VENTRILOQUIST BEHIND THE WHEEL?
A CASE STUDY IN REAL-TIME
Greetings one and all. That lengthy, ambitious, theoretical piece I promised last week is ready to go. Or at least as ready as I see it being for now. Buuuuuut, come on.
How could I let this week go by without offering my thoughts on the events in my homeland, that have captured the attention and imagination of so many people around the world? I am of course referring to Canada’s truckers for freedom convoy. As I write, it’s hard to be certain whether we’re just at the beginning or coming up to the end. Different levels of government are threatening a variety of suppressive actions. I suspect the response of the truckers and their supporters will be peaceful, not going beyond passive resistance at the most. It would be foolish though to be blind to how these kinds of dynamic situations have the potential to get out of hand.
The Prime Minister, whose behaviour in response to the convoy has been embarrassing, this morning made a speech which I haven’t yet heard. What I have heard though was the disgust and outrage from the convoy supporters. I mean, many of them have called for him to resign, so we wouldn’t expect them to be terribly pleased by anything he had to say, short of announcing his resignation. But I’ve been taken aback by the outrage. Clearly, the majority of those I sampled considered his speech nothing short of throwing down the gauntlet. There’s still 48 hours until I publish this, so if any dramatic developments occur between then and now, I’d add further comment below.
I wanted to say a few words, though, on a matter germane to this substack. Who the hell are the leaders of this thing? Almost from the very start it has been striking how remarkably savvy these people have been in communication and messaging.1 They’ve been impressively aware of all the ways their convoy and related events could be undermined and subverted – including the action of agent provocateurs or slanderous media framing of stories – and seem to be well organized in their sharing of information, warning their members about what could happen and providing strategies and tactics for how to deal with such eventualities.
Additionally, whether directly associated to the truckers or not, there has been an outburst of creativity, particularly evident online. People have composed and performed songs in honour of the convoy and others have edited together impressive collages of images of the convoy and the weekend events, put to soundtracks of songs about freedom, redemption and the country’s national anthem.
Most impressive though have been the savvy of those who seem to be the spokespersons/leaders. (It in fact has been striking how low-key has been the leadership, almost invisible at times.) This savvy was particularly on display over the weekend when they held a press conference to which only “reliable media” were invited. The gist of it seeming to be that those corporate and government media that had been insinuating they were all racists over the course of the week of the convoy weren’t reliable. This was their way of saying “fake news” without even needing to repeat the now tired phrase.
And the crispness of their responses to various challenges have spoken to a messaging sophistication that one wouldn’t necessarily associate with truckers. An amusing example was, so I’m told, when one of the organizers/spokeswoman was asked about the Mayor of Ottawa saying the truckers had over-stayed their welcome. She replied, something to the effect: tell the mayor not to worry, we’re only here for two weeks to flatten the curve. The brilliance of that response is of course not only the recontextualizing of a phrase that has become symbolic of how so many people feel they were manipulated and deceived, but it carries the veiled threat that our two weeks should be expected to be as elastic as was yours.
When I say this is not the kind of verbal sophistication one might expect from truckers, I concede to some degree that may well be based on outdated and inappropriate clichés about truckers and the working class in general. And as someone recently pointed out to me, for truckers who spend an astounding number of hours behind the wheel, the days of when their choice was the CB radio and listening to rock music is long past. Long form podcast discussions, famously associated to Joe Rogan, and so many like him, have changed the landscape of the trucker’s experience. Still, some of this communication and publicity sophistication I’ve noted isn’t sufficiently explained by being well informed. Much of it sounds like people with the verbalist dexterity of the managerial class – as I’ve discussed at length elsewhere (The Managerial Class on Trial).
I’ve made some preliminary efforts to find out just who exactly was behind all this. At this point, such preliminary efforts don’t reveal much beyond the expected regurgitation of allegations of racism, bigotry, white supremacy, far rightism, and whatever. Ho hum. It does appear though at least a few of the spokespeople have been involved in politics – particularly an Alberta separatist party.2 And it seems that a radio host played a big part. Though admittedly still at this early stage of assessment, all this seems like the tiny tip of what I’ve described elsewhere on this substack as a surplus, rebel faction of the managerial class (see here and here). The name of this substack is The Circulation of Elites for a reason – it’s how change, that isn’t about fanciful fairy tales, actually takes place. I’ll be looking into all this further, but it sounds like this trucker convoy has congealed around precisely such a rebel faction of the managerial class.
