The Candice Malcolm Show - May 06, 2022


Liberals and legacy media use Roe v. Wade to virtue signal


Episode Stats

Length

19 minutes

Words per Minute

207.89723

Word Count

4,019

Sentence Count

244

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We are recording from the fake news capital of Canada. I'm Candice Malcolm,
00:00:04.240 it's Fake News Friday, and this is the Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:18.540 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleague
00:00:22.040 journalist, Andrew Lawton, and we are on the floor of the Convention of the Canada Strong
00:00:26.720 and Free Conference, formerly known as the Manning Conference, and there is so much going
00:00:32.080 on in Ottawa. It's so interesting to be here, Andrew. I mean, is this your first time back
00:00:36.180 since the trucker convoy? Yeah, it is actually. This is the first time I've been in Ottawa since
00:00:40.940 the convoy ended, and that was the weekend when I was pepper sprayed. And don't, from my hotel room,
00:00:46.260 I have a lookout that is staring directly at where that happened. So it's bringing back all sorts of
00:00:52.520 painful, literally, memories. PTSD. Yeah, no, it's good to be back here. I've always enjoyed Ottawa,
00:00:58.000 so it's fun to be here. You know, Ottawa is a beautiful city, and the architecture, the people,
00:01:03.000 it's a great place to be, but it is also a painful reminder. We are, like, deep in establishment,
00:01:08.280 Ottawa establishment territory, home of all the gatekeepers, home of the elites who don't want
00:01:13.220 to hear from Canadians. They don't care what Canadians think. They want to basically ram their
00:01:17.020 opinions down your throat, and you really feel that amidst all of the bureaucracy. And one of
00:01:22.280 the things that I wanted to talk to you about today, Andrew, it is Fake News Friday. It was World
00:01:26.280 Press Freedom Day this week, and so you'll hear a lot of virtue signaling from liberal politicians
00:01:32.900 who we all know don't care at all about press freedom. They don't care about a truly independent
00:01:37.680 press. They don't want the facts to get out to Canadians, and yet they're more than happy to get
00:01:42.120 onto Twitter, Virtue Signal. You know, whether it's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Christy Freeland,
00:01:48.000 I heard an anecdote. They had a, they had, like, a dinner, like an awards dinner, basically
00:01:52.160 congratulating themselves on their press freedom. And this is what the liberals do. This is what the
00:01:56.840 media does. They focus on attacks on the press outside of Canada, right? Like, oh, there's this,
00:02:02.200 like, there's this looming threat of lack of press freedom in places like Hong Kong. Look at these
00:02:06.460 brave journalists in Ukraine. And they're completely blinded to their own hypocrisy. And the
00:02:12.100 focus, rather than being on actual press freedom and allowing journalists to do their jobs,
00:02:16.520 getting out of the way, stop the subsidies, stop funding journalists that you like,
00:02:19.980 and punishing journalists that you don't like. Instead, their focus, Andrew, is on disinformation
00:02:25.120 and misinformation, which is the latest buzzwords that call for them to basically censor. They want
00:02:30.680 censorship. They want to censor the internet. They have these internet censorship bills. They don't
00:02:34.360 like critical journalists. They don't want journalists who are going to do a lot of digging and hold them
00:02:39.120 account in the way that journalists are supposed to do. And so the main focus of this kind of event
00:02:43.480 is one, on look at these horrible countries around the world that don't acknowledge press freedom like
00:02:48.040 we do. And two, how can we censor the internet to scrub opinions that we don't like, including by
00:02:52.860 independent journalists? What's your take on all this? Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that
00:02:57.400 the look over their strategy is one that the liberals love doing on human rights. They love saying,
00:03:02.960 oh, you know, we got to look at Congo and Venezuela without looking in our own backyard and our own
00:03:07.440 front yard. And I mean, I mentioned earlier that the last time I was in Ottawa was covering the
00:03:11.560 convoy. The reality is that was a huge moment where Justin Trudeau's government authorized police to go
00:03:18.880 and arrest journalists for trying to do their jobs. It was only a handful of approved journalists,
00:03:24.800 mainly people in the parliamentary press gallery, that were given free reign to walk the streets of
00:03:29.500 Ottawa. And others, including myself, are threatened with arrest, even though the emergency order
00:03:34.020 specifically said anyone who was there for a lawful purpose, of which journalism is still
00:03:39.220 at this time in Canada, could be there. But then you get into this idea of proving it. And you and I
00:03:44.400 talked about this in the past. You know, one police officer was convinced by my verified Twitter
