00:06:30.000Hello, and welcome to Mountain Standard Time. I'm your host, Nathan Gita, and today I'm
00:06:42.220joined by Sheldon Clare, President of the National Firearms Association. Later, we'll
00:06:45.660be speaking to Stuart Parker, who of course is the President of the Los Altos Institute.
00:06:50.880Be sure to like the Western Standards page on Facebook to be notified when we go live
00:06:54.960and subscribe to our website to support our content. Just before we get into all the rest
00:06:59.640of this, though, I just want to be clear that as we enter the second year of the pandemic with
00:07:03.780rolling lockdowns, totally different rules across the country, depending on where you live,
00:07:07.740you'd think we'd have seen it all. People are wearing visors as if they're about to start
00:07:11.840grinding metal, returning travelers to Canada have been forced to quarantine in pricey hotels
00:07:15.700at their own expense without food, and even our lawmakers are meeting via Zoom. But the latest
00:07:20.560news out of Alberta is that Grace Life Church, whose pastor James Coates was held in jail almost
00:07:25.460all of last month for refusing to suspend services has been raided by the Mounties and a barricade is
00:07:30.820being erected to keep people away from the building. I've seen a lot of things and I had
00:07:34.560a lot of things on my COVID-19 bingo card but cops closed church with razor wire was not one of them.
00:07:41.500We've been living in this theater of the absurd since the entire pandemic began. Here in BC somehow
00:07:46.460only churches or houses of worship can spread the virus while Costco and Walmart where thousands
00:07:51.160more people attend in a day than do churches in a week are allowed to remain open it just doesn't
00:07:55.900make any sense and the masks are required everywhere except when you sit down to eat in a
00:07:59.340well not I guess as crowded restaurant anymore certainly our restaurants are closed but the point
00:08:03.180being that you as if walking into the restaurant with the mask on was effective and then sitting
00:08:08.320down without it is just as effective it doesn't make any sense with this latest act of aggression
00:08:12.800by the provincial government of Alberta with regards to Grace Life Church as well as the
00:08:16.000announcement of far more severe lockdown coming Friday at midnight essentially the same lockdown
00:08:20.200protocol we're having here in British Columbia, I believe that a boiling point has been reached.
00:08:24.320Throngs of people are calling for universal non-compliance. There are no words appropriate
00:08:28.560for this show or for Polite Company to accurately describe how the lockdown has harmed people,
00:08:33.700and I assert without caveat that when the dust clears, we will find out that the lockdowns
00:08:37.500actually did far more damage and quite possibly killed more people than the virus ever did.
00:08:42.000The devastation and how widespread it is remains unprecedented, and it is only growing
00:08:45.880with each passing day. I stand in solidarity with any and all those who simply cannot take
00:08:50.420the lockdown measures anymore. I hear you. I empathize with you. We all recall that at one
00:08:55.140point, somebody said that everybody should storm Area 51. And we all remember that, of course,
00:08:59.000that was nonsense because civilians storming that complex was not going to end well.
00:09:04.140But the problem is that when it goes the other way, when all of the enforcement officers try to
00:09:08.600tell us what to do, the fact is that it is compliance that makes the difference.
00:09:12.040I'm not calling for any kind of revolution or violence, but the fact of the matter is that if people simply just follow their own precautions and just not listen to the nonsense coming out of the mouths of their provincial health officers and just live their lives, things will probably go pretty smoothly.
00:09:28.300People might accuse me of it being inflammatory.
00:09:30.560I was actually raised in a faith that claims pacifism as its fundamental ethic, but nonetheless, the point is that we can't suspend our liberties for any longer.
00:09:38.720So I say this to Grace Life Community Church, may God speed you on your victory and may you find unlikely allies and may the rest of us stand in solidarity with you and remember that most ancient part of the creed, be not afraid.
00:09:51.940Well, Sheldon, I mean, we've been through this for a little while and we've, you know, it's not a new thing.
00:09:58.740The pandemic's been happening for quite some time.
00:10:01.700What do you think needs to change in order for things to move forward?
00:10:09.940The pandemic is really something unprecedented in modern memory.
00:10:15.140I mean, as a historian, I've looked back at pandemics through history.
00:10:20.360I mean, the great one that is still in many people's minds is, of course, the World War I ending of 1918 to 1922,
00:10:31.540the Spanish influenza, which killed 50 million people worldwide.
00:10:35.560This particular pandemic doesn't appear to be in that kind of a ballpark.
00:10:40.060It's certainly something that is out there.
00:10:42.400It's spread, but I don't see that what we've been doing has been effective in actually changing or building a better way of life for most Canadians.1.00
00:10:56.480I think what we're at risk of doing here is isolating old people who are at risk from this disease.0.86
00:11:05.880But isolation is one of the biggest threats to older people.
00:11:11.580When you leave them out, you can watch older people deteriorate quite quickly when they have no social contact,
00:11:18.260they don't interact with family members, and all of those things which are said to help prevent the disease also cause other problems.
00:11:23.860So I think that this is going to go on for a long time. I don't see the quick solutions or the ease of these various restrictions dropping off anytime soon. And I don't know. I don't have the answers for this one, Nathan. I think it's going to be a very long pull. And one thing is sure that nothing will ever be the same.
00:11:45.920I think that the most important thing maybe to talk about with respect to how perhaps there's a crossover between, of course, firearms advocacy and what's happening right now is that, quite frankly, you guys have all been here before.
00:12:00.360If you're a gun advocate, you've seen liberty stripped away for years.
00:12:18.780What do you have to say to people who are doubters before?
00:12:21.640Well, we've had well over 50 years of gun control that has had nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with civil disarmament, Nathan.
00:12:30.840That's really been the essence of what's been going on.
00:12:33.980I mean, my involvement with firearms rights advocacy goes back to the 1970s legislation, Bill C-51, which was brought in by the Liberals and brought in a mandatory police record check, which was the firearms acquisition certificate, which was done prior to transferring firearms.
00:12:53.840You had to have this little certificate which cost you a few dollars at the time.
00:12:58.240And that legislation also prohibited a number of firearms.
00:13:03.580It brought in the prohibited category for the first time.
00:13:06.680I remember that well because prior to that, you could buy a firearm at 16 years of age.
00:13:13.460After that, the age was 18 and people who owned firearms at 16 were caught in the middle in the limbo as I was in those days.
00:13:21.780and i guess it just became your dad's gun like something like that and and it was it was never
00:13:28.040it was never ever about a really about public safety it was always about putting the screws
00:13:34.560down on ordinary people to limit their access to firearms and to put more barriers up in front of
00:13:39.580people to prevent them from having interest in firearms or from having access to them it never
00:13:45.500stopped a criminal from getting a gun when they wanted one it never ever did and then you saw
00:13:50.440restrictions like saying replica firearms were prohibited well you know if someone was going to
00:13:56.280stick up a 7-eleven I'd rather that they were sticking it up with a gun that didn't work that
00:14:01.140wasn't a real gun than a real gun because if you make them know it different well the criminal is
00:14:05.720going to go and try to get a real one over a fake one and I think that makes it more dangerous well
00:14:09.980there's that and I think this is exactly where people you know it's funny because people always
00:14:13.920say the quiet part out loud you know the joke is that people are supposed to you know we're supposed
00:14:18.260to be in this position where hey like we you know we understand that there's a difference between a
00:14:22.820bb gun and and you know even a 22 as as unpowerful as that is um though quite lethal if you if well
00:14:30.340hang on a second not all 22s are are that that unlethal 22 is a perfectly efficient and can be a
00:14:38.980highly effective cartridge and the one of the common calibers for our so-called uh ar-15 the
00:14:46.500The modern sporting rifle, which has been touted as a big target of the recent Order and Council bans of May 1, 2020, of last year, 2020, was to target the AR-15, which is in 5.56 or .223 Remington, which is basically the same caliber as a .22 long rifle.
00:15:07.380that's a centerfire cartridge. It's a bit more powerful, but the caliber is the same. It's not
00:15:11.880a heavy, grand bullet capable of destroying buildings at vast distances or anything,
00:15:16.600as you sometimes think when a lot of the left liberal speak on this. So it's something to be
00:15:23.200aware of. No, and that's fair enough. The point being, of course, that again, people said, well,
00:15:28.740they'll never ban non-lethal weapons. They'll never ban BB guns. They'll never ban the idea
00:15:33.880that like those are toys for kids nobody's ever going to touch those and and gun advocates have
00:15:38.040said for years no like they're going to come for these things and then they're going to come for
00:15:40.920everything well if anyone thinks for a moment that they're not after your hunting rifle or shotgun
00:15:45.480you just need to look closely at the list of the 1500 types of firearms that are included on the
00:15:50.460bandwidth as well as firearms capable of producing over 10 000 joules or are of specific calibers
00:15:56.600that are listed because that list includes both action rifles it includes includes some shotguns
00:16:03.380It includes firearms that are extremely valuable, used for safaris, hunting, dangerous game, and so on.
00:16:10.380And the fact of the matter is that this is not about public safety, not in any stretch of the imagination.
00:16:18.360It's entirely about civil disarmament.
00:16:20.080That's what the bottom line of this is.
00:16:22.200And the NFA has taken a very strong role in fighting this.
00:16:27.480We have been working very diligently on our pre-writ election campaign advertising.
00:16:34.220We've been looking at very targeted ridings that we're going to be advertising in.
00:16:38.220We're going to be expending a significant amount of money on this particular project,
00:16:44.120a lot more than we spent even last election, which was more than any other organization out there in a pro firearms capacity.
