Juno News - Central Park Karen Meets the Mob

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:06.760 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:12.940 Coming up, cancel culture comes for the so-called Central Park Karen, 0.99

00:00:17.300 anti-Semitism and COVID-19 converge,

00:00:20.020 and why you can't trust a new documentary about one of the most famous pro-life voices in American history.

00:00:25.280 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.

00:00:34.480 Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of The Andrew Lawton Show,

00:00:38.260 Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.

00:00:41.200 Good to have you aboard the program once again.

00:00:44.540 This is going to be a bit of an interesting show, I think,

00:00:48.860 because I'm going to deviate from what we've been talking about for the last few weeks,

00:00:53.060 and I'll actually say the last few months of just the pandemic and Canadian politics and all of this.

00:00:58.420 I'm sure we might get to a bit of it.

00:01:00.160 But I want to start off by talking about this story that took place in Central Park on the weekend

00:01:05.580 that is wrong for pretty much as many reasons as it's possible for a story to be wrong.

00:01:12.620 And I don't mean that the reporting is wrong, although actually there is a bit of an issue there.

00:01:16.820 But just everything that is exemplified in this is exactly what we need to be moving away from as a society.

00:01:25.380 And it's a video of Amy Cooper, who is, or I suppose was, is a better way of putting it,

00:01:31.080 an investment advisor of some kind for Franklin Templeton,

00:01:34.760 who was out walking her dog, playing with her dog in this part of Central Park in New York City called The Ramble.

00:01:41.560 And I've been to Central Park once, I've never been knowingly anyway to The Ramble,

00:01:46.080 but apparently it's a well-known area and popular for people that want to walk their dogs,

00:01:50.640 popular for people that want to go birdwatching, like Christian Cooper was, who has no relation to Amy Cooper.

00:01:57.180 Now, I'll start with the video itself.

00:01:59.520 This is the video that has gone around the world, the video that's amassed millions of views,

00:02:03.840 the video that has destroyed this woman's life and set a narrative about what happened that isn't entirely accurate.

00:02:11.160 Let's roll that.

00:02:12.280 Will you please stop?

00:02:13.780 Sir, I'm asking you to stop.

00:02:15.320 Please don't come close to me.

00:02:16.920 Sir, I'm asking you to stop recording me.

00:02:18.520 Please don't come close to me.

00:02:19.680 Please take your phone off.

00:02:20.500 Please don't come close to me.

00:02:21.560 Can I take any pictures of calling the cops?

00:02:22.900 Please, please call the cops.

00:02:24.880 Please call the cops. 0.97

00:02:26.300 I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life. 1.00

00:02:29.160 Please tell them whatever you like.

00:02:34.200 Excuse me?

00:02:41.160 I'm sorry, I'm in the ramble, and there is a man, African-American, he has a bicycle helmet.

00:02:49.620 He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.

00:02:54.380 There is an African-American man, I am in Central Park.

00:02:57.500 He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.

00:03:00.320 I'm sorry, I can't hear you either.

00:03:07.360 I'm being threatened by a man in the ramble.

00:03:09.660 Please send the cops immediately.

00:03:13.220 I'm in Central Park in the ramble.

00:03:15.080 I don't know.

00:03:16.720 Thank you.

00:03:17.460 So there's a lot that happens in that one minute and ten second video.

00:03:22.620 We see a woman get increasingly agitated, a woman calling the police, accusing an African-American

00:03:28.920 man of threatening her, a woman who at one point is choking her dog, not intentionally,

00:03:34.120 but choking her dog as she tries to pull back, and a guy who is filming it, who we never actually

00:03:40.220 see, who at the end says, thank you.

00:03:42.080 He's gotten what he wanted out of that, which was video evidence of her doing whatever she 0.99

00:03:46.540 did.

00:03:46.800 So from that video, and from that video alone, Amy Cooper has been branded a racist. 0.99

00:03:54.440 Amy Cooper has been fired from her job.

00:03:56.840 Her company actually tweeted out to this effect, following our internal review of the incident

00:04:02.400 in Central Park yesterday.

00:04:03.720 We have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately.

00:04:08.100 We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton, and that is their pinned tweet and

00:04:13.540 has, you know, something shy of 50,000 retweets at this point, and a narrative has been cemented.

00:04:20.720 This woman has done a couple of interviews.

00:04:23.060 She's talked about her life being ruined.

