The Candice Malcolm Show - February 10, 2022


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


Episode Stats

Length

40 minutes

Words per Minute

189.28516

Word Count

7,747

Sentence Count

408

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The legacy media is so eager to smear the trucker convoy, they seem to have abandoned all basic
00:00:05.640 tenets of journalism, like being fair and neutral, covering both sides of the story,
00:00:09.780 and making sure to fact check and verify reports before sharing them.
00:00:13.720 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:19.860 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. So as we've been covering on the podcast,
00:00:24.080 as you know very, very well, since the inception of the trucker convoy and the freedom convoy,
00:00:29.540 the freedom protests and rallies in Ottawa, the sort of establishment, the Ottawa establishment,
00:00:34.340 politicians, journalists, police officers, the people in charge of Ottawa have done their best
00:00:39.420 to try to demonize and discredit the truckers before they even got there. So in the week leading up to
00:00:44.540 the protest, Trudeau predicted that there would be violence at these rallies. The legacy media quoted
00:00:49.040 experts who told us that these truckers were extremists, that they were racist, and even that
00:00:54.080 they were terrorists. Well, what got instead was a large, incredibly peaceful, patriotic showing.
00:01:00.100 It was optimistic, it was joyful, it looked more like a winter carnival, and perhaps it looked like
00:01:05.000 a Canada Day family block party instead. Well, regardless of the images that we saw pouring
00:01:09.780 out from the ground in Ottawa, the thousands of Canadian flags being waved on Parliament Hill,
00:01:15.000 the Trudeau Liberals working in lockstep with the legacy media decided to fixate on two or three
00:01:20.040 flags, two or three individuals who were flying evil flags. These flags were not embraced by any
00:01:25.460 means by the crowd on the ground, quite the opposite. There was footage that went viral of a
00:01:29.820 man waving a Confederate flag, and he was sort of confronted and heckled and told to leave by the
00:01:35.160 truckers. That went viral, but the legacy media ignored that. Instead, they pretended that the two
00:01:40.400 or three evil flags represented the whole group, and that the whole group of protesters were the same
00:01:46.260 as the two people that were waving those evil flags. They equated the entire group as evil right-wing
00:01:51.820 Nazis. That sounds extreme, it sounds hyperbolic, but I'm not exaggerating. That is what they did.
00:01:56.080 They upped their rhetoric. They began to call the protests an occupation, a siege, an insurrection.
00:02:01.780 One city councillor on the CBC even called it treason. Well, one of the things that sort of leaves us
00:02:08.620 thinking is why were the media so unwilling to cover these protests in good faith? Why didn't they try to
00:02:15.280 get to know the truckers to tell their story? Usually when we see protests and blockades,
00:02:20.200 the media are positively covering them, covering them favorably. Why was it so different this time?
00:02:25.000 Well, to make sense of this remarkable gap between the positive nature of the protests versus the
00:02:30.200 incredibly negative coverage of it, I am pleased today to be joined by journalist and author Jonathan
00:02:35.320 Kay. Jonathan Kay is the editor over at Quillette. He's an op-ed writer for the National Post,
00:02:40.580 and he is a co-host of the Quillette podcast. He's an author and a ghostwriter, and his work
00:02:45.440 has appeared all over. He had a great recent piece over in the Washington Post. You absolutely
00:02:50.760 must follow Jonathan Kay on Twitter. His handle is at John Kay. He constantly and humorously pokes fun
00:02:56.940 of the woke left, and since the start of the convoy, he's done an excellent job at thoroughly
00:03:01.680 documenting and dispelling some of the multiple attempts to unfairly smear the truckers. So,
00:03:08.280 Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:03:11.080 Oh, thanks for having me on your show. Yeah.
00:03:14.060 So, the first thing, I mean, you follow this stuff closely. You've been in, I think, in and around
00:03:18.480 the legacy media for most of your career, and I just want to know, why didn't the media cover the
00:03:24.340 truckers in good faith? Why did it seem like a smear attack from day one?
00:03:28.720 I mean, I have sort of an odd position on this because, like, when the trucker convoy started,
00:03:33.600 I think I was probably, like, 80 or 90% opposed to it. You know, maybe unlike some of your other
00:03:42.020 guests or your listeners, like, I'm super into vaccines. I think mandates are fine. Like, I am
00:03:51.280 fairly progressive, or to use that word, in most of my views on the actual substance of it,
00:03:57.420 and the only time I started to become sympathetic to the trucker convoy was when I just started to
00:04:04.420 see the hysteria of those opposing it. It's just this classic case of one side overplaying their
00:04:11.460 hand in reaction to what they want to show is the radicalism of the other side. And by the way,
00:04:17.260 there were some whack jobs on the convoy side, and I entertained all the stereotypes because I live in
00:04:23.340 Toronto, you know, it's like, oh, these trucks are going to come by, and it's going to be awful,
00:04:27.760 and maybe there's going to be extremists and stuff like that. But then, yeah, when I started to see
00:04:32.700 the footage, I was like, okay, I don't necessarily agree with these people. But it's not like this is,
00:04:37.100 you know, stormtroopers marching to Poland in 1939, or anything like that, which if you had,
00:04:42.500 if you read the social media feeds of some liberal MPs, they just completely lost their mind about it.
00:04:48.680 And, I mean, what surprised me was like, it wasn't just white people either. There was,
00:04:56.720 there was, I think there was an Indigenous drumming circle in support of the protest.
