piece of video you’ll laugh your tits off at – if you’re a right-winger
Live look at Elon Muck firing people at Twitter.
The questions about what will actually change will now come to the fore, starting with whether the Babylon Bee will get their account re-activated? Still, it would seem they’ve got a handle on this…
Leftists Worried Elon Musk Will Turn Twitter Into A Place
Where Terrible People Post Bad Opinions
And Fight With Each Other All The Time
The irony is that this all started because of the Babylon Bee’s now famous headline, which got them banned from Twitter.
And of course the possibility of the return of He Who Shall Not Be Named.
This is also relevant.
The great Iowahawk is having fun…
Resume update: Conversation Safety & Quality Associate, Twitter Inc., 2018-2022. Created bold initiative that resulted in a net $10 billion gain in shareholder value
Stamping on a human face forever
As we slowly crawl toward freedom and away from the mandates and restrictions surrounding General Tso’s Sickness pandemic, it’s worth knowing that there will always be a part of the population that loved all this and are feeling bereft.
You see it with people still wearing masks outdoors and while driving cars alone, or who still hold their phones to scan in before entering shops.
It turns out that not everybody likes freedom, and based on my everyday observations the percentage is too high for comfort in (supposedly) freedom-loving democracy.
So the following cartoon seems appropriate.
I’d forgotten about this survey from the USA.
It’s a good thing George Carlin is dead
That was one message from Bill Maher’s take on the impact of Cancel Kulture in his world of using humour to stick it to powerful people.
I haven’t covered The Slap Heard Around The World because it’s just more of Hollywood being awful, but this time in a petty way that amounted to them eating their own as well as being yet another black mark for the Oscars. IMHO it was not as bad as the crap they churn out for us to watch. And now I have Maher referring to it anyway, except that his angle isn’t the screaming about violence, toxic males or the hypocrisy involved but what it says about how the US Left is handling humour nowadays, with another in his series of Explaining Jokes to Idiots (bonus points for the shoutout to the famous Seinfeld episode, The Magic Loogie, with “back and to the left”, itself a Black Comedy parody of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK).
If you think that it trivialises Cancel Kulture in focusing on its effects on jokes instead of Very Serious Ideas then you probably don’t know about this from 2021:
A nonprofit organization that major U.S. tech companies rely on for content moderation is expanding the scope of content it will blacklist on social media platforms.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will expand its database of terrorist content to cover content shared by white nationalist and alt-right users, Reuters reported Monday. Tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Twitter, rely on the forum’s database to automatically remove inappropriate content. Experts worry that the forum’s lack of transparency could cause some users to be unfairly censored.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism was created in 2017 to censor content from U.N.-designated terrorist organizations. The forum’s board is advised by the European Union’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, which recently released a report entitled “It’s Not Funny Anymore: Far-Right Extremists’ Use of Humor.”
…
More in that link, although it’s mostly not about humour.
The worst is when the comics censor themselves, when they become Woke, which seems to be what’s happened to one of Maher’s famous compadres, Jon Stewart.
The liberal comic retired from his “The Daily Show” perch in 2015, spawning tributes from across the media landscape. He changed the face of late night TV, they cried, and they were right. For better and much worse.
His impact, from his liberal take on the news to his bleeped profanity shtick, became part of the late night playbook.
Hell, I used to laugh along with The Daily Show as well, even as he took shots at the Right (like Maher does) to a far greater degree than he did at the Left.
But I did not appreciate the fact that after basically destroying what was a very good show of Left vs Right political and ideological argument, CNN’s Crossfire – by going on it in 2004 and attacking the folks there as unserious hacks, saying it was a show that “hurt America” by treating serious ideas in a (too) humorous way – Stewart’s own show simply carried on pushing little but the Left’s line while the rest of the media environment collapsed into the same echo chamber:
Is the media landscape Stewart helped create better for it, where Brian Williams regularly engages in Stewart-like snark (he called Ron Johnson a Russian asset the other day for reading a Federalist article into the record) and Tucker Carlson is the biggest name as a solo act in cable news?
