The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 19, 2024


Liberal MP FORCED to apologize for spreading defamatory misinformation

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Mark Gerritsen Lauren Southern Justin Trudeau Ken Paxton Lauren Chen Speaker Tenant Media Kat Kanda
Freeland melts down, calls Conservatives ＂Maple MAGA＂ Coward： Jagmeet Singh refuses to vote No Confidence in Trudeau

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

166.88

Word count

1,821

Sentence count

111

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Lib Dem MP Mark Gerritsen has been sued by Kian Bextie's outlet, The Counter Signal, for spreading false information about her and her supporters. He has since apologized, but not before he had to defend himself against the charges that he was working for the Russian government.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As much as I hope for good things to happen in Canadian politics, I also cheer on funny stuff happening.
00:00:08.040 And today we have something truly funny to talk about.
00:00:11.400 So, our favorite Liberal MP, Mark Gerritsen from Kingston and the Islands, spread obvious defamatory misinformation about Cat Canada on Twitter.
00:00:22.880 She works for the Counter Signal, that is Kian Bextie's outlet.
00:00:26.540 And rather than just going after Mark online and saying that you're a liar, you know, this is why nobody likes you, all this stuff, you know, pointing out other times he's lied, the Counter Signal actually lawyered up and sued Mark Gerritsen.
00:00:40.080 And you might think, well, what are you going to do?
00:00:41.660 You're suing a politician, he's just going to ignore you, the Liberal Party's going to protect him.
00:00:46.000 You know, maybe even the government ends up paying his legal bills.
00:00:48.860 That didn't happen here, probably because Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party have been taking so many losses recently.
00:00:57.440 They just told Mark to give in rather than having this ongoing court battle end up embarrassing them more.
00:01:03.160 So, he's actually apologized. 0.92
00:01:04.920 And the funny thing is that at the same time he apologized, he then still levies his same stupid conservatives or Russian shills criticisms to, like, in Parliament, basically saying that we need to investigate conservative media because apparently we're full of people who are not actually working for the Russians and he'll have to apologize if he accuses us. 0.93
00:01:27.900 So, here's Mark Gerritsen this morning. 0.92
00:01:30.920 He said, I would like to sincerely apologize to Cat Canada for my previous post in which I allege that she is funded by the Russian government.
00:01:39.620 And, by the way, reminder everyone, go and follow Cat Canada because this was hilarious and she does a pretty good job at keeping people up to date with little political happenings going on in Canada. 1.00
00:01:50.140 You know, one of the more, I don't know, I don't even know how to describe her account.
00:01:54.540 Just a good account overall.
00:01:55.800 And then, anyways, Mark keeps going and says,
00:01:58.900 Canada is a democracy and in the context of the debate over political issues or current affairs, things can get sometimes, things can sometimes get more heated than they should.
00:02:08.180 I should not have made these statements regarding Cat.
00:02:10.540 I will be personally donating $1,000 to the Loaves and Fishes Community Food Bank in Nanaimo, BC, a charity chosen by Cat.
00:02:18.060 If others who shared my original tweet would like to donate the same, they can do it here.
00:02:22.420 Now, obviously, this is not what Mark would have said on his own.
00:02:25.800 This is effectively what the settlement was.
00:02:29.140 Kian Bexty has come out and said that this was the settlement.
00:02:32.320 He has to donate $1,000 to that food bank in Nanaimo.
00:02:36.400 And he has to put up this exact text on his Twitter.
00:02:41.740 Usually, I've heard in defamation cases that you can't delete it until like a whole year has gone by or whatever.
00:02:48.360 So you can't just try to immediately memory hole what happened or what you did by like, you know, posting it and then deleting it the next second saying, well, I technically did post it.
00:02:57.400 But now, because this was bad.
00:03:00.660 I know.
00:03:00.900 Oh, wow.
00:03:01.620 I didn't realize this.
00:03:02.620 He had to pin it to the top of his Twitter.
00:03:04.820 So that's good.
00:03:05.700 That's a big win for Counter Signal right there.
00:03:08.360 You can see that posted there.
00:03:10.040 But now I want to get to the new video that he had just posted where he tries to go after the conservatives for not taking Russian disinformation seriously enough a second after he had to apologize for spreading disinformation about Russian agents.
00:03:24.860 Mr. Speaker, earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that Russia is funneling money to conservative media figures to push a far-right propaganda.
00:03:34.880 This is a clear threat to our democracy and Canada's national security.
00:03:38.860 And yet, the leader of the Conservative Party is directing his MPs to block the Public Safety Committee's study on this real issue.
00:03:47.200 Can the Prime Minister tell this House what our government is doing to protect Canadians from this very real threat of foreign interference?
00:03:54.860 Before we get over to Trudeau here, I just want to say there is absolutely no serious connection to Canada in the story he is talking about.
00:04:11.600 If you don't know, there was a media organization set up in the United States called Tenant Media in which Lauren Chen, who I guess is Canadian, but she lives in the U.S. now. 0.83
00:04:22.980 I believe she's a U.S. citizen who set up the company in the U.S.
00:04:25.960 She was taking money from people from Russia Today, Russia's state-owned broadcaster.
00:04:34.360 It's basically like Russian CBC, except instead of cheering on progressivism, they cheer on invading Ukraine or whatever. 0.75
00:04:42.260 And so she took a bunch of money from them.
00:04:44.180 Bad.
00:04:44.960 But then what she did is just started giving other hosts money and pretending that it didn't come from the Russians. 1.00
00:04:51.320 And so people like Lauren Southern, who is Canadian, lives in Canada, and makes videos on Canada for Tenant, she was just doing generic conservative-style Canadian content.
00:05:03.020 Like Lauren Southern's approach to issues or not, she was just doing what she would have normally done, being paid from whatever source.
00:05:12.380 She was just making videos. 0.99
00:05:13.900 And the reason why Mark Gerritsen tried to smear Cat Canada, Katrina, is because she went on Lauren Southern's show like once or twice to provide some comments on some specific issues that she was like knowledgeable on or that they wanted her perspective on.
00:05:30.740 So Cat didn't know that Lauren Chen had gotten money from the Russians and was paying Lauren Southern.
00:05:36.420 Lauren Southern didn't even know where the money was coming from, but this was enough to pretend that the entire conservative independent media apparatus is full of Russian agents. 0.84
00:05:46.320 And that's exactly what he's saying here.
00:05:48.020 And when he's complaining, well, the conservatives are blocking our motion in the committee to study this issue.
00:05:54.680 And it's like, okay, no, it's not a serious issue to study.
00:05:59.140 It is a fishing expedition because one lady working for an American organization being funded by some shady Russian sources did something wrong that now, for some reason, every single Canadian independent creator who you don't like can be hauled in front of committee and ask questions and have their, you know, finances audited and all that stuff. 0.98
00:06:22.040 That's not right.
00:06:22.920 But let's hear what Justin Trudeau has to say about this.
00:06:29.140 By the way, I will mention that I heard a lot of the heckling had to do with the lawsuit that Mark Gerritsen had gotten him in, which is funny that he then posts this right before he apologizes.
00:06:55.920 Since he did have to apologize for the thing that they're heckling him about.
00:07:07.920 The Right Honorable Prime Minister.
00:07:09.640 Mr. Speaker, I thank the Honorable Member for Kingston and the Islands for his advocacy on this unbelievably important issue.
00:07:17.040 It's extremely alarming that Russia is pushing its propaganda in our democracy, but even more appalling that they are using far-right Canadian conservative influencers to divide Canadians.
00:07:30.040 No, no, no.
00:07:31.480 He is using, okay, one, I wouldn't call Lauren Southern far-right.
00:07:35.360 She's kind of all over the place on a lot of issues. 1.00
00:07:38.300 Like, more libertarian, I guess, is what I'd call Lauren Southern.
00:07:42.200 Like, she's kind of like an anti-interventionist type person, but you get tons of those on the left, too.
00:07:48.560 But like him saying, oh, they're using Canadian conservatives with an S on the other.
00:07:53.080 No, no, no.
00:07:53.900 They used one.
00:07:55.460 They used one.
00:07:56.880 There is one Canadian conservative who was involved in tenant media making news about Canada.
00:08:03.180 That is literally the entire story.
00:08:06.120 There is no there there.
00:08:08.240 Yes, we must all stand against this.
00:08:12.560 I call on all parties, including the Conservative Party of Canada, to stand up and investigate these allegations and follow up on it.
00:08:20.600 Let it get through committee.
00:08:25.760 Again, like, what are we investigating?
00:08:27.640 What are we actually investigating here?
00:08:29.480 There's nothing to investigate.
00:08:30.780 The DOJ, the Department of Justice in the U.S., are already investigating the issue in their own country because that's where it actually took place.
00:08:39.780 And now Justin Trudeau is like, well, I want to be involved, too, because I need to blame other things other than my own crushing ignorance for my unpopularity.
00:08:49.220 So it must be the Russians are coming after me. 0.58
00:08:51.720 Everyone would actually like Justin Trudeau unless Katrina went on Lauren Southern's show.
00:08:58.500 No, no.
00:08:59.760 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:09:03.100 It's a good day that Mark Gerritsen has to apologize.
00:09:06.120 I'll link his apology tweet in the description of this video below.
00:09:10.160 If you have X, go on there.
00:09:12.380 I encourage you to quote tweet it and laugh at him.
00:09:15.160 Laugh at him in the comments.
00:09:16.660 Do all that stuff because I think he deserves it.
00:09:19.500 I think he rightfully deserves it.
00:09:20.960 I think also I believe that the great thing about what Kat Kanda and Kian Bexty, the owner of Counter Signal, did is I think they required him to keep replies and comments open on his apology, which is quite hilarious because he is pretty infamous for being one of those people who just completely locks down his reply.
00:09:39.240 So I bet nobody can directly disagree with him.
00:09:41.960 So if you guys also want to support the show, I have my give, send, go in linked in the comments below pinned to the top of the comments as well as in the description of this video.
00:09:51.840 It's cost us more than $32,000 fighting back against an actual frivolous defamation case from a Chinese billionaire developer who in two and a half years hasn't even filed evidence but keeps trying to push forward on the case despite the fact his evidence was literally his LinkedIn profile, his company website, putting his libel notice in there, and then the original article that we had written about him.
00:10:16.760 So nothing, basically him just saying we defamed him was added in his evidence and then his website saying he's such a great person and like, you know, a gentleman and a scholar.
00:10:26.720 So anyways, if you want to contribute to that, really helps us out.
00:10:29.920 And if you want to sign up on my website, wyattclaypool.com, that's also in the description of this video if you want to sign up onto the campaign organizing list.
00:10:38.420 So if there's ever an interesting nomination race in your area or election, I can reach out to people in those areas and contact you, let you know, you know, what I would probably be doing in that race, who I know, you know, who I would endorse, all that sort of good thing.
00:10:53.020 Anyways, see you guys around.