Juno News - Ep 11 ｜ Rex Murphy ｜ Refusing to be cancelled

00:00:00.000 About once a week, I go onto Twitter and see that Rex Murphy is trending on the platform.

00:00:05.720 Left-wing Twitter despises him, and every time he releases a column, it seems,

00:00:10.180 the angry groupthink mob loses their mind, goes after him, and demands that he be fired from the

00:00:16.780 National Post, where he's written a regular column since 2010. Fortunately for Canadians,

00:00:23.180 Rex hasn't been fired. Not yet, anyway. Over the summer, he wrote a column with the headline,

00:00:28.600 Canada is not a racist country, despite what the liberals say. The column was fairly tame,

00:00:36.080 and stated truths that many Canadians have long agreed on, namely that Canada is not a country

00:00:42.300 defined by racism. Regardless, the column generated an extreme reaction, particularly among the staff

00:00:48.840 at the National Post, which is purportedly a newspaper with a conservative editorial position.

00:00:54.180 The newspaper held an emergency all-staff meeting, the audio of which was leaked to a left-wing blog,

00:01:01.240 where editors groveled and apologized to the woke staff for the sin of allowing an old white guy 0.84

00:01:07.920 like Rex to write a column on racism. Despite countless attempts to cancel Rex Murphy, the mob

00:01:14.440 just can't seem to close the deal. And for many Canadians, myself included, Rex is a legend and an

00:01:21.260 icon of Canadian journalism. He is most commonly known for his 21-year stint as the regular host

00:01:27.860 of CBC Radio 1's Cross Country Checkup, a nationwide call-in show where Rex would speak

00:01:34.740 directly to everyday Canadians to get a real feel for what was going on in the country. Rex also had

00:01:40.480 a regular commentary segment on CBC's The National, sharing his perspective on political, social,

00:01:46.700 and cultural issues to a wide audience. For decades, Rex has provided a much-needed dose of common sense

00:01:54.420 in a world where good sense is anything but common. In our conversation, Rex and I talked about a broad

00:02:00.700 range of issues, including his critique of the Trudeau government and its handling of the COVID-19

00:02:05.700 pandemic, the changes he's seen in the media landscape over the past few decades, the totalitarian

00:02:11.740 impulses of the left and the media, cancel culture, riots, media manipulation, and how he personally

00:02:18.700 stands up to the mob and refuses to be a victim of cancel culture. It was an honor sitting down with

00:02:24.920 Rex in this, the premiere episode of Season 2 of the True North Speaker Series. I hope you enjoy our

00:02:30.320 conversation. Let me know what you think in the comment section, and please share this video with

00:02:34.940 friends and like-minded Canadians.

00:02:48.540 Rex Murphy, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sitting down with me here today.

00:02:52.860 Well, it's fun to be here.

00:02:54.220 Well, I feel like this has just been such an interesting time in the world, an interesting year,

00:02:59.500 because every time there's an election, you wrote recently about how every election is the most

00:03:04.700 important election, and it's an election year in the U.S., and things have just sort of been

00:03:09.500 thrown into turmoil because of all of the various things that have happened. So before we get into

00:03:14.380 this sort of substance of the interview, I just want to get your overview. What do you make of the

00:03:19.500 COVID-19 crisis? What do you make of the sort of lockdowns and the state of the economy right now?

00:03:24.780 Well, it's a coagulation. We've had, since our own minor Canadian election, where we had the beginnings

00:03:35.420 of the new tension in Canada, which is a very serious problem, that got kind of sidelined. COVID

00:03:42.220 swam into view and suffocated every other issue and policy that we know about, and there are very,

00:03:48.700 very many. Some of them are international, like the two people that we have in the China

00:03:54.540 archipelago. Some of them are obviously your relations with the states. Then on top of COVID,

00:04:00.940 as a medical invasion, we had the suspension of virtually the entire Canadian economy,

00:04:11.660 and that received secondary attention because health always has priority over us. But that in

00:04:17.260 itself means that there is a subterraneous rumbling of a second vast crisis about to break out as soon

00:04:26.140 as we think we've dealt sufficiently with COVID. And then on top, this is number three. On top of that,

00:04:33.820 we had this ridiculous minority government, which depending on what day it is, is either supported

00:04:38.460 by the block or the NDP, and Mr. Trudeau deciding to play Robinson Crusoe in the Governor General's

00:04:45.980 cottage. And we have suspended parliament. I'm not an historian, so I may be completely wrong on this,

00:04:51.500 but we have suspended parliament for the longest time that I think it ever has been suspended.

00:04:56.620 And we are on top of that, this is number five, we are spending, my most recent number is at least

00:05:03.740 159 billion dollars, without a budget, without any financial update, without the ability of the

00:05:13.660 finance officers of the parliament itself to interrogate at the current world. And finally,

00:05:19.740 the auditor general, who is the most slender individual on parliament in the right now,

00:05:25.660 he's been asked to look at expenditures that are exponentially

00:05:30.060 greater than any other time in history, on a budget that is much reduced, and he can't do it.

00:05:36.620 And finally, on top of that, COVID as a psychological moment, has ratcheted up tensions of politics,

00:05:44.460 both here, but most especially in the States, because there we have the Sphinx-like figure,

00:05:50.620 the absolute phoenix of American politics, Donald Trump. And he's an electrical system all to himself,

00:05:58.380 and as it draws close to November 4th. All of these things are coming to some confluence or convergence,

00:06:06.380 and I expect the next four months, especially as it plays out on the ground in America,

00:06:12.940 and in employment up here, in industry up here, are going to be among the most singular,

00:06:19.340 and I'm not being rhetorical, that I've seen in the long wasted years of my life.

00:06:24.620 Well, it's really interesting, because so much of our attention is geared towards the US election,

00:06:30.140 and what is happening with Trump. But things around us just haven't gone back to normal. We

00:06:35.340 haven't really had a sense of normal since at least February, maybe. And it, you know,

00:06:40.540 amidst the chaos of what's happening around us, particularly with COVID, but then also the sort of

00:06:46.940 rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been around for five years or so,

00:06:51.180 but it's really boiled over. It's mutated. There's no questioning that the original

00:06:57.500 incident, the cop with the knee on the Black person, triggered a political response. But anyone

00:07:04.060 who thinks that they can now connect that particularly criminal incident, which, by the way,

00:07:09.500 led to immediate charges, which were then upgraded. Justice did come into play. If you think that that

00:07:14.940 has anything to do with the behavior in Chicago last night, for example, and went to rash 70, 50,

00:07:26.700 39 shootings per weekend, some masked citizens, Antifa or BLM, I don't know how you tell the difference,

00:07:36.460 assuming, I find this quite incredible, and I know the meaning of the word, that at some point in the

00:07:43.420 North American city, 100 or 200 or 300 strangers can walk into already tenanted and business established,

00:07:53.020 six blocks of a modern city, and assume authority over it with the tacit permission of the then mayor.

00:08:00.860 I've been reading today, before I came to see you, of citizens of Seattle who, during that period,

00:08:07.740 were asked for their past to go into their own house. And you've seen in Portland, as we're speaking,

00:08:15.500 there's been 73 nights running in which they burn down police precincts, they shoot people,

00:08:22.140 they have gang attacks. This is not BLM or Antifa, this is some other thing. This is why I spilled out all

00:08:30.300 those other things. I'm seeing something new here. We've always had clashes on the streets,

00:08:36.060 but this is a long-running program. And when I have absolutely no evidence, I cannot dissociate it

00:08:43.820 with the intense passions that are aggravated, in some cases justifiably, in other cases not,

00:08:52.220 by the extreme electrical personality of Trump. And yet, three years of collusion,

00:08:58.060 the election is coming, and I think there are new and negative forces of some real danger

00:09:04.940 that is going to re-characterize. There's one set that will not have him president again,

00:09:10.860 and there's another set that if they feel he has been broken illegitimately, are not going to be

00:09:17.020 happy again. I have not seen, I meant that thing. I know everyone says it's the biggest.

00:09:22.700 I come from John Kennedy to the present minute. There is nothing as potentially volatile as the

00:09:30.300 next three or four months in the States, and that means for us too.

00:09:33.340 Well, so Rex, what is it about the current time and Donald Trump? Because we hear it so often,

00:09:40.540 it's become cliche that every election is the most important election.

00:09:43.340 I know we do, and it's never true.

