James chats to his Canadian friend, journalist and photographer Donna Laframboise, a veteran of the climate wars, about her latest book Thank You Truckers. It’s a series of very moving interviews with people who took part in the Freedom Convoy protests of January 2022. Don’t write off Canada! They’re not all cucked. Some of them have given their all to fight the President Bieber/Carney tyranny - and a lot of them are Christians.
Thank You, Truckers!THANK YOU, TRUCKERS! CANADA'S HEROES & THOSE WHO HELPED THEM. Buy your copy now!By Donna Laframboise
↓ ↓ ↓Tickets are now available for the James x Dick Christmas Show 2025 on Saturday, 6th December. See website for details:https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/?section=events#events↓ ↓ ↓If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn’t in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold
↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children’s future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me James Dellingpole and I'm sorry I've got some really bad news for you.
I've had to move the date of the Dick and James Christmas special.
I'm really sorry about this.
It was completely unavoidable but I really apologise to those of you who've already got your tickets and were fully lined up to come in in November and now I'm moving the date.
I hope you can make the new one.
I pray you can make the new one.
It's December the 6th.
It has the advantage of being a Saturday rather than a Friday so you won't have to take the day off work if that weekend is free for you.
I hope it is.
If not obviously you're going to get a full refund and I'm really, really sorry.
Those of you who haven't bought your tickets yet, well you're in luck.
This may be a much better day for you.
December the 6th, the Saturday.
There'll be all sorts of fun there.
I mean my Christmas party is becoming legendary.
There will be, I mean I'm giving away no secrets here.
There will be a performance in Chorusland.
There might be some other Christmas, well some Christmas carols.
There will be a festive atmosphere.
I will, no, I won't wear this junk probably.
It's a bit hot.
The unregistered chickens are playing of course.
Dick, we're talking to me.
You remember Dick, my brother?
He's the one with the moustache.
There will be bell ringing for this special special on the special special VIP tickets and other perks.
I mean the food is extra, but it's really nice.
The cater is really good.
It's actually stuff you'd want to eat.
Cash bar, nice venue.
Everyone who comes to these things says, I'm so happy I came because it's really, as I keep saying, it's really not about me.
Although, obviously I'm mildly interesting.
It's not even about Dick.
It's about you.
This is a wonderful occasion for the gathering of the clans, of the tribes, and everyone there is like the best friend you've never met.
Or maybe you have met them before and you love them anyway.
It'll be fun.
December, what did I say?
December the 6th, and I promise you I won't move the date again.
Saturday, December the 6th, James and Dick's Christmas special.
Details below.
I love Delipole.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Delipole.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
I know I always say, I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But before we meet here, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.
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Just my opinion.
I'm not a financial advisor.
I reckon that it's worth holding both of them at the moment.
And you don't want them, of course, you don't want to buy paper gold.
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Go to the Pure Gold Company and they will give you what you need, be it gold or silver.
Do it before it goes up even more.
I think you'd be mad not to.
Welcome to the Delling Pod, Donna La Fromboise.
Donna, I mean, this is the first time we've seen each other in how many years?
I think almost 10, maybe.
You look fantastic.
Well, you look wonderful.
And so, podcast viewers and listeners, Donna and I go back away.
I think I first met you at one of the Heartland climate skeptics conferences with that a Bennett.
That's right in Chicago many years ago.
So before I wrote watermelons, and I think I use some of your research in watermelons.
You're like me, one of the sort of the early climate skeptics.
We were there in the trenches, weren't we, back in the day?
That's right.
Before it became a little less counter-narrative than it is now.
That's well put.
It hasn't gone mainstream, but I think that more people have recognized that maybe we do have some arguments.
Whereas at the beginning.
And it does take a while and it's very discouraging.
But that's the price to be an independent thinker.
Yeah.
Well, Donna, for those who haven't met you before, tell us about yourself.
So my background is mainstream media.
I was part of the National Post, which was a brand new newspaper that was launched in Canada in the late, I think, late around 1998.
While newspapers were folding and disappearing, Conrad Black in Canada had this vision to start a newspaper that was feisty and independent and was willing to print the politically incorrect.
And we were encouraged to be irreverent.
And it was a really wonderful, wonderful experience to be part of that when it was born and it was true to its original vision.
But before that, I had already been working for magazines and newspapers and I'd written a book by then.
So I was part of this.
That was my only time actually as a staffer on a newspaper.
And that lasted about three years before, you know, the economics of the newspaper world kind of started to catch up and Conrad Black had to sell the paper and then things changed and more than a hundred of us were laid off at a certain point.
And then I decided to just go and do some other things because by then I'd done newspapers, done magazines, written a book, and I thought, you know, the world's bigger.
Let's go do some other things.
And then I kind of got back into journalism through the back door through blogging because I started just as an ordinary person and a very, you know, uninformed person getting a little annoyed by all the climate stuff I was reading.
And it seemed to be just tacked on to every news story, no matter how irrelevant.
And it also seemed to be very, the analysis was very shallow.
And it was all the same repetitive arguments that were never persuasive to begin with.
So then I started doing some research of my own and ended up doing an expose book about the IPCC, this UN body that I had never heard of before, but actually is very influential with governments.
It writes the Bible of what's going on with the climate and then governments all over the world point to that report and say we have to bring in carbon taxes and we have to reduce our emissions and we have to do X and Y all because of this report because the UN says so.
So it was very interesting taking a look at a UN body because I'd never paid much attention to the UN before and saying, holy moly, there are all these things they're telling us about themselves, about what their personnel, about their policies.
And actually, a lot of them aren't true.
And if you have a UN body that can't describe itself accurately, can't describe its personnel accurately, can't describe its own procedures accurately, why would we trust its end product, its reports?
When you say it couldn't describe its personnel accurately, what do you mean?
They were all basically activists rather than scientists or whatever.
Well, they weren't all, but there were certainly there.
Bless you.
So, you know, we were told these are the world's top scientists, the finest scientific minds.
And then when I started looking at some of the lead authors, well, no, you're still a student.
You're a graduate student.
You're not at the top of your field.
And that's okay.
But don't lie to me about who you are.
You know, and then, yes, we found people who had long histories with NGOs like Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.
And they were in not merely contributor roles, they were in leadership roles.
So don't tell me this is the world's top scientists.
And then let me find out that they're a bunch of activists and students.
There were some good scientists as well, but when you go around saying we are the world's top scientists, and then we find out that that's not the case, it doesn't inspire confidence.
Yeah, I think you got out of journalism, of mainstream media journalism, at exactly the right time, because the kind of research you were doing would not really have been possible in the mainstream media.
You had to go out there.
We were lucky, weren't we?
The arrival of the blog came just in time to be able to get this information out.
And on the subject of the UN, you say people don't look at the UN very much.
I think that's by design.
I think that we are sort of encouraged to think of these bodies as so boring and so remote that why would I spend any time looking into their inner workings?
But actually, that's part of their shield against attention.
The boringness is their friend.
And actually, when you when you I'm glad you did it because I didn't want to have to do this stuff.
I didn't want to do the legwork.
But you're right.
I mean, once you realize that this official sounding, maybe even impartial sounding body, I mean, it's the United Nations, is actually a front for green activists pushing an agenda on behalf of trillionaires whose names we often don't know.
That's when it gets scary, isn't it?
Yes, and it's totally anti-democratic.
You know, you have these people, this very small group of people who have this worldview and they're entitled to that worldview, but it's not the worldview most of us share about what the priorities should be.
And they're writing incessant reports, just report after report after report after report.
And they're lobbying every single day.
And they have an outside influence.
I'm not saying they should be censored, but they have an outsized influence on what happens in our society.
Because the rest of us have busy lives and real things to think about.
And we're not there knocking on the door of our MPs every week saying, you have to listen to our analysis of the world.
I'm sensing from what you're saying there, just reading, because I haven't seen you for a long time.
I was trying to work out how far down the rabbit hole you've gone since I last saw you.
I mean, already it was quite an out there position that we took in being skeptical of the green agenda, which dominated everything.
And everyone believed that from the Rio Earth Summit onwards, everyone was more or less persuaded that climate change was a serious issue worth addressing.
I was never of that opinion.
But in the years since I last saw you, I've got much, much more hardcore on various issues.
For example, I have no respect at all for any of the mainstream media.
I mean, at the time, I think I might have been sympathetic towards the National Post.
I kind of agreed with a lot of its editorials on economics and on climate.
But probably now, I would think even the National Post, did we but know it, was part of the problem.
The entirety of the mainstream media is a bought and paid-for lie machine.
It was, I mean, it's terrible now.
But even probably back then, it was bad enough.
I even think that organizations like the Heartland Institute, when it staged those conferences for climate skeptics, I used to think of them as kind of heroes of the resistance.
I now suspect that probably even institutions like that are compromised because what they do, and this is what I argue, I've written a sort of an update of watermelons where I've kind of gone much deeper than I did before.
I think that it suits, I think the whole global warming industry is a lie, completely fake.
It's being pushed by elites, let's call them.
I mean, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Family, seem to be at the forefront of this.
But it suits organizations.
It suits the enemy to have organizations like the Heartland Institute's conferences where genial, often elderly professors, serious scientists get together and talk about issues like climate feedbacks versus climate forcings.
