In this episode of the podcast, I have a guest on who I've been watching on YouTube for a number of years, Mr. J.J. McCullough. He's been writing for newspapers, doing TV, and now he's got a YouTube channel that focuses on Canada and North America.
00:00:00.000Hey, everybody. This is a very special episode of the show because not only do I have a guest on, but I have a guest on that I've been watching on YouTube for probably about seven years at this point, Mr. J.J. McCullough. Very good education videos, very good videos on Canada and North America.
00:00:19.480I'm not even very good at describing what exactly your channel is, so maybe you could do it. You've been doing everything from writing columns for newspapers, doing TV, and now YouTube, but what is the YouTube channel?
00:00:33.420Yeah. I mean, I often struggle to describe it a bit as well. I've been doing it for 10 years. The sort of three Cs that I have sort of associated with it on my banner headline is I make videos about culture, countries, and Canada.
00:00:50.320And so every time I make a video and I make a video every week, I try to make one that at least sort of broadly falls under one of those three categories.
00:00:57.140And a lot of times it sort of winds up dipping into all three. And despite my best efforts, you know, when I started my YouTube channel 10 years ago, I was finishing up a career sort of involuntarily at Sun News, which had recently sort of shut down.
00:01:12.460I had been a sort of TV talking head over there and on CTV before then. And I had kind of wanted to make a channel that wasn't political because I was kind of getting a little sick of political commentary.
00:01:22.380But, you know, old habits die hard. And I still do make the occasional political sort of pundit video every so often on my channel as well.
00:01:32.220And I feel like a lot of people think of me as still as a kind of political commentator, even though, you know, I don't go out of my way to produce an abundance of that sort of content.
00:01:42.320Although I did, you know, until quite recently, I was also a weekly columnist at the at the Washington Post.
00:01:48.060So that was a career that overlapped with my my YouTube career. And I only lost that, you know, I think less than two years ago.
00:01:53.680Well, you don't even do as much commentary as more so like history videos, even when you're talking recently about Justin Trudeau announcing he's going to step down as Liberal Party leader.
00:02:04.880You go into all the ins and outs of how leadership races were, what, you know, the sort of different paths forward for the Liberal Party might be.
00:02:12.900And so it's like half commentary, which I enjoy, because oftentimes anyone can make a video where Justin Trudeau sucks.
00:02:19.600Did you guys know this? That Justin Trudeau sucks. And it's always good for people to actually make videos that help people understand how politics works.
00:02:28.360And not in the way of how does politics actually work in the CV background, but like, how does like boring political like mechanics actually function?
00:02:39.200And I think your videos do that. Well, I even got some A's on some papers, both for my bachelor and my master's degree by just watching the social credit video a few times.
00:02:48.980And making that my default answer on everything that had to do with like BC or Alberta social credit and explaining the movement.
00:02:59.440Yeah, well, thank you. That's very flattering. I mean, I like to think that my videos primarily serve an educational purpose.
00:03:07.060And, you know, I try to be I try to be sort of honest in them.
00:03:10.360I try to, you know, I try to be more nonpartisan than not to be fair, you know, or at least objective, you know, being unbiased is, I think, you know, a kind of difficult standard for anyone to meet.
00:03:21.580But you can be objective and you can try to tell the truth, even when it doesn't flatter one side or the other.
00:03:26.140Because I do think that what people and especially young people need is just sort of to understand the context in which sort of politics is happening.
00:03:34.040You can get opinions from anybody, but sort of being able to understand kind of the background, the sort of the historical context and, you know, sort of the institutional kind of procedural things in an honest way.
00:03:46.680Right. And this is sort of something that I've often cared a lot about and gets me actually in trouble with some of the, dare I say, some of the more some of the more legacy pundits is that I have a very unsentimental view of Canadian politics and the Canadian political system.
00:04:00.180You know, when we talk about the parliamentary system or the way the political parties work and all of this kind of stuff, I think it's important that we speak sort of bluntly and honestly about how these things actually work and not how they, you know, theoretically work in some, you know, textbook or on the Government of Canada website or how some, you know, sort of romantic, you know, professor at some high minded institution sort of thinks about the majesty of the Canadian political system.
00:04:28.660You know, and I think we're seeing a lot of people, you know, and I think we're seeing a lot of that unfold right now in the context of Trudeau's resignation and the liberal leadership race.
