She looks nice. Too bad that’s the smile of a bonkers, blissed out religious fanatic. “Coercion is not consent” is a nice sentiment, but that’s not what Ephesians 6:12 says. It says,

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

That’s a problem. She’s not supporting the truck convoy in Canada, she thinks she’s in a battle with vast supernatural powers. She’s not. The truckers use “FREEEEDOM!” as a slogan, but the protest is really about a bunch of well-off working class people trying to protect their privileges and pretend their bogus beliefs about viruses and vaccinations are valid. These are people who are cranky-ass babies who don’t want to get vaccinated against a disease that has killed about a million people in the US because their preachers or right-wing radio and television have told them not to. Under it all is…religion.

Christian sermons of varying lengths emanate regularly from the main flatbed stage on Wellington Street and from curbside preachers using microphones attached to portable speakers. Their words waft in the air and mix with the rumble of diesel engines and fumes, thumping dance music, the tinge of marijuana.

Starting Friday, “Jericho marches” began circling the parliamentary precinct every morning. The name refers to the Old Testament story of the Israelites walking around the walls of Jericho for seven days. On the seventh day, the Israelites marched seven times, blew rams horns and shouted. The walls came tumbling down.

This past Saturday, a woman draped in a Canadian flag led the march with a megaphone in hand.

“When we sing, enemies flee,” she said as she entered the grounds of Parliament Hill. “Hallelujah, hallelujah.”

The march then joined a mass of people gathered in formation to spell the word “freedom.”

It’s madness. Nothing but madness.

It’s not about freedom, or vaccines, or even just religion. This is a loony fringe of a fringe who are exploiting the fact that the powers-that-be, the police, the media — you know, the actual rulers of the darkness of this world and spiritual wickedness in high places — will give them loving attention and pander to their every whimper and whine. They really are spoiled babies who have discovered that tantrums will get them praise on their favored media.

It’s easy to shorthand these shambolic yet menacing gatherings as “anti-vaccine-mandate”—and they are, glancingly, the way the movie Robocop is about a robot cop, or Animal Farm is a study in zoology. The weeks-long occupation underway in Ottawa—its big rigs symbolizing the distilled essence of “white working class” mythology that cloaks these protests, nominally against vaccine mandates and coronavirus safety protocols, but in actuality accruing a vast baggage train of right-wing grievances and conspiracies—has become a memetic form, to be eagerly adopted and copied, as far as possible, all over the world. It’s worth noting that as vocal as they are, this is an extreme political minority: Canada’s population has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, at 80% fully vaccinated, and among truckers, the rate is even higher, at nearly 90%. As with any large-scale right-wing protest, the police have reacted with a profound lassitude that is tantamount to complicity, and it takes the most wide-eyed cop-boostering stance of centrist faux-ignorance to pretend that this is not solidarity but incompetence. Police have allowed certain menaces—from open fires to public urination to noise complaints to road blockades—to continue unabated, in the name of the protesters’ free speech. “In Ottawa Protests, a Pressing Question: Where Were the Police?” read a comical New York Times headline, manufacturing consent with a frenetic both-hands jerkoff motion.

The question of “why the police seemingly abandoned the country’s seat of power,” as the Times put it, is a question that answers itself: law enforcement apparatuses are a law unto themselves, fed strength by a neoliberal state that needs them to enforce its deadly inequalities. No one is watching the watchmen as they cheer from the sidelines, and that’s true on both sides of the border. Though the police have cleared a smaller bridge blockade that stopped trade between the U.S. and Canada for days in Windsor, Ontario, and seized a cache of guns on the border in Alberta, the Ottawa protests continue apace. Given the laxity that thus far has allowed the protest to grow in Ottawa, gain notoriety, proffer real menace (and so many racist and antisemitic hate crimes a hotline was set up to report them), and issue unhinged proclamations unfettered, imitator protests have already arisen in Canberra, Italy, London, Wellington, Paris, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

It’s a perversion of the concept of freedom. Freedom from responsibility? Freedom from criticism? Freedom to spread disease? Freedom to foul your diapers and let nanny change them? Freedom to believe and act on conspiracy theories?

