Central Park Karen Meets the Mob
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
38
sentences flagged
Hate speech
19
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show: Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, Andrew takes a look at the Central Park Karen video that went viral and has since been accused of being racist. Also, why you can't trust a new documentary about one of the most famous pro-life voices in American history.
Transcript
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This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, cancel culture comes for the so-called Central Park Karen,
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and why you can't trust a new documentary about one of the most famous pro-life voices in American history.
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Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of The Andrew Lawton Show,
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Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.
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Good to have you aboard the program once again.
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This is going to be a bit of an interesting show, I think,
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because I'm going to deviate from what we've been talking about for the last few weeks,
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and I'll actually say the last few months of just the pandemic and Canadian politics and all of this.
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But I want to start off by talking about this story that took place in Central Park on the weekend
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that is wrong for pretty much as many reasons as it's possible for a story to be wrong.
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And I don't mean that the reporting is wrong, although actually there is a bit of an issue there.
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But just everything that is exemplified in this is exactly what we need to be moving away from as a society.
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And it's a video of Amy Cooper, who is, or I suppose was, is a better way of putting it,
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an investment advisor of some kind for Franklin Templeton,
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who was out walking her dog, playing with her dog in this part of Central Park in New York City called The Ramble.
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And I've been to Central Park once, I've never been knowingly anyway to The Ramble,
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but apparently it's a well-known area and popular for people that want to walk their dogs,
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popular for people that want to go birdwatching, like Christian Cooper was, who has no relation to Amy Cooper.
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This is the video that has gone around the world, the video that's amassed millions of views,
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the video that has destroyed this woman's life and set a narrative about what happened that isn't entirely accurate.
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I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life.
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I'm sorry, I'm in the ramble, and there is a man, African-American, he has a bicycle helmet.
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He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.
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There is an African-American man, I am in Central Park.
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He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.
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So there's a lot that happens in that one minute and ten second video.
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We see a woman get increasingly agitated, a woman calling the police, accusing an African-American
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man of threatening her, a woman who at one point is choking her dog, not intentionally,
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but choking her dog as she tries to pull back, and a guy who is filming it, who we never actually
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He's gotten what he wanted out of that, which was video evidence of her doing whatever she
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So from that video, and from that video alone, Amy Cooper has been branded a racist.
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Her company actually tweeted out to this effect, following our internal review of the incident
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We have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately.
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We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton, and that is their pinned tweet and
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has, you know, something shy of 50,000 retweets at this point, and a narrative has been cemented.
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She's apologized profusely to Christian Cooper, to Christian Cooper's family.
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On Twitter, the video went viral, separate from it going viral on Christian's Facebook page,
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when Christian's sister, who's a TV writer, had tweeted it out.
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And she didn't just tweet out the video, she was also retweeting and amplifying all of the
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responses to the video that were calling for this woman to be fired, calling for her to
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be held accountable, and all of these other things.
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So what's happened here is a very quintessential example of social media shaming, of social
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media mobbing, where something happens, something's amplified, and what may start as an online thing
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becomes this thing that has very real-world consequences, not for all of the people involved,
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And that, in this case, is Amy Cooper, who, despite the fact that she apparently went to
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the University of Waterloo, she may or may not be Canadian, I don't know, I have no idea
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anything about her, I've never met her, I've never spoken to her, I know nothing about
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her except for the one minute and ten second video clip that I just played.
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Yet at the same time, I still feel for her, for reasons that I'm going to go through right
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now, that are partially personal, and partially about the story itself.
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And I want to look at the story itself here, because I don't want to say I got duped, because
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I'm always skeptical whenever I see videos like this, but I watched it, and I saw what everyone
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else saw, which is that here's a woman that seems to be willing to, I don't even know if
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it's invoking race because of anything other than she's just trying to describe a person,
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But a woman who is calling the police, basically trying to get them involved in something, because
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she doesn't like that she was told to put a leash on her dog.
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Christian Cooper was birdwatching, her dog was supposed to be leashed, he had said leash
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But then I saw his own Facebook page, where he actually admits to threatening her dog.
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And this part is not in any of the reporting I've seen, except for one story in the Daily
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The post is still up at the time that I'm recording this.
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And he includes a transcript, roughly, of what happened before he started rolling.
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And he says, ma'am, dogs in the ramble have to be on the leash at all times.
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And then he says, by his own admission, look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going
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to do what I want, but you're not going to like it.
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And then he says, I pull out the dog treats I carry for just for some intransigence.
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I didn't even get the chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab
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And then her inner Karen, as she's called, Central Park Karen, fully emerged.
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Now, I don't think we take from this that he is walking around with poison dog treats.
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But he seems to be making it out to be that he wanted her to think that.
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And that he wanted her to think that he was going to do something to harm her dog.
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But when the video goes with the narrative that was posted by the tweet that went viral,
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all that happened was he had said, hey, ma'am, would you put a leash on that dog, please?
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When there was some stuff that was left out there that even Christian Cooper himself
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So right there, you have a story that is different from the one that's emerging.
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Now, at the same time, I don't know, because we see her getting over agitated in the video
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For all I know, the guy is making faces, taunting her.
