Andrew Lawton of True North compares citizen journalism to The Matrix's "red pill"—seeking truth over corporate media’s selective narratives, like CBC and Globe and Mail avoiding Hamas’ terrorist label while targeting Jewish symbols (e.g., Moncton’s menorah ban). At Davos, independent journalists face algorithm suppression and accreditation denials, unlike legacy outlets, while platforms like Rumble risk Canadian censorship for defying elite compliance. Bill C-11’s CRTC oversight threatens to marginalize dissenting voices, rewarding woke alignment over scrutiny of WEF ties or policies like DEI/ESG. Lawton predicts 2024 will see backlash against these ideologies, fueled by housing crises and immigration debates, underscoring independent media’s role in exposing the elite-public divide as mainstream outlets double down on suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a feature-length interview with my friend Andrew Lawton of True North about the state of citizen journalism and politics in Canada.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
You know, the movie The Matrix gave us so many ideas.
It was quite ahead of its time.
One of the ideas that has persisted in popular culture is the idea of the red pill or the blue pill.
And this was a scene where Neo, the hero of the movie, was offered a blue pill that would make him forget everything and sort of go back to this numb state of affairs where he didn't have to worry about things.
He just became part of the Matrix or the red pill that would wake him up and make him alive and alert to the problems of the world.
In a way, it was an echo of the archetype of the Garden of Eden and eating from the tree of knowledge.
And would you, if you had the choice, prefer the bliss of ignorance as opposed to the stress and pain of knowledge?
And this is something we think about, I think, all the time.
How much news do we consume?
And can you consume too much?
And is it better sometimes not to know and not to live out personally the stress of the world?
And I tell you this, because I think independent journalists, by nature, have decided to be red-pilled.
Have decided that it's better to know the truth rather than the corporate gruel served up, the homogenized, normalized, corporate message that emanates from legacy media, from the CBC and CTV and the Globe and Mail, etc.
And never before has that been clearer than the coverage, for example, of the war between Israel and Hamas, where you look at the bodelerized version on CBC and CTV, neither of which, by the way, will ever refer to Hamas as a terrorist group, versus the direct information that we now learn about the war and many other subjects because of Twitter, especially under Elon Musk, who has taken Twitter out of the corporate media matrix.
So I think by nature, independent journalists, citizen journalists, and those who watch them make the choice in that movie, The Matrix, to take the red pill.
Here's a flashback of that movie in case you haven't seen it or don't remember it.
You take the blue pill, the story ends.
You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland.
And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Well, one of my favorite independent journalists, citizen journalists in this country, really, I think he is my favorite who doesn't work for Rebel News, is our dear friend Andrew Lawton, who has a career from the mainstream media.
In fact, for quite a while, he worked for the mainstream media, but now he is a leading journalist with our friends and allies over at True North.
Take the Red Pill00:15:27
And what a delight to spend the course of the next 45 minutes or so with him, talking about the year that passed, but more importantly, looking forward to 2024.
And in particular, the role of citizen journalists like him and I guess like us.
Andrew, great to see you again.
Hey, always good to be here.
Thanks for the invitation and happy holidays in a non-politically correct way to you and all your audience.
Well, you know what?
I appreciate that.
And it's crazy how, I mean, the holidays, we have a Christmas party here at Rebel News.
I'm not Christian myself.
I'm Jewish, but I think Christmas parties are something that people from all backgrounds can get behind.
It is obviously a religious ceremony underneath, but it's something everyone can get into.
And at our Christmas party, we had a little menorah that we lit because there's a few Jews here in the company beside myself.
And the crazy thing is the war on Christmas, and I guess you could say the war on Hanukkah, has always been more a rhetorical thing.
People who say, well, don't say Merry Christmas, say season screams.
But Andrew, this season, menorahs, that's the Jewish candelabra, menorah lightings, which have happened for decades, have suddenly been banned or canceled.
The city of Moncton canceled theirs, later rescinded that.
In Calgary, the mayor, Jody Gondeck, refused to like the Jewish menorah, saying it was divisive.
And in some places, they banned the Jewish menorah and realized, oh, yikes, we can't just ban the Jews.
So to compensate and equalize, they banned Christmas decorations as well.
So I know I'm going on at some length about your offhand comment, Merry Christmas, but actually I think the war on Christmas and the war on Hanukkah has never been this dire because we are afraid of standing up for Judeo-Christian values in the era of Islamic terrorism.
I think that's just what it is.
It is.
And please don't take this the wrong way, but I'll say one constant throughout history has been that Jewish people are victims.
And I don't mean that in the sense that their identity is victimhood, but I mean it's a constant through history that the Jewish people have been targeted by other people.
Now, I'd say the real story of the Jewish people is their resilience and their survival and their thriving in spite of that.
But why it's so dangerous when you look at the climate around is that this history of Jewish people being persecuted at every stage in their existence and being the number one victim of hate crimes in every statistic that's ever been looked at on this subject.
