Gabrielle Bauer, a biochemist-turned-author with 29 years in medical journalism, critiques pandemic policies in Blindsight is 2020, featuring 46 contributors—from Bill Maher to Lionel Shriver—highlighting exclusion of economists, philosophers, and historians while pushing lockdowns. She compares "snitch culture" to Salem witch trials, notes Sweden’s low excess deaths vs. Canada’s harsh mandates, and warns of institutional dismissal of dissenters. Despite censorship and limited media uptake, her book—available on Amazon, Lulu, and Spanish publisher Mandala—aims to spark reflection across ideological divides, framing lockdowns as a societal experiment with lasting psychological and ethical consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
Did the COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates serve society's best interests?
Author Gabrielle Bauer from the Brownstone Institute joins me today to discuss.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
After three years of almost utter and complete homogeneity in the mainstream media and, you know, in pop culture, dissenters are starting to have their say.
And it's not that the dissenters didn't really exist during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You just couldn't hear from them because of the intense censorship online.
And the dissenters, they weren't necessarily wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.
They were the fancy people, the well-connected people who all of a sudden found themselves canceled and othered, like, well, current presidential candidate for the Democrat Party, RFK.
Now, my guest today is Gabrielle Bauer.
She's an author and a longtime journalist, and she's got a new book published by the Brownstone Institute.
It's called Blindsight is 2020, Reflections on COVID Policies from Dissident Scientists, Philosophers, Artists, and More.
And the book features 46 thinkers drawn from different parts of society and even different political persuasions, but they all agree on one thing, that the policies enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic crossed the line and the world lost its way.
I'm very fascinated to talk to Gabrielle.
I've heard nothing but good things about her from my friend Laura, and she joins me right now.
Joining me now is author Gabrielle Bauer.
She's the author of the new book, Blind Sight is 2020.
And Gabrielle, thanks so much for joining me on the show.
Inadvertent Transmission00:12:43
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the book, I was, as is my job to do as a fellow journalist, poking a little bit around into your background.
And as I previously said to you, don't take this the wrong way, but you're not a crazy person.
And I'm told by the mainstream media and the people in the white lab coats that anybody who disagrees with the prevailing government narrative on the COVID pandemic is a crazy person and a conspiracy theorist.
And if you ask Justin Trudeau, a fringe radical extremist and quite possibly a white supremacist, but I don't find any of that.
You forgot racist and misogynist.
That's the truth.
That too.
Yeah.
And I don't find any of that in your background.
In fact, I find an accomplished medical journalism background for you.
So tell us a little bit about your background first.
Yeah, thanks.
It's a pleasure to be on the show.
I have an academic background in biochemistry, and I ended up as a medical writer and health journalist.
So I write for both doctors, like health professionals, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and for the general public.
I've been doing it for 29 years.
I work with doctors every day.
I work with pharma companies as well.
So you might say that I'm part of the medical establishment.
And as well, I'm 66 years old now, 63 when the pandemic started.
So yes, you would not think that my profile matches someone who would have such deep, deep objections to what went on.
You know, as I joke, I'm not a grandma, but I'm old enough to be one.
So, you know, ostensibly the policies were designed to save people like me.
But no, I had a visceral recoil against the whole thing from the start.
Okay, so let's talk about that.
I know for a lot of people, there's a moment in time where they figure out, wait, this is not at all making any sense and not at all what we've normally done when we have a wave of infectious disease rolling out of China, as we tend to do every five to 10 years.
What was it for you that really was the scales falling off your eyes?
Well, to be honest, there was the moment was literally from day one, from hour one.
There was no sort of period, you know, of a month or two months when I was on board.
I pretended to be on board for the first six weeks because everybody in my circle was.
And it took me a few weeks to really find my sea legs and, you know, start venturing online at first and then talking to other people and finding my tribe.
But I remember thinking literally when the lockdowns were announced for the first time, I thought, why are we only listening to scientists here?
A pandemic is a human problem.
It's not just a scientific problem to solve.
You know, we have to sort of shepherd the human family through all this.
Why are we not listening to mental health experts?
Why are we not listening to economists and philosophers and historians and bioethicists?
You know, this is not just a problem of trying to control a virus.
It's so much more.
And that really troubled me right from the start.
And then the whole culture that sprang up around the lockdowns and the pandemic, the shaming and the snitching and the wholesale panic, it just seemed disproportionate and unhealthy and very alien.