00:04:34.180You know, a lot of Canadians are sort of waking up to the realities of how our democracy actually works and it doesn't strike them as something that's particularly attractive.
00:04:43.520Well, I'm going to exercise your skills right now in being nonpartisan because we're going to talk about the liberal leadership race because why wouldn't we, while all the candidates are currently announcing, because outside, I'm a very conservative person.
00:04:59.380So obviously I could just make videos say, Carney sucks.
00:05:02.460Did you know that he's also, he also is in favor of the carbon tax and that Christy Freeland froze trucker bank accounts.
00:05:08.840I'm just looking at it from the perspective of who's actually a good candidate who could actually have an impact on the next election 2025 is probably going to have problems with any of these people, but getting right down to it, this is something you and I both agree on.
00:05:24.120And then I want to touch on something that we actually both uniquely said yesterday, it's just a boring race.
00:05:28.960And then on top of it, even like the front runner candidates feel like a second tier conservative party leadership candidate, because we both highlighted yesterday, Mark Carney celebrating raising $125,000 in 24 hours is genuinely not impressive at all.
00:05:47.020But maybe you can give your thoughts on why, what, what, how that struck you yesterday when you saw it.
00:05:53.000Well, it's like, I know that we have to sort of adjust our expectations in the context of sort of Canadian politics versus American politics, right?
00:06:02.180Like we're all aware that, you know, every random primary candidate will brag about, oh, I raised like 2 million bucks in like 24 hours and that kind of thing.
00:06:10.200I'm like, you know, I get that Canadian politics is smaller and all that, but like, you know, what Carney raised is not even enough to cover the entry fee in his liberal leadership candidacy.
00:06:20.340So I, which is like, what, like 350 grand.
00:06:23.760So I think it's might just be 300,000, but yeah, maybe 350.
00:06:27.560But yeah, the hilarious thing too, is that whenever I would mention this, it's not that much money.
00:06:33.700If you divide it by the maximum donation, which is only $1,750, it's 71.4 maxed out donations given to him in 24 hours.
00:06:47.580It's like, well, did you not see the month long setup to this moment?
00:06:51.320They would have had a Rolodex of donors, emails, phone numbers.
00:06:55.020They would have been text blasting people.
00:06:56.500They would have been harassing people to donate.
00:06:59.020And they got, like, what a municipal council candidate might be able to get at a, you know, at a dinner.
00:07:08.540No, and it's, I suppose in some ways it actually might reveal some of the sort of misassumptions of even his conservative critics, right?
00:07:18.740Like, because the idea was that, you know, the great strength of Mark Carney is like that he's the elitist among elitists,
00:07:24.100that he's very plugged into sort of the Canadian power network, the rich and well-connected.
00:07:27.960And if they're not willing to open their wallets for him, in the wake of what you said was an enormous lead up.
00:07:33.880Like, he's been running a shadow campaign, I mean, arguably for years, right?
00:07:37.760Like, we're all leading up to this moment in which Mark Carney makes his triumphant entry into the Canadian political space.
00:07:45.480And, yeah, for it to kind of go over like such a, you know, tiny ripple in the pond,
00:07:52.060it seems profoundly underwhelming in a way that has to be, I think, troubling.
00:07:55.560And that's the thing about the race, and I think this is what the donors are having to struggle with.
00:08:01.780It's not that they're wondering, who do I get behind because these are such dynamic and different candidates.
00:08:06.700It's like, who is going to even move the needle in terms of getting the audience's attention?
00:08:13.280I watched the announcement launch video by Critchie Freeland this morning.
00:08:17.200It's something genuinely better than anything that Carney's put out so far, and it's not actually saying much, though.
00:08:23.120It's basically, she delivered her message with some energy.
00:08:27.040I'm not even sure if the Jon Stewart interview really helped Mark Carney in any way.
00:08:31.600If people saw that, I did a short video on it.
00:08:34.500He's not terrible in it, but when you're on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and you just kind of come off as fine,
00:08:40.480well, you know, you've got to be a bit better than fine if you're trying to be the prime minister who then builds momentum to be pure poly.
00:08:48.560I know people are saying, well, there's an ECOS poll out from Frank Graves showing the Liberals have closed the gap to just 11% after Trudeau stepped down.
00:08:57.620If there is one pollster in Canada I do not take at face value, it is Frank Graves and ECOS.
