This is what “decolonization” really means
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
181.8282
Summary
The left loves to use the term "dog whistle" to describe what they call "decolonization" and "settlerism." But what does that actually mean? And what does it have to do with anti-Blackness, settlerism, and direct action? In this episode of The Candice Malcolm Show, host Candice talks about the dangers of dog whistling, and why it's actually quite dangerous.
Transcript
00:00:00.520
Decolonization is code. It's a dog whistle, if you will. And it means the mass slaughter of
00:00:05.540
civilians, or what the radical left likes to call settlers, as we saw on October 7th. Now,
00:00:10.700
if we accept this warped academic theory, which is pushed and promoted across our society,
00:00:15.140
usually dressed up as a diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative, if we accept it and we let
00:00:19.940
it go to its logical conclusion, we will see more October 7th-style massacres, not just in Israel,
00:00:25.240
but across the West, and particularly in Canada. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:40.680
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today, we're going to unpack the academic terms
00:00:45.720
such as decolonization, settler, and direct action, as well as resistance, and many others. I'm going
00:00:52.440
to talk about the latest scandals, including at my university, the one that I graduated from,
00:00:56.660
the University of Alberta. And later in the show, I am going to be debating my friend and colleague,
00:01:01.780
Rupa Supramania, on free speech and its limits here in the West. So stick around. If you're watching
00:01:07.900
this video on YouTube or Rumble, please like this video, subscribe to True North, and make sure to
00:01:12.080
turn on notifications so you don't miss any of our videos. If you're watching on Facebook, despite
00:01:16.620
the C-18 van, if you're able to still see this, please make sure you like our True North page,
00:01:21.080
drop us a comment and share this video. If you're listening to this podcast on Apple or Spotify,
00:01:26.540
please make sure to leave us a five-star review if you enjoy the podcast, and to subscribe to
00:01:30.980
The Candice Malcolm Show so you don't miss any of our content. Finally, to everyone listening,
00:01:35.180
everyone watching, please head on over to our website, www.tnc.news, where you can read our
00:01:41.180
latest reports. And don't forget to sign up for our newsletter so that Bill C-18 and the big tech
00:01:46.280
censorship cannot stop you from learning the truth. Thank you so much. The left loves to accuse
00:01:51.920
conservatives of using dog whistles. Now, if you want to test this theory, just head on over to
00:01:56.340
Google, type in Pierre Polyev and dog whistle, and you'll find about 100 legacy media stories accusing
00:02:02.400
him of all kinds of things that he never said, but that some journalists decided that he must believe
00:02:07.580
based on something totally different that he said. Do you get that? Well, I'll give you an example.
00:02:12.060
In March, Pierre Polyev's team posted an image on Instagram of a Canadian police logo. In the
00:02:17.940
description, he included a beautiful commemoration for two brave police officers who were sadly killed
00:02:23.200
in the line of duty in Edmonton. Now, instead of just accepting this nice commemoration of brave
00:02:29.140
police officers who sacrificed their lives for safety, the legacy media decided to pull out some
00:02:35.660
kind of totally different conclusion. They accused him, I kid you not, of promoting anti-Black
00:02:41.820
racism. Yes, Trudeau's media decided that a police logo is actually a dog whistle for an extremist
00:02:48.440
fascist movement, which apparently Pierre Polyev is trying to court. Now, can someone please tell me,
00:02:55.140
is there a large anti-Black fascist community in Canada that Pierre Polyev desperately needs on his
00:03:00.560
side? Who are these fascists, seriously, and where do they live? What party are they currently voting for
00:03:05.700
that Pierre Polyev has to supposedly work very hard to take their vote away and bring it over to the
00:03:11.100
conservatives? Of course, the media never explain any of that. They never bother, but we're just
00:03:15.800
supposed to believe their utter nonsense. Well, what I find interesting when we're talking about dog
00:03:21.320
whistles is the left's development of their own lexicon, usually obscure academic jargon that
00:03:27.460
eventually makes its way into mainstream language. Now, this jargon includes code words that actually
00:03:33.440
mean something quite different than they first appear. So I'll give you an example. Over the weekend,
00:03:38.160
left-wing writer and podcaster Nora Loretta posted this on X. She's celebrating the increased violence
00:03:44.020
that we see at pro-Hamas rallies. She doesn't come right out and call it violence, of course. Instead,
00:03:48.840
she calls it direct action. Here's your post. She writes, guys, the amount of direct action happening
00:03:54.440
right now is incredible. Now, we know that direct action means violence because Antifa put out a handbook
00:04:00.240
that explicitly said this. They defined direct action as proactive self-defense. Yes, very clever.
00:04:07.580
As in, I'm going to go attack those Nazis over there before they come and attack me. The only problem
00:04:12.700
is, according to Antifa, anybody who doesn't join in their anarchy and destruction, they consider to be
00:04:18.400
a Nazi. So that means that just about everybody is fair game for actual violence. Now, when Nora Loretta
00:04:24.760
celebrates direct action, she's no doubt referring to the pro-Hamas rallies that we've seen devolve
00:04:30.300
into riots. We've seen the destruction of property, often Jewish-owned businesses and places of worship.
