Regime Stenography and The Maple Gulag

Inverting reality comes at a very human cost.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend a kind of book launch and discussion event down in New York City, hosted by my friends at Compact Magazine, which featured Sohrab Ahmari discussing his new book, Tyranny, Inc., with Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin Magazine, and one of the big cheeses over at The Nation. This is the first I’ve ever been invited to such a thing, and was happy to go; I also wanted to make an enquiry with Mr Sunkara about some things he published last year.

On the Thursday afternoon before heading into Manhattan for this event, I was touring other parts of the city with my wife, who had previously lived in NYC for the better part of 10 years. We were about to pop in to an old Red Hook dive bar called Sunny’s that she quite liked when my phone rang, showing an 866 number I’ve become well acquainted with over the past couple of months. The automated voice at the other end of the line did its thing, and then I heard the voice of Chris Lysak.


Lysak, 49, is an electrician from Lethbridge, Alberta, and is currently held in a form of purgatory known as Remand; as of this writing it has been 573 days since he was arrested, along with 12 others, for charges arising from participation at the Coutts, Alberta Freedom Convoy protest site. 9 of those people walk free, Lysak and 3 others have been denied bail.

I have written in defense of Chris and the others being similarly denied justice, and we have communicated a few times via telephone from the remand center where he is held.

On this particular call, I informed Chris that I would later be in the same room as Sunkara, whose magazine published an unhinged hit piece on The Freedom Convoy. It starts off making spurious allusions to a ‘right wing, anti-worker’ agenda, while at the same time quoting corporate mouthpieces like The Canadian Trucking Alliance, a lobby group for mega carriers in Canada, with such carriers often owned by income funds and various corporations; the CTA are also donors to Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. A writer for Jacobin, a leftist magazine named after French Revolutionaries and Guillotine enthusiasts, quoting a corporate lobby group which represents the millionaire caste, is about on par for what passes for ‘Journalism’ these days, and is a good indicator of the inversions of reality we can expect from our friends on ‘the left’.

Chris Lysak

Chris relayed to me a story about what happened to his family immediately after his arrest.

”Journalists” under the employ of The Toronto Star showed up at Chris’ home in Lethbridge, Alberta, where his 73 year old father, Mike Lysak lives, along with Chris’ two daughters.

Finding the front door open, these journos let themselves in to the home, though it is unclear if one of his daughters, neither over the age of eleven, let them in, not knowing exactly what was going on.

Mike Lysak has major hearing issues, has to wear hearing aids, and was unsure of what these people wanted, though that would be made clear soon thereafter with what they published in the Toronto Star. Badgering an elder gentleman with hearing problems and taking advantage of a minor to gain access to a private residence is unprofessional conduct, to say the least, but this was only the beginning.

In what amounts to a calculated and intentional smear job, The Star published this hit piece against Lysak only a few short days after his arrest, and in the smearing, according to Mike Lysak, they twisted everything he said, and manufactured things he did not say.

The Star reporters, as with everyone else in the Canadian Media, were extremely fixated on Lysak’s alleged ties to Diagolon, a make believe meme country which does not exist, and whose deputy leader is a time traveling goat figurine. As of this writing, exactly zero crimes have ever been committed by Diagolon, the meme country that does not exist, and despite being singled out as an Enemy of The State, the man whose imagination produced Diagolon, Jeremy Mackenzie, continues to have charges against him stayed or dropped. Mackenzie and his lawyers have recently obtained documents from the government indicating the extent to which the RCMP and other officials were lead down the garden path by a lunatic activist at The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or, The Northern Poverty Law Center; these documents and the malfeasance they expose will be the subject of future writing. Let’s just say that over and above the embarrassing display of histrionics in the media and House of Commons over this meme country which does not exist, many tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money has been spent investigating the non existent meme country; almost as if Trudeau’s desperation to legitimate his invocation of The Emergency Measures Act required converting fiction into reality.

