Shaun Newman Podcast - #269 - Caylan Ford

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Caylan Ford is an international affairs specialist, documentary filmmaker, writer, and education reformer. She has filed a $7 million defamation lawsuit against the NDP, media companies & individuals.  To support Caylan Ford: https://www.caylanford.com/donate Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast⁠

This is Zubi. This is Brett Wilson. This is Brian Pectford. This is Keith Morrison. This is Tim McAuliffe of Sportsnet. This is Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Daryl Sutter and welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

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brought to you by auto clearing Jeep and RAM, the prairie's trusted source for Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, Fiat, and all things automotive for over 110 years. She's an international affairs specialist, documentary filmmaker, writer, and education reformer. She earned her bachelor's degree in Chinese history from the University of Calgary and her master's in international human rights law from Oxford University. I'm talking about Kalin Ford.

So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to Sean Newman podcast to Jay. Oh man, I'm going to start again. This is how it's going to go, I guess. Welcome. Who knows?

Maybe I'll just start at that. Fort, by the way. So, like, this is why I was running late because I have a, I have like an endless. legal battle with the individual who was sort of orchestrated this whole campaign against me. So like numerous like restraining orders, contempt applications and it's endless. So I closed the zoom on that and opened up yours. So if it takes me a minute to decompress, that's why. Well, I'm just going to start right there. I can't, I can't seem to garble it out today. So we'll just start. We'll just start there. It's the first time Sean's ever screwed up his own

name. But hey, what are you going to do? Welcome to the podcast, Kaelan Ford. First off, thanks for, thanks for hopping on. Well, thank you very much for having me. Now, for the audience, I was just joking with you before I started that, you know, the last couple of years has really changed the trajectory of all things Sean Newman podcast. And certainly I would say a year and a half ago, you weren't on the radar. And now somehow people talk, they listen, Alison, your name comes up.

I'm like, absolutely. Let's jump into it. So for the audience member who doesn't know who. who Kalen Ford is, maybe we could start with a little bit about yourself. What would you like to know, Sean? Well, actually, I guess I think you got a pretty interesting little background. So I guess maybe just some of the things that interest you, some of your travels for just a brief start. How is that?

All right. Here's one, I guess one way to approach it that I think is relevant. So I'm originally from Calgary, grew up here. and in my mid-teens between spending time hitchhiking around Western Canada and sleeping in train stations, and I developed a deep fascination with the problem of political and philosophical evil, especially as it manifested in totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and became very interested in the question of how do we avoid this? How do we avoid unwittingly participating in it ourselves,

and inoculate ourselves against sort of ideological fads that would otherwise corrupt us. And I sort of, that interest or passion became even more relevant to me probably about 20 years ago now. I started doing a Buddhist meditation practice called Falun Daffa, whose adherence in China are brutally persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party, you know, imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands, tortured, killed for their beliefs, sometimes by vivisection. And so I became very involved with... Sometimes by vivisection, I'm sorry, what on earth is that? Oh, China has a lucrative trade in human organs.

So China is either the number one or the number two in the world in terms of the number of organ transplantations that they perform. And they do that without any organized system of voluntary donation. And they do it on demand. for many, many years, you could go on the websites of Chinese hospitals, and they would advertise $30,000 for a kidney, $60,000 for a liver, we would get it to you in two weeks. Now, the only way that you're giving people organs, vital organs, in two weeks, or on demand, or scheduling heart transplants ahead of time is if you have a captive population that is being killed

so that their organs can be harvested on demand. And the biggest captive population in China, from about 1999 until probably around 2016 was people who practice Falun Dotha or Falun Gong. Since 2017, 2016, that would have been overtaken by Muslim Uyghurs, who were also targeted for this kind of procedure. So there was a very, very lucrative trade in human organs that involved collaboration between the Chinese military, military police, and the medical establishment, where they were essentially harvesting organs and selling them. And actually, there was a great paper just published by a friend of mine about two weeks ago

in the American, I think, Journal of Transplantation, is the biggest transplantation journal in the world, showing that in many cases the doctors, the organ removal is the method of killing. So in the old days, when China first started doing organ transplants, the model is you sort of shoot people in a killing field and maybe have mobile medical vans that are harvesting the organs and then getting them as quickly as possible to a hospital. But the problem is that organs deteriorate very quickly once harvested. If you shoot someone by firing squad, there's a high risk that the organs won't be usable. And so they developed other ways of doing this. And this recent

paper shows that essentially Chinese doctors are the ones sedating people, taking out their organs, intubating them halfway through those procedures, which means that they were not dead when the procedures began, and that becomes the method of killing. That's why I say killing by vivisection. So aggression, but we can talk about that for a long time. Well, it brings back up last summer, I'm married to an American.

