The alt-right has weaponized ‘freedom’ to undermine democracy https://t.co/CgQdtmXWnM
— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) February 8, 2022
Is freedom the enemy of democracy?
“If you watched any of federal Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre’s video announcing his candidacy for the leadership of his party, you might have discerned a theme: freedom
Variations of the word were used nine times in his three-minute performance. If he is elected leader and is ultimately successful in becoming prime minister, Mr. Poilievre promised, among other things, to make Canadians the “freest people on earth,” with “freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices, freedom to speak without fear.”
“Freedom over fear,” he recently tweeted.
This is not by accident, of course.
Freedom is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the U.S. During the last federal election, People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, the far-right’s current standard-bearer in this country, was greeted with chants of “freedom, freedom,” at his campaign stops.
Freedom, as an ideology, has been appropriated by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the U.S. Republican party. There is a strong MAGA fan base in this country, apparently with prominent supporters such as Candice Bergen, the new interim leader of the federal Conservative Party of Canada. Undated photos circulating on social media appear to show Ms. Bergen sporting a camouflage MAGA hat. …”
Granted, there is a lot of confusion about this term. No one knows what it means anymore as those people who used to be involved with it have gone in so many different directions.
How do you weaponize freedom? Either you have it or don’t and have to fight for it I hope these protests get bigger and bigger and spread.
It makes sense to a globalist scumbag. Freedom is the enemy for these people. I hope this trucker protest spreads like wildfire. It’s time the message is sent that we aren’t on on board with their “plan”.
Trudeau is going to go for a bloody crackdown and truckers all over the place are going to be outraged. More empty store shelves? This is planned. The responsible thing to do for Trudeau would be to just back down. So why isn’t he? Why is he escalating? For what reason?
I wish the Canucks would go on a national tax strike and show us Americans how to rein in a runaway government.
Let’s see Trudeau fund the Canadian government out of his own pocket.
There’s no comment option on the NPR article. That one is too good to pass up commenting on lol
Last time I checked on Twitter, Richard Spencer was for vaccine fascism. He is against rightwing populism. He is against nationalism and Christianity. He is for elitism, globalism, feminism, Apolloism and Joe Biden. He has also accepted liberal hegemony.
Given that you know Spencer personally, having met him years ago, how do you account for what (appears to me to be, anyway) such a substantial change in his political persona?
I understood his dislike of Trump (the ‘5%ers’), although I would not have taken it so far as to actually prefer, or worse vote for, Biden — it looks like he and the Dissident Right have parted ways, e.g. he seems to play no role whatsoever in the National Justice Party.
I feel it necessary to point out that you appeared to support (what I will call) ‘lockdown fascism’ — while not as bad as ‘vaccine fascism’, it was bad enough in that it ceded even more power, e.g. over our personal liberty, to a regime that hates us.
I thought it was important to try to stop the virus before it spiraled out of control, killed hundreds of thousands of people and established itself here ensuring that it would never go away and would be a chronic problem for years. It became clear very early on that ship had sailed. This isn’t the same thing as bossing people around for the sake of doing so in order to exert power over them.
This isn’t the same thing as bossing people around for the sake of doing so in order to exert power over them.
How is someone (e.g. me) supposed to know/tell the difference in motivation? — wouldn’t the people (petty autocrats I would call them) who imposed the lockdowns say the same thing? — for some reason, do you think ‘exerting power’ wasn’t part of their motivation?
Do you regret anything at all about your behavior at the time?
Honestly, I find your attempts at an explanation lacking — do you regret anything at all about your actions at the time?
I could not trust the government, any government, nor the the people in it, enough to allow them to restrict my personal freedom so drastically, or even have the authority to do so, regardless of the motivation — it should not have happened, and it should never happen again.
Why did you edit the post to remove the text about Spencer? — I see others also saw the original, unedited post.
OT
But a point I’ve made a number of times here:
Rep. Madison Cawthorn Launches Campaign to Impose TERM LIMITS on Congress – Pelosi “Has Been Serving Longer Than I’ve Been Alive”
While I strongly dislike the Q-/Trump-tardish GWP and rarely look at the site, I saw this link posted elsewhere, and clicked on it without knowing where it went because I liked the part about how long Pelosi has been in Congress — I post it here for the same reason.
1. It is better to just ignore those people than give them attention
2. I regret falling for the original disinformation coming out of China
3. Lockdowns worked in China and stopped the virus. We never had anything like a real lockdown here. We had 50 states and countless local governments doing their own thing and winging it. It made no sense and it didn’t work. It was purely a performance like wearing cloth masks
Ultimately, I regret not being cynical enough about this country. I should have known better than to assume that people would care about hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens dying. We have people on here who claim to care about White people, but actually at the end of the day don’t really care about mass death in their own community. I’ve seen people who got sick with COVID get shouted down by conspiratards at the Daily Stormer forum
4. I trust my state and local government. I also definitely trust my friends and family and the local hospital. I knew that people who I knew personally weren’t lying to me about the virus
5. I don’t trust conspiratards on the internet who I have watched go from one grift to another
You aren’t the bad guy here. Just wrong headed on this.
“I should have known better than to assume that people would care about hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens dying. We have people on here who claim to care about White people, but actually at the end of the day don’t really care about mass death in their own community.”
I care enough about White people to know they thrive on independence and suffer under repression, especially in the U.S.
Did you consider the damage being done to White people through lockdowns by way of…
1) The destruction of the economy and hundreds of thousands of businesses mostly White owned?
2) loss of livelihood through mass unemployment?
3) Denial of medical services because hospitals and doctors stopped or dramatically slowed down performing needed procedures like chemotherapy?
4) Suicides and drug overdoses and other stress related self harm?
5) Injuries from vaccines which the same hysteria used to justify the lockdowns also fueled the forceful application of to nearly the whole population?
6) The dramatic curtailment of civil liberties and the overt demonization of mostly White people who refused vaccines?
7) This spot reserved for all the other follow on effects we aren’t even sure about yet while we try to recover from the lockdowns.
8) Utter collapse of the supply chain for everything that has boomeranged into inflation like we haven’t seen in 50 years.
Policy failures are such because the cost benefit is negative. Thats what is happening now that we are beginning to come out of this, realize it wasn’t worth it and wasn’t done for the reasons we were told. Its not rocket science HW.
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“Lockdowns worked in China and stopped the virus. We never had anything like a real lockdown here. We had 50 states and countless local governments doing their own thing and winging it. It made no sense and it didn’t work.”
This isn’t China. Besides they are still doing lockdowns periodically to this day. It didn’t work there either. And its incredibly naive to think the Chinese government has been at all honest about anything to do with this virus and the outbreak. There’s zero incentive for them to be.
As regards the Chinese. They aren’t like us. They like their government, are naturally submissive, and have always been that way. How could you (a historian) even possibly think Whitey would ever tolerate what they would? In what world do you think Whitey should tolerate this? Our government is NOT legitimate because they do not have our interests in mind when they rule.
You’re damn right it didn’t make any sense, and we should NEVER have done it.
Why would anybody look at China with a super concentrated totally homogeneous population with relatively high trust and think that what works for them would work in the U.S, where the population has little trust in eachother or the government, is widely distributed except for those handful of metropolises that have moderately high population density and practically zero ethnic cohesion because of the fragmented demographics here and think, hmm yeah thats a great idea lets shoe horn this abusive policy we borrowed from a passive hive minded bug race who’s never really resisted its government onto this race of largely recalcitrant Anglo, Scots Irish population thats never done what they were told in the history of EVER?
Race awareness. People aren’t the same dude.
That they weren’t competent enough to pull off a more efficient power grab is a feature of a decentralized government and not a bug. It should surprise nobody it was a totally disastrous idea, and some of us have known it from the beginning.
