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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:31
Fake News Demands Government Money | True News
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Ah, it's the new Death Rise, the old Death Fall, and we're going to talk about newspapers.
No, no, no, wait, stay, stay.
It's going to be fascinating, let me tell you.
I know quite a bit about the new media since I've been doing it for About ten years, which is about as long as the new media has been around.
And I've been watching the newspapers and the television stations raise their reptile heads, sniff the air and say, hmm, smells like meteor.
Oh well, I'm sure these clouds will pass.
So in Canada, it's been particularly striking.
So in 1950, 102 newspapers were sold per 100 households.
2015, that went down to 18.
Yes, that's quite a lot.
Quite a big fall.
Four-fifths, I guess, or so.
By 2025, per 100 households, down from 102 in 1950, a grand total of two.
Counting two newspapers will be sold.
Newspapers, of course, are not in the business of delivering news to you.
They're in the business of delivering your eyeballs to advertisers.
Primarily in the form of, you know, ads for cars and stuff.
And classifieds.
And classifieds, of course, used to be the big mainstay of the newspaper.
Print classified advertising.
This is for Canada.
In 2005, it was 875 million dollars.
2005, it was $875 million.
That's quite a lot of money.
And then Kijiji was launched, coincidentally, in 2005.
In 2015, it had gone from $875 million down to $119 million because I suppose some people think that monitors will steal their soul and prefer to make phone calls.
Similarly, for advertising revenue, $2.75 billion in 2006, down to $1.42 billion in 2015.
Now, digital ad revenues are going through the roof, except for daily newspaper sites, TV sites, and especially community newspaper sites, I guess.
I guess low visits, ad blockers, who knows, right?
It's true for TV as well.
Television news revenues falling about 10%.
A year, and if you look at sort of private television stations, profits before interest and tax, well in 2011 they were 7.3%.
Not too bad.
Anything over a couple of percentage points is not too bad.
So, 2011, 7.3%!
Woohoo!
We've got a television monopoly to print money.
Oh, oh dear.
It had gone to minus 8 percent.
So a 15.3 percent swing from black to red.
Red.
I wonder if that's a color associated with the media at all.
I guess if it wasn't for McCarthy, we never would have known.
And there's an example quoted in a recent report.
Scientific American.
It's like the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, although I will say that the foldouts are less exciting than I remember from my youth.
It was founded in 1845.
Now this venerable dinosaur of an outlet gets 5.5 million visitors a month on its website.
That's unique.
Its Facebook page has 2.7 million likes.
Seems good.
Seems all right.
Now, in 2010, somebody who probably is on the dartboard at Scientific American, a 23-year-old biology undergraduate, decided to create a Facebook page.
Was it called anything as august as Scientific American?
No.
It was, I effin' love science!
uh... twenty five million likes and forty five million monthly visitors to his website compared to five point five for scientific americans so uh... it's quite a difference you know so uh... this is this is the big challenge is that there's this great equalizer of talent and with the great equalizer of talent there comes a break from the mind-numbingly generally leftist conformity that is required to be
popular or to be accepted or to be public facing in the world.
So these people are doing very badly.
We'll get to some of this data in a second.
But here's the thing.
It used to be said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
I don't think that's true anymore.
To me patriotism these days is the last defense of the hero claiming to be essential to democracy and good for Public goods!
That's the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Because now, news is to some degree attempting to reposition itself.
I said, news is as vital to democracy as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health.
Huh.
Clean air.
So would you rather be sucking down on the exhaust fumes known as the air in Beijing or London these days?
Because, you see, the London government has vastly jacked up the price of energy, which means people have bought wood-burning stoves, which means we're back to the satanic smog of the 19th century.
So anyway, would you rather have a local newspaper cluttering up your driveway or would you rather be able to breathe air that doesn't kill you?
I don't know.
It could be seen as a bit of a hysterical overreaction.
Fortunately, we never see that in the left, so it's good to be surprised once in a while.
Now, Canada's largest publisher is called Post Media Network.
I guess post means past.
Not a great title.
They have like 200 or more media outlets.
Newspapers, a bunch.
Some of the biggest dailies in Canada.
Quite a significant concentration of news media ownership.
