Juno News - January 11, 2021Parallel Societies
Episode Stats
Words per minute
188.6621
Harmful content
Misogyny
3
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Hate speech
5
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Summary
Big Tech Censorship has reached a boiling point, and it s impossible not to pay attention to it right now, because it s happening all over social media and in real-world media, and there s no way to miss it.
Transcript
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Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, big tech censorship and its attack on civil society, the unconstitutionality of curfews, and saying goodbye to a dear friend.
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Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show on True North.
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Glad to have you aboard. Well, it's still possible to do a show, which in the era of big tech censorship is not exactly something we can take for granted.
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So I'm going to be talking about what's been happening in the last few days at considerable length right now.
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Because big tech censorship, well, it's an issue I've talked about in the past. It's not one that I'm just learning about now.
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It's one that has reached a boiling point that makes it impossible, in my view, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention to it to not start doing so right now.
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The TLDR version of it, the too-long-didn't-read version of it, of course, if you haven't been following this, is that Parler, as of this point, as of when I'm recording, is offline.
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Parler is the conservative alternative to Twitter and Facebook that was started a little while ago, but really started to surge in popularity in the summer.
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Parler is offline. Donald Trump is unable to post to social media.
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Conservative Twitter accounts are hemorrhaging followers by the day.
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I've lost somewhere in the range of 2,000, but it seems to keep going.
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And a lot of that is because I think a lot of conservatives are self-deselecting.
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They're saying, you know, I don't want to be on Twitter, but a lot of it, the bulk of it, seems to be Twitter going through and just purging.
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Doing a conservative purge of accounts that it feels are too conservative.
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And if you are like me, someone who's made a bit of a name working in conservative media, that's going to very much drop your follower count.
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So people on the right are losing thousands and thousands.
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Dana Lash, who I've known for years, she's a tremendous conservative radio host and author in the U.S.
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She's lost something, I think it was like 50,000 followers, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too, too much.
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But the whole point of it is that Twitter is quite openly waging war on its right.
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On the right side of its user base to such an extent that it's not quite clear what the end game is beyond the next couple of weeks.
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And by that I mean what it's going to look like, not what their goal is.
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Because Twitter always says it's an open platform, it's a platform built on free speech.
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But the problem with it is that the actual day-to-day operations never look like that.
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In fact, whenever Twitter is in the news, it's because they've decided to censor someone in such a way that makes it not look like the open platform that Twitter always pretends to be.
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Look at, for example, during the most recent U.S. election, the ban of that New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
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A story that ultimately ended up being proven correct, but you'd never know it with the blackout that Facebook and Twitter both imposed on that story.
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So right now we had in just rapid succession, a Twitter ban Donald Trump, Facebook ban Donald Trump, Apple take Parler out of the App Store, Google take Parler out of the Google Play Store, and then eventually Amazon Web Services taking Parler offline altogether.
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And you have five companies, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon, that when they work together, can effectively remove someone from the internet.
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Now this is not a monopoly in the sense of a state-enforced monopoly, it's not a monopoly in the sense that it's more than one, but it's an oligopoly of sorts because of the sheer size of these, not because the state has given them this power.
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And this is where free market libertarians and a lot of traditionalist conservatives tend to diverge on this issue.
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Because the libertarian perspective, which is the one I've said at great length on the show in the past, is that, well, you know what, there's nothing stopping someone from building their own alternative.
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And the build your own mentality has always been the biggest saving grace I've felt to conservatives.
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You don't like liberal Hollywood? Great. Build your own movies.
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You don't like this singer? Great. Build your own songs.
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You don't like, well, building songs. You can tell why I've not built any songs or sung any songs.
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You don't like Twitter, Facebook, and their liberal bias? Great. Build your own Twitter. Build your own Facebook.
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And what we've seen in the last few days is the peril of build your own because it doesn't actually work unless you are prepared and able to build your own everything.
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And this is why it's so easy and I would say actually justifiable for people on the right to feel very dejected now.
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Because Parler was an example. And by the way, Parler had its issues. I was on Parler. I still am technically a Parler user.
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So if Parler ever comes back online, do follow me. If you're ever able to again, which is not quite clear, you will be.
