Juno News - July 06, 2020


Everything’s Just Beachy


Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

184.2051

Word count

5,049

Sentence count

320

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show: Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, Andrew talks about the Kanye West campaign, and the bubonic plague outbreak in Inner Mongolia, China, and why we should all be worried about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:06.460 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:14.900 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:21.520 Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.
00:00:26.460 Good to have you with us as we kick off another week in July.
00:00:30.200 The summer is coming down here. It is like 35 degree temperatures.
00:00:33.540 So I'm glad that I'm holed up in the basement studio, which has a nice 16 to 17 degree chill sometimes.
00:00:40.460 So I'm not looking forward to the new studio in the winter, but for now it's actually quite nice.
00:00:46.460 We'll rename it the Meat Locker before long, depending on how things are going.
00:00:51.000 In any case, let's talk about all the things that are happening right now,
00:00:54.240 because a few items on the 2020 bingo card that I didn't have.
00:00:58.620 The first was President Kanye West, and the second was bubonic plague.
00:01:04.260 These are two things that I didn't know were coming down the pipeline, but evidently are.
00:01:09.200 Kanye West tweeted the other day, as a matter of fact, on the 4th of July,
00:01:13.240 we must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building
00:01:19.980 our future. I am running for President of the United States. Hashtag 2020 vision.
00:01:25.840 Now, this was very quickly endorsed by Elon Musk, who has decided to offer his full support
00:01:32.960 to Kanye West. And then it became a running gag of which other celebrities are going to get into it.
00:01:38.160 And Paris Hilton tweeted that it was time for her to run for President, which, you know what,
00:01:42.740 wouldn't be as bad as some people might think. I would take Prime Minister Paris Hilton over
00:01:47.040 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. So, in any case, the whole point of the Kanye West campaign,
00:01:52.600 I'm not entirely clear. This is a guy who's got a really good record at self-promoting.
00:01:58.280 He's also had a come-to-Jesus moment in the last year, in the most literal sense of it.
00:02:03.520 He's actually found God, has, by all accounts, legitimately changed his life. And even though
00:02:08.320 I'm not a huge fan of Kanye, his music or his personality, I'm interested in the end game,
00:02:15.180 because he's a very smart business guy, same as the Kardashians. People like to mock them,
00:02:19.180 but they're very smart. And, I mean, Kanye now is an honorary Kardashian, having married Kim Kardashian.
00:02:25.320 So, I'm not sure if it's legitimate. He's been very closely tied with Donald Trump. So,
00:02:30.280 could this just be like an elaborate plan to railroad Joe Biden by going after
00:02:35.420 the black vote, by going after independents? I don't know. I'm interested in it anyway, 0.98
00:02:40.340 but we've already decided, and there's no political charge to this, but we've already decided that we
00:02:45.820 can elect an outsider who's been a reality TV star to the presidency. So, if this is now kind of the
00:02:51.680 new reality of it, I think we just have to roll with it. So, good on Kanye, I guess.
00:02:56.060 And then, yes, I mentioned bubonic plague. We've got another virus to worry about. Forget about
00:03:01.940 coronavirus. Forget about murder hornets. Forget about dust storms. Forget about monkeys that
00:03:06.500 transport the coronavirus. We now have in China, specifically in Inner Mongolia,
00:03:12.820 a case of the bubonic plague. According to state reports, a herdsman is in quarantine,
00:03:18.860 albeit in stable condition. However, officials are also investigating a second case because of the
00:03:25.540 most feared disease in the world, the bubonic plague. But they say, ah, it can be easily treated
00:03:29.780 now. You know what? I'm not going to take this for granted because in 2020, when anyone says,
00:03:35.060 oh, we can easily contain it, let me clarify. When China says, oh, we can easily contain it, 0.78
00:03:40.140 I think it's safe to say that we're, just when we start to wean ourselves off of coronavirus
00:03:44.800 countermeasures, we can gear right back up to prevent another black plague. So, this is how 2020
00:03:51.380 is going. You know, my wife, the other day, we were cleaning the house a bit, and she came across
00:03:56.400 a 2020 planner and said something along the lines of, you know, how naive we were to think that
00:04:00.900 anything could be planned in 2020, which I think was probably the most shrewd observation one could
00:04:06.640 come up with. But not just about planning, by the way. I'm finally, in the last few days, learning that
00:04:13.920 I get to go somewhere again. Yes, I'm going to be on a plane to Calgary in a week and a half,
00:04:19.660 just for a couple of days. So, this is like, for me, I used to travel a fair bit for work,
00:04:23.960 just stuff to cover and other things that I do. And this is going to be like the first time in a
00:04:28.660 while that I've actually been able to go anywhere. So, I mean, have they taken all the fun out of it?
