ROGER KIMBALL: Oligarchy’s Response to the Freedom Convoy Bodes Ill for Them.

According to the media, the Canadian truckers, and their imitators around the globe, are protesting COVID vaccine mandates. That’s only part of their complaint. They don’t like the government ordering them to inject substances into their bodies that have not been shown to be safe (or effective), made by drug companies that are protected from liability for years.

But the standoff is more basic. It is like the standoff between the American colonists and the British authorities in the late 1760s and early 1770s. That standoff turned on the question “Who rules?” So, ultimately, does the conflict between the established regimes and the truckers and other protestors. Legitimacy does not proceed from the barrel of a gun, although Western “democracies” everywhere seem to have ignored the lessons of history. Consider this scene from Paris, where the police just savagely beat a protestor. Juliette Kayyem, a CNN contributor, Harvard professor (of course it would be Harvard) and Obama’s former assistant secretary of homeland security for intergovernmental affairs, suggested on Twitter that Canadian police should  “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers” of the protesting truckers. (As one internet wit observed, it would be amusing to watch what would happen should she manage to slash a 100-psi steel-belted tire on an 18-wheel rig.)

There are several ironies regarding the Canadian chapter of this uprising against the self-appointed elites who wish to rule us. For one thing, although Canadian officialdom is bemoaning the fact that the truckers had, in effect, closed the U.S.-Canada border, Trudeau had essentially sealed the border between the two countries for more than a year. The Babylon Bee captured this side of the situation brilliantly with a story headlined “Trudeau Demands Protesters Stop Shutting Down City So That He Can Shut Down City.”

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