00:19:09.500They're not going to take that as as any legitimate word.
00:19:12.500They're just going to believe what they want to believe and push what they want to push.
00:19:15.500So it's disappointing that this individual has has tarnished this group.
00:19:20.500And that was clear that the organizers of this event knew that was going to happen, knew this person was going to be a target for the media.
00:19:27.500And they tried their best, but they weren't able to defeat the narrative being peddled by the legacy media on this one.
00:19:33.500Well, they just insist on the fact that this guy's leader, even though everyone says obviously he's not.
00:19:38.500I think it's a good lesson for conservatives, however, because, look, there are people out there who have horrible views, who are despicable racist.
00:19:47.500And it's important to police your own and to make sure that these people aren't able to latch on to your movement,
00:19:52.500aren't able to ride your coattails in order to promote their own, you know, despicable worldview.
00:19:58.500And it's so important to loudly and clearly condemn people like that who wave Confederate flags and who talk about race in that way,
00:20:07.500that that that that those people are just simply not welcome.
00:20:09.500And if you start talking about that stuff, you're going to get removed and and basically just excommunicated by the community.
00:20:15.500I like to see conservatives do that more strongly.
00:20:17.500And of course, when it comes to the media, they're just the worst of the worst actors, such bad faith,
00:20:22.500pretending again that somehow this individual speaks for everyone is just so such bad faith and exactly what we've come to expect from the legacy media.
00:20:31.500Harrison, well, there's one more story I want to pick up on, but this came out last Friday and we didn't cover it on Fake News Friday.
00:20:36.500But look, Andrew Coyne, who is a columnist over at the Globe and Mail, he's sort of he's an individual who goes on CBC and talks.
00:20:45.500He's sort of the quintessential Canadian Laurentian elite.
00:20:49.500Actually, he became infamous during this protest because he referred to the truckers as a group of antisocial yobs.
00:20:56.500Let's play that clip. We haven't played that clip on the show before.
00:20:58.500So this is Andrew Coyne, just so you get an idea who we're going to be talking about next year.
00:21:02.500In many cases, they're not even truckers at all.
00:21:04.500They're basically a bunch of of, you know, antisocial yobs with delusions of grandeur, a persecution complex and too much time on their hands.
00:21:14.500So a group of antisocial yobs with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.
00:21:19.500That's what he thinks about working class Canadians.
00:21:22.500Well, on the day that Justin Trudeau enacted the Emergency Act, the day that he he unleashed it and the police were storming Ottawa and militarized the city and were moving in to remove the peaceful unarmed protest.
00:21:35.500Andrew Coyne is a political affairs columnist.
00:21:37.500You know, you'd think at a moment like that, you know, watching the police move in on a group of peaceful protesters,
00:21:43.500watching the prime minister use an unprecedented power grab in the Emergencies Act, never been used before, hearing news of bank accounts being frozen, watching police brutality.
00:21:51.500You would think at that moment a political affairs columnist would choose to write a column on the actor that's leading this whole thing, the person who's causing the chaos, which was Justin Trudeau.
00:22:01.500Talking about why he enacted the Emergency Act, talking about, you know, the his position as leader of the party, the Liberal Party leading the country, how he mishandled it.
00:22:10.500You know, there's so many things you would expect a political affairs column columnist to focus in on when it comes to the person leading the action.
00:22:17.500Instead, you know, Andrew Coyne shifted his focus and decided to write a column demonizing conservatives.
00:22:23.500So he wrote a column that came out on February 18th saying, how did conservatives become so attracted to extremism?
00:22:30.500So I'm going to read a little bit here, Harrison, I'll let you react.
00:22:33.500So he writes this, conservatives who are once considered part of the mainstream.
00:22:38.500So first of all, he's saying the conservatives aren't mainstream anymore.
00:22:42.500Conservatives who were once part of the mainstream are spiraling down the same arc traced by Mr. Maxime Bernier, leader of the PPC party and others, for three weeks with the country's capital held hostage.
00:22:53.500The party's former leader, Andrew Scheer, his interim leader, Candace Bergen, and his probable future leader, Pierre Polyev, have all openly sided with the hostage takers.
00:23:02.500Their rhetoric indistinguishable from Maxime Bernier.
00:23:06.500Okay, what do you think about that, Harrison?
00:23:09.500Well, there's quite a lot to get into.
00:23:11.500I mean, the hostage takers, as Andrew Coyne calls them, who are armed with bouncy castles and hot tubs and food, really must have scared Andrew quite a lot.
00:23:21.500Now, here's the thing that I really don't understand.