00:04:34.380 So, probably, because you have to wear a mask on the plane and you can't touch anything and all of
00:04:38.400 that stuff. But, and they closed down, you know, all of the stuff at the airport where you might want
00:04:42.840 to hang out. So, if you've got a long connection, you don't really have anything to do. But,
00:04:46.820 it is a sign that we are getting back, at least to some semblance of normalcy. But not too normal,
00:04:54.720 because, oh no, the public health bureaucrats don't like that. We had, mostly across the country,
00:05:00.160 beautiful weather on Canada Day and the couple of days before and after it. And a lot of people,
00:05:05.360 because they have been cooped up since March, decided, hey, I want to go out. I want to have fun.
00:05:10.320 I want to get outside. And we've also been told, remember, that getting outside is completely fine.
00:05:16.580 That outdoor transmission is virtually nil. That during the Black Lives Matter protests, 0.96
00:05:23.080 for example, there was no spike in cases. In fact, very few cases at all from these,
00:05:28.100 proving that you can all be outside doing whatever you want and there's no risk of contracting the
00:05:33.000 coronavirus. And remember, Justin Trudeau was in the protests himself. Other public health officials
00:05:39.220 and political leaders were in the protests. So, I do not fault any Canadian for looking at this and
00:05:45.240 saying, I guess it's fine for us to be outside. So, when I see pictures of people at beaches,
00:05:51.900 I don't think, oh my goodness, what menaces to society these are. I think, well, I can't really
00:05:57.520 blame them because, after all, their political leaders have been proving to them that there's no
00:06:01.920 real risk of anything happening to you outside. So, I saw this footage. I'm not a big beach person
00:06:06.880 myself. I burn too easily. I hate the sun and the water's always too cold for me. But if someone
00:06:11.880 wants to go to the beach, I'm not going to blame them for it. But then you have this story out of
00:06:16.660 CTV where a bunch of beachgoers in Wasaga Beach in particular were told by the deputy fire chief,
00:06:25.660 they couldn't even get the full fire chief there, that they were emblematic of the worst form of human
00:06:32.240 behavior. This is what he said in a news report from CTV. Well, you've likely seen the images of
00:06:37.900 packed beaches and the lack of physical distancing. The result in some cases, like in the U.S.,
00:06:43.280 massive spikes in COVID numbers. Those concerns have now prompted strong action from the town of
00:06:48.700 Wasaga Beach. CTV's Craig Momney joins us now. And Craig, what is the town doing to stop that trend?
00:06:54.780 Sean, with temperatures on the rise, it's no surprise people are flocking to local beaches.
00:07:02.060 But for the past few weeks, the town of Wasaga Beach has been dealing with overcrowding issues,
00:07:06.380 with yesterday being the final straw. Now town officials are cracking down.
00:07:12.380 With limited things to do because of COVID and with temperatures on the rise,
00:07:15.740 people are flocking to beaches around the region. But the town of Wasaga Beach says every weekend
00:07:19.740 since June 20th, beachgoers have been neglecting safety measures, with Canada Day being the last straw.
00:07:24.780 We saw human behavior at its worst, quite frankly. Many visitors displayed a reckless disregard for
00:07:30.740 public health guidelines when ignoring physical distancing recommendations.
