Nuanced. - 166. Evan Solomon: Trump Assassination Attempt, The Deep State & Trust in Media

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Aaron Pete and Evan Solomon delve into politics, discussing the impact of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Democratic unrest, the "deep state," balancing freedom and security, and trust in government funded media.Evan Solomon is a seasoned Canadian journalist and political commentator, known for his work with GZERO Media and as a former host of major political programs on CBC and CTV, where he provided in-depth analysis on national and international affairs.Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Welcome back to another episode of The Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host here. There is a lot going on in global politics with assassination attempts, new candidates, voices like Elon Musk sharing their political perspectives. Today I'm speaking with a famous Canadian journalist about American politics, Canadian politics, and government-funded media. My guest today is Evan Solomon. Evan, you mentioned this at the beginning. when we logged on. Nothing's really happened since we last chatted, right? Right. You know, thank goodness. It's been a eventless summer. The U.S. election has been

quiet and no surprises and nothing happening around the world. So yeah, I really don't know what we'll talk about because the immediate environment just seems so dull. I couldn't agree more. Very briefly, would you mind introducing yourself just to make sure everybody knows who you are? Well, first of all, great to see again. And Tam, I'm Evan Solomon. I'm the publisher of G0 Media, which is based in New York City. We're a subsidiary company of Eurasia Group, which is a global political advisory firm, founded by a guy named Ian Bremmer, so I'm on the senior management team of that as well.

And so we're nonpartisan, and we do analysis of political risk and policy around the world. And we obviously have television shows and newsletters and we do live events and show on PBS. So we do a lot of media and then we do a lot of advisory work for different clients. Let's go all the way back to like a month ago. The president, the former president of the United States of America was nearly assassinated. And I do feel like this 24-hour news cycle, it's kind of hard to go all the way back then. Would you mind giving us your reflections on what took place? Yeah, I think actually we should start even a little further back

because the momentous events, as you say, keep causing a kind of mild form of media amnesia. Remember, Trump wins the nomination or he's on the road to winning the nomination, and yet he's convicted of 34 felonies. You might think that would be. become a major topic. We don't even reference it. It's not a baseline reference.

It doesn't even exist. It's baked in. He's got a series of other trials. For a long time, Trump's trials were going to be the kind of shadow campaign of this. That's gone. That doesn't exist. No one talks about it. It's just baked in to the circus.

Then Donald Trump survives a horridged. horrific assassination attempt and political violence not new in the United States, but not diminished in its horror and how we should never normalize it. And the shooter almost kills other people, almost kills the former president. And then Trump's reaction is remarkable. his defiant blood on his face, fight, fight, fight as he gets offstage. We think this is it. I mean, the campaign's over.

Joe Biden at that point was dottering. We've forgotten, by the way, remember his debate had been beyond bad. He's trying to run to be present for four years. You didn't think he was going to make it through 40 more minutes. And, you know, Biden, Democrats' enthusiasm was low. Biden was dottering. And Trump looked triumphant. Cut then after the remarkable response to the assassination attempt. And Donald Trump kind of presides over the RNC in Milwaukee,

the Republican National Convention, really well-done convention. He picks J.D. Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elligy, the junior senator, from Ohio, 39 years old, interracial marriage, Yale, Marine, survivor of the assassination. They put them together. You've got Trump at his peak moment and this kind of mega, not just as a Trump movement, but suddenly it's got a generational side. Here's someone that may be able to wave the torch. And meantime, Democrats are in disarray. They're infighting about Biden and the campaign at that moment is all Trump. And he's pulling away in the seven swing states and he's pulling away and all everything looks good. They're raising money. They look unified. And it was a

flawless RNC. But there were some signs that it wasn't. What were those signs? The seeds. Day one of the RNC convention was the Heritage Front platform 2025 was. they spent the whole day. The first day was all about that. It's like, oh, what's that? That's getting interesting. That started to get, this is a kind of, you know, 30 odd former staffers of Trump who had worked really hard to put together what a 900 page policy book. That was really about remaking the government in a very much more radicalized way, probably outside of disbanding the Department of Education, the FBI and other things, probably the most important thing is that they want to get rid of check and balance systems of the bureaucracy and just essentially replace

what they consider one deep state, allegedly, with very much openly another, which would be a Republican one. But that kind of, no one paid attention to it. But hang on, something was happening. J.D. Vance looked good, but no one had vetted him. And all of a sudden, afterwards, suddenly things start changing. Biden gets pushed out. The Democrats have had enough they've seen this movie, they know the end of Thelman Louise, the main characters go off a cliff, and they saw that as Biden and Harris. They did not want them to fly off. Go ahead, Aaron. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, very briefly, I just want to ask, like, Trump was almost assassinated, and do you think that changed how he thinks about this whole process? Like, that's a monumental moment for anyone to almost die on now.

national television. And I'm just curious as to whether or not you think his approach changed after that, if that changed his own kind of thinking about the stakes. There had been moments previously where the Secret Service didn't let him go on stage or rushed him off stage out of a concern something might happen. But this was moments away from almost losing his life. Do you think that that actually had an impact on him? First of all, the Secret Service, it was a huge failure and we should also say we should doesn't forget partisanship just for a minute you know political violence there's no place for it's disgusting it's disgraceful it's it's antithetical to the democratic experiment and and we shouldn't normalize it um and nor can we blame as some partisans do

oh this is the the culture of violence and division that so-and-so was responsible for i don't set that aside let's come together and just say no matter how much you dislike someone or how polarizing. The answer in a democracy is not this. Did it surprise you at all that some people, even people I know, were kind of like he missed or too bad? Like, I'm sure you saw a little bit of that.

Like, is that just a surprise? I just, there's not a, there's nothing, there's not a molecule of me that has any sympathy for people that wish political violence on anyone. it is it once you do that then you've opened the door then then then you are no longer uh someone who supports democracy and the peaceful transitions of power and yes when i saw that it was disgraceful so it actually pains me when i when people would joke about that oh this i don't understand that these some of the very same people that would crack wise about that are the same people that then

would give you an operatic sermon on January 6 and how political violence there's no place for it. I'm like, you know, pick aside. So let's set that aside. I think most fair-minded people, Democrats, Republicans, independents, whatever you are, recognize how gross it was. Your question about does it, quote, change? I'm not a psychologist, so, you know, journalists have to always be very wary of playing some pop psychologist on TV. We're reporters. We're trying to observe and report and then talk to people and maybe get some perspective and insight.

