“The fear is that the government will use the social credit scoring system to punish people who are not sufficiently loyal to the communist party, and trying to clear your name or fight your score is nearly impossible since there is no real due process.”Human Rights Watch, hardly a right-wing entity, is even more scathing in its criticism of China’s system:
“Apple CEO Tim Cook looks forward to a ‘common future in cyberspace’ with China, he told the Chinese government’s World Internet Conference earlier this month. This was an embarrassing gesture toward a state that aggressively censors the internet and envisions a dystopian future online.”Other progressive entities, including The New York Times, also have been critical of China’s social credit system but apparently have no problem with the establishment of a similar de facto system here. The Washington Post went even further, openly taking part in a social credit scheme by publicly identifying people who recently contributed to the Canadian truck protesters and demanding to know why they gave money.
Understand that the Post accessed an illegally hacked document and then used it as a weapon against people who dared contribute to something with which the newspaper’s staff disagreed, and the purpose was not to be informative but rather to endanger contributors and make them vulnerable to job loss, public shaming, and other kinds of attacks. This is not a rendition of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” but rather an attempt to impose a greater darkness on all of us.
Not that long ago, political liberals universally would have agreed that using massive electronic surveillance to monitor speech and political contributions was unthinkable. Today, not one mainstream journalistic entity has raised a question about the actions taken by Canada’s government against dissenters or even questioned the Post’s doxing of those contributors. One surmises that the editors of the Post agree with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, since many protesters do not share the political views of the Post’s staff.
“This isn’t a grass-roots trucker uprising. It’s more like a slow-motion Jan. 6, a disruption caused by a relatively small number of activists, many of them right-wing extremists. At their peak, the demonstrations in Ottawa reportedly involved only around 8,000 people, while numbers at other locations have been much smaller.
“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.
By contrast, causing economic damage was and is what the Canadian protests are all about—because blocking essential flows of goods, threatening people’s livelihoods, is every bit as destructive as smashing a store window. And unlike, say, a strike aimed at a particular company, this damage fell indiscriminately on anyone who had the misfortune to rely on unobstructed trade.
“Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
Second, by invoking emergency powers, Trudeau has assumed near-dictatorial powers, which would be antidemocratic in anyone’s book, yet again, the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crowd has remained silent. I link no articles because there are none to link.
Beyond the issue of its classifying people who simply are demonstrating nonviolently as “terrorists,” there is no way that such an order can be limited to one instance. Now that Canada’s progressive government has criminalized even peaceful dissent—with approval by the progressive elites in both Canada and the United States—it will be easier for governments to cross those lines when people express dissent against progressive measures in the future.
All of this goes well beyond the usual accusations of political hypocrisy. One accuses people of being hypocrites in order to shame them, but the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crowd is well beyond any capability of being shamed. To them, whatever Trudeau and other progressive regimes do to those that dare dissent against progressive governance is legitimate because there can be no other permissible way of thinking, even while those same people give lip service to constitutional protections such as the First Amendment.
“Woke capitalism cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of placating coastal leftists, ingratiating left-liberal legislators, or avoiding the wrath of activists. Rather, as wokeness has escalated and taken hold of corporations and states, it has become a demarcation device, a shibboleth for cartel members to identify and distinguish themselves from their nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments. Woke capitalism has become a monopoly game.
However, those individuals and entities that hold viewpoints that are “unacceptable” can expect to see daily disruptions, from their finances to simple communications by email. Given the support that American political and economic elites have shown for Trudeau and his crackdowns on “terrorist” truckers, there is little protection left for those that are not in the good graces of progressives.
Because progressive governance ultimately clashes with reality, progressives must develop ways to enforce their measures, especially when the inevitable pushback occurs. As we have learned from China, a social credit system is one way to curb dissent and to force some people to the margins. American and Canadian progressives are finding social credit also can figuratively beat people into submission.