Andrew Lawton, a conservative media figure and former True North organizer, argues the Canadian Conservative Party’s defensive strategy—like Roman Baber and Derek Sloan’s removal—mirrors leftist rules instead of asserting its own, empowering Justin Trudeau’s Liberals by fracturing opposition. He warns against splinter groups like the New Blue Party or PPC, stressing culture over politics: conservatives must resist "cancel culture" and censorship on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to reclaim free speech, not just legally but through public defiance. Since 2010–2011, Lawton’s shift to independent media stemmed from mainstream outlets ignoring dissent, and he urges support for Rebel News Plus (via code Andrew10) while rejecting isolated platforms like Parlor as unsustainable. [Automatically generated summary]
This week on Andrew Says, we have Andrew Lawton from True North, and he had a lot to say about the Conservative Party kicking Derek Sloan out of caucus.
He also didn't mix words about the party adopting a losing strategy where the liberals dictate all the rules, set the overton windows, and they just run scared and fire everyone.
We also talked about mainstream media narratives and how to battle them, labeling everyone far-right, alt-right.
You know how it goes.
Exclusively on Rebel News Plus, also, you can also see Andrew Lawton talk about cancel culture, how people have tried to cancel him, in fact, when he ran for office.
And he does give good advice also on what young conservatives can do to take part in the culture war.
It really is an info war, you guys.
So go to RebelNewsPlus.com, sign up.
It's only $8 a month.
You get this show, you get the Ezra Levant show, you get all the shows, is what I'm trying to say.
And for my show, every week you get exclusive content that you won't see on YouTube.
That's RebelNewsPlus.com.
Remember, I wouldn't lie to you, except for maybe this once.
Warning.
Censorship.
Extreme media did not know who I was being the undocumented foreigner in this land.
And they were speaking a little candidly.
Would you like to hear what they said?
What can I say?
I keep thinking I can't be surprised by what happens in this country.
And then we get another big surprise.
I followed this case.
I was here at the last hearing in the Owl Valley when Tommy gave a submission to the judge where it was obvious that no offense had been committed.
They have a bunch of anonymous sources in policing and banking saying that the fact that the killer was able to withdraw $475,000 in cash from Brink Banking, which does not at all serve consumers directly, is typical of how the RCMP would pay informants or agents.
Andrew Lawton is a podcaster, writer, and political commentator with True North.
You can find him on Twitter at Andrew Lawton on Andrew Lawton.ca and of course tnc.news.
Now, Andrew, thanks for joining me.
How are you doing today?
Hey, good to be with you, Andrew.
I'm well.
How about yourself?
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Now, I first think I saw you for the first time on your own podcast.
And as I suspected, all Andrews have great ideas.
Why don't you tell the people who don't know how you first got involved at True North?
I know you have a strong broadcasting and writing background.
Tell everybody what got you involved in politics in the first place and how you got to be with True North.
Why We Left True North00:15:41
Well, that's a big, big long question, but I'll try to give the interesting summation of it all.
I was working for a mainstream media company, actually, doing a talk radio show for several years.
And after I left that, I took a little bit of a brief foray into politics and it didn't end particularly well as I lost.
But looking back on it, I'm actually fairly grateful for that in many ways.
And I wanted to do something that was a lot more fun and really giving me a lot more of an ability to talk about the issues that I care about and follow the stories that I wanted.
So I kind of decided to chart a path in independent media.
And I was very grateful that my friend Candice Malcolm had started at the time this small upstart movement called True North.
And she had asked if I wanted to do something previously.
And it didn't really work out at the time.
But this time around, I thought it would actually be a lot of fun.
And it was a growing organization.
So for starters, it wasn't something that is like it is now with a bigger team and with full-length shows.
So the role has morphed, but I wanted to get to a return to broadcasting.
And I had actually gotten my start in podcasting before I worked for a radio station.
So it's been good to get back to it.
For sure.
And let's jump right into this stuff here that's been going on.
Canadian politics is hot right now.
We know it always isn't always, but the Canadian Conservative Party is all over the map right now.
They're all over the news, so to speak.
They seem to be in damage control weekly, if not daily.
And for the past year, it's sort of been, you know, giving people the boot, being on the defensive really quickly.
The recent examples, of course, are Roman Baber and now Derek Sloan.
Do you think in general it's a good move for the Conservative Party to be on such a defensive right now?
No, and it never is.
And I'd say one of the biggest failings of conservative parties in Canada, and even more broadly, you can see this around the world, is not setting out their own game and their own rules on their own field.
It is rather playing the left's game on the left's field by the left's rules.
And it's never going to work out particularly well.