And they reported a loss recently of... Okay, this is Canadian.
But if you compare it to Monopoly money, it's still real money.
So they reported a loss recently of $352 million.
That's not since the dawn of time, that's not since the Jurassic era, that is just in one year.
Declines of 21.3% in print advertising, 8% in print circulation.
But it's okay, because that catastrophic drop was propped up enormously by digital revenues that grew by, oh, Oh, sorry.
0.8%.
So it's kind of like if you're falling, but there's air friction to slow you down, you're going to be fine.
Stick the landing!
Roll with it!
That's really quite, quite staggering.
They've lost well over half a billion dollars just in the last couple of years.
Now, they actually have a New York hedge fund called Golden Tree Asset Management among its investors.
Well, its stock has gone down to 15 Canadian cents, Canadian cents.
Credit rating firms, they've downgraded this.
They owe almost 700 Million dollars in debt and they these notes like this debt comes due in 2017 2018 yeah, that's that's not good because of course while they're paying 8% and the interest payments and oh, it's just a It's a giant mess Refinanced.
This debt has to be paid or refinanced by July 2018.
About half of it comes due this summer in August.
And that's, well, pretty close to now.
How are they going to get the money to do this?
Actuarily, there's a word I don't get to say very often on this show.
Postmedia is actually worth more dead than alive.
It has recently been evaluated as having a negative net equity of $89.3 million.
$69.3 million.
The company's shares have lost more than 98% of their value from their peak in 2011.
So there's another one, Toronto Star.
I do remember that they were very much against, very much pro, you know, pay equity and equal work for equal value and so on, until the government extended that to private companies and then they didn't seem to be so keen on it.
Again, never seen that.
the very leftist kind of socialist-y kind of group.
Well, they closed their printing plant and fired 300 people, and their value has dropped to about 70%.
Not just in Canada.
In the U.S., total newspaper advertising revenue has gone down almost 60% from 2004 to 2014.
It's now down to about $16.4 billion. dollars.
Now, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, that's pretty significant.
We just did a video yesterday on Trump looking to drop government funding for PBS and NPR in the United States, which was half a billion dollars in American money or so.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, They are a black hole of public funds.
They got, this is as of 2015, over a billion dollars in Canadian money, right?
A billion dollars in government funding.
And rightly so, in my opinion, this makes the owners of newspapers really, really quite upset.
I mean, they have said that they're upset about having to compete with something that they're forced to pay for with their own taxpayer dollars.
That's not particularly great.
And now the Toronto Star shareholder value, well, originally at one point I guess at the peak trading at $30.60 a share, now down to about $2.
In other words, the Toronto Star, or TorStar Corporation, since 2004 has erased a little over $1.7 billion in shareholder value.
And I think the only reason they're still running is that the Toronto Star sold Harlequin.
Have you ever seen those?
Fabio, not me, Fabio, is on the cover crushing winsome lasses to his manly shaved chest with his Lions Niagara swept mane of hair.
They sold Harlequin romances, I guess.
I actually applied for a job there many years ago.
It was lean times, let me tell you that.
They sold it in 2014 for $455 million.
My guess is that Um, Harlequin, previous to that, like a decade before, might have been worth almost three times that because it was rolling in profits.
So they've managed to prop themselves up by ditching, uh, I guess Harlequin, but they branch into vampire novels now because sometimes being kissed isn't enough.
You also have to be sucked.
So, one of the reasons for this catastrophic decline in Canadian newspaper revenue, well, the federal government has decided to transfer its advertising to other places online.
This is also one of the reasons why Canadian journalism had some not insignificant conflicts of interest.
You know, when the federal government is propping up a lot of your advertising revenue, what is your level of objectivity with regards to the federal government, I wonder?
Can you criticize them?
Can you call them out?
Can you dig in and expose corruption at the federal government who pays your bills?
I don't really think you can.
There's a reason why everyone says, oh Steph, you should take ads.
You should make your videos shorter.
Don't use funny voices.
But I'm huge and I'm growing at a time when the mainstream media, the legacy media, the dino media is crashing.
