Juno News - February 10, 2022


Why did the legacy media smear the Freedom Convoy? (Ft. Jonathan Kay)


Episode Stats

Length

40 minutes

Words per Minute

194.34572

Word Count

7,910

Sentence Count

6

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary

Jonathan Kaye joins Candice to discuss the legacy media's relentless smear campaign against the Freedom Truckers, and why they ve been so eager to smear the truckers as extremists, racist, and even terrorists. Jonathan Kaye is an op-ed writer for the National Post and a co-host of the Quillette podcast. He's also an author and ghostwriter, and his work has appeared all over the internet.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The legacy media is so eager to smear the trucker convoy they seem to have abandoned all basic
00:00:05.620 tenets of journalism like being fair and neutral covering both sides of the story and making sure
00:00:10.520 to fact check and verify reports before sharing them. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is the Candice
00:00:15.020 Malcolm Show. Hi everyone thank you so much for tuning in so as we've been covering on the podcast
00:00:23.820 as you know very very well since the inception of the trucker convoy and the freedom convoy the
00:00:29.700 freedom protests and rallies in Ottawa the the sort of establishment the Ottawa establishment
00:00:34.140 politicians journalists police officers that the people in charge of Ottawa have done their best
00:00:39.380 to try to demonize and discredit the truckers before they even got there so in the week leading up to
00:00:44.500 the protest Trudeau predicted that there would be violence at these rallies the legacy media quoted
00:00:49.020 experts who told us that these truckers were extremists that they were racist and even that
00:00:54.040 they were terrorists well what we got instead was a large incredibly peaceful patriotic showing it was
00:01:00.220 optimistic it was joyful it looked more like a winter carnival and perhaps it looked like a Canada Day
00:01:05.620 family block party instead well regardless of the images that we saw pouring out from the ground in
00:01:10.660 Ottawa the thousands of Canadian flags being waved on Parliament Hill the Trudeau Liberals working in
00:01:16.140 lockstep with the legacy media decided to fixate on two or three flags two or three individuals who are
00:01:21.780 flying evil flags these flags were not embraced by any means by the crowd on the ground quite the
00:01:27.460 opposite there was footage that went viral of a man waving a confederate flag and he was sort of
00:01:32.460 confronted and heckled and told to leave by the truckers that went viral but the legacy media ignored
00:01:37.760 that instead they pretended that the two or three evil flags represented the whole group and that the
00:01:43.760 whole group of protesters were the same as the two people that were waving those evil flags they
00:01:49.080 equated the entire group as evil right-wing Nazis that sounds extreme it sounds hyperbolic but I'm
00:01:54.260 not exaggerating that is what they did they upped the rhetoric they began to call the protests an
00:01:58.700 occupation a siege an insurrection one city councilor on the CBC even called it treason well one of the
00:02:06.880 things that that sort of leaves us thinking is why were the media so unwilling to cover these protests
00:02:13.260 in good faith why didn't they try to get to know the truckers to tell their story usually when we see
00:02:18.500 protests and blockades the media are positively covering them covering them favorably why was it
00:02:23.900 so different this time well to make sense of this remarkable gap between the positive nature of the
00:02:29.220 protests versus the incredibly negative coverage of it I am pleased today to be joined by journalist
00:02:34.260 and author Jonathan Kaye Jonathan Kaye is the editor over at Quillette he's an op-ed writer for the
00:02:39.920 National Post and he is a co-host of the Quillette podcast he's an author and a ghostwriter and his work
00:02:45.420 has appeared all over he had a great recent piece over in the Washington Post you absolutely must
00:02:51.140 follow Jonathan Kaye on Twitter his handle is at John Kaye he constantly and humorously pokes fun
00:02:56.900 of the woke left and since the start of the convoy he's an excellent job at thoroughly documenting
00:03:02.280 and dispelling some of the multiple attempts to unfairly smear the truckers so Jonathan thank you
00:03:09.100 so much for joining us today oh uh thanks for having me on your show yeah so the first thing I
00:03:15.240 mean you follow this stuff closely you've been in I think in and around the legacy media for most of
00:03:19.820 your career and I just want to know why why didn't the media cover the truckers in good faith why did
00:03:25.680 it seem like a smear attack from day one I mean I have sort of an odd position on this because like
00:03:31.480 when the trucker convoy started I think I was probably like 80 or 90 percent opposed to it um you
00:03:40.700 know maybe unlike some of your other guests or your your listeners like I'm I'm super into vaccines I
00:03:47.920 think mandates are fine like I I am I'm a fairly progressive or to use that word in most of my views
00:03:56.180 on the actual substance of it and the only time I became I started to become sympathetic to the
00:04:01.440 trucker convoy was when I just started to see the hysteria of those opposing it it's it's just this
00:04:08.040 classic case of one side overplaying their hand in reaction to what they they want to show is the
00:04:15.740 radicalism of the other side and by the way there were some whack jobs on on the convoy side and I
00:04:20.900 entertained all the stereotypes because I live in Toronto you know I it's like oh these trucks are
00:04:25.740 going to come by and it's going to be awful and maybe there's going to be extremists and stuff like