00:09:44.060 And sometimes it feels like we're just sort of reliving the same stuff over and over again,

00:09:48.060 like 2016 was sort of like this, and we see it with the Black Lives Matter movement. I mean,

00:09:52.700 this is sort of a reiteration of something else, or something else, or something else. Even in Canada,

00:09:58.140 earlier this year, you know, in January, we had those big blockades that were blocking all the

00:10:02.940 railways. And in February, you know, and that was a big movement, and then it sort of subsided. So,

00:10:08.380 so is it a new movement? Yes, it is. What is different this time? Yes, it is. A, the communication

00:10:15.580 system which we have. When you have an incident in one of these, one of the states of a police officer

00:10:21.660 doing what he did, and three days later, you'll have a Black Lives movement of 100,000 people in

00:10:26.860 London, England, your mind can contain the connection. But now international connection and electric

00:10:35.740 connection means that you can, you can spread a movement under the guise of a banner. All you need

00:10:43.260 is the phrase, I don't know more, Occupy Wall Street. And coming from that, there's no content.

00:10:50.140 I mean, if you look at the record, I was thinking particularly of Chicago, because I've been reading

00:10:54.220 about it for the last three months, the number of young Black people that are dying in Chicago every

00:10:59.340 single weekend, is almost at a war level. And yet, that absorbs Canadian or American news, hardly

00:11:07.900 anything. These movements begin with a spark that is legitimate, but then either outside forces,

00:11:16.060 or those who are in the business of politics as protest. In my, I'm ancient, I made the linen for

00:11:24.380 the mummies. And when I went to a protest in the 60s, it was because 6,000 people got laid off

00:11:31.500 on an Argentian naval base, and they were denied pensions. I give you that example for a reason.

00:11:38.140 6,000 Newfoundlanders worked 35 years, and their pensions were disgraceful. So what do we have?

00:11:44.140 We got the unemployed, there was 500 or 600 at the time, and we brought them to the Confederation 1.00

00:11:49.100 Building. We met with the Premier with a petition, and we said, here's what we want, not demand.

00:11:54.700 These people have worked for 30 years, they're being denied their pension. In other words,

00:11:58.220 you see how specific it is, how particularly targeted it is. And we then didn't go around St. John's,

00:12:05.020 throwing firecrackers at people's houses, and burning down police stations, and sending the 0.57

00:12:09.820 world to the word to the rest of the world, whatever turns you on tonight, get out in the street,

00:12:15.420 beat someone up, throw Molotov cocktails at the cops, and deny the value of your own country.

00:12:22.300 This is far more than protest. It's an emergence, and I keep calling it emergence,

00:12:29.420 of a kind of politics that had been off limits before. We've seen tastes of it in other countries

00:12:37.260 and in other times, and I'm not going to fill in the analogies at this stage. But when the civil

00:12:43.260 authority allows, and to some point can commence, summer of love was the phrase of the mayor in

00:12:51.180 Seattle, and strangers can come into your street and take your house, or they can burn down the

00:12:56.380 police station and nothing happens. If you abide it, if you oblige it, if you tacitly consent to it,

00:13:05.580 and if you say that the dissolution of civil order in this particular case is okay, you are setting a

00:13:13.900 vile contagion in progress. It's not the virus that is the most contagious thing. It's once you decay

00:13:20.700 respect for civil order, and you make that an instrument of politics. Some of the politics going on

00:13:27.420 now is to make people afraid of doing certain things, standing up for certain ideas or certain

00:13:34.380 people. And that gets into the metaphorical range when you get into cancel culture. Watch what happens

00:13:40.060 on the streets, and unless we restore the security of the citizen of the state, that he or she and their

00:13:48.700 children can, in normal circumstances, walk about and be free of hostility or violence. This is the new thing.

00:13:56.380 Right. I'm talking too long, aren't I? No, it's really an interesting point, and I think it ties

00:14:02.540 to something that I was thinking about, which was that when the Black Lives Matter protests first

00:14:07.260 started happening, the George Floyd protests, we were still under strict lockdown. And then all of

00:14:11.740 a sudden, you had health experts saying it was okay to go out on the streets. But Rex, like two weeks

00:14:17.100 earlier, there were anti-lockdown protests, you know, here in Ontario, Queens Park, and in other places,

00:14:23.020 and they were completely written off as being rednecks and all these, you know, yahoos out there. 0.99

00:14:29.020 You're at the heart of another major, major problem. The vivid hypocrisy that divides circumstances. 0.95

00:14:41.420 If you do something for this reason, it's okay, even if it is a medical circumstance. However,

00:14:48.860 if you do it for this reason, and it's a medical circumstance, you are a yahoo,

00:14:53.660 you are a barbarian, and you should be locked up in the Himalayas with the other guy. 1.00

00:14:57.420 That the authorities in charge of us can so blazingly say, oh, by the way, because it's a political 0.68

00:15:07.340 protest for a cause we do approve of, has to be one of those, by the way, you wouldn't want a thousand

00:15:12.940 people protesting a pipeline out in the streets of Toronto and getting a blessing. It could be for

00:15:18.700 Black Lives Matter. It could be for some sexual movement. There's a list of causes for which you

00:15:22.860 can gather a hundred thousand people, and there's no possibility of contagion. There's another list.

00:15:27.660 If you bring 10 people together, or they walk on a beach, they're going to get sick. The hypocrisy 0.86

00:15:32.700 of these things is noted at the level that you never hear on the political panels, or you never hear

00:15:38.860 in most of the newspapers. Well, it seemed to be lost on so many of the sort of elite consensus

00:15:44.060 makers, like even, you know, MP Adam Vaughn here in Toronto said, you know, the people are protesting

00:15:49.420 for their safety because, right, but like, they so believe what they're saying that they've created

00:15:55.820 this distinction. They do not believe what they're saying. They use it as pretext. They know that they

00:15:59.020 can flout. They can flout the orders, and they can turn on others of a different persuasion who would

00:16:05.980 like to flout the orders, but they will get condemned. It is always the hypocrisy. If I say something nice

00:16:12.860 and mean it, and have some arguments for about the country or about the oil industry, you have the

00:16:20.060 complete capacity to say something, well, I find something wrong with the country, and something

00:16:24.780 greedy about the oil, and the two of us can go out and have a plate of french fries together. But in this

00:16:29.740 new world, from my standing, I'm a villain. Right. And your archangel floating up to meet before the

00:16:37.180 throne of God. If you have the right political views. If you're on that side of defense. But I just, I mean, to me,

00:16:42.860 I don't understand how the public can go along with something. After months and months and months

00:16:46.620 of being told, you cannot go outside, you can't be in groups, you can't have a funeral for a loved

00:16:51.660 one who's passed away, you can't have a wedding, you can't get married, you can't visit people in

00:16:55.900 the hospital who are sick. All of these really, really sort of life-defining things that we cannot

00:17:00.940 do. I mean, to a lesser extent, I have an 18-month-old son, and he couldn't even interact and play with

00:17:07.100 other little kids. And you think of what the long-term damage could be, consequences,

00:17:11.580 like finally, now he's getting to go out and see his cousins and stuff. But you can't imagine what

00:17:16.460 that kind of psychological damage might do. And 18 months, maybe not. But if you're three, four,

00:17:20.860 five years old, there's all kinds of damage wrecks. And then to all of a sudden have these sort of

00:17:25.900 elites come out and say, well, if you're protesting this one thing, you're exempt and you're okay.

00:17:30.620 I don't understand why there's not more backlash.

00:17:32.460 Well, I'm really glad. And not being, again, rhetorical. I'll give you even one more. Yours

00:17:38.060 is pretty painful. I want to be particular. I know a gentleman who's been married for 30 or 40 years

00:17:45.420 and who actually loves his wife. This is a rare thing, I understand, in modern days. But he really

00:17:50.300 does and does at the present minute. She had a series of climactic illnesses. But she had to be 0.97

00:17:57.900 put in a special place. He spent six hours a day with her. From the time she went into that special

00:18:04.460 place, he would leave and he would sit by her bedside six hours a day. And COVID comes.

00:18:11.500 This man loves his wife. She loves him. And he's told by the health authorities he can no longer sit

00:18:19.740 by his wife. Now, you ask the question, which is the question. You ask two questions. How could the

00:18:27.180 elites have such bottomless shamelessness and hypocrisy as to say, oh, if it's for the cause, 0.71

00:18:35.820 which is metaphysical as opposed to medical, then all the rules of life and death 0.91

00:18:41.500 no longer reply because that's for global warming. I'm going to make an easier one, okay?

