The Mark Steyn Show Free Speech Forum

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're on the Marx Stein cruise and we are just out of Sydney Nova Scotia that's in Canada for you know non Nova Scotians out there we have an audience of Americans Canadians English Irish Australian New Zealand we have some Estonians we have at least two francophones here we are celebrating diversity we have in insufficient Sudanese and Somalis but we have a Sudan's leading clitoridectomy practitioner has agreed to join us in the second half of the show now when you do one of these cruises in Canadian waters many of you know the Canadians in the audience will know that on the radio you have Canadian content regulations and that a certain proportion of what you hear on the radio is has three Canadian content which is why every third record is sometimes when we touch or all that Celine Dion one way if you touch me like this will I touch you like though it's all coming back to me now whatever thought so we have in compliance with Canadian content regulations we have an all-canadian panel and halfway through the show we are obligated by the Government of Canada to do sometimes when we touch so we're just warning you now so you can duck out and head for the lifeboats and we so we have three free of my fellow Canadians with me Andrew Lawton and yeah give them a round of applause he he stood for Parliament in the province of Ontario and then they they leaked a photograph of him with me from eight years ago and and his numbers crashed and he lost to the NDP so he knows what it's like to have guilt by association suddenly dumped on a successful political campaign Kathy Shadle you younger people won't know this but ten years ago the internet was great fun before Facebook and Twitter the big the big social media cartel came along and wrecked the internet the internet ten years ago was all decentralized and wasn't controlled by the social media cartel and one of the leading bloggers and fiercest bloggers was Kathy Shadle and I love Kathy because she's always there for you and she's a free speech absolutist and what I love is that in in the grand old days when somebody would some bloggers would say oh I've been I've been I've received a legal threat or the police have warned me that I'm not to post this particular comment again Kathy would always reprint the comment under the headline come and get me you fairies so and then we have with us towel back but Canadian musical royalty towel you'll know if you saw a slave in altar were last year towel did a lovely version of one of my favorite Canadian songs I'll never smile again by Ruth Lowe who had a big songwriting career in the United States and and gave it all up to raise her kids in the Toronto suburbs and tell did a lovely version of that of that song and as you'll know if you were with us last night he did some of his songs and then he did some of his dad songs from the Backman Turner overdrive days and then he did some of everybody's songs with Michelle Bachman as what and Andrew christened that particular band the bat Backman Bachman overdrive and and it was all going well until they did the captain and Tennille song muskrat love and that's all I remember until we hit the iceberg it was but it was quiet it was going great though we're gonna we're gonna talk about we're gonna talk about free speech free speech has gone south in the last 10 years and Millar no longer even aware of the ironies in the way they discuss free speech and what did it for me a couple of years ago was after the Charlie Hebdo thing you remember they kicked the doors down a charlie hebdo's offices those guys went in killed all those cartoonists and writers and half the world's Prime Minister's showed up for a big March in Paris the following Sunday they're all holding candles they're doing the little teary vigil and then they all go back to their own countries and that god-awful wretched squish David Cameron went back to his country after taking part in the Free Speech Shastry Sharlee and all that and he actually sent the British Constabulary to local news agents to ask those guys who they had sold the latest edition of Charlie Abdo to so the the British police could keep track on who's buying the magazine we live in terrible times for free speech wherever you are in the Western world and and these three to one degree or another have all experienced that let me start with you Andrew basically you came under a lot of pressure you you've always been you you big impresario you brought Ann Coulter to Canada for a big tour and that all was fine until you decided to stand for Parliament and then suddenly all your associations were heaped upon you I don't know if it would be fine necessarily I remember when we put that Ann Coulter tour together back in 2010 which even the non Canadians in the room know about because that was the tour where she was warned by the University of Ottawa Intelligencia that Canada's hate speech laws might you know apply to you know her political commentary but there was a lot more of an emphasis even through all of that on people just making a noise about it and then they move on and in politics that noise keeps up for the entirety of a campaign and it was fascinating because no one's immune from it and you'd see the anti Andrew Lawton stuff from left-wing outlets that would list you know your sins and and it was actually quite hilarious it would be you know Andrew Lawton you know once praised America alone which advocates for ethnic cleansing and Andrew Lawton was you know once the organizer of an Ann Coulter tour and Andrew Lawton once said abortion was wrong and it's fascinating to me that they put these all in the same category and to such an extent that it even loses any individual flavor of what it is they're trying to say but it's the new way of politics now not just in Canada either death Kathy you've kind of dialed back on on blogging recently which is a great loss for some of us but you do you actually feel it's getting worse and the Internet is actually people are forced off the internet now yeah I started blogging I in the year 2000 so I've seen the whole spectrum and at first it really was the Wild West one of the I guess one of the reasons I dialed it down really a lot of it is just energy being put elsewhere but I also got kind of tired of being the person who nobody pays any attention to because at events like this where by the way I am never a panelist for reasons that may soon become clear everyone would get up this is about five or six years ago and say fellow conservatives we are living in the age of miracles now that we have the internet no one can stop us and I'd be sitting there going Facebook can delete your account YouTube can de monetize it and people would go that's just stupid Kathy again yammering on about how we should do XY said which five years later people will always say you know we should have done that XY said thing that somebody said something about but I forget who it was and you know my complaint was that instead of starting all these blogs certain billionaires should have started 10 years ago a conservative or libertarian Facebook Twitter YouTube now people will say today oh start your own and and I'm a big fan of start your own having started my own things however if you plant an acorn today it's not ever going to catch up to the hundred year old oak tree named Facebook or Twitter it just isn't I mean it's organically impossible so a lot of energy went into I think on the right a lot of frivolity and vanity projects and things like that where the money really should have gone into the infrastructure and not the facade of yet another blog like mine so no it wasn't even blogs though because there is what annoyed me in that phase that Kathy talks about and and this for those of you who have a like a bit of spare cash and and receive emails urging you to give to causes all the time it is quite important to think about about it there was a time when people were always launching so-called news aggregators and they'd all have these butch names hey Trager yeah pundit times international that's right it's all red yeah big eagle head yeah that's right red head words red eagle pat red meat eagle patriot calm and it's your your one-stop shop and they'd be like another one-stop shop along 48 hours later and and that will bring the same news stories all covering the same news story and it's it's it it's interesting about the internet because when the internet started whatever it was 20 years ago it's it's it I don't want to over extend this analogy but it's the opposite of what happened with pornography 20 years ago pornography on the internet was in the hands of the professionals like stormy Daniels and and and what happened across the course of the twenty years is that the reasons Paul stormy is broke now and is reduced to playing sad strip clubs in Richmond Virginia is because pornography got decentralized so that now you know everybody everybody does it and so if you not that I'm recommending this particularly at the download speeds on this ship you don't have to worry about it not taking its time because if you're downloading it on this ship it'll be it'll be agent but now so now when you look at pornography on the internet isn't that my uncle Albert over there and hang on that's the girl who lives down the street at number 43 and and it's the opposite that's happened with news it's it's instead all the commentary and and and all the the news on the Internet has become super centralized and and it's the and it's a exactly the opposite of what what happened in the poor why why did that happen well we did not control the means of distribution you know I think I'll like I say a lot of people we're doing their own thing it might have been better if they had pooled their resources and you know centralized but centralized something half decent you know centralize the infrastructure not necessarily centralizing yet another aggregator I think a lot of people's well-intentioned energy and capital