Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen
Speaker 1: here a podcast that is on the cycle of being
Speaker 1: sort of Okayley introduced. When this episode goes out, it
Speaker 1: will be Indigenous People's Day and so to to talk
Speaker 1: about that more where we're gonna talk to Dalia Killsbach,
Speaker 1: who is a member of the Northern Chyenne, has Northern
Speaker 1: Cheyenne tribal citizenship and has sort of studied and worked
Speaker 1: in federal India tribal policy. Dahlia, Hello, how how are
Speaker 1: you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for inviting me
Speaker 1: here today. Of course Garrison is also here. Garrison, Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm currently also doing writing about indigenous stuff, but
Speaker 1: within the context of Canada, which people should will probably
Speaker 1: here later this week. Um so yeah, I guess first
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to talk about is a little bit
Speaker 1: is about what Indigenous People's Day is and why it
Speaker 1: is that and not the other thing. UM. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Indigenous People's Day UM, as many people know, is replacing
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say, Chris Christopher Columbus Day, UM that is
Speaker 1: still like a federal holiday. But so multiple cities and
Speaker 1: states have opted to use Indigenous People's Day instead UM.
Speaker 1: And the reasoning for that is acknowledging the atrocities that
Speaker 1: were committed by Christopher Columbus, who first of all did
Speaker 1: not discover America UM, but um continue to UM not
Speaker 1: only use slavery, but um commit different forms of genocide, rape, etcetera,
Speaker 1: all of these terrible atrocities. And so rather than celebrating
Speaker 1: UM somebody like that UM, Indigenous people say, UM has
Speaker 1: been implemented in order to recognize the people who are
Speaker 1: actually here first UM and indigenous people's across the America's
Speaker 1: there histories, UM, cultures and contributions. Yeah, Columbus, real piece
Speaker 1: of ship, worst Christopher, Like, yeah, it really cannot be
Speaker 1: overstated how baddy that guy was, even you know, even
Speaker 1: people in that era who had committed their own genocides
Speaker 1: like Isabelle and Ferdinand, who you know, expelled the Jews
Speaker 1: from Spain, where it's like, you know, if once you've
Speaker 1: reached the sentence expelled the Jews from X like you
Speaker 1: you're are, You're already in the ship lists of the
Speaker 1: worst people in human history. And even they saw what
Speaker 1: Columbus was doing, it was like what on Earth, bad
Speaker 1: bad guy, bad name. Things are going to continue to
Speaker 1: go badly? And yeah, that that was an everything that
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about, which is federal Indian policy.
Speaker 1: And you know this this is an incredibly broad This
Speaker 1: is an incredibly broad area spanning like three hundred years.
Speaker 1: So we're not gonna be able to go into like
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of depth in it. But I think
Speaker 1: it's important that people have an understanding of, i mean,
Speaker 1: aged what the US did and how everyone else has
Speaker 1: had this sort of deal with it. And then also
Speaker 1: the fact that this is something that changes over time
Speaker 1: and has has looked different, It's looked it's been bad
Speaker 1: in different ways. Yeah, and so when talking about federal
Speaker 1: Indian policy, I always like to contextualize it within a
Speaker 1: larger um sort of like Euro American, like Teley bology
Speaker 1: of colonial conquests and then moving on to settler colonialism
Speaker 1: and where we are with federal federal Indian policy currently.
Speaker 1: Um So, how do we connect Christopher Columbus to where
Speaker 1: we are currently? Um? And this is the history of
Speaker 1: federal Indian policy and Western legal discourse and how UM
Speaker 1: European powers throughout history have defined what it means to
Speaker 1: be an Indian person in relationship to UM indigenous people's
Speaker 1: rights to their own land and to self governance. UM.
Speaker 1: So when we're looking at the different periods of federal
Speaker 1: Indian policy UM, prior to their being the United States government,
Speaker 1: we have the colonial period UM, which is fourteen ninety
Speaker 1: two to seventeen seventies six. UM. This is how federal
Speaker 1: Indian policy illegal scholars divide that UM. And it's really
Speaker 1: important to kind of give the difference between what is
Speaker 1: um a colonial state versus a settler colonial state when
Speaker 1: you're talking about not just the United States government, but
Speaker 1: also the Canadian government and UM different governments globally. UM.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk just a little bit about
Speaker 1: what I mean by the difference between a colonial government
Speaker 1: and a settler colonial government, because they're tied together. UM.
Speaker 1: So by a settler colonial government. I mean what I
Speaker 1: mean is that it is defined by the d territorialization
Speaker 1: of indigenous population populations. And so rather than in a
Speaker 1: colonial government as you had with Christopher Columbus and the
Speaker 1: Spanish and with the English, etcetera, UM is rather than
Speaker 1: a state and sovereignty being conceived as all these resources
Speaker 1: are going back to the metrical all these resources are
Speaker 1: going back to England or to Spain, etcetera. And colonial
Speaker 1: occupation is in is um conceptualized within this way. In
Speaker 1: settler colonial governments, UM, the colonists come to these lands
Speaker 1: and stay and they're what they define as sovereignty is
Speaker 1: within this land that they define now as their own.
Speaker 1: So and in order for that process to happen, UM,
Speaker 1: there needs to be different forms of genocide of the
Speaker 1: indigenous populations. And so that's what we saw with Christopher
Speaker 1: Columbus and throughout history UM was just the depletion of
Speaker 1: a lot of our indigenous populous UM. And so when
Speaker 1: I mean about the United States UM being a settler
Speaker 1: colonial state, I mean that this is current and ongoing.
Speaker 1: And so when we talk about federal Indian policy, UM,
Speaker 1: federal Indian policy is always in this conversation with what
Speaker 1: started with Christopher Columbus as the doctrine of discovery and um,
Speaker 1: so that's how we define the colonial period and feel
Speaker 1: free to like stop me and ask me questions. Else
Speaker 1: I'm just going to try to move quickly because there's
Speaker 1: a lot. Yeah, I think we probably should briefly talk
Speaker 1: about what the doctory discovery is m letasy before we
Speaker 1: get to sit at the martial trilogy and stuff. For sure,
Speaker 1: what does that actually mean legally? Um? So legally, UM,
Speaker 1: it's the discovery of a quote unquote New found Land
Speaker 1: UM by European colonial forces. And the reason why it's
Speaker 1: called the doctrine of discovery was that indigenous peoples on
Speaker 1: these lands were deemed unable to govern themselves and they
Speaker 1: did not know how to utilize their land up to
Speaker 1: the definition of what the European powers thought um land
Speaker 1: use was that um, indigenous peoples didn't have the same
Speaker 1: concept of property um, and same with their relationship with
Speaker 1: resources and resource extraction. So when um, Christopher Columbus and
Speaker 1: all of these other colonizers clunky clunkyst doors came to
Speaker 1: the quote unquote New Land, UM, they saw all of
Speaker 1: this rich plentiful resource and thoughts of themselves. Well, obviously
Speaker 1: these people don't know what they're doing because there's just
Speaker 1: so much they have not done anything with it. Um.
Speaker 1: And we're going to take this back to two hours
Speaker 1: because obviously their inferior beings and don't know what property is.
Speaker 1: So um legally um it the doctrine of discovery conveyed
Speaker 1: legal title to an ownership of Americans soil to European
Speaker 1: nations um, a title that devolved to the United States
Speaker 1: and so UM. This definition is expansive UM. And expansive
Speaker 1: discovery implies that Native nations have a right to lands
Speaker 1: as occupants or possessors, but they are incompetent to manage
Speaker 1: those lands and need a quote unquote benevolent guardian such
Speaker 1: as a federal government who holds legal title and UM.
Speaker 1: So when we're talking about this legal title, it devolves
Speaker 1: to the United States later on UM in history, after
Speaker 1: the American Revolution UM, and so rather than being colonial
Speaker 1: states um as the United States like thirteen original colonies,
Speaker 1: given um the American Revolution and its own constitution and
Speaker 1: its creation of itself as a nation state, then that
Speaker 1: turns into a set colonial government. Yeah, I think we can, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can get to what happens next then, because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have you have this elaborate legal framework that lets
Speaker 1: you steal people's land and murder them and then control it.
Speaker 1: And then the outgrowth of that is this sort of
Speaker 1: weird event where the colonies go into rebellion and suddenly, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's not a colony. They're not colonies anymore. They
Speaker 1: just are the state. And so yeah, about what happens
Speaker 1: next after the sort of formation of the United States.
Speaker 1: So after the formation of the United States, Um, so
Speaker 1: we have this period the American Revolution, it's all not
Speaker 1: really dive that into. It is seventeen seventy six to
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty nine, and it's called the Confederation period. But
Speaker 1: next we have the Trade and Intercourse AFT era, which
Speaker 1: is from seventeen eighty nine to eighteen thirty five. And
Speaker 1: so this is defined with the United States Constitution and
Speaker 1: Congress's exclusive right to regulate trade relations and make lands
Speaker 1: since the land secessions, and enter into treaties with tribes.
Speaker 1: So this is a treaty making era with the tribes
Speaker 1: that only the United States federal government is able to
Speaker 1: And there's a distinction there because there had been a
Speaker 1: lot of contestation between states and the federal government as
Speaker 1: to who is going to now deal with these, um,
Speaker 1: these nations that are with our within our own settler
Speaker 1: colonial borders. So whose job is that to solve this issue? Um?
Speaker 1: So within the United States Constitution, there are three clauses
Speaker 1: that define the United States legal relationship to American Indians.
Speaker 1: And so these are the treaty making clause, the commerce clause,
Speaker 1: and the property clause. Um. And so this this movement
Speaker 1: from just relying on the doctrine of discovery and treaty
Speaker 1: making processes between different European powers now is between the
Speaker 1: United States federal government and tribes. And so what this
Speaker 1: does is now tribes are located within the United States territory,
Speaker 1: and this places Indians within the boundaries and jurisdiction of
Speaker 1: the United States, and now there are a matter of
Speaker 1: domestic interest something It leads it to one of the
Speaker 1: sort of complicated questions that changes to this whole era,
Speaker 1: which is about what does sovereignty mean for these tribes
Speaker 1: and to what extent to the even continue to possess it?
Speaker 1: And how does that even sort of how does that
Speaker 1: work if you have when you have this new state
Speaker 1: that's sort of just has his clean control here, right,
Speaker 1: and also during this period UM, well, well later on
Speaker 1: when we have UM, sorry jumping ahead of myself, when
Speaker 1: we have the extermination of the treaty making process, and
Speaker 1: this completely removes seeing tribes as independent sovereign nations. UM.
Speaker 1: So I think that will kind of get more into
Speaker 1: that later. But the thing with federal Indian policy UM
Speaker 1: is that it's sort of self prophesizing. So as settlers
Speaker 1: are moving across America, UM, the United States government also
Speaker 1: has to create these policies UM in order to legalize
Speaker 1: these land cessations and movements. And a pattern that we
Speaker 1: do see here UM throughout history and throughout time is
Speaker 1: that the United States federal government, as a settler state
Speaker 1: is UM over the rights of over the um rights
Speaker 1: to land and rights of indigenous peoples themselves. You have
Speaker 1: a priority of the settler state in order to acquire land.
Speaker 1: So that a lot of the reason why um, later
Speaker 1: these treaties will be broken, etcetera, is because settlers are
Speaker 1: moving into these lands and the United States is then
Speaker 1: breaking these treaties in order to um have more more land,
Speaker 1: more land secessions. Yeah, the laws are of just following
Speaker 1: the violence, and it's just becomes a sort of retroactive justification.
Speaker 1: For yes, it's it's a self justifying sort of sovereignty.
Speaker 1: So this is the Removal period and what a lot
Speaker 1: of people may have heard of. So it's from five
Speaker 1: to eighteen sixty one. And what we have is the
Speaker 1: extinguishment of Indian title to eastern lands and the removal
Speaker 1: of Indian tribes westward. So UM. One of the most
Speaker 1: notable acts is the Removal Act which was authorized by
Speaker 1: President Andrew Jackson, which moved Um Indians from the east
Speaker 1: to the west of the Mississippi River into what was
Speaker 1: called Indian Territory UM. And what brought about this UM
Speaker 1: Federal Federal Act UM was a series of three foundational
Speaker 1: statutes within Federal Indian Policy UM dictated by Chief Justice
Speaker 1: John Marshall. So first we have Johnson B. Macintosh Cherokee
Speaker 1: Nation be Georgia and Worcester be Georgia. And I won't
Speaker 1: go into too much detail, but what this these essentially
Speaker 1: UM did and legally defined tribes as being domestic dependent nations.
Speaker 1: And so it clarified more that again tribal nations are
Speaker 1: underneath the federal government's overview, not the states. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it placed tribes above state jurisdiction. And what this is
Speaker 1: trying to do was UM solve some issues that tribes
Speaker 1: such as the Cherokee Nation had with different states when
Speaker 1: it came to land and UM jurisdiction over said land. Um.
Speaker 1: But that is kind of the basis of a lot
Speaker 1: of federal Indian policy and still remains truth day And
Speaker 1: what is notable um in each one of these statutes um,
Speaker 1: I believe, particularly in Worcester the Georgia, although it seems
Speaker 1: that it was supporting tribal sovereignty in them and that
Speaker 1: they were above state jurisdiction, a lot of these UM
Speaker 1: statute sided racist president and the doctrine of Discovery. So um,
Speaker 1: what you see for federal Indian policy is that a
Speaker 1: lot of the found well all the foundation for federal
Speaker 1: Indian policy based on President is the doctrine of Discovery,
Speaker 1: which is reliant on the idea that American Indians were
Speaker 1: savages and needed um federal benevolence and um paternalism in
Speaker 1: order to regulate their own affairs. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: that's well, okay, we should probably not just immediatelys's get
Speaker 1: to allotment. But yeah, because there there's there's, there's there's
Speaker 1: also Yeah, this is also the period of used. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the thing you were talking about earlier, the thing you
Speaker 1: helped me know about, which is okay, it's not true
Speaker 1: to say this is when this starts, but this is
Speaker 1: Indian Removal Act Trail of Tears territory. And one thing
Speaker 1: that you know, I think one of one of the
Speaker 1: sort of running themes of this is that you know,
Speaker 1: the the law in this context is just sort of
Speaker 1: it becomes a sort of retroactive excuse to do whatever
Speaker 1: needs to be done from the perspective quote unquote of
Speaker 1: the sort of of the settler state to just take
Speaker 1: all of this land. Yeah. And I think maybe like
Speaker 1: one of the keystones of this is Andrew Jackson just
Speaker 1: straight up tellings between court to funk Off so that
Speaker 1: he can do so he can do with Trail of Tears. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so the Removal Act have and after all of these
Speaker 1: statutes that you already had that supported um, federal Indian sovereignty,
Speaker 1: and so the Cherokees in Georgia were one of the
Speaker 1: tribes that were removed. Um. And so you kind of
Speaker 1: see what you talked about the the retrograde kind of
Speaker 1: justifications for said removal despite um the statutes that are there.
Speaker 1: So although that like Marshall UM in Worcester, g Georgia
Speaker 1: determined that the State of Georgia did not have jurisdiction
Speaker 1: over Cherokee territory, all this territory, although this territory was
Speaker 1: in the state's borders. UM. Later on you see with
Speaker 1: the Removal Act that although these statutes are still president
Speaker 1: in federal Indian policy, those were noel in order for
Speaker 1: UM there to be more UM expansion of settlers within
Speaker 1: these areas. Is so when it was decided that, oh, wait,
Speaker 1: we do need this land, and we don't actually want
Speaker 1: these Indians here, let's put them to the side over
Speaker 1: past the Mississippi so that they're out of side, out
Speaker 1: of mind. Right, So we see more of this UM
Speaker 1: justification for settler expansion. And so again we bring back
Speaker 1: to these themes of like settler colonialism in order to
Speaker 1: UM kind of gain more of this land. And a
Speaker 1: lot of these statutes are still cited the doctrine of
Speaker 1: discovery in them and rather than supporting tribal policy, the
Speaker 1: relationship between the United States federal government and American Indians.
Speaker 1: Um was not based on the rights of Indians, but
Speaker 1: more that they can't they can't govern themselves, right and
Speaker 1: so so and that's the whole issue. It is like
Speaker 1: people are like they don't know what they're doing, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna push them and like take their land again.
Speaker 1: So I I I don't know if you want me
Speaker 1: to go too much into the trail of tears, but um,
Speaker 1: you're seeing a lot of patterns here, I think, different
Speaker 1: forms of genocide, different forms of taking land. This was
Speaker 1: This is all around the same time as the Indian
Speaker 1: Acting Canada as well, which was did a very similar thing,
Speaker 1: especially starting in the starting in the twenty century as
Speaker 1: well with the like expansion of the like assimilation programs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think I guess the only thing I want
Speaker 1: to point out about this is that, you know, so
Speaker 1: one of one of the things that happens trailers tears
Speaker 1: at the Streame Court like tells Jackson that he can't
Speaker 1: do this, and j actually just does it anyways, And
Speaker 1: I think that's a very interesting important moment because you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is this thing right where the federal
Speaker 1: government can tell there's Supreme Court to funk off right,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing that streame courts could do about it.
Speaker 1: And if you look at what they did it to do,
Speaker 1: the thing they did it to do was genocide. And
Speaker 1: it's I think it's it's just I think it's a
Speaker 1: very sort of I don't know, this incredibly grim like
Speaker 1: you know, encapsulation of like what this state actually is,
Speaker 1: which is the sort of genocide machine and whatever sort
Speaker 1: of you know, this is what sovereignty is, right, the
Speaker 1: ability to break your own rules to sort of into
Speaker 1: or to maintain the system. So you know, you break
Speaker 1: your own laws and you know, as we're gonna get
Speaker 1: you in a second, like you break your own treaties continuously.
Speaker 1: And you do this because you know, the genoside machine
Speaker 1: has to keep moving, right. And um there's a couple
Speaker 1: of federal and new policy theorists, um Bindeler Jr. Who's
Speaker 1: one of the most famous ones, and David E. Wilkins,
Speaker 1: who talks about how there is no need for checks
Speaker 1: and balances within the federal ding policy system. So you
Speaker 1: have Congress that is able to um pass whatever act
Speaker 1: they want, and and then you also have the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: and then you also have executive action, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: really delineated at well UM within especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to this period as to who is going to be
Speaker 1: dealing with the Indians kind of thing UM. And so
Speaker 1: this kind of confusion and not really completely defining what
Speaker 1: it means to be a domestic dependent nation, I think
Speaker 1: really just goes to show how much of a fragile
Speaker 1: edifice like settler um colonial policy is for it is
Speaker 1: within the system UM. But again moving on, it comes
Speaker 1: back again to land. So the reservation area era in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty one to eighteen eighty seven UM has you
Speaker 1: have a lot of westward expansion of non Indians UM settlers,
Speaker 1: specifically to California. You also have the creation of Indian
Speaker 1: reservations and resulting Indian wars UM. Uh. So during this
Speaker 1: era what you see a lot a lot of UM
Speaker 1: are different types of attempts that assimilation UM and a
Speaker 1: lot of warfare. So you have a lot of the
Speaker 1: Plains tribes my tribe for instance, UM, that are going
Speaker 1: through all of these battles fighting UM forced removal onto
Speaker 1: reservations UM. One of the most famous ones was UM
Speaker 1: the Battle of Greasy Grass or a little big Horn
Speaker 1: UM where General Custer was killed by Sue Cheyennes and Arapahos,
Speaker 1: and different instances of battles such as those, and also
Speaker 1: where a lot of tribes UM were forcibly removed to
Speaker 1: areas that they weren't originally from. So like how the
Speaker 1: Sheriffees were moved to Oklahoma, there was attempts of my tribe,
Speaker 1: for instance, more than Cheyenne to be moved down to
Speaker 1: Oklahoma as well, and that's why there's some Southern Cheyennes
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma and and my tribes and norther Insurance in Montana.
Speaker 1: Another UM. Another thing that is happening during this period
Speaker 1: are boarding schools UM, the boarding school era. So this
Speaker 1: attempt at assimilation through education UM, and assimilation is also
Speaker 1: UM within within the settler colonial kind of structure. It's
Speaker 1: it's defined as a process where indigenous people end up
Speaker 1: UM conforming to different constructed notions of UM settler norms UM.
Speaker 1: So if they're not absorbed within the state completely, then
Speaker 1: their attempted attempt to be assimilated UM culturally UM through education,
Speaker 1: through languages. In terms of economics and how you have
Speaker 1: a bunch of different sort of bureaucratic structures on these reservations,
Speaker 1: trying to make tribal governments appear to be UM or
Speaker 1: constructed as as settler colonial governments are UM. So maybe
Speaker 1: it's the three branches UM in ways that aren't just
Speaker 1: compatible with different tribes culturally, and you also have the
Speaker 1: attemptive eradication of different kind of spiritual and cultural practices,
Speaker 1: and a lot of Christianity be cours not to different people,
Speaker 1: and just kind of terrible things that UM. I think
Speaker 1: more and more people are becoming aware of due to
Speaker 1: due to current movements. But we'll get into that moment later.
Speaker 1: Do we want to talk about a lot and briefly
Speaker 1: because if I remember quickly, this is in the same period, yes,
Speaker 1: a lotment period and UM course assimilation. So this is
Speaker 1: like eighteen seventy one to nineteen thirty four, and so
Speaker 1: this is the end of the treaty making process. So
Speaker 1: the whole idea of UM trying to force tribes onto
Speaker 1: reservations and signed these treaties were too again take land
Speaker 1: and make sure that the United States has more land
Speaker 1: and all the land etcetera that they possibly have UM.
Speaker 1: So at this end of treaty making, UM federal allotment
Speaker 1: of Indian lands also happened in the UM the Jaws
Speaker 1: Act UM. And so what this was was an attempt
Speaker 1: to UM further shrink the reservation lands that tribes are
Speaker 1: already guaranteed within treaties UM. So during this period, I
Speaker 1: think that somewhere like nine million acres were UM taken
Speaker 1: from tribal reservations during the allotment process. So that what
Speaker 1: the allotment process did was it counted each in every
Speaker 1: individual Indian UM that was eligible. I think there were
Speaker 1: adults UM. Yeah, adults that were eligible UM, and each
Speaker 1: one of them were given a certain parcel of land,
Speaker 1: a certain number of acreage UM. And once all of
Speaker 1: this land was calculated, what you had was an excess
Speaker 1: of land quote unquote excess of land that the tribes
Speaker 1: obviously didn't need because they had still too too many people.
Speaker 1: And so what the excess of land UM was utilized
Speaker 1: force for pioneers and for settlers UM. If it didn't
Speaker 1: go UM to the federal government, it was to UM
Speaker 1: incentivized settlers to colonized, esscial settle on Indian lands. So
Speaker 1: trying its hardest to not stay true to its treaty
Speaker 1: making practices. I think the everything goes interesting to me
Speaker 1: about this is that like because one of the other
Speaker 1: goals of this is to sort of like, oh is
Speaker 1: the civilizing mission. It's like, yeah, we're gonna turn them
Speaker 1: into We're gonna turn these people into like like human farmers,
Speaker 1: like true American fintiersman or whatever. And it's just like
Speaker 1: it just doesn't work because economically it doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 1: like breaking up all these like lands, It's like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't you can't just give someone like a small patch
Speaker 1: of like shitty land and have them farm like this
Speaker 1: doesn't like this, it doesn't. It doesn't. Like they certainly tried,
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, like that was one of the main things.
Speaker 1: One of the main things in Canada was about getting
Speaker 1: them to adopt like like European farming practices, which which
Speaker 1: they already knew how to get their own food, right,
Speaker 1: they were trying to change this whole system of of
Speaker 1: like of of food growth to to this like to
Speaker 1: this European way of of farming, and it just and
Speaker 1: they were just forcing them to and there's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, gets it gets it gets super gets super
Speaker 1: like dark and horrible once you like look at like
Speaker 1: the letters that were being written by like the heads
Speaker 1: of these programs, um, like you know, instructing, like these
Speaker 1: agents were stationed at these like reservations that to like
Speaker 1: force people to be doing doing this horrible farming for
Speaker 1: like all day every day. And I think, you know,
Speaker 1: the sign that this was like like this is this
Speaker 1: is so bad that even the US government eventually is
Speaker 1: like wait this this like this is fucked up and
Speaker 1: doesn't work. So I think that's yeah, you're transition to
Speaker 1: sort of like the next phase. I guess, yeah, a
Speaker 1: very short phase. Um. Yeah. So the next phase um
Speaker 1: is the Indian Reorganization Act. And so this only lasted
Speaker 1: six years from nineteen thirty four in nineteen forty um,
Speaker 1: so this is when allotment ended. As you said, the
Speaker 1: United States government was like, wait, this isn't working. Um,
Speaker 1: what can we do? What? The Indians aren't dying off,
Speaker 1: they're not assimilating, they're not a culturating. We don't know
Speaker 1: what to do with them. UM, so maybe we'll we'll
Speaker 1: have them adopt these constitutions and a lot of them
Speaker 1: were just templates, so regardless of whether or not they
Speaker 1: were um, I think compatible with tribal different tribes way
Speaker 1: of life. They were like, you have these constitutions now, um,
Speaker 1: now you're you're a tribe, and this is what each
Speaker 1: tribe has to look like in order for us the
Speaker 1: federal government to recognize you as a legitimate entity. Uh
Speaker 1: and um. And then so you have the establishment of
Speaker 1: these um tribal governments that consist of tribal councils and
Speaker 1: the business committees, etcetera. However, this period is fleeting, very
Speaker 1: fleeting UM. And next UM, you have the termination era.
Speaker 1: So this is the period of time where the federal
Speaker 1: government essentially even more so, wants to just get rid
Speaker 1: of the quote unquote Indian problem, which is the existence
Speaker 1: of indigenous peoples UM that are reminders to the government
Speaker 1: essentially that um, they are a settler colonial force and
Speaker 1: they don't know what to do with us because they
Speaker 1: tried to commit genocide, they tried to remove us, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: It's still not working. Um. They decided that our travel
Speaker 1: governments UM aren't aren't legitimate, and they just decide, well,
Speaker 1: it's too much to try to keep up with our
Speaker 1: treaties and what we promised them. When it comes to healthcare, education, housing, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: How about we terminate our federal responsibility, our trust responsibility
Speaker 1: that are delineated in federal in the policy and in
Speaker 1: our treaties, UM and give them off to this to
Speaker 1: the states to decide what to do with and says.
Speaker 1: During this period you see um sort of the federal
Speaker 1: um dissolution of some tribes such as the monomy Um
Speaker 1: and other ones um as well. So this is another
Speaker 1: dark time there. The dark times just keep on coming.
Speaker 1: And what federal policy scholars have UM characterized federal undw
Speaker 1: policy as a pendulum the swinging swinging from side to
Speaker 1: side between this terminal, this termination of tribes, So the
Speaker 1: federal Indian government as trying to get rid of tribes,
Speaker 1: especially as you can see in this era, and then
Speaker 1: the pendulum of the other side of self determination. But
Speaker 1: both of these are held within the context of goals
Speaker 1: of assimilation. So um, this is just another phase of terribleness. Well,
Speaker 1: I think this space also like one thing I think
Speaker 1: that also like is important people understand is it like
Speaker 1: like it's not like people aren't fighting this like the
Speaker 1: whole time, I mean even going like even going back
Speaker 1: to the stuff the Seventh Cafrey, like the Seventh Cavalry,
Speaker 1: lose like bores. They lose bells all the time. People
Speaker 1: are fighting constantly. And this is this period determination period
Speaker 1: is also where you see the rise of the American
Speaker 1: Indian movements. Yeah, a lot of these periods can be
Speaker 1: like dovee into more and all of these different things, um.
Speaker 1: And every instance, in every instance of federal Indian policy,
Speaker 1: you have resistance, which we are not covering here right now, um,
Speaker 1: but you have instances throughout history where indigenous peoples have
Speaker 1: fought for their rights to land, to um, for their community,
Speaker 1: to being sovereign nations, etcetera. And that's why the federal Indians,
Speaker 1: the federal government, not Federal Indian government, the federal government,
Speaker 1: it has not been able to eradicate us, much to
Speaker 1: their dismay, um UM. And so now I'm going to
Speaker 1: switch into the eraw that we are considered to be in,
Speaker 1: which I have mentioned when I talked about the pendulum
Speaker 1: of federal Indian policy. So now we are in the
Speaker 1: self determination era, um, which began in nineteen sixty two, UM,
Speaker 1: and we have um the right it's characterized with the
Speaker 1: revitalization of tribal entities. So UM, going kind of back
Speaker 1: to when there was the Indian Reorganization Acts that we
Speaker 1: have our tribal councils. UM, there's restoration of some tribes
Speaker 1: under federal recognition who are terminated, again not all of them.
Speaker 1: We also have the Indian Civil Rights Act, so this
Speaker 1: this kind of guaranteed individual Indians UM some rights UM,
Speaker 1: not just characterized by their trib I've also the self
Speaker 1: determination policy, so this is when UM Nixon condemned determination
Speaker 1: policy and gave more control to Indians rather than the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Indian Fairs, which is a federal bureau. And
Speaker 1: just kind of like other policies that UM have given
Speaker 1: the tribes more rights to UM determine for themselves in
Speaker 1: their own trust, their own people, UM to a certain
Speaker 1: degree underneath the federal government as a mess of dependent nations.
Speaker 1: And again I think that we have seen a lot
Speaker 1: more movement, but within the context of being within a
Speaker 1: settler colonial state. UM. It's always I think a possibility
Speaker 1: that the federal Indian government or the federal government I
Speaker 1: keep saying Indian, the federal government will try UM to
Speaker 1: take more and more and I think UM, for instance,
Speaker 1: when it comes to issues of fishing rights, issues of
Speaker 1: UM hunting rights with states, not even just with the
Speaker 1: federal government. So you have a lot of states throughout
Speaker 1: throughout history but still ongoing UM that attempt to encroach
Speaker 1: on UM tribal treaties UM. And again, treaties are the
Speaker 1: basis of federal Indian policy. Without these treaties, that lands
Speaker 1: would have never been succeeded to the United States. And
Speaker 1: so UM there's just this sort of like legal legal
Speaker 1: conundrum I would say, of where all these all treaties
Speaker 1: in the history of the United States with India, with
Speaker 1: Indian tribes have been broken in some way, shape or
Speaker 1: form UM. But still UM American Indians have to live
Speaker 1: on their reservations instead of having their their land back.