Anyways, so we get the two perspectives on COVID. I'm hopping on. And we're driving, and I've got Joe Rogan on. and he's talking to Yomni Park, the lady from North Korea. And she's telling her story. And I just pause it. I must pause it like 17 times

because that story is, I mean, everyone should listen to it. Yeah. A. But you listen to that? I pause it like 16 times. Like, what are we doing right now? We're, you know, we're protecting,

you know, you go through all the statistics of COVID and everything we just did to our population. and what we're worrying about in society. And then I listen to Yomni Park. I listen to just what you said. And I go, what the fuck are we doing? Yeah, I mean, it's a good point. Everything that I intended to talk about today is by comparison, unfathomably trivial next to.

But that's the society we're living in right now, Kaelan, is exactly the things that we signed on to talk about. but when you talk like that, I'm going, man, some days I wonder, like, we get so preoccupied with such trivial things. Yeah, the sense of proportion is sort of missing, isn't it? I think so. You know, we talk about, you know, a time and age for North America, and the world for that matter was World War II, right? Hitler and what he did to the Jews and everything else. And yet, in today's day and age, atrocities that are similar to that, are happening and they kind of go you're not allowed to talk about it you're not allowed to and i mean that in itself is i don't have a word for it i i don't know what word to use for that well but this is

what i was referring to is you know when you look at who is participating in or assenting to the rise of national socialism or communism in the soviet union or china or north korea or who is participating in mass atrocities in any other historical context. And you ask yourself, you know, there's sort of that thought experiment. It's like if you were, if you had been living in the antebellum south, would you have been an abolitionist? Would you have opposed slavery? Right. If you were living in Nazi, 1930s Germany, right? Or 1940s Germany, what would you have been doing? Well, we can safely say that over the last two years for what was the end total? 90%, 87%? 87%? Definitely. I mean, you think you know the answer until you have to live through the answer, and that isn't very fun.

And I, well, no, I'll just leave it there. What we did to each other over the last two years is borderline insane. Yes. Yeah. So that's the thing. Everyone likes to think, in retrospect, it's easy to look back because moral judgment has already been passed. And it's easy to say, of course, I would be on the right side. I would have been an abolitionist. But chances are you wouldn't be. And because most people weren't, because it was an unpopular position and a difficult position. And I think because people often don't realize when they're living through world historic events. So this is why I would and ask myself, you know, what are, how do you avoid becoming unwittingly either an active participant or at least an accomplice in acts of evil? How do you learn to recognize them? And what are the sort

of heuristics or the rules by which you can try to live to make sure that you don't become that way? And did you, did you solve that, uh, that question that is like, well, yeah, I mean, I've, I've came up with a few. Um, I think I really, I wrote some of these down ones. I can pull them up. Yeah, there's an essay that I published about two years ago where I sort of concluded with this set of little exhortations to myself that I had noted at some point. One is that is sort of essentially to stay humble because anyone who espousing unflinching moral certainty is almost certainly wrong. And that's not because there's no moral truths. There are moral truths. But human knowledge is necessary.

infinite. I mean, I'm sorry, well, our ignorance is infinite. Our knowledge is necessarily finite, right? So we should, we should maintain a disposition of humility and always be willing to consider something that we, that we don't understand something. And the next is just to stand on truth. And that's easier said than done, because it requires, on the one hand, a sort of capacity for moral and intellectual discernment. And you, you know, and then on the other, the courage to give expression to your thoughts, even when it's difficult and unpopular and it involves sort of standing against the current, to never act as though ends justify means. So a lot of evil is perpetrated by people who believe that, you know, if only we can liquidate this portion of the population

that stands in our way. Yeah, the ends justify the means. Sort of earthly utopia. But your means become the end. And so how you do things is... If you lose your soul, along the journey. Along the way, yeah. The end destination doesn't matter. Yes. There's one of my favorite Confucian aphorisms is because something like, your poverty and baseness is what all men despise.

