Juno News - July 21, 2023


Marxist gets cancelled by left for criticizing gender ideology


Episode Stats

Length

44 minutes

Words per Minute

140.35974

Word Count

6,292

Sentence Count

4


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show this is the Andrew Lawton show brought to you by
00:00:08.720 true north hello and welcome everyone to the Andrew Lawton show a Friday edition of the program
00:00:16.200 here on true north wrapping up the week on this July 21st hope you're enjoying I think we're now
00:00:21.560 one month into summer so it's a third of the way over if there's anything you want to do you got
00:00:25.600 to get it done in the next two months we have talked a lot on this program about the sometimes
00:00:32.320 and I would say increasingly impossible litmus tests that are applied to people in our political
00:00:37.980 age it's not just people who are alive and well today as we've discussed at length historical
00:00:43.180 figures are subject to an impossible hurdle as well but one of the biggest and I would say most
00:00:48.640 dangerous aspects of cancer culture has been that it does not take the old line from I think I remember
00:00:55.360 if it was Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan that your 80% friend should not be your 20% enemy
00:01:01.340 increasingly it is a 100% compliance that is required otherwise you find yourself exiled by
00:01:07.780 the very people to whom you may have devoted your life up until that point one example that is easy
00:01:14.060 to bring up in this regard is JK Rowling a tremendous author who has in many respects checked every single
00:01:21.660 box expected of her as a woman of the left she's a feminist she supports gay rights she's advocated
00:01:28.460 for in general the misfits of society her books changed the world they changed people's lives but she
00:01:36.300 deviated on one key issue from those folks and has found herself now disavowed and denounced by the
00:01:44.460 very people who held her up as a model well a very similar thing has happened to a gentleman that I'm very
00:01:51.100 pleased to be speaking with on this show except I would say he has even more pronounced left-wing
00:01:56.300 credentials than JK Rowling does and has similarly on the gender issue found it to be a point of division
00:02:03.500 between him and those he's surrounded himself with for most of his life his name is Dr. Stuart Parker he's the
00:02:11.740 president of the Los Altos Institute out of British Columbia and for a self-avowed Marxist it was a bit odd to
00:02:19.900 see him with an essay in the Mcdonald laureate institute's website which I would encourage you
00:02:25.100 to read it's called intolerant authoritarians of the new left and this is Stuart Parker for
00:02:31.580 inside policy and he joins me now Stuart wonderful to talk to you thanks very much for coming on today
00:02:38.460 well thanks very much and thank you for tolerating my many uh technical and scheduling issues getting
00:02:44.380 on to this call it's um it's really nice to be here well I'm glad and I should just warn you and
00:02:51.260 the audience that there is a hail storm outside of my home right now so if we end up having to
00:02:57.500 abruptly stop and restart due to a connection issue we will do so but thankfully this is not live so
00:03:03.500 we're able to have a bit of flexibility in that regard I want to talk about your political views just
00:03:09.580 for a moment to situate this because what I I read your accounting of them and also some of the
00:03:14.700 positions held by your think tank you're not just one of these like garden variety nondescript center
00:03:20.540 leftists like you're about as far left as it comes in Canadian politics and even I would say outside of that
00:03:28.380 yeah I would agree I think that um I mean the thing is if you're very far on the left or very far in any
00:03:37.500 political direction you're one of two kinds of people you're either a person who has a very small
00:03:47.340 world and leads a sectarian life or you're a person who knows how to do broad coalition politics because
00:03:56.620 you can't rely on agreeing with most people about most things so yeah I um you know I I you know
00:04:06.860 I'm a pretty far radical environmentalist on the whole climate file and all the other stuff and um
00:04:14.540 yeah I'm I'm a Marxist I I not in terms of like believing everything Marx says because that would be
00:04:21.740 like weird and religious but um but in terms of like using uh his work and the corpus of work around
00:04:29.260 it was my primary political analysis tool yeah I'm I'm pretty much you're like uh standard um you know
00:04:42.300 eco-communist and uh so it's been an interesting journey the past few years discovering that I'm actually