went in the wrong direction leaving some people who are a little more visionary but less ideological to start buying up everything and running everything and taking everything over and and you know that how because you you you comment on the internet and you and you receive pushback because in your line of work where everyone is supposed to endlessly about being contrarian and edgy in fact you live in you you you spend your day in one of the the most ideologically homogenized industries on earth which is the music business yes that's true yeah everybody looks the same and thinks the same way and says the same sorts of things and can be and as was said on one of the panels the other day congratulate themselves on their bravery for saying what everybody else is saying and if you you know the the depressing thing is even if you don't quite make an argument if you just dare ask a question mmm I mean you're you're already on the outs yeah you're already just you know you've already you've already ejected yourself from the group I mean I don't suppose there are many Rage Against the Machine fans here in this audience but okay but I mean one of the great things that I loved watching in the the campaign was the you know these Rage Against the Machine people just going completely crazy right not ever realizing that like Clinton at you know was the ultimate representative of the machine yeah yeah and you just could not get through to these people that we're just you know I you know and we're ready for the revolution but you know they're they're on the wrong side of the revolution right right and and they won't accept it though and I mean no matter how ridiculous it gets rock music is the establishment now and and it's it's particularly absurd if you are ever in London because any any rocker who basically survived long enough so he wasn't found face down in his own vomit after a drugs overdose now has a now has a night so all these all these guys like Bono and Rod Stewart and Elton John and Mick Jagger and yet they still think that somehow they're the conscience of the world oh yeah well yeah I mean they're the you just can't argue with them they're impervious to reason impervious to facts and there's really nothing you can say to them to get them to put it together you've had these dangerous conservative inclinations a long time though haven't you it's not so big no I just want to be clear on this normally because because when you meet left-wing rock stars it's because they believe in world peace and debt forgiveness for Africa and they want transgendered bathrooms and all this kind of thing and normally when you meet a so-called conservative rock star it's because he's he's seen his tax return a knee and he doesn't want to have to move to Switzerland and all the West Indies and so he's just someone who wants who's in favor of lower tax rates but you you actually were of a conservative bent when you were like still struggling and trying to make it well yeah I mean yeah that's it's a difficult thing for me to explain cuz I mean a few people on the cruise have asked me about that it but I just just me personally I can never remember a time when it just didn't seem like this group of people over here were we're insane and had all of the wrong positions no matter what the circumstances were no matter how they would change they just would always pick the wrong way to go and then these other people over here always seem to have kind of the most realistic approach and there was that you know kind of humanity to them and I mean there was never a time when I when I wasn't like that I I mean I don't I don't really even like terms like conservative and liberal because it seems more like a kind of benevolent realism versus this insane you know total destruction thing it just doesn't make any sense to me now now your dad is not exactly a rock ripped conservative he's he's all about music yeah yeah it doesn't follow politics all that much so it does does he think you eat does he wonder where did I go wrong or no no no no when I say he's not politically that he doesn't even get to the point where he has a lot of kind of strongly held opinions about anything right so good that's good it would be like if I saw wearing a blue shirt instead of a red wine he might notice it but he wouldn't have any judgments on it okay okay and Kathy you win a slightly similar situation because because before you started blogging you wrote poetry and and presumably I mean there are so-called right-wing poets but I wouldn't I wouldn't have thought there would be a lot in the Greater Toronto Area no my first book was nominated for the Governor General's Award and if I do put out another collection of poetry it will not probably be published let alone I'd have to publish it myself and I will never be nominated again so I cling to my little nomination plaque that's actually you your your your book of poems was nominated for a Governor General yes first book yep me and Michael Ondaatje that year both lost lost to some silly woman really terrible what yeah what you 97-90 I'm trying to who was that Romeo LeBlanc was governor-general was it I think so if they'll never put up a statue to him now because they'll only have to take it down because he was the Governor General who laughs right no they won't make that he's gone straight to the séjour name MacDonald category yeah without without any any any trouble but but you I take it you still hang out with with the poetry crowd oh not anymore I mean I don't think they would I know for a fact many of them will not speak to me we have mutual friends and when my name comes up apparently the expressions are just people who were just appalled by me personally so and I was a bit of a leftist than although I would probably say anarcho-capitalists but and didn't have a lot of time for political correctness I mean I remember when I was part of the sort of peace movement no nukes thing we made fun of political correctness and all assured each other that it was just this jokey phase that the real commies were going through because we were anarchists and smarter than that and never would I believe that 20 or 30 years later it would some of the jokes we would me have come true you know we used to think that oh one day people are gonna it's gonna be wait ISM like you know and now we have fat shaming and yeah these were sketches that we would put on and now the real life you know they're they're today's social policy you're you're one of these people one of the the big points you make is on the general uselessness of comedy because you've been you've you you you mock things like child the Charlie Chaplin film the Great Dictator which did such a wonderful job in so shaming Adolf Hitler but he resigned as Fuhrer yes and and everyone feels good about it and everyone thinks jokes somehow going to save the world but in the end the serious earnest people make all the running right and I don't know if it's it just satire has not been tried you know because certainly it seems that in theory being you know making fun of people we always hear about how oh the one thing the powerful hate is being mocked if that were true george w bush would have been a little puddle on the ground after about six months of being president i mean it's it was just this ruthless almost nuclear attack so clearly it has zero effect and other than sometimes i think giving people ideas if you look at old Monty Python sketches or even a I'm a comedy buff there used to be a show called not the nine o'clock news there were sketches on there that are now happening they're real so sometimes I think that what satire does is have the bad guys taking notes and then they you know and and we can assure ourselves oh well we set a funny line and I'm sure Donald Trump is devastated by searing commentary I mean no it actually doesn't work that way no it has no effect I don't think you you at the time you touring me and Ann Coulter and people around around Canada Andrew we thought we were all kind of quite enthusiastic about being big and outspoken about free speech it do you think it's worse now five ten years on yes I mean simply put yes when that Ann Coulter shutdown happened in 2010 in Ottawa what what we had been warned by the school that can't Ann Coulter might be arrested by the Canadian police and let's Frank I'd be betting on Ann Coulter in that fight but also the questions that came up about that were always about would the schools you know say you can't do it the rioting that took place in Ottawa where Ann Coulter's safety could not be guaranteed that's common I mean that in 2010 that was still a news story that was a front-page news story across Canada in 2018 speech goes on without interruption is the headline and that you that is the news story in in 2018 and the events that have happened in Berkeley at McGill Auto I mean I can name pretty much every single campus and probably find one example in the last five years where a student group has tried to organize a speech and it's either been not allowed to happen in the first place or if it's allowed to happen they have these massive security fees that they have to pay and if they pay the security fees then they have to worry that a fire alarms not going to get pulled and if a fire alarm I mean there are like seven or eight different steps you have to go through that most people couldn't and as much as the Pro free speech groups have gotten better at mobilizing and calling the Bluffs of these university bureaucrats the situation is worse I mean Jordan Peterson has had this happen where he'll be booked to do it as talk in the school will say oh yes you can do it but you need to pay you know one point three seven five million dollars Canadian in security fees or seven dollars Americans but the but the fact of the matter is then Jordan Peterson will tweet out and say all right we're gonna fundraise this and they pay the security fees but at the end of it the school is cashing a huge check off of it and and I don't think that that's the way things should be