But if they can't be avoided by following the way, the Tao, they should not be avoided. So this idea that like you just follow the Tao and trust that if you're standing in what is right and courageous and good and just and charitable and kind, then, well, that, that's enough, right? And sometimes all you can do is stand in that. You can't actually affect change. So that would be one to honor the inherent dignity and worth of all people. And I guess, well, one is sort of a habitual thing. I'm very wary of crowds. So one of my rules was to never

join a mob and never acquiesce to one. And then if given a choice between doing evil and having evil done to you, you just always choose the latter. So like, those are some of the things that I kind of, I seem to take basic guidance for how to avoid. Can we talk about the crowd one for a second? I talk about what? The crowd. You're always hesitant, you said, to join a crowd. Yeah. I actually had this conversation. So I traveled to Ottawa, went and followed for about a week there. I followed everything that was going on. And a friend of mine from the States said almost verbatim what you just said.

He's very hesitant of crowds because history has proven what crowds are capable of. Yes. And yet that crowd gave me hope of what we're capable of. Does that make sense? Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think there, I'm not, I don't, I'm not going to say that all sort of

mass gatherings of people are necessarily nefarious, but I think that just I have a reflexive skepticism of I'm just not a joiner. And, you know, on seeing lots of people swept up in strong emotions. Maybe it's that I'm equally skeptical of passion. So when I see sort of lots of people swept up in very strong emotion, I'm just, there's a part of me that just sort of says like this can turn. And, but yes, there's certainly, you know, Like, I'm sure there are examples of where people sort of worship collectively, for example, or I have no doubt that it's a beautiful and edifying and uplifting collective experience, all the more so because it's enjoyed in the company of other people.

And there are crowds that are good and, you know, community is very good and ritual is very good. And collective experiences of mourning or celebration are essential to human societies. So it's not that I'm disparaging all of that. It's really, really passionate crowds. I just have a very acute sort of ingrained awareness that, you know, as I said, that they can turn very quickly, that they're not necessarily acting on reason or that the people are not necessarily, well, that, you know, in that environment, it's very easy to be influenced by and wrapped up in strong emotion. moment. Yeah. So you weren't out on Red Mile last night after the Flames one. No. No.

You know, as you as you go through your list, I'm a guy who really enjoys Jordan Peterson. And that's exactly how he rose. I mean, there's multiple ways he rose. But I mean, his books are essentially. Yes. right yeah 20 24 of them two books that's that's exactly what it is ways to order your life and find meaning and and some of the hardships and and making sure you stand for what you believe in because somewhere if you don't do that you'll you'll be lost in the tide so to speak yeah yeah and I think you know one of the other ways that I you can differentiate between good and and and potentially nefarious ideological movements is if they're telling you that, you know, you need to engage as an individual in moral rectitude, that, you know, that your own sort of personal cultivation of virtue is important. I think that's a pretty trustworthy message. A lot of ideological movements

do the opposite, though. They say, you don't have to worry about the hard work of trying to make yourself a better person, of trying to nurture virtue, of trying to be more magnanimous or forgiving or courageous or whatever. You just need to hold the correct. opinions and you need to police the opinions of other people and stand on the right side of a particular social movement and then you'll be a good person. And ideologies that do that invariably become extremely vicious and violent and evil. And that's one of the ways that I would, I understand a lot of, not all, but a lot of people who identify as progressives is that the cultivation of inner virtues is basically irrelevant from their vantage point. You know, if any,

anything being kind and forgiving is counterproductive with respect to the ends they're trying to achieve. And to them, the only moral criterion they can ever consider is, are you with us or against us? Are you on the right side of a social issue? Are you against it? And if you disagree with us, you're a bad person and you should be, you know, condemned, cast out from society, ignored, liquidated, whatever. So, yeah, I think that's one of the other, one of the other big lessons is it's very easy, it's very tempting and alluring to get involved with the movement that tells you, you don't have to be better.