00:04:49.980 supposedly a conservative not just a conservative but far right and in some cases a quote literal
00:04:58.060 Nazi unquote so when did those labels first get applied to you what was the the context in which
00:05:05.340 that emerged well I think um I mean I've been involved in a public cancellation campaign now for
00:05:13.500 three years there have been six public campaigns to cancel me but when I became aware that I could be
00:05:21.900 described as such things it was before the cancellation one of the things that I I think a lot of people who
00:05:29.340 end up being canceled and they make a virtue of their cancellation is that you end up like over
00:05:36.460 narrating that you end up describing yourself perhaps as more courageous or interesting than you actually
00:05:44.460 are so from 2015 to 2019 I gradually became aware that the left was becoming increasingly intolerant
00:05:58.860 and that if I expressed unorthodox views there would be consequences and so I deliberately began dissembling
00:06:08.060 lying about my views back in 2015 um because I was aware that there was this new intolerant
00:06:19.500 orthodox movement that was taking over the left and my hope was that I could wait it out
00:06:26.540 if I could just sort of like not tell people how I disagreed with the orthodoxy maybe this would go away
00:06:34.060 but of course the opposite happened so it was really in 2020 when um I was the leader of the BC
00:06:44.060 eco-socialist party right whose motto was greener than the greens and further left than the ndp
00:06:52.380 that that was our motto and we went into the 2020 provincial general election
00:06:59.180 but the whole party was a stupid idea just flat out like if you if I'd actually like said out loud what I was
00:07:08.460 doing I would have known how stupid it was because a millionaire had paid me to create a socialist party for him
00:07:15.740 like how was that gonna go um so uh my old friend jeff burner who was a friend uh once upon a time
00:07:27.660 you know I'm sort of with john cleese there every relationship has a clock on it um but he was you
00:07:35.180 know he's a traveling uh klezmer accordion act and um a friend of billy bragg and so even before gender
00:07:45.100 wang and the extreme orthodoxy arrived here he'd been dealing with that on tour and so when I was
00:07:51.340 working with him on creating the eco-socialist party we had this confrontation over a particular thing
00:07:57.580 he wanted to put in the party's policy I was willing to go along with a lot of this bull until
00:08:04.140 we had to take a vote on whether his wife who was a prominent gender doctor here in Vancouver like a
00:08:16.460 well-known local quack um she was gonna write our policy and we had to approve it sight unseen
00:08:25.180 and one of the few points of the policy that I'd already been arguing with jeff about was the idea
00:08:33.180 that if people who decide who come to believe in the gender cult and decide they're the wrong gender
00:08:40.780 and then they you know get parts of their body cut off and they take these weird drugs and they go you
00:08:46.700 know what this is actually making me feel better if they detransition the thing was that
00:08:54.060 it was essential that we go into the election saying that those people should be cut off medicare
00:09:01.580 and I just thought well that's incredibly cruel you tell these young people a lie you tell them that
00:09:09.180 they have an immortal indetectable pre-existent gendered soul that has been born into the wrong body
00:09:17.420 and now we have to do a whole bunch of cosmetic surgery and amputations and alter the structure of
00:09:25.340 the person's brain um and if people that that doesn't work for people they shouldn't get health
00:09:34.220 care ever again I I couldn't live with that that was so extreme it was so savage it was so bizarre
00:09:40.140 that I went all right that's enough I can't go any further down this path
00:09:46.540 and uh so um Jeff threatened the party that that he would destroy us publicly and in the
00:09:59.580 public square by outing our opposition to gender way and that's how the cancellation campaigns against
00:10:08.620 me began was that um uh and this is a really important thing to understand about what's going
00:10:17.740 on on the left this gender nonsense is the left's sole boundary maintenance structure the idea is that
00:10:31.740 and and and its position always changes like it's not a consistent ideology it's just madness and lunacy
00:10:39.980 and new pharmaceuticals and new medical procedures and the thing is you're not measured
00:10:47.580 on what you believe as part of the left because gender weighing is a moving target
