Juno News - WHO says there's no more Covid emergency

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.180 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by TrueNorth.

00:00:13.000 Hello everyone and welcome to you all.

00:00:15.980 Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here Friday, May 5th.

00:00:19.160 It is Cinco de Mayo.

00:00:20.880 And I don't actually know what Cinco de Mayo is.

00:00:24.200 I'm told there may be tacos.

00:00:26.480 We have a mariachi band ready to play us out into the credits.

00:00:29.720 I don't want to get too excited about Cinco de Mayo because then I'll end up facing accusations that I'm culturally appropriating like Justin Trudeau does every time he goes to a party.

00:00:40.260 But we will get to that when we get there.

00:00:42.780 Speaking of Justin Trudeau and parties, this was a little bit of a clip from the Liberal Convention, which right now is underway in Ottawa.

00:00:53.640 Because the city of Ottawa said, what's the one thing we could do to make the city more boring than it is normally?

00:00:58.900 And they decided, let's host the Liberal Party of Canada convention.

00:01:03.340 But apparently, after Justin Trudeau spoke yesterday, as is the nature of any convention,

00:01:08.960 people go up to the hospitality suites, they start having a good time, they eat, they drink, they be merry and all that.

00:01:15.360 And apparently, according to this woman, who is a black and indigenous Canadian woman, a liberal delegate,

00:01:23.320 things did not go all convivially and congenially, as she might have expected anyway.

00:01:28.540 take a look. My name is Dawn Upshaw. I'm from Nova Scotia. I'm African Canadian and the black

00:01:36.860 loyalists. I'm also Miss Disney Cree from Bay James. I attended a reception last night. We're

00:01:45.240 here from different time zones. People are tired. People are hungry. And there was liquor served at

00:01:50.280 the event. So people were getting drunk and tired rather quickly. And that's when the racism come

00:01:56.500 out so i was here last night listening and reacting to racism from liberals so when you

00:02:05.300 respond to racism do not respond with food fun and fashion shows as you've done in the past

00:02:13.220 do something and let us do something and let us be the people who guide you thank you thank you

00:02:21.300 very much. I'm very, very sorry that that happened. And I think we all want to make sure that we

00:02:27.080 condemn any type of racism of any type. And we need to understand that actions matter more than

00:02:32.180 words. That is Anthony Housefather and Marcy Ian and Ahmed Hassen on the stage there. And the fourth

00:02:44.340 one, I forgot, Mary Ng. And this woman, and again, I have no idea if she was actually a victim of

00:02:49.260 racism. And who knows? Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. But this woman is a black loyalist,

00:02:55.440 an indigenous Canadian. She's there. She says people get tired, but then they start drinking. 0.97

00:02:59.880 And when they get drunk and tired, all the liberals get racist. Well, maybe not all of them,

00:03:04.580 but at least some of them. Now, this, again, I don't want to downplay if she was a victim of

00:03:11.580 genuine racism or not. I certainly believe she felt aggrieved by it. But this is the problem,

00:03:16.660 is that you can't out-woke the woke.

00:03:18.920 So Justin Trudeau yesterday was making a whole big deal about how,

00:03:22.860 and we'll play the clip a little later in Fake News Friday,

00:03:25.440 but a whole big deal about how Pierre Polyev needs to get woker.

00:03:29.020 He says, you know, Pierre Polyev accuses the liberals of being woke,

00:03:31.960 but he needs to wake up.

00:03:33.160 And you have the liberals going all woke all the time,

00:03:35.940 saying we need to be the wokey, wokest, woke, woke, wokers.

00:03:39.680 And Wokistan is apparently no longer as woke as Justin Trudeau wants it to be.

00:03:44.580 So you get a woman who is black and indigenous who wants to go up and feel like she can party it up in a safe space and finds that all the other liberals there, in her view, are microaggressing her all day long and all the live long nights.

00:03:57.920 So whether she was actually a victim of it, I don't know.

00:04:02.680 In fact, like for all we know, that might have actually just been Justin Trudeau asking a question at the mic.

00:04:07.060 In fact, I don't think his flight has left for King Charles's coronation this weekend.

00:04:11.420 So you never know what goes down at the Liberal Convention.

00:04:14.760 The Liberals don't accredit us to their convention,

00:04:17.900 so I would like it noted that we had nothing to do with these allegations

00:04:21.920 of microaggressing misconduct that were afoot,

00:04:25.000 and the Liberals have to be held to account.

00:04:27.260 Poor Anthony, how's father there on the stage, is like,

00:04:29.580 I thought we were just talking about our tax plan.

00:04:32.320 But instead, the Liberals will perhaps double down on the drink service tonight.

00:04:37.640 But the Liberal Convention is underway,

00:04:40.380 And there was one proposal that went forward that I think is a little bit noteworthy.

00:04:47.180 Now, I want to make a couple of points here.

00:04:49.380 The first is that liberal conventions like conservative conventions, like NDP conventions,

00:04:54.840 they're kind of theatrical in a way.

00:04:57.880 So people will talk about all of this stuff and they'll even put policies forward.

00:05:02.300 But there's nothing legally binding about party policy on government.