We saw this with Andrew Scheer, where instead of sticking to the principles he had long held throughout most of his time in politics, he was very equivocal in a lot of things when he was asked about them instead of just planting his feet and saying, this is what I believe.
This is what I stand for.
Take it or leave it.
And I think there's a big lesson that the right needs to take from this, which is that you're always going to be called far right.
You're always going to be called racist, homophobic, this and that.
So trying to bend yourself into knots to make it so that you aren't called those things isn't actually going to work.
Now, obviously, no one should be any of those things, but the point is that the accusation is always going to be there.
One of the things before Derek Sloan was kicked out of the conservative caucus that really jumped out at me was Aaron O'Toole last week putting out this long statement disavowing the far right.
Now, what does the far right mean?
I know what the left thinks it means.
The left thinks that you're far right and I'm far right and Aaron O'Toole is far right.
The left, I think, thinks Michael Chong is far right.
But when someone in Aaron O'Toole's spot says, you know what, we have no place for the far right, all he's really doing is talking about his movement and his party in the terms of the left.
And it doesn't actually advance anything.
It doesn't advance anywhere.
One thing that Stephen Harper did very well is he actually wanted to push the line down the road.
He didn't want to just reclaim lost ground.
He wanted to gain ground.
And there were a lot of areas where I think people could say he could have done more and should have done more.
But conservatives since then have only been in catch up and defense mode.
It's very confusing to me where the line, and you mentioned playing, setting their own rules.
Of course, I do agree with you there.
I'm wondering where the line actually is for somebody like O'Toole.
Because in the case of Derek Sloan, what you have is a guy who's known as not a good guy, a white supremacist.
I don't know much about him.
I didn't hear about him until somebody took a picture with him at the Adams and Barbecue Fiasco.
So you've got a guy donating $100 something under a name that most people probably wouldn't be familiar with right off the top of their head.
It's not a significant amount.
And I would say it was probably very hasty of the Conservative Party to immediately say, you know, we can't have any of this.
This is racism.
This person donating.
Am I going crazy here?
What is the line?
Where is the line where we can draw where we actually defend, if you're Aaron O'Toole, defend people in our party?
Look, I've been involved in politics for a while.
And this is from the get-go, something that reeks of they wanted to get him out.
And this was the first available quote-unquote excuse they could use.
You don't turf someone for this when you could easily defend this in the way that Derek Sloan has by saying, first off, we had 13,000 donors.
I wasn't looking at every single one of them.
Secondly, I don't know this guy's name.
Thirdly, he wasn't even using his real name and so on and so forth.
So this is the situation where the conservatives acted so quickly because they clearly wanted him out.
And this was the first thing they saw that they could kind of use as a cudgel to achieve that.
And then you have to ask the question of why.
Because if you're someone who has been anti-Derek Sloan, and a lot of criticism about Derek Sloan has been put towards Aaron O'Toole, if you're one of those people, you're not satisfied by this because Aaron O'Toole still refused to kick Derek Sloan out on this policy or that policy or this statement or that tweet.
So you don't actually, again, win anything.
You don't win any of your critics over by doing this.
That's a good point.
And what I want to point out now is a few people, not many, but a few people have been asking myself and to a larger extent Rebel News, if you will, how come you guys are going after this?
How come you're not focusing more on what Trudeau is or is not doing?
And to that, I say Trudeau isn't doing anything right now.
He's sitting back.
I mean, his last public statement was him, among other things, of course, saying that he doesn't want a vaccine passport.
Whereas the last few weeks, we have O'Toole saying, this is racist.
We condemn the far right.
Don't question political Islam.
What do you think Trudeau, his plan is?
What do you think he's gaining by sitting back and watching?
Is it just let them burn their own house to the ground?
I think in a lot of cases, yes.
I mean, right now, the opposition, whose job it is to oppose, isn't really able to oppose the liberals because the opposition is too busy opposing itself.
So for Justin Trudeau, why would you get in right now?
When the attention is on what looks like a conservative implosion, you just sit back and let it unfold.
Yeah.
And when we speak about people who were no longer in the party, who've been ousted, I think of the Kerahalioses who started their own party, the New Blue Party.
And then, of course, I think of the PPC.
Now, in your personal opinion, do you think any of these people should be the Babers, the Sloans, do you think any of these people should be starting their own parties?
Should they be joining the New Blue or PPC?
What do you think is the next move for them?
Well, I mean, the problem with starting new parties is that you see fracturing take place.
And I think a great example of this is right now at the federal level.
You've had the Libertarian Party, which is a longtime party that's been in Canada.
You have the PPC, which is formed.