00:10:54.540 what what what you have to do in order to be recognized as part of the left is agree in advance to the next crazy
00:11:04.940 thing the genderists will do or say and so we're in this environment where any descent from this constantly
00:11:18.220 shifting orthodoxy is viewed as leaving the left we're undergoing a period of rapid rapid social change
00:11:31.900 and human beings don't like rapid change and so we create social coping strategies for rapid change among
00:11:41.500 conservatives a favored strategy is neo-traditionalism where you turn the thing that you're changing into
00:11:50.300 when you when you re-describe the rapid change as a return to an imagined past so whether you're thinking
00:11:58.940 about neo-traditionalist indigenous hereditary chiefs who are describing some kind of return to a
00:12:08.060 past past in which we're harmonious with the earth and we live off the land and and and and we're not involved in this
00:12:15.500 industrial society or whether you're listening to trump supporters saying make america great again
00:12:22.860 conservatives manage change
00:12:27.260 by describing the thing they have to change into as a return to the past
00:12:32.140 the left progressives supposedly love change but they actually can't handle it and so what progressives
00:12:41.580 have been doing for the past eight years i would say is using tribalism rather than neo-traditionalism
00:12:51.500 and so the way you measure whether someone is part of the left
00:12:55.580 is whether they follow the other members of the tribe into whatever the new crazy thing is
00:13:05.900 and there are no guardrails on that yeah and and just on that i mean you you touch on this in your
00:13:11.340 your essay and i i think it's an important point that a lot of these values now are used for social
00:13:17.260 organization whereas the left that you came up in that you have been a part of for the last 35 years
00:13:23.820 the core values were applied to a particular change i mean you're an environmentalist
00:13:30.380 and you do that because you want to make change you want to go after the oil companies you want
00:13:34.300 to go after the plastic manufacturers go after the miners you believe in socialism so you go after
00:13:40.140 the capitalists and after the corporations but but there's actually an action component there that
00:13:46.220 is trying to manifest that belief in the real world and and you you make a point here in your piece that
00:13:53.900 i i wanted to quote you said progressive society under woke hegemony has become post-political it has
00:14:01.580 ceased to have meaningful political demands since the rise of mid 2000 mid 2010s hashtag politics defund the
00:14:09.900 police land back me too are not political ideas they impersonate politics wokes do not make policy
00:14:17.580 proposals and have no capacity to assemble the broad coalitions necessary to enact policy through democratic
00:14:24.780 processes and you go on to elaborate on that a little bit but i thought that was a particularly
00:14:30.060 poignant uh point here you raise because you're basically saying that the louder the left has become
00:14:36.860 now the less they've actually wanted to be a part of any of the solutions to the problems they claim are
00:14:43.260 pervasive in society right because fundamentally the left is acting from despair my political mentor
00:14:52.060 david lewis not the ndp guy the um crazy man who lived in crescent valley and was like a professional
00:15:01.100 firewood collector and giant one of the firewood collector and giant one of the things that he um
00:15:06.140 he said that i have found has guided me through a lot of these political waters
00:15:12.940 is he said he would say to people who proposed i would say post-political things he would say
00:15:21.980 you lack the faith that humanity will rise to the occasion
00:15:26.380 and fundamentally i think the left is a movement gripped by despair it's why i've written three
00:15:36.220 opinion pieces about jr r tolkien's theory of hope because the left has become disgusting and bizarre
00:15:48.060 because the people in it have actually stopped hoping to change the world they don't think it's
00:15:55.740 possible they think their horizon of expectation is foreclosed and so to people on the left
00:16:04.460 um they look at the world and they go well that's all broken
00:16:09.900 who can we find to punish for that because clearly we can't fix it and it's that despair that has spread
00:16:19.180 through the left that has created our modern cancel culture because yes they lack political demands
00:16:26.940 i remember um at the crescendo of me too and you know like you know i was interfered with as a kid
