Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles and official guest host Grant Henry in the studio to talk about Tennessee’s horn honking protest in contrast with Ottawa, Canda’s trucker convoy today.
Leahy: I have a very interesting story sort of related to that, about standing up for your rights. There is a Tennessee connection to what’s going on in Ottawa, Canada, right now. The truckers convoy, they’re shutting down the state capital.
Let me go to the Tennessee connection. Andy, you and I were living here at the time and I went down there just as a participant in 2000.
Ogles: Go ahead. That’s because we’re from here and we just didn’t parachute in.
Leahy: (Laughter) Exactly! Because we’re from here. You and I, we didn’t lead the charge. That would have been the late Phil Valentine and our friend Steve Gill, who were the radio hosts down there and, of course, the Killer Bees – Marsha Blackburn, Diane Black, and Mae Beavers, who were in the state House of Representatives at that time. They stopped our RINO governor, Don Sundquist from working in cahoots with the Democrats.
They stopped a state income tax. And the way they did that is, when they were trying to sneak this bill into the Tennessee General Assembly, the call went out and radio hosts went down to the plaza, by the thousands.
And you are one of them. I was one of them. Tennesseans went down and drove around the capitol, honking their horns, and it stopped the bill. Didn’t you go down there?
Ogles: Yes, I was there. I was a small business owner at the time. And so I had the luxury of being able to go down there virtually every day and hold signs and protest. And I was interviewed multiple times by both Steve Gill and Phil Valentine back in the day. I love the moniker the Killer Bees.
Leahy: Yes. But you were there at the time. It was Tennessee grassroots activism that stopped this terrible state income tax that RINO Don Sundquist had promised on the campaign to fairly never do. And we stopped it.
Now we’ve had a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. And it was because of the horn-honking back in 2000 – an expression of populous will. Let’s fast forward to 2022. Let me read you this story. This is from a Canadian news site called The Week.
Headline: “Court Issues 10-day Ban on Honking in Downtown Ottawa.” A Canadian judge issued a 10-day injunction Monday banning protesting truckers from honking their horns in downtown Ottawa, CBC reports – Canadian Broadcasting Company, run by the government.
“Tooting a horn is not an expression of any great thought I’m aware of,” Justice Hugh McLean of the Ottawa Superior Court said. He also said the ban on honking would not rob demonstrators of their right to protest.
A convoy of truckers and other demonstrators protesting Canada’s COVID-19 policies entered Ottawa on January 29th and had been blocking streets and using horns to disturb residents ever since. Your thoughts, Grant Henry?
Henry: It’s interesting tying this back into the civil asset for conversation from before. A lot of people are saying that they’re trying to figure out a way to create crimes that these people can violate so they can be guilty of a criminal crime for the process to take some of their stuff from them. That plays a little bit into what’s happening with the GoFundMe campaign – y’all familiar with that story?
They take about $10 million [that was donated] to help these truckers, about $10 million, and GoFundMe all of a sudden came out over the last couple of days and said “We’ve been getting indications from reports on the street that stuff is getting violent … police officers are saying this. Unfortunately, we don’t want to have to do it, but of course we’re going to have to divert this $10 million to other alternate sources.”
Leahy: That would be called theft. They backed down subsequently. By the way, this reminds me of the famous prosecutor Javer in Les Miserables from Victor Hugo’s famous line, show me the man, I’ll find the crime.
Ogles: That’s right.
Leahy: That’s where we are right now. Canada is fascinating, Andy, the government is getting more and more authoritarian up there. The people are getting more and more liberty-oriented. Isn’t that fascinating?
Ogles: I think we’re – here in North America, but in the United States as well – I think we’re at this tipping point where people are having to take those kinds of personal inventories of what’s important.
And look at the beginning of COVID; we were all terrified, let’s be honest. February, March, going back two years. But as science and the data continued to come out, we became more educated.
And that’s where if you look at the Netflix film The Social Network, where you have Google and Facebook feeding us their side of the coin. So we’re not getting both sides of the conversation. And that’s dangerous.
Leahy: Very dangerous. By the way, the mayor of Ottawa has now said it’s going to be a crime to bring any fuel supplies to the convoys.
And if you bring fuel, you’ll be arrested for assisting an illegal activity. He obviously read Les Miserables. He’s a fan of Javer. Show me the man, I’ll find the crime. That’s the mayor of Ottawa.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Andy Ogles” by Andy Ogles. Background Photo “Freedom Convoy” by Glen Motz.