00:04:30.100 that um but then yeah when I started to see the footage I was like okay I don't necessarily agree
00:04:34.840 with these people but it's not like this is you know stormtroopers uh marching to Poland in 1939 or
00:04:40.660 anything like that which if you had if you read the social media feeds of some liberal MPs
00:04:45.260 they just completely uh lost their mind about it um and I mean what surprised me was like it wasn't just
00:04:54.880 white people either there was there was I think there was an indigenous drumming circle in support
00:04:59.660 of the protest uh on the Quebec side you saw a lot of seat truckers because the trucking industry there
00:05:06.040 is uh is very diverse uh so if the political class and the journalistic class in Ottawa had simply
00:05:16.180 maintained their composure and said look this is going to be an annoyance for a couple of days
00:05:20.840 there's going to be a lot of traffic there's going to be a lot of gridlock but you know we live in
00:05:24.980 democracy let these people say their piece and maybe even if like had politicians gone to talk to them
00:05:29.360 and I I think Trudeau he's actually a fairly charismatic politician if he'd actually gone out
00:05:34.440 to talk to these truckers and say I don't agree with you but you know tell me your piece I'm willing
00:05:39.040 to listen which is by the way how Trudeau dealt with separatists uh when he first became a politician
00:05:43.920 he he respectfully listened to them even though they were trying to break up Canada
00:05:47.460 uh then I think things probably would have been dissipated early and I think Trudeau and
00:05:55.360 progressives in Ottawa I think like they would have ended up better off now if you look at some
00:06:01.360 of the opinions people who oppose the trucker convoy at first are starting to come around to it
00:06:06.260 just because they're so put off by the hysterical overreaction to it and I guess I would put myself
00:06:11.300 in that camp uh you know I'm one of the smug and sufferable progressives maybe that some of your
00:06:16.240 your listeners don't like but there's only so much smugness and progressivism I can put up with
00:06:22.500 before I say look you know this is not it's not an insurrection it's not treason it's a bunch of
00:06:30.360 people saying stuff you don't like and I get that people in Ottawa don't like I mean I I live in a
00:06:35.380 neighborhood in Toronto that if a guy double parks his Q8 outside someone's house like sometimes they
00:06:39.900 call the police like you know I don't like traffic I I wouldn't want people honking their horns outside my
00:06:45.620 house I get that and you've had people in Ottawa who for you know two weeks have had to put up with
00:06:50.260 it I I totally sympathize with their position um but it's essentially a garden variety trade-off at
00:06:57.500 this point between civil liberties and the right to protest and the right of a city to say okay
00:07:01.820 enough is enough get your trucks out of our city like this kind of trade-off democracy is working
00:07:06.780 out all the time it's not helpful to cast it in the rhetoric of insurrection or war or terrorism
00:07:13.260 uh and by overplaying their hand the critics of the convoy I think have given a gift to the people
00:07:18.960 who are organizing it even if you think they're radicals well and I think to independent media as
00:07:23.820 well because I mean I've seen true north's audience really grow in the last few weeks because people
00:07:29.360 feel that they really can't get the truth from the legacy media people in the convoys what I find
00:07:33.760 really interesting talking to like you said there's a lot of young sort of new Canadians that are part
00:07:38.700 of the convoy that that for whatever reason in their community they feel they're opposed to vaccines
00:07:42.820 they really hate the mandates and they feel really almost surprised and hurt by the fact that they're
00:07:48.220 being smeared because they're usually on the progressive side of these things like I follow a
00:07:52.720 bunch of these guys on Instagram and they they were sort of part of the whole reconciliation defund the
00:07:58.920 police crowd last summer two summers ago and now they're on this side and they're being smeared by the
00:08:04.680 premise I want to talk a little bit about Justin Trudeau because I've just remembered that you worked with
00:08:08.820 him and you know him and it does seem like he has changed I mean he used to host these town halls where
00:08:14.100 he would take questions from anybody including by the way some of those town halls you look at the footage
00:08:18.360 there's people with swastikas like they have a flag and there's and by the way just to be fair the people who went to
00:08:24.600 those town halls with Trudeau with swastikas in the flag they weren't Nazis they were people who were
00:08:30.660 stupidly using Nazi symbology to smear their opponents as being Nazis which is the same as the
00:08:39.980 idiots that you saw at like there's two or three of them but of course the media shows footage of them
00:08:44.920 endlessly there were two or three idiots who showed up at the trucker convoy who had flags but if you look
00:08:50.680 at the flags they are trying to use Nazi imagery to attack Trudeau personally I think it's insane to
00:08:58.000 compare Trudeau to a Nazi or as a fascist like whatever you think of him but the media intentionally
00:09:04.980 ignore the fact these are not testimonials of Nazi belief these aren't people saying I'm a trucker and
00:09:11.560 I'm a Nazi they're people saying our opponents are channeling Nazi ideas which is stupid and hateful
00:09:18.360 but it doesn't mean they're Nazis and also there were like two or three of these nutbags like and so