Anti-Semitism always dwarfs other forms of hatred.
But we have now made Jews the oppressors and Jews the majority and Jews are white.
Jews are all of the things that we've decided to vilify.
In the same way that many people mocked the idea that Harvard said Asians were whites when it came to affirmative action.
We've now said that Jews are whites, Christians, majority when it comes to this oppressor, oppressy dynamic.
And this is why the menorah, which is literally in Canada, a symbol of a minority religion, is now treated the same way that so many of these Christian traditions have been.
We've now decided that Jews are at the top of the pecking order.
Therefore, we are okay.
We are licensed to vilify them and start stripping away all of these aspects of their identity in the public square.
And it's so disheartening.
Now, I don't think we should do this with any group.
We shouldn't do it with Christians.
We shouldn't do it with Jews.
But I think this is why the majority, and by that I mean the tyrannical woke majority, has been licensed to attack Judaism in this way that we've seen so explicitly this year.
You know, you said so many fascinating things there.
I think you're right about Jews sort of being a canary in a coal mine.
You know, there's a philosopher in Europe who said where books burn, men will in turn burn.
And I think he was right.
And that was the Nazis had their book burnings.
But there's another way of looking at it.
Where Jews burn, Christians will burn as well.
They go for the Saturday people first, then the Sunday people.
I've been to Bethlehem.
I've been to those formerly Christian cities in the West Bank.
Egypt itself used to be a Christian country.
Now it's maybe 10% Coptic Christian.
The Christians in Iraq who were extirpated by ISIS and now the Iranian militia called Hashtel Shabi.
I think those who say, well, that's just the Jews and the Jews are a bit of a bit much and the Jews are a bit of a pain.
And let's just buy ourselves some peace by voting for a UN resolution condemning the Jews.
It never stops there.
It never stops there.
I think of terrorist attacks throughout Europe.
Of course, there are attacks on Jewish institutions, but most of the terror attacks in Europe and even in North America are not on Jewish targets.
They're just on Western targets.
And I think in some ways, Jews who, you know, are Jews a minority.
Of course, they're a minority.
Are they a racial minority?
I think most Jews are white, although there are darker-skinned Jews from other places.
But I think that attacks on the Jews are rooted in that same critical race theory that you just talked about, putting the whole world into two camps, oppressors and the oppressed.
And the oppressed can do literally anything against the oppressors and it's justifiable.
And I think that is a warm-up act for the war against the West generally.
And look at us talking about critical race theory and the Jews and the war when I did want to talk mainly about independent journalism.
But I think there is some connection between the two because were it not for social media and citizen journalists, I think we would be getting a very different coverage of that war.
I don't want to talk just about the war and about Jews and Christians.
If I can jump in there, and I feel it bridges the gap between this topic and where we wanted to go with on this.
You mentioned in your introduction, mainstream media's refusal to call Hamas a terror group.
And what a fascinating display of inconsistency and incoherence.
Because you may recall when the Canadian government listed the Proud Boys on its list of terrorist entities in Canada.
The Proud Boys is officially a terrorist group.
So the media use that as cover to say, okay, well, the terrorist group, Proud Boys, the terrorist group, Proud Boys, even when individuals were not associated with allegations of terror.
And then you look at Hamas, which has the very same legal designation.
It is an official terrorist entity in Canada.
And CBC says, well, yeah, I mean, that's just the government's way of looking at it.
That doesn't mean it binds our editorial guidance.
And it's amazing how the appeal to authority only works when it fits the narrative.
When it doesn't, they will ignore that and come up with their own parameters.
And to go back to independent media, that's why I think independent media outlets are so important, because they have a lot more of a connection to reality and a lot more of a connection to, I think, how ordinary people see these phenomena unfolding.
Yeah, boy.
You know, and I think also about the churches.
I mean, literally dozens of churches in Canada have either been torched, including burnt completely to the ground, or vandalized in a less finalist way.
And the difference in coverage there, too.
I mean, if a mosque were arsoned and torched, I mean, there was a Jewish synagogue and Jewish schools in Montreal that were shot at and Molotov cocktails.
And yeah, it got some press attention.
It sure did.
But I just can't help but think if it was 80 mosques that had been vandalized instead of 80 churches or a Muslim school rather than a Jewish school, I think that both the media and the Detrudeau government would have reacted differently.
I don't know.
We're talking about the issues of the day, but I do want to bring it back to independent journalism because when Rebel News started out of the ashes of Sun News Network in 2015, there really weren't a lot of independent citizen journalists around.
And part of that was figuring out how to make money off it.
Part of it was the technology.
How do you do it?
Smartphones were fairly new.
The cameras and smartphones and video editing software wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now.
Now everyone is a videographer and an editor right on their phone.
I mean, TikTok, the video app, the kids make pretty good videos on just while they're on the school bus.
When Rebel News started, we were pretty much alone.
I think Canada Land, which is a center-left podcast site, was around.
They were around before we were.
