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The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool
- October 02, 2023
What is #HateGate? (ft. Caryma Sa’d)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 12 minutes
Words per Minute
181.73541
Word Count
13,241
Sentence Count
1
Misogynist Sentences
5
Hate Speech Sentences
30
Summary
Summaries are generated with
gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ
.
Transcript
Transcript is generated with
Whisper
(
turbo
).
Misogyny classification is done with
MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny
.
Hate speech classification is done with
facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target
.
00:00:00.000
hello everyone we're starting a little bit late but we're happy that you're here to watch
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this great live stream with a fantastic guest we did uh spencer fernando last week and now
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we have crema seed uh this week to talk about hate gate and just the overall quote quote unquote
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anti-hate industry that's currently occupying canada it's a big thing and it's one of those
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sort of topics that i always kind of talk to people like crema and others behind the scenes
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you see certain people who post certain things who work for certain organizations and you're like
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wondering why does anyone call any of these people out and it's been multiple years of me wondering
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this and daniel wondering this too and it was great to see someone who actually finally started
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making it effectively their life's work to document non-profit anti-hate groups and the hateful things
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that they do but without further ado maybe i i'll move it over to you crema you can introduce yourself
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and then sort of talk about what the concept of hate gate is or just the anti-hate industry and
00:01:00.040
sort of the way that it's sort of been injected into your life as one of the main things that you've
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been talking about these days nice break hi thanks um for that intro yes my name is karima sad
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um i'm a toronto-based lawyer turned journalist uh over the course of the pandemic as i started
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attending and documenting rallies and political events and sort of that materialized into
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uh this this whole story that that is unfolding before our very eyes and it touches on polarization
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of society division that's caused and hate hate's a big part of it um the the hate gate
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concept or or you know it came about uh in a report that i co-authored with elisa hadigan um looking
00:01:54.080
specifically at freedom of information documents that pertain to diagonal on the way that it was
00:02:01.040
investigated leading up to the freedom convoy and in the months following and it exposed this
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this interconnection a feedback loop between law enforcement media and government officials with
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in this case the canadian anti-hate network at the center of it and information that was either
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misleading or entirely inaccurate made its way into the public consciousness because of
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this feedback loop and some of the strategies that work behind the scenes to turn people on to
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certain types of division and polarization um so you know i wouldn't say that it's entirely my life's
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work um but it has this very moment maybe yeah it's evolved um from a hobby or passion project to
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um something that i'm seriously pursuing and that's because um i had the experience i'm still going
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through the experience of being targeted um by some of these strategies smear campaigns etc so i i've
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watched it play out in real time as it affects my life and that's what prompted me to seek out other
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individuals who have had similar experiences yeah yours is interesting so i'll put it in more context
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because you you used a lot of um humility which is not appreciated on this show uh karima kind of got
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big by going into like you'll say during the freedom convoy protests i mean generally for a year up to
00:03:50.720
that but yeah you're up to that but i mean we all blew up i mean i was doing stuff before the freedom
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convoy we all kind of blew up when the world paid attention and and that but you came in from a more
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personally center left position i interpreted but you came in pretty neutral and you would show videos
00:04:04.720
of like crazy lgbtqs plus lunatics yelling that everyone's a terrorist and screaming and just like
00:04:10.960
being ballistic on the streets and that means certain people got mad at you and then you turn the camera
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around and there's a guy with a bucket on his head going you know trudeau's a fascist out of nato
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everyone's a nazi the world economic forms coming to get us and then other people get mad at you for
00:04:24.080
showing that so and i've also seen you show like the more reasonable things like to your audience
00:04:28.480
i've seen you show some of the more reasonable freedom speakers and you know i i have to kick
00:04:32.240
a crazy person off a freedom stage once when they gave me an mc chance he just went on like and the
00:04:36.320
massad is at the thing and i'm like nope off you go uh so i can appreciate that you you've shown the
00:04:41.920
the lunatic so this is why you got in the cross as the anti-hate network i i it i've intuited because
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you did a thing of sort of nuance and that is not how their operation really operates it's they're
00:04:55.920
funded by the government to find hate but only on one side it's like they they map right-wing hate
00:05:00.720
um they openly cooperate with people or antifa so it it drives a lot i mean their their goal is
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almost like to drive hate because they go after people people go after them and enrages all of
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society people say crazy things but they're the experts and and then their expert advice can be
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used by in extreme circumstances law enforcement intelligence and the legal system to harass people
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uh so i've always said this tell me if you think this is a good synopsis of what i've
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kind of said on at a meta level about the anti-hate network is this is sort of how the government
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launders we'll say censorship authoritarianism more censorship now uh through like a technocratic
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proxy so like people will always defend government people like oh no you have a free speech or you
00:05:47.360
have free expression that means the government can't come after you the government can tell you
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what to say but this isn't the government it's an independent body it's the experts it's an ngo
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it's the anti-hate network they're not the government and they're just making recommendations
00:06:00.880
and then whoever's looking at it the bureaucrats go off the recommendation of experts and then you're
00:06:05.440
censored so you didn't get censored by the liberal government you were censored by the anti-hate
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network so we don't really have a charter problem or or a constitutional problem in this case it's
00:06:14.480
more of a uh private sector it's more consequences thing and i think that's sort of what drives anyone
00:06:19.920
so i call this sort of the laundering of of censorship through these NGOs yeah i think that that's actually
00:06:26.720
a pretty fair uh description of the phenomenon and you know the specific incident um that i was at the
00:06:34.800
center of was trying to have a one-on-one in-person interview with chris sky um which you know if
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i don't expect that we would have gotten any real nuggets of wisdom uh but part of my approach is
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seeing the satire the absurdity the humor in some of this and so it would have actually been
00:07:01.360
part of a parcel of a comedy show kind of underlying a roast of chris sky um and i i thought that this
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would be an engaging and fun way um to sort of tackle some of these issues to confront some of what i
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perceived as inconsistencies um and you know give people tools for thinking right that that's kind of
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no like listen i come from a comedy background so i saw the idea and i thought it was a great idea
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and and but thank you a lot of people did a lot of people did um except for the few who didn't and
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i was not prepared to encounter a blockade i had no idea that that was coming down the pipeline um you