You don’t have the freedom to afflict your neighbors, but that’s the only freedom conservatives actually want.

Jonathan Turley is a lawyer and professor at George Washington University, and he brings shame to the profession.

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley, on Canada PM Justin Trudeau invoking emergency powers to deal with the "Freedom Convoy" blockade:

"By this rationale, they could have cracked down on the Civil Rights movement. They could have arrested Martin Luther King." pic.twitter.com/s9dwkcvihQ

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 15, 2022

Oh my god yes. What if they had cracked down on the Civil Rights movement, or arrested Martin Luther King? What a horrible, unimaginable what-if to propose!

What’s that? They did? How odd that a goddamn professor would never have heard of Letters from a Birmingham Jail, never seen the photos of police dogs and fire hoses turned on black citizens. I guess that’s the state of conservative education nowadays.

He goes on to whine that the police are treating the anti-vaxx protesters like terrorists. There is no comparison between these bozos and the civil rights protesters. After the murder of George Floyd, freeways in Minneapolis were choked with people demanding their civil rights and freedom from oppressive policing. These truckers are ignorant yahoos demanding the right to be plague rats in society. They are terrorists. Easily triggered terrorists who will melt down if you whisper the words “ram ranch” to them.

Everything the critics predicted seems to have taken place. Wasn’t it obvious from the beginning that abandoning a trade alliance would hurt your economy?

From the EU, the drama of the Brexit negotiations was watched with mixed feelings. Initial regret shifted to a desire to limit the damage. Some economic opportunities to fill the gaps left by the UK opened up. Brexit was clearly going to be a loss for everyone, but far greater for the UK than for any continental European economy.

The negative impact on trade, so far, is substantial for the UK. The Centre for European Reform recently estimated that there has been an 11.2% negative impact on trade as a result of Brexit. The UK share of world trade has fallen by a further 15% compared to pre-referendum projections.

Assessing the impact of Brexit on the EU presents a challenge, as macro-economic data is contaminated by the pandemic shock. However, digging into the details of trade flows, there has been a noticeable negative effect on some countries, sectors and firms. This has been especially sizeable for small producers who used to have unbounded single market access to the UK. Now, the extra paperwork puts off firms that lack the critical mass to absorb the extra fixed costs of handling non-EU trade procedures. Over time, the situation may well improve, but some companies have already given up. British consumers have paid the price, EU consumers far less.

And yet, even now, the Tories and that idiot, Boris Johnson, are in charge of the country. The rest of Europe is sitting back and watching in amazement as the Brits punch themselves in the face, over and over again. Here in America, we’re also impressed at how much self-harm is going on, but we’re less surprised since we’re experiencing our own ongoing madness.

Oh, look, I learned a new acronym. Handy!

There’s a pointless wrangle going on in this thread about the slogan “Defund the police”, which CripDyke also addresses reasonably on the Pervert Justice blog. DILLIGAF, people. ACAB. Defund the police, whatever that means to you. Change is necessary. That’s where the focus ought to be, not on the pedantry of how the demand is phrased, but recognizing the reality of how awful the police are in this country.

For example, here’s the story of the NYPD police squad rousting black teenagers on Halloween, even hitting one of them with their car. A civilian review board found that the police were out of line, so the police voided their conclusion and said they’d handle it entirely internally. These are the kinds of people we’re looking at.

One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.

Isn’t that charming. That’s the face of the police they are proud to present.

You might wonder what’s happened to the bad cops. Here you go:

Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”

The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.

The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.

It’s not just big city problems. Here’s the story of Brookside, Alabama, a little tiny town like a model Mayberry.

The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.

By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.

The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and “making up laws” to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees – or pay for costly appeals to state court – and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.

“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. “We are not safer because of it.”

Defund the police. Does anyone want to argue that at least Brookside is one place that needs savage cuts to police funding? Anyone? They expanded the police force ten fold, and the town wants to increase it even more. Look at what they have now!