I think I'll just continue to follow what works and not take the advice of random people who, through the Dunning-Kruger effect, think that they can inform someone who's been an entrepreneur for 25 years and is running the most successful philosophy show in the world ever.
I think I'll just continue to keep my own counsel rather than, hey, your videos are long!
I don't have time.
Hey, I got a solution for you.
Close YouTube and come back.
It'll keep your place.
Oh, I've got another one.
You can play the YouTube videos a little faster.
That's going to save you some time.
Oh, I've got another one.
You can go to fdrpodcast.com, download the audio and use your I use VLC, to make it a little faster.
There's lots and lots of things you can do.
Or you can stop using computers all the time, read the classics, dig in deep into a text that has meaning and depth and relevance, and that way calm the endless kernel-popping popcorn gophers of your brain and learn how to concentrate on something for an extended period of and that way calm the endless kernel-popping popcorn gophers of your It's called civilization.
It's called really, really using your brain.
Squirrel!
Sorry, that's just what seems to happen.
If I can concentrate for three and a half hours to do a presentation on Joseph McCarthy, you can concentrate on listening to me.
It's good for you.
It's good for you.
Don't always blame me for your lack of attention.
Hamlet is four and a half hours long when it's done properly and is considered to be one of the greatest plays.
And it also has different voices.
I just wanted to point out that the fault may not always be on the other side of the screen.
Just a possibility.
Now, Quebec.
French.
French history.
French means to the left.
Well, for now, anyway.
In Quebec, a coalition of 146 newspapers called for very significant government intervention so that its members could, what, continue to enjoy fairly monopoly profits?
It's not that they're given a monopoly by the government.
It's just that until recently, the barrier to entry to get into the media was so huge.
You had to have millions and millions and millions of dollars, you know, to build studios, to get licenses, to get broadcast rights controlled by the government.
So, you know, I hate the fact that the government has all of these controls over the broadcast rights because Well, it means that people fundamentally can't criticize the government.
They can criticize little bits here and there, but they can't criticize anything foundational, because the government can yank your license.
Although, I'm sure that would never happen.
Sorry Sargon, about your Twitter account, I'm telling you.
So why do they want government intervention?
So that they can continue to enjoy monopoly profits?
So that they continue to have sadistic power over choosing whose lives they want to destroy by printing negative things about them?
I don't know!
But they're not going to say that, if that's even true.
But what they will say is they want to, quote, serve democracy while adjusting to the new digital world.
See, they're just servants.
They need the government to protect their profits because they wish to serve democracy.
It's this kind of mealy-mouthed abstract bullshit that is why your advertising revenues are declining as a And this includes non-profits as well as for-profits.
And by the way, I actually lived in Quebec for a couple of years.
Four years, in fact.
Two years when I was at the National Theatre School and two years when I was at McGill University.
I lived in Montreal, also known as the frozen bullseye nipple of the planet, where you wake up in the morning and the radio says, oh, by the way, please don't leave your skin exposed for more than 80 or 90 seconds, otherwise it's going to freeze solid!
And you're like, whoa, I got an early morning class, but how much can you learn about World War II through one bloodshot eyeball?
Anyway, so yeah, exciting, exciting.
So they want the federal government to abolish the sales tax on newspapers.
No more sales tax on newspapers!
That's interesting.
So they're saying that taxes Diminish economic activity.
Well, I'm sure that they're very keen on having taxes lowered as a whole because they understand.
See, Quebec newspapers, they're kind of for big government, you know, and Quebec would probably have left Canada if they weren't being threatened with actually having to pay their share of the national debt.
Kind of lefty, very government heavy, very union heavy in particular, which means organized crime heavy, but organized crime in some ways preferable to the government, which is just disorganized crime.
So it's interesting that they have been promoting big government, big spending, tax increases, and then they're like, oh, we're in trouble.
We're in trouble.
You know what you really need to do?
Lower your taxes so we can survive as a business entity.
It's this lack of self-knowledge.
I don't even know what to say.
I mean, it's like In the Gulag Apikalogo, I think it was, Solzhenitsyn wrote about a Soviet guard.
Okay, it's an extreme analogy, but bear with me.
