Tag Archives: Freedom

TYRANNY IN CANADA: CALLING OUT JUSTIN TRUDEAU

I rarely get political on DyingWords but there comes a time when I must criticize a political regime with a tyrannical agenda. I’m not talking China, or North Korea, or crumbling Afghanistan. No, it’s the Canadian Federal Liberal Government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Today, I’m sharing a highly thought-out and articulate YouTube video presented by my daughter, Emily Rodgers, who calls out Justin Trudeau for his increasingly tyrannical actions. First, let me rant about what’s happening to free speech in Canada under Trudeau’s watch.

Merriam-Webster defines tyranny as:

  1. Oppressive power exerted by government.
  2. A government in which absolute power is vested in a single leader.
  3. The office, authority, and administration of a tyrant.
  4. A rigorous condition imposed by a ruler or government.
  5. An oppressive, harsh, or unjust act.

I’m not going to list Justin Trudeau’s faults other than say he’s a procrastinating autocrat officially cited three times for unethical behavior—each of which should have had him removed from power. I’m going to directly speak to two tyrannical legislative bills intentionally drafted by Trudeau’s inner circle to curtail Canadian free speech.

One is Bill C-10 — An Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act and to Make Related and Consequential Amendments to Other Acts. It’s disguised as a protective action against tech giants like Netflix and TikTok to compel them into conforming to traditional Canadian broadcasting regulations by financing and promoting Canadian content (ie. propaganda approved by the federal government’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—the CBC.) In reality, what Bill C-10 does is curtail Canadians from hearing too much foreign content and reduce domestic criticism against their reigning government.

The other is a forthcoming disaster. It’s proposed as Bill C-36 and hides behind the mask of preventing hate speech. Should Justin Trudeau’s government be reelected in the current and completely unnecessary federal election, Bill C-36 is on the table. It will allow any person who remotely thinks someone else might publish, promote, or even propose an idea that might constitute “hate speech” to drag their target into court for a preemptive strike. Talk about open-season for witch hunts.

Enough of my rant. Here are Emily’s thoughts calling out Justin Trudeau. She’s saying what a lot of Canadians think but are progressively being restricted to say. A transcript follows Emily’s video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IOLEJaxc3E

Hello/bonjour Justin,

Either you’re oblivious to the imminent fallout of this carefully curated hysteria campaign of yours, or you know exactly where it’s headed, and you’re hoping you’ll get away with it.

Either you haven’t thought through the philosophical, moral, societal, psychological, and spiritual implications of the agenda you’re pushing, or you know exactly what those implications are, and you’re just hoping most people won’t figure them out.

Either you’re so short-sighted and inept at crafting viable long-term policies based on a thoughtfully weighed cost-benefit assessment, or you know exactly the price that will be paid and the clear benefit you hope it will afford you.

Either you’re incompetent, or you’re evil.

These two things aren’t mutually exclusive; your incompetence does not exempt you from moral responsibility.

You have a duty, as a leader of a Western nation, to have an explicit understanding of the philosophical basis for our civilization. You have a duty to be able to argue for our basic principles, our basic worldview, and our basic moral beliefs. It is your job to be able to explicitly explain and describe to people why Canada is a free Western nation, what freedom means, and what the implications are of failing to thoroughly define and stick to a moral worldview that fundamentally accepts the worth, dignity, and value of every human life, beginning and ending with the guiding belief that we are free; that our very identity as individuals is God-given liberty itself.

Western nations all operate on the fundamental tenet that the default nature of the world is tyranny, and that unless societies organize themselves politically to agree on the best way to beat back its looming control, we will eventually fall into tyranny’s possession.

This means that you have an obligation as the voice who represents a Western nation to describe to people what this vision is and to continuously reinforce it. This vision has altogether become far too distant to too many in our society. We act as if we are many generations removed from a significant and overt threat of tyranny. Our society has gotten to a place that is so free, so equal, and so abundant that we have developed a devastating blind spot. We are blind to the ease at which tyranny can swoop in and take over, reducing us to nothing more than a herd of obedient, lifeless zombies.

Some people accuse you of being a communist plant. But not all of us believe you are intelligent enough for this to be a coordinated, calculated plan whereby you are chiefly orchestrating a tyrannical takeover. You haven’t earned that kind of credit. Your critical thinking skills—your knowledge of core philosophy—are so woefully deficient that your undirected and feckless worldview has simply been smoothly supplanted by the resilient ideological virus that is tyranny. You are so excruciatingly incompetent at having an essential understanding of what makes our civilization so great that you have become an easy host for the parasite of tyranny.

You are weak. You are compromised. You are defenseless against its invasion because you haven’t done the hard work of contemplating the universal political truths that are required to defend us against it. You don’t understand how we got here; to the most successful and prosperous civilization ever.

You are in no position to guide a Western nation as significant as Canada because you don’t have the fully-developed faculties of reason, logic, and understanding that are needed to defend the good, true, and beautiful worldview that Western civilization stands for.

What’s worse, Justin, you don’t seem to have the heart for it.

You are permeable to mental infiltration by insidious, evil, immoral, unconscionable ideologies that seek to keep people imprisoned within their own hearts and minds.