00:04:36.400
We've seen altercations and physical fights against the police, as we saw recently in Calgary.
00:04:41.200
And we've seen blockades of highways, bridges, railways, and other critical infrastructure. Now, it's funny,
00:04:46.600
and I have to note, that when the truckers in the Freedom Convoy went over and blocked the Ambassador
00:04:51.780
Bridge for just a few hours, that was enough for Justin Trudeau to call in the military and introduce
00:04:57.120
martial law to break up the entire protest. But of course, when the pro-Hamas side does it, when they
00:05:03.000
actually go and harass him in a restaurant in Vancouver, and they tie up and block critical
00:05:08.040
infrastructure across the country, what does Trudeau do? Interestingly, it actually leads him to flip-flop
00:05:13.920
on his position. And in this case, he changed his mind and began to condemn Israel for fighting back
00:05:20.240
against Hamas. Funny, funny, strange world that we live in. Now, back to the concept of direct action,
00:05:26.980
which is considered self-defense to the radical left, just like how many people on the radical left
00:05:32.380
defended the October 7th massacre carried out by Hamas, and they called it resistance, or they called
00:05:38.420
it decolonization. Decolonization. We do hear that word a lot in Canada. So let's dive into it. What does
00:05:44.120
it actually mean? Well, Nanja Sharif, who is a writer at the Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, she stated it
00:05:50.500
very clearly on X. I don't think that anyone stated it this clearly. This is what she wrote after October
00:05:56.100
7th. She said, what did y'all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers? That's right.
00:06:04.120
According to some on the left, if you didn't get it before, you get it now. Decolonization means mass murder of
00:06:10.540
civilians. It means a massacre. It means a deadly pogrom against children in their beds. It means
00:06:15.640
genocide of the so-called settlers. Yes, settlers. The same thing that I get called just about every
00:06:20.760
day on social media by radical leftists. So if you have skin color that looks like mine, if you have
00:06:25.380
an English-sounding name like I do, you're probably a settler too. That means that you're not a civilian.
00:06:30.660
According to the radical left, you're fair game for violence, even murder. Yes, you are a legitimate
00:06:36.000
military target. Now, if you think I'm being hyperbolic, I'm not. Here's an example right
00:06:41.000
here. A professor at Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutions in the entire world,
00:06:46.120
saying just that. Settlers are not civilians. It's not hard. Yes, that is what Professor Zarina
00:06:51.880
Grewal, an American studies professor at Yale University, wrote. And no, it isn't just the
00:06:57.360
American radical left. If anything, these phrases are even more common in Canada. And the people who
00:07:02.520
understand these words and what they truly mean, the ones who are most confident and vocal in using
00:07:07.140
them, are usually in Canada. Here are just a few examples. At York University, the Students' Union
00:07:12.600
put out the following statement on October 12th. They wrote, from Turtle Island to Palestine. For those
00:07:17.820
of you who don't know, Turtle Island is what they call North America or Canada. They wrote, from Turtle
00:07:23.080
Island to Palestine and across all occupied lands, these events serve as a reminder that resistance
00:07:28.380
against colonial violence is justified and necessary. This is decolonization and land-backed
00:07:34.840
actualized as we continue to see the Palestinian people stand firm in their resistance against their
00:07:40.840
oppressors. Did you get all that? I know it was pretty jargon heavy, but they said that resistance
00:07:45.760
is justified, resistance is necessary. Remember, resistance just means violence. This is what
00:07:50.600
decolonization looks like. What we saw, the massacre, the despicable violence that we saw against
00:07:55.460
civilians on October 7th in Israel. That's all necessary. That's all what we mean when we say
00:08:00.260
decolonization. Just making it perfectly clear. And it isn't just a bunch of crazy students at York
00:08:05.300
University in suburban Toronto. We had a professor over at McMaster University, Emil Joseph, basically
00:08:10.600
say the same thing. He wrote the following on October 7th, before the massacre was probably even
00:08:14.720
finished in Israel. He wrote, post-colonial, anti-colonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your
00:08:21.620
EDI workshop. Next, here's a sign we saw at a Vancouver protest, just making it perfectly clear.
00:08:26.480
Again, the sign writes, decolonization is not a theory. Finally, we have an Ontario member of the
00:08:32.780
provincial parliament, formerly with the NDP. She got ousted over all of this. Her name is Sarah
00:08:37.220
Jama. She wrote this on October 10th. She said, I'm reflecting on my role as a politician who's
00:08:42.540
participating in this settler colonial system. And I ask that all politicians do the same,
00:08:47.280
hashtag free Palestine. She's just participating in this disgusting settler colonial system that we
00:08:53.100
like to call Canada. Our entire civilization is a disgrace, according to the far left. Jama continues,
00:08:59.340
she writes, for 75 years of violence and retaliation rooted in settler colonialism have taken the lives of
00:09:05.100
far too many innocent people. So as you know, and as we all saw, they're trying to justify, they're trying
00:09:09.940
to say that October 7th didn't just happen. It was justified. It was necessary. It was all the fault
00:09:15.240
of the Israelis for being colonial, being settlers, and colonizing Israel in the first place. Much the
00:09:22.800
same arguments that they make against Canadians. So following all this, we had a bunch of think
00:09:27.380
pieces come out in Canadian publications. I want to go through a few. Tasha Carradine in the National
00:09:31.960
Post wrote this on October 12th. She writes, Jama's statements illustrate the absurd lengths to which
00:09:37.300
the decolonization movement had been taken. Today, the word decolonization has lost all meaning.