00:07:34.920 So that was Wasaga Beach Deputy Fire Chief Craig Williams saying people going to the beach
00:07:39.960 is human behavior at its worst. Now, I know it's still early. I have not yet heard of any
00:07:47.000 coronavirus contractions from Wasaga Beach. I have not heard of any beach transmissions of
00:07:54.380 coronavirus at all. I know other beaches as well, like Grand Bend, Ontario, where we're similarly busy
00:07:59.820 and not everyone was wearing masks. Because again, the messaging on this has been so mixed.
00:08:04.560 We were told at first, don't wear a mask because it's bad for you. Then wear one if it makes you feel
00:08:10.100 better. To now, as we talked about last week, some municipalities saying you've got to wear a mask.
00:08:15.980 But then everything went out the window when the protests were happening. Whether you think the
00:08:20.740 protests are justified or not, all of the previous public health guidelines about, oh, don't hang
00:08:25.800 out with your neighbors and don't have kids' birthday parties and don't go to church and don't
00:08:29.360 have funerals and don't have picnics and don't have your family over. And remember at one point in
00:08:34.020 Ottawa, they were saying don't talk to your neighbor over the backyard fence or don't talk from driveway to
00:08:39.800 driveway to your neighbor. So all of that went out the window when they started to say, you know what,
00:08:45.440 if you're going to a protest, just try to be safe about it. You know, Teresa Tam had said, try not
00:08:50.400 to yell. They said, maybe wear a mask. They said, yeah, if you can keep six feet, try to. Every
00:08:55.880 previous bit of advice about what you have to do or what you aren't allowed to do outdoors was
00:09:01.180 obliterated. So if someone says, you know what, I've been cooped up since March. This is now four
00:09:06.900 months of my life. I haven't been able to go anywhere. I haven't been able to do anything. I haven't had
00:09:10.960 much of a social life. I mean, I never did, but for them, that's a big problem. I get it for them
00:09:16.540 to say, we're going to go to the beach. If the politicians, the public health officials, the
00:09:21.640 bureaucrats didn't want that, they shouldn't have started to change the advice based on the 0.90
00:09:26.760 political narratives of protest. They should have stuck to it. Now I would celebrate this, by the
00:09:32.220 way. I mean, I wasn't looking for anyone to contract coronavirus at a Black Lives Matter 1.00
00:09:36.820 protest. I was thrilled that no one did. A, because that's good for a healthier population
00:09:41.360 if people aren't getting sick, but more importantly, because it proved that, okay, we can start getting
00:09:46.500 back to normal. We've proved the concept that you can have big groups, big gatherings outdoor. I mean,
00:09:52.360 what's the difference between having 10,000 people at an outdoor concert versus having 10,000 people in a
00:09:58.480 park for a protest? Absolutely nothing. So if what the evidence is telling us is that people can do
00:10:05.340 whatever they want outside, that would include the beach. You shouldn't need to have Black Lives 1.00
00:10:10.640 Matter bathing suits on for going to the beach to be safe. If it's safe to be outside and in close 0.90
00:10:16.000 quarters with other people having a good time, then it's safe to do it no matter what the circumstances
00:10:20.860 are, regardless of the moral worth of the particular activity or the particular venue at which you're
00:10:27.660 deciding to partake in this. So, you know, anytime people are not following the official guidelines,
00:10:34.600 we can generally blame it on the fact that the official guidelines have changed. In some cases,
00:10:39.520 they've changed two, three, four times. So in a week and a half, after that 14 days has elapsed from
00:10:47.220 Canada Day, by July 15th, if we haven't seen any uptick in cases, then it will once again prove the
00:10:53.620 point that we can get rid of a lot of these lockdowns because clearly the bans on outdoor activity
00:10:59.940 are not in alignment with the science. The restrictions on outdoor activities are not
00:11:07.260 consistent with the science. And that's what we should all be hoping for. The problem is that
00:11:12.480 you've got to wait and they keep extending that period of time. So remember, at first it was, okay,
00:11:18.140 14 days. When Justin Trudeau was self-isolating, he did it for like a month because he was basically
00:11:23.460 saying, all right, he had to double the 14 days just to make sure there was no wiggle room on either
00:11:28.200 side or something like that. But you know, the whole point of this comment from Deputy Chief
00:11:33.800 Williams here, human behavior at its worst, this is being panned online. And I think justifiably so
00:11:39.840 because of all the things we're going to look at in human behavior. And by the way, I'm fine with
00:11:44.900 exaggerations and literary flourishes and making a point, embellishing for effect, all of that.