00:09:23.700 as you said you know their their presence was exaggerated but even to the extent that they
00:09:28.460 were depicted even the depictions of them was itself a kind of lie because it was falsely
00:09:33.420 uh implied that they were actually there to signal Nazi belief and and to be fair the same is true of
00:09:39.820 these nutbags who showed up at Trudeau events with swastikas on their flags although actually that said
00:09:45.460 there is one uh image of Trudeau actually signing a neo-Nazi flag where the guy concealed it this is
00:09:52.240 if you go on YouTube you can see it's it's crazy the guy concealed the neo-Nazi flag Trudeau signed a
00:09:57.080 corner of it and then after he was showing ha ha look Trudeau signed a Nazi flag uh to my knowledge
00:10:02.200 that's like one of the few cases where you actually had some uh wackadoodle who who really did seem to
00:10:08.800 believe in Nazi ideology and and got close to a mainstream politician well well he must be one of maybe 10
00:10:14.800 in the entire country because it's not like that that ideology is is present and aware despite what
00:10:19.780 I think the media want you to think it's it's funny because I saw that you shared that on Twitter
00:10:23.100 Jonathan and it's like if a guy with a Nazi flag shows up at a Trudeau event the headline is um you
00:10:29.760 know this highlights security concerns of how close they can get to uh Canadian politicians uh when a
00:10:35.080 Nazi guy shows up at a you know quasi-conservative rally it means that everybody at that rally is is a
00:10:40.720 Nazi which is is quite the difference but I I want to ask you because yesterday we saw Joel uh light
00:10:45.280 bound who is a liberal MP really uh articulate guy come out and basically just criticized Trudeau for
00:10:51.820 the the change in tone and and seems like strategy that that they used to have this very positive
00:10:57.000 uniting message where they never treat Canadians um you know that the Canadians are always
00:11:02.320 have access to the charter and this sort of really positive vision of Canada and in the last like
00:11:09.500 six months or so we've seen a really negative barrage of sort of hateful rhetoric towards the
00:11:14.640 people who they disagree with when it comes to vaccines and and and the mandates and the entire
00:11:20.360 lockdown COVID lockdown it's it seems to me like Trudeau is in some trouble I mean he he hid from the
00:11:26.840 protesters he went into hiding he came out with a really really over-the-top loaded speech um accusing
00:11:32.960 the protesters of all these insane things that we're talking about um and then he has a member of his
00:11:38.020 his own caucus come out and just say you know we we should be doing better than this as liberals
00:11:42.280 you you you mentioned that you think that he's he's changed quite a bit since he first came into
00:11:47.340 public office do you think he's in trouble or do you think that he'll just sort of um this is just
00:11:51.800 wash off him like uh like like usual look Trudeau has been dismissed so many times I don't know if
00:11:58.480 people watching this do you remember in times of yore there was something called elbow gate
00:12:02.700 where Trudeau like you know it was some kind of minor fracas in the commons and Trudeau stormed
00:12:09.160 around and just by sheer accident like his elbow hit the chest of some female NDP MP and uh you know
00:12:17.020 at the time Thomas Mulcair I think was was the NDP leader at the time and it was like the whole thing
00:12:20.940 was dramatized and you had columnists saying you know this is the end of the you know uh Trudeau's
00:12:26.100 uh honeymoon period and uh you know forevermore he will be defined by elbow gate and all this and
00:12:31.640 then like a week later people forgot about elbow gate like you know Trudeau has been written off many
00:12:36.040 times falsely and I don't I certainly don't know that this is the end of uh the liberal romance with
00:12:43.340 him what I can say is that um it's been very educational for me not just in regard to Trudeau but
00:12:50.920 in regard to how politics changes people because when I met Trudeau and I helped him with his book
00:12:55.460 I was struck he wasn't he's a nice guy and like I think his desire to unite the country and I I can
00:13:02.580 just see people turning off this podcast as I say this like I just I think he just lost a thousand
00:13:06.720 subscribers but I'll say he was a nice guy I think he was a genuine patriot uh the book it was published
00:13:13.880 in 2014 called Common Ground I thought it was um a lot of it was just a sort of love letter to Canada
00:13:21.180 Canada and then what really changed in 2017 with Canada 150 where progressives decided
00:13:27.660 that Canada's brand is no longer or a wonderful beacon of hope and tolerance in contradistinction
00:13:33.880 to the United States which is evil we're actually a genocide state that's you know built on a mountain
00:13:40.020 of indigenous skulls and all our political work is going to go into smearing our own country
00:13:45.440 and um and Trudeau went hard into that and it was around that time that it changed and to be fair
00:13:52.880 if you look at the pattern of Canadian prime ministers by the time they're in their second
00:13:56.340 or third term they have become so co-opted by the people around them to make everything they do
00:14:02.820 a tribalized attack on their opponents because the people around them don't care about whatever it was
00:14:08.800 that got them into politics 10 years ago they care about winning the next election so this trucker
00:14:13.540 convoy sweeps into Ottawa and you got a bunch of 28 year olds around them saying oh this is awesome
00:14:18.060 let's smear the conservatives as Nazis um and and you know by the way Harper became a kind of like
00:14:24.880 very divisive tribalized guy in his you know as his tenure as prime minister wore on it this happens