00:23:25.500The conservatives, the mainstream conservatives who he calls not mainstream, like Pierre Polyev and Andrew Scheer and Candace Bergen,
00:23:34.500all they were doing was taking a very measured defense of Canadians peaceful right to protest because they have the ability to see past the politics.
00:23:42.500They know full well that once the emergencies act has been invoked on a peaceful protest like this, there's very little stopping it from being invoked on other people's right to protest.
00:23:52.500And unlike Andrew Coyne, these conservative leaders were taking a very measured response.
00:23:58.500They weren't they weren't freaking out.
00:24:00.500They weren't, you know, writing crazy posts on Twitter.
00:24:03.500All they were doing was basically saying we defend the right for truckers to have their right to protest as we do for everyone else in this country to do that.
00:24:11.500So I just think it's it's it's it's quite quite dangerous to see the shift happening where even the ability for mainstream politicians to defend the rights of working class people defend their right to protest.
00:24:25.500That is seen as extreme. That's a that's a bad direction we're heading in if that's where the so-called elite are are now siding.
00:24:32.500Well, it's just like, you know, the perspective of a progressive who doesn't think that the conservative party should exist, doesn't think the conservatives should have a political platform and thinks that the political conservative party should basically be a party of like red Tories who have sensible progressive values and maybe care a little bit more about balanced budgets or something like that.
00:24:51.500That's sort of where he's coming from. And this idea that, like, how dare these conservative politicians want to listen to the truckers like like for I was watching.
00:25:01.500I was watching the conservatives. I think that they were very measured. I don't think that they defended the truckers in as much as I would have liked to see them do.
00:25:08.500I don't think that they that they that they truly represented them. However, what they were saying was very moderate, very moderate, saying these people have a right to protest.
00:25:16.500We should hear them out. That's basically they condemned illegal blockades and they sided with law and order, you know, compare that to Maxime Bernier, who was much more, you know, colorful in his language, much more likely to
00:25:30.500you know, use hyperbole in describing what Justin Trudeau was doing. I didn't see any of that from those conservative politicians.
00:25:35.500So Andrew Coyne is just wrong on the facts on that one. Let's continue here. Oh, because he takes a shot at journalists like you and I, Harrison, here at True North.
00:25:42.500So interesting. Now, let's let's talk about what Andrew Coyne thinks about the media.
00:25:46.500So he says, right wing opinion, formerly fragmented, now presents itself of something of a continuum running all the way from Rebel News through True North to the Sun newspaper chain and, alas, the National Post.
00:25:57.500People you'd have thought would be able to spot a grift a mile away instead have been enthralled by it as if the half witted bros in the convoy really were fighting for freedom and not providing cover for their anarcho racist leaders.
00:26:09.500So Andrew Coyne falls into the same trap as David Akin and other journalists pretending that this was, again, a top down, the top down movement where the leaders of the convoy, they weren't actually working class people fighting for their freedom, Harrison.
00:26:23.500They were actually anarcho racists who were what trying to overthrow the government, I guess.
00:26:28.500And apparently the whole thing was a grift from day one.
00:26:31.500And people like you and I should have been smart enough to see through what he calls the half witted bros in the convoys, as if calling them antisocial jobs wasn't bad enough.
00:26:39.500Now he's calling them half witted bros.
00:26:41.500So, again, this is Andrew Coyne, who is a very privileged elite, who sees himself as being very, very insightful and intelligent, looking down his nose and scoffing at the intelligence of the truckers.
00:26:54.500That's that's that's that's that's great. That's very that's very good for class relations in Canada.
00:26:59.500And he's just bitter about the idea that there's this sort of new continuum of right wing conservative media.
00:27:05.500So he much prefers that the rebel be like isolated and far, far away removed from the conservative party.
00:27:12.500Whereas now he sees this continuum. I'm flattered by this, that he says, look, there's the rebel, then there's true north.
00:27:18.500You know, the rebels is does its own thing and it's not for everyone. It's its own is its own flavor here at true north.
00:27:24.500We're a little different. We have our own flavor.
00:27:26.500And then same with over to the Sun newspapers and post media. Those two are kind of blurring together.
00:27:32.500Yeah, I think I think that's fair to say that there's sort of different types of conservative news outlets.
00:27:37.500We all have our own flavor and we're all influenced again by our own worldview and our own editorial position.
00:27:43.500Post media takes money from the Trudeau government. We do not. And and so, you know, what he's really angry about, Harrison, is something that I'm really proud of.
00:27:52.500The fact that independent media like the rebel, Ezra Levant, head of the rebel, posted a couple of days ago that his channel has had over 100 million views in the last month.
00:28:01.500So many people are going to rebel. They've had a lot of journalists and reporters on the ground filming and covering things that legacy media were just unable to cover.