In a context in which so much ink is dedicated to the concept of silos and the elimination of common space between right and left — and I mean the real right and left, not David Brooks and Maureen Dowd — do we honestly want a world where there is no space where these warring sides meet to do rhetorical battle?
The answer is: of course not. It’s much, much worse. The inability to have a space where such debates play out, and the inability of existing entities to provide such a space, has led directly to a degradation of our political conversation and a lack of familiarity with even the most basic version of the other side’s perspective on the world.
And as Jim Treacher memorably noted of Stewart’s routine:
Once I saw through his Clown Nose Off/Clown Nose On routine — “You should listen to me because what I’m saying is important, but I’ll brush off your rebuttal by insisting I’m just a comedian” — it was like the optical illusion with the cows. It might take you a minute to see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it.
Since Treacher’s analysis in 2013 people have looked at the famous old Crossfire segment and observed that Stewart was pulling the Clown Nose On / Clown Nose Off routine there as well.
There was some of this also when he recently appeared on an episode of one of his Daily Show proteges, Late Night With Stephen Colbert, and spoke some common sense about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory, which had Colbert back-peddling fast until he finally asked Stewart how long he’d been working for Senator Ron Johnson (boom-tish for Liberal snark – see above).
Sadly he seems to have gone full Clown Nose Off as a result of savage attacks by Woke critics of his old show and more recent works:
The woke mob, which will “resurface” the past to attack people in the present, deemed his “Daily Show” writers room insufficiently diverse. And Stewart, rather than defend his team or their work, groveled for forgiveness. That must have stung, but it’s more likely another moment left a palpable scar on his psyche.
That other moment was a movie called “Irresistible” that Stewart made about politics and which lampooned both the GOP and the Democrats. That was not acceptable:
It’s cowardly to make a film lampooning Democrats as out of touch rather than Republicans as unquestionably evil, but this is what “centrism” is these days, and that’s the “both sides” ideology that Stewart espoused back during his days on The Daily Show, and that’s the shit that doesn’t fly anymore.
War, baby! Götterdämmerung. The final fight between the forces of Good and (Unquestionable) Evil.
This is why his latest show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart” on the Apple+ streaming network, had an episode titled “The Problem with White People.” that ended up with Andrew Sullivan, Mr Gay Mrriage himself, a voter of Obama-Obama-Clinton-Biden in the last few years, being attacked as a racist by Stewart’s guest, with Stewart in full, Clown Nose Off agreement:
I just assumed he wouldn’t demonize or curse at a guest; he would moderate; he would entertain counter-arguments; he would defend fair play. After all, this was the man who had lacerated Crossfire for bringing too much heat and not enough light. He believed in sane discourse. He was a liberal, right?
He is indeed, it’s just that poor old Sullivan, despite writing about Woke issues, still thinks that Liberals fit his stereotype, the comfortable picture he has of them, and of himself:
At that point, it became clear that Stewart was not conducting a televised debate, but initiating a struggle session. The point of the session was not to discuss anything, but to further enforce the dogma he had pronounced. So I found myself in the equivalent of one of those workplace indoctrination seminars — in which any disagreement is regarded as a form of “hate” or “ignorance.” But worse: I was in a struggle session with a live mob sitting in, cheering and jeering, which Stewart led and orchestrated. For good measure, Stewart called me a racist and told me I was not “living in the same fucking country as we are,” and went on to angrily call me a “motherfucker.”
Sullivan also got this treatment from the guest (predictably a Liberal White Woman):
I did not come on this show to argue with another white man. That’s one of the reasons we don’t even engage with white men at Race2Dinner, because quite honestly if white men were going to do something about racism, you had 400 years. You could have done it.
A key attack point. If it sounds familiar that’s because we’ve heard it in New Zealand also, in relation to White Colonialism, and you will hear more of it in the near future. Sullivan finishes his detailed piece on the history of White and Black race in the USA by drawing the obvious parallel with Stewart’s ethnicity:
… the trope of a malign racial force existing through history across time and space is one Jon Stewart might have once recognized before he joined the woke cult. I wonder what he would have said if someone had come on his old show and said, “I did not come on this show to argue with a Jew,” or “every single Jew upholds these systems,” or “it doesn’t matter what a Jew’s politics are, he’s still a Jew, and therefore a racist”. What if she had bragged that her organization wouldn’t even engage with Jews because they were so toxic. And what if that person had looked straight at a Jewish guest of Stewart’s when she said it? What would he have said?