happening so well and to go back to Kathy's point on that about how the right should start its own YouTube or its own Facebook if every time some speaker at some college in the knit middle are know where the left-wing speaker gets to go there for free and the right-wing speaker has to pay it's not always 1.3 million but a lot of the time it's just like fifty thousand dollars in security costs that's fifty thousand taken out of the right-wing funding pool to go towards launching a conservative youtube or conservative Facebook I I wonder I want to ask a question because Americans often make this point and they say that yes Canada the UK these countries are sort of kind of free but they don't have the First Amendment and my experience and that and I used to I used to defer to that argument somewhat because in the Canadian case for example I was being actually prosecuted under a hate speech law that would have been unconstitutional south of the border but I've been in a lawsuit now which is a First Amendment suit that's been going on for six years over a two hundred and seventy word blog post and it will eventually go to the Supreme Court of the United States which once Brett Kavanaugh and a couple of other gang rape members are on there will assure that I win and but I will have had to have spent you know by that point like twelve million dollars to establish that it's legal for me to write this two hundred and seventy word blog post so there's a theoretical legal right to freedom of speech but it seems to me that what's actually more important is that what's acceptable speech in the u.s. is is actually shrinking remorselessly so that the guys getting booted off Twitter the guys getting shut down and shadow banned and all the rest of it on Facebook and YouTube that space which is nothing to do with being regulated by government that space is shrinking all the time almost parodic Li now day by day and I and so in that sense America is ultimately heading to as bad a destination as Australia or the UK or and anywhere else yeah I was gonna say and I can be I said an or kissed a while ago there are are times when I think that XY said really is just a bunch of words on a piece of paper and I think that what's happened with the First Amendment it's it's become almost like a restraining order I mean you can joke that with some people you get a restraining order against unless it's about 12 feet by 12 feet and bulletproof it's really just a piece of paper and it's reached the point where the First Amendment you know we're not living in the 50s and 60s where even liberals are leftist pretended to care about the First Amendment so while it's very nice to have this piece of paper with words written on it it's been eroded I think mentally and across the culture so that it no longer has that wonderful you know clarion call you you could stop an argument ironically by saying for I have a First Amendment right and now it doesn't even work that way you know it doesn't mean that as much anymore can I jump in here yeah well I mean I've been saying this for years that nobody believes me so it's nice to hear you say yeah like words on a piece of paper do not enforce themselves they don't interpret themselves they don't apply themselves to individual sets of circumstances people do that yeah so you you you kind of get to a point here when you're thinking about this kind of stuff where it seems like I hate to say this but you know feeling great because you have a first or a second or so whatever amendment or you have a Bill of chart you know Charter of Rights and human freedoms you know can't very easily become this kind of false comfort you know it's like words on a piece of paper somewhere but on the ground who how things are really playing out there's a million ways to curtail or abolish those rights and we have very famous Supreme Court decisions which are like outrageous examples of you know like in the United States I guess I could mention Roe versus Wade whatever you think about abortion how that should be settled you know that Supreme Court decision is an outrageous example of I mean it's just when you read that for the first time when you read that for the first time you're like I can't believe how bad this is there's no real argument that there's no reasoning it's it's it's a number of gets a majority of Justices announcing that from now on these words on a piece of paper over there mean X yeah and I mean to his credit William Brennan the famous kind of activist Supreme Court judge once said this the Constitution means whatever we say it means yeah anyone hundred percent correct well the Constitution I mean so what no and actually one and actually one thing if you if you have the misfortune to spend as much of your life reading judge's orders as I do one of the things you soon learn I mean judges are terrible writers by the way and and if you but if you what we'd you weigh up the you know District Court Superior Court all the rest of it it isn't really all that surprising that even at the Supreme Court level they're written in completely incoherent ways but III mean I think that's actually quite a big point that towel is making there that it's the disposition of a people that determines whether you have a climate of free speech and Cathy mentioned that back in the 50s lefties used to say they used to do the apocryphal Voltaire line III disagree with what you say but I will fight for the death for you fight to the death for your right to say it and nobody as I've never asked anyone to fight to the death for my just a a mildly supportive tweet or a your signature on a group facts you know whatever that would do but they don't the ones who are basically under whatever you say now under 40 under 50 under 60 under 70 they don't even pay lip service to that anymore anyway it used to be that if a policy or a decision or a statement was against the fundamental principle of free speech not even the legal principle but just the the human principle you could make that point and as Cathy said people would realize oh yeah you're right that is threatening free speech therefore it's wrong you can't get people on board with the premise that free speech is a good thing which means that if you're having an argument well no you can't censor me because that's against free speech that's that's a selling point I mean that's a feature not a bug to the to these liberals now these progressives and what's so terrifying about this if you look at the future is that in all of these cases on campuses whether it's Lindsay Shepard at Wilfrid Laurier University or Jordan Peterson or one that just came out in Canada last week where a university student was told she couldn't cite a medical statistic related to abortion because of the way it might make people feel they prioritize all of these other things over free speech in this case at University of Fraser Valley they prioritize feelings over facts literally and they say as much so when you have now free speech being put below intersectionality feminism Islamism supportive I don't know if the sedan clitoridectomy mark mentioned is here but all of it I mean when they free speech is now at the very bottom of these things you can't even have the debate because there are two different debates well they don't they really don't want you to have the debate there was I saw a story just a couple of days ago at Manchester University in England the Students Union has now banned clapping because because clapping triggers people so that for for example if like when Michele Bachmann would say the other day and she did her big thing say Oh Trump's great isn't he and everyone applauded but if someone sitting next to her had said I really like Jeb in 2020 and nobody had applauded she'd have been she'd have been she'd have been triggered by the lack of so they've now been told they can't clap and at Manchester University Students Union they have to make jazz hands you know which I was fine I find I personally find triggering because that reminds me is like racist minstrel church that's like Al Jolson doing mem and so I don't even get the logic out of it so it always seems to me again I mean the point isn't that like Al Jolson jazz hands aren't triggering it's just to wreak what had previously existed it's like killing it that's the problem I do know that that is probably going to be declared cultural appropriation from Deaf culture because that's Deaf culture is that said that's a culture we all know that people wearing hearing aids are undermining Deaf culture I don't know if you've heard that a lot of deaf people are against cochlear implants because we'll lose our deaf culture why is this deaf culture that's applause is it oh oh I see I know weird stuff I thought that was just like the fake signing that the guy at Nelson Mandela's funeral that was genius the only one here reads everyday feminism calm which is a real website but they actually do to trigger warnings right they do a trigger warning they also do this is serious a Content warning ahead of the trigger warning because the word trigger can be true a gun because it's violent imagery but what I don't what I don't get about this is is it all just a giant head fake or are they seriously triggered by this everything these people say is a lie in a weird sort of way everything is a euphemism right so everything is a human so so they make these okay like just I mean I haven't thought this through so I'm probably gonna mangle this next part but I mean you know like when it comes to free speech you know that kind of classical liberal John Stuart Mill position is that you can say whatever you want but there's that kind of harm principle unless you can demonstrate that the words that you're saying pose an imminent danger of harm to you can say whatever you want and that was kind of like the at least the superficial kind of you know the kind of even in the sixties you know the kind of free speech labor is kind of over on the left but I mean where was I going here I mean well I mean well why so I mean when you