And of course, there were some websites, rabble.ca, a union group, and there were some environmental websites.
But the idea of covering daily news, especially with the video focus, that was not a crowded field.
Today, there's Rebel News.
There's True North.
One of our alumni, Kiam Bexti, has set up Counter Signal.
Western Standard has been revived by Derek Fildebrand.
They have some video and some written.
I feel like there's a bit of a community forming in this enormous void that the media party, the mainstream media has left open to anyone who's an independent thinker.
And I don't know, I'd like your thoughts on the growth of this industry.
I mean, between Rebel News and these other organizations I mentioned, there's probably 100 journalists now.
I mean, we've got, I think, 46 or something in our company.
You add up all these different entities I've just listed.
I think there's got to be 100 journalists.
And by that, I mean producers and editors and people behind the scenes too.
100 journalists working for freedom-oriented citizen journalism companies.
That's more than work for the National Post, I'll tell you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, so you start your story, I think, in the independent media story in 2015, rightfully so.
This is the collapse of Sun News, the birth of Rebel, and all of the other subsequent things that came about and True North and Countersignal and people doing it independently.
I go much earlier than that.
And I don't have a precise year in time, but I go back to the advent of the conservative blogosphere in Canada.
I mean, you were one of the early adopters of this, and I think we're quite prolific at it.
You had other people as well, our late mutual friend Kathy Schadel, who had Five Feet of Fury, which still remains a phenomenal resource.
And you had all of these others that were doing this.
The difference between that 1.0 era of independent media in Canada is that you lost more money than you made because you had to pay for web hosting and you would sometimes get de-platformed and you had to move somewhere else.
And maybe you'd put a little tip jar and you'd make a few bucks off of it.
But it was something people did.
And I did it as well for a time because we liked it, because we wanted to, not because there was ever a career and a job into it.
And I think the turning point took place when people on the right, who had devoted so much effort into just getting politicians elected, realized that we cannot, what's the word?
We cannot abstain from the culture war.
And we need to start putting our money where our mouth is and supporting people who are telling these stories because the media is left.
We know the media is left.
We're always going to see this resistance from the media to the things that we care about.
So we need to start telling our own stories.
And I mean, in a way, it means that we professionalize something a little bit.
I mean, it's still, I remember that just the Wild West and how much fun it was when you had these bloggers and we were all sharing links to each other's stories, but it's not sustainable because people have their own lives and their own livelihoods and their own family drama.
And you also had some very nefarious actors that were trying to shut people down, either through human rights commissions or through lawsuits.
And there was really no means to defend yourself in that period.
So what happens, you know, with the advent of Rebel, which is so important, is we start to see a business model form.
And, you know, it was always very uncomfortable for me to make money in this world because that's not why I'm in the world.
I'm in the world because I enjoy it and because I want to be.
But when I take the bigger picture view and take myself out of it, it's, I think, important that we do it because we actually need to be able to compete with the people that we've been criticizing and complaining about on their turfs.
And people in the left have always had deep-pocketed donors that have wanted to insist on left-wing narratives.
And it's taken the right longer to do that.
But I think that's why independent media is so important.
And to go to where we are now, it's amazing that the rebels and the true norths and the western standards are in some ways criticized as being too establishment by some people.
And I think the criticisms are silly.
But what I think is important there is that independent media itself has grown enough that we now have the more scrappy, independent DIY folks that are doing what we were doing five years ago.
And in five years, they're going to have built up these networks that are very large as well.
And we've actually started this very incredible generational transformation.
Yeah.
Boy, you said a lot of interesting things there, too.
I remember.
Sorry, I've been right out.
You're very careful.
No, I love it.
It just makes me have a hundred thoughts.
I remember when, you know, Western Standard, the print magazine that I published, was winding up and we were still fighting the Human Rights Commission that was coming first for publishing the Danish cartoons.
So the magazine was done.
But my battle with the Human Rights Commission continued.
And I really didn't have much of a job because I used to work in the magazine.
It was done.
And I had these legal bills.
And I'm not sure if crowdfunding was even a real phrase back then, but I was trying to gather together some dough to pay my lawyer.
And I just, you know, YouTube was pretty new and blogging.
Twitter wasn't even around really.
I don't think it was even invented back then.
But I was able to scrape together enough dough from people.
And remember, and I'm talking about my Human Rights Commission battle.
So that was like 2006 that I was charged, 2008, when things really heated up.
That was before smartphones, by the way.
And people were shy about doing commerce on the internet.
They thought, oh, am I going to be ripped off?
Is my credit card?
Especially our types of people.
Yeah.
And with, you know, it's good to be skeptical.
Now I think everyone does so much of their life on their phone and the website, especially banking, people have a high level of trust with it.
But it's not just the people now trust online commerce.
It's that I think we've created a culture of political journalistic giving in Canada that maybe wasn't there before.
And fair enough, because everyone was used to getting TV for free, paid for by advertisers, or in the case of the CBC, paid for by the government.
