Stuart Parker and I discuss the Canadian socialist think tank called Los Altos Institute and the possibility of finding common ground between Conservatives and Socialists through big-tent cross-partisan activities similar to ones done in the 90's.
Stuart is a researcher, writer and broadcaster as well as a Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern B.C. His Twitter handle is: @stuartlosaltos
The Institute can be found at: https://www.losaltos.ca/
Help keep my show ad free and support independent media. Consider subscribing for a low fee and get access to by subscriber only content at my website
Stuart Parker and I discuss the Canadian socialist think tank called Los Altos Institute and the possibility of finding common ground between Conservatives and Socialists through big-tent cross-partisan activities similar to ones done in the 90's.
Stuart is a researcher, writer and broadcaster as well as a Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern B.C. His Twitter handle is: @stuartlosaltos
The Institute can be found at: https://www.losaltos.ca/
Help keep my show ad free and support independent media. Consider subscribing for a low fee and get access to by subscriber only content at my website
And we're back. Russell here with the Canadian conservative podcast, you can find me at the Canadian conservative.substack.com. And for my afternoon show today, I have Stuart Parker here. Stuart Parker is a former politician, I believe where you politician at one point, I was leader of the Green Party of British Columbia for seven years, I still hold the record for the person who managed to stay in that job the longest. So yeah, I, I've done electoral politics for most of my life. However, because of that, I kept track of how Canadian democracy was actually shutting down, and did my best to resist that. But now I'm pretty much let's say, a step back from electoral politics, because you could only really succeed in electoral politics when your social movements and your civil society are healthy. And that's not a thing we can say about Canada right now. It's not a thing we can say about a lot of the global north, but particularly Canada, and why do you think Canada sticks out beyond the other countries? I think there's some inherent weaknesses that we share with places like New Zealand, that basically mean let's think about Canadian history. What caused English Canada to come into being while the American Revolution happened, there was a group of elites and toadies in America, who were so unhappy to have achieved freedom, they decided to move to Southern Ontario and create Toronto, that's always in our that's always part of what Canada is, periodically, non elite people in Canada rise up against that elite consensus, but that's a powerful, powerful force in our country. I mean, Canada, could have any number of birthdays. And I found Stephen Harper's views on this actually very interesting. Sorry to just go right in there, but I'm going right in. When Stephen Harper got his majority government, the most interesting and audacious thing he did was a thing that he actually ended up chickening out on, because he made some mistakes, created something called the 1812 Secretariat. And the plan was that in 2014, we were going to celebrate Canada's 200th birthday. Some people may be saying, well, Harper wasn't bad at math. He was good at math that's got that's what got him his job. But let's remember that choosing to make a July 1 1867, Candidate A was a political choice. Back in the 60s, we effectively refounded the country with a new national narrative and new values. Old man, Trudeau and Lester Pearson, told us a compelling new story about ourselves. We got a new anthem, and we got a new flag. And the story that they told was that Canada was created by a bunch of elites getting together in Charlottetown, hammering out a deal over drinks, and engaging in this kind of elite brokerage, and that's what made Canada now, Stephen Harper wanted to tell a different story, which is that Upper Canada and Lower Canada didn't really exist as political jurisdictions that the Canadian partnership arose out of the War of 1812 when the British Empire fought the United States, and this coalition of the Iroquois Confederacy, Quebec, and Anglo Canada, the thing that would become Anglo Canada, marched into America burned down the White House and defended British North America. Now, right away, you can see that those stories have different values, right? The story that was told the story in which Canada was born in 1867, and Charlottetown, on July 1, is a story about who we really are. We are people who trust elite to make big deals on our behalf, hammer those deals out and dlrc in a place for everyone and everyone in their place. And that's a compelling story. So Stephen Harper's story, which is what can't Canada's values are not compromise brokerage and trusting elites in the Stephen Harper's story, our values, our valor in battle, loyalty to the crown, these very different ideas of a martial origin for Canada. Now, if I got my turn, I would say that Canada was born in 1837 when William Lyon Mackenzie and pappano rose up against the corrupt guy remnants of the family compact, they marched on the legislatures, and they shut them down. And the British Empire was forced to give us representative democracy and responsible government. Because regular folks rose up against the elites and marched on the legislatures in 1837. All those stories are equally legitimate. All of them are 100%. True historically. And so you got to ask, what kind of story do we tell ourselves as Canadians that determines what Canada is and what its values are? History of Milan Kundera, the great Czech novelist, from who was a big Cold War dissident in communist Czechoslovakia, said a very powerful thing. He said, No, no one seek power to control the future. The future is a blank slate, the future is empty. People seek power so they can control the past. Because people's imagined past creates our horizon of expectations for who we can be today. And for me, one of the reasons I've moved out of electoral politics and sort of further back to a more aerial view, is that I think until we resolve questions as fundamental as this, our efforts to fix Canada through elections are going to keep failing. You mentioned that, you know, it's all about control in the past. And it seems like in some cases, we seem to be engaging in somewhat of a revisionism of our past. There's conflicting narratives of what exactly our past is, and it depends who you talk to. They'll give you different ideas. It's either a form of rugged individualism, or it colonialism, or that's all sorts of different narratives. And everyone's trying to fight for what narrative they think, is the one that should be the dominant narrative for what Canada isn't, isn't. Yeah, and I think, ultimately, national myths are about cherry picking. They are about making four choices in the present, what I object to about the current government, what I find disgusting about the current government, and all unlike this isn't a thing this current government invented. It's just taking things that the Harper government did and amplifying the bad stuff more. This government is much more willing to trade in outright falsehood when it comes to our shared past and much more willing to deny historical facts about our past. And we moved into this crazy time, where, for instance, you know, you take someone like Terry Glavine, Terry Glavine people think of him as like some kind of, I don't know, right wing mainstream guy. I'm from British Columbia, and Terry Glavine started as a journalist here. And Terry Glavine was considered the most respected white journalist in the province by indigenous people. He still has tremendous cred among all constituencies of indigenous people in this province. And, and so Glavine and I watched in horror in 2021, when the graves were discovered those mass graves were discovered, but this story, so much of what we call like, oh, woke, anti white racism isn't woke anti white racism. It's woke white supremacist, humble bragging. Let's get clear here that they're working with the same a theory of what discover means as the most extreme imperialist colonialist person could. The graves, those graveyards are views out of the windows of indigenous people's homes. The indigenous people have been next to the graves the whole time. They know exactly what the history is. They've never forgotten it. So what do we mean by the mass graves were discovered? Oh, it meant that some pearl clutching white per white person walked by a reserve and noticed something was perfectly obvious to indigenous people. And then all these fanciful stories about all the unmarked graves came out. And when Glavine said, well, let's dig it up. Let's find the graves. Let's see what's happening. What was he called? He was called a residential school. denialist. There is no settler in British Columbia, who has done more to expose the really problematic legacy of the residential schools and Terry Glavine and for the person who is inveighed against the abuses of the residential schools when nobody else was caring back in the 80s, for this person to be called a residential school denialist show, what's he really denying? Well, he wants the information he wants. He wants to know the truth. He wants to know the facts. We're dealing with a government that views the simple desire to know what is empirically true, as somehow threatening to their narrative, as though what a narrative is supposed to be is assembling facts in a favorable order. Well, that's what it used to mean. But in the past three years, it has come to mean, what you say instead of the facts, that you don't want to know the facts. And if you want to know the information, if you want to know the facts, then you're a denier of what the narrative, the story we want to tell. Terry and I became really upset in 2021 because of the kk k style church burnings, because what did the woke mob do what was the woke mobs reaction to being reminded that their ancestors had killed a bunch of indigenous people in was go after the church's sacred buildings, the most sacred buildings on these reserves and burn them. I come from a black family. And that for me was the moment I absolutely departed from the Canadian left. Because I hadn't seen a systematic orchestrated public campaign of burning the churches of racialized people on that scale. Since you know, I'm on my mother's knee hearing about the kk k church burnings in Alabama and South Carolina during desegregation. What these people were really angry at is that indigenous people are the