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know the show ended up being cancelled that wasn't good enough it was the fact now that i invited him i was
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planning to platform him even though his platform was substantially larger than mine at the time um
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and that's kind of so but this concept of platforming i find very interesting because organizations like
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the anti-hate network will also pick on relatively obscure people at times and elevate them to the
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status of boogeyman almost um and do that by cherry picking material um characterizing it in certain
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ways and there's an element of fear-mongering and you um alluded to the the creation of hate i think that
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there is a vicious cycle that attaches to it because when you single someone out especially if they're not
00:08:48.960
how do i say this jet like they're not important right if they don't have the capabilities to
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defend themselves like then it becomes quite various like if it's an average person like i
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kind of had the luxury like this week when we started getting a lot of attention and and going
00:09:03.200
on indian media channels and like kind of going a bit viral on the india stuff the anti-hate network
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came after us because no one stepped out of line you know i had retweeted something a video someone
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did of jagmeet saying this to a man who's openly advocating for violence against hindus like
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he was on tape there's another tape i have of him like saying no we bombed and we did this and
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we kill and we kill and it's good we get like so not a guy the guy ended up retweeting he had sent
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some anti-semitic stuff four years ago i'm jewish so right but it's kind of funny like when i retweeted
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him this guy had actually messaged me like hey by the way this is my past i said this got in a really
00:09:35.920
dark place in the pandemic like i'm sorry about this made an apology then like asked and i connected
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him with like some rabbis or whatever so like it was a guy who like had some bad moments three years ago
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like how am i supposed to know this but instead of like getting in it with the anti-hate network and
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just like this guy who's coming after me i don't know his bio is like i used to work for all vice or
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other vices who cares block and we're talking about it it's no no we don't say his name like it's just
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some loser like this is the problem i don't want to give these losers anything like they what they
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was so clear that he wanted me to be like look the anti-hate network's coming after me support us in our
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fight against the anti-hate network and these guys are no nuts and then hype them up and then they
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hype us up and it's just like this toxic nonsense thing we're like we just have a bunch of parasites
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in our society running around trying to get famous off destroying other people's success and it's like
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no like you're losers but not everyone has that like not everyone can just be like okay i don't care
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like i'm doing something else whatever like for a normal person who needs a normal job who like has to
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like send their resume into things like i have 8 000 hours of me saying crazy ridiculous things like i'm not
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getting a job at like rbc anytime soon i know that but someone who wants to get a job at rbc and the
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anti-hate network says you're at this protest that can ruin their life right so like i don't want to
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feed into this system that just goes around destroying people's lives for purity reasons and like the
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thing is like there used to be just like a town eccentric back in the day that everyone knew was weird
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and he said weird things but everyone would kind of leave him alone and you wouldn't try and turn
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the man into a media figure so that's kind of one type of person that like anti-hate and these
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different sort of uh networks will go after press progress is also part of that a lot about these
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other sort of like fellow travelers with the anti-hate network what the other type of person
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is someone who effectively is almost in business with anti-hate i'm not saying in a literal sense
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but paul from and anti-hate could not go along without each other people like tyler russell and anti-hate
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live off of each other because if they say ridiculous things or they hold some event where only five
00:11:36.640
idiots are going to show up they'll get promoted as a person and they get to be considered an
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important political figure because now every single time paul from shakes hands with someone
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is at a protest even though nobody knows what he looks like i can barely remember what he looks like
00:11:50.960
he looks like benjamin franklin if he was a loser uh like there's nothing really going on with him
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yet anti-hate gets so much mileage out of of him donating to derrick sloan getting him kicked out of
00:12:02.240
the conservative party under a tool he'll he'll take he'll shake hands with adam from adamson's
00:12:06.800
barbecue or whatever and now he's somehow a nazi because one guy showed up or whatever but the and
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that's where a lot of these like anti-hate groups if anything they are perpetuating and popularizing
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actual hateful people and then they play you know six degrees of kevin bacon to try and get to
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reasonable people and then say that you're somehow traveling in the same car as them
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like and and uh maybe you have to go back to you of course karima the thing is too it feels like
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the people from the anti-hate network and these sort of other tag along groups hate you so much
00:12:38.000
because they understand you as a person and they act and they know that you're a sympathetic reasonable
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person that can't be smeared so that's why they come after you the most because you're the you're the
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person who might actually make people meet in the middle in a certain sense oh well a lot to take in
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there um a couple of points um i agree that with certain characters who receive attention and focus
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there is almost a symbiotic relationship there um and you know the the very notion that association
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means an unequivocal endorsement of anything that this other person has ever said or done
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is totally absurd uh i think that people should be judged on the merits of what they do and say
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association may be relevant at certain times to figure out where someone is coming from
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you know what what is animating them but it has to be done with such care because otherwise if
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mere association is enough to be tarnished as xyz then people are prevented from communicating with one
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another and expression being able to reach across the aisle that's in my view a cornerstone of democracy
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and if we are unable to do that the only solution is more polarization which leads me to the point
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that there are different types of people or personalities who get featured by organizations
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like anti-hate and the ones who are truly at the fringe or maybe normal people who were spotted somewhere
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or what have you um you know if the spotlight is on them and without clear basis but that leads them to
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be ostracized by other people and pushed out of their communities or lose their jobs or whatever
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tethers them to any sense of normalcy in society where do they go they get driven into more and more
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extremes where you know beliefs are valid validated the notion of persecution and perhaps they are then
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exposed to even more radical ideas so it's counterproductive even at a face level assessment of what
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they're doing and then if you dig deeper it can appear even more sinister just going back to what
