*Authored by Tommy Salmons, host of the Year Zero podcast. Originally published to his Substack.
Nearly two weeks ago a convoy of tractor trailers and passenger vehicles full of protesters descended on Ottawa, the capitol of Canada. Their message has been clear, “lift all mandates and COVID restrictions.”
The Canadian Government’s response has been to call them racists, fascists, NAZIs, seditionists, and white separatists despite the diversity of people protesting the draconian measures. The Ottawa City Counsel continues to call on strong-arm police tactics to silence opposition to their technocratic rule, and the left has gleefully joined the government in the fight against the working-class citizens asking for their lives to go back to the normalcy of 2018.
If you hadn’t been paying attention this could be confusing. The workers of the world unite, and those ideologues historically demanding a worker revolution are opposed to the movement? They must be hypocrites, right?
Well, no.
Leftist movements have always been the brainchild of angry academics envious of the wealthy. The working-class were only meant to be pawns, cannon fodder, holding the frontline so that Marxist academics could make their demands from behind closed doors and be lifted to the status of elites. Their disdain for the working-class had remained whispers until recently – “Why do they vote against their own self-interest?” they would ask with contempt. But that was as far as they would take their criticisms because their goals always required the blue-collar workers to further their doctrine.
The election of Donald Trump and Brexit changed that. The unspoken alliance of corporatists, media, and academics finally revealed itself as an oppositional force of the every-man. They went on tirades about deplorables and the uneducated. They labeled all opposition to their plans of global governance fascists and racists. They mobilized student groups, political activists, media personalities, and NGOs to fight “disinformation” and “racism” worldwide. They were set into death-throes in an attempt to preserve their power and influence.
They weren’t surprised by the desires and political identities of the working-class; they were surprised that the working-class became aware of their own desires and mobilized in a cooperative way to realize those desires and combat the established order that this unsavory faction had so carefully crafted.
In the decades leading up to the Civil Rights Movement the Marxists concluded that the workers of the world wouldn’t unite to bring forth their Socialist utopia, in fact, the workers rejected their collectivist ideas altogether. This epiphany led to the development of cultural or racial Marxism, and the goal of the establishment moved from mobilizing the proletariat to igniting a revolution that was fashioned after the Maoist Cultural Revolution. They would utilize the race-based politics of identity and the evils of history to bring forth their ends. The trick was that in order to accomplish this goal they had to distract and divide the proles just long enough to propagandize their children to turn against them, but they got greedy.
Most blue-collar people are not ideological. They spend their time oriented towards the goal of improving their lives and the lives of their children. They want to be left alone to pursue their dreams in order to leave a legacy future generations may enjoy. As politics have become pop culture, invading every aspect of life, they have become more uncomfortable. Their children come home spewing Marxist propaganda, calling them racists, and questioning their sexuality at inappropriate ages. (There’s absolutely no reason a five-year-old should be concerned with sexual orientation or identity.)
The left rejects this. In their worldview everything is political, and everyone must be coerced to submit to their ideology. When the working-class stands up against CRT, sexual practices, and the demonizing of traditional families being taught in public schools they must be brought to submission. When they refuse to submit, they are ostracized and labeled bigots. But the corporatist left didn’t predict that they would encounter so much opposition to their cultural revolution. Calling people racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, NAZI, fascist, and bigot are their only tool. They’ve overused these terms to the point that they have no significant definition or utility anymore. The hard-working small business owner, contractor, farmer, plumber, electrician, and truck driver (etc.) is not going to be bullied. They are going to fight for their children and grandchildren. They are going to fight for the future of freedom. That’s what the Marxists realized nearly a century ago – the proletariat want freedom, not revolution. The trucker protest in Canada is a microcosm, and it reflects this fact. The elites and the left are seeing what a real workers revolution is, and it is what they always feared. Their utility belt of insults has become feckless, and they must only comply to the demands to end the technocratic shift to totalitarianism because the honking will continue until freedom improves.
