The Critical Compass Podcast - February 20, 2026


Reddit is Not Doing Well with Alberta Independence ｜ Truck Talks with Mike

Topics
alberta independence movement on Reddit
Mentioned
Sugar Beats Orbiter Epstein Mike Klan
Having Honest Conversations w⧸ Everyday Albertans About Independence ｜ Jon From Alberta Discussing Fertility w⧸ Gender Dysphoric Kids Like 'Talking to a Blank Wall' ｜ Mia Hughes

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

174.11

Word count

1,160

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of The Critical Compass, Mike takes a look at the Alberta Independence Movement on Reddit, and is not happy with what he finds. First, someone vandalized the vehicle of a traitor to Canada, who happens to be a supporter of the independence movement. Second, someone else vandalizes a car belonging to a pro-Canadian patriot. Third, someone calls for the deportation of all white nationalists. And fourth, someone writes in to ask if they can be put on Epstein's island.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's check in on Reddit.
00:00:11.800 Hi guys, Mike from the Critical Compass here.
00:00:14.360 Got something today that's sort of equal parts, I guess, funny and also scary a little.
00:00:20.220 You know, I made the mistake of going on Reddit the other day.
00:00:23.160 I wanted to sort of see if on the Edmonton subreddit there was any talk of what we've got happening lately in the Alberta independence movement.
00:00:32.060 And boy, was I not disappointed.
00:00:34.480 So I'll put some screenshots on the screen here.
00:00:37.160 I've got it on my iPad.
00:00:39.120 Must be a Klan meeting today. 0.78
00:00:41.720 We've met this guy before.
00:00:43.080 He's a patriot.
00:00:43.800 He's an Alberta independence advocate.
00:00:45.840 Looks like this picture is taken potentially outside his house.
00:00:48.540 I don't see any address there.
00:00:49.720 So thankfully he wasn't docked, but this is obviously somebody who saw this in their neighborhood and thought that they'd, you know, associate the Alberta independence movement with the Ku Klux Klan.
00:00:59.800 So we can tell right from the start that this is going to be a nice, unbiased and balanced thread.
00:01:05.040 So let's read some of the comments.
00:01:06.420 So we've got Enrique69Shokwave saying, man, that would suck if those tires got slashed.
00:01:12.020 Response to that says, it would suck if somebody witnessed you encouraging this or partaking in it.
00:01:16.160 And finally, in this thread, if you ever witnessed somebody vandalizing the vehicle of a traitor to Canada, no, you didn't.
00:01:22.660 Just increasing the rhetoric here a little bit.
00:01:24.500 Random Zebra Sponge says, 1.00
00:01:26.340 These orcs are so fucking stupid. 1.00
00:01:28.800 Spelled orc wrong. 1.00
00:01:30.460 Sovereignty from what?
00:01:31.520 Joining the U.S. is now the equivalent of joining North Korea. 0.72
00:01:35.280 Wouldn't be nice if we could just drop them all off on their own island and never hear from them again.
00:01:39.980 And SnakeEyes1377 says, we can drop them on Epstein Island. 0.58
00:01:45.600 They might run into their heroes.
00:01:47.280 Misspelled again.
00:01:48.160 So this one was fun because it's just so silly and so many typos.
00:01:53.300 TessRactivism says, and this is funny because this is an old urban legend about putting sugar into a gas tank.
00:02:00.840 It makes like the engine explode or something.
00:02:02.580 Make that gas he burns to deliver the thoughtful messaging a little sweeter, but only from Alberta-grown sugar from Sugar Beats.
00:02:10.560 Got to keep it on message.
00:02:11.960 Elbows up. 1.00
00:02:13.280 You know, they're stupid because they think that this is real. 1.00
00:02:16.040 But they think that, you know, if you put sugar in this guy's gas tank, it's going to cause his engine to blow up. 1.00
00:02:20.440 So that's pretty fun.
00:02:23.020 And then just to end it off here with probably the most on-the-nose comment.
00:02:28.020 Orbiter says, low-intelligence Nazi on display.
00:02:31.080 I guess I don't know what I expected going on Reddit.
00:02:33.880 Hoping to find some nuanced, you know, rational discourse.
00:02:37.900 But you just got to be aware that these people are out there.
00:02:41.440 There's a very obvious campaign online.
00:02:43.960 And I don't really know, I don't know, we'll ever necessarily know if it's organic or if it's paid for or if it's bought it or whatever.
00:02:50.540 But we've got rhetoric about very obvious on-the-nose calls to destroy property, to potentially cause physical damage to people, calls for, you know, deporting and, you know, calling us racist or white nationalists or that our heroes are the people who are involved with Epstein or whatever.
00:03:12.940 Like, it's very silly, sort of, you know, junior high, high school level political discourse.
00:03:19.140 These are obviously not very nuanced or politically informed people. 0.71
00:03:24.100 Probably very young. 0.99
00:03:25.380 But something to keep in mind with young, ignorant, uninformed, loudmouthed, sort of silly people like this is they can easily be worked into a fervor and be influenced to cause real damage. 0.99
00:03:39.500 So, got to be aware that these people are out there. 0.99
00:03:41.480 This is what the other side is talking like.
00:03:43.960 And by the other side, I mean, you know, outside of maybe if we're in a little bit of an echo chamber ourselves on X, you know, following people who are supportive of the movement and other independence advocates, we might get a little bit siloed and not really realize how aggressive the rhetoric is on the other side.
00:04:01.060 So, just a little look into that so you're aware.
00:04:03.560 I wanted to read a quote from C.S. Lewis.
00:04:06.380 This is from a collection of essays called God and the Dock.
00:04:09.460 He says,
00:04:09.960 Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
00:04:15.860 It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
00:04:20.560 The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep.
00:04:23.020 His cupidity may at some point be satiated.
00:04:25.680 But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
00:04:31.820 This is applicable here, I think, because the types of people who are commenting the things that I just read to you, they truly believe that they are the moral good guys here.
00:04:43.340 They believe that we, Alberta independence advocates, are an existential threat to the country, to themselves, perhaps to their safety.
00:04:54.060 And so, they're behaving in a way that demonstrates the type of tyranny that they wish they could exercise over us.
00:05:02.480 We shouldn't be allowed to have a referendum.
00:05:04.220 We shouldn't even be allowed to talk about having a referendum to separate from Canada.
00:05:08.860 Because that's a moral evil.
00:05:11.200 And they're the arbiters of morality.
00:05:12.980 And so, if we're evil, and they're good, well, what is the limiting principle there to stop them from doing whatever is necessary against us, to stop us from committing moral evil?
00:05:25.820 So, bear it in mind, it's always best to not get involved in any sort of physical altercations or anything like this.
00:05:33.300 Obviously, I can't, you know, tell you guys to not defend yourself if you're attacked, like, really seriously in person.
00:05:38.860 But, best to avoid it in general, there's already laws on the, like, you can't vandalize people's properties, you can't physically attack them.
00:05:46.940 So, we have recourse for that.
00:05:49.400 But just keep in mind, when you're out there, you're doing your canvassing, you know, we've read stories, unfortunately, of people being harassed and intimidated and even pretty serious attempts to really scare people out of being a canvasser or going and signing the petition for referendum.
00:06:05.200 So, you know, there's some pretty, pretty broken people out there that want to do some serious harm, and they aren't really interested in having a discussion about it.
00:06:14.420 So, we have to be aware that they exist, we have to hold firm to our principles, get our signatures, have a successful referendum, make sure that they have nothing to hold against us, because we know that they will call us anything, they will potentially do anything to stop us, and, yeah, we've got to maintain the moral high ground.
00:06:34.840 So, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.
00:06:39.400 Cheers.
00:06:39.540 Cheers.