00:11:51.580 But to say human behavior at its worst, you know, I don't want to make everything about the
00:11:56.920 Holocaust. I know that's Godwin's law, but you know, the Holocaust, we have many other acts of 0.91
00:12:02.820 evil. We had a killing rampage in Nova Scotia a couple of weeks ago. We have people that butt in
00:12:08.340 line at the grocery store. I mean, the sheer list of things that I would say are worse human behavior
00:12:14.000 than going to the beach is longer than the coastline itself of all the Great Lakes combined. So human
00:12:21.480 behavior at its worst is people just deciding, you know what, clearly we're able to safely gather
00:12:26.420 outside. I want to have a bit of a party to celebrate the birth of my country. So this is
00:12:32.700 going to continue because right now everything just keeps getting extended. The border shutdowns
00:12:37.920 are extended. All of this stuff is just getting renewed over and over again. And we are headed
00:12:43.200 towards something of a permanent lockdown where it's not just until the curve flattens or planks,
00:12:49.480 it's until there's not a single case anywhere in the world. And then all of a sudden we're going to
00:12:54.480 be worrying about the bubonic plague. So time to quarantine again. But there doesn't seem to be
00:12:59.760 an eagerness at all among lawmakers to get us to that point where we can completely open up.
00:13:06.380 And I shouldn't say never, right? I mean, in some provinces they are. Alberta, for example,
00:13:10.840 is okay with mass gatherings. Clearly we've reopened churches in Ontario. So that's a positive and
00:13:17.180 elsewhere in the country as well. But there still is this resistance, especially at the federal level,
00:13:23.600 and in a lot of provincial governments, to just saying, all right, you know, I think we've beat
00:13:28.840 this. We've reduced our ICU capacity. We flattened the curve. Anything that happens is manageable.
00:13:35.920 I can't stress enough that when this started, the point was not zero cases. The point was not zero
00:13:43.180 cases. The point was that everyone is going to get it anyway. We want to make sure that not everyone
00:13:48.740 is getting it at the same time. And this seems like a distant memory now, but I very distinctly
00:13:55.040 remember when that was the messaging that, listen, this is going to just go wide and a lot of people
00:14:00.180 are going to contract this. We're going to develop that herd immunity. However, we need to ensure
00:14:05.680 that what we do is have a population that is getting it in a staggered, measured way so that when
00:14:12.640 the serious cases are putting people in the hospital, we have the capacity and the means to
00:14:17.240 treat it. And this is why, I mean, hospitals were girding themselves. We had field hospitals being set
00:14:24.920 up that were completely unused because there was no flood. Now, I don't consider that evidence that we
00:14:30.580 shouldn't have responded to the pandemic. I feel like that's evidence that we did the right thing,
00:14:35.220 that we did flatten the curve. Remember, it was just that two weeks. It was that first two weeks was
00:14:40.960 what they wanted. But the curve was flattened. Hospitals have been basically empty, not just
00:14:46.100 because no one's going into them with coronavirus, but people have been avoiding hospitals for other
00:14:50.900 things because they think hospitals are unsafe places, which by the way, is not entirely inaccurate.
