Even in the midst of the “gaslighting” tsunami of pop media and political attacks on the Canadian Freedom Convoy – in which aggressors attempt to distract attention from their crimes and blame their victims for opposing the criminal aggression – we see how those who demonize people trying to be left unmolested will, at any time, use their gaslighting tactic and postmodernist “critical theory” to mess with language and use it against anyone who stands in their way.
Hence, we see U Penn PhD candidate Taylor Dysart's decidedly self-defeating screed published February 11 by the Washington Post – a screed that, get this, claims the desire to be free is a “key component of white supremacy.”
Let’s pause to consider the circular logic of that, and think that, perhaps, Ms. Dysart doesn’t understand the meaning of “freedom.”
If she claims that “freedom” is a facet of “white supremacy,” and if she doesn’t like “white supremacy,” how can she justify her dislike of this supremacy without calling for freedom from it, which, according to her merry-go-round of mind-torture, is a component of “white supremacy”?
Grab the headache medicine.
Evidently using freedom of speech, Dysart claims:
In recent weeks, a convoy of truck drivers from across Canada began arriving en masse in Ottawa. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ traveled to the Canadian capital to protest new vaccination requirements for essential workers crossing the U.S.-Canada land border. The convoy has amassed significant support; its (now removed) GoFundMe raised more than $10 million (CAD) and it has been celebrated by several center-right and right-wing public figures, including Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and former president Donald Trump. The Freedom Convoy now touts itself as an ‘Anti ALL MANDATES Movement,’ desiring to remove all public health mandates.
Which requires a lot of unpacking, before we get to her allegation that this idea of leaving people unmolested is, somehow, a trait of “White Supremacy.”
First. Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are far from “right-wing” or even “center-right” figures. Joe not only leans libertarian, he openly discusses his experiences taking hallucinatory drugs, and he and Mr. Musk both smoked pot together during a Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Heck, Rogan once supported the ultra-left Bernie Sanders.
And Donald Trump is the man responsible for the “presidential” claim on March, 13, 2020, of an “emergency” that set into motion leftist-adored unconstitutional lockdowns, constitution-insulting COVID-19 bailouts, constitution-dismissing tax-funded mRNA jabs, AND their unconstitutional delivery via the U.S. military. If FDR or LBJ had done those things, many leftists not only would have worshipped the government activities, as they already do, they would have increased their adoration for the collectivist “policy makers” who pushed those actions, and called the policies “progressive” or “liberal.”
Secondly: as I have noted for MRCTV, there is no such thing as “public” health. There is only individual health. People within proximity of each other, or arbitrarily categorized by government as “a group,” do not blend into one another as if into some kind of gestalt creature. They remain individuals, always. When agents of government claim to care for “the public” health, they enter into a consequentialist world where individuals can be sacrificed for the group – which is self-defeating, since putting every individual at risk of being the one sacrificed places every member of the “group” in danger.
The term “Public Health” is a vestige of Aztec and Mayan human sacrifice: serving up one, or a minority, to the god of the state, and thinking that this will help the majority prosper.
Just don’t remember that everyone can be a target of those who wield power.
Ms. Dysart buys into the flippy ideas of Tyler Stovall, whose 2021 Princeton Press book, “White Freedom,” argues that, because the Enlightenment spread of the concept of Natural Rights coincided with African slaves being brought to the West, the Western view of freedom really is just a smokescreen to perpetuate the dominance of the “White Man.”
It's a theme also pushed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and Canada’s so-called newspaper, The Globe and Mail.
But this childish and myopic claim overlooks the history of slavery and freedom, going all the way back to Babylonia, to Hammurabi’s Codes, to Ancient Egypt and the Exodus of the Jews, to ancient Greece and philosophers such as Aristotle…
In fact, both Stovall and Ms. Dysart might be interested to learn what many libertarians know, the term, “Amagi.”
The Amagi is the ancient Sumerian cuneiform symbol for liberty, dating to 2,350 BC, a fact that doesn't exactly bolster the Stoval-Dysart-CBC-Globe-and-Mail thesis.
And numerous etymologists argue that the term “slave,” is derived from “Slav,” as LisbdNet.com notes:
The term slave has its origins in the word slav. The (Caucasian) Slavs, who inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD. Slavery can broadly be described as the ownership, buying and selling of human beings for the purpose of forced and unpaid labour.
And, as Thomas Sowell wrote in 2014:
(S)lavery was a worldwide curse for thousands of years, as far back as recorded history goes.
Over all that expanse of time and space, it is very unlikely that most slaves, or most slave owners, were either black or white. Slavery was common among the vast populations in Asia. Slavery was also common among the Polynesians, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples before anyone on this side of the Atlantic had ever seen a European.
More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.
Ms. Dysart, the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and Mr. Stovall don’t seem to understand the worldwide, multi-racial practice of slavery, colonialism, and injustice, nor the fact that people have a RIGHT not to be enslaved by mandates from other people claiming they run a thing called “government.”
They don’t seem to grasp that the nature of freedom is based on Natural Rights.
Related: 2nd Graders Taught that 'Government Gives Us Rights' | MRCTV
Humans are, by their nature, self-driven. Both philosophically and physically, the undeniable epistemological facts of self-ownership and self-inspired action stand. No one owns you, and no one can control your body or mind. Freedom is our natural state, and, by our nature, each of us has a right to be left alone. No one has a right to compel another person to engage in any activity, for that, indeed, is slavery.
No one is another person’s property.
And to deny the ability of people to acquire real property, to not respect the autonomy of others to acquire and retain the fruits of their own labor, is to enslave them, again.
What part of asking to be left alone offends Ms. Dysart?
If she – and her ideological ilk in the progressivist playpen – bothered to acknowledge rights and freedom, to oneself and what one peacefully acquires – she would have her answer about “medical mandates.”
Controlling a so-called “pandemic” can best be handled, and can only morally stand, by utilizing private action, voluntary association, and free will.
Like the term “public health,” public spaces run by the government negate that free will, and get everyone arguing over how the tax-funded places will be managed.
In a private paradigm, with real private property and voluntary association, people get to choose the places they want to visit, the standards of cleanliness they offer, or the people they accept into a place, and their standards. Each private meeting is its own test and voluntary agreement, thus allowing people to decide for themselves.
Her phobia about “freedom from medical mandates” is the default position all humans must always hold. To stray from that for medicine invites a state-run sacrificial system that, far too often, has been used to kill or experiment, to sterilize and shut away.
To stray from that default for any aspect of human existence, is to embrace George Orwell's insanity from "1984" that "Freedom is Slavery." It embraces the claim of the slave master...of the political supremacist.
Which seems dang close to what these opponents of freedom want: political supremacy over free will, and they will bend and shape any word to facilitate their goal.