BUCK: We want to talk to you about the freedom trucker revolution, what’s going on in Canada, because you’re being lied to about it even if you try to find out about it from the Canadian media, which is overwhelmingly state funded. Imagine if all we had in America really was NPR, but a Canadian version of NPR, and that’s basically what our brothers and sisters up north have.

There are a couple of news outlets. We had on one of the intrepid reporters from Rebel News, but that’s really a startup news organization. Doesn’t get the state funding that others do, doesn’t have the same reach that many other Canadian media outlets do. You’re being told that this is all a vaccine mandate protest, and that’s really only a part of it.

I would recommend to you the Bari Weiss Substack, which has now become really almost its own publishing must-read. “What the Truckers Want,” by Rupa Subramanya. “I’ve spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital,” Subramanya writes. “What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.” The author here lives in downtown Ottawa, Clay.

And one of the things that’s fascinating to read here and to learn about from someone firsthand is that this is about much more than what you’ve been told in the media. For example, this is a quote from the piece: “The convoy is spearheaded by truckers, but its message of opposition to life under government control has brought onto the icy streets countless, once-voiceless people declaring that they are done being ignored.

“That the elites — the people who have Zoomed their way through the pandemic — had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. Or else.” Clay, this isn’t just a protest about vaccine — 95% of the truckers are vaccinated. This is a protest about ending the government’s tyranny around covid once and for all, which is why the apparatus here and in Canada hates it so much.

CLAY: I’ve been thinking — and I’m sure you probably have, too, in following this Canadian trucker protest — and we have so many truckers who listen to this show. I bet if we told you right now, “Hey, honk your horn if you are listening to Clay and Buck,” all the sudden everywhere, right, major interstates, there’d be suddenly a lot of horns honking right now because these guys have a lot of time so sit and think in their individualist…

Right? What I love about them is they all are independent, individualists who are responsible for so many different things when it comes to the success of their different trips that they are taking on a daily basis. But you have time to sit and think and contemplate things, you will get to experience so many different parts of the country.

And the more I was thinking about it, the more it made sense that trucking — which is a job that in many ways is about being able to go to so many different places and experience so many different things and see the full fabric of whatever country you’re in or countries that you are traveling through would be uniquely — as a profession, is particularly offended by the notion that everybody has to do something.

And because of the fact that many of them are independent contractors, who many of them own their own trucks, that they would have the ability to actually stand up against us this, right, because that’s one of the challenges that we’ve had with all these mandates. And the United States hasn’t been as bad, anywhere near as bad Canada thanks to the federalism that we have here and the governors.

And, frankly, to the Supreme Court standing up against Biden’s unconstitutional mandate, unlike what’s going on in Canada. But it doesn’t surprise me, the more I thought about it, that it would be this group that would end up having the most significant battle for freedom that we’ve maybe seen anywhere, right, when you think about what these Canadian truckers are doing and the bravery involved in what they’re doing.

BUCK: It’s spreading also all over the world.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s about much more than just vaccine mandates, folks, and that’s what they don’t want you to know. That’s what the apparatus of the Democrats, the media, the Trudeau tyranny, they don’t want you to know that. It’s one of the reasons why Trudeau, he’s just smearing them outright.

Another thing again hat tip to this Bari Weiss Substack and this excellent piece in it, Clay. We mentioned this earlier in the week, so people are actually finding out stuff of course as always from listening to this show that they won’t hear on NPR or the CBC or CNN or whatever. There are a lot of people from very diverse backgrounds involved in the protest.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They are Sikh truckers who are standing side by side with their brothers and sisters of the trucking community there. There are immigrants from all over the world. There are Korean immigrants. There are people who have come to Canada just like many immigrants come to America to find something better, to find freedom, and they are appalled at what has happened under covid.

This is from the piece. Some of these truckers “sound like Ivan, 46, who emigrated, with his wife, Tatiana, from Ukraine to build a new life in New Brunswick, in eastern Canada. ‘We came to Canada to be free — not slaves,’ he said. ‘We lived under communism, and, in Canada, we’re now fighting for our freedom.'” That’s what these guys and girls and everyone who’s showing up to help them, that’s what these people in the freedom convoy are really pushing for.