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Because even before I saw his Facebook post that made the situation a bit more complex
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than I thought it was from the video, I felt so terrible for this woman, even if she was
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And even if we were to say she's 100% in the wrong, because I have been through the social
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And I can tell you that regardless of your sins, no one deserves the disproportionate response
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that is being unleashed on this woman has been unleashed on countless other people before.
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It just doesn't line up and it doesn't make anyone's lives better.
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So this woman probably had a six-figure job, living in New York City, has a dog.
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She turned it back to the shelter from which she rescued it because everyone was accusing
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her of being a bad dog mother because she choked the dog on the video.
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Well, the fact is she was trying to keep the dog close to her.
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And the whole point of that is that it makes sense when you see the Facebook post from Christian
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Cooper that suggests he was threatening the dog or at least goading the dog.
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And the dog, of course, seeing the tension of the situation is trying to get away.
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She thankfully has a common enough name, Amy Cooper, because she'll be Google-able for the
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end of time as Central Park Karen the racist rather than a woman who has any other accomplishments
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in her life where she's a 40-something woman in New York City, has risen through the ranks.
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So this is a woman who has had immense accomplishments that are all going to be wiped out, at least
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for the foreseeable future, because she had a bad day.
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So I don't buy into the fact that we should define people by the very worst characteristics
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they embody or by a two-dimensional or one-dimensional caricature of themselves that might not even
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be reflective of real traits they have because all of us are flawed.
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And the fact that society now has this knee-jerk reaction to any situation where instead of having
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an honest-to-goodness human conversation with someone or maybe even accepting, you know
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what, you don't like me, I don't like you, we're going to go our separate ways, the only
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response that people have is phone in the face.
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No one talks to the restaurant manager anymore.
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No one brings something to the attention of the supervisor on duty.
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People just want to get everyone else to start adding gasoline to a fire because it's all
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about the competition for likes more than it's about actually working through any of
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So here's a guy who is birdwatching, by all accounts, minding his own business.
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Here's a woman that it sounds like at the very least was breaking the rule about leashing
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And in most cases, I'd say it wouldn't impact anyone else, except today was a bit different.
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So he could have just been the bigger man and said, walking, I'm going to walk away.
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She could have been the bigger woman and said, you're right.
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You know, normally there's no one around here, so I don't care, but you're here.
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That would have been the responsible, mature way for this to go.
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And when people get into those situations, they stop thinking rationally.
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There's a point in the video where she no longer seems to be in control.
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And in her case, instead of just going through it and then at the end being like, wow, I really
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It's now permanently encapsulated in the minds and in the internet until the rest of time.
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And the fact that people are cheering this, the fact that people are cheering this is the
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most sickening part of the social media mob because no one actually wants the proportionate
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No one says, no one wants her to be able to say, you know what?
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And when she was suspended, they wanted her fired.
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And now that she's fired, they want her to never work again.
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And if anyone, anyone in the world ever decides they're going to hire her, there are going
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to be people that are going to leap into gear and go full throttle and say, you should not
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It is not just about a slap on the wrist to punish you for whatever you did that might
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And if you think I'm exaggerating, just look around.
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Look around at all the people that have gone through this.
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I mean, she was the big one, the woman who, you know, cracked a couple of jokes on Twitter
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And by the time she landed, her life was destroyed.
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Now, Justine Sacco has thankfully rebuilt a lot of that.
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She's got a job working in PR again, but it took a lot of time to get there.
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And a lot of people don't have that opportunity to jump back into it.
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You look at the Des Moines Register case, this guy who was raising a lot of money for charity
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and working with, I think it was Anheuser-Busch.
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And then what happens is someone finds that when he was a teenager, he made a tweet that
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And then all of a sudden, all the good that he's done is wiped out.
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The reporter who unearthed it had made his own offensive tweet.
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So then the reporter who unearthed this was canceled as well.
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And that was probably the most apt analysis of what can happen here, because it proves
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So the person who is supposedly the savior of all this, who's showcasing everyone else's
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wrongdoing, they're typically not able to live by the rules that they're setting out
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So I have no interest in destroying the lives of Christian Cooper or his sister, Melody Cooper.
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I have no interest in going back through their tweets and seeing if they posted something
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But I do think that even if in that first moment, that first moment, Christian Cooper,
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who wanted to birdwatch, was in the right by saying to Amy Cooper, you've got to lease
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your dog, the fact that these two have now tried to not just get the situation resolved.
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And that's where correcting something becomes mobbing when it isn't actually about that imminent
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So let's say you have an issue at a store and you think the store owes you a refund.
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The punitive approach, which is where the social media mob takes things, is get the store
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to declare bankruptcy, make sure no one shops there ever again, get corporate to come down
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and take the franchise, get the owner to never be able to own something else again.
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And the fact that the mob continues this way is, I think, important.
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It's not like the criminal code says, you know, this is the crime, this is the penalty.
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No, it's about maximum damage, maximum damage, no matter the cost, no matter the collateral
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damage, and no matter how many other people are involved with it.
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So all of the people that were a part of this, that were lobbing grenades at Amy Cooper,
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I mean, sure, Christian Cooper might be able to say, oh, you know what?
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He's been vindicated because everyone agreed with him.
