In this episode of The Critical Compass, we discuss the recent riots in the UK, the gaslighting tactics being used by the media and politicians, and the potential link between the UK riots and the January 6th riot in the US.
00:00:00.000In the greater context, the more gaslighting there is, the more there's going to be a pushback from people to act or step up or act violently.
00:00:12.820So right now in the UK, you have, well, guns are banned.
00:00:18.840So all the violence is stabbings and the rates have gone up.
00:00:23.180You even have, in these cases, the gaslighting comes from the politicians and or the media saying that, well, us opening the floodgates and having people who do not share our values is not a problem.
00:00:37.880And what you're seeing with your own eyes is not happening.
00:00:40.620And the more that kind of top-down gaslighting that, this narrative is going to cause people to act with more hate than if you just had a honest and open conversation about this.
00:00:54.440The more it's left untreated and the more it's suppressed, it's going to happen.
00:01:04.100You will always get a push-pull with these kind of things.
00:01:07.980You cannot have this amount of pressure build up without some kind of a release.
00:01:12.140And either that release is through constructive dialogue or it's through action and violence.
00:01:17.480Hello and welcome back to The Critical Compass.
00:01:39.500Today we have, we're going to focus on a couple things today, but primarily on kind of what's happening in the UK right now as far as what some are labeling as a response to migrant crime of various types.
00:01:59.240Well, when then what others are viewing as yet another uprising of, you know, far right, white extremism, you know, nice, lightweight stuff like that today, James.
00:02:12.360Yeah, the UK riots are going on right now and there's no shortage of opinions on that.
00:02:17.440Maybe you summed it up correctly of, well, you have people roaming the street with weapons and then you have the gaslighting of the news and politicians saying that, well, it's these far right extremists that are inciting this violence.
00:02:35.520And they're not calling out the people pretty much like, if you're walking around with a knife, that should be like actionable for the police to actually go after those with the weapons.
00:02:49.280And right now we're almost seeing speech is treated more harshly when it comes to policing than weapons or violence.
00:02:59.260And this is very much tied to depending on what boxes you check off, depending on what shade your skin color is in UK right now.
00:03:09.660It seems like there are preferential treatment given to some groups and others not so much.
00:03:17.280Well, I think that what we're seeing is a response that to my eyes and maybe to my, you could say to my conspiratorial bent is sort of reminiscent of how I can't speak too much to the January 6th riots in the US.
00:03:41.220I can speak more to what we both know about the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
00:03:46.260This feels to me sort of at a fundamental level in a similar sort of way of you've got a coordinated response from a mainstream media or a kind of a journalistic talking point that everything you see happening in the streets right now is solely because of there are white racists in the UK.
00:04:13.460And they are unhappy sharing their land with immigrants.
00:04:21.620What I've got some examples of, I think we can probably get into this later, is some, it's sort of an interesting look into the history of what some of these judges who are laying down these really hefty sentences on these armchair rioters is the term actually.
00:04:42.340I should find, I should find, I should find that link, I will put it in the description.
00:04:46.020But yeah, as far as I know, and maybe you can kind of lay a little bit more of the background on this, but what really kicked this off, I believe, is what was effectively a triple homicide stabbing of some children at a, I think it was like a Taylor Swift, like, I don't know if it was a dance class or a singing class.
00:05:12.420Something like that, something like that, it was like a Taylor Swift-themed party or whatever.
00:05:15.760And this person isn't a, the person who did that wasn't an immigrant.
00:05:21.100He was the, he is the child of immigrants.
00:05:25.000But that, I think, was sort of the, what a lot of people who started this protest really viewed as kind of the last straw.
00:05:36.560Do I kind of have the background close?
00:05:38.880The, I think in that particular circumstance, you're more familiar with that part of it, but I've been following a lot of the kind of one-off, there's been like no shortage of stabbings and or attacks.
00:05:56.940There's the, the notable example of like, well, there is a migrant going around stabbing the police.
00:06:07.440In that situation, they were holding back the person trying to stop the migrant from stabbing.
00:06:14.660And one of the police officers got stabbed in the neck.
00:06:16.980You have that instant, you have no shortage of other violent events, which seem to be exasperated when you have a large influx of people who may, may not share the same values as the country that they're immigrating into.
00:06:34.120In this case, UK, it's been, these numbers have been shifting quite a bit.
00:06:38.340So, um, I, I think it can be a combination of events and then you obviously have one event that like, well, it just overspills at that point.
00:06:49.160It's just too much for people to ignore.
00:06:53.420Yeah, this is the, this is that, uh, article I was referring to here.
00:06:58.000Uh, first armchair rioter jailed for 20 months over online post inciting, quote, inciting racial hatred in the UK.
00:07:05.200Uh, yeah, so, um, comes the first person we jailed, uh, through following three, yeah, it was a, you know, okay, a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport.
00:07:15.200So, yeah, this, this term, uh, has been being, uh, repeated online, uh, which is absolutely incredible to me that this is a, that we're, this is a real thing and we're not living in fake dystopia land.
00:07:31.020But what are you, what are, what are you, what do you think of, what comes to your mind when you read a term like this and you see somebody getting jailed for almost two years, uh, for, for posts that he made online?
00:07:43.500Well, that is not a, this feels like something that would happen in Russia, um, you know, that would be cracking down on like social media posts.
00:07:55.960And from my understanding right now, the UK is, I think, leading in number of arrests for online discourse out of any other country they have the most.
00:08:08.220And we still, and we still, somehow we still label the UK as a free democracy.
00:08:16.200And if people can't speak their mind freely, is that still a democracy?
00:08:22.520Uh, cause who defines what inciting racial hatred is?
00:08:58.780Well, I'll tell you who, who, who defines that, James, and you're not going to like it because you're, uh, I fear that you're in violation.
00:09:12.600Did I just violate it or are you talking about other podcasts?
