Juno News - January 16, 2020


The Andrew Lawton Show： Hollywood Hypocrites, CBC Fake News, Cancelling Vince Vaughn


Episode Stats

Length

48 minutes

Words per Minute

177.94026

Word Count

8,696

Sentence Count

515

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Coming up, Hollywood hypocrites with Dr. Gad Saad, fake news from CBC, and big moves in the
00:00:05.600 conservative leadership race. Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of The Andrew Lawton Show on
00:00:11.600 True North, episode two, and what a glorious episode we will try to make it for you. If you're
00:00:17.940 tuning in for the second time, thank you for your continued loyalty over two episodes, and if you're
00:00:23.160 tuning in for the first time, what took you so long? In all honesty though, thanks very much. We had a
00:00:27.840 great response to the first episode, so we decided we'd do it again, and hopefully again and again as
00:00:33.380 time goes on. We've got a great show planned for today. We're going to talk to Professor Gad Saad
00:00:39.560 coming up in a little bit. Also, one novel way to settle legal action, and I want to get into a little
00:00:46.920 bit more about some of the movement in the conservative leadership race, but we'll get to all of that as time
00:00:52.640 goes on. First things first, I know I took it a little bit hard with FedEx not delivering the
00:00:58.680 package that you see now on the wall behind me, the famous acoustic panels, which aren't even all
00:01:03.440 that exceptional, but I liked them and I wanted them, and FedEx, I don't want to say I tore into
00:01:09.180 them. I ranted gently about FedEx in the first episode, and more than anything else I talked about,
00:01:15.780 I was getting emails from people that had their own stories about FedEx, so it's news you can use,
00:01:20.580 as they say, but I did finally get the panels, get them put up on the wall, everything like that's
00:01:25.140 looked after, so we can now go on, and there's like one little piece that I'm waiting for that you'll
00:01:30.180 see on the show in a couple of weeks. I won't tell you what it is, but just one little thing that I
00:01:34.900 thought would be good to have, but that one's my fault. That one I don't blame FedEx or anyone else
00:01:39.460 for. I want to start off on this topic that is a very interesting one to me, and it's the way that
00:01:46.880 the Hollywood wokeness cult has really tried to take over people's lives, and the string of stories
00:01:54.240 we've seen about this in the last little while, and I'm going to talk about this with Gadsad in a few
00:01:59.280 moments, but there's been three stories over the last two and a half weeks or so that have really
00:02:04.860 pushed this forward. I mean, you had the Golden Globes and Ricky Gervais going with this absolutely
00:02:12.240 astonishingly good monologue that took aim at Hollywood hypocrites, and then you had Michelle
00:02:19.460 Williams get up, you know, half an hour later and dedicate her award to protecting abortion rights,
00:02:25.740 despite the fact that Ricky Gervais has become pretty popular, more so than he was before, for
00:02:31.660 saying, hey, don't talk about politics, no one cares what you think, and then you have this week a few
00:02:37.580 stories where Stephen King, the author, who is not Hollywood per se, but still he's in that
00:02:43.260 entertainment world, tweeted something. Well, he tweeted two things, and the first one is the good
00:02:50.700 one. The second one is the backtrack. The first tweets that he put out, as a writer, I'm allowed
00:02:56.160 to nominate in just three categories, best picture, best adapted screenplay, and best original screenplay.
00:03:01.980 For me, the diversity issue, as it applies to individual actors and directors anyway, did not
00:03:07.920 come up. That said, I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that
00:03:15.740 to do otherwise would be wrong. Now, he writes this, and he's entirely accurate, by the way, that
00:03:22.180 considering any factors other than quality means you are sacrificing quality. There's no way about it.
00:03:28.340 But he gets pounced on by the left-wing Twitter mob for this. The first response was someone who
00:03:34.860 says, to imply quality and diversity are mutually exclusive tells us quite loudly you are, or loudly
00:03:41.160 threatened you are, by the potential of a level artistic playing field in which diverse stories
00:03:46.200 are exponentially more compelling, yada, yada, yada. You've got someone else that says, when films are
00:03:52.220 created by people of color, they get constantly overlooked by institutions comprised of white men.
00:03:57.900 There's someone else who says that the assumption that quality would suffer because of diversity is,
00:04:04.320 nah, and then there's an emoji. I don't know how to articulate. But you've got all of these people
00:04:08.040 saying that he's saying that stuff made by non-white males can't have good quality, where he's saying
00:04:14.640 the opposite of that, which is that we shouldn't take anything other than quality into consideration,
00:04:19.540 which would mean, if a white person makes a movie, a black person, a cis, trans, hetero,
00:04:24.480 homosexual, bi, whatever. It doesn't matter. You should focus on the question, is this good?
00:04:30.620 And that's a reasonable proposition. He gets pounced on though. Then he goes back a little bit
00:04:37.340 with it. So the one was posted in the morning at like 7 20 a.m. And then two and a half hours later,
00:04:44.060 he decides to come out with another one. The most important thing we can do as artists and creative
00:04:50.080 people is make sure everyone has the same fair shot, regardless of sex, color, or orientation.
00:04:56.700 Right now, such people are badly underrepresented and not only in the arts. You can't win awards
00:05:04.320 if you're shut out of the game. Again, there's nothing particularly objectionable about saying
00:05:10.440 that. I agree wholeheartedly in equal opportunity. But he's saying this because he's trying to backtrack
00:05:16.760 from a comment that he made thinking, oh, yeah, this makes sense. And this is sensible and
00:05:20.900 not realizing that the Twitter mob is not a sensible enterprise. They don't care about whether
00:05:27.340 something is logical or rational. And he knows that he's going to get pounced on and no one wants to
00:05:33.000 live through that. No one wants to be canceled. After all, just look at Vince Vaughn, who the same day
00:05:39.060 there are stories about I wasn't the same day. Yeah, I think it was the same day stories about him
00:05:44.400 daring to do the unthinkable, which was shake the hand of the president of the United States
00:05:49.880 at a sports game. It was the college football playoff national championship game in New Orleans.