That is fair. Would it affect you and I? Probably. Like, would you have PTSD or would you be impacted if you were almost assassinated? Yeah. So would it be hard to, you know, again, I'm not going to pretend I know anything about Donald Trump's psychology, but would it be hard to imagine that this had no impact? Yeah, I'm sure it did. The media stories, though, that Donald Trump has changed, that this will mellow him.

I never bought that either. I think maybe he's got some residual issues. They're, by the way, now going to have bulletproof glass around him when he's back out on the trail, which is sad, but probably necessary. But he's not changed. There's no evidence. There's no evidence. since the assassination attempt that Donald Trump has changed. You know, at the convention, he said, I will only speak about this once and I'll never speak about it again because it's too painful. He literally speaks about it at every opportunity. He goes into great detail about it. It is a campaign speech, the blood, the ducking, the chosen by God. But fine. But it's not like as if he's said, I don't want to talk about it.

It's now a political rallying cry as is fight, fight, fight. Two, it has a political rallying cry as is fight, fight. Two, it has not mellowed him or made him seem like we should take the temperature down. That lasted for, you know, shorter period of time than this podcast. And now he's back on the trail calling her dumb and stupid and questioning her race. And I mean, there are no, there is no signs that this has shaved the aggressive side and the personal attacks of Donald Trump. So he seems like the exact same guy as before, but I'm with you. It is hard to imagine and maybe hard to appreciate how impactful an assassination attempt. That actually, the bullet hit him. It's, anyway, it's awful. But I'm not a speculator on the psychology of it. All I see,

all I can tell you is watching him very click carefully. There's no change on the stump. What does appear to happen is he can't find his sea legs with Kamau Harris. He is discombobulated. He is searching for a way. He has his rhetoric now everything's terrible. Like his crowds are the biggest in history. The country's the worst in history. Everything's at the farthest extreme, you know.

The economy is going to go into a great depression. We're going to have a third world war. The country will be destroyed. I mean, he's now into his American carnage, apocalyptic, uh, exaggerations on almost everything. And, and maybe that's because he feels like he's in some kind of life and death battle because he kind of was. Right. You talked a little bit about how Biden was pushed out by Democrats. I'm just curious how the Democrats have really pushed themselves as democracy is on the line. We fight for democracy. The process to how she was

selected and how Biden was pushed out, what are your reflections on where we're at? Because it doesn't feel like the population was able to kind of put forward the names they might have recommended or proposed. How do you think about that transition over from Biden being pushed out? He had a letter put forward. And then a few days later, he then agrees to go on camera and then he shares the news. It does sound like some reporting suggests that there was a meeting that took place that basically asked him to consider stepping down. And then if he's not fit to run in the next election, should the 25th Amendment be invoked? Yeah, you've asked two different questions. On the first question, it's a nothing burger

wrapped up in a nothing bun. Because in parliamentary democracy like ours, we have mechanisms to get rid of leaders. The party, look at the UK, the conservative party in the UK, we're going through leaders before the last election, like they're going through lettuce. So we get that. You know, the caucus can turn. Look, when the British conservatives in the Second World War were sick of Neville Chamberlain, you know, 40, you know, angry young men, quote unquote, they were in their 40s, conservatives ousted Neville and put Winston Churchill in. Worked out. Do you think anyone was like, that is undemps?

No. And if Justin Trudeau, his caucus, said, get out. someone else would run. Now, so there's no, in the United States, it's different. He's got to be impeached. Or he can quit, like Nixon. Or he can just say, I'm not running again, like Johnson and Truman did. So it's not like there's, there's, of course, internally the party, he didn't have party support.

So he's not going to run. That's not anti-democratic. It's not like they said, you, you're no longer the president. president, you're in charge. He just said, you know what? His party looked at him. I actually think this is great. I think this should happen more. I think there's lots of parties in Canada that could look at their leaders right now and say, we like you, we appreciate you, but we don't think we can win with you anymore. So, you know, stand down. And the temptation to name those people? Well, I mean, Trudeau's facing that all the time, of course. Chudu Singh's facing that all the time. And Aaron O'Toole

face that. Like, Canadians kind of pearl clutching about what happened to Joe Biden is kind of comical because we talk about this literally all the time. Now, we have a different system. So I don't think that. I think it's a big deal. You know, the Democrats realized Biden was old. He originally promised to be a one-term president. And he kind of got over his skis. And they were right to put them out. They were going to lose the election. And this is not a. And when Joe Biden did that interview outside of the debate when he did the interview like how will you what if you lose and he said well you know if as long as I gave it the best I got you know Democrats were like you know this this ain't your math quiz this is the presidency so they were right to get rid of

them and they've uncorked a massive amount of fundraising enthusiasm and the polls have shifted to the question of invoking the 25th amendment there is literally no evidence that he does not have the mental capacity currently to do it. He didn't have probably the runway over four years to do it. He's already the oldest president. But under what auspices or proof is there that he is at this moment mentally incapable? I don't know. That's not for me to decide. But Democrats aren't going to invoke the 25th Amendment. They don't want to. They like Joe Biden's record. They like Joe Biden. It's just that they thought Joe Biden was going to be a one-term president. He decided he wanted to go for a second coming there because he wanted to take on Trump again. It ain't happening. So I see this

as not an issue. Now, I think the bigger issue, and by the way, the fact that it goes to the vice president and people say, oh, they didn't have a, no one ran against you, the delegates, that happened. So from a process point of view, I get it. Not perfect, but if you're a dead, Democrat, she's united the party. They've got 80 odd days. It's worked and it's been the best month and the best transition I think I've ever seen in my life in terms of, you know, Doug Ford did a great job on when he came in on short run in Ontario, but it's a really, really impressive transition. We don't know her policies. As we're recording and talking today, she did her first kind of policy speech about groceries and housing and

welcome to politics now that the champagne corks have popped and they're starting to go flat we're starting to take a little deeper sip of this stuff we'll find out if he's got any policy jam here she hasn't done a serious interview yet she's just done you know set pieces they haven't sat down for a press conference yet. So they're smart. From their point of view, they're protecting her, they're rebranding her, they're reframing, and by the way, when the other guy's losing and Donald Trump has had a terrible month, you let the, you never, you never, you know, if the other guy's losing, the political

maxim is get out of the way. So you just like, hey, we should do some huge policy announcement as Donald Trump is out there, you know, showing pictures of two tick-tacks. to explain inflation and rambling on about Obama. You know, he's got issues, but she better get serious soon. We need a press conference. We need to show she's got to be vetted. And you don't win elections in August.