But that's the thing is if you're not paying for it, then you are what's being bought and sold by advertisers.
Or in the case of the CBC, you are a target market for the government's point of view.
Adversaries and Incumbents00:14:09
So I think it's taken 10 years for a critical mass of Canadian freedom-oriented people to say, you know what?
If I want there to be an alternative to the CBC and CTV and Globe and Mail, maybe I'm going to have to pony up five or $10 a month.
And maybe I'm used to that now because by the way, Netflix and Crave and all those HBO and sports channels, they've also, quote, trained people to pay for subscriptions, five, 10 bucks a month.
So I think you have a critical mass of Canadian people who are frustrated with the incumbent media and they're willing to chip in because you can't save the world if you can't pay the rent.
And, you know, we thought we could make money off YouTube ads and there was a while that we were.
You know, in 2017, we were on track to make $1 million just from those little click now, skip now ads on YouTube.
And then they just took us down to zero.
And so, you know, if you don't get any money from government because you wouldn't take any, and if YouTube cuts you off because they're of their political censorship, what's left?
Well, thank God enough Canadians believe in it and not just to support Rebel News, but True North, Western Standard, Countersignal, Spencer Fernando.
I don't want to leave anyone out, but I think it's actually very encouraging.
And instead of adopting a viewer-first model, the incumbents have taken a government-first model.
And instead of trying to compete with you or me or even non-political YouTubers, I think of JJ McCullough, who's slightly political, but he's just sort of this independent content creator in Vancouver.
He's a hoot.
You know, he's just such a likable guy, very, you know, very viewer-oriented.
Instead of trying to compete, the incumbents are all saying, shut down or throttle our competitors and give us free money.
Like it's just, they're not even trying to put their viewers first.
They're trying to put the government first in their life.
I think it's sort of sad.
The stronger independent media grows, the weaker the incumbents are.
And the more instead of trying to fix things, they just whine to the government and say, give us another bailout, please.
Yeah.
And what you said about people thinking they were getting it for free, I think is very important because every now and then I try not to engage too much in the stupid YouTube and X comments and all that, but every now and then you'll get a criticism of, oh, you know, you're beholden to your donors and your backers and your funders and all of that.
And first off, I'd say it's not true.
The people that donate to us do it because they value the work that we're already doing and would otherwise do.
But it's a ridiculous premise because mainstream media outlets are beholden to their funders as well, whether it's government or advertisers.
And we just expect that they will put inadequate firewalls and guardrails in place to avoid it becoming an influence of content.
But how you get your money is a business decision.
And I think it's something that consumers will ultimately decide if they align with.
And I would say that the independent media funding model is a much better reflection of what an outlet should be doing than the traditional model.
And one example I can give on this is our coverage at True North of the World Economic Forum.
Now, Rebel has also done this.
I went for the first time in May of 2022.
I went back in January of this year and I'm going back in January.
And this is expensive.
It's expensive to fly to Switzerland, to stay in Switzerland, to eat in Switzerland.
And this is a cost that every time I'm like, oh, I feel bad about it.
But our donors have said consistently, we want you to be there.
This is important coverage.
We want you to be there.
And they donate to cover the cost and maybe even more than cover.
I don't know, but to cover the costs of us doing that form of coverage.
And imagine if the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star said, do you want us to write about how Canada is systemically racist?
If you do donate here, I don't know if they cover that.
I don't know if their salaries are covered by that.
So their coverage of that is being funded now by government subsidies and advertisers.
And again, if there's a market for that coverage, great.
But what makes you a more authentic representative of what your audience needs and wants, but having to finance on a more project-specific basis, the work that you do?
And I think that's a very revolutionary business model that doesn't need to be limited to independent journalism.
You know, I'm glad you mentioned Davos.
I went there last time.
I had the pleasure of hanging out with you a little bit.
I'd like to show, and people have seen the videos we've done.
My favorite was when we scrummed Albert Burla, the CEO of Pfizer.
But let me show one of my favorite videos of you because you, boy, I've described this to our viewers before.
You're in this small town.
It's like Banff, Alberta.
Like it's a small ski town, really, in the middle of the mountains that's suddenly taken over by thousands of these VVIPs.
There's John Kerry, there's Tony Blair, there's like, and you only have a few minutes with them as they're walking on the streets.
So to see them, identify them, and then think of a smart question in 60 seconds, it's tougher than it sounds because they might be a bank president, they might be a former prime minister, they might be a health pharma CEO.
Like, you've got to switch gears really quick.
It's tough to do.
One of my favorites was when you talked to the man who would be prime minister, Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada and then Bank of England governor, who I think wants to be the successor for Justin Trudeau.
And I'll give him credit.
He actually had a bit of a banter with you.
Let's take a look at that right now.
Hi, Mr. Carney Angelott with True Northern Canada.
I never do spontaneously.
And my one question is, can the Canadian oil and gas sector survive the net zero approach that's being promoted here?
As I said, I never do.