00:17:01.360I mean, there's an awful lot of things going out there in politics, as you're well aware,
00:17:05.100that are playing havoc with trying to get the changes that we need made.
00:17:11.520For example, we've got significant problems with the federal Liberals being popular in broad swaths of Ontario.
00:17:25.560And I mean, our own analysts have been looking at this very carefully and they're saying between, you know, the Conservatives might take as few as 20 to 30 seats.
00:19:02.200And that's a possibility when we have division over outcomes.
00:19:06.200We have certainly some very strong and highly motivated people in Western Canada who are very angry at the lack of attention being paid to Western issues by the federal government of all stripes.
00:19:23.620And they've got some righteous indignation there that is perfectly legitimate.
00:19:27.900However, if you think it's important to look at the holistic approach and say this is a whole country and we want to be part of Canada, then you need to really look at what's important here.
00:19:42.780And what's important from our perspective is that the Liberals have to go.
00:19:49.140And I think that the biggest problems that we're going to be seeing, and these have not really hit the radar in any big way yet, is what's going to happen to our economy.
00:19:57.900When we're facing a debt that's over a trillion dollars, the highest debt Canadians have ever seen, and we cannot pay for that.
00:20:07.500I mean, we're hearing calls for things like a universal basic income, but that's simply nonsensical.
00:20:12.820We cannot afford such an extravagance when we are trying to service our debt with the majority of our annual budget.
00:20:24.740And what that is ultimately going to mean is a huge financial collapse.
00:20:28.600And if people don't understand what a financial collapse means, they need to go back and take a history course.
00:20:34.040And they need to look at things that happened in Europe in the 1920s.
00:20:37.520They need to look at what happens at the end of the 1920s in North America and in the rest of the world with the problems of the stock market experience.
00:20:47.680These are all serious, serious matters that need to be taken with full attention by modern society.
00:20:56.640If society understands the gravity of the situation we're in, then the reaction is going to be different.
00:21:03.520And I cannot see why people would support this liberal government, which engaged in several bouts of corrupt behaviors, has embarrassed itself and its country with the examples of its leadership, and has done everything it can to make us a mockery with our friends, allies, and neighbors.
00:21:25.820And the biggest problem, of course, is going to be what happens to our economy.
00:21:29.240Our economy is going to be in tatters over this.
00:21:31.680It's no wonder, from our perspective, why they want to take away people's jobs.0.79
00:21:35.660I think that it doesn't just occur to me that possibly, you know, there's no small amount of trepidation, at least on my end, for what could possibly happen if we fail to get things sorted out when it comes to civil disarmament and the rest of it.
00:21:56.880But a lot of Canadians, I mean, I'm not saying that Canadians don't have a right to firearms at all.
00:22:01.560I do believe they have a right to firearms.
00:22:03.280A lot of Canadians feel like they just don't have the same sort of rights as Americans
00:22:07.740on this question, or that it's just not articulated the same way.
00:22:11.020So what happened when it came to our constitutional formation, or even as precedent was set down
00:22:16.040by the Supreme Court and others, why is that still confusing?
00:22:19.520Why don't Canadians think that they have the same kind of rights that their American cousins
00:22:39.960We've had a couple of failed attempts at little wobbles.
00:22:44.980They've always been a situation where the monarchy has won.
00:22:49.320The crown always wins, a Canadian example.
00:22:51.960And that has been the popular outcome ever since.0.70
00:22:57.540But in terms of rights, well, despite what our Supreme Court of Canada has said, the right to bear arms predate the American Constitution and are a product of the British Bill of Rights.
00:23:10.360They're a product of a lot of common law precedent.
00:23:13.880So we have those rights, but we haven't asserted them.
00:23:17.860And what we have been seeing has those rights have been eroding through successive governments and activist legislators.
00:23:26.100what we have been seeing is a bit of a backlash
00:26:58.200And I'm seeing now that we've been getting this resurgence of a strong red Tory presence.
00:27:04.100However, despite all of that, the time for doing that division is not right now.
00:27:11.820And I mean, there is a significant need to make sure that people get involved with politics.
00:27:20.460And my hat's off to everyone who's involved in politics in any form, because that really is a huge commitment.
00:27:27.820And it can be acid on one's soul, so to speak, but it's important that we get in politics and we articulate our views clearly and we tell people why we're there so that they understand that this has to be changed.
00:29:35.040And that's where the big populations matter.
00:29:37.020But populations have been shifting and more people are living in the West now.
00:29:40.740And we don't have the proportion of seats that we probably should have in order to reflect that change in our population.
00:29:46.780But the other thing that's disconcerting is we have large numbers of people who are not inclined to vote in a way that would generally support conservative policies.
00:29:58.680We have basically a large populations of left-leaning voters in a lot of the urban centers where those votes are.
00:30:05.540So there's a real need to try to get people to understand some basic economics, that you need to have money coming in in order to spend it.
00:30:42.860And we could be facing something much more severe than that.
00:30:46.700Well, we went through state inflation through the late 70s and into the 80s.
00:30:50.200And there was some very serious corrective measures that had to be made to the range of, what, there was like 18% interest at one point on something?
00:30:59.320I well remember one of my friend's fathers going down and buying as many Canada savings bonds as he could carry.
00:31:07.600And he was laughing and saying the government has made a terrible mistake.
00:31:10.920Well, the government continues to make terrible mistakes, often even with purpose behind them.
00:31:17.060And we've got to stand up and fight that.
00:31:19.060And I say, you know, people have got to stand up and they've got to speak up and they have got to make sure that whatever they're doing leading up to the next federal election is going to see the defeat of liberal candidates.
00:31:33.100So I think that something else that needs to be noted here is, again, the idea that there is a unique reality to firearms rights in Canada in that there is a huge base for it in places that maybe, again, people in the West here wouldn't understand it to be.
00:31:52.960So something you've talked about with me before is that in Quebec, there's actually a great deal of firearms owners.
00:31:57.880Oh, absolutely. Quebec has one of the largest populations of hunters in North America. Chasse-Pêche magazine is one of the biggest hunting magazines in North America because they have such an avid readership in French Canada, not just Quebec. Of course, there's also New Brunswick and parts of Manitoba and other places in Canada as well. But there are huge numbers of Quebecers who are very, very pro-gun.
00:32:23.260The problem that you have is the divided nature of the firearms vote.
00:32:28.620And the firearms vote is not a unanimous vote in any stretch of the imagination.
00:32:33.200There are people who own firearms and hunt and engage in all those activities who vote for NDP candidates or vote for liberals, as well as voting for conservatives or other parties.
00:32:45.820And our job is to try to make that vote a bit more focused and cohesive, because if it isn't, you're going to see those particular people losing their rights as well.
00:32:56.400And when they understand the nature of the changes that are being proposed by their current liberal regime, then they tend to get a little bit concerned about it.
00:33:05.900And I think we're going to have a very, very interesting federal election, whether it be one in late spring, which is early summer, or more likely, I think, in the fall.
00:33:15.820How do we bridge that gap then? In the West, again, there's a lot of times where non-Westerners are treated with a lot of suspicion, and there's this fundamental idea that only the Western Canadians are the ones who feel aggrieved, and nobody else is taking up their grievances with us, and therefore we can all tell Ottawa what to do.
00:33:36.560Well, I think that there's this myth in some parts of the West that everybody in Ontario is a lefty. And I got to tell you, that's simply not true.
00:33:45.820And when you look at the voting, what you see is a divided country, and it's divided on ideological lines.
00:33:53.280It just happens that in parts of the West, the shift is slightly more to the right than it is to the left.
00:33:58.540In places like Ontario or Quebec, you're seeing a considerably different political situation.
00:34:05.580And you see large numbers of voters in the big centers who are voting in left and must winning seats.
00:34:13.100But it's certainly not the case that this is a unanimous block of people who are all voting left. And I've heard this over and over again from some folks who think that, well, they're all a bunch of lefties over there. And that's simply not the case. It's certainly simply not the case that everybody in British Columbia is a granola cruncher lefty either. I mean, I've been called many things in my life, but being a lefty isn't one of them.
00:34:37.340I mean, I think that the other side of what happens with kind of this miscommunication happens within Canada is that honestly, we are stronger together than we are divided.
00:34:45.860There's plenty of seats and ridings throughout the Maritimes and through Western Canada, a party commanding these heights.
00:34:53.440And even if it was two separate parties commanding those heights and working together, they could defeat Central Canada's Laurentian consensus.
00:35:01.120Well, that's difficult because of the numbers.
00:35:03.100I mean, when you start talking about things like vote splitting, vote splitting on the left works very well for the right.
00:35:08.780Like if the NDP surges in Quebec, then you're going to see a conservative victory because they take away or tend to take away votes from the liberal left, as I call it.
00:35:18.360And the liberals have very much claimed the ground on the left.
00:35:22.460The NDP has claimed the insanity ground, as far as I can tell lately.
00:35:27.180Some of the proposals for their upcoming convention, or it may be even going on now.
00:35:33.100is uh they're just they're just completely crazy and that that's that's great that they're they're
00:35:38.460talking about such things but if any of the emotions that i've seen opposed to the ndp
00:35:42.700convention actually passed well they're done as a political party in canada as far as i can tell
00:35:47.260and the liberals will have occupied that ground and they basically are the social would be the
00:35:51.980social democratic party in canada where as the conservatives have been pushing further and
00:35:56.780further to the left which is a problem for a lot of us uh that means that there is a big open space
00:36:02.780on the right i mean you've got to make sure that that people look at this and do what they can to
00:36:09.420defeat that left just despite how uncomfortable it may make one feel as the that that laurentian
00:36:17.740consensus has been touted of recent years is something that's very deep-seated and there's
00:36:23.900a very big sense of entitlement i mean i've heard pundits refer to the liberals as viewing themselves
00:36:57.040But what kind of activism we've seen out of this liberal government is extremely dangerous to this country.