00:05:06.700 So liberal members can vote for whatever they want.

00:05:08.640 It doesn't mean that Justin Trudeau is doing it.

00:05:11.180 Sometimes, in fact, often parties will try to manipulate

00:05:13.860 which policies can come before them for votes and so on.

00:05:18.320 But with that preface notwithstanding,

00:05:20.840 there was one that jumps out here that I think we need to take a look at.

00:05:24.440 Now, I saw this from Michael Geist,

00:05:26.460 who is one of the preeminent internet regulation lawyers in Canada,

00:05:31.180 a professor at the University of Ottawa.

00:05:33.880 And he plucked out this draft resolution,

00:05:36.620 a policy proposal that Liberal members will be voting on if they haven't already.

00:05:41.880 I'm going to read the preamble, because the preamble is sometimes just as fun as the resolution.

00:05:48.000 He writes, yada, yada, yada.

00:05:49.600 Mainstream media no longer employs as many reporters with extensive knowledge of particular subject areas.

00:05:54.960 This fills content with opinion programming rather than news.

00:05:58.980 And whereas this result has devalued mainstream media as a source of news and information,

00:06:04.580 Be it resolved that the Liberal Party of Canada request the government provide additional public funds to support ad-free news and information reporting by Canadian media through an arm's-length non-partisan mechanism.

00:06:19.540 So they want more money to the media bailout.

00:06:23.060 And then also request the government explore options to hold online information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms.

00:06:34.580 and to limit the publication only to material whose sources can be traced, unquote.

00:06:41.940 So here's what they want.

00:06:44.540 They want two things.

00:06:45.660 They want those things, those things.

00:06:47.660 I got so excited I banged my microphone.

00:06:49.480 I apologize if, and I didn't even buy it a drink first.

00:06:52.680 It's a Friday show.

00:06:53.620 We let loose a little bit.

00:06:55.160 But be it resolved that the government provide additional public funds

00:06:59.260 to support ad-free news and information programs.

00:07:02.520 So they want more money, and then also they want online info services, so I think they mean news platforms, to be held accountable for the veracity of material published.

00:07:14.620 So they want state-mandated fact-checking.

00:07:18.420 So if you say something that Justin Trudeau gets up to the podium and says is false, that should be removed from the platform, the government thinks.

00:07:26.640 Phil, my colleague, is telling me that I have abandoned our ability to put the clean tag on the podcast

00:07:32.540 after my little impromptu joke about the microphone.

00:07:35.320 I didn't use a wordy-dird, a dirty word, a dirty-dirty-dird?

00:07:39.520 Anyway, I didn't use one of those. I think we can keep the clean tag.

00:07:42.240 The Liberals also want, according to this motion,

00:07:46.000 to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.

00:07:50.140 So what this would mean in practice, it's tough to say,

00:07:55.220 But it sounds like they're trying to ban internet anonymity.

00:07:58.880 Now, I may not like anonymity in online posting,

00:08:01.120 but I think you have a right to be on the internet anonymously if you'd like.

00:08:05.520 And also, I don't know how you trace foreign content,

00:08:08.100 which is not all just evil Russian bots or whatever.

00:08:11.500 Sometimes foreign content can be some random guy in India

00:08:14.680 that wants to comment on your post or tweet something.

00:08:17.740 So liberal members, regardless of whether the party itself

00:08:21.480 or the government picks this up,

00:08:22.740 liberal members are trying to expand even further the federal government's control of the internet

00:08:29.880 and control of news. And they want it only basically to be mainstream media or nothing

00:08:35.340 else. They want government funded media or nothing else. Anyone that falls outside of

00:08:39.700 those parameters, they have no interest in. And the reason I'm spending so much time talking

00:08:45.580 about the internet regulatory environment here is because we've seen in the last few years

00:08:49.880 how misinformation, fact-checking, how all of this stuff has been weaponized against debate

00:08:55.820 and against dissent. Today, big news that came out of Geneva. The World Health Organization

00:09:02.340 has said that there is no more COVID health emergency. Now, if you were going around

00:09:09.900 licking doorknobs this morning and not wearing a mask and eating your bat soup, you would have 1.00

00:09:15.160 been like, well, hang on. I didn't think there was a COVID emergency anyway. But the World Health 1.00

00:09:19.260 organization has claimed for three years and three months now, almost three years and four

00:09:24.600 months, that this emergency is still in effect. Now today, Dr. Tedros, the fake doctor who runs

00:09:32.680 the world health regime, comes out and says, yes, COVID is no longer an emergency. So yay.