00:05:01.340 On the Quebec side, you saw a lot of seat truckers, because the trucking industry there is,
00:05:06.320 is very diverse. So, if the political class and the journalistic class in Ottawa had simply
00:05:16.200 maintained their composure and said, look, this is going to be an annoyance for a couple of days.
00:05:21.420 There's going to be a lot of traffic, there's going to be a lot of gridlock. But, you know,
00:05:24.640 we live in a democracy, let these people say their piece. And maybe even if like had politicians gone
00:05:28.740 to talk to them. And I think Trudeau, he's actually a fairly charismatic politician. If he'd
00:05:33.680 actually gone out to talk to these truckers and say, I don't agree with you, but, you know,
00:05:37.840 tell me your piece, I'm willing to listen. Which is, by the way, how Trudeau dealt with separatists
00:05:41.880 when he first became a politician. He respectfully listened to them, even though they were trying
00:05:46.700 to break up Canada. Then I think things probably would have been dissipated early. And I think
00:05:54.300 Trudeau and progressives in Ottawa, I think like they would have ended up better off. Now, if you look
00:06:00.760 at some of the opinions, people who oppose the trucker convoy at first are starting to come around
00:06:05.960 to it, just because they're so put off by the hysterical overreaction to it. And I guess I
00:06:10.820 would put myself in that camp. You know, I'm one of the smug and sufferable progressives, maybe that
00:06:15.780 some of your listeners don't like. But there's only so much smugness and progressivism I can put up
00:06:22.360 with before I say, look, you know, this is not, it's not an insurrection. It's not treason. It's a bunch
00:06:30.240 of people saying stuff you don't like. And I get that people in Ottawa don't like, I mean, I live in a
00:06:35.420 neighborhood in Toronto that if a guy double parks his Q8 outside someone's house, like sometimes
00:06:39.740 they call the police. Like, you know, I don't like traffic. I wouldn't want people honking their
00:06:44.960 horns outside my house. I get that. And you've had people in Ottawa who for, you know, two weeks have
00:06:49.560 had to put up with it. I totally sympathize with their position. But it's essentially a garden variety
00:06:55.700 trade off at this point between civil liberties and the right to protest, and the right of a city to
00:07:01.480 say, okay, enough is enough. Get your trucks out of our city. Like this kind of trade off,
00:07:05.920 democracy is working out all the time. It's not helpful to cast it in the rhetoric of insurrection
00:07:11.500 or war or terrorism. And by overplaying their hand, the critics of the convoy, I think have given a gift
00:07:18.200 to the people who are organizing it, even if you think they're radicals.
00:07:21.900 Well, and I think to independent media as well, because I mean, I've seen True North's audience
00:07:26.560 really grow in the last few weeks, because people feel that they really can't get the
00:07:31.020 truth from the legacy media. People in the convoy, this is what I find really interesting,
00:07:34.620 talking to, like you said, there's a lot of young, sort of new Canadians that are part of the convoy
00:07:39.260 that for whatever reason, in their community, they feel they're opposed to vaccines, they really hate
00:07:43.400 the mandates. And they feel really almost surprised and hurt by the fact that they're being smeared,
00:07:48.820 because they're usually on the progressive side of these things. Like I follow a bunch of these
00:07:53.080 guys on Instagram, and they were sort of part of the whole reconciliation, defund the police crowd
00:08:00.020 last summer, two summers ago. And now they're on this side, and they're being smeared by the
00:08:04.740 Prime Minister. I want to talk a little bit about Justin Trudeau, because I just remember that you
00:08:08.340 worked with him, and you know him. And it does seem like he has changed. I mean, he used to host these
00:08:13.360 town halls where he would take questions from anybody.
00:08:15.880 Including, by the way, some of those town halls, you look at the footage, there's people with
00:08:19.460 swastikas, like they have a flag. And there's, and by the way, just to be fair, the people who went to
00:08:24.620 those town halls with Trudeau with swastikas and the flag, they weren't Nazis. They were people who
00:08:30.320 were stupidly using Nazi symbology to smear their opponents as being Nazis, which is the same as the
00:08:40.000 idiots that you saw at, like there's two or three of them, but of course, the media shows footage of
00:08:44.880 them endlessly. There were two or three idiots who showed up at the trucker convoy, who had flags. But
00:08:50.320 if you look at the flags, they are trying to use Nazi imagery to attack Trudeau. Personally, I think
00:08:57.060 it's insane to compare Trudeau to a Nazi or as a fascist, like, whatever you think of him. But the media
00:09:03.500 intentionally ignored the fact, these are not testimonials of Nazi belief. These aren't people
00:09:10.460 saying, I'm a trucker, and I'm a Nazi. They're people saying, our opponents are channeling Nazi
00:09:15.440 ideas, which is stupid, and hateful. But it doesn't mean they're Nazis. And also, there were like two or
00:09:21.720 three of these nutbags. Like, and so as you said, you know, their presence was exaggerated. But even to
00:09:27.100 the extent that they were depicted, even the depictions of them was itself a kind of lie, because it was
00:09:32.860 falsely implied that they were actually there to signal Nazi belief. And to be fair, the same is true of
00:09:39.840 these nutbags who showed up at Trudeau events with swastikas on the flags. Although actually,
00:09:44.980 that said, there is one image of Trudeau actually signing a neo-Nazi flag, where the guy concealed
00:09:51.580 it. This is, if you go on YouTube, you can see it. It's crazy. The guy concealed the neo-Nazi flag,
00:09:56.480 Trudeau signed a corner of it. And then after he was showing how, look, Trudeau signed a Nazi flag.