00:04:24.900 She's apologized profusely to Christian Cooper, to Christian Cooper's family.

00:04:29.400 On Twitter, the video went viral, separate from it going viral on Christian's Facebook page,

00:04:34.600 when Christian's sister, who's a TV writer, had tweeted it out.

00:04:38.480 And she didn't just tweet out the video, she was also retweeting and amplifying all of the

00:04:42.760 responses to the video that were calling for this woman to be fired, calling for her to 1.00

00:04:47.020 be held accountable, and all of these other things.

00:04:48.960 So what's happened here is a very quintessential example of social media shaming, of social

00:04:57.500 media mobbing, where something happens, something's amplified, and what may start as an online thing

00:05:03.680 becomes this thing that has very real-world consequences, not for all of the people involved,

00:05:08.320 but typically for one person involved.

00:05:10.520 And that, in this case, is Amy Cooper, who, despite the fact that she apparently went to 0.99

00:05:14.460 the University of Waterloo, she may or may not be Canadian, I don't know, I have no idea

00:05:18.200 anything about her, I've never met her, I've never spoken to her, I know nothing about

00:05:22.240 her except for the one minute and ten second video clip that I just played.

00:05:27.560 Yet at the same time, I still feel for her, for reasons that I'm going to go through right

00:05:32.380 now, that are partially personal, and partially about the story itself.

00:05:37.880 And I want to look at the story itself here, because I don't want to say I got duped, because

00:05:42.880 I'm always skeptical whenever I see videos like this, but I watched it, and I saw what everyone

00:05:47.380 else saw, which is that here's a woman that seems to be willing to, I don't even know if

00:05:52.700 it's invoking race because of anything other than she's just trying to describe a person,

00:05:58.060 and, you know, he's an African-American man.

00:06:00.380 But a woman who is calling the police, basically trying to get them involved in something, because 1.00

00:06:06.860 she doesn't like that she was told to put a leash on her dog. 0.96

00:06:10.280 And that was apparently how this started.

00:06:11.780 Christian Cooper was birdwatching, her dog was supposed to be leashed, he had said leash

00:06:15.800 it, and she didn't want to, and that's that.

00:06:17.880 But then I saw his own Facebook page, where he actually admits to threatening her dog.

00:06:24.680 And this part is not in any of the reporting I've seen, except for one story in the Daily

00:06:29.540 Mail.

00:06:29.900 But this is his own admission.

00:06:31.400 This is a screenshot from his Facebook page.

00:06:33.880 The post is still up at the time that I'm recording this.

00:06:37.060 And I'm looking at the original right now.

00:06:38.900 And he includes a transcript, roughly, of what happened before he started rolling.

00:06:43.100 And he says, ma'am, dogs in the ramble have to be on the leash at all times.

00:06:46.600 The sign is right there.

00:06:48.080 She says no.

00:06:49.040 They go back and forth for a bit.

00:06:50.640 And then he says, by his own admission, look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going

00:06:55.640 to do what I want, but you're not going to like it.

00:06:58.680 Her, what's that? 1.00

00:07:00.220 Me, to the dog.

00:07:01.440 Come here, puppy.

00:07:02.600 Her, he won't come to you.

00:07:03.920 Me, we'll see about that.

00:07:05.660 And then he says, I pull out the dog treats I carry for just for some intransigence.

00:07:11.460 So there's such intransigence.

00:07:13.000 There's a bit of a typo there.

00:07:14.480 I didn't even get the chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab 1.00

00:07:18.240 the dog.

00:07:19.020 Her, don't you touch my dog. 1.00

00:07:20.300 That's when I started video recording.

00:07:22.180 And then her inner Karen, as she's called, Central Park Karen, fully emerged.

00:07:26.480 And he says, took a dark turn.

00:07:28.660 Now, I don't think we take from this that he is walking around with poison dog treats.

00:07:33.940 But he seems to be making it out to be that he wanted her to think that.

00:07:38.180 And that he wanted her to think that he was going to do something to harm her dog.

00:07:43.600 And that is what triggered this video.

00:07:45.640 But when the video goes with the narrative that was posted by the tweet that went viral,

00:07:50.140 all that happened was he had said, hey, ma'am, would you put a leash on that dog, please?

00:07:53.740 And then she says, I'm going to call the cops. 0.98

00:07:55.420 There's a black man threatening me. 1.00

00:07:56.700 I want you to come and take care of him. 0.53

00:07:58.420 When there was some stuff that was left out there that even Christian Cooper himself

00:08:03.440 acknowledges happened.