00:09:15.940You didn't think before you posted, James.
00:09:21.220And so the UK gov is going to, uh, apparently I should find the post and I should put it beside it, but they're apparently going to try and extradite, uh, Americans who, uh, who either, I don't know if it's just, if they've talked about it and make fun of it or if they, uh, uh, I suppose contribute in some way to the, uh, incitement of, uh, of racial hatred.
00:09:44.300So, yeah, this is a pretty, uh, this is a pretty clear, to me, it's a pretty clear example of these are the people exactly who define what is and what isn't hateful.
00:09:58.020Well, they take it very seriously according to, well, wait, wait, I'm just, I'm just reading this more closely.
00:10:33.280Yeah, this, this term, this, uh, online violence, this is a very interesting term and it's.
00:10:39.660It's not something that, uh, it's not something that, to me, like, I don't think that we've agreed that this is even a thing.
00:10:47.360Like, I don't think that we've, I don't know.
00:10:50.520I mean, I, I suppose that, you know, the UK is, is not Canada or the US, specifically the US with their speech protections.
00:10:56.140But this notion that words can be violence or that you can, like, so the, the reason that, that, that guy got 20 months was because some of his posts were, they said, were interpreted as encouraging people to, uh, I believe, uh, like set a hotel on fire or something that was housing, uh, migrants.
00:11:20.640Now, I understand that in, there are certain provisions in, in free speech laws in, in many Western countries that don't have carve-outs for speech that incites violence.
00:11:34.560But can you say that you, I suppose that when I hear something like that, I think more of it in the way of, like, if you're in a group of people physically somewhere, physically present somewhere,
00:11:48.060and you've got, you know, a Molotov cocktail in your hand, or your buddy does, and you, and you whip your buddy up into a fervor and get him to throw it, and then that causes some, some damage.
00:11:59.880Obviously, that's a, that's an incitement that, you know, you, you helped encourage your, your buddy to do something stupid like that.
00:12:06.080However, when you're, when it's separated by a screen, or like a phone, or a computer, and who knows how many, you know, tens, or dozens, or, or hundreds of miles,
00:12:17.940can you really say that you have the same ability, the same ability to affect somebody's actions via online violence?
00:12:30.060Am I making a distinction without a difference here?
00:12:31.460Um, I think there might be, like, uh, another gradient to this, is like, if somebody had a group, and let's say, well, let's even look at Antifa,
00:12:43.880they are organizing to disrupt, and actually, their online behavior transcends into a actionable, like, on-the-street violence,
00:12:55.360because they are going in, they are disrupting, and many of them, um, there's been no shortage of attacks.
00:13:02.360To people who had, uh, they were not deserving of the attacks from Antifa, and that was online discourse, but that was, you, in those cases, that is a organized group, and they're planning something.
00:13:16.900So I think you'd have to make an exception there, versus somebody shouting into a megaphone, and, again, you can't really distinguish between, like, a serious call to action,
00:13:30.700somebody just venting, or somebody being sarcastic, or satire.
00:13:36.940Like, how do you differentiate between the tone?
00:13:39.340Because if, unless you make a note of sarcasm, people-
00:13:43.600I even did this today, when I jokingly said, somebody made a post about spinach, saying spinach was, uh, bad for you, and I jokingly supported that, by telling people that, well, we evolved eating spinach, and we have proof of it, because, um, we have cave paintings of our ancestors defending their spinach crops against bully mammoths.
00:14:08.000And some people believed it, because I didn't put, like, I didn't say it was sarcastic.
00:14:13.380And it's, so you, it's getting very difficult to discern between serious posts and sarcastic posts, or an actual call to violence.
00:14:25.300And we also can't be responsible for, like, there are people who are mentally ill, and will take something sarcastic, and they'll interpret it in different ways.
00:14:38.360So, how much responsibility do we have for every single interpretation of something that we may or may not say?
00:14:44.680Yeah, yeah, that's a big one, I think, because it's, it comes down to a, uh, I think it really depends on how you view personal agency.
00:14:53.940If you believe that you, if you believe, like, if you fundamentally believe that people are, uh, in control of their own actions, uh, and are responsible for their, for their own actions, can you ever, can you ever truly be said to have been influenced by somebody just saying something online?
00:15:14.140Like, is there, is there ever really that exact one-to-one correlation of, well, this guy said on, on his Twitter feed that I should go, you know, harm some immigrants, and so I went and harmed some immigrants.
00:15:29.660So, not only am I getting disciplined for it, but the guy who posted that and influenced me is getting disciplined for it too.
00:15:37.000Well, I don't know, I don't know about that second step, because I feel like, I feel like if you're gonna do something, like, if you're gonna firebomb a hotel, I feel like that was already in you.
00:15:50.360You didn't need any, you didn't really need that final push.
00:15:52.980That is something that you were capable of doing.
00:15:54.880Well, there, there's another aspect to it is, um, I think the more in this, in the greater context, the more gaslighting there is, the more there's gonna be a pushback from people, um, to act or step up or act violently.
00:16:15.600So, right now in the UK, you have, well, guns are banned, so all the violence is stabbings, and the rates have gone up.
00:16:26.540You even have, um, somewhere like Sweden, which is, for their numbers of rape right now, they are one of the higher countries, um, I think per capita, and they've seen a demographic shift.
00:16:43.060So, it is not, like, Swede, like, natural-born Swedes doing, doing that as people who do not.
00:16:52.280Yeah, we have, and we have the, the, the data for that.
00:16:54.600I believe, actually, you shared that with me the other day, so we can, we can link to that.
00:16:58.680So, in these cases, the gaslighting comes from the politicians and, or the, like, the media saying that, well, us opening the floodgates and having people who do not share our values is not a problem.
00:17:13.060And what you're seeing with your own eyes is not happening.