If you want an interview with me, like everybody else, you make a request and we can have it.
And will you accept that?
Like everybody else, and I can finish it.
Well, that was an Mark Carney is a pretty clever fella, but I think my favorite one was when you actually went face to face with a banking CEO, I think it was Bank of Montreal, and you asked him a question I am certain he has never been asked before, which is namely about freezing the truckers' bank account with no judicial processes.
Take a look at that.
Minister Freeland said during the Public Order Emergency Commission that you had wanted to call the convoy protesters terrorists to deal with their financing.
Why was that?
So I would never call the convoy protesters terrorists.
What was said is that in order for the banks to be helpful, there are certain protocols.
And those protocols include a sanction where we can, in fact, help in that case.
Otherwise, it's not our business to interfere in the affairs of anyone's finances, truckers or otherwise.
One of the other banking executives on that call had pushed back a little bit and said that they didn't want the banks to be weaponized.
Was that a view you shared?
Oh, it's always a view I shared.
I don't think banks should be weaponized any more than any other industry.
I think we have jobs to do and we do it for Canadians.
And I think generally, in fact, more than generally, we do it pretty well.
Did you support the financial measures?
You know, Andrew, you mentioned would journalists cover these things?
There were a ton of journalists at Davos, but they're all, quote, on the inside.
They're all paying to be there.
Their companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying the World Economic Forum to be involved, to hobnob and make deals.
So none of their questions are ever truly accountability oriented.
I mean, Albert Bohrlin, the Pfizer CEO that we scrummed, he does interviews all day long if he wants to, but they're always softball scripted, gentle, loving questions.
They're not uncontrolled surprise questions or critical questions.
I'm looking forward to seeing you there in Davos, and I think you do good work there.
Simply by being there, you're doing more work than our state broadcaster or the regime media.
I think, though, that when we go to places like the World Economic Forum, you know, we're kept out of certain areas that citizen journalists aren't allowed.
What's concerning me, Andrew, is as citizen journalists become more ubiquitous and bolder, and there's a bit of a community forming, is that these institutions are then saying, well, you aren't real journalists.
Not trustworthy, we're going to block you from attending by denying you accreditation.
Or, if you manage to show up and manage to get one of our people being candid, we're going to throttle that on the internet.
We're going to have it fact check and and called disinformation.
So I think that they, I think some people, are waking up to the threat to the incumbents of citizen journalists and frankly, it can be hard to find your work or artwork using a google search or youtube search, because we're not um promoted like uh, regime media sources are, and that's not a theory, that's not a conspiracy theory.
We have a Youtube media handler assigned to us by by Youtube.
Her name's Coco Pinnell and she, you know, is candid with us that Youtube suppresses alternative media and boosts what they call quality or trustworthy media.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
That's what they tell us to our face.
Yeah, and and the one thing that people need to realize is the value of discovery.
And you know, one of the reasons that Netflix is so great is that when you're scrolling around, you'll get access to a show that you had never heard of before and the trailer looks interesting, or you recognize someone's in it, or there's just nothing else, and you watch it and say oh wow, this is fantastic.
And you know, to use a self-indulgent example here, I did a few weeks back uh, my first ever book event at a bookstore for my, my book, the Freedom Convoy, which came out a year and a half ago.
And I say it was the first event because many of the bookstores in Canada wouldn't carry it, Indigo wouldn't put it on its shelf, and you know, the book still did very well.
But it was interesting that there were people that had learned of it for the first time in december of this uh year, because they walked past the bookstore and they saw it in the window and said oh, there's a book about the Freedom Convoy.
I've heard about that.
They walk in and they don't know who I am, but the subject grabs them because it was there and that's what the government is banning.
I mean for now yes TRUE, North will be able to mail our list that we have and Rebel will be able to mail its list.
Now uh, there are still challenges there if some of these mail service providers are pressured and internet service providers are, but the issue is government trying to ban the discovery of new audiences and the ability of new audiences to discover the work that we're doing, and that's the inevitable outcome of a government policy that, by its design it's a feature and not a bug manipulates algorithms and manipulates home pages.
And that's what's happening here.
It's basically to limit the audience that can ever exist for these outlets, and and they don't hide that, I mean that's the number one thing that scares me about bill C11, which is now law in this country.
Bill C 11 I I regard it as the the foundation for Trudeau's internet censorship strategy.
Step one is to put the internet under government control.
That that's never happened before.
The Crtc was limited to radio and television, which no one really cared about anymore.
Everyone's online, so C11 gives government dominion over the internet.
But they have in section nine and I think you know this, they have a section, a subsection, dealing with what they call discoverability.
Like you say, how did you hear about this movie on Netflix?
How did you hear about this book in the bookstore?
Well, that discoverability, and that's what I mentioned that YouTube does.
They de-boost sites they don't like and boost the ones they do.
It's bad enough when YouTube is doing that, but Section 9 of C11 gives the government through the CRTC the power to alter the, quote, discoverability of anything on the internet for any reason at all.