If you would like to find out more about Mr Mackenzie, his punking of the Canadian Political and Media establishment, and their various punitive responses, read this -

As the call with Chris Lysak went on, he became very emotional after telling me what happened with these “journalists“ who showed up at his home, and also told me about how one of his daughters cried every day for four months straight. Being denied bail, this father has not hugged his children in over a year and a half, and with the trial not scheduled until May 2024, it might be another year before that opportunity arises.

”I don’t care what they do to me; they’re punishing my kids.”

Given that the decision to deny bail for Chris and the rest of the “Coutts Four” is a purely political act, it should behoove journalists, who ought to be in the business of holding political power to account, to be a bit more neutral in their approach to covering a widely popular protest movement, and to the political charges and prisoners the government’s reaction to it have created.

Sohrab Ahmari and Bhaskar Sunkara; photo not mine.

Later that evening I arrived at the venue for the previously mentioned book launch and discussion. When Mr Sunkara arrived, he had quite a few people who wanted to speak with him, and I waited patiently for an opportunity.

When I got the chance, there were only a scant few minutes to say anything, so I introduced myself quickly and got straight to the point.

I asked Sunkara if he had heard about political prisoners in Canada, and that bail had been denied them under extremely murky circumstances; he said he was unaware. I asked him if he thought the climate of fear that the media created under Covid was useful or necessary, and if he was aware that this hit piece published in his magazine played right into that same climate. Again, he denied any knowledge of the piece in particular, and when I named its author, a woman named Emily Leedham, he also denied any knowledge of her. I asked Sunkara what he thought about the left media and its complicity in the situation, and he didn’t have an answer.

Seeming frustrated by my line of inquiry, or maybe somewhat afraid, as my fairly standard height of only 6 feet tall dwarfed his manlet frame, Sunkara made an inane comment about how he appreciated the United States’ more libertarian approach to speech, which I guess is a reference to the First Amendment, or possibly his acknowledgement of Trudeau’s attempts to control the Internet with bills C-11 and C-18.

The show was to begin, and Sunkara made his way to the stage.


I have to wonder if Sunkara, like so many others in the media and various elite institutions, believes his own bullshit about standing up for the working class, of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. As I held up the wall in the standing room only event space where this discussion about Sohrab Ahmari’s book was taking place, I scanned the room, looking for anyone besides myself and the one other gentleman who clearly stood out as someone who sweat for a living; no such luck. Sunkara and Ahmari’s conversation wandered around the American political realm, but I don’t remember a damn thing Sunkara said that was of any consequence at all. Such a waste that this man of particular pedigree will only ever be remembered by people north of the border as just another leftoid windbag who will never know what it’s like to be unjustly imprisoned, to go from one day trying to stand up for the bodily autonomy of workers, and demanding an end to years of government psychological warfare against your fellow countrymen, to being falsely accused of the most heinous crimes so as to justify that same governments further warfare against its own citizens.

This week marked the start of the trials of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two of the more prominent figures who became leaders of the Ottawa iteration of the Freedom Convoy. One would think that a protest which resulted in no violence or any property damage whatsoever (except on the part of the police) could be moved on from, but this is Canada, a Bamboo Republic held under the sway of the CCP. Disagreement with the Regime will not be tolerated, and examples must be made of those whom are not granted permission for “power to petition itself”.

Barber and Lich both face ten years in prison if convicted of the various ridiculous charges thrown at them by the Trudeau Regime; one wonders what Sunkara will publish in Jacobin or The Nation when Canada conclusively proves that freedoms once afforded the citizens of a modern western nation state have been eliminated for good. I suspect we will see fellating of Justin Trudeau better suited for pornography; and why not, his wife just left him.

Quite a bummer that the citizens of Canada cannot leave this highly abusive relationship as easily as Sophie.






If you have a few bucks to spare, there has been a GiveSendGo set up to assist with the defense of Chris Lysak and the other political prisoners in Canada.

If you are reading this in Canada, you can also E-transfer to OperationRescue@protonmail.com.