At us using, finally, levers that the system relies on to force the system to stop being oppressive. And think about this. For what reason? This is what we’ve been telling everybody. What is the…? What has been the benefit of all this, of the chalk outlines around people in public parks, of the arrest of paddle borders, of masking up between bites, of double masking alone outside. Has there been any upside to any of this, Clay?

CLAY: It’s going to be and already is the biggest public policy failure of our lives, and we talk about the moments that crystallized how absurd it is. And I saw you tweeting about some of these things earlier, but to me it’s putting police tape, caution tape around our kids’ playground. I just want you to think about what we have done to kids masking-wise, but how irrational was it that in March and April.

Even in Tennessee where I live and even in suburban Williamson County which is one of the most rational places possible, everybody’s got their kids out of the house here, got a lot of energy. You’re trying to find things for them to do when school suddenly shut down in March. Buck, I just remember taking my kids for a walk in the neighborhood and getting to the local playground and it was covered in caution tape.

And you were not supposed to put your kids on the swings. You weren’t supposed to let them go down the slide. They took basketball rims off of hoops all over America, Buck! They had janitors that they climbed up on ladders and unscrewed basketball rims to keep people from being able to shoot and play basketball in public parks.

They filled… Buck, they filled up skate parks with sand in California to keep skateboarders from being able to use the skate parks. How can you possibly, as a voter, ever vote for anyone who countenanced any of that behavior? This is why the midterms are so important to me.

Because if there aren’t consequences for idiotic, indefensible, authoritarian, imbecilic decisions, then what’s the point of having elections? You have to hold these people accountable, and you can’t let them do what they’re gonna try to do and argue, “Well, we just didn’t know! It was better that we took those decisions than to have had too much risk.”

BUCK: “It was the experts. We just passed it on to the experts.” That’s always been a central lie of all of this. They didn’t have to listening to any of the, quote, “experts.” These were politicians who are making these decisions. They’re making it based on political considerations. The original poisoning of the well of truth around covid was the need to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.

That then was all that the left, all that the apparatus needed to justice maximum fearmongering, maximum hysteria creation. And then it really became, I think, later on clear to them that they had to just keep riding it because they couldn’t really control it. They couldn’t really direct it anymore; so what else were they going to do?

It became less useful over time, and now I think they realize they’ve got a lot of people that are Democrat base voters who are psychologically scarred. But, Clay, to the point you’re making about accountability — and this is why we will continue to hammer this — you heard Dr. Marty Makary in the first hour. They will do this again. They are not done.

There are people for whom the subjugation of not just your rights, really the subjugation of your spirit — I mean, the absolute crushing of human freedom and basic dignity — that the Fauci apparatus engaged in during this whole process, and all the misery and pain they put people through. Totally unnecessarily out of arrogance, out of arrogance that they always had answers.

They’ll apply this to whatever else they can get away with. They’ll apply this to climate change, to stopping gun violence — the same mentality, the same absolutism — which is why this is, for me, an existential issue in our society. We either win this argument, Clay, or none of the other arguments are really gonna matter. The government doesn’t get to say, “Our people are scared.

“So you have no rights anymore.” We’ve seen what that starts to look like. We’ve seen the closure of the churches. We’ve seen the “You can’t hug your dying parents in the hospital because there’s a virus that we say is too scary.” We’ve seen children being forced to be abused eight hours a day by the state. In Australia, for heaven’s sake, we’ve seen internment camps!

Not just for those who have the virus, those who could theoretically have the virus. Imagine we get a variant — and I don’t mean to even bring this up, but we get a variant — in a year or 10 years or 50 years that actually had a 3% or a 5% fatality rate, not a .03% fatality rate or .003%, whatever it is. Clay we would have true totalitarianism in this country in the blink of an eye.

Because we’ve already set in place the groundwork for it right now. Not enough pushback from us. We have to rely on truckers who work long hours and are underpaid north of the border up in the frozen parts of Canada to stand up for freedom in a way that’s rallying us here in this country. I’m so proud of them but at some level I’m also disappointed what’s gone on here, to be honest with you.

CLAY: Yeah, and I understand that.