Speaker 1: And so nowadays a lot of movement has been towards
Speaker 1: UM land back. What this means, what is this process?
Speaker 1: And I think it means a lot of different things
Speaker 1: for different people indigenous people because again there's there's seventy
Speaker 1: four federally recognized tribes and so it's not one monolith
Speaker 1: of ideas, the monolith of the beliefs. But but just
Speaker 1: by saying land back, that's like recognition that this is
Speaker 1: our this was our land first, and you're not keeping
Speaker 1: your side of the deal and never have been. Could
Speaker 1: you maybe go a bit more into land back with
Speaker 1: the topic, because like specifically, like the past five years,
Speaker 1: it has really gain a lot more like um popularity
Speaker 1: as like a slogan UM. But I think for a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of people who chanted and here
Speaker 1: it don't always really know exactly what it means. That
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like mixed opinions on what it
Speaker 1: means UM. Of course, on like the more like reactionary side,
Speaker 1: it's like people be like, what you're going to like
Speaker 1: kick white people out of these areas? Like that's kind
Speaker 1: of that's what a lot of like the reactionary takes
Speaker 1: on land back is UM. And I'm sure most people
Speaker 1: are listening to this podcast that's not what they think, UM,
Speaker 1: but they may not really know exactly what it means either. UM.
Speaker 1: They may think it sounds like a good idea, but
Speaker 1: they're not quite sure what it is. Do you mind
Speaker 1: kind of talking about how land back is like developed
Speaker 1: as as an idea and what like what like you
Speaker 1: mean by it personally? At least, Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: can talk about more about like what I mean by
Speaker 1: it personally and what I've understood it to mean to
Speaker 1: other people, because I think UM land back itself, it
Speaker 1: means like a lot of different things, and I don't
Speaker 1: think that there has been a concrete kind of idea
Speaker 1: of what it means. But I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the movement I want to contextualize it within a lot
Speaker 1: of the sort of act activism that we've seen in
Speaker 1: their recent years. Um SO for instance, no Japple the
Speaker 1: Dakota Access Pipeline in two thousand and sixteen, and kind
Speaker 1: of I think that's one of the more recent events
Speaker 1: that have really illustrated on a wide scale, like globally
Speaker 1: about UM indigenous movements, UM sovereignty movements, and especially when
Speaker 1: it comes to environmental justice. But what you saw there
Speaker 1: was encroachment on tribal treaty land within UM that we
Speaker 1: when it had to do with the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Speaker 1: Um so, although it didn't cross some of the current
Speaker 1: reservation borders, it was in treaty land, you know that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. The same thing was Stop line three,
Speaker 1: how it encroached on the hunting land and the farmland
Speaker 1: that was not technically in that like residential sholl like
Speaker 1: like um like like not in like the reservation area
Speaker 1: where people live, but it's in the surrounding area that
Speaker 1: is for hunting that is specified in the treaty. So
Speaker 1: people trying to use these loopholes to get the pipelines
Speaker 1: through right, right. And so I think what you see
Speaker 1: is a lot of solidarity across tribes because this is
Speaker 1: not new. This has never been new, and a lot
Speaker 1: of tribes can relate to that. And what you've seen
Speaker 1: and what I've hoped that I've highlighted throughout this kind
Speaker 1: of very brief overview of federally new policy is the
Speaker 1: different ways that indigenous rights to land and sovereignty has
Speaker 1: been attacked in different forms by settler and colonial governments. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think that the day and age that we
Speaker 1: live in now has allowed for um, sort of more
Speaker 1: widespread solidarity, especially over social media. UM. And so when
Speaker 1: we say land back for me, how I interpret it
Speaker 1: as what people mean when they're saying it is recognition
Speaker 1: of our tribal sovereignty, of our right to this land
Speaker 1: that has not been respected. And then I also think
Speaker 1: that it means well, if these treaties aren't being respected,
Speaker 1: then how is this treaty still UM valid? Right? How
Speaker 1: come we aren't getting our land back because you're not
Speaker 1: upholding your end of the deal. While some people also
Speaker 1: might mean and recognize that this whole United States government
Speaker 1: is a settler state, right based on the doctrine of discovery,
Speaker 1: which is based on denying tribes and American Indians of
Speaker 1: their rights to this land. UM, So some people might
Speaker 1: take it to this whole other context of yeah, well
Speaker 1: maybe this is this is all of our land, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But in practice, what does this look like? And I
Speaker 1: think in practice a lot of people UM are seeing
Speaker 1: it with reparations or people buying land back for tribes
Speaker 1: and giving it back to tribes. And we have seen
Speaker 1: some of that or um also just people interrupting the
Speaker 1: narrative UM in their own mind of their euro American identity,
Speaker 1: so non non UM American Indians and primarily European settlers
Speaker 1: and their history of their own families taking part of
Speaker 1: the settler colonial process, and how has that um what
Speaker 1: about their lands? There's everyone who UM descends I guess
Speaker 1: from these these settlers, and I want to be specific
Speaker 1: when I'm talking about euro American settlers um, um, and
Speaker 1: how they currently benefit from these systems. And I think
Speaker 1: by saying land back, UM, it's we're able to highlight
Speaker 1: this movement for tribal sovereignty and recognition on a global
Speaker 1: scale instead of searching for justice within the quote unquote
Speaker 1: like UM, searching for justice within the courts of the conqueror.
Speaker 1: How how do we expect um for the conqueror to
Speaker 1: be held accountable for all of these atrocities, attempts at genocide, assimilation,
Speaker 1: et cetera. By taking it more towards a global scale,
Speaker 1: such as no Adapple, highlighting these two other people as
Speaker 1: these are injustices, UM, this is this is ongoing genocide.
Speaker 1: I think that land back has many, like a plethora
Speaker 1: of meanings in the in that sense. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: hope that answers your question. I myself, UM might use
Speaker 1: it in in some some different ways. UM, because land,
Speaker 1: as we conceive it to be property kind of grew.
Speaker 1: That concept grew in conversation with Euro American Yeah. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: conceptions of property. So I think that UM, moving forward,
Speaker 1: when we talk about de colonization as a process and
Speaker 1: not like a metaphor, UM, that thinking of land back
Speaker 1: not within that whole idea of your American property as well.
Speaker 1: That's that's kind of another thing to consider. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think lend back would just be a whole
Speaker 1: other thing that will pay someone more qualified than our
Speaker 1: team to talk about on this show. UM. Because Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's definitely, like you know, like all of the things
Speaker 1: we've we've discussed, they deserve their own deep dives by
Speaker 1: people that are uh not me, Robert and Chris. UM.
Speaker 1: Let's see, is there any kind of resources either books
Speaker 1: or stuff online that you would recommend for people wanting
Speaker 1: to learn more about this history? UM? And then any
Speaker 1: kind of ways to I don't know, I I guess
Speaker 1: show support in these and these kind of like efforts
Speaker 1: that are going on. Yeah, for sure. UM. So in
Speaker 1: terms of resources and reading, UM, I have read Lorenzo
Speaker 1: Verrocchini's UM Settler book on Settler Colonialism. UM. That's really
Speaker 1: helpful when you're trying to understand that framework in terms
Speaker 1: of getting to know kind of more of the basics
Speaker 1: of like current UM issues impacting tribes. UM. The National
Speaker 1: Congress of American Indians does a lot of work on
Speaker 1: the federal level. UM. If you want to talk more
Speaker 1: about UM kind of lived current lived experiences of American Indians.
Speaker 1: There's illuminatives UM and getting more involved in those as well.
Speaker 1: I think that they have some tips, but I would
Speaker 1: recommend UM everyone getting more familiar with the land that
Speaker 1: they are on currently, the tribes within their states and
Speaker 1: what they can do UM, not just on the local level,
Speaker 1: but on the state level to support tribal sovereignty UM,
Speaker 1: because a lot of issues UH. For instance, I worked
Speaker 1: on the on the state policy level in Washington and
Speaker 1: in Montana, and both of those have a significant amount
Speaker 1: of tribes UM, but you have a lot of legislation
Speaker 1: that's trying to happen that infringes on tribal treaty rights.
Speaker 1: And the thing is is UM as ugly as it
Speaker 1: may be to say, but sometimes voices of non indigenous
Speaker 1: people's are listened to more within those UM contexts. So
Speaker 1: you need to get more involved on on those levels. UM.
Speaker 1: What sort of like at UM nonprofit organizations UM work
Speaker 1: with your tribes or and what sort of issues are
Speaker 1: impacting tribes And again, these are all gonna probably be
Speaker 1: surrounding travel sovereignty. So maybe it's UM fishing access, hunting rights, etcetera. UM,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good way to make some
Speaker 1: more palate, UM tangible change, to feel like you're doing
Speaker 1: something to support tribal sovereignty while you're also educating yourself
Speaker 1: and making sure that their voices are at the forefront.
Speaker 1: And that's also applicable to the federal level, especially with
Speaker 1: as you already said, like stop line three in Minnesota,
Speaker 1: contacting your legislators, etcetera, etcetera. And I think also with
Speaker 1: when it comes to one of one of the larger
Speaker 1: issues besides UM, environmental justice for indigenous peoples such as pipelines,
Speaker 1: you have right now missing a murdered indigenous women UM.
Speaker 1: So looking and looking into that UM a little bit
Speaker 1: more and who you can support who's addressing those issues
Speaker 1: along with UM. There is another movement with boarding schools
Speaker 1: right now because there's been a lot of UM bodies
Speaker 1: of young children UM that have been uncovered. And this
Speaker 1: is not an issue that happened a long long time ago,
Speaker 1: like for instance, my grandmother went to a boarding school. UM.
Speaker 1: There's still schools that UM although they're not called boarding
Speaker 1: schools right now that we're boarding schools, but are still
Speaker 1: an operation under different names. Etcetera. UM, so kind of
Speaker 1: familiarizing yourself with those histories. And then also there's a
Speaker 1: UM national UM I think it's called the National Boarding
Speaker 1: School Healing Coalition based out of Minnesota, and UM looking
Speaker 1: into them and supporting their efforts UM with this issue
Speaker 1: is also a good place to start. UM. Is there
Speaker 1: anywhere that people can find you online? Yes? I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't really use UM social media not much. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I try not to. I don't know. If I want
Speaker 1: people to find me, do not, don't, don't do it.
Speaker 1: It's better that people don't find anyone online. It's better
Speaker 1: we're all just just posting into the void. There's nothing not,
Speaker 1: just just a void. Well that that is I think
Speaker 1: going to wrap up what we have today, Chris do
Speaker 1: want to close us out with a funny bit. I
Speaker 1: light your local gas station on fire. Wow? Is christ
Speaker 1: killing you? Oh my god? Jeez? Wow? All right, goodbye
Speaker 1: for buddy. What's terrible? My me? This is it could
Speaker 1: happen here a podcast about collapse And that's appropriate because
Speaker 1: everyone's faith in me as a colleague has collapsed today
Speaker 1: as the result of a series of horrific cluster fox
Speaker 1: on my part I'm late to the meeting. I accidentally
Speaker 1: left the meeting when they started recording just a just
Speaker 1: a complete fucking ship show. Speaking of ship shows, my
Speaker 1: co host Garrison Davis, how are you, Harrison, I'm the
Speaker 1: one that saved this. I had to send the guest
Speaker 1: to the zoom call. I know, I'm not even supposed
Speaker 1: to be on this call. No you're not. You're not
Speaker 1: even supposed to be working today. That's not true. But
Speaker 1: you're not on this call, not in this call. But
Speaker 1: here am saving. This is enough. This is enough witty banter.
Speaker 1: This is a daily podcast. And now let's bring on
Speaker 1: our guest for today, monsignor Alex new House. Alex, how
Speaker 1: are you doing. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I feel like I was pulled in off the street,
Speaker 1: just like bundled into a van and then yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we uh. You know how people used to get like shanghaied,
Speaker 1: like like captured by it, allegedly allegedly and forced to
Speaker 1: work on on on boats in like San Francisco and whatnot.
Speaker 1: We do that with podcasts. I mean, that is actually
Speaker 1: most of what I've done to the people who work
Speaker 1: on your podcast. I think I think I've had everyone
Speaker 1: from your show on our show now, and it has
Speaker 1: been very much like I'm just pulling them on a string.
Speaker 1: Speaking of which, Alex, you are one of the hosts
Speaker 1: of the Terrorism Is Bad podcast, a very uh controversially
Speaker 1: named podcast. Uh. And you work at the Middlebury Institute
Speaker 1: of Internet National Studies at Monterey Center of Terrorism, Extremism
Speaker 1: and counter Terrorism Center on not not of that would
Speaker 1: be a different center, very important, very important. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: we're not We're not bringing you on to talk about
Speaker 1: how to make explosively formed penetrators, not this time. That
Speaker 1: is someone else. Yeah, but you are also you were
Speaker 1: also a actual games journalist. Yes, yeah, I got my
Speaker 1: start in this weird space. How do you How do
Speaker 1: you feel about ethics in the game journalism industry? Alex? Uh?
Speaker 1: Always been fine, Like yeah, alright, anyway, that's the end
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah. I do want to actually start there, Alex,
Speaker 1: because you and I both have something in common, which
Speaker 1: is that we we got our start writing in a
Speaker 1: field that's wildly different from consulting with like governments on terrorism.
Speaker 1: Like for me, it was I wanted to write like
Speaker 1: Dick jokes on the Internet, and I just like stumbled
Speaker 1: into a bunch of ices propaganda to that most people
Speaker 1: weren't aware of. And and that started me like lecturing
Speaker 1: at universities and ship and for you it was gamer Gates.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in kind of you telling your story a
Speaker 1: little bit to start us off. Yeah, so I was.
Speaker 1: I was during undergrad. I enterned every summer at game
Speaker 1: Spot video game website you may have heard of. It's
Speaker 1: one of the two big ones along with I g
Speaker 1: n UM. And when I was doing that, I was
Speaker 1: So this was like right in the at the beginning
Speaker 1: stages of of gamer Gate really popping off. And what
Speaker 1: ended up happening is a lot of the people I
Speaker 1: worked with, a lot of my colleagues and friends were
Speaker 1: just in the blast zone. They were just targeted by
Speaker 1: the absolute ons thought of of harassment. UM, and I
Speaker 1: just had a curiosity started looking into some of those
Speaker 1: people who were who are targeting my friends and colleagues,
Speaker 1: and it ended up being a lot of the people
Speaker 1: that were still talking about today. Uh you know, it
Speaker 1: all all rolls back up to the bright bart metropolitan area,
Speaker 1: if you will. And um, I don't know what are
Speaker 1: the thing that made me want to I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: I've been aware of your work for well, but the
Speaker 1: thing that maybe want to specifically bring you on as
Speaker 1: you started on a new project to create like a
Speaker 1: video game that that will hopefully have an ability to
Speaker 1: help like de radicalize people. And I'm I'm not entirely
Speaker 1: certain like of the details of the project, but I
Speaker 1: think it's a fascinating project because, as as you note
Speaker 1: all too well, a lot of this stuff started in gaming,
Speaker 1: not as a result of anything specifically about gaming, but
Speaker 1: the kind of like socialization that occurs in those spaces
Speaker 1: and the kind of like different communities, and it's been
Speaker 1: like we have going back to the nineties evidence of
Speaker 1: like different Nazi groups on the early Internet, like talking
Speaker 1: about like these are specifically specific groups and subcultures that
Speaker 1: you know will have an easier time radicalizing and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm interested in kind of what actually is
Speaker 1: going on with this project, um, and and how you
Speaker 1: think it's going to look at this stage. I understand
Speaker 1: it's pretty early in development right now, so I'm not expecting, like,
Speaker 1: you know, an E three walkthrough, Yeah, our E three,
Speaker 1: I wish we had that. Um. We won a grant
Speaker 1: from DHS and FEMA, their their Terrorism Prevention Grand Program
Speaker 1: this year. We just got awarded it like literally two
Speaker 1: weeks ago, so I have not even started work on
Speaker 1: it at all. But the project will be a collaboration
Speaker 1: between my center and a nonprofit games development company called
Speaker 1: the Eye Thrive Foundation. UH. And basically what we are
Speaker 1: going to do is like build digital scenarios, digital narratives
Speaker 1: that can be engaged with UH within classroom settings. So
Speaker 1: we're targeting high schools for rolling this out UH. And
Speaker 1: the idea is that we're going to give students the
Speaker 1: ability to take on roles that empower them to better
Speaker 1: understand how extremism and radicalization work as mechanisms, which will
Speaker 1: hopefully the idea is that it will it will improve
Speaker 1: resilience and you know, civil integrity and all those fun
Speaker 1: buzzwords within within high school communities. So we're not necessarily
Speaker 1: trying to de radicalize already radicalize people, but we're really
Speaker 1: trying to build community awareness, community resilience to too radicalization pathways.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is something I think about constantly because
Speaker 1: I get asked this a lot. You know, I'll get
Speaker 1: I'll get emailed questions from people, sometimes as much detail
Speaker 1: as like hey, I'm like a teacher and here's some
Speaker 1: things this kid in my classes set or something he
Speaker 1: put in an essay, and like, I'm growing really concerned
Speaker 1: about him, and like, I, I, what do I do?
Speaker 1: And my usual answer is, you know, there's a couple
Speaker 1: of people who I respect that I'll try to direct
Speaker 1: them to. But I I don't. I'm pretty good at
Speaker 1: how people get radicalized. It's something I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time studying. I don't know how how you I
Speaker 1: have trouble figuring out how to break down these pathways
Speaker 1: because like, right, the the default for a lot of
Speaker 1: people and for a lot of time has been will
Speaker 1: you d platform? Right? You um, you get them off
Speaker 1: of whatever. And there's there's still I do certainly think
Speaker 1: there's there's utility in that. But there's also you know,
Speaker 1: the toothpaste tube effect, the fact that when you you
Speaker 1: squash these popular areas where they're able to spread them,
Speaker 1: they filter off into increasingly isolated communities that developed new terms,
Speaker 1: they find out ways to hide it, and that actually
Speaker 1: increases you know, it may it may reduce the number
Speaker 1: of people who get radicalized, but the people who remain
Speaker 1: just get more and more extreme because they're even more
Speaker 1: isolated from you know, everyone else, And I don't know,
Speaker 1: how do you do how do you how do you
Speaker 1: break that that radicalization cycle? Like, how do you how
Speaker 1: do you stop that ship before it gets, you know,
Speaker 1: to a tipping point? Yeah, I mean, in general, I'm
Speaker 1: with you, I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of de
Speaker 1: radicalization strategies. Uh. And it's it's like an incredibly difficult
Speaker 1: task to to pull someone out who's already going down
Speaker 1: these pathways. And then, like you said, it's also an
Speaker 1: incredibly difficult task to make sure that when you are
Speaker 1: disrupting the radicalization networks that they aren't just disappearing off
Speaker 1: to some other corner of the Internet, which we know
Speaker 1: they're doing. Like, one of the reasons why we're we're
Speaker 1: working with a video game video game company is over
Speaker 1: the last few years, we've noticed a big migration into
Speaker 1: video game platforms, especially big social based video game platforms
Speaker 1: like Roadblocks and Minecraft, which are not like, not even
Speaker 1: remotely prepared deal with, you know, very well developed sophisticated
Speaker 1: radicalization networks. They have moved over there, h both for
Speaker 1: organization and radicalization reasons. Um, Since mainstream companies have started
Speaker 1: taking more of an interest in deep platforming them. Uh
Speaker 1: and so we're ending up like pretty wildly unprepared for
Speaker 1: this sudden onslought of extremists being right in front of
Speaker 1: kids as they're playing games or you know, teenagers or
Speaker 1: even young adults. So our idea essentially is to use
Speaker 1: that language, the same language that extremists are trying to
Speaker 1: adopt the structures of video games three via the sort
Speaker 1: of interactivity there, to better communicate the impacts of extremism,
Speaker 1: what it looks like, how to identify it, and hopefully
Speaker 1: how to avoid getting you know, falling into the traps
Speaker 1: that are laid uh for for unsuspecting people. One of
Speaker 1: the issues and I'm curiously thoughts on this because we
Speaker 1: we we talk a lot about, like I think people
Speaker 1: have become increasingly aware of how bad Facebook in particulars
Speaker 1: is a problem with this. It's it's really well real
Speaker 1: a lot of the boogaloo movement to and now this
Speaker 1: stuff is coming out about like the data Facebook has
Speaker 1: had on just and this isn't this isn't this is
Speaker 1: adjacent to radicalization, Um, the mental impact that it's been
Speaker 1: having on teenagers right, like the just how bad it
Speaker 1: is for people, and UM, I'm wondering, like how do
Speaker 1: you scale this stuff? I guess is the question like
Speaker 1: how do you actually how do you make the social
Speaker 1: internet less dangerous? Yeah? I mean that's that's going to
Speaker 1: be extremely tough. And we are even starting very very small,
Speaker 1: like we're building We're building on a narrative platform to
Speaker 1: target three high schools right now. Um. But the hope
Speaker 1: is that ultimately what we can do is build a
Speaker 1: tool set and and a platform like literally a game
Speaker 1: platform that can be used by high school teachers in
Speaker 1: high school classes throughout the country or throughout the world. Um.
Speaker 1: The idea will be to hopefully make a new sort
Speaker 1: of package of different methods and interactive experiences that can
Speaker 1: be reused into the future. But it is one of
Speaker 1: the big open questions that we will hopefully come to
Speaker 1: some sort of answer for throughout the project about how
Speaker 1: do we actually scale this up? Um? But you know,
Speaker 1: in general, it is again like one of the biggest
Speaker 1: open questions right now. One of the reasons why I's
Speaker 1: so skeptical of a lot of d RAD and CBE
Speaker 1: techniques is they try to go for scale about effectiveness, um,
Speaker 1: when in reality, one of the best and only de
Speaker 1: radicalization pathways that we know of involves people that you
Speaker 1: know and I know going out and meeting with these
Speaker 1: people one on one and having intensive, frequent communications with them. So, um,
Speaker 1: there's as far as we know, there's not a good
Speaker 1: answer right now. This is a huge place of research
Speaker 1: right now because we should just straight up do not
Speaker 1: understand how to scale up um radicalization, prevention and de radicalization.
Speaker 1: I mean in what you know, what you're trying to do,
Speaker 1: and like reaching kids in high school in something it's
Speaker 1: meant they're meant to be consuming while they're in school
Speaker 1: is even such an additional challenge because I think you
Speaker 1: and I are both young enough to at least remember
Speaker 1: that like almost nothing that you put before kids in
Speaker 1: that context in a school gets through. I can. I can.
Speaker 1: I can think about like anti drug programs and stuff
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, and how ineffective they were.
Speaker 1: There was I had one one effective anti drug like
Speaker 1: speech by a teacher and it was just a teacher
Speaker 1: who whose son was part of this this There was
Speaker 1: this one night and plane where like six kids indeed
Speaker 1: on heroin. It was there was big Rolling Stone article
Speaker 1: about it was a very famous moment, and her son
Speaker 1: was one of the kids who nearly died and she
Speaker 1: was and she like just explained like physically what happened
Speaker 1: to him and begged us not to do heroin, And
Speaker 1: that actually did stick with me. I've never never shot
Speaker 1: up anything, um, but you know, like the a lot
Speaker 1: of it doesn't work. And I think part of why
Speaker 1: it's this thing I talked about when I tried to
Speaker 1: explain like why isis propaganda was so effective, it's the
Speaker 1: it feels more authentic than the than the counter narrative,
Speaker 1: right the counter narrati of because it's it's usually focus grouped,
Speaker 1: it's coming as the result of like some sort of
Speaker 1: government initiative, a bunch of people working in together. It
Speaker 1: feels focus grouped as opposed to there's something inherently more
Speaker 1: compelling about something that just like feels like somebody who
Speaker 1: really gave a ship, cares a lot put this thing together,
Speaker 1: even if it's terrible. And I that strikes me as
Speaker 1: a really because if you're going to be scaling something
Speaker 1: and trying to reach a lot of people, it's going
Speaker 1: to have to be something that is put together at
Speaker 1: scale by an organization. And how do you. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know this must be on your mind as you're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to craft this thing. I'm
Speaker 1: just interested in your thoughts on that. Really, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that exact challenge challenges what led us to proposing
Speaker 1: the project project that we are, so the idea behind it,
Speaker 1: or the the impetus behind what we did what we
Speaker 1: proposed is, um, the exact problem of students just don't
Speaker 1: listen to people in whether that's anti drug programs or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Often, my uh my uh feeling about
Speaker 1: it is they are often resistant to it because it's
Speaker 1: very negative. It's very don't do this, don't do this.
Speaker 1: I'm setting up boundaries for for kids and analysts to
Speaker 1: act within. It's all very declaratory, very you know, commanding. Um,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no sense of treating kids like people
Speaker 1: who have control, who have interests, who have motivations. It's
Speaker 1: all attempting to restrict them. And so the idea is
Speaker 1: that we're going to attempt to build a game platform
Speaker 1: that actually empower students to operate within roles that have control,
Speaker 1: that that have something to say, to give them, voices
Speaker 1: to give them um and that sort of feeling of
Speaker 1: being an established UM person within a within a certain scenario. Um.
Speaker 1: The way that I've been thinking about it is that
Speaker 1: we're basically merging video games with like the structure of
Speaker 1: a model you in conference or something like that. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll be a little less nerdy than Model U in conferences.
Speaker 1: But that's the idea of giving people power to make decisions. Uh,
Speaker 1: and and treat them like actual, you know, operating humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I uh, I'm wondering do you have any kind of
Speaker 1: models that you're looking at when you think of like
Speaker 1: something that you see is is kind of worth I
Speaker 1: don't emulating maybe the wrong word, but like, oh, these
Speaker 1: people I think got it right and and this was effective?
Speaker 1: Like or is this really a situation where you feel
Speaker 1: like we're kind of in the fucking wilderness here. There's
Speaker 1: not a lot of great models for what's effective. We
Speaker 1: are very much in the wilderness. What I was expecting
Speaker 1: you to say, Like, so much of CV and d
Speaker 1: rad work of the last ten years has been directly
Speaker 1: towards trying to essentially recreate that, like the Dare model
Speaker 1: or the anti drug model, just in a different field. Um.
Speaker 1: And so we're going to be pulling from scenario builders
Speaker 1: and like mall un and debate and like all these
Speaker 1: different models that seem to at least work to get
Speaker 1: kids engage with like operating that sort of situation. But
Speaker 1: it is going to be pretty I mean, at least
Speaker 1: from what I understands, going be pretty new. We're going
Speaker 1: to be out there really flying blind for a lot
Speaker 1: of it UM, but we will. You know, we have
Speaker 1: a pilot phase built in to try to bay to
Speaker 1: test this with with UM some of the students were
Speaker 1: incorporating students and instructors in the actual creation development stage,
Speaker 1: so that'll be another hopefully good part of this will
Speaker 1: we'll give some students experience with the game development process,
Speaker 1: which I think will help engage them as well. That
Speaker 1: strikes me as a particularly good idea of like giving
Speaker 1: and also just giving them some agency. So it's not
Speaker 1: like this is a thing that you are forced to consume,
Speaker 1: Like this is the thing that you can like learn
Speaker 1: something from. I think that's that's very important. I'm interested
Speaker 1: in how you see how you see this because like
Speaker 1: again we kind of both got in around the same time.
Speaker 1: Gamer Gate is when I started paying attention to radicalization
Speaker 1: to how do you think it's changed since then? How
Speaker 1: do you think like the nature of of how, particularly
Speaker 1: like younger people are being radicalized is changed. And I
Speaker 1: guess I'm also interested because I get the feeling that
Speaker 1: back then it was mostly younger people getting radicalized and
Speaker 1: that's no longer the case. Just as we're talking, I
Speaker 1: just came across the video on Twitter of a group
Speaker 1: of anti vax protesters chasing parents and children away from
Speaker 1: an elementary school and screaming at them that they're raping
Speaker 1: their kids with a vaccine. So clearly the problem is expanded.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, And honestly one of the things that
Speaker 1: keeps me up at night is when we start, if
Speaker 1: you know, knocking movies are able to roll this out
Speaker 1: to more schools, we're going to run into some probably
Speaker 1: very resistant parents who have radicalized. Yum. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: the big one is, like what you said, like the
Speaker 1: radicalization demographics have vastly expanded to incorporate so many more
Speaker 1: different types of people, so many more ages and even
Speaker 1: ethnicities and genders. Um. But what we do know is
Speaker 1: that the hardcore of the of the violent extremists are
Speaker 1: still targeting adolescents. Um. We know accelerationists, for instance, hang
Speaker 1: out and try to essentially black pill about of teens,
Speaker 1: especially autistic teens, specially teens with mental health issues, UH,
Speaker 1: and bring them into a more violent, more accelerationist posture. UM.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I think that has sort of stayed
Speaker 1: constant throughout all of this. One of the big UH
Speaker 1: changes has been platforms. You know, ten years ago, it
Speaker 1: was much easier for a neo Nazi to operate openly
Speaker 1: on YouTube or Facebook, but that has thankfully changed. UM.
Speaker 1: But they have spread out into like I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: they've spread out into video games. They spread out into
Speaker 1: other sorts of platforms where the social aspect isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: the first part of the platform, but rather a secondary
Speaker 1: aspect to it, and they try to engage UM adolescence
Speaker 1: on their own turf on you know, in a Roadblocks
Speaker 1: game or in a in a video game forum. Out there,
Speaker 1: it's not even enough to say it feels like the
Speaker 1: task of reducing radicalization or or not not even mentioned
Speaker 1: pulling it back, just stopping the prod. This feels not
Speaker 1: just like whack a mole, but like whack a mole
Speaker 1: when you're surrounded by moles. UM and I guess that
Speaker 1: is the thing that keeps me up at night the
Speaker 1: most too, is that like the problem has gotten because
Speaker 1: of how social media scales, I think, in large part,
Speaker 1: has gotten so much worse than it ever was. And
Speaker 1: the I see these crowds of adults, you know, assembling
Speaker 1: in you know, places like Los Angeles and showing up
Speaker 1: outside of schools to her ask people, and like, I
Speaker 1: don't know what, I don't know what to do about that.