00:14:30.680 this happened to Kretchen uh Martin Paul Martin wasn't around long enough for it to happen to him
00:14:35.300 but I guess he came into office like that uh and it is a cautionary tale for politics because I will say
00:14:40.940 this the Trudeau who I met seven eight years ago was uniquely positioned to march into a group of
00:14:53.300 truckers and say hey I don't agree with you but like let's talk he would have done a photo op in a truck
00:14:59.020 he would have listened to them um the guy was very charming and maybe maybe he still maintains that
00:15:05.600 capacity for charm but he would not have stayed in some undisclosed location sneering about all these
00:15:12.600 supposed hate mongers who'd come to the city he would have gotten off his ass and actually met these
00:15:17.520 people even though he disagrees with them that was the Trudeau of 2014 15 16 maybe even 2017 2018
00:15:25.560 and to watch him become this kind of sullen hermit trying to score points with hyperbolic attacks on
00:15:36.120 conservatives it isn't just about Trudeau it's about how politics changes people conservatives or liberals
00:15:41.520 alike and if anybody is thinking about getting into politics uh it's a it's a depressing spectacle
00:15:47.700 because I think politics changes people and and this is like a case study in how that happens
00:15:53.360 interesting well I don't share your views I always thought that Trudeau was very arrogant
00:15:57.860 uh very Quebec centrist that he didn't have a lot of respect for western Canada and he wasn't
00:16:02.580 necessarily a very thoughtful person he hadn't really thought through the core issues of of the
00:16:07.500 country but I I think that you're right that he would have probably gone and spoken to the truckers
00:16:12.640 perhaps the French ones perhaps the Quebec ones I can't really imagine him even five ten years ago
00:16:17.300 going out to western Canada and speaking speaking to people in Alberta he and I grew up like within one or
00:16:22.800 two kilometers of each other I myself am very even though I'm an anglophone you know and like Trudeau
00:16:27.700 I don't speak fluent French I'm I have the same parochial fascination and love of Quebec as he does
00:16:33.480 so like Trudeau was very much of my tribe um and we're all creatures of our background you know if I
00:16:39.700 grew up in western Canada I would have maybe similar views about Quebec like I don't know um but I do know
00:16:46.660 he was a person of good faith I know that um you know unless I'm an incredible incredibly misjudging
00:16:53.940 his character and it's true you know he wasn't was never I think he's very smart he was never an
00:16:58.800 intellectual it is absolutely true that some of his you know the things he said uh were kind of trite
00:17:06.560 and you know he wasn't a deep thinker about Canada especially maybe western Canada um but he was a person
00:17:15.560 of good faith and I think a politician of good faith and I don't think anybody who's watching what
00:17:21.400 he and the liberal party have done over the last two weeks can can say that anything they've done
00:17:25.820 has been of good faith it's been about fear-mongering and trying to smear a flawed and diverse protest
00:17:33.220 movement as just a bunch of fascist hate mongers and it's been disgusting to watch
00:17:36.860 I completely agree with that part I the thing that strikes me about Trudeau is I always thought
00:17:41.500 this is something I thought about him from the first time I interacted with him politically in 2011
00:17:45.420 that he that he hated conservatives more than he loved Canada now maybe you think that he
00:17:50.880 you know his book is a love letter to Canada that's true now it wasn't true of Trudeau when I met him
00:17:54.740 it's 100% not true true when I when I met him 100% and I know sometimes history is written backwards
00:18:00.480 and you you impute the flaws of a person that they have now to to to the point of of political
00:18:07.000 conception I know your listeners aren't going to agree with me Trudeau was a decent guy who gave
00:18:11.740 conservatives a fair shake I mean yes it was often you know he had to spout the language of liberal
00:18:17.020 propaganda he was part of the party um but I don't you know look he he broke bread with separatists
00:18:23.880 um separate separatists who literally were trying to break up the country in the fashion that the
00:18:30.440 so-called insurrectionists of the trucker convoy are falsely accused of like he um he gets points for
00:18:37.680 that for me you know Papineau his riding a lot of separatists in that riding he'd go door to door
00:18:42.600 and talk to these people imagine him doing imagine him going truck to truck and talking to people
00:18:47.240 which by the way if he did it he'd score so many points like it would be such a wonderful spectacle
00:18:52.880 I'd love for him to he can still do that he can still do that but of course he won't
00:18:56.680 I you know I agree I think that if we had a prime minister who was willing to engage with
00:19:01.320 the truckers and willing to take their concerns seriously I think that this this whole standstill
00:19:05.760 wouldn't be as it is because people would feel at least that their voices were heard and part of
00:19:10.060 the frustration that I see from so many of the protesters is just the sort of way that they've
00:19:14.180 been written off and the way they've uh dismissed it I wanted to ask you one other question though
00:19:18.520 John while I have you um on the podcast I know that you are a someone who thinks a lot about free
00:19:24.200 speech um and the the sort of history of free speech you know alongside this smear that we've seen
00:19:30.060 on the truckers and the demonization of them uh on the other side of the border down the U.S.