And at first, I didn't quite have the vocabulary to understand my feelings.
And I spent the next three years really trying to understand why I was feeling what I was feeling, reaching out to like-minded people and developing that vocabulary, ultimately writing a whole bunch of essays about COVID.
And then when this opportunity to write this book came along for the Brownstone Institute, I really couldn't say no.
I often wondered how quickly it happened that people in East Germany adopted the snitch culture right in front of them.
And there was the threat of real force from the government.
And I don't want to say coercion isn't force because it definitely is.
But you had this real threat of people being imprisoned and taken away and gulaged because they didn't snitch on their neighbors in East Germany.
We didn't have to get that far in our culture with the threat of this virus.
What do you think made it happen so fast?
Well, I guess, you know, there's still so much debate about that.
I know that there's people who sort of say the whole thing was orchestrated.
And my view is perhaps a little more nuanced.
I mean, I hate to use the word conspiracy theorist because it's so derogatory, but I don't lean that way.
I tend to lean in the direction of groupthink is a very powerful human force.
I don't know if you, you know, you're familiar with Matthias Desmet, who I feature in the book, who talks about mass formation.
And that's where I lean.
I believe that there are, there's a certainly historical record of group craziness that takes over people, you know, the Salem witch trials being one instance.
Satanic panic is not that far behind.
Satanic panic.
Exactly, exactly.
And this happens.
And this just happened on a wider scale because of social media and instant connectivity and all that.
And so I kind of believe in the dominoes falling theory that, of course, there were some bad actors that took advantage of the situation.
And although I work for the pharma industry, I mean, I think it's because I work for them.
I understand their vested interests and I understand how they present data, you know, with a certain slant.
I mean, it's a business and that's how the business is run.
So certainly there were some bad actors and there was some obfuscation and of the reality.
But I do believe that people were just swept away by this.
Certainly, media did not help.
I mean, media, of which I'm a member, abdicated its role as a check and balance on all the craziness, you know, as a pushback.
Media just got swept along as well.
So it was a confluence of all these factors.
I think when Italy fell, so to speak, then that somehow gave the signal to the rest of the world that they had to do this.
So I don't know.
I think people are still investigating this a lot.
And there's probably things that are going to come to light in different countries that help set all this in motion.
You know, my interest in writing the book is more, you know, why people behaved the way they did.
And also what ethical breaches all this entailed.
You know, why this response was so misguided from a social, ethical, psychological point of view.
And so that's why I feature people from various disciplines, including a comedian and a priest who address all these ethical lapses.
Yeah, I think a lot for me, I've tried to do a lot of thinking about what caused people to just all of a sudden join the hysteria and start throwing gasoline on the bonfire of civil liberties instead of trying to get a bucket of water.
And I think there's a lot of people, and it's unfortunately true with the development of society becomes ease of your life.
And a lot of people, they want to feel like heroes.
And you didn't have to work very hard during the times of COVID to be told that you were saving lives.
All you had to do was stay home or wear a mask or follow the stupid arrows on the floor.
And you were psychologically in your own mind akin to a firefighter running into a burning building and carrying out a grandmother.
You were saving lives just by following stupid arbitrary rules that didn't work.
And so I think that's why there are a lot of people out there who've never really done anything for other people in their lives except follow these mindless rules that are clinging to that sense of moral superiority.
Yes.
And that's why they don't want to give it up.
That's why they want to keep the masks and they want to keep the stupid arrows and they want to keep the social distancing and all the dumb rules is because you take away the rules and all of a sudden you're just a normal person who never held a door for an old lady.
Right.
No, for sure.
And that is that was one of the greatest irritants for me.
That moral finger wagging that constantly went on, which was not justified.
And I found this a lot online.
I mean, the insults that I was subjected to online, in all my years of life, no one before had ever called me a sociopath.
No one had called me a mouth-breathing trumpetard.
Nobody had called me a, you know, a village idiot, negative IQ.
I mean, you name it.
And, you know, it was all very new for me.
I had never experienced any of this.
And it was utterly shocking.
And it took me a while to thicken my skin a little bit and just to realize, you know, not to take it seriously and realize that, well, people were scared.
That's one thing.
And I think I also detected and still detect this incredible sense of entitlement that people have.
They think the government can and should keep us safe, keep us from dying ever.