00:03:48.660 profile. Another, I had a letter from True North. I had a phone number for one of our editors. And still,
00:03:55.380 they were saying, nope, unless you're in the parliamentary press gallery, you're not getting through.
00:03:58.560 And in fact, you'll be arrested if you don't turn around. So when the government does this,
00:04:04.440 it is not just against the idea of media freedom and the idea of free speech. But more fundamentally,
00:04:10.520 it is, as you note, something that has a chilling effect on specific types of free speech, because
00:04:14.740 it's never the CBC types that are targeted by this. It's always conservative, independent media.
00:04:20.940 And I did a panel here at the Canada Strong and Free Network Conference that talked about this. And
00:04:25.300 the reality is, independent media is kind of owned by the right right now. It's the right that does
00:04:30.140 really well on this. So when you go after independent media, you're targeting conservatives,
00:04:35.620 you're targeting people on the right. It's interesting, your anecdote about how one of
00:04:39.900 the police officers really wanted a government badge. That's a mindset here in Ottawa, like everyone
00:04:44.100 works for the government. Well, because yeah, everyone has a government badge. I mean,
00:04:46.900 the Starbucks employee has a government badge, I think, in Ottawa. Exactly. No, but I think you're
00:04:50.920 right. It's interesting because there is a lot of independent-ish journalists on the left as well,
00:04:55.300 journalism. There's lots of interesting sites. The weird thing is a lot of them just kind of end up
00:04:59.060 becoming government-funded or government subsidies. I'm thinking of places like the Walrus or just
00:05:03.920 these kind of small- The National Observer, which has like government-funded reporters now.
00:05:07.600 Right, exactly. So they don't stay independent because they don't keep that. And right now,
00:05:11.600 I mean, with conservatives, it's like there's this whole growing movement of kind of grassroots,
00:05:16.800 independent shops. There's so many of them now. It's great to see, but it's like,
00:05:20.060 you know, it's a David Goliath situation because we're up against not just the behemoth of the CBC
00:05:26.460 that gets $1.4, $1.5 billion a year. And they really, really influence the press galleries because
00:05:32.260 they're so, they outnumber everyone else, right? But then you also have the corporate media,
00:05:36.320 the woke sort of capitalism that's seeping in. We heard from Jamil Javani, who was a former radio host
00:05:42.720 at Bell's News Talk 1010 in Toronto. And he was basically talking about how, even though he is
00:05:48.800 an independent-minded black man, he wasn't woke enough for the upper high ups at Bell and he was
00:05:54.620 forced to do this. And then you have the newspapers who also helped shape the news front and they're
00:06:00.100 subsidized now. They have the media bailout. And so it's really, you know, we feel like we're doing
00:06:06.260 really well. It's fun to be at a conference like Canada Stronger Free because it's filled with
00:06:09.900 conservative activists and so many of them tune into True North. And we really appreciate it. We
00:06:13.860 love you coming to these kinds of events and these conferences and getting to meet the people who,
00:06:18.440 you know, support True North, watch our programming. It's great to connect with the sort of grassroots
00:06:23.000 base in that way. But we're so small, Andrew, compared to these big giants and you really kind of
00:06:30.100 feel like you have your work cut out for you. What do you think?
00:06:33.640 Yeah, I would agree with that. And I would also say that the challenge is going to be, I mean,
00:06:38.580 just to illustrate it with an anecdote, one of the big things that we see as people on the right is
00:06:43.440 that obviously people on the right support independent media and they support it. But
00:06:47.240 it goes down that road of almost siloing it where you've got, you know, your mainstream,
00:06:51.700 which is for the left and your independent, which is for the right. And the problem with that is that
00:06:55.760 we want to be able to expand our audience. And I have no issues with watching CBC. And I mean,
00:07:00.560 I do, but I generally, in theory, I have no issues with it because I want to see and have a broader
00:07:04.960 discussion and a broader conversation. And it is challenging because we are in a space where we
00:07:09.800 have, we don't have a level playing field. We don't have the subsidy head start that a lot of
00:07:15.020 these other groups on the left do. But I also think that content is king in a way. And content
00:07:20.560 eventually is what's eroding the trust in the mainstream media. It's their content. And it's
00:07:25.720 what's elevating trust in independent media. And it's not just tooting our own horn. There are others
00:07:29.260 that we are ostensibly competing with that are in a very similar boat. But that takes time. It takes
00:07:34.800 time to sort of release that stranglehold that the mainstream media have on official media.
