CANADIAN TRUCKERS PROTEST VAXX MANDATES
Thursday, January 27th, 2022
“If you allow people to say, ‘Oh, declaring an emergency means that rights don’t apply,’ then there’s going to be lots of emergencies.”
With the spread of Big Tech censorship and lockdowns of the unvaccinated, are elements of China’s internet firewall and Orwellian social credit system now spreading to the West?
In part two of our interview with Robert Destro, former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), we discuss the state of human rights in the United States and the rest of the Western world. Destro is also a law professor at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law.
Previously, in part one of this interview, we discussed human rights atrocities in China, from slave labor in Xinjiang to state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.
“You have to stand up against tyranny. Otherwise, it will eat you alive,” Destro says.
Jan Jekielek: What are you seeing? What are you seeing here on the ground? What are you seeing in other liberal democracies around the world right now?
Robert Destro, Ph.D.: Well, one of the things we’re seeing is the weakness of institutions. We have to have strong institutions. And one of the part of the genius of the framers of the constitution was founded Federalist 51, where they said, first, we divided up all the power between federal and state, and then we divided it among branches. The whole idea was that so you have places where you could go to complain. The idea was that the people who would protect you were the ones who were closest to you, starting with your family and then moving upwards, right? We have a decentralized understanding of how you protect human rights. In any country where it’s centralized, if those institutions fail, you’re done.
After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
From the European perspective, American leadership of the West has produced excellent results and very few unpleasant surprises since the United States stepped into that role under Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. At that time, the entire future of Western civilization rested essentially upon the shoulders of just two men, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and it was the epochal good fortune of all of us that they were more than equal to their great task. The level of acuity and success of the subsequent administrations, as the competence of government of any nation must, has fluctuated. But the emphasis was on continuity, and the containment policy elaborated in the Truman Administration was generally followed through to the great bloodless victory of the West, as the Soviet Union crumbled and international Communism as we had known it evaporated.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 26, 2021, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Franklin, Tennessee.
I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin.
I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.
Look at just three things we have lost.
One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.
Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.
And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
The U.S. is only now focusing on the region after what the CSIS report termed “a decade of U.S. Arctic inactivity,” when the U.S. essentially watched from the sidelines as Russia and China methodically implemented economic and military policies that could profoundly alter the balance of power in the Arctic.
“It started with the Obama Arctic strategy, which I held up in a hearing,” said Sullivan. “It was 13 pages, six of which were pictures. Russia was mentioned once in a footnote. It was a joke.”
Sullivan said that, thanks to a bipartisan Arctic strategy mandated by Congress, the U.S. is getting back in the game, beginning with the building of six new Polar-class icebreakers.
Currently, the U.S. has only two icebreakers, but only one, the more than 40-year-old USCGC Polar Star, is in working order. The second ship is being used for parts.
The Russians, at last count, had 54.
Earlier this month, three U.S. Navy destroyers and a British warship conducted an exercise in the frigid waters of the Barents Sea, the first time U.S. surface ships have ventured into Russia’s Arctic backyard since the mid-1980s.
It comes as global warming is melting the polar ice cap, opening new sea routes and increasing competition for oil and mineral resources, with Russia, in particular, aggressively seeking to assert its preeminence in the region.
“Russia has really prioritized the Arctic as a region that is going to be so important for its future, both economically and militarily,” said Heather Conley, an Arctic expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Moscow is well aware, she said, that, in the next 30 years, “the country that controls the Arctic controls the world.”
Conley is one of the authors of “America’s Arctic moment,” the think tank’s recent report that details Russia’s increasing militarization of its islands in the Arctic Ocean in much the same way China has been militarizing islands in the South China Sea.
That includes rebuilding a naval base and installing a new, powerful radar on Russia’s Wrangel Island, located just 300 nautical miles from Alaska.
“Russia has returned to Soviet-era outposts and has built new military facilities in the Arctic Circle,” Adm. James Foggo, commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, said in a podcast last year.
“Russia’s even built an icebreaker that can carry the Kalibr [cruise] missile,” said Foggo. “So, I’ve got to ask: Who builds an icebreaker with a missile battery on board?”
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — Congressman Steve Scalise introduced a panel discussion called “Prescription for Failure: The Ills of Socialized Medicine” at CPAC on Thursday. He established what was at stake in 2020: “2020 will be a contrast election,” he said, between Trump’s freedom agenda or socialism.
“You don’t want socialism, you surely don’t want socialized medicine,” he said. “Tens of thousands of Canadians come to America for life-saving treatment. Do you see Americans going to Canada for life-saving treatment?” he asked rhetorically.
“Healthcare is only one example of what’s at stake in this election,” he said, before concluding that individual freedom will win out in 2020 and predicted that Republicans will keep the Senate and win back the House.