You know, just this amazing sense of entitlement about life and refusal to acknowledge that life has a season and an arc.
And of course, we do try to protect people, but life ends for all of us.
And, you know, again, I just sensed beneath it all this, this, it was more than COVID.
It was more that people were coming face to face with their mortality in general.
And they just didn't accept it.
And there was something else very weird manifesting that had never really seen before, that it all of a sudden became a moral failing if you became sick.
Yes.
Yeah, that is so true.
You know, I give the example of the flu.
Like before COVID, if a very old and very frail person died of the flu, and I know somebody, a relative to whom this happened, people just attributed it to their age and their frailty.
Nobody went hunting for a killer.
Right.
You know, it's when somebody is just that frail, something's going to get them.
It's sad.
We mourn the death, but that's life.
That's biological life.
And yet when COVID came along, it was, oh, you know, where did this, who transmitted it?
And who transmitted it to the person who transmitted it to transmitted it?
It's just, that's not how life works on a planet that's shared by humans and microbes.
I mean, inadvertent transmission has happened since the dawn of time.
You know, of course, we don't go around deliberately infecting people.
Yeah, but this idea of assigning blame and especially telling children, you know, don't go and kill grandma, that's so destructive to a child, you know, to saddle them with that unnecessary and unwarranted burden of guilt.
So I really objected to that.
So before we get into your book, because that's why you're here talking to me, I wanted to ask you, did you have personal fallout for being a skeptic about how the pandemic was handled?
I think for those of us who have, I think most of us, if you are an open-minded person and don't shun your friends, if they think differently about things that you hold different values on, I think a lot of us ran up against people that we disagreed with on COVID.
Disagreements During Pandemic00:06:54
But it seems as though for me, if you came from my side of the argument, if you disagreed with someone, you could just disagree with someone and life went on.
But from the other side, again, it's that sort of sense that you had a moral failing if you didn't follow the government narrative.
And so now they can talk to you.
Did you have some of that in your life?
Well, I have to say I was pretty fortunate.
And as I just told you, I mean, people attacked me online like crazy.
But as far as losing personal friendships or relations with relatives or even colleagues, that has not happened so far.
And I've even had some colleagues buy my book, colleagues who didn't agree with my position.
And I'm not sure why.
You know, I guess I tried not to be too combative in my discussions, but I did.
After the first six weeks, the first six weeks, I was scared to talk to anyone.
And I only talked to people online.
And after that, I made the decision, you know, I'm old enough that I should be able to say what I think.
And whatever happens, happens.
And so I did start to talk to people.
And I did have some disagreement, but I haven't lost a single friend or colleague so far.
So, and I know I've heard lots of stories of people who have.
I mean, the worst that happened is I remember one, I was at a family gathering in New York last year.
And when I was talking about my views to a cousin, he said, but surely you didn't support the convoy, did you?
And I said, well, as a matter of fact, I did.
And he just looked at me just kind of baffled as though, you know, this was just something that had never entered his field of vision before.
He was very, very far left.
And I think he had just never, he didn't expect that response and didn't know what to do with it.
So he just kind of changed the subject.
I thought it was, it was funny because, yeah, he could accept that I'm against some of the lockdowns, but you actually supported the convoy.
That's funny.
I see some of those people who were very pro-lockdown, pro-coercion, coming around to my way of thinking.
And I'm trying to exercise some grace and stick my I told you so's in a sack because these are these are baby critical thinkers and I don't want to scare them back to the other side.
But I'm glad that you have a you're obviously a good judge of character to the people that you keep close to you because you didn't have a lot of people shunning you or any people shunning you for your worldview.
No, I want to.
Go ahead.
No, no, sorry.
No, no, no, I just wanted to say, perhaps, I don't know.
Perhaps it's because I did get vaccinated.
I mean, that wasn't my hill to die on.
I came to be very much against the mandates and certainly against the degree of coercion.
And I never, ever, ever asked anyone else their vax status or never made socializing contingent on it, nothing like that.
But I did get vaccinated.
I imagine that if I had not gotten vaccinated, then I might have faced more of that appropriate.
And you had told me that before we were recording, but I just didn't think that was actually all that relevant to our conversation.
One of my heels to die on during all of the pandemic was: I care about medical privacy.
I don't want to know.
I don't think your bartender should know or your flight attendant should know what your vaccination status is for the flu or for COVID.
