[NOTE: What could be more appropriate on Groundhog Day than a repeat of an old essay about the movie? The film is a huge personal favorite of mine: very funny, mysterious, and touching. This essay has been slightly edited, of course, because in the spirit of the movie we try to get it better each time.]
In discussions of the film “Groundhog Day” on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, “…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”
My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.
And somewhere along the way to that knowledge, Phil’s efforts in “Groundhog Day” stopped being about getting into Rita’s pants or even getting her to love him, although that certainly took up a larger percentage of his time (and the movie’s length) than some of his other pursuits. But he probably spent at least as much time learning to play the piano (a form of love, too), or to carve ice sculptures, or to become skilled at some of the more mindless and meaningless tricks he mastered, or learning details about the life of almost everyone in town.
Was the old derelict, whose life Phil tried to save over and over and over, “worth it” either? Such questions no longer mattered to him, because the gesture and the effort were worth it, and every life was worth something to him.
Rita, of course, had always been physically attractive to Phil. But as the film (and time) wore on—and on—she became the object not just of eros, but of agape as well. By the end of the movie, I think that Phil had come to appreciate the idea of the theme and variations versus the symphony, which I wrote about here:
And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.
And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.
It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.
Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), Phil makes it clear that he has given up the pursuit of Rita entirely, and immersed himself in his love for her instead. Is this what finally frees him?
[NOTE: Here’s another essay on the film that’s worth reading.]
In other words, some people have been stirred to fearfulness by left-wing propaganda about the trucker convoy, even though that demonstration hasn’t just been mostly peaceful – it’s been totally peaceful so far.
[NOTE: See also this for a discussion of the US DOJ’s differential treatment of the BLM/Antifa protestors of 2020 versus the January 6th protestors.]
Then again, maybe the left did expect this. Maybe they changed their earlier expectations a while back. They certainly act as though they did. They gave up on the “little people” – the common man or woman, the middle class and even to some extent the lower middle class working people who care about their communities, many of whom are members of minority groups that traditionally vote for Democrats.
Maybe the Democrats figured no matter how far to the left they themselves moved, and no matter how much their policies trashed the lives of those people and those neighborhoods, minorities would still vote for them because they had fully bought the myth of the racist Republicans who would – as Joe Biden so memorably said back in 2012 – “put y’all back in chains.”
Maybe the Democrats were willing to lose the white working class because they felt they had a majority coalition of the rich white virtue-signaling liberals, the readers of the MSM (through which Democrats controlled that all-important “narrative” through which they felt they could create people’s reality), and large ethnic groups such as black people (poor or rich or in-between) and Hispanics. A combination of those groups would carry them through without the working class white people they despised anyway.
And so – among other things – the left angered the working class people who had to go to work in masks to keep the country functioning, while the leftist elites could work from home or flout their own rules. They ordered people to get vaccinated when some people were afraid or distrustful of vaccinations and the health agencies such as the CDC that had previously lied to them (and to all of us).
This isn’t just true in the US. It’s certainly true in Canada – as the truck convoy indicates. And it might be spreading (see this and this).
The left thought general strikes and demonstrations were things that they owned. How dare the right do this. How dare they!
Let me start by asking whether anyone has accused Whoopi Goldberg of cultural appropriation regarding her stage name? Not only was her birth name Caryn Johnson, but her Jewish last name – and of course her silly first name – were adopted as jokes.
Let me add that I happen to think Goldberg was incredibly good in the movie “Ghost,” not just very funny but also very touching towards the end. And her early comedy routines, which I saw during the 80s in this one-woman show, were good. I don’t know what I’d think of the video now, but I certainly liked it then.
But these days Whoopi is primarily one of the members of “The View,” a talk show I don’t watch but which has an enormous and influential following. Every excerpt I’ve seen from it is either inane or actively offensive or both, and Whoopi is by no means the worst offender there. But recently she made headlines with some comments about the Holocaust that got her into a bit of trouble that I predict will blow over.
I don’t want this post to get unwieldy by focusing on Goldberg herself, so I’m not going to go into everything she said and what was wrong with it. You can take a look at Andrea Widburg’s discussion here for that.
The gist of Goldberg’s remarks was that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, it was about “man’s inhumanity to man,” and Jews are white so this was “white people doing it to white people.” In addition, she doesn’t seem to think there was anything unique about the Holocaust: “Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”
So according to Whoopi the Nazis, with their elaborate hierarchy of racial categories that involved the Germans at the pinnacle (as a race – in fact, the master race) were doing kind of like what Jews do to Italians and Italians do to Jews every day. Leaving aside how reductionist and profoundly ignorant that is, doesn’t the perspective of the Nazis themselves matter? Because that perspective was about as explicitly racist as they come:
In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial “purity” and in the superiority of the “Germanic race”—what he called an Aryan “master race.” He pronounced that his race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world. For Hitler, the ideal “Aryan” was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people considered “inferior.”