Speaker 1: Like part of me thinks, um, part of me thinks
Speaker 1: that the only effective long term answer is to mobilize
Speaker 1: a larger number of people two show up to you know,
Speaker 1: not necessarily confront those people, but make them make them
Speaker 1: feel outnumbered, and maybe they'll stop, and that will start
Speaker 1: a process where they they alter their thinking. Like I'm
Speaker 1: thinking kind of back to in some aspects of the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement here right where you would have these
Speaker 1: people show up at schools just try to stop integration
Speaker 1: and whatnot, and they would be opposed often by by
Speaker 1: larger groups that they would see the size of the
Speaker 1: marches in the street. And like, I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't even know if it works that way anymore. Like
Speaker 1: knowing that you know, tend to one, people think your
Speaker 1: stance on vaccines is stupid, and they're willing to show
Speaker 1: up to like yell at you if that would do anything.
Speaker 1: But I don't know what. I don't know what's going
Speaker 1: to do. Like I guess I'm asking you, like, can
Speaker 1: you have you figured this out? Because I don't know
Speaker 1: what the funk to do? Um, But it's it's it's
Speaker 1: not you can't we can't close our obviously you're someone
Speaker 1: who's trying to confront it directly, but we certainly can't
Speaker 1: keep ourselves like just pretend it's not going to get worse, right, No, totally,
Speaker 1: And um, you know, I often feel like it's almost
Speaker 1: too far gone. And you know, frequently I worry that
Speaker 1: we've already passed some sort of you know, point of
Speaker 1: no return on RODO causation, exploitation of social media. But
Speaker 1: one of the other things I've also recognized is that
Speaker 1: when you're in a space that is dedicated to one
Speaker 1: type of confronting h one one method of confronting extremism,
Speaker 1: very often they will forget about, or de prioritize, or
Speaker 1: or even ignore the other types the other methods. And
Speaker 1: one of the tasks before us, I think, before we
Speaker 1: throw up our hands and give up, is trying to
Speaker 1: tie together all of the different facets of resisting extremism,
Speaker 1: from the hardcore confrontational doxing and showing up in the
Speaker 1: streets counterprotesting, which I think is an essential part of it,
Speaker 1: to UM working as hard as we can to try
Speaker 1: to get tech companies to to realize what's going on UH,
Speaker 1: and then also on the educational side, like what we're
Speaker 1: doing with this with this project UM. Some of the
Speaker 1: things that make me at least a little bit optimistic
Speaker 1: is that there is obviously inertia, both intentional and unintentional
Speaker 1: at tech companies, but frankly, they are still extremely far
Speaker 1: behind in understand adding how to even do D platforming
Speaker 1: on their platforms, how to even identify WoT D platform
Speaker 1: like the majority of tech companies are still making contom
Speaker 1: moderation decisions on a piece by piece basis, specifically looking
Speaker 1: at content. Very few of them are doing actor analysis,
Speaker 1: very few of them are doing several network analysis. Very
Speaker 1: few of them are looking at even the links between
Speaker 1: like off platform violence and on platform content like it's
Speaker 1: the They are still very much in the stone ages
Speaker 1: when it comes to contom moderation. And that's so so
Speaker 1: key when I think about like what actually would reduce
Speaker 1: the harm that these platforms are doing at scale. It's
Speaker 1: focusing on the actors um and and not just like
Speaker 1: the individual actors, which is part of the patterns that
Speaker 1: let you tell whether or not someone is like that
Speaker 1: same actor who's kind of like putting on a different
Speaker 1: hat so to speak. Um, are you aware of like,
Speaker 1: is there any I because I have not seen that
Speaker 1: happen yet. I haven't seen Facebook take that seriously. Um,
Speaker 1: and I have I have spent some time there. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen certainly haven't seen Twitter take that seriously. Um,
Speaker 1: I haven't really seen. I don't believe TikTok is like
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're just um, like you said, they're
Speaker 1: going after they're taking it on a piece bay piece basis,
Speaker 1: which is never there's too many pieces. That's never going
Speaker 1: to handle the problem. Yeah, I mean take stock is
Speaker 1: crawling right now. They're in their infancy. Um, they don't.
Speaker 1: They don't have a data sharing uh, any sort of
Speaker 1: data sharing systems set up for for researchers or anything
Speaker 1: like that. Yet I've seen optimistic signals. So I think
Speaker 1: Facebook's approach to q and On and boogleoo movement over
Speaker 1: the past year has been probably the best, the most
Speaker 1: positive development we've seen on the content moderation front because
Speaker 1: they took an actual network based approach to it. It
Speaker 1: was hands strung by a variety of different policy decisions,
Speaker 1: but it was still from like a from like a
Speaker 1: mechanics standpoint, the most sophisticated one any of the comedies
Speaker 1: is actually talked about openly. Uh and YouTube has followed
Speaker 1: in their path. They've started taking more network approaches um.
Speaker 1: They they've taken moderation action against q and on on
Speaker 1: a similar basis. But the thing that I want tech
Speaker 1: companies to start looking at is applying a lot of
Speaker 1: the techniques they're using for disinformation and in info ops
Speaker 1: work to extremism and radicalization. It's very similar, but right
Speaker 1: now it seems to be just easier politically or just
Speaker 1: there further along with doing the large scale network analysis
Speaker 1: approaches on this info um like Twitter is doing a
Speaker 1: lot of that, but it's all on information operations and
Speaker 1: take info yeah as opposed to yeah people Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I I worry too because I'm paying attention to kind
Speaker 1: of you know, you have this whistle blower from Facebook,
Speaker 1: and how that's being politicized right, how the right is
Speaker 1: kind of coming at this from a they're trying to say, like,
Speaker 1: as Ben Shapira said, they're trying to to UM the
Speaker 1: sensor alternative media voices and the like. And I I
Speaker 1: worry tremendously about the politicization because number one, it means
Speaker 1: that at best we've got like three years to get
Speaker 1: something together before you know, who knows whose wides up
Speaker 1: in the White House next. But also if it's just
Speaker 1: this thing of like veering between who gets who gets
Speaker 1: paid attention to UM based on like what is politically
Speaker 1: viable for Facebook, we're never going to solve the problem.
Speaker 1: And I I think I agree with you for the
Speaker 1: most part on the Facebook's response to the boogle boo movement.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I think the problem was that
Speaker 1: by the time they developed a functional set of responses
Speaker 1: to it UM, it had metastasized, it had grown, it
Speaker 1: had grown strong enough to exist on its own, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people have gotten exposed. What do you
Speaker 1: think is the actual is reasonable to expect in terms
Speaker 1: of response time from these people, because with boogle Ooo stuff,
Speaker 1: it was about I want to say, about three months
Speaker 1: be well, no, it was more like five. It was
Speaker 1: about five months that it had from like December of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen was when I started really noticing it. And
Speaker 1: then like you know, May at the when when stuff
Speaker 1: really kicked off with the George Floyd protests, when you
Speaker 1: started to see action taking the tail in the May. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I guess that I'm wondering, like, what is the
Speaker 1: half life of this ship? Like how quickly do you
Speaker 1: need to crack down on this stuff before it gets
Speaker 1: to be impossible to contain? Uh? Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: the biggest limiting factor on that effectiveness of uh contemnation
Speaker 1: in general, but also in particular these new approaches that
Speaker 1: the tech companies seem to be experimenting with. UM, my
Speaker 1: understanding is that part of the So I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not defending Facebook by any stretch. I'm not here to
Speaker 1: be the Facebook rallying crew. But my understanding is that
Speaker 1: they literally did develop an entirely separate approach to taking
Speaker 1: down the biblie movements. So that explains at least a
Speaker 1: little bit of the delay. But hopefully, you know, my
Speaker 1: optimistic side hopes that they will be able to apply
Speaker 1: it more quickly in the future. Um The problem is
Speaker 1: a lot of the network approaches that have been developed
Speaker 1: are have like these very high thresholds for attribution. So
Speaker 1: it has to be like a dedicated network that has
Speaker 1: crossed the line into criminal activity and is actively calling
Speaker 1: for you know, political violence on like a network level,
Speaker 1: and that like we all know that that isn't that
Speaker 1: is like the end goal or the end point in
Speaker 1: exactly right, Like that is the terminal point of the
Speaker 1: development of these extremist networks. So you know, we're one
Speaker 1: of the one of the things that we're working on
Speaker 1: is trying to figure out a way to convince tech
Speaker 1: companies that you can and should take action earlier before
Speaker 1: it reaches that point. And it's going to be a
Speaker 1: mosaic of things. It's going to be combining violent extremism
Speaker 1: with hate speech, with even like c SAM child exploitation stuff,
Speaker 1: with um all, you know, criminal criminal conspiracy network, Paul seas.
Speaker 1: All of those things need to be sort of thought
Speaker 1: of as pieces in a single, big, overarching umbrella that
Speaker 1: we can use to take down networks earlier on. But
Speaker 1: you know, it's a. It's a. That's one of the
Speaker 1: biggest tasks is just convincing them to think about it
Speaker 1: much much earlier. Yeah. Um, all right, well let's I
Speaker 1: think most of what I wanted to get into today.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else you really wanted to like, kind
Speaker 1: of talk about while you're here? Um, those are the
Speaker 1: those are the big ones for sure. We will hopefully
Speaker 1: have more to talk about very soon. And how we're
Speaker 1: approaching this project. Um, it's going to be a pretty
Speaker 1: big project. It will take two years to implement, but um,
Speaker 1: we're pretty excited to see what comes out of it. Yeah. Um, Well,
Speaker 1: people can find you on Twitter at it's just at
Speaker 1: alex new house, right, alex B new house, alex B
Speaker 1: new house. Yeah, at alex b new House. Um, they
Speaker 1: can check out where you work at seat E, C, M, I,
Speaker 1: I s UM and yeah, I'm I'm excited to see. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll have you back on when you UMU, when
Speaker 1: you you you actually put out the game. But I'm
Speaker 1: really interested in looking at that. Oh yeah, it was
Speaker 1: the last thing you brewed. Oh, I brewed a red
Speaker 1: I p A and I'm currently brewing three gallons of
Speaker 1: apple cider. Oh. Nice. We just um, we juiced ten
Speaker 1: gallons of apples and pears that I just kegged after
Speaker 1: almost four weeks of fermentation that I know. I've been
Speaker 1: I've been looking at I've been looking at apple mills
Speaker 1: like apple presses, and yeah I should I should just
Speaker 1: buy one, And we found one to rent. Um. So
Speaker 1: it's just like I don't know, thirty bucks for the day. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we just gathered up all the apples on property.
Speaker 1: But it's it was rab definitely very soon. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: were juicing all of the apples the day that um
Speaker 1: tiny got shot at that protest in Olympia. So it's
Speaker 1: just like looking at the Twitter saying there's been a
Speaker 1: shooting into protests and be like, yeah, I'm glad I'm
Speaker 1: not working today. Yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today,
Speaker 1: afternoon press and this is this is a more enjoyable
Speaker 1: use of my time right now. All right, Well, Alex,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for being on. Thank you for
Speaker 1: what you're doing, and thank you all for listening. Go
Speaker 1: with you know whoever, whatever deity up to you, it
Speaker 1: could happen here, Mike is possibly anyway, I'm Robert Evans, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know who I am because you're listening to this
Speaker 1: show unless you stumbled upon this having never heard of
Speaker 1: the internet before, in which case this is a show
Speaker 1: about how things are kind of falling apart, and we
Speaker 1: also try to talk every now and then about how
Speaker 1: to maybe put them back together a little bit. My
Speaker 1: co host is Garrison Davis. Garrison, say hello to the people. Hello, people.
Speaker 1: I'd also like you to say hello to Sean Hi Shan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a Sean somewhere up there. There's probably a few shots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was at least one or two. Garrison, What do we?
Speaker 1: What do we? What do we? What? What? What are we? Well,
Speaker 1: we're finally doing something I've been wanting to do for
Speaker 1: a while, is branching off into kind of covering different
Speaker 1: parts of like media and culture UM that kind of
Speaker 1: relate to all of these topics UM. I know both
Speaker 1: both me, but both me a little bit and and
Speaker 1: Robert more so have worked for or have have written
Speaker 1: for UM like an online investigative journalism website called belling
Speaker 1: Cat that deals in open source UM like research and
Speaker 1: one of the things that we're big fans of that
Speaker 1: Belling Cat. I've talked with a few of the other
Speaker 1: people is a game called Her Story, which is a
Speaker 1: video game that has maybe one of the better better
Speaker 1: depictions of kind of open source um investigations. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a very it's a very good game.
Speaker 1: I highly recommended. I played it a few years ago.
Speaker 1: It was lovely and I recently Uh well, originally, when
Speaker 1: I bought Her Story, I bought both that game and
Speaker 1: like a spiritual sequel called Telling Lies, which I did
Speaker 1: did not play for a while because I was too busy. Um.
Speaker 1: And then I went to the Earth First Gathering this
Speaker 1: summer and I and I came back and I had
Speaker 1: some free time, so I played Telling Lies, And because
Speaker 1: of the continent of that game, I found it really interesting.
Speaker 1: Because I'm not gonna spoil tons of it, I think
Speaker 1: you should play it for yourself, and part of it
Speaker 1: is solving the mystery on your own. But but part
Speaker 1: of it does take place to like green environmentalism activism setting,
Speaker 1: and it has one of the more honest depictions of
Speaker 1: environments like that. So I have we are we are
Speaker 1: graced with bringing on the creator of both Her Story
Speaker 1: and Telling Lies. Uh. Sam Barlow, Hello, Hey, exciting to
Speaker 1: be here. Lovely interest yeah, I I am. I'm very
Speaker 1: excited to talk with you. These games are some of
Speaker 1: my favorite things. Um. First off, I guess I would
Speaker 1: just like to kind of talk about your inspiration for
Speaker 1: this type of detective game, because it is it is
Speaker 1: unique to every other kind of investigative game out there. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, very much grounded in open source research. Um.
Speaker 1: And like using computers in the real world. What what
Speaker 1: kind of got you onto that kind of storytelling concept?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there was a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: things that all kind of sparked off at once, Like
Speaker 1: when I made Her Story. This was my first independent
Speaker 1: video game. So I've been making video games for ten
Speaker 1: plus years, um, working on other people's franchises, more traditional
Speaker 1: things kind of when I started out working on like
Speaker 1: Nicolas Cage movie tients and extreme sports games and all
Speaker 1: these kind of things. Um. But at some point I
Speaker 1: got to work on the Silent Hell franchise, which is
Speaker 1: this this very cool psychological horror franchise, and it's one
Speaker 1: of the certainly at that point in time, it was
Speaker 1: one of the few kind of established gaming franchises that
Speaker 1: had a story that was interesting and took place in
Speaker 1: the real world and had characters and things, So kind
Speaker 1: of from that point, I was really digging into kind
Speaker 1: of a lifelong interest in storytelling, especially what we can
Speaker 1: do with it interactively, and continue to be frustrated somewhat
Speaker 1: by working for these bigger publishers, and at one point
Speaker 1: I worked for three years I was directing and writing
Speaker 1: this this big budget video game that got canceled, and
Speaker 1: that kind of gave me a moment to kind of
Speaker 1: sit and think, like, what what do I want to do?
Speaker 1: Do I want to get on board another of these
Speaker 1: big video games. I was very frustrated at the kind
Speaker 1: of incremental change that you see in the kind of
Speaker 1: bigger budget video game space. It feels like things happened
Speaker 1: very slowly, which can be frustrating. So I was kind
Speaker 1: of looking around. This was when like iPhones, people gaming
Speaker 1: on their iPhones and stuff was kind of starting to
Speaker 1: blow up. The fact that you could now distribute a
Speaker 1: game individually digitally and reach an audience was sort of
Speaker 1: changing the landscape. So I kind of felt like I
Speaker 1: should get into that. And so at its conception her
Speaker 1: story was was me going, what are all the things
Speaker 1: I've wanted to do that that I wasn't able to
Speaker 1: do when I was working with these bigger budgets, with
Speaker 1: these more established kind of gaming templates. So from the
Speaker 1: get go it was I wanted to deal with characters
Speaker 1: that essentially lived in the real world, which is a
Speaker 1: hard pitch. You know, if you're asking for big bucks,
Speaker 1: every video game has to essentially be about superhero. It
Speaker 1: needs to be some kind of wish fulfillment for a
Speaker 1: teenage boy is generally what people are asking for. And
Speaker 1: the big thing with her story was subtext as someone's
Speaker 1: interesting storytelling. I was always trying to post how important
Speaker 1: subtext is and the idea that there is. You know,
Speaker 1: there are layers to a narrative that you're not spelling
Speaker 1: out for the audience that they're going to extract through
Speaker 1: performance or through whatever um And that was always a
Speaker 1: hard sell when you were kind of dealing with these
Speaker 1: kind of a bigger companies that had a very simple
Speaker 1: idea of what their audience was. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: prove that the audience was actually smarter than we were
Speaker 1: giving them credit for, and that if you gave more
Speaker 1: control to them, if you gave more of the kind
Speaker 1: of work of piecing these stories together that that would
Speaker 1: be not not just something they could do, but which
Speaker 1: would actually be more interesting and more personal and um,
Speaker 1: you know, and with her story, I had a kind
Speaker 1: of lifelong love of like crime fiction and slightly more
Speaker 1: kind of Gothic leaning crime fiction. And so it's like, right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to create a video game which is in
Speaker 1: that world and which kind of breaks a lot of
Speaker 1: the established rules of how you might tell a story. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, a lot of that I was pulling from, Yeah,
Speaker 1: my love of some of them more kind of avant
Speaker 1: gode literally stuff interesting pieces of kind of movies and things.
Speaker 1: But it was, it was, it was pulling from a
Speaker 1: lot of different kind of storytelling traditions and ending up
Speaker 1: in this this interesting place where, like you say, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a game experience where you're essentially researching the
Speaker 1: story yourself and kind of putting the pieces together. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For for people who don't know, it's like you're basically
Speaker 1: on a virtual desktop, um, and you're sorting through like
Speaker 1: a hard drive full of footage and the versatility of
Speaker 1: the game, and you know, people learning how to use
Speaker 1: like search terms, right, just like people try to use
Speaker 1: like um in open source it's called like using like
Speaker 1: Google operators. It's the same kind of the same thing. Um,
Speaker 1: But also there's like the other side of things. I
Speaker 1: think a belling Cat wrote an article about your game
Speaker 1: where they like made like a Python script to scan
Speaker 1: all of the videos for specific keywords and put them
Speaker 1: into like different folders and files. So it's like you
Speaker 1: can do the thing where you just like search it,
Speaker 1: but you could like take this to a ridiculous level.
Speaker 1: You're like breaking the game open and doing it like
Speaker 1: you're actually like investigating this and you need to be
Speaker 1: very quick. Um. So I think her story is is
Speaker 1: a lovely intro to this type of game concept. And
Speaker 1: then for Telling Lies, you kind of changed, you change
Speaker 1: some things with it. Um, you made like I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess like an expansion would be the way I
Speaker 1: would describe it for how it like it takes the
Speaker 1: same concept and pushes it further. And I think watching
Speaker 1: these things now, it is very different after being like
Speaker 1: two years on Zoom right, I'm I'm sure I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've heard this from other people as well as like
Speaker 1: you know, because because because of how Telling Lies operates,
Speaker 1: it's like a lot of it is well you open
Speaker 1: the game because you're basically cracking open and then I
Speaker 1: say hard drive. So all of it is video from
Speaker 1: like webcams and stuff. Um, so you know, watching people
Speaker 1: talking to their computer camera like this after spending years
Speaker 1: on Zoom definitely hits harder. I guess it was one
Speaker 1: of those things where so when we were first working
Speaker 1: on this and conceiving of it, which was I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe and something like that, Um, there was a leap, right,
Speaker 1: and as a storyteller you allow yourself sometimes to take
Speaker 1: that one leap that the audience will take with you.
Speaker 1: And the leap there was like these people are using
Speaker 1: video chat a lot. But I mean and as I
Speaker 1: was starting to put it together, I would start noticing
Speaker 1: people around that time doing video chat in the street
Speaker 1: on their phones, which was something I was not used
Speaker 1: to sing And I was like, oh, ship, maybe this
Speaker 1: is not too big of a leap. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think it was The Virgin or somebody ran
Speaker 1: an article that was like telling Lies is still a
Speaker 1: great game mid pandemic, it's just real hard to play
Speaker 1: now that like this Zoom thing is our lives. That
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, that was that was a big thing.
Speaker 1: I was interested in at the time, was like, what
Speaker 1: is this doing to us? What is communicating over the internet,
Speaker 1: how does that change how conversations and and things happen,
Speaker 1: And was kind of looking into some of the research there.
Speaker 1: So that, Yeah, that was wild. Was was was kind
Speaker 1: of living in that world for several years putting the
Speaker 1: game out and then spending two years on zoom Calls. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean in a few ways, I think the game
Speaker 1: has aged very well because of that, and because the
Speaker 1: way people. People are more used to interacting with the
Speaker 1: computer in that format now, so when they're you know,
Speaker 1: trying to search for these like hundreds of video files,
Speaker 1: I think they can understand it better. Um. So in
Speaker 1: some ways I think it's not It's not necessarily a
Speaker 1: bad thing. Um But yeah, let's see. So I think, well,
Speaker 1: I want to talk a bit about kind of the
Speaker 1: influences for kind of the surveillance aspect, because like her
Speaker 1: story is filmed in like a police um interrogation room
Speaker 1: for based basically basically the whole thing, whereas this pulls
Speaker 1: video footage of people like in private moments essentially. Of course,
Speaker 1: this was like after like the Snowden stuff and after
Speaker 1: all of the other kind of after the you know,
Speaker 1: surveillance became a bigger talking point. Um, but what what
Speaker 1: got you to decide you wanted to kind of revolve
Speaker 1: the game around this concept of internet surveillance. And then
Speaker 1: you know, different three letter agencies kind of fighting each
Speaker 1: other a little bit. So I think it was two things.
Speaker 1: One was in making her story and making lots of
Speaker 1: decisions somewhat intuitively kind of when it was finished and
Speaker 1: it was a big success and I looked back on it,
Speaker 1: and then kind of when a little bit of time
Speaker 1: and passed, I then had this very different relationship where
Speaker 1: I had forgotten that I was the person who had
Speaker 1: made it and so could have opinions about it. And
Speaker 1: I was really interested in how that that game established
Speaker 1: a level of intimacy with the main character that Viva players,
Speaker 1: that you're seeing being interrogated, despite the fact that it
Speaker 1: is happening through a computer desktop, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: there's none of what tradition really you know that the
Speaker 1: agency you were traditionally having a video game, which you know,
Speaker 1: conventional logic would be that's how you would establish the
Speaker 1: idea that this person is alive and that you're in
Speaker 1: contact with them. But the act of like digging into
Speaker 1: all this video footage of Eva and seeing her on
Speaker 1: screen talking essentially at you created this this interesting amount
Speaker 1: of intimacy that a lot of people responded to. So
Speaker 1: I was like, well, that's one of the things that
Speaker 1: is interesting to me to take further, because it's it's
Speaker 1: very rare that a video game creates this sensation of
Speaker 1: kind of intimacy or of getting close to or understanding people.
Speaker 1: And then it was Snowden m I think it was
Speaker 1: one of the the early reports UM from from all
Speaker 1: the various things that came out via Snowden. There was
Speaker 1: a particular UM operation in the UK, which I think
Speaker 1: was called Optic Nerve or something, and the idea there
Speaker 1: was that they were spying on everyone's Internet traffic. And
Speaker 1: I think it's a little bit easier to do that
Speaker 1: in the UK than it is elsewhere. And this one
Speaker 1: particular operation, I remember there was a PowerPoint slide that
Speaker 1: was leaked that was like their internal presentation which proved that,
Speaker 1: like in any leaked government PowerPoint will be the worst
Speaker 1: power point you've ever seen, like the clip art and
Speaker 1: just terrible nous, right um. But in this scheme, what
Speaker 1: they did, and this blew my mind. Was for a period,
Speaker 1: if I think it was two years, every single video
Speaker 1: chat that went through Yahoo in the UK was captured
Speaker 1: and recorded, and they had this issue, which I think
Speaker 1: is if you want to talk about surveillance kind of
Speaker 1: post nine eleven, the big problem with surveillance and the
Speaker 1: extent to which is now used, is like what you
Speaker 1: do with all this data? Like it's it's it's just
Speaker 1: too much. So they they were capturing all this Yahoo
Speaker 1: video chat and attempting to add the metadata and sort it,
Speaker 1: which is kind of interesting because that's kind of, to
Speaker 1: some extent kind of how something like her story worked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And the biggest issue they had, and they put up
Speaker 1: this power point and it blew my mind, was thirty
Speaker 1: of all the video chat through Yahoo at this point
Speaker 1: was sexual in nature, and they were concerned about the
Speaker 1: feelings of their operatives who were doing the tagging of
Speaker 1: all this data. So they'd put their best computer minds
Speaker 1: on it, and they'd come up with an algorithm which
Speaker 1: would detect an excessive amount of skin tone and would
Speaker 1: then kind of flag and silo those clips. And I
Speaker 1: just remember reading this and being like, what about the
Speaker 1: feelings of the people whose skin tone you're capturing, right,
Speaker 1: Like you weren't you weren't stopping to think like why
Speaker 1: are we doing this? Shouldn't we be doing this? You're
Speaker 1: you're you're solving for the problem of like how do
Speaker 1: we stop our agents seeing all this newnity? And I
Speaker 1: think there was there was a bunch of other anecdotes
Speaker 1: right in the snowed and stuff of people alongside him,
Speaker 1: like you know, looking through people's webcom data and stuff
Speaker 1: and in a in a voyeuristic way, and just this
Speaker 1: constant invasion of people's rights. So I think that it
Speaker 1: was one of those things where I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is this is like new, like you know, we
Speaker 1: now have you know you you you worry about certain
Speaker 1: levels of like your privacy being invaded, and you would
Speaker 1: certainly worry if someone was letting themselves into your house
Speaker 1: at night. But we suddenly found ourselves in this position
Speaker 1: where we have these phones that we put by our
Speaker 1: bedside at night, that have cameras and microphones that are
Speaker 1: pretty much just running right and capturing, and just the
Speaker 1: extent to which now technology has transformed surveillance, and that
Speaker 1: that was really interesting to me because I um and
Speaker 1: a big thing I wanted to do. You know, I've
Speaker 1: made her story. And like, growing up, I loved cop shows,
Speaker 1: and I particularly loved the good ones, like like Homicide,
Speaker 1: Life on the Street in the US. There was a
Speaker 1: show in the UK called Cracker Um and these were like,
Speaker 1: you know, somewhat nuanced in how they with policing, but
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're still you know, in this position
Speaker 1: now where we're starting to ask deeper questions about whether
Speaker 1: we should watch this many cops shows. Yeah, when they're
Speaker 1: like the main thing on all television all the time. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And that would be like when I made her story,
Speaker 1: Partly I pitched the bigger publishers like we should do
Speaker 1: the equivalent of a cop show like that, we should
Speaker 1: do crime fictional cop show, video game. And they would
Speaker 1: always be like nah, And I would say, well, look,
Speaker 1: this is like the evergreen. If you're a book publisher,
Speaker 1: you have a crime show, you have a crime book.
Speaker 1: You know, if you doing movies, you're going to have
Speaker 1: some movies with this genres. It works. And they would
Speaker 1: always kind of push against that. So when I made
Speaker 1: her story, that was in fact, like the arc of
Speaker 1: of playing her story to some extent mirrors my ark
Speaker 1: in that Like at the top of it, I was like,
Speaker 1: I want to make an interesting detective game, and I
Speaker 1: want to deconstruct how detective stories work. And I then
Speaker 1: started to do a bunch of research whereas digging into, well,
Speaker 1: how do actual criminal investigations work, how does one interrogate
Speaker 1: the suspect doing all that stuff? And then I started
Speaker 1: to pull up what at the time, like there was
Speaker 1: a bit it was slightly ahead of like the true
Speaker 1: crime explosion, but there was starting to be stuff on
Speaker 1: YouTube and in various places where footage from real investigations
Speaker 1: was online, and it was starting to get a bit
Speaker 1: weird and interesting, and that people were kind of vicariously
Speaker 1: watching these things. And yeah, that raised also of questions
Speaker 1: they were trying to piece together their own kind of
Speaker 1: conclusions based on these leaked or sometimes officially released interview segments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and there was one in particularly got really into
Speaker 1: the Jodi Arias case. It's just like a and and
Speaker 1: the way the media spun that story and just really
Speaker 1: dug into oh, there's like sex and murder and Mormons,
Speaker 1: and there's this beautiful blonde woman who now when she
Speaker 1: goes to court, has gone brunette, and they were endlessly
Speaker 1: talking about on cable news like her parents and setting
Speaker 1: her up as this kind of them fatal kind of
Speaker 1: ice maiden. On the slip side of this, I think
Speaker 1: there's like the thing with them the Making the Murderer documentary,
Speaker 1: which I think I have some issues with how they
Speaker 1: handle the main guy, but particularly how they showed the
Speaker 1: totally immoral interrogation tactics used on used on Brandon the
Speaker 1: kid Um, and that really cracked that whole thing open,
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, the way the police are interrogating miners
Speaker 1: without it was the lawyers is shocking, and that was
Speaker 1: that was that was part of this transition for me.
Speaker 1: Was was was going into her story with like the
Speaker 1: hero of this is the detective. It's Andre Brower and
Speaker 1: homicide life in the street. It's the genius detective that's
Speaker 1: going to come in there and crack this case. And
Speaker 1: the more I dug into in cases like Jody's where
Speaker 1: um there word various um aspects to that case. She
Speaker 1: definitely did murder her lover, but there are lots of
Speaker 1: questions around whether the relationship itself was particularly healthy. Um
Speaker 1: and by the end of it, like all of my
Speaker 1: sympathy was with Jody, not with the interrogator who you
Speaker 1: watch it and you realize that, like, the reason this
Speaker 1: person is in this situation is because their life has
Speaker 1: gone very badly, and the reason for that is everything
Speaker 1: that's happened in their life prior to this, and they've
Speaker 1: never spoken to anyone about any of this stuff. And
Speaker 1: suddenly they're in this room with the homicide detective who's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can talk to me. I'm the first person that's
Speaker 1: going to sit and listen to you, and all these
Speaker 1: tricks that they use to just get people talking, and
Speaker 1: it becomes very intimate and becomes kind of like therapy session.