second most Christian demographic group in the country. And they don't want that to be true. What they want is to tell a story about indigenous people as being noble savages who are close to the Earth, who are like exhibits in the woke museum. And the second, indigenous people didn't live up to those expectations. It's just as Thomas King, the Cherokee author says in his short story, the Indian I had in mind, you're not the Indian I had in mind. And because these people think the narrative is more real than reality. Um, their messages, if you don't start go back to acting like the Indian I had in mind, and get out your drum, and get out your head dress and stop going to church, you will be destroyed by fire. The mass grave thing is revealed so much about an eye opening experience for a lot of people. Because people don't want solutions. People just want to be angry, they want to be upset, they want they want to, they want to be mad at things. I watched, Lauren southern. She debated a Twitch streamer known as the surfs Lance from the surface and they had this big debate about the grave sites. And she kept saying, let's dig them up. Let's let's do the let's do the testing. Let's let's see what's going on here. And they just kept saying, you know that from the opposite side, it was well, the awful things happen. She's like, Yeah, awful things happened. But we don't even know how many bodies are there. What What exactly was that that actually killed them? Because there was lots of disease at the time. And it just it's so disingenuous the whole argument because people don't want the truth. No one wants the truth. They want the truth that fits their narrative. People often ask me what they think my most, you know, I have friends and they're like, What is your most leftist view that you have? And my most leftist view that I can think of? is that if we committed genocide, and our government has said, we have committed genocide, where are the trials? Why are we not dragging these people to trial? The this this genocide they're saying did not happen 200 years ago, they're saying it happened all the way up until the last residential school closed. All right, every single church member that was involved every single politician, every single administrator, every single, these people are still alive, and they're roaming around free will get them on trial, then if we committed genocide, where's the trials like the end of World War Two, and let's let's find out who the guilty parties are. And like World War Two, let's hang them. And this thing you've said so much that I have two responses here. The first thing is your first point about people wanting to be angry and not wanting solutions. This to me, I have a term for this. People have become post political. Most of the things that we think of as politics are not politics at this point, because what politics is is a group of people deciding that something needs to change, building a coalition large enough to make that change happen, making deals, making compromises, building that big tent, so that you have a Democratic majority. So you can use the democratic tools at your disposal to do that. I think people have given up hope of that. And that's what this is coming out of. People have become so disillusioned, they become so hopeless, that they think we can't do that anymore. So what they used to spend their when the time they used to spend doing politics, they do something I call post politics, which is, you come up with a story about whose fault it is the things that you can't solve your problem. You find those people and you're hurt them. And that's what politics has been replaced by. It's been replaced by this Neo McCarthyism of I blame this guy, let's see if we can ruin his life. And that's, that's catastrophic. And until you restore people's sense of hope, they're going to remain post political. Now, the second part is a technical thing. So one of the big paradoxes of the works is they love something called Truth and Reconciliation. We have a Truth and Reconciliation holiday. This is because I don't know maybe they subconsciously know what this means. Let me tell you about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Fw de Klerk is elected president of South Africa, he succeeds PW Botha, who has failed to bring down the sanctions, South Africa has got more and more authoritarian, they're killing and torturing more and more black people, finally, but the real problem for the people for the white South Africans is that all the important stuff in their stores is gone. And they have almost no industrial base. So the shelves are empty. The shelves in Johannesburg in 1989, are as empty as the shelves in Mikhail Gorbachev is Moscow. Right, there's a consumer problem. And FW de Klerk goes, Look, if you're willing to give up your control of the democratic institutions of our country, you can remain on top economically. And so there's this peace deal that's made with Nelson Mandela. And the deal is, so the question becomes, what's going to happen to all the tortures, what's going to happen to all the monsters, and at this point, the Soviet Union falls, that was Nelson Mandela's ally, he's got no backup. So they asked to agree to a pretty bad deal, which is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which immunizes all of the people who committed atrocities, the deal is, if you will tell the truth before the commission about the atrocity you committed, you will not be prosecuted. And so why does Mandela agree to this will in part because he has no foreign backing really, but in equal part, because the big problem for black South Africans is they've been denied the ability to get law degrees. Still, there are no black judges, there are almost no black lawyers. And so because there's this problem, Mandela makes this sort of Devil's bargain, where he says, Okay, we will create the TRC. And because it can't actually sentence anyone to anything, we'll use it to train a new generation of black judges and lawyers. So in exchange for letting all the torturers and war criminals go, we will get legal training, and we will get judge ships, and we'll convert the legal system using this process. Now, for some reason, people started calling for this in Canada. And I'm thinking well, you don't want to trc surely you want to hold these people responsible. However, at this time, of course, the residential school survivors have a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government and the four mainline churches that ran the schools, and the churches, insurance companies intervene. And it's like, look, you're going to bankrupt the churches and you're going to bankrupt the insurance industry. If we don't somehow indemnify ourselves in a new way. We created the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The reason the Harper government spent money on it was we agreed to a lump settlement and that was negotiated and it required involved the insurance companies paying all this money for this total amount of money being paid out. But the money to run the Commission came from the same pot as the money to compensate the survivors. So every cent the Harper government spent on the commission was money that churches and insurance companies didn't have to pay the survivors? Why on earth are we celebrating that that's a grotesque thing to celebrate, to celebrate ripping off survivors from their their legally like from the legal settlement they deserve, and shifting a bunch of insurance and liability into the government holding a bunch of meetings that don't do anything. There's not a single recommendation from that commission, that is material that has ever been enacted. It was simply an effort to steal money from the pockets of injured people. So the insurance industry wouldn't have to take too big a hit. And now it's a national holiday. About Are you surprised, though, our government holding a bunch of meetings about things and then declaring victory that that's just that's Pete Canadian government? Well, that is peak post 67 Canadian government and that's why I hate the narrative, the 1867 Fathers of Confederation narrative. Yeah, as long as that's your story about who you are as a country than the TRC is the epitome of Canadian pneus. But one of the things that excited me last year when I was in deep, deep despair, not personally and politically, was the freedom convoy, because it articulated and alternative nationalism. I just want to say, you know, the narrative that we've seen from the left is that the freedom convoy was equivalent to January 6, and that it's just a bunch of redneck Hicks and nobody's and that went to Ottawa, free dormers, and things like that. And it's such an opposing narrative. When people don't feel they've been heard for long enough, they're going to do something. And I think the left got jealous because they've been doing the writing in the states and everything. And it didn't really occur here. And then these people go to Ottawa, and they get all this attention, that kind of worldwide attention. And I think personally, I think the the left was, they were a little jealous, because they kind of enjoyed institutional power for so long. So they had to frame this narrative. Noam Chomsky would call it Manufacturing Consent about what it was and what it wasn't. And then they did the farce known as the the EAA, which you know, today with Brenda Luckey, resigning, and that report on the horizon appears another strong female in the in the most progressive government of all time is going to go under the bus again. Yes, well, that's the thing. Of course, you've noticed everything is its own opposite. And I really appreciate you talking about how these protesters were characterized, because if you were to bring Tommy Douglas back, he would be completely baffled. The idea that has somehow become left wing to hate working class people. Like that's insane. Like, that's absolutely insane, that, like, oh, how could you be a socialist, you don't hate the working class, like, like, I can't even process it. Like, I think you actually offered a much more flattering explanation than the one that I have, which is that what we've seen happen to the left between the 1980s. And the present, is what happened to the left in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, that organizations that were run by workers were taken over by what I call the commissar class. Some people call them the laptop class. Some people call them the professional managerial class, the chattering class, I like the chattering class. But the key thing is, if you think of like, people like Leonid Brezhnev, Joseph Stalin, they were