kind of like narrow the this aspect of the debate to that thing you just I mean it's very simple what they do they just expand the definition of harm to mean you know absolutely anything and everything that allows us to destroy you it's always I mean everything seems to be a proxy battle or it kind of a euphemism for what is this like in like irrepressible impulse or total destruction of any kind of healthy institution of the truth right I mean I mean another another angle is you know what begins as this as this kind of polite request for increased civility yeah because you might hurt somebody's feelings so this request for polite civility always seems to end in this totalitarian death threat against telling the truth right yeah so anyway well well the what's interesting they're very good at this because it's all always couched in this kind of therapeutic language while at the same time it's end result is quickly totalitarian again or I mean all the crazy stories star the campuses but then they leak out into the real world very quickly but this this guy who in at some university who retweeted a headline from The Spectator by the American novelist Lionel Shriver who's a guest on this show a while back and and the headline was it's okay to say a woman doesn't have a penis and hey no laughing now I'm being triggered because because she was talking about some group of a radical feminists who I I think I've got this right who don't like some of this new transgender politics because they think it's a way the phallic recei reasserting itself by the back door if you get my drift and and so she was writing this piece about some feminist group in liverpool that had been been saying that women don't have penises and this guy at some university retweets that headline it's okay to say a woman doesn't have a penis he got fired from the university magazine he got fired from some other diversity group he got fired from being president of the humanist Society the human Assessor he lost everything in the space of 20 minutes because he thinks you should be able to debate whether a woman has a penis and I know all you women here in the crowd all have penises I'm not saying you don't have anything but it's it's this was something that nobody had port Kathy Kathy used to go on about transgendered people being bodily mutilated because she had no idea that a lot of these transgender women are all walking around packing so to speak this was something that most people didn't even give any thought to two years ago and now you can't say it and there's more and more areas of life that that that that applies that that applies to well you said therapeutic culture and I apologized to my dinner companions already who've heard me say this because it's been coming up a bit when I've been at the table seriously I do think that many left us at least the sort of cannon fodder leftist who you see yelling outside of a Jordan Peterson event sometimes they become a meme because of their appearance and things like that I think a lot of these people have a genuine grievance of some kind having spent quite a few years of my life wasted on the left and having met them and been this person I can tell you that it is a lot easier to yell at Ronald Reagan person of your choice than it is to say mom how come you're falling down drunk or something like that and I think a lot of these people they even have a certain kind of effect they have a certain kind of appearance I recognise their pink hair I recognise their weight I recognize their lack of makeup and things like that these people are very familiar to me and I think that a lot of times it would be helpful if a speaker even a brilliant person like ben shapiro instead of trying to engage with facts because i know that that's the giant-sized cybers brain would say to one of these people what happened to you and see if you couldn't ask it enough times and bear the patience of all the other people in the room to get them to finally say well actually you know I'm really not mad at Donald Trump at all I met at my uncle whatever you know I think that we're sort of shouting past each other I'm not saying be more compassionate because I have no sense of compassion whatsoever but I'm terrible at that kind of thing but I do recognize some of these people they are very familiar to me I have seen them in the mirror I think a lot of them need help and if we try to argue with them by saying but don't you realize that the GDP is now for prefer that's not working out they have some addiction problems some of them have untreated mental illnesses and I think that's a lot of who our enemy is our people who they don't want they want to not have free speech because they're afraid that somebody is going to finally have the freedom to ask them what happened to you they would rather actually not be asked that it's so much easier to yell at Donald Trump and and projected outwards that they don't want to have a real debate because you might ask them the one question they don't want you to ask them yeah I think I think there's a lot of truth in that actually because I think it's C I mean that again is it's easier to have abstract causes and abstract enemies to do with saving the world or whatever but you don't look after your own show that kind of person is a Dickensian character whose name escapes me at the moment who was always trying to help the poor people of the world but her children are all laying there and you know starving to death around her and that's that's again I these things start off as niche markets because that that used to be like a rock star thing rock stars had causes and and people you know like everyone the concert to save Bangladesh is a great album but it didn't really do anything but that's that used to be the indulgence of rockers and you put up with it because you'd get a great album out of it and now everybody thinks they can strike those kind of attitudes tell ya I mean yeah I appreciate what you said because I you know you have to admit that that's true and along the lines of what you're suggesting I mean so much maybe all of all of that kind of virtue signaling seems to be more about the people that are signaling yeah then about the cause and I mean in in the cases like you mentioned I don't know about that concert in particular but I mean you you can't find an artist or anybody who's participated in any of these for the most part who in any of these sorts of like big-time virtue signaling charity events that has any clue what actually happened to the money or where it went or who was actually helped or how and in fact it's even worse than that it doesn't even cross their minds no they get paid in many cases for actually showing up to play the charity people don't know that they get their normal concert fee it's like yeah we're here to I don't know what they are but you know here I mean they're getting their normal concert fee they run off stage and it's the same rider it's just another gig yeah yeah but i but i but it feels good it makes them feel like good important people and i think that's maybe you know they're maybe trying to fill something within themselves yeah yeah I think I think that is true and that's actually you're in part why we have why people attach such passion to these attitudes that in a healthiest society they'd just be going to a boring old Anglican Church on a Sunday morning but in the void left by there somebody was telling me they passed a church in Sydney and it looked rather nice so they wanted to go inside and take a look and it had become a museum and there's a lot of that in this part of the world and in in the void left by that people look for these other things to give their lives meaning which is why who uses which bathroom can seem terribly important let's say I know free speech is a huge subject so let's take some questions from those of you who have them and I think we have Laurie oh and Enoch is going to be fired my my lawyer Katherine I mentioned she was running around taking questions but we fired her she was she was useless so we have I think as the lawyers say we have a pro se that's the legal term we have a pro se microphone holder in Enoch and do you want to go to that gentleman in the penultimate row there first thank you I was just wondering if you could tell me why George Soros is still a United States citizen and not in jail George George Soros for those for those of you who don't know is the evil mastermind who controls everything that happens in the world he was a hyung he was a Hungarian who broke the bank of England and and you make a good point that he ought to be like a Bond villain and living out in a hollowed-out volcano somewhere firing laser laser beams at world capitals but instead he apparently moves around the United States as a perfectly normal human being why is that Andrew I think towel actually would be the best one to handle this towel wrote a song about this about George Soros yet maybe after today do you want to say Catholic well money buys a lot of things and I'm sure that he will never have to worry about that one quick points this reminded me of what I was terribly I mean a terrible way trying to make about euphemisms is one interesting little point as George Soros has his you know the open society yeah which is borrowed from his mentor Karl Popper the famous philosopher was a london school of economics who himself was you would have to say kind of an anti-communist civil libertarian type guy who wrote that he knows magnum opus is this you know this 2 book series called the open society and its enemies so from what I understand George Soros was actually students of Karl poppers but you you have to know that Karl Popper is just not just rolling but you know doing all sorts of spasms in his grave because he's kind of turned that entire thing on its head yeah and that's actually a critical part of this too they're brilliant at language and we and we are not quite as nimble on our side so they take all the good words first and what's left for us is all is all the crummy