NORMALIZING NAZIS AND SILENCING DISSENT

the world is watching

There is lots of concern about the new missive from the government/CRTC about the regulation of podcasters and their streamers and I’m working on it but confess I’m confused. Friday’s release was the most obtuse presentation of a critical issue/legislation I have seen since the Iraq War. And of course they meant to do that.

No one seems to know exactly what the CRTC means but we can all agree — it is bad news, especially coming from a government that just endorsed a Nazi.

Behold Friday’s chirpy tweet from the bureaucrats at the CRTC:

Keyword…modernize. I’ll bet millions were spent on the comms advisors who came up with this benign characterization of what could constitute the wholesale silencing of the prime minister’s critics. It would make Goebbels cringe for its obvious manipulations. Broad consultations is meant to suggest national agreement for whatever legislative horrors they are about to perpetrate. Genius, really.

Just like with lockdowns; pretend all the experts perpetrating THE SCIENCE™ are in agreement and that there is consensus. Then, muzzle and defame the dissidents. Hence anyone complaining becomes an outlier, fringe, unacceptable and not worth platforming. Here is the CRTC announcement in full with a portion below. Note all the references to public consultations. I don’t know a single indy podcaster who was invited. Not one.

Today, the CRTC is advancing its regulatory plan to modernize Canada’s broadcasting framework and ensure online streaming services make meaningful contributions to Canadian and Indigenous content.

On May 12, 2023, the CRTC launched its first public consultations. After thoroughly examining all the evidence on the public record, including over 200 interventions, the CRTC is issuing its first two decisions.  

First, the CRTC is setting out which online streaming services need to provide information about their activities in Canada. Online streaming services that operate in Canada, offer broadcasting content, and earn $10 million or more in annual revenues will need to complete a registration form by November 28, 2023. Registration collects basic information, is only required once and can be completed in just a few steps.

Second, the CRTC is setting conditions for online streaming services to operate in Canada. These conditions take effect today and require certain online streaming services to provide the CRTC with information related to their content and subscribership. The decision also requires those services to make content available in a way that is not tied to a specific mobile or Internet service.

A third consultation is ongoing. It considers contributions traditional broadcasters and online streaming services will need to make to support Canadian and Indigenous content. The CRTC will hold a three-week public proceeding starting on November 20, 2023, and will hear from 129 intervenors representing a broad range of interests.

Trudeau and his team have spent five years attacking podcasters as dangerous disinformation purveyors — the very people his CRTC is likely to smack-down. Not directly - perhaps, yet. But wait for it.

A few honest journos are saying they have no idea what any of it means. In the meantime and only half-joking, I have my eye on how I would do the show out of Buffalo — but this plan is based on the crappy insta-reporting our era is known for.

What even constitutes a Canadian podcast? My passport? Where I record? Who listens? My content? This is a great existential question for Matt Walsh’s next film. What is a Canadian Podcaster?

I do think Spotify and Rumble (which is a Canadian company) and the other platforms that carry people like me — will have to make some tough choices about how far they will allow a clearly unhinged leftist regime to meddle in the psyche of the nation and the world. And regardless of what the CRTC is saying — there is no doubt this government is doing everything in its power to slay critical voices. Look what it did to the truckers.

I’m sure the prime minister has figured out that he won’t ever get blind fealty from the indies — the kind of narrative loyalty he pays for from legacy media. And I know from my years as a true crime reporter that for a person struggling with an obvious personality disorder as Trudeau clearly is — loss of control is terrifying. It feels like death.

He knows that without the cooperation of legacy media, the trucker convoy could have ended his run — by forcing a non-confidence vote. But media played along with Trudeau’s propaganda smears and made it difficult for pols to speak the truth. And of course most elected officials are cowards. Damn them all.

Narrative control feels like life or death for an authoritarian leader. It was the livestreamers like Viva Frei, The Shed and others who kept the momentum going for Team-Convoy and make no mistake, every advisor in the PM’s retinue has been trying to figure out how to end before it begins another round of populist push-back.

So, of course Trudeau will try and stop what he feels threatens his world. Truth and competent analysis are his enemy and they exist now only outside the crushing, brutalist tower built by postmodern, critical theory - the foundation of leftist thinking, most media and the current Canadian government.

It’s not exactly clear what is in store and I think Brian Lilley has done a great piece while admitting this is a tough one to figure out.

This week’s show.(listen here)

I will visit my father’s grave soon and what can I say to him. Forgive me for all that I did not know and give me strength to fight the great forgetting. Donna McLaughlin, daughter of Milton McLaughlin RCAF — Lancaster Tail Gunner

It was predictable that legacy media would rush in to protect the prime minister with versions of Nazis aren’t so bad or Nazis are bad but everything the other side does is worse.

Part two of their clean up on aisle three is that people who expose Ukrainian Nazis should be categorized as far-right. Expected, but actually seeing it in print is a rude shock. These same folks accused the unvaccinated and peaceful protestors of being the “N” word - so of course in the FAR LEFT lexicon, it has completely lost its historical meaning. Watch Andrew Coyne help Liberals run for cover.

If we are to believe inadvertent as does dear Andrew, then, as I said last week, we must accept that our elected officials have no idea with whom we were allied in the war. This is as bad as our elected officials fan-boying for a literal Nazi and deserves discussion and accountability. But those are olden-days, quaint concepts that no longer guide the half-wits and media who are running the show.

