Juno News - March 18, 2021


Sticking to Your Guns


Episode Stats

Length

33 minutes

Words per Minute

182.7232

Word Count

6,161

Sentence Count

420

Misogynist Sentences

7

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:06.740 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:13.060 Coming up, Justin Trudeau's gun policies are devastating to gun owners,
00:00:17.020 but to the gun control lobby, they don't go far enough.
00:00:20.140 Also, why Canada's policy of appeasing China doesn't work,
00:00:23.720 and why two Irish filmmakers are telling the story of Hunter Biden.
00:00:30.000 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:35.680 Welcome to The Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.
00:00:41.000 Great to have you aboard the program.
00:00:43.220 We've got a great show planned for this afternoon or this evening.
00:00:47.080 Whenever you happen to be listening to this,
00:00:48.660 we'll be talking to Anne McElhenney and Phelan McAleer later on in the program
00:00:52.940 about their new project, which is about an American political story,
00:00:57.260 but has an underpinning to it that I think is relevant to people all around the world,
00:01:01.880 including in Canada.
00:01:03.160 There's a lot of media bias and a lot of just the general culture war issue
00:01:07.060 that we see manifest in other ways.
00:01:09.460 So that's going to be something we'll talk about with them very shortly.
00:01:12.800 I want to begin by talking about Bill C-21.
00:01:16.140 This is the bill that the Liberal government tabled a few weeks back on guns,
00:01:21.200 which of course, you know, is a big issue of interest for me.
00:01:23.780 The bill cements a lot of what the Liberals did in May with that order in council
00:01:28.900 that just overnight prohibited 1,500 variants of firearm.
00:01:33.480 It more amusingly bans replica firearms,
00:01:36.860 any gun that looks like a real gun from being purchased.
00:01:40.280 It has been so broad that even the airsoft community is convinced that it's going after them.
00:01:45.040 It also gives municipal governments the right to ban handguns.
00:01:49.360 It does a lot of things that have been derided by gun owners and by the gun movement.
00:01:55.600 This is one of the reasons that I've had so much interest in the project I'm working on right now,
00:02:00.380 a documentary about the federal government's war on gun owners,
00:02:04.260 a project that's going to be coming out in just a couple of months called Assaulted,
00:02:08.520 because gun owners in Canada feel assaulted right now by the government, by Justin Trudeau.
00:02:13.900 So, this was not a pro-gun bill.
00:02:16.900 This was an anti-gun bill.
00:02:18.580 It was unnecessary.
00:02:19.800 It does nothing for public safety compared to all the damage it unleashes.
00:02:24.200 But the gun control movement apparently hates it.
00:02:29.200 Polly Remembers, a group set up by the survivors and families of victims
00:02:33.500 of the Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989,
00:02:37.560 has been a very vocal voice against gun ownership and against gun owners.
00:02:43.100 I find often irrationally so, if you look at the rhetoric they bring to the situation.
00:02:48.100 But nevertheless, they're an interesting barometer for the gun control movement.
00:02:52.100 They've sent a letter to Justin Trudeau saying that Bill C-21 is a betrayal
00:02:57.400 of the victims, survivors, and families destroyed by mass shootings.
00:03:02.120 It's a four-page letter.
00:03:04.400 And they're saying they are angry about the dismal Bill C-21.
00:03:09.240 It gives the appearance of follow-up to Trudeau's election commitments against guns,
00:03:13.520 but doesn't actually do anything.
00:03:15.660 They say that it's egregious that he's presented this bill as a response to the pain of victims
00:03:20.140 and their families.
00:03:21.520 Moreover, they say Trudeau is, quote,
00:03:23.740 playing into the hands of the gun lobby.
00:03:26.720 I'm just reading.
00:03:27.580 I don't want to read the whole four-page letter,
00:03:29.340 but I'm pulling out different excerpts of it here.
00:03:31.520 They say the bill changes nothing.
00:03:33.920 Killers will still be able to be licensed owners of legally acquired assault weapons
00:03:38.400 and could commit the same massacres with the same weapons
00:03:41.260 and the same high-capacity magazines.
00:03:44.120 Now, what they mean by that is that Justin Trudeau's bill did not mandate.
00:03:49.600 It didn't mandate the buyback.
00:03:51.980 It said you have the option to sell this back to the government,
00:03:55.360 or you can just hold on to it, but you can't do anything with it.
00:03:58.960 You can't bring it to the range.
00:04:00.080 You can't shoot it.
00:04:00.820 You can't even really take it out of the safe all that much.
00:04:03.260 That's what the bill does.
00:04:05.220 And they're saying that by doing that,
00:04:07.900 it means that there's just another shooter out there waiting
00:04:11.300 who has an AR-15,
00:04:12.980 and they're going to dig it out, and they're going to use it.
00:04:15.140 Because what Polly Remembers believes
00:04:17.140 is that legal gun owners are the problem.
00:04:20.840 They believe that all the people like me who own an AR-15
00:04:23.800 that they have legally, that they properly store,
00:04:26.680 are all just mass killers waiting.
00:04:29.300 Mass killers waiting for the opportunity to just say,
00:04:32.220 all right, I've had it with this.
00:04:33.220 Take the gun out of the safe.
