Juno News - ARC Forum attendees reject wokism and Marxism

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:20.360 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here the andrew lawton show

00:01:31.580 coming to you live from london in the wonderful country of the united kingdom a city i've had the

00:01:38.920 good pleasure of coming to on a couple of occasions and have never quite seen as much

00:01:44.880 in the way of freedom-loving people in it all at one time anyway, as I have this week.

00:01:50.220 That is because if you've been following along with the show, you'll well know I've been here

00:01:54.100 for the ARC Forum, the first ever forum of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,

00:01:59.880 an organization in part led by Jordan Peterson, by Canadian Conservative MP Les Lewis, by

00:02:06.200 folks like Michael Schellenberger and Baroness Stroud, Philippa Stroud, who has been very

00:02:13.720 prominent in the speaking lineup. I felt bad for her yesterday. I can't remember if I mentioned

00:02:18.520 this, but she was interviewing on stage. This is like a British baroness. She's, you know,

00:02:23.320 the elite of the elite, I guess. And she was interviewing Willie Robertson and Corey Robertson

00:02:28.960 from the American show Duck Dynasty. And I was watching this feeling like she had never heard

00:02:34.500 about them until five minutes before she was told she had to go on stage and interview them. It was

00:02:39.920 a great contrast this you know prim proper baroness sitting down with this very bearded duck dynasty

00:02:46.700 star from rural i think they're louisiana if memory serves and she was like talking about them like

00:02:52.560 having you know tried to really immerse herself in the wonders of rural america uh to do a bang

00:02:58.400 up job and i said where else but the arc forum are you going to see a baroness interview the

00:03:03.000 duck dynasty guys so that was a fun little takeaway from the program or yesterday for the

00:03:08.900 arc forum today things have wrapped up entirely the arc forum concluded after its third and final

00:03:16.120 day and uh about uh what time is it right now it's nine o'clock so i think just uh about five

00:03:23.900 minutes from here at the o2 arena in london jordan peterson is on stage with douglas murray

00:03:30.300 doing kind of a public finale they sold like 20 000 tickets for this thing it's insane

00:03:35.600 a public component, a public finale to the ideas that have been discussed at the ARC Forum among

00:03:41.400 the 1,500 invited folks there from 72 countries, of which I was very fortunate to be one. And one

00:03:49.360 thing that was quite interesting here, I spent a bit of time on Monday kind of doing the contrast

00:03:54.320 between the ARC Forum and its logical counterpart in some ways, the World Economic Forum. These are

00:04:01.860 both global summits with leaders from various fields that are coming together to talk about

00:04:06.480 ideas. And the key contrast between the two, I think, is that the ideas here at the ARC Forum

00:04:12.960 are rooted in the value of the individual, the celebration of humanity and Western civilization.

00:04:19.860 The ideas you hear about at the World Economic Forum are nihilistic and cynical and very

00:04:25.520 anti-human and certainly anti-individual. And I think there's, generally speaking,

00:04:30.720 a broader understanding of that here. It was a very optimistic place. Now, politics has not been

00:04:37.120 an optimistic place in the last few years, and I would say for good reason. We've had some of the

00:04:41.620 most incredible, incredible incursions on our civil liberties, not just our own bodily autonomy,

00:04:47.860 but our freedom of speech, our freedom of movement. And politics has become a lot more reactive as a

00:04:54.380 result. So I worried that everyone coming together would kind of be more grievance oriented in their

00:05:01.780 way. And I was quite pleased. And I will say pleasantly surprised to see that was not the

00:05:06.960 case. There was a message of hope. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't some skeptics among us.

00:05:12.180 I had a few little snide conversations on the sidelines, not snide, I should say, but a few more,

00:05:17.880 I'll say, cynical conversations on the sidelines with people. But of all the backgrounds we saw,

00:05:23.860 people from the US, the UK, Canada, Spain, Germany, Austria, Australia, people from media,

00:05:30.100 people from politics, all of this. People had their own approaches, their own backgrounds,

00:05:35.400 their own challenges. There was one common thread that I saw in almost everyone there,

00:05:42.080 which was a rejection of wokeness and a rejection of wokeism. That to me is so key here. And I think

00:05:50.680 there's actually a fair bit of hope in all of that, that you can bring together so many people

00:05:55.660 from around the world and everyone says, all right, we may disagree on this policy or that policy. You

00:06:00.080 may be from the British House of Lords and I may be from Duck Dynasty, but surely we can all agree

00:06:05.060 we don't want wokeness. Now, what is wokeness? Well, you ask some different people, you're going

00:06:10.160 to get different answers. One of the things that I will point out, though, is that there was a

00:06:14.860 rejection of this idea that children should be taught just untenable things about the world which

00:06:22.180 are simply not true. Like, oh, I don't know, there are 47 genders instead of two biological sexes.

