Hot Coffee Resistance

Public Oratory? I'll give it a try.

This week I was extremely honored to be invited to an event called ‘The Machine and Human Nature’ organized by a motley crew of Doomer Optimists, Modern Christian Theologians, Homesteading Enthusiasts, and Bison Nationalists, which featured speakers on many topics within and adjacent to the question of how to think about, live, and move forward from under this weird regime we all suffer under in 2023.

They asked me to give my thoughts on how to ‘Resist the Machine’, and this is the little speech I gave. Fans of my podcast should have no trouble hearing it in my voice.

I will write more on this event, and how it relates to a long running internal dialog I’ve been having. It might be a little while, but it’s on the list.

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Hello everyone, my name is Gord.

It’s been really lovely to see you all here and have the opportunity to make your acquaintance and engage in some fairly high level fellowship, if you will. One of the reasons these events are so popular, and why I have left my long suffering wife at home with the children, is that this type of communion is a necessary rejuvenation, I think, for all of us. Scattered as we are across the country, and in the case of Mr Kingsnorth, across the proverbial and literal pond, these intimate human meetings, which ought to be viewed as a sacred birthright, are pretty hard to come by - at least for me.

Before I get started, I’d like to thank Paul and everyone here at The Wagon Box for hosting this, and Ashley for inviting me to speak. Though I host a podcast and have a history of being a loudmouth online, this does not necessarily translate to competent, much less ‘Based’ oratory, so please bear with me.

Speaking of my podcast, I recently interviewed the mechanic and philosopher Matthew B Crawford, whom I’m sure most of you are familiar with. I have the sneaking suspicion Ashley asked me to speak because Mr Crawford could not be here this weekend, thus adding another layer of pressure to my already paranoid mind.

I appreciate the invite nonetheless.

On my show, Mr Crawford, being the extremely thoughtful and efficient wordsmith that he is, made a very quotable statement which is germane to the wider discussions taking place here, as well as the subject Ashley requested me to expound on, which is the question “How do we resist the machine?”

I now quote Crawford -

”I think we need to rehabilitate the term ‘Luddite’ as someone with a clear-sighted grasp of the political economy that stands behind automation, and has enough spirit to make a claim on his own behalf for both his livelihood, and his way of life.”

In using the term ‘rehabilitate’, Crawford is speaking to the frequent deployment of ‘Luddite’ as a slur, a Thought Terminating Cliché meant to immediately shut down any debate or expression of concern about new pieces of technology, or their application in systems we are oft compelled to participate in.

And compelled we are, in a myriad number of ways to which you are all quite familiar, with no consideration given to wether any individual can judge wether or not to accept this technology, nor the various points of diminishing return on it’s usefulness, or risk calculus any particular person or group comes to decide on for themselves. From automated customer service which is meant to dissuade you from seeking any service at all, to the highly annoying butt vibrators fitted to the rental car in which I convoyed here from Wisconsin, there seems fewer and fewer areas where we can escape the tendrils of the Cthulu Machine State.

An even more important question - during periods of ‘emergency’, or as Carl Schmitt put it, ‘states of exception’, such as during 3 years of the Covid Regime, does seeking the maintenance of the status quo, of demanding the continuation of our basic civil rights, also cast us into the camp of Luddites?

Just take the shot, just do the right thing, just follow The Science™️.

Some friends of mine back in Canada thought better of being forced into anything by The Machine, and using The Machine’s very own communications panopticons, they organized what was quite possibly the highest profile resistance gambit of recent times, The Freedom Convoy. Interesting then, in the aftermath of the Convoy, how Justin Trudeau brought forth the internet censorship and control Bills C11 and C18, which sought to close off any opportunity of turning one of The Machine’s weapons around on itself.

However Fake and Gay a personnage is that of Canada’s Prime Minister, his handling of the Covid “emergency” was very real, very punishing, and a prime example of the legitimate fascism our friends on the left are constantly mewling about. Many Americans are unaware of this, but Trudeau imposed a system of medical apartheid on federally regulated areas of life, especially travel. In the second largest country on Earth, uniformed agents of the state could stop you from boarding an aircraft or taking the train upon failing to provide proof of vaccination; “Vaxx card, s’il vous plait” replacing “Papierrin, bitte” as the phraseology of choice for this firmware upgrade none of us asked for nor consented to, much less actually protect us from Wuhan Plague. We make jokes about new cars being bricked in the driveway because of a software failure; it was much less funny if you lived in one of the more northerly or westerly areas of Canada and needed specialized medical treatment available only in Toronto.

There were many other indignities and humiliations foisted onto the populace by both Feds and Province, which served mainly to offer our Narcissist-in-Chief the accolades he desired from those realms of democratic unaccountability outside of Canada, and not to represent the interests of those humiliated citizens, who, in theory, are supposed to be his primary concern.

Into this vacuum of care and responsibility stepped a spontaneously organized and rag tag group of farmers and truckers, welders and mechanics, blue collar workers of all stripes.