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you were saying about the government laundering smears right and targeting individuals who have the
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potential to i don't even know what the basis of of the targeting is half the time um yeah i mean
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yeah i mean the links are so tenuous yeah the ten i mean the tenuous links are one thing i mean i've
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i always this is something that has always fascinated me like i always why do people do what they do i'm
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always interested by different radical groups and how ideal like how hardline ideologies form it's
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interesting you know i i tried to come up with a phrase like last year on like reflexive contrarianism
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and this new thing it's where people see something from the other side and they immediately will take the
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exact opposite um uh position and you saw a lot of this like right-wing people say left did this on
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trump right sometimes trump would say something perfectly reasonable and normal my number one
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thing is back in 2019 donald trump said the islamic republic of iran when they openly said they were
00:16:20.880
murdering civilians in the street he condemned them and said it was a bad thing the democrats attacked
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him for it right that that should have been something where we could all reasonably be like
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we might not like trump but murdering innocent people is bad we couldn't get on that
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right and then like on the right thing it's like you know we're why did i get a lot of things is
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like the nato stuff like right oh the media suddenly backs uh ukraine this that means russia's the good
00:16:42.800
guys and nato started the war it's like you have to be insane to think that but i saw a guy yesterday
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literally say he still hadn't seen any footage of the war he's like how how come i haven't seen any
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footage from this supposed war it's like because you don't look it up because you don't look it up but
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it's so fascinating though but like this i try and understand and like one of the so i'm getting to
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like my theory on sort of like how this some of these modern polarizational things form and i
00:17:04.240
like your opinion on this is like it's it's sort of like a you know one in group out group right this
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like i'm in and i'm out but it's sort of this like need to be like intellectually pure in a way like
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it's it's like kind of linked to their intelligence in the sense of like the media is lying and i know
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they're lying so to prove to you guys that i cannot be corrupted ideologically or intellectually
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like i possess such value i will immediately do the opposite thing so i just signal so hard that
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whatever the mainstream signaling is i'm just the exact counter signal and this is like some sort of
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like in-group intelligence displayed to them and that's that's kind of how i've seen this form in sort
00:17:44.080
of left and right modern politics where it's sort of like a need to preserve like their sort of like
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moral and intellectual integrity by just being but by playing it off of like this villain you've
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created and often this villain's like ridiculous straw man like no one has these things so you get
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these like insane opinions that that when they hit the means mainstream like mainstream conditions like
00:18:04.000
what the hell are these people talking about left and right because they they're creating these crazy
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opinions as a polar opposite of these demonic opinions they've constructed of their enemies and we
00:18:15.120
just have these lunatics running around is is is how i see a lot of this
00:18:21.040
yeah um and and i think groupthink plays a part in that right and people wanting to belong and be on
00:18:29.600
side and kind of of a similar understanding and knowing who's your team and who's the team that's
00:18:36.320
against us and that's just it's easier right it's easier that way very easy it's easy to be smart
00:18:43.200
yeah well it boils down to shortcuts right we take shortcuts and okay so and so said this that must
00:18:49.280
mean it's false it's the opposite as you or so and so said this therefore it's right you know like
00:18:54.480
yeah it's not assessing it on the merits and you know this is something that um we came across in
00:19:01.760
preparing the report for hate gate where it's opinions or conclusions that are predetermined almost and
00:19:10.880
looking for evidence to support that or ignoring or dismissing evidence that doesn't um it creates
00:19:17.920
this tunnel vision and things are not properly assessed on the merits um so it's a lack of whether it's
00:19:26.320
work ethic or diligence or critical thinking um but it it does us all a disservice because we're not able to actually
00:19:35.440
exchange ideas in any meaningful way um and you know that that
00:19:44.720
yeah it's bad yeah how do we progress if we're stifling the ability to even talk to one another
00:19:52.000
another how how do we progress forward as the foundation of democracy or one of them is rhetoric
00:19:59.200
right the greeks openly practice rhetoric like go into a park make a crazy speech about something
00:20:05.360
someone else comes up and counters you like this like they realize this at the formation of democracy
00:20:09.840
and i'm not saying ancient greece was this paradise we're like but like no this is thousands of years ago
00:20:14.560
as as we burgeon into into the modern world like people realize for for any sort of for people to
00:20:20.880
have any sort of power in a system they have to there has to be open dialogue and exchange of ideas and
00:20:26.000
this has to be healthy and and we've lost that like we've we've lost that ethos especially in like
00:20:32.560
mainstream um corporate world and it might not be so much from ideology it might just be from fear
00:20:37.840
you know hr departments might be too big you know everything's filmed like everyone just gets a bit too
00:20:42.640
scared and doesn't take risks and it just who's taking risks crazy people right and the people
00:20:48.560
the furthest left and the furthest right in in a culture of fear they're going to be only ones
00:20:52.800
saying their piece on particular issues so you know we're not we're not going to get like this sort
00:20:57.920
of nuanced you know okay on on this particular issue here's a point but here's also a thing where
00:21:03.760
like some people in the center can kind of come it's just like you know you know uh either you know
00:21:11.040
either nato's the greatest or nato's the worst or russia's the greatest russia's the worst ukraine
00:21:15.440
is real ukraine isn't real like the conversations we're having are not high quality right we're still
00:21:21.680
you know we're debating over what is a woman we're not talking about like you know what is the most
00:21:26.320
effective way to you know increase um public literacy when it comes to legal and political matters
00:21:33.760
like how do we teach high schoolers how to up themselves on a political power curve to get ready
00:21:38.720
for university and coming like these are not the conversations we're having it's who's allowed in
00:21:42.320
the washroom and what flags are we raising in the schools right so it's not that it's not that i i
00:21:47.920
just wanted to add in this because i think this would be something maybe interesting to talk about
00:21:50.880
because i think one of your your best article on all this stuff so far karima has been this one i'll
00:21:55.440
just throw the chat uh it's just from crier media about the uh about basically the anatomy of a smear
00:22:00.560
campaign and not talking about a specific one that you're involved in because i i assume we'll mention
00:22:05.200
some examples later on that you've kind of uh you know where they've kind of you know tried to do the
00:22:09.520
drive-by shooting on you from anti-hate but just the way i just want to use this more mainstream
00:22:14.160
example that every single person here will probably understand is that the way i see it starting is that
00:22:19.920
all this stuff can almost take a couple of years of setup sometimes in order to get to the point where
00:22:24.880
someone who said something completely innocuous two years ago is now cancelled uh two years later is that
00:22:30.640
and i want to sort of start from the idea that like two years ago if a politician had said hey i
00:22:36.480
disagree with the world economic forum because i don't like their political ideology most reasonable
00:22:41.280
thing to say you can disagree or agree with anyone's political ideology and how we got from that to
00:22:46.400
basically pure poly of now being labeled an extremist and conspiracy theorist for disagreeing with an
00:22:52.400
international organization's particular flavor of political ideology by mainstream media sort of uh like
00:22:59.280
journalists who are supposedly supposed to be asking very objective and fair questions
00:23:03.760
at that you know gas station he was at in pei and where i saw us getting from just having a basic
00:23:09.520
opinion to now being a flat out like like uh you know conspiracy theorist and extremist there was
00:23:15.200
multiple layers of these kind of anti-hate type front groups who started sort of making sounds about
00:23:21.920
how well there's some people who criticize the wf who are crazy nazis and that might be true there
00:23:26.560