00:14:57.420 So what's happened now is we've got a healthcare system that is ready for this. The point was never
00:15:04.860 eradication. And that's the point here. And I don't want the response to that to be,
00:15:10.660 oh, you're okay killing grandma. No, the focus from the get-go should have been on the vulnerable.
00:15:16.740 It should have been on the people that were at high risk. You want zero cases among them. You want
00:15:21.800 zero cases among long-term care homes. Those restrictions, no one's arguing with even now.
00:15:27.860 But when you have a general healthy population that is able to withstand and get over this,
00:15:34.920 the whole point was just about making sure that we didn't have a flooding of the gates of the
00:15:41.820 hospitals, which we've already succeeded against. So the moving goalposts continue to move beyond
00:15:47.600 flattening the curve, beyond planking the curve. It's going to be vaccination. Then when the vaccination
00:15:52.060 comes, it's going to be, you know, make sure we get through two seasons. And ultimately, I get that cases
00:15:57.660 are happening. I get that the U.S. is still seeing these little flare-ups. But the whole point is that a lot
00:16:03.080 of what's happened in the U.S. has been because people wanted to react against overreactions.
00:16:10.460 So that's where the whole point about trust in political leaders comes in. Because if people
00:16:14.780 don't trust the political leadership, they're not going to trust them when they say, oh, well,
00:16:18.920 I mean, just cede over your rights to us and we'll take care of you. And this is where we are now.
00:16:25.060 When people have proven themselves to be hypocrites and they say, don't go to the beach,
00:16:28.540 a beach-going population is saying, you know what? Screw you. We've done everything you've wanted.
00:16:33.360 We've succeeded. We've done our part. And you can't even do yours. Because you couldn't even
00:16:37.240 let a protest go by without showing up and virtue signaling for the cameras. When we come back,
00:16:42.800 more of The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
00:16:47.440 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:16:50.060 Another week and the desecration of monuments, statues, pretty much anything is continuing.
00:17:02.140 It's hit close to home as well. We had last week vandalism of the memorial site or what is going
00:17:08.540 to be the memorial site for Canada's memorial to the victims of communism. This is spray painted,
00:17:14.760 as you can see in this tweet from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress with a hammer and sickle signs
00:17:20.360 and communism will win. Now, is this an example of just a bunch of stupid teens or actual communists?
00:17:27.900 I have no idea. But the whole point is that nothing is safe from this scourge of desecration
00:17:33.720 that's going on right now. And no one is safe from it. I mean, we've had people that are Confederate
00:17:38.920 leaders that have had statues taken down. Also people that are entirely uncontroversial or should be
00:17:44.500 uncontroversial that have had their statues removed. And then you have this one in Rochester, New York,
00:17:51.380 not too far from Southern Ontario. Frederick Douglass statue was torn down and vandalized. Now,
00:17:58.180 this statue was on the site of where one of Douglass's most famous speeches was given in 1852. Frederick
00:18:05.620 Douglass was an abolitionist. He was a human rights activist. He was a profound and intellectual thinker,
00:18:12.980 and he was black. He was a black man. The site of the speech was a site along the Underground Railroad where
00:18:21.860 Douglass, alongside Harriet Tubman, had actually helped shuttle slaves to freedom. So the idea that
00:18:28.900 in this wave of Black Lives Matter protests, Frederick Douglass is seen as not able to withstand
00:18:35.860 the scrutiny and standards of 2020, is not just absurd, but it's actually an abomination.
00:18:43.460 And I don't take delight in this. I don't say, oh, well, the left is cannibalizing its own. I mean,
00:18:47.460 here they're taking down the statue of the guy they should love. It's actually heartbreaking to me
00:18:52.260 that there is such an antagonism to history, that not only is everyone seen as an anachronism,
00:18:58.900 but that everyone is seen as evil, that there is going to be no more history because no one's going to want
00:19:04.580 to talk about any historic figures, and no one's going to want to celebrate the good of any of this.