And What they're doing is reifying a non-existent problem.
That by even talking about it, they are conceding the point that climate change is an issue that A, we have control over, B, is worth discussing.
And I think that is part of the trap.
I think that everything about the climate change environmental movement is a lie with a hidden agenda.
Now, would you agree with me on that or would you still be sort of?
Well, I think there are a lot of very sincere scientists who felt they couldn't speak until they retired.
And then.
And then it was very helpful for them and very comforting to be in a room with other people who saw the world the way they did and didn't think that they were, and they didn't think they were crazy.
Right.
So I think there were a lot of very sincere and very brave people.
And good people.
I'm not taking anything away from them.
I'm just saying that they themselves, did they, but no, were being used for an agenda.
Yeah, and it's possible.
It's possible.
You know, it's very hard to know what to believe anymore, right?
So, yeah, it's and you know, what's happened in the meantime, of course, COVID's happened.
And if you believed the mainstream media before COVID, it's very difficult to go through COVID and still have any trust in the mainstream media at all.
It was just like, so, and, and, but unfortunately, that has happened for many other things.
It's happened for the medical system.
It's happened for the legal system, you know, certainly here in Canada where I am.
You know, where were those civil rights lawyers?
They should have, you know, they should have stood up.
They should have said something.
Where were the privacy activists?
Where were the my body, my choice feminists?
You know, we were failed by all, by, you know, many, many different sectors in society.
And the media, of course, didn't just fail us.
It's not that they stopped being a check on government.
They lined up with government to persecute anyone who expressed any dissent.
That's certainly what happened here in Canada.
So it's like, who do you trust now?
Who do you believe?
It all seems so rotten and so broken and so corrupt.
And that is not a comfortable place for someone like me who has always considered myself an optimist to be.
But here we are.
Here we are.
Well, yes, you've done what I was about to do, which is steer the conversation nearer the present.
And the reason we got in touch with each other again is you've just written this, actually, published earlier this year, wonderful book, which I'd heartily recommend called Thank You, Truckers.
And before I go on, what I wanted to say was anyone watching and thinking, well, the Truckers protest happened a while ago, do I really want to read a book about the Truckers?
Did I kind of know what it was like?
I want to say to those people, you are wrong.
I loved reading this book.
I found it a very, very moving experience.
And I felt it was as relevant now as it would have been had you published it three years ago.
There's something about it that captures the essence of why we fight and what all this is about.
And also it did something which made me feel slightly guilty.
I've sometimes in the last few years been tempted to look across at Canada and think, Canada, you're so gone.
You're so over that I think the best thing for me to do is to stop thinking about you at all.
Abandon all the plans I'd had ever to pay you a visit and maybe go and have lunch with Donna.
You live in the country, don't you?
I do now, yes, yes.
Population 7,000.
So I'm in a fishing village and it's called Port Dover and it was named after the Dover Cliffs is my understanding.
Yes, yes.
And do you have bears in your garden and things?
Not quite, but we have coyotes who come and get into the horse barns and do some pretty terrible damage there.
But we have bunnies in our backyard and they come out most days to eat the bird seed with the birds.
Donna, we have bunnies.
That's not so wild and woolly, I'd say.
So do the coyotes go and eat your horses?
Is that the well yes, yes?
If a few of them, if there's just one, you don't have to worry about it.
But if there's a pack of them and they get into the horse barns, they will go for the horse's neck and rip out.
It can be pretty.
That's horrible.
Yes, it is.
It's horrendous.
How many horses have you got?
Well, I don't have horses, but many friends around.
And so one of the things that they do is they keep a donkey.
And the donkeys protect the horses.
Not a sacrificial donkey to get eaten to get saved.
No.
No, the donkeys apparently use their hind legs to fend off the coyotes.
Yes, it's quite interesting.
So otherwise, donkeys are pretty useless these days, but they have their, yes, they perform a very important function on horse farms.
Well, well done, donkeys.
I like that.
That's a heartwarming tale.
Yeah, good on the donkeys.
No, I understand that buckaroo thing that they do.
That's good.
That's good.
Okay, so you live in a kind of a semblance of a rural idle.
I hope there are no wind turbines near you, I hope.
Pardon me?
No winter.
Wind turbines.
Well, yes.
Well, unfortunately, there are.
When we moved here, there were none, and now we can see a number of them.
And they're very distressing because they're one of the most beautiful views in the world.
And now there's three oversized wind turbines, and they're completely out of scale with the rest of the surroundings, and they're very distressing.
And I have made it one of my things on my bucket list is to outlive some of those turbines.
I'm waiting for the day when they stop working and they get hauled away to some place where they can't be recycled, but at least I won't have to look at them.
That's a very gentle ambition.
I think we're going to say, I'm just going to make one of my life goals to blow those bastards up and acquire the explosive skills and the technique needed to bring them down.
But yeah, I agree that's a possibly, well, given their short lifespan.
Exactly.
They say 25 years, but it's never that, is it?
It's just that it's just let's not get, let's not get talking about wind turbines.
Um, So yeah, I digressed, as I sometimes do.
So I was looking at Canada, and I don't know whether I can't be the only one who did this.
And I was thinking, Canada, I just want to pretend you never happened.
I want to forget about all the brave things you did, Vimy Ridge or whatever, and Dieppe, and I want to forget about Mounties and all the kind of the outdoorsy things that I associate with being Canadian and because you've lost it totally.
And what your book does is remind me that the spirit of resistance was and is there in Canada too.
So God bless you, you brave Canadians.
I mean, I have to say, a lot of Canadians are grisly NPCs, aren't they?
they're sort of slaves to zombies of the system but but what your book shows is that there are well tell me tell me about about your experience researching this book so So it will be almost four years.
It will be four years in January.
And it was almost two years into the pandemic.
And you in the UK, and I know you went through some terrible things in the UK, but by late January of 2022, you were just the UK had come through the other end, and you were dropping mandates, and you were dropping the passports, and you were getting on with life.
But in Canada, we were still stuck.
We were still stuck there.
Our politicians and our health officials were on this hamster wheel.
They were going round and round and they didn't seem to have any notion of how to get off of it.
And so here in Canada, winters are very long and very brutal.
And they can be, depending on where you are in the country, they can be very gloomy as well.
And so we were looking at another COVID winter.
And it was really, really quite up.
There were people who were very desperate, who were starting to despair, who, you know, at the end of my book, I have just one page, which is the countdown to the convoy.
And basically, it's a list of headlines from early January 2022 before those trucks got rolling on the third week.
And it's just one, you know, it's our prime minister blaming the unvaccinated for all the remaining, you know, government restrictions, you know, blaming the public for government decisions.
It's our health minister saying that even though we are one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, mandatory forced vaccination is on the horizon.
It's schools after Christmas.
So 2021, Christmas, we're coming back into the new year in 2022.
Only one province out of 10 in this country sends children back to school on schedule after Christmas.
So we had unions and doctors saying we needed another hard lockdown.
This is two years later when we already knew that, you know, it was dangerous to a small group of people, but most of us it was not dangerous to, but we just couldn't seem to break out of it.
And they were talking about new taxes on people who are unvaccinated.
And they were saying they were bringing in new regulations about you couldn't go into a large store like a Walmart or a Costco if you were unvaccinated.
So people have short memories and a lot of Canadians think, oh, the COVID was almost over.
The convoy didn't need to happen.
Well, no, that's not the case.
If you look at that list of headlines, it was dreadful.
And it was getting worse and worse, not better for anyone who was non-conformist.
So those truckers got in their trucks and they said, you know, enough is enough.
And when we have natural disasters like a fire or a hurricane or an earthquake, who is it that comes to rescue us?
It's working class men, right?
That's who rescues us.
And that's what happened with this convoy was these working class truckers just said, enough is enough.
Now, they had their own very specific concern, and that's that they had been crossing the border between Canada and the U.S. for two years as essential workers who were needed to keep our economy running.
And then suddenly our federal government decided that if they didn't get vaxed, they weren't going to be allowed to work.
That basically, if they came back into the country, they would have to quarantine for two weeks before they could do anything.
And of course, you can't be a trucker if you have to quarantine every time you come back from delivering a load south of the border.
So that was the spark that set it off.
But ordinary people just said, enough is enough.
So these truckers got in their trucks.
And Canada is a big country.
So it takes a few days to drive across the country.
And what happened was, you know, people have tried these kinds of protests before, and they never really went anywhere.
But there were so many Canadians who were so desperate and so hungry for a spark of hope that we looked at these truckers and we said, finally, someone is speaking up.
Someone is standing up and pushing back against the government.
Because as I've said, the media didn't do it.
The doctors didn't do it.
The civil rights lawyers didn't do it.
The privacy people didn't do it.
No one stood up except the truckers.
And so they got out there and they're, you know, with social media now, and ordinary people can fly drones and do some photography.
And so we got these wonderful images for a few days of these trucks coming across.
And that inspired everyone else.
So what started out as one convoy coming from Vancouver, the West Coast, by the end of the week, there were 13 truck convoys that converged on Ottawa.
And the police, they were doing their intelligence and they were monitoring things.
They expected five convoys and 13 of them showed up.