Somehow I don’t think it would be: “If I could finger snap, I would finger snap right now.”
Amid all this fighting was news of a stunning counter-attack. After asking his 80 million Twitter followers what they thought of the status of free speech on the platform, and receiving an overwhelming response that it was poor, Musk bought a 9.2% stake in the company for US$ 2.9 billion dollars, making him the largest shareholder and likely catapulting him onto the Board of Directors.
We’ll have to wait and see what influence he has. While significant, the shareholding is far short of control and BOD members are not management; they don’t manage the day-to-day functions of the company. On top of that, as this article pointed out before Musk pulled the trigger, there are a number of big roadblocks in returning Twitter to being the free speech platform it was a decade ago, and we know they exist because they are what changed it. The article details four steps and shows how they worked before and could work again – possibly destroying Musk in the process.
- Blame the platform for its users.
- Coordinated pressure campaigns
- Exodus of the Bluechecks
- Deplatforming
Still it was nice to see that it triggered an immediate meltdown across the Lefty Social Media Sphere, especially among the Twitter workers themselves.
Maybe they should hire Bill Maher to provide worker tension-relief exercises once a week. They might even learn to laugh.
THE WAR – MY STAND
I look at the news, I look at the pictures. Putin’s war on the Ukraine rivals that which Hitler unleashed on Russia, minus perhaps the executions which may well come later as ordinary Ukrainian people continue to resist the Russian occupation of their land.
Be that as it may I have decided that in order to show my solidarity with the Ukrainian peoples in their fight against Russian aggression I will not in future allow Putin apologists to post the Kremlin’s talking points in response to anything I post on my blog in relation to the war.
So, don’t waste your time. Expect to be edited out. Slava Ukraini.
Contagion
The Canadian virus continues to spread, now to Australia where a massive convoy has descended upon the Federal capital of Canberra.
“A huge crowd is building in Canberra as the anti-mandate Convoy To Canberra protest gains momentum in the nation’s capital. Last night traffic was brought to a standstill as cars, caravans, trucks and buses flooded into the city from all states. The crowd today met at Commonwealth Park before starting the march to Parliament House where a range of speakers will address the crowd.”
I wonder how long it will take before the Australian government and their MSM stenographers begin to repeat the words of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and NZ PM Jacinda Ardern about “fringe minorities“, “fascists”, “racists“, “xenophobes”, “anti-vax nutters”, etc, etc.
Amazing how consistent that narrative has been across the English-speaking countries in response to these protests.
Dance like you’re scum (updated)
Homophobic. Transphobic. Racists. Traitors.
Filled with hate. Violent. Symbols of division and intolerance. Desecrators of statues.
Did I say racists? Disgusting.
All of those words have been used by the Canadian toy boy Prime Minister to describe the thousands of truckers currently ensconced at the Canadian capital of Ottawa.
You can see them here in this video smuggled out of Truckistan.
Looks like they’re having an effect too, despite being “fringe”:
A majority of Canadians now say it is time to end COVID restrictions, according to an Angus Reid poll, a sharp increase from when the same question was asked in early January.
Meantime, here’s two photos taken on the NorthWestern Motorway in Auckland on Sunday as the local effort went along. I think that’s the St Lukes-MOT overpass.
Last thought re Canada…
UPDATE:
I no sooner post this than news arrives that Ottawa has declared a state of emergency and the police are taking their fuel/gas supplies used for heating and that anyone bringing in “supplies” of such, or food, will be arrested. A type of siege warfare then! Video shows that the cops are fully SWATted up as they grab the supplies – as you need to be when dealing with terrorists.
Heh. Well you shouldn’t have chosen Canada then. Hell, if you took the Ottawa Police and dumped them into East Germany in the 1970’s they’d have fitted in perfectly as the Stasi, but then Justin would have made an excellent leader of that nation, and would have been swooned over by Western Leftists as the youthful, cool face of communism.
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