Juno News - September 26, 2022


Combatting institutional wokeness

Topics
institutional wokeness
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Tom Kamich John O'Sullivan John Hilton O'Brien Bohemian Rhapsody Margaret Thatcher Candace Malcolm Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Jamil Giovanni Selena Zito George
Parents speak out about prosthetic breast wearing transgender teacher Pierre Poilievre and Chrystia Freeland clash over rising cost of living

Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

43.99

Word count

1,734

Sentence count

141

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, host Andrew Lawton takes a deep dive into the idea of institutional wokeness in the media, corporate Canada, and education. He talks to John O'Sullivan, John Hilton O'Brien, and Tom Kamich about their ideas on combating institutional wokeness.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:10.640 Coming up, we navigate the woke, woke world we live in by combating institutional wokeness in the media, in corporate Canada, and in education.
00:00:18.860 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:22.100 Hello and welcome to you all. This is another edition of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, the Andrew Lawton Show, here on True North, Monday, September 26, 2022.
00:00:33.840 I was just last weekend, or this past weekend, in Red Deer, Alberta, a lovely place, where I was doing a book signing, met a lot of you, thanks to all of you who came out and said hello,
00:00:45.300 and also did a live edition of this very show on stage, the first time I've ever done it on stage before, and we'll have bits of that in this program here, so stay tuned for that.
00:00:57.520 But I wanted to sort of weave it together a little bit, because Jamil Javani, who is the president of the Canada Strong and Free Network,
00:01:04.980 and there's a photo of us there, was very glad he invited me out to participate in this.
00:01:09.060 He had said initially, like, Andrew, just take the time, take the 45 minutes or whatever it was, and do whatever you want with it.
00:01:15.580 And I was originally going to just, like, take, like, 19 shots of whiskey and do a solo of Bohemian Rhapsody, and then Justin Trudeau stole my bit, so I had to come up with something original.
00:01:28.160 So instead, I decided to do a little bit of a themed look at this idea of institutional wokeness.
00:01:35.900 And I would say, first off, John O'Sullivan, who's a tremendous writer, I've met him on a number of occasions.
00:01:41.820 He was a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher when she was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
00:01:48.560 He has coined in his writing O'Sullivan's First Law, and the law states that any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will, over time, become explicitly left-wing.
00:02:00.040 And I think what he identifies in that is that there is this leftward drift in culture and institutions,
00:02:05.960 that unless you, like, completely plant your feet and say, no, this is who we are and what we believe in a way that supports liberty,
00:02:12.920 you're going to get sucked in by those leftist forces in the culture.
00:02:17.160 And I was thinking about that in the context of some of the main institutions we have in society today,
00:02:23.620 education, the corporate world, and the educational world.
00:02:28.340 And I did a couple of interviews with people that we'll share in this show.
00:02:31.980 John Hilton O'Brien, who is the executive director of a parents' rights group,
00:02:35.740 and also Tom Kamich, who is a conservative member of parliament that has a bit of a novel idea
00:02:40.500 at combating institutional wokeness in corporate Canada.
00:02:44.700 So I'll share those interviews, but I wanted to start off on the media side of things,
00:02:48.480 because oftentimes, and I, you know, I'm guest hosting Fake News Friday while Candace Malcolm was away,
00:02:53.500 so I know very well that media bias is a real issue.
00:02:57.680 But it was interesting that a lot of people I don't know understand the why, why it is.
00:03:03.320 It's not just a bunch of people that sit around a table and say, you know, we're leftist ideologues,
00:03:07.900 and by George, we're going to make sure that our leftism is, you know, insidiously entering all of our content
