What Happened Today: Feb 15, 2022
Canada goes full emergency; Russia steps back; Prince Andrew settles
The Big Story
In a remarkable show of the total power that modern states can exercise over citizens by invoking a state of emergency, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday that he would order private banks to freeze the accounts of individuals linked to protests against vaccine mandates. Invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act, Trudeau has promised to give police “more tools” to imprison or fine protestors in order to crack down on the mass protests that began three weeks ago with a “freedom convoy” of truckers, a decision that has alarmed Canadian civil liberties advocates. Speaking with The Scroll, Canadian legal scholar Bruce Pardy, a professor of law at Queen’s University and executive director of the Toronto-based think tank Rights Probe, noted that the law has never been used prior to this, and it was intended for “existential threats to the country that cannot be dealt with using existing laws.” The trucker protests may be a nuisance to the government, but they have been overwhelmingly peaceful and so come nowhere close to the threshold for invoking the act—which, according to Pardy, “requires critical danger to life or limb or threats to national sovereignty.” Trudeau was vocally supportive of the Black Lives Matter protests that spread from the United States to Canada two years ago and was photographed kneeling at a rally he attended in June 2020—during the initial wave of the coronavirus pandemic, when public gatherings were still strongly discouraged by Canadian authorities. But he has taken a very different approach to the current protests against vaccine mandates, refusing to meet with the movement’s leaders and treating it as a national security threat on par with terrorism. As Pardy sees it from his vantage at the center of the protests in Ottawa, “the federal government is going full-on authoritarian to crush dissent, with enhanced police powers, financial surveillance, asset seizure, crypto supervision, and license suspensions.”
Read it here: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/greg-taylor-why-trudeau-declaring-a-national-emergency-should-be-a-non-starter
Back Pages: James Kirchick on What Joe Rogan and Ukraine Have in Common
The Rest
→ Russia said it will pull back some of the more than 100,000 troops it had massed on Ukraine’s border as Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday that his country was ready to discuss security issues in a sit-down with Western powers. A Kremlin spokesman insisted that the troops were simply making a scheduled return to their bases after completing training exercises, but the move came after Putin met with German chancellor Olaf Scholz, and signaled a de-escalation of the conflict. For Russia, the most significant security issue remains the possibility that Ukraine might join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, bringing a U.S.-led military alliance onto the country’s doorstep. For Ukraine, the most significant issue is the need to defend its borders and political autonomy from the more powerful and expansionist Russia.
→ China’s Belt and Road Initiative is extending the country’s influence well beyond Asia and Africa into the Southern Hemisphere, where it is competing directly with the United States. Last week, as the Olympic games provided a forum for Beijing to conduct diplomacy with visiting dignitaries, Argentina signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative. There are now 20 countries, out of 33 total in Latin America and the Caribbean, that have joined the global infrastructure network that links markets across the world together in a Chinese-led economic consortium. Joining the project “should make it easier for Argentina to obtain funding from the China-led” banks, according to the Asia Times.
Read it here: https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/argentina-joins-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative/
→ The Biden administration’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is one of the people implicated by new information in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of Russiagate. As noted in yesterday’s Scroll, Durham’s latest filings accuse the Clinton campaign of hiring a technology company in 2016 to “infiltrate” Donald Trump’s computer servers in an effort to build a “narrative” about Trump’s collusion with Moscow. That effort included spreading a story that was widely disseminated in 2016—and since discredited—about a secret communication channel between Trump Tower and Alfa, a Russian bank. Sullivan was working as a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign in 2016 and has admitted to being one of the operatives who spread the Alfa Bank story to reporters. But when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, Sullivan categorically denied knowing about anyone in the Clinton campaign attempting “to procure fake Russian information to harm Donald Trump.” At the time, he called the suggestion “totally absurd.”
→ Further shutting the door on the chances that the public will learn more about the secrets surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew will not have to have to go to trial after settling a lawsuit with Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of raping her when she was a teenager. Had he not settled for an undisclosed sum, Andrew would have been weeks away from being deposed by Giuffre’s lawyers, which would have required him to testify under oath about his relationship to Epstein, who allegedly introduced him to Giuffre. In a joint statement released Tuesday by the two parties attached to the court filing for the settlement, Andrew pledges to “make a substantial donation … in support of victims’ rights.”