00:09:39.020 But what's interesting here is that all good things had to come to an end. And for people

00:09:44.200 who are in the control business, COVID has been and continues to be a very good thing. This has

00:09:50.820 been a mechanism by which governments have expanded control, by which big tech has confined

00:09:56.640 debate, and by which all of us have been turned against each other. And when I have talked about

00:10:03.720 the fallout from COVID, which we still don't entirely know, all of the consequences that

00:10:09.060 we're seeing are not, you know, these perennial long COVID complaints, but the consequences of

00:10:13.800 the COVID era are almost overwhelmingly, sorry, are overwhelmingly and are almost always

00:10:19.240 consequences of government policy. I mean, I had the opportunity to witness a panel discussion not

00:10:25.840 long ago that was talking about just the education consequences alone and how children have been

00:10:32.080 stunted and basically three years they've lost, at least two, of education. You talk to university

00:10:38.460 professors who have first-year courses and they say that they're looking at essays from students

00:10:43.340 who have gone through high school without ever learning how to write, and they go to university

00:10:49.100 and get in, and they're trying to get their degrees in whatever, the next generation of

00:10:53.600 doctors, of lawyers, of gender theorists, all very important roles, and they are unable to

00:11:00.620 just fundamentally string together a sentence because their education has been denied.

00:11:07.060 And I mean, some of these problems existed before COVID in the education system, but they were

00:11:11.260 certainly exacerbated by COVID. And what's more concerning about this fallout is how much denial

00:11:20.680 there is that all of these things that we had to live with actually happened. You've got people

00:11:25.840 like Anthony Fauci, who you can find, you know, a dozen clips of him saying how important a lockdown

00:11:30.820 was. And now he's saying, literally, he used the words in an interview the other day,

00:11:34.800 I never recommended a lockdown. And I saw this juxtaposed with like five clips of him saying,

00:11:40.740 I advise the president to lock down. I've advised the president to lock down. We need to shut things

00:11:45.100 down. And the great walk backening, as my friend Laura Rosen-Cohen calls it, is in full force.

00:11:51.300 People that have been in many ways at the driver's seat of the most draconian measures we've seen

00:11:58.280 ever in the last hundred years, certainly, that weren't in wartime, that are now saying,

00:12:05.260 well, I never really did that. And they just sort of move on. And it's this push for

00:12:09.180 COVID amnesty that we saw a call for in the Atlantic a few months ago that a lot of people

00:12:14.540 may be willing to go along with because they just want to move on from the last three years.

00:12:18.720 But other people are saying, hang on, you don't get to just shirk accountability and pretend that

00:12:23.900 the last three years never happened. You don't get to pretend that you never divided family

00:12:28.220 members against each other, that you never locked the elderly in their homes, that you never locked

00:12:32.480 children out of their schools. And it's one thing for the WHO to say, yay, we've weathered the

00:12:37.900 storm, the emergency is over, it's quite another for us to actually look at the harms that

00:12:43.380 governments have caused, governments largely driven by WHO policy in that same time span

00:12:50.000 under the auspices of and in the name of this so-called COVID emergency, which if it existed,

00:12:55.440 it certainly didn't exist for three years and four months. I spoke in the previous show with

00:13:01.460 my colleague Rachel Emanuel about the Alberta election, which is currently underway right now.

00:13:06.960 We're getting all the press releases from all the candidates.

00:13:09.880 They're announcing their platforms.

00:13:11.600 Yesterday, Rachel Notley, the former premier seeking to return to the seat,

00:13:16.900 had a press conference in which she said she wanted to send a message to conservatives

00:13:21.700 that were thinking of voting NDP for the first time.

00:13:25.540 And I was like, well, this actually sounds quite interesting.

00:13:27.400 So I went on Zoom because you could connect via Zoom.

00:13:30.600 And I joined the press conference.

00:13:31.760 And you have to click the raise hand button if you want to ask a question.

00:13:35.720 And they never called on me, the only one on that press conference that has, I'd say, probably a larger share of conservatives in the audience that are the people Ms. Notley ostensibly wants to speak to.

00:13:48.480 But they called on one reporter twice.

00:13:50.720 So that was how much they really, really, really didn't want me to ask her a question.

00:13:55.060 But when we talk about this election, I think we need to also take a look back into four years ago, the election that elected Jason Kenney as premier of the UCP government, the first ever UCP government, and one particular story that may not be politically relevant to a lot of people now, but is culturally relevant and is incredibly relevant to the individual at the center of that story.

00:14:19.740 And that is Kaylin Ford, who I have interviewed in the past, and we'll talk a little bit about that in this show.

00:14:26.120 She was a star candidate, called a unicorn by some people in the 2019 election.

00:14:32.680 She was running for the UCP in a seat that wasn't a traditionally conservative seat, but they thought was within reach, incredibly well-educated, incredibly eloquent, and was the victim of a horrific smear campaign by someone who she once called a friend.

00:14:46.500 And that smear campaign was very much enabled by mainstream media outlets and by some alternative media outlets.

00:14:54.680 And Kaylin Ford has released a new documentary about this ordeal and also about the broader themes it touches on.

00:15:02.260 It's called When the Mob Came.

00:15:04.900 And Kaylin joins me now.

00:15:06.740 Kaylin, it's good to talk to you again.

00:15:08.380 Thanks for coming on today, firstly.

00:15:10.500 Thanks, Andrew.