00:08:04.600 So right there, you have a story that is different from the one that's emerging.

00:08:10.420 Now, at the same time, I don't know, because we see her getting over agitated in the video 0.84

00:08:15.580 and increasingly agitated.

00:08:17.200 For all I know, the guy is making faces, taunting her.

00:08:19.980 For all I know, he's doing nothing.

00:08:21.380 I don't know.

00:08:22.060 And I don't care.

00:08:23.200 Because even before I saw his Facebook post that made the situation a bit more complex

00:08:29.620 than I thought it was from the video, I felt so terrible for this woman, even if she was 0.73

00:08:35.700 in the wrong.

00:08:36.220 And even if we were to say she's 100% in the wrong, because I have been through the social

00:08:41.980 media mobbing before.

00:08:43.640 And I can tell you that regardless of your sins, no one deserves the disproportionate response

00:08:50.260 that is being unleashed on this woman has been unleashed on countless other people before.

00:08:55.260 It just doesn't line up and it doesn't make anyone's lives better.

00:08:59.960 It only destroys lives.

00:09:01.540 So this woman probably had a six-figure job, living in New York City, has a dog. 1.00

00:09:05.780 All of that's gone now.

00:09:07.880 She's lost the job. 0.99

00:09:09.120 She even lost the dog, by the way.

00:09:10.840 She turned it back to the shelter from which she rescued it because everyone was accusing

00:09:15.380 her of being a bad dog mother because she choked the dog on the video. 0.98

00:09:18.880 Well, the fact is she was trying to keep the dog close to her.

00:09:23.200 And the whole point of that is that it makes sense when you see the Facebook post from Christian 0.80

00:09:28.240 Cooper that suggests he was threatening the dog or at least goading the dog.

00:09:32.880 So that's why she wanted to keep it.

00:09:34.520 And the dog, of course, seeing the tension of the situation is trying to get away.

00:09:38.320 And yeah, the dog ends up getting choked.

00:09:39.960 So it looks not pretty and I get that.

00:09:42.860 But now she's lost the dog.

00:09:44.260 She's lost the job. 0.99

00:09:45.620 She thankfully has a common enough name, Amy Cooper, because she'll be Google-able for the 0.97

00:09:50.040 end of time as Central Park Karen the racist rather than a woman who has any other accomplishments 0.97

00:09:55.720 in her life where she's a 40-something woman in New York City, has risen through the ranks.

00:10:01.060 She's a vice president or was.

00:10:02.920 So this is a woman who has had immense accomplishments that are all going to be wiped out, at least 1.00

00:10:08.380 for the foreseeable future, because she had a bad day.

00:10:11.740 So I don't buy into the fact that we should define people by the very worst characteristics

00:10:18.340 they embody or by a two-dimensional or one-dimensional caricature of themselves that might not even

00:10:24.440 be reflective of real traits they have because all of us are flawed.

00:10:31.200 All of us are flawed.

00:10:32.260 And the fact that society now has this knee-jerk reaction to any situation where instead of having

00:10:38.120 an honest-to-goodness human conversation with someone or maybe even accepting, you know

00:10:43.180 what, you don't like me, I don't like you, we're going to go our separate ways, the only

00:10:46.980 response that people have is phone in the face.

00:10:51.140 Phone in the face.

00:10:51.980 That's the only way we need to do it.

00:10:53.420 No one talks to the restaurant manager anymore.

00:10:55.700 They go home and just write a bad Yelp review.

00:10:57.760 No one brings something to the attention of the supervisor on duty.

00:11:01.500 They just try and trash them online.

00:11:03.780 No one works out their differences now.

00:11:05.580 People just want to get everyone else to start adding gasoline to a fire because it's all

00:11:11.840 about the competition for likes more than it's about actually working through any of

00:11:15.840 these differences that exist.

00:11:17.620 So here's a guy who is birdwatching, by all accounts, minding his own business.

00:11:21.900 Here's a woman that it sounds like at the very least was breaking the rule about leashing 1.00

00:11:26.480 her dog.

00:11:27.980 All right.

00:11:28.620 That is a pretty minor infraction.

00:11:30.880 Not leashing your dog when you're supposed to.

00:11:32.720 And in most cases, I'd say it wouldn't impact anyone else, except today was a bit different.