00:05:56.700 And for 30 seconds, for 30 seconds, Vince Vaughn, who I've always liked, by the way,
00:06:02.040 talks to Donald and Melania Trump at the end of which shakes his hand and walks away. And that 30
00:06:07.380 seconds is enough to get people saying, oh, you know, we can't watch Vince Vaughn's movies anymore.
00:06:11.760 And the reason this is so absurd, many reasons, but the primary reason this is so absurd
00:06:18.160 is because people are willingly overlooking what they think Vince Vaughn's quality is as an artist,
00:06:26.880 because now he's done the unthinkable, which is normalizing Donald Trump. And then you've also
00:06:32.640 got the Stephen King thing where Stephen King dares to say, ah, you know what? I kind of think that we
00:06:37.440 should focus on quality and not anything other than quality. And they capitulate or they force
00:06:42.900 him to capitulate because their concern is the same one they've done for Vince Vaughn, that we can't
00:06:48.340 look at the quality of the artist anymore. We have to be intersectional about all of this. We have to
00:06:53.200 find a way to take down everyone unless they toe the line on every single thing that we say.
00:07:00.400 And it's just so tiresome, which is why Ricky Gervais, who, by the way, I don't love Ricky
00:07:06.540 Gervais. I think he's talented. I don't love him. I'm not a fan of his, but it's why his monologue at
00:07:11.640 the Golden Globes, I think was so powerful because he went in there and just took a flamethrower and
00:07:17.860 took out the entire sacred cow of this Hollywood moral grandstanding, which is exactly what the
00:07:26.620 industry seems to have pivoted towards in the last little while. And it's not a new concept
00:07:32.180 for celebrities to try to talk about the issues that matter to them, the causes that matter to
00:07:38.500 them. This isn't new and it's not a free speech issue. They have the right to, no one's saying
00:07:42.920 they don't have the right to. The issue that I raise is the entitlement factor. Why do you think
00:07:48.980 your opinion matters more than someone else's? Why does your opinion matter more than some banking
00:07:56.240 CEO who speaks up and says, you know, I think we need to do whatever the case may be? Because
00:08:01.260 if, because these people decry the 1%, well, they are the 1%. And that's why it gets so infuriating
00:08:09.860 to listen to them go on and on and on. I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio, who famously will take a private
00:08:18.240 jet to a climate summit. You had Joaquin Phoenix, another one. I'm actually going to play the Joaquin
00:08:23.800 Phoenix clip because I think this is important for you to hear exactly what we're dealing with here.
00:08:28.820 I struggle so much with what I can do at times. There are things that I can't avoid. I flew a
00:08:33.240 plane out here today or last night rather. But one thing that I can do is change my eating habits.
00:08:39.820 And so I just want to urge all of you to join me in that and you as well, Jane. And thank you so much
00:08:46.140 for this opportunity. Yeah. So Joaquin Phoenix, who decides to do his part by ordering the vegetarian meal
00:08:52.400 on his flights to talk about climate. That's how he fights climate change. And it's, it's laughable,
00:08:58.500 but also there are people who take these things seriously. Even if most people in our circles,
00:09:06.260 people on the right anyway, roll the rise at it. These folks do have influence and you can't just
00:09:12.640 totally roll your rise because you have to understand why we are where we are. And I want to
00:09:18.000 talk about that a little bit with Gad Sad. And the reason for that is because a lot of this you can
00:09:23.020 trace back to academia. You can trace back to the academy. You can trace back to the trends that you
00:09:29.340 saw in the 80s and continuing in the 90s in universities, which have now permeated through
00:09:35.180 all these areas of society. And also hopefully we'll talk about a way to perhaps find a bit of a solution
00:09:42.060 to this. Joining me on the line now is the Gad Father himself, host of The Sad Truth, Professor
00:09:48.560 Gad Sad. Good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today. Oh, my pleasure. Nice to see you again,
00:09:53.360 Andrew. So let's talk about this Hollywood wokeness, which started with the Golden Globes,
00:09:59.460 but has actually, I think, carried a fair bit. I mean, a few stories that I mentioned, Vince Vaughn now
00:10:05.600 getting cancelled in real time for daring to shake Trump's hand. You have Stephen King making a comment
00:10:12.020 that I thought was very sage and then kind of backtracking. Why is the Hollywood wokeness
00:10:18.200 discussion coming to a head right now? Well, because they suffer from all the idea pathogens
00:10:24.440 that I discuss in my forthcoming book, one of which is a commitment to the DI religion. DI,
00:10:30.640 the acronym is diversity, inclusion, and equity. And so they, of course, conflate equality of
00:10:37.220 opportunities with equality of outcomes. I mean, I'm speaking now about the Stephen King case,
00:10:41.340 where he was perfectly correct in saying, look, you should not be using diversity metrics and
00:10:46.900 judging art. Of course, he then backtracked. But more importantly, his original message did not go
00:10:52.940 far enough. You shouldn't be using diversity metrics, not only in art, in anything that involves
00:10:58.020 excellence, right? What makes us a great society is that we abide by an ethos of a meritocracy,
00:11:03.440 right? Academia is now completely infested with this kind of diversity stuff. You no longer give
00:11:09.260 professors titles or chaired professorships or academic awards based on their achievements by,
00:11:16.560 but by whether they abide or adhere to certain, you know, diversity metrics. It's grotesque.