00:06:28.980 That parents are not the ones that should be responsible for their children's education. That

00:06:34.160 we should allow grievance and microaggressions to govern speech and discourse rather than

00:06:40.580 just allowing humans to govern themselves and be civil, and if they're offended, to just not

00:06:46.400 want the state's intervention. I mean, these are all very anti-woke values, which shouldn't be

00:06:51.780 left versus right, but have increasingly been so. And I had a number of conversations where I wasn't

00:06:58.160 even intending to set out down this road, and one of them I did, and that was with James Lindsay,

00:07:03.640 who you may know from X or Twitter, as we used to call it back in the day, by which I mean

00:07:07.940 like two weeks ago. James Lindsay, who goes by Conceptual James on Twitter and actually

00:07:13.300 was speaking to a very large crowd in Alberta a few weeks ago. And I was trying to get him on

00:07:19.900 the show then and we just weren't able to work it out time wise. But I sat down with James Lindsay

00:07:24.100 and I wanted to talk about wokeness in that proper context here, where it comes from and more

00:07:29.400 importantly, what on earth we do about it. Not sure if you can distill this big question down

00:07:36.060 into a simple soundbite answer, but I'll give you an opportunity to do so. Where does wokeness come

00:07:41.680 from? Hell, no, it's the evolution of Marxist thought into the Western context. The Western

00:07:51.600 context is not suited to an economic Marxism because the Western world, with its access to

00:07:58.780 liberty and markets, has enabled upward mobility economically. So it's very hard to say that the

00:08:04.400 worker is intrinsically oppressed and motivate a workers party when the worker can look at his

00:08:09.460 buddy who said, well, they'll just work harder and you can move up and you can start your own

00:08:13.060 company if you want and everything. And so they had to modify it in thought. You see this in the

00:08:18.620 60s. They say that we have to move from the working class as our base for revolution and

00:08:24.020 into identity politics. We have to look for a new basis for this energy because the West wasn't

00:08:29.020 suitable to it. So that's where it comes from. The oppressor-oppressed dynamic makes for some

00:08:33.840 very weird and inconsistent positions I mean you were just in Canada recently you know that

00:08:39.060 you know Muslim families were leading the charge on the parental rights battles kind of getting

00:08:45.040 gender ideology out of schools you fast forward a couple of weeks and all of a sudden now Muslims

00:08:49.460 are the oppressor or the oppressed group instead of the the oppressor if you talk to some of the

00:08:55.560 people on the left and the people on the left don't seem interested in trying to reconcile

00:09:00.520 these inconsistencies yeah that's because this oppressor oppressed thing is a useful kind of

00:09:08.300 naming heuristic but what really it is is the people and groups and situations that are advancing

00:09:14.580 leftism are good and the situations and circumstances and groups that are hindering

00:09:19.420 leftism are bad this is explicit and i think this is a maoist project woke is a maoist project come

00:09:25.940 to the West, Mao actually says, and he gave a lecture in 1957 or a public speech on the

00:09:33.140 correct handling of contradictions among the people, and he says immediately, well, who

00:09:36.660 are the people and who are the enemies of the people?

00:09:38.680 Let's distinguish.

00:09:39.760 And he says very clearly, the people who are advancing the cause of building socialism

00:09:43.080 are the people.

00:09:44.160 The people who are hindering the cause of building socialism are the enemies of the

00:09:46.980 people.

00:09:47.180 So it's very clear that which they can use to advance leftist agendas, oppressed.

00:09:53.800 that which they can't use or that's stopping them from advancing, oppressor, bad, destroy.

00:09:59.960 People on the right oftentimes want to deal with this by going after the institutions that tend

00:10:05.400 to give the wokest their support. Is that the right approach? Where do you think the way in

00:10:10.500 is to start pushing back against this? I mean, they've infiltrated so thoroughly that it's very

00:10:16.540 difficult. We do need to start working our way back toward reclaiming which institutions we can.

00:10:22.760 that's going to happen through personnel in other words firing woke people when they abuse their

00:10:29.220 positions in power which they are want to do eventually and replacing them with people who

00:10:34.040 are not woke and having policies arranged to push in that direction or push back in that direction

00:10:39.540 and simultaneously through changing what I refer to kind of broadly as the liability field

00:10:44.760 what I just talked about you're it's a liability to get hired it's a liability to keep your job to

00:10:49.940 be woke, blah, blah, blah. That's part of the liability field. But usually I'm talking about

00:10:53.400 lawsuits where there are, you know, discrete harms that are so egregious in a place like Canada.