00:19:11.060 So now people are wondering, is this just retaliation? Are people retaliating against Black Lives Matter
00:19:18.020 protesters by taking down Frederick Douglass? But there's no evidence to suggest that. In fact, the evidence is
00:19:23.780 that everyone's just taking down every single statue, and the people doing it are people that think that
00:19:28.740 these things are monuments to evil. And that's just so not the case. And you know, there is something
00:19:36.180 very dangerous in all of this. You know, statues have been used to idolize, yes, they're not just there as
00:19:42.580 historic artifacts. But the whole point about statues, and someone brought up this point to me the other
00:19:48.420 day, and I thought it was interesting. They're saying, you know, why do you have statues up to people if they
00:19:53.620 are controversial? Why wouldn't you have a statue of Hitler up, for example? Because, oh, well, it's a part 0.54
00:19:59.140 of history. And the best explanation that I thought of for that was that you're talking about different
00:20:04.580 regimes there. So, you know, Hitler would not be idolized because the Germany now is a different 0.75
00:20:10.260 Germany than it was then. He was toppled. He was seen as bad. The regime changed. Germany's now on a
00:20:16.180 better path. You look at, you know, Confederacy is a bit of a different example because they lost. I mean,
00:20:22.660 like it or not, why would you have monuments up to losing generals? However, when you look at other,
00:20:28.980 like, Wilfrid Laurier, John A. Macdonald, past prime ministers, this is all one Canada. This is all part
00:20:35.620 of the series of prime ministers, the series of Canada's history that brought us to the point we
00:20:40.900 are at right now. And it's important to protect that history because everything the country is,
00:20:47.780 is because of its past. And when people start to say, well, you know, it's all about context and
00:20:53.780 all of that, they're missing the mark. You know, John A. Macdonald might not have said the right
00:20:58.020 thing about Chinese people. He might not have done the right thing about Chinese people. He might have
00:21:02.020 said some things about aboriginals that were very in poor taste considering what we know and think now.
00:21:07.940 Although, by the way, he was actually on the Aboriginal issue. John A. Macdonald was very
00:21:12.580 progressive compared to a lot of his contemporaries. So I don't even like going down that road with it.
00:21:18.580 But the reason I bring this up is to say that he still created a country that has the capacity to
00:21:26.020 fight back against all of these things. He created a country that has the capacity to seek freedom,
00:21:31.700 to seek equality, to seek justice. And if you believe in the notion that a country is bigger
00:21:38.260 than the people who govern it, that a country is an idea rather than a collection of people,
00:21:43.620 it's easy to say, yeah, no one needed to be perfect in history for the country itself to rise above that
00:21:50.660 and to shed anything that is negative and to continue to grow. And this is something that I was
00:21:56.260 reflecting on and hadn't quite figured out how to express when I did the Canada Day show. And I know
00:22:01.700 we were talking with David Millard Haskell for a lot of that too. But it is something that I think
00:22:07.140 we need to internalize here, especially in the United States, because in the US they do hold to that
00:22:12.660 idea that the United States is an idea. They cling to that notion very significantly. And the whole point
00:22:19.140 of it is that yes, you know, in spite of everything that's happened, for better, for worse,
00:22:23.380 the United States continues as a country, one of the most uninterrupted, long lasting democracies
00:22:31.940 or republics in the case of the US in the world. I mean, you think of how few countries there are
00:22:39.220 that can go on for centuries without interruption. And that's pretty darn impressive. I mean, the British
00:22:47.540 is one example. Canada at 150 years, yes, it's a relatively young country. But if you look at how
00:22:53.700 few countries can do that for 150 years without changing regimes, that's quite significant. So we
00:22:59.380 need to celebrate the history, not tear down the statues. People that I'm talking to on the show right
00:23:04.260 now, I know get this. But I'm hoping we can in society start to reach the point where people are not
00:23:11.460 throwing out everything. And when the Frederick Douglass statue comes down,
00:23:18.660 it's amazing how a lot of the people that are okay with the Christopher Columbus statue coming down,
00:23:23.380 that are okay with, you know, the George Washington and the Thomas Jefferson statues coming down,
00:23:28.500 and are okay with the Washington Monument being defaced, are thinking, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on,
00:23:32.580 no, we don't want to take down statues. And that's a point here that I think needs to be raised is that
00:23:39.460 there is always going to be someone that wants to push the destruction a little bit further,
00:23:44.580 no matter what, because there are some people who just like the destruction, no matter what,
00:23:48.100 no matter who, they just want to destroy things. And these people need to be stopped,
00:23:55.460 because eventually there's going to be nothing left to celebrate. There is going to be no history.
