Insane Wingnut Truck Protest in Canada Threatens Democracy In General

What’s happening in Ottawa, they were clear, is two separate events happening in tandem: there is a broadly non-violent (to date) group of Canadians with assorted COVID-related gripes, ranging from the somewhat justified to totally frickin’ insane. 

But that larger group, which has knocked Ottawa and too many of our leaders into what my colleague Jen Gerson so perfectly described as “stun-fucked stasis,” is now providing a kind of (mostly) unwitting cover to a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state — not just the city of Ottawa, or Ontario or Canada, but of democracies generally. 

Part of what reporter and columnist Matt Gurney discusses in the article is an encampment of people in the latter category, which has become a fortress type setting. (You can build a pretty powerful fortress if you can move around a bunch of 18 wheelers.) 

It seems clear — and the police chief in Ottawa has been saying this — that local police can’t resolve this situation. The country has essentially lost control of its own capital. 

And now those “protestors” are expanding toward shutting down trade links between the two countries. They’re being cheered on and now joined by far-right groups in the U.S. In Josh Kovensky’s article today about far-right activist Leigh Dundas, he notes that she’s taking a lead role liaising between Canadian and U.S. far-right activists and identifying “strategic” border crossings which can be shut down to paralyze trade between the two countries. 

One thing that becomes clear reading this is that the important stuff happened before the authorities in Ottawa even knew what was happening. And then it was too late. Once you have an organized, fortified encampment of far-right agitators you can’t just dismantle that without the potential or maybe certainty of a lot of violence. 

I really hope U.S. authorities are watching this closely to prevent things like this from happening on the U.S. side of the border. At the beginning you can deal with it in a pretty straightforward way. If you let it get out of control, as they did in Ottawa, the options become really bad. 

This isn’t just more right wing crazy or the kind of white privilege performance art that we’re used to seeing from the Bundy clan here in the U.S. It’s both of those things. But this is a much more grave challenge to the authority of the Canadian state itself. They are showing that, at least so far, the Canadian state is unable to defend itself or the civic and commercial lives of its citizens.

Fucking treasonous wingnuts really do want to fuck everything up.