THE REVOLT OF THE CANADIAN TRUCKERS: New video from Reason TV:

Related: Bounce Houses, Sing-Alongs, And Freedom Hugs: The Trucker Convoy Looks Dangerously Fun.

Earlier: War Of The Worlds. Canadian Truckers’ Protest is first battle in global clash between those who live in Physical World, and the ruling class of Virtual World.

QUESTION ASKED: Why Can’t We See the Other 14,000 Hours of January Sixth Video Footage?

FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE ‘OASIS OF THE SEAS:’ Cruising in the Era of Covid.

My latest, over at EdDriscoll.com.

(Bumped.)

THIS IS BIG: FACEBOOK IS ACTIVELY ATTEMPTING TO SUPPRESS REPORTING ABOUT ONE OF ITS DIRECTORS ALLEGEDLY GETTING CAUGHT IN AN UNDERAGE SEX STING.

Earlier: Facebook exec fired after allegedly caught in child sex sting.

OUT ON A LIMB: The Chinese Communist Party always medals in moral corruption.

Profiteering off China’s regime isn’t new, but these Olympics raise broader implications. The CCP intentionally wields the profit motive as a tool to co-opt foreigners and foreign corporations into plowing capital and know-how into the Chinese market, for the regime’s benefit. Mr. Xi even has a term for the practice: “dual circulation,” in which the CCP lures foreigners to become more dependent on China while simultaneously working to reduce Chinese companies’ dependence on the outside world. Meanwhile, the Party allows a few lucky foreigners to make piles of cash. In return, these individuals serve as witting — or in some cases, unwitting — propagandists for the regime.

US corporations are starting to awaken to the impossible situation that they’ve put themselves in. By investing in Xi’s China, they’ve signed up for Beijing’s rules, which exist to prop up the regime at all costs. Their bets on China expose these companies to intellectual property theft, reputational harm and physical threats to their employees. Thus NBC News, which broadcasted the Games, tried to walk a fine line between ignoring the regime’s human rights abuses and criticizing the communists too harshly. The conundrum resulted in some truly cringe-worthy discussions, including one panel in which one China “expert” sanitized his commentary and made pains to present the CCP’s point of view of the Uighur genocide.

The 2022 Olympics felt far too much like the 1936 Olympics — but without Jesse Owens.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Bonus Edition.

COVID: WAS IT REALLY ALL BAD? Of Course: Joy Behar Will Wear a Face Mask Indefinitely.

UPDATE: Joy Behar spotted maskless despite her pledge to wear masks indefinitely.

Unexpectedly!

JIM TREACHER: It’s a Good Thing Quintez Brown Wasn’t Wearing a MAGA Hat.

Imagine for a moment that a young man wearing a MAGA hat walked into the campaign headquarters of a mayoral candidate in an American city, pulled out a gun, and started shooting. Imagine that he came so close to assassinating the candidate that a bullet grazed the man’s sweater. And now imagine that the shooter’s bail was set at only $100,000, and a group of white supremacists raised his bail and put him back on the street within a couple of days.

Would that be national news? Would you be able to turn on CNN or MSNBC at any hour of the day without hearing about it? Would it be presented as further evidence of what’s really wrong with America?

Heck, I’m so old, I can remember when all you needed to do to receive universal condemnation by the American media was to wear a MAGA hat and stand next to an American Indian and a drum circle.

Related: Sorry, Freedom Convoy — fundraisers are only for left-wing criminals. Black Lives Matter bails out an alleged attempted murderer.

QUESTION ASKED: “Why would anyone keep their money in a Canadian bank after this?”

Related:

MEN ARE BETTER AT EVERYTHING, I GUESS, EVEN BEING WOMEN: Congrats to trans Ivy League swimming champ Lia Thomas for defeating a biological female in the 500 free (and setting a new record!) (Video).

Related: Watch: Matt Walsh Destroys Woke Gender Narrative With One Simple Question.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Bulldog Edition.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: BLM Assassin and Black Supremacist/Anti-Semite Bailed Out By BLM… With a Little Help from You-Know-Who…

The very same media which tells me that it is desperately afraid of a new pogrom whenever there’s a pro-Democrat storyline in an antisemitic attack sure seems to get very, very quiet about the great majority of antisemitic attacks in the US.

Is it not Time for a National Discussion on Antisemitism?

Why not?

Does only Fake Jake Tapper know when it’s the proper Time for a National Discussion About Antisemitism? Does he feel it aching in his bones, like some people can feel the rain coming?

It’s almost as if they don’t care at all about Jews being beaten or killed — they only care about political propaganda for their beloved Democrat Socialist Party.

On to the Disappeared Man, on to Mr. Yesterday’s News, on to Local Crime Story No. 33,247, Qunitez Brown:

* * * * * * * *

You know how the media is always accusing people of being anti-Semites? Except the actual anti-Semites, who are the media’s political allies?

Well you’ll just never guess what group Quintez Brown was obsessed with.

Read the whole thing.

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF FACEBOOK UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Facebook exec fired after allegedly caught in child sex sting.