00:09:02.520I don't have any vendetta against him, but when his last poll in December shows a 24% gap, actually 25% gap in favor of the Conservatives,
00:09:10.680and it's come down to 11% in January, that's not real.
00:09:14.500It's what I call an unmotivated polling change.
00:09:18.120If the poll from one to the next is very different, and there's nothing really in the news that would suggest that it would close up that much,
00:09:25.960because while Trudeau stepped down, all the problems of the government are still there, and he technically hasn't even left yet.
00:09:30.300That does not cause a 14% swing, but if you were to having to define this race in a sentence, what is this leadership race all about?
00:09:46.200What's the fundamental question of this leadership race for the Liberal Party?
00:09:51.300Not for Canadian politics, but for the Liberals, what are we doing here?
00:09:55.300I think, you know, I guess this is two or three words, but like turning the page, like I do think that that is kind of like fundamentally what they're looking for,
00:10:06.220and what they should be looking for, which is the idea like, you know, we're putting a bookend at the Trudeau era,
00:10:10.840we're in some sort of new era that feels forward-facing, right?
00:10:16.120That's not just all about looking backwards and sort of playing sort of cleanup for the Trudeau legacy,
00:10:22.180but, you know, we're kind of like forging a new legacy for the, you know, the 2020s,
00:10:26.700and we're kind of into a new era of Canadian politics defined by new ideas, addressing new problems,
00:10:31.740and a new kind of like mindset of leadership to deal with those challenges.
00:10:35.520And, you know, I think that Carney is like well positioned to be that kind of person in theory, you know,
00:10:42.620and I think that's why the Conservatives are very desperate to tie him to the Trudeau government,
00:10:48.780because they understand that at some level, he can make a more persuasive case to be something new.
00:10:54.260I mean, a man who's literally never held elected office before is by definition, you know, somebody that is a bit of an outsider.
00:11:01.040And again, like, you can argue that he's, you know, been consulting with the Liberals for ages, which he has been,
00:11:06.600but, you know, he can make that claim a lot stronger than someone like Chrystia Freeland was,
00:11:11.260who has, you know, or has been, who has been, you know, Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Finance Minister,
00:11:16.300you know, on Trudeau's side since the very beginning.
00:11:20.180So I actually didn't see her campaign launch,
00:11:24.020but I'd be, I'd be curious to see if you felt that she communicated any of that energy at all,
00:11:30.120because that definitely feels like it's her biggest liability is her closeness to Trudeau.
00:17:08.780But the thing is that I find constantly political consultants and whatnot are playing to a voter who's already on side in the Liberal Party.
00:17:16.860And then the Conservatives, they're playing to voters who will never vote for them in the first place.
00:17:21.500So like Aaron O'Toole is the perfect encapsulation of trying to get the Liberal Party's base who was never going to shift in the first place.
00:17:31.860No, I think it's kind of like one, this is maybe a little off topic, but I do think it's kind of like remarkable how there's been no real reckoning with the failure of Aaron O'Toole, right?
00:17:43.480Like that there's always this kind of narrative in sort of the Canadian sort of pundit class and, you know, I'd sort of say kind of progressive urban Canada in general, that like, oh, the Conservatives would be doing so much better if they would just sort of tack more to the middle and be a kind of more progressive kind of party, right?
00:18:01.640Like you see this with the, what is it, like the center ice Conservatives and that guy who's trying to create his centrist party and all that kind of thing.
00:18:11.060So it's like, it's a line that you always see and like, you're going to surely see it now this time where, you know, there's always this kind of person where it's like, well, you know, I wish that there was something between these two crazy extremes and all that.
00:18:22.480But it's like Aaron O'Toole more than anyone else in modern Canada tried to offer that in the last election.
00:18:28.920Like he went out of his way. He even self-identified as a progressive. He made such a big deal about how socially liberal he was and how his ambitions were not radical and, you know, how we're not your dad's Conservative Party or whatever that line he used was, right?
00:18:45.020Yeah, please call that from Alison Redford.
00:18:46.480Yeah, no. And it's like, he did worse than Andrew Scheer did, right?
00:18:49.880And I just feel like there has been no reckoning with the consequences of that or the lessons to be learned from that. And that's just, that's just incredible to me.
00:19:00.100I'm not trying to sideswipe anyone, but I always find it fascinating that when you go on some of these political like panel shows on CBC or CTV, and one of the commentators is like a failed Conservative campaign manager, and they're going to tell you what the Conservatives need to do and what the Liberals are doing wrong.
