In the summer of 2020, Gretchen Whitmer praised not just Black Lives Matter but also the “spirit” of the “defund the police” movement. Two years later (and facing a nail-biter of a reelection campaign), the Michigan governor has changed her tune when it comes to the Canadian truckers conducting their Freedom Convoy. Whitmer called upon the growing demonstration, which is currently stalling transit between Michigan and its northern neighbor, to end the “unacceptable” protest.
Left-wing politicians and their agents in the media haven’t hidden their ever-shifting standards, drawing a false equivalency between the race riots of 2020 and the convoy up in Canada today, but beyond sheer hypocrisy, the two aren’t the same.
For starters, independent of how inadvisable disrupting traffic for any reason is, where is the property damage in Canada that we saw from Minneapolis to Manhattan two years ago? But more importantly, what is the point of either of these demonstrations? There is where the difference lies.
After George Floyd was horrifically murdered by officer Derek Chauvin, nearly 7 in 10 Americans believed that the killing of George Floyd was a sign of broader problems in the treatment of black people by police, including almost half of all Republicans. Tapped specifically by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican Tim Scott had legislation ready to ban chokeholds and regulate no-knock warrants. Chauvin was ultimately and correctly convicted of murder, but a bipartisan bill in Congress was ready to prevent the sort of slips through the cracks that allowed Floyd’s death in the first place.
Yet Black Lives Matter rioters lit up Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the entirely justified police shooting of alleged rapist Jacob Blake the exact same way they did Floyd’s Minneapolis. The terms of the BLM riots weren’t unclear. They were nonexistent.
That doesn’t matter to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is definitely not the illegitimate love child of Fidel Castro. The prime minister explicitly said that he participated in protests like BLM when he “supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues.” The truckers, who have a simple demand to end the second-class citizenship of unvaccinated Canadians, were accused by Trudeau of expressing “hateful rhetoric, violence towards fellow citizens, and a disrespect, not just of science.”
In Trudeau’s logic, truckers opposing vaccine mandates in a country that is nearly entirely vaccinated constitute “violence” and “disrespect” toward “the science.” But burning buildings down just for kicks? That’s just an expression of a valid concern! Got it?
A protest is only effective when the goal of the demonstrators is clear. The truckers have an obvious demand and are exercising their power to achieve it. BLM, on the other hand, had no specific demand. They wanted catharsis and chaos, and they squandered their opportunity for actual progress to do so. Say whatever you want about the truckers, but they’re using the power they have with as little force as possible to exact a sole, defensible goal. You may not endorse it, but it’s nowhere near as egregious as destroying a city for the thrill of it all.