00:17:16.400And the more that kind of top-down gaslighting, that distorted messaging, that this narrative, as long as it's perpetrated, this narrative is going to cause people to act with more hate than if you just had a honest and open conversation about this.
00:17:55.840And either that release is through constructive dialogue or it's through action and violence.
00:18:00.900Yeah, and you have a, um, you also have an institutional problem, uh, in the, in the justice systems in these countries where it feels like there, you have a two-tiered system where, uh, the people who are committing these crimes that prior to there being this floodgate opened, as you put it, uh, aren't being punished in the same ways that those crimes were being punished prior.
00:18:29.780I don't have examples offhand, um, but anyone can look and see these.
00:18:36.260There's plenty of examples that were posted, you know, on, on Twitter lately about, you know, however you want to, you know, give an example.
00:18:45.500And there's a, there's a, there's a case of it, you know, like I, I, off the top of my head, I recall like a 17-year-old, uh, um, I think it was a Pakistani immigrant who wasn't, didn't really receive any sentence for,
00:18:59.780raping a 12-year-old because, as this kid put it, he just didn't know that that was rape.
00:19:05.900So, like, there's, you, you can, you can see these scenarios if, if anyone else did them.
00:19:14.320If, if anyone else did these actions, behaved in this way, they would be punished much differently.
00:19:21.120And, like you say, I think people see enough examples of this or read enough examples of it in the news and, and they, they build up a, uh, a model in their mind of, well, no, this isn't being taken seriously.
00:19:35.800And if I don't do something about it, I, I can't, I can't trust my institutions to do anything about it.
00:19:42.340So what is there left to do other than vigilante, a vigilante response?
00:19:51.200We're seeing that in the United States.
00:19:52.980Um, you can directly see, uh, areas will, like you have, uh, very democratic run cities that have the highest number of repeat effects.
00:20:05.800And that's directly tied to like a catch and release system.
00:20:10.540You have this also in Canada and very much this happens more in the cities where, again, maybe these are drug related crimes or these are fueled by drug.
00:20:24.000And somebody is, they are on the streets causing problems and they're well known to the police and because of judges and the framework that they have, they're not really, they're not doing anything.
00:20:39.860And I think people are noticing as well.
00:20:41.840And it just adds up to just more chaos and less safety for the average person.
00:20:49.220Um, obviously if these people are reoffending, there's no deterrence.
00:20:53.660Um, so the UK, I think is just a few years ahead of Canada.
00:21:01.200Uh, if these same patterns would continue.
00:21:07.380And, uh, and we, and, and speaking of, of this kind of legal, but what could be, you know, legal capture, it could be viewed as I'm going to share this thread here and we don't have to go through all the points, but this is a very worrying thing that, so this, um, Pagliacci the hated, um, this, um, this person actually, her name's Anna Slats.
00:21:28.300Uh, she's the, uh, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Redux Mag.
00:21:33.640Uh, it's a journalistic, uh, it's an online publication, uh, just reading from their site with a focus on covering crime, child predators, and women's rights.
00:21:44.900And, uh, she posted this thread that she compiled of, uh, so I'm just going to read it here.
00:21:51.040Almost every judge I've identified as being involved in the rapid prosecution and incarceration of individuals who participated in the Southport riots has a history of letting convicted pedophiles walk free with no jail time.
00:22:03.680So here's a short thread on two-tier justice.
00:22:06.860Um, so, and I think it's important that we do name these people.
00:22:10.820Uh, Judge Andrew Menary, Menary sentenced William Nelson Morgan, 69, to 32 months in prison for refusing to move out of the way of police officers.
00:22:21.040Um, Menary previously led a pedophile who collected, I don't even know if I should just say these words, but we can just read them.
00:22:28.720Uh, let him walk with no jail time because his lawyer said he had good character.
00:23:24.880Judge Francis Laird sends Charlie Bullock, 21, to 18 months in prison for throwing rocks at a line of police.
00:23:30.880That, so, just go back here, 32 months in prison for refusing to move out of the way of police officers, and 18 months for throwing rocks at a line of police.
00:24:23.680Sentenced Leanne Hodge in 43 to two and a half years for shouting racist abuse at a police officer.
00:24:31.180So Sloan had previously let a pedophile caught with 10,000 images of schoolgirls walk free because he hadn't looked at the images frequently enough.
00:24:44.980Judge Neil Rafferty denied bail to even those arrested with viewing the remote remote, the riots remotely.
00:24:51.060Yeah, this is, this is another disgusting one.
00:25:03.080This is, there's just so many examples of these.
00:25:07.700Just absolutely morally reprehensible actions that are not being punished.
00:25:12.740This is, this is specifically more on the, like, on the sexual abuse side where you can find, you can, yeah, because this is what Redux focuses, focuses on.
00:25:24.320You can find some people have made similar lists.
00:25:28.140And if we find it, we'll add it to the show notes of, like, well, here's somebody who only got six months for stabbing, who stabbed somebody else, got six months.
00:25:39.760And here's a longer term sentence for something for inciting violence or some hate speech.
00:25:46.100So what we're seeing is, this is the inversion of this.
00:25:56.080I don't think the, like, you don't accidentally get to this.
00:26:01.000This is an inversion of what should happen in reality.
00:26:03.820And I think no, no rational human looking at this just from a purely, purely, like, without any ideology, just from a purely moral sense, I don't think you would, you would reevaluate the moral weightings of these actions.
00:26:22.920The only reason you're getting this is because of ideological beliefs that reframe the whole moral landscape, and it's distorted the whole moral landscape, and that's through this DEI lens.
00:26:40.640Yeah, you have a, and you see it in Canada, too, just to bring it back home here, where, when you mentioned the catch and release policies that Canada has, well known for having, it, and I think this is actually explicit in the wording.
00:27:00.660I'd have to find an example of it, but I do believe that they actually do word it in the way of, basically, the crimes that people from marginalized communities commit must be weighted differently than crimes of other communities.
