The Candice Malcolm Show - Why did the legacy media smear the Freedom Convoy？ (Ft. Jonathan Kay)

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 1.00

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 1.00

00:08:44.880 them endlessly. There were two or three idiots who showed up at the trucker convoy, who had flags. But 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.57

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 0.99

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 0.99

00:15:16.260 his ass and actually met these people, even though he disagrees with them. That was the Trudeau of 2014. 0.99

00:15:21.280 15, 16, maybe even 2017, 2018. And to watch him become this kind of sullen hermit trying to score 0.77

00:15:33.720 points with hyperbolic attacks on conservatives. It isn't just about Trudeau. It's about how politics 0.88

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. 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.70

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 0.98

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, 1.00

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 0.90

00:27:51.200 thing. And he's clearly an antisemite and he was using the protest to, to promote his crazy website 0.93

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 0.96

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.66

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 1.00

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. 0.74

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 1.00

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 0.92

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 0.60

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 0.58

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.

The Candice Malcolm Show - February 10, 2022

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

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