00:16:35.100 i had some things to say but what i noticed during the me too movement which is really the beginning of all
00:16:40.700 this right there are all these people coming forward going i was molested in this way i was abused in this
00:16:47.660 way i was exploited in this way and what did they seek they sought to punish individuals
00:16:56.140 they had no social solution the left had become so full of despair they couldn't imagine a society
00:17:06.380 in which fewer women would be raped next year in which fewer children would be sexually interfered with
00:17:14.540 next year all they could hope to do was punish individuals for specific crimes and mia kirschner
00:17:24.140 who uh you know you know i was born in the right year to think she's like the most beautiful woman
00:17:29.740 of the canadian cinema um wrote this essay and obviously i was going to read it it's a mia kirschner
00:17:35.580 essay and she doesn't write opinion pieces and she wrote this piece for the globe and mail
00:17:41.340 during me too where she said look there are very simple things we can do to reduce the level of sexual
00:17:48.300 violence in the movie industry we can prohibit this through state law we can prohibit this through trade
00:17:57.660 union contracts and she produced this enormous list of things we could actually do to solve the problem we
00:18:07.020 were supposedly addressing and no one picked up on that no one said what about moving our horizons beyond
00:18:19.100 firing harvey weinstein and creating a world in which there will never be another harvey weinstein
00:18:27.020 and other than sarah polly and mia kirschner um i didn't see anybody in the movie industry take that
00:18:35.420 step and that was really the harbinger of where we were going to go that the left isn't doing politics
00:18:43.100 it's given up on politics the energy that people on the left would have put into
00:18:50.540 knocking on doors or phoning people or taking meetings with civil society organizations they
00:18:58.460 might sway to their side has been put into immiserating individuals not to solve problems
00:19:07.420 but to punish people for the existence of problems the left no longer has the self-confidence to think
00:19:17.020 it can solve in your left though was there ever room for dissent because i mean conservatives in canada
00:19:25.180 especially don't agree on it with any with each other on anything like what would would internal
00:19:29.820 debate have been a thing for most of your last 35 years in left-wing activism or was everyone pretty
00:19:36.300 much on the same page on on every issue i mean the left was a site of debate yeah like if i were to
00:19:45.100 make a criticism of the old left the left that i'm now you know it's amazing what you can get nostalgic
00:19:51.900 for like i want the berlin wall back at this point um i you know the big problem the left had was that
00:20:01.820 it was primarily a site of debate it was a a cacophony of different voices proposing different solutions
00:20:13.820 for the ill that ailed society that was what the left was and we we laughed at ourselves over that we
00:20:23.740 laughed over the fact that everything was up for debate that we were always in some kind of debate
00:20:29.900 that the deliberation never ended and so to go from that to a completely orthodox society that has no
00:20:40.300 tolerance for debate um i have whiplash like i can't recognize the movement i was part of because
00:20:51.260 being on the right i look at this as being the left starting to apply to itself the same tools that
00:20:59.580 it seemed to be content applying to the right for many years and a lot of people on the left
00:21:04.460 were completely fine with cancel culture until they learned that it might actually start
00:21:08.540 uh pointing in their direction and i'm curious which side of that you were on were you ever the
00:21:13.660 kind that celebrated the demise of your political opponents that celebrated their cancellation and and
00:21:20.380 or or was this something that you would always a bit of discomfort with i i i i am not going to claim
00:21:27.740 that i was a highly virtuous person on the left but the thing you're talking about was never my thing
00:21:33.020 you know i became part of the left like jeff burner the guy who first canceled me we became friends
00:21:42.380 when we were five and we we organized a group of kids who would side with each other when we were being
00:21:52.700 bullied like to me that's what the core of left organizing is that like that's that that was
00:22:02.780 constitutionally what it was all about it was about you get people who are under resourced and scared
00:22:10.220 and we form into a team and we side against the bullies so from the beginning when cancellation began