Now, they list for French language reasons or aboriginal reasons or Canadian content reasons, but those are just examples.
That's not an exclusive or exhaustive list.
So by giving the government the power to alter discoverability, do you doubt for a second that they will use that power, which they, which they just gave themselves, to boost CBC Globe and Mail and de-boost Andrew Lawton and completely unboost Ezra Levant?
Yeah, well, no, for sure.
And I mean, the great irony is, is that the letter of what they're claiming is that they're trying to make Canadian content more available.
Well, I mean, you can't get more Canadian than True North.
I mean, our coverage is about Canada.
We aren't talking about how terrible Canada is.
If anything, we're being far more patriotic and talking about how great Canada is.
But I don't believe for a second that True North will be the beneficiaries of this.
And the reason that's very important here and contextually why people need to realize this is that they're going to be making these normative judgments about what type of Canadian content is available.
And I've said, you know, if I basically come out as a disabled transgender lesbian and change the Andrew Lawton show, I bet it will be C11 compliant.
We'll be on all your home pages.
When CBC did that one thing a while ago where Talking Tomato was lecturing the audience about colonialism, that'll be Canadian content, but anything critical of that will not be.
Now, there's an easy answer to this, which is just let the companies who are not perfect, but they have a pretty good sense of what audiences want to see.
Let the companies run their algorithms.
Rumble vs. The Establishment00:07:37
If someone like you or I has an issue with the way YouTube is doing things, we can decide, hey, we want to use Rumble or we want to start our own platform.
But I mean, again, it's going to be very interesting to see how players like Rumble are forced into this.
If they don't play ball, are they going to be blocked?
Will you as a Canadian not be allowed to go to Rumble because they've decided that they will not manipulate these algorithms to comply with the government?
You know, and that's a great point about Rumble.
They have been banned in France, the entire country of France.
You can't get Rumble precisely because they will not follow France's censorship regime.
And I salute Rumble.
And I'm a little bit worried for them because as Rumble grows, it intends to be a YouTube competitor.
It's probably only 1% the size of YouTube, but still that's enormous.
But boy, they want to squash Rumble like they want to squash Elon Musk's Twitter or X, as it's now called.
Let's look ahead to 2024.
We're going to see you at the World Economic Forum in three weeks in Davos.
And I love hanging out with you.
It's nice to have a friend from Canada when we're surrounded by all these jet-setting in the belly of the beast.
Yeah, it really, it's quite alienating to be in those circles.
And it can be a little lonely in a way because, you know, you have thousands of these people all on this World Economic Forum mission.
And it's like trying to swim against a tidal wave.
There are a handful of other citizen journalists there.
I saw Savannah Hernandez there.
There was a Japanese citizen journalist who said she was inspired by our work.
And she decided to go to Davos.
It was a wonderful.
So there are some.
And she actually, by the way, questioned Klaus Schwab.
She saw him.
She was Tako Ganaha.
And he was about to answer her question.
And then he said, And she said, I'm an independent journalist.
And his answer was, no, thank you.
And he got in his car, which tells you how afraid they are of independent journalism.
And I should tell you, Miss Saka is about the sweetest, nicest person you ever meet.
Here's a clip of her.
She waited in the coal for hours to get a moment with him.
She was not rude.
She was as polite as you would expect a young Japanese journalist would be, so polite.
But his disgust for the fact that she wasn't one of the journalists who paid to be there.
And that's my point.
If she would have said New York Times, Washington Post, CNBC, CNN, he would have made a moment for her because they all pay to be there.
But how dare you grubby citizen journalists ask me a question.
Here's Masako.
I can't remember her last name off the top of my head.
Trying to ask a very polite question of Klaus Schwab, and he showed his true self.
Take a look.
Jeremy Schwab.
Jimmy Schwab, I'm from Japan.
May I ask you for.
I'm from Japan.
Yeah.
And may I ask you for a comment?
We're on our way to the next thing.
We're a bit late.
I think Japanese.
I think we're going to rush, actually.
But thank you.
Thanks very much.
Which media are you?
I am an independent gentleman.
This is from the United States.
Yeah, I know it's an extraordinary.
I have to ask.
Thanks, Mr. Speaker.
Well, good for her.
And hopefully she'll be there too.
You know, there are some interesting people who go there, but it's quite difficult to get there.
Davos, it's sort of like Banff, and then you have to really go there on purpose, but they buy up every single hotel room and every single Airbnb in the entire town.
So you have to stay one or two towns away and schlep in every day.
It's quite arduous.
And of course, the prices are jacked up enormously just for that week.
The week before, the week after Davos, you can get a lovely hotel room for $100 a night.
During Davos, if you can get them at all, they're literally thousands of dollars a night.
It's crazy.
We're staying literally in another country.
We are staying in Austria and driving in and out every day because we could not find a place that would not have just made our donors, even then, who want us to be there think this is, I can't do that.
Wow.
I mean, it is an interesting geography.
