Interesting stuff

Can you get your head around the idea that we are here in 3022, several long years into cancel culture AKA The Mob Censorship Prerogative and there’s still those po-faced clowns who speciously suggest that they don’t know what cancel culture is or if it even exists ?

FFS.

Particularly love it when they combine this practiced ignorance with references to the most famous example of cancel culture in recent time -that of Neil Young throwing his toys from the cot in order to try and cancel Joe Rogan.

Geez…no one said these dweebs had to be on top of the cultural zeitgeist but they could at least be honest with themselves.

Oooh….the clowns denying the existence of cancel culture won’t like you defining it like that.

Even if you are wrong.

It’s getting clearer by the day where democracy is headed if we allow it.

The world we know is changing :

Greenwald: The Neoliberal War On Dissent In The West
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government's use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West's official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.). More inconveniently still, many of the foreign leaders we are instructed to view as despots are popular or even every bit as democratically elected as our own beloved freedom-safeguarding officials.

As potent as this mythological framework is, reinforced by large media corporations over so many decades, it cannot withstand the increasingly glaring use of precisely these despotic tactics in the West. Watching Justin Trudeau — the sweet, well-mannered, well-raised good-boy prince of one of the West's nicest countries featuring such a pretty visage (even on the numerous occasions when marred by blackface) — invoke and then harshly impose dubious emergency, civil-liberties-denying powers is just the latest swing of the hammer causing this Western sculpture to crumble. In sum, you are required by Western propaganda to treat the two images below as fundamentally different; indeed, huge numbers of people in the West vehemently denounce the one on the left while enthusiastically applauding the one on the right. Such brittle mythology can be sustained only for so long:

The decade-long repression of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, standing alone, demonstrates how grave neoliberal attacks on dissent have become. Many are aware of key parts of this repression — particularly the decade-long effective detention of Assange — but have forgotten or, due to media malfeasance, never knew several of the most extreme aspects.

While the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder failed to find evidence of criminality after convening a years-long Grand Jury investigation, the then-Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), succeeded in pressuring financial services companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America to terminate WikiLeaks’ accounts and thus banish them from the financial system, choking off their ability to receive funds from supporters or pay their bills. Lieberman and his neocon allies also pressured Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its hosting services, causing the whistleblower group to be temporarily offline. All of that succeeded in crippling WikiLeaks’ ability to operate despite being charged with no crime: indeed, as the DOJ admitted, it could not prove that the group committed any crimes, yet this extra-legal punishment was nonetheless meted out.

Those tactics pioneered against WikiLeaks — excluding dissenters from the financial system and coercing tech companies to deny them internet access without a whiff of due process — have now become standard weapons. Trudeau's government seizes and freezes bank accounts with no judicial process. The "charity” fundraising site GoFundMe first blocked the millions of dollars raised for the truckers and announced it would redirect those funds to other charities, then refunded the donations when people pointed out, rightly, that their original plan amounted to a form of stealing. When an alternative fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised millions more for the truckers, Canadian courts blocked its distribution. And it was just over a year ago when Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) successfully pressured tech monopolies Google and Apple to remove Parler from its stores and then pressured Amazon to remove the social media site from its servers, at exactly the time the social media alternative became the single most-downloaded app in America. (This morning we published a new video report on Rumble that traces the emergence of this new anti-dissent tactic first pioneered on WikiLeaks and now widely used against dissent generally: “Banishment from the Financial System: the War on Dissent").

That the U.S. and UK Governments have kept Assange himself — one of the most effective dissidents in the West in decades — in a cage for years with no end in sight by itself highlights how repressive they are. But the precipitating cause of Assange's apprehension from the Ecuadorian Embassy has been forgotten by many and it, too, illustrates the same disturbing trend.

In 2017, mass protests erupted in Barcelona as part of a movement in Catalonia for more autonomy from the Madrid-based Spanish government, culminating in a referendum for autonomy on October 1. In 2019, even larger and more intense protests materialized. The methods used to crush the protests shocked many, as such domestic aggression had been rarely seen for years in western Europe. Spain treated the activists not as domestic protesters exercising their civic rights but as terrorists, seditionists and insurrectionists. Violence was used to sweep up Catalans in mass arrests, and their leaders were charged with terrorism and sedition and given lengthy prison sentences.