00:03:13.600 and commentary and journalism, it's not like that.
00:03:16.540 I mean, you do get some ideologues that work in mainstream media.
00:03:20.500 There's no denying that.
00:03:21.620 But a big problem, I think, is also where people are coming from before they end up in that industry.
00:03:27.420 And you look at the journalism programs that exist in Canada,
00:03:30.640 by and large, at liberal arts universities and big urban centers.
00:03:34.020 They attract people that not always, but often, come from these, I mean, what in the U.S. they call the coastal elites.
00:03:41.060 I mean, people that live in the coastal states as opposed to the so-called and derisively referred to flyover states.
00:03:47.200 But people that come from Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal,
00:03:50.640 and they aren't really connected necessarily to the communities that they need to understand to do their jobs effectively.
00:03:58.440 And when people have that background, there are two things they can do with it.
00:04:03.100 They can try to better themselves.
00:04:04.500 They can try to learn about all these things and these people and these views they don't know.
00:04:08.140 Or they can keep the blinders on.
00:04:09.960 And I've seen both.
00:04:11.120 Like, I was, when I was covering the Aaron O'Toole campaign,
00:04:14.200 I met a journalist from a legacy media outlet who was very kind and very friendly
00:04:18.500 and actually asked me at a couple of points,
00:04:20.600 admittedly, like, almost like I was a zoo animal, like,
00:04:23.060 what would a conservative say about X?
00:04:24.880 Or what would a conservative think about this?
00:04:26.780 Because it was clear this person didn't actually know any conservatives
00:04:31.220 and may not have ever sat down face-to-face with someone.
00:04:34.760 And I use that with a small C, not a large C.
00:04:37.380 So that, I think, is an example of something where
00:04:40.260 someone was trying to challenge their sort of internal selection bias.
00:04:45.420 I've had other people that don't want to do that.
00:04:47.980 For example, I was once trying to get a bunch of journalists out to a gun range.
00:04:51.440 There was a firearms group that had said they wanted to bring journalists out
00:04:54.640 to let them go shooting so they could understand firearms.
00:04:57.860 And a lot of them, even people that were not pro-gun, said,
00:05:00.960 yeah, that seems like a good idea.
00:05:02.820 And then I also had one that said, absolutely not.
00:05:05.500 I don't like guns.
00:05:06.240 I don't want to.
00:05:06.900 I don't want to touch one.
00:05:08.100 And this was a person who made factual errors in their reporting about firearms,
00:05:13.280 who was just so completely closed-minded,
00:05:15.860 didn't even want to entertain this world.
00:05:17.900 So that is, I think, what you're up against.
00:05:21.340 It's not just that people have these perspectives that have never put them in a church.
00:05:25.980 They've never put them face-to-face with a conservative.
00:05:28.120 They've never met someone who, in a U.S. context, voted for Trump.
00:05:31.280 Or in Canada, might even vote conservative.
00:05:34.380 So that's where I think it's very important.
00:05:36.740 And I'm all about having conversations.
00:05:38.340 I'm all about breaking down barriers.
00:05:40.560 You can't know what you've never been told or never been shown.
00:05:43.520 But you have an obligation to, I think, want to try to expand your horizons.
00:05:48.800 And I would encourage you to look up.
00:05:50.580 She is a New York Post columnist, Selena Zito.
00:05:53.800 She's a really fantastic author.
00:05:56.200 She did this project that she wrote about, I think it was in 2018,
00:05:59.340 called the Main Street Project,
00:06:00.640 where she took a group of Harvard politics students.
00:06:03.540 Again, talk about coastal elites. 0.99
00:06:05.500 And she took them on like a tour of Main Street, USA,
00:06:09.200 including to a town called, I think it was Chicopee, Massachusetts,
00:06:12.620 like an hour from Harvard, that they had never been to,
00:06:16.100 that everyone in the, it was like your quintessential small town.
00:06:18.680 They had like, you know, the people that own the diner,
00:06:20.520 the people that go to the gun range, and they were all Trump voters.