00:37:03.140And it's a reason that we're seeing a surge in separatist movements and anger, particularly in the West, and division over resource extraction and all of these issues that are so near and dear to a country that has been based on resource extraction for its entire existence.
00:37:20.600Going all the way back to the fur trade.
00:37:21.880We're going all the way back to the fur trade.
00:37:23.540The fur trade is very much a driving resource extraction industry that was completely renewable and has of late been very much pushed down.
00:37:59.820Our court challenge with Cassandra Parker Premack and KKS Tactical versus Canada that we organized and are fully funding is a very focused challenge to the Ordering Council.
00:38:14.540And coupled with that, we have to work very hard to ensure the defeat of Liberal candidates.
00:38:22.020Because we can win the challenge in court, but if the Liberals win a majority, all of that work will be for naught,
00:38:27.920as it will come back to bite us in an even much more aggressive way.
00:38:31.980And it's going to be essential that we defeat these guys in this next election.
00:38:38.840i think that's something else that needs to be kind of noted as we as we look at the possible
00:38:46.720looming election and and you made this point about vote splitting i i you know call me an
00:38:51.700idealist but i've always thought that there really is you know there really is a methodology to
00:38:55.780creating a kind of policy platform that could win over 51 of the season 51 of the people like why
00:39:02.460why do we need the vote split in order to win can't there be a policy that appeals to canadians
00:39:08.480enough that they really do elect a majority with a majority of votes? Well, I've rarely seen a
00:39:14.720majority, a policy that attracts a majority vote. It's a divided country. We're not a two-party
00:39:22.400system, really. We have multiple options out there, and that's been made clear. That's
00:39:28.880particularly been a feature that's come out of really the 1960s. I think that's where we really
00:39:34.980started to see Canada become a much more pronounced third-party system. It was before that,
00:39:41.480but it became very pronounced, particularly when the CCF became the NDP and they made the covenant
00:39:46.860with labor that they had, which I think was broken in the 80s and it's become confused as to what the
00:39:53.660NDP stands for. I don't think the NDP's been very clear with it itself since the 1980s when it became
00:39:59.940confused over the environment and labor. And you saw such scenes as Mo Sahota, for example,
00:40:05.120standing at Clayquot Sound, trying to decide if he should have his picture taken with the
00:40:09.020labor loggers or the environmentalist protesters who were protesting the logging. He couldn't
00:40:15.220decide where he was supposed to stand. And it was clear on his face that he didn't understand that.
00:40:19.560And I think that's where the NDP has been for the last 40 years. And this is why you see the rise
00:40:24.540of things like the Green Party, which kind of started off as a kind of a conservative
00:40:29.480sandal wearing or Birkenstock granola crunching left and right mix and has sort of evolved
00:40:38.780into another socialist party, which is again a gun grabber party.
00:40:43.860Then, you know, you've got these strange divisions out there.
00:40:47.480The left is getting pretty full with different divisions over on it.
00:40:52.200and the right of the spectrum has become vacant.
00:44:34.860I mean, the Conservatives are the only party that rolled back gun control legislation, which is what they did with ending the so-called long gun registry, which was a partial fulfillment of a promise that had been made to repeal Bill C-68.
00:44:49.480But when they didn't do that, that caused a lot of furore and angst and anger.
00:44:53.940And, you know, people are still mad about that.
00:44:55.720I'm not happy about it either, but we're working towards trying to get back to that.
00:45:01.320But there's an awful lot of bad gun laws out there that need to get repealed.
00:45:04.860Because they simply aren't about stopping crime.
00:45:08.260They are not about anything to do with public safety.
00:45:27.460And simultaneously, but people are still told like, oh, every time there's a shooting,
00:45:32.440every time something goes wrong like oh more will help more will help well what's what's happening
00:45:36.500is that there's an american anti-gun narrative that's driving canadian uh gun grabber groups and
00:45:42.480canadian federal politics because they keep trying to promote things that american gun
00:45:46.680grabbers are promoting in the united states that we already have as gun control uh the so-called
00:45:51.500red flag laws and we've had that for decades and and and and they're they're still pushing this
00:45:56.860stuff because their american lefty friends down there are telling them this is what they want in
00:46:02.140the united states and and what they don't get is that there are substantial differences between
00:46:07.240the legal structures of our countries right it's it's quite a big difference and uh it's not
00:46:13.080something that one can just so we need oh i've heard people say oh we need a constitution like
00:46:16.700the americans well really why would you want all your rules limited by a constitution you know
00:46:22.700that's that that's what that my response to that is and i when you when you have it in the common
00:46:27.420law, you're not supposed to have those limited. I see Carolee Queen's comment there, every gun
00:46:33.140owner I've talked to said they will not be giving up their guns. Yeah, that's pretty much the consensus
00:46:37.620I've got as well, Carolee. That's very, very much the word I've been getting. I haven't heard anyone
00:46:43.580say that, yeah, I'm willingly going to hand over my, you know, many tens of thousands of dollars
00:46:49.000worth of property that I've invested in. And I mean, some of the things people need to understand,
00:46:57.000Some of these rifles they banned cost literally $70,000, $80,000.
00:47:02.260I had a rifle in my hands that is now prohibited under Canadian law that the purchase price of it was $75,000.
00:47:11.940It's handmade by Peter Hofer in Austria.
00:47:14.160It's inlaid with platinum and gold filigree and engravings and handmade tailored to that particular firearms owner.
00:47:22.220Are someone going to, because it's got more power than the 10,000 joules, does that mean you're going to just willy-nilly hand this over to the federal government and just say that's it?
00:47:32.920And not to mention the ammunition you purchased, the sight systems you purchased for us, scopes, infrastructure cases, all of that infrastructure.
00:47:41.120Even an AR-15, the modern sporting rifle, the single most popular firearms platform in North America right now, which they claim they want to ban and they asserted that, you hand-build these.
00:47:56.500You put specific parts, trigger parts, carrying handles, charging handles, special sights, upgrades to all kinds of aspects of these things.
00:48:07.020You can be looking at an AR-15, $10,000, $20,000, and then you add in your ammunition and everything else you purchased to have full enjoyment of your property.
00:48:16.480It's a property rights grab that is unprecedented in Canadian history.
00:48:22.200It's outrageous what they think they are going to get away with.
00:48:25.600Something that's actually been something I want to visit in this show a couple of times through the theme is that, quite frankly, there's, you know, quite frankly, we I know that I know that Canadians are actually they must be arming themselves.
00:48:44.740Because when I look for when I look for certain rifles that I want to find, or certain ammunition I want to find, there's a bit of a shortage.
00:48:53.180and so there's this funny weird kind of not duplicity but it's it's completely bifurcated
00:48:58.860it's like oh canadians you know they're nice unarmed people or whatever this weird projection
00:49:02.700that comes out of you know the liberal narrative of canada and then you go online and try and
00:49:06.740purchase a weapon totally legally you have your you have everything you need to do you try to
00:49:10.480purchase a weapon and they're out and they're sold out everywhere well as you as you well know when
00:49:16.480you took your serve money and bought yourself a nice fine rifle to go do your job up and up in
00:49:21.000north where you were protecting people from bear attacks. A lot of Canadians have gone and bought
00:49:27.640firearms and ammunition in this last year. I saw the shelves in the gun store. I went in there and
00:49:33.560I talked to some people. One gun shop employee said to me, he said, Sheldon, you wouldn't believe
00:49:39.080this. Some guy came in here and bought $4,000 worth of ammunition. I said, what caliber did
00:49:44.600he buy? He said he bought every caliber that he said he needed, but he laid down $4,000. He took
00:50:05.020And I mean, I well remember when I was involved in renegotiating the Explosives Act to better serve the needs of the firearms owning public who store ammunition, hand load ammunition and shoot black powder, do reenactment and so on.
00:50:22.420That one of the things we did is we took the people from the explosives branch into people's homes and we showed them what exactly people were doing because they didn't understand at all.
00:50:31.160They didn't realize that a firearms owner might be shooting 10,000 or 20,000 rounds of ammunition in a year, especially if you're a competitive shooter.
00:50:40.220They didn't understand that when you buy ammunition, you tend to buy it in large lots for consistency, particularly for rifle shooters, but others as well.
00:50:49.540And when we took them into people's homes, we were saying, okay, look at all this ammunition.
00:50:54.000How would your rules accommodate this?
00:50:56.420And they were going, oh, oh, I see what you're saying here.
00:51:00.700And so they made some changes to the language to allow for people to be able to make use of their ammunition and to store it safely in their homes, as they always had been doing, despite what the Explosives Act had previously said, which was fairly limited.
00:51:17.140And we managed to get some significant changes for that.
00:51:19.720I remember the SAMI rep crediting me specifically and saying, Sheldon, if you had not been here, that we would not have gotten those changes.
00:51:26.380And he said, you know, that's really great that you did that.