00:04:34.220 Go and start killing on a spree.
00:04:37.960 And this is not to take away the pain of the victims
00:04:41.180 of this very dark and very painful chapter of Canadian history
00:04:45.780 and of Quebec history specifically.
00:04:47.440 But it is just not in alignment with the facts.
00:04:51.960 We know that the problems with gun violence today,
00:04:54.760 the problems with mass shootings,
00:04:56.260 the problems with the bulk of gun violence,
00:04:58.480 which comes from gangs and existing organized crime,
00:05:01.660 have nothing to do,
00:05:03.220 not little to do,
00:05:04.080 but most of it has nothing to do
00:05:06.200 with lawful gun ownership.
00:05:10.760 So the idea that Justin Trudeau
00:05:13.300 can tell legal gun owners
00:05:15.840 that your guns are useless now,
00:05:17.440 this is what he said,
00:05:18.240 he said it's next to useless,
00:05:19.520 that Justin Trudeau can say that,
00:05:21.880 and then lawful gun owners feel assaulted and attacked,
00:05:25.040 and they feel like their property's being taken away,
00:05:26.820 and they feel terrible,
00:05:27.640 and the gun control group is still saying,
00:05:30.080 this, oh man, you stabbed us in the back,
00:05:31.700 yeah, you promised you were gonna take action.
00:05:33.860 I mean, this is, to me, I find quite hilarious.
00:05:37.800 Bill C-21 is dismal, I agree,
00:05:40.600 but for different reasons.
00:05:42.780 So the problem with this is that now Justin Trudeau
00:05:45.720 has put forward the bill
00:05:47.480 that he thinks is going to be the big firearms bill,
00:05:50.200 or one of them,
00:05:50.920 he's done a sequence of these things,
00:05:52.880 and the gun control people are saying it's not enough.
00:05:57.900 Now, I actually have an interesting experience with this,
00:06:01.200 because True North has an audience
00:06:03.180 that is, believe it or not, quite diverse.
00:06:05.520 I know a lot of people think of us
00:06:06.660 as a conservative platform,
00:06:07.920 which generally speaking, we are with a small C,
00:06:10.860 but we get people that are libertarians,
00:06:13.480 people that are more traditional, fiscal conservatives,
00:06:15.940 we get people on the left that tune into our content,
00:06:18.420 we have all sorts of people,
00:06:19.960 and a lot of people in cities,
00:06:22.040 who whenever we've sent out an email,
00:06:23.760 or I've done a video on guns,
00:06:25.180 are actually very negative towards it.
00:06:27.440 People have said, well, you know, I'm conservative,
00:06:28.920 I hate Trudeau, this and that,
00:06:30.380 but nope, I hate guns.
00:06:31.320 No one should have them.
00:06:32.520 No one should have the right to own a gun.
00:06:34.380 And I find this interesting,
00:06:36.040 because there is a lot of misinformation,
00:06:38.580 even from otherwise educated and informed people
00:06:41.440 about guns and about firearms,
00:06:43.580 and a lot of misinformation
00:06:44.480 that tends to creep in to the political debate on this.
00:06:47.920 And the people who are the most prone to saying that,
00:06:51.640 to saying, oh, you know, no one needs a gun,
00:06:53.200 or the guns have to be come off the streets,
00:06:55.480 or the one that I really love,
00:06:57.040 oh, you know, we're just becoming like America.
00:07:01.140 Okay, I mean, in no way is that true, but okay.
00:07:06.540 And this is why I find it to be fascinating,
00:07:09.100 because there is an emotional attachment
00:07:11.120 that people have brought to the issue.
00:07:14.320 And a lot of that has been because of the advocacy
00:07:17.520 of people that are genuine survivors or victims
00:07:21.200 of horrific crimes that involve firearms.
00:07:25.020 But the problem with this is that
00:07:27.080 having been subjected to something so terrible
00:07:30.640 does not make you an expert.
00:07:32.800 It means people should listen to you.
00:07:35.700 People should hear your stories, hear your pain,
00:07:38.040 but we need to have an honest accounting of the facts.
00:07:42.140 And when the gun control lobby is saying
00:07:45.500 that we have so many threats out there
00:07:48.320 because of the Canadian gun regime,
00:07:50.000 that is just not factual.
00:07:51.940 And in no way whatsoever does that stand up
00:07:54.980 to any of the facts that we have at our disposal
00:07:58.500 about guns and about gun crime.
00:08:01.580 So my issue is this,
00:08:02.420 if the liberals who do not care at all about firearms
00:08:05.040 and gun owners are getting hit
00:08:07.440 by the gun control activists for not going far enough,
00:08:10.000 they're probably gonna go the next step.
00:08:12.820 They're gonna go the distance.
00:08:13.960 And there's one line I wanna read here in particular.
00:08:18.120 This was in an article in La Press about it.
00:08:21.620 And it's, I'm paraphrasing here,
00:08:23.600 but basically what Natalie Provo from the organization,
00:08:27.780 from PolyRemember says,
00:08:29.200 is that Trudeau isn't allowed to go and cry with them
00:08:32.160 at their photo ops anymore.
00:08:34.060 That's what she says in the first line here.