00:09:42.200
Now, I disagree with Tasha here. I don't think that decolonization has lost its meaning. It's the
00:09:47.520
opposite. We found its meaning. Its meaning is clearer now than it's ever been. The left is
00:09:52.500
telling us exactly what the word means, and we need to listen. Next, Howard Englund, writing in
00:09:57.820
The Hub on October 13th, wrote, there is a smaller group for whom the idea of decolonization has a
00:10:03.300
harder edge. They welcome it as a chance to turn the tables on our country's historically dominant
00:10:07.620
European majority, not by supplementing our traditional symbols with new ones, but by
00:10:12.640
disparaging them as shameful and displacing them. Now, Howard is getting a little bit closer,
00:10:18.500
but he still dances around the issue. So the point of decolonization means action. It means direct
00:10:24.280
action. They told us this is not a theory. This is something you hear about in a classroom or in a
00:10:28.100
DEI workshop. Decolonization means direct action. It means violence. That is what they're telling us.
00:10:33.960
Finally, JJ McCullough, who is a prominent Canadian YouTuber, he wrote on October 12th on X the
00:10:39.760
following, I'm a little troubled by the fact that decolonization, which is a very mainstream concept
00:10:44.360
in Canadian political discourse, is understood, at least by some faction of Canadians, to mean
00:10:49.420
indiscriminate extrajudicial killing. Just a little troubled by that. Yes, JJ has hit the nail right on
00:10:55.780
the head. He is right. He is troubled. And we should all be very, very troubled by that. Okay, let's move on
00:11:02.280
to talk about how this is all playing out on university campuses, which, as we know, are ground zero for
00:11:07.340
radical leftism and extremism. And as we're learning, ground zero for the violent ideology that is known as
00:11:13.940
decolonization. So my alma mater, where I graduated from the University of Alberta, became something of a
00:11:20.820
punchline in a joke over the week because of an open letter that was signed by the University of Alberta's
00:11:27.860
Sexual Assault Center. So the center was one of the signatories. It wasn't the only one. There was
00:11:33.060
about 40, from best I could tell, groups and individuals who signed this letter, including
00:11:37.140
Sarah Jamma, the disgraced MPP from Ontario. And the letter, amongst many other things, denied that
00:11:44.240
sexual violence happened against Israeli women. So I won't read the entire letter, but here is what
00:11:49.520
it looked like. It says, stand with Palestine, call on political leaders to end their complicity
00:11:54.380
in genocide. We know that when the far left calls Israel genocidal, they're really just using Hamas
00:12:00.060
talking points because, of course, it is Hamas that is genocidal against the Jews. The Jews are
00:12:04.340
just simply trying to protect themselves and have their own country. I digress. The letter rambles
00:12:09.500
on and on and on. One of the most interesting parts of the letter is that they specifically call
00:12:14.580
out Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the far left party in Canada. And they call them out. They said,
00:12:18.800
Jagmeet Singh repeated the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of
00:12:24.340
sexual violence. And so that, of course, the, you know, total hypocrisy and ignorance of a sexual
00:12:32.000
assault center, a place where women are supposed to go on campus if they have been the victim of a
00:12:37.000
horrible assault, like sexual assault. They're supposed to feel safe going there. And here we
00:12:41.600
have this group at the University of Alberta denying, openly denying, against all evidence, against all
00:12:48.040
proof that sexual violence took place. Imagine being a Jewish woman on campus at the U of A
00:12:52.760
and even considering going to a place like that, the sexual assault center, such a disgrace. No
00:12:58.860
wonder it made headlines around the world. Here's the Daily Mail in the UK. It says,
00:13:02.980
sexual assault center at Canadian university signs on to open letter that disputes women were raped
00:13:08.060
and sexually assaulted during Hamas terrorist attacks. It made news across the U.S. and even in
00:13:13.640
Israel and, of course, across Canada. Former Senator Linda Frum posted this on Twitter.