words since that's a big problem let's have a another question that a Michele in the in the back row there in the looks like burnt burnt orange blood orange is that there's that what it is already I'm not what color Oh Nick hello Nick oh yeah sorry I didn't I I really can't see from back back here Nicola from from Ontario give us give us your question Nicola well to start um you know that song about do they know it's Christmas throw that yeah live a I wish thought that was so stupid because they're all Muslims yeah that's right it was East Africa do they know it's Christmas yeah they don't because they're not Christians no and if you did tell them it was Christmas they'd get out the machete yeah so I was thinking more to me more more than free speeches free space like I see what's going on in Europe you know you're afraid to sit out on the sidewalk cafe cuz you're gonna get you know hit by a terrorist or you know you in London you're gonna have acid thrown in your face or something like that so I find that it's the the space public space that's shrinking more more than the free-speech yeah actually that's a profound point because if you have a society without the norms of free speech violence is what's left you know the answer to the Charlie Hebdo thing is that if you don't like Charlie Hebdo is cartoon why don't you do an even more savage and satirical and lacerating cartoon but charlie hebdo's enemies say no no we don't want to bother with that it's not a cartoon competition we just rather kill you and that is actually when you don't have a culture of free speech and you don't like someone getting renting a car and riding up onto the sidewalk and mowing down the people sitting in the sidewalk cafe actually becomes the equivalent of free expression an artistic expression and the challenge for France and other European countries is when you when you get to like a twenty percent Muslim population which they will be in France pretty soon you're gonna have to have eighty percent of everybody who's left basically gung-ho for free speech because you were this at this other twenty percent they don't all want to kill this Charlie Hebdo guys they don't want to all rent cars and mow you down on the sidewalk but they have no commitment to real vigorous open free speech and that arithmetic eventually becomes dispositive Andrew yes and I think that the two are connected though the free space and the free speech there's a term called no platforming which is basically trying to deny a person who wants to speak a platform so these people would have no issue calling up Holland America and saying we don't think mark Stein should be able to have his panel and then we move to another Cruise Line and they call them up and they move to another and they call them up and and they would systematically go through every single venue every single space until we didn't have one and they've done this with other speakers before not just on campuses but in the real world as well and what's fascinating about this is that they'll say oh no no no no when I do that it's my free speech that I'm expressing bees you don't have a right to a platform and they're taking this literalist view that because it's not government that's censoring you it's not a free speech threat but every time I've met one of these people I've asked them okay one question would you prefer or do you think it would be okay if the government did what you're doing right now and their answer is always yes they they fundamentally don't believe in free speech the problem is that not only are companies not and I don't want to mention any specific ones but companies are doing this we're they're they're saying not even out of ideology but out of fear they don't want to deal with the hassle they don't want to deal with the fire alarm they don't want to deal with the bad press but even governments are my own town we have a few people from London Ontario here London Ontario passed a bylaw I think was less than a year ago saying that you couldn't use a park or even a public space for any rally of any kind if your view ran contrary to the city's ideology and this is the the kind of stuff that again if you had said ten years ago when Human Rights Commission's were the thing even then this would have seemed farcical and possibly something that couldn't actually happen why what remind me again why we got kicked out of the what was it the London conference centre the London Convention Center I mean that was a municipal we were booked in there and I was looking forward to going there yes so this was back after the Ann Coulter tour mark Stein coming to London Ontario the first ever speech there I believe and the city-owned Convention Center so this is the type of place that would have been covered under this bylaw I mentioned which wasn't around then maybe this was why actually but this City Convention Center called us a week before the event and said upon consultation with you know members of our board and concerns from the local Muslim community we were afraid that this event would not meet the sensibilities of London now two months earlier a Canada's largest BDSM conference was at that venue and that didn't concern the local Imam sexy Palooza was okay but not not Steiner Palooza the only Colditz Steiner Palooza because they'd hosted sex up a loser and the poster for that at this municipal conference centre had been some poor guy who was like strapped to the rack this while some dominatrix in a steel tipped backs past was giving him the cat-o'-nine-tails and and so that's perfectly acceptable yes to the taxpayers of London but me coming in there with no no no no no we we have to maintain normal social standards and me too there is something about London Ontario because you remember when they tried to keep me the white supremacist from speaking with a Jew on one side and a Muslim on the other we were thing and I remember you tore tore apart a particularly stupid London Free Press columnist who I don't think ever showed his face again no so I got a say polka mark was very upset because in the lead-up to the event that we did have which we put to another venue he was every time his name was actually different they wouldn't refer to him as mark Stein they used his full name on his passport controversial Arthur Mark Steyn but then within the last day the day of the event it was tonight outspoken author mark Stein and they demoted I don't yeah I think but I like that the cod because that's again it's this way of labeling so they always say oh the controversial mark Stein is coming to London Ontario on Tuesday they'll be hosting the controversial mark Stein it's like the conference I couldn't get a table in a restaurant they said I said oh it's marks sign I'd like to book at our sorry wall for actually on the controversial night oh why didn't you say so we've got our that's fantastic come this way can I call you Cointreau it's like I mean that is what it is six for you Kathy another great line of Kathy's that she used all through the Human Rights battles is you're too stupid to tell me what to think and what yeah and and and you're absolutely what's so depressing about this is the moronic group think of so-called mainstream commentators and all the rest oh it's very true it I mean just having encountered some of these people nowhere near as many as Marquez but even something like watching the classic encounter between Ezra Levant and the poor woman in the human rights commission who was sitting across the table from him I'm sorry but these are people whose IQs are lower than mine and I don't care if they have PhDs and I didn't go to university these people are done and they're running everything and I resent that enormous Lee and yes by the way t-shirt available with that slogan on it from a friend of mine who makes them and they sell actually fairly well okay that's good it is it is a great line there let's let's take another question yeah the lady sitting just behind Nicola at the back there how do you explain how the people in media worldwide of just voluntary shut up you go back to Salman Rushdie what happened there the cartoons who printed the cartoon so you've got a nation with the First Amendment any person I know extra right so what's the reason for this a creatives why are they so willingly doing this do you think they own property that they don't want blown up I think I think even before Charlie Hebdo there was a huge idea that people could come through our door and kill us if we do X because it's not even a matter of annoying people writing letters to the editor these are people who have put warrants out death warrants out for people you know they're not playing games they fly planes into buildings so they won't have any hesitation of coming in just shooting you and your staff I mean honestly I think a lot of it at basis you know The Globe and Mail has a really nice building and it would be a shame if something were to happen to it you know yeah and and it has actually though deteriorated since the Salman Rushdie thing I mean 30 years ago pretended to care even his people fellow authors who hated his guts at least had the decency to pretend to care yeah because it was not a well-loved me know Salman Rushdie was unlikable even by the standards of fashionable Northland and novelists and he was a pleasant person but they all went to the mats for him in a way they wouldn't even 10 15 years on that a tall gaunt owl and and and the idea of artistic solidarity has gone now well it's so much to say about all this I could go for hours I mean I just was thinking as you're speaking and I mean when you back up and then back up again and back up again I always kind of end up thinking about that that troubling question which I think you kind of wrestled with judging from America alone and some of the stuff you wrote there is is I mean that question about whether liberal democracy can can engender that that that sense of meaning and almost religious attachment that some of these other in some cases religions are kind of false religions