00:18:46.860 But if you want to see your dying wife, well, you know, you're a barbarian willing to spread the 1.00

00:18:52.860 death plague to the rest of the world. And you asked the other thing was, why do people,

00:18:59.100 at a level of discourse that a lot of people don't deal, if you drop out of the television world

00:19:05.260 or the world of panels or conferences, and you sit around in other places, and these are what I call

00:19:13.260 the good people of this world. They know this. They laugh at it. They scorn it. But in some cases,

00:19:20.300 they're immensely ticked. And when, for example, I'm going to tie things together here, when they see a

00:19:26.220 WE scandal and $900 million being passed over for distribution with a $50 million fee, and they 0.99

00:19:33.500 haven't got enough to repair the goddamn muffler. And they paid taxes last year, however little they 0.99

00:19:39.420 had to work to pay them. This is being seen. I don't think it relates to the violence that we see in

00:19:44.940 the States, because that's political. But it does relate to the faith of a certain element of the

00:19:50.060 Canadian citizenry, who are its backbone, the truck driver and the person at the grocery store are

00:19:56.380 looking up. Why is that woman at the grosseteria store not allowed to take a tip, by the way? I've tried 0.96

00:20:01.740 a few times. Why isn't there some sort of signal that this was really special work? And you went there

00:20:09.420 from the very, very beginning, and the truck driver. Yet we can have them get to the higher classes, teachers,

00:20:15.660 full salary. And we have this huge debate. There is a division in this country. It isn't racial.

00:20:22.460 It is how the ones that are very comfortable and very secure operate on a set of rules that works for

00:20:29.420 them and has exceptions built in for them when they want to pick them. But for you, I forget the guy who

00:20:35.180 was walking his dog about six weeks ago and got an $800 fine. Right. But if you've been running around

00:20:41.820 with three or four big signs and trying to burn down a building, they'd probably give him the

00:20:45.580 governor general's middle. Well, or if he was the mayor of Brampton who was just caught the hockey

00:20:50.940 rink playing and he didn't have a mask on or anything. I'd ask you a question on that. How is it that

00:20:55.100 someone who was once a leader of a party and who then becomes a mayor, how can you be so zealously 1.00

00:21:03.900 stupid as to pull off that? You got to work at that. It sort of represents the attitude. 1.00

00:21:10.460 And what I see, what I see really, Rex, is a separation between the sort of elite opinion

00:21:16.700 and the opinion of everyone else. And I think that's what's dividing.

00:21:20.060 The separation of elite life.

00:21:21.580 Right.

00:21:22.220 For others. When I see the, I drive a lot of cabs because they have a car for a long while.

00:21:26.940 When I see the cab driver here from Somalia or whatever the hell they're from, 1.00

00:21:30.380 the cabs are dirty, they're sweaty. He's on 12 hours, 14 hours a goddamn day. And he loses the 0.99

00:21:37.500 value of his license. And then they bring in a carbon tax or something, or they bring in,

00:21:43.420 they kill his whole, his whole future. Or I see the women that work in the hotels. I end up with a lot 1.00

00:21:49.660 of them. They're all, all that I see come, they come from the Philippines. They're sending money home. 0.88

00:21:55.660 Right. Does that world ever show up on these panel shows? Does the farmer who had to pay the

00:22:01.180 extra carbon tax to dry his damn wheat, and his wife is working in the pharmacy in town to support 0.99

00:22:06.540 the farm. Do you think that these people are going to be discussed on the five o'clock shows? 0.98

00:22:11.820 We're in two worlds. And that world up here that's comfortable, they can get their $48,000

00:22:17.660 contracts and still sit on the damn panel. $48,000 or $41,000 or whatever it was, is a gold mine for 0.97

00:22:24.060 the people watching. Right. Well, Rex, I mean, you understand Canada and the country probably better

00:22:29.100 than anyone. You had a long, long time radio show on CBC and then CBC National. We all have a voice

00:22:34.540 in our life. Well, I'm curious about that. Because, you know, you were sort of a pathway, a bridge

00:22:42.620 between the people. They would call into your show. They would tell you you were sympathetic

00:22:47.820 or empathetic to situations of people all over the country. And, I mean, you're not at the CBC

00:22:53.500 anymore. I want to know what you think. Do you think the CBC has changed? It's got worse.

00:22:59.260 Do you think that they're part of the reason why the elite consensus is so separate from...

00:23:03.740 I didn't criticize what I'm in. I call it manners, believe it or not. I managed. I had a thought that

00:23:11.820 it's better to get something out than nothing. I did the dominant philosophies at the CBC at the time.

00:23:18.300 I didn't like. And I know this much. I only emerged in so far as I can claim to have emerged because I

00:23:24.780 got a beginning in Newfoundland. And in Newfoundland, thank God, back then, we were less civilized.

00:23:32.220 We could get away with more than the stuff that I was getting away with on Newfoundland television

00:23:37.820 would never have made a minute on Canadian television. And I wouldn't go into the whole

00:23:42.060 tale. But when I finally worked my way through the system, if you can put it that way, or got lucky,

00:23:47.580 probably lucky is better. I thought that, you know, in terms of commentary, at five minutes a week,

00:23:53.340 even if it wasn't everything I wanted to get out, or occasionally, because this is very important,

00:23:58.780 if I could make a connection. I remember we were talking about the Philippine women.

00:24:02.220 There was one commentary I still remember. It was a Filipino woman in, I think, Edmonton. And she'd

00:24:07.900 been spotted by one of her employees that she was working two jobs. So they wanted to send her back

00:24:14.780 to the Philippines because she was working too much. And I remember it very well. I went on that night,

00:24:21.740 and I said, we have a need of new immigration laws. We've got to put a block on Filipino women 1.00

00:24:27.900 who really wanted to do some work. Working too hard. So that's a cameo that just came to me,

00:24:32.940 and forgive me. But that was one of the reasons why I held on, because every now and then,

00:24:37.820 you would have one moment to shine. You got very particular. The other reason was, I thought that

00:24:43.820 CBC was not connecting with at least 60% of its own audience, and that they needed at least a filament,

00:24:51.820 the thinnest possible line to some other point of view. And so I took that over. And on checkup,

00:24:59.820 I only had one philosophy. I wasn't the guest. I was the filter. If you got on, I wanted to treat you

00:25:07.660 well. I'm not going to guide you because I'm not better than you. Say what you want to say. You can be

00:25:13.580 nice. You can be dull. I made that a point. I didn't care. If you got on, you were eight minutes and you

00:25:18.940 were, that's you. Let's hear it. Okay. And it was the politest, to use a showy word,

00:25:26.380 that more than anything else in life in that program, Canadians liked that because it was

00:25:30.780 not interesting in a dead sense. But it gave you over time a reflection of the temperament of the

00:25:37.740 majority of the people. Majority. It wasn't the leaders. Right. I used to love talking to some of

00:25:43.580 the truckers that end up down in the States. They'd pull over to the side. We'd be talking about,

00:25:47.900 you know, Chinese immigration or something. We'd end up talking about the price of the hamburger 1.00

00:25:52.220 on the road. Right. That's the stuff that worked. Well, that is interesting because that's the kind

00:25:56.220 of thing you wouldn't really hear about otherwise. It's life. But I feel like that kind of programming

00:26:00.940 doesn't really exist on the CDC. No, it doesn't. It's all cost programming,

00:26:03.420 attitude programming. Well, and it probably wouldn't be able to. I remember a couple months ago,

00:26:08.300 maybe it was a year ago now, a fellow that was a radio host out in Vancouver got fired because

00:26:13.020 he was making sort of racial stereotypes saying, I think something similarly, you know, along the

00:26:18.380 lines of what you were just saying about how Filipinos work really hard and other cultures

00:26:21.740 don't work as hard or something. I know him. He made some comment about cultures and that was

00:26:26.380 considered politically incorrect. In a world where you cannot make a positive

00:26:31.180 reference to a group that you know, I know many, many people from many, many cultures. And I've also

00:26:38.140 determined that in the case of the poor women, and it is almost exclusively across the entire

00:26:43.660 country and usually in the better hotels, I keep saying, you know, the big people go to the rich

00:26:49.180 restaurants and they'll drop a $50. The one up there who has been cleaning up last night's spew

00:26:54.940 party is lucky to be getting minimum wage. I always feel pay some attention to ordinary people. 0.57

00:27:01.740 For sure. Well, so even in my neighborhood, like I mentioned, I have an 18 month old son,

00:27:06.140 and I stay home with him. I also get some help from my mom, from his grandma. And we go around

00:27:12.060 the park in my neighborhood. And it's almost all Filipino women with the little kids because they 1.00

00:27:17.260 are all everyone in the neighborhood has a Filipino nanny. And that's just sort of how it is in Toronto. 0.94

00:27:22.460 And it's it's it's really kind of interesting. It's awkward. But there's so much, you know,

00:27:31.420 the other points that we have here, you know, all this COVID stuff and the interruption of the school,

00:27:38.700 it reminds me of the other great element, greater than news media, is the kind of educational decline.