00:19:18.940I've seen one of these people. I'm not going to name them just to not be rude. But they're like, you know, I've been up against Justin Trudeau. And so I know what the Conservatives need to do to counter a man like Mark Carney or somebody like Christy Freeland. I've gone up against all these people. I'm like, you lost. What is this? Does no one ever leave quietly in this business?
00:19:38.440Does anyone just realize they burnt the house down and just dance back into the background and let other people fight the fire here rather than saying, you know, I used to live in that house that's currently burning down. I know where you should be pouring the water on. It drives me up the wall.
00:19:53.560But speaking of these kind of moderate, progressive type political people, you and I both have an equal hatred for Zoom or social media politics. And that is also why I brought up Anita Anand and us snaking back to Aaron O'Toole brings up Anita Anand again, because he was praising her as she was stepping down.
00:20:15.040I this is something I find sidetracked so many young people when they get into politics. There is both the kind of and I'm talking from the perspective of conservatives, but obviously exists in the liberals and the NDP as well, that you get oddly hard edged politicos who want to talk about, you know, we should slash the federal budget by 80 percent or we should have zero immigration or we should do we should adopt a Catholic theocracy or something like that.
00:20:45.040Yeah. But the one that gets on my nerves, because honestly, I think especially around staffers and in staffer culture, it's far bigger is the enlightened centrist who praises the most boring politicians you've ever seen in your life.
00:20:59.920I see this on a daily basis, all of these stan accounts, or I'm not even kidding, Kim Campbell, Charles Tupper, the seven week prime minister, for people that you don't know who they are. And there were so many people say, you know, Anita Anand would have been the exact person the liberals needed.
00:21:17.860And now they're pushing the idea that she should actually run for liberal leadership in Ontario if Crombie loses, because she'll beat Doug Ford. Guys, read a book. That's not how politics has ever worked at all. I think this also ends up like making it so that people like 10 years into their political life of engaging, they still haven't done anything substantial.
00:21:39.860And I think social media politics has really ruined it. You've done a great video on that. I should edit it in right here of why just fringe social media politics ends up actually just destroying people's understanding of, you know, how bills move downfield, how to influence stuff, how to sell memberships, how an actual campaign works.
00:21:59.860And that's even infecting Carney and freelance campaigns. There are staffers all around them trying to do the, you know, Mark Carney's rat thing.
00:22:07.980Oh, yeah, I saw that. That was pretty cringe, for sure. But no, I mean, I saw you. I forget if you talked about this in one of your shows, or if it was in a tweet. But I think like the good way that you expressed it, when it comes to this kind of like zoomer, sort of fascination with obscure politicians and all that, is that you sort of, you said it, you said something along the lines of like, that they
00:22:29.260assume that if someone is obscure and unknown, then that means that they are significant, right? And that somehow like, this is a kind of like flex of how deep and substantial your political knowledge is, if you're able to kind of like nerd out on a very sort of minor figure of political history, when it's like, it's opposite, like, it's the exact opposite.
00:22:53.200It's like people that are big and famous are usually big and famous for a reason, like that they're, they've accomplished sort of substantial things. And if people are small and obscure, it's like, yeah, maybe once in a great, great while, there's like a forgotten figure of history who had an underrated effect on things, but they've really sort of like, over learned that lesson and over applied it.
00:23:11.640And I know what you mean as well, where it's like, I mean, like, I feel like you, you see this a lot, uh, when it comes to like obscure political parties, obscure political movements, you know, and it's like this obsession with putting everything on the political compass and putting everything in tier lists and, and just like kind of treating politics, like it's a, like it's an RPG or something, right?
00:23:31.580Where it's like, can you amass like the biggest kind of like, uh, you know, appendix of all of the different monsters and goblins and Pokemon and stat lists and tier lists and all this, right?
00:23:42.500The, the political compass and the political spectrum in general has just been like a net negative for people being able to understand things because people are very like hierarchical and how they think about things.
00:23:54.460And as soon as they see the compass or the spectrum, they're like, okay, I need to be the furthest right or the furthest left that person's left.
00:24:04.620So there were, there were like NDP accounts talking about how Carney's actually a capitalist chill because he says that we need to grow the economy.