00:07:39.820 And it's interesting, too, because I mean, this this kind of goes back to like libertarian
00:07:43.260 capitalist theory. It's like, you know, that the bad companies keep getting subsidized. So they keep
00:07:47.700 doubling down on their bad business. Yeah, it's not a free market. Yeah. And so it's like in a normal
00:07:51.640 market, those companies would be forced to make real decisions that might lead to innovation.
00:07:55.920 I'm thinking of like a group like the Winnipeg Free Press, right? This has been a newspaper
00:07:59.800 forever. More than half of their funding now comes from the government. And you go on their
00:08:03.380 website and it's like really clunky and old. And they're not entering the 21st century.
00:08:08.300 They're not bringing it. And it's the same thing with these big, you know, post media, these big
00:08:12.260 unionized shops that don't know how to collect news anymore. I was talking earlier with Holly Doan,
00:08:19.640 who is its founder, and she runs Black Locks Reporter. And they just do tremendous independent
00:08:24.400 research and independent media. And she made the point you just did about content is king. It's
00:08:28.480 like people want good journalism. And they're really increasingly not getting that from the
00:08:33.220 mainstream media anymore. So they're turning to independent people. I really do feel like we
00:08:37.680 have our work cut out for us. So I want to talk to you, you know, the big story of the week is
00:08:41.920 something that's spilling over from the United States, this decision that was leaked out from the
00:08:46.880 Supreme Court of the United States, overturning Roe versus Wade. People who are familiar with this
00:08:51.520 court case, like it's almost universally agreed that this case was really poorly argued, that it
00:08:57.980 doesn't stand up to scrutiny, that it's a very bad decision. And yet, you know, this question of
00:09:03.500 abortion, the abortion debate in the U.S. is spilled out. You know, they're having it. It's
00:09:07.880 happening in the United States, still into Canada. All of the politicians on the left, all of the media
00:09:11.780 have used it as an opportunity to say, well, first a virtue signal about how glorious Canada is,
00:09:17.400 because we don't have abortion laws. But then also to try to, you know, turn it against the
00:09:23.300 conservatives. We know in 2019, a large part of the reason why I think Andrew Scheer ultimately
00:09:28.140 wasn't successful is because he didn't have a good answer to this question about abortion,
00:09:32.300 about gay marriage, and people were worried that he was a religious zealot or something like that.
00:09:36.220 I think that the liberals right now are just so excited that this issue is something that the
00:09:40.660 media will talk about and use it to paint conservatives as being sort of anti-woman or whatever.
00:09:46.180 Have you heard, you know, we're at this conference with all these conservative activists. Have you
00:09:51.300 heard a lot of people talking about it? What's your take on how this will affect the conservative
00:09:55.300 leadership race and the conservative movement more broadly in Canada?
00:09:58.860 Yeah, I haven't heard too, too much yet at the conference specifically. But just in the last few
00:10:02.360 days, the one point that I've raised, I think I raised this on my show the other day, is that
00:10:05.600 abortion is a wedge for conservatives in a way that it isn't for the liberals. And it used to be. But
00:10:10.700 the liberals under Justin Trudeau have just purged anyone that doesn't go along with Justin
00:10:15.600 Trudeau's view on this from their caucus. So the liberals are in lockstep with each other,
00:10:19.740 the NDP, the bloc are in lockstep. So they know that it's not at all, there's no losing
00:10:25.080 when they bring it up. They just want to force conservatives to have some stand up and say,
00:10:30.440 I'm pro-life and some stand up and say they're pro-choice. A divide that works within the
00:10:34.240 conservative party that has always allowed for people to approach these issues and other issues
00:10:38.380 of conscience from whichever perspective they'd like. But they know that then the CBC is going to go
00:10:43.140 into overdrive the Toronto Star and it's going to be, oh, these antiquated anti-woman dinosaurs. And
00:10:48.320 it just goes into this whole thing. So what you need is a conservative that can, and you touched on
00:10:54.060 this with the Andrew Scheer observation, that can defend and sell their position, not necessarily to
00:11:00.660 convert people, but to explain it. Because defense isn't working. You get conservatives that end up
00:11:05.640 apologizing for their values, which is never the way you win anyone over. Leslie Lewis has done a great
00:11:10.620 job on this. She's put out her platform on abortion, which has no hidden agenda. And she said,
00:11:15.080 this is what I stand for. Boom, boom, boom. And as a result, there's not really that much criticism