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But, you know, if it was actually just about the collateral, or not the collateral, it
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was actually just about that imminent short-term issue, he filmed fine.
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If the police do come and they say, well, this woman said that you were threatening her
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life, and he says, well, I actually have this video.
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And this is not just about this case, by the way, but right now you have to point out that
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this woman has found herself in the middle of a culture war that, knowing nothing about
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her, she may or may not have had anything to do with in her life up until this point.
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Because now she's, you know, a symbol of the race relations problem in the United States.
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People are comparing her to the woman who had Emmett Till Lynch.
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People are comparing her to the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery, and I think it was South Carolina
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And there are channels you have to go through if you want real results.
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So for starters, yes, this case is not as simple as it is made out to be.
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I'm not convinced that Christian Cooper is as lily clean as he may think he is because
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of his own admission that he was threatening the dog.
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But the other side of that is that even if it was, even if this woman was wrong, and this
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woman was entirely off base and offside and didn't do anything right, is what she's going
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Does anyone deserve this for reacting in a moment in a way that is not appropriate?
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And if you think that, my goodness, how wonderful it must be to be as perfect as you.
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And there are lots of people like this, by the way, that say, oh, well, you know, if she
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As though everyone is in control of themselves 100% of the time, as though no one errs, no
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one messes up, no one makes these mistakes, and that we are all supposed to, from our little
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keyboards, look at the world around us and say, oh, well, you know, that was wrong.
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And I can say that because I'm here on this side of the computer, and it's a one-way street.
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You know how in criminal justice you have the right to face your accuser?
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Yeah, it doesn't work that way when you've got a million anonymous keyboard trolls who
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remain able to go through their lives, and one person whose entire life is under scrutiny
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Global News did a story about her where they had, like, reached out for comment about whether
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And even when she, by the way, pointed out that her life was being ruined in an interview,
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and I mean, power to her for trying to nip this in the bud, the headline in one particular
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case from the UK Sun, Amy Cooper whines, her life is being destroyed.
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So the idea that she's now become a part of this Karen meme, I mean, may seem like a punchline
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to a lot of people, but it goes beyond the Karen part of this.
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I mean, Central Park Karen, fine, maybe a fun meme, but this is not staying on the internet.
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We're talking about someone who is a human being, flawed or not, in the wrong or not,
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is now going to suffer for a much longer period of time than most people in the world have
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suffered for their mistakes and have paid for their mistakes.
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And think of the worst things you've ever done, the most embarrassing things you've ever
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done. And I bet you're pretty grateful there was no one with a cell phone camera in your face
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in those moments. And my goodness, people need to have a lot more perspective than they do
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on these sorts of things. And I stress the point that I made earlier, that no one is left standing
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at the end of this. Back in a moment with more of The Andrew Lawton Show.
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Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show. I said I wasn't going to be talking about COVID-19. I
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didn't mean it at all. I just meant I wasn't going to be making it the focal point of the show because
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I have to jump on this story from the Jerusalem Post, which part of me finds to be baffling. And
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then the other part of me was said, yeah, maybe it's not all that surprising after all.
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One in five English people believe coronavirus is a Jewish conspiracy, according to a survey.
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The story points that it's a University of Oxford survey. One in five Brits think that
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Jews created COVID-19 to collapse the economy for financial gain. So it's like they have a very
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specific reason for thinking it. It's not just a Jewish conspiracy. It's that, you know, Jewish
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conspiracy to reap profits from it all. The finding came as part of a wider survey, the story says,
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attitudes towards the virus and the measures taken to prevent it. They found that there was
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an undercurrent of mistrust over official advice on the virus within the public. But increasingly,
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the conspiracy beliefs forming have become greater. And this is weird because I've gotten a few
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conspiracy theories throughout this. The one that we talked about a couple of months back was that
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Trudeau was under house arrest. And that's why he was doing his briefings from Rideau Cottage because
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he had an ankle bracelet. The other conspiracy that I got was that somehow 5G networks were involved in
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coronavirus. And this one I find weird because like 5G with Huawei is problematic for reasons to do
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with Huawei. We don't need to add a different layer to it. It can just be bad on its own. So I don't feel
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that we need to have convergence. And then now we have the story that the Jews are behind COVID-19.
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But interestingly enough, this is not a radically new belief system. I said a couple of weeks back
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that the Iranian Ayatollahs were pushing this. Iran was saying that the Jews were behind COVID-19.
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And I don't know if it's behind the virus itself or just making it seem like the virus is a threat.
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I don't know how sinister we're supposed to believe that the Zionist virus unleashers are here.
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But Iran is now peddling this dangerously anti-Semitic misinformation to such a point
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that 20% of people in England are buying into it. And I don't know, by the way, I'd be interested
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in seeing the survey here if it was multiple choice and they were being given this option
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by the Oxford researchers or if the people volunteered it themselves. This is actually a
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really important question that I haven't been able to find the answer to. Are the Oxford researchers
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saying, so, you know, tell us what you think about it? And someone says, well, you know,
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I think the Jews are behind it. Or are they giving them the option? Because that tends to skew things.