Also related to the managerial class theme of this substack, a certain discourse has emerged over the last 24 hours, as I write the first draft of this post. Through their elected municipal officials and social media, the “citizens” and “residents” of Ottawa have been complaining about the truckers, framing themselves as victims, fearful to leave their homes, and anxious to get back to normal life. It’s worth noting though that, according to the City of Ottawa’s website, 18.2 percent of the Ottawa workforce is employed by the federal government. That’s one out of every five and half people working in the city.3 And of course, it’s this federal government that has been responsible for imposing the freedom-compromising mandates, which the truckers and their supporters are in the city to demand relief from. And of course, the mandates (true provincially as well as federally) are despised among other things for how they’ve damaged the lives and livelihoods of working-class people. These so-called public servants — who’ve imposed, managed and enforced these mandates —though didn’t lose their jobs or suffer disruption to their pay checks. They certainly didn’t lose multi-generational small businesses. The worst most of them suffered, along these lines, is having to work on their computer from home.
So, it’s not hard to see how such moaning from the “citizens” and “residents” of Ottawa just might stick in the craw a bit of the truckers and their supporters. As we might put it, here: the apparatchiks of the administrative state are none too happy about the plebs, whom they presume to manage, cluttering up “their” capital city. This is unfolding as precisely the kind of class conflict I’ve discussed here before. A populist insurgency turns upon the administrative apparatus of the ruling faction of the managerial state – likely led by a less than obvious surplus, rebel faction of the ruling class.
The point is not of course that the presence of such a clandestine, ventriloquist, rebel faction of the managerial class in any way necessarily discredits or otherwise compromises a populist movement for change. That can be true, especially if the rebel managerial class faction has itself been captured by psychopaths (see here), but I see no sign of that. And fleshing out exactly why I say that, and what broader implications underpin such an observation, is important to clarifying the answer to an important question that I posed some while back in an earlier post.
We will have to get back to that question. But, no, on the contrary, this kind of rebel faction leadership is probably the only way such a populist insurgency can hope to succeed in a battle with the conceptually adroit and verbally dexterous ruling faction of the managerial class. (See the discussion here, on this substack, as well as my book The Managerial Class on Trial.) My prediction would be that that’s precisely what we see unfolding across Canada and in Ottawa in real-time. I’ll be looking into this more closely as the drama unfolds, and we will see what we find.4
I expect it’s more lucky-happenstance than actual strategy but given how central it is to the bureaucratic paternalism of the managerial class’s administrative state – in Trudeau’s government, but also around the world – it was delicious of them to have come up with a model of widespread popular protest that was the biggest middle finger one could imagine to the global warming and climate change agenda of “the Great Reset” crowd. Yeah, we’re going to drive thousands of transport trucks across a country stretching thousands of miles wide, just to bring your regime crashing down. You’ve got to admire the audacity.
One of the spokespersons/leaders, PJ Dichter has just done a 40-minute interview with Concordia University evolutionary psychologist and popular online political commentator Gad Saad. Oddly, though, there is virtually no reference at all in the discussion to Dichter’s background. Though they mention having known each other for years. Also, if Dichter isn’t merely confabulating, he is obviously very well connected with people in both government (including the Liberal Party) and the corporate media. So, again, not your standard trucker profile. See the video here.
And of course that doesn’t address how many other people’s businesses and jobs in Ottawa are entirely dependent upon the main industry of this company town, nor how that influences their perspectives and interests.
On Monday and Tuesday, the truckers were giving food to the homeless and bought shovels from local stores to clear the snow and ice off the wintery Ottawa streets. Even that wily strategic genius, Gandhi, would have been impressed. (A hint of things to come, in future posts.)
"That can be true, especially if the rebel managerial class faction has itself been captured by psychopaths (see here), but I see no sign of that.,"
Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Great article.
Though the populist sentiment is genuine, the unfolding is looking more and more like a Jan 6 style deep state operation. One wonders which actual state or states could be involved. Perhaps the excess elites just prefer to keep busy rather than to rebel.