But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts). Normally all one need do is recast the dominant narrative of events in such a way as to allow the system to reestablish compliance by enough links in the informational control chains to inspire physical action in meat space – or at least just distract the public until the problem goes away. The problem is that none of this has worked to move the trucks. The Virtual class can’t move the trucks. Smears alone can’t move trucks. All the towing companies in Ottawa have refused to move the trucks. Because, surprisingly, it turns out tow truck drivers also drive trucks for a living. There aren’t enough police to seize the trucks, because the rank and file police in Ottawa have been taking all of their vacation and sick days, mysteriously not showing up for work, or simply resigning. It turns out that police officers tend to also be part of the Physical class, and class solidarity may actually be a thing. Meanwhile, even the narrative reframing trick – which usually works great – has been failing. There’s simply been too wide a gulf between what citizens have been told and what they can see with their own eyes. Sympathy for the truckers’ cause actually seems to have grown. More than half of Canadians now oppose continuing to mandate vaccines, and two-thirds now support removing COVID-19 restrictions. Multiple Liberal MPs have turned on Trudeau to speak out against his approach. Five provinces have now moved to end pandemic restrictions, including Ontario. No matter how desperately Trudeau has scrambled to change the narrative, he hasn’t yet succeeded. Even a gambit to threaten the truckers with having their children removed by child protection services – presumably to make it easier to instigate a narratively convenient violent confrontation – has only led to backlash so far. Relentless discipline by the truckers has provided him with almost nothing to work with.
Which is why the Virtual elite have steadily escalated up the ladder of more and more coercive informational control, leveraging their hold on state power to try to compel compliance by the revolting Physicals. This began with the government requesting crowdfunding site GoFundMe shut down the $10 million in funds raised there for the truckers. The company complied immediately, saying the Freedom Convoy had engaged in “an abuse of power” (what power was unclear) and was supporting “hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, and intolerance.” Then came as many legal fines for obscure violations as authorities could find to throw at the truckers, while a replacement fundraiser on GiveSendGo was also frozen by a Canadian court. But now, with the protests in their third week, Trudeau has gone nuclear, invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act for the first time in its history. A renamed version of what was once called the War Measures Act, this allows him to override civil liberty protections in order “to remove the blockades, including by force.” Trudeau specified this includes the ability to compel the tow companies to move the trucks. And while Trudeau has denied that he will use his new powers to deploy the military against the Canadian people, his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that financial institutions will be instructed to “cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” and that that they “will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order” and with full “protection against civil liability.” All crowd-funding platforms will now also fall under the control of “Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules,” which will require fundraising campaigns to be approved by Canadian intelligence services. That Trudeau’s government would choose to jettison any remaining illusion of Canada still being a liberal democracy just to harm their political class enemies isn’t too surprising. It’s their method of doing so that is particularly striking: control over digital financial assets is pretty much the ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals. We should expect more use of this tool around the world anywhere the Physicals continue to revolt against their masters. And here the Virtuals have a significant advantage because they are free to use the maximum level of coercive force available in their natural domain, while the Physicals cannot – because, in the physical world, that would mean violence, which is something the protestors have rightly forsworn. So, the current trucker protests in Canada may soon be brought to a close by the state. But this is unlikely to mark the end of the story. The great Honkening of 2022 has already been revelatory to people around the world. It is the climax of a process in which all the divides in society, including between the “Physicals” and “Virtuals” I’ve described here, have been revealed by the pandemic and governments’ responses. At the same time, the pandemic served to clarify the continued reliance of the Virtual class on “essential workers.” The revelation of the exceptional vulnerability of modern supply chains has demonstrated very clearly to everyone paying attention that the Physicals still possess tremendous power of their own as long as they are able to act in unity and solidarity – or as many signs at the protests have pointed out to the Virtuals: “no truckers, no food.” In this sense the Freedom Convoy has already become the most successful labour movement in decades, awakening a genuine new “class consciousness” (as a Marxist would put it) in the minds of the reality-based “working class.” And it is notable that this has already become a transnational phenomenon, with the convoy protests spreading like wildfire around the globe precisely because the exact same divide now exists in so many developed countries, where the Virtual ruling class has everywhere overreached with similarly hubris. Naturally, the Virtuals have everywhere greeted this development with horror. Looking at the map above, or out their windows, they may have realized just how vulnerable they are holed up in their cities. Perhaps they are imagining that, should the Physicals outside – who they once felt safe to ignore – engage in not just scattered protests but a full-scale revolutionary revolt, or even simply a general strike – suspending all movement of goods – their bastions of enlightened civilization would be starving, shivering, and buried in trash within a week. So of course they hate and fear the truckers. It’s no wonder that Trudeau is panicking and behaving a bit like a dictator facing an existential challenge to his rule. In a sense he is. There is an obvious irony here in the fact that ostensibly left-wing parties, like Trudeau’s Liberals, have everywhere turned viciously on the working class – an observation that is now widespread, as far as I can tell thanks mainly to the satirists at the Babylon Bee – but this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occurred across the West as the “left” became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress.
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