working for the workers, but they looked down on the workers because they were from the managerial class. And this is a problem that happens on the left, that the managers seize control of the Oregon workers organizations. This doesn't just happen at work. It happens everywhere. And because it's the managerial class, they feel completely entitled. They of course, don't think they're the enemies of the workers. They have patronizing views about the workers, especially the non white ones. But we see what happens when the workers get uppity and express themselves, in their own words with their own cultures, where they talk their language not in the crazy bizarro etiquette infused neologism, crap that woke speak in, that you could only learn at a university. If people if people have Mini University, how would they even know the crazy words these people want to hear? I mean, I have a PhD in history and I can barely spew this stuff out, you know, from the University of Toronto for God's sake. And yet, there's still there's a patronizing contempt in which workers are held. And you see that when the workers get uppity, when they don't act the way they're supposed to when they don't speak their lines on cue. Now, I'm not saying the freedom convoy was, you know, a work of genius. But it's a basic thing, what happened, what happens in countries all across the western hemisphere? And this is what I kept saying to the lefties. They, they've invaded Ottawa, it's like, how the hell can you invade your own country? They're occupying Ottawa, it's like, where are we in favor of a movement called Occupy like 15 minutes ago? Well, they're committing crimes. You know, in Occupy camps, people were raped, people were killed, people died of ODS. And so the freedom convoy had some flakes and loons who showed up, like, welcome to every mass protest in history. But there's this effect all through North America double standard, though, it's a total double standard. And that is something I first noticed with the Trump movement. And within two years, the left had mirrored that it's like, with both the far right and the far left, they see the double standard as a virtue. To them. The whole point is that their people have one standard applied to them. And the bad people have another standard applied. I was also reading a lot of the panic about it. And I was thinking about how they're talking about these folks who are mainly from the boreal forest belt from terrorists to Timmons, right. There's a particular area of the country, it's got a lot of oil money in it. I don't love the oil industry, but I love the place. And what and I read, and they're, they're like, they're talking about these people as invaders, and they're talking about them as in all these ways, I think, you know, as a historian, I didn't do a field in Canadian history. But I did teach some Canadian history. This is reminding me of something that's reminding me of something, what is it? So the press coverage of the Northwest rebellion, the way the woks talk about the freedom convoy is the way the John A Macdonald government talked about Louis Riel and his people. And they're actually the same kind of people from the same kind of place? Well, my problem Stewart is the left and they talk a lot about working class. And I'll say when I was younger, I, I was very, very left when I was younger, as many young people are, right, they want to change the world, they see the inequality. And they think that that needs direct action. And only I'm somehow going to be able to solve the problems if only I marched in the streets and made a bunch of noise and that like I, I get the paradigm when you're young, you think that's going to make a difference. You know, the left when they were going after the freedom convoy, and that they bolstered the right in a way that I don't think they ever anticipated it drove. It drove solidarity to the right. And even the even friends I know that were have been pretty hardcore leftist. I would challenge them and I would say, Who do you think the fucking working class is? Who do you think they are? It's truckers. Its minimum wage workers that feel that they're not being heard on anything. They're not unionized. It's the security guards I become the EMS, the police. The firefighters in downtown cities are overrun by overdoses and violent ex cons and parolees that we don't seem to be able to deal with. It's the McDonald's worker who has to go in I know this for a fact Tim Hortons workers in Prince Albert Saskatchewan, I talked to them fill like really, really good people come to Canada and work permits get abused by these companies. And that that that like to say, Oh, look, we're giving work to people that want to come to Canada. And here they are getting paid $10 An hour and they have to go into the bathroom, a Tim Hortons with broomsticks and literally job addicts to get them out of there because they're in their past. Oh, shooting up and the police won't respond and no one seems to notice there's a war on noticing you can't notice those things. Oh, I'm stealing that. You're gonna see the words war on notice saying? I'm doing a sub stock article on that. Okay. Get that out first, and then I'll start plagiarizing. Let me just say though, there's another cultural comparison that's helpful for deciphering this. And I know NOTICE This with like, I mean, I've been canceled, right? In the most extreme way, I would struggle to find a more extreme cancellation story than my own. I'm not going to get into that crap. But what I will say is that once I had been canceled, I really, of course, what began to happen to friends of mine is that they were placed under social pressure, that they would be canceled if they didn't cancel me, because simple proximity to me was making them unclean. And this is essentially what I would call Neo Vedic politics. This is Indian style, caste politics coming to Canada, where there's the bottom caste, the Dalits are the people who do unclean work. And what you've been doing is describing unclean things that we classify as unclean work, right? Minimum wage, food service work, police work, first response work, rig, work, wash, work millwork. And people who are like that, the laptop class thinks about them, the commissar class thinks about them, the way conservative elites in India think about Dalits. They see the work as dirty, and they see the dirtiness of the work as reflecting the soul of the person doing that means that not only are these people doing your literal shit work for you, you hate them for doing it the hard way, and you'd make more and more demands of them. So these ask clowns who keep going defund the police defund the police keep throwing more work at the cops. I mean, my cop friends all have fake jobs that they tell people they have at parties now to just like, not get into a hassle. You know, I go, I go for breakfast with my cop friends every month, in part because I want to show my defiance of this theory of unclean work. This idea of if this person is doing this work, they must be a low character, that the work reflects the person. And like this is an ancient atavistic idea that comes out of you know, galena ik medicine from 2500 years ago. This is, but it's amazing how the worst the work is the worst the conditions, the more the elites hate the workers. And of course, what that does is it effectively it means that we have essentially two employment and social streams in the country. We have the untainted clean people. And we have we have those of us the Neo Dalits, who have somehow been revealed this change in our souls, which of course we were born with. That's the other thing during the cancellation process. Nobody decided I chain, they decided I had reveal the tainted nature I had always had in this way we have this powerful taking the worst elements of Hinduism and Calvinism and plugging them into each other. It's frightening to me the whole of canceled culture. My one friend, you know, well, I wouldn't say friends acquaintance. We argue all the time. And his reasoning is always it's not cancelation, it's accountability. We're just holding people accountable. So he calls it accountable. And I tell him I say, besides refuting his main point, I always tell him I said, you need to look past yourself and in the present, and what you think is doing is righteous. And I want to tell you this, what do you think happens to these people when they lose their jobs and their livelihoods? Their wives, leave them their kids? Don't talk to him? What do you think they go put a gun in their mouth and blow their fucking brains out? No, they find other work. They harden up, they get radical, and that's how you end up with like fucking Oklahoma City bombing shit going on, like real, real, bad stuff going on where people are hardened, to the point where they're so apathetic. They're so nihilistic about society. You know, they in the online sphere, we call it black pilled, though they become what they were accused of. And what exactly you tell people that they're Nazis enough times, they might just agree with you. That's what I kept saying about, oh, these people are Nazis. You know, what, one day you might convince them, and then you'll be very, very sorry. Well, yeah. And that's the scary part is I told him, I said, these people, they're not going to disappear. They're gonna just harden up and then you're gonna have an actual Rise of an actual far right party or something like that, or an actual really, really bad hate movement will come about I've had people telling me online, you're racist, you're this You're that and I tell these people in real life, I work with troubled people. And I've actually come across people that are legitimately racist people, like legit You know what they do? They'll tell you straight up, they're racist. They don't hold back real racist people. They're proud of it. It's part of their identity there. They won't hold back on it. There's no secret, you know. And that's right. And let's also remember, and I think that's true of many people who who call themselves anti racist. When somebody says that math is white, that Oh, non white people aren't logo centric, like white people, we need to get rid of math, because it's colonial, and it's white. It's like, white people are responsible for maybe 15% of the discoveries in the history of math. Math is overwhelmingly as a field over the past 3000 years dominated by advances made in Asia and Africa and not in Europe. Sure, we've got Newton and Leibniz, but that's pretty damn recent. But this idea, oh, no white people own math. So much of anti racism is if you look at what they're saying about non white people, the