Tucker: This is what the collapse of democracy looks like
Fox News host shreds light on Canada's crackdown of the Freedom Convoy protesters on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
You have to feel a little bad for the many heads of western democracies. For them, the end of the coronavirus pandemic is really the worst thing they can imagine.
Put yourself in their position. For two years you've wielded unprecedented power over your country. You've told citizens where and when they can work and shop and worship and go outside. You've controlled what they wear. You've decided how their children will be educated and what drugs they must put into their bodies. For a person with no useful skills and limited job prospects in the real economy, and that describes all of them, it's been an extraordinary experience: No democratic leader in history has ever been this powerful, as powerful as you are right now. You're like a god. Each morning, you wake up and survey your creation, and you revel in your omnipotence. You can hardly believe how far you've come. The last thing you want is for all of it to end.
But of course, it is ending. The virus that gave you these powers is in retreat. It's no longer a public health emergency. The vaccine that you promised would be a panacea, didn't work in the ways you pledged they would. They didn't stop infection or transmission. Now you've done your best to hide that fact, but everybody knows it. So for you, the jig is up. The ball is over. It's almost midnight. Just a few hours from now, you will once again be merely a scullery maid. You'll be taking orders from your citizens rather than giving them and the thought of that sends you into a panic.
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Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister, speaks during a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. (David Kawai/Bloomberg)
What do you do next? How do you make this moment last forever? There's only one way. You must find a new emergency that justifies making your powers permanent. If you're going to remain god, you're going to need the devil to fight. So, if you're wondering why so many western leaders suddenly are vilifying their own populations, people they were supposed to represent, this is why. Find an enemy, create a crisis, stay in power forever. It's the oldest recipe for tyranny that there is. If we don't recognize it in our own age, it's only because nothing like this was supposed to happen in a democracy, but it is happening, most clearly in Canada.
Last week, Justin Trudeau used a peaceful trucker strike to declare martial law. Trudeau seized control of the police. He shut down opposition media coverage. He declared himself the final arbiter of all financial transactions in the nation of Canada. These are dictatorial powers, but they were necessary, Trudeau explained, because this was an emergency. White supremacist and other sedition-minded forces, backed by foreign saboteurs (sound familiar?) threatened the very existence of Canada. The truckers were effectively an invading army.
Well, over the weekend, Trudeau defeated that army. They were unarmed. He is not. Trudeau cleared the trucker strike by force. Yet his emergency powers remain. Today, Justin Trudeau explained that he will remain in full control of Canada indefinitely. And that's essential, he said, to keep Canada safe, but the video tells a very different story. In fact, it's Trudeau's crackdown on human rights that has put Canadians in danger. Trudeau's forces told one woman she's no longer allowed to record what happens in her own city.
WOMAN: I just want to get a coffee, ok?
POLICE: Why is the camera in my face right now? ...Right now you are in the red zone.
WOMAN: I’m scared, I want to go for a coffee down there.
POLICE: Where are you from?
WOMAN: Alberta.
POLICE: We’ve been patrolling all day, if we see you again it will be different.
OTHER POLICE OFFICER (GRABBING A HOLD OF THE CAMERA): Leave. Take your camera and get out of here.
WOMAN: I’m walking away.
OTHER POLICE OFFICER: Do you understand that?
WOMAN: I’m walking away...
OTHER POLICE OFFICER: Walk away. Your phone doesn’t need to be in our faces when you’re walking away.
WOMAN: I’m walking away.
RAND PAUL DENOUNCES TRUDEAU’S ‘DANGEROUS’ EMERGENCIES ACT, WARNS OF SIMILAR US LAWS
"I just want a cup of coffee."
"Get out of here."
Multiply what you just saw by an entire country, and that's Canada tonight. There's no longer any pretext that this is about the COVID pandemic. No one in Trudeau's government is trying to protect Canadians from anything much less a virus. This is political repression.
If you doubt that, consider what happened to a place called the Ionic Cafe. That's a coffee shop in downtown Ottawa. On Sunday, riot police tried to break into the cafe and shut it down. Why? Because the proprietors had dared to serve coffee to the truckers during the protest. Under Justin Trudeau, that is now a crime. A man called Enrico, who works at the cafe, said he saw Trudeau's forces mistreat a civilian on the sidewalk, possibly like the mistreatment you just saw. When he told them to back off, "Hey, this is Canada," they turned on him.
MAN FILMING: OK, share this out, you guys, get it out everywhere now. Get it out. They're saying they're going to break the window. They already walked around back, you guys. Here's your tax service. Here's your taxes at play, everyone. Welcome to absolute tyranny.
So that kind of thing is happening all over the capital city of Canada. The virus is in retreat, but there's a new crisis and that crisis is disobedience. Last week we showed you the footage of Trudeau's forces trampling a woman with horses. Now, internal texts show the officers who rode those horses celebrated what they did.
"Just watch that horse video. That is awesome," said one officer.
Awesome. An elderly woman being trampled by a horse. The Canadian government has confirmed that those texts are real but none of the supposedly progressive politicians in Canada care in the least. No one on the Canadian left or the American left, for that matter, has condemned any of this or any other grotesque violation of human rights in Canada. State media aren't even reporting that it's happening. But it is happening. Over the weekend, the show obtained footage of a particularly brutal beating in Ottawa during the crackdown. When you watch it, you can see a man being kneed repeatedly by Trudeau's men.