like kind of standard secular leftism and and maybe you know maybe that's why you just have that you just push and push and then they cave and you push and push again and they cave again and there's these other blocks of people that have kind of coming back to what Kathy was saying about those sort of sorts of sources of meaning and that sense of purpose and identity and all those sort of you know sort of sub political aspects of being human yeah whether whether it it can last and in a weird sort of depressing to say that maybe I mean it seems like we need some infusion of an extra ingredient Yeah right we need we had iron but then they made steel because they kind of infused a couple other Ella yeah and I you know I don't know if John Stuart Mill is enough to combat no thing I think you're I think you're right there and it's and I'm always very resistant I remember when my human rights battles started in Canada and somebody wanted some keen bloggers wanted to have like a big rally for free speech at Parliament Hill and Ottawa and and I in the end I said no because I knew exactly what would happen that there'd be seven people who would turn up because you know we could all meet in in his 1984 Honda Civic it would be we didn't need to have a big gathering on Parliament Hill because it's an abstraction and unless it's rooted in something like like a kind of cultural pride or a civilizational pride or religious faith people abstract liberal principles are not enough for people to actually live their live their lives that way let's let's take another question the gentleman at the back there Enoch has been has been waiting quite a while it's let's go to him I just wanted to ask about the mechanisms and the infrastructure of suppressing speech and chilling speech in academia where I am it's always been in in force sensitivity training unfortunately right wing nut jobs isn't a protected class but recently in my university they've had bias response teams and AH and the posters for these read like ads for the Stasi where you're supposed to report things you hear other people saying about non criminal things now is this sort of filtering down to lower and lower levels is this happening everywhere it's it's certainly happening academia yeah I would I would say it is one and that again that is I think that said one of the dangers here it's very easy to make big cultural shifts and a lot of time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain and I remember being in Hungary I was talking about this with John O'Sullivan the other day because John and Melissa live in Budapest and I spent a lot of time there just after the fall of the Iron Curtain doing a film for the BBC on on operetta and the BBC crew were all just the usual ghastly socialist Marxist BBC types but the one thing they were actually offended by was the culture of informing because when you in Hungary at that time you'd be but like with Georg it was this was like you know a couple of months after the fall of the communist and gurgi would be this bein charming Hungarian delight and then you'd then you'd go on to the next of Fellows house and he'd tell you oh yeah yogi seems like that but he ratted out my three friends and they wound up spending 30 years in jail with the secret police and then you'd be talking to that charming victor the the charming guy and you go to someone else's house and they tell you no no no Victor ratted out far more people than gurgi I mean basically they turn everybody into informants and and these BBC Trotskyite Marxist socialist guys who were who were on that TV crew just didn't like it because they thought it was not English it was not cricket to just inform on everybody and now in in Britain everybody informs on everybody and the police tweet these the same insane sick freak South Yorkshire Police who did nothing about all those raped girls in Rotherham do all these stupid tweets saying if you hear somebody say something that seems offensive to you even though it may not actually be a cry do let us know because we can still go and investigate them and ruin their lives for a few weeks and it is and it is one of the most I think one of the most repellant features of what's happening this idea that it's perfectly normal now to rat out your coworker rat out your fellow student ruin their lives for something that nobody with even 20 years ago a basic sense of fair play said turning everybody into freelance members of the Stasi is not what free people do and now we're and now we're doing it so quick story so 22 years ago hired this bass player who happened to be Russian and he'd grown up during the days of the Soviet empire so what was it like seit these was terrible it is terrible well tell me he said well what was it like well I was walking down Street one day and they say to my friend why are they not fixing holes in Street and my friend said I do not know and I turned corner and police arrest me and somebody had passing by him on the sidewalk and I overheard the thing alerted police and in the next 30 seconds yeah and they'd apprehended him stuck him in and I so he's telling me this horrible there's nightmarish dystopian thing that it happened to this guy and I'm like man that is like hell on earth and now and now we're kind of starting to experience it yeah like I mentioned in my on your show a year ago I mean if you if you add that sort of thing and you've taken away the presumption of innocence no and it's not just a legal thing it's it's at work it's at play it's everywhere you just it's just the merest hint of an allegation everybody presumes that you're guilty and even worse than that never gives you any chance to even explain why you that you're innocent yeah yeah which is the classic Soviet thing the mayor charge is enough to convict you I mean that that is a real when when we talk like this though the left thinks we're just being paranoid about about this candidate I know because well they say they that but I think that's become one of their cliches is that oh you're just pairing it's just an expression that they use like you know bless you after you sneeze they know they know we're not paranoid because they're the ones who are running no it's not actually this is this is them gaslighting us yes seeing you're paranoid yeah and the only way around a lot of this is to a refused to participate and be to sabotage it so you know I did learn some things on the left about putting sugar and gas tanks and things like that you know like one way to to get back at thought the South Yorkshire police would be for you know a hundred people to coordinate phoning them at any given time and sending them all to somebody else's house their friend's house on a more and more hilarious ridiculous thing it's like a general strike of course it's not gonna work if two people do it you know you do have to have some kind of organization but I've said for years that if everyone just said Merry Christmas and everyone just said no I am NOT going to diversity training what are they going to do right because if we all didn't do it then the company would be empty and it would go out of business so like it's to me it's easy and people say well it's easy for you to say it it's like well first of all it's hard for me to say and second of all I wouldn't have to say it if you would just do it for once you know but it's always me and you and three other people ISM yeah no no there it would I just to go back to that whole Danish cartoon they when when Cathy says it's always me and you and the rest of it that's what I'd talked about this with Kate Smyth word like me say gets annoyed when I say something nice about Julie Bishop the former Australian foreign minister but she and she and I actually talked about this a couple of years ago because a Julie Bishop went to the Charlie Hebdo offices after the thing and she said I just wanted to say we love your work guys which I I was appreciative of and I said to her what depressed me about the Charlie Hebdo thing and all these just sorry Xiao Li is that when it counted there was there wasn't any just me Charlene III had a slight acquaintanceship with I think it's three of the people who died that day because on all these stupid free speech conferences it's always the same people going around Europe and Europe and then some of them get killed and some of them get shot and some of them get forced into hiding so like I started I was like 12th on the bill I was like the Acrobat in the vaudeville thing I'm like down there and then as everyone else ahead of you gets killed and shot and forced into hiding you suddenly wind up your top of the bill see you're the one is going to get killed or shot or forced into hiding and there's a very small group a very small group of people and in the end the Charlie Hebdo card the Charlie Hebdo reprinted the Danish cartoons and Ezra lavance Western standard reprinted the Danish cartoons and I think somebody in Norway we printed the Danish cartoons and Lamond and The Times of London and the Washington Post and none of the big guys we printed the Danish cartoons and what I was talking about with Julie Bishop that that haunted me in the days after that Charlie Hebdo thing when I talked about that couple of fellas I'd known the three guys had known who who died is the realize is the thought of those final moments when the door was kicked open and they realized that the world wasn't with them and they were going to die alone because of the cowardice of the editors at the Times of London and The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail and Lamond and de Velde and all the rest of them and that's that's the that's the horror of it that unless you do that ayaan Hirsi Ali thing and share the risk they will just pick off people one by one and it becomes easier the more they do that for everybody else to - shut up let's let's have a question from the lady in the front row here you know come on sprint sprint sprint you can get there you can get there run or I'll forget what I'm gonna say anyway I'm glad you said