00:15:11.360 and to clarify the documentary is as we speak being rendered and will be released later tonight

00:15:16.960 so okay but later this evening it should be uh should be public and um yeah wonderful i appreciate

00:15:24.880 that uh clarification and i had the the good fortune of being able to see an advanced copy of

00:15:29.680 it which was was quite compelling and and even having followed your story and and having known

00:15:35.440 you in in some capacity i i learned things from it and was forced to reflect on on certain things

00:15:41.120 then I don't want to rehash a lot of the details that the people can can find for themselves but

00:15:46.400 I'll ask firstly why you wanted to do this because for for someone that's gone through what you went

00:15:51.440 through it wouldn't surprise me if you wanted to just kind of shut the door and lock it on that

00:15:56.080 chapter of your life and and move on and I know you've done that largely you've started a fantastic

00:16:01.040 school in Calgary or you're trying to open one in Edmonton as well why go back to this time in your

00:16:06.800 life? Well, so in answer to that question, look, we talk about people being cancelled, and there's

00:16:12.840 obviously a spectrum, right? Some people might be deplatformed on one or several occasions.

00:16:17.740 In my case, my life was annihilated. I was on the front page of the Toronto Star four times,

00:16:24.720 they said I came from a trash heap, and that I would have been caught promoting white supremacy. 0.96

00:16:29.520 Three different CBC headlines said that I basically was a white supremacist. It was on 0.98

00:16:34.060 CBC's The National with Wendy Mesley, and it didn't stop for a month. So it was almost daily

00:16:40.780 coverage, making these claims about me. Any attempt that I made to try to tell my own side

00:16:46.780 of the story ended up suppressed. We can get into that. Employers wouldn't engage with me. I was

00:16:52.040 told I couldn't sit on charitable boards. Friends left me. They faced ostracism from their social

00:16:57.600 circles if they continued engaging with me. This was complete character assassination. I couldn't

00:17:03.300 livelihood. It took me almost four years before I was able to get new employment. And that was

00:17:10.160 through an organization that I founded. So I was persona non grata. I couldn't just move on. And

00:17:16.840 this is one of the misconceptions that I hope this documentary will maybe prompt people to reflect on

00:17:21.080 is when you are subject to this sort of like shame storm, the media will move on, the mob will move

00:17:28.800 on, that person's life has been completely torn through. And they can't just always pick up the

00:17:37.440 pieces and sort of reassemble it. So on the one hand, this was, I had no platform to tell the

00:17:42.920 story, and I had no employment. But I did have a background in documentary filmmaking, which is

00:17:48.140 very fortuitous. One of the interesting dynamics here is that you're obviously interviewing some

00:17:54.580 of the people in this documentary you're you're releasing it but you're you're featured in it and

00:17:58.600 it's about you and and there are other people that are being interviewed about you and I'm

00:18:03.020 wondering why just from a production standpoint you decided to approach it in in such a personal

00:18:08.380 way because oftentimes and I know this is someone who's written about cancel culture there can be a

00:18:13.000 temptation to deal with it in the abstract because it's a bit safer you can talk about other people

00:18:18.200 being cancelled and hope that that may you know in in a roundabout way kind of get people to sort

00:18:23.280 of take your side on it without having to really expose yourself again yeah so um making a

00:18:29.440 documentary about my own life is it is horrifying um you know it is i i was sharing with you it

00:18:36.120 feels to me like just the height of narcissistic self-indulgence and it's very obvious and i'm

00:18:40.760 very upfront about the fact that this is a persuasive piece that my goal is actually to

00:18:44.200 change people's minds about me and that's that's extremely personal i'm kind of like laying my

00:18:49.620 heart bare for the world. And I may or may not find that that's a cathartic event. You know,

00:18:57.940 but yeah, it is challenging. You'll notice in the film, I often slip into speaking in the third

00:19:01.540 person. And I think that's just a, that's a coping mechanism that I acquired to try to

00:19:05.520 intellectualize the experience because I found it, it's very difficult to talk about me in this

00:19:10.520 context. But yeah, so it's, it's really challenging. I had to, the way I tried to overcome that was by

00:19:16.060 dressing it up intellectually and sort of couching it in a philosophical framework. So the entire

00:19:20.820 documentary is actually kind of framed by Plato's Gorgias dialogue. And the central thesis, if I

00:19:27.600 might summarize, that comes from that dialogue is that we should take greater care to avoid doing

00:19:34.760 wrong than we should to avoid suffering wrong. And that above all else, we should care about

00:19:40.820 actually being good and rather than making people believe that we're good and this relates to

00:19:47.080 cancel culture in the sense that I think cancel culture it's obviously not culture it's an

00:19:51.960 anti-culture but it's a culture of intellectual and moral inversion where false virtues or the

00:19:57.940 performance of false virtues is celebrated at the expense of the real thing and so this is a

00:20:04.460 documentary about well is it is it better to strive for the real thing or to sort of perform

00:20:10.020 the counterfeit? And is it better to suffer injury or to do it from the vantage point of

00:20:16.480 the soul? So this is how I've tried to overcome the difficulty of turning the lens on myself in

00:20:22.420 my own life. One of the challenges that I believe you would presumably admit you faced is that you

00:20:29.780 are, as people can tell, I think from your answer there and from any of your other work, an incredibly

00:20:34.480 intellectual person. You're a very cerebral person. You're well-read. You have references

00:20:39.100 dating back thousands of years for things. And intellectual exercises are not really all that

00:20:44.640 fitting in modern politics, which is about soundbites and brevities. There's one, you know,

00:20:49.820 little illumination of this in the documentary when your former campaign manager is talking

00:20:53.680 about canvassing, which is when you go knocking on doors and your role in the party's view of

00:20:59.080 things is to knock on a door to find out if they're voting for you or not, and move on to

00:21:03.840 the next door. You're not trying to persuade them, you're trying to identify them. Whereas your view

00:21:07.540 was the one that would make campaign managers have an aneurysm,

00:21:11.100 which is let's sit and have a conversation for 20 minutes or 30 minutes.