SOMETIMES THE LEFT HAND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING:

Meanwhile: Ottawa Police March On Freedom Convoy: ‘Starting To Feel Like The Beginning Of The End.’

BEIJING 2022 WINTER OLYMPICS: Kamila Valieva was ‘thrown to the wolves’ ahead of figure skating final, says weeping Katarina Witt. “Witt was continually fighting off tears herself and at one point asked the editorial team to cut the camera from her. ‘This is actually unbearable,’ she said. ‘She’s a 15-year-old kid and she’s broken from it. She’s really been thrown to the wolves now. ‘She was a shadow of her former self when she walked out of there. She couldn’t win in this whole game.’”

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Cold War-era East Berlin had armed checkpoints — now Ottawa does too.

It has already been nicknamed Checkpoint Trudeau.

Actually, like Cold War East Berlin, there may be need for many checkpoint names.

“The secured area includes almost 100 checkpoints that will have police presence to ensure that those seeking entry to that secure area for a unlawful reason, such as joining a protest, cannot enter the downtown core,” acting Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said Thursday.

Canada’s capital, operating under the Emergencies Act, now has ‘no go zones” similar to a police state. Authorities set up checkpoints with armed police officers in downtown Ottawa on Thursday — from Highway 417 (Queensway) to Parliament Hill, where dozens of trucks have been parked for three weeks.

To get through the Berlin Wall under communism, people had to go through entry points known as Checkpoint Alpha, Checkpoint Bravo and, of course, Checkpoint Charlie. Now to get into through Ottawa’s police manned border points, people must produce papers to prove they live in the area or have a reason to be there.

Related: Creating precedents.

By positioning the protestors as “those who fly racist flags” – as a fringe minority with unacceptable views – Trudeau committed a fatal error: he left himself no face-saving exit from the imminent and predictable crisis that would befall him. No respectable politician can strike a deal with such undesirables after libeling them in the way that he did. The only path left was to crush them.

By granting himself the discretion to freeze the banking privileges of citizens without a court order or judicial review based on nothing more than a politician’s nebulous definition of “involved,” Trudeau has indeed gone full dictator.

What a long strange trip the last two years have been:

More: War Of The Worlds.

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.

In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.

The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.

Exit quote: “Again, this is class warfare. The Left hates not only the working class, but the Physicals. Leftist culture will continue to push the Virtualization of all aspects of life, because this is what dispossesses the Physicals and increases the control of the Virtuals. This is a story of the World Outside One’s Head clashing with the World Inside One’s Head.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

OLD AND BUSTED: Follow the Scientists.

The New Hotness? Follow the Polling! Democrats’ internal polling shows swing voters believe party went ‘too far’ on COVID. “The slide deck provides a snapshot into some of Democrats’ strategies as their outlook for the 2022 midterms grows increasingly grim.”

THE PROBLEM WITH ANTI-WOKE LIBERALS: They are foot soldiers for the status quo.

For [John] McWhorter, “the Elect” win by duping well-intentioned modern people into adopting a malignant worldview. Wokeness, in this telling, is just a set of bad ideas. Bad religious ideas, to be precise, which assail the rational, individualistic pillars of the “post-Enlightenment society we hold dear”. If that’s the case, the “solution” is for the rest of us to double down on secular individualism. We, the non-Elect, should simply recognise that we’re dealing with faith-based fanatics, people who can’t be reasoned with, and “work around them”.

The author is less than clear on what this might mean in practice, other than answering progressive claims with a resounding “No”: No, we won’t apologise. No, we won’t recant. No, we won’t mouth your inanities.

There is much that is sensible here. It’s especially commendable for a black, liberal intellectual, for example, to warn that the quest to extirpate all racist thoughts, once for all, is quixotic and dangerous.

But I’m afraid his diagnosis, and the treatment that follows from it, are woefully lacking. For one thing, the anti-woke liberals, who trend heavily toward Christopher Hitchens-style New Atheism, badly misunderstand religion, McWhorter especially so.

In fact, he admits early on that the book is likely to get pilloried for “disrespect[ing] religion.” But the problem isn’t so much his mean caricatures of traditional faiths as his sloppy definitions and the unaccountably sharp divisions he draws between religious and “secular” reason. These lead him to lose sight of the liturgical character of all political society, even the ardently godless.

Certainly, it’s hard to deny the religious characteristics of wokeness. The woke have their own liturgies (like the ones I witnessed in Houston). They believe in original sin (slavery, colonialism) and exalt themselves as a sort of secular Elect and excommunicate heretics (cancel culture). They’ve built a hieratic structure, composed of high priests (the UCLA critical theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, say), popular preachers (Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo) and ordinary pastors (your workplace diversity consultants). And because theirs is a messianic faith, they are hellbent on imposing it on the rest of us.

So far, so familiar. After all, it isn’t exactly ground-breaking to notice the religious dimensions of secular ideologies. The classic of the genre remains Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), which exposed the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. But where Aron was nuanced and sophisticated, and obviously learned when it came to a Christian faith that wasn’t his own, McWhorter is too often downright crude. Straight-faced references to The Da Vinci Code as a guide to understanding how believers think? Check. Blanket assertions that the Bible “makes no sense”? Check. Constant evocations of “the medieval” as shorthand for superstition and barbarism? Check.