So I just, I didn't want to bring that up, but I think that's a really important point to make that you just made is that we're not necessarily against the vaccine, although I think this one was not as advertised.
And a lot of people are figuring that out.
But you seem to be, as you said to me, against the mandates and against the coercion of it all.
And for me, too, it was also the government handing the coercion over to the private sector and then saying, see, it's not us.
It's actually the bar that wants to stay open so the guy who owns the place doesn't lose his shirt.
That's the guy vax carding you.
It's not us.
Yeah, no, for sure.
And I have to say, and again, my views evolved as well.
Like when the vaccine rollout started, I wasn't that opposed to the mandates at that point because I thought, well, it's not that different from school mandates.
And I, you know, all my kids got vaccinated and I never really gave it too much thought.
I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.
So I thought this is not that much different.
But then as time went on, and as I talked to bioethicists for the book, I began to realize that, no, this was not just like the childhood vaccine mandates.
This was much different.
The degree of coercion was, you know, off the charts way more.
If a parent did not want their child to get vaccinated, there was always a way out without sacrificing their career, you know, or their prospect.
This was very different.
And so I really, you know, my views certainly shifted toward vehemently opposing the mandates and the way they were handled.
Yeah.
And I'm like you, I try not to walk down the conspiracy road, but boy, it's hard these days.
And it felt as though they wanted to eliminate the control group with these mandates, right?
You got to get everybody vaccinated.
So there's nothing to compare against at the end of the day.
And I think that was one of the reasons why the mandates were so harsh that you couldn't watch your kid play hockey, couldn't get on a plane.
I mean, this is Canada.
We're one of the biggest, least populated countries on the face of the earth.
Hopefully someone will edit my alarm going on in a video.
But this is Canada.
We're one of the least populated places on the face of the earth.
And we were not just confined to our location, but oftentimes confined to our homes.
We couldn't mix how, like, we couldn't mix households.
And I think that was to make sure that should something go wrong, that there was nothing to compare it against.
And I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'm there on that one.
Yeah, well, whatever.
That was certainly the result, you know, whether that was the explicit intent, that was certainly the result.
And I do remember, you know, coming back to the vaccines after I got vaccinated and there was that period of the vax passports to go on the restaurant, I always felt really uncomfortable, really uncomfortable showing my papers, so to speak.
You know, and that's what really made me realize, okay, this doesn't feel right.
And I started to think and look deeper into the whole thing.
There were a lot of people who were very uncomfortable with being included in the biomedical elite of society.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
I didn't, I didn't want to be part of this elite.
Yeah.
Sweden's Organic Uptake00:04:39
Now, let's talk about the book.
Your book, Reflections on COVID Policies from dissident scientists, philosophers, artists, and more.
Oh, here I'll hold it up.
Thank you, please.
Thank you, please.
So Blindside is 2020.
What inspired the book?
I think it was an entirely organic process because my feelings, you know, I had so much passion for the topic.
And from the start, I started collecting links and quotes and listened to interviews.
I didn't know where this was all going, but there was such a need to understand and to somehow express and put my little drop of water into the conversation that I started doing all this research without knowing where it was going.
And then in August 2020, I took a trip to Sweden when there was that window of opportunity for travel just to get away from the madness that was Canada and to experience some semblance of normalcy amid all this.
And when I came back, I wrote an essay about my experience in Sweden and that got published.
And that led to a bunch more essays.
And then I realized that I really enjoyed doing this, writing these social philosophical essays about COVID.
And I started writing for the Brownstone Institute among other news outlets, some mainstream, some more niche.
And then I pitched this idea for a book to them and they went for it.
They were happy with my writing.
They said I was a popular writer on the site.
And then it became a reality.
So I'd say the whole thing was sort of organic and not really premeditated.
So it was the best kind of scenario in a way.
when you have a strong passion for something and you know you find a way to get it out yeah i love the title of your book because now looking back we can really see that those early objectors were right the data is continuing to roll out with sweden um we also know where i am in alberta we have a little town called lacrete and i don't know if you know about it but it's at the top of the province it's like eight hours from the capital city It never locked down.
And I think it's distance from the capital, the fact that it's, you know, it's at the end of the road at the top of the province.
It's a religious, largely Mennonite community, although most, a lot of the people there are not Mennonite, but it's a town of like 3,000 people.
It refused to lock down.
It just said, you know what?