00:22:17.020 as a phenomenon my attitude was never to celebrate it it was always just this irrational hope that
00:22:26.460 it would blow over i wouldn't get into the fight that people would realize how useless and self-destructive
00:22:37.420 it was but one of the problems and you know my my old friend george jubot made an excellent observation about 20th century politics
00:22:48.060 we were talking about because he was a conservative i was a i was a leftist and um he was a brilliant man
00:22:56.860 one of the best political strategists the west has ever seen and um he said you know i think you might
00:23:03.180 be the only berkey and marxist in the world but um jabot basically he his um his thing his argument was
00:23:15.900 that we reached our best politics in the 1970s when the right was being led by people who escaped from
00:23:23.420 the soviet union and the left was being led by people who had survived the great depression
00:23:30.700 and this was about decent people acting on their historical experience
00:23:37.260 the victims of capitalism versus the victims of communism basically yes exactly and the those
00:23:43.820 were the that that was the best moment in our politics because it wasn't driven by some desire
00:23:49.980 to remake the world it was driven by a desire to prevent other people from experiencing a form of
00:23:59.180 suffering no one should have to experience and so what i would say about the left today one of the reasons
00:24:08.060 it's become possible to take this turn is that the survivors of mccarthyism are dead
00:24:15.500 one of the things i did last year was i interviewed don todd who was a communist philosopher in the 1950s
00:24:25.740 and he led a big zesty life but he was discharged from the military in the middle of the korean war
00:24:34.060 where he was fighting communism because he was a communist and he spent eight years on the blacklist
00:24:42.940 and it was very helpful um to talk with him about this because he could tell me
00:24:50.860 how i was supposed to live what the things were that i needed to do to survive being blacklisted
00:24:59.420 and we had this conversation and i explained to him he's housebound he's 94 years old
00:25:04.860 and i explained to him the blacklist was back and at the end of the conversation
00:25:10.380 he shook my hand and passed me a 20 bill because that's what you do when your friend is on the blacklist
00:25:21.420 and the problem is that today there are no blacklisted leaders of the left
00:25:29.340 no one on the left remembers
00:25:33.740 ideological authoritarianism because you've got to remember that mccarthyism worked just like what's
00:25:39.100 happening right now the government didn't keep most of those lists most of those lists were kept by
00:25:44.380 private corporations the lists that kept you from getting work the lists that kept you
00:25:50.620 from being invited to events um these lit it was because society
00:25:59.100 had become authoritarian it wasn't just the state the state was just a small part of the picture
00:26:05.580 and the loss of that cultural knowledge that mccarthyism that
00:26:15.100 zelsatzung in east germany um that the barrios nkvd in the soviet union
00:26:23.900 these things are largely staffed by volunteers it's largely volunteers who have decided to become
00:26:33.900 part of the authoritarian project the problem is that the left today thinks that because they're
00:26:39.420 doing volunteer work for big pharma that they're doing volunteer work for the military industrial
00:26:45.340 complex that somehow that's not part of a totalitarian order when in fact that's the essence
00:26:54.300 of a successful totalitarian order well and when you mention that i mean the fascinating thing
00:26:59.580 here is that a lot of the the nemeses of the left certainly of the marxist left the big corporations
00:27:05.980 now are capitulating to this thing themselves i mean i for example a story i told on my show a few
00:27:12.860 weeks ago there's a in in my city of london ontario we have a military uh general dynamics
00:27:19.260 plant that makes tanks for saudi arabia or armored vehicles for saudi arabia now this is an issue that
00:27:24.940 you know i would think the left and the right should be able to be in agreement with but you drive
00:27:29.260 down the street and you see they had the giant lgbt progress flag with the rainbow and the the trans
00:27:35.500 stuff and i'm like this is the military industrial complex making weapons for saudi arabia flying the
00:27:42.220 progress flag to say we love the trans folks we love the gay folks and and and you look at all the
00:27:47.980 big banks again you know the the evil capitalist overlords in canada flies this flag yeah yeah and and