→ Intel will be purchasing Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli company that produces semiconductor chips, which power everything from smartphones to automobiles to home appliances. The $5.4 billion purchase, which marks Intel’s continued investment in Israel (the company has five sites in the country and approximately 14,000 employees), comes in the midst of a global shortage of semiconductor chips that has had profound impacts on the auto industry, leading to $210 billion in lost revenue for manufacturers and skyrocketing prices for new and used cars. The shortage has also deepened production delays and inventory issues for phones, computers, and appliances. In 1990, the United States produced 37% of the world’s semiconductor chips; in 2021 that number was down to 12%.
→ Don’t get it twisted, folks. Disinformation is not the vibe! While down in Texas endorsing Greg Casar, a progressive candidate running for congress in Texas’ 35th Congressional District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters opposing Casar’s support for Israel. “I want to be unequivocal,” AOC said as the protesters were ushered out. “We are here to stand up for the rights of Palestinians and Palestinian children. One hundred percent. Don’t get it twisted. Because disinformation is not the vibe.” Casar’s support for American military assistance to Israel and his opposition to BDS are out of step with progressive orthodoxy, but in a letter to an Austin-area rabbi, he called for a foreign policy that respects the “right of Israelis to live in their own democratic state [in] peace, free from violent attacks” as well as “the right of the Palestinian people to live in peace, security, and democracy.”
→ A report from the Department of Defense finds that mergers in the American military-industrial complex now threaten national security. At the end of the Cold War there were 51 defense companies; today there are five. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing are the only remaining prime contractors, leading to far less competition for government contracts and issues with adequate supply, ultimately resulting in higher contracts for taxpayers to shoulder. The DoD report is part of the Biden administration’s efforts to curb the power of big companies and enhance competition across the economy. It also marks a reversal from previous Pentagon policy, which encouraged consolidation in the wake of the Cold War, when the United States began to wind down its military spending.
→ A jury in Manhattan federal court found The New York Times not liable for defaming former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The case stems from a 2017 editorial published by the Times that suggested Palin’s political action committee was linked to the 2011 mass shooting that left Rep. Gabby Giffords with severe brain injuries and partial paralysis. The jury, which has been deliberating since Friday, didn’t realize when it delivered its verdict that the judge in the case had ruled yesterday that he would dismiss the complaint against the paper because Palin’s lawyers had not met the high bar necessary to show the paper acted with “actual malice”—the precondition of defamation.
→ The American West has been experiencing worse drought conditions over the past two decades than at any point in the past 1,200 years, according to researchers. Details of the so-called “mega drought” were published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The past two years have been especially dry and hot for the region. One of the paper’s authors attributed roughly one-fifth of the current drought conditions to human-driven climate change.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z
→ Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is facing a new criminal trial that could extend his prison sentence by another 15 years. Navalny, who survived a poisoning attempt in 2020, is already serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence. The new trial, in which Navalny is facing embezzlement and corruption charges that he and his supporters say are political in nature, began Tuesday inside the IK-2 penal colony where Navalny is serving his current sentence. “[The authorities] want to hide him from all people, from his supporters, from journalists,” Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote on Instagram before the trial began. “It is so pathetic that they are afraid to hold the trial in Moscow.”
James Kirchick on the Danger of Vital Institutions Losing the Public’s Trust
What do Joe Rogan and Ukraine have in common? Both have become victims of distinct yet related mainstream media monomanias.
In recent weeks, the world’s most influential influencer has come under fire from “the blue stack,” the term Zaid Jilani used in this space to describe the interconnected complex of institutions—“progressive nonprofits, large portions of the news media, woke corporations, Democrats in government”—pushing for “ideological conformity across American life.” Initially, Rogan’s heresy against this ruling caste was his promotion of anti-vaccine “misinformation,” a thought crime he perpetrated by dint of inviting prominent vaccine skeptics onto his show for his characteristically discursive questioning and banter. This was a serious enough offense to draw the attention of the White House, which added its voice to the chorus of 1960s musicians calling upon Spotify to rid itself of its turbulent podcaster.