might be some crazy people who like criticize the wf me and daniel see them all the time where they
00:23:31.760
literally think they control the world and it's like i don't like the wf they also close fob is
00:23:36.240
also an idiot and does not have enough political power yeah the plan is well i read the great reset
00:23:40.640
and the great i read the plan it's stupid it's written by someone who was drunk during a second
00:23:45.920
year sociology class and thinks they're a genius like yes but but we got from we got from there to then
00:23:51.920
anti-hate and sort of other groups like press progress calling out specific individual people
00:23:56.480
who talk about the wf lot who maybe are a little bit odd and eccentric and then that's moved to the
00:24:01.840
point where you'll have people like duane bratt and other professors or academics being quoted in cdc
00:24:08.160
articles that were saying experts say that or as a wire story from canada press that experts say
00:24:13.600
that you know pure poly of is inviting conspiracy type language and just by the first the anti-hate people
00:24:20.000
basically enabling people to say that criticizing wf sounds conspiratorial that we now then have
00:24:25.120
experts saying this sounds like a conspiracy theory type language and then you have a journalist in
00:24:30.560
pei saying you use conspiracy theory type language and we can just keep dropping the qualifications as
00:24:36.000
we go along and that's kind of what's happened to a lot of people that anti-hate has targeted is that
00:24:41.520
it starts out that they have 17 qualifications for well this is what this what this person said but this
00:24:46.800
person's a specific flavor crazy and they take this meaning they take this opinion in this weird
00:24:52.800
direction or whatever but eventually metastasized into just basically saying you're you're a conspiracy
00:24:58.240
theorist based on literally nothing but the opinion being said by increasingly like credible people
00:25:07.360
yeah there's probably a few things there um one being this tendency toward keyword right like we're
00:25:14.960
our brains are seo optimized almost and so we hear something and then it triggers well this is the
00:25:21.760
implication of it even though there may be other interpretations etc um that are available or plausible
00:25:30.400
but that's just not how we are wired to think anymore um i love by the way i'm gonna i love that
00:25:37.440
line of brains are seo optimized that hit that hit me because sometimes i'm writing an article and i'm or
00:25:42.560
thinking your title i'm like okay you got an seo after like how do i don't change the content but
00:25:46.480
like they're always out of sort of front of me i'm like okay how do you get people to pay attention
00:25:50.000
to one line you said to listen to the other things you're gonna say so yeah my brain is a little
00:25:54.480
bit hardwired like that i'll own that i'll own that i think i have an excuse because i i work on
00:25:59.600
both ends of it but uh that hit me that that will keep me up an extra half an hour tonight
00:26:04.080
you are free to take that one um a gift um i'll trade you i'll trade you that for laundering uh
00:26:13.360
some sort of censorship and we can so so that's an element of it um there's also like when we're
00:26:19.840
talking about experts or expertise um who is being spotlighted as an expert um to what extent are their
00:26:28.400
credentials you know being thoroughly assessed right like and that's not to say that every expert
00:26:34.400
quoted in the news we should dismiss because simultaneously there is a devaluing of expertise
00:26:40.960
and people who have no background in something opining as though they are sort of holding a doctorate
00:26:50.400
right um so it it is happening from both ends where there's simultaneously an over-reliance on
00:26:57.840
experts to um promulgate certain views or narratives um and also um this devaluation of of expertise so
00:27:10.000
it's kind of it's funny how that happens on on both sides and maybe something um to explore further um and
00:27:17.600
then the other aspect of it is conflation um and sort of there's something and then we fuse it with
00:27:25.920
something else and suddenly that something also means something else even though it doesn't always um
00:27:33.680
it's probably also true that politicians to some degree um are aware of what these keywords are and
00:27:41.760
are deliberately invoking them in order to um reach a certain audience or portray certain messaging um so
00:27:51.360
it's you know these things are happening in parallel but it's they pile on each other yeah the conflation
00:28:00.560
thing like that's a modern political tactic if i've ever seen one like it's a right justin trudeau
00:28:05.520
i'm dealing with that right now with sikhs and calisthenes or the conceits and calisthenes or
00:28:09.200
justin trudeau invites a um a literal nazi to parliament ss waffen nazi and then you have them
00:28:15.040
saying well some conservative mps um met with christine anderson and she's right-wing in germany that
00:28:21.920
makes her i'm gonna call her nito and these are the same things and it's like it's it's not even close
00:28:26.080
uh to the same thing and like you could disagree with christine anderson and you could say you know what
00:28:30.000
she might have said some stuff that i would think is islamophobic fine that does not equate to literal
00:28:36.080
mass murdering genocidal like wearing hugo boss leather uniform throwing people in an oven shooting
00:28:41.680
kids in the head like the the you know that's the conflation thing right and it's like you know the
00:28:47.040
guilt by association only works one way right just uh peer polyev some guy shows up takes a picture
00:28:52.800
jerry mckenzie who doesn't even like peer polyev is a ppc guy oh look who peer polyv supports right and
00:28:58.640
then the media remember when justin trudeau invited jaspal atpal to india a convicted terrorist
00:29:03.680
in our court system we tried to assassinate an indian official he's brought with the liberals to india
00:29:08.800
and this is right that whoa now the experts say well that that's that's different that's that's
00:29:14.720
that's something and that's you know that's just violence against hindus it's not really an issue so
00:29:19.840
you know what what gets pumped up what doesn't and everything's conflated what about this what about
00:29:24.240
that yeah it's toxic and everyone just kind of checks out because the hardliners have their
00:29:28.880
excuse like all the true and on people it's like oh true to invite a nazi well peer polyev took a
00:29:33.280
picture with someone four years ago so right i it's a wash i'm just gonna cut in here what i'm
00:29:40.080
going to thank jason abby for giving for contributing to the legal fund this is not beer money it is legal
00:29:44.800
money but thank you for that jason but i just wanted to also just talk about just the fact that
00:29:49.520
when you're doing a lot of these anti-hate activists people from the anti-hate network press
00:29:53.360
progress we literally had press progress imply that we're pro-nazi despite half of our writers
00:29:58.320
having you know dead relatives in uh in poland uh but the thing is that these people are fairly nasty
00:30:05.040
people and i think that's something that people have to cut through it's not that they're trying
00:30:08.320
to do their jobs and they're just a little bit off they just really care about like combating far
00:30:12.960
right hate there's a a smarmy smugness to the way that many of these people go and talk about their
00:30:19.120
work when you see anti-hate network people being uh interviewed and asked questions in parliamentary
00:30:25.040
uh hearings stuff like that dan lloyd asking them questions and then they start kind of like getting
00:30:30.320
all like uppity about the fact that oh you don't you don't support uh far like us going after far
00:30:35.040
right hatred and whatnot it's always this kind of almost mafia-esque gangster type quality to the way
00:30:41.920
that they confront people and they ask them questions and they tend to it always comes with accusations with no
00:30:47.600
ability to actually correct anything and i and pretty much every single one of us here has
00:30:52.240
experienced that and especially you kareemah because again they're not saying that while we
00:30:56.400
think cream is wrong we think kareemah is promoting hate by doing x we think that by platforming chris sky
00:31:02.480
x will happen ergo she should do it it's that they just start throwing insults as soon as you don't bow
00:31:07.360
down to their particular view on a subject and maybe you can talk a little bit about that because
00:31:12.480
i thought when i was reading that article that you're at the anatomy of a smear campaign
00:31:16.320
the nastiness that immediately comes out from just simply you disagreeing with their tactics
00:31:21.520
is above and beyond absurd yep um and i i think i we talked earlier about groupthink and that affecting
00:31:31.520
both sides of the political spectrum and i think within the left um which is a simplified binary but if
00:31:40.720
we go with that within the left there's an even higher degree of expectation that everyone will be
00:31:48.400
in lockstep on every issue and if you step out or are caught having unorthodox thoughts you are exiled
00:31:59.360
and that's the end of it um so absolutely a purity spiral uh and you know the cannibalization the
00:32:08.560
self-cannibalization of your pool of supporters um so that you know that exists independently in the way
00:32:17.040
that i've experienced it and what i like a modern french revolution in a way where even ross's bear
00:32:22.400
gets the guillotine eventually is kind of yeah yeah that's exactly um so it's short-sighted um on top of
00:32:29.920
everything else because you're alienating support and also one day you're next right so that's silly
00:32:36.080
um but what i describe in anatomy of a smear campaign and the way that i've experienced it is that
00:32:44.560
it starts with anonymous accounts and they are able to say the most outrageous and ludicrous things
00:32:51.360
because there's zero accountability and no real way to fight back because it's not an even battle um one
00:33:00.160
person has their name and face on the line and therefore there's you know anything that can be
00:33:06.080
used as ammunition um and whatever lands or hits has a tangible impact on reputation versus an unknown
00:33:15.760
right a total unknown we we have nothing to work off of except for post history and what they purport to