A Soviet guard.
who ran afoul of Stalinism and ended up in a gulag and he was beaten like the guards and he participated in many beatings of prisoners and then he himself was thrown in some witch hunt some you know you're now a counter-revolutionary or something insurgent so he was beaten by the other guards and you know he crawled back to his cell And he said, I had no idea it hurt this much.
See, now that's more self-knowledge and self-awareness than a lot of these Quebec lefty papers are showing, right?
Because he's at least, wow, I did this.
I didn't realize how much it hurt.
So when they're talking about tax increases and more and more government spending and more and more government programs, and then when they run into financial trouble, they're like, whoa, we got to cut these taxes.
You think they'd have said, wow, you know what, for years we've been saying government needs to spend more and tax more.
Now we understand what it's like to be on the other side if you don't happen to have the government-granted monopoly of airwaves and licenses and this and that and the other.
Now we understand we better start reversing our position on increasing taxes because now we understand how important it is to lower taxes.
Because high taxes are killing us!
No, I don't think that there's that.
It's not double think, it's just leftism.
They also want the Quebec government to provide a five-year financial assistance program.
Oh, mon Dieu!
You must be kidding!
you Thank you.
What can I even say?
I'm sorry.
Focus, focus.
So, the basic plan is Please lower your taxes on us while increasing your spending on us.
Oh yeah, they're all about serving democracy.
It'd be nice if they could also, I don't know, occasionally pick up the train and follow behind that lovely bride we call reality as well, but that might be asking just a little too much.
So they want a five-year financial assistance program, including refundable tax credits.
They want refundable tax credits that cover 40% of production costs.
Including the journalists' salaries.
And they also want refundable tax credits, 50% of what the papers invest in their digital platforms.
And these are reserved for print only.
No one else.
You can't be on the Internet and ask for these things.
It's just for us.
So they want monopoly privilege.
They want to pay far less in taxes.
They want the government to basically spend more, because it has to when its tax revenue goes down.
And, you know, the argument that is made, not by these people in particular, but in general, and this is all over the West, maybe all over the world.
Here's a quote.
Journalism is a part of public infrastructure.
And in any country, in any country, and our public infrastructure in journalism is collapsing.
If it was roads and bridges falling down or the sewers weren't working or anything else, there'd be people marching on City Hall.
Right.
So, the fact that people aren't marching on City Hall but instead are coming to me and coming to other people, the Rebel Media is a great outlet in my opinion, it says something.
Why aren't people marching on City Hall?
Maybe because the analogy is completely ridiculous.
There is, you know, the New York Times was I think in debt like hundreds of millions of dollars.
Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, I think he just lose like over four billion dollars after Trump won and the wall started being talked about getting built.
But he propped up the New York Times for hundreds of Billions of dollars, and of course he benefits from Mexicans going to America and sending remittances back to Mexico, which is one of the largest sources of income in Mexico, bigger even than their oil revenues.
So of course the New York Times is resolutely against the wall and against...
Having a country called America.
Well, sorry, they are in favor of having a country called America wherein the government takes money from citizens.
They just want it given to others.
So that is a huge conflict of interest which isn't really talked about.
Now Donald Trump in 2014, because he's a genius, I'm telling you.
Look it up.
Statistically he is.
He said that having a Twitter account is like owning the New York Times without the losses.
It's almost like he gets it.
And he's 70!
Look, things change.
Things change.
I understand.
Things change.
Back in the day, there used to be this guy called the Town Crier.
I don't believe it was a relative to John.
But anyway, the Town Crier.
And the Town Crier used to have a big-ass bell, and he used to come to the middle of the town, and he would ring his bell, and he'd say, Oh, yay!
Oh, yay!
Oh, yay!
And he would scream out the news at the top of his lungs.
I believe he also opened for Bon Jovi at one point, but that's just my critique of his singing style.
But anyway, now the town crier at some point was replaced, because there was the printing press and all that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, things change.
People complain about the pollution of the car, but before the car there was the horse, and if you've ever seen the arse end of a horse in full eject mode, you'll understand that the horse is itself quite a significant source of pollution.
There used to be a job called shoveling shit in the streets of horse-infested towns, and that job is no longer.
Maybe they became reporters.
The sewage system isn't working.