You win them in November. So all the Democrats should maybe put a little paper bag over their mouth and stop hyperventilating a bit because they're getting a little dizzy. I only wanted to speak with you about these types of issues because you're really understanding them. you're right near there. You're understanding them kind of from a closer lens than I'd say so many Canadian leaders or journalists are able to. So it's a pleasure to speak to you about American politics. I don't cover them very often. You just wrote a piece about Elon Musk and the political

power of young men. Could you summarize that? So this, I wrote this after Elon and Donald Trump did that two and a half hour conversation on X. and it was a conversation. So it was not an act of journalism. Elon Musk is an open endorser and supporter of Donald Trump. He's raised money through a political pact that he's helped start. He's offered to give $45 million a month, although now he say he may not do that, but not an insignificant announcement to make.

He has openly endorsed Donald Trump on the ex-space he offered to work for Donald Trump in a government efficiency committee to help cut workers, and then Donald Trump cheered him because he cut his own workers. I don't know how that's going to help in the heartland. It already blew back on them with the head of the unions in swing states like Michigan. So I think that was probably not the wisest way to endear yourself to the working union person in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But nonetheless, after that, it was pretty remarkable still. It's like two and a half hours.

I mean, Elon Musk, for all his eccentricities, he's pretty compelling guy. He's a genius. He's like the modern day Thomas Edison. And Donald Trump's can hold the microphone. So everyone listened. How would I describe it? It was a mess. I mean, it was a ramble fest, like two and a half hours of anyone.

Like, think about it. Tom Cruz is pretty good. Like, he does a two-hour movie and he will spend $200 million because it's hard to hold people's attention for two hours. These guys are like, what if we just chat? It was like they did a pretty good job, but it was pretty messy. It was delayed. But why did they do it?

The question is, why do it? Like for Trump, it's a crazy thing, right? Because he's got a public company called Truth Social that he's trying to raise money on. And it's tanking right now. tanking, and then he goes on his competitor, X. Like, why bother joining truth social if the same guy's going to X? So why would Trump undermine his own business? Remember, in 2022, Donald Trump called openly, and I put the clip in my article,

he called Elon Musk a bullshit artist, and Elon Musk snapped back saying Donald Trump should be sale off into the sunset. Like, they hated each other. Now the bromance billionaires are back together for lots of reasons. But one reason is the most important thing here is that this election is about young men and suburban women. For the Democrats, suburban women are their secret sauce. The salience or the importance of the abortion issue after Roe v. Wade was overturned is profound. And Democrats saw that Donald Trump and the Republican Party had a real setback during the midterm elections about a year and a half ago.

Why? Because of the importance of the abortion issue. And then J.D. Vance comes along and the sheen goes off that rose because he starts talking about childless cat ladies and families. And it's hurting him. It's really, really hurting him. And, you know, Vance was badly vetted and all this stuff. and these are not minor things. These are haunting them. And Vance can't shake it. And he's not great on the stump. And even though he was a Marine and a bestselling author and grew up like great story on paper, but you know, the clips about him talking about postmenopausal women and the family and the child. Like women are like allergic to this stuff. And that's not good because

suburban women come out and vote and they vote Democrat. And that's been a problem. And that's been a problem for the Republicans. So they need to appeal to suburban women in swing states and they ain't doing it. And J.D. Vance has been an anchor, not a sale. Then you've, so they, but they do over index on young men. Young men, 18 to 29, are a big constituency. And the whole idea of masculinity is a big part of the Republican campaign. And it works. And I was writing about a poll done by a you gov poll done by a group called the national research into young men. And they actually do research into, you know, who do young men like. And Elon Musk is the number one over it.

By a mile, they love what he does. They love being an entrepreneur as they're, you know, when you, you, this survey pulled, you know, over a thousand Americans. So, you know, plus or minus three in July. of this year. So it's recent. Elon Musk, one of the number one guys being an entrepreneur. They like Joe Rogan, Jason Peter or Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate, the far right guy, sort of misogynous far right guy in England, which is surprising because you think it's a British thing. But Elon Musk is very involved in the kind of violence that's gone on in in England.

So they young men don't, the young men that they like don't often vote. But if, but the actually of the young men that do vote, it's kind of a 50-50 split. But the young men that don't vote, heavily indexed Republican for Trump and Musk. And if Musk can recruit those folks, that is a big swing at the bat for the Republicans. And this was about Elon bringing young men into the fold and trying to drive up the numbers for Republicans. And, you know, it's going to be young men versus women, suburban women. And then beneath the that, and this plays out, Aaron, real quick, in Canada, too. There's a subtext about what it means to be a man. Like, the left have been dismissed as woke soy boys who are wooed and all those

kind of expressions, right? And the right has kind of a hyper-masculine where soldiers were aggressive, were tougher. You know, you get that. And you saw at the RNC, like, look at the masculine figures. Hulk Hogan was there ripping his shirt off, right? like literally they're leaning hard into a kind of masculinity. Dana White, the head of the U.S. He is speaking and Hulk Hogan from the former WWF is speaking and Kid Rock is speaking and Donald Trump who's, you know, you know, sleeping with porn stars and like this is, these are, these are that, these are like unapologetic, uh, forms of a certain type of masculinity. And the Dems have had a big man problem. They're wokey and their luxury and they're weak and that, you know, that's, so Kamala Harris appoints or asks Tim Walls, the governor of Minnesota, to be her running mate.

Why? Because she's trying to shore up the masculine ticket. He wears Carhart jackets and it doesn't look like Michael Ignatje if wearing plaid. It looks like he's actually worn them for his whole life, right? He's a football coach. He was a 24-year vet of the National Guard. He's a teacher. He looks like, like you could not like him.