There's so many other countries right around there, but coming in from a different country every day, well, I hope you drive safely because those roads can be snowy in the Alps.
But, you know, seriously, it's why wouldn't the CBC go there?
I mean, it's a target-rich environment.
I use the phrase V VIP because these aren't just VIPs.
These are the masters of the universe.
BlackRock has a huge pavilion there.
And a lot of the causes on the liberal left.
I mean, when I was there last time, Ukraine had a large booth, the key Oscar facility.
I went there.
I thought it was very educational, actually.
The CBC would have loved that.
But they don't want to acknowledge that the World Economic Forum is some source of power.
It's sort of funny.
Klaus Schwab wrote a book literally called The Great Reset.
He talks about these things.
But if you support them, then no problem.
But if you oppose them, you're a conspiracy theorist who's talking about things that don't exist.
Jonathan Monpetty of the CBC said talking about eat zibugs is a conspiracy theory when in fact the Canadian government itself gives subsidies to that insect farm.
I think it's in London, Ontario.
In fact, if you talk about the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or any of these globalist institutions, if you talk about them approvingly, thumbs up.
But if you oppose them, you're told you're a kook for even claiming they exist.
You go there and you see with your own eyes.
That's why the CBC won't go.
What do you think the CBC?
Why do you think they don't go there?
They would have 100 interviews a day, they could, with the world's leaders.
Why won't they go?
It's tough.
I mean, on one hand, they want to pretend that there is no connection to Canada.
And I think that's the reality there: they want to say that this organization on which our deputy prime minister sits on the board, and for whom our prime minister was a young global leader, and for whom Canada has given money, has literally financed the World Economic Forum.
They want to say that there's no Canadian connection there.
And in fact, I think it was, and I might be wrong about this.
There was a Canadian media outlet.
I won't actually say who it was because I can't remember.
There was a Canadian media outlet that literally ran an op-ed from the former spokesperson for the WEF, chastising people for criticizing them and accusing them of being conspiracy theorists.
So the Canadian media was literally doing damage control for the organization.
The editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, David Walmsley, has I've seen him at Davos the last two times.
I've had some lovely chats with him, but he's part of the club.
He's not there reporting.
He's there as a participant.
So he would have paid to go.
So the Thompson family, which owns the Globe and Mail, they're the richest family in Canada.
I can't remember offhand their net worth, but it is 11 figures.
Like it's in the tens of billions.
So when the Globe and Mail sends someone to Davos, they pay to be there and they're going to be connected and to do some deals.
They're not going to be to scrutinize.
I should have pulled it out for our conversation.
But yeah, he didn't have the orange, you're a member of the press badge.
He had the white badge with the blue line that you're an invited guest.
And I will say, incidentally, I was accredited last time as media.
This time, they have not responded to my many, many inquiries about that.
Now, as it happened, I think the best coverage was the coverage that we all got out on the street, just catching people as they went in and out, because even as accredited media, there were not a lot of places I was able to go.
But even that this year was a little too close for comfort for them, apparently.
Four Things Happening 202400:05:24
Yeah.
Well, we tried the opposite.
We applied this year and I wrote them a very nice letter, if I may say so.
I said, look, we're going to be there anyways.
We're going to talk about you anyways.
Why don't you manage us, handle us, talk to us, give us your side of the story?
We are going to be there and we are critics.
Why don't you answer our criticisms or try?
I mean, I'm not going to lie and say we're there to praise you.
We're not there to praise.
But I said, why don't you do some media relations with us and accredit us?
And they refused.
We'll be there nonetheless.
Hey, I want to end with what I promised we would do, which is to talk about the year ahead.
I can think of four things that if I'm really trying hard to be an optimist, and you got to try, you got to keep hope alive.
These are four things that I think might change in 2024.
I think there's reason for optimism.
I mean, look, you never know what's going to happen.
Out of the blue, Elon Musk decides to spend $44 billion to buy Twitter, to de-censor it.
I mean, he's not making money off it, I'll tell you that.
The largest purchase in history, maybe.
He just took $44 billion to buy a social media app and to reinstate ban people.
And I think that's a miracle.
I'm worried about his personal safety, frankly.
I think they're going to try and Donald Trump him with all sorts of prosecutions.
But in the meantime, it's sort of a miracle.
Andrew, let me read you four things that I think might happen in 2024.
And you tell me if you agree or disagree.
And maybe tell me if these are things you're going to watch, or you don't have to answer mindless.
You can tell me what you think is going to happen in 2024.
So here's a few things I just jotted down.
I think the DEIESG, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and environmental and social and governance movements, these woke movements in our institutions, I think they've reached their peak.
And we're going to start to see governments defund DEI offices.
For example, a week or so ago, the state of Oklahoma wrote to every university and said, you must shut down your diversity, equity, and inclusion office if you seek any more funding from the state.
So boom, stroke of a pen, hundreds of DEI troublemakers gone.