00:27:46.780 I'm not, you know, I'm not a specialist or anything. But the absence of rigor in the in the teaching of

00:27:53.980 how to think, how the mind operates, how to accumulate information, how to discriminate between

00:27:59.980 particular instances, how to refine an argument, how to understand where to get the information

00:28:06.380 from in the first place, how to conduct an analysis within your own mind of your own mind,

00:28:14.060 and introduction to the proven great thoughts that have been established over three or four thousand

00:28:22.300 years. I cannot imagine if I live near Everest, not once looking up. And the same is true if you have

00:28:29.900 30, 40, 50 years on this earth, and you don't taste Beethoven or Michelangelo or Shakespeare.

00:28:36.300 If you ignore everything that is awesome, that has been constructed by the human spirit,

00:28:41.580 you haven't tasted life, and you lack judgment. And so many of these ridiculous people running around 0.99

00:28:47.580 on the street, I saw one interview, an interview with the one who wanted to haul down the statue of 0.94

00:28:53.180 Winston Churchill, she thought he was still alive. You had to be pretty empty-headed in Britain of 2020,

00:29:02.540 not to know that Churchill is dead. We've scooped your heads out. But that's sort of the thing is like,

00:29:09.500 a lot of the movement is driven by sort of ignorance, but also arrogance. The idea that we know better

00:29:14.620 than everyone else, we know better than anyone around us. Arrogance is the twin of the ignorance.

00:29:18.780 And nothing fuels arrogance more than knowing nothing to begin with, except the one little sweet idea

00:29:25.580 that you think makes you special. And the idea that your idea overrules mine, just on your say-so,

00:29:33.900 is one of the most despicable features of our time. I can say this about you, but you can't say anything

00:29:40.540 about me. And if we do, we'll chase you out of your job, or we will put you off the screen,

00:29:46.060 or you won't be allowed to teach next year. Global warming is a really great example.

00:29:49.580 Right. I can't imagine that an argument about the weather, because that's what it's about.

00:29:54.460 Not the soul, not the sexuality of some person, not some deep religion. It's the goddamn weather. 1.00

00:30:00.540 And if you say, I don't believe it, bang, bang, bang. 1.00

00:30:03.180 It's not even the weather. It's like a theoretical idea of what the weather might be like 100 years ago,

00:30:08.220 based on models, based on math. Based on bad models and bad math, and the conjunction of huge amounts

00:30:14.700 of money and forces, trying to push a particular agenda of which global warming is merely the

00:30:20.300 instrument. Well, so I want to get back to the CBC and sort of how it all fits together. Because

00:30:26.860 you were at the CBC for a long time. You understand that institution better than most, because you've

00:30:31.100 been on both sides of it. Because I've suffered. You've suffered. Well, you provided a service for

00:30:35.420 the country for many years, and then that service ended. But we see the CBC in Canada as sort of one of

00:30:41.660 the leaders of this concept or of saying, you know, these are the things that we believe in.

00:30:47.260 Yeah. And if you don't believe these exact things, you don't even get a seat at the table anymore.

00:30:51.180 No, you don't. That is precisely it. You don't get to be part of the conversation.

00:30:53.420 And we saw that with global warming that, you know, if you didn't have the exact right opinions,

00:30:57.900 Rex, you were a denier, right? You weren't even, you know, and but it's expanded in the same way as

00:31:03.980 we saw with, you know, the ability to say things after the George Floyd riots. You know, you had

00:31:12.700 Stockwell Day getting kicked off of his panel there because he held the wrong opinion, which was to say

00:31:18.300 his bad eyes in high school had him suffer some humiliation. And that to make a comparison of

00:31:24.700 that to having humiliation because of race was some crime. It may have been a bad analogy,

00:31:30.220 but there's nothing wrong with him. By the way, I'm glad you brought that up. One thing that was

00:31:34.140 missing from the Stockwell Day story was the host of the program, even if she agreed with the silly

00:31:40.700 decision to knock him out, to at least come on the next day and say he's been a decent and a worthwhile

00:31:46.700 guest and a fine human being on this show. We're sorry he tripped. And in the meantime,

00:31:52.700 we got Alavaro in a much different situation. Courtesy is the beginning of a lot of civic virtue.

00:31:59.180 They should have said, thank you, Stockwell. Well, and at least acknowledge that, you know,

00:32:03.820 there are other opinions. Yeah, there are other opinions. I mean, and that's sort of the funny

00:32:07.500 thing because I get accused of it. Sometimes I know you haven't. Hopefully we'll get into what

00:32:11.100 happened with you at the National Post. But, you know, I'll get called, you know, right wing or far

00:32:16.700 right or something like that. Yeah, of course you will. And it's like, okay, you know, in the actual

00:32:20.300 country, there's a really wide range of views. There's a wide, wide range of opinions. I know.

00:32:24.860 People in the media hold a very narrow subset of those views. And so what the media might consider,

00:32:30.860 you know, far right, it's because they all sit on one very small perched sort of center-left

00:32:36.700 ideology where they basically all hold the exact same opinion. They're in the same closet. And if you

00:32:40.060 deviate even ever so slightly, then you're offside and therefore you can't be part of the conversation.

00:32:45.260 You're pushed out. And it's like, you know, how can we combat that? Or how can we carry on together in

00:32:50.140 society if we have no... Well, first of all, we, well, first of all, you, and you've already

00:32:56.300 done it in your case, you recognize that such institutions as CBC and CDB and global,

00:33:02.380 implicitly or explicitly, they don't set the agenda. You'd say no. And if, you know,

00:33:08.700 a buddy comes on and says, we're going to have icebergs floating down the great northern peninsula in

00:33:14.460 six months, you get up and you say you're out of your head. The other thing is you do when I'm

00:33:18.940 not flattering you. You do what you're doing. You give opinion. And by the way, if someone called

00:33:24.140 you a racist or called you female, they called you ugly and a slut, all those nasty names that they 1.00

00:33:29.660 do come up with, resent it. I can't swear on this one. F off. But keep doing it. What paralyzes me is, 1.00

00:33:39.980 we make a great deal of Remembrance Day in this country. And we always underline that these brave

00:33:46.380 boys, because they were mainly, of both wars fought, so that we would have one thing, either democracy or

00:33:54.540 the elements of it, the freedom to speak, the freedom to think. And if they could go through the trenches

00:34:01.260 and go through the Panzer War of the Second, so that we could stand up without fear of being

00:34:07.900 tossed into a gulag to say no to something. Why are we so timid, resisting another person's opinion

00:34:16.940 now? Because someone might call us a name. I just don't understand it. I really don't. And when

00:34:24.220 people tell me, you know, I'm in there at the CBC, if I said that, you know, I might lose my job.

00:34:29.580 Lose your job. Lose it. You're making an awful bargain. Now, by the way, they might inflame or

00:34:38.540 exaggerate the degree of consequence to cover an inherent cowardice. But I'm no stronger than you.

00:34:46.540 You're no stronger than I in this little discussion thing. And if I say something now that you either

00:34:52.620 don't like or disagree with, you would say to me, you're out of your mind. And we will continue to

00:34:59.020 talk. And I will not think less of you. Not even you're out of mind. Just, you know,

00:35:02.700 respectfully disagree and we can talk about it. But that's the whole idea is that you should be

00:35:09.020 able to talk about areas where you disagree with. We could. We're built that way, yes. But this new

00:35:13.660 commandant, the liberal, what we'd call them, virtue merchants, they have a soft totalitarian.

00:35:22.140 This is what you think. And when you see, I've seen this on many of the videos down in Portland,

00:35:28.620 where you see this almost flower white woman talking to this black officer and telling the

00:35:36.620 black officer he's not black. I mean, that's the other thing. I'm glad you mentioned this. 1.00

00:35:41.420 We have also come to the point, we are now allowing the utterance of true lunacies

00:35:48.940 to pass with respectful silence. You must have seen in the last couple of days, the article justifying

00:35:54.700 that two plus two is not four. It can be five. And instead of taking whoever wrote the little thing

00:36:00.700 and dropping them in a pail of pitch, you may examine that argument, please. We have the case of J.K. Rowling,

00:36:08.540 who I think since the days of Eve has got some evidence on her side that man is a man and a woman 0.96

00:36:13.740 is a woman. And if she says that, even if she were wrong, but she says that ancient concept,

00:36:22.860 and she's pilloried by the mad women who called people TERFs or some damn thing. 1.00

00:36:27.580 Right. I mean, it's crazy. 0.99

00:36:28.940 What role do you think the media plays in all this? Because one of the things I kept noticing,

00:36:32.860 I just, I feel like we're being gaslit. And that's a reference to a movie from the,

00:36:37.420 I think, okay, so the idea is that you, you know, you see something and that you keep being told that

00:36:42.700 what you're seeing is not real to drive you crazy. But, you know, they call them peaceful protests.

00:36:47.180 They're not.

00:36:47.980 And the headline will be peaceful protests. And then in the body of the story, you'll find out that there's

00:36:51.900 been hundreds of people arrested and people shot.