You could not like his policies. But for Democrats, he's like a unicorn. He's like a carhart wearing camel hat wearing hunter, veteran football coach of a state champion who's standing for trans rights. Oh, my God. They're like, bring him on to shore up support. Will it work? We don't know, but certainly the Elon Trump, this is a war about not just for the young man, but what does it mean to be a man in 2024?

And what are those values? And that's actually a really interesting discussion that will resonate in Canada as well. There's two big questions that come out of your article that I'd like to discuss. And one of them is around this idea of the deep state. and it's a complicated topic, but I'm just wondering from your perspective, what is the deep state? I don't know because this is a term

that is, I can tell you what it's used to describe, whether it exists or not is a different debate. The deep state is a term that is used to describe the permanent government, the so-called bureaucracy, that the conservative right alleges is fundamentally stacked to the left and that under the guise of nonpartisan bureaucrats who are supposed to advise and consent to whoever is in power, the argument is actually no, there's a permanent status quo,

the swamp, the deep state, whatever you want to call it. And fundamentally, it is not only resistant to change because it's a protector of the status quo, but it's resistant to change because it's fundamentally a progressive left-wing, maybe radically left institution that needs to be dismantled for freedoms to flower. That's the theory.

Does it exist? Can I modify your theory a little bit? Yeah, yeah, go ahead, please. From everything, like I consume, I've watched Jill Rogan, Patrick Bet David, Tucker Carlson, I view, I'm very interested in like how we come to these things and how things become more extreme and become more divided. And the only change I'd make is that I don't think it is far, far right or far left. I think it's establishment that are pro military industrial complex, pro big pharma, pro big business, and those are the priorities.

When you look at some of the politicians, particularly in the United States, how much money they've made, despite the fact that they have, salaries that should explain and we should be able to understand it yet they've made so much more money through their family or through connections over their life and you see the the homes that they end up in those are i think what people are referring to it's not that they are pro left or pro right or really strong on an issue it's that it seems to have such financial benefit for these individuals and then they go on to other businesses like whether or not their private sector that then end up going very very well for them and it doesn't seem like they're health accountable for the mistakes they make. It seems like they just seem to move on and find

bigger and bigger opportunities from there. So I think that would be the only change I'd make. It's a good discussion, of course. That's why I love coming on because you always raise great, great points. Look, I actually disagree with you that it's not left or right. Clearly, the deep state is a very much today, an idea that is central to conservative, Republican conservative thinking. And I use that term conservative slightly in brackets because I don't believe Donald Trump is a true conservative. You know, I believe he's a cult of personality that is a populist. You know, there are populist conservatives and conservative populace. He is 100% not a conservative popular. I don't think he's ever read any serious conservative philosophy.

I don't think he could, I don't think he would know if Edmund Burke hit him on the head. Like, I just don't think he's a conservative any way, shape, or form. He is what he is. That doesn't mean Republicans aren't, but that party has been radically altered under Trump. Agreed. And I think to that group, the deep state is central to their kind of drain the swamp. And I think you're talking about when the left was really interested, and this is kind of in the 60s and 70s, when they were paranoid about the military industrial complex,

which they thought was run by the right. So they were like, ah, you know, which is, by the way, ironically, an Eisenhower term from a Republican president. But the military industrial complex was a kind of left construct. Look, people in government, when you become a senator or a member of Congress, you're going to get a good job afterwards. I think what you're talking about is let's try to just, be a little more nuanced. The deep state, to me, is a political construct to rally a certain

form of populism. That doesn't mean that within that kind of malformed hot rhetoric, there are not some interesting points to pick up, corruption in government. And the left and right are, you know, on this, yes, is there corruption in government? Are there insiders? There's a lot of political pork. And the disparity between the, this is frustration because the average person is like, I pay a lot of taxes. I'm just not seeing results, you know, and we're coming out of a period of low growth environment, scarcity, post-pandemic, lots of distress. There's lots of things going on. So you're right. I just don't think that the term deep state is, is it a helpful way to try to understand it. I actually think it's a completely non-helpful way because it's a cheap bow around a kind

conspiracy around government where you know when you say oh big business like what does that even mean like of course like we want big i mean like the coke brothers big business like certain voices who pay think tanks a large amount of money to kind of control the political discourse in a way that like have you seen have you seen those mashups of videos of everybody calling jd vance weird and it just becomes like i can like there's pages and pages and pages of it and then you see the same thing on the right, like the right will come up with a slogan. But like these things, I think I've watched like mashups of people across news rooms, across the country, all saying the exact same thing. That starts to freak out the people because then it's like, is this a high,

like what is going? That makes people very, very uncomfortable because it doesn't feel like the, the news you're consuming is somebody speaking freely. It feels way more controlled than you would think it is when you turn on the TV and you go, I'm just watching my local. newscaster who lives in Vancouver or lives in Toronto, then it becomes like, what's controlling this thing? Yeah, but just, I think, I think before you, I think there's a lot of stops on this subway car before we get to, you know, who's controlling the Wizard of Oz. Like, like, there's a lot of things that are pretty normal, right? You know, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, you know, people are always looking for a lens through which to see the world and make sense of it,

and politician's job is to frame it. And, you know, you have the freedom of expression to start a think tank and to fund a think tank and to hope that your meme or your framework fits, right? Michael Gmachia, if you're just visiting. Everyone's like, yeah, it's just visiting, he's just visiting. Or, you know, it doesn't, you know, how we all talk collectively with a series of shared vocabularies.

remember part of this is that the world has atomized you know you and i you know i'm on your podcast it's a great podcast but 10 years ago there's no such thing right you couldn't broadcast your voice right now we've got millions of people like you doing this fantastic but we had like three channels in the world that even when i was doing that and so you know the people were had us comment about they read the same newspapers and watched the same tv and read the same newspapers there's like six things and then they had their local news and that's it so there's like 10 forms of now there's 10 million and there's no more shared realities there's different realities so i think occasionally when something breaks through what the word woke culture don't totally know what it means deep state

don't totally know what it means jaddy vance is weird don't totally know what it means but of course they're memes they're media viruses we we've studied this stuff does that mean there's a deep state controlling it probably there's less control i think in my intention to you who are worried about overt forms of secret control is that the center is totally busted. There's no control. People, there's no consensus. There's no trust. There's a thousand bases of information. And in fact, people don't trust anything anymore. There's no, I mean, Donald Trump, I mean, think about this, Aaron, like this is, this is, again, not a partisan comment. These are just what Donald Trump on Twitter or on true social came out alleging that Kamala Harris's crowds are AI generated and they don't exist.

