Protesters smash windows while protesting Nazis or police violence and it becomes fodder for right-wing vilification of the broader left for years. Conservatives demand a police or military crackdown. But when a “Freedom Convoy” disrupts $300 million a day in trade between Canada and the U.S., halting auto production across the country? The right-wing celebrates and sends money.
Paul Krugman assesses the financial and political implications of the “embrace of economic vandalism and intimidation” by the same people who roundly condemn racial justice protests. “What we’re getting here is an object lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about ‘law and order.’”
Krugman does not reference composer Frank Wilhoit, but that’s where he’s going.
In fact, it is not really truckers behind the vaccine mandate protest in Windsor, Ontario. Ninety percent are already vaccinated. Krugman notes, “Last week a Bloomberg reporter saw only three semis among the vehicles blocking the Ambassador Bridge, which were mainly pickup trucks and private cars; photos taken Saturday also show very few commercial trucks.”
Teamsters who represent truckers on both sides of the border condemned the protest. The blockade may already have inflicted a couple of billion dollars in economic damage:
That’s an interesting number, because it’s roughly comparable to insurance industry estimates of total losses associated with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd — protests that seem to have involved more than 15 million people.
This comparison will no doubt surprise those who get their news from right-wing media, which portrayed B.L.M. as an orgy of arson and looting. I still receive mail from people who believe that much of New York City was reduced to smoking rubble. In fact, the demonstrations were remarkably nonviolent; vandalism happened in a few cases, but it was relatively rare, and the damage was small considering the huge size of the protests.
Your perception depends to an extent on whose ox is being gored. Particularly if you watch right-ring news outlets. They portrayed Black Lives protests as an existential threat to peace and stability, and the trucker protest as a culture-war cause célèbre.
Krugman concludes:
Recent events have confirmed what many suspected: The right is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing ends.
Antifa vandalizes buildings: bad.* Kyle Rittenhouse shoots dead BLM protesters or antivaxxers vandalize the economy of two countries: good.
The right is also perfectly fine with gun violence so long as its partisans are holding the guns.
South of Calgary at the Coutts border crossing between Montana and Alberta, Canadian Mounties confiscated an assortment on Monday:
Mounties in Alberta say they swept in to make arrests and seize weapons and ammunition as an already tense blockade near the Coutts border crossing was about to escalate dangerously.
The RCMP said they had arrested more than a dozen people by Monday evening in and around Coutts who were associated with the protest, had access to a large collection of guns and were willing “to use force against the police if any attempts were made to disrupt the blockade.”
“We knew what was about to happen or inevitably to happen, and we acted as soon as we could,” Supt. Roberta McKale told media.
A number of investigations, including “conspiracy to attempt to commit murder” and those related to possession of weapons are taking place, she said.
Brian Beutler just days ago summed up the politics of the right’s self-styled patriots:
Underlying all the brazen lawlessness and antisocial conduct on the political right is an implicit threat, especially unsubtle among far-right men, to make the country ungovernable if they don’t get their way, let alone if they face any kind of consequences for their actions.
Underlying those implicit threats is a conservative premise Frank Wilhoit stated succinctly in 2018:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
* And, yes, left-wing vandalism is bad.
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