As long as the people are crippled by fear, awed by the pomp and rituals of the State, and bamboozled by media organs that act as spokespersons of the State and Big Pharma, they feel disempowered and largely at the mercy of their rulers. But there is a power of resistance latent in the people that the people themselves almost always underestimate.

Citizens often feel helpless in the face of the majestic power of the State. This was especially true during the pandemic, when governments across the world, with the complicity of journalists and scientists, railroaded citizens into sheltering from the world and shuttering their businesses for months on end, while the real problems, such as overcrowded hospitals and underdeveloped and suppressed antiviral treatments, remained unaddressed.

Many citizens complied with lockdown, mask, and vaccine mandates because they sincerely believed they were helping society cope with the pandemic. Others complied out of raw fear, and against their better judgment. Those who did not see the point of masking their healthy children, isolating children in perfectly good health, abandoning elderly relatives to die alone, or vaccinating children at negligible risk from Covid, often went along with the dangerous charade because they simply felt they had no other choice.

A people living under the thumb of a tyrant has not yet woken up to its own power of resistance. Like a sleeping giant, the people are powerless as long as they remain in a profound slumber.

Political rulers would do well to tiptoe around this giant, lest they wake him up. They try to keep him under their power by drip-feeding him with whatever sleeping pills they can get their hands on, whether paralysing fear and despair, or naive and infantile faith in technocratic elites.

But there is no guarantee that a sleeping giant will sleep forever.

When the people’s fear begins to lift, when the curtains fall away and they see the State in all its naked humanity, when people begin to recover a sense of their own dignity and power – what Czech dissident Václav Havel paradoxically referred to as “the power of the powerless” -- the ice of despair and isolation begins to thaw, and the first rays of hope and fraternity pierce through the clouds.

A few brave souls stand up and fight for themselves, and in so doing, they stand up for the rest of us. Their public testimony, often given at great personal cost, serves as a lightning rod for a new wave of public resistance. People who had hitherto been hunkering down at home and hoping to ride out the storm of authoritarianism suddenly realise that their own power, when united with the power of others, is far greater than anything they had suspected.

The most exquisite irony of all is that it is tyrannical figures like Trudeau, Macron, and Biden, who, intoxicated with their own power, and emboldened by mainstream journalists (here is a piece of commentary from a journalist at The Guardian on the freedom convoy that leaves me speechless), who kick the sleeping giant of the people so hard that they manage to shake it out of its profound slumber.

Let’s not forget that a burdensome colonial tax was sufficient to spark the American Revolution.

People are waking up all over the world to the fact that their leaders have betrayed their trust and hung them out to dry, imposing draconian, discriminatory, and socially destructive policies that entirely lacked any sense of measure or proportionality.

People increasingly understand that their political leaders are serving an agenda that has more to do with saving face and finding scapegoats (e.g. the unvaccinated truckers in Canada) than promoting the health and well-being of their constituents. People are coming to the realisation that if they do not take a stand now, for themselves and future generations, they might just find themselves living under the yoke of totalitarianism for the foreseeable future.

The Freedom Convoy has become a lightning rod for a new international freedom movement, with freedom marches multiplying across the world, like an unstoppable virus, from Ottawa to Calgary, from Washington DC to London, from Paris to Brussels to Amsterdam, from Rome to Berlin, from Canberra to Wellington.

Well done, Mr Trudeau, you’ve woken up a sleeping giant. And rest assured, he won’t be going back to sleep anytime soon.

This article has been reposted from David Thunder’s The Freedom Blog. Check out his video explanation of his aims.