00:08:35.800 Nope, you know, that's enough of the beautiful photos
00:08:37.540 with Trudeau just crying at our side.
00:08:39.480 They're saying, yeah, he comes there,
00:08:40.920 he says he hears our pain,
00:08:42.100 he talks about all that he's gonna do,
00:08:43.720 but he's not actually doing anything.
00:08:45.600 And Justin Trudeau wants these groups to back him
00:08:48.260 more than he wants groups
00:08:49.760 like the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights to back him.
00:08:52.540 So he's gonna eventually give them what they want.
00:08:56.160 And this is why it's a slippery slope argument,
00:08:59.060 which I know people don't like,
00:09:00.220 but it's one that people need to hear.
00:09:02.260 Because, and this is so key,
00:09:05.580 they're never going to stop.
00:09:07.460 It's always an incremental move.
00:09:10.680 And by that, I mean that whenever someone says,
00:09:13.700 well, you know, yeah, no one needs an AR-15.
00:09:16.080 So I guess that seems like a reasonable enough policy.
00:09:19.620 That's not the goal.
00:09:21.320 The goal isn't just to say, all right, you know what?
00:09:23.120 We want to get the AR-15s off the street
00:09:24.760 and then we're going to stop.
00:09:26.100 And we see this in C-21.
00:09:27.800 It's the AR-15s.
00:09:29.200 Then it's the handguns from the municipal level.
00:09:31.940 And then it's going to be something else.
00:09:33.560 And then it's semi-automatic shotguns.
00:09:35.300 And all of these things that if you're not a gun owner,
00:09:37.540 you don't necessarily know or care about the difference of.
00:09:40.800 But they are very significant.
00:09:42.700 And again, if I can plug the documentary,
00:09:44.980 one of the things we're talking about
00:09:46.520 is how people are in a lot of ways across the country
00:09:50.280 embracing guns as a way of life.
00:09:53.040 One of the folks we spoke to is a wildlife documentarian.
00:09:57.260 He loves nature.
00:09:58.060 He loves the world.
00:09:58.780 But he's got to save his life if he's out in the bush.
00:10:01.180 We have someone else who is in tremendous, tremendous form at competitions.
00:10:07.060 He's a Canadian Armed Forces veteran.
00:10:09.380 And he can now no longer shoot in competitions with the gun he's always shot in competitions
00:10:14.880 because the liberals have decided to ban it.
00:10:17.280 There are stories like this that are across the country
00:10:20.760 that we are talking to people of all walks of life about.
00:10:25.080 And these are stories that Justin Trudeau doesn't care about.
00:10:27.980 But again, I mean, he likes to go and do the photo ops and cry and say,
00:10:31.480 I feel your pain and we're going to take guns off the street.
00:10:33.640 But that's not enough because they want nothing short of complete 100% total disarmament.
00:10:39.620 And you know, if it gets to the point where the only gun left in Canada is a musket,
00:10:43.120 they're going to go after that as well.
00:10:45.280 We've got to take a break.
00:10:46.260 When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:10:48.540 Stay tuned.
00:10:50.160 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:10:53.680 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:10:55.840 We have in Canada seen a policy of appeasement towards China.
00:11:01.040 This has been Justin Trudeau's MO when it comes to China.
00:11:04.200 It's why Patti Hajdu never wanted to criticize China's COVID numbers.
00:11:09.000 It's why Canada has never wanted to basically hold China to account for anything.
00:11:13.280 Why when the entirety of Canada's parliament, with the exception of the liberals,
00:11:17.700 were wanting to condemn China's genocide against Uyghurs,
00:11:20.980 the liberals went, oh, well, it's a loaded term,
00:11:24.920 even though the liberals accused themselves of genocide
00:11:28.060 and every other Canadian governing party in the country's history.
00:11:32.340 So the reason I talk about this policy of appeasement
00:11:35.060 is because one of the great defenses of it
00:11:37.140 was that Justin Trudeau was playing some form of 3D chess.
00:11:42.860 And I know, don't laugh.
00:11:44.920 People thought this, that he was playing some form of 3D chess
00:11:48.060 because, well, you know, it's a complicated situation.
00:11:50.480 We've got Meng Wanzhou in BC
00:11:52.340 and then we've got Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China
00:11:55.200 and the liberals are trying to get their release done.
00:11:58.060 And, you know, here we are now
00:11:59.720 where China has announced that starting tomorrow,
00:12:05.080 the two Michaels are going on trial.
00:12:07.440 Michael Spavor's trial starts on Friday
00:12:09.500 and Michael Kovrig's trial starts on Monday.
00:12:13.040 Now, these trials are over half-baked charges
00:12:16.820 about espionage and all sorts of things
00:12:19.940 that were clearly retaliatory to actions taken against China.
00:12:25.640 They had nothing to do with the conduct of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor
00:12:29.300 and even if it did,
00:12:31.040 the fact that these two arrests took place in conjunction with each other
00:12:34.080 shows that this was very much China
00:12:36.920 looking for a cudgel to use against the West.
00:12:40.380 So time is basically running out.
00:12:43.240 These trials are going ahead.
00:12:45.120 Any progress that was apparently being made
00:12:47.260 towards their release and return to Canada
00:12:49.620 clearly has not been met by progress on China's side of things.