00:06:23.680 And these students had like great conversations with these people
00:06:26.520 and learned about small town America,
00:06:28.180 and then were shocked to learn later on
00:06:31.000 that they had spent the day cavorting with Trump voters.
00:06:33.520 Because they had like, again, in their Harvard lives,
00:06:37.040 never encountered someone like that,
00:06:39.280 despite the fact that two years earlier, Trump had won the election.
00:06:43.620 And I think that's an example of how,
00:06:45.440 and the rural-urban divide is tremendously important,
00:06:47.740 but that's just one very significant example
00:06:50.600 of how media bias takes hold in Canada.
00:06:53.120 When you, people are writing about communities and people
00:06:55.880 that they don't understand,
00:06:57.240 and some of them have never made an effort to understand them.
00:07:01.480 And there are some mainstream media reporters
00:07:03.360 that do a very good job of trying to do this.
00:07:05.620 And again, a lot of them may not genuinely have a bias,
00:07:08.720 but even if they don't have an explicit political bias,
00:07:11.080 they have an inherent bias in terms of lifestyle,
00:07:13.980 as we all do.
00:07:15.420 Our lives and our outlooks are shaped by our upbringing,
00:07:17.820 by our environments, and so on.
00:07:20.120 But it's about understanding the people that were outside that.
00:07:22.960 So that's one example there.
00:07:24.700 But we also took aim in this show at other institutions,
00:07:28.740 at, for example, Corporate Canada,
00:07:31.720 where we've all seen it.
00:07:33.840 We've all seen the profile pictures change of companies,
00:07:37.760 the political proclamations,
00:07:39.840 the capitulation to cancel culture,
00:07:42.000 and it's corporations that are becoming political entities
00:07:45.540 more than they are necessarily becoming corporate entities.
00:07:49.220 So Tom Kamich,
00:07:50.440 who is a Conservative Member of Parliament in Calgary,
00:07:53.860 a movement Conservative,
00:07:55.460 he is working on this bill
00:07:57.320 called the Mind Your Own Business Act,
00:07:59.640 which would essentially compel companies
00:08:01.720 to not behave in a way
00:08:03.840 that is about keeping their woke points renewed
00:08:07.180 and racking up their woke score,
00:08:09.020 but about what is in the best interest of the shareholder.
00:08:12.620 So basically compelling corporate leadership
00:08:14.500 to make business decisions,
00:08:16.680 not socio-political decisions.
00:08:18.680 Now, there's a part of me,
00:08:20.240 the Libertarian to me,
00:08:21.100 that's a bit uncomfortable with aspects of this,
00:08:22.760 and we're going to talk about that,
00:08:24.020 but it was my great privilege in Red Deer
00:08:25.420 to sit down with Conservative MP Tom Kamich
00:08:28.060 on the Mind Your Own Business Act.
00:08:55.420 Thank you.
00:09:25.420 Thank you.
00:09:55.420 Thank you.
00:10:25.420 Thank you.
00:10:55.420 Thank you.
00:11:25.420 Thank you.
00:11:55.420 Thank you.
00:12:25.420 Thank you.
00:12:55.420 Thank you.
00:13:25.420 Thank you.
00:13:55.420 Thank you.
00:14:25.420 Thank you.
00:14:55.420 Thank you.
00:15:25.420 Thank you.
00:15:55.400 Thank you.
00:16:25.380 Thank you.
00:16:55.380 Thank you.
00:17:25.380 Thank you.
00:17:55.380 Thank you.
00:18:25.380 Thank you.
00:18:55.380 Thank you.
00:19:25.380 Thank you.
00:19:55.380 Thank you.
00:20:25.380 Thank you.
00:20:55.380 Thank you.
00:21:25.380 Thank you.
00:21:55.380 Thank you.
00:22:25.380 Thank you.
00:22:55.380 Thank you.
00:23:25.380 Thank you.
00:23:55.380 Thank you.
00:24:25.380 Thank you.
00:24:55.380 Thank you.
00:25:25.360 Thank you.
00:25:55.360 Thank you.
00:26:25.360 Thank you.
00:26:55.360 Thank you.
00:27:25.360 Thank you.
00:27:55.360 Thank you.
00:28:25.360 Thank you.
00:28:55.360 Thank you.
00:29:25.360 Thank you.
00:29:55.360 Thank you.
00:30:25.360 Thank you.
00:30:55.360 Thank you.
00:31:25.360 Thank you.
00:31:55.360 Thank you.
00:32:25.360 Thank you.
00:32:55.360 Thank you.
00:33:25.360 Thank you.
00:33:55.360 Thank you.
00:34:25.360 Thank you.
00:34:55.360 Thank you.
00:35:25.360 Thank you.
00:35:55.360 Thank you.
00:36:25.360 Thank you.
00:36:55.360 Thank you.
00:37:25.360 Thank you.
00:37:55.360 Thank you.
00:38:25.360 Thank you.
00:38:55.360 Thank you.