00:13:19.160
She posted the letter and wrote, the University of Alberta needs to find new professionals to staff
00:13:23.540
at sexual assault center, given that current members believe some women deserve to be raped
00:13:27.680
and that Jewish rape victims lie. If you are U of A alumni, please make your feelings known to
00:13:32.300
President Flanagan. I took up that call since, like I said, I am an alumni of the University of
00:13:37.660
Alberta. So I posted the letter that I wrote to President Flanagan right here. Basically, it's come to
00:13:43.540
my attention. This has happened. You know, I'd like to see you take some action, look forward to seeing how you
00:13:48.160
will handle this situation. I was pleasantly surprised that just one day later, the university
00:13:53.100
did reply to my email and they replied to my call and Linda Frum's call, many others, and they took
00:13:59.460
action. The University of Alberta's President and Vice Chancellor, Bill Flanagan, released the following
00:14:04.240
statement, basically saying, look, this person is no longer employed by the university. The university
00:14:08.980
has appointed a new interim director at the sexual assault center. This was great to see. Actually,
00:14:14.680
pretty proud of my university for taking this action and showing some leadership here. I wasn't
00:14:19.200
the only one. International human rights lawyer, Halal Neuer, wrote the following. He wrote,
00:14:23.080
good news. Samantha Pearson, denier of Hamas rape, has been fired from her position as head of the
00:14:27.980
University of Alberta's Sexual Assault Center. Bravo to Mr. Flanagan at the U of A for his swift action.
00:14:33.540
All universities should fire Hamas apologists. That is absolutely right. Unfortunately, that's not
00:14:40.120
going to happen. There are so many universities that employ Hamas apologists that promote them.
00:14:45.000
And the problem doesn't just end there. Even in the covering of this story, you see the Globe and
00:14:50.380
Mail do the exact same thing that the woman who got fired from the crisis center said. So here's a
00:14:56.980
headline from the Globe and Mail. University of Alberta replaces Sexual Assault Center director
00:15:01.660
over a letter questioning alleged Hamas rape. So the Globe and Mail throws in the term alleged just
00:15:09.820
again to throw doubt at what is now at this point very much verified claims that Hamas used rape as
00:15:16.840
one of the tools of their horrific attack on October 7th. Despite this very small glimmer of hope from
00:15:23.320
the University of Alberta, the problems run much deeper. I pointed this out last night, Tuesday,
00:15:28.600
November 21st, there was an event at the U of A called Glory to Our Martyrs. Our martyrs. Yes,
00:15:35.840
the Hamas terrorists who murder Jews are known as martyrs. And according to whoever's organized this
00:15:41.940
event at the University of Alberta, inside an official building, those are our martyrs. Those are
00:15:46.920
our martyrs, according to some people at the U of A. A University of Montreal lecturer who shouted at a
00:15:53.660
Jewish student to go back to Poland has been suspended for the rest of the term, suspended with
00:15:58.720
pay, of course, so not really that big of a deal. Imagine still getting paid for a job you no longer
00:16:03.080
have to do. And that's the supposed punishment. Over at the University of British Columbia, we saw these
00:16:08.100
stickers popping up all over campus. Yes, I love Hamas. Again, they don't just quietly support terrorism.
00:16:14.420
They love terrorism. They love Hamas. And they're very, very open about it. They want everybody to know
00:16:19.380
they're saying the quiet part out loud. They're saying it really, really, really loudly. They think
00:16:23.380
violence is great. They love Hamas. Now, of course, there are a million examples on university campuses
00:16:28.920
of radical leftist students and faculty. Sometimes you can't even tell the difference between the
00:16:33.020
students and the faculty. But they are making absurd and obscene comments celebrating Hamas,
00:16:38.260
celebrating terrorism, celebrating October 7th. Resistance is justified when people are occupied, they say.
00:16:43.980
By any means necessary, they say. Globalize the Intifada, they say. Decolonize Canada. All of this
00:16:51.360
just means justification for violence. It's all a call to action, a call to violence, a call for more
00:16:57.080
massacre. Now, thankfully, I'm not the only one noticing. Thankfully, Elon Musk sees it the same
00:17:02.360
way. So I want to point out a series of tweets from the other day. Individual named Colin Wright wrote
00:17:07.860
this. He wrote, decolonization is the woke version of jihad, and it should be viewed and treated the same
00:17:13.220
way. 100%. I completely agree with this. Now, Elon Musk saw this tweet, and he replied,
00:17:18.660
yes, decolonization necessarily implies a Jewish genocide. Thus, it is unacceptable to any reasonable
00:17:24.980
person. I would go way beyond that. I would not say that it implies a Jewish genocide. I would say
00:17:29.440
it's a genocide against any group that the left calls settlers, or the left considers the need for
00:17:35.220
decolonization, and Canada is ground zero for that. This is where so much of these ideas are coming
00:17:41.000
from. Elon clarified, and he went even further. He said on November 17th, as I said earlier this week,
00:17:47.440
decolonization from the river to the sea and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
00:17:53.920
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension. Now,
00:17:59.160
this is a good first step. A big public platform like X recognizing that these veiled calls for
00:18:05.020
violence are still calls for actual violence. They have no place in our society. The next important
00:18:10.360
step would be for Canadians to begin to recognize that this term, decolonization, decolonization is
00:18:16.480
simply a call for violence. When you hear it at your place of work, your children's school, or by any
00:18:22.480
government official, you need to stop them. You need to voice your concern and explain to them that it is
00:18:27.980
an extreme call for violence, and extreme calls for violence have no place in Canada.