Later it was expanded into not just persecuting Jews, but killing them and wiping the entire group off the face of the earth based on their ethnic identity.
But the Jews were merely the lowest in the Nazis’ hierarchy, which made them the Nazis’ highest priority. The plans of the Nazis, once they conquered Europe, were to eliminate other groups in a stepped program according to national origins. Black people were not their concern for the simple reason that, at that time, Europe had very few black people (but gypsies were certainly among the Nazis’ targets). Whether you call these groups ethnic groups (most have distinct DNA profiles, by the way) or races does not matter. The point is that it mattered very very much to the Nazis, in fact it was of paramount importance.
Read about the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost to learn what the Nazis had in mind for their fellow white people in eastern Europe:
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II. It would have included the extermination of most Slavic people in Europe. The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazi movement’s Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten (English: Drive towards the East) ideology of German expansion to the east, both of them part of the larger plan to establish the New Order…
The Generalplan Ost proposal offered various percentages of the conquered or colonized people who were targeted for removal and physical destruction; the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would become German. In ten years’ time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines of East-Central Europe…After the war, under the “Big Plan”, more people in Eastern Europe were to be affected. In their place up to 10 million Germans would be settled in an extended “living space” (Lebensraum). Because the number of Germans appeared to be insufficient to populate the vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples judged to lie racially between the Germans and the Russians (Mittelschicht), namely, Latvians and even Czechs, were also supposed to be resettled there….
According to Nazi intentions, attempts at Germanization were to be undertaken only in the case of those foreign nationals in Central and Eastern Europe who could be considered a desirable element for the future Reich from the point of view of its racial theories. The Plan stipulated that there were to be different methods of treating particular nations and even particular groups within them. Attempts were even made to establish the basic criteria to be used in determining whether a given group lent itself to Germanization. These criteria were to be applied more liberally in the case of nations whose racial material (rassische Substanz) and level of cultural development made them more suitable than others for Germanization. The Plan considered that there were a large number of such elements among the Baltic states. Erhard Wetzel felt that thought should be given to a possible Germanization of the whole of the Estonian nation and a sizable proportion of the Latvians. On the other hand, the Lithuanians seemed less desirable since “they contained too great an admixture of Slav blood.” Himmler’s view was that “almost the whole of the Lithuanian nation would have to be deported to the East”. Himmler is described to even have had a positive attitude towards germanizing the populations of Alsace-Lorraine, border areas of Slovenia (Upper Carniola and Southern Styria) and Bohemia-Moravia, but not Lithuania, claiming its population to be of “inferior race”.
The Nazis were absolutely obsessed with race, and they divided white people up into many different races.
But it was the Jews who were marked for utter elimination, and this was so important to the Nazis that – unlike with Generalplan Ost – it couldn’t wait till the war was over. It had to done at the same time, and resources were diverted to that endeavor. What’s more, it came rather close to succeeding in making Europe Judenfrei.
So in that sense the Jews were not planned to be utterly unique in terms of being destroyed, just the first and the most urgently and thoroughly destroyed.
But ultimately what Whoopi Goldberg was talking about involves today, as well, and it has to do with “whiteness.” I wrote a post on the subject in October of 2020 entitled, “The new whiteness of the Jews.” In it, I said:
Jews can be all things to all Jew-haters: outsider “people of color” when necessary, insider privileged whites when necessary. But the common denominator in these categorizations is that the hate against them does not die. It just takes on different guises. And of course, Farrakhan has always been a spreader of the poison.
On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.”
“People who have become white, says Howard University professor Hopkinon. This toxic drivel is part of what is taught to young people today, and just because it’s drivel doesn’t mean it’s not toxic.
[NOTE: Here’s a post I wrote in 2005 on whether the Holocaust was unique.]
This change story is worth reading. Like so many, it’s not really about someone who changed his or her mind in terms of the basics. It’s about someone who realized that those basic principles couldn’t be found where he or she had thought they were.
A few excerpts:
Those two semesters at home hadn’t been kind to me. I didn’t really keep in touch with my Bryn Mawr friends; gazing at their mansions through a glitchy Zoom made me feel like an outsider. When we did talk, they obsessed over how scared they were of the virus and how many precautions they were taking, as though it was some kind of competition. Instead of sharing my thoughts and experiences, I stayed silent because I feared their criticism and eventually dropped off…
The stakes of leaving were high. I had to walk away from my $75,000 scholarship, my friends—everything. After a few weeks of being overcome with uncertainty, I started looking for schools that were more aligned with my values.