So there was this massive enthusiasm from all corners of the country to go to Ottawa and to tell the politicians enough is enough.
Because people had been protesting outside of their provincial legislatures for most of the COVID pandemic era, and they were just being ignored.
And their protests weren't even being reported by the media.
So it was time to go to Ottawa and to do something new.
And so that's what happened.
And they were these folk heroes.
They were just, they were folk heroes for people.
And people would say, oh, I hear the convoys coming through.
I'm going to go to a highway overpass and stand and cheer them on.
And you know what?
I might be the only one who goes, but I'm going to go there.
And they would go there.
And then there would be 300 other Canadians and they weren't wearing masks.
And they had flags.
And Canadians are not like Americans.
You know, we don't really go around waving flags, but there were a ton of Canadian flags.
And people were hugging each other and they were crying and they were laughing and they were feeding each other hot chocolate.
And it was this sense of community that we had lost for two years during the pandemic.
And it was transformational.
It was transformational.
And some people, that was their experience of the convoy going to an overpass.
And they still talk about it today as a moment that they will never forget.
Yeah, that's the feeling I get reading the book.
That it was when Canadians realized that what was happening to them and their country was really not normal.
That it was, I mean, you've got lots of examples of people who emigrated from Eastern Europe and lived behind the Iron Curtain and moved to Canada.
And they kept saying to people, you've got to fight this stuff.
This is communism.
This is what's happening is not right.
This is not the free country I came to join.
And I think that the truckers were that wake-up call, weren't they?
They enabled people, they explained to people what they knew in their hearts, but couldn't quite articulate because the media wasn't saying it for them.
This was wrong and something had to be done.
Yes, yes.
And so, you know, so the truckers, so there's, you know, there's one story in the book where this gentleman on the East Coast, the Far East Coast.
So, you know, the truckers left from Vancouver, but on the East Coast, the other side of the country, this gentleman, he has a vintage MAC truck.
It's the kind of truck that's very close to the one in the old movie, Chris Kristofferson movie Convoy.
And so his buddies were saying, there's a convoy going on.
You have to go.
You have to put your truck in that convoy.
And he was saying, well, you know, it's in a snowbank, whatever.
Okay, I'll try and dig it out and I'll put on some cables and some heaters and we'll see if it starts.
And if it starts, I'll go to Ottawa.
And if it doesn't, you know, so, and the darn thing started, he says.
So he puts a big flag, a Canadian flag on the back of this truck.
And he goes to the service station to put some fuel in.
And he puts $320 worth of fuel into this truck.
And when he goes in, and this is five minutes from his house, he hasn't got on the highway yet.
He hasn't driven hundreds of miles yet.
It's five minutes from his house.
And he goes in to pay.
And someone else, another member of the community, has paid his fuel bill and gone and gone.
So just anonymously paid this.
This is, I'm, you know, I am supporting you.
I am supporting what you're doing here.
And that was the incredible experience these truckers had all across the country.
People would just give them $100 bills and get out of your truck.
I need to hug you.
And please, please, please, you know, take our good wishes with you.
They were rock stars.
It was amazing.
Yes, that's why there were scenes that kept bringing tears to my eyes because there was so much of this going on.
And it seemed that people were desperate to show their gratitude for the truckers.
So they'd give them wagges of money.
And the truckers were going, well, I'm just an ordinary guy.
I don't deserve this.
So they'd be sort of passing the money on.
It'd be like a hot potato, this pile of money that they couldn't quite, no one wanted to grab it for themselves.
It was, I mean, it was kind of good communism in a way.
It was like if communism were a good thing, it might look actually.
We can talk about this.
It's actually the world of Christianity.
It's actually the world of the early Christians.
It is.
It is very much.
Yes, yes.
And I had, you know, there's a gentleman in the book who was an Air Force pilot.
And during COVID, he realized he had to get out of the Air Force because they wanted him to, you know, he's a pilot.
He understands science.
He understands how the world works.
And now they want him to do these, you know, abide by these ridiculous mask rules.
And, you know, the world was going crazy.
Anyway, he leaves the Air Force.
And there's a great story about all of that and him and his family trying to, you know, be a voice of reason.
But when he's in Ottawa, he looks around and he says, this is what Jesus would want.
Everyone is helping each other.
Everyone is being super kind and generous to each other.
If Jesus was here, he'd be happy.
And I didn't go to Ottawa with a Christian worldview.
I wasn't looking at it through that lens.
But the more I've thought about it and the more I interviewed people, many of those truckers were Christians.
I've come around to that view, that what we saw in Ottawa was something very unusual.
Very rare.
I don't expect to see it again.
It was a glimpse of the divine.
It really was.
It was humans, our best selves.
And it was sustained for a number of weeks.
It wasn't just a moment.
I'm currently reading this book, which I'm pressing on everybody.
And you must read it too, because it's so good.
It's called Everyday Saints.
Everyday Saints by Metropolitan Tikon.
T-I-K-H-O-N.
And it was a huge bestseller on publication in Russia.
Tikhon, interestingly, is rumored to be Putin's personal confessor.
But he's done his time in the monasteries.
Anyway, the book is about, or partly about, what it was like being a monk or a nun in the worst period of the Soviet Union.
So during the terror, for example.
And the story that emerges again and again is that God is closest to us when we are in extremists, when things are really bad.
So one of the monks says that he was never happier or never felt closer to God than when he was in the gulag, having had his fingers broken every day, sorry, one by one, being tortured by the NKVD.
And then he was shipped out to the gulag.
And, I mean, it was horrible.
He felt that God was with him in those times.
And there's a nun I'm just reading about at the moment being shipped out east on the train.
Anyway, the reason I mention it, apart from everyone should get it and give it to their friends, is that I got the same feeling reading your book, that God, Jesus, was walking among those Canadians and that sense of altruism.
And just great.
And you spent quite a long time talking to these people.
Must have been a job.
Well, I went there as a photographer.
So there's this historic thing going on in Canada, and I'm a photographer, and I'm going to go to Ottawa and I'm going to help document this historic moment.
So that was my reason for going.
And I spent a week.
I spent a week just walking around Ottawa and hanging back and watching people interact with the truckers.
And at that point, I didn't talk to the truckers a lot.
I was more interested to see how the public was interacting with the truckers.
But there were some people that I met and I take a photo of the trucker and say, if you give me your phone number, I'll text you this, text you, this copy of the photo.
So I came back after a week with numerous photos.
And I didn't intend to write a book.
I didn't.
The media in Ottawa was appalling, was appalling.
You don't surprise me.
So it was so strange.
And I went with a friend who wasn't who isn't terribly political.
And she like we'd walk around and then we go back to the hotel room and we turn on the television and we'd be getting this newscast, which said that there were a bunch of far-right terrorists out on the streets, you know, terrorizing the public.
And we had just spent hours watching people hug and kiss and feed each other and feed the homeless.
And it was absolutely the opposite.
The media coverage was so dramatically different.
And I think that was certainly a turning point for my friend where she went home and said, well, why should I watch the evening news anymore?
It's all bullshit.
Right.
So that was worthwhile then.
That was worthwhile.
She sounds like she was radicalized.
I mean, a completely normal person.
Yeah.
And there were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Canadians who had that experience.
Really?
Yes, yes.
So I had another gentleman who was a pastor from Montreal and he originally from Ghana.
And I met him and he said, well, one of the reasons I'm here is because my friends are telling me that what they're saying on social media is exactly the opposite of what the television is saying.
So I had to come and check it out for myself.
So there were many, many people who had that experience who said, you know, I knew the media was a little bit biased.
Of course, they're going to twist things a little, but this, this is just unbelievable how, you know, how dramatically false the coverage was.
So, but as a former mainstream media journalist, I sort of thought that the media was going to snap out of it.
I thought, okay, we're all going to go, you know, this is going to pass in a few weeks or a few months.
The temperature is going to cool and people are going to get their brains back and we're going to start talking about what happened there in an honest way.
And that never happened.
It has still not happened.
And we're almost four years later.
So I realized that if anyone was going to tell the story of these ordinary people, and there have been other books written in Canada about the convoy, but they are often from the point of view of one of the organizers or one of the spokespeople.
And my book is just ordinary folks.
You know, why did you get in your truck and drive 2,000 kilometers across the country?
Why did you do that?
And what happened?
And what did you see?
And what happened afterwards?
So I've gone out and just got those ordinary stories.
And I, you know, they're now, they're part of the record.
And I'm very proud of that because otherwise we wouldn't know.
And I have friends who, you know, I have a friend in Toronto who's who recently just started reading my book.
And she said, honestly, Donna, we had no idea.
We had no idea because all we heard from the mainstream media was there was those nasty truckers and they were being such a nuisance to the poor people who lived in Ottawa.
That's all I knew, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Do you know?
How do you explain?
We both worked in the mainstream media.
And I have to say, there are very few people of my very few among my former colleagues who've gone on the journey I have.
I mean, one of the, I do a podcast occasionally with Elizabeth Nixon.
Do you know her?
Yes.
Of course you know Elizabeth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But she's one of the very few former mainstream journalists who's walked the walk and seen through the lie machine.
Are you not mystified that people that one would have considered colleagues could participate in this lie?
How do you explain that?