00:33:24.000
stand for um but anyone can be anyone on the internet right and so so that like that that you've
00:33:32.320
even said some of these anti-hate people and then you've even said some of these anti-hate people who
00:33:36.240
are like board members they are like regular writers they will also like you to the best of your knowledge
00:33:42.160
and all the evidence out there they will they operate anonymous accounts as well even though they
00:33:46.800
supposedly put their face on the internet too well it has been part and parcel of the
00:33:53.920
mo um so i can't say who's doing what currently but it is a known fact um and just last year there
00:34:04.320
was a job posting for someone to go undercover and infiltrate white supremacist groups and you're going
00:34:10.880
to write us two to three articles per week and just totally unrealistic expectations because how can
00:34:17.840
someone stay undercover be accurate and truthful but also meet that quota it you can pick two out of
00:34:26.560
the three at best it's called lying you just have to lie a little bit more but uh but you you know
00:34:32.720
like so we know that that's part like so that's but that's the first layer of it anonymous accounts
00:34:37.680
make smears and then you know other accounts pick that up and maybe soften the language a little bit
00:34:44.240
maybe not um but it goes up this almost chain of command it reaches influencers it potentially
00:34:51.120
reaches journalists um this is repeated into fact this is part part and parcel of how corrupt ngos
00:34:57.600
work on a lot of issues like i won't get into trouble like geopolitically but i've seen it on like
00:35:02.720
chris you know left-wing ngos and right-wing ngos when they want to criticize a government that's you
00:35:07.840
know not on their thing um you get someone like you know i i see a lot on you know you can use israel
00:35:13.840
or india or any of the things where you have an ngo making outlandish claim that um hindus or sikhs or
00:35:19.280
muslims or whoever their thing is did this the mass thing like they over report something it gets picked
00:35:25.440
up then by other ngos as ngo says once it gets picked up the original ngo then retracts and says okay
00:35:32.320
we didn't really say that so they're no longer legally liable but everyone else all the end their
00:35:36.080
ngos in the ecosystem they can all report on it by saying these people said it so like they like
00:35:41.760
because if you want to go after somebody you have to go off the original and the original well no we
00:35:44.640
changed it but you still have all these ngos sort of reporting the original extreme you know over
00:35:50.720
exaggeration of the first one and like so again i've seen this tactic being used before on the things
00:35:57.040
all right so there's there's two areas that i think we need to get to uh i think uh what people
00:36:01.520
would find a lot of interesting um so first one i saw this come up in the chat uh greg
00:36:06.000
from diverge media asked and i want he wanted your take on this uh but this would be the government
00:36:10.560
censoring bill c11 um the new podcast regulation yes uh what's uh her view and unless he's he what's
00:36:19.680
he views on the regulation of podcasts here to see being forced on canadian media personalities
00:36:24.480
so i think uh this is we'll do this and then i gotta i got a question after that
00:36:28.160
i think um the crtc is not particularly democratic in the way that it functions
00:36:36.160
um and in who gets to make these determinations about what qualifies i think that it is overreach
00:36:44.480
quite frankly um to even imagine that you can control content on the internet and it feels inevitable
00:36:52.880
that this trickles down to affecting people's ability um to freely express themselves uh which i i see as a
00:37:03.440
net negative even in a world where misinformation disinformation um hysteria hyperbole
00:37:13.600
it's part of a business model right clickbait is a thing so there are incentives for people to be
00:37:23.840
less measured less nuanced less truthful in order to monetize their platforms or gain popularity or fame
00:37:32.240
so that that that that is the issue that needs to be contended with um but i don't think it happens
00:37:38.640
by regulating speech or content um and i think that overall censorship um it's a cudgel and and we should
00:37:48.320
be as a society very careful with how we introduce or use it first of all because political winds can shift
00:37:56.560
at any given moment and once there is an apparatus in place to censor civilians to surveil them to
00:38:03.520
monitor them uh right it's you're a fool if you think the person in power always will agree with you
00:38:10.080
you're an absolute fool if you think the person will always agree with you like eventually you're
00:38:15.200
going to be on the outs of someone in power and it's the old chris for hitchens thing like who do you
00:38:19.360
trust to to to make the delineation of what is hate what you also end up getting when you have too
00:38:24.800
much crtc regulation as well as just the general uh federal subsidization of like you know the cbc and
00:38:31.760
other media outlets and then the regulations over top of it is that you ban any new information from
00:38:37.040
really entering the scene in a big way in independent media as you probably all know there's zero dollars
00:38:43.760
in independent media there's nothing there because the thing is that there's so many regulations already
00:38:49.200
dictating what you can do and what you can say when it comes to television and radio that everyone
00:38:53.680
else has to do their thing online and then it becomes too difficult to do on we can't even post
00:38:57.840
stuff on facebook right now uh that now you don't you can't have anything but the uh the you can't
00:39:03.920
have anything but the subsidized media and on top of that now you have places like and the only way
00:39:09.120
you can break through is by getting subsidized by doing some sort of performing some sort of function
00:39:14.560
that the federal government agrees with which is kind of where anti-hate comes into play they get a bunch
00:39:19.520
of money because there's no way anti-hate is making enough money on ads and stuff like that and donors
00:39:25.680
in order to get by it's all federal money nobody reads them and that was actually the funny thing
00:39:29.920
that you said karima where they were like can you infiltrate a nazi uh like a nazi cell and write us
00:39:36.240
three articles about it a week i don't even think those people put up three articles a week with the rest
00:39:41.200
of their staff right now it's actually there's not that much hate it turns out to be able to report on
00:39:46.320
yet they want you to report on three articles about the exact same group every single week because
00:39:51.040
they desperately need it but uh but yeah it's like the crtc regulation is is making it so difficult
00:39:56.160
to break into the space and the oversaturation of subsidized media means that most people who might
00:40:01.040
have private interest in funding media and funding other views just don't want to do it because they
00:40:04.800
don't see how you could break through and right now is a very critical juncture because the canadian
00:40:11.600
anti-hate network has made a bid for five million dollars of federal money to be an anti-hate
00:40:17.520
watchdog yeah that's a lot of money and that's a lot i'm gonna have to get a bernie farber tattoo in
00:40:24.320
order to keep myself out of prison i need bernie farber's face on my face in order to just you know
00:40:29.520
be able to buy groceries that'll be the new vaccine passport scan scan an anti-hate tattoo
00:40:35.440
you know it's subjective right because um it it just is and and we already have certain parameters
00:40:46.160
on speech so free expression is free expression up to a certain point i'm not just talking about
00:40:52.960
criminal law but also um you know defamation law certain restrictions on the way you're able to
00:40:59.520
advertise so it's not truly free um and there are mechanisms to deal with it but the the law
00:41:11.440
it it is a tool in the toolkit um and there's not much of an emphasis put on creating in order to have
00:41:23.040
alternatives in order to you know promote or or provoke thought um it's more about shutting things
00:41:30.800
down uh and i i think that that's it's counterproductive um it makes people double down or
00:41:38.720
pushes them to farther extremes um and you know it's it is the antithesis of progress well so i'm gonna
00:41:47.760
i'm gonna i'm gonna jump in here why i i there's i think there's a good follow-up here that i know you
00:41:51.760
have to understand i'm gonna i'm gonna outrank you here so we appreciate that also uh ben bankus
00:41:56.800
and i are arranging a protest against the crtc next saturday we think we just we'll come up i'm gonna
00:42:01.440
meet with him after this and we're gonna protest that so next weekend we'll do something but
00:42:06.480
this sort of shutting things down and free speech and and yeah we have other things and there's other
00:42:10.000
things in law so i'm not a hate speech guy but i understand there are things that you say with words
00:42:14.080
that are illegal like i'm not a crazy person and i think ken has just sort of hit an international
00:42:18.320
incident and there's some people here from india um who might want answers to this particular
00:42:22.400
question and one of the things i kind of went viral on is going ballistic screaming about
00:42:26.640
calistani nonsense in this country i go crazy when we have places like the anti-hit network saying
00:42:32.080
you took a picture with him who took a picture with him who four years ago was beside a poster
00:42:37.440
uh by someone whose grandfather was friends with adolf hitler and therefore you're dangerous and
00:42:42.960
here we have canada country where there are calistani-affiliated gurdwaras and the majority
00:42:48.160
of sikhs in canada are not calistani they like me because i'm anti-calistani i know it has nothing
00:42:52.720
to do with the sikh religion it's an isi-funded nonsense bs movement that doesn't care about
00:42:57.840
sikh human rights because they don't say anything about pakistan but they're screaming about india and
00:43:03.120
screaming at india fine that's political things but we actually have people who again they did the
00:43:08.000
the the floats with india ghani calling for the assassination of indian ministers um photos
00:43:14.000
