Today, I am turning my blog over to former Chicago Tribune colleague and columnist John Kass. John produces a blog from his base in Chicago. You can subscribe to his blog by clicking on this link: https://johnkassnews.com/.

John’s columns for the Tribune were among the best I saw during my 27-year-career at the Tribune–and that includes those penned by the legendary Mike Royko. John’s incisive observations and razor-sharp wit are unmistakable. Read on and see for yourself.

O Canada, What Have You Done?

By John Kass

For all its blood-curdling shrieks about “authoritarianism,” the political left has always been about two things:

Force and the hammer.

It is force they employ to grab that government hammer. And it is the hammer they wield under the color of law, to impose control.

We see this now in Canada, and here in the U.S. And we’re witness to open political class war that was sparked by the pandemic, but the conflict has been building for years.

It is a class war between the wealthy establishment elite of the Zoom World, who telecommute to work virtually, and have a profound influence in government and the shaping of policy.

And the other group on the other side? They’re not wealthy and have little government clout. But they’ve gone to work in person to do their jobs and their duty even before there were vaccines. There is no virtual reality for them. They live and work in the real world. It is the world where their hands get dirty, and their backs begin to ache.

People like the truckers of Canada, hounded by Canada’s pajama boy dictator.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has shamefully imposed what amounts to martial law and began rounding up truck drivers protesting his vax mandates, freezing the funds of their Freedom Convoy, threatening their licenses and their livelihoods.

Another such Freedom Convoy is being organized in America, headed toward Washington. Is it political? Of course, it is. Everything is absolutely political now.

And some in America wonder, are we next? They can see that the left is addicted to force. They have eyes. They see the hammer in their hands.

It is all force. The force of the cancel culture to destroy the lives of those who dare dissent. And through their allies in the Biden administration, they’ve portrayed concerned American parents as domestic terrorists. Why? Because parents wanted to defend their children from state-sponsored indoctrination in government (public) schools.

And you’ve seen force used by their allies in the corrupt (and dying) legacy corporate media. It is used to shame dissenters, kicking opponents to the margins of society, as the left wonders publicly, without a whit of irony, about the rise in anger across the electorate.

They’ll find out in November.

And force used by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the history of the world, the Lords of Big Tech, who employ their algorithms to determine how we talk about what we know, and what we see. They have allied themselves with corporate media to censor and suppress dissenting views that threaten their hold on power.

During the last national election, these agents of force suppressed reporting in The New York Post, the oldest newspaper in America, for daring to publish articles now commonly understood to be true. These were articles about the kinky foreign business deals of First Son Hunter Biden and his laptop, and the leverage supplied by “The Big Guy,” who just happens to be Hunter’s father and the American president.

We’ve seen force in racial guilt employed as a lash, to deconstruct time-honored values of equal opportunity and redefine the American republic as oppressive and systemically racist since its inception. It is a lie. And we’ve been force fed.

And in blue lockdown states like Illinois, we’ve seen a governor applauded during the pandemic for shutting down houses of worship, churches, mosques and synagogues, while he kept “essential” businesses open, like the pot dispensaries and the liquor stores.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire, defies the parents of school kids and the circuit and appellate courts that knocked down his unconstitutional school mask mandates. He’s taken his case to the Illinois Supreme Court. He is like the others. He just can’t let go of the hammer.

You see force in the application of rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me pandemic mandates. The elites order kids to be masked at school, though what’s left of the pandemic doesn’t threaten most children. And you see this elite going maskless at the Super Bowl, at their sumptuous parties, at their fine dinners at The French Laundry and other such places, while the faces of their working-class serfs are covered in those masks, as evidence of power. And in the schools even special needs students were ordered to keep the masks on.

Blue state politicians spent two years rubbing their unmasked arrogance into the faces of their voters month after month. And now they’re afraid of the coming backlash and hope to spin their troublesome history away as they’ve done before. But it’s too late for that.

Do they think we’ll forget what they’ve done?

It has all been about force as two distinct cultures formed: The wealthy elite of Zoom World, of the Big Tech kings and politicians, journalists, unelected Kemalist bureaucrats, and so many others.

And in the other world, in that other culture, where the serfs and most people live and turn on the TV where late-night comedians mock them?

They showed up for work before the vaccines. They were at their posts before herd immunity. The Zoom World hailed them as heroes, once, like the truckers who brought food.

Do you remember when we called them heroes?

And now Canada shames herself by attacking the truckers.

O Canada.

I don’t want to criticize Canada. I love Canada. I’m half-Canadian. My mother was born there in a small town outside of Toronto. Part of my family still lives there, aunts and uncles, cousins. One was a member of Parliament.

