Juno News - August 22, 2022


The Toronto Star goes after Poilievre again

Topics
Canadian Christian nationalism
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Michael Corrin Trump Maxime Bernier Harrison Rupa
Smith tells Kenney to stay out of leadership race Will the mandates return？ (ft. Dr. Kevin Bardosh)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

178.61

Word count

1,166

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this week's episode, the guys discuss a recent article in the Toronto Star written by Michael Corrin, an Anglican priest, who takes aim at Canadian Christian nationalism. They also discuss the growing influence of the far-right in the media, and whether or not this is a good or bad thing.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.180 Now, switching gears, because as you know, those who watch this program know that we try to end the show on a bit of a lighter note,
00:00:06.160 or we try and find something to laugh about on this show.
00:00:09.000 Well, there's a Toronto Star op-ed written by Michael Corrin, who's a former Toronto, what was it, Sun News Network, the failed Sun News Television Network.
00:00:17.480 He used to work there. The guy used to be a conservative, but he's totally switched his position.
00:00:22.300 And he's now bashing conservatives as much as he can in the media.
00:00:24.920 Well, Michael Corrin wrote an article in the Toronto Star, and the headline is,
00:00:30.060 the headline is, Canadian Christian nationalism, not Christian, it's not Canadian or patriotic either.
00:00:36.520 So you read that headline, you probably think, yeah, you know, probably not a ton of support for Christian nationalism in this country.
00:00:43.040 But then, how did I know, Rupa, that in this article somewhere, they were going to tie Pierre Pauliev into Canadian Christian nationalism?
00:00:50.780 Sure enough, three paragraphs in, there he is. It seems to be the playbook for the legacy media.
00:00:54.920 Oh my goodness, yes, it read like a screed, a rant, and it had all the elements of verbal diarrhea from the left.
00:01:03.540 You know, yeah, you get, you have Trump, you know, you have all of the key keywords, key buzzwords, right?
00:01:10.840 You have Trump, you have the far right, you have nationalism, you have Pierre, Pierre Paulievre.
00:01:17.400 You have the Freedom Convoy, of course, we can't forget those people.
00:01:21.300 So, you know, it just, it just read like, you know, this guy clearly, it read like he had a lot of issues,
00:01:28.160 and he was just kind of, you know, you know, going into this rant to get, get this off his chest.
00:01:35.720 Yes. But, you know, I actually had to read this nonsense, and I blame you for this, Harrison.
00:01:44.360 Sorry.
00:01:45.140 The things I have to do, you know, for True North.
00:01:48.220 But anyway, so, you know, he's making, you know, he has a very specific interpretation of Christianity.
00:01:55.160 He doesn't like Calvinism, that's pretty obvious.
00:01:57.920 And he has this very, you know, he's this elite disdain, you know, that, you know, he says these people at the protest,
00:02:05.700 they had misspelled quotes from the Bible or even misquoted from the Bible.
00:02:10.560 So my question to him is, does that mean that their faith is not genuine?
00:02:14.660 They're not Christians, if they can't spell right? 1.00
00:02:19.840 You know, it all sounded very, very elitist.
00:02:22.880 And more to the point about, you know, his criticism of Christian nationalism.
00:02:28.500 See, you can be a Christian, and you can be a nationalist.
00:02:32.660 So you can be a Christian nationalist.
00:02:34.680 You can be a Christian, and you can be a socialist. 0.62
00:02:37.900 As a matter of fact, the foundation of the British Labour Party is Christian socialism,
00:02:43.580 and the foundation of many political parties in Europe.
00:02:47.020 So if you can be a Christian and a socialist, why can't you be a Christian and a nationalist?
00:02:52.640 You know, so basically this guy, I mean, in this, you know, long rant, you know, it comes across as though,
00:02:59.800 and it's unfortunate that this is coming from an Anglican priest, or, you know, it doesn't matter that he's Anglican,