Author Dr. David Schneider, an orthopedic surgeon from Colorado, explained how with socialized medicine, wait times for care “are disastrous.” In Canada, the wait time to see a specialist is two years, and then another two years to get the procedure.
“People in this country would go crazy if you were told you had to wait four months,” he said.
Then he explained how Princess Diana would be alive today, if not for socialized medicine. “Princess Diana was in the car accident in France,” he explained. “They actually don’t have any trauma specialists in France.”
“For the first hour after that accident, she was still in that tunnel,” he continued. “And after an hour, they took her to a nearby hospital and she was alive for another three hours and they couldn’t control the bleeding from her pulmonary artery.”
Schneider explained that “there were no trauma-trained people there.”
He continued, “I really believe, knowing what I know about her care and comparing it to what Congressman Scalise had, Princess Diana would have lived had that accident happened here in America.”
The trade agreement negotiated in 2018 by the U.S., Mexico and Canada languished for more than a year as congressional Democrats pressed the Trump administration to extract concessions from Mexico on labor regulations and pharmaceutical patents. The amended USMCA, successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement, was signed this week, putting an end to 14 months of political wrangling. But to those of us who live in farm country, the pact means a lot more than politics.
To Sam Dobson, whose farm in Statesville, N.C., has been in his family for 150 years, the USMCA represents hope. He is a seventh-generation dairy farmer, and the USMCA boosts the chances that his son Chase will be the eighth. “In agriculture, your goal is to leave a legacy and not a liability, and the No. 1 goal for us on our farm is to leave our farm and our legacy just a little bit better than we found it when we got it,” says Mr. Dobson.
Since Nafta came into force, U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico have quadrupled, from $9 billion in 1993 to $39 billion in 2017, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. But dairy farmers were left behind as other agricultural exports boomed. U.S. milk prices are in the fourth year of a slump due to chronic oversupply. Canada has historically restricted how much U.S. milk it imports, putting U.S. dairy farmers at a disadvantage.
Farmers in Iredell County, N.C., which I represent in Congress, produce more than 3 billion gallons of milk a year, according to the American Dairy Association of North Carolina. In the 1970s, there were more than 200 dairy farms in Iredell County. Now there are 22. This is a trend that goes far beyond North Carolina. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that 2,731 dairy farms across the U.S. closed last year due to a combination of low profit margins and a gradual decline in milk consumption. “Without these agreements,” Mr. Dobson says, “you’re going to see a disappearance of the industry.”
A very sobering article that was written as a warning to Canada but also applies to the U.S regarding Communism and Socialism. Key words that we have been bombarded with from the Left for years are becoming louder – Socialism, Social Justice, Global Warming/Environmentalism, Equality, Save the Planet, Indoctrination of our children in the educational system, redistributing wealth, eliminating fossil fuels, Medicare for All (controlled by the government, of course). This article addresses them all and warns what they lead to. Thanks to Steve Bishop for sharing this article. Nancy
“I Survived Communism – Are You Ready For Your Turn?”
JANUARY 3, 2019The article below was written by Zuzana Janosova Den Boer, who experienced Communist rule in Czechoslovakia before coming to Canada. She said, “Having recognized all-too familiar signs of the same propaganda in my adopted country of Canada, I felt obligated to write the article below ( I survived communism – are you ready for your turn?)– because I do not want my adopted country to suffer the same fate as the country from which I emigrated (Czechoslovakia).”
Her warning is something all Canadians need to see. That’s why I’m sharing her article in full on SpencerFernando.com, and I encourage you to share it:
“I Survived Communism – Are You Ready For Your Turn?”
By Zuzana Janosova Den Boer
“It was scientifically proven that communism is the only social-economic system providing the masses with justice and equality – 100% of scientists agree on this. The topic is not up for debate!”, so proclaimed my professor during one of his lectures on the subject ‘scientific communism’, while the country of Czechoslovakia was still under communist control. I was reminded of his blustery pronouncement the first time I encountered the spurious claim that “a consensus of 97% of scientists agree global warming is man-made.” Most people don’t question scientific statements because they think they are facts. They do not understand that scientific statements must always be challenged, because Science is not about ‘consensus’; ideology is.
In March of 2007, the website WorldNetDaily published an article entitled “Environmentalism is new communism”. In it, the former Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, stated: “It becomes evident that, while discussing climate, we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment, but a clash of views about human freedom.” He goes on to describe environmentalism as “the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.” Klaus has also written a book: “Blue planet in green shackles”, in which he states “communism and environmentalism have the same roots; they both suppress freedom.” He also warns that any brand of environmentalism calling for centralized planning of the economy under the slogan of ‘protecting nature’ is nothing less than a reincarnation of communism – new communism.