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It's like, OK, do you believe COVID-19 is the responsibility of, you know, 5G, of America,
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of ISIS, of Jews? Yes. OK, we'll check off the Jews then. So that's the thing is like,
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because some people, I'm sure, are just having a bit of a lark. They're at home and a researcher
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calls them and they're bored because they've been in lockdown for two months. And that's certainly
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one possibility is they say, oh, yeah, yeah, we'll go with that one. But, you know, if it is real
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and if it is verifiable, these data, it's actually very dangerous because the rise of anti-Semitism
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in Europe has been responsible for monumental issues. You look at the fact that Jeremy Corbyn,
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for example, who was the former Labour leader, was a fairly unrepentant, I'll say anti-Semi. I mean,
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he was an anti-Semite. He is an anti-Semite or at the very least he's comfortable running a party
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at the time that was of anti-Semites. And Labour, since Corbyn, has had to really hone this in a bit.
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And the replacement had actually issued an apology on behalf of Labour to the Jewish people and said,
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listen, I mean, we need to do better here. But in mainstream UK, you have a lot of anti-Semitism
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and anti-Semitic beliefs. And this lets a lot of these anti-Semitic tropes and punchlines really
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prosper. And I don't know the reason for it. I think that, you know, immigration is part of it.
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You have, I mean, as part of the EU, you've got people from parts of the world where anti-Jewish
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conspiracy theories are pretty common that are, you know, loading up in England and the population
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dynamics change. But you also have the fact that there seems to be this social acceptability
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to be an anti-Semite that isn't there for attacks on other groups. And this is so horrific because
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Holocaust indifference is becoming a big issue. And as a result, Holocaust denial is becoming a big
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issue. And I spent a lot of time on two separate occasions at Yad Vashem, which is the Israeli
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Holocaust Center. It's a campus, a museum. It does a lot of amazing work. And the one thing that was
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challenging is that they're finding that a lot of young, even Jews, young Jewish teenagers
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are just so tired of hearing of the Holocaust. They're like, yeah, I know it's terrible. I don't
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really care. But there isn't that identity that is shared with it like there used to be where people
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said, yeah, you know, it's important for us to survive and thrive as people because we had this
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thing two generations away. Well, now the Holocaust is three generations away. There are fewer people that
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have that firsthand knowledge and experience with it to share with their families. So as a result,
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the younger generation of Jewish people, there are a lot of issues in getting them to care about it.
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And as a result, getting them to care about anti-Semitism, realizing what happens when you
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allow anti-Semitism on a mass scale to spread. So I can laugh at this in a way, but at the same time,
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there's a very serious undertone and undercurrent to this that needs to be pushed back against.
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And we're going to be talking about, we're talking with Jonathan Van Maren about a really
00:25:59.140
interesting story that is, again, a case of two sides and perhaps a truth in the middle there,
00:26:05.160
but not letting the narrative that you read first being the one that you hold to.
00:26:09.780
But also, I want to just mention very briefly, as everyone finds their way to cope with being
00:26:14.840
in lockdown, there is a guy who has been getting YouTube famous, which is real fame or not,
00:26:21.620
I don't know. But YouTube famous doing Sudoku puzzles online. He's become a YouTube sensation.
00:26:29.140
His name is Simon Anthony. He quit his job at an investment bank to start doing Sudokus on YouTube.
00:26:37.040
And now his stuff has, you know, just gone absolutely viral. He did one Sudoku called
00:26:42.140
the Miracle Sudoku, where he started with only two numbers, a one in that little box there,
00:26:47.960
you can see on the left and a two in the box on the right. Thought it was ridiculous. But after 25
00:26:53.040
minutes, and I don't know if it was like, if it's 25 minutes, or if that was an abridged version,
00:26:58.020
but after 25 minutes, he was able to do it. So, so good on him. And for me, like, I thought the whole
00:27:03.740
point of Sudoku is that you could just do it yourself. I didn't realize that it was a spectator
00:27:07.580
sport. But I guess people are so bored with themselves that they'll watch other people doing
00:27:11.580
things rather than doing them themselves. We've got to take a quick break. When we come back,
00:27:16.100
we'll talk to Jonathan Van Meren here on the Andrew Lawton Show. Stay tuned.
00:27:27.880
Welcome back to the Andrew Lawton Show. Well, Jane Rowe is probably the most famous name
00:27:33.280
attached to abortion rights in the United States and around the world. And Jane Rowe's real name,
00:27:39.220
Norma McCorvey, became probably one of the most well-known pro-life voices in America for the last
00:27:45.600
several decades. And now a documentary is trying to put forward a different view that Norma McCorvey,
0.95
00:27:51.460
aka Jane Rowe, was actually just making a financial calculation. She was just saying pro-life talking
00:27:57.780
points for money and that she wasn't actually that. And this is something that, of course, has
00:28:02.020
been jumped on by a lot of activists to say that the pro-life movement's a fraud, the religious
00:28:06.880
rights a fraud. But it doesn't seem like the documentary is actually something that can
00:28:12.280
necessarily be taken at face value. I want to play a clip from this FX documentary,
00:28:18.640
Deathbed Confession Highlight, of Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Rowe.
00:28:28.560
Do you think they would say that you used them?
00:28:39.720
Well, I think it was a mutual thing. You know, I took their money and they put me out in front
00:28:45.280
of the cameras and told me what to say. And that's what I'd say.