00:10:01.300 To my knowledge, that's like one of the few cases where you actually had some wackadoodle who really did
00:10:08.440 seem to believe in Nazi ideology and got close to a mainstream politician.
00:10:13.300 Well, he must be one of maybe 10 in the entire country, because it's not like that ideology is
00:10:17.900 present and aware, despite what I think the media want you to think. It's funny, because I saw that
00:10:22.340 you shared that on Twitter, Jonathan. And it's like, if a guy with a Nazi flag shows up at a Trudeau
00:10:27.280 event, the headline is, you know, this highlights security concerns of how close they can get to
00:10:32.840 Canadian politicians. When a Nazi guy shows up at a quasi-conservative rally, it means that everybody
00:10:39.180 at that rally is a Nazi, which is quite the difference. But I wanted to ask you, because
00:10:43.680 yesterday we saw Joelle Lightbound, who is a liberal MP, really articulate guy, come out and
00:10:49.520 basically just criticized Trudeau for the change in tone and seems like strategy, that they used to have
00:10:56.300 this very positive uniting message where they never treat Canadians, you know, that the Canadians are
00:11:01.940 always have access to the charter and this sort of really positive vision of Canada. And in the last
00:11:09.320 like six months or so, we've seen a really negative barrage of sort of hateful rhetoric towards the
00:11:14.660 people who they disagree with when it comes to vaccines and mandates and the entire lockdown,
00:11:21.100 COVID lockdown. It seems to me like Trudeau is in some trouble. I mean, he hid from the protesters,
00:11:27.540 he went into hiding, he came out with a really, really over the top loaded speech, accusing the
00:11:33.260 protesters of all these insane things that we're talking about. And then he has a member of his own
00:11:38.300 caucus come out and just say, you know, we should be doing better than this as liberals. You mentioned
00:11:44.320 that you think that he's changed quite a bit since he first came into public office. Do you think he's
00:11:49.280 in trouble? Or do you think that he'll just sort of, this is just wash off him like, like, like usual?
00:11:54.640 Look, Trudeau has been dismissed so many times. I don't know if people watching this,
00:11:59.740 do you remember in times of yore, there was something called elbow gate, where Trudeau,
00:12:04.340 like, you know, it was some kind of minor fracas in the commons and Trudeau stormed around and just
00:12:09.740 by sheer accident, like his elbow hit the chest of some female NDP MP. And, you know, at the time,
00:12:17.680 Thomas Mulcair, I think was, was the NDP leader at the time. And it was like, the whole thing was
00:12:21.080 dramatized. And you had columnists saying, you know, this is the end of the, you know, Trudeau's
00:12:26.140 honeymoon period. And, you know, forevermore, he will be defined by elbow gate and all this.
00:12:31.500 And then like a week later, people forgot about elbow gate, like, you know, Trudeau has been
00:12:35.480 written off many times falsely. And I don't, I certainly don't know that this is the end of
00:12:41.240 the liberal romance with him. What I can say is that it's been very educational for me,
00:12:49.640 not just in regard to Trudeau, but in regard to how politics changes people. Because when I met
00:12:53.660 Trudeau, and I helped him with his book, I was struck, he wasn't, he's a nice guy. And like,
00:12:59.580 I think his desire to unite the country, and I can just see people turning off this podcast,
00:13:04.200 as I say this, like, I just, I think he just lost 1000 subscribers. But I'll say he was a nice guy.
00:13:09.500 I think he was genuine patriot. The book was published in 2014, called Common Ground. I thought
00:13:17.400 it was a lot of it was just a sort of love letter to Canada. And then what really changed in 2017,
00:13:24.980 with Canada 150, where progressives decided that Canada's brand is no longer over a wonderful beacon
00:13:31.600 of hope and tolerance in contradistinction to the United States, which is evil, we're actually a
00:13:37.340 genocide state, that's, you know, built on a mountain of indigenous skulls. And all our political
00:13:43.440 work is going to go into smearing our own country. And, and Trudeau went hard into that. And it was
00:13:50.540 around that time that it changed. And to be fair, if you look at the pattern of Canadian prime
00:13:54.440 ministers, by the time they're in their second or third term, they have become so co-opted by the
00:14:00.020 people around them, to make everything they do a tribalized attack on their opponents, because
00:14:05.720 people around them don't care about whatever it was that got them into politics 10 years ago,
00:14:10.700 they care about winning the next election. So this trucker convoy sweeps into Ottawa,
00:14:15.080 and you got a bunch of 28 year olds around him saying, Oh, this is awesome. Let's smear the
00:14:18.820 conservatives as Nazis. And, and, you know, by the way, Harper became a kind of like very divisive
00:14:25.720 tribalized guy in his, you know, as his tenure as prime minister wore on it, this happens,
00:14:31.200 this happened to Kretchen, Martin, Paul Martin wasn't around long enough for it to happen to him,
00:14:35.400 but I guess he came into office like that. And it is a cautionary tale for politics. Because I will say
00:14:40.980 this, the Trudeau, who I met, seven, eight years ago, was uniquely positioned to march into
00:14:51.280 a group of truckers and say, Hey, I don't agree with you. But like, let's talk. He would have done
00:14:57.840 a photo op in a truck. He would have listened to them. The guys was very charming. And maybe maybe
00:15:04.600 he still maintains that capacity for charm. But he would not have stayed in some undisclosed location,
00:15:10.960 sneering about all these supposed hate mongers who'd come to the city, he would have gotten off
00:15:16.260 his ass and actually met these people, even though he disagrees with them. That was the Trudeau of 2014.