I think what we saw recently from the Ivy League justifying their anti-Semitism, the DEI officers justifying bigotry, I think that was the jump the shark moment.
So I think you're seeing some pushback on that.
I think transgender extremism has overplayed its hand too, and you're starting to see provinces like New Brunswick and Saskatchewan bring in basic laws giving parents the right to know what's going on in schools.
I think the carbon tax and nitrogen tax idea, which they tried out in the Netherlands, I think times are so tough economically that people are just sick of it.
Even traditionally liberal voters who in fat years would have said, oh, yeah, sure, give me some of that environmentalism.
I think that that is out of favor, including in Canada.
And finally, I think the subject that no one's been allowed to talk about for 20 years, immigration, is finally on the table again, partly because of extreme housing prices, because bringing in a million folks a year.
And partly, I think, because people look at the pro-Hamas hate marches and say, holy mackerel, a lot of those folks are newcomers who just brought their ancient hatreds here.
So DEI, transgenderism, carbon and nitrogen taxes, and immigration, I think those are four issues in 2024 that you'll see movement on.
And hopefully you'll see a move back towards conservative ideas and free ideas.
What do you think?
Yeah, and I think I'll say on all four of those issues, there is a giant chasm between what the establishment has said is the universal accepted and acceptable view and what a lot of ordinary people think who aren't connected with politics and who aren't entrenched in a left or right conception of politics.
And we saw this on a lot of the gender stuff with the million person march.
I mean, the idea that there was no consensus on this in the way that the media claim there was and the liberals claim there was was very apparent.
Immigration is very similar as well.
We are in the midst of a housing crisis.
And you cannot have a government that is committed to bringing in millions more immigrants in the next few years without that.
I mean, again, just numbers alone, to have an increase in the population that is vastly larger than the amount of housing units that are being built is going to exacerbate an existing problem.
So there is a consensus that is shifting and eroding on all of these issues.
Now, who leverages that, how it plays into politics, these are all, I think, very real things.
But generally speaking, I would agree on every four of those, every one of those four points, that there is a divide between how ordinary people view them and how the elites view them.
And I think that will become very apparent.
And independent media is crucial to that.
True North Announcement00:03:30
You've been very generous with your time.
I want to talk a little bit about True North and your personal projects.
You guys are doing great.
I'm a subscriber and a monthly donor, by the way, just telling you.
And I know you had your live event.
It was called True North Nation, which was a conference, which was wonderful.
You guys do books as well.
I know that you published Dr. Tom Flanagan's new book about Kamloops, and we interviewed him a few days ago.
Are there any other things we should be excited about or look forward to in 2024?
Are you in a position to make any announcement yet about your own projects?
I don't want to let the air out of your balloon, but, you know, and you want to announce things in your own way.
Are there certain things we should be looking for from True North in the year ahead?
I think one thing we'll do in True North is try to expand even more.
I mean, we've had a really, really strong year and we've added more people to the team, and we're going to have some more new faces that people will be able to see.
As far as personally, I'm not in a position to announce it just yet, but I have a new book that I have just sent off to the publisher and/or be just sending off to the publisher soon, depending on when people see this.
And I'll hope to have an announcement about that pretty early in the new year.
I'm excited about that, but I can't let the cat out of the bag too much just yet.
But I am optimistic about 2024, both professionally for me and for TrueNorth.
You know what?
And you told me in confidence, so I wasn't trying to put you on the spot.
I was just hoping you were going to let us know.
But, folks, it's very exciting, and you want to keep your eye on Andrew Lawton, who had one of the best-selling books in 2022, by the way, of course, about the Trucker Convoy.
He was the first out of the gates with an excellent history-sort of the people's history of the Trucker Convoy.
So, absolutely.
The website is tnc.news.
And you could say that Rebel News and TNC True North are competitors, and in some ways, that's obviously true.
But I think that there are so many thousands of regime journalists with such enormous budgets and viewerships and influence that the handful of citizen journalists and independent journalists and non-government-funded journalists out there,
I think whatever competition there is between us dwarfs in importance to our collaborative goal of telling the other side of the story and shining a light of scrutiny on things that the regime media won't.
So, I regard True North as a friendly competitor, but frankly, I regard them as an ally more than anything.
And I feel that way about Western Standard magazine, which, of course, I ran as a print magazine 20 years ago and is now an online.
And I hope to maintain this collegial approach.
For heaven's sakes, there's so bloody many of them, and there's so few of us that I think that the good guys have to stick together.
And Andrew Lawton, you're certainly one of the good guys.
Please pass on my personal regards to your whole team, including to your founder, Candace Malcolm, who I think is a great innovator and a thought leader.
Great to spend some time with you.
Merry Christmas, and we'll see you at the World Economic Forum.
And we'll try to catch us some bad guys out there.
Yeah, we'll have to go back to Al Capone's Pizza and Closters, which was like the most cost-effective meal we could find in Davos.
I think we went there like two or three times, our respective teams.
But I look forward to it again, and great work as always.