00:11:37.780 All right.

00:11:38.260 Fine.

00:11:39.580 So he could have just been the bigger man and said, walking, I'm going to walk away.

00:11:43.280 She could have been the bigger woman and said, you're right.

00:11:45.220 You know, normally there's no one around here, so I don't care, but you're here.

00:11:48.840 You're bringing it to my attention.

00:11:50.120 I'm going to leash the dog.

00:11:51.400 That would have been the responsible, mature way for this to go.

00:11:54.780 But no, it didn't happen.

00:11:56.480 He escalated.

00:11:57.420 She escalated. 0.99

00:11:58.380 He escalated some more.

00:11:59.540 She escalated some more. 0.99

00:12:00.640 And when people get into those situations, they stop thinking rationally.

00:12:05.040 They do.

00:12:05.820 And you can tell.

00:12:06.860 There's a point in the video where she no longer seems to be in control.

00:12:12.040 And that's the reality.

00:12:13.580 And unfortunately, people go through that.

00:12:15.980 And in her case, instead of just going through it and then at the end being like, wow, I really

00:12:19.840 wish I handled that differently.

00:12:20.980 It's now permanently encapsulated in the minds and in the internet until the rest of time.

00:12:28.320 And the fact that people are cheering this, the fact that people are cheering this is the

00:12:34.100 most sickening part of the social media mob because no one actually wants the proportionate

00:12:38.660 response.

00:12:39.160 No one says, no one wants her to be able to say, you know what?

00:12:42.120 I made a mistake, Mr. Cooper.

00:12:43.500 I'm sorry.

00:12:43.980 And they move on.

00:12:45.180 They wanted her suspended.

00:12:46.640 And when she was suspended, they wanted her fired. 0.91

00:12:49.020 And now that she's fired, they want her to never work again. 0.93

00:12:51.880 And if anyone, anyone in the world ever decides they're going to hire her, there are going

00:12:56.200 to be people that are going to leap into gear and go full throttle and say, you should not

00:13:01.760 hire this woman. 1.00

00:13:02.540 Don't you know about this?

00:13:04.940 That is what happens here.

00:13:06.740 That is the cycle.

00:13:07.560 It is not just about a slap on the wrist to punish you for whatever you did that might

00:13:11.720 have been wrong.

00:13:12.400 It is trying to destroy your life.

00:13:14.980 And if you think I'm exaggerating, just look around.

00:13:18.400 Look around at all the people that have gone through this.

00:13:20.560 It's not just Amy Cooper.

00:13:22.040 Before her, it was Justine Sacco before.

00:13:25.000 I mean, she was the big one, the woman who, you know, cracked a couple of jokes on Twitter

00:13:28.700 on a flight to South Africa.

00:13:30.520 And by the time she landed, her life was destroyed.

00:13:34.100 Now, Justine Sacco has thankfully rebuilt a lot of that.

00:13:37.180 She's got a job working in PR again, but it took a lot of time to get there.

00:13:41.660 And a lot of people don't have that opportunity to jump back into it.

00:13:45.780 You look at the Des Moines Register case, this guy who was raising a lot of money for charity

00:13:51.560 and working with, I think it was Anheuser-Busch.

00:13:54.900 And then what happens is someone finds that when he was a teenager, he made a tweet that

00:13:58.960 was offensive.

00:13:59.680 And then all of a sudden, all the good that he's done is wiped out.

00:14:02.720 The reporter who unearthed it had made his own offensive tweet.

00:14:06.000 So then the reporter who unearthed this was canceled as well.

00:14:08.920 And that was probably the most apt analysis of what can happen here, because it proves

00:14:16.300 that eventually there's no one left standing.

00:14:19.260 There's no one left standing at the end of it.

00:14:21.620 So the person who is supposedly the savior of all this, who's showcasing everyone else's 0.65

00:14:27.320 wrongdoing, they're typically not able to live by the rules that they're setting out

00:14:31.760 for others.

00:14:32.960 So I have no interest in destroying the lives of Christian Cooper or his sister, Melody Cooper.

00:14:39.000 I have no interest in going back through their tweets and seeing if they posted something

00:14:43.360 that is making them worthy of cancellation.

00:14:46.200 But I do think that even if in that first moment, that first moment, Christian Cooper,

00:14:52.800 who wanted to birdwatch, was in the right by saying to Amy Cooper, you've got to lease

00:14:56.900 your dog, the fact that these two have now tried to not just get the situation resolved.