00:24:12.420If we want to pay for social services, if anything, Carney's saying something extremely socialistic that he thinks the free market is just a vehicle to spend more on, on social programs.
00:24:22.000But that wasn't enough because don't, you know, that he's actually a left-wing trader.
00:24:25.960I have been seeing other left-wing creators attacking Jagmeet Singh because he got rid of the commitment to democratic socialism that was in some subsection of the federal NDP constitution as if anyone cared.
00:24:41.240But this is a deeply like interesting and important thing.
00:24:47.060But as soon as you introduce the spectrum of the compass, people are like, I'm going to be the most centrist.
00:24:51.500I'm going to be the most authoritarian right or like libertarian right or left or whatever.
00:26:36.520No, it's really quite disturbing because – I mean, I think that what you gave like the –
00:26:42.180Benny Johnson and Andrew Tate is a good example of that.
00:26:44.460Because you have – and this is, I think, very much a dysfunction of the right, which I think anybody who sort of self-identifies as a conservative should be concerned with, is that you have increasingly like conspiracy theory world has become sort of right-coded, right?
00:27:00.240And so as a result, like conspiracy theorists and complete sort of wackos and people that just have this like incredibly adversarial relationship with like civilization, like that these people are very dopaminergic as far as personalities go.
00:27:15.640Like they're often very entertaining, they're very flamboyant, they're shocking in a way that's, you know, kind of, yeah, again, like sort of titillating and in a very sort of shallow kind of way.
00:27:25.920And the problem is, is that sort of in the game of commentary, you know, in the game of making media, which is ultimately all about just attracting eyeballs and clicks and view counts, like it behooves you to go for that kind of content, right?
00:27:40.880And so you kind of have this terrible sort of nexus in which you kind of have like right-wing grifter types, and then you have conspiracy theorists becoming right-wing coded, and then so you bring that together and then increasingly it seems like if left to its own devices and market forces alone, a lot of right-wing commentary will inevitably just descend into platforming sort of cranks of various sorts or another.
00:28:04.880Whether that's Andrew Tate, whether that's, you know, Alex Jones, who is of course now also right-coded, you know, Candace Owens, even, you know, Tucker Carlson, like all of these people seem to be spiraling more and more and more in the direction of just platforming, like highly sort of flamboyant cranks.
00:28:21.420And when you have, like, when you're tied to no principle in how you do your commentary and what you believe, so many of these people who are on the right, in fact, then become extremely unprincipled in social ways, in economic ways, in terms of what policies they back.
00:28:38.100That's why you see people like Candace Owens now joining Redbook or whatever that new Chinese social media app is, because it's all just about the attention.
00:28:46.920Do you, and this is my thing about grifter commentary, because grifter can often be just a throwaway term that doesn't really apply, because as Ann Coulter has pointed out in the past, if I'm a grifter and I'm still beating you in a debate, what does that say about you that I'm beating you and I don't even believe the things I'm saying?
00:29:04.220But there is a new class of people who truly, I don't think Candace Owens actually thinks Emmanuel Macron's wife is a man.
00:29:11.360I genuinely do not think that she cares.
00:29:13.560I actually, and I don't mean this in a way that what she says isn't wrong, I don't think that Candace Owens is actually anti-Semitic.
00:29:20.140I think she is saying the things that get clicks and doesn't care.
00:29:23.380Maybe she will eventually become it in her heart because she said enough things like that,
00:29:28.920but so many of these people will literally misunderstand politics on purpose.
00:29:34.500The H-1B visa debate that happened in the U.S. was from, like, people can have, there was genuinely good disagreements to have with what Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk said.
00:29:47.060They were kind of not addressing that that program is used for, like, abuse of labor in terms of just bringing in people for jobs that you could easily pay somebody for in the U.S.,
00:29:56.080but you can get, like, subsidized labor this way.
00:29:59.100Same thing happens in Canada all the time.
00:30:01.040The temporary foreign worker program is so subsidized.
00:30:03.960It actually does incentivize owners to bring in foreign workers rather than domestic.
00:30:07.660But so many people are turning it into, oh, my goodness, Elon Musk and Vivek want our country taken over by India.
00:30:13.820I'm like, you know they didn't say that.
00:30:16.220And this also happens in Canada, too, where people, creators, will misunderstand politics on purpose to say,
00:30:23.280a year ago when it wasn't going to happen, is Trudeau going to resign?