And she's talking to like 10 people and 1,000 people. Aaron, it's madness. You know that, right? Like I don't care. I have no skin in the game here. I don't care whether her crowd's bigger. I'm reporting it. But this is not a normal.

This is like a crazy thing to say. because it's so obviously not true. It's such an obvious, crazy thing to say, but a lot of people believe it. People would tell me all, oh, yeah, we believe it. They believe that pizza parlors are pedophile fronts for QAnon. So your sense of there's a mass control, my sense would be there's no control. And people, I'm a G.K. Chesterton guy on this, which is hilarious,

when he said, when people stop believing in God, it's not that they believe in nothing, it's that they believe in everything. And people believe everything now. So your concern about total control from some secret deep state, which in mine is counted by like, there's no control.

Good luck, you know? Yeah, a couple people say, weird on TV, that's not control. So I think our institutions and our coherence as a society and our ability to think differently and debate is under deep threat because people don't even want to disagree anymore.

They think if you say something, you're controlled. Like, you know, I was a journalist for years in Canada and people would say, oh, they tell you what to say. Trudeau must tell you what to say. Or CTV tells you what to say. I'm like, literally, no. Like, it just never. But they believe it.

They believe I'm some government drug. So I would just say, let's be careful before we think that, I mean, I get that's out there. but let's just ask practical pragmatic questions and try to avoid sort of hardcore generalizations that don't really illustrate and help us see what's going on. But to your point, the influence of big pharma or big business, yeah, was ever thus, that's politics. Government's job is check and balances against the overexpressure power of the powerful to make sure that the powerful don't exploit the less powerful. I mean, that's why we built

democracy. Agreed. And I think a lot of this comes from so many different failures. If you look at 2008 and how Obama handled the financial crisis, you can argue that you can look at everything in hindsight in a different way. But he bailed out the big banks. And then you start to go, who do you work for? Because it certainly wasn't in very impoverished people's benefit that that happened. And you can make certain arguments. But like, that was very uncomfortable for so many people. And then you start to see rises in people wanting to camp out on Wall Street and argue against what's going on and talk about financial crises. And we never really got to the bottom of some of these things in a way that the general public felt like we had proper closure.

Then when you look at COVID and what we were told in 2020 versus two years later or three years later, people don't feel comfortable that we started here and we ended up here. And people weren't very clear that we didn't have all the facts here. And now they're saying, well, now looking in hindsight or we have more evidence or the science has changed. People don't feel comfortable with these conclusions. So I do feel like it forces people to start to try and come up with some of the ideas. That's why I really enjoy speaking with people like yourself because there's so much information coming at us. And if you listen to this person and that person, then you're starting to come to these conclusions. But if you listen to this person and that person,

start to come to different conclusions. And we start to, you're right, I think we're more divided than ever. But to counter that, I'm curious as to what you think of people like Joe Rogan, because he has trust from his audience in a way that I don't think Elon Musk has or Donald Trump. And there are certain people building a foundation that really do have trust in a way I think legacy media would have loved to have had and did have at a certain point. But now he seems to, in my opinion, have taken that over. Okay, I'm going to just try to take a couple of slices off. Let me just go back to 2008, the financial crisis, which I think you're right.

to point out that a lot of distrust. Occupy Wall Street, yeah. By the same token, we have to be careful that we can't be what they call counterfactual, like what if it didn't happen? So I'll give you an example. What if it's true, it is horrible for people to think. We bailed out the big banks. So the big banks screwed up and then you took taxpayers' money, the very people that got ripped off

and took their money and bailed out the very people that did the ripping off. off, then they benefited and now everyone else pays a price. So it's like, oh my God, it's so frustrating and disillusioning. By the same token, if those banks failed, if they didn't do it, right? So this is the thing. Like when you've got cancer and there's two alternatives, you are going to feel absolutely shitty, if I can say that, when we give you chemo and radiation treatment. It's going to be awful. There's going to be tons of side effects. And you're like, I don't want to do it. But the option is worse. So 2008 was like a really bad series of choices, really bad for everyone, the too big to fail. And we're going to have to bail out these

jerks. So they did. Now, I don't know what the other path was. It's easy to say we should and let everyone fail and let the banks run. But we've seen a movie like that in the 30s before and it's 10 years. Now remember, just I'll add, in the UK, they were so frustrated with all the, you know, post that and what was happening with the EU and that sense of the local, that they did Brexit. Is there anyone out in the world that thinks Brexit was a smart economic term? They've blown their feet off. They're the slowest growth economy in Europe, right?

It was a disaster for the Brits, a disaster. So, you know, that frustration and that distress can lead to actions, but doesn't make it better, right? It doesn't necessarily, just because you're frustrated that your mortgage payment is too high, burning down your house is not necessarily the best solution. So I just want to say 2008, you're right to point it out, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that was wrong. And I want to take that to the pandemic because, you know, you and I talk a lot about this. The pandemic is we're still feeling the political resonances and impact of the pandemic. When was the last time?

And I'll ask an honest question because I ask this to people because we hear a lot about we got it wrong. We over indexed on the lockdown. We shut down our kid. I have two kids. They were in high school. They were in school. It was like a nightmare. We hurt the kids and the kids weren't targeted and da-da-da-da.

And we blew it and we'll never have a lockdown again. A vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom. And then the trucker thing happened. and that's all we hear about. When was the last time someone said to you how many people died in Canada of COVID? Don't say with COVID or of, like my uncle died. He got COVID and died in a hospital. He was a doctor.

People say, well, he was old. I'm like, yeah, he was alive and walking around for five miles a day. Then he got COVID and he died. He's like, well, did he die of COVID or with COVID? I'm like, he died when he got COVID. He went to the hospital and he drowned. in his fluids on a lung machine. So that's COVID.

