Given the difficulty of navigating the last two years of lockdowns and mandates — and the death grip some blue states and cities have on keeping those mandates going like it’s the source of their power; their precious, if you will — watching what’s happening in Canada has been something like a clean breath of fresh country air after leaving the city. Makes you feel alive again.

If you’ve been hiding under a lockdown rock, here’s a taste of what’s been happening.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other liberal Canadian leaders have slammed the trucking “Freedom Convoy” as spreading “hateful rhetoric” and expressing “violence toward fellow citizens.” But protesters on the ground say that’s not the case at all.

“I have not seen one negative flag here. No Nazi flags or anything like that,” one woman protesting in Ottawa, who has been in the capital since Friday, told Fox News Digital.

“The truckers and supporters here have made an effort to say that we will call out any violence or hatred that we’re seeing, and we’ll report it to the police,” the woman continued. “So we’re all on the same page here. We don’t want to see any violence. They didn’t drive all this way to promote any violence or hate. They’ve come here to make a very peaceful statement that we would like to stop mandates and we’re supporting free choice.”

The Freedom Convoy of truckers left Vancouver for Ottawa on Jan. 23 to protest the federal government’s vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers and is calling for an end to coronavirus restrictions. The convoy reached Ottawa this weekend and police estimated between 5,000 to 18,000 people were on the streets Saturday. The number is estimated to have come down to the hundreds of protesters as of Wednesday.

BREAKING: Polish immigrants just arrived in Ottawa with thousands of Polish sausages and bread for the truckers

“We came from communism. We want a free country.”pic.twitter.com/T09i7p0z1b

— Truckistan Amb. Poso 🏁 (@JackPosobiec) February 2, 2022

As an American, it’s a bit disheartening that a nation besides the U.S. is leading in the cause of freedom against mandates. Mandates, I might add, that stopped feeling like a public health emergency the first time a riot broke out in 2020 and the press and government officials justified the carnage as more important than stopping the spread of COVID. More than a year later, Canadian truckers, knowing their key role in the supply chain, leveraged their own power and said no to forced vaccines. It’s been remarkable to watch. I’m buying a t-shirt. Literally.

And I talk about it on the show today, as well as this extraordinary piece at Bari Weiss’ substack (that I stupidly neglected to talk about when it came out) detailing how the Hollywood Country Club set is being replaced by a new Hollywood Country Club set: the Woke Hollywood Country Club set. And I offer some thoughts on the bubbly and fun “Encanto” (trailer below).

Come on, get happy.

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