I quickly discovered that almost every school that was operating even remotely normally was overtly religious. That was really hard for me to wrap my brain around given I had a somewhat fixed view of conservatives being rigid and intolerant. Yet, here I was, confronted with the fact that these religious institutions were, in practice, far more aligned with my values like individual liberty, critical inquiry, and diversity of thought than the place that explicitly claimed to be those things…
[Now at Hillsdale] I went to office hours—in person—the other day for one of my new classes, a required course about classic literature and I got into an interesting debate with a professor. Upon sharing an idea that directly refuted his interpretation of a line from Genesis, which I had never read before, he said, “That’s a great point. Why didn’t you share that in class?” “I didn’t want to be argumentative,” I told him. “Be argumentative,” he said emphatically.
Biden pledged that his first nominee to SCOTUS would be a black woman. He did exactly the same with his vice president spot, and see how that’s turned out. Kamala Harris’ performance as Veep has been so abysmal that it’s set back the cause of black women, if anything.
And if I were a black man I’d be spitting angry. What are they, chopped liver? How many black men have there ever been on the Court? I count two: pioneer Thurgood Marshall and reviled-by-the-left Clarence Thomas (who doesn’t even count as black in the left’s playbook because he’s conservative). Ah, but Joe wants firsts.
By the way, Scalia was the first person of Italian descent on the Court. Alito is the second. And lest you think that people of Italian ethnicity haven’t been long-term victims of discrimination, think again.
Or what about that grab-bag combination category, Asians? That would be a first. Hispanics already have Sotomayor (Cardozo didn’t count, being Jewish-Spanish). There have been no Slavs whatsoever, either – I hereby suggest Rod Blagojevich, of Serbian and Bosnian ancestry, and he’s a lawyer as well.
And speaking of diversity, nineteen states have never produced a SCOTUS justice. One of them is Delaware, and so I hereby propose that Biden appoint himself (he moved there at the age of ten, anyway, and has been based there). He did go to law school, didn’t he?
At President Joe Biden’s lowest moment in the 2020 campaign, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn came to him with a suggestion: He should pledge to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
After some cajoling, Biden made the promise at a Democratic debate, a move Clyburn credits with turning out the Black support that helped Biden score a resounding victory in the South Carolina primary and ultimately win the White House.
I actually think that although Clyburn’s support was indeed a major turning point, it was also a reflection of a turning point that had already occurred within the Democratic hierarchy, whose members realized with panic that the less-electable Bernie Sanders might just win the nomination, and that everyone needed to back off so pretend-moderate Joe could make it. I believe Clyburn’s support was a step – probably the first step – in the execution of that plan.
All of that is secondary to the question of what this sort of pledge means. An approach that designates and narrows the possibilities leads almost inevitably to the perception that the person is less qualified and was only chosen because of his/her group identity. That’s not good. It’s not necessarily true, either, but it’s a perception that is unavoidable.
But actually, these days the Court is so political that – except for “swing” justices – members of the Court are overwhelmingly defined by their politics and judicial philosophies, irrespective of race. In other words, I suspect that any Joe Biden pick of any ethnicity would vote just like any other. The rest is optics.
Yes, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and whoever else has joined their cause have the right to threaten to leave Spotify if the platform doesn’t boycott Joe Rogan. But they would serve their cause better if they just state clearly what bothers them about Rogan or his guests, and then try to prove it wrong by arguing against it and marshaling some facts to prove their thesis.
Ah, but they’re musicians, see, and what’s more they’re famous ones. A lot of people are joking about how their time is long past and much of the Spotify listening public hasn’t a clue who they are. There’s no doubt their time in the sun has gone by. But their music is still better than almost everything new that’s more popular on today’s streaming platforms.
That’s my opinion; make of it what you will. “Heart of Gold” and “Both Sides Now” are great songs, whatever the present-day political idiocies or even self-righteously tyrannical dreams of their creators.
I’m used to ignoring, or at least getting past, the politics of artists whose work I admire. It helps in the case of Joni Mitchell or Neil Young that listening to them doesn’t automatically involve buying anything. YouTube’s free, for example – although, like everything else, listening on that platform has its political problems for me as well.
Wouldn’t you think that musicians that are “passed it” (classical reference) would like that Rogan is bring[ing] listener[s] to the music?