00:27:55.660 it's and and you know the funny thing is is that these people that have have been the challengers
00:28:00.780 of authority have won and still no one is good enough for them nothing is good enough for them
00:28:07.020 no you're not good enough what happened is right you know how every election in the united states there's
00:28:17.900 this very very boring story about there are white educated republican women in suburban pennsylvania
00:28:27.260 and they will decide this election because the democrats will finally come up with some pitch
00:28:33.820 to convince these women to join and then the vote stays the same and people think then that the
00:28:41.020 democrats pitch was stupid it didn't work but that's wrong our political parties have largely swapped
00:28:49.660 members over the past 30 years well i'd say even the last 10 in particular yeah yeah it accelerated it
00:28:57.740 began in the 90s and it reached its crescendo in the past 10 years so and and it's interesting the
00:29:08.700 friends of mine who remain friends but who are still on the left because it's very hard to stay friends
00:29:16.060 with me and not x of the left for fear of things that will happen to you but the two friends who have
00:29:23.900 the reason they've been able to surf all this is that their class position changed um a friend of mine
00:29:31.900 he has been living in the v5l postal code his uh whole adult life now where is that for those not in bc
00:29:43.180 um so this is commercial drive in vancouver it is the wokest neighborhood west of toronto okay
00:29:52.780 basically like you go down there and everybody's like got some kind of bespoke facial hair
00:30:00.300 and they're wearing corduroy and riding a unicycle like it's insane down there um just this giant
00:30:08.540 corduroy unicycle show and um but my friend's class has changed over that time he moved there he was
00:30:20.940 like um you know a rockabilly guy with a leather coat who came out from uh a mill town where they made
00:30:30.060 shingles and you know now he's like a logistics industry consultant uh who is uh flies all over
00:30:38.620 north america to stay in that postal code he went from paying 500 a month for a basement suite
00:30:46.460 to purchasing a one-bedroom condo for a million dollars in the same postal code
00:30:54.860 um and so what we have to recognize is that the people who've been able to stay on the left
00:31:03.900 have not maintained their class position they have radically improved their class position
00:31:11.260 working class people i got into an argument with a guy who claimed to be a marxist the other day
00:31:16.620 about whether the true doctrine of karl marx is that you should hate the industrial proletariat
00:31:25.340 and i'm like you can't be on the left if you don't hate the proletariat like i don't understand how
00:31:33.820 people are saying this unironically i don't understand how people don't when they express
00:31:40.860 views like that recognize the absolute absurdity into which they have marched but um certainly if
00:31:53.100 your class status is insecure staying on the left is incredibly important right now how else can you
00:32:00.220 impress rich people now i also do want to suggest that this diversity equity and inclusion stuff
00:32:09.100 this thing where the corporations put up the pharma pride flag and they go woke
00:32:15.820 and the military industrial complex oh right produces queer nukes did you see this from the
00:32:21.740 bulletin of atomic scientists i didn't know we're new clock for my whole life my whole life i've been
00:32:30.540 going this doomsday clock is very credible it's measuring how close we are to total annihilation
00:32:36.780 well the bulletin of atomic scientists have changed their position we're not trying to denuclearize
00:32:43.340 anymore they don't want to decommission the nukes they want to i'm literally quoting the bulletin queer
00:32:50.540 the nukes that if they just make all the nuclear weapons gay they won't blow us up um
00:33:00.460 um and i i i'm looking at this like like how is anyone taking themselves seriously in a context like
00:33:10.460 this things must be totally insane to have reached that point where it's like never mind banning the
00:33:17.660 nukes that's what we fought for our whole lives during the cold right flag on them and they're all fine
00:33:23.340 yeah so when we we launch it on uh you know putin's moscow it'll at least be the nice rainbow colors
00:33:29.180 going through the sky it's a nuclear nuke um so and that's part of the problem here like
00:33:37.980 one of the things we're trying to do part of the absurdity of a show like this
00:33:41.500 is we are trying to respond rationally to what has happened to the political left