most racist thing you will hear on TV all week, oh, showing up on time is white. What an incredibly racist thing to think or say, well, and yet, and yet, and so the most outrageous claims of white supremacy in this country today are made by anti racism consultants. Now, this now, of course, there is an upside to this, right? I had no cred on the right when three years ago, I had cred on the right in the 90s, because of organizing a good cross partisan organizing I did back then, which was supposedly what we're going to talk about today, who knows if we'll get to it. The point is, I was reverse credentialed into the right, high end up on the western standard, I end up on this show. Why? Because the left hates me. And this is a credential to other people that the left hates. And as the left MCs itself, it is getting more powerful, but it's getting smaller and smaller, and more and more authoritarian, more and more anti democratic. What's happening is we're all being reversed credentialed onto the same team, you know, when I was running for school board, when they really brought the hammer down, and boy, did they bring it down. The last speech I gave as a school board candidate, was at a Catholic men's group working talking with young men, most of whom worked in the oil industry. And what got me there. What has allowed socialists like me to join with libertarian capitalists, as part of this big anti authoritarian coalition, is that we trust each other, because the really problematic people have a beef with all of us. And so in a way, I feel like the people who are doing the most work to assemble an anti authoritarian coalition are the authoritarians themselves, because they they express contempt for us. And there are people who they've gone after all these people who've been canceled because they deviated from the left's Orthodoxy in one way. You know, some people have been canceled because my friend Kim, she didn't want to get one of those newfangled vaccines from Pfizer, because she's got leukemia. Isn't it a constant immune suppressed state, and she didn't trust this new science. So she was thrown out of her community, despite being a perfectly good communist, I get thrown out, because why? Well, because I don't think women have penises. Everybody's got their own story. And so there's this incredibly diverse group of people who are all starting to have a common experience. And the trick has got to be relearning how to work together. Because in the post political age, people have forgotten or never learned to one extent or another how to do actual politics, real handshake politics. And that's why I would never have occurred to me to do this. And obviously, I thought most of like an aside from the initial political demand, get rid of Vax passes, which I totally supported the truckers on. Pretty much everything else. The Freedom convoys said I thought, well, that's either crazy or impossible. But the reason I love them was that they figured out the more important thing, which was then know how to put on like one of those sour, dour, like protests, like Occupy where everybody's like, Oh, yeah, it's all really bad. Let's spend a lot of time in pain together. No, they got a bouncy castle. They had bonfires. They didn't know how to put on some sort of 20th century protest. You know what they staged they staged an NFL tailgate party. I looked at Ottawa and I thought, that's the biggest tailgate party in the world. Well Why am I not at the tailgate party? Because that's where you make deals. That's where you make alliances. That's where you make the chains of trust that hold a coalition together. Because ideas by themselves are never enough. They're just living out the Beastie Boys, you got to fight for your right to party because the facts passes and people losing their jobs and that I just said, they're just doing the Beastie Boys say you got to do. Yeah. And I think there's a funny paradox to that. I was I was a COVID Zero guy. I really thought if we were disciplined enough, and because I've studied the history of public health, and I know that they're they're indigenous nations that exist today, only because they went into 100% quarantine during the virgin soil epidemics. So I wasn't one of those. Oh, you should never have really coercive laws. If it were Ebola, we would want coercive laws, right? So I don't believe this. Oh, you should. The state should never do this. There was an overreaction. The people who had the most unscientific ideas about COVID, especially during those early months when it hadn't mutated into Omicron, yet Coronavirus, has always had the same mutation path. No, they don't always they have them 90% of the time, we didn't know whether COVID would follow the 90% route or the 10% route and get more lethal. They got less lethal and more contagious, like almost all Corona viruses do. So I was one of these COVID Zero type guys at the beginning. And so I didn't see people I went to mask all the time, so people can see my facial expressions, I couldn't see their facial expressions as dealing with everybody through video. And so the people who had the craziest most unscientific ideas about COVID acted normal around each other. And the paradox The irony was that after three years, the people who started the craziest went the least crazy. And the people who started with the like most scientific, most risk averse worldview went the craziest, because they isolated themselves from all the things you need in order to stay human. How come throughout the whole pandemic episode, all the people they called crazy and conspiracy theories. Why did they end up being right about almost everything? That's right. Like why? Like, I? Well, some of it is oh, I believe there was a 90% chance they were right that they were going to turn out to be right, I was I was avoiding risk around the 10% mutation path. So it's like with the climate stuff, right? I get into arguments with people because 10% is too high a chance of a massive disaster. Like that's running back and forth across the 401 over and over again, trying to not get hit, like you've still got a 90% chance of pulling it off. I believe in the precautionary principle, I do want to pay attention to 10% chances. I knew from the beginning there was a 90% chance it was going to mutate into something that was not particularly lethal. I was just insulating against the 10% in case we ended up in some kind of Ebola situation. i A lot of my choices are not choices I make because there's a certainty something will happen simply that there is a disturbingly high probability that it will. And that's in part because I used to work in the insurance industry. Simple probability is the standard in tort law. If there's a 10% chance that something bad something catastrophic is going to happen to you, that's worth $2 million. You give the person $200,000. I come out of a background that was concerned about probabilities. And also I was living in a place full of indigenous reserves that went into lockdown because they remember the Alaska Highway was the last time we had virgin soil epidemics rip through Northeastern BC and kill over half of the indigenous people. There are people alive who lived through that. So of course they shuttered the reserves. I wanted to support those indigenous people. And the bloody woke government of John Horgan NDP use their emergency powers to smash every reserves quarantine, Haida Gwaii quarantined and the government smashed the quarantine and forced forced tourists on the Haida gwai All the man camps that are building that stupid dam that will never be built. You know, they're just like, you know, digging into sand and a beach right like it the Site C dam. Would you just decided to spend a million dollars a day on it for the rest of time, in order to keep people employed doing this insane work? All those camps were running. Those were right next to the reserves. The government waived all of the public health all the crowd size rules for the unclean workers of course There were no COVID protections for them only for the laptop class. No, this is this is intolerable. I'm standing in solidarity with indigenous people have historical memory of epidemics. And I'm risk averse. And those are my reasons. You know, one last thing, you know, you spend a million dollars a day, eventually you'll equal Kathleen wins, gas powered power plants and never got built for cost. Oh, yeah. Well, that government, good God, I think she still holds the record for being in charge of more than any other lesbian in history. So I didn't hate everything she did. But her energy policy was a lot of virtue signaling. You said back in the 90s, you had done a lot of this, what do you call big 10? Cross partisan activities? So tell us a bit about that. And then what would you like to do? Moving ahead? How would you re envision that in the modern era, and I'm going to preface with one last thing, the modern era, everything that I found on the left now is Credentialism. So how can we possibly do this? When everything has to be credentialed? Now, where we from the left? I hear it all the time? Are you a doctor, are you this? Are you that, but then I also hear the cognitive dissonance. This is someone's lived experience, you can't question their lived experience. So I'm going to throw that Oh, and oh, it's a lot. I'll let you go with it. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to give three examples from the 90s of the kind of big tent cross partisan organizing, I'm talking about the Charlottetown Accord of 1992. And the referenda about that the BC electoral change Coalition and the BC anti casino coalition. Now, in 1990s, British Columbia, of the NDP was in power for the whole decade, pretty much. This was like this is the first time we really saw the new face of the left that we have come to see as just the normal left in the 21st century, a lot of virtue signaling a lot of bullshit a lot of just the whole deal. They really got into this Nixon going to China thing, right of just like, hey, we can do stuff, the right couldn't get away with. So we will bring in policies to the right of Mike Harris, and no one will call us on it. And that's a lot of what happened in BC in the 90s. So one of the one of the parties project was to build a whole bunch of casinos, a big waterfront casinos, because they had I shit you not the BC gambling expansion strategy. They felt that British Columbians were spending an insufficient portion of our income on gambling. And they felt that it was important that British Columbians gamble more imagine making that your goal as a government, as I said, when I ran in the White Rock byelection during the 90s It's like government. I mean, imagine a government with an alcohol expansion strategy. It's like, oh, this population isn't drinking enough. How can we get more booze into them with like more liquor stores, more ads? It's an insane problem to construct. Now, all kinds of people oppose the casino expansion. Christians opposed the casino expansion. Public health advocates on the left like the greens the party, I was leading at the time, oppose the casino expansion. The police oppose the casino expansion. And there was a small number of grassroots activists and I, although she's gone a bit weird of in the 21st century. Connie Fogle, Isabelle minty. They're all these grassroots anti casino activists around what was the cause of their life. And instead of platforming themselves, they went, what is the most diverse group of people we could put on the board of the coalition? So I was invited to sit on the board of the anti casino coalition with Phillip Owen, the conservative mayor of Vancouver, it was understood that most of the activists were actually older, social democrat, left wing women. Like the act, the people who did the actual work of the coalition were pretty demographically concentrated. Of course, there were recovering gambling addicts who were involved in other groups. But what they what they felt they had to do was rather than present themselves for spotlight and signal their own virtue, they sought to find the widest possible range of opinion leaders across the spectrum that they would present as their figureheads. We did no business. We delegated all of our responsibilities to Connie Fogle and Isabel minty. But we understood what our role was to sit next to people very different from ourselves and publicly shake their hands and say, we're going to defeat this casino together. Interestingly enough, the lobbyist who worked hardest on bringing casinos to Vancouver in the 90s nots was a gentleman named John Horgan. He was the key gambling industry lobbyist for the waterfront Casino. Now, the Charlottetown Accord was an amazing time, right, where every elite interest in the country stood behind that terrible constitutional deal that Brian Mulroney hammered out. We were going to give every province a veto on every possible constitutional amendment. We were going to extinguish aboriginal title in untreated territories. It was a disastrous stem to stern pile of crap that Mulroney I think put forward just to get his name in the history books. But the point was, every corrupt interest in the country had been dealt in every elite interest in the country was dealt in. And they formed and I love this term. Can't remember who used it. I think the best description of the people backing the Charlottetown Accord in BC were a coalition of everyone but the people in British Columbia. The opponents of the Charlottetown Accord were the leader of the party that had won no seats in the previous federal election, as it was in fourth place in the polls, gentleman named Preston Manning, future leader of the opposition, Rafe Mair, a former health minister and talk show host, Pierre Trudeau, the most hated federal politician in British Columbia. And people went nuts for it that you had this triumvirate of these three guys who had nothing in common and actually hated each other. They became this voice. And there's a moment when Rafe mayor because he's running his opposition to the A CT out of his online out of his radio show. There's no money for the no committee in BC. We're outspent by the Yes, committee 40 to 140 to one plus the every level of every government is endorsing the Accord, and this guy phones into wraiths show and he goes, you know, the thing about this accord is it is that if I vote against it, I get to vote against the government, the union's that he just started listing off the corporations and eat the banks. And he's listing off like every hated elite force. So because they assembled this coalition of anyone, everyone but the people, it didn't matter, that like our side was being led by three really weird guys. What we were in it for was that everybody had a there was somebody in that elite coalition that everybody in BC wanted to punch in the face as hard as they could. Again, it gets back to this reverse credentialing. And so after being outspent 40 to one, we beat them by more than two to one in the referendum vote 70% of the popular vote against that monstrosity. Now, these were experiences I had already had in 1997 when BBC produced what we call a wrong winner election result, a feature of PERS first pass the post, I noticed the media has retired that term since Justin Trudeau totally unlike the old man has had to wrong winner election victories in a row. That's where the party that gets the second most votes wins the most seats. So in 1996, the BC NDP was reelected with a majority government with 39% of the vote, while the BC Liberals which got 42% of the vote were defeated. And what this produced was everyone who was not a new Democrat, was appalled by the 96 election. Greens were appalled. We did a phenomenal job. We had enough. We had enough votes that we wouldn't want to see it under proportional representation. The right was appalled because the right wing vote was divided. And so the NDP came up the middle even though they didn't even get the most votes. Everybody had a beef with the 96 election results. And so my political organizer at the time I have my one of the greatest political strategists this country has ever seen. He's left the country because he was cancelled. Julian last Dr. Julian West, PhD in enumerative combinatorics elect neural systems math from MIT. He was my strategist, and he saw a path. And so he went to the conventions of every political party that was defeated in the election and shook hands with people. And we made some interesting friends. We discovered that Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation felt that it was time to change the electoral system. Why did Troy want that? He was a NEO Jeffersonian, and he wanted to make sure that no party ever had a majority in the legislature again, so that the legislature would gridlock like an American legislature. People on the left, they're like, Oh, we can have like a permanent NDP green majority will vote for it for this. And everybody in the Electoral College change coalition had a different reason. We had only one hole in the coalition, and that was NDP years. So what that meant was that everybody else on the left side of the political spectrum had to be over represented in the coalition's public face. Going back to that lesson we learned from the anti casino coalition. So we had a ritual. And I'm going to tell this story, because the story is like a parable. You can tell this story to prove any one of about eight points, some of which may contradict each other. It's just so rich in truth and complexity. Our coalition, every organization in it had one vote on the board, even though some organizations had 30,000 members and some had 500. But the board determined who was seated on the board, and we would go through this very ritualistic very ritualized Annual General Meeting, try Lana get to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation was the president and being a NEO Jeffersonian who was considered to be far right. We have to nominate him in a particular way. So the speech nominating Troy for another term as president was always given by Charles Boylan, the leader of the Marxist Leninist party of British Columbia, the party to the left of the Communist Party, that back Enver Hosea, the dictator of Albania. But Charles is a brilliant man, very well spoken and just a great comrade. Because if you're very radical in your views, either you're a sectarian and you only work with like the 12 people who think exactly what you think, or you're a genius at doing coalition work, because you recognize you're never going to be the majority view in a room. So Charles would give the speech nominating Troy every year so the Marxist Leninist would endorse the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. And we would carry on for another year, one year, a bunch of well, leftist data gets headlined by EMTs, pop up the hand of Iraq, one of the most EMTs pop, it isn't really even a person. He's like a harbinger. It's like if you're on the left in Vancouver, and MTS shows up at your meeting, you know, you've already lost your project has already failed. This guy only jumps on to sinking ships. And we knew this even in the 90s. So MTS wanted the the key thing about the electoral change coalition was he we had exactly one demand proportional representation, period, we agreed on absolutely nothing else. Because the biggest constituency of members and activists were pro lifers. The Christian Right, felt totally excluded, they would join a big tent party, and then the big tent party would use their votes and volunteers and kick them in the teeth all day. And I understand why one might be motivated to do that, if one were pro choice, as indeed I am. But that was the thing. And they needed, they felt they needed their own party and they were only going to get that with proportional representation. So I'm working with the Christian right working with the CTF working with a Marxist Leninist. And MTS comes to this meeting with a motion that we should endorse a whole bunch of other ideas. And so Troy rules them out of order. So like that's outside the mandate of the coalition, we can't even debate this. And so MTS and his friends are like the chairman is a dictator, the chairman is a dictator. And they started you know, and they start adding these procedural things. We're having none of it. Eventually they leave. The most surprising member of our coalition that never released its involvement publicly, but it's been long enough. No one will care was the BC association of Chartered Accountants, numbers, people just like proportional representation because they like playing with numbers and there's more numbers play in PR. The Chartered Accountants decided to take us out for dinner. So we go to the swanky sushi bar on Robson Street in Vancouver. We're having the sack a we're having this great sashimi. We're having a great time. And Troy is still trying to recover from the meeting because he works so hard to like be tolerant of the left all day. He goes, I just can't believe this. These people it's like they they were acting like I was some kind of Stalinist and Charles Boylan stops and he goes to try, I love you like a brother. But I consider Stalin to be the greatest person who ever lived. And I'm afraid I just can't tolerate you saying another bad word