00:11:22.020 Yeah. And you actually raise a valid point there about how this has really permeated through all
00:11:29.480 sectors. I think a lot of these Hollywood people would love to take over corporate boards and
00:11:35.140 academia and their kids' school boards with diversity and inclusion and equity, but would be
00:11:42.040 very resistant if anyone were to come into their movies and say, oh, no, you need to have these
00:11:46.260 quotas and everything. So typically, it seems like their formula is diversity in every sector but
00:11:51.820 their own. Well, that's the classic, you know, pathological hypocrisy that many of these ideologues
00:11:57.980 suffer from, right? I'm going to talk down to you about the importance of you being green,
00:12:03.800 and I'll do so while driving my private jet, right? So it's grotesque. And oftentimes people say,
00:12:10.040 why do I get so worked up about these issues? Because I despise hypocrisy. I despise intellectual
00:12:16.800 dishonesty. And so I go after all of these schmucks. Yeah, Joaquin Phoenix a couple of weeks ago,
00:12:23.700 or it might have been a week ago, was speaking at some climate march. And he acknowledged in the
00:12:28.140 speech, you know, there are some things I can't avoid, like I had to fly here. But you know what,
00:12:32.800 I live without meat every now and then. So I'm, you know, I'm on the front lines of this. And you're
00:12:38.240 right. I mean, the hypocrisy is always the worst part about this. And this is why I thought Ricky
00:12:43.320 Gervais' monologue at the Golden Globes landed so well, because he was really lighting a fire
00:12:49.040 that I think needed to be lit from within and hasn't really been in recent years.
00:12:54.280 I agree. I mean, some of your viewers might be interested in a recent article that I wrote
00:12:59.060 in Psychology Today, where I discussed why I thought Ricky Gervais' performance, if you'd like,
00:13:06.280 or speeches were so psychologically satisfying. Because to most of us, we don't take well to
00:13:13.400 having these astonishingly privileged people who otherwise, as Ricky Gervais exactly said,
00:13:19.560 know very little about the issues that they're pontificating about, are constantly talking down
00:13:25.300 to us, right? So because you play a hero doctor in a movie doesn't mean that you know anything about
00:13:32.340 the epidemiology of diseases, you pretend to know something, right? But because they're constantly,
00:13:38.920 their egos are stroked, as though they are genuine heroes, they start taking themselves seriously,
00:13:44.680 know what you know, and know what you don't know.
00:13:47.680 Yeah, you actually made a very interesting point in that article. And you had said that the human brain
00:13:53.180 didn't really evolve with the idea of cinema. And that when someone meets someone who played a
00:13:58.980 superhero, their brain, in some ways, processes them as the superhero, instead of a guy who pretended
00:14:05.420 to be that character.
00:14:06.980 Exactly right. And I mean, I'll push that example a bit further. The reason why we become so emotionally
00:14:12.980 attached to, say, a sitcom character that we let into our bedroom or our living room every week,
00:14:19.880 is precisely for the same evolutionary reason, right? Our brains did not evolve knowing that we would
00:14:24.880 be interacting with these fictional characters in sitcoms. So they somehow become part of our
00:14:30.380 inner circle. They become sort of, they're our friends, even though it's make-believe world,
00:14:35.820 but my emotional system will respond to these sitcom characters as though they're part of my family,
00:14:41.160 and I become vested in them. Same principle.
00:14:43.820 So let me ask you then where it goes from here, because this idea of real-time cancellation of
00:14:51.880 these people is a problem they have to contend with. Stephen King comes out of the gate, makes a
00:14:57.200 fair comment, and then starts to backtrack with that other tweet of saying, no, no, no, I believe
00:15:01.840 that all of these different groups are underrepresented. And I mean, the remedy to that is exactly what
00:15:07.060 he claimed, you know, three minutes earlier was the problem, is that, okay, if they're
00:15:11.820 underrepresented, then you have to start putting in all of these quotas that are artificial in nature.
00:15:17.340 And then Vince Vaughn as well. You've got people that are saying to him, not just, you know, I'm
00:15:22.740 not a fan of Trump, and I wonder, you know, why you would shake his hand, which I think is weird
00:15:27.120 enough, but people saying, oh, it's a shame. I've always loved him, but now I can't watch him anymore.
00:15:32.140 Why? You like him. You like his work. Just because he shook someone's hand, you now say, oh,
00:15:37.760 he's toxic. We can't do this. I mean, the way that we're going to resolve this is by the silent
00:15:44.180 majority, most of whom detest the stuff, actually having the testicular fortitude, if I may say,
00:15:51.280 to actually speak out against this, right? It won't take much for people to rise up against this
00:15:57.900 nonsense, but it really is a domino effect. The problem is, as I discuss in my forthcoming book,
00:16:03.440 case, right? Everybody diffuses the responsibility. You know, let Gadsad put his neck out,
00:16:11.120 and hopefully he's got the courage to lead the fight for the rest of us. No, Gadsad is one small
00:16:16.940 voice in a big jungle of BS. So if everybody were to assume the responsibility of fighting against
00:16:26.160 these pathogenic ideas, then we could quickly reverse the trend. If not, I fear that the worst is
00:16:31.780 yet to come. Yeah, you're right about that. Everyone wants someone else to lay the groundwork
00:16:37.700 and roll out the carpet and the red carpet, since we're talking about Hollywood. So now that when
00:16:42.760 someone goes up and does the shtick that Ricky Gervais did, it's not nearly as courageous or bold,
00:16:47.860 because now he's basically carved out this little hole that anyone else can walk in. It's like
00:16:53.020 walking in someone else's footsteps in the snow, because you didn't want to get your ankles cold.
00:16:58.060 And I fear that, well, in some respects, it's fine if more people are doing it. But you're right,
00:17:03.440 everyone's waiting for someone else to take the lead on this. And the other side is sparing no
00:17:09.000 effort in trying to push back the other way. Exactly. And one of the things that I often get
00:17:14.240 is people writing to me saying, yeah, but you know, you have a large platform, you know, you're a
00:17:18.320 professor, so people listen to you. And my answer to them is, look, this is an ideological battle.