This is indefensible. Defunding is the answer.

The pandemic has been a good thing for the rich. They’ve consolidated their power.

The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19. Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities—as well as the inequality that exists between countries—are tearing our world apart. This is not by chance, but choice: “economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most. Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality. We can claw back extreme wealth through progressive taxation; invest in powerful, proven inequality-busting public measures; and boldly shift power in the economy and society. If we are courageous, and listen to the movements demanding change, we can create an economy in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which inequality no longer kills.

It’s only a small ‘elite’.

The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during COVID-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years—fourteen years that themselves were a bonanza for billionaire wealth.
This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages—all aided by the weaponization of racism.
These trends are alarming. By not vaccinating the world, governments have allowed the conditions for the COVID-19 virus to dangerously mutate. At the same time, they have also created the conditions for an entirely new variant of billionaire wealth. This variant, the billionaire variant, is profoundly dangerous for our world.
New figures and analysis released in December 2021 by the World Inequality Lab reveal that since 1995, the top 1% have captured 19 times more of global wealth growth than the whole of the bottom 50% of humanity. Inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century has been surpassed.

The good news: we’ll only need a small number of guillotines to take care of that group.

The bad news: they control the media, and have succeeded in brainwashing hundreds of millions to act against their own interests and prop up the oligarchs. It’s shocking how thoroughly they’ve convinced the mob to spurn vaccination, the most effective tool to control the pandemic. It’s as if the media moguls and politicians are finding it advantageous to promote death and disease.

The next election is going to be a doozy. The Republicans have been pulling out all the stops to claim that the last one was fraudulent, and you just know that the only time a Republican will accept an election result is if a Democrat loses. Every election is going to be surrounded with a cloud of lawsuits, and further, they imagine that victory means they get to trample over the law even more. Steve Bannon is already planning to lock Joe Biden up.

Fringe conservative Steve Bannon announced that the 2023 Republican agenda, should they win the House and Senate back in 2022, will be to impeach and arrest President Joe Biden.

Newt Gingrich went even further. He’s going to lock up every congressperson who had the temerity to investigate the 6 January insurrection.

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.

Do they even realize these are extraordinarily anti-democratic proposals? You can dislike Biden and the Democrats, but doing their job is not criminal activity — unlike, say, using a political office to enrich themselves or conspiring to revolt if an election doesn’t go their way. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, we see the end product of this kind of thinking. Tucker Carlson Wonders Why the U.S. Would Side With Ukraine’s Fledgling Democracy Against Putin’s Russia. Charming.

“Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?” Carlson asked. “They’re both foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States. Kind of strange.”

Carlson’s comments came as Russia has steadily massed troops on Ukraine’s border over the last few months. The latest assessment by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry estimates that there are 127,000 Russian troops in the region. In response, up to 8,500 U.S. troops have been put on heightened alert for a possible deployment, the Pentagon confirmed Monday, with most of them intended to aid NATO forces.

Such countermeasures are pointless, Carlson argued, because Ukraine, a fledgling democracy, is “strategically irrelevant” to the U.S.

I remember when Republicans were fanatically anti-Russia, and they defended their position by advocating for Democracy and the American Way of Life; we were the forces of Good, that shining light on a hill, and they were the evil empire. Now Tucker Carlson declares No rational person could defend a war with Russia over Ukraine. Nobody thinks a war like that would make America safer or stronger or more prosperous. I wouldn’t suggest we should go to war, again — we’ve been rather quick on the trigger to plunge into wars — but there’s a difference between that and thinking we should side with an openly tyrannical dictator like Putin. It’s nice that they aren’t even pretending these wars aren’t about profit and gain, but that they’re even baffled by someone who’d take the side of a democratic underdog against an oppressive authoritarian invasion is revealing.

But then it’s become obvious that Republicans don’t like democracy and are eager to set up their own authoritarian dictatorship.

Even if they like that idea, though, they should look at their prospective emperors. There isn’t an Augustus among them, just a lot of bumbling poseurs and deeply stupid demagogues.