00:19:34.780 we've seen sort of a similar smear campaign um unleashed against Joe Rogan incredibly popular
00:19:41.160 podcaster and I wanted to I wanted to have your take on this because I know you you've commented
00:19:46.880 on it quite a bit but it it just seems like we're in such a wild place in our society where
00:19:52.540 someone who is so incredibly popular but also who seems like a genuinely good person who asks honest
00:20:00.780 questions he's intellectually curious he has a huge audience because he so many people relate to him
00:20:06.820 and yet the way that he's covered in the media the way that the media and and some of the people in
00:20:11.460 the media trying to smear him it's like it's unrecognizable from anyone who watches the the podcast
00:20:16.640 so I I I know you have a lot of thoughts on this I want to I want to switch gears and ask you about
00:20:21.300 Joe Rogan. So it's a very analogous phenomenon whereby Joe Rogan is not someone I agree with
00:20:27.780 especially on vaccine stuff uh I I'm very pro vaccine I'm not one of these people who on social
00:20:33.760 media you know like my name is John K triple vax boosted you know I'm wearing five masks like
00:20:39.420 but I am in terms of public health very conventionally minded I support vaccines I don't support forcing
00:20:45.480 people to get vaccinated but one of the reasons I came on the show is to tell people like on social
00:20:50.060 media if you follow me you know I'm not a kool-aid drinker I'm not a slavish follow of orthodoxy
00:20:54.640 but I'm somebody who has looked at the science and vaccines save lives they can save the lives of
00:20:59.840 people listening to this if they're not vaccinated the government should not force you to get
00:21:02.920 vaccinated but I'm telling you that it's a good choice and I'll end my speech there because no
00:21:07.960 one wants to be hectored about this well well but but but in terms of vaccines I mean Canadians have
00:21:12.620 by and large I think over 80 percent of Canadians are now vaccinated and and and if you go into the
00:21:17.240 sort of the age groups that are most at risk like people over the age of 70 over the age of 80
00:21:22.060 it's like 99 which I assume that the only people who are not getting vaccinated in that age group
00:21:26.580 is because they're too old and frail and and and that there is concern well well anyway less than
00:21:31.700 one percent are not vaccinated so almost almost everyone who needs to be vaccinated is vaccinated
00:21:35.520 at this point your statistics are correct but I'm just saying I tweeted this the other day
00:21:38.560 an ER doctor at my health club we had a half hour conversation about this he's had two patients
00:21:44.160 two Omicron patients who have died under his watch one was a 90 year old who was from a family of
00:21:49.720 anti-vaxxers one was a 79 year old who said he quote didn't have time to get vaccinated so
00:21:55.060 anyway end of speech about vaccines in terms of Joe Rogan it's similar to the convoy in the sense
00:22:00.840 that I don't I don't listen to Joe Rogan's podcast I only listen I don't the only podcasts I listen to
00:22:05.600 are like nerdball historical podcast people always assume oh you must listen to Sam Harris you must
00:22:10.020 listen to Jordan Peterson you must listen to Rogan it's like no I don't listen to any of those things
00:22:13.080 um and the only reason I'm on Rogan's side at all in terms of this insane campaign to get him thrown
00:22:21.000 off Spotify is because of these these people who insist that someone they disagree with shouldn't
00:22:26.820 be on a platform that has a diversity viewpoint Bill Cosby has some kind of podcast like or whatever
00:22:31.860 on Spotify like they didn't come after him but Joe Rogan comes and like it's insane you had Olivia
00:22:39.100 Chao prominent Toronto leftist yesterday she tweeted I am not making this up she tweeted how disgusted she
00:22:46.280 was that Spotify has uh Joe Rogan on it and she says that's why I use Apple music it's like Apple
00:22:54.580 really those you know slave labor commanders in in China uh like people are using this issue as a
00:23:03.420 sort of virtue signaling thing if you just ignore Joe Rogan and say you know what I don't agree with
00:23:08.640 him I'm vaccinated like you know I don't encourage my friends to listen to but whatever then people
00:23:17.400 like me would have no basis to defend Joe Rogan because on the substance of the views I disagree
00:23:22.200 with Rogan the only thing that makes me want to defend him is people trying to get him canceled and
00:23:26.260 it's the same with the trucker convoy in substance I disagree with their views about the mandate but then
00:23:30.960 when you come after them and call them Nazis and try and take away their money and say you know like
00:23:36.060 let's bankrupt these people let's let's publish pictures of their trucks and their their corporate
00:23:40.800 identify identifying data so we can make sure they can't feed their children I'm like you just push
00:23:47.020 someone over to the other side because as soon as you do that I don't care what their views on mandates
00:23:51.780 are I'm on their side if your goal is to ruin their lives because they have views you to disagree with
00:23:57.780 and that's what the left is just completely overplaying their hand not just on vaccines
00:24:02.220 not just on Rogan on gender on race I mean this is this is why I think next couple of election cycles
00:24:10.920 you're going to see a lot of populists get elected and then you're going to have pundits in Canada say
00:24:15.700 oh this just proves how racist Canada is no it doesn't prove how racist Canada is it proves that you
00:24:20.020 overplayed your hand when you had the chance and now you're paying the price for it
00:24:24.660 just I know I'm keeping you for a longer than I said I would but I just had another question
00:24:29.580 you're someone who like you said you're of the same ilk as Justin Trudeau you come from