praising terrorists as martyrs um putting like targets on people's heads there's people openly
00:43:20.400
running around threatening i mean the lawyer for hard to sign the jars is telling all the hindus to
00:43:24.880
get out of canada he's going to send them all back to india and we have these factions um that have
00:43:31.200
certain we could say minorities of minorities which are outright threatening like
00:43:36.000
widespread ethnic violence and we're not like hedging it they're like no no no we're not
00:43:41.600
speaking in english so the anti-hate network was too late to translate but it's like get revenge
00:43:47.040
blood for blood glory to the martyrs like kick them out like fomenting legit violence praising suicide
00:43:53.040
bombings like things that are any reasonable person should say this crosses the line yet this doesn't
00:43:59.440
make it onto the anti-hate network like literal ethnic violence we're calling for it straight out no
00:44:05.360
ambiguity against an identifiable group of hindus sorry from everyone in terms of exoticism that we
00:44:11.760
don't know what these people are up to uh it's just it's too complicated seeks hindus it's this
00:44:16.640
group versus this group i can't make sense of it and then but then you get people going really hardcore
00:44:22.080
after like non-existent i would like the most center-left opinion on this because like it's easy for
00:44:26.960
me and why it is right-wingers to kind of say there's a wokeness element to this and blah blah blah blah
00:44:31.920
um which like i still think there is a bit of a wokeness element too and you could also say maybe
00:44:36.480
a bit of a racist element where you know white people don't care about the lives of brown people
00:44:40.960
because oh that's them that's not us i acknowledge that both sides exist but i i i would like a bit
00:44:46.320
more of a you know a center-left reasoned you know musing maybe on on this well i think if we look at
00:44:55.440
who is staff who's on the board um there's probably a lack of capacity frankly um to deal with issues
00:45:04.640
that aren't plain and obvious and you know part of the norm of what they're looking for in terms of
00:45:12.160
hate um so they just don't have that inclination or skill set or perspective um because it's not a
00:45:24.320
particularly diverse group um and you know representational politics itself can be sort of a
00:45:32.960
check this box okay it's good we have the identity covered um but you know that's not what makes people
00:45:39.600
tick and that's not actually what it means to be diverse in in a sense that uh you're you're getting
00:45:49.840
a variety of opinions and viewpoints and perspectives and you're able to bounce that around
00:45:57.440
that's what erica yeah oh sorry i was just going to say that that's where erica ithel uh apparently
00:46:03.360
thinks that you're not actually brown because you don't share the right opinions in her opinion
00:46:08.720
right it's a weird form of tokenism um it it eliminates people's agency to
00:46:15.680
think or express themselves um it uh i don't i don't see at all how it um
00:46:26.240
there's one thing i remember from statistics class that i always found very profound it's a mathematical
00:46:31.920
thing but i think it works on this and it's when they said never dichotomize a continuous variable and
00:46:37.520
what that means is like like there's if it's a continuous variable it means it's sort of changing
00:46:42.000
and fluid and you have to analyze like that but if you try and cut it into two things and treat it
00:46:46.320
like an actual number like the conclusions you get will be completely skewed and it doesn't work
00:46:52.160
right that's like a that's like a statistical counting but i i see that always is like it's
00:46:56.640
always been sort of my analogy on sort of the current racial climate in north america where we
00:47:01.280
decotomize the continuous variable it's white people and people of color right and one is good
00:47:06.240
and one is bad but yeah that's not exactly the way to think of it because again you know black is
00:47:11.040
different than brown also like brown like right it just ran india bangladesh and then within india
00:47:16.240
how about these different things and then then brown is south america and india like i couldn't
00:47:21.120
find two more different cultures if i tried between like brazil and india right but they're pocs and i'm
00:47:28.160
what like so you know it's it's me it's like we've dichotomized continuous variable and then if you commit
00:47:33.120
a a a a heresy uh from the church of poc well then you're kicked out right that happened to you
00:47:39.440
my most famous one is ian hersey ali right she she was kicked out of you know she lost the woman
00:47:45.440
muslim uh refugee all that because she took some heterodox viewpoints so she lost all of that type
00:47:52.080
of stuff and you and you have this uh really you know sort of again this toxic polarized environment
00:47:57.520
that we keep talking about if i could on this um there is a very perverse eagerness on the part of
00:48:06.880
um people who buy into this this viewpoint where they really like going after poc um to use that term
00:48:19.600
who don't align and finding the bad poc and making sure everybody knows who they are um so you know
00:48:28.000
an opportunity for self-examination on the part of these individuals why why that is something
00:48:35.600
they feel they should be weighing into first of all um in can i can i add theory like i've noticed this
00:48:43.680
it's it's sort of the heresy element this is like i think why are women get a lot more hate on
00:48:48.320
uh like when they step into the trans issue because they're supposed to be protected by this
00:48:53.840
thought thought of intersectionality so it's the heresy element to it it's sort of right if i do it
00:48:58.800
it's sort of expected i can you know i can ramble about washrooms all day and people might not like
00:49:03.840
it but no one's going to try and kill me um and then you know you add oh you're brown and you're a
00:49:08.560
woman and you've done this well you've done a even greater heresy we gave you so much we gave you
00:49:15.200
everything you could have been on the pedestal but you rejected it you were the chosen one
00:49:20.320
you were the chosen one karima why not i don't know why have you forsaken so i think it's an
00:49:25.440
extra level of viciousness you see it on the indigenous leader uh the inuit woman who backed
00:49:30.880
polyev saying i wasn't defended and then people just viciously like white liberals who are like we
00:49:35.600
need truth and reconciliation truth and reconciliation until an indigenous person has a
00:49:40.640
legitimate truth and reconciliation moment with the leader of the conservative party and then you
00:49:45.920
know all the gloves are off um you see that all the time so yeah that that's that's a real so
00:49:52.080
interesting and i use poc or person of color because it's my favorite phrase because it's so silly
00:49:56.800
because everyone who uses poc would would be if i called you if i called you a colored person
00:50:03.120
they would go ballistic and do that space but we've changed like the little way and now it's like
00:50:07.680
and now now you have to call them a colored person but like in a different way because i just know in
00:50:12.160
five years like poc is going to be like an offensive thing that like only a racist would say and you
00:50:17.920
could just see that coming so i'm just enjoying that you know in kind of if we're looking at recent
00:50:26.320
events um the way that the million person march for children or whatever it's it's framed as
00:50:33.840
um the way that that was covered really illustrates um some of the shortcomings in a binary dichotomized
00:50:42.720
approach um you had people screaming at muslims to go home um right and it's there is this tension
00:50:52.640
and hypocrisy and a framing that leaned heavily into the notion of hate um i was on the ground in the
00:51:01.840
durham region so you know i i only could be at the one particular protest um but it's it's a mix and
00:51:10.800
anytime you're painting an entire group with a single brush particularly a group that's kind of
00:51:17.360
nebulous and amorphous and doesn't really have gatekeeping uh in any meaningful sense um it just
00:51:24.720
cheapens the discourse and our ability to actually engage on the substantive matters it it you know
00:51:32.240
it it is very unfortunate well one of the things that you saw with a lot of people reporting on that
00:51:38.320
and one particular guy i'm actually having to deal with now but when you go through all their tweets
00:51:43.120
they keep saying it's it's a hate march oh it's a hate rally it's it's the anti-lgbt rally even though
00:51:48.240
it's like it they're standing up for one of the most oddly widely held beliefs in canada of believing
00:51:55.040
in parental rights but they're just pushing back on the minority of people in government and other
00:51:58.960
institutions that seem to demonize people for like wanting to know what goes on in the classroom and
00:52:03.440
whatnot not even demanding that this must be done in the classroom just saying i'd like to know what's
00:52:07.200
going on and that's it but i would say that what highlights is that just the word hate or hateful or
00:52:13.120
bigoted has become a pejorative in and of itself is that you'd rather be called anything you'd rather
00:52:18.800
be called any slur than hateful because if you're as soon as you're hateful people just imagine things
00:52:23.680
that you might have done and it's deliberately vague and this is exactly the type of the person
00:52:27.920
i'm thinking of right now and the tweets that they put out they're not from they're not from the
00:52:31.600
anti-hate network they're not connected to them or press progress or any of these uh individual
00:52:35.920
organizations but they have the same tactics they'll never specifically say that you're a racist or you'll
00:52:42.320
that you're this or that they'll just label the thing that you're part of a hate movement and then
00:52:46.640
they'll often just post subtle vague stuff hoping that then the bot accounts the anonymous accounts
00:52:52.880
in their replies fill in the gaps and fill in the kind of uh slurs down there for them but even then
00:52:59.920
these even these people who are scared to ever directly say something about you because they don't
00:53:04.400
want to be like sued or anything like that even though usually i find the people that they're
00:53:08.240