DAVID PAISLEY: I can hear noises of people getting shoved around outside, being arrested, a man being kneed there. That's terrible.
Kneeing him, again and again, and again. He wasn't resisting. And the man who shot that footage was called David Paisley. He runs a website called shedmedia.ca. Police have arrested Paisley and seized the camera equipment he used to shoot that— $5,000 worth. Now we thought that video was remarkable, so we alerted several Canadian media outlets over the weekend, including CBC and CTV to this footage. We gave them David Paisley's contact information, news organization to news organization. But none of them reported on it. So we looked into it ourselves.
Several protesters who were there said that a trucker in an orange jacket called Csaba Vizi was attacked by police officers during the crackdown. We reached Csaba Vizi and he confirmed it and provided footage. It shows him exiting his cab calmly, kneeling down in front of his truck and clasping his hands behind his head.
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CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: I’m proud you’re here
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (speaks French)
CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: I don’t speak French.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It’s very hard, but, you don’t lose.
CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: No, I am not.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Second battle.
CSABA VIZI, TRUCKER: As soon as they let me out, I’ll be back. … I’m going down. I’m going down by knee, hands behind my back. I am self-ready... I’m peacefully protesting.
So the man surrenders, on camera, and then he's kneed repeatedly into submission. Now we'd love to have more footage, but it turns out none of Justin Trudeau's men was wearing a body camera at the time. That's pretty weird. No one in Canadian state media cares to follow up on that story, and so they're not. They don't care, either.
The brutality is just one element of this crackdown. On Saturday, Ottawa's new police chief promised to hunt down the regime's enemies no matter where they are in coming months and ruin them financially.
OTTAWA POLICE CHIEF: So, I will stand here today again and say this demonstration is over. Go home. If you don't go home, we will remove you from the streets. … If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges. Absolutely.
If you were involved in a protest, you'll be sanctioned and charged. What does that mean exactly? Well, last night, Justin Trudeau's government announced that it's also going after anyone who "directly or indirectly participated in the protests." According to Mark Strahl, who is a member of Canada's parliament, the dragnet has ensnared one of his constituents. It's a woman called Briane. Her crime? Donating $50 to the truckers. In response "her bank account has now been frozen." Briane is a single mom from Chilliwack, working a minimum wage job. She now has no money at all. So under Trudeau's new order, she won't simply lose access to her bank account. She will also lose access to credit unions, co-ops, trusts and loan providers.
This is what the collapse of democracy looks like. It's not simply beating people in the streets. It's making it impossible for them to live because you steal all their money. You award yourself the power to control every dollar in your country. Where's that power come from? Well, it's a self-appointed power, that Justin Trudeau now has, and you prevent anyone from speaking out against you. So Trudeau is not just targeting people who parked their trucks in Ottawa, he's crushing anyone who supports them. He's going after their employers. Over the weekend, the owner of a trucking company in Ontario received this threatening call from Trudeau's authorities.
CALLER: Well, my job is to, um, to phone the registered owner of the trucks to ask them if they're still in Ottawa and if they are still in Ottawa, I wish to tell the registered owner that now they can be subject to the new measures under the Emergency Measures Act, so they can like seize assets and freeze bank accounts and all that kind of stuff.
So, Trudeau's government is promising to seize company assets and zero up bank accounts because one company truck parked on the street in Ottawa. It's not simply an overreaction, a grotesque overreaction to a peaceful protest. It's a wild and unprecedented expansion of powers that is permanent, and that make democracy impossible. Canada's finance minister explained that Trudeau is not going to give up this power. Ever.
CANADIAN FINANCE MINISTER: We will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place. The authorities of FINTRAC, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and payment platform and their payment providers. So that's... something that we need to do and we will do and that needs to be in place permanently.
You'll notice that some of the harshest authoritarians, not simply in Canada, but across the West, speak in light, lilting voices going up on the last syllable. They don't sound like Mussolini, but they've awarded themselves greater powers. By the way, this all seems to have happened overnight in Canada, but that's simply because most Americans don't pay attention.
A year ago, Canada's government began debating something called C-36. That bill would allow activists to head to court and accuse someone of "contemplating hate speech"—not even saying something unauthorized, just thinking about saying it. So, what is hate speech exactly and what does it look like to contemplate it? Well, back around 2020, a man living in British Columbia wrote to complain to a Canadian government official called Bob Rae. The man wrote that "you and your government have blood on your hands for not quarantining Canada's borders before we’d imported COVID from around the world."
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Justin Trudeau attends a news conference on March 7, 2019 in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo by Dave Chan/Getty Images)
Now you can agree with that or disagree with it, but it's hardly a wild opinion and of course, it will always be permitted in an actual democracy, but the Canadian official's response to Bob Rae's response "Worthy of a block. Hate speech."
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Criticized me, the person in power, and now it's hate speech. Now, contemplating saying something like that is itself a crime. Canadian government officials like Bob Rae can send people who criticize them to jail. Trudeau's government has moved to reintroduce Bill C-36 "as quickly as possible."
Now, the Biden administration, you should know and not forget, has encouraged all of this. "Vladimir Putin is the tyrant," they tell us, "not Justin Trudeau." At this point it's pretty clear that if you want to know the future they are planning for us in the United States, look north to Canada.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening monologue on the February 21, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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