00:28:09.500Here at true north, we've had similarly very, very good numbers, not quite that high, but still, I'd wager that more people are reading true north than than a lot of those post media newspapers.
00:28:18.500And it's great that people are getting their news from other sources and that if you are conservative, you don't have to be stuck with the National Post, which, again, is a big corporation that takes money from the Trudeau government and isn't always necessarily going to take the side of conservatism, especially when it's more of a populist or a Western Canadian movement.
00:28:39.500And so the thing that Andrew Quinn is most upset about, to me, is a great sign for the conservative movement that we have more outlets, more voices, more opinions being expressed.
00:28:51.500Well, I think one thing to note is that at true north, we don't call Canadians, uh, half witted bros and anti-social yobs.
00:28:59.500Most Canadian, most of those Canadians, we don't call Canadians that read our work that, and we don't call Canadians that don't read our work that we actually take it.
00:29:07.500We have, we have, we have a sense of respect for Canadians exercising their rights, um, to protest.
00:29:13.500And clearly this is, this is really upsetting Andrew Coyne.
00:29:16.500Um, and no wonder, I mean, luckily I, at my role, I have the ability to see the, the data, the backend, the numbers on our site.
00:29:22.500And it's no surprise that our growth is catching the attention of these people who work for sinking ship legacy media outlets.
00:29:30.500It is a threat to their, to their dominant, uh, control over the media.
00:31:12.50090% of the working class are fully vaccinated at work, but it fits the populist conservative ambition of hiving off working class voters from the left,
00:31:19.500whom they accuse of being more concerned with racial and sexual identity politics than traditional working class issues.
00:32:13.500And just by simply saying that someone's vaccinated, therefore they're not part of this group is wrong on the surface.
00:32:18.500The broader point that he's making here that it's a phony class war.
00:32:21.500Look, the idea that a bunch of people who work in the real world, who don't have the luxury to sit on zoom all day, to work from their home, to be, you know, hived off from society because they can live in this virtual world.
00:32:33.500The people who actually have to get up every morning, get dressed, go out and, you know, face the world, COVID or not, regardless of the weather.
00:32:41.500These are the people who have had enough.
00:32:43.500And very, very much is a class distinction.
00:32:45.500And it is so obvious that it's not just conservative commentators who are making this point.
00:32:49.500I write a piece about it in the New York Times yesterday.
00:33:33.500He's in a position of power, but he's losing that power.
00:33:36.500And he's angry that that power is slipping away.
00:33:39.500Yeah, the guy who says that this isn't a class war is the same guy calling working class Canadians halfwits and antisocial jobs.
00:33:48.500I mean, how much how much more how much clearer can it get the the person from the CBC and Globe and Mail basically attacking all of these people and looking down on them is saying, oh, this is not a class war.
00:34:03.500And and Andrew wouldn't know that because he hadn't spent any time talking with any of these people.
00:34:07.500I wonder if he's even talked to a trucker in maybe in his whole life, because this kind of opinion is from the same kind of person that wouldn't be wouldn't even know a trucker if if they walked if they walked past him on the street.
00:34:21.500Oh, that's a good point. And to the earlier point that somehow this is a continuum from Rebel to True North to Sun Papers all the way to National Post.
00:34:30.500One of the people one of the journalists who has been the strongest proponent and advocate for the working class and the truckers has been Rex Murphy, who writes for the National Post.
00:34:39.500He's probably the most prominent writer for the National Post.
00:34:42.500And it's because he grew up in a working class environment and he still goes out of his way to try to interact with the working class and people like truckers.
00:34:50.500So there's there's quite a distinction that you can see between a person who loves her country and cares about getting to know them and wants to hear from different people from different classes.
00:34:58.500Rex Murphy and someone who's very isolated, very insular, very snobby and sort of telling everybody else what to think.
00:35:05.500And that is Andrew Coyne. Well, it's no surprise, Harrison, that this came out. Polls show that trust in the media and the government are at an all time low.
00:35:13.500So in 2022 so far, only 35 percent of Canadians say they trusted traditional media. It's down from 38 percent last year.
00:35:20.500My guess is that it has plummeted even more over the past weeks, seeing the way that the media has turned into essentially propagandists for the Trudeau government, repeating their lies that this was an occupation,
00:35:31.500that these protesters are extremists and Nazis and racist. And to so many people, it's just clear as day what the media is doing and how out of touch and untrustworthy they are.
00:35:42.500Well, Harrison, thank you so much for joining Fake News Friday. It's always fun to have you on the show. Thank you.
00:35:47.500Yeah, it's great to be on, Candace. Thank you.
00:35:50.500All right. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.