00:51:29.200and you know it's it's been something we've been doing for years and I mean
00:51:34.160this isn't my day job being an NFA president this is a this is a voluntary
00:51:38.080position our board of directors are volunteers we all have jobs we do during
00:51:42.940the day I teach history at a community college that's that's my job as a
00:51:47.920graduate degree in military history that's when I study conflict I study
00:51:52.820warfare and I'm looking at what's going on around the world here and I just I'm
00:51:57.920thinking wow we're we're heading for a war and there's a war that's going to be a clash of
00:52:02.960ideologies left and right it's division over religion division over territory so much division
00:52:12.120is going on in the world world right now that it cannot but be avoided and i look at these civil
00:52:17.960disarmament programs we see in so many countries and they're very clearly uh part of that ideological
00:52:23.860divide and maybe kind of to pivot into what what can be done here at home people you know this is
00:52:31.140another thing we try to you know repeat on the show and try to discuss on the show is that there's
00:52:36.620got to be a way for people to organize and act at a local level if somebody wanted to organize and
00:52:42.580act at a local level what what should they do when it comes to firearms right well they should join
00:52:47.200In the National Firearms Association, of course, you know, the shameless plug, NFA.ca, they
00:52:55.700also need to get involved in their local shooting clubs.
00:52:58.980They need to get involved at the political level with their local party rioting association.
00:53:04.400I mean, get in there, be someone who shows up to put up signs and to take them down,
00:53:09.100be someone who helps go out and do door knocking and distributes pamphlets and do the boots
00:54:41.780You know, the whole COVID care and stuff,
00:54:46.260the whole panic-demic thing plays well for them.
00:54:49.240It doesn't play so well for conservative-minded voters.
00:54:53.520But the economy is also going to be a huge role for everybody.
00:54:57.940And I believe that what we're going to see here
00:55:01.380is Mr. Trudeau making an assessment about whether or not
00:55:05.960The damage caused by people becoming aware of how bad the economy is going to be is going to be balanced off by some kind of a solution to the pandemic.
00:55:14.540I think what would happen in Trudeau's nifty campaign is somehow lockdowns and all of this nonsense that are actually provincially driven rather than federally driven.
00:55:28.740If all of that stuff sort of goes away, people are going to say, well, look at that.
00:55:33.200The Liberal government will get credit for that, even if it's undeserved.
00:55:38.360And then that would be the time for him to say, OK, I'm going to call an election.
00:55:43.040See, we solved the pandemic. It's the only crisis of our time.
00:55:46.560And if they wait until that, that works for them.
00:55:52.060However, the problem is, the longer they wait, the worse the economy gets.
00:55:55.400So you've got this problem with the pandemic juxtaposed against an economy, which is getting worse partially because of a great deal because of what's happening with the pandemic.
00:56:06.580So it's going to come down to about those two major issues, I think.
00:56:13.600And everything else is really a supplemental issue to one part of that or the other.
00:56:18.040So it depends where you're where you see that sitting.
00:56:21.140So that's what I think is going to happen.
00:56:22.920So, you know, it has Charlene says it's time for Trudeau to go. Well, okay, then you need to do what you need. Everybody out there needs to do exactly what will make Trudeau go. And that is not to split up any vote on the right that is going to allow liberals to come up.
00:56:42.160I mean, they still elect liberals in Edmonton.
00:56:45.240So, you know, it's and I heard a rumor that there was an NDP government in Alberta once upon a time.
00:56:52.300So, you know, you know, so it's true that that can happen.
00:56:56.680And if the vote isn't focused, the lessons of history are very, very clear.
00:57:02.280You end up with something that you don't want.
00:57:06.480Yeah, at least under our current system of first, fast, and post.
00:57:08.960But we won't get into electoral reform here.
00:57:12.160We're still waiting for our next guest to come along here.
00:57:41.020I'm just I'm just you know looking at dank memes I'm liking all the yeah of course you are
00:57:47.160I think I think that if there is if there is kind of a way to meander back to reality here it's um
00:57:54.700the the problem the problem I think still is that for a lot of people they they feel like the
00:58:01.000conserves aren't going to campaign as conservatives how how do we push our party to campaign as
00:58:08.500conservatives. You show up. The world, as this old saying goes, the world is run by those who show
00:58:15.560up. If you show up, you drive what happens. If you don't show up and you sit and you complain
00:58:20.240on Facebook, well, then you basically complain on Facebook. It's like yelling at clouds. We'll go
00:58:27.140outside and yell at the clouds and see if anything changes. And the clouds aren't going to pay
00:58:31.340attention and they're not going away and they're not going to change. So you need to show up. You
00:58:35.500need to get involved with the local politics you need to get involved with your local associations
00:58:39.680and show up like i said boots on the ground that make the difference and if you don't have boots
00:58:44.720in the ground get money for the people who have their boots on the ground so you can make sure
00:58:48.840that they keep in good shoe leather and they can keep up the fight you know put ammo in the hopper
00:58:53.340ammo in the hopper yep absolutely that simple we uh do have our next guest giving uh giving it a
00:59:01.060click now we'll see when he uh navigates his way inside and then we can do a quick switcheroo here
00:59:06.000um i'll at least give him an introduction and then i mean again we're doing this live uh and
00:59:11.140this isn't tucker carlson we don't have that money either i so so there's not going to be a
00:59:15.900lot of scene changes or a commercial or something i mean i could i could do the whole mike lindell
00:59:20.360thing if you want but i don't know is that trademark can i say that i don't know probably
00:59:24.280somebody will come after you on trademark i'm big on that myself it's something yeah yeah i know
00:59:29.060you've you've been quite uh brand protection thing well i mean you know it's the fundamental
00:59:35.240thing is that like i'm just appreciative that we have this conversation because because the thing
00:59:40.080is that what i think that what this platform is for you know if i can be so bold i obviously i'm
00:59:45.100not in charge around here i'm just a host but i think that if i can be so bold it's again to
00:59:49.740facilitate these conversations because there are these divisions within the right that need to be
00:59:53.400discussed they need to be discussed frankly there are these divisions even in the left about the
00:59:58.420questions around sovereignty as well. That's another thing we're going to be talking about
01:00:01.340a little bit with Stuart is what are some of those, again, just like yesterday talking with
01:00:04.840Aaron Ekman about what are some of those reasons to be a sovereignist or separatist, or at least
01:00:12.620want a fair deal for the West and not think that the federal government is your friend just because
01:00:16.460you happen to be on the left. And finally, kind of just as we do look at sort of the situation
01:00:22.320we're in right now um how how do we do this best how do we make sure that people have the
01:00:28.660the access to to their own liberties and i think that's been the biggest thing with covid
01:00:32.560is that uh our our liberties are being curtailed in no small amount so we have stewart parker on
01:00:40.400with us uh we're going to uh segue here as quickly as we can uh stewart sheldon sheldon
01:00:46.480stewart but thank you for your time sheldon thank you nathan it's always pleasure having
01:00:49.760All right. Good to meet you. Good to meet you, too. Take care. Absolutely. Well, Stuart, I'm just going to introduce you here and we're going to let us do some shuffling around here and maybe you can tell us a little bit more about yourself.
01:01:02.840So Stuart Parker is, of course, the president of Los Altos Institute.
01:01:06.260He is a former president or leader of the Green Party, a leader of the Green Party in British Columbia.
01:01:13.720And, of course, he is an agitator for all things justice based in his particular milieu.
01:01:19.680And he likes to get into scraps over very important, important topics, important topics.
01:01:25.100He fights the good fight. Stuart, welcome to the program.
01:01:28.040Oh, it's great to be here. And congratulations on the program.
01:01:31.360i'm yeah i'm i mean i'm still blown away that they're letting me do this but uh we're doing
01:01:37.780our best to put it all together uh we're we're very thankful again thank you sheldon he's just
01:01:43.060waving goodbye there and uh but we're thankful to have you here stewart so let's let's just start
01:01:47.780from the top uh let's just start from the top what uh what what is the fundamental question
01:01:55.100when it comes to, you know, people who are of the right or of the left, what is the fundamental
01:02:00.960question for them to think about when it comes to sovereignty, particularly for you on the left?
01:02:05.920If people are talking about sovereignty, or they're talking about getting more independent
01:02:10.260from Ottawa, what should that look like? Well, I think there are two pretty distinctive paths.
01:02:16.560And we, in many ways, British Columbia and Western Canada generally have functioned as colonized colonial regions for a succession of empires.
01:02:30.360First, the British Empire, then the American Empire.
01:02:34.240And what's interesting in British Columbia is we exist on this kind of fault line that's developing between the Chinese and the contemporary American Empire.
01:02:42.720So one of the things we have to recognize is that we have never fully been independent, we've never fully had self-determination, and local democracy here is largely, used to be anyway, about two different groups playing off against each other.