My answer is that it’s my hunch that both Young and Mitchell think that in the Venn diagram of “Young fans,” “Mitchell fans,” and “good people,” there’s a huge amount of overlap – and that in the Venn diagram that adds “Rogan listeners” to the mix, the “Rogan listener” circle is way off somewhere – overlapping greatly with a “bad people” circle.
Young and Mitchell also most likely thought their threat would work, and that Spotify would choose them over Rogan. So far, it hasn’t. But I’m not sure how much they care. They can now wrap themselves in a mantle of sanctity with the people they believe constitute almost all of their fans, and certainly all of their virtuous fans. How many fans do they need, at this point?
[NOTE: I will add that so far, Spotify was initially hurt financially in terms of the value of its stock (which had been falling somewhat even before Young’s announcement), but it seems to have recovered to its pre-announcement levels. At least, that’s how I read this graph. From what I gather, Young made his announcement last Monday.]
…and it’s absolutely no surprise. I previously wrote about Rosales here; he is the suspect in the killing of Houston police officer Charles Galloway. The term “cold-blooded murder” seems to fully apply in this case.
Now more facts about Rosales have been revealed, and as I guessed (and as almost anyone would have guessed), he’s not a US citizen. Rosales is apparently a citizen of Guatemala with possible cartel connections. It is unknown when he came to this country or how he came, but a good bet would be across the Mexican border. However, he’s apparently been here a long time – perhaps around twenty years, working as an auto mechanic.
Rosales has been wanted by the police since 1996:
“He was arrested for aggravated assault with a knife back in 1995,” she said. Rosales pled guilty and was given probation, which Ogg said he promptly jumped.
This sounds like a violent crime – perhaps even an attempted murder, although he pled to a lesser charge – and he was given probation. In Texas? Were the prisons that full back then? We can’t blame Soros-funded prosecutors, back in 1996.
“He absconded [in 1996] and literally evaded detection and capture by law enforcement on that open warrant for 25 years,” [DA Ogg] said.
Rosales has gone by multiple identities prosecutors said, and had been wanted on the aggravated assault charge under a different name.
So they weren’t looking for “Rosales,” they were looking for someone with a different name. They certainly knew what he looked like, though. But how hard were they trying to find him? Maybe not all that hard; after all, he was just a probation jumper – at least in the US (he’s wanted for a later murder in El Salvador, apparently). And he had a different name, or several different names – they’re not sure even now what his real name is.
Yet another question I have: he’s an illegal alien, so why on earth would they just give him probation for a crime like that? Especially way back in 1996, long before Obama and Biden? Was there ever an attempt to deport him (not that it would have kept him out of this country permanently, because he would have just kept coming back illegally if he felt like it)? It was Mexican authorities who apprehended him in Mexico, where he (predictably) fled.
I have a feeling there are an awful lot of Oscar Rosaleses out there. Note, also, that he had at least four helpers after the fact, who have now been charged with assisting him afterward.
I’m also curious whether Rosales was ever stopped by the police before, or whether the unfortunate officer Charles Galloway, whom Rosales murdered, was the first to try to do so.
Rosales was brought before a Harris County magistrate Wednesday night for a probable cause hearing. Appearing in court in a yellow jumpsuit, Rosales was recorded by OnScene TV speaking out during proceedings and accusing the seven police officers surrounding him of deadly inclinations.
“I know you don’t speak Spanish and I want to say whatever I think,” Rosales was recorded saying. “All the officers and the security guy, they want to, like, try and kill me right here, they can do it. Whatever I don’t care. Everybody in this room has waited for this chance to hurt me.”
So he’s the big victim. Everyone’s against him. Which they no doubt are, for very good reason, but they’re not going to kill him in a courtroom. He’s committed a capital offense, so he might end up losing his life at the hands of the law; they’re seeking the death penalty. When he says at this point he doesn’t care, he may be telling the truth, or part of the truth. On the other hand, he’s a high risk for flight, even in prison. He probably has connections that could help him do just that, and he could get “lost” again.
“The first thought that came to my mind was, is how many other Rosales’ are out there that are wanted?” Andy Kahan, director of Victims Services for Crime Stoppers, said.
He says we saw a similar story play out in 2019 with the murder of Harris County Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal. The man accused of shooting him during a traffic stop was also a wanted fugitive for violating his parole.
“We got to a get a grip on this issue or you are going to continue to see people, especially in law enforcement, pay the ultimate price, by losing their life,” said Kahan.