Trudeau is the master of surviving. Aggressive hairstyle management and a comms department brazenly unbothered by having to construct lie after lie are what keep our Rainbow Prime Minister in office. But he is our leader. People voted for him and we have to face facts: this narcissistic, drama enthusiast and those who protect him represent democracy as it exists in Canada. They are enabled by cowardly phonies in opposition who make no headway against or actually support perhaps the most corrupt and morally reprehensible government in our history. From across the pond Douglas Murray nails it.

What makes this worse is that this all comes after a period in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been perfectly happy to call decent, ordinary Canadians Nazis. To use measures like the de-banking of his critics in moves that have horrified most of the other democracies in the West. When a bank in my country of birth — Britain — was recently found to have de-banked a politician (Nigel Farage) for what turned out to be political reasons not only did the head of the bank resign, but politicians in Britain from across the political system condemned the bank. Such moves are unlikely to be taken by another bank in Britain again. But in Canada it seems to be perfectly acceptable, because at any time the Canadian prime minister and deputy prime minister can claim that their critics are homophobes, xenophobes, racists, Nazis, misogynists and all of the rest.

Thank you for so much love in your posts about Jack Wood, RCN signalman and my late father. The comments were brilliant and I was touched to see that so many of you struggled through a childhood like mine — we weren’t alone. Some of the emails I received also generated a weep — like this one about Milton McLaughlin from his daughter. He is 2nd from right with a wee squint.

Dear Trish 

Thank you so much for your writing on Nazigate and for your personal reflections of your father Jack Wood. I suspect that there are more of us than we know…the children of those who went to war to defeat a threatening darkness in the world. We, the adult children, also faced a type of war I call the ‘after- war’ .

We are the children who had fathers who returned from the War deeply scarred and maimed either physically, mentally, or both.

How can we understand the terrible nature of war when we are in a time of great forgetting. My father was also a 17 year old farm boy who joined the RCAF after his brother - age 24- was killed in a bombing run flying over Germany. They placed my father in the position of tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber. It was in 2000 that I travelled to Nanton, Alberta to the War Museum and stood beneath a Lancaster bomber and stared up …up into that small black hole where they placed the tail gunner . A cold, dark and very vulnerable space . I wept uncontrollably.

Memories return in the dark of night - ghosts that haunt- and I wonder if they are asking that we break our long silence.  Memories of a broken father in a Kingston Military Hospital drugged into oblivion in his paper slippers and blue gown . I was 13. No one spoke of it or explained what had happened to my father . It was like a secret and I did not speak of this until my 50’s. Secrets are burdens and weigh one down like a stone. Memories of alcoholism and shame and violence and living in utter terror as a child. It is the reality of the ‘after- war' that is generational and full of suffering.

 War is talked by politicians in abstracted terms like missiles/bombs/money /enemy. The real history is being replaced by a new narrative …newspeak and double think and control of the media, education, language and perception. I was stunned to see military brass smiling and clapping as they stood beside Hunka . It felt surreal and incomprehensible . Alice in Wonderland territory.

I will visit my father’s grave soon and what can I say to him. Forgive me for all that I did not know and give me strength to fight the great forgetting.

We are in a descent into a more totalitarian world and how can people be stirred to question and search for the truth hidden in a pack of lies and deceit by those elected to power. 

I remember Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s words to the world   " Live not by Lies”

Donna McLaughlin

Donna and the McLaughlin family are who we really are. This is a Canadian story of sacrifice, love and redemption. Sadly, voices like hers are silenced in media and in our political life.

And this from Teri Jenkins on our second topic this week which, the explosion of parental estrangement. It’s all well and good to draw the line, but what happens when we regret it? I will be doing more on this subject soon.

Hi Trish!

Just wanted to reach out and say Thanks for your most recent podcast topic, I really enjoyed it.  I got a bit wrapped up in "narcissistic father" stuff from being on antisocial media in the past, and consequently spent most of 2021 not really engaging with my parents.  I'm grateful that I pulled my head out of my ass eventually, and also that I didn't have any therapists in my life encouraging that path as I agree that it's not any way to move forward.  

It worked out well actually, as my parents were buying the government narrative for most of that time and we probably avoided a blow up.  By late 2021 my husband and I shared what it was like to be unvaxxed and some of the things "friends" and family were doing to us and my parents stood by us, which made me realize that they will always stand by me no matter what and I am lucky to have them.  Many relationships imploded in the past 3 years, but I am grateful that one managed to get stronger.

My Mom and Dad were born in 1956 and Whiter Shade of Pale is my Dad's favourite slow song.  I shared that video with him, and he replied "That is probably the best version of the song ever... I have seen it before, but thanks for bringing it back to my attention. Your mother and I used to slow dance to that !"

I took that song being played at the end of that episode as a sign that I should pay special attention.  

Thanks for all the great work you do, especially the recent Lich/Barber trail reporting.  I feel fortunate to be connected to you and I am certain that I grew up watching you on The Fifth Estate, which was one of my parent's favourite shows, and probably why your voice seems so familiar to me!

Take care and keep on keeping on,

Teri :) 

For Teri’s parents.

That her face at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.

Stay critical.