That's just such a direct analogy, I don't even know what to say.
But yeah, things change, things change.
And then there was the 20th century was the age of the newspaper.
And the newspapers had some reasonable stuff.
And American newspapers were very much into yellow journalism, right?
I mean, starting wars and lying about people and so on.
Pretty wild stuff.
In Canada, America is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That's the slogan.
In Canada it's peace, order and good government.
Nothing too loud.
It's the old joke.
How do you get 700 Canadians out of a swimming pool?
You say, excuse me, would you mind getting out of the swimming pool?
Anyway, I still find it funny.
I love this place in many ways.
So yeah, things change and things move on and it's natural.
For the ground to shift underfoot.
And anyone who couldn't see this coming is not competent to be in charge of anything.
And running to the government, that's also very predictable.
But running to the government is going to alienate your audience.
I'm telling you that.
You'll buy maybe a year or two of staving off the inevitable, but you are going to destroy your audience.
I'll give you a couple of reasons why in a second.
But what they want to do, you see, is they want to change the tax laws.
And what they want to do is, this is according to a report that just recently came out from a supposedly independent think tank, but the report was commissioned by the federal government.
So they suggest creating a federally funded agency that would distribute about four hundred million dollars a year to news organizations.
Ah!
I don't think you would be absolutely and completely and totally forced to change your name to Pravda, eh?
But it would be something.
See, the government would then be paying the news organizations because there's nothing that says objectivity like being funded by the state.
Where are they going to get this money?
Well, you'll know that whenever someone opposes a government income measure, they'll call it a tax.
But whenever they approve of it, it's called a levy.
I took my Chevy to the levy.
Eugene levy.
Levitate.
Levitas.
Anyway, it is, just call it levy.
I remember back in the day when they were jacking up taxes they said it's called the health, the fair share health levy.
I don't know.
Because, you know, calling things by their proper names.
We've become allergic to that and we wonder why our civilization is undergoing some significant foundational challenges.
Well, when you deny reality and you call jumping off a building learning to fly, well, you're going to leave a deranged stain on the sidewalk.
But we're aiming to change all that, aren't we, my friends?
So, they want to say, well, we're going to remove tax deductions on foreign digital advertising.
Remove tax deductions on foreign digital advertising.
Now, I haven't seen the math, but let me go out on a limb here.
I'm going to tell you how I think they're getting this number.
They're saying, well, there's this amount of advertising that comes in from foreign outlets into Canada, right?
So we're going to put X percentage tax on that.
And that's going to give us 400 million dollars.
I mean, it's... You have to be on the left to not understand how little the left thinks rationally or can understand from experience.
It's sort of like saying, OK, well, the Canadians' average salary in Canada is X dollars.
So if we tax people at 100 percent, the government would get all that money.
Have you never seen Star Trek?
Do you not understand the Prime Directive?
The moment you start taxing foreign digital advertising, you know what's going to happen?
People are going to stop advertising in Canada.
I mean, Canadian outlets are not doing very well competing against foreign digital platforms, particularly in the realm of news, right?
There's not that many in the top.
I mean, the CBC is number one, but then they're getting a billion dollars from... You know, it's funny, much smaller than Canada, much more money being going to just one outlet as opposed to You know, the Arts Councils and NPR and PBS and all of that in America.
It really is quite astonishing.
So yeah, they have this fantasy that, well, see, there's all this money foreign people are advertising in Canada and we'll just take some portion of that and give it through the government to the Canadian media.
No, you won't.
No, you won't.
People will just stop advertising.
They will.
They'll stop advertising, which means there'll be less money to give to the Canadian media.
Because they're not advertising in Canada, the foreign agencies or foreign outlets will create much less Canadian content.
You see how this all works?
It's really not hard to figure out.
I don't know why people have so much trouble with this.
I'll just push this tiny snowball down this giant mountain.
I'm sure it'll stay tiny all the way down.
By the time it gets to the bottom, it won't wipe out civilization.
So this is madness.
So, if you're going to start taxing foreign outlets for advertising in Canada, they're going to reduce their spending on Canadian advertising.
And they may even just decide not to do it because it's too much hassle to do the paperwork, to collect stuff, to do all the filings, to maybe get it wrong.