Indeed. In fact, I found this video which features an interview with a woman who had been previously involved with Dhaliwal’s killer, and she had some interesting things to say about that:
Billionaire financier George Soros is putting a half-million dollars toward an advertising campaign on behalf of the Democratic nominee for Harris County district attorney.
Soros is a longtime backer of liberal causes who’s trying to boost the efforts of challenger Kim Ogg to unseat Republican incumbent Devon Anderson.
Ogg won, and she’s the current prosecutor. But although Ogg ran as a Soros-type reformer, she’s performed in a less radical way than that, and was subsequently challenged from the left in her re-election bid in 2020:
Jones and Cloud believe Ogg has been far too timid in pursuing criminal justice reform. They question her decision to continue seeking the death penalty in some murder cases. They say her much-hyped reforms, including marijuana and mental health diversion programs, aren’t doing enough to stop low-level arrests. And they criticize her for rallying last-minute, and unsuccessful, opposition to a legal settlement that eliminated cash bail for most low-level offenses—a major step toward ending mass incarceration—despite saying she supported bail reform while campaigning in 2016. The county is now facing another lawsuit challenging its practice of jailing felony defendants, many of them charged with nonviolent drug crimes, for weeks or months if they can’t afford bail. With the county currently in negotiations to settle the lawsuit, Ogg has remained publicly noncommittal other than to say she has “concerns about the public safety impact.”
Time was when a Harris County DA would think twice about adopting even the most modest reforms for fear of being tarred by conservatives as soft on crime. But thanks to changing demographics and an anti-Trump backlash, the local Republican party is on the ropes…
“The sands continue to shift in the politics of the Democratic party,” said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. “A platform that seemed progressive four years ago now seems outdated and not ambitious enough.”
I wonder whether those sands have shifted again. Ogg certainly seems to be coming down hard on Rosales:
“We will do all we can to ensure the defendant never again breathes free air, never again steps foot in society as a free man and never again harms the people of Harris County,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a tweet.
The widow of slain NYPD officer Jason Rivera ripped Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in her husband’s eulogy at his funeral Friday morning, as she described the gut-wrenching moment she found out he’d been killed.
“Although you won’t be here anymore, I want you to live through me. This system continues to fail us. We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now,” Dominique Luzuriaga told mourners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as they gave her a standing ovation.
They were newlyweds.
Rivera and another young officer, Wilbert Mora, 27 years old, were killed. Here are the circumstances:
The cops responded to the domestic disturbance call at 119 W. 135th St. shortly after 5 p.m. Friday. McNeil, 47, ambushed the two cops before he was shot and wounded by a third officer at the scene, police said.
The rookie cop who shot McNeil, Sumit Sulan, was hailed as a hero but is still struggling with the nightmarish experience, his parents said this week…
Mora and Rivera, who were assigned to the 32nd Precinct stationhouse, had responded to the Harlem apartment after a woman reported that her “distorted” son was threatening her. The caller told the dispatcher that no one in the home was armed. The mother did not know her son had a gun, law-enforcement sources have told The Post.
“He is threatening to do things to her,” according to a police log of the 911 call by Shirley Sourzes. “He is in the house now.”
Isn’t that the sort of thing that police “reformers” think should be handled by social workers? Any volunteers for that job?
More:
The two officers questioned the woman and her other son but were ambushed by McNeil when they began walking toward a rear bedroom. He burst through the door and opened fire with an illegally modified Glock handgun.
According to police, McNeil had been arrested five times before the deadly encounter and was on probation after being convicted on a felony drug charge in New York City in 2003.
McNeil was arrested four times outside the city on various charges, including assault on an officer and weapon possession.
Sources tell CBS2 McNeil also has a history of posting anti-police and anti-government messages on social media.
Thousands of truckers and others opposed to cross-border vaccine mandates and other public health restrictions have rolled into Ottawa on Saturday for a rally on Parliament Hill.
For the past week, several teams of truckers and supporters across the country have been making their way to the nation’s capital as part of the “freedom convoy,” raising more than $8 million from more than 101,000 donations on GoFundMe along the way, as of midday Saturday. Some convoy participants have already been in the city since Friday, lining the streets and waving flags in front of the Hill.
It’s an impressive demonstration.
A great many people are fed up with the two years’ of COVID restrictions and in particular with mandates. It’s not that they don’t have respect for the damage COVID can do; most people are well aware of that. It’s just that the response of many governments, both local and national, has been to grab more power and control (and then to flout their own rules in private, but that’s another story) without much thought of a meaningful cost/benefit analysis.
Here’s a video by Viva Frei, who is Canadian. It’s from two days ago, and he talks about how the Canadian media was first covering (or not covering, in some cases) the story:
