His critics call him Prime Minister Zoolander after the vacuous male model in the movie of the same name.
But Canada’s Justin Trudeau is someone much more sinister.
That’s been obvious ever since the PM turned the federal government’s power on the COVID mandate-protesting truckers of Canada’s Freedom Convoy in 2022, jailing them, seizing their rigs and even shutting down their bank accounts (“debanking,” as it’s known) — though that last came to a swift end when enough Canadians withdrew their money to threaten a bank run.
We were told the truckers were “right-wing extremists,” probably racist and possibly agents for the dreaded MAGA cabal. Really.
This was twaddle at the time and mostly went to show just how afraid the West’s leadership has become of a populist revolt.
But now we’re learning more.
Last week, federal Judge Richard Mosley found that the Canadian government overstepped legal bounds in going after the truckers, writing, “I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.”
It’s worse than that.
Recent independent journalism has demonstrated this “unreasonable” decision wasn’t simply an honest mistake.
It was the product of a deliberate campaign of deception and denigration the government organized with help from its media allies.
Leaks, often misleading, characterized the truckers as extremists.
Media reported these, and nonprofit groups repeated the message.
The government-funded nongovernmental organization (got that?) the Canadian Anti-Hate Network identified the feds’ opposition as extremists and possible terrorists, which the government then used as “independent” support for its actions.
None of this should come as a surprise.
Here in the United States, we’ve seen a similar phenomenon.
And European governments have been rolling out a similar script to deal with those who complain about unrestricted immigration and farmers’ protests against “green” policies designed to shut them down.
Apparently anyone who challenges the insider crowd’s power is the next Hitler.
Except the insiders are the ones wearing the jackboots.
Talking about France’s “yellow jacket” working-class protests, French geographer Christophe Guilluy observed: “Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.”
The all-out campaign to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020, being echoed in 2024, is another example.
We had insiders spreading phony “Russia collusion” narratives to a cooperative press, entrapment campaigns aimed at senior Trump officials like Gen. Mike Flynn, and a last-minute 2020 goal-line stand by the media and intelligence community to discredit — and censor any discussion of — the stories The Post broke on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the incriminating material it contained. Trudeau claims Canadian Conservatives are taking cues from Trump on Ukraine: ‘MAGA-influenced thinking’
More than 50 retired intelligence officials signed a letter (falsely) denouncing the laptop story as Russian disinformation; major media and tech companies censored it; Twitter (now X and under more enlightened management) even blocked users from sharing the story via direct messages.
Of course, the laptop story was genuine.
A Media Research Center poll indicated 16% of those who voted for former Vice President Joe Biden would have changed their votes had they known the truth.
Is that accurate? We’ll never know because they didn’t know the truth, and that’s because the powers that be deliberately chose — and colluded, to use a once-popular word — to keep voters in the dark.
I mentioned just how afraid of a populist revolt the West’s leadership has become.
But why, exactly, is it so afraid?
Perhaps these people fear for their necks if the commoners ever figure out what’s been done to them.
You can certainly imagine that being the case in Justin Trudeau’s Canada.
As journalist Elizabeth Nickson writes, “If Canada were a state, it would be poorer than West Virginia or Mississippi, despite being the second-largest country, with abundant natural resources, in the world, blessed with a highly educated populace.”
Domination by bureaucratic insiders produces stagnation.
The insiders get rich and get to feel important, at everyone else’s expense.
In America, it’s harder to make such comparisons, but certainly the last half-century has seen an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle classes to the educated insiders.
No wonder the latter are so scared.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.