If someone forms a new party on top of that, it's going to completely make it so that everyone just looks like they're running a vanity product.
Provincially, you have the Freedom Party, you've got the Libertarian, and now you've got Jim and Belinda Carahalios with the new Blue Party.
If someone else were to form a new provincial party, again, it would look like each person has their own vanity project.
My concern is less with parties and more with a movement.
I mean, if you believe that politicians are cowards or you believe that politicians are mushy or you believe whatever, the answer to that is to make a climate that either gives politicians the ability to stand up for something or to at least create a climate that elects politicians that aren't like that.
Now, I think there are good people that believe the right things and advocate for the right things in office in Ontario and at the federal level.
But the whole point is, is that we have a climate now that makes it very easy for people to get ousted, for people to get canceled, as you've talked about in the past and as I've covered on my show extensively.
So yes, I mean, new parties might solve a short-term need, but creating a new party doesn't deal with the underlying cause of that problem, which is that mainstream parties are apparently not actually open to the big tent of opinions that's always been taken for granted.
Yeah, and I'd have to agree.
If putting out a two-page document or having a random person donate to you is the marker for getting kicked out of a caucus or a party, I'd say that's pretty low.
And as you said, they probably didn't want them there in the first place.
And even if they're making good points, apparently we can't have that in the moderate Conservative Party.
And that's concerning to me because, like you said, what's going to happen in a snap election that happens, liberals are going to gain a little bit more, probably.
Conservatives are going to get a little bit less.
NDP will continue to lose.
But I don't know how this progresses anyone forward in the type of ideas that someone like you or I or somebody who's a viewer of ours might prefer to have to go.
And if they start joining or creating new parties, you're right.
It's going to fracture a lot more.
It's going to be way more heart.
It's going to be a lot harder to get proper messaging.
So in my personal opinion, I'm thinking that maybe they should try to start a coalition in the PBC or in one of these existing parties and really hammer home the messaging.
But I do recognize that on the other side, they're going to say, Maxine Bernier and Derek Sloan on the same team.
This is just a racist party.
So it's hard to win in a political climate like this.
You mentioned of cancel culture.
A lot of people are saying that's what O'Toole is doing.
He's taking part in this.
It's not a very conservative thing to do.
Has anyone ever tried to cancel you, Andrew Lawton?
Have you experienced this personally?
Oh, like seven times by lunch usually on most days, I think.
No, I've been through it.
Look, I ran for office.
And when you're running for office, everyone throws everything they've got at you.
And I'm someone who came of age in an era where social media was a thing.
So I had inopportune tweets and Facebook posts that, of course, have been screenshotted and reposted years after they were deleted.
I mean, this is a common occurrence in politics right now and in media and in many other sectors.
And to the point that I made on the last question about how we need to create a culture here, politics is downstream of culture.
That's the axiom that was made famous by Andrew Breitbart.
And it's truer than ever now, which means that the answer is not going to come through just, you know, electing this person or that person.
We have to start winning over hearts and minds in culture.
And canceled culture is a huge example of this, because if we don't resist the cancellation of others in our own lives, we're only going to fuel a culture that will eventually come for most of us.
Yeah, and to your point there, I was going to ask you next of combining the culture and the politics to where it's more of a, I don't want to say mainstream because that sounds like one thing, but where it's top of mind, it's not hard for people to talk about certain political issues or not specifically shun anything that they may not have heard of aside immediately when they hear them.
So my question was going to be, what's your advice for younger conservatives in Canada who aren't sure where to turn?
They turn on their Snapchat stories or their Instagram stories and see what's trending.
And it's all probably completely opposite to what they see as the correct answer to thing.
What's your advice to a young conservative who has everything thrown at them?
And if they were to come out with their own opinions and speak with their mind, let's say in front of a classroom of their peers, they would get completely canceled as much as you can as a teenager.
Maybe what's your advice to them when it looks like maybe from their own point of view that there's nowhere to turn to hear people that they agree with?
That's a really, really good question.
And I mean, the one thing I will say is that you're going to have a tough few years.
That's my advice to anyone in that.
I mean, it's not going to be easy.
If you have two options, one is to speak out.
You're going to risk being pilloried and mocked and potentially reprimanded for that.
And if you keep quiet, you're also dealing with another set of problems, which is not being able to be yourself and talk about these things.
So I think that accept that neither one is perfect.
And then the question is, which do you think is better in the long run?
And if you take a stand for something, I'm a firm believer in the fact that you can never look back on that and regret it if you've taken a stand.
Now, that doesn't always mean picking fights.
I think as a culture, what we have to get better at doing is bringing back the art of disagreement.
