Quick Bits

I kept putting off covering the huge ruling by the Canadian supreme court last week, which called Castreau's fascist measures to punish speech he didn't like unconstitutional.

I missed that, but will try to make up for it by quoting Spiked's Tom Slater on the Rise of the Liberal Strongman.

Justin Trudeau and the Rise of the Liberal Strongman

His crackdown on the truckers heralded a new era of 'centrist' authoritarianism.

At first, I assumed Justin Trudeau was just a bit tragic. When the dashing Canadian PM rose to power in 2015, the man seemed too cringe to be real. A man who confused virtue-signalling with statesmanship and Tumblr talking points with a political ideology.

I misread that as "a Tumbler account given human form," and will be using that goin forward.

A man who once chided a woman at a public event for using the word 'mankind' ('We like to say peoplekind', he retorted). But as a ruling of the Canadian Federal Court this week reminds us, beneath the colourful socks, woke bromides and disconcertingly long history of blacking up resides a dangerous authoritarian.

Remember the Freedom Convoy? This was the Canadian truckers' revolt against Covid mandates which began two years ago this week...

Trudeau's response, you may recall, was enough to make Xi Jinping proud. He invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history, granting the government sweeping powers to freeze protesters' bank accounts, break up demonstrations, crush crowdfunding efforts and compel tow-truck firms to clear the streets. The crackdown was all the more outrageous given many of the blockades were already in the process of being resolved amicably. Plus, those parked up in Ottawa had been peaceful. They held cookouts, honked horns and danced. Which is why there were remarkably few arrests. Before Trudeau sent the heavies in, that is.

Now, a top Canadian judge has decided that this outrageous clampdown was illegal to boot. Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act has been deemed an infringement on Canada's charter of rights and freedoms. It was 'not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration', the court ruled. All this gives the lie to the government's absurd demonisation of the peaceful, multiracial truckers' protests as a 'dangerous', 'far right' and even 'insurrectionist' movement. Indeed, so many of the claims made to justify the clampdown have turned out to be lies. At a separate inquiry in 2022, police had to admit that claims the truckers were 'armed' amounted to them having tools and tire irons. Not a single trucker was arrested in Ottawa for illegal possession or storage of a firearm, according to the Toronto Sun. While videos on social media showed a family friendly atmosphere, complete with bouncy castles, Trudeau talked darkly of kids being used as 'human shields'. It would be funny if it wasn't so sinister.

Imagine if Donald Trump had done this while he was still in power? There would have been a military coup. He'd probably be locked up right now, in some secretive facility buried miles beneath a mountain -- the sort of place where they keep the Bond villains and the UFOs. And yet because the Western commentariat loves Trudeau and loathes the working classes his trucker crackdown was given a free pass....

For all the talk of populists and their simpleminded working-class voters ushering in a new 1930s, we now see where the true threat to liberty comes from. And not just in Canada. Indeed, we've seen the rise of what we might call liberal strongmen -- sorry, strongpeople -- right across the Western world. From the unhinged Covid authoritarianism of New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern to Emmanuel Macron's brutalising of the gilets jaunes to Joe Biden's banana republic to the speech-policing, women's-rights-shredding rule of Nicola Sturgeon, all of the 'centrist' darlings of our age have turned out to be itching to shut up, lock up and even beat up their own citizens. Particularly citizens with the chutzpah to stand up for their rights and their livelihoods.

Read the whole thing. Yes, the left is authoritarian and increasingly brazen and open about it. They view all disagreement with them as illegitimate and therefore illegal, and are quite ready to use government force to extinguish their enemies.

And speaking of Macron's brutalization of the gilets jaunes -- French farmers are blockading Paris with their own truckers' convoy.

Macron will crush them as Castreau crushed his inconvenient dissidents.

Kurt Zindulka at Breitbart:

Calls for revolution are in the air of France once again as farmers have vowed to continue their tractor protests against the globalist green agenda with a planned blockade of Paris after rejecting "concessions" from the government.

After a week of shutting down motorways across the country, forcing politicians of all stripes to come to meet them on their turf, the farmer uprising is set to descend upon the French capital as they were unimpressed by the compromises proposed by newly-installed Prime Minister Gabriel Attall.

With their demands not being met, farmers have decided to ramp up the pressure on the metropolitan liberal elites who vote for green agenda policies without feeling the consequences and allowing the rural population to suffer.

What is being dubbed as the "siege of Paris", farmers are planning on shutting down at least seven critical entry points to the city and have hinted at enacting a blockade of the Rungis Market, the second largest wholesale food market in the world which serves as the main hub for food deliveries into Paris.

"The idea is that there are no trucks that can serve the capital, to ensure that no product enters Paris, to make Parisians understand that they need farmers to live. I say to our friends in the capital region: it's going to be a long week," the head of the Young Farmers Union Maxime Buizard said per Le Figaro.

Video of farmers dumping slurry at the gates of the Var prefecture in Toulon.

A report on the "siege of Paris."

Video of farmers blocking the entrances of restaurants in Paris.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the horrible racist, homophobic MAGA attack on Jussie Smollett by two Nigerian brothers he paid money to.

As Dan Rather used to say: "Courage."

The Film Actors Guild, for some reason, has weighed in on the Arrec Balwin manslaughter charges.

[F]AG-AFTRA is standing by Alec Baldwin after he was charged Thursday with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of "Rust."

The guild slammed the charges against him, calling it "wrong and uninformed."

"The death of Halyna Hutchins is a tragedy, and all the more so because of its preventable nature. It is not a failure of duty or a criminal act on the part of any performer," [F]AG-AFTRA said in a statement.

"The prosecutor's contention that an actor has a duty to ensure the functional and mechanical operation of a firearm on a production set is wrong and uninformed. An actor's job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert."

Really? How strange. Actors routinely present themselves on experts in all fields. But not this one, huh...?

So I guess actors'll stop pontificating about gun control, huh? After all, [F]AG says they're not experts in weapons safety.

...

Baldwin's attorney called the charges a "terrible miscarriage of justice" in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Yeah, just like Andrei Sakarov.

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge: Biden's lying; he needs no congressional authority to close the border. He can do that now -- he just refuses to do so unless the Republicans give him open-borders concessions.

As Republican governors circle the wagon around Texas, President Biden on Saturday doubled down on a reluctant agreement to secure the southern US border - but only if if Congress passes a bipartisan bill that would also allocate funds for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and would still allow as many as 150,000 illegal crossings per month.

"If that bill were the law today I'd shut down the border right now and fix it quickly and bring a bipartisan bill that would be good for America and help fix our broken immigration system and allow speedy access for those who deserve to be here," Biden said, according to Fox News' Chad Pergram.

Except, as many have pointed out, Biden doesn't need Congress, or the bill, to do that right now.

As we noted yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson debunked the claim, saying "President Biden falsely claimed yesterday he needs Congress to pass a new law to allow him to close the southern border, but he knows that is untrue."

"As I explained to him in a letter late last year, and have specifically reiterated to him on multiple occasions since, he can and must take executive action immediately to reverse the catastrophe he has created," Johnson continued.

Black Chicago Democrats want the city to end its "sanctuary city" status.

Government employee Cata Truss told "Fox News @ Night" Democrat voters like her are growing increasingly frustrated with the party's handling of the issue.

"There is no moneys to take care of the migrants, nor is there moneys to take care of the people that are there. And so we have a mess on our hands," Truss said Wednesday.

Truss argued Windy City residents are upset over low income communities and schools being "divested in" while funds are used for the care of migrants instead.

"This is the sentiment from the city of Chicago: We would like to have our status as a sanctuary city removed," she said. "We would also like to see a better plan in place."

Snopes reflexively claimed a picture showing Biden wearing a hardhat backwards was "false."

The black strap across this retard's forehead is supposed to go at the back of your head.

Question: The guy giving the thumb's up has a sh**-eating grin. Did all of these guys know that Joe Biden had retardedly put the hardhat on backwards, but let him take the picture anyway?

I say "Yes."

Under pressure and mounting embarrassment, Snopes were forced to stop banging the other members of the Snopes polycule and do the actual fact-check -- they render their partisan judgment first, then later get around to actually checking the facts -- and admitted the the photo was real and the hardhat was on backwards.

John Fetterman waved the Israeli flag in the faces of pro-Hamas protesters at Congress.

This is the ballad of John Fetterman,
whom a stroke made into a Betterman.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:30 PM

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