00:12:53.420 Otherwise, this wouldn't be going to trial.
00:12:55.380 Now, I was reading from one expert in the National Post
00:12:57.960 that even though the trial is taking place now, basically,
00:13:02.400 and might only take a few days,
00:13:03.800 it could be months or even years before they announce a verdict
00:13:06.640 because we're talking about a country here
00:13:08.480 that actually does not care at all about human rights,
00:13:11.840 that doesn't care at all about the West
00:13:13.340 and I would say doesn't even care specifically about Canada
00:13:16.420 or how it's viewed by Canada.
00:13:20.100 Remember, there was this interview
00:13:22.500 that was on the CPAC channel in Canada
00:13:25.280 with the Chinese ambassador
00:13:26.800 and even with the Liberals not joining the vote
00:13:31.060 to declare China a perpetrator of genocide,
00:13:33.520 they were not making the distinction
00:13:35.380 between Parliament and government
00:13:36.780 because in China, you don't actually have freedom
00:13:39.420 to do these things.
00:13:40.440 So anything that lawmakers do in China's mindset
00:13:44.020 is no different than Canadian government officials doing it
00:13:47.240 because to them, they don't understand this idea
00:13:49.900 of a country that doesn't just control
00:13:51.780 its political opposition and all of these other things.
00:13:54.740 But anyone that ever said,
00:13:57.280 well, you know, we shouldn't criticize China
00:13:58.800 because you know what?
00:13:59.840 We have this rocky situation here.
00:14:02.300 What has that gotten us?
00:14:03.840 Appeasement has gotten us nowhere.
00:14:07.640 And that is basically the line.
00:14:10.320 Appeasement has gotten us nowhere.
00:14:13.520 Justin Trudeau has heaped praise onto China in the past.
00:14:16.860 You know, the infamous line
00:14:18.240 about how it's his favorite basic dictatorship
00:14:20.400 because they can do things when they want them
00:14:22.620 and they can turn their economy around on a dime.
00:14:24.720 Well, they can also turn around human rights on a dime,
00:14:26.900 which is exactly what they've done
00:14:28.200 with Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
00:14:31.720 And I don't blame Canada
00:14:33.480 for the two Michaels being arrested.
00:14:35.440 I don't blame Canada for them being imprisoned,
00:14:37.620 detained without particularly consistent access
00:14:40.940 to consular service without due process.
00:14:43.340 That is not Canada's fault.
00:14:46.080 But I do blame Canada
00:14:47.380 for not wanting to take any tough position with China.
00:14:50.840 Canada's position on the world stage
00:14:53.120 has just been to be everyone's friend.
00:14:54.620 They just want to go to the parties.
00:14:55.780 They want to rub elbows and hobnob
00:14:57.600 and do all that other stuff.
00:14:58.500 But when push comes to shove,
00:14:59.900 they were pass blocking for China
00:15:01.680 instead of actually playing the rush against China.
00:15:06.000 And this is so tremendously dangerous,
00:15:08.600 not just for Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor,
00:15:10.660 but for Canadian interests more broadly.
00:15:14.320 Canada has proven that it is someone
00:15:16.480 that can be completely walked all over.
00:15:20.840 And that's a dangerous point.
00:15:23.320 And that's an incredibly dangerous position
00:15:25.280 for our country to be in.
00:15:27.200 Appeasement hasn't worked.
00:15:28.920 It's not working.
00:15:30.480 The trial date, some theorists are saying,
00:15:33.400 some analysts are saying,
00:15:34.580 might be tied to a meeting between Beijing
00:15:36.800 and Washington officials in Alaska that's taking place.
00:15:41.040 And if the US government under Biden
00:15:43.140 is trying to reopen the door to China
00:15:44.800 and try to find ways to work through it,
00:15:46.700 if China's response to that is,
00:15:49.180 we're just going to flex our muscles
00:15:51.200 and show you what we're capable of,
00:15:53.800 how is this country at all to be taken seriously
00:15:56.480 as a good faith actor?
00:15:59.380 It's not.
00:16:01.160 And I don't know what the answer is.
00:16:03.020 I think there are a lot of things
00:16:04.040 that need to be done with the China relationship.
00:16:06.180 But the point of this is,
00:16:07.320 you can't give them the benefit of the doubt ever.
00:16:10.960 You just can't.
00:16:11.920 It's just not how things work.
00:16:13.240 Before we talk to Anne McElhenney and Phelan McAleer,
00:16:16.880 I wanted to switch briefly to an update
00:16:19.140 on a story that was very personal for me
00:16:21.120 that I have spoken about on the show in the past,
00:16:23.820 including with Conservative MP Garnet Jenis.
00:16:26.680 And that is Bill C-7,
00:16:29.340 which as amended,
00:16:30.540 thanks to the senators in the Liberal caucus,
00:16:33.840 or sorry, the independent senators group,
00:16:36.400 and most of the Liberal MPs,
00:16:38.800 as well as the Bloc Québécois in the House of Commons,
00:16:41.500 will allow the right for people with mental illness
00:16:44.880 to seek and acquire assisted suicide.
00:16:47.660 This is what the expanded version
00:16:49.640 and amended version of C-7 has done.