Back in April 2020, I was thinking we got to stop this thing like the first SARS virus, which got loose when I was in college, before it spirals out of control, establishes itself here, becomes a chronic problem and never goes away.
Here we are two years later and the death toll is currently over 900,000 and should be over a million by April. This is also just the start because it is never going away now. This is what we were told at the time was a mild flu like disease.
Even if you added up all the people who died from COVID related suicides, vaccine injuries, COVID related drug overdoses and all manners of deaths which anti-vaxxers insist are entirely real (people die from the vaccine, but not from COVID), that wouldn’t come close to the sheer number of people who have died from COVID, not to mention all the people who haven’t died, but who now suffer from some kind of lifelong dehabilitating condition as a result of the disease.
I wish people who are obsessed with vaccines would just admit that they don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of people who have already died from COVID and the countless more who will undoubtedly do so in the future. More people have died from this than anything else in American history. It isn’t real to them though. Vaccine deaths are real, but COVID deaths are not real. The latter is being faked.
A good friend of mine is a tattoo artist. He has made a small fortune for himself putting tattoos on people whose relatives have died from COVID. The virus is never going away now. There is no point in controlling it now. It is too late for that.
This is a timely interview from Dr. Paul. Listen all the way through please.
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/rand-paul-encourages-u-s-trucker-convoy/
He responds to everything from beginning to end on this. Including touching on the financial incentives hospitals had to inflate death rates of Covid.
You are still dodging this point in particular (dodging everything else too, but this is the salient point). You cannot use the official death rates to make a point when they are known to be bogus.
I don’t deny folks died from Covid. I don’t like that they did die. I got vaccinated and had serious issues from it. I don’t like that either. Many people had no issues. I had no choice but to get vaccinated and there was never a reason for that either because I had already had covid, the only effect I still have from that is that Coffee, Onions and Skunks now all smell the same which is bizarre but not life threatening.
None of what has been done necessarily follows from a bad virus being loose, especially when there is no reason to think it will be consistently or diligently applied across the population. Lockdowns, masks, none of it
Ultimately its not the responsibility of you, me or anybody else to shoulder the burden for every death from this thing (except arguably the dipshit Chinese that engineered and fumbled it, and our brilliant government that paid them to do it).
The not being able to easily paste links thing is obnoxious. It doesn’t even let you paste the link when you submit the post here in the comments. If this is intentional I wish you’d turn it back off because I can just paste it in two parts and it can’t tell the difference.
“Ultimately, I regret not being cynical enough about this country.”
You aren’t the only one. We are learning, though.
“This isn’t the same thing as bossing people around for the sake of doing so in order to exert power over them.”
Spreading propaganda and curated statistics that support an obvious psyop serves that end all the same. Good intentions don’t really count for much.
The big lie is an albatross precisely because it threatens to loose the sword of damocles when inevitability people realize you made fools of them, and robbed them while you were doing it. This is where the Brandon administration finds itself. At best, the big lie can only ever end in pyrrhic victory.
Its a lesson anybody trying to influence other people needs to take to heart.
Nobody will ever thank you for making a fool of them.
Also, fuck Richard Spencer. That effete Swpl faggot can fling himself off something tall.
Revealing back and forth between commenters Eah, IronicSockAccount, and our Host on the never-ending Covid-19/mutations saga. I think Hunter is most distraught over covid because ultimately it shows the utter foolishness of trusting authority, whatever its source. He is finally displaying a tentative understanding of the impact of monetary incentives on the federal Leviathan, where even “public servants” like Anthony Fauci operate at the behest of for-profit organizations, which Robert Kennedy Jr.’s book shows was the long run operations paradigm of the NIH. Lockdowns, masks, and the remaining “policy” had zero to do with taming a disease.