00:15:21.280 15, 16, maybe even 2017, 2018. And to watch him become this kind of sullen hermit trying to score
00:15:33.720 points with hyperbolic attacks on conservatives. It isn't just about Trudeau. It's about how politics
00:15:39.380 changes people, conservatives or liberals alike. And if anybody is thinking about getting into politics,
00:15:45.020 it's a depressing spectacle, because I think politics changes people. And this
00:15:51.220 is like a case study in how that happens. Interesting. Well, I don't share your views.
00:15:56.020 I always thought that Trudeau was very arrogant, very Quebec centrist, that he didn't have a lot
00:16:00.740 of respect for Western Canada. And then he wasn't necessarily a very thoughtful person. He hadn't
00:16:04.560 really thought through the core issues of the country. But I think that you're right,
00:16:09.980 that he would have probably gone and spoken to the truckers, perhaps the French ones, perhaps the Quebec
00:16:14.480 ones. I can't really imagine him even five, 10 years ago, going out to Western Canada and
00:16:18.620 speaking, speaking to people in Alberta. He and I grew up like within one or two kilometers of each
00:16:23.580 other. I myself am very, even though I'm an Anglophone, you know, unlike Trudeau, I don't
00:16:27.900 speak fluent French. I have the same parochial fascination and love of Quebec as he does. So
00:16:33.780 like Trudeau was very much of my tribe. And we're all creatures of our background. You know, if I grew up
00:16:40.020 in Western Canada, I would have maybe similar views about Quebec, like I don't know. But I do know he was a
00:16:47.100 person of good faith. I know that, you know, unless I'm an incredible, incredibly misjudging his
00:16:54.160 character. And it's true, you know, he wasn't was never, I think he's very smart. He was never an
00:16:58.820 intellectual. It is absolutely true that some of his, you know, the things he said were kind of trite. And, you
00:17:07.540 know, he wasn't a deep thinker about Canada, especially maybe Western Canada. But he was a person of good
00:17:15.900 faith, and I think a politician of good faith. And I don't think anybody who's watching what he and the
00:17:21.860 Liberal Party have done over the last two weeks, can can say that anything they've done has been of
00:17:26.200 good faith. It's been about fear mongering, and trying to smear a flawed and diverse protest movement
00:17:33.560 as just a bunch of fascist hate mongers. And it's been disgusting to watch.
00:17:37.660 I completely agree with that part. I the thing that strikes me about Trudeau is I always thought
00:17:41.520 this is something I thought about him from the first time I interact with him politically in 2011.
00:17:45.980 That he that he hated conservatives more than he loved Canada. Now, maybe you think that he,
00:17:51.160 you know, that's true now letter to Canada.
00:17:52.580 That's true now. It wasn't true of Trudeau when I met him. It's 100% not true of Trudeau when I met him.
00:17:56.980 100%. And I know sometimes history is written backwards, and you impute the flaws of a person
00:18:03.640 that they have now to the point of political conception. I know your listeners aren't going to agree
00:18:09.780 with me. Trudeau was a decent guy who gave conservatives a fair shake. I mean, yes, it was
00:18:14.980 often, you know, he had to spout the language of liberal propaganda, he was part of the party.
00:18:19.660 But I don't, you know, look, he broke bread with separatists.
00:18:26.100 Separatists who literally were trying to break up the country in the fashion that the so called
00:18:30.840 insurrectionists of the trucker convoy are falsely accused of, like, he gets points for that for me,
00:18:38.440 you know, Papineau, his writing, a lot of separatists in that writing, he'd go door to
00:18:42.500 door and talk to these people. Imagine him doing, imagine him going truck to truck and talking to
00:18:46.980 people, which, by the way, if he did it, he'd score so many points. Like, it would be such a
00:18:52.040 wonderful spectacle. I'd love for him to, he can still do that. He can still do that. But of course,
00:18:56.360 he won't. I know, I agree. I think that if we had a prime minister who was willing to engage with
00:19:01.380 the truckers and willing to take their concerns seriously, I think that this, this whole standstill
00:19:05.780 wouldn't be as it is, because people would feel at least that their voices were heard. And part of
00:19:10.080 the frustration that I see from so many of the protesters is just the sort of way that they've
00:19:14.200 been written off and the way they've dismissed it. I wanted to ask you one other question, though,
00:19:18.580 John, while I have you on the podcast, I know that you are a, someone who thinks a lot about free
00:19:24.220 speech, and the sort of history of free speech, you know, alongside this smear that we've seen
00:19:30.100 on the truckers and the demonization of them. On the other side of the border down the US,
00:19:34.740 we've seen sort of a similar smear campaign unleashed against Joe Rogan, incredibly popular
00:19:41.220 podcaster. And I wanted to, I wanted to have your take on this, because I know you commented on it quite
00:19:47.740 a bit. But it just seems like we're in such a wild place in our society where someone who is so
00:19:53.880 incredibly popular, but also who seems like a genuinely good person who asks honest questions,
00:20:01.240 he's intellectually curious, he has a huge audience because he so many people relate to him. And yet,
00:20:07.580 the way that he's covered in the media, the way that the media and some of the people in the media
00:20:11.760 trying to smear him, it's like, it's unrecognizable from anyone who watches the podcast. So I know you
00:20:18.380 have a lot of thoughts on this. I want to I want to switch gears and ask you about Joe Rogan.