00:27:18.660You know, members of non-marginalized, which only means white in the Western world, right?
00:27:23.340But, um, the, the crimes of marginalized, people from marginalized groups must be treated differently, because, I guess the implication is that they couldn't help themselves, like, they just, you know, they were, they weren't given a fair shake, and so they're, um, you know, they, they didn't know what they were doing, or they didn't, um, you know, they, they, they couldn't, couldn't have helped it, because, whatever reason.
00:27:51.760Like, to me, that's such a, it's a very patronizing, very, uh, very infantilizing way of viewing human beings, because, because I don't, I don't believe that that's actually the case.
00:28:03.020I, I, I, I can see, I can see an argument for why, you know, somebody who maybe always lived in poverty, uh, you know, behaves in a way psychologically that, uh, you know, maybe they, they can, they steal, you know, because they never had anything.
00:28:19.980So, the only way they could ever get anything was, like, I understand that, but if you're a person who has a, as a criminal history of, uh, you know, of abuse, or, or, you know, very serious, you know, acts of violence, things like this, that, to me, that shouldn't matter, because the actions are happening anyway.
00:28:38.920It, I don't, I don't think the next victim of this person particularly cares about that person's backstory if they, if they could have been, if it could have been prevented.
00:28:47.600Exactly. Yeah. The, uh, there is something to be said about echoes of trauma or echoes of abuse through generations, through families, that, that is something that, like, you, by the same way you can say, like, oh, that person had really good parents, and some of the values came through because of that.
00:29:08.440Yeah. Yeah, that good parenting, and the reverse, and the inverse is true as well.
00:29:13.260They've used language to distort this, and it actually changes how we view people.
00:29:20.540Um, so marginalized, that means that somebody else did that to them.
00:29:28.220It takes away personal agency from the individuals.
00:29:32.340It's saying, well, the system created you this way, and you don't have free will, and any hardship, or any difference in outcome, is the system's fault, and not your fault.
00:29:44.660And it, it, it, with that kind of wording, or if you're saying, well, Canada's a racist country, and all the cards are stacked against you, like, that's a pretty hopeless situation.
00:29:54.840Like, that, it doesn't empower individuals.
00:29:57.900What it does is it powers, empowers a state to find solutions for them.
00:30:02.700Same thing with homelessness, somebody's not a homeless person anymore, they are unhoused, because somebody unhoused them.
00:30:14.300Yeah, they're experiencing homelessness, or somebody unhoused them.
00:30:17.660And again, that takes away from personal, any sense of personal responsibility, or the hope of invoking change by yourself, without a large government to set the framework for you to change your life.
00:30:38.080If somebody has, if somebody, if an institution, or a history of institutions have placed you in the margins, then, then by that framework, only they can remove you from those margins.
00:30:53.060Yeah, it's a very, um, I was having this kind of an unrelated discussion, actually, with some family members the other day about, um, why the American Constitution is such a unique one in the world.
00:31:08.080And, and, and, the, the, the term, and I can't remember, this isn't my idea, I can't remember who I heard it from.
00:31:14.240They were talking about the, like, why the word inalienable, another big one, is so important in that, in that language in the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, I, I don't know.
00:31:26.780But the, the term, the, the, uh, the notion of inalienable rights, which means, inalienable means even you can't deny yourself those rights.
00:31:35.800Because, because they're instilled by God.
00:31:39.000So, not even you can deny your own humanity.
00:31:41.460And that's a very, or, or your, or the, the natural human rights that you were born with endowed by God.
00:31:48.540Like, that's, that's a, those are very powerful words that not a lot of people view themselves as having.
00:31:55.060A lot of people view the rights they have in their society as being, uh, bestowed upon them by a state, or by a government, or by some, some institution.
00:32:05.960And if you view it like that, well then, they can also take those away from you.
00:32:10.420So, there needs to be a recognition, I think, kind of across the Western world now, that there are certainly, like, it's not, it's not racist, or, or xenophobic, or, uh, like, it's none of these words to believe that you have the right to live in a peaceful and harmonious way.
00:32:32.340Like, those, that is something that you should view as something that, simply by you existing on this planet, you are owed.
00:32:40.020And, and not by a government, but by just the fact that you're here.
00:32:44.640So, maybe this is a little bit too philosophical, but.
00:32:50.940I, I think, I think that's a perfect point to, to reinforce.
00:32:54.660And I think you see that a little bit, um, it, it overlaps into this debate on immigration.
00:33:04.360Um, I can't remember where I first heard this, but somebody was proposing that there's, there's almost a country, its culture, and its values are not just, it's not just the individuals living right now in the present.
00:33:24.660It also reflects the future and the past.
00:33:27.980So, it's everybody who lived and it was all their blood, sweat, and tears that went into creating the framework, creating the system that we have, creating the culture, and creating things that work.
00:33:41.260And then, right now, we're living that, and we're all, obviously, we're handing it off to the future generation, to our children.
00:33:49.320And we almost have this responsibility to honor the sacrifices and the way that things are set up to even get us to this point.
00:33:58.840And, and I think there's a lot that, first of all, we, we have a lot of revisionist kind of policies of, well, we named a road after somebody and we think they're a bad person now.
00:34:10.980And we retroactively deem them a bad person.
00:34:15.240And by all their accounts, they were a, they were somebody who built the community.
00:34:20.480They were an upstanding citizen and they are deemed a racist by somebody's definition now.
00:34:28.660By our modern definitions, outside of the context of when they lived and what they were doing outside of that.
00:34:35.260We, instead of talking about it and saying, well, this is where we are at now, we are renaming things and trying to bury history.
00:34:45.220And we are, we almost treat history as, well, if you have this idea of like, well, Canada is a systemically racist place, then of course you would want to pretty much dismantle all of history.
00:35:03.080You'd want to rewrite it and dismantle the system that is actively racist.