When my brothers and I were little boys, on our CCM skates and hockey sticks in our hands-on frozen ponds around Chicago, we’d sing “O Canada.”

We’ve sipped good single-malt scotch with the Scots of Fergus, enjoyed great steak in Winnipeg, once I even dreamed of using hounds for mountain lions in Alberta.

We’ve fished for walleye and pike from Red Lake to Lac Seul. We had our share of bear issues. And I’ve fished for Atlantic salmon in the Canadian Northeast, on dry fly in rivers running through great forests once owned by the newspaper I once loved.

I’ve swallowed Tim Horton’s coffee and put that brown gravy on my fries. It didn’t kill me.

But the Canada I love is not Canada now.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the middle school drama teacher who loves to wear costumes is a character in a bad novel, the vindictive son in the search of the father, wielding his government hammer with vengeance.

Trudeau got what he wanted out of the Freedom Convoy of truckers who dared opposed his vaccine mandates. He got the pretext to impose his version of martial law, the Emergencies Act—used during wars and against Quebec terrorists–and he did so without a vote from Parliament.

He governs as a mad, frightened boy-king unable to stop himself.

Some in the Canadian media and The Washington Post—the Democratic Party’s cheerleader/enforcer–used information that was reportedly hacked, in order to hold supporters of the Freedom Convoy up to public ridicule.

Donors were doxxed to shame them. Businesses were hurt. Others were just strung up on social media for abuse.

When Trudeau said he admired the authoritarian state of Communist China, it should have been a warning.

“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” Trudeau said in 2013, “because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green … we need to start investing in solar.’”

That was particularly ridiculous since China has no intention of going green. Pajama boy dictator, don’t you know that China burns coal.

China burns more than half the world’s coal, while useful idiot leftists like Trudeau and his American counterparts insist we “go green” at great cost to our people. They aren’t in Xi Jinping’s face, demanding that China go green. Are they? They leave China alone because they respect and fear power, and put shackles on our economic growth.

The other day, Trudeau falsely accused the truckers in Ottawa of harboring fascists in their ranks, just because one masked idiot had waved one Confederate flag, and another masked idiot reportedly had Nazi symbolism.

These fools were loudly denounced by the truckers up in Canada. But corporate media had their symbols and used them to marginalize the truckers, their newfound deplorables. Trudeau also played his swastika card by accusing a Jewish conservative MP of supporting “people who wave swastikas.”

Yes, he is a fool. Of course, he is a fool. But a mad fool drunk with power. Canadians understand this.

Using his hammer, Trudeau froze bank accounts of protestors and any others—including Americans—who dared support the Freedom Convoy. He sent mounted police in to trample the protesters and arrest them. Trudeau’s government kept most journalists at a distance, another element of control.

Included among Trudeau’s victims was a woman trampled in a walker. Joe Warmington, a journalist for The Toronto Sun denounced Trudeau and described it all as “grotesque.”

Grotesque indeed.

“While Trudeau tried to pin the online postings of a Swastika and Confederate flag on the truckers, they brought in a crane to raise the Canadian flag and sang ‘O Canada’ every day,” Warmington writes. ‘They definitely wore out their welcome while clogging up the parliamentary district of Ottawa, not wearing masks and excessively honking their horns.

“But they didn’t cause violence.

“So why the heavy hand in their mission to win back the city?” Warmington asked.

Why? The left is all about force.

And now that truckers in the U.S. are organizing an American Freedom Convoy of truckers headed for Washington, we ask ourselves:

Will Joe Biden play the same game with them as did Trudeau?

Biden bragged a fabulist brag about driving a big rig. And has already unleashed White House political hacks and the Department of Justice to condemn parents concerned about Critical Race Theory indoctrination as potential “domestic terrorists.”

That attitude cost Democrats the Virginia gubernatorial election. And there are warning signs from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s heavily Democratic district in San Francisco, where voters by overwhelming margins voted to oust hard-left school board members.

It’s too late for Biden, old, weak, and wobbly, to change his party’s course. And the left that wags the Democratic dog has no intention of changing course. In the American mind, the Democrats are firmly identified with angry force from the left.

Democrats in America had hoped the pandemic would have allowed them the wholesale use of mail-in votes and other techniques they used in 2020. As state legislatures thwarted them, they accused their opponents of being Jim Crow racists. That didn’t work.

And now they panic because they know what’s coming for them in November.

But Canada?

She’s always stood by the United States as our ally. The Canadian people have always had our backs. We should have theirs. And I’ve loved Canada as a second homeland.

But with the pajama boy dictator as prime minister, with that hammer in his hand, Canada shames herself.

O Canada.

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(Copyright 2022 John Kass)