When was the last time someone mentioned the people that died of COVID? I mean, almost never, I would argue. I bet you no one said to you, what's the, I'll ask you, how many people died of COVID? Did I know? No, like, what's the number? What's the number? Like, not the number that you trust or people say, I don't trust that number of if the numbers wrong.

How many people, this was a deadly virus that was killed. Do you remember the early days when there was no event? vaccine and we were seeing those pictures of New York and we were seeing those pictures of Italy and people were dying. It was scary, man. And then we finally got vaccine. Thank God we got some vaccines. I was so happy. Now, a lot of people now say, we shouldn't. Maybe we got a hundred percent a lot of things were wrong. But of course you're getting things wrong. It was a virus we've never seen. People were dying. It was terrifying. We have forgotten this. It's like the Vietnam War happened. And in America, they never spoke about it for 10 years.

because they're too ashamed of it. Look, I agree with you on all of that. The only thing I'll say is nobody was as honest as your being now when it was happening. You were attacked, you were called out, you were accused of terrible things. You were acute, like there were posts going around. If you walked into a building without a mask on, that you're killing somebody's family member. Within my own university, there was a question of like, if you don't get a vaccine and then you take the bus or something, whether or not you're contributing to somebody grandmother's death.

Like the conversation was not reasonable, and there were a lot of very, very reasonable people trying to have a conversation, and then those people were being accused of being anti-vaxxers, hating science, not following it. There were changes around mask mandates. And so, like, I think the reflection now is not that did we get some stuff wrong? Because, like, even if you have the perfect plan going into it,

like lots of things are going to rise. I think that's all willing to be accepted. people I still hear from who are upset about it are much more concerned that there was this kind of militant follow this. And if you don't, you're an extremist. And I don't think that was reasonable. And the people protesting the truckers were treated like they were extremists in a lot of circumstances when a lot of them were like, hey, we understand a lot of this now. I just need to cross the border. And this is a part of my job. I'm just sitting in my truck alone. Do I need a vaccine passport in order to go down and drop off supplies when i'm just going to be in my truck this entire time not interacting with people like that was an unreasonable thing to ask for during it but now looking back we can kind of go well that's a reasonable conversation we should be able to have and so i think the frustration is the voices were so loud and so military about it that that's the concern i think so many people have i i hear you what i'm trying to do in the

reason I'm pausing is it's you know in ref it's hard to go back right because you know like hindsight's 2020 and we have all these but but you know remember when you're playing with a full deck you're a much better card player than when you're playing two cards and we were playing with just a couple cards so there were some over enthusiasms and some governments every government had a little bit provincially that had different things um you know I would just say that there's an old maxim in the law that says hard cases make bad laws. So if you try to build a law around the one crazy extreme case, you're kind of probably going to get some bad laws.

If you try to build for the kind of regular experience that all of us have on a data database, you probably more or less it works. COVID was an extreme emergency. I think something like 60,000 Canadians, died in that period. And for almost 5 million people got it and recovered. And, you know, hard to say if we didn't have vaccines, how many more would have died? I don't know. You don't know. Some people point out, oh, all the people who had vaccines died, obviously that's not true. people. I mean, you know, the world was facing a crisis. By the way, remember, it wasn't just

Justin Trudeau who was overreacting as a kind of political form of control. You know, I remember Donald Trump, Tucker, I wrote an article about Tucker Carlson. I mean, Tucker Carlson was one of the first to point out what was going on in Italy. Go back and look. He was like, this administration is not taking it seriously enough. Guess what happened, Aaron? Tucker Carlson went to the White House and met with Donald Trump and openly said, you've got to take this more seriously. This is deadly.

You've got to get vaccines. Tucker doesn't talk about that. I've written about this. I'll send you the links of this. There's many, many stories about Tucker Carlson. Now Mr. Anti-Vacine, now he's on sale. Vaccines are poison. Tucker Carlson was the guy that was telling Donald Trump.

This is really serious. No one's talking about it. So, like, let's not just very quickly, him saying that doesn't mean he was pro, like, the vaccine didn't exist at that time. So, like, that has no relationship to what he said at the beginning that this is, it should have been taken seriously no matter what. That doesn't impact his later comments about. My point is not everyone knew everything. Like, his view today is radically different than what his view. So when you've got Tucker Carlson trekking his butt to the White House to lecture Donald Trump,

about the seriousness. And then Donald Trump, remember, he was the guy that had mandates. He was the guy that was, you know, people were worried, scared. And so, of course, there's going to be all sorts of things that didn't work out. Going back now and picking at scabs, one of the big issues was the, you know, what happened in Ottawa. I was very involved with it. You're right. There's lots of people that can't.

I spoke to them every day. I mean, I really, when people accuse journalists of doing, like, I just know. I was there. I was out there every single day. I talked to people. I put them on camera. I never used them as background. When I was live on camera, they all spoke. There's lots of video about it. And it's really, look, you're right. There's people there that were scared and they were worried and there weren't bad people. But there was a ton of bad people there too that were using COVID for their own ideas about democracy. And that was radical. So here's my question, I guess, How do we make sure that the people who were reasonable and thoughtful and respectful but disagreed with the processes are somehow vindicated now?

Because I do understand the argument of like, let's not go back to every issue three years ago. What do you mean? Vindicated. Pierre Pollyev disagreed with everything and he's 20 points ahead in the polls and he's leading the kids. Like what's this big, like, what's happened to these people? They have power. They run. This guy looks like he'll be the next prime minister.

I mean, the idea that there's like, if you disagree with the government, you've been disinpaired. What are you talking about? I mean, probably the most influential person in the country right now is someone that was serving coffee to the truckers. Like, like, again, I just, I'm always trying to avoid this notion that there's some grand conspiracy. There's a couple people that are up on charges, you know, tomorrow leach and all that stuff. I get that. That's different. Okay, there's legal processes you're going to, we can debate whether they should or they shouldn't.

I get that. But the idea that everyone that disagreed is somehow needs to be vindicated. No, I don't think that. And like, perhaps that is the answer. Perhaps the correct answer is that we vote in the person that we believe reflects those values. And that's a fair answer. I'm just thinking of like, I again know a few people who chose not to get the vaccine. Justin Trudeau at the very beginning said, I won't do a passport.