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Parler had its bugs and its user errors, but it was an example of conservatives putting their money where their mouths were and saying,
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all right, we don't like what Twitter and Facebook are doing. We're building our own.
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And they had a lot of support. A lot of the conservative heavyweights and conservative media were on Parler.
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People like Dan Bongino and Dana Lash, who I mentioned, and then little old me.
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And I actually was using it more for just posting stuff that I was posting to Facebook and Twitter.
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I wasn't boycotting or giving up one because I'm a firm believer in the fact that you have to wait and see what happens with these things
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before you decide to go whole hog into it. And a lot of the people who did do that,
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A lot of the people who did throw away their Twitter accounts to go to Parler now are effectively silenced because of that.
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So that's a bit of an aside, but I think a relevant one.
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So conservatives did what they were always told to do, which was build their own alternative.
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And now what's happened is Apple has said, all right, we're not going to allow Parler to be on there.
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So what do conservatives have to do? Build their own smartphone so that they can build their own app store?
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And then Parler is taken offline by Amazon Web Services, which most people view Amazon only in the context of that place that you go
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when you want to get a book shipped to you or get a potato ricer at two in the morning or something delivered the next day.
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But Amazon's web service is actually the biggest, I think one of the biggest, if not the biggest hosting services for cloud computing in the world.
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Amazon Web Services is the backbone of, I think, NASA and Netflix and governments and huge companies, huge websites.
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So Parler is taken offline by Jeff Bezos, who's usually the most loathed man in the world to the left.
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But this week is now a big hero to the left because he's decided to take those evil conservatives away from their one online safe space.
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The one place where the left couldn't really cancel conservatives was on Parler.
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So what do conservatives have to do? Build their own web hosting company?
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Amazon Web Services has warehouses and warehouses and warehouses full of servers.
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These data centers all over the world, including numerous in North America.
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So for conservatives to just say, all right, well, build your own is not an overnight process.
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And more importantly, I think it's lamentable that that's what society has become.
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The whole point of build your own was actually built on a very dangerous idea, a correct idea, but a dangerized idea.
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And the idea that fuels the build your own narrative is that the left and the right cannot coexist.
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Now, you may laugh at the idea that that could not be true.
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When I mentioned that line of, I think, Margaret Thatcher about how your 80% friend is not your 20% enemy,
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there's something to that that we all need to learn from, which is the disagreement never needed to be and never should be a trump card.
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There are lots of people that I could break bread with that I don't agree on many things at all with or people that I agree on some things with.
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But the idea of conservatives needing to or anyone needing to build their own alternative to Facebook and Twitter
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was because Facebook and Twitter had demonstrated they were not interested in giving the same rights to people on the right
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as they were to people on the left insofar as their ability to use these platforms and services.
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So if you're using all of these things, you don't have a right to them.
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When I talk about what these companies are doing and I talk about censorship, I'm not talking about state censorship.
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I'm not talking about people being thrown into gulags by the Stasi or something like that.
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I'm talking about people who are, in a lot of ways, being censored by a cultural force that is so ubiquitous now
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it is as strong as a state censorship could be in this day and age.
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And that's what's happening right now is that a lot of people aren't even able to have these conversations
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because if you say, oh, well, you know, this is an attack on free speech,
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someone will be like, well, actually, it's not an attack on your free speech
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You actually have no idea what you're talking about
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we have in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada,
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In the United States, there is a First Amendment.
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These freedoms are irrelevant if, in practice, there is no culture that supports them.
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because it is paramount for governments to be restrained from limiting these rights.
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The problem is that the threat to these freedoms is not really coming from governments
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the group that is supposed to be welcoming these freedoms and using them every day.
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And the idea is it used to be that you could say to someone,
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ah, well, that's an attack on free speech, ergo, it's wrong.
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Now people think free speech is this antiquated, archaic, patriarchal, racist,
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Free speech is only for people that are going to use their right to free speech
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So the parallel society problem is very real because people are not interested in open platforms,
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in genuine open fora where people on the left and people on the right can all talk about
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whatever they want and because they only want the uniparty.
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They want one side to have a monopoly on discourse and that is their own.
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Now, if it hasn't become apparent, I don't have an answer to this.
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And even when I am seeing the libertarianism that I've always welcomed and embraced on this
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severely challenged, I still know that regulation is not going to make any of this better.
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Forcing social media companies to act in a different way is only going to make matters worse.
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It may make them look different, but in the long run, it's going to make them look worse.
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When people talk about the platform publisher divide, that is not really something that matters
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But even in the absence of a solution, at the very least, people need to understand that
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if five companies, if someone at five different places decides that you don't deserve to exist,
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they have the power to wipe you off the face of the earth.
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This is, I think, one of the big misnomers of it.
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It's not about Trump's right to tweet, which I don't even think this is about Trump anymore.
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And it hasn't been about Donald Trump for a long time.
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But because we're talking about Donald Trump's account, most of the people engaged in this
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discussion are only able to view this through the lens of their emotional hatred of Donald
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I don't care about Donald Trump's Twitter account right now because I care about Donald Trump
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I care about it because I care about the precedent that this is setting for your Twitter account,
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for mine, for your Facebook, for mine, for your website, your email, your banking, your
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And if you can't get over your hatred of Trump, of Parler, of the right, or your frustration
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with what happened on Capitol Hill, you're missing the big picture here, which is that
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five companies is what it takes to digitally deperson you.
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If you don't have an app, you don't need Apple and Google to necessarily deperson you.
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Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon can do it all by yourself.
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But let's look at this critically because Donald Trump was not just gone after by those, but
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Shopify, a Canadian company, went after Donald Trump by taking the Trump Tower store offline,
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This was the Trump store that you would buy things that have the word Trump on them from.
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Like when I was at Trump Tower in New York a year and a half or two years ago, I bought
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And I think I bought a Trump fidget spinner, which I have, I should have brought it out for
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This is not anything to do with President Donald Trump, nothing to do with Capitol Hill.
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But when Shopify stepped in and they said, you know what?
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Overnight, you no longer have the ability to buy anything from the Trump online retail outlet.
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What if they went after someone that didn't have the money or the institutional backing
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of the Trump Organization, which has the ability to rebound from this, I'm sure, despite a little
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What if they went after someone else, someone that didn't have the ability to fight through
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People are told they can't use their PayPal accounts, which cuts them off from revenue
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Imagine if one day Google said to you, you know what?
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Ah, it's one thing to not be able to tweet or Facebook, but what if you were denied access
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And this is the problem with the build your own.
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The vast majority of people do not have the capacity to build their own email account on
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I mean, I'm relatively tech savvy and I still use an email account provided by one of those
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free email account services as well as my work emails.
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But this is the problem is that you cannot feasibly build your own everything.
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And it's looking decreasingly possible or I guess increasingly impossible, be the better
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way to word it, that we can ever get over the hurdle to get to that cultural reality where
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everyone realizes, hey, let's lay down our arms and realize that this is not the world
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And it's easy when the left is the cultural dominating force for the left to jump up and
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But if and when that shifts and the left no longer has the cultural hegemony, if you will,
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then all of a sudden this precedent that they've set that tech companies should actually be
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engaging in these issues the way they are by censoring, by deleting, by deplatforming,
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by taking offline, then all of a sudden that will look very bad, which is why people, again,
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And Parler's business model is an app and a website that people use, which no longer is
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So Parler's entire business model has been taken offline because of all of this.
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Now, the rationale for this I should express a little bit on because the rationale is that
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companies are saying Parler's website was used for violence, to plan a violent Capitol
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Hill riot and could be used for violence in the future.
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Now, I was very clear in my thought on what happened on Capitol Hill, and that hasn't changed.
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As I said, I hope you like other things that I say, but I'm not changing on that one.
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So all of a sudden, these companies that are saying they're platforms and not publishers
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are actually blaming a company and targeting a company for actually being an open platform.
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And there's something very twisted and ironic in that, that the companies that claim they
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are platforms are actually mad at a company that genuinely is an open platform.
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And by the way, an open platform that still does not allow violent rhetoric.
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Parler does not allow users to use the platform for criminal activity.
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That's one of the few rules that exists in the terms of service.
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Just because people have been able to screenshot violent things on Parler does not mean those
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things do not get yanked eventually under the terms of service in the same way that some
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stuff on Facebook and Twitter will get yanked as well.
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So there is something in this that I find to be quite concerning for everyone.
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It's not that I'm at all endorsing violent rhetoric, nor is Parler for that matter.
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It's that Parler is not distinct from all of these other platforms.
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And by the way, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, these platforms have
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Terrorist attacks have been planned using chat messaging apps.
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Facebook, Twitter, these things as well have entertained it just because they have policies
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to take stuff down doesn't mean they aren't still used for these things.
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So in that sense, the challenge put to Parler is that it's not good enough at censoring.
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When Parler itself was saying that it actually was trying to get better on dealing with the
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stuff that was genuinely illegal, genuinely illegal, not just violating these internal terms
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of services like Twitter's ban on dead naming or whatever the case may be.
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So I don't accept that a free speech platform is something that should be vilified because
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a free speech platform might attract some people that not everyone wants to have a dinner party
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I think it's actually something that should be encouraged, though.
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But we don't have to like what people are saying to respect that they have a right to say it.
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That used to be the cornerstone of free speech.
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And again, I'm not talking about violent rhetoric.
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I'm not talking about speech that does cross that threshold of being criminal.
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I'm talking about undesirable, unpopular speech, speech that might be biased against you,
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speech that might be critical of you or of something you stand for.
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And we can talk about this regulation, that regulation, this bill, that bill.
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But we're never going to get past what's happening right now if we don't understand that this problem
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is coming from a tremendously dangerous cultural reality, which is now being ratified and codified
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We'll be back in a moment with more of The Andrew Lawton Show.
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This is going to be a big week in the lockdown fight, another form of a battle.
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We've been covering a great length on this show.
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And one of the big questions is whether Ontario is going to get a curfew,
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a la the one that was put in place in Quebec just a few days ago,
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in which we're already seeing arrests of people for, you know, just walking down the street,
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basically doing something that used to be an activity you'd take for granted in a free society.
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So what the Ontario plan is going to look like, we don't yet know.
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But we do know that curfews are not respectful of the Charter.
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And there was a great op-ed in the Toronto Sun about that written by Dr.
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Matt Strauss and civil litigator Ryan O'Connor, who joins me on the line now.
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So let's talk first off about why curfews are, in your view, not constitutional.
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So there are several sections of the Charter that apply to curfews.
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First, every Canadian has the right to free assembly and free association.
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So that's the right to gather and the right to attend a demonstration.
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Every Canadian has the right to liberty to go about their business as they see fit
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So those are the main provisions of the Charter that are breached
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when you can't leave your house between, in Quebec's case, 8 p.m. and 5 a.m.
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This is something that I've found to be really concerning for two reasons.
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Number one is that it forces people just to live in a state of fear.
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It's like, oh my goodness, I got to get home before 8 p.m.
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But it also forces a lot of other things to shut down.
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And this is what we've seen in Quebec, whereas it's not just about you can't leave your house.
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It's all of a sudden the government then has a mechanism to stop all of the things that you
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might do outside your house from happening, like making businesses close early and making
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other people really force themselves to prove that they have a right to be out if they are
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I mean, what was interesting about the Quebec example is that when the curfew started on
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Saturday, they delivered an emergency alert message to everyone's phone saying,
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you can't leave your house at all, which is actually incorrect, interestingly enough.
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You're allowed, there are exceptions in Quebec, you're allowed to go walk your dog.
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You're allowed to, if you're an essential worker, go to work.
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You're allowed to, in the Quebec circumstance, you're allowed to travel the airport to go
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to Florida, but you can't walk around the block without a dog.
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So it is, I think there is an attempt by government to sort of, to demonstrate how serious the pandemic
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But at the same time, you can't unfairly, inappropriately or arbitrarily restrict persons'
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And another issue too, is the fact that there's very little, little evidence to suggest that,
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that curfews are even effective in that, you know, in preventing viral spread.
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Because throughout the entirety of the lockdown measures, we've been told that, you know,
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well, everything's falling under that, you know, catch all reasonable limits category.
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Is this another one of these cases where the government would say, you know,
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the pandemic is really our trump card over these civil liberties concerns?
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Well, a government can't just say, well, there's a pandemic, therefore the charter is suspended.
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The reason why we have a charter of rights to protect our, our ancient and constitutional
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liberties is, is because governments will trample on them in times of crisis.
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So I think that the, all, this is all the more reason to talk about why the charter is breached.
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And the government can't just simply say, well, this is a reasonable limit.
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Yes, all, all charter rights are subject to reasonable limits as can be demonstrably justified
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But, but those limits have to be rationally connected.
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So from the, there has to be a rational connection between the charter breach and,
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you know, and the policy, there has to be minimal impairments.
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There has to also be proportionality between the charter breach,
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the negative effects of the charter breach, pardon me, and the positive benefits.
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In a case like a curfew, a curfew to me is not minimally impairing.
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You know, you can't go out for, you know, very few reasons after 8 p.m.
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Does the virus spread at 8 p.m. but, you know, but not at 7 p.m.?
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It's really hard to understand Quebec's rationale behind its, behind its restrictions.
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And, and the significance of the restriction is important for any, you know, if this is challenged
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in court, you basically cannot leave your house.
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That's the most extreme imposition on Canadians' rights since the October crisis.
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So the government may say, well, yes, everything's subject to section one of the charter,
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But, you know, in a time of crisis, if you can't rely on the charter to protect your rights,
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you know, it's really not worth the paper that's written on.
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If there were evidence backing up a curfew, and I know that's a big if,
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because even Quebec's top doctor, as you've noted, said there was very scant evidence on this.
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Or is your view that the charter breach, the freedom breach is too significant,
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that even if it did have a marginal success at getting cases in check, it wouldn't matter?
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Well, the problem is, is the court is also going to, like, you know, the context of a challenge,
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whether or not the, the charter breach is, is arbitrary, or it's overbroad.
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You know, large manufacturers, for example, in Quebec are, are exempted from the rules.
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So you can go to work at your large manufacturer.
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We've heard evidence, at least in Ontario, I don't know the cases in Quebec,
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where there have been outbreaks at large industrial workplaces.
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So if the premise of, if the premise of the curfew is to prevent viral spread,
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it's not attacking the very places where viral spread is happening.
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And then a law that is arbitrary doesn't survive the reasonable limits clause of the charter.
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A homeless person can't go for a walk around their mission or their shelter,
00:25:59.040
A court is not going to look too, look too kindly on a circumstance where a homeless person is being fined $6,000
00:26:06.400
Or, you know, maybe they don't even have a place to go.
00:26:09.940
And that's, that's really problematic from a constitutional perspective.
00:26:13.440
One of the big challenges that we've seen in some of the church challenges and other challenges of fines here
00:26:19.120
is that there really isn't an ability to get a remedy in time to really do anything about it.
00:26:25.280
We've had people that are putting these challenges.
00:26:27.080
I know a lot of them may not be heard or decided until the restrictions, we hope, end on their own.
00:26:34.980
Or do you think there is a possibility, if something in Ontario is put forward,
00:26:38.420
that there's an injunction application or some other measure that could be heard quick enough to make a difference?
00:26:45.740
Well, courts will hear injunctions, you know, fairly quickly in the circumstance, particularly at least in Ontario.
00:26:50.860
You know, sometimes within a hearing injunction motion, pardon me, within two weeks of an application being started.
00:26:55.860
We've seen with some of the religious services restrictions that from the time you start your proceeding
00:26:59.360
until the time of the injunction, it can sometimes be as little as nine days.
00:27:02.400
But the problem is, is that it's very hard to get an injunction in the circumstance
00:27:05.840
to be essentially asking for the court to exempt you from the application of a law.
00:27:11.200
But the thing is, is that it seems as if lockdowns are going to continue beyond,
00:27:15.380
at least in Ontario, they're supposed to end later on this month.
00:27:18.300
Looks like with the case counts, that's probably not going to happen.