When that effort to de-platform Rogan failed, the blue stack turned to a slickly produced video (later discovered to have been promoted into pseudo-virality by a Democratic Party messaging firm with a history of manufacturing outrages) depicting him repeatedly uttering (but not employing) a talismanic racial slur. “Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word is another January 6 moment,” declared an article on the CNN homepage, merging two of the three “narrative delusions of the Trump era”—racial panic and fears of a fascist takeover—which I identified last year.
It is the third delusion—the baroque assortment of genuinely worrisome facts, manipulative half-truths, and deranged conspiracy theories collectively known by the shorthand “Russiagate”—that illuminates the similarity between Rogan and Ukraine. As I write this, the world watches with trepidation to see what Russian President Vladimir Putin will do with the more than 100,000 troops he has amassed along the borders of Ukraine, a country he has been violently tormenting since 2014, when he annexed the Crimean peninsula. The Biden administration has loudly warned that Russia will launch a full-scale invasion, in expectation of which it has evacuated all but a handful of U.S. embassy staff from Kyiv and urged American citizens to leave the country.
The Clinton-campaign-directed machinations to undermine the democratic legitimacy of Donald Trump should have no impact on how Americans understand their country’s foreign policy toward Ukraine. And yet they have become impossibly entangled. We now know that a technology company executive who had worked for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign “exploited” access to Trump White House computer data in order to create a narrative linking the former president to Russia—the latest charge to emerge from Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian election interference. But we are only beginning to see the full consequences of the revelations, which extend far beyond the results of 2016, because, unfortunately, when an institution surrenders its credibility—whether it be a major media outlet or a government intelligence agency—to forward a political agenda, it will lose the trust of the people. It’s a story as old as the boy who cried wolf.
Consider State Department spokesman Ned Price’s warning at a press briefing earlier this month that Russia might create a pretext for invasion by disseminating video of a fabricated Ukrainian attack on Russian-speaking civilians. The charge was entirely plausible given Moscow’s century-long history of dezinformatsiya (disinformation) and maskirovka (deception), but it was treated by many observers as if it were ridiculous on its face because the State Department no longer has enough public trust to be believed as matter of course—even when its claims are credible.
For another example of this dynamic at work, and one that joins the fate of the beleaguered podcaster with that of the imperiled Eastern European country, take a look at this short clip from a recent Rogan interview with a libertarian comic named Dave Smith. Rogan listens sympathetically as Smith explains why the corporate media is out to destroy him. Who are these people to denounce your credibility, Smith says, pointing to a string of mainstream media failures, including the widely hyped story, leaked during the height of the 2020 campaign and later discredited, that the Russian government had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan. So far, so good. But then Smith rips into the same “corporate media” for “pushing this war propaganda between Russia and Ukraine,” as if predator and prey are equally at fault for the catastrophe that may yet unfold, as well as for the “big fat lie” that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people, which he absolutely did.
Many if not most Rogan fans, who are understandably frustrated if not downright disgusted at the dishonest tactics employed by those trying to cancel him, will probably find this line of argument persuasive. The mainstream media and America’s intelligence agencies have done much to damage their credibility in recent years. But that does not somehow absolve Russia from threatening Ukraine and the entire post-World War II European security order, something which ought to concern all Americans regardless of their party affiliation or ideological preference.
Fans of Joe Rogan need not worry. Their man will be just fine even if Spotify decides one day that his brand of irreverence isn’t worth the tsurris. Ukraine, alas, enjoys no such comfort.
Kudos to candidate Casar, and thank you to James Kurchick for making a vital point. The whole Clintonite-neoliberal-now-woke establishment is kaput. Its credibility is now a piece of decaying garbage ready for the next pickup. And just wait till someone cracks on the Epstein case.
As far as Canada goes, there's only one expedient left: the Canadian parliament needs to meet in emergency session and hold a vote of no confidence in the Trudeau cabinet. Assuming he loses it, his government will be forced to resign. He and his cronies need to then be placed under parliamentary investigation. Trudeau has a long record of enhancing his office's powers, to the point of freaking out even Canadians who are longstanding Liberal voters. (They call him an "authoritarian Justin Bieber," a narcissistic pretty boy with dictatorial tendencies.)
Canadians see the “Freedom Convoy” as a threat. Closing borders, defying laws, blocking the nation‘’a capital, posting nazi symbols, are not consistent with “Peace, Order and Good Government”.
The invocation of the Emergency Measures Act is long overdue.