00:16:52.000 Now, once these amendments passed,
00:16:53.600 it was a lock.
00:16:54.260 We knew it was going to happen.
00:16:55.660 But it has been formalized now.
00:16:57.920 The bill with its amendments has gone to the Senate.
00:17:00.500 The Senate has reviewed
00:17:01.500 the House of Commons amendments
00:17:02.760 and has voted 60 to 25 with five abstentions,
00:17:06.880 which means the bill is now proceeding to royal assent.
00:17:09.940 Now, Canada is without a Governor General right now.
00:17:14.080 Now, that doesn't mean that all bills are frozen.
00:17:15.980 It just means that the duties are shifted
00:17:17.520 to Richard Wagner,
00:17:19.300 who's the Chief Justice of Canada,
00:17:20.800 serving as the Administrator of Canada.
00:17:23.660 But this is going to be very soon the law.
00:17:27.360 Now, they've built in a sunset clause of sorts,
00:17:29.880 where for two years,
00:17:31.320 that prohibition on people with mental illness
00:17:33.180 getting assisted suicide will still remain.
00:17:35.840 And if government wants to come up
00:17:37.320 with any regulations or any approaches to that,
00:17:39.920 they have two years to do it
00:17:41.640 before automatically it becomes legal.
00:17:44.100 And basically, my fear is it becomes open season.
00:17:47.300 So the message to you,
00:17:48.660 if you care about this,
00:17:49.800 because I got a lot of feedback,
00:17:51.440 even from people that aren't conventionally supporters
00:17:53.500 of my view of the world,
00:17:55.220 saying that, I mean, this is terrible.
00:17:56.700 We should all be aligned on this.
00:17:58.740 You have to talk to your MP.
00:18:00.420 The two-year clock is going to start very soon.
00:18:02.520 And you have to get them to roll that back
00:18:05.520 before that runs out.
00:18:07.020 If no one can agree on anything,
00:18:09.120 it becomes the law.
00:18:11.840 And that's why putting in that two-year limit
00:18:15.480 is really dangerous,
00:18:17.000 because it forces people to come to an agreement
00:18:19.480 on a contentious issue
00:18:20.660 without going through the proper deliberative process.
00:18:24.600 And when I talk about good faith actors,
00:18:26.460 remember, the Liberals allowed this to be put in
00:18:28.700 without having any scrutiny,
00:18:30.160 without being discussed in committee,
00:18:31.580 without having any real oversight
00:18:33.880 through the political process.
00:18:35.400 There was virtually no debate on this whatsoever.
00:18:39.580 So the two-year starts now.
00:18:41.700 And this is not a partisan organization by any stretch,
00:18:44.560 but just personally, as a survivor of suicide,
00:18:46.960 I can tell you, I'm going to be fighting this,
00:18:49.100 and I hope you will too.
00:18:50.460 When we come back, more of The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:18:52.580 Stay tuned.
00:18:54.820 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:18:59.120 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:19:01.580 A few weeks back, I moderated, you may recall,
00:19:04.800 a panel on big tech censorship.
00:19:07.320 And one of the big stories we talked about in that panel
00:19:10.160 was during the presidential election last year,
00:19:13.220 the New York Post and its story,
00:19:15.560 which under any normal circumstances,
00:19:17.880 in a normal world, in a normal universe,
00:19:19.900 would have been the bombshell story of the election
00:19:22.020 about Hunter Biden and his laptop,
00:19:24.500 but instead became suppressed,
00:19:26.900 became subject not just to the cancellation
00:19:29.260 and censorship of the New York Post by Twitter,
00:19:31.480 but anyone who wanted to share
00:19:33.560 the New York Post story on Twitter, on Facebook.
00:19:37.040 And the reason I bring all that up
00:19:38.560 is because this is a story,
00:19:40.360 despite the significance of it,
00:19:41.940 that most people have not heard
00:19:44.360 because of all of the forces working against it.
00:19:47.200 Well, two fantastic filmmakers are telling the story
00:19:50.300 in a film they've announced
00:19:52.060 called My Son Hunter.
00:19:53.860 Peter, Phelan McAleer, and Anne McElhenney joined me now.
00:19:57.120 Good to talk to you both.
00:19:57.920 Thanks for coming on and congrats on launching this.
00:20:01.200 Thank you very much, Andrew.
00:20:02.580 It's an important story, yeah.
00:20:04.080 So we are a few months now past the election.
00:20:07.340 A lot of the people that did pay attention to it
00:20:10.020 were people in our orbit because they were looking for it.
00:20:12.860 A lot of the people in the mainstream society
00:20:14.760 were not hearing about this.
00:20:17.120 Are you worried that you're going to have
00:20:18.640 those same forces against you trying to tell this story?
00:20:21.340 Well, yeah, that's why we're making a movie, actually,
00:20:25.220 rather than doing a documentary or a news story
00:20:28.220 is because movies have much more penetration.
00:20:31.120 People will not necessarily seek out a documentary,
00:20:34.120 but they may come across a movie.
00:20:36.360 And we're going to put this online.
00:20:37.520 We're going to give it away.
00:20:38.940 And it's going to be entertaining.
00:20:40.380 It's going to be fun.
00:20:41.360 It's going to be accessible.