00:03:06.720 but the fact that this is, you know...
00:03:08.380 Well, from a priest in general, I think.
00:03:10.260 Yeah, yeah. I mean, he just seems angry.
00:03:12.720 I thought priests were supposed to be kind and compassionate and understanding of the other,
00:03:18.040 but it was quite the opposite.
00:03:20.620 He just sounded very hateful in his op-ed.
00:03:24.000 And to me, to my mind, it sounded like he wanted a situation where basically a small power elite decides
00:03:30.920 what level of religiosity we should have in society, what brand of Christianity we should have,
00:03:38.280 maybe even what brand of culture.
00:03:40.800 It just, for me, you know, it was just, you know, just plain nonsense.
00:03:46.940 Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a, the way that the legacy media do this,
00:03:50.900 they find the scariest words and put them together to try and gin up a lot of, a lot of readership,
00:03:55.840 because, as we know, these guys are struggling to get viewers on their websites anyway.
00:03:59.540 So the more that they can use this sort of language and ride the American wave,
00:04:03.720 I mean, if you're plugged into American news, you'll know, for example,
00:04:06.620 that a lot of people on the American right were having a total laugh at the Atlantic this week
00:04:11.500 when the Atlantic tried to say that rosaries are now becoming a hate symbol, an extreme hate symbol.
00:04:16.980 So, of course, and there's also been some talk about Christian nationalism.
00:04:20.940 There's a congresswoman who proclaimed that she was a proud Christian nationalist.
00:04:25.080 And, of course, that just got the left up in arms.
00:04:27.260 So, but there's this very strange phenomenon happening where legacy media journalists are so,
00:04:33.400 are so focused on trying to tie the front runner in the conservative leadership race
00:04:39.440 to the very worst elements of politics in our culture.
00:04:44.780 And you don't see that from the independent media on the other side.
00:04:48.280 So you won't see that.
00:04:49.260 But it's a very bizarre thing where they're trying to make Pierre Polyev out to be this
00:04:53.400 extremely dangerous, very fringe politician.
00:04:57.480 And it's bizarre to me because they almost treat Pierre Polyev worse than they do Maxime Bernier.
00:05:02.000 And anyone who knows the inside of conservative politics knows that Pierre Polyev is not a nationalist.
00:05:08.220 He definitely doesn't appeal to the Christian nationalist or far-right voting bloc.
00:05:13.680 And his campaign is staffed with insider establishment conservatives.
00:05:16.680 So it's like they're trying to kind of bend reality.
00:05:19.500 And I think this is all desperation and panic, really.
00:05:22.560 To me, it really reeks of panic from them.
00:05:25.060 Absolutely.
00:05:25.860 It's not at all bizarre.
00:05:27.380 I mean, that's what I wanted to say.
00:05:29.220 It's actually all quite predictable, actually.
00:05:31.880 Pierre Polyev would be very much a centrist in American politics.
00:05:35.080 You know, and that's the irony of this whole thing.
00:05:39.320 They're panicking because, you know, you have these polls coming out that show that younger
00:05:44.600 people are turning conservative and possibly turning to Pierre.
00:05:49.680 So I think this is the kind of thing that really upsets them.
00:05:53.020 This is the kind of thing that could, you know, upset, you know, existing narratives, you
00:05:59.280 know, that they've tried so hard to, you know, have in place over the last few years.
00:06:05.300 And it's just it's just the elites, you know, it's just elite opinion facing a direct challenge
00:06:11.320 right now.
00:06:11.880 And and they're trying to counter it by, you know, trying to smear the conservative leadership
00:06:17.380 race and particularly Pierre Polyev, whether you like him or not, that's a different issue.
00:06:21.720 But, you know, I think to tie him in with everything, including Christian nationalism,
00:06:25.840 it's just really, really bizarre.
00:06:27.480 It just is a sign of desperation, as you say.
00:06:29.700 Amen.
00:06:30.480 Amen.