00:18:32.620
So how can we fight back against the radical left, their newfound confidence to openly call for
00:18:38.320
violence, or at least veiled calls for violence using terms like direct action, resistance and
00:18:43.740
decolonization, which we know are just euphemisms that mean violence, and in some cases, even
00:18:47.820
mass murder. I wanted to bring in my friend and colleague, Rupa Subramania, to have a discussion
00:18:53.260
on this topic. I don't know if we always agree, especially on this issue, but I always really
00:18:57.760
respect your position and the research and the thought that goes into it. So a couple of weeks
00:19:02.440
ago on Twitter, there was a sort of brouhaha over a column by Warren Kinsella. He basically
00:19:09.320
pointed to some of the very vicious pro-Hamas rallies and some of the sort of more vocal
00:19:14.740
people that were more or less calling for genocide. And in his original tweet, he wrote this,
00:19:22.460
again, if they're hearing a visa or do not have citizenship, deport them. If they have citizenship,
00:19:28.220
charge them. I think that they deleted that tweet and changed the headline a little bit,
00:19:31.840
watered it down a little bit. I believe that the latest version of the headline said,
00:19:36.520
charge them, prosecute them, convict them, and then jail them. Either way, Ben Mulroney,
00:19:41.100
who is the son of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and he's a sort of well-known TV host in
00:19:45.580
Canada, he quote tweeted, Warren Kinsella quote posted and wrote, oh, I co-sign this. And he sort of
00:19:52.440
took issue to it and said, you know, I don't like the fact that people's civil liberties could
00:19:57.620
potentially be violated. We're talking about deporting people just because we don't like their views.
00:20:01.500
So I'm wondering if you could sort of expand on your thinking and talk about why you do not think
00:20:07.280
we should deport people who promote and celebrate mass murder.
00:20:11.320
Well, first of all, I mean, let's unpack what you said. I mean, you know, you're asserting they're
00:20:16.980
celebrating mass murder. All of these things are up for interpretation. They're highly, highly contested.
00:20:23.820
Your view may be that they're calling for mass murder. I've been to three of these rallies here
00:20:30.600
in Ottawa. There are people who, there are all kinds of people who are part of this movement,
00:20:35.980
including people who are calling for mass murder. I'm not denying that. But let's stipulate for the
00:20:41.600
sake of argument that saying river to the sea or free Palestine is inciting violence.
00:20:47.480
Now, that falls under criminal law and should be prosecuted as such. That's my opinion. There is
00:20:57.920
no legal, but there is no legal or ethical basis for deportation on such grounds that I'm aware of.
00:21:04.120
It would be, first of all, it would be unconstitutional. And this is the kind of stuff
00:21:11.440
that happens in totalitarian countries, countries in the Middle East, countries like China, where you
00:21:19.300
question the state or you question Islam, for example. I've lived in some of these places.
00:21:25.000
You do get deported for crossing that red line. And the red line in these countries happens to be
00:21:30.940
these things. I personally don't want to go there. I'm a free speech absolutist, but I want to make it
00:21:38.760
clear that, you know, incitement to violence is where I, you know, there's a clear red line for
00:21:44.760
me there. So, for example, if you tell someone to go, you know, buy a gun and tell them to go and
00:21:50.300
kill a bunch of people, that is not protected speech anywhere that I'm aware of, neither in the
00:21:55.420
U.S. nor in Canada. But we get into more difficult terrain, in my opinion, when it comes to expressions
00:22:02.500
such as from the river to the sea and free Palestine. Now, on one reading of it, it would seem like
00:22:07.960
this is a call for the destruction of Israel, and this would not be considered protected speech.
00:22:13.920
However, another reading is that this is just a trope or a refrain used on behalf of the
00:22:21.400
Palestinian cause that goes back several decades. It is even used by entities such as the Palestinian
00:22:28.100
Authority, which does not call for the destruction of Israel. It does not wish to annihilate Israel off
00:22:34.960
the map. So, it would be a stretch to say that this is an incitement to violence for someone to
00:22:41.440
take up arms against the state of Israel. Now, I want to point to, I mean, I don't know how much
00:22:50.680
you want to go into this, but, you know, Candace, you and I spoke earlier about how this is a battle
00:22:57.840
for civilization, in a sense. I don't know if you want to go into that, but I'm happy to talk about it.
00:23:08.000
Well, we can get into that in a minute, Rupa, because I just want to pick up on what you said.