01:03:06.880a rentier elite whose job it was to extract the natural resources to send to the center of the
01:03:16.060empire that we were serving. And then various groups have cropped up from time to time that
01:03:23.780have a different agenda. And I think it's really important to recognize that if your agenda is
01:03:30.120simply to keep exporting natural resources, whether we're, it doesn't really matter what
01:03:35.360political formal political identity is we are going to function as the periphery of an empire
01:03:42.400and whether we're technically an independent country or not will make absolutely no difference
01:03:49.200if the and the reason that this elite tends to fight for a continuation of us being a deindustrialized
01:03:59.040extractive place is they know is that they fear real consequences from the empires that we sell
01:04:06.380our raw materials to they know there are political consequences and if people at the center get
01:04:11.680annoyed uh then they'll be replaced with people who will send the raw materials and so i think
01:04:21.480that we really have to look to the history of places in latin america that have functioned like
01:04:27.120this. And we have to recognize that true independence, as opposed to just a new flag
01:04:34.180and a continuation of our current status, that true economic independence is going to really
01:04:40.280ruffle some feathers. It's going to produce enormous confrontations. And we can look to the
01:04:46.880political history of places like Chile to see how far the various empires go to make sure that we
01:04:55.980start shipping them their stuff now i'm not from an environmental stamp for on the one hand i'm
01:05:02.540not a huge fan of glenn clark's overall time as premier uh in the 90s right he this is when i was
01:05:08.460leader of the green party we were in lots of confrontations we faced off in the newspaper
01:05:14.380and he did the and he was responsible for the huge surge in the natural gas and fracking sector that
01:05:19.900goes on to this day but why was he taken out it was taken out because he tried to
01:05:28.380turn some of our raw materials into finished products here in the form of the fast ferry
01:05:33.820program now yeah there were some bumps along the way but nowhere near as many bumps as ford or
01:05:39.580tesla or someone hits when they bring out a whole new line of vehicles never mind starting a whole
01:05:44.780new industry but the rentier elites of this province the people who profit from shipping
01:05:51.500unprocessed aluminum out of bc or shipping pop cans out of bc they went nuts because they knew
01:05:58.540that their job was on the line so what is an what's an environmental independence agenda
01:06:05.820weirdly enough it's also an industrial agenda it's because if we don't reclaim our economy
01:06:12.140then um then political independence is meaningless that that's a statement i like that
01:06:20.560thank you steward for kicking us off so well right there let's talk about the nature of empire i'm
01:06:26.260certain that people you know that are watching right now they maybe that's not the exact language
01:06:31.220they would use to conceive of it but they do they can kind of understand like well yeah no ottawa
01:06:35.500does seem to rule us from very far away and doesn't seem to really care very much and even uh
01:06:41.360If you are in rural Alberta, maybe you don't think that Calgary or Edmonton cares about you very much.
01:06:45.760Certainly here in Prince George, a northern capital, I know our rural regions probably don't like how Prince George acts,
01:06:51.260but certainly we don't like how the Lower Mainland acts sometimes.
01:06:54.840How do we feel like we have a say, but also like we're not in conflict with all of our brothers and sisters in this country all the time?
01:07:03.540Well, I think that fundamentally, if you want to make a social change or an economic change or a political change,
01:07:09.680you need a large consensus of people. And if there was one thing that British Columbia used
01:07:16.540to be good at that we are terrible at today is that people in British Columbia used to be able
01:07:23.620to see an elite consensus coming a mile away, right? Moments like the Charlottetown Accord
01:07:30.540where 70% of us voted on the no side, even though we were outspent 80 to 1 by the yes side.
01:07:40.940That's a striking moment. And there's a guy who phoned into Rafe Mayer's show in the middle of
01:07:45.980all this, the late, great Rafe Mayer, in whose shadow shows like this are taking place.
01:07:53.280And he said, you know what's great about this referendum is I get to vote against the politicians,
01:07:59.000the unions and the corporations and the media the whole damn lot of you and in the past
01:08:07.160what we've been able to do here on certain occasions is we've been able to create an
01:08:13.140anti-elite consensus a consensus of the majority in which people we might call you know rural
01:08:21.540conservatives and people we might think of as urban lefties come together as part of a larger
01:08:28.540process of pushing back against the authority that is coming from, you know, Vancouver,
01:08:37.620Ottawa, D.C., Beijing, wherever, to say that. And I think that, and so I think that we have
01:08:49.580to go with things that will benefit the majority, regardless of their politics. And one of those
01:08:56.320things is something that I really, your first column for The Standard really spoke to me,
01:09:03.680because what it was talking about was what a Marx-informed lefty like me would call land
01:09:11.980reform. In Latin America, one of the reasons they've been able to build coalitions to retake
01:09:18.120their economies is because they don't grant rural land to individuals based on either the fact that
01:09:31.680they're, you know, the son of the Bloedel family or part of a warehouser lineage or one of those
01:09:38.760big forestry companies, or because they're descended from indigenous aristocrats, right?
01:09:45.120those are we understand all title to rural land in totally you know aristocratic feudal terms
01:09:53.360it's just that we had we weren't as good as the kingdom of hawaii we didn't get the deal you know
01:09:59.840indigenous aristocrats didn't get the deal they got in hawaii to be part of that elite and so we
01:10:05.440have that problem but the reality is that um if you go to a place like bolivia or mexico where
01:10:13.440they've actually reformed land tenure the basis of the claim for land is that you need the land
01:10:20.880and can use it to support yourselves and that you can make something of it and while a
01:10:27.360disproportionate number of the people who make those claims and get that land are indigenous
01:10:34.000their neighbors of all extractions have the same rights if they're living the same way
01:10:40.400one of the hypotheticals that i put in front of people is i said what if bc had quilombos
01:10:47.840quilombos um were communities of escaped african slaves in the uh brazilian serpau their jungle
01:10:56.960and also all through uh the tropics in latin america and these escaped slaves formed communities
01:11:05.040often in like the first generation after slavery began so these communities would have been rural
01:11:11.360racialized communities since 1550 and the idea that the poor indigenous people0.94
01:11:19.680should get the land around them but the poor african people shouldn't is the way british
01:11:26.240colombians would think because none of the aristocrats of the african people came over1.00
01:11:32.080as slaves they have no aristocratic title to the land therefore they don't deserve it
01:11:36.640when in fact my view is as a socialist everybody who is on the land base who depends on that land
01:11:46.800should have the right and the opportunity to form into groups that manage that land together
01:11:53.120and extract its value together and sure they should be within rigorous environmental standards
01:11:59.840But one of the problems with environmentalism, going back to the very foundation of the Sierra
01:12:05.200Club, is that environmentalists allied themselves with the railway companies in creating those great
01:12:12.240big parks. That's seen as an environmental victory. Yellowstone, Banff, Jasper. But what
01:12:17.920those projects were was a way of paying for the rail line through that area because there were
01:12:24.240were no minerals under the soil. There were no trees to log. It's alpine. So this is worthless,
01:12:31.500and this mountain pass costs a fortune to build the railway through. So you know what we're going
01:12:36.360to do? We're going to put a fence around it. We're going to call it a park. We're going to advertise
01:12:39.920it as a tourist attraction. The railway company is going to bring this big hotel, and we will
01:12:44.520march every indigenous person out at gunpoint or shoot them on site. That's how America made1.00
01:12:51.880Yellowstone Park. That's how it made Yosemite Park. And so environmentalists from the beginning
01:12:59.220have been associated with what I call the disinhabitation of rural land. But if you
01:13:06.320want to look at societies that live effectively and sustainably on the land, there aren't these
01:13:16.480big bald patches with fences around them the humans are kept out of that you don't see
01:13:23.540that way of being and so I think environmentalists really need to move past the idea of uninhabited
01:13:35.540disinhabited land that is an aesthetic product that we sell to the wealthy and we have to
01:13:42.060start thinking about spreading out onto the land. Because right now, rural British, well,
01:13:48.940rural people generally, right, we're feeding the cities. The food that's not coming from California
01:13:58.380is coming the other way. It's coming from the north. This is where your local BC organic beef
01:14:07.100that is, you know, being served in an eatery on Granville, Iowa, this is where it's being raised.
01:14:14.480Perhaps one of the reasons why, and I know, I know that you have a lot to speak to on this
01:14:18.300count as well, Stuart, is that one of the reasons why things happen the way they happen so much now,
01:14:24.240or people feel so disenfranchised politically, personally, even religiously, they just feel,
01:14:29.940they feel like they don't have a stake in things. You're talking about having a stake in the land.
01:14:33.260The biggest prevention of having a stake anywhere politically or physically is that it seems like we live in a democracy.
01:14:42.760We live in a thing where the technocrats are in charge, the regulations are in charge, people don't feel like they have a say in things.
01:14:52.700Your discussion of Bonnie Henry throughout the pandemic has been very helpful on this point.
01:14:57.260Yeah, I think that one of the tragedies that has happened in B.C. in my lifetime was that both the NDP and Social Credit understood, this is the old NDP, not the current zombie,
01:15:14.100but the NDP and social credit both understood that the bureaucracy had a class consciousness
01:15:23.840and an agenda, and that in a democratic system, you have to constantly cut the bureaucracy back
01:15:31.940in order to prevent it from seizing the democratic power of elected officials.
01:15:38.380and this was a really when BC was at its most politically volatile and interesting
01:15:47.800both the right-wing populists and the left-wing populists knew this right there was no party for
01:15:55.820progressives over in Ontario all the parties were progressive they were all already totally
01:16:03.060enmeshed with the bureaucrats uh bill davis's tories you know were indistinguishable from
01:16:10.040stephen lewis's ndp and uh you know the liberals uh in ontario but here um often whenever the
01:16:20.380government changed hands and often just after an election there would be a mass purge and
01:16:25.840reorganization of the bureaucracy that would often seem quite inefficient um that was one of the
01:16:32.220things Glenn Clark tried to bring back was recognizing that there's a way in which legislators
01:16:40.200and bureaucrats are cooperating to run the state, but inside that cooperation is a war over who
01:16:48.580controls the state, and both things are going on. It's like the Cold War. People always
01:16:54.380under-emphasize how much the U.S. and U.S.S.R. cooperated in order to have stuff to fight over,
01:17:00.560And we see that's really how government worked in B.C., and everybody understood that.
01:17:08.160And then there's this dramatic shift with the arrival of Mike Harcourt, mayor of Vancouver.
01:17:14.900And, of course, he comes out of something called commission government, where city councillors are literally the servants of the bureaucrats.
01:17:23.300I interviewed a city councillor here in Prince George for my show, and that was their thing.
01:17:31.380It was like, well, you know, I'm going to listen to what they tell me, and I'm going to do what they say, and that's my job.