We all bore witness to the reaction from Trudeau and His Machine; at first the King fled his Castle, and hid away in a cottage somewhere in Quebec, while all levels of government, from the Feds on down to the city of Ottawa, were caught with their pants down, and didn’t do very much at all to ‘deal’ with these heathens who had taken over the streets. A positive, but short lived development; we all know what punitive measures eventuated.

What to make of this expression of resistance? What does it have to tell us about what we can do under The Machine, state of exception or not?

Revealed within the actions of Convoy participants and its supporters were many small acts of humanity which show us at a very granular level that the Machine has yet to extinguish our spirits. The truckers in Ottawa, who were ‘holding the line’ in weather conditions much like we see outside these windows today, required refueling of their rigs, to keep motors on high idle or APUs running so as to maintain warmth.
As Ottawa Police made a point of intercepting fuel being delivered by Jerry Cans, many people began to carry around empty Jerry Cans, decoys meant to keep the cops busy trying to figure out who to seize from. Given the Machines fixation on electrical utopianism, and the opening volleys now launched in the war on your right to drive, or to even own a vehicle equipped with an internal combustion engine, the Jerry Can has become a powerful symbol of resistance, one that most people have in their shed or garage. (Hopefully an older Jerry Can, not the newer versions which the machine has emasculated by regulating away the breather cap.)

Another form of resistance seen during the Convoy was the generosity displayed by so many hundreds of thousands of people; not merely random acts of kindness, but deliberate and basic human contributions. From simple gestures such as buying coffee, to mechanics who followed the various convoys to Ottawa and offered their services to the truckers, free of charge, to meals and the opening of homes, the human spirit expressed its disdain for the Machine in the motherly love of filling bellies and warming of hearts. I recently interviewed a journalist from Canada, a wonderful lady by the name of Donna Laframboise, who has spent this entire time, from the Convoy to now, documenting these acts of solidarity; there are so many of them that she is writing a book which features nothing but. She has also written a children’s book called Opa’s Convoy Letters, about the many letters of support Convoy participants would receive from children. Many of those participants received so many that they have multiple shoe boxes overflowing with these letters; a hopeful sign not just for those truckers, but for the many of us concerned with children being sucked into screens.

Donna used to be a part of what I call Cathedral Nord, to steal Lord Yarvin’s neologism, a columnist for Canada’s biggest left wing newspaper, The Toronto Star, and a contributor to many magazines. Seeing the inversions of reality brought forth by Cathedral Nord, and the many class dimensions deliberately left out of the discussion, she has made the decision to focus her book exclusively on participants - no organizers, no media people, no YouTubers nor government officials will be included; The Machine, this time, the one to be left out in the cold.

Speaking of Lord Yarvin, he was a little less enthusiastic about the Convoy and its various successes. Pointing to the vicious reaction of Trudeau and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, (who is the granddaughter of legitimate Ukrainian Nazis, FYI), and their schemes of freezing bank accounts and seizing assets, Yarvin seemed to imply that the Convoy and its expression of mass resistance caused The Machine to behave in the way that it did, and therefore, any positive policy changes or moving of the needle in the right direction was more or less canceled out. Maybe this is some Dark Elf logic, or maybe it’s just, to borrow a phrase from our leftist friends, victim blaming, but it misses the value of symbolism.

While I was in Ottawa for the first weekend of the protest, it became apparent to me, immediately, that something deeper in the human spirit was being touched on. People do not spontaneously and immediately leave the warmth of their homes to stand atop highway overpasses in temperatures approaching 30 below zero for nothing, much less come out every day in this weather for 3 weeks straight, in spite of the inversions of reality they saw in the media, or threat of harassment from agents of the state.

Not to make this an argument with or about Yarvin, nor his uncomfortable proximity to supporting the regime on this particular matter, but if the main question here is how to resist The Regime, or The Machine with a capital M, I believe we need to bring it as close to the heart as possible. What I am saying is that there is power in speaking from the heart, from standing on the based bedrock of your own spirit as a human, and just saying no, I will not let this Machine crush that spirit, I will be my brothers keeper, especially at 30 below when my brother trucker is taking it to Trudeau. And especially, MOST ESPECIALLY, when those within the fourth estate, entrusted with the sacred duty of holding power to account fail in their duty.

The spiritual heart of an entire nation was nearly destroyed by Trudeau’s Maple Flavored Machine, and it remains to be seen if this nation, nor the families and community which compose it, will ever recover; but recovery and the future depend on resistance, even if it as simple as buying your fellow man a coffee in the cold streets of Ottawa.

Earlier in the talk I mentioned Crawford, who intoned us to have enough spirit to make a claim on our own livelihoods and way of life. I would submit to everyone here that the claim is available in very simple acts of kindness, generosity, and spirit, or the skill employed in maintaining an older vehicle. They can’t stop you from self organizing, as Paul, Ashley, and James have done here. They can’t stop you from seeking the counsel of everyone else here on how to live, nor fortifying yourself with the righteousness embodied in the works of guys like Andy, or Mr Kingsnorth.

Resistance to The Machine is available all around you, deep inside you, and in the heavens which permeate all. Go forth.