that about the free speech and the the news media and all of this that's happening but I'm from Colorado Springs Colorado and we're one of the last County strongholds of the Conservatives and we're losing it fast but we're the home of Focus on the Family we're the home of Michelle Malkin and so we can still say a few things but the problem is I don't know what we can do when we have a feeling and we want to use our free speech we write to the editor and of course you have to use your full name and they decide whether they're gonna put it in the paper so you find your letter in the paper which I've done a couple of times and then they allow three or four of the contradictory and you never hear another piece of support for you and like the the the network's thank God for Fox I mean if you listen to any of the others we had a lady from Colorado Springs that the view invited because she had made some kind of a comment and she went there and they tore her apart and and she wasn't sophisticated she wasn't PhD or anything but she had a strong feeling but nobody would listen to it and so I feel that the only way that we can say how we feel is through the voting booth and that's why that's why Trump was elected all we heard I live in flyover country we are one of the Walmart deplorable people but we're the hard workers who pay our taxes who don't break the law and we were tired of it and I could feel it all the way through leading up to the election and I had hoped for that day but not a lot of hope and I woke up my husband at 3:00 in the morning and I said guess what and I was elated by it but that it to me is the only way that we can speak our mind is not to verbally do it because you're going to be shouted down you're gonna be degraded your life's gonna be ruined so you do it at the voting booth let me let me turn that point around slightly because that's that's true and and everybody goes on you know on Tuesday November cast their vote won one of the problems with the parties that are supposed to be standing up for individual liberty though and you see this right now in things like the Cavanaugh hearing is that the minute anybody on the right says something marvelous controversial the first thing that all those networks you mentioned you're ABC CBS CNN whoever it is is they get to some so-called moderate unquote Republican and demand that he distance himself from and so we've just seen it Trump gave some speech and immediately everybody stampedes to Jeff Flake and Susan Collins office to demand that they distance themselves from there and and when you then take it to the next stage so as I as I experienced during my battles in Canada they were I could count on one hand there was a Conservative government in Canada at that time I could count on one hand the cabinet ministers who were actually useful in that struggle and I could actually count on one finger the cabinet ministers who were prepared to be publicly supportive in that struggle and then you take it to the next level where you have so-called conservative parties such as in the United Kingdom where Theresa May and Dave Kameron are no friends of free speech whatsoever and they are as enthusiastic as anybody for restricting your free speech right so unless you it's very difficult sometimes when you go to the voting booth to find a party that will actually take a principal does it well and if we come back to your battle in the Ontario election your party leader who won and he didn't actually kick kick you out of the race but he did actually pull the plug on a couple of other candidates he found too controversial for his taste yes and it's challenging and to trudys point I think voting is important but the big battles here and I know mark has experienced this firsthand cathy has as well the institutions that exist where you can't vote the people out between elections and just one great example Canadians would be aware of this case I think Americans may as well a couple of months ago a Christian University in Canada Trinity Western University lost a Supreme Court case where what was at this at stake was whether they could produce a law school that would produce law school graduates given that it had a belief system that excluded students living on campus from having sex outside of a heterosexual marriage and the Supreme Court said you can't the Supreme Court said this is homophobic it's transphobic it's this phobic it's that full butt and and that was a bad case and the Supreme Court ruled that well you know yes this threatens their constitutional freedoms but and there's always the but even with Supreme Court justices but the real egregious nough sullen six of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Conservative government six of the nine justices know that case was decided by supposed conservatives the Human Rights Commission prosecuted people for hate speech with a conservative appointee the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lambaste Conservatives when it had a conservative appointed head the institutions are the problem here and you have to deal egde it amaz imeem they've d legitimize themselves but you need to push them over the edge at eliminating the authority of these groups because otherwise the elections don't matter yep and that's actually very that's that's very important there's we're actually getting a kind of institutional support now for for censorship the runs across the political spectrum and this town not to not to denounce your business but but or your art form but where are the contrarian rockers on this there does what they're convinced that they're still contrarian as they're getting knighted and hang a hanging out at $10,000 a plate Hillary Clinton fundraising dinners but that's that that's basically the controversial they they think they're rebels yeah I mean it's it's strange they kind of live in this strange bipolar type mental state where you know I don't know one one thing I that I can never figure out and I think Michele Bachmann who is like the world's unlikeliest Kanye West fan as you know and I got no use for cardioid at artistic sense that as far as that's concerned but I it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that when you're as wealthy and famous and successful as he is that it's a reasonable expectation to be able to say what you like and Kanye thinks it's odd to be who he is and people telling him oh no no no no you can't say that I mean that's that's it's about as basic as that isn't it you have to give him a bit of credit right for all that business yeah I mean I just for what I've seen is it kind of it doesn't really matter how much money most of these people have in the bank they're their immediate circle of peers is really what's important to them right so if you've out a child go to school and you know you've seen your parental influence evaporate almost overnight because now they have like the peer group I mean that doesn't seem to really change so maybe that's kind of what keeping most of these people from speaking their minds some I don't know I mean between Kanye and Dennis Rodman would write you got to give these guys a lot of credit right you know they're just getting roasted by their friends and if I can just say I mean that mom with Dennis Rodman on CNN that was like the greatest my greatest CNN moment of all time you know that I'm talking about with that what's his name was at Cuomo or one of those guys yeah Chris Cuomo where Dennis Rodman is crying wearing a make America great again kappa just talking about how obama blew him off anyway but you know for every guy like that Kathy there's like an extraordinary number like you know Steve Martin like Steve Martin is hugely successful he made a I think he made a bad joke about an Italian restaurant it was like a lasagne joke and for some react aunt even remember why people took against it was it racist or something something like that it was a racist lasagne joke I don't know any races lasagna jokes but but he back down he apologized for seeing Carrie Fisher was a great girl she died because he used the word girl yeah I mean that's the part I don't understand the point of having money unless you just give people the finger for certainly that is my dream in life yes that I would be so rich that I could just tell everybody to drop dead and then they have all this money why aren't you using it the way I would use it I was like Judge Judy a big nightmare not enough that they have to avoid saying the wrong things they aren't allowed to say nothing and this is I think one of the worst parts Taylor Swift got into this and I know that Taylor Swift may or may not be your cup of tea but she was actually subjected to a pretty significant media campaign columnist I think in the Washington Post and even the LA Times were saying her silence on Trump is no longer allowed because the fact that this you know country pop star who sings to sixteen-year-olds hasn't you know stopped her concert and started talking about how tonal Trump is Hitler means that she supports Donald Trump in it but but this is the thing so it you don't even need to make the race lasagna joke not making any joke could actually be problematic as they'd say it's it's horrible to see these guys they they say something that like the thought police get upset about they've thought police go after and then just they just instantly cave and they go through this humiliation torture rich right and I mean I can't even imagine the hell that Brett Kavanaugh went through and and I don't know that anybody could have done a better job when he you know he came back but I will say that there's a big part of me that wishes he would have like shown up on a motorcycle with aviators smoking and just sat down like with a giant bottle of Jack Daniels and and announced that Dianne Feinstein should be brought up on Senate ethics charges right and you should be smoking while he's saying absolutely and and that's actually tell is making an important point here because if they're gonna ask you about your high school drinking