Speaker 1: But by the end of it so so for me,
Speaker 1: like the hook of her story is, oh, you get
Speaker 1: to solver murder, but really, by the end of it,
Speaker 1: it's like a character portna. You should entirely be with
Speaker 1: her that is less about seeing justice done right. So
Speaker 1: I even but even coming away from that, I was like,
Speaker 1: I still feel slightly uncomfortable with with kind of having
Speaker 1: made this thing that is reveling in how much fun
Speaker 1: it is to be involved in the police work or whatever.
Speaker 1: And so I was definitely thinking about the snows and stuff,
Speaker 1: thinking about that aspect and the extent to which technology
Speaker 1: has just so empowered policing in general to the point
Speaker 1: where it's there's this great um Like one of the
Speaker 1: core themes that I wanted to dig into and telling
Speaker 1: lies was that when you see people try and defend
Speaker 1: this stuff and defend policing in general, is they try
Speaker 1: and set it up so that you basically have They
Speaker 1: talk in terms of families and very close relationships, so
Speaker 1: they're kind of like, well, the government is your parent,
Speaker 1: and they're trying to look after you. And you understand
Speaker 1: as a parent, you're going to sometimes invade the privacy
Speaker 1: of your children or sometimes you're going to inhibit their
Speaker 1: freedoms because you're trying to protect them. And we all
Speaker 1: understand that, and that's part of being human, and that's
Speaker 1: all that's happening here with government, right We're trying to
Speaker 1: protect you from the big bad, the evil sort of
Speaker 1: like there's some tweet from the YPD the other day
Speaker 1: that was like you'll be come, You'll come running when
Speaker 1: evil is on your doorstep. Someone was saying something and
Speaker 1: and and for me, once you you take that understanding
Speaker 1: of how people relate directly to which they how families work.
Speaker 1: The second you scale it to the size of government,
Speaker 1: it breaks like that you cannot extend that metaphor. And
Speaker 1: then when you add in tech, um, you know, the
Speaker 1: extent to which uh, you know, privacy has been degraded
Speaker 1: of freedoms. Um, you know, when you start just blanket
Speaker 1: looking for crime, right, you start creating all the systemic
Speaker 1: issues that we have just suddenly become amplified. Um. So
Speaker 1: that that to me was kind of interesting. Um, well,
Speaker 1: you know, here is like a means to explore that.
Speaker 1: And I like one of the things that was interesting
Speaker 1: to me about her story that in retrospect was the
Speaker 1: extent to which it was about watching video, which seems
Speaker 1: like a dumb thing to say, but like the choice
Speaker 1: to use real video kind of inspired by watching all
Speaker 1: these interrogation piece of footage from Jodi and people. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it was was kind of made Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense, and I just kind of got on
Speaker 1: with it. But then looking back, I was like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because people talk about this game as being
Speaker 1: an interactive movie, but it's nothing like a movie. No no,
Speaker 1: and it's not how movies work. It just happens that
Speaker 1: it uses a video camera. Only similarity is that it
Speaker 1: has live action footage that yeah, So I was like,
Speaker 1: I really want to go even further into that texture.
Speaker 1: And so I was just thinking about and when I
Speaker 1: was starting to do my research, like the idea of
Speaker 1: surveillance and and the commonalities between like classic old school surveillance,
Speaker 1: I you know, someone sat in a car some binoculars
Speaker 1: watching someone and and modern surveillance. The commonalities that it's
Speaker 1: quite boring, right, there's just a lot of sitting and
Speaker 1: watching nothing. Yeah, right. And but out of that, and
Speaker 1: when you kind of read the first hand accounts of
Speaker 1: the people doing the surveillance or some of the depictions
Speaker 1: of this media, like there's a level of intimacy that
Speaker 1: you get with the person you're surveilling right where you know,
Speaker 1: if you're just sat watching them and you schef someone's life,
Speaker 1: if you're listening to a bug in someone's kitchen and
Speaker 1: just hearing all the just everyday ship in their lives,
Speaker 1: or if you are you know, watching them through some
Speaker 1: kind of technology, Um, you're just spending all this time
Speaker 1: with them, and that's like a that's like a very
Speaker 1: non cinematic thing. It's just like this that menu shy
Speaker 1: and the time stretching out of just being present with somebody.
Speaker 1: And that was kind of interesting to me of just
Speaker 1: kind of putting you in that headspace and kind of
Speaker 1: thinking about what that means. I think that totally gets
Speaker 1: through because of the way you break up the conversations
Speaker 1: and telling lies. You have to sit and watch these
Speaker 1: characters as they're just doing nothing for sometimes like like
Speaker 1: over five minutes. They're just like sitting there, um, and
Speaker 1: you do get like very intimate with these characters, but
Speaker 1: it almost like in a very like creepy way where
Speaker 1: you like you feel like I shouldn't be here, which
Speaker 1: is kind of the general feeling of telling us really
Speaker 1: interesting because I like some people would have a very
Speaker 1: and and this was you know, completely again like trying
Speaker 1: to process how I felt watching the like the videos
Speaker 1: of all the various police interrogations and stuff, was like,
Speaker 1: this is fascinating because there's human beings were fascinated by
Speaker 1: other human beings, and here is this extremely interesting dramatic
Speaker 1: stuff where people are just really spilling their lives out.
Speaker 1: It's why true crime blew up, right, But then you
Speaker 1: have all these moral questions around it. And obviously with
Speaker 1: telling lies, it's inspired by lots of real things, but
Speaker 1: it's fake and you're watching actors act this stuff. But
Speaker 1: still some people would have this real visceral reaction of
Speaker 1: like I shouldn't be watching some of this stuff, and
Speaker 1: I'd be like, I mean, you you can. It's like
Speaker 1: that was that was where it became really not cinematic
Speaker 1: to me, was like, you know, if you're watching a
Speaker 1: you know, a noir film or you know, a thriller
Speaker 1: and you have you know, or even like the The
Speaker 1: thing for the domestic stuff for me was you know,
Speaker 1: you could watch and a sitcom, watching any a normal
Speaker 1: sitcom and the husband and wife are sat in bed chatting.
Speaker 1: At no point do you feel like I shouldn't be
Speaker 1: here because you're in the kind of classic Hollywood invisible
Speaker 1: camera set up. You're this, you know, you have permission
Speaker 1: to be there as the invisible camera spectator, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel as weird as it would if you're hiding
Speaker 1: in the closet of this comple's bedroom. Um So with
Speaker 1: the setup I'm telling lies, you immediately feel like, oh,
Speaker 1: like this I am in this position that I shouldn't be,
Speaker 1: And so suddenly all those more domestic moments become charged
Speaker 1: with like a very different vibe. Yeah, because you're watching
Speaker 1: them and you're you're not invited, like right, you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're sitting looking at this ns A hard drive and
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, I'm not supposed to be watching this
Speaker 1: like this, this, this isn't They never invited me into
Speaker 1: this conversation. Telling Lies very much feels like a much
Speaker 1: more mature game than her story. Not in terms of
Speaker 1: like has like more mature content, but like in terms
Speaker 1: of like this concept growing up and like evolving and
Speaker 1: gaining more depth. Um, particularly because you know, not only
Speaker 1: just because it has way more characters, but because you know,
Speaker 1: you get to all of your kind of games deal
Speaker 1: with some degree of like characters lying to you and
Speaker 1: like just doing like straight line to your face. That's
Speaker 1: kind of a that's my read on a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of your games. Um, I mean, you're the
Speaker 1: game is called Telling Lies, so so you definitely see
Speaker 1: like elements of of you know, all of these trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what is true and what is not.
Speaker 1: I think it is interesting looking at like how easier
Speaker 1: it is to lie via these technological platforms. UM, I
Speaker 1: don't know to just like you feel like telling the
Speaker 1: truth is just so much more work and you may
Speaker 1: as well just get through this conversation by doing a
Speaker 1: few white lives, which is that inspiral out of control. Um.
Speaker 1: When you combine this with you know, law enforcement infiltration
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff, he gets it gets
Speaker 1: very complicated very quickly. Um. One thing that I think
Speaker 1: you guys handled very well in Telling Lies was kind
Speaker 1: of the activism side of things. So like when when
Speaker 1: I play this game, like almost immediately after coming back
Speaker 1: from the stop lining three protests, um, and like and
Speaker 1: and like in Earth First Gathering, you know, everyone there
Speaker 1: is always very people try to be aware of surveillance
Speaker 1: to be like, okay, you know, you don't talk about
Speaker 1: certain things if there's phones nearby and stuff. So so
Speaker 1: that whole side of things was very interesting to like
Speaker 1: play this game right afterwards because you have to see
Speaker 1: like the other side of things, being like, okay, if
Speaker 1: the the FBI is infiltrating this group, here's you know,
Speaker 1: one of the ways that they do it. And like
Speaker 1: that from my perspective being you know, in activism spaces
Speaker 1: for a while not just like environmental ones, but you
Speaker 1: know other ones like here in Portland. Um, you had
Speaker 1: you handled this topic very accurately. Um, where what kind
Speaker 1: of stuff did you pull from to kind of create
Speaker 1: these like these you know environments and interactions between people.
Speaker 1: Because I'm not sure if you have any experience yourself
Speaker 1: and stuff like this or if you've got people onto
Speaker 1: like like you talk to people who are more experienced activists.
Speaker 1: What was kind of your inspiration for like, you know,
Speaker 1: the opposite side of things, not on the law enforcement.
Speaker 1: So that was that was like one of the big
Speaker 1: initial jumping off points. So uh like in terms of
Speaker 1: the kind of real life inspirations, Like the seed of
Speaker 1: this whole thing was to remember when this was it
Speaker 1: was I'm gonna say two thou could be completely wrong here,
Speaker 1: but it was The Guardian in the UK I think
Speaker 1: broke the story. But it was and we've recently had
Speaker 1: some good progress in this this area, but broke the
Speaker 1: story of this UK spy Cops operation, which was a
Speaker 1: specific unit within the London Police whose job was to
Speaker 1: infiltrate groups, to surveil them from the inside. And um,
Speaker 1: it was horrific and they were like a couple of
Speaker 1: things about it that were horrific. One of them was
Speaker 1: that like, essentially their modus operandi was to find vulnerable
Speaker 1: young women on the periphery of groups, target them romantically,
Speaker 1: and then they would be the collateral to get, you know,
Speaker 1: to have people then more solidly enter into these groups.
Speaker 1: And then they had like a whole you know, stepped
Speaker 1: plan of like once you're in, how you kind of
Speaker 1: would would destabilized steer these groups from within UM. And
Speaker 1: the the thing that really made this even worse UM
Speaker 1: was the fact that most of the groups, I think
Speaker 1: maybe all of the groups targeted with this particular unit
Speaker 1: were green activists. There's this incredible, incredible, like you couldn't
Speaker 1: make this stuff up. But there's a famous libel case
Speaker 1: where McDonald's was suing these these two activists in the
Speaker 1: UK right because they were putting up flyers exposing some
Speaker 1: of the practices of McDonald's and the group that they
Speaker 1: were members of, which I think at this point was
Speaker 1: called Green Piece, but it was different to the kind
Speaker 1: of more famous Green Piece in London. Prior to them
Speaker 1: doing this big kind of mcd arnold's thing, UM was
Speaker 1: losing members and it got to a point where there
Speaker 1: were so few people in this group that it would
Speaker 1: have shut down had it not been for the fact
Speaker 1: that there were a large number of undercover cops in
Speaker 1: this group. So you know, if you imagine at some
Speaker 1: point there were actually more undercover cops and private security
Speaker 1: people undercover in this group that actual activists, which has
Speaker 1: enabled the group to continue. And in fact, the original
Speaker 1: flyer that they put out was written I forget the
Speaker 1: guy's name now by one of these undercover cops. He
Speaker 1: wrote the copy for this flyer that went out and
Speaker 1: then was you know, saw this these people dragged up
Speaker 1: in court and was this huge you know, McDonald's won
Speaker 1: the case, but in terms of pr it was hugely
Speaker 1: damaging to them. But yeah, that that for me was
Speaker 1: the thing that seemed even more a point because because
Speaker 1: here you had this story of the state so actioning
Speaker 1: the you know, one of the most terrible abuses. Like essentially,
Speaker 1: you know, what was happening was pretty easy to to
Speaker 1: kind of call it rape, right. There was women in
Speaker 1: sexual relationships with people and thinking it was consensual, but
Speaker 1: not realizing that they this was you know, what they
Speaker 1: were getting into was not what they thought it was,
Speaker 1: and so this was just so appalling and like from
Speaker 1: a just to kind of base emotional level, just it
Speaker 1: was so hard for me to imagine the pain of
Speaker 1: Um and these women when relationships with these undercover officers
Speaker 1: for years and then and and and part of the
Speaker 1: modus operanda was when you were done, you had to
Speaker 1: exit and disappear. And they had this whole plan where
Speaker 1: the cops would claim that they were being followed and
Speaker 1: that they were worried, and then they would disappear. And
Speaker 1: then they would cool from some European country and say
Speaker 1: that they've kind of fled the country because they were
Speaker 1: worried that the cops were onto them, and then they
Speaker 1: would slowly kind of disappear and this you know, some
Speaker 1: of these were kind of pre modern Internet, so it
Speaker 1: was easier for someone to kind of disappear. But this
Speaker 1: stuff totally happened in the Green Scare in the States,
Speaker 1: in you know, around this was around this was My
Speaker 1: big question was was this you know, some of these
Speaker 1: cases were kind of the original inspiration. And when I
Speaker 1: started thinking about trying to tell a story inspired by
Speaker 1: their originally it starts off and and and there's still
Speaker 1: in based in the UK and based on these things,
Speaker 1: and there was a particular, ah, a particular flavor to
Speaker 1: it where the cops doing this work it was part
Speaker 1: of the Matt Police, who were you know, that's the
Speaker 1: more kind of gang story, Like there's there's a real
Speaker 1: reputation that the Matt Police have. So these cops that
Speaker 1: were chosen for this work were the ones that were
Speaker 1: a bit more kind of Marcho and edge. Um, and
Speaker 1: there were there was I mean, there was so much
Speaker 1: stuff to it was horrific, Like they would only pick
Speaker 1: cops that were married, um because they felt that that
Speaker 1: h gave them some level of ability to be sleeping
Speaker 1: with these activists and not lose themselves in it. Um.
Speaker 1: But obviously the wives didn't know what was sending um.
Speaker 1: And and there's just there's so many layers of this
Speaker 1: that I just thought was it was awful, and coming
Speaker 1: off the first story, I was like, well, I would
Speaker 1: love to tell an undercover cops story in which we
Speaker 1: acknowledged that the undercover cop is bad. They aren't, like,
Speaker 1: you know, because because it's such a classic trope, is
Speaker 1: the undercover cops story. Because you get to have your
Speaker 1: cake and eat it, you get to see someone on
Speaker 1: both sides the law you get, you get all the
Speaker 1: tension and thrills of it. But usually, you know, whatever,
Speaker 1: even if the if the movie or the story or
Speaker 1: whatever has a bitter sweet ending, the protagonists always the
Speaker 1: undercover cop. And ultimately, because they're the protagonist, they're the
Speaker 1: one that your heart goes to, right. And the secondary characters,
Speaker 1: whether that's like the wife in Donnie Brasco or Good
Speaker 1: Fellows or something, you know, they basically serve as a
Speaker 1: foil to the main character. So I was like, well,
Speaker 1: can we tell a story where, um, we we treat
Speaker 1: the wife and the activist who's being targeted and the
Speaker 1: other people on the periphery of this guys think more
Speaker 1: about their perspective on this world, and let's acknowledge from
Speaker 1: our perspective that this is wrong. Everything that's happening is
Speaker 1: wrong and it's not justified. And then let's just see
Speaker 1: what the impact is on people. UM. So, once we
Speaker 1: started developing it, and when I was speaking to Anna
Speaker 1: partner about doing it, um, I felt like, oh, we
Speaker 1: should move this to the States, um to make it
Speaker 1: feel certainly as well, because the larger audiences American to
Speaker 1: to kind of reiterate and make it feel kind of
Speaker 1: more identifiable and have it be less quaint and British. Um.
Speaker 1: So my number one question from day one was like, well,
Speaker 1: does this ship happen in the States, and as such,
Speaker 1: does it happen in the same way. And so we
Speaker 1: brought on a researcher who then started pulling stuff up
Speaker 1: and and the big thing for me was replacing the
Speaker 1: undercover group the met with the FBI, and and then
Speaker 1: I that became fascinating to me because then I started
Speaker 1: digging into the FBI and understanding their history and everything
Speaker 1: that's wrong there. But yeah, immediately I start seeing all
Speaker 1: these great examples of of yeah, this explicit infiltration of
Speaker 1: green groups um, some pretty horrific cases of entrapment um,
Speaker 1: where you know, people infiltrate these groups and then encourage
Speaker 1: them to do more extreme and violent things on the record.
Speaker 1: It's the point where you're listening to like recorded FBI
Speaker 1: stuff and and you can hear the group being like
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about that, Like that doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a great idea, dude, And the the FBI person is
Speaker 1: there going like, what, I don't know, I really do
Speaker 1: think we should blow this bridge up. Guys, and it's
Speaker 1: so obvious like when you listen to which is why
Speaker 1: a lot of these cases have ultimately been thrown out.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was it was It was I guess
Speaker 1: for the project, reassuring to see that all this stuff
Speaker 1: was happening over here. Yeah. I mean, and the FBI,
Speaker 1: like the specific FBI agent that we kind of follow
Speaker 1: definitely feels very American and feels very real. Um. I
Speaker 1: really like the actor that you got to play him. Um,
Speaker 1: he definitely feels like a lot of kind of the
Speaker 1: law enforcement dudes who kind of handle this side of things. Um.
Speaker 1: That was that was That was definitely that was like
Speaker 1: an FBI. He became like the fbiis of it became
Speaker 1: very important to it. And it was interesting the way
Speaker 1: that the FBI they had this brand, which is partly
Speaker 1: reinforced by the media, Like they had the great idea
Speaker 1: back in like forties or fifties to themselves fund and
Speaker 1: support cop shows. So this whole idea we have through
Speaker 1: the X Files, through pretty much every serial killer media whatever.
Speaker 1: The idea of the FBI is being like the smartest
Speaker 1: and the best, like that's put out by them. But
Speaker 1: it's really interesting to see they believe that like they
Speaker 1: are beyond approach and like they have higher standards for like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you want to join the FBI, there
Speaker 1: is in theory this kind of moral moral check that
Speaker 1: you have to pass. But into abi age and flipping
Speaker 1: backwards and shooting somebody when his gun falls out of
Speaker 1: his pants at a clip. Well, then you read about
Speaker 1: it and you're like, actually the experience, the lived experience,
Speaker 1: and we were it was it was so bizarre because
Speaker 1: I was like, I really want to understand what it's
Speaker 1: like to be an FBI wife, and um let's find
Speaker 1: let's reach out and the research I've done. Some of
Speaker 1: the stuff we pulled up, I was like, oh it
Speaker 1: it does sound pretty bad. Like there's a requirement if
Speaker 1: you're an FBI agent you have to move every three
Speaker 1: years or something. So if you're the wife to an
Speaker 1: FBI agent, you essentially move every three years, and so
Speaker 1: you never get a chance to build your own career
Speaker 1: or to make roots. And so you're generally and the
Speaker 1: wage is not great, which is why they're very vulnerable
Speaker 1: to corruption. Really, um, so you're generally living. There's usually
Speaker 1: kind of areas where all the FBI families live, so
Speaker 1: it's this very insular world, and you you start to
Speaker 1: see where some of these wives have come out and
Speaker 1: spoken about it. They're like, it's really shitty because husbands
Speaker 1: who believe themselves to be like you know, March of
Speaker 1: superheroes get to disappear for three days at a time
Speaker 1: and we can never ask where they are or what
Speaker 1: they're doing. And there's this of internal code which you
Speaker 1: seen a lot of law enforcement right where they will
Speaker 1: cover for each other and protect each other. Um. And
Speaker 1: you suddenly start to see that, like, ah, you know this,
Speaker 1: this is not like And in fact, I remember reading
Speaker 1: sort of the guy who inspired like Silenced the Lambs.
Speaker 1: The TV show mind Hunter was based on him in
Speaker 1: his book. Um, this guy who was one of the
Speaker 1: early kind of serial killer profiling people within the FBI.
Speaker 1: You read his book, it's a terrible book. When I
Speaker 1: heard that Fincher was adapting us like, wow, good luck,
Speaker 1: m But it's incredible the lack of self awareness he has. Um,
Speaker 1: this guy is so sexist and so bad. Every time
Speaker 1: he introduces a woman, it starts by from the legs up,
Speaker 1: like he's describing and Um. At the very end of
Speaker 1: the book, he reveals that his wife leaves him, and
Speaker 1: he kind of writes as if this is a huge surprise,
Speaker 1: and you're like, yeah, he's calling u. Chapter one and
Speaker 1: he has the best buddy, So like the guy who's
Speaker 1: who's the kind of number two in mind Hunter on TV,
Speaker 1: there's like a real life version of him. And halfway
Speaker 1: through the book, his wife hires an assassin to kind
Speaker 1: of hitman to come in and kill him, and the
Speaker 1: guy just narrowly avoids it. And the guy writing the
Speaker 1: book is like what an evil woman like, oh my
Speaker 1: poor friend, And you're like, well, hang on a minute,
Speaker 1: what did your what was your friend? Like? Yeah, what
Speaker 1: was going on? Yeah, there's there's there's probably something going
Speaker 1: on there. So yeah, it was Yeah, that that sense
Speaker 1: that which I think for me, expanded beautifully to the
Speaker 1: bigger picture of like that character kind of believing that
Speaker 1: he's the good guy absolutely, you know, he's the sheriff
Speaker 1: in the Western. He's coming in and he's fixing problems
Speaker 1: and he's saving the world. But and then apart and
Speaker 1: and and his inability, like it's such a brittle worldview.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, guys, he he is very once, yeah, once
Speaker 1: he's exposed to thinking that the world is maybe different.
Speaker 1: It just totally breaks him. Yeah. His specific arc I
Speaker 1: think is extremely interesting. Um, but I don't want to
Speaker 1: spoil it because I think it's it's it's too it's
Speaker 1: too shocking. Once you get to the final piece of
Speaker 1: his story, you're like, oh wow, um, I think that
Speaker 1: was laid out in a really beautiful way. But it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not like shocking away like oh this
Speaker 1: this like doesn't make sense. It's like, oh no, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see that, I can see why he's doing this,
Speaker 1: but it's still it's like you kind of slowly watched
Speaker 1: this guy get broken down piece by piece. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: because he starts he's very much like the superhero FBI agent.
Speaker 1: He's like yeah, ha ha, I'm gonna I'm gonna stop
Speaker 1: these terrorists or whatever, and then he just like yeah,
Speaker 1: watching him progress throughout the story and you can see
Speaker 1: like how pathetic he is. Sometimes there's a great uh
Speaker 1: one of the UK spy cops. Um, I forget his name.
Speaker 1: If we're doing this three years ago and I've had
Speaker 1: all these names in my head, but he um uh
Speaker 1: he was assigned and he was he infiltrated this green
Speaker 1: group somewhere in the UK for a couple of years
Speaker 1: had this relationship with this girl. Um was participating and facilitating.
Speaker 1: The one detail that I loved and tried to make
Speaker 1: sure he was accurate was all these cops would have
Speaker 1: a van or they would have like a big truck
Speaker 1: in the UK because they realized that, like in these
Speaker 1: smaller groups like being the transportation was like your superpower.
Speaker 1: So like if you are someone was like, oh, I'll
Speaker 1: drive everyone to the thing, I'll get us all that
Speaker 1: because I have this big van. UM, that was the
Speaker 1: easiest way to just kind of make yourself useful. Um.
Speaker 1: But this guy is doing all that. At some point, UM,
Speaker 1: they decided to pull him and they pull him out.
Speaker 1: He returns to his wife and his normal life back
Speaker 1: in London. Um. But he can't go back to his
Speaker 1: normal life, and so he starts and he's done all
Speaker 1: the stuff of disappearing, but he just starts getting up
Speaker 1: and driving and maybe he's in the north of England somewhere,
Speaker 1: just just shows back up and he's like, oh, I'm back, guys,
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, ship, what happened? I thought you
Speaker 1: had to like disappear because people are after you, and
Speaker 1: he's like, no, it's all right, ah and just goes
Speaker 1: back to living as an activist. UM. And at some
Speaker 1: point one of his superiors notices that the mileage on
Speaker 1: his police paid vehicle is huge, and they're like, why
Speaker 1: is this guy doing so much? My legion is because
Speaker 1: he's driving all the way back and continuing to live
Speaker 1: this life and inhabit this character that he's set up. UM.
Speaker 1: And at some point I think he gets found out
Speaker 1: and it all goes horribly wrong because he no longer
Speaker 1: has like the fake idea and stuff that they gave him.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean that, and it's like that stuff
Speaker 1: is interesting. But then you it was always important to
Speaker 1: never be overly sympathetic. And when you see them struggling,
Speaker 1: there is returns of life. There is certain points where
Speaker 1: you see the FBI agents struggling because of how like
Speaker 1: smug he is. You're like, yes, he's struggling, and you
Speaker 1: like get excited when he gets like when he gets
Speaker 1: like reprimanded or he you know, people are like mad
Speaker 1: at him for various reasons, and it is very interesting
Speaker 1: how you like how sympathies get pulled in certain directions
Speaker 1: because like, by the end of the game, you definitely
Speaker 1: have a much fuller perspective on who this guy is
Speaker 1: and how his kind of psyche works, because he is
Speaker 1: really in a lot of ways like kind of pathetic
Speaker 1: as like a person. Um And he like needs to
Speaker 1: like hype himself up for himself, to like make himself
Speaker 1: feel like he's special. Then when that gets broken down,
Speaker 1: he just completely collapses. I guess one of the last
Speaker 1: things I want to talk about is like, throughout all
Speaker 1: your games, you have kind of a through line of
Speaker 1: like fairy tales. You kind of you bring in fairy
Speaker 1: tale concepts into all of these games. Um And. I
Speaker 1: like how a lot of your games are very open
Speaker 1: ended in some ways. I think of her story being
Speaker 1: much more open ended than than telling lies in some ways.
Speaker 1: Um And, I really like that you kind of you
Speaker 1: can't like look up, like what is the ending of
Speaker 1: this game. It's like no, like you have to piece
Speaker 1: it together in your own brain like that, and whatever
Speaker 1: you think the story is, that's what it is for you.
Speaker 1: There's no like definitive ending, especially like especially for her story.
Speaker 1: Um And how this combines with fairy tales, I think
Speaker 1: it's it's a really interesting way to like include like
Speaker 1: mythology into these more modern stories. What's kind of your
Speaker 1: pot process behind you know, kind of kind of including
Speaker 1: mythology and fairy tales into these more like modern stories
Speaker 1: of like you know, people interacting with like government, law enforcement,
Speaker 1: and then just you know, breaking down their own psyches
Speaker 1: under these heightened situations. Yeah, I mean I think it.
Speaker 1: I think it came initially with her story of yeah,
Speaker 1: thinking about that, the kind of meta storytelling nous of
Speaker 1: these things, right, of the extent to which now experiments
Speaker 1: and like how we tell stories, um, and but a
Speaker 1: lot of times, like the myths and the the kind
Speaker 1: of classic stories that people go to those right to
Speaker 1: ryan understand the bigger questions or certainly like, um, I
Speaker 1: guess partly came out of Ah, the start of first story,
Speaker 1: I had like two youngest kids, and you're so you're
Speaker 1: reading them all the classic stories, and you realize the
Speaker 1: extent to it, these are just encoding our society's values. Right.
Speaker 1: But I had this incredible book that was that my
Speaker 1: parents got for me, and I tracked down and made
Speaker 1: sure we still had when I had my kids. That
Speaker 1: was called it was like folk Tales of the People's
Speaker 1: of the Soviet Republic from like the early eighties, and
Speaker 1: it was collected like a lot of people. I think
Speaker 1: it was Ukrainian folk tales and they were amazing because
Speaker 1: they were so dark. Like the message of each of
Speaker 1: these stories was trust nobody. The rich will always win,
Speaker 1: you will undet dead and unhappy, right, And each story
Speaker 1: would start with the poor peasant his brother gets rich,
Speaker 1: he asks for help. The brother like is horrible. Like
Speaker 1: this is one story where this brother who's like, oh,
Speaker 1: if you want some grain because you're starving, and then
Speaker 1: gouge out your own eye and I'll give you some grain.
Speaker 1: And then it comes back from are grain later and
Speaker 1: he's like, gauge out your other eye. Now, chop off
Speaker 1: your hand. And it's like they're so dark, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: but this is reflecting what it was like to live
Speaker 1: in that world and grew up and you're preparing people
Speaker 1: for the realities. So um, you know, I think that
Speaker 1: to me was really interesting and and her story tells
Speaker 1: this story that kind of to some extent, grows out
Speaker 1: of this childhood and then we're telling lies. Definitely, it
Speaker 1: was part of this idea of of yeah, how Logan's
Speaker 1: character David sees the world and relates to his part
Speaker 1: in it, and like his utter inability to realize that
Speaker 1: he's the bad guy in the story right and thinks
Speaker 1: he's the good guy. Um, And and that was like
Speaker 1: that was partly the key to breaking his character, I
Speaker 1: think was his daughter. So he has this character who's
Speaker 1: the six seven year old daughter, and that's like, you know,
Speaker 1: he lets down and does horrible things to a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of people. Um, but the thing he's not going
Speaker 1: to be able to get over is knowing that he's
Speaker 1: laid his daughter down, right, knowing that at some point
Speaker 1: she will grow up and be an adult woman who
Speaker 1: if she learns about what her father has done, we'll
Speaker 1: we'll think less of it and you know, we'll realize
Speaker 1: that he's the bad guy in the fairy tale whatever.