00:20:22.060 So it's a very analogous phenomenon, whereby Joe Rogan is not someone I agree with, especially on
00:20:28.600 vaccine stuff. I'm very pro vaccine. I'm not one of these people who on social media, you know,
00:20:34.820 like my name is john k triple vax boosted, you know, I'm wearing five masks, like, but I am in
00:20:40.580 terms of public health, very conventionally minded, I support vaccines. I don't support forcing people
00:20:45.800 to get vaccinated. But one of the reasons I came on the show is to tell people like, on social media,
00:20:50.320 if you follow me, you know, I'm not a Kool-Aid drinker. I'm not a slavish follow of orthodoxy.
00:20:54.900 But I'm somebody who has looked at the science and vaccines save lives. They can save the lives
00:20:59.740 of people listening to this if they're not vaccinated. The government should not force
00:21:02.620 you to get vaccinated. But I'm telling you that it's a good choice. And I'll end my speech there
00:21:07.120 because no one wants to be hectored about this. Well, but but but in terms of vaccines, I mean,
00:21:12.100 Canadians have by and large, I think over 80% of Canadians are now vaccinated. And,
00:21:15.500 and and if you go into the sort of the age groups that are most at risk, like people over the age
00:21:20.900 of 70 over the age of 80, it's like 99%, which I assume that the only people who are not getting
00:21:25.580 vaccinated in that age group is because they're too old and frail and and that there is concern.
00:21:30.080 Well, well, anyway, let less than 1% are not vaccinated. So almost almost everyone who needs
00:21:34.480 to be vaccinated is vaccinated. Your statistics are correct. But I'm just saying I tweeted this the
00:21:38.120 other day, an ER doctor at my health club, we had a half hour conversation about this. He's
00:21:43.560 had two patients, two Omicron patients who have died under his watch. One was a 90 year old who's
00:21:49.060 from a family of anti-vaxxers. One was a 79 year old who said he, quote, didn't have time to get
00:21:54.420 vaccinated. So anyway, end of speech about vaccines. In terms of Joe Rogan, it's similar to the convoy in
00:22:00.560 the sense that I don't, I don't listen to Joe Rogan's podcast. I only listen, I don't, the only
00:22:04.640 podcasts I listen to are like nerd ball historical podcast. People always assume, oh, you must listen to
00:22:09.280 Sam Harris, you must listen to Jordan Peterson, you must listen to Rogan. It's like, no, I don't listen to any of those
00:22:12.880 things. And the only reason I'm on Rogan's side at all in terms of this insane campaign to get him
00:22:20.580 thrown off Spotify is because of these, these people who insist that someone they disagree with
00:22:26.080 shouldn't be on a platform that has a diversity viewpoint. Bill Cosby has some kind of podcast
00:22:31.200 or whatever on Spotify. Like they didn't come after him, but Joe Rogan comes and like, it's insane.
00:22:38.060 You had Olivia Chow, prominent Toronto leftist. Yesterday she tweeted, I am not making this up.
00:22:44.180 She tweeted how disgusted she was that Spotify has Joe Rogan on it. And she says, that's why I use
00:22:51.760 Apple music. It's like Apple, really? Those, you know, slave labor commanders in China. Like people
00:23:01.760 are using this issue as a sort of virtue signaling thing. If you just ignore Joe Rogan and say, you
00:23:07.820 know what? I don't agree with him. I'm vaccinated. Like, you know, I don't encourage my friends to
00:23:13.680 listen to, but whatever, then people like me would have no basis to defend Joe Rogan because on the
00:23:20.320 substance of the views, I disagree with Rogan. The only thing that makes me want to defend him is
00:23:24.940 people trying to get him canceled. And it's the same with the trucker convoy in substance. I disagree
00:23:29.040 with their views about the mandate. But then when you come after them and call them Nazis and try and
00:23:33.280 take away their money and say, you know, like let's bankrupt these people. Let's, let's publish
00:23:38.120 pictures of their trucks and their, their, their corporate identity identifying data. So we can make
00:23:43.240 sure they can't feed their children. I'm like, you just push someone over to the other side. Cause as
00:23:48.740 soon as you do that, I don't care what their views on mandates are. I'm on their side. If your goal
00:23:54.700 is to ruin their lives because they have views you disagree with. And that's what the left is
00:23:59.300 just completely overplaying our hand, not just on vaccines, not just on Rogan, on gender, on race.
00:24:05.140 I mean, this is, this is why I think next couple of election cycles, you're going to see a lot of
00:24:12.060 populists get elected. And then you're going to have pundits in Canada say, oh, this just proves how
00:24:16.460 racist Canada is. No, it doesn't prove how racist Canada is. It proves that you overplayed your hand
00:24:21.360 when you had the chance and now you're paying the price for it. Just, I know, I'm now keeping you
00:24:27.060 for a longer than I said I would, but I had to send another question. You're someone who,
00:24:30.720 like you said, you're of the same ilk as Justin Trudeau. You come from the progressive side of
00:24:35.200 things. You surround yourself seems like with, with progressive minded people. What's happening
00:24:40.040 on your side, on that side of the aisle? Why, why are they overplaying your hand? Why are they so
00:24:44.480 zealous? Why are they so angry and hateful and insistent upon not, not just refuting the ideas of those
00:24:51.160 they disagree with, but, but erasing them and canceling them and pushing them off the public
00:24:55.100 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, uh, cultural
00:25:05.960 Marxism, whatever that means. Um, from my vantage point, it's, it's, it's a simpler phenomenon. A lot of
00:25:13.080 it is laziness. You have a lot of progressives, many of them well-intentioned people, many of them,
00:25:19.220 my friends, uh, coworkers, uh, coworkers, uh, coworkers who spend a lot of their life in
00:25:24.900 ideological silos and their Facebook groups, uh, their book clubs. It's people who agree with them.
00:25:32.900 They have the same hashtags. They have the same views. They have lost the ability to defend those
00:25:37.340 views because their intellectual ecosystems don't permit any descent to be raised. So when they see
00:25:44.420 any sign of dissent that's geographically proximate, like somebody driving a truck through their city
00:25:50.820 with a Canadian flag on it, that says no to mandates, they no longer have the intellectual
00:25:55.280 tools or reflexes to actually have any kind of debate or discussion about the substance of the
00:26:01.340 issue. The only thing they know how to do is say, aha, that's one of the Nazi insurrectionists I have
00:26:09.080 been warned about on my Reddit group or whatnot. And so it's just this sort of like, um, it's like an
00:26:15.680 immune system that gets activated with antibodies. And the only language they have is, is the language
00:26:23.200 of they're antisemitic. They must be Nazis. They're insurrectionists, or they look for what they imagine
00:26:30.180 to be analogous historical episodes, such as the January 6th, uh, riot at the Capitol in the United
00:26:36.240 States, even though we're in Canada, it's a completely different movement, completely different
00:26:40.360 country. The whole January 6th thing, that's what they know about. It's a, I think it's called the
00:26:45.480 availability bias. Uh, when they look at psychology, that's what's in their mind. So that's what they,
00:26:51.960 they label it as. And I, I I'm much less convinced about like esoteric theoretical analyses, uh, based on
00:27:02.120 how people have been convinced. A lot of it to me is just laziness, people who don't have the capacity
00:27:07.200 or will to defend their views, except by recourse to lazy, hysterical slogans about Nazis. And then
00:27:14.280 of course, when they see, uh, some solitary idiot with any kind of Nazi sign, they seize on it. They're,
00:27:22.800 I mean, it's, it's like some kind of intellectual orgasm they have, which is like, aha, this proves
00:27:27.500 everything I've been ranting about for the last week because some, some fruit loop is, is holding
00:27:33.320 a sign. There's a guy who was in Toronto. He was holding this like handmade sign for his website.
00:27:39.440 He had some website called Goyim TV. I'm sure, I'm sure you've seen this photo. He's holding a thing
00:27:43.980 about how all he calls them a pharma judicals. All these Jews like me have, um, are behind the vaccine
00:27:51.200 thing. And he's clearly an antisemite and he was using the protest to, to promote his crazy website
00:27:58.540 called Goyim TV. The only reason anyone's ever heard about this Goyim TV website is because the
00:28:04.500 progressive media has focused on this guy relentlessly as somehow being a spokesman for
00:28:08.540 the movement. And he's not, it's been documented. They actually took this guy's sign away, ripped it up
00:28:14.620 and sort of like threw this guy out of the protest because they were so disgusted by his antisemitism.
00:28:18.580 I actually, I'm into free speech and I'm Jewish. I don't think you should take his sign and rip it
00:28:24.340 up. I think everybody deserves free speech, even antisemitic hate mongers and outliers like him.
00:28:30.220 But the fact that they actually took away his sign and tore it up means that this guy's an outlier,
00:28:36.240 but nevertheless, you go on progressive social media, this guy's become a celebrity. So the people
00:28:41.400 making these antisemites a celebrity are not people in the trucker convoy. They're the progressives
00:28:47.220 who profess to be fighting antisemitism. And so whether they make a celebrity out of this,
00:28:51.680 I visited this guy's website just to see what kind of like crazy crap he's gone on it. But
00:28:56.340 in a million years, I never even would have known about this, this crazy website, were it not for
00:29:01.120 progressives making the insane claim that this nut somehow represents the convoy. So we live in a
00:29:07.920 really weird times.
00:29:09.540 I think that's why the protesters, the organizers would have to, like, I agree that they shouldn't rip up
00:29:14.600 this sign, but they should say you have to leave because if you stay here, they're going to pretend
00:29:18.440 that you're part of the move that you're supposed to.
00:29:19.940 Or somehow stigmatize them or somehow just like have people standing around saying,
00:29:23.940 we have nothing to do with this guy. Like, not give the media any pretext to, like, close crop a
00:29:32.800 photo of him somehow, you know, being associated with the protest. Yeah, there has to be a mechanism
00:29:38.240 mechanism to stigmatize him. But, you know, people were saying, oh, should we let communists
00:29:43.440 parade the hammer and sickle rallies? Yes, we should. Or Palestinians who go around, we just
00:29:48.660 saw this in Toronto a week ago, Palestinians going around demanding the eradication of the state of
00:29:53.080 Israel. So somehow the media didn't make a big deal about that one, even though like the whole
00:29:57.320 protest was based around an anti-Semitic premise. I see lots of swastikas at those rallies.
00:30:03.240 No, but those are social justice swastikas, so they're permitted. But like I, there are plenty
00:30:10.940 of groups, conservative groups who want to ban those people from marching, which is hypocritical.
00:30:15.280 They should have the right to march. People should have the right to express crazy views. It's part of
00:30:22.720 living in a pluralistic society. What we should be able to count on in normal times is a media and a
00:30:32.160 political class who don't ascribe the craziest, most stigmatized viewpoints expressed at a protest
00:30:39.060 to the protest movement as a whole. And this is, by the way, something the leftists had to confront
00:30:43.160 with. We had an author at Quillette, more and more of my authors at Quillette are socialists who are
00:30:47.480 disgusted by the way the left has been hijacked by snobbish identity-based movements, who was saying
00:30:54.940 this guy used to march on 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,
00:31:03.860 there's some whack job would come in with like, I love North Korea, or, you know, I love communism,
00:31:09.780 or Stalin was right, you'd have Trotskyists and Maoists, and just like every, every fruitcake
00:31:15.100 in the neighborhood would come out with this homemade sign about how amazing communism is.
00:31:19.020 And right-wing media would seize on that and say, aha, these are a bunch of Trotskyists who are just
00:31:24.520 trying to like turn Canada into, into a communist dictatorship, which was, of course, it was, it
00:31:31.920 was conservatives playing the same trick that progressives are now playing. Both sides do this.
00:31:37.220 Well, I don't, I don't, I like, I hear that a lot that people say, oh, well, conservatives used to
00:31:40.840 be the one that were for censorship, and they were the ones that were trying to smear everyone. Well,
00:31:44.220 it's like, I know, but I didn't, it's, it's like, it's like, I didn't, right? So it's like,
00:31:47.800 it's like, you're, you're saying, okay, well, what you guys are doing, what, what the left is doing
00:31:51.640 now is, is comparable to what the right was doing in the eighties. It's like, well, if I think if I
00:31:57.400 was live in, or if I was active in the eighties, and I was a political commentator, I would say that
00:32:02.000 that was wrong too, because I think, I think this was the nineties. So in the nineties, I went to law
00:32:07.500 school in the United States during the nineties, and a big movement among conservatives, this is in
00:32:13.340 the United States, was to pass an amendment. And you've actually, Trump even talked about this
00:32:18.700 at one point, an amendment to prevent the burning of the American flag on the pretext that well, it's
00:32:26.140 not that's not really a form of speech, it's kind of a desecration of a national symbol. This was a big
00:32:30.860 deal, they were trying to cancel flag burners. Now, I think burning a flag is stupid. But you should be
00:32:36.900 able to burn a flag. But you had conservatives, who were trying to insist that that wasn't real
00:32:43.560 speech, it was violence, which directly mimics what progressives say now when they say, well,
00:32:48.820 you know, when you express support for JK Rowling, that's not speech, that's a form of trauma.
00:32:53.000 Like, they learned that from conservatives. So, you know, I disagree.
00:32:58.260 I don't know. I don't know that they learned that. I think it's probably just like you said,
00:33:01.880 a lazy instinct that something is happening.
00:33:03.320 Look at last summer. Last summer, we saw countless Canadian statues get pulled down,
00:33:09.340 right? We saw not just people who were involved with residential schools, but, you know, Queen
00:33:15.100 Victoria, Queen Elizabeth. I think there's a statue of Captain James Cook in Vancouver that got thrown
00:33:21.000 into the ocean for some reason. You know, we saw desecration of national symbols by the left. And we
00:33:26.700 were told that it wasn't violence. It was understandable and justifiable and all part of the reconciliation
00:33:31.860 process. I didn't hear a lot of conservatives saying that, you know, that that should be
00:33:37.620 considered treason or that that should be. I mean, people said, hey, we should uphold the rule of law
00:33:42.620 and vandalism shouldn't be okay. It's not part of speech.
00:33:46.140 To me, the most disgusting example was in Montreal. They pulled down a Johnny McDonald statue. This was,
00:33:53.660 I think, I forget if it was Black Lives Matter or an indigenous rights protest, but the two kind of
00:33:59.240 merged. And the video was online. And then as soon as it came down, it was just a complete criminal act.
00:34:06.100 And then a protester went over and pretended to hump John A. McDonald's head. Like the whole thing
00:34:10.880 was just, I'm not like, I don't fetishize Canadian history as like some sort of sacred text, but I was
00:34:15.980 watching it. I was like, whatever side these people are on, I'm on the other side of it. And,
00:34:20.300 and federal politicians actually stare at their shoes. I'm talking about like Trudeau and liberals
00:34:25.960 to their credit. I think there were like Quebecois politicians who actually, they were the,
00:34:31.720 they were the voice of reason standing up for John A. McDonald, that, that Anglophone
00:34:35.900 assimilationist who normally they might, you know, be skeptical of because if they've nationalist
00:34:42.460 Quebecois sympathies. In fact, actually this is, we were talking before about the liberal MP who's
00:34:47.540 become the voice of reason and has pushed back against Trudeau. No surprise. He's from Quebec.
00:34:52.820 Quebec. And as, as I said on Twitter earlier, many of the disaffected civil servants and liberal
00:34:59.020 politicians who feed me scoops and, you know, will DM me with, um, sometimes they're just looking
00:35:05.460 to Kvetch because they can't do it among their liberal friends. They do it to me because they
00:35:09.180 know, um, I have an appetite for that. Um, they're from Quebec. Quebecers have, are, are, are,
00:35:17.260 are much less cowed by this sort of Anglophone progressive left-wing social panic that has become
00:35:23.860 dominant since 2017. And by the way, I should say a lot of them are immigrants because you've
00:35:29.500 got people saying, look, I didn't come from Iran or, uh, Eastern Europe to, to Canada, the land of
00:35:35.920 freedom. So I could see a repeat of this kind of top down autocratic demand for ideological purity.
00:35:46.740 Uh, I want no part of that. And, and I, my, in my view, the people who are going to save the Canadian
00:35:51.920 left from their social panic are going to be Quebecers and immigrants because here in Toronto,
00:35:58.080 in particular, uh, old stock, as Stephen Harper once called them old stock Anglo upper middle-class
00:36:05.540 wasps have lost any ability to embrace common sense or to reject the sanctimonious pieties of
00:36:13.720 American imported progressive ideological. They just, they're there. They don't have the capacity
00:36:20.920 to do it. They feel they have no moral capital whatsoever to exercise independent thought.
00:36:25.220 They slavishly follow whatever hashtag comes down the pipe 15 minutes ago. And we're going to have
00:36:30.780 to look to, to Quebecers, uh, and immigrants, uh, you know, this is my Eastern Canadian bias. I don't
00:36:36.520 live in Western Canada. So maybe my perspective would be different. Um, but, but they are, I hope going
00:36:42.720 to rescue the Canadian left with some assistance from old school socialists who realize that the real
00:36:49.900 divide in our society is class-based. It is not skin color based. Uh, and, and I, more and more,
00:36:57.260 I have time for old school socialists who have a class-based analysis of our society. Cause you've
00:37:01.720 got people like me, I'm living large, right? Like, uh, you know, um, but the reason I'm living large is,
00:37:07.140 it's, it's, it's cause of class it's, you know, it's not because I have white privilege or I'm cis or,
00:37:11.380 uh, you know, white privilege does play part of it. Racism is a real thing, but God, I would love it
00:37:17.740 if the left got back to traditional Marxism, right? You know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I agree
00:37:23.680 that, you know, what, what I think what we're seeing with a trucker convoy is like a class uprising,
00:37:27.900 like, uh, people who have had to live with COVID people who have had no choice other than to go out
00:37:33.560 there and face it and live with it. They're used to it. And they're sort of pushing back against all
00:37:38.380 the middle-class Canadians who are very comfortable with the new normal of working from home, living from
00:37:44.780 home, having minimal social interaction, it's a lot easier, uh, for them. And then maybe they
00:37:49.660 have more apprehension and they're more nervous about going back into a hundred percent. And it
00:37:54.140 is, but it's totally class-based in my neighborhood. My neighborhood is full of consultants, lawyers,
00:38:00.660 journalists like me, um, who are like, Oh yes, I don't care how long it takes, how many zoom meetings
00:38:06.080 I have to take. Um, you know, we're going to fight this thing and have quarantine for the next five
00:38:12.080 years. It's like, yeah, of course you feel that way. You know, you can charge 400 bucks an hour to
00:38:16.100 someone for a zoom meeting. I think you'd sing a different tune if, you know, you owned a restaurant
00:38:20.500 or, you know, you were into event management or you had a bar or, you know, you were a trucker or
00:38:26.900 something like that. Like if you had a job that required you not to like nod your head on zoom
00:38:32.380 meetings all day and get paid for it, like it's, it's a totally class-based divide, but, but in order
00:38:38.820 for them to justify their class privilege, they have to pretend it's about race or because otherwise
00:38:45.520 they can't import the, the culture war into a domain that they feel they have a moral advantage
00:38:52.680 on. Cause they know that if you look at a class-based analysis, they're the douchebags, but they have to
00:38:58.820 pretend it's the people who are delivering food and trucks and stuff who somehow like lack their magical
00:39:04.840 insight into social justice. And, and, and this is the thing that's turning people like me, I think
00:39:10.000 away from progressive politics. Cause in every other respect, if you look at my lifestyle, I should be a
00:39:15.480 doctrinaire progressive, but I just can't, I can't drink their Kool-Aid. It's just, it's, I can't do it
00:39:21.000 anymore. Well, it's, it's really refreshing to hear your perspective. I know you, you know, often the
00:39:27.260 people I have on the show are more on the conservative side. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing
00:39:32.200 your views, even though they're different. It's crazy that anyone calls me a conservative, like
00:39:35.260 only in a country that's gone as crazy as Canada politically could, could anyone even consider,
00:39:40.200 but I look at like my trolls on Twitter. It's like, Oh, you hardcore conservatives, you're all the
00:39:44.320 same. Really? Hardcore conservatives. Why? Because like, you know, I read Harry Potter to my kids and I
00:39:50.400 don't think JK Rowling's like, you know, Hitler adjacent, that's what makes me a conservative. Now you've
00:39:55.680 lost your minds. Right. No, they're certainly, certainly doing, um, a lot of, they're certainly
00:40:01.200 helping conservatives like me in, in, in pushing, pushing more Canadians, um, over to the sort of
00:40:07.680 common sense side. But I really appreciate your time, Jonathan. It's been great, uh, talking to you.
00:40:12.020 I appreciate all your insight and I hope that you'll, uh, come back and join us on the show in
00:40:15.540 the future. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is
00:40:19.860 The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:40:25.680 The Candace Malcolm Show.