00:33:52.460 and certainly classic security is playing a big role here certainly fear of cancellation and other
00:34:01.500 stuff is playing a role here but none of it can fully account for how completely insane
00:34:09.900 this thing is if we had read a william gibson novel in the 1980s you know when cyberpunk was a new thing
00:34:20.620 when the the horizon of dystopian fiction was a near future ecologically impoverished cyber society
00:34:32.140 if william gibson had created a social movement that believed that we all had pre-existent undetectable
00:34:45.740 gendered souls that god was putting in the wrong bodies with increasing frequency and the only way to
00:34:55.740 emancipate society was to cut off the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of children
00:35:06.460 and sterilize children primarily focused on indigenous gay and disabled children
00:35:14.220 if there were like a there were this social movement that believed in this mass sterilization project
00:35:21.340 and that also um had a militia called antifa
00:35:29.100 that dressed in black masks and beat the old ladies in the street
00:35:37.020 we'd go gibson this this doesn't hold together
00:35:40.700 i can't believe in a dystopia this ridiculous how on earth could a movement which as we saw in melbourne
00:35:49.420 right there's this moment where antifa is faced with two crowds
00:35:53.980 kelly j keen and her let women speak rally and a group of nazis
00:35:58.540 and antifa ignores the nazis and grabs a 70 year old woman yeah push her to the ground and kicks her skull in
00:36:09.340 and that's what's going to happen we we wouldn't believe that as a piece of fiction we would go
00:36:16.220 why is it that if you show a progressive a video of an old lady being beaten in the street
00:36:23.980 by young masked men with bizarre cosmetic surgery and tattoos and they look and they go i'm not sure
00:36:32.860 who's who's in the right here i need more context yeah who knows who the real bad guys are anymore
00:36:41.100 right i i i there's no way this would have helped up in a work of speculative fiction
00:36:48.380 like they dive into the most like atavistic bizarre madness and that's the problem because
00:36:58.220 we keep thinking this is a thing you can debate and one of the things people keep saying are we
00:37:03.260 going to beat these people sooner we're going to you know look at the polls showing that more and
00:37:09.420 more people oppose gender way and it's like you don't understand authoritarians authoritarians
00:37:18.860 right they look at machiavelli right machiavelli wrote this great book about how terrible 15th
00:37:23.900 century italy was and he described like all the things that would cause you to get ahead in 15th
00:37:29.740 century italy and some idiots went oh that that's obviously how you should do politics
00:37:36.380 which is not what he was saying at all but the point is that machiavelli
00:37:43.900 said that authoritarians don't want to be loved they want to be feared
00:37:48.860 being popular only gets in the way for them because their payoff is the knowledge that we're
00:37:57.580 being coerced that we're being forced that that's that's what they live for and so when you look at
00:38:06.700 these folks they don't want to sell you an ideology you could agree with they want to sell you something
00:38:14.700 no one could agree with something so inconsistent so monstrous so insane that suggests that anyone
00:38:26.220 who does not want to find disabled children and cut off their body parts is an evil person
00:38:34.700 that what they're doing is they're not measuring your agreement they're not looking for agreement they're
00:38:40.700 looking for submission yeah the the no desire to persuade and win people over uh which i think
00:38:49.340 was probably the hallmark of most activism over the last uh certainly the last 60 years
00:38:56.860 well that's right because we lived in a democratic society with a democratic social contract
00:39:03.260 and the idea was if you want to get something done learn to work with people who aren't like you
00:39:12.220 one of the things that helped equip me for this because god knows if i had been a regular leftist
00:39:18.060 i wouldn't have survived the past three years of my world being turned upside down
00:39:22.700 but i was an early campaigner for proportional representation for electoral reform that put minority
00:39:34.460 voices in the legislature and what a lot of people would do not credit particularly fair vote canada today
00:39:43.420 is that the modern proportional representation movement in canada was founded in the early 1990s
00:39:50.620 by pro-lifers so when i started working on electoral reform i was surrounded by anti-abortion activists