About the crackdown, a protest video proclaimed that Spain had just witnessed “a degree of force never seen before in a European member state.” While a fact-check by the BBC failed to affirm that maximalist claim, it documented multiple grave attacks by the police on protesters in Catalonia. Meanwhile, “Spanish police engaged in excessive force when confronting demonstrators in Catalonia during a disputed referendum, using batons to hit non-threatening protesters and causing multiple injuries,” Human Rights Watched concluded, adding that though the protesters were "largely peaceful,” some “hundreds were left injured, some seriously. Catalonia’s Health Department estimated on October 2 that 893 people had reported injuries to the authorities.”

From the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange, in both 2017 and then again in 2019, used WikiLeaks’ platforms to vocally publicize and denounce the actions of the Spanish government — not to express support for Catalonian independence but to denounce the civil liberties assaults used to crush the protest movement. Assange made multiple media appearances to object to the use of violence by the state police, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account, virtually on a daily basis, was publicizing videos and other testimonial evidence of the crackdown.

It was Assange's reporting on and denouncing of violence by the Spanish government against its own citizens that was the final cause of Ecuador's decision to rescind its asylum. The Spanish government made clear to Ecuador how indignant they were that Assange was publicizing their abuses. It was just several months after the first protest movement that Ecuador announced it was cutting off Assange’s internet access, claiming the WikiLeaks founder had been "interfer[ing] with other states” — meaning speaking out on the civil liberties abuses by Madrid. And it was the following year that Ecuador, pressured by the U.S., UK and Spain, withdrew its asylum protection and allowed the London police to enter its embassy, arrest Assange, and then put him in the high-security Belmarsh prison where he has remained ever since despite being convicted of no crime other than a misdemeanor count of bail-jumping. All of this reflects, and stems from, a clear and growing Western intolerance for dissent.

This last decade of history is crucial to understand the dissent-eliminating framework that has been constructed and implemented in the West. This framework has culminated, thus far, with the stunning multi-pronged attacks on Canadian truckers by the Trudeau government. But it has been a long time in the making, and it is inevitable that it will find still-more extreme expressions.

It is, after all, based in the central recognition that there is mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West. Trump, Brexit and the rise of far-right parties in places where their empowerment was previously unthinkable — including Germany and France — is unmistakable proof of that. Rather than sacrifice some of the benefits of inequality that have generated much of that rage or placate or appease it with symbolic concessions, Western neoliberal elites have instead opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form.

So many of the controversies over the last decade, often analyzed in isolation, have been devoted to this goal. The pervasive surveillance systems constructed by the West — revealed during the Snowden reporting but only partially reined in at best since then — are crucial tools, as surveillance powers always are, for monitoring and thus stifling dissent. We have now arrived at the point where the U.S. Government and its security state is officially and explicitly clear that it regards the greatest national security threat not as a foreign power such as China or Russia, and not as non-state actors such as Al Qaeda or ISIS, but rather “domestic extremists.” For years, this has been the unyielding message of the DHS, FBI, CIA, NSA and DOJ: our primary enemies are not foreign but are our fellow citizens who have embraced ideologies we regard as extremist.

This new escalation of repression depends upon a narrative framework. Those who harbor dissenting ideologies — and particularly those who do not embrace that dissent passively but instead take action to advocate, promote and spread it — are not merely dissenters. The term "dissent,” in Western democracies, connotes legitimacy, so that label must be denied them. They are instead domestic extremists, domestic terrorists, seditionists, traitors, insurrections. Applying terms of criminality renders justifiable any subsequent acts of repression: we are trained to accept that core liberties are forfeited upon the commission of crimes.

What is most notable, though, is that this alleged criminality is not adjudicated through judicial proceedings — with all the accompanying protections of judges, juries, rules of evidence and requirements of due process — but simply by decree. When financial services companies “choked” WikiLeaks back in 2010, they justified it by pointing to the government's claim that the group was engaged in crimes and therefore in violation of the rules of the platforms ("‘MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal,’ spokesman Chris Monteiro said" when explaining its shutting of WikiLeaks’ account). The same was done to 1/6 protesters who have been punished in countless ways prior to conviction. And now Canadian truckers have been magically transformed into criminals without the inconvenience of a trial; “‘we now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,' GoFundMe said” when explaining why it shut down fund-raising accounts.

Last June, PayPal announced a new partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), whereby the liberal activist group would identify individuals and groups whose ideology is, in the eyes of the ADL, “extremist.” This would enable not only PayPal but financial services companies around the world to then terminate their accounts and exclude them from the financial system. Clearly, once the ADL declares a person or group to be “extremist” and PayPal banishes them, no other mainstream corporation will want to be accused of hosting them. As PayPal's founding Chief Operating Officer David Sacks warned at the time the partnership was announced, the purpose of this program is “shutting down people and organizations that express views that are entirely lawful, even if they are unpopular in Silicon Valley.” Comparing this to the spate of unified Silicon Valley censorship that has erupted over the last several years, Sacks explained why this power is so alarming:

As for the notion of building your own PayPal or Facebook: because of their gigantic network effects and economies of scale, there is no viable alternative when the whole industry works together to deny you access.

Kicking people off social media deprives them of the right to speak in our increasingly online world. Locking them out of the financial economy is worse: It deprives them of the right to make a living. We have seen how cancel culture can obliterate one’s ability to earn an income, but now the cancelled may find themselves without a way to pay for goods and services. Previously, cancelled employees who would never again have the opportunity to work for a Fortune 500 company at least had the option to go into business for themselves. But if they cannot purchase equipment, pay employees, or receive payment from clients and customers, that door closes on them, too.

This is why it is so imperative for the Democratic Party and their media allies to describe the four-hour riot at the Capitol on January 6 as an insurrection and attempted coup. If those are mere protesters or even just rioters, then all the standard protections and legal safeguards apply to them, as liberals demanded be applied to protect BLM and Antifa protesters, even ones who used violence. If, however, they are part of a broader insurrectionary movement — an ongoing attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government — then they are elevated from ordinary political adversaries into a faction of sustained criminality, and anything and everything, from censorship and detention to extra-legal means of banishment such as no-fly lists and exclusion from the financial system, becomes justified, even necessary. (Note that such repressive tactics, cheered by liberals and even many on the left, have often swept up anti-establishment voices on the left, such as when PayPal banned Antifa-linked individuals along with Proud Boys members, and when animal rights activists are targeted for persecution by the FBI along with Oath Keepers, but such is the inevitable outcome of censorship and dissent-repressive schemes).

Canada making permanent the “emergency “ government ability of financial and asset freezing of dissenters

What a huge surprise.

Totally not the beginning of a social credit system.

Trudeau’s deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who is also a director of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, says she plans to make her emergency powers permanent. pic.twitter.com/g8JTCwzmqX

— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) February 19, 2022

A while back I had a discussion with some on here who posited that I was imagining the onset of authoritarianism and censorship of dissident viewpoints within democracies of the developed world.

I’d be interested in hearing their perspectives on the same topic these days.

Here’s an excellent piece by Matt Taibbi on the issue:

When Boring People Turn Dangerous: Canada's Insane Power Grab
The Canadian government's decision to freeze bank accounts in the trucker protests is a mad leap toward bureaucratic dystopia

Matt Taibbi
17 hr ago

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829

On Christmas Eve, 2018, New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin published, “How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings.” Chronicling the credit card history of the man who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida Sorkin noted Omar Mateen had not merely spent $26,532 on weapons and ammo in the eight months before the 2016 attack, but had wondered if his doing so had raised red flags:

Two days before Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he went on Google and typed “Credit card unusual spending…” His web browsing history chronicled his anxiety: “Credit card reports all three bureaus,” “FBI,” and “Why banks stop your purchases.”

He needn’t have worried. None of the banks, credit-card network operators or payment processors alerted law enforcement officials about the purchases he thought were so suspicious.

Sorkin’s piece ended up being an argument in favor of credit-card companies, payment processors, banks, and others working together to bring about a Minority Report-style panacea in which society’s dangerous folk could be cyber-identified and stopped before they commit horrific acts. At one point he quoted George Brauchler, the District Attorney who prosecuted the Century 16 movie shooter in Aurora Colorado, James Holmes:

“Do I wish someone from law enforcement had been able to go to his door and knock on his door and figure out a way to talk their way into it or to freak him out?” he said of Mr. Holmes. “Yeah, absolutely.”

I’ve never owned a gun and have been sympathetic to gun control ideas for as long as I can remember. Sorkin, however, was not talking about gun control. He was theorizing a quasi-privatized vision of social control that would bypass laws by merging surveillance capitalism and law enforcement.

In a rhetorical trick that’s since become common, he described how the failure of companies like Visa to block Mateen’s purchases made them “enablers of carnage.” Clearly, someone made the mistake of letting Sorkin see Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and Cliff Robertson now whispers from the beyond to him too. If those with power to act don’t stop wrongdoing, aren’t they just shirking their great responsibility?

By the way, this same Sorkin once suggested he wouldn’t stop at arresting Edward Snowden, but go after the reporter who broke his story, too. “I would arrest him and now I’d almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, the journalist… he wants to help him get to Ecuador,” he said, on CNBC’s Squawk Box. It’s amazing how selective one can be in one’s authoritarian leanings. After Goldman, Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein appeared to commit perjury in 2011 when he told the Senate, “We didn’t bet against our clients,” Sorkin rushed an apologia into print saying “Mr. Blankfein wasn’t lying,” failing to remind audiences that his Dealbook blog at the Times was sponsored by… Goldman, Sachs.

Sorkin’s Visa piece is suddenly relevant again, after fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.

Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:

It looks as if we're about to fall in love with Russia all over again…

Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later
years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers,
seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid
Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed
president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader
with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia,
offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . .
we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just
completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand
years.”

To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second
war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press… and
worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor
of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic
institutions. But many of even Putin's fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to
give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…

Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”

The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?

She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother”:

Twitter avatar for @SteveSaretsky
Steve Saretsky
@SteveSaretsky
Regardless of your political views, this is rather disturbing. Next up, CBDC.

February 18th 2022

154 Retweets953 Likes
When HSBC got caught laundering over $800 million for groups like the mass-murdering Sinaloa drug cartel, no government official asked any financial companies to “review their relationships” with Europe’s largest bank. Nobody leaned on any firms to stop doing business with Too Big to Fail scumlords who laundered money for terrorists, gouged customers in a foreign exchange scam, manipulated energy prices in California, or did any of a thousand other serious things.

If anything, the pattern has been opposite. Here in the U.S., Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup* were repeatedly busted for violating federal fraud statutes, but authorities showered all three with billions in cash and logistical aid to help them acquire Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia. Because it’s awesome? To help rich crooks? Get even richer?

Freeland appeared with me on a long Bill Moyers segment once to discuss this very issue of non-enforcement of large-scale corporate wrongdoing. She did a good job evincing concern for all this unchecked corruption, recalling themes of Sale of the Century. Yet here she is now, deciding the moment to break glass and deploy incredibly dangerous emergency powers is, of all things, a protest of the great unwashed.

Deciding to seize funds is a major leap in the manic progression of a certain type of disordered authoritarian personality who’s suddenly everywhere. They’re coming out of decades-long disguises as milquetoast center-left careerists, and they all seem to believe now that all things on earth happen or don’t because of them. It’s as if Raskolnikov’s madness seized a generation of Western yuppies simultaneously.

It started after 9/11, when a sizable portion of the West’s intellectual class — even some who protested initially — accepted the idea that in the face of a big enough threat, everything is permitted. It started with small things like allowing the government to access library records, progressed to the shrugging acceptance that “We tortured some folks,” and moved quickly to the secret mass-surveillance programs that Sorkin wanted Greenwald and Snowden arrested for exposing.

For certain kinds of people, for the McKinsey consultants and Ivy League lobbyists and corporate lawyers and diplomats and Senate aides who get aroused watching the deskbound exploration of moral gray areas on shows like The Good Wife, the Giant Database we ostensibly built to fight Islamic terrorists long ago stopped being a terrifying super-tool of the kind Promethean legend warned humanity against. Instead it began to represent, to them, the righteous power that properly redounded to them for being so much smarter, wiser, and better educated than everyone else. They were put in charge of it for a reason!

We saw hints of what was coming after Brexit and around the time of Donald Trump’s election, via op-eds with headlines like, “Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Room.” The people needed saving from themselves. Leaving democracy in their hands was like letting a macaque run loose with a hammer. There was a significant heightening of “Democracy is overrated” rhetoric after Trump’s election, but the “No More Screwing Around” bugle-call didn’t really sound until the coordinated removal of Alex Jones from Internet platforms in August, 2018. This move was celebrated almost universally because Jones is a demented lunatic, but it was still a deeply un-American kind of move. Jones was a perfect fit for the old-school “Even a goddamned werewolf is entitled to legal counsel” defense of civil liberties, but Facebook, Apple, and YouTube put a very public kibosh on that, and it proved a turning point.

Once the GoodThinkers realized all it took was a few phone calls to a few pals in a few Silicon Valley boardrooms to eliminate a major social irritant, they immediately began looking around and asking (I predicted this at the time) what other public annoyances might need disappearing. In their minds, the fact that they had the power to remove purveyors of extremist rage and “It makes the frogs gay!” conspiracism at any time essentially made it their fault that any of those people were still on the air.

This is when you started to hear previously liberal intellectuals use language like, Why are we allowing this? A perfect recent example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondering aloud “why Tucker Carlson is allowed” to be an asshole on television, or Washington Post media writer Margaret Sullivan asking how Joe Rogan dodged “accountability” for his unacceptable vaccine views. Sullivan’s column reads like a confessional monograph on the authoritarian mind, implying Rogan was to blame for the death of her unvaccinated former Buffalo News colleague Miguel Rodriguez, even though “I have no idea whether he had ever listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast.”

It couldn’t be that Rodriguez simply came to his own decision, perhaps even a wrong decision, about getting vaccinated. To Sullivan, Rodriguez died because Rogan was allowed to speak, and because Spotify, which “enables him,” didn’t crack down on his BadThink before it reached Rodriguez’s apparently childlike mind.

Abroad, we’ve seen the mania for control in the refusal to leave Afghanistan (as GoodThinkers refused to accept they couldn’t force the cooperation of the local population), in the “Yats is our guy” intervention of our diplomats to prevent a common boxer like Vitali Klitschko from assuming too big a role in Ukraine’s post-Maidan government, and in our constant scrambling to intervene militarily everywhere from Niger to Syria to Libya and beyond. At home, we see it in Facebook hiring intelligence officials to “disrupt ideologies underlying extremism,” in efforts to make sure Amazon doesn’t sell Irreversible Damage, in PayPal teaming with the ADL to disallow transfers to and from “evil people,” and in countless other campaigns to use credit-card companies and processors and Internet platforms and other bureaucratic tools to stop “illegitimate” activity. People like writer C.J. Hopkins saw this coming years ago, but mainstream pundits were silent when it came to the possibility of overreach, so long as a threat such as Trump existed.

The more furiously they played at speech Whac-a-Mole, the more BadThink they found, usually in the form of people protesting their crackdowns. Disallowing all discussion of Stop the Steal somehow didn’t prevent people from believing the election was stolen, nor did removing Donald Trump from Twitter, but these people kept pushing harder. Maybe, Sullivan and others wondered, Fox should be banned, even if Fox had actually called the election for Biden? Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is currently arguing Fox broadcasts are treason; sooner or later, there will be a serious effort to yank the channel from the air, because these people are delusional enough to think an extreme move like that would change hearts and minds. The situation long ago passed the point of absurdity. A recent example of how preposterous this has all gotten is TikTok locking Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s “Breaking Points” account for “hate speech,” the “hate” being a defense of Rogan:

Twitter avatar for @esaagar
Saagar Enjeti
@esaagar
Our Breaking Points @tiktok account which amassed 50k followers in just 3 weeks has been locked for "hate speech" violation. To be clear the clip is a defense of Joe Rogan from 2 weeks ago which includes ZERO hate speech
Image
Image
February 21st 2022

513 Retweets3,615 Likes
Virtually any media figure who doesn’t work for a major corporate outlet and who has unconventional ideas about anything long ago had to accept that their Internet presences — which in some cases double as businesses — can be shut down at any time, for any reason, without any real right to explanation or appeal. That’s been troubling enough. This development in Canada takes this to a new level. We’re already seeing reports that people with family members in the “Freedom Convoy” are having “difficulty banking”:

Twitter avatar for @Gray_Mackenzie
Mackenzie Gray
@Gray_Mackenzie
A senior police sources tells our @grahamctv, that they expect to break the back of the protest today and that some family members of convoy folks have had difficulty banking because a family member has been involved in the protest #cndpoli #ottnews
February 19th 2022

776 Retweets3,057 Likes
This Soviet concept of guilt by association will now put it in the minds of everyone — not just in Canada but everywhere, since we’ve already seen these efforts reach into the pockets of American GoFundMe donors — that not only speech but their money might be disappeared, or frozen, because of their views, or the views of someone they know. This is madness, the kind of thing that sparks revolutions. It also forces a second look at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s much-panned remarks from 2013 about having a “level of admiration” for “the basic dictatorship” of China.

What Trudeau said he admired back then was China’s speed in turning its economy around, but it’s starting to seem like the admiration ran deeper. For years now Western thought leaders have been moving toward a Chinese-style social credit system, with labor more and more stripped of political rights and citizens algorithmically scored for financial and, now, political correctitude.

Remember at the outset of the pandemic, when a pair of Harvard professors wrote in The Atlantic, “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”? That was no blip. What the likes of Trudeau, and the Harvard profs, and Sorkin, and Freeland, and all the rest are saying is no different from George W. Bush’s infamous “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier, he he he... just so long as I’m the dictator, he he he.”

We killed Bush for saying that out loud, and rightfully so. But in the age of Trump, Brexit, January 6th, and Covid, we’re more and more being asked to sympathize with the authoritarian urges of the Trudeau set. How hard they have it, surrounded by Rogans and Honkers and other saboteurs, while tasked with stopping Covid, Putin, and white supremacy. If only we’d just shut up and give them more tools!

Because these dingbats don’t recognize the legitimacy of alternative beliefs, they can’t see that the trucker protests, for whatever else they are — according to some reports, annoying, costly, and inspiring a growing number of detractors — are grounded in fears of exactly this kind of bureaucratic credit system, where you need a stamp of social approval to travel or order a cheeseburger. This kind of thinking is supposed to be an anathema to Western democracy, even in Canada. The basic tensions between viewpoints came out in a bail hearing for Tamara Lich, the Alberta woman charged with “counseling to commit mischief” for organizing the $10 million GoFundMe campaign.

CBC described a confrontation at the hearing, when Lich’s husband Dwayne made the mistake of citing an American rights concept to the incredibly named Judge Julie Bourgeois:

“Honestly? I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my first amendment, I thought that was part of our rights,” he told the court.

“What do you mean, first amendment? What’s that?” Judge Julie Bourgeois asked him.

“I don't know. I don’t know politics. I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t supportive of the blockade or the whatever, but I didn't realize that it was criminal to do what they were doing. I thought it was part of our freedoms to be able to do stuff like that.”

“Can you tell me if what they did is really legal?” Lich asked. “If this is something that they can be doing?” he said. Meanwhile, news came out that Trudeau was announcing the Emergencies Act would need to stay in place for a while, because of potential “future blockades.” Open-ended preventive autocracy, in Canada. Who had that on a Bingo card? Justin Trudeau? Chrystia Freeland? Christ, it’s like waking up to learn the cast of The Office has declared the Fourth Reich. Boring people are dangerous, too.