00:23:11.380
Look, I don't think that Canada is immune from going down a totalitarian path. I think that we saw
00:23:16.080
glimpses of that during COVID and with the trucker convoy and Trudeau just sort of quashing a protest simply
00:23:21.660
because he doesn't like it. So, I am with you on this. I think that we need to preserve the right to
00:23:26.320
peaceful assembly, the right to protest, and the right to free speech. Those are absolute
00:23:30.540
cornerstones of our society. But when we're talking about the difference between a country
00:23:35.320
like Canada, which is an open, diverse, tolerant, pluralistic society, we come across a sort of
00:23:41.720
fundamental problem. I think it's an existential problem when we also pair that with mass unchecked
00:23:48.480
immigration. So, people are allowed to come from anywhere in the world. We don't screen for
00:23:53.180
ideology. We don't screen for values. So, for all we know, of the people coming to Canada,
00:23:57.660
they could all be fervent, you know, crazed Jew-haters. They could hate gay people and want
00:24:04.840
to, you know, implement some kind of a law where we kill these people, right? And so, it's like,
00:24:10.240
sooner or later, in a liberal democracy like Canada, we're going to have to deal with a problem
00:24:14.600
that many people around the world hold views that are simply incompatible with the West. And I do
00:24:20.320
believe it's a civilizational struggle. I think that Canada's made a lot of problems when it comes
00:24:24.420
to just allowing anybody to come in. And then on top of that, you have this festering ideologies
00:24:28.940
on college campuses, as I mentioned previously in the show, terms like decolonization, which people
00:24:34.360
will openly say it means mass violence. It means massacres like October 7th. So, again, you know,
00:24:42.140
not to just simply repeat the question, but I'm wondering if you could get into, like,
00:24:46.140
how does a country like Canada preserve pluralism while also maintaining the freedoms? Because I
00:24:51.080
think that these people will happily use our freedoms against us. They don't actually believe
00:24:54.580
in free speech, Rupa. Because as soon as it comes to people who criticize Islam, criticize the prophet,
00:25:01.960
criticize even Hamas leaders. We saw a Washington Post cartoon taken down a couple weeks ago because
00:25:06.720
it was offensive to Hamas leaders. You know, they're happy to use that sword against us. But then at the
00:25:12.660
same time when it suits them, they're going to drape themselves in the veil of we deserve free
00:25:16.920
speech, we deserve peaceful protests or the right to free assembly. They don't actually hold those
00:25:21.840
values. So how do we deal with that? Well, we have to deal with it because it goes back to the
00:25:26.300
fundamental tenets of Western civilization. Before I get into that, I want to address the values thing
00:25:33.680
when it comes to citizenship. I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't think we should be allowing
00:25:38.540
people who want to come to Canada and want to implement Sharia law, for example. That's not
00:25:43.940
going to, that's not the direction in which we want to go. So if, for example, I think the U.S.,
00:25:49.340
as far as I am aware, expects you to sign a saying that you are, you don't belong to a communist party
00:25:58.620
or a Nazi party or something to that effect. So yes, I think we could develop something along those
00:26:04.680
lines, for sure. So we're in agreement there. But how do we preserve this? Now, a lot of people have
00:26:12.700
talked about this in terms of a civilizational battle, what is happening in the Middle East,
00:26:18.160
but it's also, that term has also been used in the context of free speech, you know, a clash of
00:26:25.720
civilization, as Samuel Huntington put it. And so therefore, we must suppress views that we don't
00:26:33.780
like. I think that by going down that route, we're actually undermining a core Western value that
00:26:39.440
goes back to the Enlightenment, which is free and open debate. You might find that kind of speech
00:26:47.100
deplorable and repugnant, and I find that absolutely to be the case. But free speech is not about
00:26:54.680
liking something or upholding the rights of views that we agree with. It is actually, it comes down to
00:27:02.000
protecting the protecting views that we disagree with. And that's the fundamental litmus test of
00:27:09.320
free speech of any civilized society. I want to talk about civilization. Why is this important? Why
00:27:15.340
is this a fundamental core of Western civilization? Well, our Western civilization was founded on two
00:27:21.120
sets of ideas and cultures. One was Greece and Rome, and the other was the Judeo-Christian
00:27:28.440
heritage. So Greece and Rome, all of the knowledge and antiquity accomplishments during classical antiquity,
00:27:37.440
and then the Judeo-Christian heritage. And then, you know, and then the Renaissance happened,
00:27:43.100
which rediscovered the glories of Greece and Rome, and then you had the Protestant Reformation.
00:27:46.760
And then finally, the Enlightenment of the 18th century, which included thinkers across Europe,
00:27:52.520
like Voltaire in France, Immanuel Kant in Germany, David Hume and Adam Smith in Great Britain.
00:27:59.520
But here's the crux, and this is why this is so important. All of these thinkers of the Enlightenment
00:28:04.740
agreed on one thing, which is free, open, and civilized and rational debate. This was one of the
00:28:11.720
fundamental tenets of a free, open, and liberal society. They, you know, look at what happened to
00:28:17.160
Galileo, who was persecuted by the Catholic Church for saying that the earth revolved around the sun,
00:28:22.740
and he had to recant his view just to save his life. Let me remind you, all of this was happening
00:28:28.500
in the context of the 18th century, which witnessed horrific wars and revolutions, you know, notably the
00:28:33.560
Revolutionary War in the US in 1776. And then you had the, as a consequence of that, you had the First
00:28:41.560
Amendment in the US, which offers the most robust protection for free speech anywhere in the world.