01:17:40.080So in BC, we hated that kind of politics until Mike Harcourt came along, and Mike Harcourt really didn't seek to purge the bureaucracy.
01:17:51.580He sought to build it as being like Ontario's bureaucracy, and that's where we've been heading ever since, to the point where the current government essentially sees itself as an extension of the civil servants, right?
01:18:08.040And they believe that we will achieve a perfect government when there are no Democratic nomination meetings and parties where every member of the legislature is picked by an HR committee.
01:18:19.460uh and uh you know it's it's it's that blatant right that's that's the position of um you know
01:18:28.520uh uh premier horgan's press secretary uh that um you know this is just a job interview
01:18:34.740and like the fact that this part of the government is elected is sort of an inconvenience
01:18:40.680so i think we have to get back to that spirit of wac bennett dave barrett bill bennett glenn clark
01:18:48.840who saw the bureaucracy as an incipient threat to our democratic institutions,
01:18:54.820a necessary evil, in other words, rather than a trusted partner.
01:19:01.180And this is precisely it, because it's funny, it networks all the way back into the land reform question that you put forward there,
01:19:07.420by referencing what I had written about.
01:19:09.960Because, I mean, my parents have a farm, and dealing with the ALR and dealing with the regional district,
01:19:15.920And like there's like nine levels of government between Joe Blow just trying to like scratch out a living or just just plant something or just raise some cows or pigs.
01:19:25.840And like the people he elected to try and help him in this question, it is it is entirely rentierism.
01:19:33.340And there's no there's no way of navigating the regulations.
01:23:56.600Because I don't know what she's even saying anymore.
01:24:01.020Well, and I mean, the provincial, I mean, this is the kind of smartest guys in the room move that the B.C. government has made.
01:24:09.600So they investigated Bonnie Henry, and what the SARS report said was that she would risk people's lives to cover up evidence to conceal a pandemic.
01:24:23.960That was what she did at Sunnybrook Hospital, and that's why after that senior position, she had essentially retired.
01:24:34.180She was brought out of retirement by this government.
01:24:37.300She's one of the few, one of their appointees who is not like a holdover from the Christy Clark or Gordon Campbell era.
01:24:47.040And I think they were very smart in the way that the NDP is smart because I always made sure Adrian Dix stood behind her at the press conference,
01:24:58.760that he, that she spoke first, that she was understood to be the authority.
01:25:04.620and they then spent 60 grand on a PR firm to craft that image with the shoes and the hair
01:25:14.100and the tone and that anytime a rural person she asks a question she says well first
01:25:21.960we must be kind you know because rural people ask unkind questions like why did you lift my
01:25:29.200local quarantine and now my grandmother's dying. So this sort of thing. So she is a creation
01:25:37.680of this government because I think they understood from the beginning. Either she will pull off
01:25:44.320whatever bullshit needs to be pulled off or she'll fail and it'll be all on her. And we will then
01:25:55.260leave the breadcrumbs back to the SARS report and it will just have been a bad hiring decision
01:26:03.100which will let Adrian Dix take a ministry that doesn't have such long working hours
01:26:09.340but largely leave him secure in his position oh well it was really my responsibility I'm going
01:26:15.420to step down from cabinet right they they I mean look at bow and ma they literally now have a
01:26:20.940minister for resigning over Sightseek. That's her function in the cabinet. So the old white0.99
01:26:29.740men in the premier's office have understood that they can play identity politics at the same time0.77
01:26:37.340as they create human shields. That's a damning statement for sure. And just to be clear,
01:26:45.740that's exactly what we need to hear when it comes to the questions of the BC NDP government.
01:26:50.940Let's pivot a little bit into Site C. I mean, obviously, Site C is a controversial thing. You've come out strongly against it. Can you explain it from that environmental point of view? Most of us on the right would say, hey, it's water going over a concrete bridge that happens to have no hole underneath it. And then it turns a turbine and that's green, isn't it?
01:27:10.600That's as rudimentary as it gets for us on the right sometimes, though some of us are also like, well, the empire is coming, and the empire went and took the peace country, and that's not fair, and those poor farmers, et cetera, and so there's that populist right as well.
01:27:25.440But as a general concept, most of us on the right don't think of dams as being not green.
01:28:03.700Now, at this point, we're going to take a hit on anything, because we've been screwing around in this valley, and we've made a mess of it, and we've wasted a lot of money doing it.
01:28:13.100But I don't believe in, you know, economists know that the sunk cost fallacy is a real fallacy.
01:28:20.880The issue is, what should we do with the Peace Valley if we woke up tomorrow morning and everything was as it is?
01:28:28.600you know, that we're in all this debt, we've got all these vehicles there, we've cut all these
01:28:37.040trees, we've mucked around around the river. And my view is that from the perspective of the
01:28:43.980things that we need to be self-reliant here, we should stop the construction. We should just stop
01:28:51.400it and walk away. We've made bigger, dumber mistakes. What do we get in exchange for stopping
01:28:57.580that at construction well we get the only place you can grow cantaloupes uh north of 54 on the
01:29:04.460entire continent right we have one of the most stunningly agricultural productive agricultural
01:29:11.660valleys and if we are going to make a go of it independently with a variety of climates and
01:29:19.420having to produce an increasing portion of our own food as climate change knocks out food systems in
01:29:26.060the global south the most important thing for us we have to we have as much hydro as we can sell
01:29:33.420and more it's not the thing we're short of energy from dams is not a thing bc
01:29:39.660is short of what bc is short of is um warm good growing season agricultural land in the north
01:29:49.100That is our number one need. And I think that's a good idea. In addition to that, Site C would contribute to the larger crisis in the slave Athabasca-McKenzie River system.
01:30:07.580One of the problems with doing macrohydro is that you have all these trees die, you have all of this soil disturbed, it produces methylmercury concentrations, which makes the fish in your reservoir toxic, you can't get the normal things out of your reservoir, you would get out of a lake.
01:30:29.980And so we have water with these increasing methylmercury concentrations from the last two reservoirs.
01:30:38.480We do not need a third to further increase both the duration and the concentration of a chemical that disrupts local food systems.
01:30:51.980Besides, those rivers have got to go through the tar sands yet.
01:30:55.520they're in they're going to be in terrible shape by the time they hit the northwest territories
01:30:59.840anyway and so the other thing we shouldn't be doing is we shouldn't be taking a system that's
01:31:04.400in crisis and making it worse and that is what unesco has said to us about site c that they'll
01:31:13.040have to withdraw the world heritage status from wood buffalo national park uh because um
01:31:19.360We keep expanding the tar sands, we keep increasing plants to increase methylmercury levels, this
01:31:26.860is not going to be an ecosystem that should be part of an international park system.
01:31:34.000So that's also another issue, which is we have industries that I'm sorry, Nathan, please
01:31:49.360yeah it's not a problem steward um yeah i think kind of reflecting a little bit on what uh what
01:31:57.400steward said say if i'm allowed to think out loud for a moment is uh and we'll bring him back as
01:32:02.900soon as we can i think i think one of the things that comes to my mind at least is that well no
01:32:07.680steward has come back to us you're good i'm sorry federal express decided to descend on my home i'll
01:32:13.960just be another two minutes my sincere apologies not a problem no i mean this is a lot right and
01:32:22.280as i've told you guys a couple a couple of times i mean i mike i might might agree with you more
01:32:28.600than stewart does on that question i i can sympathize with that to a certain extent for sure
01:32:33.960uh and i do happen to hold the opinion that the oil sands are very well taken care of and much
01:32:39.000more ethical than what we get out of saudi arabia but again we uh we're doing our best to try and
01:32:44.920make sure this is a free expression platform so there are going to be people on this platform
01:32:49.640that not everybody agrees with that's okay and we're just trying to keep it within the bounds of
01:32:54.200not denying certain political facts around uh history and bad things that happened in history
01:32:59.640and uh keeping the language under control so that's kind of what we're trying to do
01:33:03.320on those counts so i hope that everybody can abide by those rules and nobody tries to
01:33:06.840get anybody canceled for something silly but i mean with to the point of what is green and and
01:33:14.600what isn't green and all that or or at least to the point of like what should energy be used for
01:33:19.800how should energy be made i think that for us british colombians we do need to take a serious
01:33:24.920uh look at just what what do we want that power to go towards that's very important i think
01:33:31.720um very important especially considering that we sell so much of it to uh to the united states so
01:33:37.500Stuart's back with us, so we'll bring him back on.
01:34:32.300So if socialists and environmentalists don't come together with people of faith and, you know, other rural folks, then we're not going to be making that.
01:34:50.460we won't have these decisions to debate because these decisions will be made in boardrooms far
01:34:56.260away or they'll be made by parties captured by interests in the southwest of the province and
01:35:05.560interests offshore and by a progressive culture that is increasingly a culture people don't want
01:35:13.800to be in, one that has turned in really upsetting directions in recent years. Not to say that,
01:35:21.860you know, mainstream conservative culture has had a great time either, but I think we have to
01:35:27.740recognize that sometimes we do have to enter into these grand coalitions against a greater evil.