about him. And I'm sitting next to Kathleen Toth and Heather Stilwell, from the Christian heritage party. And everybody just butts Buster got tears are strictly This is like the best joke we've ever seen in our lives. And everybody was closer after that Stalin moment. So we would complain to each other about the lunatic activists we had to deal with in our own groups and our own process problems. It turns out, we actually had a lot in common and how we had to do business every day, even though the beliefs themselves were different. And we built these strong interpersonal bonds, through absurd moments like that, where what held the coalition together really was not a shared belief in proportional representation. What held it together at that moment, was trust. So there's, there's my spiel on the golden age of the 90s. I'm sure like all old men, I have some rose tinted glasses through which I'm looking at it. But those are true stories. Other people who were there remember them. Nick Luna and the village of Andrews am seatmate the biggest the guy who really started the movement with his book on PR in 93. After the secrets were defeated, he remembers that lots of us who were there remember that those strange, strange times, and I'll tell you, being in a room with people where you only have to agree about one thing is 20 times as easy as being in a room with people, you have to agree with about 20 things. So I think that's how we got to get back into stuff. We got to pick one thing at a time to get practiced again at doing coalition politics. And for me, that issue my personal choice is the gender orthodoxy. I don't know whether you saw the headlines in right wing media. Because progressive media mainstream media won't cover this because it's contrary to the narrative. We're telling a transphobic narrative and, and it's like, it's like I'm watching bizarro Stephen Colbert, it's like, are you saying reality is transphobic. So the the prison service has, I mean, corrections Canada has been putting serial rapist in women's prisons for three years if they identify as women. And by that, I mean, simply saying I'm a woman, and a bunch of women have been raped and impregnated and gotten aids from that. But corrections Canada was holding a hard line on one issue, which was putting serial pedophiles in prison mother baby units. But the Canadian Bar Association has been running a three year campaign to put serial pedophiles in prison mother baby units. And last week, corrections Canada capitulated and there is now a serial child rapist in a prison Mother Baby Unit in British Columbia. And how will that ever pass muster though that my question is Correctional Service Canada, they have their own risk assessment in that, like, how can I say that has been changed by pressure from the Canadian Bar Association? The Canadian Bar Association argues that risk assessment is itself transphobic. What we've decided is that it's our government's job to find fresh meat for pedophiles, I think and so that's the issue I've chosen as the single issue coalition, I'm working to build where we bring together feminists, people of faith, ex cons, sexual abuse survivors, and just decent human beings, people who have worn blood in their veins, not these reptiles. Can you imagine? I just I think of the members of the board of the Canadian Bar Association, sitting there deciding that the most important thing in this country is to give serial pedophiles access not just access but to lock children in rooms with convicted serial pedophiles. And I think let's let's start with that. If people can't agree that that's wrong, I don't know that you can build a broad coalition but I think the overwhelming majority would find that to be an obscenity. You know the one thing that all the political spectrums still agree on except for the most radical and heinous is that pedophiles are bad Now we have different ideas of how to approach it. You hear from left all the time, oh, we need to go after the sexual abusers in the churches and that sort of thing, which the right has been trying to deal with for years, they've acknowledged as a problem in the Catholic churches, they've been trying to deal with it successfully or not. They've acknowledged the problem, the rights issue, with the drag queen storytime hour and all that sort of thing. They're saying, there's people that are not being properly screened. They're already involved in activities that are paraphilic in nature, and now they're instructing kids in there some cases they're not even being screened in before they do, you know, have access to children, not because it's more important to be progressive than it is to do proper screening. And like the worst thing I've ever seen the one thing you know, I don't get mad on Twitter very often, because it's all catharsis for everyone. It's a big it's, it's a big mind experimental. But the one thing that drove me nuts is that this drag queen that had been convicted of sexual assault against children, and had been doing the drag queen storytime hour after I made a comment someone had posted underneath a list of Republican politicians that had had sexual assault charges brought against them or whatever. And, oh, when are you going to start talking about this? And I and I actually got triggered, I actually had to go outside touch grass and everything like that. Just I shut Twitter off. And I said, You know what I'm done for today. I can't do this anymore. Because it's like, are we really playing your pedophiles worse than my pedophile? Or is that the game we're playing? Is that where we're at? Is that literally, we're going to be partisan about this. How about this? How about we all agree that they're terrible, and that we don't do enough to punish them, we don't do enough to protect children, and that our society needs better screening mechanisms, and that we need to develop a better solution for how to handle this, the hour is later than you think. Let's remember that D AI training, diversity, equity and inclusion training, and many school curricula. Now teach that the term pedophile is stigmatizing language. And we must refer to pedophiles as minor attracted persons. No, in order to reduce the stigma. It's being taught in your schools now, it's It's unbelievable to me, so I can't even rely on the people who have gone woke to think. And this is right why they took me down. Because this is right the speech where they said that I was confessing to having raped dozens of children. The speech I gave, admittedly I was in I was in a very difficult state, I was triggered, I was having a very difficult time I've been thrown out of my home. I was traumatized. But I, what I the speech I gave was about how pedophiles are getting away with it, and how this society only objects to strangers raping our children. As long as the assailant is known to the child, we seem fine with it on a shocking number of conditions. And so of course, the only thing to do was to accuse me of being a pedophile. The irony, right of all this is that you actually you can meet regular people with jobs walking around in three dimensional space in our society, who aren't like, pity the poor pedophiles, we have to accommodate the more. I don't know what to do with that. Because to me, if you know, and I'm a late comer to the idea that Western civilization has a lot to offer, you know, like you, you know, I started out from a certain perspective. But in my view, one of the things that makes Western civilization one of the contributions it made was Roman war propaganda during the Punic Wars, because, although of course, Rome had mercenary commercial ambitions, they wanted to take Carthage just trading routes and get hold of North Africa. The way they mobilize their people was by telling a true story, which was the story of all the Carthaginian babies who were sacrificed to the god ball. And the Roman people were willing to cross the sea and die in order to protect other people's children. Because this is like basic. It's not even basic to being a human basic to being a great ape. Whether you're a gibbon or a chimp or a gorilla, you care about the other great apes, children. You don't just care about your own children. You care about strangers, children, and we've somehow lost that. We're supposed to applaud when people sterilize their kids. You know, we had the big moral panic 10 years ago about Sudan and FGM and we went, how could a family FGM their daughter and jet mutilate her Have genitals permanently and then have a party about it? Well, now we know because we are that society, we unveil children with mutilated genitals, and people clap and cry, go, you're so brave, you're so brave for mutilating your child, I find this truly horrifying. The thing that's holding people back from freaking out about this is that they can't even suspend disbelief. They can't believe it's gone that far. And the message we have to get to people is the hour is later than you think. I agree. 100% Stuart, you know, I think what we need now is we need the victims need to speak up so when I was a child, my my sibling was our family was groomed by a groomer that was not related by blood but through marriage. Both my parents had to work there was some family issues in our family and that which left an opening which predators look for and that and my mi sibling was repeatedly raped from the age of about eight years old till till they finally told someone in about 11 or 12 and the suicide attempts the cutting like writing on the wall like kill me I just want to die and no one knew because the person that had done this had effectively terrified them because this person owns several firearms and basically said if you tell me I'm going to kill your family and you'll be alive and I'll own you and it'll be all your fault this fucking pervert When did a full trial and everything dragged dragged dragged us all to trial it we had family services in our home we had it was it was awful you need to quickly become an island because people think they're going to catch a case of the rape or something like that if they come near you so family friends, family, I remember family calling How did you not know what was going on? How could you let this happen to your children you're awful parents in that like family still wouldn't even talk to and and you know what the pervert did? He went to prison, you know, the victim service officer. And I told my parents study went to a protective custody unit. So basically like arrange for perverts, and that cellblock for perverts, and that where they just exchange stories and get better at being perverts, and quickly went to minimum security, which is