Who knows, right?
It's a lot of work.
You know, you don't just slap a tax on people.
They've got to change.
I mean, I've worked in software.
I know how much you have to change when regulations change.
It's enormous.
So they may just give up on Canadian content.
They're certainly going to reduce it, which means you're going to get less Canadian content from foreign outlets.
And you're going to have much less money to give to the Canadian outlets.
So you're going to end up with less Canadian content as a result of this.
Guaranteed beyond the shadow of a doubt.
This is the kind of nonsense that goes on.
They say the move could free up to 300 million, 400 million, and you could give that to what's called a New Journalism and Democracy Fund.
And they say, no, no, no, don't worry, it's going to be managed independently from the government.
Huh.
Yeah, yeah.
The government collects the taxes, the government gives you the money.
But don't worry, the government won't have any hold or sway over it in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
These are the same people that if someone who's skeptical of global warming Ever took a dime from an oil company?
Ah!
Conflict of interest!
And they say, no, no, no, they never told me what to write.
I bet they... Oh, come on!
Who's kidding who?
Whoever pays the piper calls the tune!
Oh, wait, I need money from the government?
Oh, yeah, totally independent.
Completely... Oh, my God.
I don't know how people live.
How do they, like, make it through a door?
Hmm.
Hmm.
Maybe one day the government will come and open this for me.
And it was two federal departments they paid in large part for this report that says that governments should stop paying newspapers directly.
Now, of course, the newspapers like it.
And they like the fact that they're going to get all of these subsidies and other outlets can't get these subsidies.
And that's obviously important.
They're shareholders.
This is an important thing that people often miss.
The shareholders of these companies will love this government investment because it's going to prop up and buoy up the price of their shares and allow them to recover at least some of their losses.
So I think that's an important thing to understand as well.
And it is, I think, the death knell.
When this kind of stuff happens to an industry, like when the foundational economic model for the industry falls apart, there are a lot of death throes.
You know, a lot of twitches, you know?
Like a dinosaur beheaded still runs for it.
There is some twitches afterwards, but here's what happens, and you can see it happening all over the place.
If you have a great deal of intelligence and charisma and potential and writings, if you are like a jam-packed smorgasbord American mall of human capital, then what happens is when your industry starts to fall apart, you get out.
Like you get out so quickly you leave that like puff of wily coyote dust and you can actually just run straight through a wall to an exit that you've painted, like a hole to an exit you've painted on a wall.
So the smartest people leave the industry because they You know, you can see which way the wind blows and you decide to get out before the building comes down.
So what's left are less competent people and people who have less capacity to find jobs in other more productive areas.
They're kind of hanging on like grim death.
They're the older people, the people without as many transferable skills, or the people who are just addicted to the power of the press and its capacity to make or break people.
Seemingly it will, at least until recently.
You get this death spiral, right?
As the economic model collapses, the smartest people leave, which leaves less intelligent people, less competent people in charge of an industry that is already dying, which causes to accelerate, which means that the second tier of intelligent people leave.
And you understand, it's basically a slow motion, high print version of Venezuela.
So this is what's going down.
Now, if you guys decide you can do things, you know, like I, you won't listen to me.
The media doesn't Generally listen, I think Steve Bannon pointed this out.
I mean they double down on the leftism and the media of the past, the media of my youth has been largely co-opted by a whole bunch of social justice warriors who are not there to promote the truth or even to promote their ideology just there to disrupt and destroy.
I mean they are, you know, they are to engineers as a bunker buster is to an architect.
So, You won't listen.
You won't listen.
Even though I've been ridiculously successful in doing what I'm doing, you won't listen.
But I'm going to say it anyway.
I just like to get these things... be charitable and get these things off my chest.
If you take this government money, it's the final nail in your coffin.
It's the final, because no one will look at you the same way.
Once you've taken that deal with the devil, once you've taken that government money, because it was there before, but it was hidden in sort of government advertising and so on, if it becomes explicit that you're being paid off by the government, your credibility will be gone.
Will be done.
Absolutely, completely, and totally done.
And that's something, I mean, you're probably still going to do it, or at least try for it.