00:24:02.100 And make no mistake, they are not interested in social justice. They are not interested in just
00:24:07.700 finding a way to, you know, remedy this, to right this wrong, to fix this problem.
00:24:12.740 They actually just want everything gone. And I've said it time and time again,
00:24:17.060 they are not interested in creating anything. They are only interested in destroying. And what comes next
00:24:22.820 is someone else's problem. Yeah, I watched on, on Friday, I watched Hamilton, which I saw it on
00:24:29.380 Broadway, but a year, year ago or so, and it's now on Disney Plus. So my wife and I watch Hamilton,
00:24:34.660 and there's a great song in it. I'm not going to give away too, too much, but you can look up the
00:24:38.180 song on YouTube if you want. I'm not going to play it. The, the King George character who is in the
00:24:44.420 show sings, what comes next? And it's basically about the American revolution has just happened.
00:24:50.420 America is independent. King George comes out and in this mocking tone asks rhetorically,
00:24:55.700 what comes next? And you know, there's a funny thing about that. Now, in the case of the American 0.98
00:25:00.100 founding fathers, they knew what came next. They did that. But in the case of the people tearing
00:25:04.180 down the statue saying we have to get rid of this bit of history and that bit of history,
00:25:08.340 they have no clue what comes next. And what's worse is they don't even care. They don't even care.
00:25:15.700 That is someone else's problem. They've done their part by pushing over a statue. But you know what,
00:25:21.140 it's a heck of a lot easier to topple something than it is to build it. And they're not interested in
00:25:27.460 the building. So what we need to do is see through this for what it is, which is a hollow movement
00:25:33.700 based not on social justice, not on countering racism, a hollow movement based on destroying
00:25:38.740 things that they already hated in the first place. And this is far more important than,
00:25:45.620 you know, this company changing its name, the Dixie Chicks becoming the chicks, Lady Antebellum
00:25:49.940 becoming Lady A and all of that stuff, because this is actually messing around with something that
00:25:54.740 matters. I don't, if the Dixie Chicks go away, it doesn't bother me. If the history of civilization 1.00
00:26:00.100 starts to go away, that does bother me a fair bit. And it's not being overdramatic because these people
00:26:06.100 want our history reduced to the very worst. Part of history is celebrating the good, celebrating the
00:26:13.300 bad and figuring out the difference between the two. Destroying the statues isn't just taking down
00:26:19.140 monuments and idols, but it's also about rewriting and revising. Because a lot of these people don't
00:26:25.300 think that in a museum, a lot of these figures should be given that positive treatment anyway.
00:26:31.060 So it isn't just about the celebration of them, like some critics tend to say.
00:26:36.820 So my point on this would be recognize the end game, recognize what they want. It's not just about
00:26:42.580 the statues. It's about what the statues represent, which is the very ideals on which
00:26:47.620 Canada and the United States have been founded, which these people fundamentally despise.
00:26:53.460 And I know I'm going out not on a chipper note here, but it's an important note. So I hope you
00:26:58.420 heed it. And again, to the legacy of Frederick Douglass, that this man ends up with his statue
00:27:03.620 on the ground is just an abomination. We've got to wrap things up for today. My thanks to all of you
00:27:08.820 for tuning into the show. We'll talk to you in a couple of days with more of Canada's most irreverent
00:27:13.780 talk show. Thank you. God bless. Good day, Canada. Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.
00:27:18.980 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news