basically day camp for detailers, and then got out fought all of his parole conditions. So my sibling had to carry a fucking because it's before cell phones. And I had to carry a rape whistle around in case he came around to try to do something to them. And there was nothing we could do about it. There was nothing we could do about it. My my sibling went to counseling for years, years of running away from home. We it was an extremely dysfunctional family ended in divorce. My own mother, it helped her with her mental health issues helped her go insane. When she told us that she had cancer, we're all sitting at the supper table. She told us she had she had cancer, my mother, and she said that's okay, I deserve it for what happened to so and so. And just and you know what everyone did, everyone just sat there and ate their supper, like was just normal, like that type of talk was just normal. And that's, I think that's a really important story. Because one of the things I have noticed, if you look at the frontlines of the movement that's fighting the gender orthodoxy, there are one of two backgrounds, you see somebody who's a leader fighting, fighting this movement, they either have a story like yours, or they escaped from a cult. Those are the two background stories. Every time I know the next time I need another person who's willing to put it on the line for this movement. There is a story of sexual violence, or there is a story of a cult. And I think that for people who haven't, haven't witnessed that, they desperately want to think that these things are not all around them. They want to think that these things are extraordinary and uncommon, things their worldview doesn't have to account for, but we know better. And so I really appreciate you telling that story. If people knew Stuart, if people knew the monsters that walked on the street next to them sat next to him in the bus, went to went to the store, and that sat in the restaurant and that they'd never leave the home. They'd be they would never if they knew if they knew if they just knew they would be shocked and terrified. They there was a year 2013 My life has been very different since 2013. I kind of seemed like a basket case. In some ways. Since then. A bunch of circumstances coincided that forced me to remember some stuff. And of course, it's horrifying when you have repressed memories. You don't remember the bad thing first. You remember the last time you remembered and repressed it again. I had the good fortune of being a lifelong Doctor Who fed And they introduced a monster on Doctor Who that year, which told me all I needed to know about Steven Moffat, the showrunner, and what his childhood was like. And in a way the monster was an attempt to communicate with more fortunate people about this reality. The monster was called the silence. And it had one superpower, which was that every time you looked away, you forgot ever having seen it. And every time you saw it again, you didn't just remember, you remembered every other time you had seen it and forgotten. And it was a brilliant metaphor. And they introduced this monster I'm completely transfixed is helping me to process my own experience. And the reveal halfway through the season, it's 10 years I don't care about spoilers, is there's this moment where they look out at a crowd. And it's not one monster, it's 10% of the population. They are everywhere. And I found that to be I mean, I think that's what speculative fiction for is for. It's for describing reality, to people who aren't ready for reality. So I would, I would really advise anyone who wants to see that the impossible astronaut from Doctor Who in 2013, best metaphorical construction of that world. So I think those people who can see the monsters can see that they're everywhere, we make different choices. I think that that for me, I bust out my old cross partisan organizing skills to do that. And so Los Altos Institute is a, it's like, you know, we're old school socialists, old school, green were like way on the left very, you know, eco focused very anti fossil fuels. But we chosen to make an exception in our organizing this year, we've created a gender critical organizing group in Vancouver. That doesn't just include socialists like us, one of the most exciting members is Karen litski, the main organizer for the People's Party in Vancouver. And I'll tell you, we had our first meeting on February 6, in this pub, members of the Vancouver lesbian collective showed up, a People's Party organizer showed up. And this wave of optimism hit me, because I realized that I hadn't been in a room like this, a room where you're doing really where everybody is putting aside their differences, to do real politics about something urgent. I hadn't been in a room like that in 15 years. And I think our society is ready for rooms like that, again. How are you going to promote this coalition? Are you going to make it into an official nonprofit or something like that? Like how and with that, are you worried if you were to do something like that, if you'd have what type of red tape you get in the lobby ism and because there is big conservative money that's being thrown behind this? You see it with Matt Walsh, and and the whole daily wire and Steven Crowder episode going on in that. So like, What is the vision for this coalition? And how would you fund it and manage it? Well, one thing that we don't talk about, it's really important that we get to because obviously, as a person who has been spat out by the left fairly violently, I often my criticisms of the left are a little closer to my heart. But let's remember that it's Doug Ford's government that brought in the gender orthodoxy and Ontario, it's Christy Clark's government that brought in the gender Orthodoxy in BC. It's a cross partisan thing. Brett Kavanaugh votes against the gender Orthodoxy in the Supreme Court, but Neil Gorsuch, the other Trump appointee, votes for it. So let's remember that every part of the political spectrum is split to one degree or another. It's just that the right is split 5050. And the left is split at 20. But everywhere in society, you know, what we're going to do is there's going to be a time in a year or so to build the big national coalition. But what I want to do is just get on with simple things. Vancouver has the most extreme media blackout, Karen litski, ran for school board, no media here would acknowledge that she was a candidate, and no billboard company newspaper or radio station would allow her to buy ads from we have total silence here. This is we are in the we this is the core of the Canadian woke iStan. We're going to start simple. One of the other things that I'm doing and these are all so I'm going to start simple. One of the other groups that I've organized that's adjacent to this Is this I've done ad hoc, after my comradely air Keith. So Antifa right. And Tifa are just a militia that works for the pharmaceutical industry for free. Last time Antifa punched an actual racist in the face is like decades ago. And Tifa shows up to attack people who oppose Vax passes vaccines, masks and gender science. And they're violent. They spit on people, they punch them, they kick them. My comrade Leah Keith 50, Keith 56 year old woman, the last two rallies she's spoken at, in the US, and Tifa just shown up and punched her in the face. And of course, they can do so with impunity. So the other thing I'm doing is I've been organizing a group of men. And this is important it just get in touch with me personally. If you're a man, and you and I'm, you know, I'm with the Quakers, you're not here to dish punches, you're here to take them, you're here to stand in front of the women and take the punch that's aimed at them. I want to get into the business of providing some more security trained in non violence to support women when they speak out. I mean, cuz not everybody can be Chris Elston. I mean, Chris Elston is a truly extraordinary person, I was not kidding. When I said on Twitter that I he is the closest thing to a prophet we have right now because he has this power to speak through things that silence other people. But he also like he's a big tough man who's taken a lot of punches and broken bones and all this other stuff. People can't people can't. His activism is his it's admirable. But the rest of the rest of us aren't cut out for that. So we got to do is make sure that people who want to show up and oppose the orthodoxy and protest against it are physically safe. So we're starting with little basic things like, can we build some better information distribution networks, can we build some publications that have better reach, and the number one priority for my group right now, Los Altos Institute, we chose to be founded, even though I'm a pretty like, mediocre Christian, we chose to not be a secular organization, because what I had observed was that religious people feel more excluded in secular organizations than they do in organizations run by people of other religions. And it's totally panned out that way. We got Mormons, we got six, we got Jews, we got, we got a whole range in addition to the Christians, and we need to round that coalition out because there are a lot of communities of faith that are asleep right now and need to be awakened. Christians are ahead of the game. But one of my big priorities is we have a huge Sikh population here. We have a growing Muslim population here. And one of my first priorities is, first of all, just teaching how to do broad coalition work. And then taking those lessons and going to the temples and the mosques and say, look, we've got a team up here, got to come out and work with the lesbian collective because we're all in this together. Tell you something. This is from personal experience. I've done a lot of volunteer work in my life. I grew up volunteerism was very important to me. It's been very important to me my whole life and not giving back without renumeration. For all the years I've seen of activism and I'm gonna stereotype stereotype a bit here but you see those overweight nose piercing multi hair colored in the guy million Pins and Things like the I know that type and that and they're out there and they got the microphone, they're blasting it in your ear. They're there, they're saying their turfs die anyone we don't like die and things like that when they march against my favorites when the march against poverty, the gay get these people hoses now get them free drugs now get them this stuff now and they're marching down the streets and they're marching past people passed out that are overdosing on the side of the road. I've worked I volunteer with with one particular