00:36:53.580 I wrote that today or yesterday. And it happened over and over and over again.

00:36:57.900 I know. I had four examples in, I think it's my most recent column.

00:37:00.540 Right.

00:37:01.420 That, you know, you got a hundred, you got 28 people shot in a peaceful protest.

00:37:05.100 Or the other one was peaceful protest intensified.

00:37:09.180 Yeah. There's people dying on the street and there's arms being scattered.

00:37:14.140 The media have become part of the game. I don't want to start on American media and I'm not

00:37:20.780 talking about Fox. The American media, since especially the Hillary election,

00:37:26.700 have decided they're no longer observers, they're participants.

00:37:29.980 They are agents of change. They have doctrines, like a church has doctrines.

00:37:36.140 They have ambitions. They have stated political goals.

00:37:39.420 Well, the Toronto Star has always had that.

00:37:41.420 The Toronto Star is a marshland of much liberal opinion and always has been.

00:37:49.260 But it offers some sort of metaphorical comfort. But down in the States, this is active.

00:37:58.140 The hatred of Trump is a passport to every possible kind of reprehensible reportage.

00:38:06.780 You can say anything, bend any rule, make up anything. You have three years of an insane collusion

00:38:14.460 that he was an agent of Vladimir Putin. And we ran that up here too, by the way.

00:38:19.900 Well, as he was, you know, putting the harshest sanctions that the US has ever put.

00:38:24.620 Never mind the contradictions. Right.

00:38:26.060 You could not write this story. And yet on CBC, CBV, global, up here,

00:38:31.500 any new break, oh, it's cut. Now the walls are closing in. And when it blew up, and it has blown up,

00:38:38.540 I resent this. Where are the backstories? Hey, we thought this, we fed it to you 50% of every newscast.

00:38:47.020 We were really, really wrong. And we now want to discover how did we get that wrong. And as soon

00:38:54.220 as he was out of that one, it was the Ukrainian conspiracy. And they were on to that within seconds 0.61

00:38:59.900 of that. The news media have lost conscience. They've lost the idea of genuine scrutiny. And

00:39:08.140 they serve a partisan force. So it's that's the set of media. That's kind of stuff that you're doing,

00:39:16.140 which is a breach from the norm. And there are hundreds and hundreds of others. I have no ability

00:39:22.620 to project. But this is where things news will dissipate. And at the same time, disseminate more

00:39:29.820 of it. But the fault of the current established media is that they've lost much of their conscience.

00:39:37.340 But I feel like the problem, Rex, is that most people just don't pay that much attention. So

00:39:42.300 they sort of vaguely see headlines. They understand. Same with the George Floyd protests. They say,

00:39:50.140 okay, a cop really brutally murdered someone. And therefore, a lot of this is sort of justified.

00:39:56.620 And then they don't kind of follow up to see the same thing with the Russia stuff. There's a lot of

00:40:01.340 people out there who probably don't know that the whole thing was disproven. They just sort of believe

00:40:05.980 that it's still sort of true. And it happened in the past with some of the previous Black Lives

00:40:10.860 Matter protests, where, you know, the idea of hands up, don't shoot, that Michael Brown was

00:40:15.180 shot in the back, where, you know, the investigation done by Barack Obama's DOJ found that he actually

00:40:20.380 wasn't and all this stuff. But people don't pay attention to that follow up. And like you said,

00:40:24.460 the media doesn't do a mea culpa and say, you were wrong about all this stuff.

00:40:28.300 That's another reason why so much of the ordinary, I hate the word, I really do when you use it in

00:40:33.660 this context, but normal people, they've closed their doors on all of us. You know, if they have a

00:40:41.500 bakery and they had to make cakes to survive, or if they got a farm, or if they're in the pharmacy,

00:40:46.540 or their taxes, they do their business, and they say, you know, we've come to believe that this is

00:40:51.500 such a mess, that none of them are telling us the truth. Journalism is the only profession I think

00:40:58.700 I know that's lower than politics. And the number of respected journalists in this country

00:41:04.860 is abysmally low. I know some in BC, I wouldn't be there because it's not right to do so. But once you

00:41:10.700 let people lose faith in primary institutions, if you once see them saying, I'm not sure my schools

00:41:18.700 are doing what schools are supposed to do, why were they bringing in these we frauds, for example?

00:41:24.700 And if universities are manufacturing attitudes rather than building minds, if they're indoctrination

00:41:32.700 centers of very low intellectual caliber, why would I send son or daughter to one? But we're at the

00:41:40.540 end of that great blossoming where ignorance, assumption, the elite casting agendas that if

00:41:47.260 you don't agree with this, well, look at Brexit, they were all barbarians who wanted back their own

00:41:52.780 country. And if you keep crapping, I hate to leave vulgarisms, on the general citizen, you elect Donald 0.80

00:42:02.220 Trump. I think Trump, by the way, is a very good guy. I want to make that really clear. But most people

00:42:06.620 forget that if they treated the general citizen with respect, there would not have been an election

00:42:13.020 of Donald Trump. I see it that way, too. I think that Donald Trump was like the great revenge of the

00:42:18.140 sort of working man or the working class in the field. He's the avatar of your revenge, that's a fact. 1.00

00:42:21.980 Right. And it's like we've had, we're so tired of your nonsense and your BS and you're telling us 0.88

00:42:26.140 what to think and what to believe. I remember halfway through that election, yeah, like there started to

00:42:31.020 be a sort of thing that I noticed on social media where the idea was, if you don't support Hillary 0.99

00:42:36.460 Clinton, it's because you're sexist. Yeah, exactly. And I remember debating a guy that I went to school

00:42:41.420 with and it's sort of like, well, what do you mean? Like, I'm a woman. I don't like Hillary Clinton for

00:42:45.420 these 10 policy reasons. You know, what does that have to do with that? It's like, but they really

00:42:51.020 believe it. And it's like, well, it's because you've ingrained sexism and you don't see her the same way

00:42:56.460 and the scandals that get talked about her. And they have this whole kind of conspiracy almost

00:43:00.860 about why that's the case. And you see that same iteration, that same line of thinking

00:43:05.100 today with the concepts around racism, that you must be racist if you don't believe the causes of

00:43:09.980 this group. You must know this, that Joe Biden, what was it, five, six weeks ago, talking to the Black

00:43:14.620 reporter, told the Black reporter, because he was going to vote for Trump, that he wasn't black.

00:43:19.180 You can't make this up. Right, yeah, exactly. So good. Canadians still have a lot of faith in

00:43:23.660 institutions. I look at the polling data and in the U.S., you know, politicians, journalists,

00:43:29.660 police officers do okay, but a lot of those institutions have really low approval.

00:43:33.500 Surprisingly, when you look at Canada, there's still a lot of faith in institutions like journalism

00:43:38.540 and politics. I mean, obviously politics takes a hit depending on who's in office in the scandal.

00:43:43.420 It has to be declining. I'm not questioning the polls because I don't know.

00:43:47.180 But I do, I do. Up until this year, I travel variously. It's not just the city,

00:43:54.220 I've been up north. I've been in the towns. I've met every sort of group you can imagine,

00:43:59.340 over 20 years plus. And I went to Weyburn, Saskatchewan last summer. It was a wonderful

00:44:06.300 meeting. A thousand farmers. And you talk to them, you know, they take the cow stick,

00:44:12.860 they gave me one of them. I said, I bring it back to the CBC. This is for hitting the cows to get them to win.

00:44:17.660 No, it certainly, it certainly is in decline. I'm just, I'm always surprised that there is still

00:44:23.420 faith in the institutions because I watch media really closely. I sort of critique it. And to me,

00:44:28.780 it's just so obviously not reporting the truth, it's not reporting what's actually happening in the

00:44:33.500 world. That snobbish, the lack of education. I had PhDs at CBC working as research assistants.

00:44:43.100 But they had done a PhD and I ended up making it up in gender geography. And I mentioned Sherlock

00:44:49.340 Holmes and what? But if you've done, you know, three years work on gender geography,

00:44:56.620 you don't know who Sherlock Holmes is. You're ignorant. You've wasted seven years of your life 1.00

00:45:01.820 putting stuff in your head that relates to nothing. It's vapor. Anyway.

00:45:06.460 Well, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier that the writing habits you get from

00:45:11.020 academia. I mean, the idea that you hire someone because they have a university degree and they

00:45:15.500 show up on a job and they can't really write and they can't really think and they can't really put

00:45:18.860 ideas together. It's like, what have you been doing for the last four years? I think that people who are

00:45:23.820 aspirant for a journalistic exercise, if they can't be talked out of it. If they go to a university,

00:45:32.940 the last thing they should do is go to a journalism school. They should study, I suggest history would

00:45:39.260 be one great thing. They should obviously study English with a particular emphasis on narratives.