The problem is that for a status quo/trust your betters lover of hierarchy like HW, covid policy exposes the lie at the heart of traditionalism: there are no benevolent dictators (with a few exceptions like Lee Kwan Yew, that prove the rule). And this concept extends to the lower recesses of society that traditionalists cite as trustworthy.
Those local and state governments you trust, and the for-profit medical facilities and their employees and management, are no less in the thrall of the Oligarchs than is the federal monstrosity. Wealthy landowners bribe mayors and county zoning boards to build manufacturing plants in residential communities, Fortune 500 companies bribe state legislatures and governor’s offices or executive branch organizations to build polluting facilities, and so on. Even you family might sell you out for the last penny, if the opportunity arises.
In reality, the status quo is always a matter of legitimating power relationships that favor the rule makers into binding authority, i. e. “rules,” that will facilitate the weightier elements of society winning the game of life, due to their genetic heritage. So favoring only one way of life does not make society better per se, it just lets TPTB pretend that might makes right. There is no basis to “trust” anyone in a position of authority with your life, because for the right price, all will sell you out.
And that is the ultimate problem with moderate dissidents, as it is with moderates generally: the hope that we just all get along prevents them from challenging Power in a realistic way. No one gives up anything without a fight. Assuming one can effect their world by conceding good faith of opponents is a losing proposition. The game of life is not moot court, any more then the Supreme Court is a philosopher king entity.
You need to wise up, Hunter, and join the battle. We are all Canadian truckers now. General Strike, anyone? Like you know who has been proposing for 2 1/2 years here at OD. The time to fight the bastards has arrived.
“I thought it was important to try to stop the virus before it spiraled out of control,”
Yes, a very rapid spread could have clogged all hospitals and lead to many times the current death tolls.
Taking reasonable precautions is prudent, well justified.
“but actually at the end of the day don’t really care about mass death in their own community”
Yes, most ppl are too selfish, egocentric. That’s why the WHITE race is in deep trouble, “it aint happenin in my neighborhood, i don’t gib no s**t.”
All you could do was shake your head and curse at some of the clownish and self-centered behavior that went on.
Richard Spencer:
When is he going to put He/Him on his Twitter profile? Get with the program Dickieboy. If you’re going to bootlick go all the way!
Is freedom the enemy of democracy?
You can have one, or the other. But not both. The two terms are mutually exclusive of one another.
Democracy is completely antithetical to freedom. Every serious intellect from Plato to Tocqueville understood this. It used to be one of the core concepts taught as part of a liberal arts education.
Democracy is actually a form of communism. Both communism and democracy pronounce every person equal. Not by accident was East Germany named the “German DEMOCRATIC Republic.”
@X
Several Communist states have call themselves Democratic, and several Communists have called themselves democrats.
When libs talk about democracy what they really mean is plutocracy.
“When libs talk about democracy what they really mean is plutocracy.”
In the so-called “United States®,” they mean the Judeo-Plutocratic manipulated and controlled Northern States using their superior numbers and decisive votes to tell the other thirty-four States what to do, or else.
Get rid of the States from Maine to Minnesota, and from New Jersey to Iowa, and we get rid of 90+% of the Plutocrats, Jews, and most of our socio-political problems, in one fell swoop.
The folks in the interiors of California, Oregon and Washington State, will take care of the Left Coast for us. They’re more than ready to get busy.
The U.S. can survive with sixteen fewer States. At one time, it only had thirty.
End Reconstruction. End the War.
Sure James, just throw away millions of good people because of some scum in the cities. Anachronistic dumbass.
“Is freedom the enemy of democracy?”
Newspeak, welcome to 1984, double good double think.
Slavery is freedom, ignorance is knowledge.
I thought we ALL wanted to be “free”!? That’s what Irving Berlin, Bing Crosby et al. told us…. BLOODY LIARS.
Bing Crosby in blackface? I guess his remains will have to be exhumed, incinerated and dumped in a swamp, like Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering.
By today’s “standards” America in 1942 was every bit as “Nazi” as the Axis powers!