00:35:06.500So this motivates people to both kind of attack any, and it's, it's not straight white males.
00:35:16.600It's, they're kind of the crux, but it is any Western values that got us to this point.
00:35:23.140And a lot of them would be hardworking white males or Christians or that are maybe at the, they're attacked more, they're more at the tip of the spear of these attacks of this dismantling, but it's not just them.
00:35:38.500It's more, it is Western values that are being dismantled.
00:35:42.260And then as they're being dismantled, well, there's this idea of this global citizen.
00:35:48.020Well, what does it mean to be a global citizen?
00:35:50.340And with that, they're trying to have these open borders that, well, your country doesn't belong to you anymore.
00:36:20.820Is it our responsibility to open the doors and solve all the problems or are those problems best solved in the countries that like, if, if there's hunger and poverty in countries,
00:36:33.900do we solve it by having people move away from that or do we create the systems?
00:36:39.280Do we help empower people in those countries to create the systems to fix the problems?
00:36:44.260Sounds like you want to spread some freedom there, James.
00:36:52.720Well, this is a, this is another point of you'll, you'll hear people talk about, well, well, in Canada, well, we're getting it's doctors and engineers that are coming over.
00:37:03.500Like, well, that's partially true, but is that necessarily the best thing as well?
00:37:09.340Is it the best thing to have the most, is it the best thing to have the most talented people from these countries?
00:37:17.980These are highly creative, highly skilled people, high functioning individuals that would normally put those skills into increasing the livelihoods of them around, like the people around them in the communities of wherever they're from.
00:37:34.540If all that talent leaves these places, if there's no incentives, then you are lacking the creative talent and the creative individuals to solve some of these problems in those places.
00:37:46.420So they are losing some of this capability to solve these problems for themselves.
00:37:51.760So we are sapping their solution away from them.
00:38:05.000I know that's a, that's a talking point, but even if it was, that's a whole other discussion, but our, uh, Canada's, uh, licensing and, and, uh, certification systems in our institutions is crazy.
00:38:17.460Like it's, it's, it's one of the worst in the world from what I understand and just a small anecdote.
00:38:22.420Um, my, uh, my mom used to work, um, in, uh, in oral pathology, which is a, a very, uh, specialized form of dentistry where, you know, an oral pathologist is essentially a doctor and a dentist.
00:38:37.480Uh, and, and so there are, um, very few offices, uh, in the country for this specialty.
00:38:44.260Uh, and they had people working in that department as lab techs who were, uh, licensed orthodontics or orthodontists in other countries.
00:38:56.440So you, you have somebody who was working as an extremely high end specialty, uh, dentist in an, in another, and this is, uh, this person I'm thinking of is from, uh, I think from Venezuela, Colombia or Venezuela.
00:39:11.940Uh, and, and they could only, this is an orthodontist who is now working as a lab tech in Canada.
00:39:18.700They came to Canada to work as an orthodontist because that's what they were doing in their modern medical system country.
00:39:27.040It took, I think, I think it took like six years for this person to recertify everything completely and start working in orthodontics again, which is, it's ridiculous.
00:39:38.380I'm like, well, there's a certain amount of specialists that every, like the world needs a certain number of, like there's going to be a certain number of health problems and you will have a certain number of specialists.
00:39:49.420And if some of them are coming to Canada and they're not even using their skills for that specialty, then that's worse than them just staying at home.
00:40:01.840And, and I want to take it back actually to a point you made about, uh, you know, um, Western countries, specifically North America, Canada, and the U S you know, how, how responsible are we for, for taking these people from across the world?
00:40:15.360We have people talking out of both sides of their mouth when they say, you know, the, the same people who want you to believe that Canada and the U S are these, you know, irredeemable nations, uh, with histories of slavery and oppression and residential schools and, and just horrifying racism and bigotry.
00:40:37.100We're that, but also we're the destination of choice for every single country in the world right now, who is experiencing some sort of refugee crisis.
00:41:10.020You, you wouldn't have so many people wanting to come over if the conditions here for them were really that we're like worse than where they came from.
00:41:23.260Um, it's also, you have to acknowledge implicitly that it's worse where they came from.
00:41:28.600You have to acknowledge that if there, there is a reason why there are people, uh, dying in, in rafts, crossing the English channel to get to the UK.
00:41:38.060Like there, there's a reason why they're doing that.
00:41:40.200So one other point on this is, uh, you have this, this specific idea that, well, racism in North America and Canada and the U S is at its highest.
00:41:51.920And they think it's just, well, it's a racist country and they distort the numbers and they treat it as a endemic that we need to fix.
00:42:01.480And what we don't realize is that there is plenty of racism in countries just because somebody has, somebody could be two shades of Brown in the middle East and they have plenty of reason to hate each other.
00:42:14.820Same thing in India, they have a caste system.
00:42:18.480There's no shortage of racial hatred for, well, even sometimes it's, it's just tribalism focused on some quality.
00:42:29.560And sometimes these qualities matter and sometimes they don't, sometimes you can't even define these qualities.
00:42:35.000A caste system is like, well, the same thing of like, well, you're upper class versus lower class.
00:42:40.060Your, well, your family bloodline is better than somebody else's.
00:42:44.280Therefore you should be treated a different way.
00:42:47.020These things exist in these other countries and we're opening up the gates and to think that these same problems and these same patterns and these same systems and, or racial tensions wouldn't be brought over.
00:43:01.700They're just, they're not erased when they come here, just because Canada is a welcoming place.
00:43:06.460Well, if it's just a welcoming place, what you're doing is you're just opening the door for new forms of tribalism to take hold.
00:43:16.880Because if you impose, let's say if we had immigration, we had strict cultural, if we say like, well, you got to adopt these cultural values and Canada is super strict on it.
00:43:27.800So maybe you'd be filtering out and you wouldn't have some of the good things from other cultures.