00:20:42.740 But it's going to tell the truth,
00:20:44.140 the truth of Hollywood and big tech and big media.
00:20:47.260 And I don't want you to hear.
00:20:49.120 So what is My Son Hunter about?
00:20:52.340 Well, I mean, it's a lot about the Biden family
00:20:55.020 and the Biden's family corruption,
00:20:56.660 family with a big F and a small F.
00:20:58.400 But it's also, it's very much like your introduction alluded to.
00:21:02.040 It's very much about media and about media bias
00:21:04.660 and big tech censorship.
00:21:07.000 That's equally as important a story here
00:21:10.140 as the story of the Bidens.
00:21:11.800 And the story of the Bidens is extraordinary.
00:21:14.180 And it's amazing when you just think of the details of it.
00:21:17.020 Here's a guy, Hunter Biden, who has a drug problem.
00:21:19.820 I mean, that's not particularly unusual.
00:21:21.660 A lot of people have that.
00:21:23.180 We're from Ireland.
00:21:24.020 You know, we exported alcoholism around the world.
00:21:27.160 So here's a guy with a drink.
00:21:28.500 You know, he's got an alcohol problem.
00:21:30.260 You know, he has to go to rehab.
00:21:33.860 He has all these things that happen to him.
00:21:35.760 You know, he gets a stripper pregnant
00:21:37.700 and then, you know, says he isn't the father of the child.
00:21:41.860 You know, he, all this kind of stuff.
00:21:43.860 And here's, when you add all that about his,
00:21:46.380 that he went to the Navy, that he was there for one day,
00:21:48.900 got a special dispensation because he was older.
00:21:51.240 And the first day he turns up,
00:21:53.540 he tests positive for cocaine and gets thrown out.
00:21:56.600 But put alongside that, the fact that this guy is the guy
00:22:00.540 that an energy company in the Ukraine,
00:22:02.820 after doing a worldwide executive search,
00:22:05.780 say, that's the guy.
00:22:07.820 That's the guy we need to have sitting on our board.
00:22:11.760 And, you know, your listeners,
00:22:13.580 the people who watch your show are smart
00:22:16.640 and they have common sense.
00:22:18.780 This is not the guy you want on your board.
00:22:21.780 Let's not, you know, I mean,
00:22:22.640 obviously the alcohol is a drug addiction thing.
00:22:25.320 You know, I'm very sorry and all that.
00:22:26.660 That's not, this guy is on their board
00:22:28.700 for one reason and one reason only.
00:22:31.240 There is one reason and one reason only
00:22:33.380 that that guy is getting $3 million
00:22:35.000 from the mayor of Moscow's wife.
00:22:37.580 There is one reason and one reason only
00:22:39.480 why that guy is getting an $85,000 diamond ring
00:22:43.200 given to him by a random Chinese, you know, businessman.
00:22:47.600 There's one reason only that he's getting $100,000,
00:22:50.140 him and members of his family to do a shopping spree
00:22:53.540 from Chinese business people.
00:22:56.080 And there's one reason only,
00:22:57.260 and that's the reason that we're going to expose
00:22:58.720 because the big guy,
00:23:00.780 the big guy that's referred to in these emails
00:23:03.160 that came up in that very laptop that you talk about,
00:23:06.100 the big guy is Joe Biden.
00:23:08.200 I want to read how you've described this film, Anne.
00:23:11.660 You said it's Austin Powers meets King Lear
00:23:14.440 with a dash of House of Cards.
00:23:16.520 So you've got all the bases covered.
00:23:18.280 Yes.
00:23:18.600 Yeah, well, it is.
00:23:19.740 I mean, it is.
00:23:20.220 It's a family story as well as a,
00:23:22.560 and it's got all these exotic locations, you know.
00:23:24.760 It's got the Ukraine.
00:23:26.140 It's got China.
00:23:27.280 It's got Monte Carlo.
00:23:28.960 Delaware.
00:23:31.140 You know, and then at the end,
00:23:34.000 when we spoke to a famous director in Hollywood,
00:23:36.240 we won't say who it was,
00:23:37.020 a famous writer as well.
00:23:38.880 And he said, you know,
00:23:39.600 ultimately Hunter Biden hates his father.
00:23:42.720 That must be the reason he left the laptop behind.
00:23:45.540 There's tension there.
00:23:46.220 He was never the favorite son.
00:23:48.200 Bo was the favorite son.
00:23:49.400 So there's that tension.
00:23:50.960 Then you've got House of Cards, you know.
00:23:52.880 I mean, really, Joe Biden had a son who was an addict.
00:23:56.780 How did he treat him?
00:23:58.580 He made him his bag man, you know.
00:24:01.620 There's something deeply, deeply sinister about this family.
00:24:06.100 And, you know, and it's brilliant, brilliant movie material.
00:24:10.720 It's dark.
00:24:11.480 It's funny.
00:24:12.120 It's exotic.
00:24:12.960 Let me give you a funny.
00:24:13.800 There's plenty of beautiful women.
00:24:15.600 Let me give you a funny.
00:24:16.400 And there's lots of beautiful women in it.
00:24:17.700 Let me give you a funny.
00:24:18.800 I mean, again, you know, your audience are smart.