Well, you and I both know because of our climate experience that the mainstream media is kind of, you know, they're pack animals, right?
There's a dominant analysis and everyone goes along with it.
And that dominant analysis tends to be shared by politicians and by bureaucrats and by academics.
You know, it's a worldview of a particular slice of the elites in our society.
And it's pretty identical, whether it's Canada's elites or the UK's elites or Australia's elites or Germany's elites.
They all have this pretty inflexible worldview.
And so that already existed.
We knew that with climate.
I knew that from trying to report on fathers in divorce court.
You know, I'm the women's studies major trying to talk about how the courts are being unfair to fathers and therefore to their children.
Global warming is a massive con.
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it screened in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
We've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question: okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that one.
Just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Guy.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
And I'm treated like I'm some kind of nutcase because everyone knows that it's always women who are the victims of everything, right?
So we knew that already before COVID.
But I think what really startled me with COVID was that the media stopped even pretending to be the check, a check and balance, you know, the check and balance role on government, on the powerful.
You're supposed to hold the powerful to account.
They stopped even pretending that was their role.
And very, very early on in COVID, when we didn't know what was going on and it was scary, and I had a father in long-term care and I was very concerned about his safety because there were, you know, 11 people were dying in one institution in two weeks from that very early strain of COVID.
I, you know, I, like other people, I was very concerned.
And I wanted to, I wanted some guidance.
And the media is, you know, the conduit that gives you the guidance of how to behave and what we think and what's going on.
But then the media just became the mouthpiece of the government through COVID.
And they spent months and then years being that.
And then, and I don't think they've ever come back again.
But, I mean, without attempting too much amateur psychoanalysis, I mean, didn't we both become journalists in order to be kind of maverick heroes who spoke truth to power and sought out the truth at whatever cost and enjoyed being the naughty boy or girl saying the emperor has got no clothes.
So since when did these people lose that aspiration and think, well, I'm happy being a pack animal?
Or do they, or do they maybe think they're not pack animals?
How do they reconcile it in their brains?
How does it work?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know what the explanation is other than we are pack animals.
You and I are very curious about the world, right?
So we want to keep asking questions.
We want to keep exploring.
We want to keep examining our prior views.
But most people are not that intellectually nimble.
And a lot of journalists are just interested in the paycheck and the dinner parties.
Right.
By the way, you said, I think some people might be misled by what you said earlier about people sort of dying of COVID.
There's one example I just read in your book where one of the truckers describes how one of his relatives was not vaccinated and got taken ill.
And the last his wife saw of him was going to hospital in the ambulance.
And basically, he was taken out with Rem Desivir, aka Run Death is Near, as a punishment for not being vaccinated.
I mean, he was effectively terminated by the Canadian state for not having taken the death jab.
Would you say that's fair?
Well, certainly his family feels that that's what happened to him.
Yes.
So one of the truckers in Ottawa, whose story I tell, he had a brother who wasn't vaccinated, became very ill.
The ambulance showed up and didn't seem, even though the guy's blue by now, did not seem to be in any terrible rush, you know, and the family really feels that he receives second-class care and then he was given remdesivir.
And yes, they certainly feel that he was, yeah, he was harmed and he was a victim of all of this madness, yes.
He might have survived otherwise.
This happened a lot in the UK as well.
The health secretary at the time, a game show contestant called Matt Hancock, ordered shedloads of run death is near, remdesivir, which is designed as it's for patients on the terminal pathway, normally.
It's a kind of, it stops you being able to breathe properly.
So if you're giving somebody that, you're not thinking, I'm trying to boost this person's chances of recovery.
You're basically giving them a death sentence.
Yes, yes.
It's so painful to even think about this, some of this stuff, though.
Oh, my God.
That's what I'm thinking.
Which brings me back to the point you were making about, I was going to ask you about this.
You say that one of the reasons you wrote the book was to remind Canadians that this is what happened really not very long ago.
And you already have contrived to pretend it didn't happen.
It's the same here, but I imagine I'll bet Canada's even worse.
That people are like, la la la, yeah, it was COVID, it was a thing, and it was very serious at the time, but we're all over it now.
And they effectively have colluded to deny the crazy things that were done by the state against them, things that would not even have been tolerated probably under Stalin.
I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
This was people being judicially, well, not judicially, being executed in hospital by the people who are supposed to save them.
People being shut in their homes.
People being denied schooling.
And I was going to ask you, what percentage of Canada, of Canadians, will even go there and admit that what happened happened?
And how many are in denial?
Unfortunately, I think it's probably at least 80% of the population is in denial, does not want to think about it, does not want to talk about it.
And we have people who, many people took the vaccines and are fine.
They had no adverse reactions.
But there are some people who took those vaccines and their health has never been the same again.
They are in terrible, terrible distress.
And we can't even talk about it.
You know, we have a wonderful independent filmmaker who lives very close to me here.
He has done a film called, Why Can't We Talk About This?
And you can see it on YouTube.
Why can't we talk about this?
And it's about a buddy of his.
He grew up with him.
He's a very athletic guy.
He took a number of vaccines.
And he was one of those people who were kind of saying mean things about those who didn't take vaccines on social media.
And then he had, you know, I'm not sure how many he took, but a few days after his final vaccine, his legs started to drag.
And he lost his ability to walk and is now basically in long-term care in a bed.
And he is, you know, he should have many decades of life ahead of him, but his life has been totally destroyed.
And the filmmaker, Dean Rainey, this very brave filmmaker who's made this film, can't get the film shown in a local theater.
We're not going to show that film.
It's called, Why Can't We Talk About This?
So, you know, and this is a small community.
It's a small community that votes conservative.
And we can't watch this local filmmaker's film about a local person who has suffered this terrible injury and no one's helping him.
You know, that's the state of Canada.
And it's very frightening.
It's very frightening because my conclusion is that if the government tried to pull something like this again, all these massive violations of civil liberties, 80% of the population is just going to go along with it again because we haven't had any accounting.
We haven't had any Acknowledgement of what happened.
The entire society was traumatized and we're not talking about it.
Yeah.
What if COVID was just the test?
What if that was just a dry run for the really serious thing that they're trying to do to us?
Yes, and yes.
And that is terrifying.
That is just terrifying, isn't it?
And seeing how many, I mean, the cops didn't.
We've already dealt with the medium.
I know there were exceptions to this.
Some cops just were in tears at what they had to do.
But there were heavy-handed cops beating people up.
There were people, sort of fifth columnists mingling with the truckers and then sabotaging their fuel lines and putting contaminated fuel into their trucks.
And women who'd been paid to frighten them by saying they're going to hit here next.
You should get out now before it gets serious.
They're going to confiscate all your goods and whatever.
A lot of bad behavior, the sort of things one associates with sort of Soviet era countries.
Yes, so there definitely were provocateurs who, it looks pretty clear, were encouraged to behave in certain ways by the government and by the police.
It certainly looks that way.
There's no other explanation that makes sense.
And then there were just individuals.
So what happened with the Ottawa protest is that once they got to Ottawa, that was kind of a week-long process.
And then they were there for three weeks.
And for that three weeks, it was relentless.
The media was relentless about how horrible these people are and how dangerous they are and how violent they are and they're racist and they're supposedly rapists and they're, you know, and they're supposedly stealing from the homeless.
And it went on and on and on for three weeks, for three weeks.
So there were a lot of people who, if you weren't in Ottawa and you weren't watching social media, and even some of the people in Ottawa, they were so petrified, they didn't even come out of their house.
And it's not because there was any real danger, but it was because the media had convinced them of it and the politicians had convinced them of it.
So there were individuals.
Some of them may have been connected to Antifa and some of them were just individuals who would do really, really awful things like come up to a fire barrel and there's some truckers hanging around and it is minus 20, remember?
And it's February in Canada.
It's cold.
And there's truckers that are standing around with, you know, keeping themselves a little bit warm.
And some guy comes up and makes some small talk and then throws a can into that fire barrel.
And the can explodes and there's shrapnel everywhere, right?
So that, and that was just probably just an individual person who did that kind of thing.
So there was, there was, you know, that sounds like paid actor of the state to me.
Well, perhaps, perhaps.
I don't know if we, we, we, is there any way to tell?
But the point is, is that the truckers were dealing with that.
They were worried.
They were worried, you know, because the government was saying that they were violent and blah, blah, blah.
They were worried that firearms were going to be planted in their trucks on their trucks while they slept.
They were worried about that.
They knew that there were snipers on all the tall buildings, you know, pointed down at them for three weeks.
So on the one hand, they're being treated like kings and like rock stars, and people are constantly coming to their truck and saying, thank you, thank you, and please don't go.
And what do you need?
How can we help you?
Let us do your laundry.
We'll bring it back tomorrow.
So they were getting this amazing treatment, but they were also under a lot of stress because there were all of these different ways where they were vulnerable.
And one guy had a couple of his mirrors broken off and branches stuffed in one of his gas tanks.
And there was this very low-level kind of harassment.
And it's not clear who was responsible because no one was interested in actually investigating that.
Yeah.
Well, on that point about how can we tell, my inference would be this.
One of the things I've realized in my journey down the rabbit hole, and I talk to all sorts of people who, I mean, it's like meeting the best friends you never knew you had.
