Western Standard - July 15, 2022


CORY'S RANT： MSM obsessed with UCP challenges while ignoring an NDP scandal

Mentioned
Thomas Dang Benjamin Aldritt Jason Kenney Rachel Notley Theo Fleury Jeremy Nolay Danielle Smith Stephen K. Back
Andrew Ruhland on the interest rates hike WS Fireside chat with Roman Baber, hosted by Derek Fildebrandt.

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

212.34

Word count

654

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

What should be a scandal making headlines across the province is sliding under the radar. We ve got pundits and columnists focusing on potential infighting with the UCP, and they re pouring fire on the divisions going on within their leadership race. Meanwhile, the NDP are skating on what could be a criminal offense committed by one of their MLAs in a vile, politically motivated effort to access the personal health records of Jason Kenney.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey, look, squirrel, and that's going on right now.
00:00:02.260 That's what the legacy media is shouting
00:00:03.740 as what should be a scandal making headlines
00:00:06.240 across the province is sliding under the radar.
00:00:09.060 I mean, well, we've got pundits and columnists
00:00:10.840 focusing on potential infighting with the UCP
00:00:13.620 and talking about how some of the candidates
00:00:15.340 they feel are extreme, and they're pouring fire,
00:00:18.040 you know, onto the divisions going on
00:00:20.260 within their leadership race.
00:00:21.580 The NDP are skating on what could be a criminal offense
00:00:25.100 committed by one of their MLAs
00:00:26.500 in a vile, politically motivated effort
00:00:29.000 to access the personal health records of Jason Kenney.
00:00:31.900 Yeah, you're not hearing a lot about this.
00:00:32.960 It's out there, but you're not a lot.
00:00:34.760 And giving credit where it's due,
00:00:36.580 the state broadcaster, our CBC, the Mother Corp,
00:00:39.360 dug into the court records
00:00:40.380 and found some pretty damning evidence
00:00:42.540 on the alleged hacking efforts of NDP MLA Thomas Dang.
00:00:46.440 Dang has admitted that he was trying to hack
00:00:49.200 the Alberta health records
00:00:50.280 because he wanted to test the system, he says.
00:00:52.800 He'd heard there might be vulnerabilities
00:00:54.040 and felt it was his civic duty
00:00:55.880 to test it out for the safety of Albertans. 1.00
00:00:57.900 To be blunt, that's a load of crap. 0.99
00:01:00.420 Court documents indicate Dang's efforts 0.99
00:01:01.940 were focused in on Premier Kenney.
00:01:03.800 It's not a coincidence.
00:01:04.780 He was using Kenney's birthday and other information
00:01:06.940 in hopes of finding out Kenney's vaccination status
00:01:09.520 through using brute force hacking programs.
00:01:12.100 He spent four days trying,
00:01:14.220 and he wasn't as good a hacker as he thought he was
00:01:16.100 because now he's facing charges.
00:01:18.040 Now, clearly, what Dang was likely hoping to find anyways
00:01:21.180 was evidence that Kenney wasn't vaccinated.
00:01:23.840 In that case, one can presume he would leak the information
00:01:26.000 and hopefully start a scandal that would harm the UCP.
00:01:28.880 I suspect if Dang had managed to crack into the system,
00:01:30.940 he would have moved on to other UCP MLAs too,
00:01:32.980 and who knows, other public figures
00:01:34.540 to try and find out who's vaccinated and who's not
00:01:36.860 and shame them because the NDP were constantly demanding
00:01:40.380 who's vaccinated, who's vaccinated, who's vaccinated.
00:01:42.520 Well, they feel that they had the right to,
00:01:45.040 at least Mr. Dang felt he had the right to go in
00:01:46.660 and try and find that out.
00:01:47.720 Now, the alleged acts of Dang are scandal enough. 0.97
00:01:50.500 The potentially explosive part of this story, though,
00:01:52.320 revolves around who knew what and when.
00:01:54.060 I mean, court documents indicate Dang had notified
00:01:56.520 the NDP Chief of Staff, Jeremy Nolay,
00:01:58.580 and NDP Director of Communications, Benjamin Aldritt,
00:02:01.740 about his findings.
00:02:03.400 And these are top staffers within the NDP.
00:02:06.820 Did he report to them because the party
00:02:08.100 had sanctioned his efforts?
00:02:09.820 Did they know he was trying to hack private information
00:02:12.180 to citizens while he was doing it,
00:02:13.500 or did they only know afterwards?
00:02:14.820 Did Rachel Notley know?
00:02:16.020 That's the big question.
00:02:17.700 Nolay and Aldritt are her main advisors.
00:02:19.980 Did an opposition party purposely support efforts
00:02:24.000 to violate the medical privacy of citizens?
00:02:27.100 If they didn't know Dang was doing it, 0.96
00:02:29.240 did they immediately condemn him
00:02:30.540 and report it to the police
00:02:31.620 as soon as he told them about it?
00:02:33.520 Aldritt sent an email
00:02:34.380 to Alberta Health Communications Director Steve Buick,
00:02:36.560 I guess, claiming a party, just in quotes,
00:02:39.120 had tipped him off to a potential breach.
00:02:41.720 Now, he already knew it was Dang, 0.99
00:02:43.240 but he neglected to mention that.
00:02:44.360 It was just a party.
00:02:45.800 Now, Dang's going to be going to court 0.99
00:02:46.760 at the end of this month.
00:02:47.480 Perhaps we'll get more clarity on what happened
00:02:50.000 and it'll be revealed then.
00:02:50.940 Right now, there's some serious questions
00:02:52.520 hanging out there,
00:02:53.800 and we may never hear the answers to them.
00:02:55.360 This incident could warrant a public inquiry.
00:02:58.480 We aren't going to get one, though,
00:02:59.900 because the mainstream media is too busy
00:03:01.220 complaining about Theron Flurry's appearance
00:03:03.320 at a Daniel Smith rally.