00:10:59.980 It's got to be so egregious that the courts can't ignore it. The U.S. is a little more friendly to

00:11:05.040 that. I also think, by the way, that the U.S. and Canada, just to remark, should keep bouncing the

00:11:09.560 energy against woke ping pong ball across the 48th parallel because we're doing a great job

00:11:14.300 motivating each other. I think we're actually a wonderful pair for once.

00:11:18.000 there is an anti-woke left i'd say it's probably not as large as it should be

00:11:22.840 and a lot of the people in it tend to get typecast as being you know evil right-wing

00:11:26.900 racist nazis and whatever but is there a concern that that coalition among the anti-woke will be

00:11:33.260 too thin to survive if you drill down and you know people who are in the trenches saying yeah

00:11:38.400 we don't like wokeness don't really agree on anything else um the thing is that the anti-woke

00:11:43.220 left is beholden to the power center of the left by virtue of the fact that they still commit to

00:11:49.120 the left. And the power center of the left currently is woke. So they are caught between

00:11:53.820 a rock and a hard place and sort of almost a black hole that either sucks them in or flings

00:11:58.600 them completely out into, like you said, right wing nut job land, even though they're kind of

00:12:03.920 determined leftists. And it's a very big challenge that this group has to deal with, that

00:12:12.060 But they would also benefit from woke losing its influence over the left in a, you know, whether sane is the right word or not, but a non woke left emerging back into the, you know, the ecosystem of left wing thought that's permissible would be beneficial for them.

00:12:30.180 And I think that under present circumstances, unless woke has actually dealt itself a fatal, self-inflicted wound with this supporting Palestine-Hamas thing,

00:12:41.460 I think that that's going to be a very challenging thing for the left to do.

00:12:44.880 The woke are going to have to be discredited on other terms.

00:12:48.600 Do you think gender is the issue that's going to destroy that leftist coalition?

00:12:53.260 Because it seems to be the one that has the most broad support for the anti-woke position,

00:12:59.060 The idea that there are two sexes, if you talk to ordinary people on the street, that's a relatively universal thing, but you wouldn't see that reflected in the institutions.

00:13:07.560 Well, until three weeks ago, I would have said most definitely because I hadn't quite considered how powerfully the anti-Semitism would manifest itself.

00:13:18.680 And that seems to be waking people up much faster, and in particular waking up people with money who are very concerned about what they're funding.

00:13:24.480 I think there's a little bit of irony. We've had such a robust education in the West about Nazis and how bad Nazis are and everything, which is good for that, so that we're very sensitive to recognizing those trends and we're very sensitive to wanting to shy away from them immediately.

00:13:38.780 but on the other hand we've learned virtually nothing about communism so now we find ourselves

00:13:42.320 in the position where the left is championing something that's calling i mean at times

00:13:48.980 explicitly for gassing jews and all of a sudden this is a shock moment that's breaking people

00:13:54.800 open as for gender though it's the most obviously most untrue position it's the one that touches the

00:14:01.800 most lives being a parent is not a political position unlike what the feminists want to say

00:14:06.200 that the personal is political. Parenting is not a political act, and most parents don't think of

00:14:10.860 it as a political act. They think of it as a get through the day and make these kids have enough

00:14:15.080 to eat in the best environment that they can on a day-by-day basis with just the challenges of

00:14:21.640 parenting. And so what it threatens to allow and what it is allowing, like we saw in Canada with

00:14:26.440 Muslims and Sikhs and Christians and agnostics and Jews all coming together up until this recent

00:14:31.800 conflict what we saw was that parenting transcends all the other boundaries political religious

00:14:38.100 and it gives the ability to build a gigantic coalition plus to start shaking people loose

00:14:44.980 from from the cult and thinking something's badly wrong here we're doing to be as generous as

00:14:51.540 possible highly aggressive surgical interventions of mentally unwell children as the pathway to

00:14:57.440 treatment that's the primary pathway to treatment and threatening to take parents parental rights

00:15:02.900 away from them through the state if they don't go along with this this is a scary moment for

00:15:07.480 parents and scary moments wake people up yeah i particularly enjoy him saying there that parenting

00:15:17.860 is not political and i think this is something that when we talk about politics and what engages

00:15:25.020 people, what activates people. I think it's when the state ends up at your doorstep when you never

00:15:32.000 asked for it, that the government has to worry. And that was, I think, the story during COVID,

00:15:36.380 where people who didn't really care about politics or didn't feel the need to get involved in

00:15:40.020 politics felt very personally affronted by politics when government was regulating their

00:15:45.140 liberty in a way that had never been done before in their lives. And parents' rights issues,

00:15:50.240 very same dynamic. People that just want to raise their kids, feed their kids, get their kids a good

00:15:54.900 education are now finding the state pushing this indoctrination quite frankly what else do you call

00:16:01.180 it on their children and thus they're like all right we're going to take a stand here and I think

00:16:06.420 that it is interesting to talk about where the greatest victory is likely to come or the first

00:16:12.020 big victory to chip away at wokeness and I think there's a lot of truth to the idea that gender is

00:16:17.100 the one although as he said the anti-semitism aspect is incredibly key and you know we've been

00:16:23.840 talking on the show since October 7th, since the day Hamas launched this latest round of attacks

00:16:28.620 on Israel about this idea. And it wasn't just the attacks by Hamas on Israel and on Jewish people,

00:16:35.200 but I think it's the continued attacks and assaults on Jewish people and their rights,

00:16:39.920 their identities, their existence that has become so normalized in communities across the country.

00:16:46.100 On the weekend, 100,000 people took to the streets of the city I'm in right now, 100,000 to get, I

00:16:53.020 mean we thought the freedom convoy was great because of how many people it brought out but

00:16:56.080 100,000 people on the streets many of whom were very explicitly supportive of violence against

00:17:05.220 Jews and violence against Israelis I'm not going to say every one of the 100,000 was but enough

00:17:10.120 were that it should give a lot of cause for concern so you can make an argument that is a

00:17:16.520 logical argument even if you disagree with it that people who are of Muslim background Arab

00:17:21.400 background would have a reason to align with the Palestinian cause. Why do people on the left

00:17:29.160 outside of that? Why do people on the so-called queer left who would have no home in Gaza that

00:17:36.420 would be particularly comfortable with them do that as well? I wanted to talk about that and

00:17:40.040 this idea of coalitions, which are really at the core of why wokeness has been so powerful.

00:17:44.600 And I did so with Andy Ngo, who is a fantastic contributor. He's a great exposer of the far left and has risked his own safety on a number of occasions to do what he does. And it was interesting that his take on that very dynamic.

00:18:00.960 We've seen, obviously, pro-Hamas or pro-Gaza protesters who are Muslim,

00:18:07.120 in which I think we can understand a little bit of where they're coming at it.

00:18:10.640 But we've also seen supporting Gaza and Hamas,

00:18:13.960 people on the far left that are in these very weird coalitions,

00:18:16.840 people that wouldn't really get along very well in Gaza.

00:18:19.840 And I'm wondering, with your experience covering far-left protests,

00:18:23.200 how these people rationalize support for a society

00:18:26.040 that doesn't really have a place for them in it?

00:18:28.020 I think the narrative that the public has been sold on the very complicated conflict involving Israel and various Palestinian militant factions is that it's about oppressor versus oppressed, which is this cliche that you hear brought out a lot.

00:18:50.880 But really, that's simply sort of the way it's framed.

00:18:54.600 So to a leftist mindset, they want to be on the cause of the oppressed.

00:19:06.320 But there's also been quite, I mean, it's not quite as simple as that.

00:19:10.340 There's a long, we've had years now of radical leftist ideologues, many of them academics, pulling in the Palestinian-Israel conflict, weaving it into the decolonization theory and ideology, I would say.

00:19:34.120 and

00:19:35.440 that

00:19:38.800 we're also now

00:19:41.380 more than three years

00:19:43.920 after George Floyd

00:19:44.820 in America you have

00:19:46.520 a

00:19:47.940 generation of young people

00:19:51.080 who were radicalized

00:19:52.400 and now

00:19:55.280 they've been mobilized again

00:19:56.700 to sort of be the foot soldiers

00:19:58.060 the ideology is like

00:19:59.880 the thread that runs through

00:20:02.140 BLM

00:20:03.880 Antifa, decolonization, critical race theory, Israel hatred, it's a very, it's a threat of bloodlust.

00:20:15.320 The ideologies for each, these different things are quite different.

00:20:19.400 I mean, you have to wonder what does, what does Palestinian nationalism and radical Islamic politics have to do with Antifa or BLM?

00:20:31.660 Well, really very little other than the fact that they would like to see America suffer

00:20:38.180 and its friends and allies internationally suffer as well.

00:20:42.840 Do these people understand or have an ability to rationalize this internal cognitive dissonance if pressed?

00:20:51.220 Or is it that they genuinely are never pressed and they do not give it any intellectual weight whatsoever

00:20:56.040 about how they can support these two things that are contradictory or that have nothing to do with each other?

00:21:01.660 they're not pressed in their circles, for one.

00:21:05.420 So I think they generally don't have to really think about it.

00:21:13.760 Or they've been radicalized to become the faithful and the devout,

00:21:20.560 that it doesn't matter actually what countering evidence you present to them.

00:21:24.660 They're able to reject it.

00:21:28.100 What is, I guess, the logical outcome of this?

00:21:30.960 I mean, a few weeks ago, we had in Canada a lot of Muslims and evangelicals linking arms,

00:21:36.200 supporting parental rights, speaking up against transgender ideology.

00:21:39.340 Now, you know, two groups that are on this different side on Israel-Palestine.

00:21:44.260 I mean, are we just going to see more and more of those fractures?

00:21:47.040 Or do you think the left will just keep getting larger and larger

00:21:50.200 as that sort of amorphous protest blob that I know you've seen?

00:21:56.100 Well, what's been happening with the left is that their alliances and their coalitions have been growing.

00:22:00.700 It hasn't gotten smaller.

00:22:03.200 They've added to the long list of people who have grievances.

00:22:06.920 It's only grown.

00:22:08.300 I mean, you know, first it was about black grievance.

00:22:14.500 Then it's about brown grievance.

00:22:16.920 Then queer and gay grievance, trans grievance.

00:22:20.500 It just keeps growing.

00:22:21.400 And the danger of all this is that present within that type of worldview, there's a lot of support for the use of extreme violence and terrorism.

00:22:38.400 terrorism. And I think what surprised me a bit about some of the rhetoric that's

00:22:44.640 come out in the last three weeks since the 7th of October is that how open they

00:22:51.120 are about their incitement to violence. Before, during the George Floyd-inspired

00:22:57.780 BLM Antifa riots, it was a bit more subtle. It wasn't, when I say a bit more

00:23:03.240 subtle, it wasn't subtle then, but there was a bit of enough plausible deniability,

00:23:07.800 Sort of like when people were smashing up businesses and setting fire to police stations, they were saying they were doing it for racial justice or out of rage because of what's been happening to blacks in America.

00:23:26.240 that it justifies this type of reaction now it's like

00:23:30.540 the sentiment is people expressing the support for the actions of hamas like that is uh

00:23:40.620 they've crossed the line and uh some of them have been called out for it but a lot of them have

00:23:50.320 been called out and their response is yeah and so what yeah and i think that is the real takeaway

00:23:58.720 of all of this these people are not called on it they don't feel the need to explain themselves

00:24:03.260 because they know they have to go back to my discussion with andrew with james lindsey

00:24:07.960 this uh institutional backing and they they have a media that's generally in their corner they have

00:24:14.100 in many cases a political establishment that's in their corner and that is i i think the real

00:24:20.000 reasonable reason that you need to, I don't want to say upend institutions, but certainly reclaim

00:24:25.680 them and take them back. And I think the one thing that the left has always done very well

00:24:30.620 is fight on multiple fronts. They fight on multiple fronts. And they also don't take

00:24:36.720 a beat after one win. They move immediately into the next one. And that is so incredibly,

00:24:43.320 so incredibly important. Apparently in the comments section, some of you were like,

00:24:48.620 not even paying attention to the interview. And we're just like looking at who you could

00:24:51.800 recognize in the background. So maybe we'll have to do like a Where's Waldo thing. Sean tells me

00:24:56.560 there's a woman named Angela Williams, who's been like, you know, identifying everyone in the

00:24:59.920 background. So they all get like credit as being extras on the Andrew Lawton show, which I believe

00:25:06.040 is actually worth nothing. So maybe we don't give them credit for it. But nevertheless, it was

00:25:10.200 actually a lot of fun. And the one I mean, I sort of joked about Davos that in some ways,

00:25:14.240 it's like just a normal convention because you're just you know seeing people milling about but it

00:25:18.860 happens to be you know oh the prime minister of Belgium uh this was a weird one like that because

00:25:23.680 it was like all these kind of conservative or conservative adjacent celebrity types where you

00:25:27.560 look at them and you're like oh that's uh oh that's Dr. Oz oh yeah actually I was chatting

00:25:32.420 with Dr. Oz today we we didn't do an interview uh because I don't really know if I can share this

00:25:37.700 story but I guess I I will now I was like asking him you know I I wanted to do an interview and I

00:25:42.420 said, hey, I just want to run this topic by you. I would love to talk about trust in the medical

00:25:47.500 community post-COVID. And his response was just laughing at me. Not laughing at me, but I think

00:25:53.420 laughing at the idea as if to say he realizes that that is pretty much impossible because of

00:25:59.060 how little trust there is. And I would say deservedly so. But nevertheless, Dr. Oz and I

00:26:03.980 had a nice little chat, was chatting with Peter Boghossian, who you may recall, I was actually on

00:26:09.160 his show, he did a little gag, which, well, not really a gag. It's like a thought experiment that

00:26:14.760 I hope to share some footage of when it is published, whenever that is. But I'm trying

00:26:20.680 to think of what else was going on today, because some people are just curious about the feeling in

00:26:24.640 the atmosphere. And I go back to the fact that it was hopeful, which is incredibly, incredibly

00:26:30.440 important, and I think probably unexpected, because we really didn't get the sense that

00:26:35.900 there was much to be hopeful about. Now, we did speak about Israel and Hamas with Andy Ngo. And

00:26:43.340 why this is a bit important, I will point out here that the dog whistles we've heard from people

00:26:51.260 on the pro-Hamas side or the anti-Israel side have become, in some cases, a lot less oblique,

00:26:59.260 a lot less subtle. People have been very explicit. I mean, when protesters chant from the river to

00:27:04.080 the sea. Palestine will be free. What they are saying is that they want Israel to be annihilated.

00:27:08.720 They want from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea to be all a Palestinian Muslim

00:27:14.380 land. When people talk about gas the Jews, there isn't really a hidden symbolism there. They're

00:27:19.960 saying they want to gas the Jews. But there are some coded words that you hear. And one that I

00:27:26.340 need to call out is the so-called ceasefire. This has become the rallying call of the left,

00:27:32.020 the NDP in Ontario, labor unions, leftist activists, they say, oh, ceasefire, ceasefire,

00:27:38.920 ceasefire, as though Israel is the problem and Israel needs to lay down its arms here.

00:27:44.620 That is the call we hear from people. Now, the one thing that I will point out here is that

00:27:50.000 ceasefire involves a two-way exchange of ceasing fire. Hamas is still holding more than 200

00:27:57.240 Israelis captive. They're still holding hostages. And Hamas has broken every ceasefire it's had

00:28:03.820 with Israel. Remember, there was a ceasefire in place until October 6th. And then on October 7th,

00:28:09.000 we know what happened. This is one clip which I need to share with you that has been making

00:28:15.380 the rounds here of a Hamas official on Lebanese television, Gazi Hamad.

00:28:27.240 And ...

00:28:57.240 out

00:29:00.100 relatively

00:29:04.720 .

00:29:18.600 .

00:29:19.260 .

00:29:20.120 .

00:29:20.180 .

00:29:20.600 .

00:29:20.620 .

00:29:22.760 It is justified.

00:29:36.640 If you don't speak Arabic and you're listening to the podcast and not watching where you'd

00:29:44.820 be able to see the captions, I'll tell you that he did all the greatest hits.

00:29:48.200 Literally called for Israel's annihilation, said we'll do this again and again,

00:29:52.620 over and over, we'll keep doing it, said that the people of Palestine are the victims here. So

00:29:58.480 everything they do is justified. And of course, you know, just to remind you the again and again

00:30:04.840 bit, that is not exactly the language of a group with whom you could have a meaningful and reliable

00:30:11.200 ceasefire. Yet I haven't seen that clip circulating among the same left-wing folks that have been so

00:30:17.180 keen to call for a ceasefire in the first place. And this is why a lot of them fundamentally

00:30:21.840 are not interested in peace, although they claim that. They are interested in peace

00:30:26.340 on Hamas terms, peace on Palestinian terms. And while it doesn't fit into the broader discussion

00:30:32.960 of wokeness that I was having on the show, I did want to take a bit of a stop and just talk about

00:30:38.200 Israel, because I ran into Dennis Prager, who's been one of the most consistent and clear voices

00:30:43.540 on Israel. Now, he's a Jewish man, a conservative lion in American media, but his stand for Israel

00:30:51.040 is not just because of his own Judaism. I spoke about that for a few minutes with him the other

00:30:55.940 day. Let me just first ask you, how would you rank the world's support of Israel right now,

00:31:02.100 left and right? I mean, in one sense, we see, you know, Democrats, Republicans,

00:31:05.920 liberals, conservatives saying the right things, but is it authentic in your view?

00:31:09.760 uh i i'm not a uh pursuer of the question is it authentic uh i i care how people act and speak

00:31:21.680 how authentic it is let god judge my i only care about what people do and what people say publicly

00:31:29.100 so if we live in a world where people feel

00:31:34.700 that they have to come out and support Israel, but they really don't believe it?

00:31:41.580 That's fine with me.

00:31:43.560 It's hard to imagine such a world.

00:31:46.740 Does everybody who supports Hamas, which is the same as saying I support the Palestinians right now,

00:31:54.440 are they mean it or are they just reflexively anti-West?

00:32:01.000 It doesn't matter.

00:32:02.540 It matters what you do.

00:32:04.700 So, as I said, I don't know about the authenticity issue.

00:32:09.300 I only care about the moral clarity issue.

00:32:13.840 If you can't say Hamas is evil and Israel is good relative to their enemy, your moral compass is broken.

00:32:23.600 Why is it that so many on the left have such difficulty with that?

00:32:27.020 I mean, you look at, you know, queers against Israeli apartheid being one of the most absurd examples of this.

00:32:32.280 people that would not be able to be who they are in Gaza, but are still believing that Israel is

00:32:37.480 the oppressor. I mean, how on earth do they reconcile that in your view? How do they reconcile

00:32:42.800 saying men give birth? How do they reconcile saying America is systemically racist? How do

00:32:48.600 they reconcile saying defund the police? The left is always wrong. That is a rule of life. It has

00:32:56.420 been true since vladimir lenin till till today not liberals liberals are wrong for voting for the

00:33:03.720 left but liberal values are the antithesis of left-wing values the left is always wrong and

00:33:09.560 all the touch everything it touches it destroys so when you ask how does a gay uh become pro

00:33:16.480 palestinian when they they might not live a week if they were openly gay in gaza whereas they'll

00:33:23.320 have a parade for them in Tel Aviv. It is not a matter of reconciling. They hate what is good.

00:33:32.220 All leftists hate what is good. They hate what is beautiful. They hate Shakespeare. I mean,

00:33:37.400 they hate. These are lost souls. Every civilization seems to produce some,

00:33:45.060 and they have unfortunately become dominant. Why is, just in closing, Israel so important,

00:33:52.460 and why should it be supported? Well, there are many separate issues here. Why should Taiwan be

00:34:00.500 supported, okay? Taiwan is not the cradle of Western civilization that Israel is. It all

00:34:07.820 comes from the Hebrew Bible, everything in the West. But I would be as adamant about supporting

00:34:15.880 Taiwan, to be perfectly honest. The idea that you don't support any other country until you're

00:34:24.680 invaded is not a moral position, in my opinion. You're the strongest country on earth and you

00:34:34.460 only protect yourself. You don't protect the little guy. But Israel is of incredible strategic

00:34:41.980 it comports to America. It is America's ally in the Middle East, a pretty important part of the

00:34:46.540 world. Plus, if you believe in values, that's the cradle of Judeo-Christian values. There's your

00:34:53.620 Judeo. I think that's pretty significant. That was American broadcaster, author, and Prager

00:35:02.440 you founder, as the name might suggest, Dennis Prager. He's actually fantastic. I interviewed

00:35:08.360 him a few years back when he was doing a big speech in canada very very gracious i i he was

00:35:14.340 like he acted as though he remembered me but i think he was just being very polite so he's you

00:35:17.940 know he's a good schmoozer but uh that was i think an important topic and it was interesting you know

00:35:23.000 the whole point of this forum and i'm gonna have some more interviews next week that i won't have

00:35:28.940 time to get all today uh just to kind of sprinkle it out but one of the things that was interesting

00:35:33.740 is it was about ideas more than it was about individual politics and individual policies.

00:35:40.080 And I had a lovely email from someone, if I can find it, I want to share from a listener who said,

00:35:46.140 just want to drop you a note to say that your ideas from the UK have been, in my view,

00:35:49.940 some of your best work or your recent broadcast from the UK. The guests have been compelling,

00:35:55.100 the subjects varied, and your questions have been very astute and germane. Oh, well, thank you,

00:35:59.380 you flatter me you have tended to concentrate on universal issues philosophies and ideals which

00:36:04.760 makes for deeper conversations and i there's more to the email i'm going to respond to the the

00:36:10.640 person directly after the show but i i quite enjoyed that because every now and then we get

00:36:15.600 so focused on the nitty-gritty we lose sight of the bigger picture and i i think politics uh is so

00:36:21.520 often important but often meaningless as well and i how do i square these two seemingly i'm being

00:36:27.720 like the leftists I talk about, saying things that are seemingly incompatible. And what I mean is

00:36:32.280 that politics matters. And I think politics is one of the most direct ways in which all of us

00:36:37.940 can make a difference. We go to the ballot box, we cast a ballot, and we, along with tens of

00:36:42.860 thousands of other people, elect a member of parliament who, along with 337 other people,

00:36:47.480 can vote on policy. So your fractional share of influence is very, very small. It's very,

00:36:55.220 very small. I mean, statistically speaking, most people, if they as individuals stayed home,

00:37:00.020 it would make no difference in what happens in the course of the country. But it's all of us

00:37:05.380 together doing that, that makes change. But at the same time, it's not the only thing we can do.

00:37:12.840 And I think people that focus only on politics are not really in the business of making change.