00:27:20.960
So I think there is an opportunity for a person to bring a challenge to,
00:27:24.100
whether it be a curfew, if a curfew is imposed in Ontario,
00:27:26.360
it might be that the curfew is ongoing for a month or maybe more,
00:27:32.840
And in that case, there will be an opportunity for persons to challenge
00:27:35.460
on an urgent basis these issues before the court.
00:27:39.320
With curfews in particular, there almost is outside of the legal argument against them.
00:27:44.760
There's something very chilling about them, because this is actually that wartime mentality.
00:27:50.240
And a lot of the other restrictions, some could argue, might have been a bit more incremental.
00:27:54.040
But for me, this has been the one that I found the most unsettling,
00:27:57.100
even though ostensibly it wouldn't affect my day-to-day life all that much.
00:28:01.000
I very rarely leave home after 8 p.m. in general, let alone during the pandemic.
00:28:05.460
But there is something very symbolic about it, too.
00:28:09.660
Well, it's symbolic that we, you know, the same government that has been lauding
00:28:13.580
our health care heroes and our essential workers and our truckers, etc.
00:28:18.140
Those are the people that have to go to work past 8 o'clock.
00:28:20.020
A lot of people can stay at home and, you know, work from their home office,
00:28:25.460
But for those individuals that have been told that, you know, we rely on you,
00:28:28.840
thank you for your service, those are the very people that are going to be
00:28:31.780
being pulled over in their cars by the police on their way to the long-term care home.
00:28:35.960
They're going to be individuals who are pulled over by the police on the way to go
00:28:38.460
to the yard to pick up their truck to do an overnight delivery.
00:28:41.260
So those very heroes that we've been taught, that government's been talking about,
00:28:44.200
are the very individuals that are going to be targeted by,
00:28:47.080
frankly, the most appalling and chilling aspect of it.
00:28:52.660
And the other aspect of this, too, that I found is that there are going to be people
00:28:57.660
that I think genuinely are already dealing with lockdown issues.
00:29:04.240
Maybe they have just a really tiny apartment in Toronto,
00:29:06.860
and they don't have many opportunities to get away.
00:29:09.320
Maybe someone works 12-hour days, and they now don't have the ability to do anything.
00:29:13.760
I could see a lot of people really falling through the cracks of this,
00:29:20.300
because there's a system in place that doesn't allow them to actually live their lives.
00:29:25.980
We talk about COVID just in terms of case counts every day,
00:29:30.400
but think of all the other issues that COVID and lockdowns are causing.
00:29:35.040
It's illegal in Ontario, for example, to go to the gym.
00:29:42.280
That has a real significant impact on mental health and physical health.
00:29:45.540
And if you're worried about on your way to work because you're allowed to go to work,
00:29:49.020
so you're an essential worker, or if you're walking your dog,
00:29:54.140
you're looking behind you constantly to see if there's a police officer in the vicinity.
00:29:57.800
You're looking around you constantly to see if a bylaw officer is going to give you a ticket.
00:30:05.400
You may have a significant problem on you psychologically if you have mental health issues.
00:30:08.540
It's always looking behind your back like it's a police state, and that's really problematic.
00:30:13.800
Yeah, and I actually just read this morning a case of a Montreal family given $3,000 worth of tickets
00:30:21.360
because they were on their way back from New Brunswick.
00:30:24.680
And by the time they got into Quebec, I guess it was after 8 p.m.,
00:30:27.560
so they violated the curfew, and they're saying that they should have not been given that
00:30:33.380
But these sorts of stories are going to become more and more common.
00:30:36.620
Sure, and when you give police discretion to apply a new law,
00:30:39.800
you can never be certain that they're going to apply it in a way that is compliant with the law
00:30:45.300
You know, and I don't begrudge police necessarily.
00:30:48.960
and they literally just received orders to enforce a law that was enacted last week.
00:30:53.080
They may not be aware, individual officers may not be aware of the exceptions to the rules,
00:30:59.020
And there was video online from Saturday night that showed a gentleman who was walking his dog
00:31:02.640
was pulled over by the police, maybe because they don't know there's an exception.