Speaker 1: So um, that was like just interesting to me to
Speaker 1: set him in that moment and have him reading those
Speaker 1: stories and see see his relationship with his daughter, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that, Yeah, he end up just relating
Speaker 1: those things back to what are these these kind of
Speaker 1: base values and so much of those folk tales is
Speaker 1: preparing you for the fact that people are going to
Speaker 1: lie to you and trick you and you know all
Speaker 1: those kind of aspects. Yeah, well a lot of them
Speaker 1: do deal with, like, you know, failures of trusting people
Speaker 1: and you know, getting getting let down and being misled.
Speaker 1: A lot a lot of those do kind of follow
Speaker 1: on these same same kind of rough templates. UM. Let's see,
Speaker 1: is there anything you're working on now that you wanna
Speaker 1: that you wanna plug? Um? And of course you know
Speaker 1: people should pick up Telling Lies her story. UM. I
Speaker 1: have them on Steam. I think they are best suited
Speaker 1: to be playing on PC, but you can get them
Speaker 1: on console. We can get them on iOS. But in
Speaker 1: any anything anything upcoming? Yeah, we're working on currently. This
Speaker 1: project is called Immortality UM, which is very ambitious. Uh.
Speaker 1: It will be out next year. It deals with the
Speaker 1: story of an actress who only ever made three movies
Speaker 1: the latter half the twentieth century UM, and then disappeared.
Speaker 1: And we have recovered footage from these three movies. UM.
Speaker 1: It's been interesting because telling Lies, Like, I've always been
Speaker 1: someone that when I think about the kinds of stories
Speaker 1: I want to tell, I've always thought that I'm not
Speaker 1: a capital P politics person, right, I tend to be
Speaker 1: interested in how people relate to each other and some
Speaker 1: of the kind of smaller politics. Um and once I
Speaker 1: got to telling lies, it was like, oh, actually, like
Speaker 1: there is some capital P politics want to present tied
Speaker 1: to all this, and so dug into that was like, well,
Speaker 1: so I want to do right by this. Right, So
Speaker 1: we did involve speaking to lots of people, did involve
Speaker 1: bringing in all the research and everything. Um. So coming
Speaker 1: away from telling lies, and as I mean, it was
Speaker 1: making the game was insane because it was during Trump, right,
Speaker 1: Trump happens, and I remember going into it thing like,
Speaker 1: we're making this story about the FBI being bad. That's
Speaker 1: a pretty reasonable endpoint. And then once we hit Trump,
Speaker 1: you had all that stuff of like the good FBI
Speaker 1: agents and theory or THEBI might be the people that
Speaker 1: bring Trump down, and suddenly they it was leaning into
Speaker 1: the myth of the FBI and I was looked down
Speaker 1: it and just everything getting worse, and it was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is like so intense to be making something and
Speaker 1: speaking to some of these issues whilst this is all happening. Um. So,
Speaker 1: finishing that, I was like, well, okay, for the next project,
Speaker 1: we are definitely going away from talking about real life
Speaker 1: issues and capital P politics, and then just accidentally it's
Speaker 1: become because we're talking about an actress in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century and what it means to make movies, and ah,
Speaker 1: digging into that suddenly becomes about a whole other bunch
Speaker 1: of systemic issues. So yeah, not not managed to avoid
Speaker 1: the politics again, but it's I've been a really really
Speaker 1: interesting project. I think. I think once you crack that
Speaker 1: egg open of realizing that politics are kind of intrinsic
Speaker 1: to every story we tell, it's hard to hand. It's
Speaker 1: hard to kind of put that back in the box
Speaker 1: because once you're realized you can use politics in a
Speaker 1: very interesting and complex storytelling way that still doesn't alienate
Speaker 1: a lot of audiences. It's like, oh, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: just using another way to interact with the world. I
Speaker 1: think that was that was one of the things that
Speaker 1: were slightly disappointing. I guess we're telling lies was like
Speaker 1: we we're working on it. I'm like, we want to
Speaker 1: make sure we get these things right because like, these
Speaker 1: are very important issues and there are some nuances and
Speaker 1: so we you know, we don't want to accidentally say
Speaker 1: something that is incorrect or we don't want to give
Speaker 1: people the impression that we're you know, yeah, yeah, yeah wrong. Um,
Speaker 1: So I was expecting some level of scrutiny in terms
Speaker 1: of discussing the games themes and everything. Um and I
Speaker 1: guess like the video games world is still not quite
Speaker 1: ready for that. Like they're quite happy to talk about
Speaker 1: the game mechanics and how this thing will works since
Speaker 1: we big picture emotional responses, but no one's willing to
Speaker 1: kind of dig deeper. And we had like as the
Speaker 1: game was coming out and continues to be, you have
Speaker 1: the bigger name developers being like, there's no politics in
Speaker 1: our video games. As they're like to make a game
Speaker 1: about you know, you know, being a black Ops unit
Speaker 1: taking down communist countries. We're not gonna about politics. We're
Speaker 1: gonna yeah that constantly a constantly just saying it's it's
Speaker 1: possible that they'll always say we we both sides it right, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll tell both sides and let people make the decision.
Speaker 1: And something that was very adamant was very im porn
Speaker 1: to me on telling lies was like, if we're making
Speaker 1: this game, it is not the point of the game
Speaker 1: is not to give you a mush of information and
Speaker 1: have you decide the moral. Yeah, good or bad, something
Speaker 1: like we're going into this with the assumption that we
Speaker 1: in the audience or most of the audience believe that
Speaker 1: people doing these things are wrong, and then we're just
Speaker 1: And then I'm interested in what does it due to
Speaker 1: the people, What what is it like to be in
Speaker 1: this world? What are the consequences of ramifications? How does
Speaker 1: one exist and continue to live a life after having
Speaker 1: been involved in these things? So for me, a political
Speaker 1: game is it can't be the political story in any media.
Speaker 1: It can't be going back to first principles pretending we're
Speaker 1: in debate club, because I just I think that's just
Speaker 1: that's absolutely lies the audience. I think you can say
Speaker 1: a political story is one which embraces and acknowledges the
Speaker 1: reality of the various power struggles and inequalities that we
Speaker 1: have and then has something to say about or has
Speaker 1: a particular angle it wants to interrogate, or something it
Speaker 1: wants to shed light on. But it's very childish, and
Speaker 1: I think we're definitely struggling with this in video games,
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, if it's about politics, then it
Speaker 1: should be a big question and we should assume no answers, right,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, this is a completely bullshit and
Speaker 1: and it kind of it can lead to some problematic ways,
Speaker 1: which is why you see a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: game footage in actual like harorist propaganda, like with like
Speaker 1: like with like not sayings and white supremacist stuff. They
Speaker 1: use a lot of game footage in their propaganda videos
Speaker 1: when especially when it's like both sides of these issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a I have I have a particular interest in
Speaker 1: the intersection between like politics, extremism, and gaming because the
Speaker 1: gaming is very important to our modern kind of extremist
Speaker 1: ecosystem um, particularly around like four Chan and like you know,
Speaker 1: like mass shootings. All of these things play into game culture.
Speaker 1: Not not not saying games cause these events to happen, because
Speaker 1: they don't, but like the way they interact with these
Speaker 1: people is actually interesting. You know, this is very different
Speaker 1: from like the way like this Senate is like, oh,
Speaker 1: games are causing mass shooting because they're not. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's it's it's it's it's it's a completely separate thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's there is there is a Fox News kind
Speaker 1: of hysteria around gaming. But at the same time, like
Speaker 1: and and clearly, you know, one way I pitched her story.
Speaker 1: When I was telling people why it was interesting, It's like,
Speaker 1: this is a game about listening. I was like, that's
Speaker 1: cool because you know, whatever you think about the larger
Speaker 1: politics of it, or or the question of whether video
Speaker 1: games themselves are inherently harmful or anything like, the fact
Speaker 1: that's still the stories we tell are about someone with
Speaker 1: a gun in their hand or assault in their hand,
Speaker 1: and the power dynamics and the story the types of
Speaker 1: stories and the types of protagonists, Like, it's screwed up.
Speaker 1: And I think to the same extent that the fact that,
Speaker 1: like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about a bunch of
Speaker 1: glorified cops going around saying in the world, like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you continue to reinforce these things, yeahbously, all of
Speaker 1: the art we make are saying certain things about the world,
Speaker 1: and we're reinforcing a certain narrative over and over again
Speaker 1: and not really thinking critically about it. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: problem with making art. I mean, I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: conf as being anti gamer. I would play a lot
Speaker 1: of games. I really like gaming. I just think some
Speaker 1: some companies need to figure out why why certain games
Speaker 1: are used in mass shooting manifestoes in certain games aren't
Speaker 1: particularly around like politics, like the particularly talking about like
Speaker 1: white supremacy, and how certain games kind of playing too
Speaker 1: certain things. Because even even a game like wilfon Stein,
Speaker 1: which I think handles this topic very well, still will
Speaker 1: you know, get brought up in certain you know, propagandi
Speaker 1: videos because they do have cool shots of Nazis walking around. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the kind of the problem with some of these things. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, if they weren't killing if Nazis weren't
Speaker 1: killing people as much as wouldn't be as much of
Speaker 1: a problem. But because that's still a thing, that's still
Speaker 1: a thing that needs to get talked about. Anyway, this
Speaker 1: this this took a very sad sad turned towards the
Speaker 1: end of anyway. Yeah, I will, I will, I will
Speaker 1: just strongly recommend playing her story, playing telling lies. I
Speaker 1: think these games, you know, interrogate our our predispositions about
Speaker 1: about kind of police detective work, um, and you just
Speaker 1: get to learn a lot. You get to learn a
Speaker 1: lot about like people on characters because like a lot
Speaker 1: of these games, you know where the setup is, like, oh,
Speaker 1: solve this crime or mystery. But then by the end,
Speaker 1: you're solving a very different mystery and you're kind of
Speaker 1: solving what makes the person tick, and it's very You've
Speaker 1: I really like the art that you have in your games.
Speaker 1: They've brought me a lot of happiness. So thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you for that, and thank you for talking with
Speaker 1: all of us, um about your work. I'm jo, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me and uh yeah, like I say,
Speaker 1: I was, I was hoping to have hundreds more conversations
Speaker 1: about what Telling Lies was about and about these issues
Speaker 1: when it came out. But it's uh, you know that,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, it's hot just general media landscape now,
Speaker 1: like you put something out there and it comes out
Speaker 1: and people consume it, Yeah, move on, Like you don't
Speaker 1: have that it's bad of like discussion that I don't know,
Speaker 1: it feels like it used to used to be a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it definitely did did used to be a thing.
Speaker 1: And definitely your games have had an influence on media
Speaker 1: in certain ways. And I know there's been like a
Speaker 1: few other like projects that like Netflix is doing that
Speaker 1: is kind of taking your concept but not really doing
Speaker 1: it correctly. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's definitely been a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people always send me them. They're like, oh, this sounds
Speaker 1: a lot like a story, this thing, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: but it's it's build non linear. Yeah, exactly like you
Speaker 1: let people. I don't. Yeah. Usually it's like watch the
Speaker 1: eight episodes. You can watch them in any order, which
Speaker 1: isn't how her story works. No, yeah, like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's a yeah, there's a whole different thing going on.
Speaker 1: But no, I mean it's it's interesting times for that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. But anyway, play these games on Steam
Speaker 1: and that that doesn't for today. You can follow the
Speaker 1: show on Twitter and Instagram, at Happening here pod and
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Do you have Do you have a
Speaker 1: social media that you would like to plug or would
Speaker 1: your people? If people are on Twitter, that's where I
Speaker 1: tend to be despite its despite yeah, I know, I am.
Speaker 1: I am Mr Sambalow on Twitter, Mr sambal I will
Speaker 1: say I I actually I actually do like your Twitter account.
Speaker 1: You do. You do post some fun stuff every once
Speaker 1: in a while. That's that's kind of a weird contescen
Speaker 1: thing we think to say of anyway, by for Puddy,
Speaker 1: that's gonna that's gonna be way too jarring to open
Speaker 1: an episode ware, Well, we already did it, so keep moving. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh huh. Um, the episode is actually gonna start with
Speaker 1: Garrison saying that's way too jarring to open an episode with,
Speaker 1: and the listeners won't know that that is a much
Speaker 1: easier opening. Um, alright, so we're doing I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be reading a thing today and then we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the thing that we're reading. Um,
Speaker 1: and and and who are you? And who is here? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is it happen here, this is it could happen here.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm Garrison, I am our resident Canadian. Yeah, that's Anderson.
Speaker 1: That's Anderson the dog in here. We had we had
Speaker 1: to hire a Canadian for a diversity quota. You don't
Speaker 1: you do not anyway, we have Chris here, Robert Evans
Speaker 1: as usual, um, and Sophie. So we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk a little bit about about Canada today.
Speaker 1: So in the in like descripted what if scenarios first
Speaker 1: positive in the original it could happen here. Um. It
Speaker 1: detailed what it might be like to live in the
Speaker 1: United States during a modern civil conflict. And like one
Speaker 1: of the stories that we kind of tell ourselves as
Speaker 1: a culture is about you know, crossing up into the
Speaker 1: safe haven of Canada whenever stuff breaks out in the States. Um,
Speaker 1: whether that be like an escape from just the hell
Speaker 1: that's us politics, um, or you know, going up into
Speaker 1: the cold northern terrain better equipped to deal with climate change.
Speaker 1: Canada is kind of just viewed as a bass gien
Speaker 1: of like of liberal democracy in North America. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: I've I've made jokes in the past about using my
Speaker 1: Canadian passport to escape up into the forest of Alberta
Speaker 1: when things get too dicey here in the States. But
Speaker 1: this like weird utopian view of Canada, uh is not
Speaker 1: just wrong about Canada's current political state, but also assumes
Speaker 1: that Canada is like immune to the political shifts that
Speaker 1: the States have gone through the past few years. Which
Speaker 1: is it's it's very obviously not um so like Canada
Speaker 1: internationally is and specifically in the States, it's it's used
Speaker 1: as like, you know, Canada, it's it's used it's like
Speaker 1: America's little brother, but it's you know, it's much more
Speaker 1: you know, democratic, it's much more liberal. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like this kind of ideal scenario for like what the
Speaker 1: state's could be, and like Canadians have a weird view
Speaker 1: of the States as well. Like Canadians, they're both like
Speaker 1: the like they're kind of obsessed, Like a lot of
Speaker 1: Canadians think no more about US politics and then they
Speaker 1: know about Canadian politics, um, but almost in like a
Speaker 1: way that we watch sports. It's it's like it's like
Speaker 1: this thing that we like watch as entertainment, like like
Speaker 1: some kind of like sick reality show. That's how I
Speaker 1: think a lot of Canadians really view US politics, um,
Speaker 1: because it's just so wacky compared to the kind of
Speaker 1: more like civil parliamentary system that we have in Canada.
Speaker 1: US politics just looks very, very bizarre, and there's always
Speaker 1: this notion it's like, no matter how bad things can
Speaker 1: get in Canada, at least we're not the States. At
Speaker 1: least at least we're not at least we're not the US.
Speaker 1: And that is kind of a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of how a lot of stuff can get really get
Speaker 1: can just like surviving Canada longer, because it's just they
Speaker 1: view it like at least, at least we're not as
Speaker 1: bad as the other people. So that's how you know
Speaker 1: it gives them kind of some kind of sense of security.
Speaker 1: But in terms of like, in terms of Canada as
Speaker 1: a country, you know, we we we've said that Canada
Speaker 1: as a country is basically just you know, a few
Speaker 1: mining companies in a trench coat, and the trench coat
Speaker 1: is healthcare. Um. And that's that's really all they are
Speaker 1: is as as as a country. UM. But today we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about kind of Canada's slide towards farther
Speaker 1: right wing politics, UM. Both you know, historically and then
Speaker 1: more recently, because a lot of what we've seen in
Speaker 1: the States has happened kind of in its own weird
Speaker 1: Canadian way around the same time. UM. But before we
Speaker 1: really before we really get started, I think it would
Speaker 1: be remiss not to mention how the Canadian government has
Speaker 1: historically treated Indigenous and First Nations people um, living on
Speaker 1: that land. Of course, it's like not only just hundreds
Speaker 1: of years ago, but a lot more recently as well.
Speaker 1: Just in the past year, there have been thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of like hidden graves found across the provinces at
Speaker 1: the sites of these residential schools. UM. And the process
Speaker 1: of looking for these on Martin graves has like just
Speaker 1: just started. UM. The Canadian Historical Association published a letter
Speaker 1: this past Canada Day Canada Day is like Independence Day
Speaker 1: but for Canada, UM, saying that it was abundantly clear
Speaker 1: that Canada is guilty of is guilty of genocide. UM.
Speaker 1: I know there's there's a few episodes behind the Bastards, UM,
Speaker 1: and I think even worse here that that talk about
Speaker 1: residential schools UM and and the genocide of Indigenous Canada.
Speaker 1: So you can you can check those out. And I
Speaker 1: this episode to be more focused on Canada's political shifts
Speaker 1: the past five years. But since we're talking to be
Speaker 1: talking about Canadian fascism, I thought it would be irresponsible
Speaker 1: to not mention this upfront as like a thing responsible responsible.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna try to take us through aspects of
Speaker 1: Canadians of Canada's politics chronologically. UM. You guys can button
Speaker 1: and kind of ask questions and clarifications about stuff. UM.
Speaker 1: But the first thing that we're gonna start with is
Speaker 1: actually going to be on the First Nations side of things,
Speaker 1: and that that's kind of how that that's what mostly
Speaker 1: Indigenous people are called in Canada's First Nations. UM. Even
Speaker 1: you know the Indigenous people up in Canada, most amuse
Speaker 1: that term. So that's the term I'll be using for
Speaker 1: some some of this stuff, just because that's the one
Speaker 1: that's used up there. Um. So the the residential School's
Speaker 1: program is where I'm gonna briefly mention a few things
Speaker 1: about it, just because of how it kind of relates
Speaker 1: to some of the stuff that we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: with for the rest of the episode. UM Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna read someone. I'm gonna read some words
Speaker 1: by by Duncan Can Bull Scott. Who was the department
Speaker 1: Who was who was the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs.
Speaker 1: This was like a rank in the Canadian government. Um.
Speaker 1: He served as the Deputy Superintendent from nineteen thirteen to
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty two. UM. And he's arguably like the main
Speaker 1: architect of the residential schools program. Um he was. He
Speaker 1: was also good friends with the first Prime Minister of Canada,
Speaker 1: John John John McDonald. So here's here's here's how this
Speaker 1: guy the the architect of this program. This is this
Speaker 1: is how he kind of talked talked about this in
Speaker 1: letters to both his like his underlings and just like
Speaker 1: openly quote it is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose
Speaker 1: their natural resistance to illness by habituating so close in
Speaker 1: the residential schools, and that they die at a much
Speaker 1: higher rate than in their villages. But this does not
Speaker 1: justify a change in the policy of this department, which
Speaker 1: is geared towards a final solution for our Indian problem.
Speaker 1: It is quite within the market to say that fifty
Speaker 1: percent of children who passed through these schools did not
Speaker 1: live to ben of fit from the education in which
Speaker 1: they had received. So that's that's just what he calls it.
Speaker 1: He he says, the final solution to the Indian problem.
Speaker 1: It's very very very clear. What what like that? That's
Speaker 1: just the language he uses. And this was like before
Speaker 1: Hitler though, like this was this was attention to these Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah like this. This is just like this is the
Speaker 1: mindset of all of these same people. This is all
Speaker 1: of all of the same thing. Um. Another another another
Speaker 1: quote from this dude is I want to get rid
Speaker 1: of the Indian problem. I do not think of it
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact that the country ought to
Speaker 1: continually protect a class of people who are able to
Speaker 1: stand alone. That's my whole point our objective is to
Speaker 1: continue until there's not a single Indian in Canada that
Speaker 1: has not been absorbed into the into the body politic,
Speaker 1: and there's no Indian question and no Indian department. That
Speaker 1: is the whole objective of this bill. The bill referring
Speaker 1: to the residential schools program. So that's that's how he
Speaker 1: talks about these things. Um. There there's other letters that
Speaker 1: he's sent that's like telling is um his like agents
Speaker 1: because he had like agents stationed at at Canadian at
Speaker 1: Canadian reserves to like not let Indians do dancing because
Speaker 1: both that's you know, that's doing their cultural practice, but
Speaker 1: also it will distract them from learning how to do
Speaker 1: Western farming. Um. Like they weren't allowed to go to
Speaker 1: fairs or exhibitions or anything that you like that anything
Speaker 1: that has like that is reminiscent of like any kind
Speaker 1: of cultural tradition that is not white in European. Um.
Speaker 1: So he he is, he is a pretty pretty pretty
Speaker 1: bad dude. He probably deserves his own his own thing
Speaker 1: that this this specific guy. But you can can you
Speaker 1: can kind of see like these like fascist ideas and
Speaker 1: rhetoric are not foreign to Canada. Um. And you know
Speaker 1: it's been there since its infancy. Now, Canadian politics is
Speaker 1: very different in a lot of ways compared to American politics. Uh.
Speaker 1: Canada tries to kind of follow the European model, whereas
Speaker 1: America is very much like the rebel state that tries
Speaker 1: to play on its play by its own rules. Um.
Speaker 1: Kind of the first main difference is that Canada isn't
Speaker 1: a two party system. Um. It's it's more like a
Speaker 1: two party plus system, because yeah, there still is the
Speaker 1: main Liberals and the main Conservatives, but there are there
Speaker 1: are other parties that actually can get elected. Um. And
Speaker 1: it's it's not it's not like a strictly two party
Speaker 1: system the same way the States is. So that makes
Speaker 1: things more interesting. Um. And another thing that's really interesting
Speaker 1: about like a cultural politics that's that's different from the States.
Speaker 1: You know. Besides, you know, Canada obviously has like a
Speaker 1: parliament and a prime minister. That's different, but that Canada
Speaker 1: view and Canadians view nationalism and patriotism very differently, uh,
Speaker 1: compared to to like United States. Um. Citizens patriotism and
Speaker 1: in some ways nationalism have always been kind of more
Speaker 1: of a liberal, progressive thing, um. You know, in opposition
Speaker 1: to the states where it is not really seen as
Speaker 1: a liberal progressive thing. Um. It's like, even under conservative leadership,
Speaker 1: Canada kind of prides itself as as sort of like
Speaker 1: liberal utopia. And that's where a lot of the patriotism
Speaker 1: and celebration of Canada comes from among its you know,
Speaker 1: mostly liberal and more socially progressive citizens. They like celebrate
Speaker 1: Canada as like this great progressive nation, and that's where
Speaker 1: a lot of the patriotism comes from, is like, oh,
Speaker 1: look look how progressive we are. Um. Then the nationalism
Speaker 1: part can be a bit more tricky, uh, because you
Speaker 1: first need to understand like the English and French divide
Speaker 1: which within the country, which I barely understand that to
Speaker 1: be honest. I was I was, I was. I was
Speaker 1: born in the Prairies. That was you know, much more
Speaker 1: of like the Protestant English Ilish English settlement. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not from Quebec, but we'll be talking about Quebec
Speaker 1: a lot here because it is very important to how
Speaker 1: nationalism works in Canada. So the divide between the French
Speaker 1: and the English make elections really interesting because the English
Speaker 1: majority politicians usually need to court some of the French
Speaker 1: Canadian population and and people in Quebec in order to
Speaker 1: get enough parliamentary seats to have a majority government, because
Speaker 1: Canada works on having a majority within the parliament. Um,
Speaker 1: you can have a minority in in in the parliament
Speaker 1: like the Liberals currently have. So even if you know,
Speaker 1: someone doesn't win a plurality of votes, that can still
Speaker 1: be in control of the government in an in a
Speaker 1: minority or usually a majority capacity. We'll get into this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff later. Um. But even though they need
Speaker 1: to get seats from Quebec to have you know, a
Speaker 1: decent control of parliament, Quebec kind of likes to act
Speaker 1: like its own special country. Um. They even have their
Speaker 1: own like federal political party, uh, the Block Kepuqua and
Speaker 1: so like that. That that's a that's a federal party
Speaker 1: that operates in forwarding the interests of Quebec. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: functions as like a separatist party, but not really anymore. Um. So,
Speaker 1: although the Block Keuqua is a lot is a lot
Speaker 1: more secular and progressive than basically any any other major
Speaker 1: party outside of the n d P UM but despite
Speaker 1: them being much more like socially progressive that are also
Speaker 1: like one of the biggest nationalist parties um in Canada,
Speaker 1: and you know, the far right parties in Canada have
Speaker 1: had always had their you know, brand of ethno nationalism,
Speaker 1: but that was that's that's been much less pronounced than
Speaker 1: the kind of like keep non French Canadians out of
Speaker 1: Quebec and keep Americans out of Canada type of nationalism
Speaker 1: that's common with like liberals UM and specifically you know,
Speaker 1: progressives inside Quebec, which you can't blame them for wanting
Speaker 1: to keep Americans no, yeah, like you can good sense.
Speaker 1: If I could keep Americans out of America, I would
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah. But so that kind of sentiment, you
Speaker 1: can see how that connect, like you know, be used
Speaker 1: to foster some not good things though that that that
Speaker 1: that specific type of thinking of of like keeping nationals,
Speaker 1: like you know, keeping four nationals out of your state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good to not have Americans there, but you know
Speaker 1: that's going to get extended towards other people's unfortunate Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and like so even though you know, the nationalism
Speaker 1: can be a lot more progressive, that's not to say
Speaker 1: as no nationalism does not come up within these sex
Speaker 1: um which is going to bring us to uh when
Speaker 1: when a briefly talk about something from the thirties call
Speaker 1: the called the National Unity Party of the National Unity
Speaker 1: Party of Canada. Um, the National Union National Unity Party.
Speaker 1: That is a weird thing to say. Um was was
Speaker 1: originally called the Canadian National Socialist Unity Party. Oh wait,
Speaker 1: now that remindmate national socialism. That seems like a term
Speaker 1: with a little bit of baggage. Yeah, remember correctly, yep,
Speaker 1: it sort of does. Um so that this was a
Speaker 1: party formed in nineteen thirty four by a little Nazi
Speaker 1: shirt head named Adrian R. Khan. Um. Now that is
Speaker 1: if you cannot tell that it's me trying to say
Speaker 1: a French name. So he is from Quebec. This is
Speaker 1: a lot of Canadian Nazi stuff originates inside Quebec because
Speaker 1: it already has such nationalist tendencies. Um So. Our cohns
Speaker 1: introduction into nationalism started around the turn of the century
Speaker 1: amid fears in Quebec that Chinese immigration would threaten the
Speaker 1: white French Canadian working class. Um, this is still a
Speaker 1: big thing in Canada. Uh. Racism and nationalism against the
Speaker 1: Chinese is still a big thing. We will talk about
Speaker 1: this at the very end of this of this of
Speaker 1: of these episodes because it's that's still a thing the
Speaker 1: Conservative Party talks about a lot um. So, yeah, his
Speaker 1: his internationalism was because of fears of Chinese immigration in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds. Um the the anti his so
Speaker 1: his anti immigrants upbringing, plus the fact that he attended
Speaker 1: the Catholic school um that there there there was no
Speaker 1: there was no public schools in Quebec until the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: All of the schools were either Catholic or Protestant. Now,
Speaker 1: this is also part of the cultural divide inside Canada,
Speaker 1: where usually the English speakers are Protestant and they're usually
Speaker 1: further west and the and the Catholics are usually you know,
Speaker 1: French Canadians. There's a lot of that inside Quebec. Um,
Speaker 1: so he went to a Catholic school, uh, which were
Speaker 1: at the time very anti Jewish because what was happening
Speaker 1: is the Jewish people in Quebec wanted to make their
Speaker 1: own Jewish schools and the Catholics, like in charge, didn't
Speaker 1: want that because then that'd be less people were inside
Speaker 1: Catholic schools and they weren't you know, learning Catholicism. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot a lot of stuff going on here
Speaker 1: that is kind of extreme contributing. So he was you know,
Speaker 1: already anti immigrant because of the Chinese and then he
Speaker 1: got got exposed to anti Semitism inside its Catholic schools
Speaker 1: UM and that you know, pushed him onto this specific path.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty our Khan made a deal with
Speaker 1: the head of the Conservative Party R. B. Bennett that
Speaker 1: in exchange for fifteen thousand dollars, which is like two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thou dollars in today's money, our our
Speaker 1: con would craft a smear campaign UM trying to assist
Speaker 1: the Conservatives in basically smearing the Liberals to gain more
Speaker 1: Conservative support inside the province of Quebec, which at the
Speaker 1: time was majority liberal leaning. So our Kan got to
Speaker 1: work and started prepping like pseudo fascist propaganda for the
Speaker 1: Conservatives UM and by the nineteen thirty federal election it
Speaker 1: absolutely worked UM Bennett and the Conservatives one they gained
Speaker 1: twenty four parliamentary seats in Quebec, which is a massive success.
Speaker 1: Like before they did not win any seats in Quebec,
Speaker 1: So gain twenty four seats in for over the course
Speaker 1: of just one election, massive win. UM. So after getting
Speaker 1: the after getting the Conservatives elected, the Conservative Party dropped
Speaker 1: our Khan because he was you know, a little hashtag problematic.
Speaker 1: Um uh huh. So after he got dropped by the
Speaker 1: Conservatives short shortly later, our Khan made contact with the
Speaker 1: growing National Socialist Party in Germany. Um. And over the
Speaker 1: next few years he just he started to gain more
Speaker 1: fascist contacts around the world. He would exchange letters people
Speaker 1: from people like Peteople, people from the German Nazis would
Speaker 1: come over and meet with what and come over to
Speaker 1: Canada and see what he was doing. He would travel
Speaker 1: around meeting other other Nazis around the world. UM. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of just like just gaining a lot, a
Speaker 1: lot more contacts. So then in nineteen thirty four he
Speaker 1: formed his own fascist party, which is the Canadian National
Speaker 1: Socialist Unity Party. And within that year, so in in
Speaker 1: the you know midnighteen thirties, it merged with other Canadian
Speaker 1: nationalist parties that were more based in the west, so
Speaker 1: you know, in the prairies like Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC.