00:15:04.960 It's never about that.

00:15:06.100 It's about punishing the people involved.

00:15:08.760 And that's the problem.

00:15:10.100 And that's where correcting something becomes mobbing when it isn't actually about that imminent

00:15:15.720 thing.

00:15:16.100 So let's say you have an issue at a store and you think the store owes you a refund.

00:15:20.460 The corrective approach is get the refund.

00:15:24.140 The punitive approach, which is where the social media mob takes things, is get the store

00:15:29.440 to declare bankruptcy, make sure no one shops there ever again, get corporate to come down

00:15:33.800 and take the franchise, get the owner to never be able to own something else again.

00:15:37.500 And the fact that the mob continues this way is, I think, important.

00:15:41.920 There's no measured response.

00:15:43.620 It's not like the criminal code says, you know, this is the crime, this is the penalty.

00:15:47.260 This is the crime, this is the punishment.

00:15:48.740 No, it's about maximum damage, maximum damage, no matter the cost, no matter the collateral

00:15:54.500 damage, and no matter how many other people are involved with it.

00:15:58.600 And who wins?

00:16:00.460 Who wins at the end of this?

00:16:01.760 So all of the people that were a part of this, that were lobbing grenades at Amy Cooper,

00:16:06.960 how are they better off?

00:16:08.320 They just move on to the next thing.

00:16:11.020 I mean, sure, Christian Cooper might be able to say, oh, you know what?

00:16:13.600 He's been vindicated because everyone agreed with him.

00:16:15.680 But, you know, if it was actually just about the collateral, or not the collateral, it

00:16:21.100 was actually just about that imminent short-term issue, he filmed fine.

00:16:25.540 That gives him a bit of an insurance policy.

00:16:27.480 If the police do come and they say, well, this woman said that you were threatening her 0.55

00:16:30.340 life, and he says, well, I actually have this video.

00:16:32.500 I was going nowhere near her.

00:16:33.840 Great.

00:16:34.920 But why does it need to be posted publicly?

00:16:37.200 And this is not just about this case, by the way, but right now you have to point out that

00:16:42.560 this woman has found herself in the middle of a culture war that, knowing nothing about

00:16:47.020 her, she may or may not have had anything to do with in her life up until this point.

00:16:51.580 Because now she's, you know, a symbol of the race relations problem in the United States. 1.00

00:16:57.820 People are comparing her to the woman who had Emmett Till Lynch.

00:17:01.940 People are comparing her to the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery, and I think it was South Carolina

00:17:06.640 a couple of weeks ago.

00:17:07.780 Again, a case that reveals serious problems.

00:17:10.500 But there's a proper process for these things.

00:17:13.580 And there are channels you have to go through if you want real results.

00:17:18.300 And that's not what's happening right now.

00:17:21.060 So for starters, yes, this case is not as simple as it is made out to be.

00:17:25.980 I'm not convinced that Christian Cooper is as lily clean as he may think he is because

00:17:31.380 of his own admission that he was threatening the dog.

00:17:34.140 But the other side of that is that even if it was, even if this woman was wrong, and this

00:17:40.840 woman was entirely off base and offside and didn't do anything right, is what she's going 1.00

00:17:46.940 through worth it?

00:17:49.300 Does she deserve this?

00:17:51.400 Does anyone deserve this for reacting in a moment in a way that is not appropriate?

00:17:58.460 And if you think that, my goodness, how wonderful it must be to be as perfect as you.

00:18:06.980 And there are lots of people like this, by the way, that say, oh, well, you know, if she

00:18:10.580 doesn't like it, she shouldn't have done X.

00:18:12.500 As though everyone is in control of themselves 100% of the time, as though no one errs, no

00:18:17.040 one messes up, no one makes these mistakes, and that we are all supposed to, from our little

00:18:21.560 keyboards, look at the world around us and say, oh, well, you know, that was wrong.

00:18:25.680 And I can say that because I'm here on this side of the computer, and it's a one-way street.

00:18:30.820 You know how in criminal justice you have the right to face your accuser?

00:18:34.580 Yeah, it doesn't work that way when you've got a million anonymous keyboard trolls who

00:18:39.420 remain able to go through their lives, and one person whose entire life is under scrutiny

00:18:44.980 right now.