00:37:18.060 There was a time in which I stood for political office, and I thought that was a way I could

00:37:22.400 perhaps make some change. I know now that perhaps being in the Ontario legislature from 2018 to

00:37:28.280 2022 would not have been a period in which I probably would have been with my libertarian

00:37:32.900 bona fides particularly welcome. I maybe could have pushed back in some ways verbally, but I

00:37:39.080 wouldn't have been able to stop these things that I found so horrible. I like to think that on my

00:37:43.540 show, I was able to wield a bit more influence by talking about this, by telling the stories

00:37:47.880 of real people. And this is where we choose our battlefield. Do we want to battle on the floor of

00:37:54.680 the House of Commons or the legislature of our province? Do we want to battle in the marketplace

00:37:59.040 of ideas? Do we want to battle in the classroom? Do we want to battle in civil society in some

00:38:03.960 other way? And I do think that oftentimes, you know, this policy, oh, we're going to do tax

00:38:09.940 credits for parents to enroll their kids in sports programs. Well, that's a policy that means

00:38:15.780 something to people. It's a policy that may save people a couple hundred dollars a year,

00:38:20.260 even the carbon tax. It's a policy that means something to people. But does any of that matter

00:38:25.960 if the core foundations of our civilization are being eroded every single day?

00:38:34.720 And that's where I think you need to do both. And I think sometimes you need to get down to

00:38:38.900 the nitty gritty and sometimes you need to talk about the big ideas. So I really enjoyed being

00:38:43.060 able to do that this week. And I'm going to, I don't know if I want to say I'm going to make

00:38:47.020 this the big ideas forum on my show, but I would like to, if I take that email from that gentleman

00:38:52.780 to heart, find ways to incorporate at least every now and then some of these bigger ideas that

00:38:57.660 separate us from the day-to-day of politics. That's a bit of a, I don't know if it's a pledge

00:39:02.700 there, but I guess a bit of a thought there. Just before we wrap things up, we were going to be

00:39:07.120 talking about the Alberta election, or I guess more of the UCPAGM. The election's already come

00:39:13.160 and gone. This is quite a fascinating story. The United Conservative Party of Alberta is having its

00:39:18.220 AGM this weekend. I'm going to be there. So I'm actually like taking a bit of a detour on my way

00:39:23.080 back tomorrow. I'm flying to Calgary for the UCPAGM. And this is going to be fascinating because we

00:39:30.260 have a few resolutions that are up for debate that are dealing with some of the issues we've

00:39:34.880 talked about on this show, notably parental consent and gender stuff. But you have also

00:39:40.420 pushing 4,000 people, 4,000 people that are registered and will be attending this. Now,

00:39:47.320 that's largely due to the organizing work of Take Back Alberta. We were supposed to have

00:39:51.860 David Parker, who is the founder of that, but he has not dialed in for the interview. And I don't

00:39:57.800 think at this point we're going to be able to get him in time if he does. So it's unfortunate. I was

00:40:02.740 looking forward to speaking to David about this, but the folks in Alberta are going to have, it

00:40:09.240 looks like, the largest political party convention Alberta has ever seen. Now, why are people so

00:40:14.980 involved? Is it just because there was an organizing effort to get people in? Is it because they feel

00:40:20.180 they can wield some real influence in the UCP and by extension the Daniel Smith government? I don't

00:40:25.600 know, but that's going to be one of the things to talk about here. What has activated thousands of

00:40:31.960 people in Alberta to want to go to a political party convention where they have to spend money,

00:40:36.960 book a hotel when they could be doing anything else. And this is where I go back to what it is

00:40:42.200 that motivates people. I mean, hurting libertarians has got to be the most thankless task imaginable.

00:40:47.520 And the people in Alberta have had that happen. There was a mobilization effort to vote out Jason

00:40:53.180 Kenney, which was ultimately successful, a mobilization effort to elect Danielle Smith.

00:40:57.000 and now even though she's there there's an effort underway to make sure that party maintains its

00:41:03.180 grassroots mandate and doesn't become exactly what a lot of these critics thought and claimed

00:41:09.340 the Jason Kenney government had become certainly by the end of it so that's going to be something

00:41:13.940 we are keeping an eye out for tomorrow we'll have something very special for you I'll give

00:41:19.120 you more of an update on that it's going to be pre-recorded because I'll literally be in the air

00:41:22.620 during the showtime, and my last few attempts at using Air Canada Wi-Fi have not given me

00:41:27.800 confidence that I could, you know, live stream a show from wherever I am on the plane. So we will

00:41:33.160 find a way to bring you that, but it's going to be lots of fun, and then I'll have a full report

00:41:36.960 on the UCPA GM over the weekend, and a bit of a recap on Monday's show. So lots of good stuff,

00:41:43.120 as Justin Trudeau's team would have said back in the day, sunny ways ahead, except this time,

00:41:47.280 I mean it. And it's not Sunnyways on Justin Trudeau's terms. So with that, I will bid you

00:41:53.180 farewell. Thank you. God bless. And good day to you all. Thanks for listening to the Andrew

00:41:58.320 Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to TrueNorth at www.tnc.news.

00:42:17.280 We'll be right back.

00:42:47.280 We'll be right back.

Juno News - November 01, 2023

ARC Forum attendees reject wokism and Marxism

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