It’s right up there, or down there, with kicking puppies and putting kittens in clothes dryers. How else, after all, would you characterize the tormenting of the Amish, everyone’s favorite quaint, pacifistic Luddites? Well, there is another way — as something Justin Trudeau’s Canada is currently doing.
The story, which broke a month ago, is striking. Ontario’s Amish community is being fined $300,000 ($222,660 U.S.) for not downloading the Canadian government’s Covid app. This is even though Covid fear is about as far past its sell-by date as Joe Biden is. It’s even though religious freedom is supposed to be a priority in Western nations. And, for a kicker, it’s even though the Amish reportedly don’t use the smartphones necessary for downloading the app.
The story also has wider implications. As American Thinker points out, it’s “a preview of coming attractions if Kamala becomes president.” That is, given enough power, U.S. leftists would behave just as their Great White North comrades do. They’d tyrannize us — for our own good, of course.
Not an Amish Paradise, Weird Al.
Rebel News reported on the story last month. After writing that rural Chatsworth, Ontario, is home to an Amish community living an 18th-century lifestyle, the site continued:
Their simple way of life — without electricity, telephones, or the internet — sets them apart from the rest of the modern world. Yet, this peaceful community is now grappling with a problem no one would have expected: a heavy-handed government bent on enforcing digital compliance.
… The problem began with the Canadian government’s enforcement of the ArriveCan app during the COVID-19 pandemic. This app was mandatory for anyone entering Canada, requiring travellers to submit their health information digitally.
The Amish, however, do not use smartphones, let alone apps. They also have religious exemptions from vaccinations, making the use of such technology unnecessary and intrusive for them. Yet, despite these clear exemptions, the government insisted on compliance, leading to severe penalties.
The result? The Amish community in Chatsworth has been slapped with nearly $300,000 in fines for not using the ArriveCan app. This is a community that doesn’t use electricity, let alone digital applications.
The fines were not just a bureaucratic oversight — they were a targeted action. The government even went so far as to place liens on their properties, effectively freezing their ability to obtain loans and transfer land titles within families. These punitive measures have left the Amish community in a state of shock and despair.
Do note: Contrary to popular belief, Amish do sometimes embrace modern technology, albeit with limitations. Rebel News appears to be saying, however, that the Chatsworth Amish don’t; if so, they would be “Old Order Amish.”
A New Order World
Regardless, it probably takes a pretty mean person to want to torment the Amish. And it takes a pretty big government to empower that mean person to do so. Hence our constitutional limitations, as American Thinker explains:
Although Canada does not have a First Amendment, it does have a 1982 “Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” According to that charter, Canada does have “freedom of religion.” It’s so—ahem—important that it appears very early in the endless document, a Section 2(a). This section promises that “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: a. freedom of conscience and religion.”
What’s unstated—the little caveat, the tiny asterisk—is that this freedom exists only if the government allows it. It’s a privilege, not a right.
In this regard, our Constitution is hugely different. As Obama once complained, the American Constitution is “a charter of negative liberties, [that] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you…”
That’s exactly right. Privileges come from the government, and what the government giveth, the government can taketh away. Rights, however, are inherent in each individual, and the government cannot touch them unless for an extraordinarily good reason.
The way modern leftism works to get around these constitutional limitations is to dress the lust for power in the clothes of compassion. We’re not touching your rights. We want to do things for you. Or as Obama added in the same interview quoted above, that darn Constitution “doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.” Reagan had the answer for that complaint: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
When Darkness Falls
It’s especially terrifying because the reality can be far worse than simply having, as philosopher C.S. Lewis put it, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims,” one whose autocrats are “omnipotent moral busybodies.” Just consider a very old study, one I believe dates back to the ’50s. It found that no matter the time or place, leaders are always worse in character than those they govern. Additionally, more recent research showed what the discerning perceive themselves: An inordinate number of politicians are narcissists and/or psychopaths. On occasion, one could be even worse, exhibiting the “dark tetrad”: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.
This brings us to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. Jordan Peterson, a fellow Canadian and famed clinical psychologist, has said that Trudeau is at least “a narcissist.” Really, though, the best way to describe an individual thus disposed is evil.
Such people will torment others. This may be because they despise what the victims represent; because they’re envious of a good the targets embody (e.g., relative innocence, which epitomizes the Amish) and hence want to destroy it; because they get off on exercising power; or because, like a wicked child who tortures small animals, they enjoy causing others pain.
Regardless, this is why our Founders provided for a tyranny-forestalling governmental balance of power — and it’s why, when we disrupt that balance, we do so at our own peril.