And you discover all sorts of things about this strange new world we live in where you realize the truth as opposed to the media narrative.
And the conclusion that I've tentatively reached, I'm subject to change, but is that the sort of the maverick crazy who goes out and does things like put exploding canisters into fire barrels or whatever exists only in the movies or on TV series,
which are themselves a creation of the lie machine.
I think that almost all terrorism, so-called terrorism, is actually the work of, is actually sponsored, curated, whatever, by the intelligence services.
I think it's highly likely that this guy was, I mean, you think about it, what kind of person would go, well, I've read a lot in the newspapers about how awful these truckers are.
I think I'm going to show them what I think.
I'm going to make a bomb, a can.
It was just like a can of beans or something.
Okay, sorry.
Yeah.
Even so.
I'm going to get a can.
I'm going to put it in there so it explodes in their faces.
I don't know.
I think that you've got to be pushed to do that kind of thing.
That's just my thought.
You may be right.
I did like the other thing that emerged from the story about contaminated fuel and stuff.
The ingenuity of the truckers and their supporters in getting round in circumventing these problems.
It reminded me a bit of the ingenuity that you find in Colditz prisoners, say, people in prisoner of war camps, how they get round the guards and get things through and can make maps or whatever.
And here the truckers, I mean, when you've got the police against you, you've got all the authorities against you, and yet somehow they managed to get new supplies of fuel in and they managed to get loads of food in.
And they got around it, didn't they?
They did.
They did.
And actually, I spent a wonderful day many years ago at the Berlin Wall Museum.
And when I came out of that museum, what stayed with me was the human ingenuity, all the different ways over the years that people had tried to get over under the Berlin Wall while it existed.
And there were just Endless examples of all kinds of different things that people had tried.
So, yes, I understand.
And you're right.
And just to go back for a minute to would someone individually decide to harm the truckers, individual ingenuity, you know, I think it's a possibility.
It's a possibility.
Because there were so many people who were doing the opposite, who, as you say, were finding ways around, you know, to smuggle in fuel.
So there's that wonderful story of the dairy farm boys who come in.
They're farm boys and they've got this fuel in the back of their truck, except that they've bottled it up in big milk jugs, and they've even sealed it like a milk jug.
And they've put those milk jugs in cardboard boxes and they've taped them up so a very cursory exam of what they have in the back of their truck isn't going to reveal much.
But then it's hundreds of liters of diesel fuel that they bring in in the middle of the night that they're smuggling in for the truckers.
And, you know, so those kinds of stories, they're just endless.
And, you know, and another farmer, so I think those guys were from Ontario, the dairy farm boys.
And then there was a farmer from Quebec.
He's just spent this whole three weeks smuggling in fuel in the back of his pickup truck.
And he figured out when the police shift change happened in the middle of the night, so there weren't many people around.
And he said, I just came in every night and I never got caught.
Yes, people figured it out and it was amazing.
And it was, and, you know, the very first trucker that I spoke to told me about an elderly woman who said, I'm going to come back with a jerry can full of fuel in a baby carriage for you.
And, you know, covered in a blanket.
And of course, that's what the French resistance did, right?
They smuggled things in baby carriages.
So, so, you know, they're the, yes, yes.
So human ingenuity, you're absolutely right.
You know, they're marvelous stories of how people decided to.
And this is why I find this moment in Canadian history encouraging and inspiring, because Canadians said to the government in a very cheerful way, screw you, we are bringing fuel to the truckers.
And thousands of people did that.
And they just figured out a way.
And sometimes it was just one jerry can, but that was their contribution.
And they did it even though the police had said that they were at risk of getting arrested.
And they just said, screw you, we're going to laugh about this.
We're going to make a game about it.
In fact, the convoy organizers had this marvelous PR stunt where they got a whole bunch of people to take empty jerry cans.
Now there was some fuel.
So some fuel was in there, but most of them were just decoys.
And they planned this event where they walked up to the streets of Ottawa.
And this is after the police said you're going to get arrested.
And they were just cheerful and they were laughing and they were banging on those jerry cans like they were drums.
And the cops were laughing too because it was just they'd been outsmarted, right?
So it was a very cheerful but very emphatic screw you to the authorities.
And that made me very proud.
It's a bit like in Cold It's where they stage the Christmas concert and all the Germans are amused at the the prisoners dressing up and meanwhile the escapers are carrying out their daring plan.
Tell me about the.
I want to ask another question, but tell me about what are Hutterites exactly.
So Hutterites are a religious.
They're kind of like Mennonites, but they are different and they dress different and they have their own communities.
And I think they call them colonies.
And in Canada, they are found in rural areas, particularly on the prairies.
And they keep very much to themselves.
They're very aloof normally.
They don't mix with the community.
They don't get involved in politics.
They live rurally and self-sufficiently and very much by the word of God.
And they came out and supported the truckers, which is in itself historic and absolutely historic, because usually they would just be keeping to themselves, minding their own business.
And when they heard that the truckers had this terrible vaccine mandate, they started supporting the local truckers who were protesting at a border crossing near them in Manitoba.
And then when the truckers started coming across from Western Canada and they knew they were going to be reaching Manitoba, these communities organized and they just produced all this food.
So they did some pork.
I think they barbecued like three or four pigs, entire pigs, turned it into pulled pork.
And then there were pails of potato salad and there was pails of sausages and they said, we are going to support you.
So they set up at a service station where they knew that the truckers were going to be pulling through.
And what happened, and they had all of this food and all of it ready, and then the police said, it's too crowded.
There were so many Canadians, ordinary Canadian supporters, who had come out to meet the truckers just around that city that the police said, sorry, this is too dangerous.
So the trucks kept going and they went a couple hours down the highway.
And so the Hutterites have all this food.
And so they pack it all up in their trailers.
And they too drive down the highway into a different province.
And they set up in the parking lot of a recreation center at 10 p.m. at night when it's cold and it's windy.
And they feed the truckers.
This is, you know, nothing like this has ever happened in the history of Hutterites in Canada, to my knowledge.
This is just this magnificent event.
And the gentleman who relates these events from the Hutterite community says that he felt that what happened was a gift from God.
Because if they had just, if plan A had worked and they had just been running up to trucks and giving the truckers food and then the truckers would just pull out again, they said we would never have experienced that incredible, incredible experience of going down the highway and there's overpasses full of people with Canadian flags cheering on the truckers.
We would never have seen that.
We've never experienced that.
And we would never really have talked to the truckers.
But because we had to go to the next province and feed them, we actually got a chance to meet them and to become friends and to actually connect in a real human way.
So he just says, you know, that was God's plan, and it was a much better one than our plan.
So, you know, no one's going to forget that.
No one who is part of that is going to forget that experience.
Not amongst the Hutterites and not amongst the truckers either.
I think you're right.
I think he was right, rather, about God's plan.
I think God uses these situations.
Because there's another great story in the book, we should mention about the Bouncy Castle.
What was interesting about the Bouncy Castle, I thought, was the various academics working for the regime, effectively, were saying, yes, this is a brilliantly staged psyop.
When it was nothing, it was just a kind of an accidental thing done by a mum who happened to, anyway, tell us a story about the Bouncy Castle.
Yes, so, you know, the Bouncy Castles were, you know, the media is saying these are terrorists, these are terrible people.
What kind of terrorists bring bouncy castles to their protest, right?
So when the bouncy castles, when people took pictures of the bouncy castles and those photos went around the globe, it was like, okay, well, there's something wrong with the media narrative because this doesn't fit.
And then, of course, there were pictures of the guys in the hot tub.
And, you know, so all of these really fun, very playful examples of, no, this is not the protest you've been told it is.
So the woman who brought the bouncy castles and is responsible for that, it really was a master stroke rhetorically.
She's a 31-year-old mom, Francophone, lives in Quebec, three-hour drive from Ottawa.
She came to Ottawa with her cousin, and it was like, oh my God, these are sane people, and they're hugging, and they're behaving like human beings, and they're not, you know, doing this six feet apart and masking and all of that nonsense.
I have to come back here.
And so she looked around and the one, you know, everyone went to the convoy and said, how can I help?
What can I do?
How can I make a contribution?
You know, this is amazing, right?
This is what people's response was.
So this woman said, well, there's not really a kids' corner anywhere.
And she has a couple young sons.
And those sons for that time ended up were spending time with her ex-husband.
And so she is also an event planner.
So she's got the Rolodex that says, okay, I know where to get the popcorn machine and the candy floss machine.
And I know where to get face painters.
So she just went on social media and she said, I'm going to do this little kids' corner in Ottawa.
And if anyone has anything they'd like to donate, you can drop it off here and I will bring it to Ottawa.
So then she just got inundated with all these donations and there were games and puzzles and they had to be something that the kids could do with mittens on, right?
So, and if anyone has costumes or, well, that's how the bouncy castles happen because this other person said, well, I have bouncy castles.
So there's suddenly on the weekend, there's these 10 massive bouncy castles in downtown Ottawa.
And the kids are playing and the sun is shining.
And there's some bales of straw and they're climbing on them.
And it looks entirely what it is, family-friendly and just a joyous, a bit of normalcy after two years of horrible, horrible pandemic restrictions.
So it's lovely.