00:24:21.440 This is the Austin Powers side of the formula.
00:24:23.360 If you're digging out the funny.
00:24:24.520 So here's a guy who has this, you know, drug problem.
00:24:27.840 He goes to a rehab.
00:24:29.360 He's walking in the door of the rehab and he meets a woman called Bicycles.
00:24:35.180 Her name is Bicycles.
00:24:36.300 She's homeless and she always has a bicycle.
00:24:39.020 And so her name is Bicycles.
00:24:40.300 And this guy, the guy that the Ukrainian energy company chose above everyone else to be on their board, decides to go and live with her, to go and live with Bicycles instead of going to rehab.
00:24:53.780 So you can see where Burisma, you can see, you can understand.
00:24:56.960 And why they wanted this guy on the board of their energy company.
00:25:01.100 You know, an international executive search turned that up.
00:25:03.800 Turned that up.
00:25:04.540 This guy that got rejected after one day at the Navy.
00:25:08.000 Anyone who's ever lost their job or had trouble getting one is going to be just infuriated by all of this, especially in the last year with the pandemic.
00:25:17.360 Let me ask you, Phelan, because you've done some tremendous work before that I've talked about on the show from the Gosnell movie to FBI Lovebirds and Ferguson.
00:25:25.440 And a recurring theme in those is that you take a lot of the dialogue from court transcripts, from verbatim things that have happened.
00:25:35.320 Do you have that going into this?
00:25:37.200 I mean, how do you get the factual basis or how much of it do you get from which you can build the fictionalized or at least dramatized account?
00:25:44.980 Well, Hunter Biden gave a confessional interview to The New Yorker in 2019.
00:25:50.200 Now, it was clever because he gave it and the interview was buried and no one ever followed up on it.
00:25:56.320 And all of these facts we're telling you about now came from Hunter Biden's mouth.
00:26:00.260 Then you've got the emails that he has never denied and that no one involved in the emails has ever denied.
00:26:07.380 And several people involved in the emails have confirmed.
00:26:10.800 So, you know, this we don't we're not going into conspiracy theories.
00:26:14.280 We're going into confirmed details.
00:26:17.520 And boy, I'll tell you, you know, you don't need to go into conspiracy theories.
00:26:21.540 You know, there's a lot of questions to be answered.
00:26:23.600 There's a lot of fun to be had.
00:26:25.420 And there's a lot of information to bring to people.
00:26:27.360 And there's a serious point as well, which is this point that, you know, when all of this was available, as Philem says, all this information was available, freely available.
00:26:34.480 It's all out there just to be found.
00:26:37.080 And intrepid reporters are supposed to be intrepid.
00:26:40.700 They're supposed to care about this kind of thing, particularly in the run up to a presidential election.
00:26:44.680 And they chose not to report on this.
00:26:46.380 And that's going to be a very, very important component of this movie is exposing and showing the media for exactly what they did with The New York Post, who were intrepid,
00:26:55.760 who did have this story and tried to get it out to the public and were suppressed by big tech.
00:27:01.120 But also, you know, shame on The New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, all of these places that did not tell this story at all.
00:27:11.020 Yeah.
00:27:11.460 And you raised something very important there.
00:27:13.520 And I know that, you know, a lot of my audience, of course, is Canadian.
00:27:16.340 And some people may wonder why this is relevant.
00:27:18.260 But I think there's a national and an international aspect of this because the media problems exist all over the place.
00:27:24.420 And one thing that I find particularly insidious about all of this is that, you know, if Barron Trump were to walk down the street within three months of the time some Russian diplomat had walked down the street,
00:27:37.720 it would have been on the front page of The New York Times.
00:27:39.720 You know, we heard for the entirety of Donald Trump's presidency and even beyond Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian collusion.
00:27:46.440 And here you have something that, as you know, is plain as day.
00:27:50.520 It's not even hidden in plain sight.
00:27:51.880 It's just in plain sight.
00:27:53.620 And you have to crane your neck in ways that the human body is not meant to twist to not look at it.
00:28:00.200 But that's what's happening.
00:28:02.120 Yeah, totally.
00:28:02.960 Totally.
00:28:03.580 The lack of curiosity of journalists to these great stories is, well, it's very understandable, but it's madness.
00:28:13.240 It's complete madness on a whole slew of levels.
00:28:17.780 These are brilliant, brilliant journalistic stories.
00:28:20.740 And the detail.
00:28:21.340 Yeah, they tell themselves.
00:28:22.520 They tell themselves.
00:28:23.380 I mean, you can't.
00:28:23.860 There's no colour.
00:28:24.440 You don't have to add colour.
00:28:25.440 The script for this movie is writing itself.
00:28:28.040 And, you know, and if Hollywood had any decency, they would be competing to make this movie at this stage.
00:28:33.920 It writes itself.
00:28:35.120 But they're not because big Hollywood, big tech and big media, their job is to cover up for the Democrats, cover up for the Democratic Party and cover up for liberalism.
00:28:43.360 And they're entitled to do that, I suppose.
00:28:45.840 But let's not call themselves journalists.
00:28:48.080 Let's call themselves stenographers or, you know, court unics or whatever it is they are, but they're not journalists.
00:28:55.920 And you've got a crowdfunding campaign set up at mysonhunter.com.
