Dictator Trudeau Won’t Give Up Tyrannical Powers

CLAY: Buck, throughout the entirety of the weekend, the amount of force brought to bear on truly peaceful protesters who were actually not creating any substantial threat to anyone is off the charts. And there’s couple things that to me are terribly frustrating and also create a great deal of fear going forward, and that is, first of all, they have seized so many different bank accounts, millions of dollars in bank accounts based on people donating to the Canadian trucker protest.

This is an unprecedented overreach of power that has been embarked upon by Trudeau under his Emergency Powers Act that he undertook. And the second part of this is Trudeau had two options to me, Buck, really two options here at its essence. He could do what a lot of Democratic governors have done: Look at the data coming out on covid and make a decision to eliminate masks and vaccine mandates and claim victory even though many of us out there who have been watching this data know that it didn’t actually occur that all of these restrictions led to covid disappearing, okay?

So that in and of itself was one option. And that’s the option that honestly is kind of a rational option even if you don’t want to admit you were wrong. He chose the other option. Rather than relent and start to dial back all sorts of issues in Canada — and, by the way, United Kingdom, Boris Johnson is coming out in the near future here and effectively announcing all covid restrictions are over, even though, by the way, 95-year-old queen — who we, of course, wish well — is evidently doing fine with covid in England right now.

BUCK: Handling light duty.

CLAY: Yes. Still actually working even while she has covid, and the other option he had is he could have been rational. The other option was: Crush this protest like a totalitarian dictator, and he took the second option here, and even now… I believe we have audio of this, Buck. Even now he’s not saying it’s not over. They’re going to treat these protesters like it’s January 6th and follow them to the ends of the earth. Listen to this.

BUCK: He is the absolute worst. Just start with that. I think you could make a very strong case that he’s the worst politician in North America right now, and I mean that based on his character and on what has happened as a result of his decision-making — his or her, any politician across North America. He’s an absolute joke to anybody who thinks that Canada’s a place that values liberty and freedom at any level.

Justin Trudeau has really made that look like a farce. Beyond that, though, Clay, when you see what’s happened here, there are far-reaching implications of this kind of decision. You have seen the mobilization of a Western democracy and really our closest ally, almost an adjunct state, America Jr., whatever you want to call it.

CLAY: America’s top hat.

BUCK: Yeah. You have seen a mobilization of what is effectively either, you could say, counterinsurgency or counter-insurrection powers of the state to suppress a peaceful political protest. Now, people will remember that it wasn’t long ago that there were actually in this country — not really in Canada so much, but in this country, there were — riots, ongoing riots causing disorder, destruction. They tried to burn down a church across from the White House, right? We remember what he was going on.

They were pulling down statues. They were destroying neighborhoods, burning down police stations, trying to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland. And the apparatus of the left was furious with the notion, furious with the notion that Trump was sending in any additional law enforcement resources or anything. That was thuggery. Those were jackbooted fascists going in to Portland or D.C. or wherever — and now look what Trudeau has done.

Clay, they sent guys in full-on, head-to-toe tactical gear with long guns to pull guys out of trucks who had spent the last few days handing out sandwiches and playing ice hockey in the streets and saying, “Can we go back to our normal lives?” The mobilization of a state of emergency in Canada to break a peaceful protest that is a righteous protest.

With demands that should be clear to everybody as the way forward is something that I think we’re gonna, unfortunately, be dealing with the ramifications of for a long time. You think they’re only gonna use it against the truckers? Anytime now there’s a protest that seems to come from the right, they may decide, “Oh, look at the stuff they said! Neo-Nazis! Trumpist insurrection!” They lied about the movement in order to justify what they did against the movement.

CLAY: It is. I don’t want to say America did well with covid because we certainly didn’t, but if you look at New Zealand and you look at Australia and you look at the Canada — three countries that I think most Americans precovid would have characterized as relatively easygoing, relatively moderate in the politics and the perspectives that they adopt — they all three lost their mind, frankly, in a way we did not. I think to a large extent, that is because of our federalism.

Because we had governors, in particular Ron DeSantis, who were willing to look at the data and take risks. And while that might have upset the Blue Check Brigade out there, what it did was it encouraged the other side of the country. And so we had less of a pervasive anger in the United States compared to I think what happened in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They kind of leavened it based on federalism.

BUCK: This is why the discussion… You’re totally right, and I think you said this a couple weeks ago, and I’ve shared this with other folks too — attributing it to you, of course — that where was the America trucker protest for the most part? Well, the truckers who live in Texas and the truckers who live in Tennessee and Florida and the Dakotas and Montana and Wyoming, they’re like, “We’re kind of okay,” you know?

They haven’t been put through the same degree of what you’ve seen in Canada. As for those other states you mentioned, what we used to call the Anglosphere just for the English speaking nature of it, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, there was a madness that covid unleashed, really a mass hysteria, and I do think that it very much correlated with a degree of socialism in those countries.

We have thought of socialists in the past as, “Oh, they just want free health care,” but there’s also a mentality. Socialists believe in effectively creating a religion of the state and that if you just give them enough authority and power, they will create a de facto utopia. And that means that also in the event of an emergency, the same people that believe the government can create perfection think the government is in a perfect position to deal with a threat like this.

But you just have to give it all the authority that it wants. So I think that’s why you saw the countries… I do like Australia as “East Germany with koalas,” and that’s started to catch on a little bit because I think it’s true. You saw people recognizing that the socialist mind-set in times of duress lends itself… All the sudden the benevolent authoritarianism of a Big Government socialist state doesn’t feel so benevolent anymore.

CLAY: And what’s interesting is England today is effectively ending all restrictions. Australia has now opened back up for tourists. New Zealand is acknowledging that zero covid is no longer a reality, and I believe we were talking about during commercial breaks their covid cases have now surged 24000% or something such as that when they stopped being able to isolate themselves and keep everyone else from coming in the country. And even with Biden as a disastrous leader, I feel in many ways, if you compare us to all of those other countries that we would ordinarily have considered to be our peer group, that things have gone better than we could have hoped relative to places like Florida.