00:24:34.040 the progressive side of things you surround yourself seems like with with progressive minded people
00:24:38.440 what's happening on your side on that side of the aisle why why are they overplaying their hand
00:24:43.820 why are they so zealous why are they so angry and hateful and insistent upon not just refuting the ideas
00:24:50.800 of those they disagree with but but erasing them and cancelling them and pushing them off the public
00:24:55.080 square like where is this coming from why is it happening so I think there's a lot of people who
00:25:00.320 will go kind of deep into theories about critical race theory and post-modernism and
00:25:04.320 cultural Marxism whatever that means from my vantage point it's it's a simpler phenomenon a lot of it is
00:25:13.280 laziness you have a lot of progressives many of them well-intentioned people many of them
00:25:19.180 my friends uh co-workers former co-workers who spend a lot of their life in ideological silos
00:25:26.320 and their Facebook groups uh their book clubs it's people who agree with them they have the same
00:25:33.280 hashtags they have the same views they have lost the ability to defend those views because their
00:25:38.420 intellectual ecosystems don't permit any dissent to be raised so when they see any sign of dissent
00:25:46.020 mandates that's geographically proximate like somebody driving a truck through their city with
00:25:51.020 a Canadian flag on it that says no to mandates they no longer have the intellectual tools or reflexes
00:25:57.360 to actually have any kind of debate or discussion about the substance of the issue the only thing they
00:26:03.080 know how to do is say aha that's one of the Nazi insurrectionists I have been warned about on my
00:26:11.200 Reddit group or whatnot and so it's just this sort of like um it's like an immune system that gets
00:26:16.640 activated with antibodies and the only language they have is is the language of they're anti-semitic
00:26:25.800 they must be Nazis they're insurrectionists or they look for what they imagine to be analogous
00:26:31.380 historical episodes such as the January 6th uh riot at the capital in the United States even though
00:26:37.700 we're in Canada it's a completely different movement completely different country the whole
00:26:41.960 January 6th thing that's what they know about it's uh I think it's called the availability bias uh
00:26:47.540 when they look at psychology that's what's in their mind so that's what they they label it as
00:26:53.000 and I I'm much less convinced about like esoteric theoretical analyses uh based on how people have
00:27:03.080 been convinced a lot of it to me is just laziness people who don't have the capacity or will to defend
00:27:08.200 their views except by recourse to lazy hysterical slogans about Nazis and then of course when they see
00:27:15.480 uh some solitary idiot with any kind of Nazi sign they seize on it they're I mean it's it's like some
00:27:23.800 kind of intellectual orgasm they have which is like aha this proves everything I've been ranting about
00:27:29.160 for the last week because some some fruit loop is holding a sign there's a guy he was in Toronto he
00:27:35.480 was holding this like handmade sign for his website he had some website called goyim tv I'm sure I'm sure
00:27:42.040 you've seen this photo he's holding a thing about how all he calls them uh pharma judicals all these
00:27:48.280 jews like me have um are behind the vaccine thing and he's clearly an anti-semite and he was using the
00:27:55.560 protest to to promote his crazy website called goyim tv the only reason anyone's ever heard about this
00:28:02.040 goyim tv website is because the progressive media has focused on this guy relentlessly as somehow being
00:28:07.720 a spokesman for the movement and he's not it's been documented they actually took this guy's sign
00:28:13.560 away ripped it up and sort of like threw this guy out of the protest because they were so disgusted by
00:28:17.720 his anti-semitism I actually I'm into free speech and I'm Jewish I don't think you should take his sign
00:28:23.880 and rip it up I think everybody deserves free speech even anti-semitic hate mongers and outliers
00:28:29.480 like him but the fact that they actually took away his sign and tore it up means that this guy's an
00:28:35.480 outlier but nevertheless you go on progressive social media this guy's become a celebrity so
00:28:40.840 the people making these anti-semites a celebrity are not people in the trucker convoy they're the
00:28:46.520 progressives who profess to be fighting anti-semitism and so whether they make a celebrity out of this
00:28:51.720 I visited this guy's website just to see what kind of like crazy crap he's going on it but
00:28:57.160 in a million years I never even would have known about this this crazy website were it not for
00:29:01.000 progressives making the insane claim that this nut somehow represents the convoy so we live in really
00:29:08.200 weird times I think that's why the protester the organizers would have to like I agree that
00:29:13.880 they shouldn't rip up his sign but they should say you have to leave because if you stay here
00:29:17.560 they're going to pretend that you're part of the movement or somehow stigmatize them or somehow just
00:29:22.120 like have people standing around saying we have nothing to do with this guy like not give the media
00:29:29.320 any pretext to like close crop a photo of him somehow uh you know being associated with the protest yeah
00:29:37.000 there has to be a mechanism mechanism to stigmatize him but you know people were saying oh should we let
00:29:42.680 communists parade the hammer and sickle rallies yes we should or palestinians who go around we just
00:29:48.520 saw this in toronto a week ago palestinians going around demanding the eradication of the state of
00:29:53.000 israel so somehow the media didn't make a big deal about that one even though like the whole protest was