00:21:14.360 And how difficult is that for you coming from an academic background

00:21:18.640 and an intellectual background where you believe

00:21:20.700 that everything can be approached with reason

00:21:22.880 and that every kind of conflict can be the start of a conversation

00:21:26.840 when I think the crux of the problem here

00:21:29.000 is that you have people that aren't interested in conversations,

00:21:31.400 that aren't interested in challenging their perceptions,

00:21:33.920 however wrong they are.

00:21:35.860 Yeah, and you see me struggle with that in the film, I think, because my general assumption is

00:21:40.100 that people are reasonable and they can be reasoned with. On the campaign trail, I actually

00:21:43.740 found that that assumption was usually borne out. Most, you know, generally people, when you meet

00:21:49.060 them face to face, they are quite reasonable, but... Yeah, that's the Twitter is not real life

00:21:52.940 thesis, which I generally agree with. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I was really struggling

00:21:57.760 with this. And I think part of the explanation is people who deploy the tools of cancel culture

00:22:03.180 I just take for granted that most people assume that truth is good and that in the case of a

00:22:12.640 dispute or a sort of moral contestation, you can engage in dialectical conversation where

00:22:18.260 both parties are aiming toward truth. And this is the means by which disagreements can be adjudicated.

00:22:24.980 But if you're dealing with people who don't believe truth is good,

00:22:28.460 then it has no moral weight. You can't appeal to it. It doesn't make any sense to try to say,

00:22:35.400 you know, what you're saying is untrue. They don't care. The point is to suppress truth in

00:22:40.400 the hopes that by doing so, you will create some space for a new reality, a supposedly better

00:22:45.500 reality to flourish. And so that's why cancel culture sort of undermines the fundamental logic

00:22:51.720 of civilization. It destroys even the most sort of fundamental means by which we might adjudicate

00:22:57.140 disagreements. But yeah, I mean, you see me like struggling with that at a very personal level in

00:23:01.060 the film. Well, and you mentioned something which I think was incredibly astute, which I hadn't

00:23:06.040 really thought of, which is that, and I'm going to butcher your line, so I won't pretend I'm

00:23:09.680 quoting it accurately, but the premise of it was that cancel culture only works if there's an

00:23:15.420 institutional application of it. And that, you know, everyone just shouting in the void about

00:23:19.140 how you are X or Y is not really cancel culture. It's when some other organ, whether it's a

00:23:24.840 political party or an employer or a media outlet decides we're going to apply this to reality. I

00:23:30.640 was wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit. Yeah, well, so, you know, there's kind of

00:23:33.620 two dimensions of cancel culture. There's the public shaming and the deplatforming. And cancel

00:23:37.980 culture is sort of when these two things come together. So the public shaming, so having people

00:23:42.380 sort of say terrible things about you on a very large scale, that is a devastating experience.

00:23:48.740 And anyone who has gone through it will know, even when it's just online, it affects you very

00:23:54.520 deeply, you know, triggers a sort of fight or flight response,

00:23:56.980 it makes you question your perception of reality and your

00:24:00.940 beliefs about yourself. So it's devastating. But what the sort

00:24:07.360 of mob aims to do is not just to humiliate you or harass you, it

00:24:12.720 is to appeal to authorities to strip you of your platform, your

00:24:17.020 livelihood, your ability to speak your ability to defend

00:24:19.560 yourself. So they're asking institutions, they're asking

00:24:23.440 people in positions of power, whether it's your employer or

00:24:26.140 media outlet or venue or whatever, in my case, a

00:24:28.480 political party and others, they're asking them to sort of

00:24:32.080 deperson you. And so the actual cancellation is only affected

00:24:35.800 through an act of institutional capitulation, it is you have to

00:24:39.500 have someone willing to submit to the demands of the mob for

00:24:44.480 this to actually be for it to work.