It's just lovely.
And there were some issues with those bouncy castles because usually they get put up in the summer.
Not in minus 20 or minus 30 weather.
And you tell the kids to take off their shoes before they go in the bouncy castles.
And here are these kids with their big rubber boots in the fantasy castles.
So some of them didn't survive.
But the point is.
The bouncy castles, not the kids, I hope.
Yes, that's right.
So it was just joyful and wonderful and colorful.
And it was this, you know, in terms of, you know, a face of the protest, it was, it was.
Yes, yes, yes.
Optics, it was marvelous.
And, but when I interviewed her, you know, that's what everyone knows about the bouncy castles.
When I interviewed her, she said, well, that's not like that was just a small part of what I did.
You know, I had all these games and I had this tent and then I had a heater in the tent and it was a heating station for a warming station for the little ones.
There were all of these things that I did and I was making soup and the bouncy castles were just part of it.
So it was just one person, one person who used her own time, her own resources, and made that happen.
And it was, you know, in the scheme of things, it was marvelous.
It was marvelous.
And it was just one person who did that.
And yes, there were all of these people on Twitter and whatever saying, oh, this is, you know, this is the PSYOP and this is an intelligence op and the government or, you know, they're very clever and they're trying to pretend they're not terrorists.
And nope, nope, it's just this one woman.
And what's interesting is that no one else has bothered to find out.
No one else has written her story.
No one else has tracked down this woman like I did and to find out what actually happened.
Well, because all the journalists are bought and paid for, so they're never going to ask these inconvenient but it's a lovely story and it's at the heart of Canadian history and there's so little interest in those stories.
And so I just think, you know, a friend of mine has said, Donna, this is sort of like chicken soup for the soul.
There's just page after page of these very, very inspiring, moving stories of human stories, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a question I should have asked earlier because Ottawa.
Ottawa's like your capital, isn't it?
It's like the sort of administrative, it's not a kind of do people actually live there?
I mean, is it a can't have a very big population, I imagine.
Well, they do live there.
You know, Ottawa's nickname is the town that Fun forgot.
It is mostly bureaucrats, or perhaps not mostly.
That perhaps is not correct.
There is a very high percentage of government workers, obviously, who standardize that.
That's pretty.
So, you know, there is a larger than normal percentage of people whose livelihoods depend on the government and who are going to therefore be inclined to see the world through the way the government sees it and the way the government describes it.
So that is a problem with Ottawa.
And yes, but Ottawa is surrounded by farm country.
And so one of the things that happened were those farmers, it was easy for them.
You know, if you're a half an hour or an hour from Ottawa, it was very easy for those rural people to come in and support the truckers and to bring them food on a regular basis.
And there were these wonderful relationships that were formed between French-speaking Quebecois people and truckers from Western Canada.
And usually, those two groups see the world in very different ways.
Or at least the politicians representing those two groups make it seem like we see the world very different ways.
So the national unity, people got a chance to spend time because it was a three-week protest.
They got a chance to spend time and to really get to know other Canadians from different parts of the country.
And it was an incredibly unifying experience.
And again, no one talks about that in the mainstream media, but everyone went home with contacts from across the country now, right?
So that's one of the gifts that keeps on giving is that there are now relationships and bonds that cross those what have traditionally been pretty serious barriers.
And we understand each other now better.
And we care about what's going on in other parts of the country now that we know people from there.
And when you go through a crisis with someone, the bonds you form with them are very strong.
They're not just, oh, I met someone at a dinner party.
It's like, no, we went through something very significant together.
So those bonds have a different quality.
Yeah.
I think this is how we win.
We're not going to stop them building the gulags.
You've mentioned the 80%.
The fact is that I'm not being pessimistic here.
I'm just being realistic.
We are never going to wake up enough people to stop this stuff in its tracks.
But what we will be able to do, well, we will win, is counter this by being human and by doing all the things, by forming communities, doing things we're meant to do, doing things they hate us doing, and want to stop us doing at every turn.
Just speaking to each other, because they're trying to usher us into digital gulags already where we don't communicate face to face and where we're stuck in our 15-minute cities and they don't want us traveling and they don't want us, they don't want us talking.
And this is our revenge.
Again, it's why I keep thinking about that Everyday Saints books.
It's like living in the Soviet Union under the terror, and they're going to do horrible things to us.
But we've got our humanity, our God-given humanity.
Yes.
And you said communities, and that's very important.
That's very important.
So, you know, people, some people are very discouraged.
Ottawa was wonderful, but then the ending with all the police violence and arrests and charges and lawfare.
So I was in court just less than a month ago when two of the organizers of the convoy were sentenced.
Okay, more than three and a half years later, they've been through this court process and it's taken three and a half years and they're not done yet.
And one of the guys, they're still trying to seize his truck and take it away.
This is the truck he earns his living with.
So we're going to be coming up in January on the fourth anniversary and this stuff is still going on.
So people, there are some people who are very discouraged by that.
And what I say to them is, we have to communities, we have to build communities, parallel communities, perhaps, of people who see, who understand, and that we can trust.
And when the next horrible thing happens that the government tries to tries, you know, that we have a community already.
Because one of the things that COVID did was made us feel like we were alone and we were the only ones feeling this way, that we were isolated and we must be crazy.
And the convoy showed us that we weren't.
There were lots of people.
And one of the first things that happened when some people arrived in Ottawa was they just cried.
They cried.
It was like, I'm not alone.
Look at all of these other people.
And they are different from me in many ways, but they all see what I see.
And that's that this COVID stuff is crazy.
And we have to stop it.
And we have to keep, you know, get back to a semblance of a normal life.
So I say to people, these communities, these groups, when I go out and talk to my book to a freedom group of people who were radicalized during COVID by what they saw and who realized that maybe they have to rethink the medical system and they have to start homeschooling their kids because the educational system has gone crazy, you know.
So we have to do it together.
We have to lean on each other and support each other.
And I think you're absolutely right.
That is the way forward.
And one of the ways we can do that is by joining churches because finding the churches where there are like-minded people like us.
That's one of the ways we can find each other.
Yes, I want to come back to this later on.
But I just people will be wondering why we haven't talked about yet, so we must.
About the financial persecution of the truckers, about people having their well, they shut down the fund the crowdfunder, didn't they, for the truckers?
And people were sort of persecuted.
They had their bank accounts frozen and things.
It was extraordinary.
Yes, yes.
And that's one of the big red flags.
It's like, all right, we're really going off script now.
We are totally leaving the normal world.
So the police lied and the media lied and the politicians lied and they all told GoFundMe that the truckers were this violent protest, which was not true.
And one of the things is, now we have more than three years later, when you look at what the truckers were charged with, they were charged with mischief, right?
They were charged with, you know, some of them were charged with disobeying a court order.
Well, the court order was about not honking.
And the vast majority of them obeyed the court order, but there were a couple of, you know, they were never charged with insurrection.
They were never charged with sedition.
They were never charged with assault.
I am not aware of a single trucker who was charged with assault.
But you had the police claiming that these were this was violent.
This was a violent protest.
So therefore, GoFundMe listened to those authorities and shut down the fundraising.
And the fundraising had been like historic.
In a matter of days, there was like more than $10 million had been donated to the truckers.
And in the Canadian context, that was well more than all of the political parties had raised in the last quarter combined.
So it was just this massive amount of money that flowed towards the truckers in a matter of days.
And then that got shut down.
And then the Emergencies Act was declared.
The Emergencies Act is supposed to be for emergencies that are so serious that neither the police nor the armed forces can deal with them.
You have a bunch of families and truckers who are keeping one lane open everywhere so traffic can go by.
And this is the emergency that the government says exists.
So, you know, it's bizarre.
The Emergencies Act gave them the power, or they believed that it gave them the power to seize bank accounts.
And so there are, so, and the weird thing about the bank accounts is that it seems like it was totally random.
Some people who were very, very central in the protest, like the guy who had the boom truck that served as the stage that was right there in the center of the action, his bank account didn't get frozen.
But then, you know, a gent who's two blocks down the way who has already left Ottawa.
The next day he finds out that his bank accounts are frozen.
So, you know, it was very random.
There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason.
And perhaps some of the banks quietly pushed back and delayed some of the freezing of the bank accounts.
It's not clear.
It's not clear at all.
But, you know, I have, there's a gentleman in my book.
He sat on Wellington Street in his blue Peterbilt for three weeks.
And then as his wife is leaving town, she's trying to fill up at a service station and her cards don't work.
So, all right, it's winter, it's the middle of nowhere.
How do I pay?
Now, as it turns out, she had a credit card that was solely in her name, and so she was able to pay for it.
But those, that couple has two young teenage boys who are under 16.
And if you're under 16 in our banking system, a parent's name has to be attached to the account.
So the dad's name is attached to these boys.
So these boys had their bank accounts frozen too.
So because it was the trucker and anyone associated.
So in another case, the guy is protesting.
His elderly parents, who haven't come anywhere near the capital, who have nothing to do with the protest, but he has his name on their bank accounts because they're elderly and they might end up in hospital and he might have to keep paying their bills for them.
Well, you know, while they're incapacitated, he has his name on their bank accounts.
Well, their bank accounts were frozen as well.