00:29:57.880 based around an anti-semitic premise um i see lots of swastikas at those rallies no but those are those
00:30:04.520 are social justice swastikas so they're permitted uh but like i i i there are there are plenty of groups
00:30:11.400 conservative groups who want to ban those people from marching which is hypocritical they should
00:30:15.720 have the right to march um people should have the right to express crazy views it's part of probably
00:30:22.920 living in a in a pluralistic society um what we should be able to count on in normal times is a media
00:30:31.720 and a political class who don't ascribe the craziest most stigmatized viewpoints expressed at a protest
00:30:39.400 to the protest movement as a whole and this is by the way something the leftists had to confront
00:30:43.080 with we had an author at quillette more and more my authors at quillette are socialists who are
00:30:47.400 disgusted by the way the left has been hijacked by uh snobbish identity identity-based movements
00:30:54.120 who was saying this guy used to march in the peace parade i think it was called in vancouver and he said
00:30:59.400 whenever they had a peace parade in vancouver it was in the 80s for you know nuclear disarmament
00:31:03.720 there's some whack job would come in with like i love north korea or um you know i love communism or
00:31:09.800 stalin was right you'd have trotskyists and maoists and just like every every fruitcake in the neighborhood
00:31:15.960 would come out with this homemade sign about how amazing communism is and right-wing media would seize
00:31:21.240 on that and say aha these are a bunch of trotskyists who are just trying to like turn canada into
00:31:26.360 uh into a communist dictatorship which was of course it was it was conservatives playing the same trick
00:31:33.800 that progressives are now playing both sides do this well i don't i don't i like i hear that a lot
00:31:39.000 that people say oh well conservatives used to be the one that were for censorship and they were the
00:31:42.680 ones that were trying to smear everyone well it's like i know but i did it's it's like it's like i
00:31:46.760 didn't right so it's like it's like you're you're saying okay well what you guys are doing what
00:31:50.680 what the left is doing now is is comparable to what the right was doing in the 80s it's like
00:31:55.320 well if i think if i was live in or if i was active in the 80s and i was a political commentator
00:32:01.320 i would say that that was wrong too because i think this is the 90s so in the 90s i went to
00:32:07.160 law school in the united states during the 90s and uh a big movement among conservatives this is in the
00:32:13.240 united states was to pass an amendment and you've actually trump even talked about this uh at one point
00:32:20.600 an amendment to prevent the burning of the american flag on the pretext that well it's not that's not
00:32:26.440 really a form of speech it's kind of a desecration of a national symbol this was a big deal they were
00:32:31.480 trying to cancel flag burners now i think burning a flag is is stupid um but you should be able to burn
00:32:37.240 a flag but you had conservatives who were trying to insist that that wasn't real speech it was violence
00:32:44.920 which directly mimics what progressives say now when they say well you know when you express support
00:32:49.880 for jk rowling that's not speech that's a form of trauma like they learned that from conservatives uh
00:32:56.040 so you know i i disagree i don't know i don't know that they learned that i think it's probably just
00:33:01.160 it like you said a lazy instinct that something it is like yeah look at last summer last summer we saw
00:33:06.280 countless canadian statues get pulled down right we saw um not just people who were involved with
00:33:13.400 residential schools but you know queen victoria queen elizabeth um i think there's a statue of
00:33:18.360 captain james cook in vancouver that got thrown into the ocean for some reason um you know we saw
00:33:23.800 desecration of national symbols by the left and we were told that it wasn't violence it was
00:33:28.920 understandable and justifiable and all part of the reconciliation process i i i didn't hear a lot of
00:33:33.880 conservatives saying that um you know that that that that should be considered treason or that that
00:33:38.920 should be um i i mean people said hey we should uphold the rule of law and vandalism shouldn't be
00:33:43.880 okay yeah it's not part of speech the most to me the most disgusting example was in montreal they
00:33:49.240 they pulled down uh johnny mcdonald statue this was i think um i forget it was black lives matter or
00:33:55.880 an indigenous um rights protest but the two kind of merged um and the video was online and then as soon
00:34:02.920 as it came down it was just a complete criminal act uh and then a protester went over and pretended to
00:34:08.360 hump john mcdonald's head like the whole thing was just i'm not like i don't fetishize canadian
00:34:13.720 history as like some sort of sacred text but i was watching it i was like whatever side these people
00:34:17.880 are on i'm on the other side of it and um and federal politicians actually stared at their shoes
00:34:24.280 i'm talking about like trudeau and liberals to their credit i think there were like quebecois
00:34:29.160 politicians who actually they were the they were the voice of reason standing up for john mcdonald
00:34:34.520 that that anglophone assimilationist who normally they might you know be skeptical of because uh if
00:34:41.560 they've nationalist quebecois sympathies uh in fact actually this is we were talking before about the
00:34:46.520 liberal mp who's become the voice of reason and has pushed back against trudeau uh no surprise he's
00:34:52.280 from quebec and as i said on twitter earlier many of the disaffected civil servants and liberal
00:34:58.920 politicians who feed me scoops and you know will dm me with um sometimes they're just looking to