Speaker 1: So emerged a few other kind of nationalist groups and
Speaker 1: started gaining traction, getting thousands and thousands of members. This
Speaker 1: actually became an actual thing. You can find footage of
Speaker 1: of his rallies and they're just terrifying, just like you know,
Speaker 1: just it's it's the same thing whenever you see like
Speaker 1: the Nazis, you know, rallying in Britain. You know, it's
Speaker 1: it feels different than watching a Nazi rally in Germany
Speaker 1: because you can feel a lot more, you know, if
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the same feeling. But but come home
Speaker 1: your own countrymen kind of do the same thing that
Speaker 1: you associate with the old footage of dead people is exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he was getting thousand numbers across Canada, um you know,
Speaker 1: mostly in the provinces of of Quebec and Alberta. So
Speaker 1: the two main provinces we're to talk about are going
Speaker 1: to be Quebeca and and Alberta because that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of the far right stuff gets
Speaker 1: started out. Um So in ninety eight, so that's like
Speaker 1: four years after he started this, Uh, the Canadian National
Speaker 1: Socialist Unity Party merged again, this time with various nationalist
Speaker 1: group groups and so called swastika clubs. Um in there
Speaker 1: we're already inside like Ontario and Quebec, so on the
Speaker 1: eastern side of Canada. So now he he united both
Speaker 1: the Quebec stuff Eastern Canada and Western Canada, and then
Speaker 1: he called that the National Unity Party um and Our
Speaker 1: Khan appointed himself the Canadian fural Gosh, yes so, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from a time Time magazine piece
Speaker 1: from July of nineteen. Our con scheduled Canada's first national
Speaker 1: fascist convention for Kingston, Ontario. The mayor and city council
Speaker 1: did not want a fascist convention held in their city
Speaker 1: and called the police to prevent it. Defiantly, Leader Arkhan
Speaker 1: slipped forty five of his leaders into a room near
Speaker 1: police headquarters. It's this old tibe language held forth unmolested
Speaker 1: for five and a half hours. Upon emerging, Leader Arkan
Speaker 1: wired thanks to the mayor for his courtesy extended and
Speaker 1: announced the formation of the new National Unity Party. A
Speaker 1: flaming torch will be the new party's emblem, Canada for Canadians,
Speaker 1: its slogan, and the upraised arm of its salute for
Speaker 1: King Country and Christianity. Moving onto Ontario, Leader Arkhan, supported
Speaker 1: by eighty five of his Blue Shirts uh he claims
Speaker 1: there were eighty thousand members at the time, held a
Speaker 1: meeting in Mancy Hall that there was attended by about
Speaker 1: eight hundred sympathizers. More impressive, however, there were three anti
Speaker 1: fascist counter demonstrations held simultaneously. Two outdoor anti fascist meetings
Speaker 1: drew four hundred persons until broken up by police fearing
Speaker 1: a clash, but at Maple Leaf Gardens the Canadian League
Speaker 1: of Peace and Democracy attracted ten thousand so as was
Speaker 1: the first big fascist rally in Canada. There was like,
Speaker 1: you know, ten thousands of these more liberal people rallying
Speaker 1: elsewhere and four hundred like anti fascists ready to you know,
Speaker 1: beat up these Nazis, um, but then the police beat
Speaker 1: them up. Because history doesn't change. Times of flat circle,
Speaker 1: we're still doing the same thing. Now. Do you know
Speaker 1: who won't rally eight hundred Canadian Nazis called the Blue
Speaker 1: Shirts to sell you products? Tell us promise that yeah,
Speaker 1: depending depending what Hello Fresh has recently been sending there.
Speaker 1: Why do you always pick Hello Fresh? There are so
Speaker 1: many worse brands that we can't ignore the fact that
Speaker 1: they've been increasingly building their militant capacity for the last
Speaker 1: seven years. Anyway, here's some ads. You have too much
Speaker 1: to read, and we are back talking about the Canadian
Speaker 1: Blue Shirts. Um. The Hello fresh hello shirt. Please continue
Speaker 1: blue aprons, the blue Aprons. Thanks Chris, Thanks Chris for
Speaker 1: saving the bit all right, thank you. Um. So next
Speaker 1: year after his first rally, nine, World War two obviously
Speaker 1: started to ramp up and the Canadian government arrested our
Speaker 1: Cohn for plotting to overthrow the state UM and his
Speaker 1: national In the party was banned from federal elections. Arkhan
Speaker 1: was released from prison after the war, but he continued
Speaker 1: his political aspirations. UM. He ran for federal election twice
Speaker 1: in Quebec, once in nineteen forty nine and once in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three. Both times he uh, he ran under
Speaker 1: his National Unity Party banner, despite it being banned from elections.
Speaker 1: I don't know how he did that, um, both times.
Speaker 1: Laws are fake. Yeah, both times he placed second with
Speaker 1: over five and a half five and a half thousand votes,
Speaker 1: just about like thirty percent of of of the vote. Um. Actually,
Speaker 1: but the second time he ran as he ran just
Speaker 1: under a nationalist banner UM, and he got second as well.
Speaker 1: But he got like the vote, so he did a
Speaker 1: slight slightly better just running as a nationalist in Quebec,
Speaker 1: not like the National Unity thing, because that was you
Speaker 1: know more overtly Nazi, but he kept holding National Unity
Speaker 1: Party public rallies until the mid sixties. His last rally
Speaker 1: I think attracted like one thousand supporters, too many. I
Speaker 1: was hoping you were going to say like three and
Speaker 1: there was probably sad footage, but that's sad in a
Speaker 1: different way. Yeah. So he finally died in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: and with him also died the National Unity Party. I
Speaker 1: So I bring this one up because it's one fund
Speaker 1: up and interesting, um and too. It's like it's indicative
Speaker 1: of the weirdness that can come out of Quebec's nationalist
Speaker 1: political bent. Uh. We can see that now with a
Speaker 1: modern fact, you know, neo fascist Canadian political party that's
Speaker 1: based out of Quebec, which we will talk about shortly, um.
Speaker 1: But even like the nationalist tendencies within Quebec's more mainstream
Speaker 1: progressive population, Like I'm going to read some of the
Speaker 1: policy positions of the block keebu Qua party. That's that's
Speaker 1: that that's that's like the Quebec Sovereignty you know, party
Speaker 1: that is still actually very very popular in elections specifically
Speaker 1: in Quebec, and just ahead of this, if you're a
Speaker 1: French speaker, and you're frustrated by Garrison's pronunciations or my
Speaker 1: pronunciations of Quebecqua that your language isn't real and it's
Speaker 1: and you're deed from the French. Yeah, and you're responsible
Speaker 1: for this Nazi so unlike unlike English speakers who have
Speaker 1: been responsible for Spanish. That's my take, okay, anyway, saying
Speaker 1: Spanish here here, here is the progressive liberal block Kibuqua
Speaker 1: policy positions UM Quebec sovereignty you know, up into independence.
Speaker 1: But usually it's just you know them pushing the interests
Speaker 1: of Quebec. UM environmentalism, abortion rights, you know, pro abortion
Speaker 1: rights UM, l g l g lgbt Q rights, UM,
Speaker 1: legalization of assisted suicide, UM, opposition to Canadian participation in
Speaker 1: the Iraq war, UM abolition, abolition of the abolition of
Speaker 1: the monarchy right UH forcing forcing immigrants to speak French
Speaker 1: in Quebec. Lost lost blocking immigration to Quebec. You've also
Speaker 1: lost me The Quebec Secularism law, which banned public workers
Speaker 1: in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols primarily targeted
Speaker 1: at Muslims, and seeks exemption Quebec's exemption from the requirements
Speaker 1: of the Multiculturalism Act. Yeah, I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: the Multicultural Act, but I'm it's great. It's it's it's good.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so you can kind of see how like
Speaker 1: they have you know, all these like you know, pretty good,
Speaker 1: pretty good progressive SIGs and then and then they get
Speaker 1: really anti immigrant, right, so this is like, this is
Speaker 1: kind of hard to explain to Americans, how like you
Speaker 1: can be very like pro gay, pro you know, abolition
Speaker 1: of the monarchy, but then also be like, no, but
Speaker 1: we don't want those brown people in Quebec. Yeah. So yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: we're gon we're gonna move on from Quebec specifically, but
Speaker 1: don't worry, we will be back because you're still a problem.
Speaker 1: But there there are there are other things too, are
Speaker 1: other things to discuss. So after our cons fascist Canadian movement,
Speaker 1: there was a stint of like Canadian skinheads in the seventies,
Speaker 1: you know, a on the same time as the UK
Speaker 1: and the US UM in the seventies, there was an
Speaker 1: unsuccessful Nazi party called the Nationalist Party of Canada that
Speaker 1: spawned a skinhead gang called Heritage Front. Um. Heritage Front
Speaker 1: disbanded around the mid two thousands because the Canadian FEDS
Speaker 1: infiltrated it and kind of you know, cut that down.
Speaker 1: So critical support to the Canadian Feds. But now we're
Speaker 1: gonna move on to unite the right, not not not
Speaker 1: the United Right that you're thinking of, the Canadian Unite
Speaker 1: the Right movement from the ninety nineties and early two thousands.
Speaker 1: That one probably wasn't problematic right there. It has no
Speaker 1: lasting problems. So because of Canada, because of Canada's multi
Speaker 1: multiparty system, there's more opportunity for ideologically similar parties to
Speaker 1: split the vote, you know, of people leaning in a
Speaker 1: certain direction. Um. Throughout most of the later half of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, they were multiple conservative right wing parties
Speaker 1: that were operating at the same time, which did split
Speaker 1: the right of center vote. This is in part what
Speaker 1: allowed Canada to rise as like a liberal haven, because
Speaker 1: for a while the Conservatives just couldn't get elected because
Speaker 1: they were splitting the vote too many ways, leaving the
Speaker 1: main liberal party to win the vast majority of elections. UM.
Speaker 1: Obviously this frustrated right wing politicians and vote and voters
Speaker 1: than in the ninety nineties there were there were there
Speaker 1: were two main right wing parties, there was the older
Speaker 1: Progressive Conservative Party. They're like a classically fiscal conservative party
Speaker 1: with slightly less socially conservative beliefs, So you know, I
Speaker 1: would rather take them compared to the alternatives here. Um.
Speaker 1: The other major party was a right of center party
Speaker 1: called the Reform Party, which was much more of like
Speaker 1: a right wing populist and extremely socially conservative party, more
Speaker 1: similar to like the Trump era Republican Party. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're much they're much more right wing populist,
Speaker 1: they're way more socially conservative, kind of what we traditionally
Speaker 1: think of as like, you know, like a racist Republican
Speaker 1: that this this this is their party called called the
Speaker 1: Reform Party. So after after loss after loss throughout the
Speaker 1: nineties and during the turn of the century, conservative efforts
Speaker 1: were being made between these two parties to unite into one.
Speaker 1: In nineteen there was a Unite the Right conference held
Speaker 1: in Toronto, Ontario, trying to bring together politicians and delegates
Speaker 1: from these two main conservative parties. But they also brought
Speaker 1: in some much more extreme Christian fascist parties, which there
Speaker 1: was like four of at the time. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of Christian fascist parties around this time.
Speaker 1: Um So, the conference garnered a negative news coverage in
Speaker 1: part to due to the inclusion of these far right
Speaker 1: Christian extremist parties. And then after the conference, polls were
Speaker 1: conducted that suggested that many of the Progressive Conservative supporters
Speaker 1: would rather vote liberal than vote for the new kind
Speaker 1: of merged more extreme right wing parties. So like a
Speaker 1: lot of these a lot of these fiscal conservatives are like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to vote for all of this weird racism.
Speaker 1: I just don't want there to be higher taxes. So
Speaker 1: like I'm gonna I'm gonna rather vote for the liberals
Speaker 1: than vote for these fucking weirdos, which I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's that. That's the conservative I would rather have.
Speaker 1: Um So, the conference didn't sit well with the with
Speaker 1: the Progressive Conservative Party. Um it's a politicians or or
Speaker 1: the political leaders. So the merger plans were cut off.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, we're not gonna do this. You guys
Speaker 1: are too weird and racist. We're not doing this. Um
Speaker 1: Then in two thousand to No, I think it's important
Speaker 1: that this was after nine eleven. I think this is
Speaker 1: really the reason why this happened. Um. One of the
Speaker 1: original Reform Party founders that the Reform Party is the
Speaker 1: more populist one. So one of the original founders named
Speaker 1: Stephen Harper, took control of the populist Conservative Party and
Speaker 1: worked to improve the optics of the more extreme sides
Speaker 1: of his party. I think it's very important this. This
Speaker 1: happened after nine eleven, and this is how the merger
Speaker 1: actually worked. So in two thousand three, merger talks sort
Speaker 1: of up again, and in August of that year the
Speaker 1: two parties announced the merger had been completed. There was
Speaker 1: a new United Conservative Party. Um. In the announcement, Harper
Speaker 1: is quoted as saying, our swords will henceforth be pointed
Speaker 1: at the Liberals, not to each other, and in December
Speaker 1: Harper was voted in as the new party leader. The
Speaker 1: work did pay off in the two US and six
Speaker 1: Canadian federal election. The Conservatives gained a controlling minority government
Speaker 1: among the electorate, with the former co founder of the extremist,
Speaker 1: you know, populist Reform Party, Stephen Harper, becoming the new
Speaker 1: Prime Minister of Canada. So this is how he got
Speaker 1: from Reform Party to being the you know, the prime
Speaker 1: Minister in through through the two thousand's um he was
Speaker 1: the Prime Minister of Canada for most of the time
Speaker 1: I lived there. That that that's who I think of
Speaker 1: when I think of the Prime Minister of Canada's I
Speaker 1: think of Stephen Harper. So Harper remained as Prime minister
Speaker 1: until the two thousand and fifteen election that saw noted
Speaker 1: black face appreciator Justin Trudeau elected under the Liberal Party.
Speaker 1: So that's good. What a good system we have that
Speaker 1: that that man like just your range of his black look.
Speaker 1: Say what you will about the man, very careful. You
Speaker 1: know you under no circumstances got to hand it to him.
Speaker 1: You do not, in fact, have to hand it to him.
Speaker 1: Well you have to hand him, uh the little the
Speaker 1: towel that he uses to get the black face off
Speaker 1: of his face. He can go into his work running Canada.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, yep, cool country. So didn't find out that
Speaker 1: like five of our governors all had black face photos.
Speaker 1: It was it was. It was a big year for
Speaker 1: black face. It really it's incredible because I can't picture
Speaker 1: Like again, I grew up very right wing and definitely
Speaker 1: had some said some uncomfortable things in my time. I
Speaker 1: don't think there was ever a point at which I
Speaker 1: would have been like, yeah, this seems like a good idea.
Speaker 1: It's what the fuck? Like, Yeah, what is the joke there?
Speaker 1: It's pretty it's pretty bad. Justin Trudeau liberal. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: is incredible. He is the one all of the wind
Speaker 1: Mom's thirst over. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, Um, Beyond making it
Speaker 1: easier to vote in right of center candidates, what what
Speaker 1: the Canadian unit the right accomplished was pushing the conservative
Speaker 1: establishment much further to the right than what the previously
Speaker 1: popular Progressive Conservatives had established, while maintaining the respectability and
Speaker 1: civility the progressive Conservatives had cultivated. We are now going
Speaker 1: to skip ahead to two thousand seventeen. UM. In January seventeen,
Speaker 1: soon after the US President Donald Trump put into place
Speaker 1: the travel band from from you know, seven Muslim majority countries,
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a message via Twitter to
Speaker 1: those fleeing persecution, terror, and war, Canadians will welcome you,
Speaker 1: regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength hashtag welcome
Speaker 1: to Canada. So Trudeau is like, if the US is
Speaker 1: gonna be racist, we're gonna we're gonna let them in.
Speaker 1: Um for this, uh, for this next part I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote from the New York Times. Um Just hours
Speaker 1: after watching the television reports suggesting Canada would accept immigrants
Speaker 1: that were shunned by Trump, the twenty eight year old
Speaker 1: political science student packed his glock, handgun and rifle and
Speaker 1: trudged through the snow covered streets of Quebec to a
Speaker 1: nearby Islamic cultural center. As fifty three men were finishing
Speaker 1: evening prayers, he unloaded forty eight rounds. Six people were killed,
Speaker 1: several of them with shots to the head, and nineteen
Speaker 1: others were injured. One was paralyzed for life. In the
Speaker 1: month before his rampage, the shooter tralled the Internet eight
Speaker 1: hundred and nineteen times for posts related to Mr Trump,
Speaker 1: reading his Twitter feed daily, and homing in on the
Speaker 1: American president's travel ban on several Muslim majority countries. He
Speaker 1: kept a cash of guns underneath his bed at his
Speaker 1: parents house, and among his friends was just his twin brother.
Speaker 1: The shooter told investigators that he wished he had killed
Speaker 1: more people and he wanted to protect his family from
Speaker 1: Islamic terrorists. Experts on radicalization say that in Quebec, the
Speaker 1: French speaking province surrounded by an English speaking majority, The
Speaker 1: anti immigrant far right offers fertile for fertile, imperious ground
Speaker 1: for psychologically unstable youths seeking a sense of identity and
Speaker 1: a scapegoat the head of the Canadian based Center of
Speaker 1: Prevention of Radicalization leading to Violence that they said that
Speaker 1: the Quebec mosque shooter was in part of it was
Speaker 1: part of a growing number of educated, middle class white
Speaker 1: youths in Quebec drawn to far right ideas, fueled by
Speaker 1: the election of Mr Trump and fanned by fears of
Speaker 1: immigration that threatens Quebec's identity. When the Anti Radicalization Center
Speaker 1: was started in two thousand and fifteen, they dealt with
Speaker 1: sixteen cases of youths in the province that we're getting
Speaker 1: radicalized by the far right last year, which was like sixteen, uh,
Speaker 1: this center had one d and fifty four such cases.
Speaker 1: So this is this is kind of the the arc
Speaker 1: of things. Really, Trump's Trump's election did spire did did
Speaker 1: spur a lot of this growing like oh, these political
Speaker 1: beliefs are acceptable now, right, Like this is something that
Speaker 1: is like we are we are we are allowed to
Speaker 1: do this, and that that did echo in Canada and
Speaker 1: across a lot of the a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of other countries. Um. What what one of one of
Speaker 1: the victims of the of the Quebec uh massacre his
Speaker 1: his father said that he come to Canada from Algeria
Speaker 1: in the to escape terrorism. Um. And he said that
Speaker 1: like Quebec did not create the monster the shooter, but
Speaker 1: the Islamophobia that is inherent inside Quebec gave him like
Speaker 1: the motive. So this is really does relate to connate
Speaker 1: to like the political situation of Canada. And it's very
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not a coincidence that the majority of
Speaker 1: these types of attacks are inside either Quebec, Toronto or um.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're if you're a white, if you're
Speaker 1: if you're in Alberta. It's said it's more tied to
Speaker 1: like other other like conservative values, but like a lot
Speaker 1: of it is around Quebec for a lot of these
Speaker 1: like shootings and always acts of terrorism. Um. There was
Speaker 1: like the there was the in cell guy who ran
Speaker 1: over tons of people in Toronto with his car. Um.
Speaker 1: Same same kind of thing of like of getting more
Speaker 1: more used to these kind of having these far right
Speaker 1: ideas be more loud um and then thinking them as
Speaker 1: more of like a normalized thing. So that so the
Speaker 1: Quebec mosque shooting, uh kind of well, couple a lot
Speaker 1: of people in Canada's being like, oh, we're not immune
Speaker 1: to this. This is like an actual thing that we
Speaker 1: have to deal with. Two. Um. And the next few
Speaker 1: months after Trade's January announcement, border crossings did see an
Speaker 1: increase in Canada formally accepted more immigrants and refugees and
Speaker 1: and not. And there was like the term in Canada
Speaker 1: is like an irregular spike of border crossings. Um. The
Speaker 1: fact the way Canadian media reported this, I think it's
Speaker 1: very irresponsible, the way they tried to like frame this
Speaker 1: as like after this announcement, We're getting so many irregular
Speaker 1: crossings that only fueled this type of like this type
Speaker 1: of anti immigrant sentiment. Um. It was. It was not
Speaker 1: really great. A lot of the old articles I pulled
Speaker 1: up for this for like, had really had really disgusting framing,
Speaker 1: especially you know, viewing it now. So in March, the
Speaker 1: Canadian Parliament passed a motion that condemns Islamophobia and request
Speaker 1: that the government recognized the need to quell the public
Speaker 1: of a climate of fear and hate, specifically around Muslims.
Speaker 1: And immigrants. Um. The motion was non binding, so it
Speaker 1: doesn't it doesn't mean anything. It's just the government saying
Speaker 1: something nice. Um. But it's still it's it's still sparked
Speaker 1: tons of outrage. Um. You know. It called on the
Speaker 1: government to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism
Speaker 1: and discrimination. Uh. The the margin was passed by like
Speaker 1: it was passed by a margin of like two hundred
Speaker 1: two h two over ninety so people a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of the Conservatives in Parliament didn't didn't like this,
Speaker 1: but it it's it's it garnered so much online backlash.
Speaker 1: There were there were petitions and nationwide protests condemning this
Speaker 1: bill as an attack on free speech. Um and Uh.
Speaker 1: The person who introduced the bill um uh in an
Speaker 1: MP named um Ikracalid, received death threats um on through
Speaker 1: like their email and like they had like their private
Speaker 1: private information leaked. And it turned in this very very
Speaker 1: big kind of one of the first things where it
Speaker 1: had like these like national protests in Canada that you know,
Speaker 1: similar to how we had like the free speech thing
Speaker 1: around to two and seventeen. This was like the Canadian
Speaker 1: version of that and how this kind of started Um.
Speaker 1: Then in December, Urdeau signed into the United Nations Global
Speaker 1: Migration Pact. There's another non binding incentive designed to provide
Speaker 1: understanding among nations, but how to deal with the global
Speaker 1: immigration crisis. Again, all these things are just people talking. Um.
Speaker 1: But it made people very, very mad, because if you're
Speaker 1: talking about it, that means it actually is real and
Speaker 1: it's actually gonna affect you, or it's just ignoring that
Speaker 1: these problems exist. So really, after Trump's election, after the Quebec,
Speaker 1: after after the Quebec Mosque shooting, then we have all
Speaker 1: these bills. This kind of ignited a in person rallying
Speaker 1: possibility and in person protests that Canada hadn't really seen
Speaker 1: before for this type of like anti immigration sentiments. Um.
Speaker 1: And we'll we'll talk more about these protests after after
Speaker 1: we have a little little bit of an ad break.
Speaker 1: You know, who doesn't get protested except for that one
Speaker 1: time when they illegally overthrew the government of Ecuador. Uh
Speaker 1: have to be more the the That's right, Garrison, our
Speaker 1: sponsors only one time did they inside cause mass protests
Speaker 1: as a result of overthrowing a sovereign government. That's pretty good,
Speaker 1: Pretty good, are you? Trying to do like a Banana
Speaker 1: Republic thing. What are you? What are you doing? I'm
Speaker 1: just saying most podcasts three to four governments overthrown by
Speaker 1: their sponsors. All Right, it could happen here, just the
Speaker 1: one baby, Hello, welcome to Why Canada isn't a liberal
Speaker 1: utopia and actually has a lot of the same systemic
Speaker 1: problems that every other Western country does and it's not
Speaker 1: immune to fascist infiltration and fact co option. So as so,
Speaker 1: I know, we we've we've talked a lot about Quebec
Speaker 1: and stuff, which is uh great because yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a problem. But this exists in the western provinces as well. Saskatchewan, Alberta,
Speaker 1: BC have a lot of these growing kind of things.
Speaker 1: But they're not French Canadians doing this. They're more like
Speaker 1: you know what we in America would you know recognize
Speaker 1: as like rural conservatives. Um. So around all of this,
Speaker 1: you know, increased discussion around immigration in two seventeen UM,
Speaker 1: around the same time people in Western Canada had We're
Speaker 1: facing a bit of an economic recession. They had you know,
Speaker 1: significant job loss around this time UM, and projects that
Speaker 1: traditionally brought work to the area, like pipelines were you know,
Speaker 1: there was discussion of them getting stalled and people you know,
Speaker 1: moving more towards renewable energy. This kind of increased a
Speaker 1: lot of the political tensions between the Eastern you know,
Speaker 1: liberal majority Canada and the western more rule Canada. Um
Speaker 1: quoting an article from the CBC, uh, Toureau just keeps
Speaker 1: giving away all of our money to immigrants. Samantha two boy,
Speaker 1: that is a that is a French name. I'm not
Speaker 1: even attempted that one. Samantha Frenchie anyway, this mother of five,
Speaker 1: she attained a January fifth rally with a webster, her husband,
Speaker 1: and two of their children. It was her first protest
Speaker 1: for any cause we're stuck paying for all this money
Speaker 1: that he wants to give away to everybody but Canadians.
Speaker 1: My kids are growing up, and my grandkids and all
Speaker 1: of their kids are going to be poor and stuck
Speaker 1: in a hole that they're never going to get out of.
Speaker 1: This is this is you know, very common type of thing,
Speaker 1: like oh, we're getting taxed and taking all of our
Speaker 1: money and giving giving away to immigrants. This happened after this,
Speaker 1: after the Syrian refugee crisis, when Canada is sort of
Speaker 1: accepting a lot of Syrian immigrants. That's that's around the
Speaker 1: time that I left Canada. Um. But I totally remember people,
Speaker 1: you know having very similar sentiments of like, why are
Speaker 1: we you know, paying for all of these refugees, you know,
Speaker 1: and and that that that's that's the thing that happens
Speaker 1: in the States too, yeah. Um. So the economic tensions
Speaker 1: developed in Western Canada, combined with the increase in anti
Speaker 1: immigration sentiments among conservatives, were in part spurred by the
Speaker 1: Trump presidency, led to the Canadian Yellow Vest movement. UM.
Speaker 1: This is totally separate from the French protest movement. UM.
Speaker 1: The Canadian version just stole like the working class branding
Speaker 1: and just used it for their proto fascist crusade. Um.
Speaker 1: So the Canadian yellow Vests were a a group of
Speaker 1: connected protest movements over the course of nineteen that had
Speaker 1: a lot of like impersonalities but also a lot of
Speaker 1: online mobilization. It's kind of since tid out, but it
Speaker 1: was a major force in pushing right wing extremism in
Speaker 1: Canada and having it be accessible to like regular people.
Speaker 1: Right It's it's not it's not like the Proud Boys
Speaker 1: at all, where it's like you know, specific you know,
Speaker 1: bad people doing this thing. It was like appealing to like,
Speaker 1: you know, the oil workers, appealing to like the moms.
Speaker 1: It was like it was, it was. It was primarily
Speaker 1: used Facebook as a means of sting off this type
Speaker 1: of information and making it seem you know, acceptable. UM
Speaker 1: the Canadian Loovest's quoting an article from vice UM Canadian yelvests,
Speaker 1: which had over a hundred thousand members on their Facebook
Speaker 1: as of May, carries the greatest potential for radicalization leading
Speaker 1: to violence in Canada right now, according to the executive
Speaker 1: director of the Canadian Anti Hate Network UH. The group's
Speaker 1: description says it says it was created to protest the
Speaker 1: carbon tax and build that pipeline and stand against the
Speaker 1: treason of our country's politicians who have the audacity to
Speaker 1: sell our country's sovereignty over to the globalist u N
Speaker 1: and their tyrannical policies. But concerns over Canadian soil sector
Speaker 1: appeared to be a very little factor in the discussion
Speaker 1: that goes on inside these groups. Instead, members are obsessing
Speaker 1: over with the defending you know, Western civilization from Islam,
Speaker 1: bashing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and spreading whatever you know,
Speaker 1: far right conspiracy theory is trending at the time, and
Speaker 1: I cannot overstate the amount that these people hate Trudeau.
Speaker 1: But it's it's not for like reasons because he wore
Speaker 1: black face. Like they find the most bizarre ways to
Speaker 1: hate this man. Um A lot of these people think
Speaker 1: that Justin Trudeau is the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is a very a very
Speaker 1: popular conspiracy theory in Canada. It is like the way
Speaker 1: that Trudeau is treated by Conservatives is baffling because like,
Speaker 1: I hate Justin Trudeau, but I think I hate him
Speaker 1: for like reasonable reasons, Like he made a lot bunch
Speaker 1: of promises around you know, environment stuff that he didn't
Speaker 1: follow through on. He doesn't do he doesn't do anything
Speaker 1: he is. He does a lot of blackface. It's like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of reasons to hate Justin Trudeau, but
Speaker 1: not because he's the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro leading
Speaker 1: us to like leading trying to sneak Canada into what
Speaker 1: the socialist you end, Like, that's not that's not what
Speaker 1: he's doing, Like, yeah, he was the illegitimate son of
Speaker 1: Fidel Castro. There's a couple of those in the United States.
Speaker 1: One of his daughters is now like a right wing
Speaker 1: radio personality, and god, that makes so much sense. He
Speaker 1: you know, he's castro. He did a lot of fucking
Speaker 1: like who who would care? It's not your your fault,
Speaker 1: who your dad is. It's just like this is it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's like a weaker, like funnier version of birtherism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It makes it. It is like the Canadian
Speaker 1: version of that. Like it's very weird. He's like Justin
Speaker 1: Trudeau is very cringe e. He lies about all of
Speaker 1: his promises. Um, he talks about game, He does a
Speaker 1: lot of virtue signaling. He does a lot of black face.
Speaker 1: There's are all really good reasons to face. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of black face. But the way the ways
Speaker 1: that they come up with trying to make him seem
Speaker 1: like a bad dude or just baffling, um, very very bizarre.