So the bank accounts of teenagers and the bank accounts of elderly parents, so they can't get any money.
They don't know if they're going to get their pension deposited.
They're obviously distressed.
In his case, his father had come from Czechoslovakia, no, from Hungary, had fled the iron from behind the iron curtain, and now he's in Canada and the government has shut down, has seized his bank account, right?
So that was very troubling.
So, you know, so yes, the government was incredibly heavy-handed and shut down people's bank accounts.
And it was like, you know, one of the women, one of the wives said, you know, you went online and it was just, you looked at your bank accounts and it was a bunch of zeros and dashes.
It's like all of your financial life is just wiped out.
Now, for most people, that only lasted a few days.
And then it went back online and they said, you're not in Ottawa.
You're not going to go back to Ottawa right now, right?
We're going to put your bank account back on.
For some of the leaders, it was like three months that they had no bank accounts.
And the thing is, there's no court order.
They've not been charged with anything.
They've not had their day in court.
They have not had an opportunity to in any way give their point of view, express their point of view.
It's just your bank account is shut down.
And now, how can you get home?
How can you pay your bills?
It's outrageous, unbelievable that the government would think that this was in any way acceptable and acceptable for a protest that was non-violent.
There were no assault charges laid against these people.
It was peaceful.
It was peaceful protest.
What must have made your experience even more surreal is having somebody like Justin Trudeau allegedly in charge of the country.
I mean, if you've got somebody like Stalin, at least you know that Stalin is an absolute bastard.
And you know what he's going to have you shot in the back of the head as soon as look at look at you.
But Justin is like, oh yeah, I'm a lovely guy.
Sunny ways, sunny ways.
So much.
He's like a sort of second-rate children's party entertainer.
Turn up in a clown costume.
And why did I mean it's easy for me to point the finger when I'm in a country where you've got Keir Starmer, but I don't get how 80% of Canadians say, the 80% of Canadians that you say would rather pretend this never happened.
Could they not sort of go, well, this clown is in charge.
how can we take him seriously?
How can we?
Did nobody say, why?
Why Trudeau?
I wish I knew the answer to that.
So we had elections and this horrible, horrible man, you know, just before the Truckers, that was January, February of 2022.
We had an election in September of 2021.
And Trudeau decided to run that election on basically segregating the unvaxed.
He said, if we get elected, the vaxed will not be able to get on trains or planes in this country.
Now, that means we had an iron curtain around Canada.
I, as an unvaxed person, could not leave the country.
I could not leave the country.
And he ran on that and he got elected.
Now, it was a minority government, but he won.
A large chunk of Canadians voted for him.
He was voting machines, though.
Did you not think all elections are rigged anyway?
Well, I used to.
I used to, and now I'm not so sure.
I'm not so sure anymore because there are just incredible things happening and no one wants to know about them.
No one wants to investigate them.
And there are Elections Canada, you know, admitted after that election that there were hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes that had not been counted.
Oh, well, oh, well, we won't even bother to look at them.
And the races had been very, the victories had been very narrow in many cases.
So, you know, I'm starting now to unfortunately question everything, even things that I would not have crossed my mind were an issue before.
So, you know, we have a media that was in love with Trudeau because he was young and he had charisma and he was photogenic and he had a famous name.
And the same media was telling us that the Conservatives were evil bastards who no one likes them.
And, you know, the leader of the Conservative Party, I happen to know lots of people who admire him, lots of women who think he's wonderful and has a great recipe for the country.
But according to the media, women just despise him.
So, you know, if you're told that, if you're told that again and again and again, I guess you believe it.
So, you know, Canadians, unfortunately, a lot of Canadians are sheep.
And we just, they are assigned their opinions by the media and they continue to watch CBC, which is just as bad as BBC.
And we have this terrible situation.
And I don't know what to do about it because, you know, people have a right to their opinion, but they're not investing much time figuring out whether they have an informed opinion or not.
Yeah, yeah.
Regular viewers will know that one of my hobbies is red pilling people in the sauna at my local.
Yeah, I just find people, when people are just wearing a pair of swimming trunks and otherwise naked, that they're more susceptible to interesting arguments.
But I was in there the other day.
This is actually continuing on an anecdote that I failed to tell Elizabeth Nixon.
And these two Canadians walked in, and I could tell by their accents they were Canadian.
And I started quizzing them about where they're from and stuff.
And I thought, I'm not even going to try.
I'm not even going to bother with these two.
It's so obvious that they are part of your 80% that it's just like, I have nothing to say to you people because you are betrayed mankind.
You haven't done your basic job, which is to stop us being enabled us to be free and like God designed us to be basically.
You've just acquiesced to tyranny.
And you lost your right to have a nice chat with James.
And so just very, very briefly, I don't want to linger on this.
I don't like lingering.
I don't like talking about current affairs because I think it's all rigged anyway.
But Carney, he must have, Mark Carney, you've let in a technocrat, a grim technocrat who's massively behind the New World Order, as much as obviously Justin Trudeau was.
Again, why?
Well, you know, yes, I wish I knew the answer, but the answer, you know, does boil down to we have people who believe the media.
The media now in Canada is being entirely funded by the government because it is the model is collapsing.
And so not only do we have, are we spending, you know, and we are a much smaller country, we're spending $1.4 billion a year on the CBC, which is totally, obviously, government funded.
But now the government is paying $20,000 and $30,000 of pretty much every journalist's salary in a newsroom right now, because otherwise the newspapers would totally collapse.
So, you know, if you're taking any government money, but if your whole survival depends on government money, of course, you are going to see the world the way the government sees the world.
So that is the state of our media.
And the only silver lining there is that more and more people are looking at the media and saying, you're lying to us.
And that is a process.
And I think amongst young people, it is, you know, there's more media literacy.
People are a little more savvy because they can't, you know, younger people are the ones who are going to look at social media and then look at what the television is saying and say, okay, there's a problem here.
They will notice that.
But we have a generation that is still, you know, the generation who is still listening to CBC and getting their worldview from CBC.
That's an older generation.
And they tend to be the people who vote or they vote, you know.
They get off their ass and they actually get to the polling station.
And so those people are still very much part of the mix.
And, you know, I don't know what it takes to wake up people, but, you know, to go back for a moment to everyone was victimized.
Everyone was traumatized by the COVID era, by the incessant media, by the incessant health, health officials.
You know, we were all lied to and terrified and traumatized.
And some people are never going to recover from that.
And they have been brainwashed totally and they are in their own way victims.
And I have some compassion for them.
And I wish I could give them a wider view of the world, but they're stuck there.
And some of them have been really damaged by that experience.
Yeah, no, I must remind myself of that occasionally when I'm too ready to just like write them off as incredibly annoying norms.
They were victims of a military grade science, which is definitely conducted using the full panoply of the intelligence services, the military, the media, unlimited funding, courtesy of the victims.
I mean, yeah.
It's hard to blame these people too much.
I was going to ask you, I was going to ask you before I moved on to my final thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
How difficult was it to stay unvaccinated in those times?
Well, it really depends where you were situated.
As a writer, as a journalist who works from home in my home office in a small town, it was not too difficult for me personally.
Normally, and stuff like that.
Yes, well, I couldn't go in a restaurant, but all right, you know, not being able to go in a restaurant for six months is not the end of the world.
It's, you know, it's a first world problem, right?
So, you know, there were, you know, as I mentioned, I had a father who is in a care facility and I couldn't enter the care facility because, you know, I might give him COVID, but he could come out and sit in my car in this small little bubble and we could go to the restaurant and then we could go back in my car and I could drive him back.
So, but I couldn't go into where he lives because I don't have a vaccine.
So for me personally, I managed and I didn't let it bother me too much.
But there were other people.
Some of the stories I've heard from people who were pilots or, you know, they worked for a university and they waited until the very last day.
And then it was like, if I don't get this, I'm going to lose my job, right?
And I have a mortgage and I have kids and I have all of these.
And so they were coerced.
They were coerced.
And then there were other very brave people who just said, well, I'm going to lose my job.
Or I will quit my job right now because if I quit my job, I will get some unemployment benefits.
But if I get laid off because I am asserting my bodily autonomy, then I will be seen to have been fired with cause and I won't get any employment benefit, unemployment benefits.
So that's what the government in Canada did.
Not only are you going to lose your job, that social safety net that is there to help people when they lose their job, you're going to be disqualified from it.
Believable coercion.
So there were people who, you know, there were people who made very difficult decisions.
And some people say, I regret what I did.
We felt very pressured.
We felt very like we were going to lose everything.
So we took this vax and our health has been a problem, and I really regret it.
And if I'd had a crystal ball, I wouldn't do that again.
So it was difficult.
You know, if you were kind of in the rat race and people didn't want to rent apartments to you, they thought they could ask for your vax status if you were just looking for a new apartment.
It was unbelievable.
And there are, you know, and there are numerous cases that I know personally of small business people, mostly running small restaurants, who said, no, we're not doing that vacc passport checking business.
And in our place, you don't have to wear a mask.
And, you know, they were harassed, they got charged, they went to court.
One woman was fined $50,000.
Now, it's in appeal right now, and the appeal judge apparently asked the crown prosecutor, so why was it $50,000 rather than $1,000 fine?
Who knows?