00:18:45.840 Global News did a story about her where they had, like, reached out for comment about whether

00:18:49.280 she's a Canadian citizen.

00:18:50.440 So now her life is being uprooted.

00:18:54.380 She's never going to get it back.

00:18:56.240 And even when she, by the way, pointed out that her life was being ruined in an interview,

00:19:00.100 and I mean, power to her for trying to nip this in the bud, the headline in one particular

00:19:05.000 case from the UK Sun, Amy Cooper whines, her life is being destroyed.

00:19:10.100 So the idea that she's now become a part of this Karen meme, I mean, may seem like a punchline

00:19:15.980 to a lot of people, but it goes beyond the Karen part of this.

00:19:19.380 I mean, Central Park Karen, fine, maybe a fun meme, but this is not staying on the internet.

00:19:25.300 This is not staying on the internet.

00:19:26.820 We're talking about someone who is a human being, flawed or not, in the wrong or not,

00:19:32.700 is now going to suffer for a much longer period of time than most people in the world have

00:19:38.220 suffered for their mistakes and have paid for their mistakes.

00:19:41.880 And think of the worst things you've ever done, the most embarrassing things you've ever

00:19:45.580 done. And I bet you're pretty grateful there was no one with a cell phone camera in your face

00:19:50.660 in those moments. And my goodness, people need to have a lot more perspective than they do

00:19:57.480 on these sorts of things. And I stress the point that I made earlier, that no one is left standing

00:20:03.140 at the end of this. Back in a moment with more of The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:20:07.480 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show. I said I wasn't going to be talking about COVID-19. I

00:20:18.360 didn't mean it at all. I just meant I wasn't going to be making it the focal point of the show because

00:20:22.720 I have to jump on this story from the Jerusalem Post, which part of me finds to be baffling. And

00:20:29.200 then the other part of me was said, yeah, maybe it's not all that surprising after all.

00:20:33.460 One in five English people believe coronavirus is a Jewish conspiracy, according to a survey.

00:20:41.540 The story points that it's a University of Oxford survey. One in five Brits think that

00:20:46.640 Jews created COVID-19 to collapse the economy for financial gain. So it's like they have a very 1.00

00:20:52.160 specific reason for thinking it. It's not just a Jewish conspiracy. It's that, you know, Jewish 0.89

00:20:56.260 conspiracy to reap profits from it all. The finding came as part of a wider survey, the story says,

00:21:03.200 attitudes towards the virus and the measures taken to prevent it. They found that there was

00:21:07.740 an undercurrent of mistrust over official advice on the virus within the public. But increasingly,

00:21:13.840 the conspiracy beliefs forming have become greater. And this is weird because I've gotten a few

00:21:19.740 conspiracy theories throughout this. The one that we talked about a couple of months back was that

00:21:24.360 Trudeau was under house arrest. And that's why he was doing his briefings from Rideau Cottage because

00:21:28.700 he had an ankle bracelet. The other conspiracy that I got was that somehow 5G networks were involved in

00:21:35.340 coronavirus. And this one I find weird because like 5G with Huawei is problematic for reasons to do

00:21:41.380 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

00:21:46.420 that we need to have convergence. And then now we have the story that the Jews are behind COVID-19. 0.93

00:21:52.960 But interestingly enough, this is not a radically new belief system. I said a couple of weeks back

00:21:59.320 that the Iranian Ayatollahs were pushing this. Iran was saying that the Jews were behind COVID-19.

00:22:05.420 And I don't know if it's behind the virus itself or just making it seem like the virus is a threat.

00:22:09.860 I don't know how sinister we're supposed to believe that the Zionist virus unleashers are here. 0.99

00:22:15.680 But Iran is now peddling this dangerously anti-Semitic misinformation to such a point

00:22:22.780 that 20% of people in England are buying into it. And I don't know, by the way, I'd be interested

00:22:28.920 in seeing the survey here if it was multiple choice and they were being given this option

00:22:35.260 by the Oxford researchers or if the people volunteered it themselves. This is actually a

00:22:40.980 really important question that I haven't been able to find the answer to. Are the Oxford researchers

00:22:45.140 saying, so, you know, tell us what you think about it? And someone says, well, you know,

00:22:48.360 I think the Jews are behind it. Or are they giving them the option? Because that tends to skew things. 1.00

00:22:52.780 It's like, OK, do you believe COVID-19 is the responsibility of, you know, 5G, of America,