00:45:48.140 I mean novels, but I also mean essays. And if they really want to get good at it,

00:45:54.540 they should do the study of poetry, not for its beauty, but to analyze how words at their maximum

00:46:04.460 power and force have been organized. There is no greater introduction to the communication

00:46:13.100 of different ideas and blending argument than close attention to the most exquisite management of

00:46:22.220 words that the language has, and that is in the highest poems. And I could give you just a hundred is

00:46:28.940 enough if you studied a hundred short poems, but really studied them. Why is this line so electric?

00:46:37.820 Why is this so powerful? You'll never find a cliche. You'll understand what vibrant,

00:46:46.380 excitable or persuasive language is. And we have from Montaigne to S.J. Perelman, we have 40 to 50 of

00:46:55.180 the greatest English essayists that have ever lived. And the first great journalist, believe it or not,

00:47:01.420 Samuel Johnson, was also a repository of some of the highest class essays that have ever been done.

00:47:08.620 All your journalism is in other books. And as far as setting up the microphone and learning how to

00:47:14.220 chit chat back and forth, you could take a month off somewhere and go to some school and pick all that 0.94

00:47:19.180 crap up. But you have to read the past. You have to have some history. And if you're in English

00:47:24.540 journalism, obviously, you got to have English. The rest is, can you think? Right. And I think that's why

00:47:30.940 in some ways journalism has fewer barriers now than ever because anyone can tell a story. They can

00:47:36.860 pick up their phone and film something that shows a unique angle that the mainstream media perhaps

00:47:41.180 isn't covering. And there's so much more information. There's so much more.

00:47:44.460 And also we've allowed journalism to wander into self-duration. You know, we go to school not to

00:47:55.420 learn where we live. We go to school to learn the things we don't know, the things we haven't met.

00:48:01.580 And outside of our own personality, we want to hear about the personalities of others. But if your dating

00:48:09.420 life is the subject of your entire fascination, and you can get a lifestyle columnist job,

00:48:17.660 you may call it journalism. I call it narcissism. You're not spreading information, you're confining it.

00:48:24.620 You can have entertainment journalism, you know, so-called. But the serious stuff means that it's

00:48:30.060 the things that make us different. And to call in education now that you must have a representative

00:48:35.260 face in front of you to teach you, otherwise you can, that goes against the entire history of

00:48:41.420 civilization. We learn different things from different people. I'd rather know the Battle of

00:48:47.660 Troy, which is the archetype of all battles, than I would love, I know of a certain battle in Newfoundland

00:48:54.300 and Harbor Grace. I learned that too. But if I had a choice between the two, the one I would want to

00:48:59.660 learn this, the Troy one, I'd eventually get to this. And if I had the chance for some Australian to come 1.00

00:49:06.540 teach me English literature, I'd take them over to Newfoundland and they're teaching me Newfoundland

00:49:10.700 literature. I would. Why is that? You want to get stuff that you don't have.

00:49:18.460 You know, I got the Newfoundland lingo, I can't figure it, but I don't know Erasmus. And also,

00:49:26.140 it's past. You have to embed your, your journalism means every day. That's etymological. But the only

00:49:34.540 way you can write about every day is that you have to have some mental map of a temporal scheme

00:49:40.700 book. I can go, and I'm not bragging, it's true. I can go from Shakespeare to Yeats. And I get,

00:49:47.820 there are places all along the way. And so when I see something now, and I can either as a, as an

00:49:54.700 expression or a phrase or an idea, I can see where Yeats connects with John Donne. Like, that's 350,

00:50:02.460 is 400 years. Same sentence almost. So then you say, well, this isn't new. So what you start to write,

00:50:10.140 this is also true 400 years ago in a different context. Right. It teaches you another way to

00:50:14.700 think about it. Journalists are jacks of all trades, but history and a real study, they should be humble

00:50:23.020 before language. I agree with that. So I studied political science in school. I remember going to a

00:50:28.300 seminar down in the US and meeting other students that studied politics, but their degrees were in

00:50:33.980 government or in politics. And I was kind of curious, like, what's the difference? And basically,

00:50:38.380 it was that in Canadian political science courses, you learn about, you know, ancient Greek philosophy

00:50:43.820 and the origins of political thinking. And it was much more based on sort of philosophy,

00:50:49.580 whereas they just literally learn the nuts and bolts of government. They learn systems. And to me,

00:50:53.980 it's almost more like a degree in engineering or something like that. It's like understanding

00:50:58.620 how things work. And to me, it's like, well, yeah, the purpose of the education really was what you

00:51:05.260 get out of it, which is not just the knowledge of how a government works, but the ideas underpinning

00:51:10.780 it and where we came from. And the other thing, we don't know each other, but this much I know of you,

00:51:15.660 you worked a little bit in the political system. I maintain it as an axiom that any full-time

00:51:21.980 journalist in the political idea should be sent from his or her province and told to join the

00:51:27.980 party he or she most despises, really, to be given a three-month or a six-month job on salary.

00:51:35.020 You are now a partisan working for the party you hate the most. And you go into the question periods,

00:51:40.220 and you go into the caucuses, and you go to the campaigns, and you go door to door.

00:51:44.380 You mingle with the actual stuff of politics, and you hear from North Westminster or wherever the

00:51:50.940 hell you are, a voice that you will not hear in the scrum at Ottawa. And then when you come back,

00:51:58.460 having left to one party you really don't like, you can then say, I'm going to judge all politics.

00:52:04.940 Real experience on top of education. Journalists need to get out of their own biases and their own

00:52:10.620 provinces. Well, I think that would be good for all Canadians. I mean, I find this a lot on social

00:52:16.620 media. I think social media, we were talking earlier about how women get all these insults 1.00

00:52:21.020 and stuff like that. Everyone does, right? Social media brings out the worst in people,

00:52:24.620 and it gives them a platform to say the things that they would never say in real life to your face,

00:52:28.780 right? And so you have to get really tough skin through that. But one of the things I find is that,

00:52:33.420 wow, there's a subset of people out there that really loathe conservatives. They just hate to their

00:52:38.460 core, the concept that you're conservative. And there's no kind of trying to understand or bridge

00:52:43.260 the gap or trying to see where they come from. And you see the same thing regionally, Rex. I mean,

00:52:47.340 you're from the East Coast. I mean, I don't think that there's any kind of like real hatred towards

00:52:52.060 the East Coast. But I went to school in Alberta. I grew up in Vancouver on the West Coast, but I went

00:52:56.220 to school in Alberta. And there seems to be like a real hatred towards people from Alberta when you're in

00:53:01.820 other parts of the country. And maybe it goes back and forth. Oh, I know. I've studied. I've made that part of my

00:53:06.300 political colonizing. Yeah, I know you've commented on this. But do you feel like the country is more

00:53:12.460 divided now than it has been before? I tell you what, at the institutional level, at the management level,

00:53:18.060 the management of this country is incompetent at the present time. I find that when I get down, and I don't like

00:53:24.380 these spatial metaphors up and down signifying equality. I mentioned Weyburn. When I get with large groups of

00:53:30.460 people that aren't in some silly academic setting, it's the farmer here. Or I went to a great

00:53:37.500 logging conference in another place. And I've been at a lot of farm exhibitions. And I know nothing

00:53:43.340 about nothing. And yet you make the rounds, you meet the women, you meet the men, some of the kids. And

00:53:49.900 there's something so stable and welcoming. I mentioned 9-11 when the Newfoundlanders welcomed the

00:53:54.380 Americans. Gander you know about, Gambo you don't. In an even smaller town. Never traveled any more than 0.79

00:54:01.500 50 miles, the majority of them. But the natural spirit, it was unaffected. They're not looking around

00:54:09.020 saying they're going to think we're really good. It was real. They were staggered. They were in anxiety.

00:54:17.020 There's a little tiny place. What can we do for them? And if they dropped down in labor, it would have been

00:54:23.180 different in form. But it would have been the same. The great swath. And that's true of all the cultures.

00:54:30.380 We get into this identity book. It's true that the norm of most people is good. And in Canada,

00:54:38.380 it is so easy and so friendly. I've been around now for far too long for far too many people. But it

00:54:44.620 really is interesting how gently pleasant people are when they meet a stranger that's not a stranger,

00:54:50.860 if you're following me. I expect to be, you know, a rock straw nationalist. People are just plain.

00:54:57.580 The natural sentiment of the country is towards a controlled harmony, a disposition

00:55:04.860 to go positive before the results come in. In other words, extend the good hand and we'll see what

00:55:12.300 happens. It is not vicious. It does not contain any elements of predetermined animosity based on

00:55:21.580 category. We all have a subdivision of people who are either strange or angry or ugly. That's everywhere.