00:28:48.100
Wow. I took their money and they put me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say.
00:29:09.040
We've gathered here today to pay homage to the children that are being aborted in this
00:29:21.780
abortuary. We're doing this because abortion is wrong. And I, as the former Jane Rowe of
00:29:31.720
Roe versus Wade, do regret signing the affidavit for the pro-abortion camps. That was probably about
00:29:41.680
it. It was all an act. Yeah. I did it well too. I am a good actress. Of course, I'm not acting now.
00:29:52.780
So she says there she's a good actress, but she's not acting now when she says that
00:29:57.480
this was all essentially just a big sham. Jonathan Van Maron, pro-life activist, author,
00:30:03.280
publisher, and editor of The Bridgehead has said that the documentary is painting a picture that
00:30:08.020
isn't necessarily accurate. People that were very close to Norma McCorvey right up until her last
00:30:13.200
day alive, she passed away in 2017, tell a very different story and their voices are not included
00:30:18.880
in the documentary. He's written two great pieces on this, one in Christianity Today and another in
00:30:25.080
the American Conservative, both tackling different aspects of this. Jonathan, good to have you back
00:30:29.460
on the show. Thanks for coming on today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Andrew. So let's start first
00:30:34.120
off with Norma McCorvey's role in the pro-life movement because Jane Rowe, Roe v. Wade, still years
1.00
00:30:40.600
after the decision is really just a cornerstone of the American political discussion. How big a player
00:30:46.940
was she in the pro-life movement after her conversion to Christianity and after she, so to speak,
00:30:53.000
flipped sides to being pro-life? Well, she was, she was, I think, I think one of the reasons her
00:30:59.700
story is so potent is that she was a symbol. So she came out actually in 1994 and wrote a book
00:31:05.600
called I Am Roe. And that book detailed her role in the Roe v. Wade case, which as most of your
00:31:13.200
listeners and viewers will know, got passed down on January 22, 1973. And at this point, when this book
00:31:19.300
got published, she and her then lesbian partner, Connie Gonzalez, were actually working at an
00:31:24.360
abortion clinic and Operation Rescue moved next door to the abortion clinic. And the head of
00:31:29.200
Operation Rescue at the time was a man named Flip Benham. He was a pastor, a former alcoholic,
00:31:33.940
and he befriended her while she was on her smoke breaks. And eventually throughout those conversations,
00:31:40.060
she became pro-life. She came over to his side of the question. And then the big famous switch was
00:31:44.720
when she was baptized in his backyard pool. And that baptism was broadcast for national television.
00:31:50.240
And only three years after her book, I Am Roe, she wrote a second book called One by Love,
00:31:55.160
which was sort of the addendum to her original memoir about how Jane Roe had switched sides.
00:32:00.280
And so she was very well known, I remember as a kid reading her book, and Nora McCorvey was Jane
00:32:06.100
Roe to a lot of pro-life people because Roe v. Wade is still the decision driving almost all of
00:32:12.020
American politics. You could make the case that Roe v. Wade is the reason Donald Trump got elected.
00:32:17.940
When you look at those final few moments that she had alive, one of the conversations she had was
00:32:25.300
with a spiritual mentor and a friend of hers who, in your view and in your telling in your columns here,
00:32:31.540
said that she was still the same person she always was. There was no flip back to being pro-choice,
00:32:36.960
Well, so the interesting thing, I think, about the AKA Jane Roe is I was suspicious right away when the trailer
00:32:43.880
got released, simply because none of her close friends were interviewed in this documentary.
00:32:49.400
So if you've got, you're a journalist, Andrew, so you know this, when you're really trying to uncover
00:32:53.560
a full story and all of its complexities, you talk to all the different people that somebody knows
00:32:58.300
to try and get a real sense of who they were and what their mindset was.
00:33:02.480
And they call the documentary her deathbed confession. It's sort of this throwaway line she gives with a chuckle.
00:33:08.120
You saw that in the trailer there. But it actually wasn't her deathbed confession because the people who were there
00:33:13.580
at her actual deathbed tell a different story. She told Janet Morano of Priests for Life hours before she died
00:33:19.940
that she wanted Janet to continue to fight for the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
00:33:23.080
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, who was her spiritual advisor, spoke to her hours before she passed away.
00:33:28.720
Karen Garnett, who was her friend for 22 years, spoke with her as well just a couple of hours before she passed away.
00:33:35.640
I think the producer Nick Sweeney, who did the interviews with her, I think the big coup that he pulled off
00:33:41.520
was getting the entire mainstream media to run with the whole she got paid to change her mind line
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00:33:47.360
long before the documentary came out. Because that narrative is sort of solidified, even though when you watch
00:33:53.220
the documentary, which I did on Friday night, she never at any point actually says that she was paid to change her mind.
00:33:59.320
And any idiot knows that there's a big difference between being paid to change your mind
00:34:04.480
and being paid to advocate for a specific position, which she absolutely was.
0.84
00:34:08.640
You've gotten paid to do speaking. I've gotten paid to do speaking.
00:34:11.940
It's called an honorarium. And surely Nick Sweeney knew this.
00:34:14.700
He just wanted the line to be, Jane Roe got paid to become pro-life, therefore the pro-life movement's a sham.