00:17:24.580 It's a battle for the soul of our society. So it's trench ideological warfare. Even if you're
00:17:30.600 interacting with one of your friends on Facebook, where only a few people are going to hear you
00:17:35.220 speak out, challenge them politely when they say something that you think is contrary to your
00:17:41.600 values. In other words, it doesn't have to be that you have a gigantic platform a la Ricky Gervais
00:17:47.040 before you should be, you should feel compelled to speak. It's door to door ideological warfare. So
00:17:54.640 however small your voice is, it is big enough to affect some change. So participate in the battle of
00:18:01.260 ideas. You know full well that a lot of what we see now in the mainstream culture really started
00:18:08.780 in academia. And I think a lot of people outside of the academy didn't really take it seriously
00:18:13.560 because, oh, it's just this thing that's happening in the universities, a lot of the political
00:18:17.800 correctness trends that we see. And now we look at this situation where the academy has pushed even
00:18:23.620 further. We've all seen the reports of, you know, the number of professors that identify as Marxist,
00:18:28.740 the number of now students that identify as Marxist and are resistant to capitalism, resistant to free
00:18:34.820 speech and all of this stuff. Do you think the solution has to come from within the academy too?
00:18:40.220 I mean, I do, because as you said, the ecosystem from which these idea pathogens originally came
00:18:46.900 from, patient zero, so to speak, is really academia. So unfortunately, what I think ends up happening
00:18:53.880 is that most academics are busy with their daily lives, right? I don't, yes, I know that over there
00:18:59.600 somewhere in the humanities or the social sciences, they're saying some crazy things about postmodernism,
00:19:04.700 that there's no objective truth, but I'm busy in my lab. I don't have time to worry about these
00:19:10.160 things. So it goes back to what we discussed earlier, diffusion of responsibility. Someone
00:19:15.220 says, let Gad Saad, let someone else worry about this problem. I'm busy. And therefore, my selfish
00:19:22.280 careerist pursuits take over the greater responsibility of protecting truth. So once academics decide that
00:19:31.740 this is a sufficiently important problem for them to address, as a few academics have done, but too few,
00:19:38.680 then I think we could reverse the trend very, very quickly. Because again, as someone who has a pretty
00:19:43.820 large platform, I could tell you that most of the messages that I receive are precisely ones that
00:19:49.240 despise this stuff, but people are afraid to speak out. So I receive endless messages from students,
00:19:54.740 from faculty members, from university staff who say, I support that, but please, please don't mention my name.
00:20:03.400 Once they lose that last part, please, please don't mention my name, then we will solve the problem.
00:20:07.860 One of the things that I see from a lot of people on the right in these issues is the desire to
00:20:16.040 really implement parallel ecosystems. You know, if you have an issue with public schools,
00:20:21.380 go to private schools. If you have an issue with the big tech companies, start your own tech
00:20:25.640 platforms that are conservative friendly. If you have an issue with universities, focus on these
00:20:30.420 private ones. You don't like Hollywood, make conservative movies that kind of operate in this
00:20:35.420 own sphere. And I understand that temptation, but I also feel there's a problem in that,
00:20:41.060 in that it means you're giving up on some of the broader cultural fights that are taking place.
00:20:46.200 Actually, you're giving up on all of them because you're saying, all right, we can't win on their
00:20:49.580 turf. Let's go play with ourselves at the kids' table. I completely agree. Look, it is absolutely true
00:20:55.560 that people can set up their own, you know, equivalent to YouTube and people have tried to do that.
00:21:02.340 But the reality is that YouTube now has much of the traction, much of the traffic. And so it is easy
00:21:08.680 and facile to say, hey, set up your alternative medium. Yes, of course you can do that. But the
00:21:13.400 reality is, as you exactly said, no, I want to fight you on YouTube and on Facebook and in the
00:21:18.780 university halls. I am a defender of truth. That's what I committed to doing when I became a professor.
00:21:24.800 And therefore, no, I don't need to allow you to espouse all of these ridiculous things in the
00:21:29.520 university. No, I'm going to fight you on them. And I wish more people would take up the battle cry.
00:21:35.980 So bringing it back to the Hollywood factor, then, Gad, do you think that or how do you think
00:21:41.580 people should respond to this? Because I think that part of the puzzle is when a Ricky Gervais
00:21:47.260 comes out and says something good to reward that, basically, to say, yes, there are people calling for
00:21:52.760 your head, but I can assure you there are more of us that are going to support you, support your right
00:21:56.880 to do this. But beyond that, where do you think we need to go to push back against this
00:22:02.000 die nonsense, as you call it? Well, I mean, in the most, in the clearest, most direct way,
00:22:08.620 you can do it by engaging in consumer choices that lets the producers of these movies know that you
00:22:15.620 don't support this kind of stuff, right? What makes literature, art, cinema so beautiful is that it
00:22:22.840 speaks to certain universal themes, right? I mean, I could listen to an ancient Greek poem and read it
00:22:27.960 today that was written 2,500 years ago, and it moves me because the software that's in the mind
00:22:34.540 of the person who created that poem is exactly the same software that my brain runs on, right?
00:22:39.280 That's what makes art so beautiful. And so you don't need an indigenous, Muslim, quadriplegic,
00:22:45.820 transgender person to tell a story. If there's a good story that that person has to tell,
00:22:50.240 by all means, allow it to be told. But I don't need to be moved according to identity markers.
00:22:57.040 I'm moved by our common humanity. And so the way that you could fight back against this stuff
00:23:02.200 is if you see that these movies are no longer about art, no longer about celebrating our humanity,
00:23:08.720 logical BS, don't see that movie. And eventually, the market will take care of this idiocy.
00:23:14.700 Yeah, it certainly will. And I'd say not soon enough. But at the same time, there are a lot
00:23:20.320 of people that just begrudgingly go along with this, because as you mentioned earlier, they don't
00:23:25.380 know that they have a power. I mean, a lot of the times, if you look at people that have resisted,
00:23:31.900 the platform comes from standing up for it, the platform comes from taking that first step.