you should actually turn up for the hearing yeah with a six-pack and consume all of it during I and things first yeah I mean he could have gotten dirt on some of those guys and just roasted yeah yeah I would have loved that now you know whom a master that of course is Donald Trump yeah I can't you can't land a punch on Donald Trump no without him getting you in at like a full nelson headlock no no you know body slamming you know no and actually Donald the one thing that the the great thing about Donald Trump I mean I like that time when he like a accused Ted Cruz's father of being on the grassy knoll in Dallas because like I didn't see that coming and I thought it was like a very interesting an interesting strategy to take with your principle right and I loved it when after for some reason Ben Carson was running on the fact that he'd once attempted to knife his mother and and there was some question as to whether he was just had genuinely attempted to knife his mother or whether he was just pretending to have knifed his mother to look cool to the Republican base who Brewer for some reason all looking for guys who knife their mothers I don't know I don't like it's complicated to follow but I like the I liked it when Trump said well you know if you do actually pull a knife on your mother you don't really change like that it's kind of like a sex offender and and Ben and Ben Carson was asked how he liked a couple of weeks later he pulled out of the race and Ben Carson was us how he felt about being compared to a sex offender and he said well you have to give it to Trump it works and add the thing about that Cathy is what was beautiful to watch is actually someone who just says whatever the hell he wants to say and none of the normal consider and the great question is is that just Donald Trump's prerogative or can other people do it too no I realize that it but it is it's twofold first of all I think it's jujitsu or some kind of martial art where you know if you just in a comedian will tell you this too if you just go out there and go boy Lacy gentleman and wife at I mean no one is gonna say anything to you because that would be stupid you've already admitted X you know and Donald Trump doesn't hide his hair and it doesn't try to do any of those things and it's it's my critical mass argument again which is if everyone would just do this you will notice that the effect it can have is is reduced I've been afraid to type this or we're all going to get trouble or will I get sued and I can guarantee you that none of the things that I thought what happened have happened now other things have happened right but not the things that I was afraid of so sometimes I think we think ourselves into a corner of well you know I'm going to lose my job and all this stuff well what if maybe you'll find a better job you know maybe you'll find I lost a lot of friends over 911 because I suddenly realized I had many America asked for it friends who were otherwise wonderful people well they're they call but I'm sitting up here with you because I went on the internet going non idiots after 9/11 kind of thing you know it was it was pretty difficult and under the Google algorithm that pulls up seven hits I think you you you make a good point though that in a sense it's not worth worrying about anything because what will kill you it will be the lasagna joke that kills you you know you could you could do you could do twenty set you could worry about the first twenty seven treats and and should I say this should I say and they'll all be fine and then you'll make some innocuous lasagna joke and you'll be dead when it happens so actually the most important thing I think we we can all do is is cease worrying about that because when they take you out it will be for something that you you didn't see coming and the world and the world is so mad now the the guy I got to that really got to me and because what's so that the great thing about Trump is he's funny he's brilliantly funny and he's funny about things you're not meant to be funny about which is why they don't like him and we live in a world now where the police investigate jokes when Nelson Mandela eventually died some guy in England was having trouble with his computer and he tweeted my computer takes longer to shut down the Nelson Mandela and it's not that funny Kathy stop that and the police came round and investigated him and again it's the Soviet thing they used to be the guys who wouldn't let you tell the joke and now in some of the oldest settled societies on earth we have police departments in who investigate the joke final question are you optimistic we can change this Andrew I wasn't before Trump got elected and I think that the question will be and I'm not one of the people that's a die-hard he can do no wrong type I'm one of these people that tries to view it in a very down the middle way but I think that the story of how the media has overplayed its hand every single day of the Trump presidency is the fascinating one and every time the media says oh this is gonna be the end of Donald Trump and then three days later his poll numbers go up that wears thin and I think that the question will be can anyone else pull it off but him because if in 2020 or in 2024 more aptly we start to see politicians that are coming out and not being afraid of it I mean Michele Bachmann's absolutely tremendous she does not hesitate to mention the problems with the Somali migrants in Minnesota no Canadian politician would do that hmm if you point that out they said they would start just handing them out orders of Canada and the fact remains that if Trump is someone who is part of a bigger shift instead of just an anomaly then I think the political culture will have changed enough but I don't think it's early I think it is too early to say definitively but I think that that's going to be what it hinges on optimistic cafe IIE Co some of that and let's not forget that in Europe we're seeing some populist government's come in but I'm I'm not really sure you know when I was a teenager nuclear war was my retirement plan because I was always told that we were gonna die anyway so I didn't really give it a lot of thought I I'm not sure if I'm optimistic or a mystic it it really is one day at a time in one Trump rally at a time and I I guess I just I sort of refused to get too down about it or worry too much about it I mean someone I know who's been blogging a long time anonymously which drives me up the wall as you know well if they find out where I live they'll kill me and I said well then you'll be dead ya know so if that's optimistic or pessimistic depending on your religious or whatever standpoint that's what I feel well be yeah I think for Kathy that is optimistic it's the glass is 1/16 full you know Tao optimistic yeah um yeah I guess I am cautiously optimistic I think I I'm not myself convinced that culture is always downstream from Paul I'm not quite sure that that's true and if Trump picks up some Trump like senators in the midterms which I expect and we have some of these weaklings like Jeff Flake retiring um you know we could see like we could see some important legislation that maybe frees up some of that cyberspace area and we could see kind of a thaw yeah yeah I think that could happen I I hope so I will tell you something I was really shocked when just just as a closing thought because it's like the tenth anniversary coming up when I got dragged before three Human Rights Commission's in Canada three different cases for quote flagrant Islamophobia which is way worse than just common or garden Islamophobia flagrant Islamophobia and I was all upset about it because someone had said to me the idea is they quote denormalize unquote you and I thought this was such a creepy word and I was really worried about that and oddly enough when I watched the three genius jurists in the Robson Street courthouse in bang Hoover twists themselves and not I was guilty under the way the stupid British Columbia Human Rights code was written I was I was guilty and I was doing the come and get me you fairies line that Kathy does and the fairies were terrified of being made to come and get me so they twisted themselves you think you were saying Roe Roe vs. Wade is a poorly written decision you should see the garbage order the garbage ruling that those three judges in British Columbia gave I was guilty but they were scared as hell of people standing up to them and if you've ever been in a you know in American courtrooms you meant to stand up when the judge comes into the room right and in a Canadian courtroom shift to do that plus a lot else you're supposed to walk out backwards you're supposed to bow to the judge and you're supposed to walk out backwards as well bow if you need to use the bathroom in the middle of the trial or whatever you gotta back up by on the Monday of that trial a couple of people didn't stand up when the judges came into the room by mid-week the majority that peep the people in that courtroom were not standing up for the judges you you can impress upon these supposed authority figures that they do not have the right to tell you what to think and I have had a lot of you know I've had I've had rough moments in the years since then when this has gone badly and that has gone badly but I ever since beating the rap in those stupid cases I have never had any fear about exercising my right to free speech in the years since and I urge you all to do the same and to remember those people in British Columbia who when the judges walked in they just say yeah go ahead you got nothing on me and that's and that's the way to do it I would like to thank Andrew Lawton Kathy Shadle tel Backman three courageous figures and we will see you next time thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Mark Steyn

Views: 52,425

Rating: 4.9438019 out of 5

Keywords: The Mark Steyn Show, Mark Steyn, Kathy Shaidle, Tal Bachman, Andrew Lawton, free speech

Id: GndE0LQ7qxo

Length: 95min 59sec (5759 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 02 2018