criticizing are not litigious people they tend to be litigious people and they
00:53:12.000
project their litigiousness onto you uh is that uh is that like they just they still are these
00:53:18.320
same people are still comfortable saying hateful because that's the acceptable way of of going
00:53:23.200
after someone that nobody you're never ever going to be able to successfully sue someone for defamation
00:53:28.240
for calling you hateful even though it's probably far worse than calling you like a nazi because that's
00:53:33.120
such a ridiculous label most people won't believe it but people believe hateful
00:53:36.640
yeah it um is a convenient vehicle um to transport a lot of assumptions and kind of uh
00:53:52.000
create a particular perception um and if that's the first thing someone hears about you that you're
00:53:58.560
hateful uh it colors the way that they interpret any subsequent action um and there will be a
00:54:07.120
projection of malice or nefarious intent where perhaps there is none um and it could be based on
00:54:17.680
a figment of something you've never actually said or you hit retweet on someone who has other tweets that
00:54:25.120
you know are problematic but that's not what you were talking about in the retweet but it doesn't
00:54:30.320
matter because it's all the same cesspool or i was on a podcast um last week where you know i'm lambasted
00:54:39.840
because this person has said this other thing but okay how about we engage with what conversation or
00:54:48.160
dialogue i actually had um and and there's an unwillingness to to do that or i found over the
00:54:57.600
years it's a mental trick that a lot of people will use who want to like be political but don't
00:55:02.720
want to think too deeply or get into conversations and don't want to go to the side of the echo chamber
00:55:07.040
it's like so i always like people ask me like advice back in a facebook article so i'm like don't
00:55:11.520
write 14 paragraphs right because if you write 14 paragraphs so you have a long podcast someone's going
00:55:16.880
to find one little line in there where you misspelled or get something and ignore the wider point on a
00:55:22.160
technicality right so my advice when people ask me how to argue with losers on the internet is like
00:55:27.680
keep it short and just make a point and don't get sidetracked and then like but the best advice
00:55:31.680
to give you is just like don't do that all day like go outside you know like if someone says something
00:55:37.120
silly and you can think of something funny to say right away okay that but like i wouldn't get
00:55:41.840
caught in paragraphs long facebook arguments is is is but i go there all right there's there
00:55:47.040
i'm going to transition to a question i really want to ask you before we hit the hour mark because i
00:55:50.240
think we talked about this beforehand and we never really got into it and it's part of the national
00:55:54.240
issue so one of the things that we talked about hate gate is this sort of how it has worked in the
00:56:00.640
past with the canadian intelligence agencies to create sort of a let's say a false intelligence
00:56:05.440
report because this is a big thing a current geopolitical thing i know the nazi in parliament but
00:56:10.560
we currently started a major geopolitical um fight with an ally in india and we're claiming to have
00:56:16.720
an intelligence report in the bag that's top secret and you know i have made the point publicly that
00:56:24.000
i've seen the government you know lie about uh an intelligence report before so you're gonna have
00:56:29.680
to show me what you have before i believe uh justin trudeau's government is my position like if i see
00:56:34.800
something concrete i will believe it but i'm i'm not taking anything at face value and you're a lawyer in
00:56:39.840
this case and a journalist so you have a sort of an extra close to the ground point of view here so
00:56:45.200
i'd like to i'd like you to sort of explain to the people what what you can on this topic well if
00:56:53.120
the information is top secret then why introduce the idea or the accusation or the allegation
00:57:04.160
in public in the way that it was done without anything to corroborate it because with india we've
00:57:11.120
seen real consequences flow from that um and was this political grandstanding is it domestic power play
00:57:19.360
is it you what what we don't know right we don't know um but if i could i'll i'll refer to um a sequence
00:57:28.400
of events that came out of the freedom of information documents that we looked at um and
00:57:34.400
this was happening during the freedom convoy minister of public safety marco mendicino made
00:57:42.080
public statements that hey there's this weapons cache in coots and there are strong connections
00:57:48.480
to organizers of this far-right extremist group who are in ottawa and when pressed by reporters at
00:57:57.120
the conference for further details he essentially pushes them off to law enforcement and law
00:58:06.000
enforcement in this chain of emails are going back and forth to say well what do we do with this how do
00:58:12.640
we um how do we respond how do we substantiate his claims um and what they ended up doing was quoting
00:58:21.280
uh from a global news article i believe it was that quoted the anti-hate network and they they basically
00:58:30.320
presented a media story back to the media to answer questions that a government official um likely drew his
00:58:40.560
thoughts from the media um so a very like it's a backwards system um and i would not be surprised
00:58:51.280
if that's kind of what we're looking at with this india situation if that comes out at some point down
00:58:58.320
the line that government official made these statements based on maybe something but you know
00:59:06.400
we're doing work after the fact to try and substantiate can i ask yeah i mean by rachel gilmore
00:59:14.080
yeah rachel gilmore noted calistani expert like because i i've i've i'm one of the few people
00:59:19.840
who's so no she's talking about the other one for the uh for the freedom convoy one i was
00:59:23.600
still worked there at the time yeah i'm just saying like i i wouldn't be surprised because i like i like
00:59:28.320
it's an open source report parts of it like and it makes sense why i'm like one i can get like i can
00:59:33.760
pretty much guarantee the indian government was following this guy right we have reports in the
00:59:38.800
vancouver sun that he might have been running a terrorist training camp like our own media was reporting that
00:59:42.480
i got videos of him ak-47 saying things like he was openly advocating for violent secessionist
00:59:47.760
behavior um and and a renewal of hostilities in the punjab region so yeah if you know it's like if we
00:59:54.640
had a major flq cell that existed in belgium and and someone in belgium was just screaming about
01:00:00.320
destroying canada and like you know finding all the english-speaking people canadians in belgium and
01:00:06.880
and kill like yeah i think cesus would try and follow this guy so you probably have something
01:00:11.680
in the thing of like yes we know the nia was monitoring him and yes we know he was receiving
01:00:16.400
threats yeah because there's videos of him we even have info that cesus was meeting with najjar on
01:00:21.120
like a weekly basis and it wasn't even specifically to warn him about security threats it was just to
01:00:25.360
you know first warn him about security threats and then they kept meeting with him every single
01:00:29.520
week so it's like well there's a big opening there for someone like najjar to say when they're like
01:00:33.760
well who could be threatening you and then he just starts basically feeding them bad information
01:00:36.960
with the indian government because his whole life they could have been meeting with him because
01:00:40.400
people complained about him threatening to kill hindu people like it could have been both ways you could
01:00:45.040
have been like listen you're getting death threats from this community um because you're sending death
01:00:50.720
threats to this community so they could be meeting him for multiple reasons of hey there's some
01:00:54.640
credible threats against your life also you're threatening everyone else's life please stop like it could
01:00:59.360
have been it could have been we don't really know but it kind of you can there's like an
01:01:03.520
an occam's razor sort of like why would there be indian intelligence around this guy okay look at
01:01:08.240
what he's saying and doing why are the threats against his life look at the video content he makes
01:01:13.280
and you know how are we here so and then you know we have this top secret canadian intelligence report
01:01:19.520
the bc guy gets it it's just an open source report there might be something else in the hole we know
01:01:24.560
there's something with the five eyes potentially do they wiretap indian diplomats we don't know like
01:01:29.760
so yeah it's it's a massive cluster but again i'd be much more willing to trust the canadian
01:01:34.560
institutions if i hadn't seen the canadian institution systematically lie on important issues
01:01:39.760
um for a period of a few years now so i'm i'm fully in the you have to show me something something
01:01:45.440
concrete the liberals have to show me something concrete for me to believe it i i'm not taking
01:01:49.600
anything on face value yeah maybe to go back to kareema now on something specifically about you
01:01:54.720
because i uh we are past the hour mark so we'll keep this pretty fast and sort of two more things
01:01:59.440
one question i'll have a bit of a wrap-up question too that i think that people often misunderstand that
01:02:05.680
when when you once as soon as you label an organization like anti-hate or any even legacy
01:02:10.400
media publication people always have this sort of myth in their head that this person is sort of like
01:02:16.160
a 1960s style journalist pounding the pavement with their like you know with their like uh notepad going
01:02:22.240
around collecting clues and figuring stuff out it's just really not how it works these days the
01:02:26.320
internet's fantastic for research but kareema do you perceive that a lot of people don't realize just
01:02:32.400
how shallow most of the information people work with these days in order to do that as we are literally
01:02:37.920
seeing that weekly content do three articles a week and something that should be taking a month
01:02:43.120
and there is that and there's also this tendency to kind of copy paste or accept or replicate the