00:31:06.840
But the problem is when you give police discretion under a new law to apply it,
00:31:10.240
you don't know that they're going to apply it in a way that's consistent with the charter
00:31:19.000
Here's How Curfews Violate Charter Rights.
1.00
00:31:21.420
One of the co-authors, lawyer Ryan O'Connor, joins me now.
00:31:24.560
Ryan, thanks very much for coming on today and great work with this piece.
00:31:30.120
And again, I mean, I said to Ryan there, like I actually am not affected by this directly,
00:31:35.100
but this is still one that I'm finding to be a lot more difficult than some of the other restrictions
00:31:42.940
You know, even something as simple as going for a walk, now you can't do.
00:31:46.460
If you want to take a nice little brisk chilly walk after 8 p.m., well, you're not allowed to.
00:31:51.360
I did an interview with Ezra Levant on Rebel News last week,
00:31:55.160
and Ezra had mused openly, thinking out loud in a way that I'm sure his lawyers love,
00:31:59.440
about whether he should make like anyone in the country who wants to be a freelancer,
00:32:03.200
a Rebel freelancer, so he can just issue them one of those permits that your employer can give you
00:32:10.280
So certainly I'll have to hope that Candace Malcolm and the leadership team at True North let me out.
00:32:15.500
I don't know about the rest of you, but it sounds like Ezra has something cooking up there.
00:32:21.300
When we come back, I'd like to pay tribute to a very dear friend of mine that we lost this week.
00:32:36.680
Before we end things for today, I want to take a few moments to say goodbye to a dear friend
00:32:42.780
who passed away over the weekend after her battle with ovarian cancer.
00:32:53.360
and most people weren't even using the internet, let alone reading blogs or writing blogs.
00:32:58.300
She had her instrumental role in creating what became the Canadian conservative blogosphere
00:33:05.060
long before all of the big tech censors started to run the show.
00:33:09.540
And in doing so, she influenced a lot of people, and I include myself in that category.
00:33:14.540
When I was reading her blog as a younger conservative, I thought,
00:33:23.700
And she was never anything less than encouraging.
00:33:27.500
She became a supporter, a mentor, and eventually a friend.
00:33:31.700
I had the great privilege of traveling with her on a couple of different Markstein cruises
00:33:36.140
where we were both speakers and appeared on a panel together both years.
00:33:40.360
There's a picture of Kathy and I, as well as our friend Tal Bachman and Markstein himself.
00:33:46.980
Kathy was an agoraphobe in the most literal sense,
00:33:52.180
except she didn't have a phobia in a clinical sense.
00:33:58.480
She just never left home, she said, so she didn't need it.
00:34:01.340
She loved her husband, her cats, and she loved what she did.
00:34:06.580
And it wasn't just about politics, but it was about poetry.
00:34:11.720
If you ever said anything bad about the Who, she would, I'm sure, gut you like a fish right there.
00:34:15.740
But she didn't need to use violence because her tongue was sharper than any weapon known to man.
00:34:22.300
She was and is one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite people.
00:34:27.840
And I know that she leaves a huge wake and the internet will not be the same,
00:34:32.220
just as the lives of those who knew her will not be the same.
00:34:35.880
I want to thank Kathy for helping me get my start in blogging,
00:34:39.980
which led to podcasting and then doing talk radio and eventually back to podcasting and blogging.
00:34:47.300
I want to thank her for always being a supporter, not just of me, but of others I knew that reached
00:34:53.160
out to her for advice and received it, whether they liked it or not, what they got.
00:34:58.460
And I want to thank Kathy for always showing me the importance of the culture.
00:35:04.680
She was uninterested in which politician was saying this or which politician was up in the
00:35:09.560
polls or down in the polls because she understood that life was more than elected politics and
00:35:13.780
partisan politics. And she didn't have time for the politicians. At a time when most people were
00:35:19.840
looking at elections, she was not. She was looking at the culture long before Andrew Breitbart even was
00:35:25.400
doing so. Kathy was a trailblazer. She's known for her work, her writing, but she to me is known for
00:35:34.120
herself. And I thank Kathy for everything. I miss her. I send my thoughts and prayers to her husband,
00:35:47.920
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at