Speaker 1: So um. In an interview with somebody from the Yellow
Speaker 1: Vests exposed Anti Fascist Research Team, which was a very
Speaker 1: good Twitter account around it's it's it's inactive now, but
Speaker 1: this this was a very good account, a very good
Speaker 1: account that did really really solid research into the into
Speaker 1: the Yellows movement UM. In an interview, they were asked
Speaker 1: type of impact they think the yellowsts could have in
Speaker 1: Canada and this was This was their response. The image
Speaker 1: of the threat is no longer the skinhead, blood, blood,
Speaker 1: blood and honor type. We're dealing with average people who
Speaker 1: don't understand the impact of the rhetoric. They're calling for
Speaker 1: the mass death of an entire religion, or they're celebrating them,
Speaker 1: or they're celebrating the violence against that religion, or they're
Speaker 1: celebrating violence against government officials. They are just one step
Speaker 1: away from outright fascism, but they can't see that, and
Speaker 1: they refuse to see that, which I think it's very
Speaker 1: is a very good UM summary of like how the
Speaker 1: yellow vests were a popular movement specifically on Facebook. UM.
Speaker 1: Another part of it was the idea of like Western
Speaker 1: separatism UM, Like you know, the people in Western Canada
Speaker 1: feel ignored, They feel you know, put upon, they feel
Speaker 1: oppressed not just for feelings, not not just for being Westerners,
Speaker 1: but they honestly feel oppressed because they're white. They feel like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're focusing on you know, only going to give money
Speaker 1: to the brown people. That's the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: they feel like in the West. UM, they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, my right to free speech was taken away
Speaker 1: because of the because of the non binding bill, and
Speaker 1: refugees can just walk across the border and they make
Speaker 1: more money than I do. So they they have they
Speaker 1: have all these all these ideas that are not actually
Speaker 1: based in reality, but they can believe them. UM. And
Speaker 1: they you know, find these news sources that are just
Speaker 1: echo chambers that reinforce this belief to the point where
Speaker 1: they become radicalize themselves. UM. It's very it's a very
Speaker 1: very common thing, especially around twenties nineteen. I was tracking
Speaker 1: a lot of these Facebook groups around twenty nine as well,
Speaker 1: just in my spare time, UM, because it's just interesting
Speaker 1: to watch them interact. UM. I'm gonna give like, you know,
Speaker 1: like a brief recap of like a typical yell yellow
Speaker 1: best protest around like Edmonton, UM, based a bit off
Speaker 1: of of of of of a few CBC articles. So
Speaker 1: you know, protesters would gather around in front of UM
Speaker 1: like the Legislative building, holding signs, wearing bright yellow vests. UM.
Speaker 1: And they would do this like basically every every weekend
Speaker 1: for you know, months and months and months on end. Um.
Speaker 1: Some protesters when we stand at the podium showing conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories about how powerful the Jewish families controlling the world are.
Speaker 1: Um as one as one dude did at the Alberta
Speaker 1: legislature um on like January. Um. Some may come sporting
Speaker 1: red make Alberta great again. Hats uh this was very
Speaker 1: very popular, very popular. Um. Others may proud the sidelines,
Speaker 1: stress like they belong to a biker gang. Um. Instead
Speaker 1: of only instead of Hell's Angels patches, they have patricks
Speaker 1: that say Wolves of Odin and Canadian Infidels. Uh. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give you one, guests, what type of ideology the
Speaker 1: Wolves of Odin have? Yeah? The the communists, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: they're not easy. Um. But most of the protesters voices
Speaker 1: are not away from are not from the fringes. Most
Speaker 1: of them just have jobs, um you know, you know
Speaker 1: in like high rises, or they drive it for uber
Speaker 1: or their teachers or pipe fitters or real estate agents.
Speaker 1: And although their message is like muddled by all of
Speaker 1: these other like you know, much more overtly extremist kind
Speaker 1: of talking points, they all have one thing in common
Speaker 1: that they feel like they're getting ignored and being left
Speaker 1: behind by the liberals in the East. UM. This is
Speaker 1: echoed by one of the person that got interviewed at
Speaker 1: these rallies was named Lynn Smith, who was a former
Speaker 1: oil and gas worker who now works in the school system. UM.
Speaker 1: They were at a a yellow vest rally on in
Speaker 1: January nine that was like the first first fourth protest
Speaker 1: she attended. UM. She said, they're just giving away our country.
Speaker 1: We have no rights anymore, they're taking them away. No
Speaker 1: more Lord's prayer, but they're putting prayer, prayer rooms in
Speaker 1: schools for Muslims. Um, Mary, Christmas, you're you're You're not
Speaker 1: You're not allowed to say anymore. It's supposed to be
Speaker 1: happy holidays. They're changing, they're changing our country, and we've
Speaker 1: got to stand up and say something about it, because
Speaker 1: because this is our country. I was born here, my
Speaker 1: parents are born here. It's wrong. So, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: sure people in the States they're familiar with this type
Speaker 1: of rhetoric. Um, but just the the increased nature of
Speaker 1: in Canada was surprising to a lot of Nadians, and
Speaker 1: like president of a lot of like liberal Canadians, because
Speaker 1: they're like, but you're you're in Canada. Why are you
Speaker 1: doing the States thing? What? Why are you doing the
Speaker 1: thing that they do in the States. Why are you
Speaker 1: doing it here? Um? But you know the same reason
Speaker 1: you know people do in the States is because they
Speaker 1: feel ignored by politicians, you know, saying that's that's why
Speaker 1: this happens in Saskatchewan and Alberta m NBC way more
Speaker 1: than it happens in like Ontario, right is because you know,
Speaker 1: the more farther away you are from you know, the
Speaker 1: big cities, the less your interests are cared for by
Speaker 1: a lot of politicians. So the ones that speak to
Speaker 1: you are these like extremists who are trying to prey
Speaker 1: on these actual you know, financial insecurities. Um so. A
Speaker 1: lot some of the protesters say that they're not like
Speaker 1: a post immigration but but most of the focus of
Speaker 1: the Edmonton Yellow Best rallies has been has been about
Speaker 1: who can come into the country and how they're allowed
Speaker 1: to get here. Um uh. One one guy named Brett Webster,
Speaker 1: the father of five, who works like a construction construction industry, says,
Speaker 1: they're overwhelming our resources. We can't properly let these people
Speaker 1: and make sure it's safe for them to come in
Speaker 1: and make sure that they're skilled and assimilate into our
Speaker 1: country and know our ways and our values. So most
Speaker 1: of the extremest stuff in Canada outside of Quebec does
Speaker 1: come from does come specifically from Alberta. You know, the
Speaker 1: big big cities in Alberta are are Calgary and Edmonton.
Speaker 1: This happens also in a lot of the more rural
Speaker 1: areas that you know, mostly used to run on like
Speaker 1: oil drilling. Um. After losing an election to the more
Speaker 1: social democratic NDP party, UH, the two provincial Conservative parties
Speaker 1: in Alberta had their own little mini Unite the Right
Speaker 1: and merged together in to us in seventeen, leading to
Speaker 1: their success in the polls in nineteen. So then the
Speaker 1: Conservatives have since then, they've done a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff in Alberta, like cutting down their health care to
Speaker 1: actually a lot of a lot of the Conservative voters
Speaker 1: don't like, but like they voted for because that was
Speaker 1: the platform. You just were being scared of brown people,
Speaker 1: so you voted for the Conservatives. But now but now
Speaker 1: your healthcare is cut. So that's that's how politics works. Um.
Speaker 1: So that that's kind of a brief summary of the
Speaker 1: Yellowist movement and how it how it gained a lot
Speaker 1: of popularity. Um. They they would do rallies around like
Speaker 1: polling centers, the would they would they would like they
Speaker 1: would attack people. They would have you know, violent rallies
Speaker 1: where a lot of like older older men who were
Speaker 1: in the Yellows movement would be you know, pretty violence
Speaker 1: towards you know and anyone in their area during a protest. UM.
Speaker 1: But they kind of kind of around COVID, the Yellow
Speaker 1: Vess kind of sput it out. A lot of the
Speaker 1: people in these Facebook groups got you know, moved into
Speaker 1: other conspiracy theory groups um, and the l S movement
Speaker 1: kind of lost its train. UM. So that's where we're
Speaker 1: kind of going to end for today, is with the
Speaker 1: kind of the Eloss kind of fizzling out. And then
Speaker 1: the next part we'll talk about what's happening from and
Speaker 1: the election that year took like kind of the present
Speaker 1: fascist rumblings um inside different sectors of Canadian politics. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that is that's my that's my very very brief right
Speaker 1: up of of right wing populism and extremism in Canada.
Speaker 1: Uh pre p yep. It's fun. It's not, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's upsetting. Um, and it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of the same problems we have here of
Speaker 1: you know, politicians really ignoring people in certain parts of
Speaker 1: the country which provide provide very fertile recruiting ground for
Speaker 1: a lot of extremists. I think it's going to all
Speaker 1: end well, well, that is our that is our that
Speaker 1: is our official policy, that everything is going to turn
Speaker 1: out great. Yeah, it seems fine. I mean there's like
Speaker 1: there is actual ways of preventing this from happening. Right,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not it's not a hopeless thing. We
Speaker 1: can actually do it if we want to. Just people
Speaker 1: with power to do it, don't don't don't like doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well and good, that is the message of the pod Sophie.
Speaker 1: Cool and good. So yep, that's that's Canadian fascism part one. Cool. Um.
Speaker 1: I would recommend if people want to learn more about
Speaker 1: the Canadian uh yellow vests, check out the yellow Best
Speaker 1: Exposed Twitter account. Uh. There's also like there's also articles
Speaker 1: about them. They were a very very good anti fascist
Speaker 1: research team. Um. Yeah, I would just recommend if you
Speaker 1: want to learn more about this the specific movement, all
Speaker 1: of their work on it has been great. Um, so yeah,
Speaker 1: shout out, shout out to yellow vests exposed. That's the pod. Alright,
Speaker 1: Well go get your Tim Hortons and tomorrow, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: go get your Tim Horton's and you're I don't know,
Speaker 1: maple syrup and go find a moose, find and just
Speaker 1: follow us. Zone Media or happened here? Pot on, the
Speaker 1: twits and the inst against Bye bye everybody, a goodbye,
Speaker 1: a hello. Nope, that's not it. Nope, that's it. Garrison
Speaker 1: started the episode. Yes, has begun, It cannot be unbegun.
Speaker 1: A oh that's all right. Let's let's roll right into it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk so well, welcome. This says it could happen here.
Speaker 1: Um today the today, the here is is Canada, that
Speaker 1: is the that is where it could happen. Um. This
Speaker 1: is gonna be part two of my little deep dive
Speaker 1: into Canadian fascism and the far right rumblings in general
Speaker 1: in the Great White North. And oh god, that is
Speaker 1: a bad, bad nickname for Canada, the Great White North.
Speaker 1: Did not really think that went through, oopsie doodle of
Speaker 1: maybe the yeah, there's a good chance did anyway. Um,
Speaker 1: the last episode we left off with the Canadian yellow vests. Um,
Speaker 1: and you know of frightening increase in Islamophobia and anti
Speaker 1: immigration rhetoric around late after Trump selection. And we started
Speaker 1: the last episode by talking about one of Canada's first
Speaker 1: fascist political parties. And we're gonna start to part two
Speaker 1: but talking about Canada's new kne oh fascist political party
Speaker 1: that also got started inside the province of Quebec, just
Speaker 1: like the National Unity Party did. Uh. This one is
Speaker 1: called the People's Party of Canada. Um. Before we get
Speaker 1: into the People's Party, And first to give some background
Speaker 1: on the founder of the party, Maxine Bernier. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's how that's that's how I'm gonna say his name. Um,
Speaker 1: No one at me, It's good enough. Um. Bernair was
Speaker 1: born in Quebec in nineteen sixty three. On is the
Speaker 1: son of a Conservative talk radio host turned politician. Isn't
Speaker 1: that funny? Isn't that funny? How that keeps happening? Um? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Bernair entered politics into US in six um. He
Speaker 1: ran as the Conservative Party candidate for the House of
Speaker 1: Commons in the same writing district that his father had
Speaker 1: represented in the eighties and nineties. Stephen Harper, leader of
Speaker 1: the New United Conservative Party initially wanted Maxine's father to
Speaker 1: re enter politics, but Bernair Senior was less keen on
Speaker 1: that idea, and in dead told Harper that he that
Speaker 1: perhaps his son should run in his place. Radio and nepotism,
Speaker 1: radio and nepotism, yep, and politicians and yeah it is
Speaker 1: it is starting great. Um. So at this point Bernair
Speaker 1: was more like a free market libertarian, libertarian type guy,
Speaker 1: you know, still with some of the same like conservative
Speaker 1: immigration stuff that's that's common in Quebec, but he was
Speaker 1: more of just like a libertarian dude. Berner easily won
Speaker 1: the writing writings for what we call districts here in
Speaker 1: the States, ranking at sixty seven percent of the popular vote,
Speaker 1: which was the largest majority for a Conservative politician outside
Speaker 1: of the province of Alberta. So he he did, he
Speaker 1: did very well. Bernaer, who had a background in business,
Speaker 1: quickly rose through the ranks of the Conservative Party. Within
Speaker 1: the same year, he was appointed to be a cabinet
Speaker 1: minister in the Harper government. Um and he worked as
Speaker 1: a as an industry minister from to us in six
Speaker 1: to US and seven before being promoted to a foreign
Speaker 1: affairs minister and then in two thousands eleven, he was
Speaker 1: appointed of he was appointed as Minister of the State.
Speaker 1: So in in spring of after the fifth after the
Speaker 1: federal election, uh Brennair put in his bid to be
Speaker 1: the new elected Conservative Party leader. Um, so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: briefly explain how Canadian elections work. You You don't vote
Speaker 1: for a prime minister. You vote for a party within
Speaker 1: your specific district if you if if your party wins,
Speaker 1: they get a seat in parliament. Whoever has the most
Speaker 1: seats in parliament, that's whose prime minister gets elected. So
Speaker 1: whoever is whoever is the leader of the party, they
Speaker 1: will be prime minister if that party gets in the
Speaker 1: most seats. So in two as in sixteen, Burnair put
Speaker 1: in his bid to be the new Conservative Party leader. Uh.
Speaker 1: He got remarkably close to securing the spot as leader
Speaker 1: of the Conservatives. In the final round of voting, he
Speaker 1: received forty nine point zero five percent of the vote,
Speaker 1: losing to Saskatchewan Conservative politician Andrew Sheer who got fifty
Speaker 1: point nine percent, less less than two percent difference. He
Speaker 1: was so close to becoming leader of the Conservative Party,
Speaker 1: like ridiculous. So yeah, after his extremely slight loss, he
Speaker 1: continued to work in Shear's Conservative Party for a few years. Um,
Speaker 1: if you remember from the last episode, around this time
Speaker 1: was when these homophobia and anti immigration talking points were
Speaker 1: starting to gain a new popularity, and Berner followed along
Speaker 1: with this trend. He would tweet out about the dangers
Speaker 1: of extreme multiculturalism and he had like an increasingly racist
Speaker 1: and divisive rhetoric, and that kind of caused some drama
Speaker 1: within the Conservative establishment. So in August of eighteen, around
Speaker 1: the same time the Yellow vest movement in Canada was
Speaker 1: starting up, Berner resigned from the Conservative Party with the
Speaker 1: stated intention of forming a new federal populist far right
Speaker 1: political party. Um here here, here's a segment from his
Speaker 1: resignation speech and he he does talk in a very
Speaker 1: thick Utch accent. I am not going to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're channel the energy. Um that was that was just
Speaker 1: direct audio instead of leading as a principal Conservative and
Speaker 1: defending the interests of Canada and Canadians. Andrew Sheer is
Speaker 1: following the Trudeau Liberals. I was told that internal polling
Speaker 1: is showing that the Liberals response to Trump is popular
Speaker 1: and that in six months, if the polls change, the
Speaker 1: party's stand may change to the same thing happened in
Speaker 1: reaction to my tweets on diversity and multiculturalism. This is
Speaker 1: another crucial debate for the future of our country. Do
Speaker 1: we want to emphasize or ethnic and religious differences or
Speaker 1: exploit them to buy votes as the liberals are doing,
Speaker 1: or emphasize what unites us and the values that can
Speaker 1: guarantee social cohesion. Just like other Western societies grappling with
Speaker 1: this issue. A large number of Canadians, and certainly the
Speaker 1: vast majority of Conservatives, are worried that we are heading
Speaker 1: in the wrong direction. But it's not correct to raise
Speaker 1: such questions. So yeah, and I think the honestly one
Speaker 1: of the main reasons why Brenair hasn't been super successful
Speaker 1: um is because of his accent. Like he is, it's
Speaker 1: harder for Protestant white Canadians to support him because he
Speaker 1: talks with a French Canadian accent. Um If if if
Speaker 1: he talked in like good English, I think he would
Speaker 1: have he would have won Conservative leadership um and his
Speaker 1: Populist party would be way more popular than than than
Speaker 1: it is now. So critical support to other French racism
Speaker 1: is preventing the racist from being racist enough. Yes, you
Speaker 1: love to see you certainly see it. We do, we
Speaker 1: do see it. So Bernair faced some pushback from his
Speaker 1: conservative colleagues, including Stephen Harper U of trying to divide
Speaker 1: the right and split the right of center vote. UM
Speaker 1: and some of the less socially conservative members of the
Speaker 1: main Conservative party decried Berner's departure and subsequent New People's
Speaker 1: Party as just a plain attempt to pander to xenophobia
Speaker 1: and racist right wingers. But Berner went right to work
Speaker 1: and ran enough candidates under his new party to secure
Speaker 1: a spot in the federal election debates that were like that,
Speaker 1: you know that how we watch presidential debates, same thing,
Speaker 1: but these have you know, multiple candidates because there are
Speaker 1: multiple parties, the same thing. But basically he was able
Speaker 1: to get in the televised debates. Um, the PPC, which
Speaker 1: is the People's Party of Canada. I'm just gonna say
Speaker 1: the PPC now because it sounds funny. Um. They started
Speaker 1: going viral on the internet after pictures of massive billboards
Speaker 1: with Berner's face and big text that said say no
Speaker 1: to mass immigration. This this this guy very is this
Speaker 1: guy very Mimi around like these big these big PPC
Speaker 1: billboards um I'm gonna I'm gonna read a bit from
Speaker 1: a write up and it's going down by some local
Speaker 1: um Montreal anti fascists. There have been suggestions that the
Speaker 1: PPC spokesperson and architect of its public relations strategy, Martin Mass,
Speaker 1: has been key to its embrace of the far right.
Speaker 1: Mass was owner of the publisher of the Capucua Libre,
Speaker 1: which is an online libertarian news outlet that shut down
Speaker 1: in ten and that pp but that PPC's cozy relationship
Speaker 1: with racist is primarily due to the influence of this
Speaker 1: one person is highly doubtful. However, that's the PPC is
Speaker 1: positioning itself as the option of choice for those who
Speaker 1: find the Conservative Party insufficiently right wing. Racism is clearly
Speaker 1: just one of the most effective tools for such a strategy.
Speaker 1: Witnessing PPC billboards and tweets against mass immigration, also tweets
Speaker 1: about being against Antifa and Bernara's Diet tribe, about radical
Speaker 1: Islam being the biggest threat to freedom and peace and
Speaker 1: security the world today, and how he complains about other
Speaker 1: parties are are complacent and pandering to Islamists and promising
Speaker 1: that the PPC will make no compromise with the tolitarian ideology.
Speaker 1: A number of media articles have revealed all the far
Speaker 1: right connections to people active in the PPC as organizers
Speaker 1: and members whose signatures were used for the PPC to
Speaker 1: gain official party status. UM. For instance, a Derek Horn,
Speaker 1: the PPC volunteer and a security agent who accompanied Bernair
Speaker 1: at a variety of offense and media interviews. He has
Speaker 1: been revealed to be a founding member of the neo
Speaker 1: fascist Canadian Nationalist Party, which we we briefly mentioned in
Speaker 1: the last episode. UM. Sean Walker is an American immigrant
Speaker 1: and organizer with the PPC in St. Catharine's UM, as
Speaker 1: well as one of the people who signed on for
Speaker 1: PPC to be an official party. He was revealed to
Speaker 1: be the president of the National Alliance US, based in
Speaker 1: the Nazi organization seven. He was also convicted. He was
Speaker 1: also convicted of hate crimes at the time for violence
Speaker 1: Stands People of Color UM. Following these revelations, Walker was
Speaker 1: expelled from the PPC and Bernard claimed that he'd slipped
Speaker 1: through the party's betting process. However, was also revealed that
Speaker 1: Bernar follows him on Twitter. UM. Others who signed up
Speaker 1: for the for the PPC to be an official party
Speaker 1: include Janice Bulch, a founding member of the Patriotic Europeans
Speaker 1: against the Islamification of Accent, and also Justin L. Smith,
Speaker 1: leader of this of the Sudbury chapter of the Soldiers
Speaker 1: of Odin. So a whole bunch of whole bunch of
Speaker 1: fascist people are working work working for the party. Um
Speaker 1: And unsurprisingly a number of a number of candidates have
Speaker 1: made headlines. But there as there you know, social media
Speaker 1: posts from the past and present have surfaced featuring like racism, Islamophobia,
Speaker 1: and a lot of spreading of far right conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: You know that was just kind of common. There's too many,
Speaker 1: honestly to mention. UM. And it's it's not just that
Speaker 1: the PPC has a few bad apples in it. It's
Speaker 1: like the whole the whole party is rife with these
Speaker 1: kind of one of these kind of sentiments. UM. One
Speaker 1: gauge of this and the sign and a sign that
Speaker 1: like this is intentional is the as looking at the
Speaker 1: candidates who have left the party or have been kicked out.
Speaker 1: When it became clear that there would be no condemnation
Speaker 1: of the far right from the upper ranks, there was
Speaker 1: like and justin like twenty ninet alone, there was like
Speaker 1: three candidates who were who left or were either kicked
Speaker 1: out um because they you know, had objections to the
Speaker 1: racism rampant within the party. They were like complaining about, hey,
Speaker 1: these guys seem kind of racist, and then they were
Speaker 1: kicked out of the party or or or or they left.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's that's a not a good problem to have. Um,
Speaker 1: so in in uh finishing up this this little quote here. Um. Indeed,
Speaker 1: a cursory, ac cursory look at the Facebook pages of
Speaker 1: PPC candidates reveals what's been really noteworthy is how selective
Speaker 1: the news stories about racist tweets or Facebook posts have been.
Speaker 1: Almost every PPC candidate in Quebec has recently in repeatedly
Speaker 1: shared articles from climate denialist sources, including many with a
Speaker 1: conspiratorial bent. A candidate for Pap and You even produced
Speaker 1: his own YouTube expose revealing how George sorrows it's behind
Speaker 1: an international and global conspiracy theory to crash economies and
Speaker 1: make money spending um panic about climate change. Secondary to
Speaker 1: climate denial, there's a lot of fears around free speed
Speaker 1: chin mass immigration, which are both recurring themes in the
Speaker 1: PPC candidates, and roughly one in five have recently shared
Speaker 1: news articles from what we would deem a national populist
Speaker 1: or fall right sources, including less manchetz dot com, which
Speaker 1: is the website of the French language of the French
Speaker 1: language translator of the christ Church Um Manifesto um, and
Speaker 1: that that the guy who ends the website is also
Speaker 1: involved with organizing in the Montreal in the Montreal chapter
Speaker 1: of the Yellow Bests. Um. Yeah, so he he both
Speaker 1: translated the manifesto and he's also running the Montreal Yellowest movement.
Speaker 1: So that's fun. Um, it's not fun, it's bad, um,
Speaker 1: Andre Pietrie pipe poo wow. And it's so Remember so
Speaker 1: I didn't learn French in Canada because I was in
Speaker 1: a weird Christian private school. Otherwise I could be a
Speaker 1: lot better at this job. But anyway, there's there's a
Speaker 1: there's a there's a there's just like a far right
Speaker 1: YouTube channel. But this guy called a studio who a
Speaker 1: lot of his stuff was shared. Um. And there's a
Speaker 1: more like eccentric and sporadic mix of of of other
Speaker 1: news sources, including Unite the Right attendee Faith Goldie who
Speaker 1: also ran for mayor of Toronto and got third place.
Speaker 1: UM Quebec based que and on figure Alexus trudell Um
Speaker 1: and the al right YouTuber black Pigeon Speaks. Of course,
Speaker 1: the main yellow Vest page was shared a lot, and
Speaker 1: also sources from the highly racist The Voice of Europe.
Speaker 1: So yeah, a lot of a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of not not great news sources being being shared by
Speaker 1: the PBC. UM. So that is the gist of the
Speaker 1: People's Party as of twenty nine UM. Overall, their performance
Speaker 1: in the election was kind of a flop. Bernair lost
Speaker 1: his own seat in Quebec. No PC candidates got into
Speaker 1: office and the party only managed to get one. Uh.
Speaker 1: The party only managed to get one point six percent
Speaker 1: of the total national popular vote, so that's good. It
Speaker 1: only got one point six percent of all of the
Speaker 1: votes in Canada. So we're gonna take a break from
Speaker 1: the People's Party for now and we will circle back
Speaker 1: towards it um at the end. But after after an
Speaker 1: ad break, we will we will talk about the what
Speaker 1: the main Conservative Party was up to during this time
Speaker 1: and uh a little bit after the election, so yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: and now the cats just blocking the whole thing. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. The cat is in the bathroom. I moved
Speaker 1: my cats. They were blocking the camera. Hello. Um, people's
Speaker 1: party not doing great in the first election. That's fun.
Speaker 1: Let's see what the regular conservatives are up to. I'm
Speaker 1: sure it was things that are just good and cool.
Speaker 1: If I know anything about conservatives, it's that they're not
Speaker 1: not hashtag problematic. Yeah, you just let's just go okay,
Speaker 1: So I'll just be sad over here, and the audience
Speaker 1: can know that I'm sad the whole time you're talking.
Speaker 1: I would rather as episode not such a not such
Speaker 1: a downer, but it's it's hard to make it. The
Speaker 1: is kind of an upper I'll make a bargain with
Speaker 1: the audience that if they listen, I will I will
Speaker 1: do my French accent at least one more time. We'll
Speaker 1: see doing the French accent. This is the happiest I
Speaker 1: have seen Robert all day. Well, he does look very tired.
Speaker 1: You didn't say earlier, Garrison, and this was very funny
Speaker 1: that you'd be better at your job if you could
Speaker 1: speak French. But given what we are here, it cools
Speaker 1: ow mediate you would actually be much worse at your job. Um,
Speaker 1: and in fact, if you if you were to speak French,
Speaker 1: I would I would fire you immediate. It's actually requirement.
Speaker 1: You can't pronounce things to certainly not French. There's other
Speaker 1: languages you're allowed to know how to pronounce, but not French.
Speaker 1: No oblo francaie. So let's pick up right after Maxine
Speaker 1: Bernard lost the Conservative leadership to Andrew Sheer in um.
Speaker 1: Sheer won the leadership on a on on like a
Speaker 1: platform of classical financial conservatism and a slightly more socially
Speaker 1: moderate platform um. When Sheer got into office, though, one
Speaker 1: of the things he faced criticism for, even among the
Speaker 1: Conservative caucus was his association with a little media with
Speaker 1: was his association with a little media outlet called rebel Media.
Speaker 1: Yeah so most most listeners may not know what rebel
Speaker 1: media is, but you've certainly seen their stuff or felt
Speaker 1: their effect. Yeah, it's like the rough draft of bright
Speaker 1: bart and also Canadian and Canadian, Yes so Canadian. Uh so,
Speaker 1: Rebel Media is a Canadian far right neo fascist propaganda
Speaker 1: Outlet's start that has a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: bright Barti vibes um rebel media. Yeah, bright Bartesque, rebel media,
Speaker 1: host thinking tribute years have included a white nationalist and
Speaker 1: white genocide proponent, Laurence Southern UM and Proud Boy founder
Speaker 1: Gavin McGinness um. McGinnis produced a quote satirical video for
Speaker 1: Rebel called ten Things I Hate about the Jews. Yeah so,
Speaker 1: and it's and it is worth noting that both Southern
Speaker 1: and McGinnis are Canadian. Um, They're actually a lot of
Speaker 1: alt figures that are Canadian. Of course we have we
Speaker 1: have Lauren Southern, Gavin McGinnis, Um, we have Stephen Crowder,
Speaker 1: uh Stefan malin you and of course Jordan Peterson. All
Speaker 1: of those people are are Canadian and most of them,
Speaker 1: most of them still live in Canada. Yes, he's still alive.
Speaker 1: Made he made insane tweet the other day. God, he
Speaker 1: made the most tweet. That tweet made it all worthwhile. Baby,
Speaker 1: he got everyone to go check his Twitter feed. It
Speaker 1: is amazing. You can you can hear his brain shorting
Speaker 1: out when you read that tweet, Like you need to
Speaker 1: find the tweet it is. It is just it is
Speaker 1: the most beautiful piece of poetry of ever. It's like
Speaker 1: somebody taught a stroke out of type. It makes no sense. God,
Speaker 1: it's so good. Um, I'm going to quote an article
Speaker 1: by a Global news dot c a on Andrew Sheer
Speaker 1: and Rebel media. Quote. Despite a string of controversies faced
Speaker 1: by Canadian right wing media outlet of The Rebel, including
Speaker 1: allegations of downplaying the Holocaust movie minted, Conservative Party leader
Speaker 1: Andrew Sheer has so far continued to make himself available
Speaker 1: to the company that other prominent Conservative politicians have criticized
Speaker 1: for its controversial reporting and activism. Shear's campaign organization also
Speaker 1: has a direct connection to The Rebel. His campaign manager,
Speaker 1: Hamish Marshall, is listed as a director of the company's
Speaker 1: federal incorporation records, which show its most recent annual gathering
Speaker 1: meeting was in February this year. Following the leadership election
Speaker 1: in Toronto on Saturday, she granted one on one interviews
Speaker 1: with a handful of major media organizations, including a face
Speaker 1: to face interview with The Rebels Ottawa correspondent Brian Lily.