We're not limiting our churches.
We're not limiting our businesses.
If the businesses so choose to do it, fine, but good luck to you in a small town like that.
In fact, the county itself of Mackenzie County, it's larger than a lot of European countries.
I think it's larger than Belgium.
It's oil and gas rich and forestry rich.
And the town council there said, large companies, you don't get to come and work inside of our county if you have a vax mandate for your employees.
And they became the control group for the rest of the, I think for the country, because when now you look at what their vaccination rate was without coercion, because they removed coercion from the equation, it's only about 30%.
So that places like that, places like Sweden, they really show you what the uptake on vaccination for COVID would have been without government coercion.
Yeah.
Although I believe Sweden actually does have a high vax rate, but they did very well, ultimately, without any lockdowns.
Yeah.
You know, and very, very few restrictions.
I mean, now they have one of the lowest excess death rates in all of Europe.
You know, and I always said that it would take years, not months, for us to really be able to evaluate the impact of all these policies.
And I think that's how it's probably going to still take a few more years until we really, really have the answers.
But we're getting closer to them now.
I think we are.
And I think also the societal fallout of our institutions, I think that's going to take time to manifest.
You know, like we've chased all the good, we, I mean, the government, the royal we, they've chased all the people who should be in positions of leadership in their institutions in medicine, in academia, in the judicial system, in policing, in the military.
Freedom To Publish00:12:19
All the critical thinkers, the conscientious objectors, the people who are resilient to coercion, they've been chased right out of the organization when they should be.
They should be promoted to positions of leadership.
And now we've just got a bunch of yes men left in these institutions.
And I fear for the future.
Well, that's exactly it.
I mean, how to manufacture consensus?
Well, you suppress dissent.
Easy peasy, right?
You got consensus.
You remove everyone who disagrees.
But I found it interesting that you were referring just now to this town in northern Alberta, you know, where there was some religious practice.
And it reminds me of, I saw a video about the Amish as well.
Same thing.
They just said, we're not doing any of this.
And they fared at least as well with COVID as anyone else.
And I found that whole religious aspect interesting because, I mean, I'm not religious myself, but during COVID, I really came to have an appreciation for the religious worldview and perspective and rejection of this biomedical model of life.
You know, and the Orthodox Jewish community was another.
I have, you know, a mostly Jewish background.
And when I read about the Orthodox Jews in New York and in Israel who just refused to comply, I felt an understanding or kinship with them that I'd never felt before, because I really, they were just rejecting that whole model of life that the mainstream was imposing on everyone.
This model that says you can completely disregard everything that makes life worth meaning, that gives, you know, community.
We can just disregard all that in this futile quest to try to keep people metabolically alive.
That's what I call it.
You know, that was the only thing that matters.
And our reasons for being here don't matter at all.
Community connection doesn't matter at all.
And I think that's what some of us just recoiled against instinctively.
It was just this very two-dimensional view of life.
You know, and the whole purpose of it all just never entered the discourse.
Just stay home, save lives, stay home, save lives.
There was something very alienating and off and off-putting about it.
Yeah, we saw that with a lot of the Christian pastors featured in our documentary that's being released on July 5th.
It's called Church Under Fire, Canada's War on Christianity.
And we spoke to members of the Christian community who objected to the lockdowns or at least the restrictions on places of worship and the consequences that they faced because of that.
I mean, we had pastors facing, you know, weeks in jail, Pastor James Coates here in Edmonton, Phil Hutchins in New Brunswick.
I mean, it was just an insane time to see these China-style lockdowns on pastors.
And many of them weren't even COVID skeptics.
They just said, we are going to gather.
That's all they said.
And that's what had them end up in jail.
Getting back to your book, because I could talk to you forever about what you think about the lockdowns and all those things, but I know that your time is precious.
Tell us about some of the people featured in your book.
Okay.
Well, let's start with religion.
I featured Father Raymond D'Souza, who is also a columnist for the National Post.
And he was one of the people who just really made me understand that for some people, religious communion is, you know, is like food and water.
It's like an IV dream.
And you can't just arbitrarily declare that this is non-essential and then declare that walking through the aisles of Walmart is essential.
That was completely arbitrary.
And again, the people that I featured in my book, I deliberately went beyond scientists and doctors because scientists, epidemiologists, virologists, public health people, they can tell us about what they know about containing a virus.