This used to be something that anyone could do, that I could say something that I think, you could say something you think.
We disagree.
We have at it.
No one punches each other.
And that's that.
And maybe we end on a note where we agree with each other.
Maybe we don't.
Right now, no one has that.
No one wants to do that.
And I'd say this is mostly coming from the left, as we well know, where they just don't want to have my side and your side.
They want only one side to be on the table.
And that's the problem we see in politics.
And to bring it back to politicians and partisan politics, we can't accept that.
We can't eat at the table that the left has set for us.
Now, what's your opinion on the culture and climate in university and colleges?
I went to broadcasting school at Humber College for anyone who's interested.
And even there, in a broadcasting setting, I was exposed to new music, new people's opinions, people who are from different parts of the country who believe different things.
A dairy farmer, shout out to dairy farmer Alex that I haven't spoken to in 10 years.
What do you think is the solution now to reversing course, which appears to be almost more of a, it's like they're degressing into more of like a childlike behavior in university and campuses?
We've seen it all, of course, with Jordan Peterson, if you want to go back a few years.
How do we reverse course on that?
Is it a matter of mandating politics from professors?
Is it cutting out some courses?
Is it simply trying to encourage more school groups?
There are so many in the United States, Young America for Freedom, Turning Point USA.
What's the reversal of that?
And how do we accomplish that?
I do think those sorts of groups are valuable because they make you feel like you're not as much of an outcast as you might feel if you pipe up in your gender studies class about your belief on whatever.
But I would also caution against siloing, which I think is only furthering that inability for people to have respectful disagreement.
If everyone has their own little bubble and they don't go outside of it, I think expose yourself to new experiences.
Maybe it's new music.
Maybe it's a different conversation.
I would say don't actually treat the left the way the left treats the right.
Because we tend to, I think as conservatives, close down when we hear people talking about, you know, these little buzzwords that we all know are associated with left-wing ideology, where I'd say, don't actually be afraid of engaging.
Because some people, and again, it may be a minority, but some people, if you catch them as an individual, not in a group, as an individual, you can have that dialogue.
The problem is that group speak is a product of group think.
And you're never going to get anywhere if you've got the conservative group talking to the liberal group.
But one conservator talking to one liberal, I have hope it's possible to have a dialogue in some cases.
My colleague Dave says 30 minutes alone with that person and I can change their mind.
So this new wave of tech censorship we're seeing, and I'm sure you've come across it.
Build Your Own Platforms?00:03:09
Don't mention election fraud.
You can't question anything to do with coronavirus.
Have you had any pushbacks or warnings at your company with your show where you've had to, you know, self-censor?
Is this a problem you're facing at your company?
It's not a huge deal.
I mean, True North has a very open approach to speech, but like anyone else, we get concerned about what's happening with the platforms that we're on.
And we try to diversify.
We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on YouTube.
We have our own website.
We were on Parlor while Parlor was around.
And I personally have that approach as well.
And we've also had on a couple of occasions our Facebook page vanish overnight.
Both times Facebook will bring it back and say, oh, you know, we're sorry.
It's a misunderstanding.
But each time it feels like, is there someone at a switch here that decides, you know what, your time is up?
I've had in my own Twitter profile over the last few weeks, very fastly dwindling follower counts.
And at some points, I'm like, okay, is Twitter messing around with the number?
Are conservatives that are following me just quitting Twitter?
Or is this part of this mass purge of right-wing accounts?
And I think it's probably a combination of all three or certainly the latter two.
So it is still an issue.
And I mean, the challenge with this is that if you are using a social media platform, you are a guest on that platform.
You're not paying for it.
If I use Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and I have a Gmail account, I mean, that's all because those companies have decided to offer a product in that way.
So I don't like entitlement about these things, but we also have structured our world around them.
And that's, I feel, is the big risk with big tech.
We've become far too reliant on these, which if you are in part of a cancelable group, which is what conservatives on social media platforms are, there's a big risk there.
Well, I want to point out that it's going even further.
And my question is going to be, to play devil's advocate, I think of my one friend who sort of has establishment opinions, the libertarian argument of build your own social media platform, build your own web hosting, build your own video platform.
Where does this end up?
Do we end up with, you know, take the Taco Bell Road on this highway or take KFC Avenue?
What's the end game here for these companies?
And where do you think that this all ends up?
Do you think it just ends up with a ton of different platforms?
Do you think it ends up with people being silenced?
What's the end game here?
Well, I mean, this is something that I've had to reckon with in the last couple of weeks because I am a libertarian, especially on this issue.
So I have always been an advocate of build your own.
And it becomes very difficult when it's, well, now you've got to build your own app store and build your own internet and build your own smartphone and not just build your own app.