I won't have that type of requirement because it would be to visit. Then later on chooses to proceed with that. Those people were not allowed to go into restaurants, not allowed to go certain places, and it was to put pressure on them to do that. Now, I think Fauci just recently came out and said he's got six shots and he's still got COVID and he's had it a few times. And like, that makes people go at the time I was told this is going to be effective. It's going to protect me. It's going to protect other people and it's going to have all of these effects. Those people who chose not to who went through all of those things, I think are looking for a little vindication. Now, maybe it is best through going to vote for Pierre Pauliev and reflect that value. But I do think the more we suppress those people and say, move on, scab, let's just forget about it, the more we build like political anger or political frustration. And again, maybe that's let out through the voting process. But that worries me because there's still so many people who are animated by these issues.

Yeah, I think to my response is twofold. democracies, the fundamental dynamic of a democracy is the line between individual freedoms and security. And we trade off forms of freedom for forms of security, right? You can't run into a theater and yell fire, even though you have free speech. So we have free speech with, in Canada, reasonable limits, right? That's our term. then we negotiate reasonable limits. Now, you and I may say, well, I am a libertarian. I should be

able to streak naked into any place. I mean, like, these are real things. I want to take my clothes off because I'm an individual and I want to sunbathe in the park, naked, screaming. And then I want to go into a theater and scream fire. And then I want to say, kill the Jews. And I want to say all these things. This is my individual freedoms. Don't. Now, in Canada, you can't say kill the Jews because that's inciting hate speech. You can't run around naked because, you know, that's indecent exposed. And all because, you know, guess what? My freedom to do that is, you know, as the old saying goes, my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose. Right. So we have. have reasonable limits. The Americans have a different series of limits. You know, we have limits

on giving money to our political process, right, on political funding. The Citizens United case in the state said money is a form of free speech. So every country is going to decide. But let's just talk about Canada. The debate between when a government's job is to protect you and your freedoms, right? Today, with the Gaza war, there's lots of debates. Should protesters be allowed to come to your neighborhood and come out with their flags, their Hamas or Palestine flags or whatever and scream at Jews or should Jews be allowed to do? Like, then people are going to say, hey, the police should stop that. Get them off campus.

Get them on campus. Get them out of my neighborhood. Get them in my neighborhood. We are always negotiating freedom of speech and freedom of individual rights with security. And that is beautifully difficult to figure out. The system we've devised is to negotiate that publicly through democratic institutions. Sometimes we go too far one way. The state overtakes, you know, the 1970 FLQ crisis and the War Measures Act, the truckers.

Maybe some people say too far. Maybe some people say not enough. Let's negotiate. But when the state overtakes, there's consequences. Sometimes individuals are hurt. That's why when individuals, like you were talking about, get hurt when the state over-extend. sends their power in the name of security and crushes individual freedoms, right? There's a backlash and there's and there should be an accountability for it.

And that's been happening now politically, legally, and maybe there'll be some civil issues with it. But the state is always going to try to negotiate what level they're supposed to protect you. During the Second World War, they interned the Japanese, right? Yeah. You've got to protect these people because they're double agents, protect the rest of Canadians. In retrospect, not cool. At the time, a lot of people felt like a, so you're right, time allows us. But let's not, again, I just, again, I hate sound like, like, let's not pretend that we're shocked that we're debating the extent of

powers of the state and the limits of individual freedom. That's literally the fundamental core. And this is why I'm so, I love our jobs because this is literally why I want, I think debate is so important because if we don't, if we lose trust in everyone and we, you know, like when I was on television every night, I wanted people on to debate this shit because Canadians got to see it that were really genuinely. I remember having the justice minister. I remember David Lamede on there.

I'm like, how dare you do this? How do you justify doing it? I had Lamede on. I had Mendecino. These are important discussions. Now, whether you and I agree where the line is, we shouldn't. In Canada, everyone's free to have their own view and then promote it. But when the state goes too far and crushes your rights or my rights or Tamara Leach's rights or Joe Smith's rights.

we've got to pay attention to that. Some people may agree and some people may not. But so what? Like the peaceful disagreement is the course on democracy. So I know you're up and honest. I know it's an issue, but like I know you well enough to know that that I just don't want to pretend that something that's very normal.

That is a feature. Like the mistake that I think is happening, not you're making that, is that we think the feature of democracy, which is to debate the limitations of the state and the role of individual freedoms, that's a feature of democracy. But when we talk about it like this, it's like it's a bug in the system. Like, I can't believe the state overdid this. And it's like, how could that ever happen?

I'm like, that's going to happen every single day. That's why we're on the watchtower. You and I, that's our job. So it's a feature of our system, not a bug. That's all. I couldn't agree more. I definitely think it's important also, like from my perspective, I try and bring those voices of people I've spoken with because it de-escalates the political tensions, I hope, so that people feel like their voice is being heard and those conversations are taking place. I promise one last question. It's something that I spoke with Steve Pagan about, so I'd love your thoughts on it. Can we trust government-funded media? this whole interview. First, I love your, our chats. And, and I'll tell you what I really resent about you. Resent? Yeah, resent. This is what I resent about. You get me in these great conversations

and we never have a beer because we're far away. So it's like we have these conversations. I was like, I've always ready to, like it's like my favorite discussion. I'm like, oh, I just feel like I'm with my buddy and I'm like, no, we should have a drink and then you know, go do a game. But anyway, we're sitting here in our houses far apart. And all we get is this. I only resent that we're not doing this face to face and having a good time. So, because you're just, I love your questions. Okay, so let me just be a fuss budget for a sec. I don't know what you mean by government-funded media because there's two ways to interpret it. One, the government owns you and is telling you what to say. And two, the government has a pool of

funds that people apply to to support an industry. And the government, so one, is the CBC, therefore, the state broadcaster that just basically parrots what the state says? No, I mean, I know I used to work there, no. And, you know, they don't do it under Trudeau any more than they did it under Stephen Harper. Do they, by the way, are they perfect or are they, do they have propensity? that are left or right? Yeah, sure. Like, you should criticize them all the time. But they're not, they're not a mouthpiece of the state because they're not, there's an ombudsman and then there. And nor as companies that have, you know, over the years availed themselves of certain government support systems, subsidies or other, are they state government? So yes, I do. I think you can have funding coming from governments to industries and those industries still being objective and criticizing. Yes, because we have decades of proof that that can happen.