They cannot tell us and they have no extra authority on what it means to be human, how to balance different priorities, how to do cost-benefit in one way or another.
They have no authority on that.
And this is what was missing.
It was just listen to the scientists, follow the scientists.
Well, no, the scientists are just one group of experts at a table.
And we should have had all these other experts right from the start.
And so I feature a comedian, Bill Maher, who had a very sane perspective on COVID from the start.
I feature many writers, novelists, philosophers, deep thinkers who, like one of them being Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher, who again, you know, I really could connect with his visceral objection to all this.
He talked about this emphasis on bare life and what I call metabolic life at the expense of living.
This idea of canceling living to save lives.
Not to mention that, you know, it didn't save lives the way people promised.
But even so, it was just this two-dimensional vision.
And he talks about that.
And he emerged early in the pandemic as a voice against all this.
And he also talked about the permanent state of exception, how we are living in a society that is just looking for emergencies everywhere.
And after one emergency has ended, we move on to the next and we move on to the next.
And, you know, he talked about how unhealthy it is for a society to be living in this permanent emergency mode where we cannot allow any semblance of normalcy.
So, and then I feature novelists.
One of them is Lionel Shriver of We Need to Talk About Kevin Fame.
She's a great, you know, very wry, crotchety American writer who's been living in England for many years.
And I put her in the chapter on freedom because, again, she was just appalled that her compatriots just accepted this assault on freedom.
And she and another writer that I feature in the freedom chapter, Matthew Crawford, just talk about the value of freedom and how people, you know, just dismissed that.
You know, freedom really is as important as life itself.
And it was very disconcerting to me to see freedom reduced to this caricature, you know, free dumbs.
Oh, you want your free dumbs to go to Arby's and get a sandwich or something.
No, that's not what it was about.
Yeah.
It was about the freedom to do whatever I want without the government asking me my medical status.
I want to ask you before I let you go, because you've been very generous with your time.
I want to ask you about the censorship of the COVID skeptics and how it was constantly morphing.
You could have your entire existence online canceled early on in the pandemic if you said something like, I'm not sure if these vaccines are as effective as they keep telling me they are, because I got it and then I got sick and they told me that I wouldn't.
You couldn't even talk about your own personal experience online or on YouTube without your Twitter account being just locked down, your YouTube channel being taken away.
It became my full-time job to make sure we didn't lose access to our 1.6 million YouTube subscribers every day just by saying things we knew to be true because of the just intense censorship of people who are now proven right.
And those same social media companies, they changed their policies quietly.
And now you can talk about vaccine injuries and you can talk about skepticism about lockdowns, but they never actually go back and retroactively fix the censorship that they did as though you could fix censorship.
But they never even give you your account back.
They just say, well, we got it wrong, but that's not our problem.
And they just move on from it.
Yeah, no, it was terrible.
And in addition to that, I think what I've experienced also with this book, and it's a disappointment, is just the left-wing media's lack of interest.
I mean, my objective in writing the book was to speak not only to people on our side, but to people on the other side.
And I really, really tailored the book with that in mind.
The kind of book that you could give to your left-leaning friend who's locked in a certain narrative, just to sort of make them think, ah, okay, this is why some people objected to this.
Okay, something to think about.
And, but I have found that it is.
I mean, my publisher has been great in promoting the book and I've supplemented my publisher's efforts, but I found that it's been so much easier to attract interest from so-called right-wing media than from left-wing media.
And, you know, that's another form of censorship or ignoring.
And so then people don't get the full picture.
I mean, I'm still working on it, you know, and I've had a few little bites here and there, but it's, I find that that's a very big shame in that, again, you know, we aren't, we don't get to influence or to really participate in the discourse to the extent that we should.
And then the debate still gets framed in a certain way.
On the flip side of that, I somewhat understand the psychology of people who don't want to pick up your book and read it because your book, if you pick up the book and read it, if you're on the other side of this and you just spent three years acting like an absolute tyrant, like just discriminating against people because of their medical choices, and you pick up this book, and again, I use the phrase, the scales fall away from your eyes.
You don't want to admit to yourself, like you have to admit to yourself that you were wrong, really wrong.
And you were not the person you thought you were when you are mugged by the reality of something like your book.
Yeah, I suppose that's part of it.
Although I have to say, where I have had success is individuals that I know that were on board with that and who know me.
And, you know, I told them my book was published.
They bought it.