00:24:47.680 One of the things that I found quite interesting is that I

00:24:51.640 don't know if it was intentional on your part but there seems to be a bit of conflict even in the

00:24:55.700 way you discuss it about whether you did anything wrong and i think generally speaking you you are

00:25:00.760 of the mind or should be of the mind that you didn't but it's very easy when discussing it

00:25:04.720 to fall into that trap of wanting to make amends still yeah so look when um from my vantage point

00:25:12.560 it looked to me like the entire world was saying that i was a terrible person that i was morally

00:25:19.000 abhorrent you know people if you if you read the tweets carefully that appear on the screen you'll

00:25:23.320 see people saying you know your family should be so ashamed you deserve to be exiled it's great

00:25:27.880 you'll never work again the person who outed you is full of courage we should have more people like

00:25:33.080 him in politics things like this um and moreover like i said employers wouldn't wouldn't touch me

00:25:40.120 wouldn't respond to me like media wouldn't engage with me so you start to really doubt your

00:25:45.960 perception of reality and what happens when the outside world has seems to have one view and you

00:25:52.680 hold an internal perception that's different this creates a deep dissonance that you're naturally

00:25:58.840 going to try to want to resolve somehow and there's sort of three main ways that you can

00:26:03.400 try to resolve that you can either try to persuade the world to see things as you do

00:26:08.200 or you can adopt the world's view of you or you can go a kind of stoical approach where you

00:26:13.960 separate the internal from the external and you no longer rely on any kind of external validation

00:26:19.000 to tell you what's true just sort of guided by you know sort of faith in things unseen um and uh

00:26:25.320 and i kind of oscillate between all three of those and so you'll you know you'll see me really

00:26:30.040 grappling with well why are thousands of people demanding apologies from me why is a premier two

00:26:35.960 premiers and a mayor of a city and all of these news you know sort of media figures why are they

00:26:40.760 they all asking me to apologize for what and and I really grappled with this question and I would

00:26:47.240 ask people in earnest you know what what have I done wrong because I don't understand and I never

00:26:53.260 got an answer when you talk about the employer aspect of this I mean the one thing that that

00:27:00.200 really is the most jarring about cancel culture defenders of it will often say well it's not

00:27:05.660 about cancel culture it's consequence culture they say that you know it's the they almost

00:27:09.800 appeal actually to conservative language where they say well no it's you know it's about justice

00:27:14.020 it's about consequences it's about the idea of the marketplace of ideas and and the problem with that

00:27:20.780 is that no one who fuels this is interested in proportionality they they don't say you know you

00:27:26.340 sped so you should get a speeding ticket and pay it and move on with your life it's like everything's

00:27:30.760 the death penalty basically to use uh an extreme well i'm actually to be honest it's it's not even

00:27:35.680 all that extreme in some cases with how they view. And that's the problem here. So it's that even if

00:27:41.420 people believed you were unfit to be a candidate, which I don't feel was the case, that's not what

00:27:46.020 they wanted. They wanted you stripped of your party membership. They wanted you prevented from

00:27:49.680 working again. There would be people that would have said, I'm sure her family should disown her 1.00

00:27:54.120 and her friends should disown her. And if you were to get a job as a barista at Starbucks, that would 0.75

00:27:58.420 be offensive to them. And I was wondering if you could, not if you could, but if you have come up

00:28:04.180 with an explanation for why. Why is that the case? Why is it so extreme in a sense that I don't think

00:28:10.620 anyone could, if you were to talk to them one-on-one, explain how saying this thing, even if it was what

00:28:16.920 they claimed, warrants this outcome? So you've touched on one big aspect of what's wrong with

00:28:23.440 cancel culture, which is that it's not actually an administration of justice. It's not justice

00:28:28.540 because there's nothing resembling due process. There's no rules of evidence. There's no right to

00:28:33.360 a defense or presumption of innocence or all of these things that we would associate with or to

00:28:38.480 face your accuser right my i had you know an anonymous accuser and uh and i was um i was

00:28:44.420 further publicly shamed for identifying him i now have a restraining order against him

00:28:48.780 my case led to the recognition of a new tort of civil harassment in alberta

00:28:53.580 that was the person accusing me who was trumpeted as a hero in the media

00:28:58.360 So that's the deeper problem, is that cancel culture reflects a complete failure of clear moral reasoning. If you start to think that sort of quasi-criminal harassment is okay and defensible and good, if their target is someone who has an opinion you disagree with, then you are morally, like, you're, it's not that you're morally, you're morally and intellectually bankrupt if you think that.

00:29:24.540 So it's that the crimes that they identify don't make any sense. You never see people being cancelled for actual criminal acts. You see people being cancelled for often extremely ambiguous violations of emergent social norms, or social norms that a small minority wants to see sort of in ascendancy.

00:29:45.680 So I think that's the deeper problem, is that having an opinion or observing a fact or asking

00:29:54.800 a question in good faith is just not really a transgression that merits this. But on the other

00:30:02.720 side, the people who engage in cancel culture, I talked earlier about how it celebrates false

00:30:10.160 virtues at the expense of the real ones what i mean is that cancel culture aims to snuff out

00:30:16.960 loyalty charity forgiveness a commitment to truth a slowness to judge um you know friendship

00:30:25.520 solidarity all of these kinds of virtues are are suffocated in the climate created by cancel culture

00:30:32.000 and the fake sort of performative virtues are outrage you know a quickness to judge to believe

00:30:38.080 the worst of other people to listen to slander to make sure that that person is injured permanently

00:30:44.320 so that's i think the real problem with this phenomenon and it and it leads to a complete

00:30:49.680 breakdown you were talking earlier on your show about the long effects of covid it destroys social

00:30:54.160 trust and solidarity and sort of social comedy and cancel culture has the same effect there is

00:31:00.480 obviously this cultural and social dimension to your story and there's also a media story and i

00:31:06.320 I know there's a lawsuit underway that you've waged that touches on this.