00:34:20.540
Is there not still some truth to the idea that even if she was getting paid for a speaking fee,
00:34:25.860
which is a pretty common practice in the pro-life community and in other political movements,
00:34:30.400
that being pro-life still afforded her a lifestyle and that there still may have been a financial motivation
00:34:41.120
Well, so that's sort of the interesting thing. Not really.
00:34:43.840
If you look at what their evidence was, when they said that he had found all of these documents that proven she'd gotten paid off,
00:34:51.580
the number that was quoted in the Daily Beast and the LA Times was roughly $430,000 over 21, 22 years.
00:35:00.180
By the way, over that period of time is not a huge sum of money.
00:35:07.840
I know pro-life speakers who make that much in a single speech.
00:35:13.540
So this is a very small amount of money to anybody familiar with the landscape of the movement we're talking about.
00:35:18.840
And the other thing that gets left out is this money was paid to her ministry, Roe No More Ministries.
00:35:25.040
They were donations to a ministry that she ran, and those donations were actually made to that ministry
00:35:31.100
so that she could stay in Texas because she didn't like traveling.
00:35:37.000
And so the whole idea that she was paid was—I was relieved when I saw the documentary.
00:35:42.200
I was like, does this guy have evidence that people were bribing her to hold her position?
00:35:47.300
You just never know what sort of bombshell is going to come out.
00:35:50.220
So all of her friends—I've got a few more interviews coming out this week—said she was very volatile.
00:35:58.240
She got paid to show up in this documentary, ironically, while he's accusing the pro-life movement of paying her off.
00:36:04.080
He paid her to show up in this film, a.k.a. Jane Roe.
00:36:07.680
But the documents he shows in the documentary are 990 forms for a pro-life ministry, right?
00:36:16.200
And if we're going to start calling donations to a pro-life nonprofit bribing,
00:36:20.260
then we're all—anybody who works for a pro-life organization is being bribed to hold that position.
00:36:24.620
So all of that was just a total nothing burger.
00:36:31.380
And what she got paid was very low compared to what other pro-life speakers get.
00:36:37.320
The final point I'll make on that is can you imagine what documentary they would have made
00:36:41.020
if they said the pro-life movement exploited Norma McCorvey
00:36:44.220
because they had her give all these speeches and they didn't even give her an honorarium, right?
00:36:48.300
This was a—he was going to have a narrative that she got exploited
00:36:51.920
regardless of whether she got paid or if she didn't get paid.
00:36:55.620
That whole side of things is kind of a joke once you see the film.
00:36:58.940
So I know it's a bit of an unrelated point here,
00:37:01.280
but I think that one of the bigger problems that I have
00:37:03.660
is that a lot of people tend to take documentaries as being gospel
00:37:07.380
and complete, you know, non-fiction without any bias, without any ulterior motives.
00:37:14.080
Like Tiger King tells us, you know, people just put characters in
00:37:17.260
and form a narrative that's going to make for a good story.
00:37:19.700
And in this case, there's clearly an agenda there.
00:37:22.560
But at the same time, whatever the bias of the documentarian is,
00:37:25.740
the bias of the producer, the bias of the mainstream media,
00:37:28.620
she still said those words that, you know, it was all an act,
00:37:32.180
that she's a good actress, that she's not acting now.
00:37:34.320
So how do you reconcile what these friends of hers that you've talked to have said
00:37:37.920
with her saying pretty clearly in her own words,
00:37:41.840
whatever led to that point that, yeah, she was acting, but she's not now?
00:37:46.080
Well, it's so funny that you put it that way when you sit in her own words.
00:37:49.420
When you watch the documentary, they're having a discussion
00:37:51.440
about how she got paid to say stuff for the camera.
00:37:53.420
So she had this like stump speech, like many speakers do.
00:37:56.780
And of course, hers was, I was Roe, I am Roe no more.
00:38:00.720
And she was talking about how they would put her out in front of the cameras
00:38:06.280
And then the documentary filmmaker actually asks her,
00:38:12.060
And she says yes, in reference to her speaking in front of the cameras.
00:38:15.800
I know pro-life speakers who have been getting the same speech for 20 years, right?
00:38:19.660
They're not speaking with the same passion infused into their voice.
00:38:25.440
And it's interesting that that was in her own words.
00:38:32.020
And then she said, yes, I'm a great actress, but I'm not acting now.
00:38:37.660
There's a bunch of instances in which these quotes are sort of pulled out of context.
00:38:44.660
She said I was acting when I was in front of the cameras, which many people are.
00:38:49.360
But there's a quote towards the end of the film as well,
00:38:51.080
where they play a clip from a former pro-life activist turned pro-choicer, Rob Schenck,
00:38:57.520
where he says, you know, I think that we kind of used her.
00:39:00.220
Rob Schenck's former friends say he speaks only for himself.
00:39:03.220
And then they put a quote from Norma right in the middle where she says these guys are all assholes.
00:39:08.080
And they think, you know, God sent them to save the world.
00:39:10.820
But you're not actually told who she's referring to.
00:39:15.800
So you don't even know which people she thinks are assholes because, yeah,
00:39:19.400
there were people in the pro-life movement that she absolutely thought were terrible.