01:35:33.940Absolutely. And let's talk about that for at least a moment or two. You are actually the
01:35:39.940first canceled person that I've brought on to this show. I'm honored to have you here because
01:35:45.280because you did get canceled by by a certain group of people. And maybe that you can explain
01:35:51.680that a little bit what happened there in the political in the political world of the BC
01:35:56.360election last fall. Well, I was just a crazy time. So there. So the way I think in some ways,
01:36:09.100the term cancel culture is trivializing because it suggests that while it is true that society
01:36:17.740as a whole is growing more frightened of teenagers on twitter um teenagers on twitter are not in and
01:36:24.620of themselves particularly dangerous um teenagers on twitter only become dangerous um when they
01:36:33.980when they're freaked out about something is something that can be used by powerful interests
01:36:42.600to silence someone. And the term for that is McCarthyism. A lot of people don't understand
01:36:52.880how the original McCarthyism worked, and that's why I think that people don't often use the term
01:36:58.460neo-McCarthyism to talk about what's going on in our society now. Because we often think
01:37:07.960of Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts and J. Edgar Hoover and his communist
01:37:14.540witch hunts as being McCarthyism. That this state-directed program of making lists, holding
01:37:22.220hearings and, you know, you know, punishing people was the story. But of course, the real story is
01:37:33.440that right at the edge of the state, there are much more powerful things like the Hollywood
01:37:38.880blacklist. And most of the people who were blacklisted during McCarthyism are people of
01:37:45.400whom the American government was never even aware.
01:37:49.080Most people who were blacklisted were blacklisted because they said a thing
01:37:55.280that indicated they were a threat, and then a private company or their union
01:38:02.420or their in-laws or whomever began pulling things away from them,
01:38:09.300like their family, their job, their place in church, things like that.
01:38:18.160And that part of McCarthyism was done by volunteers.
01:38:21.580It was done by volunteers with no state direction at all.
01:38:26.000And even when you think of the most authoritarian states,
01:38:28.980like Cold War East Germany or Cold War Brazil,
01:38:33.100still, most of the work in those states of finding dissidents and punishing dissidents
01:38:41.180was done by volunteers. It was not a top-down effort. And so what cancel culture really
01:38:47.980is then, it's the equivalent. There are certain things that are the equivalent of being a
01:38:54.440member of the international communist conspiracy, as in the 50s. And one of those things happens
01:39:02.500to be being seen as a transphobe. That if you can tar someone with the accusation that
01:39:12.080they're transphobic, then we're off to the races. But of course, what do you have to
01:39:20.660say to be revealed as a transphobe? Well, just like in McCarthyism, the most dangerous
01:39:26.780thing to say is that other person over there that you're persecuting they're not a communist or
01:39:33.580they're not a transphobe and that's what happened to me judy graves um the legendary uh homelessness
01:39:41.820activist in vancouver dedicated her whole life to uh helping people find housing uh judy
01:39:50.540among her close friends was Jamie Lee Hamilton, who for many years was the leader of the trans
01:39:57.600community in Vancouver. And Jamie Lee, you know, is somebody I've worked with, I've fought with,
01:40:06.060I respected her. And I'm saying her, right? This is not typical transphobe mode of operation.
01:40:13.120so jamie lee got cancer and it was not caught for the longest time and the reason it wasn't
01:40:22.460caught is that it's a type of cancer that only afflicts male bodies so jamie lee's doctor felt
01:40:32.280there was a danger of being accused of transphobia and therefore didn't send her for the test she
01:40:41.100needed when they were needed and didn't respond to pressure uh from outside so the cancer was
01:40:48.260not caught until judy caught it and then judy provided all the palliative care for jamie lee
01:40:54.420for the rest of her life pretty much and at her memorial judy is upset and she says you know
01:41:02.840If only the doctors had understood that Jamie had a male body, she'd be with us today.0.88
01:41:19.340So saying that Jamie Lee Hamilton had a male body in front of people then caused Judy Graves to be tarred as a transphobe.1.00
01:41:30.340And great pressure was exerted by the charitable sector on the United Church to drum her out of all offices she held in that church and make, you know, and push her to the margins of a society.
01:41:47.960And so a few months later, I was on Facebook and the Green Party's main trans rights spokesperson, Nicholas Sperling, was writing about how we really had to do something about Maureen Bork and Judy Graves.
01:42:08.700and you know because they said that jk rowling was not you know transphobic right again that's
01:42:17.340what proves you're transphobe is that you say someone else isn't a transphobe the way you say
01:42:23.260i am a communist in mccarthyism is that guy over there is not a communist i know him and that's
01:42:30.220what goes on here if you do not denounce um an innocent person then you're thrown to the wolves
01:42:40.060with them so instead i said you know what judy and i are long-term supporters of trans rights
01:42:47.100we worked on jamie lee hamilton's first campaign in 1996 um i know that you disagree on a couple
01:42:56.380of small points, but I really think that if instead of attacking her, you talk to her,
01:43:05.980people like her and me and Maureen, we've been on your side for longer than you've been
01:43:10.860politically conscious. Please don't do this. So because I had said not just that Judy Graves
01:43:20.220was innocent but the JK Rowling was innocent, that meant I was transphobic. So for instance,
01:43:26.700Bob Mackin and the breaker described this as an angry incoherent rant about Parker's worship of
01:43:34.300JK Rowling. Right? That's what that is. You will notice that whenever someone is accused of having
01:43:41.340made a transphobic statement, they will never quote the statement. You just have to keep saying
01:43:48.220what did they say what did they say what did they actually say and it uh and so um
01:43:58.300now nicholas spurling was a candidate for a competing party in the election so um uh when
01:44:05.660she attacked me publicly i just went well you know this is just politics this is this is silly
01:44:13.500and then mariam haddad who was running for the leadership of the green party at the time
01:44:20.300came along she had endorsed the party i was leading the eco-socialists and mariam came along
01:44:27.900and uh and said uh um you know i've endorsed the eco-socialist you're going to destroy my
01:44:35.340leadership campaign if you don't resign and i said i'm not going to resign i don't even know who you
01:44:39.500are. I'm not a Green Party member. And so then she got her campaign manager to phone
01:44:47.500me at 10-minute intervals and just scream, resign, resign, resign into my phone. So that
01:44:53.600went on for an evening. And then, of course, the tie-ee got into the business. They wrote
01:45:04.100a nice hatchet job piece um i'm shocked i'm shocked their whole gotcha thing in the time0.54
01:45:12.980no their whole gotcha thing in the tie was that i had said that they were trying to prevent judy
01:45:18.100from getting work which they were but um they went judy graves is retired so you see that it's all
01:45:25.540lies right uh because nobody's ever worked after they retired no um so so this is uh so what
01:45:35.300happened then is that i was um so then to my surprise um people in my party started losing
01:45:44.980their nerve because of course every hour that goes by they're being asked to denounce me and
01:45:50.580if they don't denounce me personally then um and they also have to say like the the incantation0.70
01:45:57.860which is after you denounce somebody you have to say trans women are women sex work is work
01:46:02.580and that that reaffir that liturgically reaffirms your membership in the mainstream uh because we
01:46:10.100just decided to slide in um people who believe that sex trafficking is a myth perpetrated by big
01:46:18.260feminism and the cops uh so anyway we're um uh so i pretty and so i thought well and i said to the
01:46:29.940party look um you know i understand uh what's going on here we just have to weather this because
01:46:39.620these people cannot be appeased no matter what you do they will just smell more blood in the water
01:46:46.500and uh but the party's communications committee wouldn't back me and i didn't feel like
01:46:53.580reconvening a meeting of the board to sack the communications committee in the middle of the
01:46:57.680election during this elaborating crisis uh so eventually i said look you know they've they've
01:47:08.780sent you know trans activists have sent uh i think it's over 20 000 public rape threats to jk rowling
01:47:15.960probably an additional 50,000 private rape threats.
01:47:21.100And I said, look, these people are talking about J.K. Rowling now.
01:47:28.560And so I think that you've got to realize that unless we offer to rape J.K. Rowling ourselves,
01:47:36.780you're not getting out from under this.
01:47:38.420You're just going to have to weather it.
01:47:40.660But they didn't go that way, so I turned in my resignation.
01:47:45.720and then the party became a hilarious game of survivor as the party kept making new decisions
01:47:54.760to appease the lobby and new threats were then uh were then made against uh every member of the
01:48:05.640board every time they bulked at making a new concession so what finally happened was that
01:48:13.800the party the party went through I think two leaders after me in the space of a
01:48:20.920week and if they'd managed to get it down to two candidates Chris Chapman and
01:48:28.920Jonathan Sheps were still willing to run and walk through the storm but what
01:48:36.300then happened was uh the guy who had paid to create the party jeff burner a former friend of
01:48:45.020mine um put up a message on his facebook page that he had the name and contact information of
01:48:51.420every person on the board who had not voted to personally denounce me and that they were to be
01:48:57.980hounded all day, every day until they issued a press release denouncing me as a bad person
01:49:05.780and a bigot. So all but three members of the board resigned. And those are the ones that
01:49:14.020Jeff Berner didn't have contact information for. So the party pulled out of the election.
01:49:20.600It was an absolute fiasco. And it was really largely my fault because I wasn't thinking
01:49:26.820about the coalitions that are possible i was thinking about the coalitions that were possible
01:49:32.340because you know all kinds of chumps like me supported barack obama in 2008 and
01:49:41.060law and the vast majority of gay americans it was 89 supported him in 2008 despite his
01:49:47.300opposition to gay marriage that the the people on the left used to be able to form coalitions
01:49:55.780with people with whom they disagreed about a social issue but now as my friend jeff ranger says
01:50:02.660everything has to be about everything else all the time or it will be stopped
01:50:10.340and that i think that's exactly what we find sometimes even on the right to do it if i was
01:50:14.500to be completely candid is that you know a lot of things with whether whether whether we're talking
01:50:19.380about you know the more independent question or sovereignist question because i think there's
01:50:22.260smaller questions that fit into that larger question but then you got to try and put your
01:50:25.980talking points in there all the time and even further to the rest of Canada and what's happening
01:50:30.520or the fact that the Liberal Party never talks about China in a negative light like these are
01:50:34.680all things where just the truth is covered and I think that I think what I really respect about
01:50:40.380you personally and of course this story that you're telling is that you you try to live out
01:50:45.500the truth and uh and you got you you know you got kiboshed for it and that that takes integrity and
01:50:50.620A lot of people don't have that integrity these days, especially in the political world.