00:55:27.900 But in the national disposition, treat other people decently. If you have the capacity,

00:55:32.620 help them when you can. Be friendly. Don't be over friendly. And moderate. All that sounds dull,

00:55:42.620 but it adds up to a word that has not got the value that it much deserves to have. They are decent human

00:55:49.420 beings. And they can be farmers, or they can be corporate masters, by the way. Or they can be doctors,

00:55:57.020 or they can be janitors. They can be anyone. But the mix that I've encountered is overwhelmingly more

00:56:04.940 positive than negative. And it is overwhelmingly more welcoming than bigotism.

00:56:11.020 Oh, so this is sort of the line of thinking that you had in that column that you wrote saying,

00:56:16.460 you know, Canada's, sure, there's individual instances of racism, but there are all over the world.

00:56:22.460 Yeah. And the country isn't characterized by racism. No. And that's such an important distinction. And

00:56:28.380 when I read your column, I was sort of, you know, relieved because it's like, finally someone's

00:56:32.940 saying this, right? Well, it's obvious. And it's almost like, why does it need to be said? Well,

00:56:36.460 it didn't need to be said in the real world. But in that moment, no one else was saying it. And there

00:56:41.340 was sort of a chilled, you know, we were watching what was happening in the US. What's he doing? And, you know,

00:56:45.900 people who were speaking out against it were getting sort of canceled. We talked about Stockwell

00:56:49.580 doing having the wrong opinion or stating the opinion in the wrong way on the CBC. And you

00:56:54.700 wrote a column that was very sort of gentle and reasonable and not over the top, not bombastic,

00:56:59.820 not aggressive. It was dull. Well, I don't know about that. It was interesting. And like I said,

00:57:05.260 when I read it, I felt good because it's like, you know, someone needs to say this because this is how

00:57:09.740 we all feel. And similarly, I've traveled all over the country. I've lived in different cities,

00:57:13.820 different regions. And I think that there are a few sort of themes and characteristics that Canadians

00:57:18.540 have. They sort of tend to defer to order. They like to follow rules. They're friendly,

00:57:23.980 and they will go out of their way to help people. Obviously, that's not everybody, but that's the

00:57:28.060 general sort of character. And so why is it that that column that you wrote just sort of struck a

00:57:33.580 chord and launched this negative reaction? Because I won't be specific, but because there is

00:57:40.860 a mindset or a mentality that seems to have only found nourishment in nursing imaginary or real

00:57:52.780 grievances and putting a microscope on every possible flaw. And Mr. Trudeau, I wrote another

00:58:02.860 column a while back. I don't mind him apologizing for what he perceives to be, what he calls historic

00:58:09.660 wrongs. But if we're going to get a rain of apologies from the prime minister, I would also like to hear

00:58:17.180 him on alternate days saying, oh, by the way, this is not the entirety. And if we do have an incident of

00:58:24.700 racism, and we do have them, we also have incidents where the opposites happen. I don't know if people

00:58:31.900 remember the great flight from Vietnam. And these are hardly our lookalike neighbors. I don't remember 1.00

00:58:41.420 anyone saying that Canada's immigration policy had some secret device to bar out sets of people based

00:58:47.980 on their color. I've been in too many small. I've met a guy from, I forget the African state. I met him

00:58:55.900 up beyond Edmonton. And I said, what in the hell are you doing here? You left, you know, the tropical climate 0.52

00:59:03.980 and you're way up in the last 15 years. He said, I love it here. I see too much of the benign being

00:59:13.260 bypassed and every little tiny silly thing. And secondly, grievance mongering is also a form of politics.

00:59:21.100 You can get ahead in this world. If you decide to make picking at various sexual, ethical, ethnical,

00:59:31.260 sexual, religion, if you can find some spot where you can claim a grievance and blame it on the whole

00:59:38.620 society or the whole history, it's a path towards a certain celebrity. But you do not hear, they're not

00:59:47.020 on the panels. You do not hear about the woman out in Red Deer and her next door neighbor died

00:59:56.140 and she decided their husband's alone. She bakes some bread once in a while and gives them some

01:00:01.020 Sunday dinner. I've been down in Newfoundland when tragedies occur and husbands have been lost.

01:00:07.820 And other husbands come over in the winter and take care of it. We don't, and by the way,

01:00:12.300 they don't look for the color. They look for the need. You could multiply a thousand times.

01:00:19.580 Individual gestures and individual concourse constitutes the tissue of a nation, not the 0.97

01:00:26.300 stories that hit a damn headline or my ridiculously innocuous column. If I'm not allowed to say, 0.93

01:00:34.700 I'm grateful that I happen to land here as opposed to North Korea, if I'm not allowed to say, I actually

01:00:45.420 like it here and I have a couple of good reasons why it should be liked. And if that causes a storm,

01:00:53.980 the dilemma is not mine to face. The mystery has to be unraveled in the mind who finds it injurious to

01:01:00.540 read such a thing. And yet that's sort of the situation that you found yourself in because

01:01:05.420 the column said other things too, right? It was a critique of Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna

01:01:09.660 who were sort of playing on this race-based sort of... Every now and then I said,

01:01:13.900 please include something, you know. Positive. So can you walk us through sort of what happened?

01:01:19.180 Because it sort of turned into a stir. We saw that there was a report. I'll walk you into it so far

01:01:23.420 as far as I know about it. I don't care about those things. It was a big blow-up and I know there was.

01:01:30.460 I didn't explain, I'm being very frank with you, didn't really greatly explore. I know there was a,

01:01:35.740 because I couldn't avoid reading it, something of a roar in the newsroom. I was asked if I minded

01:01:43.580 if another column was written. I said, write 10. I don't care. I write what I write.

01:01:48.620 I said, I don't want to write. Fine. I don't care. That's what we do. I did make it a point to say

01:01:56.380 that if there was going to be interference, I'll say this out loud too, then you know you've got

01:02:02.620 a choice to make. I'm not stopping what I'm doing and I'm not apologizing for what I wrote. I think

01:02:08.220 you saw that. So I said, I'm going to write one saying where I am. You can take it and they do and

01:02:14.060 they backed it. And I will make one tiny, tiny, tiny claim here. The fact that I went out of my

01:02:22.460 way to say, no, I'm not apologizing. I think Stockwell Day made a really bad mistake. He's a

01:02:27.260 decent man. He should have said, well, I might have said something clumsy, but I didn't say anything bad

01:02:33.740 and I'm not apologizing. And the celerity with which some powerful people in this country,

01:02:43.980 someone in one of the art magazines recently, almost disemboweled himself in glutinous apology

01:02:51.660 for some imagined sin. Look, there are real pains in this world. There are people in other countries

01:02:59.740 wondering whether they can get food for the baby tomorrow morning. We have some in China. There

01:03:05.020 are people in jails. There are people who have fantastic and painful illnesses. There are people

01:03:11.100 in poverty. And we sometimes find such silly stuff and organize our lives and our passions behind it.

01:03:19.900 We should be ashamed of ourselves. We have it really, really, really good in this country, regardless of

01:03:25.580 any background. And in comparison with most of the countries of the world, we've been given a

01:03:31.340 benediction. Generations passed. I'm from Newfoundland. I know what it was like down there in the 30s.

01:03:40.060 I wouldn't have lasted. We've had it soft and easy. We've inherited more than we've ever built

01:03:46.780 ourselves. We have a stable democracy. We have a reason civility, a reason civic order, and we have

01:03:55.580 the greatest spread of natural resources over one of the vast landmasses in the entire world.

01:04:00.300 We don't have civil war. We never get huge natural disasters. And aside from this, I'm not sure,

01:04:08.460 whatever COVID is, this is about the worst thing we've faced since the First World War. Can't you be

01:04:14.620 grateful? Think of the people crawling around in civil wars and in places like Cambodia, 30 years, 0.98

01:04:22.940 people who went through war, who lived in Russia. Count your damn blessings. That's not chauvinism. 0.99

01:04:31.820 Right. It's reality. I'm glad you mentioned gratitude because I feel like that's something that's

01:04:36.620 often just missing in our society. Don't get it. Don't get it. One of the things I learned just

01:04:41.020 sort of growing up here is that the people who I always found were the most sort of patriotic

01:04:44.780 Canadians were immigrants, people who had come from other places. My husband- I can speak to that too.

01:04:49.740 Yeah, my husband came from Iran when he was 13. And, you know, to this day, he'll say he'd be

01:04:54.860 dead or in jail if his family had stayed in Iran. I have a friend from Belgrade. I have a whole

01:04:58.620 family from China. They beam when they talk about this place. I love them more than I love some of

01:05:05.260 the Canadians. Well, because they've seen something different. They understand what liberty means.