00:43:33.500Maybe that'd be lost, but you'd also be filtering out some of these like negative effects, this tribalism that'd be brought on.
00:43:41.360We're already seeing it with like interracial group violence in Canada.
00:43:46.620But like there, between protests, between the, there, there's no shortage of it and there'll be no shortage in the future is my, my feeling anyways.
00:43:58.460Yeah, there, there definitely used to be a, um, a bit of a, I would say more of an emphasis, even in Canada of, um, of we, we really had a strong emphasis, I would say in the, and I can only use my personal experience for this one.
00:44:19.020Um, cause I'm a first generation Canadian.
00:44:20.660So when, what my parents told me anyway, that when they, when they were attempting to come, when their families were, were trying to get into Canada, it was a long process.
00:44:30.860It took a long time, like many years, multiple years.
00:44:33.580Um, you had to do, you had to, uh, you know, certainly pass a very difficult citizenship exam.
00:44:41.820You had to know a lot about the country there, there were people at the time they, you know, kind of was a running commentary.
00:44:47.280They said, you know, that, um, people would think that, uh, a newly, uh, a newly, um, made Canadian citizen often knew more about Canada's history than people who were born here.
00:44:57.960You know, so it was, it was something that was very highly, um, prized was, was a, was the, the willingness to adopt Canadian values and to, to become a member of this new, like the, the recognition that the reason why you tried so hard to get here is because you know that you're going to have
00:45:17.260better life here than from where you came.
00:45:19.720So there was, there was a bit of a, um, there was more, I guess it's hard to ascribe these emotions to people you don't know, but it, it feels like there was maybe a little bit more gratitude from, from the people who were coming, but, you know, in the sixties and seventies and kind of the, that first sort of major, you know, wave of immigration to Canada than there is now.
00:45:42.080Well, it was, it almost sounds like you're describing the process was more difficult.
00:45:46.260It took more work on the individuals and there was a sense of accomplishment for learning and passing the test and getting through that.
00:45:55.160And even I like have some friends who recently immigrated who are upset at how easy it's getting for people to immigrate because it almost devalues all the effort they went into and the steps.
00:46:13.680Or if somebody comes in illegally and is granted like a permanent residence, like afterwards, instead of like deporting them, they say like, well, you came here, uh, it's still not the best, but we'll, we'll let you stay anyways.
00:46:30.180That is insulting to people who worked hard and the many people who come to Canada, they love Canada, they do a great job and they, they fit right in and they, um, they help make Canada a better place.
00:46:43.040So yeah, it is, it is difficult because we are a country built on immigration to a certain point.
00:46:54.660Canada is maybe a little bit different than the UK of the UK is even, it's tough because well, well, and then you have Ireland and you have populations that were pretty homogenous.
00:47:07.760So their problems are going to be, it's going to be amplified because of how homogenous the people were in Canada.
00:47:16.560We've, uh, we've been, obviously we've had quite a mix of full, like you think about how many different countries in Europe and how many different cultures, even if Canada was primarily European for a certain amount of time, you still had a mix of European cultures.
00:47:40.840Countries that those kinds like the Nordic countries specifically have a very long history of being very, um, actually somewhat isolationist in their, in their policies and, and their, you could see for a number of years prior to a very recent kind of shift in immigration policy, specifically in, uh, in like Sweden, like you say, uh, uh, the Netherlands also is suffering from this in a, in a, it's a different way, uh, you know, being very homogenous and very, you know, that, uh,
00:48:10.640And the trouble is when you say this, at least for me, I always feel like I have to couch it in like, well, I don't mean white people are better, you know, obviously we're not saying that, but, you know, you could make the same argument for like, you know, a country like Japan, you know, Japan is a very, extremely homogenous society, very, very historically isolationist, like, for hundreds of years, you like, you couldn't even go to Japan, you know, Japan really only opened themselves up to the world, and, you know, I think maybe
00:48:40.640less than 150 years ago. And they have, that's a similar thing that you can say of, you know, the Nordic countries where extremely low crime, very prosperous in different ways, a very, you know, a very efficient sort of wealthy, you know, high upward mobility society. And, you know, those aren't white people, they're Asian people, you know, so it doesn't have anything to do with the race so much as it has to do with if there are certain
00:49:10.620things that I believe you can only properly accomplish as a nation, if you have a group of people willing to work towards similar ends, who have similar desires.
00:49:22.340Yeah, it's like a homogenous in how tight knit their culture is, how well their values are shared. And then like, you need that for a high trust society. And I think Japan's one example of that. And we have many examples of low trust
00:49:40.620societies. But one other point on Japan is like, I would never dream of, like, I would never go to Japan and be disrespectful in public and take pictures of a geisha. And like, that would, I know, culturally, that wouldn't fly with them.
00:50:05.220Imagine me going there, and they get angry at me, and I'd call them racist. What if, what if the, like, what if they flip this, like, if the script resembled how we treat these situations in North America, or in, in the UK right now, you would say, well, somebody imposing, well, somebody going in and
00:50:27.660doing something against some of these established cultural values of the place they're moving to, or visiting, somehow have more power, and they're shielded from criticism.
00:50:41.120And you would never see that in anybody traveling to Japan. They don't, they don't operate that way. They don't let it slide.
00:50:48.040Yeah. Yeah. The, the power of, the, the way that, and I don't know, like, I don't think it's only explained by, like, like, self-hatred, or, or self, like, uh, like, guilting, you know, like, white guilt, or whatever they, whatever you want to call it.
00:51:04.300I don't think it's solely explained by that. I think that's a, that's a big part of it, but the, the power of labels in our culture is very strong.
00:51:12.500You know, people, people have a very, and I, and I think that as well is sort of, is, is an example of, you know, like, there's such a, the, the words, like, you know, calling somebody a racist, or, or xenophobe, or, or, or a sexist, or something, it wouldn't have the power that it does in discourse if we, if we truly were that as a society.
00:51:35.880Because then people wouldn't care if they were called that. It wouldn't matter to them. You could, you could freely admit to being such, and it wouldn't, it wouldn't impact you in any way.
00:51:44.200But we are so strongly averse to those ideas that, that even the threat of being perceived as it is so distasteful to us.
00:51:53.820Yeah, if you had an entire country of, like, truly sexist people, that would not be, that accusation would be like, it wouldn't be giving any new information.
00:52:07.760It wouldn't be discerning between anybody. It would not be, you couldn't accuse anybody. You just assume everybody is that.
00:52:14.900So the reason, yeah, we, we actually care about being called these labels. And I, I think now we're starting to see a pushback because it's being overused.
00:52:23.780You're seeing people who, well, they'll say that, like, if you haven't been called a racist or a bigot or misogynistic for just saying, just having a conversation, then you're not discussing things of importance.
00:52:39.200You're not asking the right questions because it gets thrown around so much. I think that's a, uh, it's a, uh, initiation that everybody has to go through is be called a bigot at least once.
00:52:52.940It's a strange place to be in. Yeah. To know you're doing something right. You're being called those things. Uh, I'm going to share this. Actually, I think a good segue into this. This is a, um, a, uh, very interesting, uh,
00:53:09.200double quick, quick video here of something Christopher Hitchens said back in 2009 versus what the current prime minister of the UK is saying. So this is, uh, this refers to, uh, what we were just talking about as far as terminology goes. Uh, and in this case, specifically, uh, Islamophobia. So this is a very, uh, I think timely, uh, quote that this, uh, that I hypocrite found. I'll play that right now.
00:53:33.380Give it up or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you. This is very urgent business. Ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you resist it while you still can. And before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing you will be told.
00:53:53.380You can't complain because you're Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred, for example, or, or, or bigotry.
00:54:05.840Whereas it's only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion. Watch out for these symptoms. They're not the symptoms of surrender.
00:54:13.380Very often ecumenically offered to you by men of God in other robes, Christian and Jewish and smarmy ecumenical. These are the, these are the ones who hold open the gates for the barbarians.
00:54:25.740The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open for them. And it's your own preachers who will do it for you and your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.
00:54:35.540Resist, resist it while you can. And if you wonder what will happen if you don't, look and see how a cricket team in Middlesex in England had to change its name by force last week because it was called, it had been for years, the Middlesex Crusaders.
00:54:50.940Look and see how stories about little pigs can't be taught to children in English schools anymore, lest offense be taken by the religion of peace.
00:55:05.540One of the things that is coming up over and over again is Islamophobia.
00:55:10.000And when you can see the stats, you can see the numbers rising, particularly since October the 7th, although we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that before October the 7th, this was all heading in the right direction.
00:55:20.880It's been far too high for far too long. Clearly, we need to just say over and over again, Islamophobia is intolerable.
00:55:28.820It can never, ever be justified. And we have to continue with a zero-tolerance approach.
00:55:36.180And I think there's more we can do in government. There's certainly stuff online, which I think needs tackling much more robustly than it is at the moment.
00:55:43.580What I'm hoping, Keir, is your experience as a prosecutor means you'll be thinking about the strategies we can use to make sure we take action against those who break the law.
00:55:54.440Well, I wish Hitchens was here today. He would have a lot to say about what's unfolding in the world now.
00:56:02.500But the contrast between those two clips was quite impressive.
00:56:07.080One was just, Hitchens very much focused on like, well, you have to use your free speech now because it's slowly being eroded.
00:56:18.980The term Islamophobia is also, it's a weighted term and it's being used in a political way.
00:56:26.100And then you contrast that to, well, today in the UK, they're saying, well, we need more top-down controls, specifically policing through digitally, like digitally monitoring policing speech to control Islamophobia.
00:56:47.920It also depends on how they're measuring.
00:56:51.460So, do they just like go on Twitter X and look at a mention, they do a keyword search and be like, well, there's been more keywords of this keyword, therefore hates increased.
00:57:02.920And then they have to impose some fix based on these, some random modeling that you can create these trends however you want.
00:57:12.280Yeah, it's another example of, you know, you have Hitchens telling you, listen, these people are going to use words against you to stifle your speech.
00:57:30.000And they're going to do it in a way that's meant to control you.
00:57:33.100And then, literally, you have a man who is directing a government right now to jail people, to literally put, like, young kids in prison for things that they say online because it's deemed that term, that Hitchens, 15 years ago was saying, this is what's going to happen.
00:58:04.660I, I wonder what the UK would be like today if he were still around because that's, he, I feel like, was a, I don't know if he, if he had a moderating effect on, on the culture there because he was so well respected and so, just so biting and so, like, he had a way of really getting to the truth of things in a way that you just couldn't deny.
00:58:25.940He was just, he, he, his thought was just on such a higher level than everyone else around him that you just couldn't help but kind of be amazed by it.
00:58:34.100And, uh, yeah, I wonder if it'd be any different today.
00:58:37.060I, I think he would have got the Jordan Peterson treatment.
00:58:46.080I think he, he could, uh, well, it didn't seem to hurt Peterson, you know, he, he, uh, I, uh, I met him one time at a, at a talk that he gave, um, in Alberta here.
00:58:56.620And, uh, uh, and I told him that, uh, it was, uh, it was, I said that it's, it's a shame that people view you as controversial and, like, what you're saying is controversial.
00:59:09.960And he said, you know, there are worse things.
00:59:14.320And I was like, well, I guess that's true because, I mean, he's, yeah, he's managed to make it work for him.
00:59:19.720But yeah, that's, uh, but the, the, the one observation there is the perceived, the fact that he's deemed controversial or that if you sample, and I have friends and family, like if I bring up that name, they have negative connotations or they'll only remember them from one little event.