00:35:05.480 kvetch because they can't do it among their liberal friends they do it to me because they know i have
00:35:09.960 an appetite for that um they're from quebec quebecers have are are much less cowed by this sort of
00:35:20.200 anglophone progressive left-wing social panic that has become dominant since 2017 and by the way i should
00:35:26.520 say a lot of them are immigrants because you've got people saying look i didn't come from iran
00:35:32.120 or uh eastern europe to canada the land of freedom so i could see a repeat of this kind of top-down
00:35:42.360 autocratic demand for ideological purity uh i want no part of that and and i my in my view the people
00:35:50.840 who are going to save the canadian left from their social panic are going to be quebecers and immigrants
00:35:56.200 because here in toronto in particular uh old stock as stephen harper once called them old stock
00:36:03.640 anglo upper middle class wasps have lost any ability to embrace common sense or to reject the
00:36:11.480 sanctimonious pieties of american imported progressive ideological they just they're they don't have the
00:36:20.360 capacity to do it they feel they have no moral capital whatsoever to exercise independent thought
00:36:25.480 they slavishly follow whatever hashtag comes down the pipe 15 minutes ago and we're going to have to
00:36:30.760 look to quebecers uh and immigrants uh you know this is my eastern canadian bias i don't live in
00:36:36.600 western canada so yeah maybe my perspective would be different um but they are i hope going to rescue
00:36:43.080 the canadian left with some assistance from old school socialists who realize that the real
00:36:50.200 divide in our society is class-based it is not skin color based uh and and i more and more i have
00:36:57.480 time for old school socialists who have a class-based analysis of our society because you've got people
00:37:01.880 like me i'm living large right like you know um but the reason i'm living large is it's because of
00:37:07.880 class it's you know it's not because i have white privilege or i'm cis or uh you know white privilege
00:37:13.320 does pay play part of it racism is a real thing but god i would love it if the left got back to
00:37:18.680 traditional marxism right you know i i i i i i i agree that you know what i think what we're seeing
00:37:25.240 with the trucker convoy is like a class uprising like uh people who have had to live with the
00:37:30.360 covet people who have had no choice other than to go out there and face it and live with it they're
00:37:35.240 used to it and they're sort of pushing back against all the middle-class canadians who are very
00:37:41.080 comfortable with the new normal of working from home living from home having minimal social
00:37:46.680 interaction it's a lot easier uh for them and then maybe they have more apprehension and they're
00:37:50.920 more nervous about going back into a hundred percent and it is but it's totally class-based
00:37:55.560 in my neighborhood my neighborhood is full of consultants lawyers journalists like me um who
00:38:02.680 are like oh yes i don't care how long it takes how many zoom meetings i have to take um you know we're
00:38:08.760 going to fight this thing and have quarantine for the next five years it's like yeah of course you feel
00:38:13.640 that way you know you can charge 400 bucks an hour to someone for a zoom meeting i think you'd sing a
00:38:18.040 different tune if you know you owned a restaurant or you know you're into event management or you had
00:38:24.280 a bar or you know you were a trucker or something like that like if you had a job that required you
00:38:29.800 not to like nod your head on zoom meetings all day and get paid for it like it's a totally class-based
00:38:36.520 divide but but in order for them to justify their class privilege they have to pretend it's about
00:38:42.760 race or because otherwise they can't import the the culture war into a domain that they feel they
00:38:51.720 have a moral advantage on because they know that if you look at a class-based analysis they're the
00:38:56.840 douchebags but they have to pretend it's the people who are delivering food and trucks and stuff who
00:39:02.520 somehow like lack their magical insight into social justice and and this is the thing that's turning
00:39:08.760 people like me i think away from progressive politics because in every other respect if you
00:39:13.800 look at my lifestyle i should be a doctrinaire progressive but i just can't i can't drink their
00:39:18.280 kool-aid it's just it's i can't do it anymore well it's it's really refreshing uh to hear your
00:39:24.280 perspective i know uh you you know often the people i have on the show are more on the conservative side so i
00:39:29.640 really appreciate you uh coming on and sharing your views even though they're different it's crazy
00:39:33.480 that anyone calls me a conservative like only in a country that's gone as crazy as canada politically
00:39:38.840 could could anyone even consider but i look at like my trolls on on twitter it's like oh you
00:39:42.920 hardcore conservatives you're all the same really hardcore conservatives why because like you know
00:39:48.760 i read harry potter to my kids and i don't think jk rowling's like you know hitler adjacent that's
00:39:53.640 what makes me a conservative now you've lost your minds right like no they're certainly certainly doing
00:39:59.800 a lot of they're certainly helping conservatives like me in in in pushing pushing more canadians
00:40:06.280 um over to the sort of common sense side but i i really appreciate your time jonathan it's been
00:40:10.840 great uh talking to you i appreciate all your insight and i hope that you'll come back and join
00:40:14.920 us on the show in the future thank you all right thank you so much for tuning in i'm
00:40:18.840 kendis malcolm and this is the kendis malcolm show
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