Read the whole thing.

In other dispatches from the religious left: The left’s Nicene Creed. Those ‘IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE’ signs are very revealing.

JEFF DUNETZ: We’re Screwed! Always Wrong Fauci Says It’s Time to Move Toward Normalcy. “History teaches us that if Dr. Fauci tells us something is getting better–, we’re screwed. You may remember that on January 21, 2020, Fauci told the press, ‘I think the risk is very low right now for the United States.’ Fauci explained that we had ‘14 days to slow the spread less than two months later.’ On 2/17/22, we are 703 days later, America is still trying to slow the spread? . Remember how he’s flip-flopped on masks? When he said no masks, then masks, two masks, and then wear masks again? This guy flip-flops daily —he doesn’t follow the science. He follows who will put him on television.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

● Chaser:

At Commentary, Chrstine Rosen writes: The Masking Regime Is Coming Apart.

We’re in an odd cultural moment when an organization that was traditionally dedicated to protecting civil liberties goes to federal court to argue for more restrictions on those liberties. It’s a moment in which school administrators refuse to protect children from sexual assault if the act is committed by someone who has chosen to change genders, but they’ll eagerly punish students for observing a democratically elected governor’s order giving them the choice not to wear a mask.

The ACLU lawsuit also fails to make sense on its own terms. The organization claims to speak for the rights of disabled children in the Virginia school system, and hyperbolically invokes the Civil Rights movement to justify claims like, “Universal mask use may be necessary to protect some children . . . For many of these children, Governor Youngkin has effectively barred the schoolhouse door.” But as any parent of an autistic or hearing-impaired child will tell you, masks prevent their children from being able to participate fully in school. And what of the vast majority of students who struggle to hear each other speak and make meaningful, normal social connections because their faces are obscured by masks all day. Do their rights not matter?

Related: Former ACLU leader Ira Glasser slams organization’s ‘progressive’ new agenda.

BURNING RUBBER, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Cargo Ship Full of Porsches, Bentleys and VWs Is On Fire and Adrift in the Atlantic. “Thankfully, the 22 crew on board have been reported as successfully evacuated from the ship,” but: “With the fire still burning and salvage plans being hatched, The Drive can now also confirm that the ship is also carrying 189 Bentleys and an unspecified number of Audis, with VW Group estimating the total number of vehicles on board to be close to 4,000. The Felicity Ace is regularly used as a charter vessel for VW Group, and also carried at least 21 Lamborghinis on its most recent voyage from Europe to America in January.”

COVERING THE IMPORTANT NEWS: A History of the Last Time I Ate at a Chinese Buffet. “As the waitress went off to retrieve my drink, I stood up, aimed myself at the buffet, and….RELEASE THE KRAKEN! It’s easy, especially if you’re somewhat tallish and large-bodied, as I am, to imagine yourself as Godzilla, grabbing up random things — egg rolls, fishing boats, pork dumplings, Tokyo office towers — and snapping them with your jaws, the crumbs of buildings and chicken parts falling onto the dun-colored carpet below.”

DEMOCRACY DIES IN RACISM: WaPo Describes Justice Clarence Thomas: “the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.” “Justice Thomas still deigns to think for himself, and refuses to kowtow to the old order run by Thompson and Clyburn. And for that reason, he continues to be destroyed by the left, without even the slightest hesitation. Oh, and by the way, in 2005 then-Senator Biden threatened to filibuster then-Justice Janice Rogers Brown, who credibly could have (and should have) become the first black woman on the Supreme Court.”

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DOXXING: Washington Post seeks to dox and shame donors to Canadian freedom protesters.

An email shared by journalist Saagar Enjeti appeared to be by a reporter with the Washington Post, who said they were “writing about leaked data on GiveSendGo contributions to the trucker convoy in Canada.

THIS IS CNN: The Chris Cuomo/CNN Saga Abruptly Takes a Dark Turn.

According to the woman, she was working as a temporary staffer on ABC News in 2011 and was hoping for a permanent role.

Chris invited her to his office for lunch, she says. She arrived but found there was no food. He then allegedly started ‘badgering’ her for sex and when she refused him, she says he sexually assaulted her. No other details about the alleged assault have been made public. The woman said she then sent him friendly emails to try to smooth things over.

When the #MeToo movement gained momentum, she said she heard from Chris – by this time CNN’s star host. He said he wanted to run a segment on the firm where she worked.

She said she interpreted it as a veiled threat not to come forward with her own #MeToo claim. A spokesman for Cuomo denied the allegations outlined in the letter.

Elsewhere at CNN, great moments in timing: ‘Irate’ Chris Wallace Has Meltdown Over Jeff Zucker-Allison Gollust Scandal, Said To Be At War In D.C. Bureau With Jake Tapper. “He went over there for Zucker and now Zucker is gone. Wallace feels that he has been stiffed. He’s got no staff, no Executive Producer and the guy he gave up a prized gig for has just walked out the door.”

Finally, from Stacy McCain: Corporate PR Coochie-for-Hire Exits Praising CNN’s ‘Journalistic Integrity.’