I’D COMPLAIN TO THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, BUT I’M SURE IT APPROVES: Canada’s increasingly autocratic government.

Related: The tyranny of high-status opinion: How the woke left wrote the script for the Canadian state’s tyrannical assault on the protesting truckers. “At first glance, it looked like one of the strangest, most incongruous moments of the great trucker uprising of 2022. There were the truckers and their working-class allies, in Ottawa, loudly agitating against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, when a bunch of hyper-woke, definitely not working-class counter-protesters rocked up to rail against this horn-honking throng. And what did they chant, these painfully PC counter-protesters? ‘Trans rights are human rights’, that’s what. As clear as anything, these supposed leftists, seemingly horrified by the sight of working-class men and women fighting for their rights, engaged in arguably the most striking non-sequitur of the 2020s so far – they brought transgenderism into an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism. . . . And yet, at another level, at a deeper level, this weird, disjointed counter-revolt against the ‘revolting’ truckers actually makes sense. For what we had here was the shrill, noisy reassertion of high-status opinion against the supposedly low-status demands of the truckers for more freedom and better working conditions. This was the correct-thinking set staking its moral authority over the irritated truckers; the upper-middle-class guardians of approved ‘progressive’ thought pushing back against a pesky, old-fashioned, grassroots demand for liberty and respect.”

Plus: “In fact, it goes even further than this. These counter-protesters, whether wittingly or not, were marking out the truckers as ‘problematic’, as bigots, as real-life Emmanuel Goldsteins deserving of the most severe forms of condemnation and even punishment. They were putting a target sign on the heads of these unpersons, signalling that they are fair game for shame, censure and even police repression and assault. The counter-protesters, for all their self-indulgent fantasies of radicalism, were behaving as the running dogs of the Trudeau regime. Trudeau had already branded the truckers as ‘transphobic’ – and also Islamophobic, homophobic and anti-black – on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. And these ‘trans rights’ counter-protesters were essentially doing Trudeau’s bidding, obediently echoing the vile anti-working-class prejudices of the Canadian state, as they hollered at these working-class protesters: ‘Trans rights are human rights!’ They were publicly declaring that the truckers are thoughtcriminals, possessors of dangerous, bigoted thoughts, and thus they may be crushed. And lo, they were.”