Pro-Hamas thugs try to take over a public skating rink in Toronto. Mayor Olivia Chow tries to speak at a public event and is heckled by the thugs. Anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish woman in Vancouver. Wokeland author George Denny talks about what California could look like in a few decades.
00:14:00.700This isn't even talking about, you know, some of the idiocy of the gender pronoun thing and whether your kids want to identify as this or that and whether the school should let parents know or not.
00:14:09.020These are kind of minor in the whole scheme of things.
00:14:11.760This is your children being given drugs like fentanyl and you aren't allowed to know about it as a parent.
00:14:59.160But, of course, it's depicting and looking ahead to what things are going to evolve to or potentially evolve to if we keep letting the land of the woke evolve and do what it does.
00:15:53.300But most people won't put packing it into a fictional package, I guess, makes it more consumable.
00:15:59.760Was that sort of your intent and what you put together in this novel?
00:16:02.140I guess it was, and you actually brought in a couple of my influences, you know, 1984 being the gold standard of authoritarian dystopia.
00:16:12.880Wokeland came from the idea that California is so off the rails.
00:16:17.060Let's let's give the rest of it to the people who are currently running the government so that we can go full on identitarian and make your identity the driving force of really every conversation and every claim about truth.
00:16:53.300I mean, so one of the things that I think a lot of people are catching on to the DEI discussion these days is that it's really a backdoor to a sort of identitarian Marxism to make each group the same became the overarching goal of San Francisco and the West Coast and identity politics and therefore broke in all of our American freedoms, rights of individualism and so forth that that allowed our country to be this great.
00:17:20.940San Francisco also is a great place to set the novel because there's really no idea that's too extreme.
00:17:26.700As you said earlier, San Francisco and Vancouver do have certain overlaps in terms of permissible drug policy.
00:17:34.680And I think the outcomes speak for themselves.
00:17:37.500Not everyone realizes that San Francisco has a bigger budget than New York with the outcomes that are quite world famous.
00:17:50.900It's blessed with an abundance of resources from oil and gas to agriculture to human resources to Hollywood, even for that matter.
00:17:57.500Yet now we're seeing a changing of the tides.
00:18:00.440I mean, the net domestic migration has been dropping in California.
00:18:04.340People are fleeing California for other states despite all that potential.
00:18:08.680I mean, illegal immigrants are kind of coming in at a large level, but people are voting with their feet.
00:18:15.360You know, that can only lead to bad things in the long run.
00:18:19.020Yeah, it's a fairly predictable process.
00:18:22.980I mean, California had, as you mentioned, all these economic opportunities from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to land in the Central Valley where you can grow anything, which is why our farmers love California and actually stick around.
00:18:36.360But the outward economic migration is oftentimes taxpayers replaced by economic dependence in the cities who are oftentimes drug addicts and homeless.
00:18:48.220And as you can see from our major cities, sort of replacing the old system that built California.
00:18:57.220And this used to be somewhat of a conservative state 30 and 40 years ago.
00:19:01.880And now we are bordering on socialists.
00:19:04.800Well, and it seems to really stem a lot, though.
00:19:08.380I mean, from the civic level, and we're doing that here, too.
00:19:11.600I mean, Calgary is in Alberta and Western Canada.
00:19:14.140We're known as the Texas of Canada, typically the more conservative part of Canada.
00:19:19.060But we elect these far, far left mayors and councils for whatever reason.
00:19:23.900And then we're always shocked when they become exactly what they are.
00:19:27.260I mean, in San Francisco, though, what's interesting, we're watching London breed infighting with white progressives now, though, because there's one of the interesting things that happens with the woke.
00:19:37.340And, you know, when you're so focused on identity, you can't even get along with your allies any longer.
00:19:42.480It's been kind of a bizarre thing to watch down there.
00:19:46.180And that is somewhat entertaining for a lot of us, because there's really no such thing as being woke enough.
00:19:54.040You know, the battle in San Francisco is not Democrats and Republicans.
00:19:57.420It's Republicans and Democratic Socialists, which was my last supervisor in District 5, Dean Preston, who wants to challenge London breed for mayor from the left.
00:20:09.180So even though London breed is running a city that a lot of Democrats would approve of, in San Francisco, she's constantly being attacked from the left for not doing enough, not defunding the police more than the 3% that she did in 2020.
00:20:23.440And, you know, not quite being progressive to the socialists' desires.
00:20:29.720So in the fictional depiction you have, basically, California has sort of broken away.