00:11:19.060 that she faces from the media because they don't sense that weakness that they do a lot of other
00:11:24.500 times. Yeah. Of like where it's like someone feels like they've been caught doing something
00:11:28.700 they're not supposed to do. It's no, if you believe it, own it. Right. Yeah. And I think, I think
00:11:32.900 you're right. Like there was a weird thing where, well, first of all, I just want to say that the
00:11:36.400 media is so dishonest on this issue. They treat it completely black and white, right? Yeah. You're
00:11:40.360 either, you either believe that birth begins at conception, in which case all abortions under
00:11:45.040 any circumstances, no matter what, are going to be illegal. Which is a minority position among pro-lifers.
00:11:49.980 Right. Right. Well, and, and, and even maybe people who have that view might not want to
00:11:54.500 legislate that way. And then the other side is like, oh, hey, you know, the baby's born, but I changed
00:11:59.920 my mind. And, you know, it's like, it's like no, no laws on abortion whatsoever. You can have
00:12:04.200 late-term abortions. You can have partial abortion abortion. We don't care. All abortion
00:12:07.400 everyone. The reality, Andrew, is that most Canadians fall somewhere in the middle. They
00:12:11.520 probably do want protections against late-term abortions or sex-selective abortions. There's
00:12:16.080 so much more nuance in this, but I saw the Journal de Montreal front page. They had the faces of all
00:12:22.020 the conservative MPs who they have called pro-life. And it's like, they're perpetuating this idea
00:12:27.420 that, you know, the people in the conservative party have like this really removed view that
00:12:34.160 that's so offside with the rest of the Canadian public when, of course, there is more nuance.
00:12:37.800 I will just say, I think that by and large, Canadians and even most conservatives just
00:12:42.400 don't really want to have this discussion. They would prefer to just not talk about it
00:12:45.660 and they want the issue to be put to rest. And so to your point that Leslie Lewis has been
00:12:49.580 able to, you know, very substantively explain her exact position, then there's, there's no
00:12:54.780 reason to keep pushing it because there's no gotcha moment. Yeah. There's no, there's no
00:12:58.620 opportunity to embarrass her in the way that they, I think they, they were able to embarrass
00:13:02.940 or at least catch Andrew Scheer flat footed. What do you think?
00:13:07.220 Yeah. I think the one area where I would slightly disagree with that is that the status quo in
00:13:13.180 Canada is unique in the world and not in a good way of a zero laws, zero restriction at all.
00:13:18.740 Technically, if you found a doctor to do it, you could have an abortion up to a minute before
00:13:21.720 a child is delivered. That's rare. When Canadians learn about that, they're opposed to it, but
00:13:26.220 Canadians don't know it. Sex, selective abortion as well, aborting someone, a child for no reason
00:13:31.160 other than you don't want a daughter. It's one of the largest motivating factors in some cultures
00:13:36.280 towards abortion. Canadians don't know that's legal. When they do, they oppose it. So whatever
00:13:41.600 you think of those policies, there are nuances to it that are lost in, as you mentioned, that
00:13:45.800 dichotomy of pro-life, pro-choice or pro-life, anti-choice, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, like
00:13:51.780 these semantics that people bring into it. And I mean, Trudeau, it could backfire what he's done
00:13:56.940 because he's now said that we need to introduce legislation to ensure that this right to abortion
00:14:01.800 in Canada is unshakable and no one can ever take it away. And he says we need to have a debate on
00:14:06.820 it. It's okay. Well, if you want to have a debate on it, that's what a lot of conservatives have
00:14:09.540 wanted. They said, let's just have a discussion about this that allows us to talk about this.
00:14:13.680 What about unborn victims of crime? What about sex, selective abortion? What about late-term abortion?
00:14:18.460 And I could see, I mean, setting aside the makeup of the House of Commons right now,
00:14:22.300 I could see if we did have a national discussion about abortion, Canadians settling on, you know,
00:14:27.640 maybe third trimester abortions are not a thing we should have. So it could backfire.
00:14:32.020 Yeah, it's interesting because I've been looking into the U.S. because a lot of Americans are
00:14:35.160 misled about what Roe does and doesn't do. I mean, the idea of legislating from the courts is not
00:14:40.260 something that has a tradition in Canada or the U.S. So this idea that Roe would be the ones who
00:14:45.340 determine the laws rather than the Senate, you know, the state Senate, the lawmakers, the people who are
00:14:50.360 elected to make these decisions. To me, it's much better in the hands of people who have, you know,
00:14:55.620 are represented by the public as opposed to someone who's appointed for life that has, you know,