00:28:48.280
And then you had the French Revolution of 1789 and beyond, you know, which saw the high ideals of
00:28:56.920
revolutionaries, you know, which was liberté, égalité, and fraternité, subverted by a brutal dictator named
00:29:06.000
Napoleon. The Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, then you go into the 20th
00:29:14.400
century, like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, all of my heroes, put freedom of expression as a core
00:29:21.280
fundamental value for any free and civilized society. So our Western civilization, as we know it
00:29:28.520
right now, has been refracted through evolution over the centuries in one that prizes public reasoning
00:29:35.800
based on free, open, and civilized debate as a way to discuss and resolve problems of public policy.
00:29:44.420
So in the context of the current situation where you have these pro-Palestinian rallies,
00:29:52.560
I think it would be absolutely detrimental to suppress these voices, because all it's going to do is
00:30:01.860
it's just going to move the stuff underground. We've seen this play out over and over again. Just look at
00:30:07.800
what is happening in Germany right now. They banned pro-Palestinian protests. Has that reduced the number
00:30:12.700
of anti-Semitic attacks? Can someone actually say that is happening? It hasn't. In fact, it's gotten
00:30:20.840
It's certainly a band-aid. It's a remedy. And I'll agree with you on that, Rupa. I just want to jump
00:30:24.880
in, though, because I agree with you on the value of the Enlightenment and those great thinkers that you
00:30:30.680
mentioned. I'll just say that they all had a foundational and fundamental agreement, whether
00:30:35.580
they wrote about it or not, whether they believe themselves to be theists or atheists or Christians,
00:30:40.520
they all held a fundamental ideal of what it meant to be a citizen, what it meant to contribute,
00:30:47.420
what it meant to be an equal member of society. And what I worry about, what I see today, is that
00:30:54.060
we don't share that foundational belief, that that foundational belief has been torn apart and ripped
00:30:58.000
apart, that we don't have the same basis starting point. And I agree that sometimes these bands,
00:31:03.800
these ad hoc bands, aren't necessarily fixing the root of the problem. And I worry that that root of the
00:31:09.100
problem is so foregone that I don't know how we can repair it, starting by saying, look, we have
00:31:14.080
these core values that we all have to agree on. I think that might be a first step in helping.
00:31:20.880
But I agree that you need to be able to think, you need to be able to critique the system,
00:31:25.540
and that that's all happening. But I fear, and another example of this was the viral TikTok trend
00:31:32.000
that we saw last week of young Americans talking about Osama bin Laden and their reverence for him
00:31:37.120
and his letter to America and how it's changed their world, and they're having an existential
00:31:40.360
crisis. It's like, when we don't have a core belief, when we don't have a message that unites
00:31:44.760
our society that tells us why, tells a story to ourselves about why we're here, why what we're
00:31:50.420
doing is important, why we all share, you know, a collective belief, which is something that they
00:31:54.940
did have in the Enlightenment. I worry that we don't have that now. And so we're trying to save,
00:31:59.560
preserve freedom of speech. But it's actually freedom of speech is one of the things that's helping to
00:32:03.300
sort of unravel our whole civilization. We do have it. I disagree with you there. We do have all of
00:32:08.960
the core values at, you know, with us. It's just that we've, we as a not you and I, because I think
00:32:17.560
you and I have consistently stood up for individual liberties and freedom and that sort of thing. But
00:32:23.740
Western society, at least over the last 10 years or so, has taken a wrong turn. You know, for the last
00:32:31.000
few years, it was the left, the progressive left that, that, that, that presided over a culture of,
00:32:38.440
you know, canceling people for views that they disagreed with and, and, and, you know, and
00:32:45.280
especially so here in Canada. But all we have right now is to continue to, all we can do right now is
00:32:53.800
to continue to uphold these rights values, stand up for them every single time that it is under
00:33:00.640
threat. And that is my battle, right? I see the free speech debate, the free expression debate.
00:33:07.000
I see all of these things in an abstract way. For me, it is not specific to a certain crisis,
00:33:13.140
not specific to a certain issue. It is in an abstract way. I look at these things and it is not
00:33:19.880
an emotional issue for me. I look at it in a clinical kind of way. Is this actually going to get us more
00:33:26.000
freedom? Uh, and, and look what happened, um, during the pandemic, right? That wasn't too long
00:33:32.120
ago. The pandemic was sold to us as an existential crisis. You don't abide by these restrictions. You
00:33:38.300
don't abide by these lockdowns. We're all going to die. That was basically the messaging from our
00:33:43.460
public health authorities. Some of us, including myself, momentary, momentarily believe that messaging.
00:33:49.560
And I, and I regret that to this very day. Um, and, and, and so there was this mass justification,
00:33:55.920
uh, for the curtailment of our civil liberties and peacetime. It was imposed on us saying this was an
00:34:01.620
emergency, uh, doctors who dissented were canceled and fired. Um, and, uh, you know, and then you
00:34:07.960
saw the freedom convoy and people who supported the convoy had their bank accounts frozen. It was an
00:34:13.480
Orwellian reaction by the state. And, and I, I, I fear that we are repeating the same mistake here.