00:23:37.700 It's not that they waited until they had it and then said, okay, now I can talk about all of these
00:23:42.720 things. Look, this is going to sound a bit cliche. But you know, when I open my laptop,
00:23:47.900 the first time that I'm going to strike the first letter of my next book, the journey seems very far,
00:23:54.760 right? I open a word, a word document, and there's not a single letter written. And then one letter
00:24:00.680 after one letter, one syllable after one syllable, one sentence after another, one paragraph after
00:24:05.440 another, I wake up a year, a year and a half later, and I have a book ready. So it takes that first step,
00:24:10.860 everybody has to do that first step. It seems gargantuan. It seems as though it's an intractable
00:24:16.340 problem, but it isn't. The Berlin Wall did fall, right? And it fell very quickly. And so these
00:24:22.260 idiotic ideas that are truly lobotomizing us, certainly in academia, could be defeated,
00:24:29.960 but people have to take that first step.
00:24:31.980 Professor Gad Saad, joining me on the line, host of The Sad Truth, and all around prolific tweeter
00:24:39.400 and commentator on all things crazy in the culture in which we live. Gad, thanks so much for coming
00:24:44.800 on. Good to talk to you again.
00:24:46.000 Likewise. My pleasure. Cheers.
00:24:47.620 We are back. This is the Andrew Lawton Show on True North. Thanks for sticking with me through that.
00:24:52.680 That was a fun interview to start the first week of the show, for sure. Let's talk a little bit
00:24:58.140 about CBC, which I genuinely try to avoid doing, but in this case, I think it's very relevant.
00:25:05.180 CBC has admitted to having a bit of egg on its face in response to a story they published that
00:25:13.920 just wasn't entirely accurate. And the story was about Stephen Harper and comments that Stephen Harper
00:25:22.500 had supposedly made about Iran. And if you saw the headline, it was that they were saying Stephen Harper
00:25:31.080 was calling for regime change in Iran. That was what Stephen Harper was pushing for. And regime change
00:25:37.620 has a lot of baggage to it. It's a pretty loaded term because it's the type of term that people associate
00:25:43.960 with the Iraq War, which is still contentious and people are, I think, more and more souring on it as time
00:25:49.020 goes on. So they accused Stephen Harper of, while he was doing a speech in India, pushing for regime
00:25:54.300 change, which sounds like he is out there just basically trying to nation build as a one man
00:25:59.480 operation. Now, in actuality, that wasn't what he was talking about. What he was speaking about was
00:26:07.020 how we cannot expect to see any substantive change or stability in Iran without a change more broadly.
00:26:16.020 And this is something that is very problematic, to use the word that the left loves these days,
00:26:22.580 because it is really trying to put Stephen Harper into that neocon bubble that they know people are
00:26:29.520 going to respond to without even reading the story. And that is precisely the problem with all of this.
00:26:35.960 And if you look, for example, at the original headline, Harper says regime change needed in Iran to bring
00:26:42.240 peace to region. Now, Stephen Harper posted on Twitter, his own comments without any commentary,
00:26:48.740 he didn't even mention a word in the tweet, he just posted the full context. And what he said,
00:26:55.940 no one could really take issue with, I don't think any of us believe that Iran would have deliberately
00:27:02.400 shut down an aircraft. But the very fact that Iran believing such a thing could happen would be
00:27:09.260 allowing normal civilian traffic, I think, tells you something about the nature of that regime and
00:27:15.000 its priorities. And I, you know, I do believe we need to see a change in Iran, if we are going to see
00:27:20.660 peace in the Middle East, I see an increasing number of states in the region, Israel that I'm close to,
00:27:28.500 certainly the Sunni Arab monarchies, others who are increasingly trying to work together and see a
00:27:34.940 common future and common interests. And you have this one actor that, quite frankly, is, you know,
00:27:41.580 based on religious fanaticism and regional imperialism. And as I say, as a friend of the
00:27:47.560 Jewish people, frankly, an anti-Semitic state. And I think if somehow if there's is any way through
00:27:53.460 the protests in Iran or the consequences of this that Iran could go on a better trajectory, I think
00:27:58.860 that would be very core to resolving the problems of the Middle East, certainly not resolve them all
00:28:03.700 overnight. But I think without a change in the nature of the government of Tehran, the Middle
00:28:08.880 East will continue to be in turmoil. So you hear in that he's talking about the fact that, yeah, you
00:28:13.200 need change in the region for more stability. You've got to ask questions of Iran in all of this. And
00:28:18.600 CBC had actually walked it back. They said the headline and lead paragraph of this story have been edited
00:28:25.540 from a previous version that stated Stephen Harper said regime change was needed in Iran. A previous
00:28:31.740 tweet with that headline has been deleted. In fact, Harper said, I do believe we need to see a change
00:28:37.520 in Iran if we are going to see peace in the Middle East. I think without change, the nature of the
00:28:43.100 government will continue to be in turmoil. And they admit in tweet three of three, he did not use regime
00:28:48.920 change specifically. I liked Ian Brody, who is a former chief of staff to Stephen Harper. He says they
00:28:55.580 they say edited when they should say corrected. They're not really admitting wrongdoing. They're
00:29:00.780 just saying, yes, we've just made a little change in this. Like, you know, if the comma was in the
00:29:05.360 wrong place is basically what they're doing. But hey, baby steps in all of this. It's so important
00:29:11.720 because we see the media bias problem in Canada. A lot of the time it isn't as overt as the media saying
00:29:18.440 conservatives bad, liberals good. Although, I mean, CBC is suing the Conservative Party of Canada. So
00:29:24.660 take from that what you will. But it's a lot. It's often more insidious than that. You see it in little
00:29:29.920 ways that they're framing stories. Like, for example, this story with Stephen Harper commenting
00:29:36.960 on Iran. Because Stephen Harper has always been very good about staying in his lane as a former
00:29:44.580 prime minister. He's always been very solid in not trying to be an armchair critic of the current guy.
00:29:51.720 He said, yep, I had my time. Now I've moved away. And there have been very few occasions when he has
00:29:57.000 spoken out to condemn something that's happening. And typically, it's with stuff to do with foreign
00:30:02.680 policy. The Omar Khadr $10.5 million payout was a big example where he said this is just
00:30:08.940 unconscionable. And it means that when he does speak out, there's a lot more weight and heft to it.