00:15:00.960 very little scrutiny and accountability. But also the idea that it would just like immediately ban
00:15:06.880 abortion all over the United States. Obviously, it's going to be a state's rights issue. So states
00:15:10.560 like California and New York are never going to, you know, change the laws to ban abortion, whereas other
00:15:15.360 states would. But the interesting thing is you look at the European Union, you look at countries
00:15:21.200 in Europe that have laws already banning abortion of 15 weeks, 12 weeks, and you step back and say,
00:15:27.960 oh, wow, Canada really is an outlier because we don't have any laws whatsoever. So maybe you're
00:15:32.900 right that there is more of an appetite to have this discussion. And if so, I think Trudeau might be
00:15:38.060 a little bit surprised with where the Canadian public is because, again, we're so misled. I'll just give
00:15:42.560 another example for Fake News Friday. ECOS, which is run by Frank Graves, who is a sort of
00:15:48.120 interesting character and a pollster that's not always very reliable. He put something out that
00:15:52.440 said something like 80 percent of Canadians are pro-choice and only 12 percent are pro-life or
00:15:58.520 something like that. Again, these euphemisms that don't really, you know, people might not have really
00:16:02.700 thought through what they mean. But, you know, if you think that you have 80 percent of the Canadian
00:16:08.140 public on your side, you might be much more brazen to go forth to try to legislate something,
00:16:12.980 but then you might not realize all this nuance that's built in and all the views that Canadians
00:16:16.440 have that are actually not black and white and have, you know, a lot of room for discussion.
00:16:22.280 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:16:23.700 And, you know, that's the role of Canadian politicians is to take on these sort of important
00:16:29.380 moral and cultural issues and help navigate through it. And so Trudeau's style of, you know,
00:16:34.980 divide, wedge, demonize. I could see that all playing out. I don't know that that's really
00:16:40.880 the direction that we want to go in our country. I don't know that that's the direction that we want
00:16:44.120 to go in the conservative movement, but we might be headed there again from external factors.
00:16:49.360 What else is on your mind at this convention? I know there's a lot of exciting speakers. Do you
00:16:53.740 have any interesting interviews lined up? What do you have planned in Ottawa?
00:16:56.940 Well, I mean, obviously, the main event, which you play a role in, the leadership debate,
00:17:01.300 has been a big part of what a lot of people want to get out of this. And my hope is in general that
00:17:06.580 whenever you have a forum like this where conservatives are coming together, and I use
00:17:10.920 that with a small C, that people are talking about the movement itself, not just the day-to-day
00:17:15.740 electoral politics and the horse racing, but the movement itself and the values. Because,
00:17:20.460 you know, victory without values is meaningless. Values without victory is also in its own way
00:17:24.660 meaningless. I mean, you can die on a hill and die for something, but if you're at the end of the day
00:17:29.280 not doing anything with it, it's understandably challenging. So I think that, yeah, you need to
00:17:33.640 start talking about the tactical things of how you win, but you also need to talk about what it
00:17:37.560 is that you stand for. And I think that principles matter. And oftentimes we assume that principles
00:17:41.820 are antithetical to victory, which I think is a big failing in the conservative party.
00:17:46.320 Well, and that's why it's great to be around conservative activists and people who, you know,
00:17:51.100 have really strong convictions in certain areas, areas of expertise, areas of activism,
00:17:55.540 activism, because you're getting everybody in the space together, provides an opportunity to have
00:18:00.840 those discussions, have those debates, flesh them out, figure out exactly where we think,
00:18:04.960 where we stand on different issues and kind of get the ball rolling to, to what you made earlier,
00:18:10.480 conservatives are often playing defense. It's like, why don't we, why don't we take a step forward
00:18:14.440 and start to push forth our own agenda? Well, it's great to be at an event in person. It's been a long
00:18:19.920 time. It's great to just be around people without having to wear a mask and socially distanced and
00:18:24.900 all that kind of stuff. And your own co-worker, some of whom you've like never met in person
00:18:27.720 until this weekend. Yeah, we have that with a couple of our producers here. We've got Sean
00:18:31.940 right there. I've never met him in person, finally get to meet him in 3D instead of 2D. So
00:18:36.860 it's, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candice Malcolm
00:18:41.620 joined by Andrew Lawton. We are on the floor of the Convention Centre in Ottawa. Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:18:49.920 Thank you.