They read it.
That's been successful.
So I think that, you know, once people get their hands on it, you know, it's really not a combative book.
And it's more of an exploratory book.
You know, here, look at the menu, you know, see why we felt the way we did.
And I also get deep into some personal experiences, you know, how the lockdowns drove me to try LSD and see a Zoom therapist and all this stuff.
I have a history as a memoirist too, so I weave all that in.
So I think again, you know, once people get it into their hands, it has not, it has made people think it hasn't offended people.
It's just, you know, the barrier really is to get the left-wing media to, you know, to sort of spread the word.
And I think that's what all of us face who write so-called counter-narrative books.
You know, it is.
So I know my publisher, Jeffrey Tucker, from Brownstone, said the sort of book that people on our side should just give their friends on the left wing.
Here, try this.
So I really hope that, you know, that this happens a little bit.
Yeah, you don't seem like a combative lady.
And I'm sort of shocked that you tried LSD.
The craziest thing I did was I finally got around to starting Game of Thrones.
Gabrielle, I want to give you the opportunity to tell people how they can get their hands on your book.
Okay, well, it's available at all the Amazon outlets, either as a print book, an e-reader, and recently as an audio book as well.
And I'm not the narrator.
Amazon Outlets Available00:04:21
Publisher chose a narrator.
For Amazon haters, it's available on Lulu.
I mean, it's published by an American publisher, so you won't find it in many bookstores here.
Spanish speakers, it has also been picked up by a Spanish publisher.
So they can pick it up at Mandala Ediciones.
Oh, nice.
And I will include a link to your Brownstone page in the show notes and in the text accompanying this interview so that people can just click right through if they want to.
Yeah.
And also, I mean, if possible, you could also include perhaps a link to the Amazon ordering amazon.ca.
That would be wonderful.
And yeah, well, thanks very much.
Really enjoyed talking to you.
Well, friends, as always, we've come to the portion of the show where we invite your viewer feedback.
It's the reason I give out my email address right now.
It's Sheila at RebelNews.com.
If you have opinions about the work that I do here at Rebel News, particularly on the show, send it to me at that email address.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you're writing me.
But also don't hesitate to leave a comment on one of the platforms where you might find the free version of the show, YouTube, Rumble, because sometimes I go looking for comments over there.
And that's exactly what I did today.
So today's comments come to us from YouTube and they are on last week's show with my friend and filmmaking partner, chief documentary filmmaker here at Rebel News, Kian Simoni.
We were discussing the completion and the world tour launch of our new documentary called Church Under Fire, Canada's War on Christianity.
For details and showtimes near you, and we have showtimes all across the country right now, go to savethechristians.com and you can just click through, find a city near you, click through, get your tickets.
But also act fast because we already have locations that are beginning to sell out.
And I know that we had people asking for a show in Eastern Canada.
We do have one in New Brunswick where one of the pastors in our documentary, Pastor Phil Hutchins, is located.
So we're bringing the documentary to his church.
So if you want to meet the man at the church that stood up to the government and he spent seven days in jail, just go to savethechristians.com, find that showing, click through, buy your tickets.
But again, act fast because showtimes are selling out.
So anyway, we've got some comments from the YouTube, as they say, on this very topic.
This letter comes from Redacted2275, who writes, I wish you all success.
This was a topic that I've seen only Rebel News covering with seriousness and that it would have been forgotten if it wasn't for this channel.
Trudeau being Castro's admirer is not a joke anymore.
You know, there were other outlets that did cover this, but we really saw these stories through to the very end.
And we did build a lot of trust with the congregations.
We were very respectful and careful of the congregations who were also very, very different.
But they knew that we would accurately present what they did and why they were doing what they were doing.
We've got another comment here from JBNF2RP.
I'm going to assume that's not your real name.
Who writes to us, Jesus is Lord, not the state.
Thank you, Rebel News, for your courage in making this documentary.
Thank you to all the pastors and Christians in Canada who took a stand while under pressure from the state to capitulate to unjust measures.
Thank you to the truckers who broke the grip of the state on the people.
And thank you, Lord, for emboldening your people in Canada.
Those are great letters.
I don't have anything to add to that.
I want to thank everybody so much for tuning in and everybody who works behind the scenes in Toronto, but also all across the country to bring you my show whenever you want to watch it or listen to it.
They work very, very hard and they are very skilled broadcast professionals.