00:39:22.860
There were people that she really couldn't stand.
00:39:24.900
And then there were the people that she wanted to speak with hours before she passed.
00:39:28.960
So all of the major quotes are kind of presented almost totally without context.
00:39:33.880
At the end of the documentary, for example, she's shown hating Donald Trump
00:39:39.840
I talked to several of her friends, and none of them are surprised.
00:39:42.200
They said, look, a lot of pro-lifers are ambivalent about Trump.
00:39:44.680
And a lot of people said he's the kind of guy who gets women abortions.
00:39:54.780
Even the quote where they say, where she says, and pardon my language,
00:39:58.360
you can bleep me if you need to, but just quote directly,
00:40:00.760
that if a woman has an abortion, you know, it's no skin off my ass.
0.94
00:40:07.660
And one of the reasons that makes me suspicious as to what the question was,
00:40:11.440
I guess she could just be describing what is simply true.
00:40:20.020
Why am I still passionate about this issue, right?
00:40:22.300
Is the fact that he didn't give you the questions and you didn't give the context.
00:40:25.220
If there was more there, there, it would have shown up in the film.
00:40:28.480
But I really do think his biggest coup was getting three or four quotes
00:40:35.300
When in a two hour film, there's maybe 15 minutes of new material.
00:40:38.840
Most of it's just old interviews and old footage.
00:40:43.220
Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point.
00:40:45.740
And the one thing I would also add to that is that it's telling that sometimes you see
00:40:52.700
And there's always, I think, a question that a viewer has to inject into that,
00:40:56.760
which is why are you not showing us in this particular case?
00:41:01.800
Whereas at this other point, you showed us a longer response.
00:41:04.360
And that's where that grain of salt or 10 gallon barrels of salt need to be deployed here.
00:41:10.800
I guess what I would ask is what her motivation would have been for participating in this?
00:41:16.080
Because you've said that she wasn't a fan of the traveling and the speaking and whatnot.
00:41:20.960
So why, if she was in her dying years, would she go down this road,
00:41:24.920
regardless of whether or not she knew the agenda of the film or the documentary?
00:41:29.580
Well, there's a couple of answers to that question.
00:41:31.660
And I'll give you a little bit of a scoop here in a minute.
00:41:38.020
And she usually asked for money in exchange, especially towards the end of her life.
00:41:41.100
Despite the claims of massive bribes, she didn't have a whole lot of money.
00:41:44.060
And she was taken in for over a year by a kindly pro-life lady in Dallas when she just needed a place to stay.
1.00
00:41:51.540
She texted back and forth with Father Frank Bavone, who released those text messages when Nick Sweeney showed up.
00:41:57.460
And she was doing the documentary where she said,
00:41:59.200
I'm doing some interviews for a documentary, hoping to make a few bucks.
00:42:01.960
She actually said that she was doing it for money.
0.67
00:42:04.620
What hasn't been reported on yet, and I got this from her friend Karen Garnett,
00:42:08.440
who was quoted in both of the articles that I wrote that you referred to.
00:42:10.780
She mentioned that by the time Nick Sweeney showed up on the scene, she'd been in and out of the hospital already 11 times.
00:42:19.020
And the doctor told her her lungs were black and hardened, that she could not smoke cigarettes or it could kill her.
00:42:26.680
And what Karen Garnett told me in an on-the-record interview is that Nick Sweeney would take her out and give her cigarettes.
00:42:36.040
She would be messaging her friends, like, can you at least get me an electronic cigarette?
00:42:39.260
She was a lifelong heavy smoker from a very young age.
00:42:41.740
And this producer was giving her cigarettes, even though the doctor said it could kill her.
00:42:46.260
So she said she wanted to make some bucks.
0.92
00:42:49.180
So I don't know what the amount that exchanged hands was, but that's one motivation.
00:42:52.920
Two, she says almost in the first 50 minutes of the documentary, she said, I really like attention.
00:42:58.840
Right. So that's that. Well, that was another motivation for wanting to do the documentary.
00:43:05.540
The first thing I did when I found out about this film coming out is I Googled to find out what his previous film projects had been.
00:43:17.280
And then there was a third one, I believe, also on on an LGBT related issue.
00:43:22.300
So he was obviously coming to this with with with with a motivation right off the bat.
00:43:25.940
And also it's just, again, important to recognize the context of when he showed up.
00:43:30.840
Now, just as an addendum there, she does have a biographer, Josh Prager, who's been working on a book on her for ages and did say that she was very conflicted about some things towards the end of her life.
00:43:41.660
She did feel that there were some pro-lifers who exploited her, which two of her friends told me as well.
00:43:45.920
And I quote them in my Christianity Today article.
00:43:47.760
But he said that she did say some interesting things that she struggled with about the abortion issue.
00:43:56.080
But if there is a bombshell there, if there were some things she struggled with, Nick Sweeney didn't get it and it didn't show up in the documentary.
00:44:03.640
So if there was if there is a real scoop about something that she thought towards the end of her life that she shared with nobody,
00:44:08.660
Josh Prager got that story and we'll be learning about that next year.
00:44:14.020
The documentary was really a well edited nothing burger.