00:30:14.260 But in this particular case, he said nothing controversial. And CBC decides they're going to
00:30:20.740 extrapolate from it and rebrand it in something they know is going to get ragged on by people.
00:30:28.020 And people let them get away with this a lot of the time. I mean, what's that old quote that a lie
00:30:33.180 has traveled all the way around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on or something to
00:30:37.900 that effect? And it's certainly with the media. So you look at their apology tweet or whatever you
00:30:43.480 want to call it. The tweet has 39 retweets and 50 likes. The original one had significantly more.
00:30:54.880 The original one had gone fairly viral. Now it was starting to get a bit ratioed. People were responding
00:31:00.540 to say he didn't actually say this. But nevertheless, it was the original that had a lot more traveling
00:31:09.060 than the correction did. More people see that than will see them saying, oh, maybe we begged off. And
00:31:15.360 it's the same with newspapers. The corrections are, you know, buried, you know, underneath an ad and
00:31:19.880 like page 12 or something. Well, the original headline that might have warranted the correction
00:31:24.640 everyone saw. And the problem with all of this is that you've got a government now in Justin Trudeau,
00:31:32.020 who is hellbent on appeasing and bankrolling CBC. You've got CBC that is trying to really put its
00:31:40.000 tentacles into more areas in Canadian media. They want to start becoming this, I don't even know the
00:31:46.480 name of it, but this funder of local media enterprises or perhaps just take over in individual markets.
00:31:52.660 And a Canada that is so reliant on state media is a Canada that does not have an accurate,
00:32:01.680 honest voice on these things. And that's the painfully fundamental reality here is that if
00:32:08.920 state media becomes the only game in town, which is what CBC would like, you can't trust it because
00:32:14.620 they are effectively forced to comment on the people that signed their checks. And my goodness,
00:32:21.880 this is now going to be $1.3 billion. The mandate letter that Trudeau gave the heritage minister
00:32:28.900 calls for even more CBC funding and on it goes. I mean, give it a decade and we're probably going
00:32:34.280 to be giving them $2 billion a year, if not more. And they're going to be saying that they still need
00:32:40.740 to expand into all of these different areas. And no one, no one seems prepared to rethink CBC.
00:32:49.700 No one in the conservative movement, no one in the conservative party, let me clarify,
00:32:55.880 no one in the conservative party seems prepared to do something about this. In the 2017 conservative
00:33:01.780 leadership race, Andrew Scheer had made a comment, a tacit comment about, you know, maybe CBC doesn't
00:33:08.740 need to be in the news division because that's an area where everyone else is, you know, competing
00:33:13.880 adequately. And this was taken by iPolitics who ran a big story about him, but there wasn't really a
00:33:20.440 policy there. He wasn't really announcing anything. He was, I think, responding to a question and said,
00:33:25.160 maybe, maybe this is worth doing. I would love to see a conservative leadership candidate as we head
00:33:30.620 into the leadership race, say, defund CBC or sell off CBC or something like that, just to get that
00:33:37.920 discussion going, just to get the discussion going. Because right now, no one is prepared to deal with
00:33:44.160 this thing, which is not only a fiscal balloon that's hanging up in the sky, just there money
00:33:50.100 that's wasted, that's not going to anything else, but has significant implications for trust in media
00:33:56.900 as well. And that is, I think, going to be a big problem moving forward. And I would love to see some
00:34:03.640 leadership in someone prepared to take that on. I try not to have things be so heavy all the time.
00:34:10.300 So I've got a fun story for you from the Associated Press, where I go a little bit outside of Canada
00:34:15.900 for this one, but bear with me because I think it's kind of fun. A Kansas man has asked an Iowa judge
00:34:22.200 to let him engage in a sword fight with his ex-wife, embracing trial by combat. So he's very unhappy
00:34:31.240 with this protracted litigation. And if you've ever seen the justice system's pace, you'd understand
00:34:36.240 why. So he wants trial by combat, where he and his ex-wife will be able to, quote, rend their souls
00:34:43.320 from their bodies, unquote. I mean, who among us hasn't wanted that at some point in the day?
00:34:48.420 And ultimately, he needs a 12-week extension for the reason that we all need extensions in court,
00:34:55.140 so he can procure Japanese samurai swords for the trial. So trial by combat. His rationale is
00:35:02.520 actually pretty sound. He says U.S. law doesn't specifically prohibit it. And because it doesn't
00:35:08.180 specifically prohibit it, therefore it should be fine. Now, presumably trial by combat would require
00:35:14.280 someone else to agree to it. I don't know if that is something the ex-wife is game for. He was very
00:35:21.280 generous, though. Very magnanimous, actually. He said that if she wants, she can appoint someone else
00:35:25.860 to serve as her champion in the battle. He suggested his ex-wife's lawyer, which in that case,
00:35:33.980 I think people might be rooting for the guy, rooting for the husband, not for the lawyer. But
00:35:38.940 you never know. Trial by combat. Coming soon to a Kansas courtroom near you. This one's also a fun
00:35:46.960 one. Students outraged as U of T professor makes students follow him on social media for grades.
00:35:55.120 Now, this I find just bizarre for many, many reasons. A professor that will set aside 5%
00:36:01.460 of the student's grades for, one, buying his book, two, getting him to sign the book, three, four, five,
00:36:11.160 following him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. So if you just do LinkedIn and Twitter and not Facebook
00:36:16.000 and you get the book, but don't get it signed, you get 3% on your grade, otherwise you get nothing.