00:20:35.620There's been something of an independent state now, though dominated by the woke.
00:20:40.180I mean, when we see that population shift, though, I mean, the people of ambition, the people of common sense, the people of means are fleeing.
00:20:46.840When you get that misbalance, it doesn't necessarily, it's not that necessarily unbelievable that you can start seeing secessionist movements.
00:20:55.480It would be interesting, and, you know, certainly the premise of the book isolates California and proposes an American solution to our current division by sort of putting all of the far left in the same place in California and allowing the rest of the country to sort of get back to the classic American values.
00:21:17.800But the future of Wokland is, in many ways, reflective of the California of today with the outgoing migration and people who love California for what can't be ruined, but the way that government has really taken over all of it, pushed out the middle class and made it so hard to live here, I think portends a future Wokland in some way.
00:21:40.560Yeah, well, dark comedy almost would be kind of some words that could be applied.
00:21:45.120You use some, a little bit of humor in a sense, but it's more you got to laugh to keep yourself from crying sort of thing.
00:21:51.480And the actions of the woke or the trends of things certainly give you a lot of writing material.
00:21:55.920It sounds absurd, but are based on very real efforts and things going on today, aren't they?
00:21:59.880Absolutely. And, you know, one of the first images that I had that made me write this book is the idea that all of these identitarian politics sound like great virtue signals, but when push comes to shove, it's really hard to get anything done.
00:22:16.600And I said, Act One, at the end, there's a battle for South Lake Tahoe on the border of California and Nevada.
00:22:25.400And in a situation of combat, I think the stakes couldn't be higher, and that's really a way to weed out the virtue signals and what's really important to people.
00:22:36.400So in that sense, it might be a dark comedy for military vets.
00:22:40.620Yeah, well, and Lake Tahoe, I mean, you know, I read some of the crazy things in California.
00:22:47.740Everybody's kind of seeing as we get larger populations, some things are happening.
00:22:50.900Fresh potable water is a commodity that's getting expensive and difficult to come across.
00:22:56.260But I recall a recent big desalinization project that was supposed to come along to hopefully ease some of the water issues and things going on and to help with that and reduce the draining of things like Lake Mead and things like that.
00:23:08.520It got shut down, though, by the woke again, because apparently they were worried about pulling water from the Pacific Ocean.
00:23:15.800Are you familiar with that one? It really kind of shocked me up here.
00:23:20.380Yeah, I mean, so the environmental agenda in California has worked against a number of things,
00:23:26.200but the water issue is really what pits the urban cities and oftentimes the true blue population of California against the red farmers in the center of the state.
00:23:35.180You know, it sort of reminds me of how if you wanted to even redecorate your bathroom,
00:23:41.980you'd have to get an environmental impact report and about three years of paperwork to even propose the city tax you for it.
00:23:52.280Well, and the disrespect, I guess, in general for you mentioned earlier, you know, individualism, individual rights,
00:23:59.240I seem to recall a while back, maybe you can give me an update, I didn't follow up on that.
00:24:03.920Karen Boss in Los Angeles, they were talking about forcing hotels to take homeless people in if they had vacant rooms in their hotels.
00:24:11.420I mean, that the concept of private property and what the hotel owners pick and choose who can stay in them was not even a consideration for these guys.
00:24:18.400Did that ever actually come to being or did some common sense prevail on that one?
00:24:40.900This is the announcement from New York that some schools will go to remote learning because they have migrants sleeping in the gyms and so forth.
00:24:50.460In Los Angeles, in Karen Bass, you have a really steadfast homeless problem because the existing strategy of Housing First pretty much promises to be an attractive, you know,
00:25:05.500the carrot that draws more and more homeless in as you deal with your existing population.
00:25:12.520So your book, I mean, offers, as the other ones we mentioned before, sort of a warning.
00:29:01.060Are you working on a sequel or another one in the future here?
00:29:04.280Well, it's not a sequel, but I have a far lighter book on the intersection of romance and technology, also set in San Francisco.
00:29:14.960And funnier, easier to read, but not nearly so political and deep.
00:29:22.880Okay, well, hey, we can't always read nothing but the political and deep stuff.
00:29:27.000Well, thank you very much for coming on to talk to us today.
00:29:29.660And I really hope your book sells excellently or continues to.
00:29:34.700And I always appreciate just, you know, again, people packaging up serious messages into a nice palatable package like that so we can read it and make people think.