01:05:10.620 Right. And all this, this, this obsessional, puritanical fault finding and always putting

01:05:20.700 your center, yourself at the center of the virtue being discussed. There's a narcissism here disguising

01:05:27.900 itself as, oh, I'm rooting out injustice. We've invented more areas of false pain. There's enough real

01:05:37.340 pain in the world not to be playing around with two plus two equals five. It really is, you know. 0.58

01:05:43.260 Well, then what do you make of the the argument that you can't talk about racism in Canada because

01:05:48.700 you're a white man or you're an old guy? There's no such thing. A white privilege is a garbage concept.

01:05:54.940 It is a political concept. And racism is a dynamic between racists. And it's a plural. You have no 1.00

01:06:03.340 special stock. Am I to claim that because of the Irish famine that you can't read James Joyce?

01:06:11.580 You can't rule out the areas of discussion based on your uccacy. If I want to talk to someone about

01:06:20.940 English literature, I know a little bit about that. That doesn't mean I can tell you to shut up.

01:06:25.660 Right. And this idea of lived experience is somehow authenticating any assertion. What other kind of

01:06:33.020 experience is there? Have you got some unlived experience that I haven't heard about? I have

01:06:37.900 lived experience. No, I have experience. You have more lived experience, yeah. But the thing that the

01:06:42.860 left is really good at, really clever at is they take something that's completely obvious. Like

01:06:47.340 everyone has different experiences. Of course. Everyone has a different perspective based on their

01:06:50.460 experiences. They have a different view of things based on where they come from. Yeah, we also have minds and

01:06:55.260 logic and brains and we can read. Right. A lot of things besides how I feel. Right. But then that sort

01:07:01.020 of leads and it doesn't just become my lived experience. It's like my truth, which is different

01:07:05.180 than your truth. Well, that's again, it's a high school argument. Right. Anyone who pays respect to

01:07:10.380 people who talk about their truths, and there's six of us in the room, we have seven truths. You're allowed

01:07:16.540 to do it. You can join in if you want. But it's third grade thinking. It just doesn't stand.

01:07:23.180 And there's another thing. On the thing like 2 plus 2, on the thing like logic. You don't bend.

01:07:30.940 I'm sorry. There are people trying to suggest that the STEM studies should now take in race factors

01:07:38.140 and this fact. This is garbage. And here's the beginning of change. I don't know why people mute 0.99

01:07:45.660 themselves when they see obvious idiocies that are literally an insult to your intelligence if you 0.98

01:07:52.940 don't say no back to them when they clamp their mouths. If you want to go study astrophysics, 0.96

01:08:01.660 go to a good astrophysics university. Don't phone Oprah and bring in Dr. Phil and think you'll feel your

01:08:10.140 way to it. Because there are so many obvious things that we're being told are not obvious.

01:08:16.540 That's also where all the people beneath the television studios are laughing their heads off

01:08:21.580 or are pissed off. And they're saying, this is a lie. What's his name? Obama. You can keep your doctorate.

01:08:28.380 He lied to them 50 times in the world. Not one newsman outside of the hard right types. He said that lie

01:08:34.460 over and over and over again. Never got challenged. Everyone else knew it wasn't. You can't suppress the

01:08:40.460 truth and think that other people are not noticing. Right. Well, do you think that we're going to hit

01:08:46.300 a turning point, Rex? Like at some point, because I feel like now, you know, you say don't apologize.

01:08:50.700 And if you're in a place where your workforce is telling you to do something that you don't want to

01:08:55.420 quit, most people can't do that. Most people have to go to work. They have to go to work. And they just

01:09:00.540 learn to keep their mouth shut. I know. And they have opinions and, you know, like we were talking

01:09:04.380 about earlier. Where does that finally go? I mean, I agree with you. People who have dependents

01:09:10.700 and are hard up, they got to have the job. Yeah. And so they don't have the choice to just say,

01:09:14.940 like, I refuse to apologize. But if they continue to accept the clamp, I don't mean them individually,

01:09:20.620 the clamp will just come on harder. You work so that you have the means to live, that you can provide

01:09:26.940 supplies for yourself and your family and possibly a bit of entertainment. But if, if, if in the

01:09:32.140 earning of the, of the means to live, life itself becomes conscripted, and that you have to bend your

01:09:38.780 personality, and that you have to bury inside of yourself things you know are not true, then as you

01:09:45.020 live that life, it will become exhausting and not worth living to begin with. So I know the challenge.

01:09:51.180 I certainly don't have the answer to it. But if we concede too much of what is false, it will corrupt

01:09:58.620 us. That's the challenge. And then, I mean, there, there's just, you can point to so many examples.

01:10:05.340 One was Queen's University is introducing a new initiative where it's going to allot a certain

01:10:10.300 percentage of, of its places at medical school to black and indigenous Canadians or people. And those

01:10:17.420 people don't have to write the same entrance exams as everyone else. So, so you can become a doctor

01:10:21.580 without actually writing the MCAT. I mean, at what point in our society are we conceding so much to

01:10:26.540 try to make up for, you know, in some ways very legitimate grievances or, there are grievances and

01:10:31.260 they are legitimate, but you can't, at what point have we given up too much? You can't apply to wrong

01:10:35.340 remedies and you can't dissolve truth. I cannot play the Mozart, the Latin G minor unless I got four or five

01:10:45.500 years of extremely good medical musical instruction. And it's no good, I'll go to Dr. Phil because he's

01:10:51.980 neutral. It's no good me phoning up Dr. Phil and saying, come in here and talk me into playing the

01:10:57.340 Mozart, you know, the ballad. There are certain things, one of the great things of Western civilization

01:11:06.460 is that it built up protocols for the approach to acquiring and adding to knowledge. And these were

01:11:13.100 independent of scribal belief, they're independent of scripture, they were observational, they were

01:11:18.620 empirical, and they followed laws of logic and arithmetic. It's a cold, neutral, value-empty system,

01:11:27.420 but it is a system for ensuring certainty at the level of physical fact. It's one of the greatest

01:11:35.660 institutions, if not the greatest, after language. The ability to acquire technical understanding

01:11:43.500 of the world in which we're in. There's only one path to reaching it, scientific method, rationality,

01:11:51.580 and the discipline of mind and mathematics, especially mathematics. You can dislike mathematics,

01:11:58.300 you can call it white mathematics if you want, but if you do, you're an idiot. It's mathematics. 1.00

01:12:05.740 And an Indian, one of the ones that I most admire, he was a genius, intuitively, at the age of four.

01:12:15.580 He knew more of the nature of mathematics than Einstein at 20. It had nothing to do with color of skin.

01:12:25.180 But the system, you don't go into universities and say, oh well, we can throw in a bit of

01:12:32.860 cultural studies and women's fiction into the disciplines of algebra and quantum physics.

01:12:43.020 That's just willing insanity. You should be talking to Jordan Peterson about this stuff. He's much better

01:12:49.420 at it. Well, and so we were talking about Jordan a little bit before the the camera started rolling,

01:12:54.060 and I think that he's contributed so much just just in reminding us of some of the very basic truths.

01:13:00.460 Like, I know I sent my dad some of his videos when he was just first kind of becoming famous,

01:13:05.820 and my dad's like, you know, I already agree with all this stuff. Like, this is nothing new to me. And

01:13:09.740 to me, I'm like, well, he's saying something that no one else is really saying at this moment.

01:13:13.580 I'll end it like this. We do need a refurbishment and a reminder of the things that are true

01:13:22.940 and the things that count. We, meaning certainly of my generation, my father's, it wasn't true.

01:13:30.460 We grew up without that edge of want or need. They didn't have their medicines. They didn't have

01:13:36.540 reliable jobs. They had many illnesses. They were truly poor. They didn't know if they would ever

01:13:43.100 have any possibility of a good life. And as the 40s went to the 50s, the 60s, and all Western culture

01:13:50.140 came, all the toys, the computers, wealth as other portions of the world cannot even dream of it.

01:13:57.900 You carry in your pocket a computer that, as the cliche has, I could send five missiles to the moon 60

01:14:03.900 years ago. And we're shielded without war, without famine. We've had it so damn good that we've forgotten

01:14:13.020 that it is transient. It has to be supported. And this main support of the system we enjoy

01:14:19.500 is holding on to reality and truth and stop playing games with each other on false political charges.

01:14:27.100 Well, thank you so much, Rex. It's so insightful and we really appreciated

01:14:31.100 every moment of the conversation.

01:14:32.060 It just had to be a delight, eh?

01:14:34.620 Well, thank you so much for being here.

01:14:36.860 I'm very pleased to meet you. You're a first class.

01:14:38.620 Thank you so much.

01:14:40.620 Thank you so much.

01:14:49.180 Thank you.

Juno News - September 10, 2020

Ep 11 ｜ Rex Murphy ｜ Refusing to be cancelled

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript