Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” began with protesting rules implemented in January by the Canadian and later the US governments requiring truck drivers to be fully vaccinated to enter their country. It snowballed into a demonstration against dysfunctional coronavirus restrictions. The Ottawa trucker protesters demanded: No Lockdowns, No Mandates, No Vaccine Passports, and if not, that Trudeau resign.
Why Many Progressives Misrepresented and Condemned the Ottawa Trucker Protest
Tag: truckers
Have We Lost Our Humanity?
Social media oligarchs and the corporate press are flooding Americans’ minds with Ukrainian officials’ pleas, most notably from President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling for the U.S. and NATO to “close the sky.” That is to implement a No-Fly-Zone over Ukraine, shoot down Russian planes, strike Moscow’s air defenses inside Russia, and otherwise start World War III. Even Senator Marco Rubio, the neoconservative spokesman, opposes this. Yes, we oversee and cheer on weapons transfers to keep the war going without any care for how much it costs in blood or treasure. But it is not enough. Zelensky says this reluctance to plunge the globe into what would almost certainly be a nuclear war shows we are losing our “humanity.”
Have We Lost Our Humanity?
When protests aren’t progressive
When protests aren’t progressive
The best way for progressives to prevent such sentiments from snowballing into a movement that actually could win power is to take an approach rooted in humility. Talk to the protesters, listen to their grievances, promise to discuss options for addressing them with elected and appointed officials.
Such humility will come naturally to a politician hoping to represent the broadest possible coalition of working-class voters. It will appear impossible to someone convinced that every citizen of a certain socioeconomic stratum ought rightly to be an automatic ally and contributor to the present-day iteration of the progressive political project.
How the Left betrayed the Truckers + Elites Are Smearing Truckers Because We’re Doing Their Job Representing the People
How the Left betrayed the Truckers
Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.
The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?
Related:
Elites Are Smearing Truckers Because We’re Doing Their Job Representing the People
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 