00:59:41.720Or you'll mention somebody like Joe Rogan and they're like, I don't know about him.
01:00:10.540But yeah, like, so you get these, um, even with these kind of juggernauts with a large platform, large reach, I think we're still showing the, the power of media over a inactive, not inactive.
01:00:31.620Like a, people who don't actively participate and seek out information or seek out ideas contrary to what they believe.
01:00:42.840So these NPCs just following their, their beliefs match up with what they're told for many things.
01:00:50.000Um, and then we get cases of like, well, friends and family, maybe they're not as informed.
01:01:00.400So they're just getting ideas from like osmosis through, through whatever's mentioned.
01:01:06.700There's still is this opportunity to like, well, talk about these things, or maybe you bring up immigration numbers.
01:01:14.420Like you mentioned, like, well, is 10 million per year too much in Canada?
01:01:19.000And then you like, get them to a point where they've admitted, yeah, maybe a hard cap at some point, maybe there is a sustainable number, or maybe there's a different way.
01:01:28.560Like, rather than treating these things as blind truths and blind narratives of like, well, Canada requires immigration.
01:01:35.140We just open up the floodgates and we never do a check and balance.
01:01:38.940We never do a double check on like how much we should, we should do.
01:01:43.880So I'm hoping we have more, more of these conversations.
01:01:49.160And then, and to that point, you know, there's, and maybe we can wrap up on this, but to the, to the point of, you know, yeah, there, obviously we have to agree that there is a, there's a limit of, you know, amount of people we can welcome into any place at any time.
01:02:01.440Because if for no other reason, then what is the life that those people that you're purporting to want to help, what is that going to be when they get there?
01:02:11.020You know, I think we, this was months ago, but I believe we, we saw some statistics that it's been about a decade since the, the major Syrian refugee crisis into Canada.
01:02:23.220And, and maybe you can recall better than I can, but I, I believe the number was like only, only 10% of those Syrian refugees who came in that initial wave are making above a poverty wage right now.
01:02:34.560Like, so you've, you've got, you know, if you, if you want to use as a lot of these people who are very pro immigration want to use that you're doing this to help people and to, to better the lives of people.
01:02:50.120Well, in order to do that, you have to acknowledge that there is an upper limit because past that point, you actually aren't helping people.
01:02:57.320You're, you're just shuffling them from one place of the world to another.
01:03:00.820Um, and if there's, if there's nothing there for them to move, to have, like I say, that upward mobility that other countries have, um, actually you're objectively making their lives worse.
01:03:12.020Cause you know, you've uprooted them from their home with the promise of a better life and all that they have is either exactly what they had at home or worse because now they are not surrounded by their family and the places they grew up in and things.
01:03:26.780And there's nothing for them to aspire to strive to because the infrastructure is not in place for it.
01:03:30.800So yeah, there's, you know, there's, uh, there's, there's definitely a broader conversation to be had here other than either you're pro immigration because you love people or you're anti immigration because you hate people.
01:03:44.460Well, there's one example I've been meaning to ask more people of like, well, let's say you have a, a family, you have three kids and well, there's a whole bunch of kids that need to be adopted.
01:03:56.740What would, what would, what would adopting one kid do to your like family, to your schedule, to your, well, you need to pay for food and you need space for another bed.
01:04:08.400And well, what about two, two adopted kids?
01:04:13.300What if you have more adopted kids than you have your biological kids?
01:04:17.620Like, what if you take them all in one year?
01:04:19.740Like it gets progressively harder for that to be feasible.
01:04:26.000And I think that's an example where people, it hits a little closer to home because then they're like, well, that's how I have to cook larger meals.
01:04:33.640And like that welfare, that family welfare state that they've, that they have to rely on.
01:04:41.060A lot of people find it very difficult even just to get all the meals, get their kids fed, keep the kids happy, keep them, get them to school on time.
01:04:50.500And all of these things are difficult enough with the number of kids that they have right now in Canada.
01:04:54.680We are struggling to just provide even reasonable health care to the citizens that we have right now.
01:05:04.260Our roads are always under construction.
01:05:07.600Like we have a water main break in Calgary.
01:05:12.700So they're under water restrictions right now.
01:05:14.680We have a lot of money that's required to just keep Canada functioning the way it is.
01:05:19.940So we can't even divert less money to that without more things breaking, which would decrease the quality of life of the people coming here anyways.
01:05:34.040Because they're not getting the quality of services that Canada is known for.
01:05:38.740So it still doesn't make sense from that standpoint as well.
01:05:45.240Yeah, people don't like talking about those things because it makes it feel like transactional or like a business arrangement or something.
01:05:52.140But the fact is that it kind of is a business arrangement because you do have to financially account for these things.
01:05:58.560You can't just, you know, it's a little naive to think that you can just, well, we're just welcoming people.
01:06:05.880We're just welcoming people into new Canadians, you know?
01:06:09.700Well, okay, but how about all the other things?
01:06:12.060There's a lot of things that go into living a good life and if you, you know, if you can't, if the pace of constructing that good life,
01:06:23.880there's a lot of things that went into constructing what we have here and to allow, you know, two goofballs like you and me to sit in air-conditioned rooms and ruminate on this stuff online.
01:06:35.460There's a lot of stuff that had to go right for us to get to this place.
01:06:38.720And it's not an accident, so it takes a lot of administrating and people need to start thinking about it more, I think, in that way than just from the feel-good ways.
01:06:50.460Yeah, I think that gives us plenty to think on, plenty to potentially relay in further discussions.
01:07:00.780I think this is one we'll probably be returning to because it's not a problem that is on its way to being solved.
01:07:08.660It is currently still getting worse before it's going to get better.
01:07:12.280Fortunately, it feels like there's a few more conversations happening and there's a little bit more awareness.
01:07:21.080So hopefully that's a step in the right direction.