00:34:20.480
Um, I find many of the things that are being said at these protests, absolutely abhorrent. By the way,
00:34:27.040
let me point this out. None of this is new. We are only waking up to this problem now. I remember
00:34:32.960
walking, uh, in downtown Ottawa two years ago, a year and a half ago, there was another protest reacting
00:34:38.880
to something that was happening, um, uh, in, in, between Israel and Hamas. And these, you know,
00:34:45.420
everybody was chanting from the river to the sea, free Palestine and so on and so forth, intifada
00:34:50.260
and all of that stuff. There was absolutely no debate. There was no attention paid to this issue.
00:34:58.480
None of this is new. My point is that, you know, we have to allow this to, we, we have to allow,
00:35:06.560
uh, views that we find absolutely abhorrent. We have to, we have to allow that because it is not
00:35:12.280
going to, you're not going to destroy Hamas ideology or radical Islam or any of the things
00:35:17.120
that we find absolutely abhorrent. We're not going to destroy that by suppressing someone else's right
00:35:22.300
to express that, uh, freely. It's not going to go away that way. I think the, the only way we can,
00:35:27.740
uh, do that is through debate. And, and even if the other party does not engage in debate, we must,
00:35:33.780
we must insist on upholding the right to free speech.
00:35:38.680
Okay. I, I, I definitely see where you're coming from and I, and I appreciate your defense of, of
00:35:43.540
sort of basis of, of, of freedom of speech and, and, and fighting against sort of tyrannical
00:35:48.400
government. I'm just going to ask you a couple of questions because I know, you know, you said that
00:35:52.300
a lot of it is up for interpretation. So from the river to the sea, it's nuanced, perhaps you could
00:35:56.700
say that it doesn't mean what we think it means, but some of the words, you know, we've been seeing
00:36:01.040
more and more, right? So, uh, just, just sort of rapid fire here. Uh, if someone calls for jihad,
00:36:06.440
do you think that that's, that's a call for violence?
00:36:09.080
Again, it's, uh, I mean, this is a discussion I had with a senior official in the UK, uh, when I was
00:36:15.760
working on my free speech in the UK story last week, and, uh, we had this very same conversation.
00:36:21.980
Uh, now he's, you know, uh, said that he, he wants to basically see these protests banned,
00:36:28.820
but even he had to concede. It's hard to, you know, from, from, from, uh, um, from a legal
00:36:35.460
perspective, it really is hard. You know, you know, everything is context specific, right?
00:36:40.400
Jihad, a Muslim will tell you it is an internal battle, but we also know that it means, uh, you
00:36:46.480
know, it could potentially mean. I think, I think, I think most Muslims won't say that Rupa. I think
00:36:50.600
most Muslims will say that, that jihad has long been understood to mean a physical. I, I, I don't
00:36:55.920
know. I mean, the Muslims that I, I, I have, uh, I, I have interacted, I've lived in the Middle East.
00:37:01.120
It is, it is up for interpretation, just like intifada. Intifada, uh, again, uh, has been, it,
00:37:07.800
it, it means resistance. It means resistance or opposition. Uh, nobody had any problems, uh, using
00:37:13.780
the word intifada in the context of the Arab Spring. You see, the thing is, even, even having said all
00:37:20.020
of that, you and I can disagree on what these things actually mean. My point is that it is still,
00:37:25.520
as far as I'm concerned, it is still protected speech. If there's active support for a terrorist
00:37:29.980
cause, material support for a terrorist cause, let's take the Kalistani problem for a second.
00:37:35.960
There are people in Canada, in, in, in our cities who take, uh, out floats and parades glorifying,
00:37:43.400
uh, uh, Kalistani terrorists as martyrs. I find that absolutely repugnant. It, it makes,
00:37:49.400
it makes me sick when I see that, but I hope I uphold the right to free expression as long as
00:37:55.320
they're doing it peacefully. Uh, as long as they're-
00:37:57.520
Including the mastermind of the Air India bombing? You think if, if someone's holding up a banner-
00:38:03.780
They are doing that. They are doing that. I mean, they are absolutely doing that. I'm a free
00:38:08.540
speech absolutist. I find it distasteful and repugnant. Again, it goes back to the core
00:38:14.040
value of Western civilization, which is what I care about. Um, you know, it is for me,
00:38:18.940
the litmus test of free speech really is not if you agree with someone, but if you strongly disagree
00:38:23.980
with someone and you respect their right to speak freely, that's the litmus test for a civilized
00:38:29.180
society. And I just don't, I've lived in repressive societies where, uh, you know, things are
00:38:35.820
interpreted differently by someone who wants to come after you. And I've, I've faced the
00:38:40.140
consequences of that and I've seen others face the consequences of that. And we are, uh, going
00:38:45.660
down a slippery slope here in Canada. We've already, we came very close to being a totalitarian
00:38:50.300
society under the pandemic. And I seriously, I do not want us to go down the same path.
00:38:57.340
Okay. I think that's a great place to leave it. Rupra, Supermania, thank you so much for joining.
00:39:00.940
Thank you for your insights. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for tuning in.
00:39:04.860
I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.