Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada found the country’s trucker protest against mandatory vaccinations deplorable, and, with that, The New York Times took that as marching orders and spring into action against the convoy.
Tuesday’s Times story “Trudeau Condemns 'Freedom Convoy' Trucker Protest in Ottawa” by Dan Bilefsky and Vjosa Isai was almost comical in the way it railed against the awful things the truckers were supposedly doing -- the same things the paper either ignored or applauded when they occurred during the Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd in late May and June 2020.
Bilefsky and Isai briefly admitted that our neighbors to the north have been “suffering pandemic exhaustion after enduring months of truncated lives,” but went back to the bashing.
After the paper failed to condemn violent rioting in major U.S. cities, these accusations from the Canadian convoy seem hardly worth mentioning:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Monday lashed out at protests against pandemic restrictions over the weekend in Ottawa, chastising demonstrators for desecrating war memorials, wielding Nazi symbols and stealing food from the homeless….
The racial protests toppled statues, blocked streets and freeways and caused massive property damage and looted Nike stores and Targets and high-end stores in New York City, set fires and burned flags and smashed police cars, not to mention stabbings and shootings. The Times covered it all neutrally, with no social distancing lectures at a time when outdoor weddings and funerals were limited or banned. Meanwhile, protestors danced in the streets.
The Times couldn’t hide the violence from the BLM protests, but often spun the protestors themselves as heroic as shown in this excerpt from May 2020:
Underlying it at the start was a moment of witness, part anger, part despair, part hope, defined by the seemingly endless drumbeat of deaths as senseless as that of Mr. Floyd’s….It is impossible to manage and control a group as varied and eclectic as those who have shown up at the protest scene in Minneapolis: a 40-year-old black mother of three who had joined her boss, a 21-year-old white woman, to pay homage before their shifts started at a Little Caesars pizza place in the suburbs….
Bilefsky and Isai continued to give Trudeau a megaphone to smear his political foes (click "expand"):
But he criticized the protesters for flying “racist flags,” hurling abuse at small business owners, spreading disinformation and, in one case, going to a homeless shelter in downtown Ottawa and demanding food.
“There is no place in our country for threats, violence or hatred,” he said, adding that the convoy was not representative of a majority of truckers, 90 percent of whom are vaccinated.
An Ottawa law enforcement spokeswoman said Monday that the police had begun several criminal investigations following the desecration of monuments and other threatening behavior during the weekend protests in Canada’s capital.
(There was plenty of “desecration of monuments and other threatening behavior” in major U.S. cities during the BLM-linked riots, and radical marauders roamed the streets intimidating people eating at restaurants, without Times condemnation.)
But, alas, miscreants in this group were held up as a quintessential example from this group:
While the protests were, at times, unruly, a majority of the protesters were peaceful. Nevertheless, urine stains were seen on snow covering the National War Memorial on Sunday morning. Police towed vehicles that protesters had parked on the memorial and Jim Watson, Ottawa’s mayor, said protesters had disrespected the country’s war dead.
Another Times story lamented the “loud and sometimes violent protests” of the truckers -- again, a formulation that was never used to describe the actual violence at BLM protests.