$50,000 because she wouldn't check her customers.
And she's out in a small rural area.
These customers have been coming to her place for decades.
What a woman.
Yes, yes, she's remarkable.
She is really remarkable.
And she's still fighting.
And, you know, it's four years after COVID kind of went away.
And she's still stuck with this mess.
And she's had a quadruple bypass since.
It takes its toll on people's health.
Yeah.
I want to run this theory by you, which is that what happened during COVID was essentially quintessentially satanic.
That this it was designed by true, well, I mean, an evil mind, let's say, in order to steal people's freedoms, in some cases, their lives or their health or their livelihoods.
That people were made to do things that no government anywhere has any right to impose on anyone.
That's not what governments are for.
I mean, they do far too much anyway, but that this was really stepping way over the line.
And it was a terrible experiment conducted against ordinary people to see how much they would take.
And in a lot of cases, they failed.
They failed the test because they showed the government that they're willing to give away their freedoms for a mess of pottage and they're not prepared to stand up, or even that they actually actively participate, they become their own prison guards.
But at the same time, in things like this, in sort of satanic schemes, what you find is that God finds a way of thwarting the enemy's plan by using this opportunity to show people at their very best.
So people get to be given some examples of this: people sort of behaving well beyond the call of duty and doing things they could never otherwise have done.
And I was wondering whether the experience has changed your view.
Because when you and I first met, I think if somebody had asked me if I was a Christian, I'd have shuddered slightly.
And then I'd have said, well, I mean, I'm C of E and I go at Christmas and I got the children baptized.
And I'd have started sort of backtracking slightly.
Essentially, the idea that I was a Christian would have been a slightly kind of embarrassing thing that you didn't ask people about.
And when I met you, I think obvious Christian.
Has the experience changed you?
It has, it has.
COVID and then especially writing this book.
So I think I would have had the same reaction that you just described.
You know, the truth is that I've spent much of my adult life pretty hostile to organized religion.
You know, there are things in my past and my family's past with the Roman Catholic Church that I was raised in that were very negative.
And I have seen, I've not had a high opinion of religion as structures, as organizations.
I know and have met over my lifetime really, really amazing people who are Christian and who get their strength and their courage from their Christianity.
So I've always tried to be very respectful of people of faith, even though I did not count myself in that group.
And going through COVID and watching how most people behaved, how most people went along with outrageous things really shook my faith in humanity.
It really did.
I feel I have a better understanding now of how some of the terrible things in history happened, that how ordinary people just did not rise up and stop it, but it continued for years, some of those horrible decades with the gulags.
So COVID changed me and writing this book changed me as well because I went to interview these truckers and not everyone by any means, but many, many of the truckers were Christians.
And I wasn't necessarily even expecting it sometimes.
And then I'd be in the middle of an interview and I'd think, oh, here's another Mennonite trucker.
And I wasn't, I didn't even, I, you know, hadn't clued in.
So, so, and, you know, and the Mennonites are sort of like the Hotterites.
They're less so.
They're a little more engaged with, you know, they call, they talk about Mennonite origins.
So we were raised traditional.
We don't necessarily live that way anymore, but we're still very much Christian and we're still oriented around the church and we send our kids to the Christian school.
So there were a lot of those truckers and it became very clear to me writing this book, interviewing these people, that their worldview, their ability to see past, all of the horrible stuff that the government was, you know, all the brainwashing, their ability to see past the brainwashing had to do with their Christian perspective.
And their Christian perspective kept them, you know, Kept their path clear and helps them recognize that things, unacceptable things were going on.
So, so, and then, you know, one of the one of the chapters in the book, the last chapter actually is about is about this amazing church in Ottawa, downtown Ottawa, that decided rather early on to open its doors, even though the government was saying you can't have more than five people and blah, blah, blah.
And they just decided to defy the government, partly because they're an inner city church and they have a lot of people who are really, really dependent.
You know, they're trying to get off drugs and they need the support that that church community provides to them.
And saying to them, you can't come to church is like cutting off their rehab, their support system.
So this amazing church, you know, was sort of already kind of in rebel territory.
And then they decided to open their doors when the truckers came to town and for 12 hours a day and be a warming station.
And we're going to feed you and we're going to care for you.
And of course, we're going to feed your soul as well.
And so this church was standing room only during the convoy because all of these truckers were coming to the church for not only Sunday service, but during the week.
And it also became a magnet for people who wanted to help the protesters, the truckers.
So it became this incredible community experience.
And, you know, the pastor's wife from that church said, we had people coming in here saying, I didn't used to believe in God, but I do now because of what I see happening here in this church and what I see happening on the streets of Ottawa during this protest.
Just humans supporting each other and helping each other and this massive amount of resources.
People were dropping off barbecues and generators and food and clothing for the truckers.
And they were giving it away to the shelters and the soup kitchens.
It was this massive outpouring of love.
And yes, there was, I think God was working there.
And I have, you know, I'm on my own spiritual journey now, but I've started going to church lately.
And that's not something I've done as an adult.
And I'm not sure where I'm going yet, but I'm doing things that 20 years ago, if you would have told me I would be doing this now, I'd say, not a chance, not a chance.
That's not me.
But here we are.
Here we are.
Yeah, here we are.
Exactly.
Well, that's great.
Donna, it's really lovely seeing you again.
I feel like we're almost in the same room, even though we're separated by the Atlantic.
I hope I see you again.
I mean, in the flesh.
Yes.
I'm not telling you I'm coming to Canada anytime soon.
I'll probably get arrested anyway.
Well, we'll have to see.
We'll have to see about that.
And I'm a little bit afraid to go to the UK now because all of those people getting arrested for social media posts, you know, I'm a bit concerned as well.
It's a weird, it's all very weird.
Tell us where we can get hold of your book.
Well, the book is on the wonderful Amazon website.
And, you know, There are lots of opinions about Amazon, but for writers who are independent, it's a wonderful place because I can put this book on Amazon, and you in the UK can buy a copy and order a copy, and someone in Australia can get a copy in the US as well.
So Amazon is the main place, unless you do come to Canada.
And then, of course, I would like to give you one in person.
Thank you.
And you've got a substack?
I have a substack called Thank YouTruckers.substack.com.
And these days, because I'm doing a lot of promotion, I've not done as much writing as I used to.
But there are three years of daily posts where lots of photographs of the trucker.
And actually, if you don't mind, we have just 30 more seconds.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You take a nice photograph, by the way.
I love the photographs you took of me.
You made me look almost attractive.
Thank you.
So one of the things is, did you take an opportunity at the end of the chapter to do this QR code thing?
No, QR code is the devil's work, Donna.
I don't know.
Okay, so at the end of every chapter, there's a QR code and there's also a very short internet address.
Okay, so the QR code just takes you to a page on my substack, actually.
Okay, so in each...
Yes, so, you know, when you're writing a book about real people, sometimes you get to just put in one photograph of them.
Yeah.
You get to write, but...
But at the bottom of every chapter, there's this link, and you can go look at the photographs of the truckers that I've just described.
So you can see the trucker and you can see his big sign on the back of his truck.
And often there are numerous photos of the Hutterites.
The gentleman is sitting with his family around the table.
Yes, so I don't know whether I'm normal.
I don't think I'm not.
But I just stopped reading at the point where I saw the devil's sign thing that I don't understand.
And I thought, right, I'll move on to the next chapter now because that's a thing that I don't need to look at.
But now you've explained it, it makes sense.
And I would like to know, I'd like to know what outfits Hutterites wear.
Do they wear hats?
Do they wear, I don't know, smocks?
Well, the gentleman often look very much like any other Canadian.
But if you go to the photos on that chapter, you can see him sitting with his family and his wife and his daughters are wearing what is very traditional for them attire, which is different from what the average Canadian would wear.
Yes.
And there's this one other story.
You can see all these photos.
When I was interviewing people, they would send me these photos and they would send me these videos.
And so it was like extra evidence of what they were telling me.
So there's this one story about this woman who's cooking outside.
She's the daughter of truckers.
She set up this kitchen outside and she says, someone brings me, I think it's 1500 frozen sausages.
What am I going to do with these sausages?
They're frozen solid.
How am I going to barbecue them and feed them to the truckers?
So this young couple come by and they say, how can we help?
What do you need?
And she says, well, I need to thaw these sausages.
So they bring up their car and they lift up the bonnet, you would say, the hood of the car, and they start the car and they put these frozen sausages right in there and thaw them.
And so you can see that photo.
Like that's one of the photos that appears at the end of the text.
Defrosting sausages.
Yes, these two beautiful, beautiful young people.
We have no idea who they are, but here's the photographic proof that this happened.
That's good.
I'm going to go and do that now.
Thank you, Donna.
It's been lovely seeing you again.
Everyone else, come on, you love my podcast and you want to support me.
So do, I don't mind you watching for free and it's lovely and I love you all very much.
But you don't have a special place in my heart as the people who actually make the extra effort and become paid subscribers.
So do consider supporting me on Substack, Patreon, buy me a coffee.
I like buy me coffees.
Support my sponsors and oh yeah, and come to my live events, obviously, if you can get tickets.
I mean, they sell out so fast.
Thank you again, Donna LaFromboise, and I hope to see you soon.