You have neither the fortitude nor the intellectual rigor that are necessary to defend us and our way of life that we hold dear.

And because of this glaring weakness, you are also too arrogant to know just how many people see right through you. We see exactly where you are ineffectual and exactly how petty you are.

There is an immutable truth about the human being, and that’s that inside each of us is imbued a spiritual compass that points us toward reality itself. Call it a conscience, call it a soul, call it a moral ought, call it whatever you want. But this immutable truth that each of us possesses will always ultimately conquer the lies that tyrants try to weaponize against our dignity and autonomy.

We’re being told not to trust the truth that we see before us.

We’re being told that our reasonable and warranted skepticism is unwarranted and irrational.

We’re being told that to question the insult to reality that’s being inflicted on all of our psyches makes us the bad guys.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time. And don’t think that just because you have the media machine helping you distort reality that the majority of us will continue to play along. There is a significant number of us who see what’s happening; we smell the disingenuousness, and we know we’re being manipulated.

Here’s another immutable truth: Once people wake up and realize how they were played, they tend to counteract by showing their teeth. We have an innate predisposition to defend our personal dignity, which is why tyranny begins its strategy by attacking a person’s self-respect.

Don’t think you’ll get away with this game forever. Don’t think the charade will last. You’re dealing with people raised by the Western heart. Conquering tyranny is our religion. It is our worldview. It is our philosophy. It is our way of life. It’s in our blood.

Justice will prevail in the end. And tell me, Justin, will your blatant, cheap power-grab be worth it when the sentencing inevitably gets handed down?

Sincerely,

The no-longer-silent majority

A FREEDOM LESSON TO REMEMBER

A3November 11th is Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries—Veterans Day in the United States. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is observed, not just to reflect on the time in 1918 when armistice was signed to end the First World War, but to honor sacrifices made by so many military personnel—ensuring the survival of democracy. This story from a little classroom teaches you an eye-opening lesson about freedom that you’ll never forget.

A1Martha Cothren is a social studies teacher at Joe T. Robinson High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On the first day of school in September of 2005, Ms. Cothren did something to be remembered. With permission from the principal and school superintendent, she removed all the desks in her classroom.

When the first-period kids entered the room, they were shocked to find no desks.

“Ms. Cothren, where’s our desks?”

She replied, “You can’t have a desk until you tell me how you earn the right to sit at a desk.”

They answered, “Well, maybe it’s our grades.”

“No,” she said.

“Maybe it’s our behavior.”

She told them, “No, it’s not even your behavior.”

A2And so, they came and went. The first period. Second period. Third period. Still no desks in the classroom. Kids called their parents to tell them what was happening and by early afternoon a television news crew gathered to report about this crazy school teacher who’d taken all the desks out of her room.

The day’s final period arrived and, as puzzled students found seats on the floor of the desk-less classroom, Martha Cothren said, “Throughout the day, no one’s been able to tell me just what he or she has done to earn the right to sit at the desks that are ordinarily found in this classroom. Now I’m going to tell you.”

Martha Cothren went over and opened her classroom door.

A6Twenty-seven Veterans, all in uniform, walked into that classroom—each carrying a school desk. The Vets began placing the desks in rows, then walked over and stood against the wall. By the time the last soldier placed the final desk, those kids started to understand—perhaps for the first time in their lives—just how the right to sit at their desks had been earned.

Martha said, “You didn’t earn the right to sit at these desks. These heroes did it for you. They placed the desks here for you. They went halfway around the world, giving up their education and interrupting their careers and families so you could have the freedom you have. Now, it’s up to you to sit in them. It is your responsibility to learn, to be good students, to be good citizens. They paid the price so that you could have the freedom to get an education. Don’t ever forget it.”

I think Martha Cothren taught us all a lesson about freedom in that Little Rock classroom. And I think her lesson needs to be shared.

A13Over my six decades of enjoying freedom, I’ve attended every Remembrance Day ceremony as far back as I can remember—two of those decades marching in the parade wearing the red serge uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

But I didn’t earn the freedom to march in my police uniform. That was earned by people like my father, Alan Rodgers, a World War Two air-gunner who served in a Lancaster bomber crew flying over Nazi Germany, and my mother, Lillian (Wegenast) Rodgers, who proudly served in an equally-important uniform as a Royal Canadian Air Force air traffic controller.

Alan JumpAnd today, I proudly watch as my twenty-five-year-old son (yes, also Alan Rodgers) marches in the uniform of the Canadian Army, with his earned paratrooper jump wings.

I proudly wore a peace officer uniform for a lot of years, but what I did in helping to maintain local law and order was nothing—absolutely nothing—compared to what Veterans of the Great War, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan did for our society.

And now we have ISIL/ISIS to face. Selfishly, I hope my son never has to use the skills he’s been taught. Alan’s skills are to employ the harsh tools of war needed to protect our freedom.

Freedom is not free. It’s earned at a tremendous cost. Many paid the ultimate price to give us freedom—like the freedom Martha Cothren had to educate her kids in that desk-less classroom.

Lest we forget.