Speaker 1: Prior to his convention interview, Sheer appeared on The Rebel
Speaker 1: in February in a studio interview with host Faith Goldie
Speaker 1: on her show on the Hunt. At the end of
Speaker 1: the discussion, Goldie asked she Er if if he would
Speaker 1: agree to go on a duck hunting trip with her
Speaker 1: after after he wins the leadership on Canada Day, which
Speaker 1: he agreed to. UM We briefly mentioned faith Goldie earlier
Speaker 1: in her connection to the People's Party UM and her
Speaker 1: brief campaign for the Toronto mayor, but here's some more
Speaker 1: background on her UM and her coverage and her coverage
Speaker 1: of the Unite the Right rally for Rebel media. Quoting
Speaker 1: from Winnipeg Free Press, in the course of her dispatches,
Speaker 1: Goldie argued the events in the Charlottesville were evidence of
Speaker 1: a rising white racial consciousness that was going to change
Speaker 1: the political landscape in America. She also wanted to she's
Speaker 1: actually not wrong there. That was, Yeah, she's not wrong,
Speaker 1: but I think she's she's on the other side of
Speaker 1: the ai alat and whether this is a good or
Speaker 1: bad thing. Yeah. She went to great lengths to laud
Speaker 1: the twenty point Meta political Manifesto composed by White National's
Speaker 1: leader Richard Spencer, a document that includes calls to organize
Speaker 1: U states along ethnic and racial divides and celebrates the
Speaker 1: superiority of white America. Faith Goldie described Spencer's manifesto as
Speaker 1: robust and well thought out. Goldie was fired by Rebel
Speaker 1: in mid August and seventeen, but not due to her
Speaker 1: participation in Unite the Right. She was fired for appearing
Speaker 1: on a Daily Stormer podcast to discuss Unite the Right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, that's that's fine. So yeah, fine, nice
Speaker 1: to have her. Interviewing Conservative leader Andrew Sheer asked for
Speaker 1: his reaction to Unite the Right and Rebel media um
Speaker 1: after what happened in Charlotte'sville in Sheer, who had previously
Speaker 1: been interviewed by Rebel multiple times, finally di of ad
Speaker 1: the outlets, saying, look, I believe there's a fine line
Speaker 1: between covering events and giving a platform to groups who
Speaker 1: are promoting a violent, disgusting point of view. I won't
Speaker 1: be granting interviews going forward. So that's nice that it
Speaker 1: took someone dying in Charlotte's Bill to realize that you
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't talk to the fascist media source. Um. So,
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of Unite the Right, the mainstream conservatives
Speaker 1: kind of had to tread carefully around social issues because
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, yeah, they're there's still not seas we
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't be pandering to them. Um. But as more
Speaker 1: time a distance led the air cool. Some Conservatives went
Speaker 1: back to the same old rhetoric around the twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: election um. For instance, in his twenty nineteen election campaign,
Speaker 1: uh Tom Chemick, of the parliamentary representative of one of
Speaker 1: the parliamentary representatives for Calgary, Alberta, wrote out and spread
Speaker 1: flyers with the all claps with the all caps header
Speaker 1: of crisis at the Border with text reading deer constituent.
Speaker 1: The Independent Autor General of Canada has published a scathing
Speaker 1: report confirming that the Ottawa Liberals have failed to safely
Speaker 1: and responsibly manage Canada's borders since Justin Trudeau you responsibly
Speaker 1: tweeted out that Canada would open sporers to anyone seeking entry.
Speaker 1: The number of people illegally crossing the board into Canada
Speaker 1: from the United States has surged past one thousand a month,
Speaker 1: with almost twenty people illegally enteringen alone, and while speaking
Speaker 1: to voters of CONAC repeatedly insisted that all the problems
Speaker 1: of people illegally crossing the Canadian border isn't a symptom
Speaker 1: of a failure of systems to respond to a growing crisis,
Speaker 1: but merely a failure for border patrol. To with to
Speaker 1: assert control over people. UM. Quotes and flyer courtesy of
Speaker 1: about This Tom chemic Guy A courtesy of a. Dan
Speaker 1: Olson of Folding Ideas. He's a great Canadian documentarian who
Speaker 1: released a magnificent piece on Q and on and conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories last year on his YouTube channel of Folding Ideas. Overall,
Speaker 1: I really really like Dan. He makes very good stuff. UM,
Speaker 1: so thank thank you to him for sending me those
Speaker 1: those those flyers. UM. Anyway, during the twenty steen election,
Speaker 1: Sheer led the Conservatives to gain a total of twenty
Speaker 1: six seats in the party inside Parliament, going from ninety
Speaker 1: five up to one hundred and twenty one, but they
Speaker 1: did finish thirty six seats behind the Liberals despite beating
Speaker 1: the Liberals in the popular vote by one point three percent.
Speaker 1: So there was a thirty four point four percent for
Speaker 1: Conservatives and thirty three point one percent of the popular
Speaker 1: vote for Liberals. The margin was just over like two
Speaker 1: hundred and forty thousand votes. UM. The Liberals lost twenty
Speaker 1: seats in the election and the n DP lost fifteen seats,
Speaker 1: and this was the first time since to UH since
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine that a party won the most seats
Speaker 1: without also winning the popular vote. Um. What what pushed
Speaker 1: the Conservatives over on the popular vote was due to
Speaker 1: you know, extremely high conservative turnout in uh in in
Speaker 1: in various in various writings. So basically more Conservatives voted
Speaker 1: in certain runnings than they usually do, so even if
Speaker 1: the Liberals still win the district, there was still more
Speaker 1: Conservative votes to be counted. Um. And also they based
Speaker 1: really swept the Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where
Speaker 1: they won seventy of the vote in sixties five percent
Speaker 1: of the vote respectively. But their victories in those states
Speaker 1: and their higher turnout did not convert into many seats
Speaker 1: because the less population dense areas have fewer federal writings
Speaker 1: and fewer available seats um. And the Liberals had to
Speaker 1: rely heavily for seats in Ontario though, you know, the
Speaker 1: most populous province that include cities like Toronto, um and
Speaker 1: you know other a few other big cities. So you know,
Speaker 1: Canada doesn't have the most democratic system like so the
Speaker 1: same way you know in the States were familiar with
Speaker 1: you know, people losing popular votes, um but still getting
Speaker 1: elected president and stuff. You know, in Canadas, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a little bit different because of how you vote
Speaker 1: for parties in your own little district. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's still not perfect, right because, like it is, it
Speaker 1: does feel weird for the leader of the leader of
Speaker 1: the country to not have his party to not have
Speaker 1: also won the popular vote because of how you know,
Speaker 1: districts work out and how higher turnout in some areas
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that it's going to have more seats, um.
Speaker 1: You know. But the other side of things here is
Speaker 1: that like Canada also doesn't have ranked choice, so like,
Speaker 1: still the majority of people voted for left of center
Speaker 1: candidates if you include you know, the Green Party, the
Speaker 1: n DP, and the Liberals. So even the Liberals lost
Speaker 1: the popular vote, there's still like a majority left of
Speaker 1: center voting. So if they if they had ranked choice,
Speaker 1: maybe the results would have been different. So Canada's system,
Speaker 1: it definitely is in perfect for how they do elections. UM,
Speaker 1: I would I would prefer ranked choice, as you know,
Speaker 1: basically basically I would prefer that for like every country
Speaker 1: if they're gonna have elections. Um. So yeah, just kind
Speaker 1: of explaining why they can lose the popular vote, but still,
Speaker 1: you know, still win a majority controlling government. UM. So
Speaker 1: after the election, Sheer announced he was resigning as head
Speaker 1: of the Conservatives in December of twenty nineteen. UH. This
Speaker 1: was after it was revealed that he had used party
Speaker 1: funds for his children's own private schooling. So good for him, UM,
Speaker 1: a new bid for Conservative leadership went into effect. We're
Speaker 1: gonna mainly focus on two candidates here. There was an
Speaker 1: erin o'tool and Derek Solan. UM. O'tool fancies himself as
Speaker 1: another kind of like classic financial conservative and a social moderate.
Speaker 1: He feels more like the old progressive Conservative candidates from
Speaker 1: back before the two of US and three Unite the
Speaker 1: Right merger. Um. We got some like John McCain vibes here, UM,
Speaker 1: but Derek solan is more similar to the farther right
Speaker 1: parts of the U s IS current Republican Party, like
Speaker 1: anti abortion, anti LGBT, racist tweets, etcetera. UM. But as
Speaker 1: a whole, Solon's extremism was rejected by the Canadian Conservatives.
Speaker 1: UM he got only he got like only fourth. He
Speaker 1: got fourth placed with fifteen percent of the vote during
Speaker 1: the first round of voting. UM and ultimately o'tool one
Speaker 1: leadership after three rounds of votes, um and o'tool now
Speaker 1: has the has the new challenge of trying to appeal
Speaker 1: to the Canadian Conservatives more moderate wing, as well as
Speaker 1: the more Trumpian wing that's developed the past few years.
Speaker 1: He's been relatively successful in crafting like a boring, polite
Speaker 1: Canadian version of Trump's nationalism, with slogans like Canada First
Speaker 1: and take Canada Back, um, you know, despite supporting trade
Speaker 1: deals outsourcing Canadian jobs to cheaper overseas markets because they
Speaker 1: never actually mean what they say, um and the and
Speaker 1: As the Liberals have grown more aware of Canada's bloody
Speaker 1: history and have like toned down the red and white
Speaker 1: maple leaf patriotism, the Conservative Party under o'tool has seized
Speaker 1: on this opportunity to make Canadian patriotism more of a
Speaker 1: right leaning staple, just like patriotism is, you know, it's
Speaker 1: more of like a right wing thing in the States.
Speaker 1: So basically, after we were like, oh yeah, residental schools
Speaker 1: were bad, Canada's kind of sucked up, liberals are like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we maybe shouldn't be so we shouldn't be waving our
Speaker 1: maple leaf legs everywhere. Maybe we're not a perfect country.
Speaker 1: The Conservatives like, no, you have to be proud to
Speaker 1: be Canadian. So they've kind of taken patriotism to be
Speaker 1: their new thing. Well, previously it was much more of
Speaker 1: like a liberal thing. The Islamophobia and overt religious bigotry
Speaker 1: under a tool has been slightly trimmed down UM, and
Speaker 1: climate change has at least been mentioned as a existing UM.
Speaker 1: But there has also been increased discussion on trying to
Speaker 1: hack down Canada's healthcare and privatize more aspects of it, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: good job, guys, take away the only good part of Canada. UM.
Speaker 1: Like Uh. The province of Alberta under Jason Kenny has
Speaker 1: done this to a disastrous effect UM, raising the cost
Speaker 1: of medical care for lower class people, many of whom
Speaker 1: voted Conservative. UM. I have family in Alberta, and just
Speaker 1: the past five years the changes to the healthcare system
Speaker 1: there has been horrible. UM, it's not it's not great.
Speaker 1: So basically, what what what o'tool wants is he he
Speaker 1: wants he wants to ba just privatize more elements of it.
Speaker 1: He has a specific term he uses like he wants
Speaker 1: like a he wants to like split the fed like
Speaker 1: the like the taxpayer healthcare and privatized health care into
Speaker 1: two sections, and you can choose which one to join
Speaker 1: in anyway, it's silly. Um. O'cheval did take a wee
Speaker 1: little stance to distance himself from the more extreme wings
Speaker 1: of his party when he decided to remove MP Derek
Speaker 1: Solan from the caucus. Uh TOO announced that Solan will
Speaker 1: not be allowed to run as a candidate for the
Speaker 1: for the Conservative Party in the next election either, saying
Speaker 1: racism is a disease of the soul, repugnance to our
Speaker 1: core values. It has no place in our country and
Speaker 1: has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada. I
Speaker 1: won't tolerate it. Um. Also last year, O'Toole refused to
Speaker 1: say whether he thinks systemic racism exists UM. But the
Speaker 1: decision to remove Soland was made after it was revealed
Speaker 1: that he accepted a donation from the Canadian Nazi Paul
Speaker 1: from during uh during Soland's bid for a Conservative leadership
Speaker 1: back in the nineties of From was a figurehead of
Speaker 1: the Canadian far right movement, appearing at Heritage Front rallies
Speaker 1: and also caught on video at a party celebrating Hitler's birthday,
Speaker 1: which he lost his high school teaching job over well, look,
Speaker 1: it's just polite to celebrate a guy's birthday, you know,
Speaker 1: whether or not he's Hitler. Under no circumstances do you
Speaker 1: got us celebrate this? This is a a hot take. Um. So,
Speaker 1: there has been a bit of the there has been
Speaker 1: a bit of a rift in the Conservative Party over
Speaker 1: how much Trumpian rhetoric should be allowed in the Canadian
Speaker 1: Conservative Party. UM and this kind of rift has definitely
Speaker 1: increased after January six. UM. The problem for Conservative politicians
Speaker 1: is that to win elections they need to appeal to
Speaker 1: the largest swath of voters um and that includes more
Speaker 1: socially conservative and increasingly far right rule folks. But if
Speaker 1: they go too far, they'll lose the moderates to the
Speaker 1: Liberal Party. So you have it's like this delicate balance.
Speaker 1: But to kind of give you like an overview of
Speaker 1: what the current state of the Conservative of Like votership
Speaker 1: is UM four. Intent of the Conservative Party of Canada members,
Speaker 1: So you know, people signed up to vote in the party,
Speaker 1: you know, regular people UM four in ten would say
Speaker 1: that they would have voted for Trump for intents, say
Speaker 1: that they think Democrats told the presdential election and for
Speaker 1: intents say that the Conservative and four intent believe that
Speaker 1: the January six riot was staged or was done by
Speaker 1: the Democrats, are done by Antiva. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: the state of the Conservative Party in Canada for like
Speaker 1: the for the voters. So you know, politicians have to
Speaker 1: kind of in order to win, they need they need
Speaker 1: to still still need to appeal to those people, but
Speaker 1: they don't want to do that thing usually, like they
Speaker 1: usually don't like usually there like a big talking point
Speaker 1: is like rejecting the divisive politics of the of the
Speaker 1: of the United States. Like that's a big thing people
Speaker 1: say in Canada. Is that, like they don't want it
Speaker 1: to become like, you know, like a fighting match because
Speaker 1: like the other main difference between Canada's elections in America's
Speaker 1: elections is like America is like always an election season,
Speaker 1: right like every you know, even after each election, it's
Speaker 1: like you feel like campaigns start right up again. Um,
Speaker 1: Canada's campaigns only run like a few months before the election,
Speaker 1: Like like it is not like those things you guys
Speaker 1: do objectively better than a lot of the world does.
Speaker 1: It's not just Canada. The idea that like, oh, elections
Speaker 1: are terrible. We should spend this little time. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like like two or three months of campaigning. That's it. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not like a two year, four year thing. No,
Speaker 1: that is a thing that we should absolutely the election
Speaker 1: should be about eleven minutes from from the start of
Speaker 1: the campaign to the vote. Everybody gets a minute to
Speaker 1: explain their their politics and then we vote and then
Speaker 1: we throw them into the sea. Yeah, So trying to
Speaker 1: trying to craft marketing to the divided right wing. It's
Speaker 1: been interesting to watch. You know, there's like videos about
Speaker 1: Tool walking through you know, downtowns with Pride flags in
Speaker 1: the background and you know, featuring visible like minority Canadians intermingling.
Speaker 1: But then you also have a tool like raally against
Speaker 1: cancel culture feeling suggestions that the liberal government's pandemic response
Speaker 1: is part of a socialist great reset and pulling out
Speaker 1: the dog whistle on like China and the coronavirus, you know,
Speaker 1: as often as you can. UM Tools in the past
Speaker 1: also downplayed Canadians Residential Schools program UM and described the
Speaker 1: efforts of activists pushing to removal of statues of the
Speaker 1: of the Residentary of School architect as stupid. Um, so
Speaker 1: I I do think o'tool prefers a Conservative party resistant
Speaker 1: too far right branding, but he knows he needs to
Speaker 1: appeal to its voters in order to win elections. So
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's just it's the thing that's not great,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting to watch. Um. In August one, Justin
Speaker 1: Trudeau noted black face appreciator called a snap election in
Speaker 1: an effort to gain more parliamentary seats in hopes of
Speaker 1: getting a majority Liberal government, something a prime minister should
Speaker 1: not be allowed to do, by the way, like a
Speaker 1: priva minister should not be able to decide when to
Speaker 1: do elections. That is, like should totally not be a thing,
Speaker 1: Like what, no, you shouldn't do that. But anyway, um.
Speaker 1: As snap election ramped up, the Conservative Party under a tool,
Speaker 1: made some extremely questionable choices for their marketings and their slogans. Um,
Speaker 1: what does the phrase secure the future bring to mind? Anything? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So that became the new tagline for the entire Servative
Speaker 1: Party under a tool. Kay, sure, we got, we got,
Speaker 1: we got, we got Secure the Future, billboards, we got,
Speaker 1: we got, we got websites Conservative dot c a slash
Speaker 1: Secure the future. We got mailer's magazine covers all emblazoned
Speaker 1: with secure the future or secure our future. Um, and
Speaker 1: you know what will secure our future? Garrison the Chevron
Speaker 1: ads that keep popping up. We keep securing our future. Yeah. Great,
Speaker 1: you're welcome. It's a great time. Chevron appreciators for everyone. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back and just appreciating Chevron, just like Justin Trudeau.
Speaker 1: Appreciate Justin Trudeau. Yeah, so secure the future great slogan,
Speaker 1: not a good slogan. Bad um. I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a bit from a mailer that went out to Conservative
Speaker 1: Party members after a tool one leadership quote. I firmly
Speaker 1: believe Canada has everything. It has everything it takes to
Speaker 1: recover from COVID nineteen and enjoy prosperous future if we
Speaker 1: have a government that knows how to secure the future.
Speaker 1: If the truth, if the Trudeau Liberals stay in power,
Speaker 1: they'll continue spending taxpayer money at pandemic era levels long before,
Speaker 1: long after the virus is behind us. The result, all
Speaker 1: the things we love about Canada will be in serious jeopardy.
Speaker 1: Our debt will become out of control, and they'll never
Speaker 1: be able to get back the Canada. You and I
Speaker 1: grew up in the kind of Canada our children and
Speaker 1: grandchildren deserve. So later on in the page, oh tool
Speaker 1: says we need to stand up to the Chinese Communist
Speaker 1: Party and hold Beijing accountable for sabotaging our economy and
Speaker 1: taking jobs from Canadian workers. Um And. On August sixteen,
Speaker 1: the Canadian Conservative Party twitter account tweeted out and I quote,
Speaker 1: Canada's recovery program will secure the future for you, your children,
Speaker 1: and your grand and your grandchildren. So that's fun. Also, also,
Speaker 1: guess how guess guess how many words is in that
Speaker 1: last sentence? Yeah, yeah, we're going back to calling Canada
Speaker 1: Calanada again. That's it's like a dog whistle, but except
Speaker 1: for you know, a dog whistle, only dogs can hear it,
Speaker 1: except everyone. It's just a whistle. It's just it's just
Speaker 1: a regular whistle. Yeah, it's it's it's that he just
Speaker 1: tweeted it tweet Yeah. So as anyway, um as O'Toole
Speaker 1: was getting all secure the future piled um. Canada's actual
Speaker 1: far right populist party, the People's Party, was gaining much
Speaker 1: more popularity amid the pandemic and the anti mask, anti lockdown,
Speaker 1: anti VAXX protests. The COVID nineteen pandemic was a gift
Speaker 1: to the far right in general, as it allowed the
Speaker 1: injection and proliferation of conspiracy theories to accelerate at levels
Speaker 1: almost never before seen and provided fair recruiting ground to
Speaker 1: gain new followers. The PPC latched onto this and was
Speaker 1: extremely successful. They were you know, they sponsored protests, They
Speaker 1: did a whole bunch of campaigns that are around like
Speaker 1: anti mask stuff, anti vaccine, you know, all all of it. Um.
Speaker 1: So the PPC was able to be not just a
Speaker 1: safe harper for anti immigration, white nationalists and neo Nazis
Speaker 1: and other far right groups, but also now more mainstream
Speaker 1: anti lockdown, anti vaccine, anti government protesters as well as
Speaker 1: you know, gun rights activists and some general rule workers
Speaker 1: feeling left behind from even the Conservative Party. So the
Speaker 1: PPC has changed from a niche right nationalist party to
Speaker 1: a full blown far right populist force. What Bernar in
Speaker 1: the and the PPC have done so effectively since the
Speaker 1: pandemic is to use the broad concerns around COVID and
Speaker 1: freedom and the more you know, mainstream concerns about economic anxieties,
Speaker 1: job loss, lots of businesses, immigration and changing culture and
Speaker 1: managed and managed to rule all of these things up
Speaker 1: into one tight package, which is really appealing to a
Speaker 1: lot of Canadians who are very anxious about the state
Speaker 1: of their country, especially amid the COVID nineteen pandemic. So
Speaker 1: the results of the September snap election, which was you
Speaker 1: know last month, we're basically the same as the twenty
Speaker 1: election UM, except the PPC went from one point six
Speaker 1: percent of the vote to five percent of the vote,
Speaker 1: A big, big change, uh. They That means they were
Speaker 1: ranking above the Green Party and nearly tying the block
Speaker 1: kebu Qua, So they made I know, like one of
Speaker 1: five percent doesn't seem like tons, but like this is
Speaker 1: a really big jump for a brand new party UM,
Speaker 1: especially especially if they're ahead of the Green Party and
Speaker 1: tying the Block Party. That is like a notable shift UM.
Speaker 1: The University of Ghulaf Professor of of Political Science Tamra
Speaker 1: Small said that said this after the results of the
Speaker 1: last snap election. Quote, I think the only leader who's
Speaker 1: a static about last night's results is Bernair. I don't
Speaker 1: think they're going anywhere. I think it seems that he's
Speaker 1: taken the populism and attached to far right politics, the
Speaker 1: idea that Canada was immune to this sort of far
Speaker 1: right populism, the idea that Canada was going to be
Speaker 1: free from the populism that we saw in Europe, like
Speaker 1: what Nigel Farage is in the UK. But I think
Speaker 1: lots of people are wondering if Bernara is just gonna
Speaker 1: say I'm not here to form an actual government, I'm
Speaker 1: just here to challenge the system and use that as
Speaker 1: a way of gaining massive support. Um. After a CTV
Speaker 1: news emailed the PPC for comment for their post election story, uh,
Speaker 1: the party spokesperson sent back a one line email response,
Speaker 1: I don't respond to requests from leftists. Activists masquerading as
Speaker 1: journalists get lost, so that's fun. Also in late September,
Speaker 1: Bernard's Twitter account was temporarily suspended for encouraging his supporters
Speaker 1: to attack journalists. Yeah just not like I'm okay with
Speaker 1: criticizing journalists stuff, because most journalists are like not great.
Speaker 1: But when you're using your political Twitter account to just
Speaker 1: like tell people to just go attack the press, usually
Speaker 1: it's a bad sign of of like a political party.
Speaker 1: Usually it's just like, yeah, political parties when they do
Speaker 1: that usually leads to bad things. UM, we are going
Speaker 1: to talk about one kind of wrapping up here. We're
Speaker 1: talking about one Ontario People's Party candidate named Mario Greco,
Speaker 1: who was a another another high school teacher UM and
Speaker 1: self proclaimed game developer UM of A few years ago,
Speaker 1: I I see Chriss Vincent because like you know, this
Speaker 1: can't lead to good things the gamers, it can't be good.
Speaker 1: So a few years ago, Greco made a video game
Speaker 1: called Happy Culture Shootout UM. Quoting an article from Press
Speaker 1: Progress dot c A Happy Culture Shootout is a Space
Speaker 1: Invaders style game that allows players to control spaceship that
Speaker 1: shoots laser beams at caricatures of various identity groups. Quote
Speaker 1: this game, it's about an alien order to invade Earth
Speaker 1: and transport all humans to happy Land, Greco says on
Speaker 1: his personal website, which includes other games that he authored,
Speaker 1: like Die mar which is about a young, misunderstood hero
Speaker 1: who sees to liberate post war Germany. Umo in in
Speaker 1: asist in a since telated video obtained by Press Progress,
Speaker 1: The People's Party Canadate delivered a presentation to university students
Speaker 1: several years ago, offering his postmortem on the game UM.
Speaker 1: Reco expressed surprise that his students and faculty reacted negatively
Speaker 1: to the game, with one calling it the most racist
Speaker 1: game I've ever played. Greco says his game is not
Speaker 1: racist in the slightest, noting that he made fun of
Speaker 1: his own Italian heritage. He also claimed that some students
Speaker 1: thought his gay Pride parade level was hilarious. My friends
Speaker 1: and I love people of all cultures, and we also
Speaker 1: love humor of all types that includes harmless racist jokes.
Speaker 1: Greco said in the video, the game was intended to
Speaker 1: make a joke about how ridiculous cultural stereotypes are, so
Speaker 1: we can laugh about it together and move on with
Speaker 1: our lives. UM. During the presentation, the People's Party candidate
Speaker 1: offered a interesting side note about the games Israel level.
Speaker 1: According according to Greco, a faculty member at the university
Speaker 1: strongly recommended that he removed Jewish stereotypes from the game.
Speaker 1: He was like, no, get rid of it immediately. Don't
Speaker 1: have any religious content whatsoever. I know that subject is very,
Speaker 1: very touchy. So yeah, this is just a game where
Speaker 1: you race shoot to minority people. UM. Anyway. In twenty
Speaker 1: six and Greco posted a photo on Facebook of an
Speaker 1: illustration of Pepe the Frog, which he said was drawn
Speaker 1: by one of his students in in the white board
Speaker 1: of his York Region high school. Um Peppe had a
Speaker 1: little speech bubble that said free Kuekistan Gray yep. So
Speaker 1: now nazis so. Currently Greco is spending his time tweeting
Speaker 1: about critical race theory and trying to get into office
Speaker 1: under the People's Party banner UM. In his Twitter bio,
Speaker 1: he calls himself an egalitarian, libertarian nationalist, and he still
Speaker 1: also teaches computer science at Ontario High School. Diferent call
Speaker 1: themselves fascists. I know it's it's not fun. These people
Speaker 1: are all all for the worst, most scum. Um. And
Speaker 1: one one more thing before we sign off. UM. Last month,
Speaker 1: right before the September election, I was forwarded some pictures
Speaker 1: of some People's Party of Canada posters and flyers put
Speaker 1: up linking to their campaign website. That someone came across
Speaker 1: UM around town, not not Portland's, like somewhere in Canada.
Speaker 1: UM under the PPC logo there was you know, pictures
Speaker 1: of people's faces and big black text that said it's
Speaker 1: okay to be white, right bad. So that's the liberal utopia.
Speaker 1: Of Canada everybody, um, And basically, like the reason why
Speaker 1: I wanted to put these episodes together, it's because like
Speaker 1: we we lots of like, you know, we make a
Speaker 1: lot of jokes about, you know, escaping to Canada as
Speaker 1: the States gets too fascist, and I just want to
Speaker 1: like say, like I'm not saying Canada's getting at the
Speaker 1: same rate, but Canada is not immune to the same thing.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's it's it's it's you can't you can't
Speaker 1: run away from authoritarianism by moving, yeah to a country
Speaker 1: with no history of authoritarianism, like I don't know Germany,
Speaker 1: uh huh. Yeah. And I think the everything is important
Speaker 1: with with Canada particularly is that like Canada is like
Speaker 1: affected by American political trends. And you see this absolutely
Speaker 1: like like one of one of the things that I
Speaker 1: remember looking at when I was when I was looking
Speaker 1: into sort of if you look at the history of
Speaker 1: like anti astion riots for example, So there's a huge
Speaker 1: wave and night No. Seven that goes like it goes
Speaker 1: all the way up the West coast because a lot
Speaker 1: of them, and it ends in Toronto, yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, yeah, and you see you see that
Speaker 1: like and you see that like today to where it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Toronto I think has the highest rate of anti
Speaker 1: Asian attacks like in North America. That's not pretty impressive
Speaker 1: considering like the absolute shit show going on in like
Speaker 1: New York, in LA and Seattle, and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: Toronto's worse. No, it's it's it's real bad. There's I
Speaker 1: talk a lot about how the far right is getting
Speaker 1: a lot, a lot more, a lot stronger of an
Speaker 1: influence in Alberta, and it is spreading into other eastern
Speaker 1: eastern provinces, not just inside Quebec. You know, there was
Speaker 1: the insult attack in Toronto a few years ago that
Speaker 1: killed like I think like a dozen people. Of course,
Speaker 1: there was the Quebec mosque shooting. There's been a lot
Speaker 1: of these kind of things popping off, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's even more starting in like British Columbia as well,
Speaker 1: which is which has a decent far right kind of
Speaker 1: influence at least on the eastern side of BC, um
Speaker 1: away from like Victoria and from Vancouver. UM. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to like place together and be like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's worth looking at these countries that
Speaker 1: we usually view with you know, generally doing better and
Speaker 1: be like no, like it's the same thing is happening there,
Speaker 1: and it's all it's all part of the same overarching
Speaker 1: slide right word that we've seen in both in the
Speaker 1: UK we were even seeing it now in Germany, we're
Speaker 1: seeing it, you know, in the obviously the States under Trump,
Speaker 1: and in Canada, even though the Liberals have won the
Speaker 1: past few elections, it's still scooting right word. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to put this thing together. If you
Speaker 1: want to keep up to date on Canadian stuff, you
Speaker 1: can check out the Canadian Antihit network, which does work
Speaker 1: tracking extremism in Canada. And yeah, that is uh, that
Speaker 1: is what I put together. Thanks Garrison. Yeah, you're welcoming
Speaker 1: from You're welcome. Well, that's the episode that's gonna do
Speaker 1: it for us here and it could happen here today,
Speaker 1: come back tomorrow or you know whenever, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about another part of the world. Maybe I don't know Portugal.
Speaker 1: Fuck it, I don't have stuff pulled for partures. No,
Speaker 1: that's what we're doing now. Follow us on Twitter, on Instagram,
Speaker 1: and it could happen here. Pod and Cools on media
Speaker 1: leafive star reviews, whatever, Goodbye, Goodbye Hey. We'll be back
Speaker 1: Monday with more episodes every week from now until the
Speaker 1: heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is
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Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
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