00:29:00.140 And I wanted to ask you about the Hollywood connection because you're raising two and a half million dollars for this.
00:29:04.460 You've already gotten a huge amounts of money.
00:29:06.660 And I know you're going to continue to have momentum there.
00:29:09.100 This is huge by the standards of crowdfunding for a feature film.
00:29:13.600 But this would be pennies to a lot of these Hollywood film studios.
00:29:18.080 That's right.
00:29:18.800 Totally.
00:29:19.260 Totally.
00:29:19.640 This is the catering budget on big movies.
00:29:22.440 I mean, that's often a joke.
00:29:24.940 It's actually true.
00:29:25.900 But, you know, this is where we are.
00:29:29.120 We're forced to make do.
00:29:30.960 We're going to film it in Serbia, which is cheap and will double as Ukraine.
00:29:35.500 It's even got a Chinatown where we can pretend it's China.
00:29:39.100 Does Serbia double as Delaware, too?
00:29:43.380 We might shoot Delaware in Delaware.
00:29:45.360 Oh, okay.
00:29:46.140 Or Oklahoma or somewhere on this side of the ocean.
00:29:49.580 And the only good thing about Serbia is it has, apparently, I'm told, has lots of very beautiful women and strip clubs,
00:29:57.700 which no movie about Hunter Biden would be complete without women and strip clubs.
00:30:02.960 But, no, I'm glad you mentioned about the crowdfunding campaign.
00:30:05.920 We've raised, I mean, so we're raising, as Film says, we're raising $2.5 million.
00:30:10.420 It's the biggest campaign we've ever done.
00:30:12.340 We raised $2.3 million in the past for the Gosnell movie.
00:30:15.760 But, you know, we had our first day yesterday, right?
00:30:18.380 Yeah.
00:30:18.660 And on our first day, we're up to a little over a quarter of a million dollars already.
00:30:24.220 So about 10% of the budget already, which is a great start.
00:30:28.780 But we would love anyone who's listening to this show to, you know, give what you can.
00:30:32.960 You know, it's important.
00:30:34.320 This is an important story.
00:30:35.740 And as Film says, we shouldn't need to be making this movie if journalists did their job.
00:30:40.920 We're now heading towards over $300,000.
00:30:43.920 So money is coming in.
00:30:46.120 But, you know, it's a stretch between there and 2.5.
00:30:49.440 But it's great.
00:30:50.040 But people are really great.
00:30:51.060 We've got 60 days.
00:30:52.220 So please, people, let's make sure the cover-up stops.
00:30:56.140 Yeah.
00:30:56.640 No, this is an important story.
00:30:57.640 Now, I know that when you had the Gosnell film released, one of the things that was just tremendous about it, and I think I may have said this to you, Phelan, when we spoke last time, is that, yes, there was a political message there.
00:31:09.200 But it was a good movie first, before it was just one of those preachy, hit you over the head with it ones.
00:31:14.920 And I think that that's important for people that haven't seen your work to understand that, yes, you guys have been great advocates for many causes over the years.
00:31:22.260 But you're entertainers first and foremost in this way.
00:31:25.580 Like, you want to make a good movie.
00:31:27.420 Yeah, no, it's essential.
00:31:29.000 And when we were making Gosnell, that was our big command, was this has to look like every other movie, funny, which is a funny thing to say about a movie.
00:31:36.440 You know, we wanted people to look at it and think, oh, it's one of those procedurals, you know, a courtroom attention.
00:31:42.180 You know, in my chambers now, objection.
00:31:44.720 Yeah, whatever, you know, C5, whatever, you know, all that.
00:31:47.740 And, you know, it's important that we make entertainment that is entertainment.
00:31:53.840 And if there's anything we want to say, it needs to be subservient to the entertainment, to the story, to the narrative.
00:32:00.740 And, you know, the great thing about covering these court cases is if you stick to the truth, you know, the truth will set you free and tell a great story.
00:32:10.280 MySonHunter.com, that's the website where people can chip in.
00:32:13.600 And you can also catch Anne and Phelan on their fantastic podcast, the Anne and Phelan Scoop.
00:32:19.000 Anne McElhenney, Phelan McElher.
00:32:20.760 Thanks so much for coming on and a happy belated St. Patrick's Day to you both.
00:32:24.600 Thank you so much.
00:32:25.440 Thank you.
00:32:26.520 Thank you, Andrew.
00:32:27.420 Bye-bye.
00:32:28.100 My thanks to Phelan McElher and Anne McElhenney for coming on the show.
00:32:32.100 Always a delight to talk to them both.
00:32:34.200 And actually, I have had the chance on two occasions and hopefully a third very soon to be on the same cruise as them, the Mark Stein Cruise, which has always been a great time.
00:32:43.080 We were supposed to do one in October, but, of course, the world has gone nutty.
00:32:46.540 So now it's this October, and let's hope we get to do that as planned.
00:32:50.920 In any case, my thanks to them both and to all of you for tuning into the show.
00:32:54.420 We'll be back in just a few days' time with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show, The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
00:33:01.440 Thank you, God bless, and good day.
00:33:03.120 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:33:05.220 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:33:13.080 The Andrew Lawton Show.