00:36:21.600 And this was something that a student actually complained about on Reddit. And the professor says
00:36:27.800 that students are able to learn from him and the things that he posts. He said, I would say there's
00:36:35.600 not much for me to profit from as far as the books. But then he said that students have benefited from
00:36:43.220 being connected and making use of his networks. He said that, you know, most people are okay with
00:36:50.720 this. His students all think it's fine and dandy. And here we go. Like, I didn't know this was an
00:36:56.680 option to boost my Twitter following. I could just take like a guest lecturer position at, you know,
00:37:01.160 the University of Western Ontario and say, all right, 25% of your grades follow me on Twitter,
00:37:05.460 listening to the podcast, subscribing on iTunes, which by the way, subscribe on iTunes,
00:37:09.560 you get no credit for it. But I'm happy with you, which I guess is some form of credit. I don't
00:37:16.240 know. We'll trial by combat if you don't want to subscribe. But this is now something that he has
00:37:22.720 said he'll continue. He said it is part of the course because he is a social media guy. So this
00:37:29.080 is what happens in millennial academia. I should have asked Gad Saad about that one too. We've got to
00:37:35.880 take a quick break. We'll close things out on The Andrew Lawton Show when we come back. Stay tuned.
00:37:40.780 Welcome back, everyone, to The Andrew Lawton Show. I said from the outset of the program,
00:37:46.200 it wasn't going to be all conservative leadership all the time. But you also can't exactly gloss over
00:37:52.800 the biggest Canadian political news stories as they develop. And it is a bit of a horse race right now.
00:37:58.480 And a few updates this week. More movement than I anticipated. Well, not anticipated,
00:38:03.280 but then I knew about during the first episode. The big three are that Ronna Ambrose is out of the
00:38:11.520 race. According to initially a report in La Presse that was then picked up by the English language
00:38:15.740 press, Peter McKay is in. At least he's going to be in. We'll talk about his announcement in a moment.
00:38:22.200 And the big one is that Stephen Harper seems to be dedicating his time to blocking Jean Charest,
00:38:28.740 who hasn't officially announced. But it sounds like his organizing very largely and significantly
00:38:35.160 behind the scenes. So these are three big movements. It's not like, oh, that guy who is the staffer
00:38:39.780 to Kim Campbell is running. It's not running anymore. These are bigger movements here.
00:38:45.280 I want to talk about all three, but specifically Ronna Ambrose to start, because this is, I think,
00:38:50.680 the one that everyone assumed would happen from the outset. And I didn't see her running. So I wasn't
00:38:58.960 going to bet everything I owned on it, but I didn't see her running for a couple of reasons. And one of
00:39:04.520 them is that I think a lot of Ronna Ambrose's appeal has been that forbidden fruit syndrome. People wanted
00:39:10.760 her because they couldn't have her. This is why she was chosen by the caucus to be the interim leader
00:39:15.880 after Stephen Harper left because she was non-threatening in the sense that she wasn't
00:39:20.120 going to be running for the permanent leadership. And she was very candid about that. So by her
00:39:25.140 taking on that role very capably, I might add, I think she was a tremendously successful leader of
00:39:31.540 the opposition. She was very good at being a steady hand and keeping the party on its course.
00:39:37.340 She did that because she was unifying and inoffensive to the party. So the idea of her jumping into a race
00:39:44.300 where she has to start scrapping to get airtime, to get votes, to get money, to get all of these
00:39:50.040 things, which is how you have to run a leadership, was never the strength that she brought to the
00:39:55.620 table. So I don't necessarily think that she was the shoe-in that people thought. I mean, I think
00:40:02.080 she's very similar to Lisa Raitt, who in 2017, and I like Lisa a lot, did not do well in the
00:40:08.300 leadership. But at the same time, she was also very popular and liked as a deputy leader. Some people
00:40:13.380 are liked in certain roles, and in others, it's not necessarily a guarantee. And I had a conversation
00:40:20.760 with someone a while back, maybe three or four weeks ago, who had said that basically their belief,
00:40:27.600 and I think they were kind of indicating that Rana understood this, was that everyone likes her when
00:40:33.240 she's not in. The second she gets in the race, she's, oh, this former Harvard cabinet minister, and all
00:40:37.420 of these different things. So that's a big problem because the media loves to do this. They love to say,
00:40:42.700 well, why can't all conservatives be like X? And then once X gets into the race, they become the
00:40:48.400 new Hitler. In Ontario, this happened to Christine Elliott. Everyone said, oh my goodness, why couldn't
00:40:53.180 Christine Elliott be the leader? But they still hate her. Once she runs and she's in government,
00:40:57.740 everyone hates her. I mean, if Michael Chong were to be the leader of the conservatives, and I hope that
00:41:03.720 doesn't happen, the media would turn on him and think he's the latest and most furthest right thing
00:41:08.960 that has ever happened since sliced bread. No, sliced bread. Actually, sliced bread had some very
00:41:15.080 offensive tweets back in the day. So sliced bread has been cancelled now. He's far right.
00:41:19.760 But my goodness. So I think Rana Ambrose is very valuable. I would love to see her return to politics
00:41:25.960 at some time. She's out, and I think she's enjoying her post-political life a fair bit and is staying put
00:41:32.540 there. Peter McKay is interesting because I did not anticipate, when would it have been a year ago
00:41:40.160 that I saw him, that he would ever jump back into politics. Now, Peter McKay is a guy who was the
00:41:45.760 defense minister. He was the attorney general. He was at one point trying to be the leader of the
00:41:52.800 Conservative Party of Canada, or wanted to be. And Peter McKay, I saw him at an event in Toronto
00:42:00.960 about a year ago, maybe a little bit more. And his wife, Nazneen Afshinjam, the human rights activist,
00:42:07.840 was speaking. And Peter McKay was at the back of the room. And he was pushing a stroller. And he had
00:42:14.600 one of those reverse backpacks on that you put a child into. And then he had another backpack on his
00:42:20.860 back for the gear for the children. And the stroller was a double. So he had his three kids there.