Because I don't know how you can rescue your business model.
I mean, if I was in charge, I would change things completely, and there's still things that could be done.
I mean, you could actually start addressing the concerns of Canadians.
Like by 2036, estimates are that a third of Canada will be immigrants and not from Europe, right?
So Canadians are very concerned about this, about what's happening to the fabric of the country.
Nobody's asking Canadians, just as they didn't ask Americans after the 1965 Immigration Act, if they wanted to fundamentally shift the nature of their country to other cultures.
Nobody's asking.
But it's a huge concern.
One of the reasons you can't sell newspapers is society's becoming increasingly culturally and linguistically fractured.
And so you're losing your own base by supporting all of this diversity, no matter what, diversity at any cost.
And diversity, if you do the research, You will find out that diversity has a terrible track record diversity plus proximity almost always equals significant conflict It's just one example you can I mean I address these things and this is one of the reasons why my channel is growing and your revenues are declining and I'm actually bigger than some of you already because I'm willing to actually listen to facts listen to what people are concerned about and try and talk to their concerns in a way that is positive fact-based and and productive.
I'm not always bound by this politically correct stuff, which makes you increasingly irrelevant in increasingly more fractious times.
So you could actually rescue yourself, you could pull yourself out of the quagmire, but you would actually have to have a significant amount of moral courage.
I think in times of universal deceit, as the saying goes, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
You could do these kinds of things, but you would face some significant criticism.
If you're politically correct, you won't be criticized.
You'll be treated even worse, which is you'll be ignored.
Right?
If you bring facts and reason and evidence to people, even if it shocks them, it upsets them or whatever, well, you'll be criticized, but you won't be ignored.
And you are willing to be ignored and you're willing to extinguish decades or sometimes even centuries of investment in your infrastructure and your credibility.
You're willing to be ignored because you don't want to offend.
And the business model is get noticed.
The business model is shock people.
You need to shock your audience from time to time.
And I do this on a regular basis.
I get new subscribers every day.
I get new people.
I do a big video.
New people come in.
Hey, I've never seen you before.
I wonder what you're all about.
A guy wrote to me recently.
He said, you know, I've been listening to you for a while.
I didn't even know you were not a Christian.
Anyway.
But you need to shock your audience, because you want intelligent people to be your audience, because intelligent people, well, it's more fun to talk to intelligent people, plus they tend to have some money, IQ, and income are closely correlated, not always, but correlated.
So you want to have intelligent, engaging conversations with intelligent and engaged people, and that means you have to not be an echo chamber.
Echo chambers are seductive for less intelligent people.
More intelligent people are driven mad by repetition.
Less intelligent people love repetition.
You know, when I was a kid, I could read the same comic over and over again.
Now, if I've seen the same 15-second commercial three times, I'm about ready to rip my own head off.
Apply directly to forehead!
You need to challenge your audience and an audience will love to be challenged.
I mean some will get angry and some will storm off.
Good!
Good!
They weren't going to do you much good anyway.
They were just going to drag down the quality of the conversation and they weren't going to fund you in any way anyway.
You've got to challenge your audience, you've got to shake them up!
So, yeah, challenge your audience and ask them for things, right?
Ask them for money, ask them for support.
You don't have to go the route of advertising, you can go through the route of donations.
And that's the route I've taken because I wish to retain my independence and integrity at all costs.
And it's true, the vast majority of people may never donate to what you do.
They're called free riders, even though they, at this channel, believe in the free market, personal responsibility, ethics and integrity.
They haven't quite made that connection to actually subsidizing this show that they value so much, which you can do at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
So yes, you will have to challenge yourselves, you will have to challenge your dogmas, and you will have to understand That the vice grip that you're facing is the vice grip that in some ways a lot of you have been advocating for everyone else and it's only now that the whip you've been using to crack over the heads of others is barking by your own ear that you're realizing the weapon that you have in your hands and you have a much better opportunity about how to use it.
But I doubt you will take my advice because people on the left, and I'm not saying all the Canadian media is on the left, but There's a wee bit of a trend.
You may not listen to this, in fact you probably won't, but I wanted to put my conscience at ease by at least giving you the good advice.
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