00:44:17.940
Let me ask you about her reliability as a spokesperson, because this was actually a point that came out in the documentary about how she wasn't the perfect spokesperson for the pro-choice movement.
00:44:29.020
She didn't have all of the checkboxes they would have loved to have had.
00:44:32.580
And I'd say the same is probably true on the pro-life side.
00:44:35.280
I mean, had she not been Jane Rowe, I don't think there would have been much of a role that she could have played.
00:44:41.400
Now, admittedly, that's a big if, but but if she hadn't been, I mean, that that was her role is that chapter of her life where she was Jane Rowe.
00:44:48.000
And it doesn't sound like she didn't go through and you acknowledge this her life without a lot of struggles right up until the end.
00:44:55.520
Yeah. Well, so just to give you a little bit of context, right.
00:44:58.040
By the age of 22, she had been sexually abused by a relative.
00:45:02.100
She'd been beaten by her husband and then divorced.
00:45:07.400
She was also she also done a five year stint in reform school in Texas where she had also been sexually abused.
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00:45:12.940
By age 22, she was a deeply hurting and a deeply broken person in many ways.
00:45:18.480
People like that generally don't make reliable spokespeople.
00:45:21.500
And in fact, the reason the pro-choice movement didn't want her as a spokesperson, this is where you can't really blame them, is that one of her one of her major interviews that got arranged.
00:45:29.100
She admitted that she lied when she said the pregnancy that formed the basis of the road case was through rape.
00:45:34.240
And they felt that confirmed that she was very volatile, that it made them look like like they'd been lying all along.
00:45:43.080
It's interesting you bring up her reliability because three separate people without having communicated with each other that I interviewed back to back all said the biggest the biggest reason, you know, that Rob Shank on this film in this film.
00:45:58.980
He was the former pro-life fellow was full of it.
00:46:01.180
And the narrative was wrong is that you couldn't coach Norma McCorvey to say anything.
00:46:06.380
They said, you know what, if we could have coached her to say certain things and to stick to her stump speech, we would have.
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00:46:10.960
But when you invited Norma McCorvey to show up and you handed her a mic, she was going to say what Norma felt like saying.
00:46:15.940
When she went on TV, she was going to say exactly what she felt like saying.
00:46:18.980
And to give you a prime example, one of the first times she went on TV after her pro-life conversion, she hadn't really thought all of the details through yet.
00:46:26.800
They asked her if she was okay with abortion in the case of rape.
00:46:30.780
She didn't even fully understand the pro-life position at that point.
00:46:36.200
So if she was this sort of groomed and coached speaker, she would not have been going on TV and saying, actually, I support abortion in these particular circumstances.
00:46:45.400
So her friends were pretty upfront and basically said, like, look, if we could have coached her, we would have.
00:46:52.400
Norma was Norma, and you took what you could get.
00:46:57.060
And everybody said that her sense of humor was just uproarious but also extremely irreverent.
0.84
00:47:02.560
She really did not fit the mold of, you know, a Christian inspirational speaker.
00:47:06.620
You know the type that I'm talking about, right?
00:47:09.680
They have no pictures on Facebook of them having a beer.
00:47:15.620
And the pro-life movement left it, and the pro-life movement loved her for who she was.
00:47:20.780
You know, I'm assuming the timing of this is to coincide with the upcoming election, caste conservatives and the religious right and the pro-life movement in a bad light.
00:47:29.700
But the fact is, we're talking about three and a half years after this woman passed away.
00:47:42.200
Look, it's no accident that FX Hulu is the one that released this documentary.
00:47:47.040
Some of your viewers might know this, but they also recently released an ongoing miniseries called Mrs. America on Phyllis Schlafly, who was also a pro-life activist who took on the Equal Rights Amendment and won.
00:47:56.580
And the things they say about her are just horrifying, and things that they could not say if she was still alive.
00:48:04.020
Like, Phyllis would have sued them into the ground if they said this while she was alive, but now she's been gone for two years, and now they can sort of say whatever they want.
00:48:11.160
I think that one of the political ramifications that's very interesting here is that in the mid-2000s, Norma McCorvey actually sued to have Roe v. Wade overturned based on new evidence that abortion hurts women.
00:48:23.080
Evidence in her deposition, in her Supreme Court filing, is actually being used right now in another pro-life case that's winding its way up to the Supreme Court.
00:48:33.140
So there is some suspicion that this documentary, if you can undermine Norma McCorvey's sincerity, then you can undermine the evidence that is still currently in play in a very important pro-life case.
00:48:43.200
The same way that FX Hulu released a series trying to claim all sorts of horrifying things about Phyllis Schlafly, like she was a racist, etc., etc., just as the Equal Rights Amendment is on the Biden platform.
00:48:54.880
The issues that Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey, Phyllis Schlafly, the issues that they were involved in, their lives revolved around, are very much in play, in some cases back in play.
00:49:06.000
And yeah, I think that these documentaries are getting this much traction because they're still considered to be politically relevant in the moment.
00:49:12.520
It's not just a trip through, you know, the 1990s pro-life movement and all the craziness of Operation Rescue.
00:49:20.700
Jonathan Van Maran, author of The Culture War, publisher of The Bridgehead.
00:49:31.740
We'll be back next week with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show, The Andrew Lawton Show, here on True North.
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