organization and you know what? We deliver direct services to the most vulnerable people. And you know who it was there wasn't no fat atheists, people in that one? No, you know, the majority of people I worked with multi ethnic Christian and Muslims. Those were the majority of the people and and the reason why is if you're actually following the Catholic faith, I'm not here to do sermon or anything like that. One of the theological virtues is charity and charity is not simply putting $5 in the collection basket every Sunday charity is going out and doing what you know and again, I'm not going to get too religious here is cleaning In the feet of the sick, right like Jesus, right, you know, the whole parables and that and with the Muslims their faith causes them to do very similar work is in that if they follow their faith, for people that say down with religion, we need to get rid of religion and that people going into all these vulnerable places to help people. It's not the atheists, it's not the fat blue haired, you know, big nose ring, you know, multi patch, multi pin, you know, freaks, it's, it's everyday people going in there because they hurt it's not just their faith, but they personally have a calling towards it towards helping people and, you know, they're, they're waking up to a lot of this stuff. And, and I remember people telling me, you know, you're you're racist, you're this, you're that and I'm like, when's the last time you actually went to a soup kitchen help someone's last time you did community outreach, when's the last time you actually took bundles of clothing from people and went down and washed it? Because people are like, well just collect clothing from people and hand it out? Oh, that's a good way to spread light skinned that No, it has to be disinfected, and it has to be properly sized, and people, you know, distributed, you know, to the maximum effectiveness. And, you know, one of the things is a theory that I really gave no credence to until a few years ago was the God shaped hole theory that if you don't have religion, something like it will be made. You know, it's that line from the Utusan went down to the church house where the citizens sit. They say they want the kingdom but they don't want God in it. That is the gender orthodoxy. No movement has propounded with such force, the idea that we have an immaterial, undetectable, preexistence soul since the founding of Mormonism, the gender Orthodoxy is entirely based on the idea that we have gendered souls that exist before our bodies come into being, and that even though they can't be scientifically detected, so we have a religion. It's just there's no God on top. And one of the things that believing in God allows people to do with the reason I keep them around, is he prevents me from taking credit for things, your luck isn't your luck, it's God's your success isn't your success. It's God's, if you take all of the structures of religion, with orthodoxy, and an immortal soul, and all the really problematic stuff, and you push God off the top of that, then you see how bad a religion can go. And I really, you know, I hadn't seen evidence for that. I think the other thing about religion is, it's a guardrail, the pneus how much you need religion is in direct proportion to how badly your society is screwing up. In the 1970s, when we had a relatively egalitarian and prosperous society, we were pretty secular, because we didn't need religion, it seemed unnecessary. The tasks religion isn't built for all time, isn't equally productive at all times in places. What religions do is they is they is if things start going off the road, there are mechanisms inside religion that limit how far into the ditch you can drive. So I have a new respect for religious movements. And I also understand that you can't get away from religiosity. The Soviet Union had a religion, it's just the Stalin was at the top instead of God. Lay state was the religion. And that is the worst thing. I mean, St. Augustine, right in the city of God, one of most important I mean, there's talk about great things from North Africa, the Romans when the Punic Wars, they get rid of the Carthaginians, people stopped being sacrificed to ball 600 years later, there's St. Augustine in the same town. And he makes an important observation, which is that even the church is controlled by the city of man. The world is a battle between the city of God and the city of man. But even the church itself cannot be conflated with the City of God. It just contains enough of the City of God that it's imminent in that system. And I think it's really useful to think we need to think about our religions with humility. A mature religion knows how little it can solve 20th century commissar led Soviet state capitalism believed it could solve any problem. These gender orthodoxy folks believe they can solve any and all problems. A mature religion knows exactly how hard it is to solve even the smallest problem working together with people. We need a little maturity because the struggle we're undertaking is a very difficult struggle. People keep saying, well, the works are unpopular. It's all gonna be over soon, I think, well, the woke shut down democracy before they allowed themselves to become unpopular. They revel in their unpopularity, it demonstrates their power over us. You know, when an authoritarian is ready to become unpopular, that's when you know they've consolidated power. So this is going to be a brutal struggle, no matter how unpopular the dominant ideology becomes. And so we need the perspective of people of faith, to understand how hard the work is going to be, and how gnarly greasy and shitty the work is going to be how to go back to a previous theme, unclean, the real work will be and it's the unclean workers who are going to be doing it. You know, I want to go back to a to a point that we brought up really early on and you said you were going to steal it from me at some point. That's all right. Oh, yeah. Go back to that. I'll be a comrade on this. And I'll share it with you. That's no problem. I coined a phrase, I don't know if anyone else has coined it, so I don't, but I'm going to take credit. So I haven't heard it come from anyone else yet. And I call it the war on noticing. You're not allowed to notice things. And if you do if you do happen to notice things you are not allowed to talk about at the very least if you notice, it has to be a thought crime in your head. You cannot speak it similar to what's her name. The the lady that escaped from North Korea, where her mother told her not to whisper things because the the animals could hear something like that. I Yomi Park I believe her name is and that, you know, basically, there's this big, you know, I walked down the street, I see someone lying, they're homeless on the side of the road. Their foots half rotted off from from rotting the needles and they've had a little fire to stay warm overnight. I'm not allowed to notice that. And if I do notice it I'm not allowed to talk about unless I'm only going to showcase kindness and compassion. I can't at all judge in this whole thing of oh, we legalize drugs and BC to D stigmatize and D stigmatize. I don't think there's been any stigma for the past 10 years. Like we it's, you know, but it's not just the homeless population. It's, you know, like, in we're where I live like, I go Saskatoon, I can see what indigenous youth gang Terror Squad I can see them in the native syndicate and they're they're just walking around openly flaunting their colors the only people still wearing the masks out in public. And for good reasons not it's maybe they're onto something they're hiding their identity. Who knows there is this this thing where I can't notice that there's gang members openly walking around displaying colors down Main Street, I'm not allowed to notice that. If I do notice it, I'm the only thing I'm allowed to say about it is that those poor youth they have no nothing going on. Their lives are hopeless. So they got sucked in the gang life, which is a total revisionist bullshit thing. And that I've studied indigenous gangs. I've studied gangs in general in Canada, the whole thing of the you know, this whole like, Oh, we're the underdog, this whole like Machiavellianism style thing is all BS. And the world is full of cry bullies right now. They certainly are dominating things. I want to leave you with a word about maps, because I think this this ties a bunch of stuff together, Italian ties your noticing together, it ties the unconscious colonialism and white supremacy of the left into it. I spent a lot of time thinking about well, what is the debt? What how what makes colonialism different from other kinds of imperialism. And you know, I think colonialism is an evil, blah, blah, blah, it's legacy is clearly tainted our society. And I eventually figured it out. Because in the city of Nanaimo, the city of Nanaimo has a street grid, that makes no sense downtown. All the streets don't connect, there's this big hill. Why? Because the British Empire getting bothered getting a topographical map of Nanaimo before sending the map to the imperial officials. And that's the thing about colonial maps, what you do is you draw the map. And then when you arrive in the territory, you decide that all of the problems are caused by the territory failing to resemble the map. So what you do is you beat the territory until it resembles the map that you've brought. That's why Canadians are so good at not notice it. The problem is not that we're just we're averting our eyes. The problem is we have a map of how things should be. And when we see a thing in the world that isn't on the map, maybe we ignore it. That's a best case scenario for someone who's not in the map. The more common scenario Mario is we find the thing is we can encounter the thing. And we smash it until the territory resembles the map. I think that and that's that's the thing it's like. And you see the casualties of that in these women's prisons today. They have a map of what's supposed to be happening. And the fact that different things are happening is being blamed on the people who don't look like the representation. These people are carrying around. We have got to put the map down. We've got to put the map down and examine the territory. One of my political mentors, I don't know whether he's alive or dead. I've been looking for him for five years. His name was David Lewis, not the old comment, not the old socialist, but a guy who referred to himself as a professional firewood collector is a brilliant climate activist. He left me with this quote, fear those who feign blindness and those who say they see