00:42:27.040 And he was wearing his glasses and this little, like, crew neck dad sweater. And I saw him. And
00:42:33.120 we're chatting very briefly. And I thought to myself, this is a man who is completely satisfied
00:42:38.240 with life after politics. He had literally turned himself into a human minivan for his kids and all
00:42:44.100 their stuff. And things change. Things change. Because a year and however many months later,
00:42:49.120 he is in the race. Very anticlimactic announcement, though. If you saw it, he tweeted. I'll pull up the
00:42:57.920 exact wording. I think it was four words. So I can't get the four words wrong. Because there are
00:43:03.140 so few of them. I'm in. Stay tuned. And because it's Canada, he, of course, tweeted it in both
00:43:08.060 official languages. So he's in. Stay tuned. We were like, woo. So there's no, like, grand video or
00:43:13.260 website or speech or anything like that. Just a tweet. And he's apparently, according to the media
00:43:17.980 reports, going to be formally announcing next week. Now, Peter McKay is going to become the
00:43:22.920 red Tory poster boy. He was testing the waters, you could tell, before Andrew Scheer even left by
00:43:30.680 firing a couple of pot shots at Andrew Scheer, like miss scoring on an open net. That was the one line
00:43:36.040 he gave in that panel. And you could tell that he was greasing the skids for eventually jumping in
00:43:41.460 and saying, all right, here I am. But I think he overestimates his popularity quite significantly.
00:43:48.220 I think that Peter McKay will sweep Atlantic Canada. The Conservative Party of Canada rules do
00:43:55.260 not really give much weighting overall to Atlantic Canada. Every riding has 100 points. And there are
00:44:02.540 only so many Atlantic ridings. I think there are like 20, 27 or 28 total. And that's that. I mean,
00:44:08.680 he'll probably do well in parts of Ontario. But I don't think that a red Tory is going to be the way
00:44:14.420 the party goes. And if they do, I don't think it will be Peter McKay. What I do find interesting
00:44:19.940 is that there must be some people a little bit nervous about Jean Scheer. And the reason for that
00:44:27.420 is that Stephen Harper resigned from the Conservative Fund. Now, initially, this was a McLean story from
00:44:33.440 Paul Wells. When it came out, it looked as though Stephen Harper was resigning in protest for how
00:44:38.540 the Conservative Fund handled the Andrew Scheer private school tuition top-up thing that came
00:44:45.020 out a few weeks ago. But then the story evolved a little bit. And I'm going to read a section from
00:44:49.720 this here. Two top Conservative sources have told McLean that Harper's main goal in resigning
00:44:56.180 is to free himself up to block Jean Charest's campaign for the party leadership. Charest goes on
00:45:03.940 and talks about how Harper and Charest were close, but they had a falling out back in 2007.
00:45:10.420 And now Stephen Harper is apparently wanting to devote his time to blocking this guy. Now,
00:45:15.560 Stephen Harper, who's always been, and I mentioned this earlier, pretty good at staying out of the fray.
00:45:21.420 Stephen Harper getting involved in this way in a party street fight means he must hate the idea
00:45:27.940 of a Charest leadership. Now, I hate the idea of a Charest leadership based on what I've seen so far.
00:45:34.260 I think it's like remaking Marvel movies because you don't have any new ideas. It's that we already
00:45:39.720 had this guy. And I think I might have said that on the first episode. It's great. I'm already running
00:45:43.700 out of material and it's the second episode. But the thing about Stephen Harper is that if he were to
00:45:50.500 get into the Conservative leadership race right now, and I'm not saying he is, but if he were to do that,
00:45:55.820 he would be a shoo-in because Stephen Harper is still very much the spiritual leader, if you will,
00:46:02.520 of the Conservative Party of Canada. It's his party. Everyone compares everyone to him. The critics
00:46:07.480 compare and the people that like the CPC compare. So if he were to come out and say, this is the person
00:46:13.120 we're backing, I'm pretty sure that person would win because Stephen Harper is the guy the Conservatives
00:46:21.000 hold as the benchmark. And he set a very high standard that's difficult for subsequent leaders
00:46:26.940 to meet. But if he says no, and he says, I'm fighting, people are not going to turn well to
00:46:32.560 that. I think, you know, whether Shoray had a chance in the first place, I'm not convinced he did. But
00:46:38.680 this will certainly give him no love at all from people in the party that are anything right of
00:46:46.580 Michael Chong. I mean, this is a guy whose most relevant political service was as a Liberal. And it
00:46:55.000 was as a Quebec Liberal, yes, which is a bit different from a Federal Liberal. But that's how
00:46:59.140 he's known. That's how he made his mark. And more importantly, he's done. End of scene. You don't get to
00:47:03.940 do an encore when you're not... Who does encores? Bob Dylan or Elton John. Like, you don't get to do an
00:47:10.100 encore when people aren't, you know, standing up and cheering and yelling for it. No one, no one in Canada
00:47:16.040 is standing up and cheering and yelling for Jean Charest to get back into the stage,
00:47:20.380 except for Jean Charest. And that's incredibly important. Now, Stephen Harper, people would
00:47:24.720 take an encore from him. People would take an encore from Stephen Harper. They are not wanting
00:47:29.520 one from Jean Charest. So this is the big movement this week in the conservative leadership race.
00:47:34.960 Like I said, we'll talk to all the candidates. We'll get them all on the show if they'll come.
00:47:38.600 But this is going to be a very interesting race if it becomes, especially if Stephen Harper is not
00:47:45.260 backing his former attorney general and defense minister. And I don't think he will, given... I mean,
00:47:51.380 it sounds like he might not even be backing anyone, but certainly to do the anti-endorsement,
00:47:56.000 which is what he's doing with Jean Charest. That's all we have for today. My thanks to everyone who
00:48:00.960 listened to the program, to Gadsad for coming on. And please do subscribe. You can head on over to
00:48:06.480 andrewlottonshow.com. And all the links are there to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
00:48:13.160 YouTube, Omni, Carrier Pigeons, I believe we've just added this week. So all the things you need
00:48:18.600 are right there. We'll talk to you next time, folks. Thank you. God bless and good day.
00:48:22.240 Thank you.