00:22:59.500 of ISIS, of Jews? Yes. OK, we'll check off the Jews then. So that's the thing is like, 0.97

00:23:05.980 because some people, I'm sure, are just having a bit of a lark. They're at home and a researcher

00:23:09.080 calls them and they're bored because they've been in lockdown for two months. And that's certainly

00:23:12.720 one possibility is they say, oh, yeah, yeah, we'll go with that one. But, you know, if it is real

00:23:17.620 and if it is verifiable, these data, it's actually very dangerous because the rise of anti-Semitism

00:23:25.980 in Europe has been responsible for monumental issues. You look at the fact that Jeremy Corbyn,

00:23:32.100 for example, who was the former Labour leader, was a fairly unrepentant, I'll say anti-Semi. I mean,

00:23:40.320 he was an anti-Semite. He is an anti-Semite or at the very least he's comfortable running a party

00:23:45.300 at the time that was of anti-Semites. And Labour, since Corbyn, has had to really hone this in a bit.

00:23:52.200 And the replacement had actually issued an apology on behalf of Labour to the Jewish people and said,

00:23:58.620 listen, I mean, we need to do better here. But in mainstream UK, you have a lot of anti-Semitism

00:24:05.160 and anti-Semitic beliefs. And this lets a lot of these anti-Semitic tropes and punchlines really

00:24:10.760 prosper. And I don't know the reason for it. I think that, you know, immigration is part of it.

00:24:16.280 You have, I mean, as part of the EU, you've got people from parts of the world where anti-Jewish

00:24:21.000 conspiracy theories are pretty common that are, you know, loading up in England and the population

00:24:26.300 dynamics change. But you also have the fact that there seems to be this social acceptability

00:24:33.080 to be an anti-Semite that isn't there for attacks on other groups. And this is so horrific because

00:24:42.420 Holocaust indifference is becoming a big issue. And as a result, Holocaust denial is becoming a big

00:24:47.740 issue. And I spent a lot of time on two separate occasions at Yad Vashem, which is the Israeli

00:24:53.640 Holocaust Center. It's a campus, a museum. It does a lot of amazing work. And the one thing that was

00:25:00.360 challenging is that they're finding that a lot of young, even Jews, young Jewish teenagers 1.00

00:25:04.640 are just so tired of hearing of the Holocaust. They're like, yeah, I know it's terrible. I don't

00:25:08.780 really care. But there isn't that identity that is shared with it like there used to be where people

00:25:16.640 said, yeah, you know, it's important for us to survive and thrive as people because we had this

00:25:21.080 thing two generations away. Well, now the Holocaust is three generations away. There are fewer people that 0.80

00:25:26.420 have that firsthand knowledge and experience with it to share with their families. So as a result,

00:25:32.320 the younger generation of Jewish people, there are a lot of issues in getting them to care about it.

00:25:37.580 And as a result, getting them to care about anti-Semitism, realizing what happens when you

00:25:43.040 allow anti-Semitism on a mass scale to spread. So I can laugh at this in a way, but at the same time,

00:25:49.000 there's a very serious undertone and undercurrent to this that needs to be pushed back against.

00:25:54.420 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.

00:27:22.700 You're tuned in to the Andrew Lawton Show.

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.

00:28:23.660 Did they use you as a trophy?

00:28:25.780 Of course. I was the big fish.

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.

00:28:57.400 That's what I'd say.

00:29:01.020 Wow. Wow.

00:29:07.000 Give me an example of what you'd 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,

00:32:36.540 if you will.

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 0.98

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. 0.98

00:33:59.320 And any idiot knows that there's a big difference between being paid to change your mind 0.97

00:34:04.480 and being paid to advocate for a specific position, which she absolutely was. 1.00

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

00:34:37.040 to jumping into it as fervently as she did?

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.

00:35:04.540 Well, that's roughly $20,000 a year.

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.

00:35:34.700 She didn't like speaking very much.

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.

00:35:57.180 So who knows what she would have said.

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?

00:36:12.900 I work for a pro-life organization.

00:36:14.820 It's not a very big amount of money.

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.

00:36:28.060 She wasn't paid very much.

00:36:29.720 She wasn't paid very often.

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.

00:37:12.400 And we know that's not the case.

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.

00:37:59.580 That was sort of her stump speech.

00:38:00.720 And she was talking about how they would put her out in front of the cameras

00:38:04.460 and she'd get paid to speak.