00:40:02.140 our biggest organizational donors were the canadian taxpayers federation and so because my views have
00:40:11.580 traditionally been so extreme i had to figure out very early on how to do business with people
00:40:19.980 who had fundamentally different convictions from mine and to find common ground with those people
00:40:27.900 there used to be a thing in the 20th century i remember this from like the greatest generation
00:40:34.620 one of the things you associate with the people who won the second world war is there were a lot of
00:40:41.660 of interfaith multi-partisan marriages where the husband and wife would joke about the fact that he always
00:40:52.300 voted liberal and she always voted tory that they canceled each other's votes out every election for 50 years
00:41:00.460 and that was a thing we used to be proud of we used to enjoy we used to know how to experience difference
00:41:10.140 the left's obsession with diversity is entirely about its lack of diversity its inability to manage diverse opinions
00:41:24.860 and diverse experiences um i don't know if you've been watching all of our major papers threatening muslims with pogroms lately
00:41:35.580 but that's quite interesting yeah and it's about how you can i'm not saying this has happened to you but
00:41:44.060 how you can in today's society never change your position but somehow find yourself dramatically
00:41:50.300 uh in a disconnect from everyone else because the world can move around you and leave you uh in as you've learned
00:41:58.140 a very lonely place among your old friends and i know you've made new friends that you may disagree with on on most things
00:42:04.220 but your experience and your uh penchant for coalition building has served you well uh it's a piece that
00:42:10.700 people should definitely read intolerant authoritarians of the new left it's in inside policy which is published by our
00:42:16.940 friends at the mcdonald lorry institute again not a hotbed for a marxist thought by any stretch but it's a
00:42:22.780 great piece and stewart parker thank you so much for coming on today great to speak with you well thank you very much
00:42:29.340 uh and uh yeah i'm really glad to be getting this stuff out there to your audience because i actually
00:42:38.140 care about convincing people who don't agree with me well you you coming on with me will cement your
00:42:43.980 cancellation on the left so we'll have you uh waving the may wearing the mega hat and flying the
00:42:48.940 f trudeau flag before long stewart great to talk to you sir thanks so much for coming on today
00:42:54.140 that was dr stewart parker and you know one question that i would have loved to have put to
00:42:59.500 him had we had more time and we may have him back on because i think it's an interesting topic
00:43:04.540 is this idea of the way the left views the right relative to how the right views the left and one
00:43:11.900 thing that strikes me here is that i know i'm generalizing but i think when we look at communists
00:43:16.620 for example we kind of just chuckle at them like because if you're a a garden variety communist in
00:43:22.300 2023 uh it's like oh look how quaint that is but but the left does not view the far right with the same
00:43:30.780 level of quaintness in fact anyone who is like you know even to the right of justin trudeau is viewed
00:43:35.580 as a you know bordering on a nazi or an outright nazi and and that's the i think the distinction here is
00:43:41.260 that the right does not view the far left with the same level of fear and anger and venom that
00:43:47.420 the left views the the far right and the problem then of course is how they define far right and how
00:43:54.140 you can be far right without really even being right at all but all of this is i think part and
00:43:59.740 parcel of what stewart and i were just talking about there and it's that there are two camps on the left
00:44:05.020 there is the increasing majority of those that aren't interested in persuasion they aren't
00:44:10.300 interested in coalition building they want power and they want control and then there are the others
00:44:15.340 who are increasingly just relegated to the far right with the rest of us because they don't go along
00:44:21.340 with in some cases even just one specific thing which might be gender ideology so thanks again to
00:44:26.860 stewart and to those of you who tuned in hope you have a great weekend we'll talk to you all next
00:44:31.180 week with more of canada's most irreverent talk show here on true north thank you god bless and a
00:44:36.620 good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to
00:44:41.420 true north at www.tnc.news