00:30:31.760You hit some walls and reevaluate where you're going.
00:30:35.520So speaking of dystopian and weird and police and things like that, one of the areas that a lot of people have been talking about, of course, lately has been with David Menzies out in, he's the rebel news reporter.
00:30:48.360This, I think even Elon Musk jumped in on X about that when the video went pretty viral.
00:30:53.820He was walking along trying to kind of scrum Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.
00:30:59.340And suddenly from the side, this bald-headed gentleman here, you can see in the picture, was a plainclothes police officer who stepped in his way and bumped him.
00:33:38.860So I just see nothing but losses all over the place, except, yeah, sure, Rebel will get a few bucks, but that's not the right way to get it.
00:33:45.140Of course, that's, you know, people have to understand it's more important to protect the rights of ones you don't like than the ones you like.
00:33:57.120It's easy to say, you know, stand up for the ones you like, but you've got to stand up for the ones you don't.
00:34:31.940If, assuming it's Poliev who's in, and let's say he gets tired of the left-wing media and there's plenty of it.
00:34:38.940I mean, he's done his method of dealing with them, you know, munching an apple while they try to shoot loaded questions at them or chewing them out.
00:34:45.080But he's not having thugs slam them against walls and pull them aside and put handcuffs on them.
00:34:51.920If the president gets set that these guys can get away with that, I'm not saying Poliev would do it, but he could.
00:35:21.920I'm sure if I was on that plane, though, when a piece, I guess there's a piece that covers where there was a potential door port and they bolted on.
00:36:54.840Commenter, angry Canadian, saying, shouldn't those doors have locks?
00:36:57.700I'm going to throw a guess out here, but I'm saying no.
00:37:00.500In the case of the guy who let himself out and fell on the tarmac, you have to keep it so it can be opened by a passenger because there are emergency exits, right?
00:37:07.320Like perhaps there would be an incident where there's not a person in authority to open that.
00:37:12.500Maybe there's a fire coming through the cabin.
00:37:14.060Maybe it just crash landed, something like that.
00:37:15.840You have to make the doors able to be opened quickly and easily by somebody.
00:37:21.400Unfortunately, that doesn't stop the morons.
00:37:25.240So I don't know what you do, you know, give an IQ test and the people who are under a certain level are chained to their seats to drool for the flight so they don't open doors on the tarmac or something.
00:37:38.020As, again, this ongoing thing, you know, our immigration is just massive right now and our housing crisis is hitting, inflation is hitting.
00:37:45.580It looks like 355,000 foreign students have chosen to stay in Canada as permanent residents.
00:37:53.180See, this is part of when they do the number juggling.
00:37:56.040Some people, liberal defenders and everything say, no, the actual immigrants are only, you know, 400, 500,000 a year.
00:38:00.720Yeah, but they neglect talking about the people here on temporary visas, people here who are students, they're supposed to be temporary, things like that.
00:38:08.340Well, 355,000, almost 30% of them stayed permanently.
00:38:12.420And, you know, it's not necessarily a bad thing, okay?
00:38:14.760These are hardworking students, many of them, they're contributing, they're going to go out, get jobs, they've taken their training, whatever that may be, and post-secondary.
00:38:23.400They've paid a premium to go to those schools.
00:38:25.360They spent a lot of money to go to them.
00:38:27.360But it also does add to the challenges we have, okay?
00:38:31.920They still need houses, they still need food, they still need cars, they still need all of these things.
00:38:37.400So when we talk about those immigration numbers being beyond just what the government is purposely taking in year over year,
00:38:44.340let's bear in mind we've got hundreds of thousands of students who are graduating and staying,
00:38:48.400which can be good for the economy, can be good for everything.
00:38:51.540We need more nurses, we need more doctors, we need more chemists, we need more carpenters, you name it.
00:40:25.240If the Gazan citizens want to stop the war, they should turn in their Hamas buddies.
00:40:31.220Quit pretending that all these residents of Gaza didn't see the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels being built.
00:40:36.860Quit pretending they didn't see the water lines ripped out and converted into missiles.
00:40:41.720Quit pretending these citizens didn't see the training of the terrorists on hang gliders with their guns, the importing of the supplies.
00:40:50.160And let's quit pretending that the reality is out there that over 75% of Gazans support Hamas.
00:40:56.820Hamas is an illegal terrorist organization by Canada's definition.
00:41:02.640So if we've got a population where three-quarters of them say outright they support the illegal terrorists that we have banned in this country,