01:02:54.960
source finding but the source finding itself you know without going to the original document or the
01:03:01.760
original podcast so you take a line that someone else has found you don't bother to check the original
01:03:08.720
context of it and then you repeat that and then it gets repeated again and you know the repetition um
01:03:16.800
it it it makes something fact um and yeah so the the there's a lot that can be done with internet
01:03:25.520
research um but that in my view is only part of what an investigation should entail um and the rest of
01:03:36.160
it is hard work and i don't know who well i guess that's why you're hated as well is because going
01:03:45.680
with your cameraman down to these protests and filming is always the other side of the story that
01:03:51.120
even if they're trying to build up someone as a particularly dangerous figure this person needs
01:03:55.440
to be looked out for this person's crazy don't go anywhere near chris sky he's gonna hurt your family
01:04:00.800
and then you guys go to uh go and film them at public areas yeah you might not agree with everything
01:04:06.080
they say yeah you might not like their rhetoric yeah they might believe some things that are maybe
01:04:09.680
like maybe don't think that maybe let's slowly convince them that that's not true but if once as
01:04:15.040
soon as the camera comes out and you start filming you're like oh it's a person it's not literally a
01:04:19.840
demon that we have to all like you know get the rcmp involved and start trying to take down these
01:04:25.040
people are just people at the end of the day and like canada does not have the like frankly a violent
01:04:32.080
crime rate to justify thinking that anyone who has some sort of eccentric alternative view needs to be
01:04:38.320
like you know closely watched and monitored the way that a lot of these organizations are almost advocating
01:04:43.680
for yes um i think part of the flack i get is because in catching people in their sort of natural
01:04:53.520
environment if we put it that way um sometimes where they may not be paying attention to the fact
01:04:58.960
that they're like they're exposing themselves just by being right and and we capture that and you know
01:05:06.640
there's obviously editorializing that goes into anything um but i try not to be unfair about the way
01:05:16.400
we portray clips and it it makes people and their humanity their imperfections um shine through right
01:05:26.480
uh and yes we are all kind of ordinary folks at the end of the day and have to coexist unless we are
01:05:35.920
looking for a society that's very carceral and okay bad opinions means you are exiled or caged or
01:05:43.920
whatever um and that's not the world that i want to live in and that doesn't mean compromising on
01:05:50.240
key or core values it means actually standing up with conviction for those values and confronting
01:05:57.200
things head on um and if there's not a willingness to do that uh it's cowardice and the loudest voices
01:06:06.160
will continue to dominate the conversation and that will be the extremes on either end
01:06:10.560
yeah i couldn't agree more yeah that's that's pretty good i mean we've done an hour five is
01:06:16.720
there anything the last question i made was just going to field you quickly was just the uh the a
01:06:22.800
question about uh what you think that people should take i guess the what people should take away from
01:06:29.680
all the reporting that you've done on the anti-hate network hate gate and all this other stuff like
01:06:33.760
what should the average person not that like go and march in the streets and you know storm the palace
01:06:38.400
kind of stuff but the kind of the mood and attitude that people should have when it comes to this
01:06:43.920
information because i assume that your response is not go out and make up stuff and smear the anti-hate
01:06:49.520
people back because as silly as that sounds that's a that's a natural human tendency to want to do it
01:06:54.640
back and that's a race to the bottom um so it sucks when people aren't playing fair uh because
01:07:02.320
the way that we operate and the reason we have laws is to kind of maintain a semblance of order right
01:07:10.320
peace order good governance um but yeah descending to kind of the same level or using the same tactics
01:07:18.400
i don't think that that is helpful um you know call to action like maintain a healthy dose of skepticism
01:07:26.080
um but don't be um as you put it a reflexive contrarian just for the sake of it right um
01:07:33.840
right yeah i mean the media is is low quality but not a hundred percent of what's said on cbc
01:07:40.000
is wrong like and i used to do a thing where i'd watch an hour of cbc and i'd break down what's right
01:07:44.080
and wrong and like i've seen cbc outright lie like just outright i remember 2019 they were covering the
01:07:50.320
iran revolution they were showing protests in the streets people chanting maghbar from hori islami i speak
01:07:55.200
very little farsi i know that means death to or down with the islamic republic so hannah marchand
01:07:59.920
says what they're saying is they want no more corrupt politicians and weapons deals that's not
01:08:05.600
what they're saying right so that was an outright falsehood lie in this representation but sometimes
01:08:11.040
they give you a story you know story and you know it's mostly true but there's some slanting here
01:08:15.840
and they omit a little bit there so it's not like you know if you just base your opinion and say
01:08:20.720
a hundred percent of that is wrong i'm going to do the opposite well you're also coming to
01:08:24.560
something that's also wrong like it's not perfect yeah no one's you know no one's thinking and
01:08:29.600
sometimes the story is 100 true but you're like why am i even seeing this story like the one day
01:08:33.920
where you freaked out when the cbc covered the fact that shocked gasped teenage boys playing hockey
01:08:39.440
sometimes chirp each other oh yes teenage boys playing hockey used used some dangerous rhetoric oh
01:08:45.360
no you know i mean the the things the things we said in like on the high school hockey team like
01:08:51.600
to like the other teams things they said to us whatever like and it wasn't even like like there
01:08:56.960
there's sometimes maybe a racial homophobic component to it but it like wasn't even that like
01:09:02.000
i remember i had a friend who would like if he got hit he would like threaten the other guy to to
01:09:06.960
give him a blowjob and then like confuse them like he would just go really homoerotic and like
01:09:12.160
that's how he would get in their heads like because it's hockey and you say crazy things and you're
01:09:16.000
fun with them and it's like right it and and then the cbs can article oh the the toxic culture of
01:09:21.280
hockey it's like like can we can we not have anything fun anymore can people just not live
01:09:26.320
their lives like yeah if i got up on the stage and said the things that i would that that we said
01:09:31.920
like on the ice okay yeah cancel me but that's not gonna make a good bit yeah that'd be a good bit
01:09:40.240
like it was funny it was funny and we were having fun it's fun it's also fun in the ice like some guy
01:09:44.720
hits you and he says something and then you say something like it's like and you don't like you
01:09:49.120
know it it's fun it's competitive like and i mean yeah i can't speak to the hockey culture i don't
01:09:54.880
know what that is like and i probably wouldn't enjoy it myself um but you know it's context like so
01:10:01.520
context playing football like it's it's just like it's it's a lot of it's like teenage male stuff like
01:10:06.800
that i think our society is pretending like is like the worst thing ever and it's like i mean a lot
01:10:12.560
it's happening anti-hate stories these days it's just like someone said something that you might
01:10:17.280
not say in front of your grandmother it's like i wouldn't say it either and like no like polite
01:10:22.320
company or even privately also why is this a story but uh yeah but it's like it's more the sports
01:10:28.560
culture and like of like trash talk right you say things you have your team the boys like you work
01:10:33.200
together you get competitive like you put it on the floor you lay it on the ice and then you go back
01:10:37.280
like and it's but like yeah and then we're like we're pretending like this is oh my god where did
01:10:42.480
this come from i don't know 100 000 years of human history like there are certain cultures that probably
01:10:47.920
should be challenged right so police culture for example yes that's the way it's always been done
01:10:52.640
this is the status quo there are aspects of that that are i think harmful um so being critical of a
01:11:00.880
culture is one thing but yes the blanket statements and particularly sort of in civil society like
01:11:09.840
they're i don't know if everyone could just be cool i guess that's my that's my send off message yeah
01:11:16.480
everyone be cool um or try harder to be cool um and it's an actual call to action i mentioned this
01:11:24.640
five million dollar bid i strongly encourage people to reach out to their federal mps their
01:11:31.360
representatives um it's one way to participate in democracy it's not the only way it's not determinative
01:11:38.000
um but write in and share what your concerns may be do it in a respectful way lodge your complaint
01:11:46.000
use the processes that exist and it's hard because there aren't a lot of levers
01:11:52.240
that can be pulled to actually make change or hold our politicians to account but if we give up
01:12:01.280
entirely and these processes atrophy it doesn't get better yeah well that's a fantastic play the way to
01:12:08.880
end this whole thing off so to sum it all up if you're a cool of new uh if you're a cool enough dude
01:12:14.880
follow karima uh said on twitter i will link her in the uh in the description or in the feed the
01:12:22.080
comments ah i'm getting bad people are asking for our social media why it um yeah okay follow us on
01:12:29.200
twitter follow karima on twitter support us through the support links and everything like that
01:12:35.680
and if you're looking for our contact literally type our names into google or twitter or whatever
01:12:39.920
you're looking for if it's our name and our face that's us and then you can dm us there
01:12:44.400
it's not our faces it might not be us yes anyways have a great day everyone
01:12:49.520
you
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