Because Parlor, for whatever its technical faults, was conservatives doing that.
It was, you don't like Facebook and Twitter, fine, build your own.
And then that becomes, of course, its own cancelable platform and you don't have the ability to have that hosted on a website and all of these situations that we've seen.
So my view on this, again, and I hate sounding like a broken record, but there is a cultural aspect on this because the problem is not going to be solved by technological infrastructure.
It's not going to be solved by having a conservative internet because it's just not practical to do that.
Cultural Shift for Free Speech00:05:13
We have to get to a point where we're not succumbing to these boycott campaigns that are becoming so ubiquitous and so commonplace.
You know, the reason that these things have so much success is because companies give into them.
If a company turns away a boycott, the boycott campaign tends to just move on.
Now, a question I asked Michaela Peterson was around sort of like, you know, everybody has their red pill moment.
And she mentioned that it was about Jordan Peterson's daughter, by the way.
She had a moment where she was really into medicine and medical advice with her with her diet.
And she realized at some point that she couldn't trust, along with the news, she couldn't trust, let's call it political science or the medical industry being propped up by big businesses.
What was Andrew Lawton's realization as far back as you can remember?
Maybe it was yesterday.
What was the spark that caused you to think, maybe I can't trust everything the news is putting out there?
Maybe I can't trust everything this one person says.
Because I think people are still going through that.
I ask people a lot now, do you think there's still red pilling going on?
And I think people are starting to realize that even with things like coronavirus, you can't trust that just because the government says it or because the WHO says it, that it's actually the best thing out there.
You need alternative opinions.
So with that, I ask you, what was there a moment in your life where you had a realization where maybe you can't believe everything you're reading?
Or were you just raised that way?
Because I certainly wasn't.
Yeah, I wouldn't, I wasn't raised that way, but I also don't think that I've consciously had, and that's a great question, by the way.
I don't think I've consciously had that red pill moment because I've been conservative as long as I've been political.
And there always has been a bit of a countercultural approach to conservatism, to being on the right.
And I mean, it's not to say in my younger teenage years, I think I had my socialistic idealism.
But as long as I've actually consciously tried to understand politics, I've been on the right.
And I think coming up in that, not from family upbringing, but just from my own, I guess, intellectual upbringing, if you will, I've always been aware of the fact that there is this side of the story that's not being told.
Now, I think when I got my start doing blogging and podcasting, that wasn't a revelation per se, but I think it was an acknowledgement of the mainstream media is not getting it right.
And I saw, this is going back to like 2010, 2011, that there was an avenue for independent voices before podcasting was industrialized in the way it is now, before blogging could be a full-time job.
I was doing it alongside other conservatives, including your boss Ezra, just because we wanted to, because we liked it and believed in what we were saying.
So again, it's not a single moment with a flip switch, but I'd say that was part of the journey right there when I was looking at this and saying, you know what, I think I need to be a part of this other story that needs to be told.
For sure, I completely get that.
I wish my worldview was as consistent for as long as yours has been.
Well, I mean, I certainly the ideological journey has changed in that time, I will say.
I would not say at all I was as consistent or had the intellectual depth behind my beliefs, but that did come along while I was on that path.
Sure.
Now, the last question I want to ask you before I let you go, and it's not David Menzies related, I promise.
We all have our goals and we all have the point that we're trying to make or the change that we're trying to make.
What is Andrew Lawton personally trying to accomplish?
What is your goal in this political world?
Can you quantify that in some way?
Can you put it down to an idea?
Yeah, and I hope it's not too much of a cop-out to say free speech, because that has been, I'd say, the defining value that I tend to always come back to.
And sure, I talk about firearms rights and I talk about taxes and I talk about cancel culture and social media and stuff like that.
But ultimately, the one that I always come back to is free speech.
The one that fires me up more than anything else is reading a story about, you know, government wanting to create a bureaucracy to regulate social media content or something being someone being censored.
So I'd say that's the issue, but it's not just about catching up to really bring it full circle to how we started.
It isn't just about not wanting to lose ground.
I actually want to take a step forward on this issue and have more free speech enshrined in law, but also enshrined in cultural attitudes than we've ever had before.
No, I completely agree and I'm right there with you.
And when I talk about number one issues for me, freedom of speech is right at the top.
So you can find Andrew Lawton, Andrew Lawton on Twitter, andrewLawton.ca, and of course, TNC.news.
And if you're watching this behind the paywall, which of course I know you are, go to RebelNewsStore.com and use code Andrew10 for a discount.
Andrew Lawton, final words.
Just say thank you to all of the subscribers for supporting independent media.