The Plague You Should Be Freaking Out About Is Abuse Of Power – The Federalist

For anyone still nave, stubborn, or fanatical enough to believe the Covid tyranny weve been suffocating under for the past two years is about a virus, let the events unfolding in Canada disabuse you of that illusion.

Invoking the Emergencies Act to freeze bank accounts, conduct mass arrests of peaceful demonstrators and protest organizers, target reporters and photographers, and establish red zones and checkpoints, all in response to a mobilized citizenry that is weary of ineffective, illiberal, and discriminatory Covid restrictions this all smacks of dictatorship, not democracy. It certainly has nothing to do with public health.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walked back his use of the Emergencies Act this week, but the Canadian government continues to keep protesters in jail and push banks to freeze nearly C$8 million in the personal and business accounts of people who peacefully contributed to the protest before it was criminalized. Banks also have threatened to suspend loans of those on government blacklists of Canadian citizens who peacefully participated.

Meanwhile, jurisdictions around the world are hastily rolling back Covid edicts, lamely pointing to the usual fake science. Behind the scenes, governments understand what their counterparts in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and France seem determined to ignore: the people are no longer buying their narrative. Instead of bingeing on Covid fear porn, the real plague we should have been freaking out about is totalitarianism, the 20th centurys deadliest scourge.

The Canadian government declared war on a grassroots, non-violent protest against compulsory vaccinations and other Covid restrictions. Enabled and emboldened by a complicit press, the regime demonizes those who demand the protection of fundamental individual rights over submission to collectivist oppression. Trudeau ludicrously and disingenuously labeled protestors racists and misogynists.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland threatened that recalcitrant truckers would have their bank accounts frozen and their vehicle insurance suspended. She also announced the broadening of terrorist financing rules to encompass crowdfunding platforms, and warned that Big Brother would be coming for their cash.

Ottawa police are threatening protestors with criminal charges and financial retribution. Last week, an elderly, mobility-impaired woman was shockingly trampled by Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Police have even been targeting citizens in their own homes over social media posts.

Around the world, other aspiring dictators and their henchmen are using one hand to smother their subjects with public health love and the other to trample, beat, detain, and arrest those who disobey. Western governments are reverting to the abhorrent trends of technologically enabled totalitarian ideologies that shaped the European continent for the better part of a century.

Australia was at the cutting edge of crushing dissenters long before Ottawa. As early as September 2020, Victoria Police barged into the home of a pregnant woman and arrested her in front of her husband and two children for a Facebook post encouraging people to attend an anti-lockdown protest.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern laughed off the estimated 1,500 protestors gathered outside Parliament demanding an end to her repressive health dictatorship, as spreaders of misinformation and disinformation. Like Trudeau, Ardern is dishonest and deranged enough to keep rabbiting on that her number one priorityroughly 700 days and 56 deaths into slowing the spreadis steering New Zealand through the pandemic.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who infamously said he wanted to use the vaccine pass to piss off the unvaccinated by making life as hard as possible for them, is doing just that. French authorities responded to their countrys own Freedom Convoy by banning the demonstration, threatening heavy fines, license suspension, and jail time for unauthorized protestors. They deployed 7,200 police officers and armored vehicles, who resorted to firing teargas at bystanders including families with children, all for the peoples health and safety.

The West didnt win the day over communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 because of democracys deep roots in European soil. There were none. On the contrary, Europes interwar experiment with parliamentary democracy following the World War I collapse of the great autocratic empires was a blip on the radar.

By the mid-1930s, a crisis of capitalism and loss of trust in liberal institutions left many Europeans feeling that democracy had done its dash and individual freedoms were overrated, thus paving the way for both the tyranny of fascism and the specter of Communism. Theres a similar feeling enabling Covidianism today. Under the last centurys violent New Orders that followed this public acceptance, which led to the deaths of tens of millions of people in Europe alone, rapid technological advances enabled a self-perpetuating elite to use terror and ideology to dominate the mobilized masses in an unprecedented manner.

Significantly, the authoritarian regimes that supplanted democracy craftily used and abused democratic freedoms and institutions in order to abolish democracy itself. The National Socialists, under Adolf Hitler, rose to power using legitimate elections and the parliamentary process, then exploited an unstable and neutered legislature, a strengthened executive, and a disturbing pattern of emergency orders to trash the whole system. Across Eastern Europe after World War II, the Communist Party relied on coalition governments to get its boot in the door, then systematically began kicking out the other parties.

Theres no such thing as it cant happen here. We must always be vigilant given these terrifying lessons from history.

Seventy-five years down the track, Gen Xers, millennials, and even boomers, who grew up taking for granted that democracy is the norm rather than the status quo, are now learning in real time that liberty must be shaped, won, and preserved. This reckoning is throwing a spanner in the works of the Covid-powered totalitarian machine.

Contrary to Trudeaus propaganda about a small fringe minority with unacceptable views, protestors have turned out en masse in Toronto and Calgary to express solidarity with those demonstrating in Ottawa. Two-thirds of Canadians say its time to end Covid restrictions and learn to live with the virus.

In the United States, only one-third of Americans list Covid as a top-five issue for 2022, and 59 percent of voters support the truckers. European leaders and democratic governors and mayors across the United States, who glimpse electoral annihilation on the horizon, are spending Bidens winter of severe illness and death quietly archiving their blueprints.

It would seem that the gig is up. Twentieth-century philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarian regimes cannot survive without a fanatical mass cult, unshaken by reason, argument, or experience, that identifies with and conforms to the movement, even at their own expense.

It may be dawning on petty tyrants like Trudeau that there just arent enough Covid cultists to sustain the beast. This would explain his astonishing about-face when he announced the revocation of the Emergencies Act. After sniveling literally two days before, he had no choice but to invoke these powers, employing the abusive spouses textbook trick of I didnt want to hit you but you made me do it. The national emergency has apparently now evaporated.

On Monday, it was all about misinformation, disinformation, foreign funds, ideologically motivated violent extremism, and urging the Canadian Parliament, Weimar Republic-style, to take an ax to democracy in order to safeguard democracy. Within 48 hours, it was back to the were all in this together sweet talk about healing, working together, and fighting a virus, not each other.

Only its not about fighting a virus, and it never was. Covid-19 is a smokescreen for the most lethal plague of all. Thats the ever-present evil by which men seek to dominate the masses, smash and rebuild their minds, and bend them to some relentless dogma or ideology. Victims of this devilry invariably respond by collaborating, conforming, submittingor resisting.

Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast migr, she is now helping to repopulate the countrys interior. She holds a masters degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.

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The Plague You Should Be Freaking Out About Is Abuse Of Power - The Federalist