00:38:06.280 And then the documentary filmmaker actually asks her,

00:38:09.520 would it be fair to say it was all an act?

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.

00:38:23.120 It's all Dale Carnegie at that point.

00:38:25.440 And it's interesting that that was in her own words.

00:38:28.820 Those words were literally put into her mouth.

00:38:30.680 Is it fair to say it's all an act?

00:38:32.020 And then she said, yes, I'm a great actress, but I'm not acting now.

00:38:36.480 And then kind of laughs.

00:38:37.660 There's a bunch of instances in which these quotes are sort of pulled out of context.

00:38:41.140 So she wasn't saying I faked my conversion.

00:38:43.420 I've been acting all this time.

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. 1.00

00:39:03.220 And then they put a quote from Norma right in the middle where she says these guys are all assholes. 0.99

00:39:08.080 And they think, you know, God sent them to save the world. 1.00

00:39:10.820 But you're not actually told who she's referring to.

00:39:13.940 You're not actually told what the question is. 0.99

00:39:15.800 So you don't even know which people she thinks are assholes because, yeah, 0.98

00:39:19.400 there were people in the pro-life movement that she absolutely thought were terrible. 0.99

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

00:39:37.160 and saying she hopes Hillary wins.

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.

00:39:49.720 I wrote that in 2016 prior to the election.

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, 0.99

00:40:00.760 that if a woman has an abortion, you know, it's no skin off my ass. 0.99

00:40:03.580 You're not given any context. 0.99

00:40:05.480 You don't know what the question was asked.

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.

00:40:14.220 Like, look, I've got two kids.

00:40:15.820 Why do I care about this issue?

00:40:17.240 It's not going to be my kids who are aborted.

00:40:19.320 It's other people's. 0.93

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

00:40:32.640 to define the narrative of the whole film.

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

00:40:50.880 the question and other times you don't.

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?

00:40:59.420 Why are you showing us a short response?

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.

00:41:34.680 So one, she did all sorts of media requests.

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.

00:42:17.120 She was in extremely poor health.

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.

00:42:24.580 She was already on oxygen at this point.

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.

00:42:32.980 She was dying for a smoke.

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.

00:42:58.000 I'm good at getting it.

00:42:58.840 Right. So that's that. Well, that was another motivation for wanting to do the documentary.

00:43:03.860 And he obviously had an agenda.

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.

00:43:10.740 One of them was Transgender Kid Camp.

00:43:12.540 The other one was Born in the Wrong Body. 0.95

00:43:14.620 Another one was on Sex Dolls.

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.

00:43:53.100 That will come out in his book in 2021.

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.

00:44:12.400 Nick Sweeney didn't get it.

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.

00:45:04.060 She married him at the age of 16.

00:45:05.300 She'd been pregnant on a wedlock three times.

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. 0.76

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.

00:45:40.260 When they claimed that they hadn't been lying.

00:45:42.540 That's the story.

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.

00:46:05.080 They actually said it while laughing.

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. 0.79

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.

00:46:29.660 And she said she was.

00:46:30.780 She didn't even fully understand the pro-life position at that point.

00:46:34.180 She was just expressing what she had to say.

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.

00:46:50.860 But nobody could coach Norma. 0.58

00:46:52.400 Norma was Norma, and you took what you could get.

00:46:54.380 She liked to have drinks.

00:46:55.560 She smoked like a chimney.

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?

00:47:08.680 They're sort of squeaky clean.

00:47:09.680 They have no pictures on Facebook of them having a beer.

00:47:11.900 That was not Norma McCorvey.

00:47:13.760 She was who she was, take it or leave it.

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.

00:47:35.260 No ability for her to respond to it.

00:47:37.480 And that's almost by design, you can tell.

00:47:40.420 Well, it's 100% by design.

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.

00:49:17.680 No, it's about the here and now in a big way.

00:49:20.700 Jonathan Van Maran, author of The Culture War, publisher of The Bridgehead.

00:49:25.880 Always a pleasure, sir. Thanks for coming on.

00:49:27.920 Thanks a lot, Andrew.

00:49:30.020 That does it for me for today.

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.

00:49:37.120 Thank you, God bless, and good day, Canada.

00:49:39.400 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:49:41.280 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:49:50.700 Thank you.

Juno News - May 27, 2020

Central Park Karen Meets the Mob

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