01:50:54.880Yeah, and I think that that's not like – there's an element of kinds of people,
01:51:03.060kinds of political activists, kinds of honor that are fading from the world.
01:51:08.480But I think in the case of what we're talking about here,
01:51:12.680about people who will tell the truth and people who won't,
01:51:16.120But I think that we are reaching the greatest appetite we've ever had as a society for people who tell the truth, because institutions in our society have been captured to prevent those people systematically from having a voice.
01:51:36.360and canada has done special things to do that that makes it diverge from the history
01:51:42.680of every other commonwealth country we began changing our election legislation from 1993 to
01:51:50.1202003 in that 10-year period we change we changed the system from a system that was it was not a
01:52:00.840a bottom-up system like America, but it was a system of mutual agreement. The top and the
01:52:08.120bottom had to agree. Both the party leader and the riding association had to agree on who the
01:52:13.600candidate was, and if they didn't agree, there couldn't be a candidate, right? That the caucus
01:52:19.880determined who was a member of the caucus. That was a flat vote. Who's in, who's out.
01:52:28.440and prime ministers served at the pleasure of their caucus there are these other but that
01:52:36.880doesn't happen anymore why because the nomination of candidates has both become a right held solely
01:52:45.340by one individual the registered leader of a party until he or she is deposed that one individual
01:52:53.780holds that right but they have delegated that right to vetting committees which are committees
01:53:03.140within political parties whose criteria for selecting candidates are unpublished and the
01:53:09.540names of whose members are unknown sometimes a member of the vetting committee one will reveal
01:53:15.700themselves if they have to justify a really outrageous decision. So, you know, where's
01:53:22.560Canada's Donald Trump? Well, Donald Trump obviously would have been de-vetted by the
01:53:30.280vetting committee for the Tory leadership race. There would have been no way he could
01:53:34.940have inserted himself into that. Ditto Bernie Sanders. You know, would Bernie Sanders have
01:53:41.320been allowed into an NDP leadership race in this country? No way. And that's why I find voters
01:53:49.880across the spectrum increasingly, there's an appetite for voting for anyone who's telling
01:53:55.300the truth, whether or not you even agree with them. It's like cheering for an animal that got
01:54:00.240loose in a slaughterhouse or something. And that's changed not just within my lifetime,
01:54:06.800but within yours. Corky Evans was the minister of force in BC in 2001 and he came out of cabinet
01:54:16.720meetings and they would say how did it go? Well, what we are doing now is stupid but it's not as
01:54:22.880stupid as the last policy. You had characters like Garth Turner standing up criticizing his
01:54:31.360leader in parliament and of course my old pal svend robinson these these are like real people
01:54:39.360who existed at the start of this century who are unimaginable today the only time somebody like you
01:54:48.480or me is allowed to run for public office is for a fringe party that will be systematically
01:54:55.040deplatformed throughout the election. I think a lot of that has to do obviously with the media
01:55:02.180we have in Canada. It's one of the reasons I'm proud to be with the standard is that it gives
01:55:07.460me a platform to tell the truth within some very, I think, very reasonable parameters and to have
01:55:13.600people on from all across the spectrum. That's again, it's one of the reasons why we're speaking
01:55:18.240today. Again, my own personal respect for you and the fact you have great things to say and to give
01:55:22.060us an idea of what what that might look like for western canada from uh your point of view but also
01:55:26.880the fact that i mean we are able to have this conversation on this platform i don't know if
01:55:30.760you're going to get the same call from cbc no um i got uh i got pushed down some stairs by the cbc
01:55:37.680once uh no i've uh my my interactions with the cbc are um i was shoelace tackled by a producer i've
01:55:46.900I've run the full gambit of our national public broadcaster and ways of experiencing them.
01:55:53.040You know, they really, if a black woman meets the criteria for getting in a CBC-sponsored debate,
01:56:02.900that's happened twice in campaigns I've been in.
01:56:06.720It's amazing watching them just change the rules and not even tell you, not even, you know, sugarcoat the thing.
01:56:13.720uh so yeah i think our um i think one of the big problems in western canada though
01:56:19.760is now ontario i've said some bad things about them i'll continue to say bad things about them
01:56:25.840it'll be another part of our basis of unity here uh but one thing about going to ontario and quebec
01:56:32.360manitoba even um is that there is an old newspaper culture there there are newspapers
01:56:43.580papers where the media understood themselves to be the fourth estate, they were a professionalized
01:56:49.980group, and papers had different ideological bents, and they had both reactionary and thoughtful
01:56:58.560pieces that were in dialogue with each other, right, the Post and the Star arguing with
01:57:04.000each other, the Star and the Globe arguing with each other, all based around this ethos
01:57:09.620of objective journalism. We've never, never had that here. The sorry state of BC media
01:57:20.760is really not much sorrier than it was in my youth. Like the Sun and Province were the
01:57:26.800same company starting in like 1908 and the big forest companies would just take turns
01:57:34.420as to whose job it was to run the sun and province at a loss on behalf of the industry.
01:57:40.280And same with the legislative press gallery, right?
01:57:43.980There is no pretense of inclusion or objectivity.
01:57:50.180The things that communists said about the private liberal press
01:57:57.420were an exaggeration in most of North America,
01:58:03.300but they've been literally true here for the moment we started printing.
01:58:09.940Maybe that's a way to kind of pivot here and come to more of a resolution. We have a few
01:58:15.300minutes left here, but if we were to look at kind of the state of the West today, especially with
01:58:20.260the federal election looming, what do we need to be thinking about? What is clear to us that's
01:58:26.740going to change or what needs to change in the West, right or left, in order for there to be a
01:58:31.300move forward to gain to gain more autonomy and and a stake for the people in this country this part of
01:58:36.820the country well uh i i think that uh people who care about that are going to be stuck voting for
01:58:44.820fringe parties um or uh they're gonna be um uh or you know they're they're gonna sit the election
01:58:53.780out because the mainstream parliamentary parties are captured parties that are not democratic
01:59:02.820and have no interest in reflecting regular folks' views. Now, depending upon which, I mean, I could
01:59:09.300offer you two voting strategies. One, of course, is for the party that this station likes most,
01:59:17.060the western separatist party from tory dissidents but i'd ask folks to consider voting um
01:59:26.900also consider that another way to express that is through a vote for the communists because
01:59:31.700they do support import substitution industrialization they have an economic
01:59:36.820independence agenda that i think is i haven't seen out of the movement on the right yet it's a
01:59:42.820it's culturally framed because finally the right's winning the culture war so why wouldn't you frame
01:59:48.420it that way after being on the back foot for 40 to 50 years. So I think that one is going to vote
01:59:56.980for a fringe party and one is going to recognize that this election is not about us and what we
02:00:06.340have to focus on doing is making our own local institutions robust what i'm interested in are
02:00:13.780the 2022 municipal and school board elections in bc what we need to do is start at home
02:00:23.700throwing out commission government pulling school boards out of province-wide bargaining
02:00:29.220and using the tools that we have forgotten we can even pick up here and recognizing that
02:00:38.800the courts are like dice. So if a senior level of government says you can't do it,
02:00:44.660well, let's roll the dice in court. So that's where my organizing interest is really pointing.
02:00:52.120I think that until there are major law reforms to restructure federal political parties,
02:00:59.220Um, a federal election is not the time to do the organizing and build the broad coalitions we need to, to actually shape our destiny.
02:01:12.620And, and I must admit that, that, I mean, I can say amen to all of that. I, again, you know, there's, there's plenty of places where we differ, uh, and that's fine.
02:01:21.720I mean, again, that's one of the things I've been trying to emphasize from day one that I've been here and I hope to emphasize every day until I'm finally canceled or, you know, I get to retire into the sunset.
02:01:32.040If there's such a thing as retirement in the late capitalist world we're entering, something I gave up on way back in 2008, I think most of my generation did.
02:01:42.200But the point is that, again, from the very beginning, it has always been clear to me that there is no way forward without these conversations where we just, whatever we disagree on and wherever we agree on, the coalition builds, the movement builds, and we're able to move forward towards people having a stake, land reform, people having a sense of belonging in their own home.
02:02:04.160yeah i think that that is exactly it and one of the things for those who haven't tried it
02:02:11.120one of the things you'll discover that's really lovely if you reach across to the other extremists
02:02:17.860that you've been fighting on the logging road or at the abortion clinic or wherever it was
02:02:23.120um you discovered that it's actually way easier to come up with strategy make agreements get along
02:02:31.040and even make friends with people you have one thing in common with than with people you're
02:02:37.160trying to have everything in common with. So it's just a great exercise for, even if we fail
02:02:44.440politically, broadening our own social horizons and reminding ourselves that contrary to what
02:02:51.220most people seem to think these days, our neighbors deserve to stay alive, stay in their homes,
02:02:59.440whatever their private thoughts are, whatever their public pronouncements are,
02:03:04.480that having a job, having a home, getting to have a family,
02:03:08.320these are universal things that we should want for our enemies, too.
02:03:13.020And I think that that's, if we don't recapture that, everything else is on the line.