I'll give you an example. Do you think that a police officer is going to function neutrally and enforce the law, or are they going to enforce the government that pays their salary? We never say that about a police officer. Oh, I guess you'll just, that cop is going to be a, you know, or the RCMP is going to do what Justin Trudeau says today. Or Stephen Harper says today, we hope not. By the way, they try, of course, but they shouldn't any more than the media shouldn't.

So, number one, so there has to be arm's length. So yes, I totally believe it. Is it great that the government, is it causing distrust? Of course, it's causing distrust. Like, I get it. But I don't think the term government-funded media is, you know, every industry in this country, the auto industry, the oil and gas industry, the renewables industry, they all get government subsidies, right? So I guess my question is if everyone's availing themselves, like, you know, I'll give you

an example, the most conservative person who hates the CBC and thinks that government-funded media is a woke, left, deep state concoction of mouthpiece of Justin Trudeau and the soy boys, great. If they had a tax credit, a child benefit tax credit that the federal government gives them because they had a child and they took that, are they a government-supported family now? Do we trust their voice now to speak? They're availing themselves. No, because they pay taxes and their citizens and they can avail themselves of a service and of the government and then criticize the government. I mean, this is not that hard. Like we have our. jobs. I assume that the religious Catholic doctor who's operating on me is going to operate on me

with the very same concern as a Jew that he would, to another religious Catholic. It wouldn't even occur to me that the doctor would be like, well, you know what, let's mail this guy in. But, you know, when the Catholic guy comes in, I'm really going to bring the A team in. Of course we would, we, God forbid, that would ever happen, right? People, we're decent people. We're trying to do jobs. There's check and balance the systems. It's not everyone's a meat puppet with an invisible hand in their back and their mouth is being moved.

When it, we should be vigilant about it. That's just so, so you know, you and I've talked about this before. I'm not cynical, but I'm skeptical. We should be skeptical optimist. We should ask that question. Is the CDC being biased? And when it is, hammer the way. If CTV is the same, if global's the same, if G0 media is the same, if they say that they're going to do X, they got a delivery.

If they say their wife, they're biased, if they're right or left, great. But if they say their objective, act objective. And when you're not, you'll get your butt kick. And you should. I have no issue. But that doesn't mean that just because you've taken a penny from the government subsidy, that you're somehow a propaganda voice. So I just don't buy that. And I don't look at Steve Paken's TV, Ontario.

Does anyone in their right minds really believe Steve Paken and TV Ontario, which has existed under conservative governments and liberal governments and NDP governments, is really a mouthpiece for any of those? Are they a mouthpiece for Doug Ford? Were they a mouthpiece for Kathleen Wynn? Were they a mouthpiece for Bob? No, they did their jobs. And so this is not a hard question for me.

But I do think you pointed to something really great, which is distrust is at an all-time high. And the media can't just allege that they're fair. They have to show and prove their fair. And if they're not doing that in this environment, they will die. And that's their own fault. They got to do their job at a higher level because it's more competitive out there. It's just hard. But, you know, don't play violins.

Get out in the field and kick them out. Yes. It is so surreal to me that I get to speak with you. Again, I was watching you on TV and you were speaking with Ellis Ross and I remember admiring what you do so much and what you're passionate about is what I ended up becoming passionate about. So I appreciate you always being willing to sit down and do this. I do think we'll have to do one of these in person one day because it's so interesting. And I have 15 more questions sitting in my mind, but it's always an honor to sit down with you and speak with you because you're so eloquent with how you think things through. But you also give the space. to kind of walk through the process that you thought it through for others to kind of walk through that with you so i appreciate your time as always well first of all i love our chats uh i'm dying to come out to chillowack the thing i like about what you do and i mean it is like people need to just have conversations right like we're normal people in the sense that you know everybody doesn't matter left or right up or down like we want a house for our families we want you know kind of We want good neighbors.

We want safe communities. We'd like to have the probability of prosperity, right? And we don't want to be around boring people that agree with this all the time. We want to be around people who challenge us and make us grow and make us think. And so you do that. You ask great questions. You're such a humane person. You have such a wide range of things to say.

And it's just a pleasure. And I learn a lot from your podcast. By the way, which is great. You and your team do just a superb job. So I can't wait for us to meet. I really do hope we can, I'm annoyed that we keep becoming better friends and we've never met in person. So that sucks.

But we'll get there. We'll get there. Thank you so much again. Can you tell people how they can follow your work? Yeah, sure. You can go to g0media.com on the interwebs. You can sign up for our newsletters. They are nonpartisan, and if they're not, you can send me a note and kick my ass.

uh they're uh not they're free so just subscribe to g0 media there every morning they're geopolitics and we have one on canada g zero north and uh we have a show on pbs with ian bremer so yeah let us know as you know aaron i love the conversations uh when we fail we try to do better you know and and one thing i'll never say is we're perfect all the time we blow it a lot like everybody but we give it everything we've got as open and as transparently as we can. And I'm really proud of the work that we're doing. So please jump on board. You're the man. Thank you so much again for doing this.

Go follow him. I always love reading your articles. It always gives me a new fresh perspective. So I appreciate your time. You're the best, man. He loved that, didn't you? Absolutely. Yeah, he was just smacking me around with other perspectives. I could just feel you back there soaking it all in, being like, he's speaking for me. How does he form these sentences so coherently?

All of these things I'm thinking. I can just feel you back there. I wish I had him said that. That's what I meant to say. On the Trump stuff, because we were just talking before you were invoking the 25th, and he's like, woppa, woppa. You loved that. You loved it.

You needed that. You needed a little bit of me, just taking it on the chin right here. Yeah. That was amazing. Yeah. So. I could feel it. I could feel you smiling back there.

Well, and you had, he was going to just, like, 10 minutes into his monologue. You're like, can we just back up to this assassination attempt? Yeah. Yeah. You know,