00:31:10.680 But to further the discussion of just the lack of proportionality, it wasn't enough that, you know, these allegations had you dethroned from your spot as a candidate in perspective MLA.

00:31:21.620 But the deplatforming continued long after that.

00:31:24.940 Anytime you popped up to tell your story, like on Danielle Smith's show with me, even that was seen as offensive to the mob for you to have the right, even after you've already paid the price, to discuss it.

00:31:36.900 Yeah. So this is a plot point in the documentary, but the first public interview I did was on now Premier Daniel Smith's show. And the sort of NDP acolytes Progress Alberta, which was basically a sort of third party advertiser or PAC for the NDP, they put out a petition saying she should be driven off the air.

00:31:59.160 she needs to apologize, you know, they're going to go after their advertisers. Former Calgary

00:32:04.140 Mayor Nahid Nenshi was apparently was agreeing with the premise of this petition, telling

00:32:08.900 reporters that they should boycott her show. And then the person who was behind the accusations

00:32:14.200 against me also threatened legal action against them, Karim Devraj. And eventually they capitulated,

00:32:19.540 Khorus took down the interview from all their platforms, and something very similar happened

00:32:23.060 to you yep that's your cue to elaborate well it's i i don't to be honest i i don't know what more i

00:32:32.000 i can say on that i i mean it was it was very difficult for me because when you and i did that

00:32:37.560 interview i think it was almost an hour in in length uh it was very difficult to do for me as

00:32:43.260 well because i had gone through my own uh experience not as national as yours was in in 2018

00:32:48.700 And there was a bit of a catharsis in that conversation.

00:32:51.600 And then to have that sort of interview and not just, you know, sort of threatened with

00:32:56.920 legal action, but then even when you re-uploaded it on your own platform, that sort of continued

00:33:02.020 of, you know, I was sort of asked, why are you letting her do it?

00:33:05.140 I was like, I had nothing to do with it.

00:33:06.420 But it's, it struck me as just so profound.

00:33:12.440 It goes back to what you said about the lack of justice in this, that, you know, even someone

00:33:16.680 being able to defend themselves or or even not even defend because the damage had been done but

00:33:21.720 to put on record their side of the story was something that was continually taken away and

00:33:29.780 it's no it it i don't have words for it it's terrible yes it is and i guess my question to

00:33:39.120 you would be how much of that when you had people disowning you when you had media that kind of

00:33:45.100 was doing what we just described how much of that was from people that in your view knew it was all

00:33:52.160 nonsense and went along with it versus people that actually believed maybe there was a kernel of truth

00:33:57.040 to it um yeah the the difference between the expression the the public versus the private

00:34:03.480 opinions that people expressed was very stark um cancel culture is uh it's a preference falsification

00:34:09.980 machine. Because when you see all these people on Twitter sort of saying terrible things about you,

00:34:16.020 attack anyone who dares to defend you, or even sort of withhold judgment about you,

00:34:22.640 it creates a climate of terror that leads people to believe, well, it's not safe to support this

00:34:27.560 person. Now, that's a false appearance, because Twitter isn't representative of real life,

00:34:31.960 media is not representative of real life. In real life, people were, for the most part,

00:34:37.580 exceedingly generous kind I still get people to this day who will come up to me and say sorry

00:34:43.820 that for what happened to me um and it was the complete opposite in the sort of online and and

00:34:49.860 public realm people felt that they could not do this so uh you know the one one of the journalists

00:34:54.960 who tried writing a kind of investigative feature story about what what had actually happened here

00:34:59.940 he found it was very very challenging to get people willing to go on the record um that they

00:35:05.320 would privately say, you know, what an injustice, this is so

00:35:08.320 terrible. And they couldn't say so publicly. So, you know, you

00:35:13.360 sort of, you know, and speaking of like, where's the kind of the

00:35:17.020 moral that you know, the damage, I expect the NDP to behave the

00:35:22.500 way they behave, right? In a way, and there's an I have legal

00:35:28.700 recourse there. So I've, I've launched a $7 million defamation

00:35:31.840 suit against the CBC, the Toronto Star, the NDP, Progress

00:35:34.460 Alberta, all the others. Where there's no recourse and where there's no comprehension

00:35:39.740 is the betrayal of friends. And I don't know if you've had analogous experiences, but betrayal

00:35:45.720 is one of the strangest forms of suffering. It's one that can really turn into an internal

00:35:51.300 affliction because it remains incomprehensible. You can never ask people, why did you abandon me

00:35:57.620 in my hour of need, right? So that's actually the one that kind of cuts deeper.

