Action4Canada - September 12, 2025


Dallas Brodie： The Risk of Courage

Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
Mentioned
Tara Armstrong John James Lindsay
Empower Hour Dallas Brodie： Exposing and Opposing the Reconciliation Industry Sept. 10, 2025 Empower Hour Michelle Stirling： Land Grabs： Connecting UNDRIP & Palestine Sept 17 2025

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

157.75

Word count

574

Sentence count

52


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) joins Jemele to discuss her experience as a candidate and how she dealt with the fallout from a controversial comment she made about a black woman in a white shirt. She also talks about how she handled the backlash she received from her comments.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 initially, John, for example, wanted me to say, he said, Dallas, it's the problem that you use
00:00:03.880 the word zero, zero bodies. He said, you shouldn't have used the word zero. I said,
00:00:09.540 zero is a bad, see, this is how silly it got. He says, you should have acknowledged that there
00:00:14.640 has been suffering in your comment. I said, John, but this isn't about that. Everybody's
00:00:19.420 all acknowledged that I'm dealing with a situation of if we can't have truth at the law society,
00:00:24.840 then we are truly doomed. That's the whole center of truth. And I'm talking about the objective truth.
00:00:32.340 And this is precisely what got me into the most trouble was me saying, everybody's saying, well,
00:00:36.500 this is my truth. This is her truth. This is this truth. But there really objectively is only one
00:00:41.440 truth. My shirt is blue and white. You can say you're seeing that it's yellow, but it's not yellow.
00:00:46.900 But if your truth is it's yellow, I won't deny you that. But objectively, it is a blue and white
00:00:51.580 striped shirt. And so I just had to live with it. It got very ugly after that. Once we were sitting
00:00:59.460 as independents, I was shunned in the legislature, literally and completely. The entire conservative
00:01:08.540 caucus was told not to speak to me, look at me, ever refer to me or be caught speaking to me anywhere
00:01:14.800 in the hallways. I've been told this. They were told to literally shun me in every way possible.
00:01:21.580 And I had friends who I loved in that, who still they were so scared, they wouldn't even
00:01:26.680 look at me. And Tara got Tara Armstrong, who decided to leave to and Jordan, it was pretty
00:01:32.420 bad. It was bad. But we, we started finding our feet. And, you know, sometimes there are
00:01:39.600 blessings in disguise. And I decided that I will stand in the truth, the truth. And if I never
00:01:48.800 win again in politics, so be it. But I will not have compromised my principles. And I know
00:01:55.920 my heart. Nothing I said was intended to be racist or mean or cruel. It was the truth.
00:02:02.440 And so I, I just decided I'm going to let the chips fall where they may. I will not compromise
00:02:08.180 on this. Otherwise, I'm just being like all the other politicians that I have personally
00:02:11.840 disliked completely when I watch them fold like a house of cards. Just risk being unpopular
00:02:19.400 at the dinner party. Okay. Just, just risk offending. I've had people say, Dallas, it's so good. You
00:02:24.920 can say it because I can't say it. I'm like, I can't say it either. Like this wasn't fun
00:02:28.300 for me. Like, it's not like I had some special power. It's just that now that I've walked through
00:02:32.760 the fire, it's over now. I feel free and I'm on the other side and I can speak and I'm not
00:02:38.340 afraid at all anymore. It's, it's almost a, it's a trial by fire. And once the media,
00:02:44.400 the Twitter mass, the mobbing, as James Lindsay calls it, the modern, the modern day struggle
00:02:49.620 sessions, there's a whole podcast he's done about this. You, you, you get through it and
00:02:55.200 you're through. Yeah. Say to people, just do it, state your position and you'll find out
00:03:01.380 courage is contagious and other people will come to you and say, thank you for saying that.
00:03:08.340 Thank you.