00:36:02.880 yeah and and it also i mean for in my case it i i was fortunate that it didn't happen hugely the

00:36:09.500 bigger issue was people that were the quiet friends but you know they're only quiet friends

00:36:14.000 and and the challenge that i experienced was that the way that i could sort of reconcile

00:36:19.440 what was happening was that well everyone who knows me knows it's nonsense so so when someone

00:36:24.780 who does know you doesn't behave the way most of the people who know you are it does force you to

00:36:29.560 sort of question, wait, maybe, and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, and you start

00:36:33.620 to internalize some of what other people are saying. And just to be more precise on the media

00:36:38.040 side of things, I'll say, and I'm not proud of this by any stretch, but litigation and the threat

00:36:43.340 of litigation are very powerful forces. I mean, when a company, be it True North or Chorus, is

00:36:48.620 served with a legal notice, I mean, it very much triggers that political impulse of, well,

00:36:54.380 you know, making it go away, because not everyone has the capacity or the bandwidth or the funds to

00:36:59.400 make everything the hill to die on. So you've actually turned around and have used this process

00:37:05.920 to seek justice. And I'm wondering if you were optimistic that that would work.

00:37:11.760 With the litigation? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for context, you and Chorus and one other podcast

00:37:20.480 were served with legal notice from Jivraj. Other podcasters were threatened with legal action. He

00:37:24.840 never pursued any of that. It's a bluff because everything that I've said was true. And he knows

00:37:29.100 that um but uh but you know it's if you're a small outlet that's a potent threat and um but i'm uh

00:37:38.060 now two years into discovery uh against some of the nation's biggest media outlets and um obviously i

00:37:45.100 can't say too much about that i don't want to breach the implied undertaking rule but um

00:37:51.420 i am more optimistic now having learned what i've learned than i was when i started this process

00:37:56.060 but it is a long process and it's very costly and you know that's kind of one of the perverse

00:37:59.660 ironies of being cancelled is if you're defamed in such a way that makes it difficult to earn a

00:38:04.060 livelihood it may take a decade and a half million dollars to use litigation to try to seek redress

00:38:12.060 for that so um so that's challenging but like i said i'm optimistic that it's a meritorious case

00:38:19.260 we have a clip from the documentary i want to show people and then we'll uh we'll wrap things

00:38:23.820 up in a moment but people can take a look at that right now she's surrounding a united

00:38:27.420 conservative party candidate has caused her to step down yes uh kaylin ford has resigned as a

00:38:33.100 ucp candidate in the riding of calgary mountain view after report claiming she echoed white

00:38:38.460 nationalist rhetoric what was shared was her private messages she was engaged in a facebook

00:38:43.980 chat with somebody the accusation was that she had said something in a private conversation that

00:38:50.780 had echoed the words of white supremacists.

00:38:54.460 Kaelin Ford says those Facebook messages were taken out of context.

00:38:58.440 The statement did not have one word of contrition, apology, or backing down from those statements.

00:39:04.060 The NDP has now started running attack ads, framing the United Conservative Party as intolerant.

00:39:09.840 I was utterly shocked to hear of the comments that that candidate, who was of course a star candidate for the UCP, made.

00:39:18.820 that is a bit of when the mob came featuring and produced by kaylin ford it comes out tonight

00:39:27.020 uh congratulations on this i know this has obviously been four years of your life now and

00:39:32.260 as we've discussed the story is still unfolding in in some ways but i'm glad you're standing up

00:39:37.600 and talking about this kaylin thanks for coming on today thank you adrew all right that is kaylin

00:39:42.460 forward we are just about out of time for today but it is friday so let's go to fake news friday

00:39:49.400 roll that stinger

00:39:51.340 yes fake news friday making our way through the blizzard of bombast the hurricane of

00:40:08.660 hilarity. I didn't write the alliterations ahead of time, so sometimes if I pick a weird

00:40:15.080 weather event, I don't know where to go from there. So I am the purveyor of fake news right

00:40:18.920 now. But today we do a follow-up on World Press Freedom Day. I mentioned on Wednesday the

00:40:24.660 brazen hypocrisy of Justin Trudeau's celebration of it, but one more takes the cake. This was a 0.70

00:40:30.300 tweet from Seamus O'Regan, who is a liberal minister, a former journalist himself, celebrating

00:40:36.720 World Press Freedom Day. Let's put that up on the screen there. He says, we have a free press in

00:40:42.200 Canada. We don't get to tell them what to write. We don't get to tell you what to read. Hashtag

00:40:48.040 World Press Freedom Day. Well, perhaps we can show this CBC story. Do we have the CBC story?

00:40:59.980 I don't think we have the CBC story. Okay. Well, the CBC story I can tell you about is the one of

00:41:04.920 Lorne Gunter's column being subject by the Liberal government trying to have it spiked

00:41:11.040 from social media. So Seamus O'Regan says, we don't tell journalists what to write,

00:41:15.360 we don't tell you what to read. Just three weeks after the federal government tried to literally

00:41:20.560 censor, literally censor, not just figuratively censor, literally censor an unflattering column

00:41:27.200 about the government's immigration policy. So Seamus O'Regan may not be a mainstream media

00:41:32.540 journalist, but he is still peddling fake news as a cabinet minister. That does it for us for today.

00:41:38.280 We'll talk to you all next week with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True

00:41:42.320 North. Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton

00:41:48.560 Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - May 05, 2023

WHO says there's no more Covid emergency

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