You just have to believe this, do this, persecute people who disagree with you. You have my curiosity firing on all cylinders this afternoon. And the reason that is, is, well, multiple reasons. You're going down the philosophical road. I love a good deep conversation. But I'm curious how a lady like yourself gets trapped, caught, whatever the word is. I should preface this. For the listener, of course, you ran for the United Conservative Party Mountain View. Yes. you speak well I don't know

this is what I always say like now that I'm you know putting my toe or maybe jumping head on I don't know into the waters I go why don't we have better politicians and then I sit and listen to you speak and I go huh there's a lot to this lady I like this where is this going but how on earth did it all like you get

ostracized from society for a conversation you had on Facebook messengers And I, for life of me, I can't reconcile those two. So I'm curious. How does that come to be? Well, I guess we should give the. Yes. Please give the story. Yes. I jumped you. I jumped to you a long way. And curious detour. Where I was kind of going with that, talking about a background involved in countering totalitarianism and authoritarianism in the world today. And I spent, you know, most of my, well, really my entire adult life since my late teens, working with refugees.

and asylum seekers, you know, documenting their stories of being imprisoned and persecuted. And then studied in an academic context, studied, well, I studied Chinese history, but 20th century history, history of totalitarianism. Then I did a master's in international relations and then another international human rights law. And at some point along the way, probably about 10 years ago, I started to get this uncomfortable feeling that a lot of the qualities that I associated with totalitarianism were increasingly prevalent in the West. So like 2012 we're talking? Around there, yeah.

Okay. And this sort of corresponds with what people now sometimes term like the Great Awakening. It's just when things just started going really sideways. And when I invoke this comparison to totalitarianism, I don't mean the overt coercion, right? It's not like people knocking down your door at midnight and hauling you all. off to a gulag, but the underlying social conditions. And, you know, sort of a state of extreme atomization, the confusion and the corruption of our moral symbols, of our language,

the increased tendency, the sort of intolerance of truth seeking, a general hostility toward the truth, a belief that it doesn't exist, or that it's purely subjective, or that it can be changed by changing the meaning of words or through assertions of power or something. And we could go on about that. That's a long conversation. But in any case, I was sort of unsettled by it. And I thought, well, something needs to be done about this.

And politics, it's probably true, is like mostly downstream of culture, but not entirely. Politics can also change culture to some extent. And so I thought, well, you know, there's one area within politics where you might be able to at least kind of hold back these currents is in the realm of education. you know, if students acquire a greater sense of, like, a greater capacity for intellectual discernment, for moral discernment, if they learn to stand on truth, if they understand the difference between a good and bad form of argument, right? You can improve these things. And so anyway, this led me to make the decision to run for political office. And so in the 2019 provincial election, I was a candidate for the United Conservative Party in a constituency that normally votes kind of liberal, sort of like a left liberal constituency.

But I was going very well. Like I was campaigning for eight months. I'd raised huge amount of money, had like an incredible team of volunteers, really dedicated donors. And we were on track to win, according to our internal polling. But a month before the election, this organization called Press Procedure, progress, which is sort of like I described them as effectively like the opposition research mill for the NDP. They published an article. It was the fifth article they had published about me. And the previous ones were all completely false and they didn't care that they were false. So this is the fifth time that they

published an article sort of trying to take me out or seek my disqualification as a candidate. But this one sort of resonated a little more in the zeitgeist and was very well-timed. And they claimed that I, in a private conversation, years earlier, had expressed sympathy for white supremacist terrorism. How many years earlier? About two years earlier. Okay. Yeah. And they couldn't produce the record of that conversation. So no one has ever, that's never been publicized. The person who provided it to them has destroyed his record, so it can't be scrutinized. And they basically took like four tiny excerpts of this conversation, edited them, in some cases, removing like half of the content in a given sentence, and then put them out to the public and sort of dress them up in this really sensational frame,

saying that I support acts of terrorism. This is three days after the Christchurch mosque massacre, where 50 people were killed at prayer. And so they're insinuating sort of just kind of through speculation and guilt by association that you're dancing in the street going that was the greatest thing ever like so you know it's just an extremely cynical misappropriation of a tragedy and one that was i think designed to rub salt in the wounds of communities that were already reeling and feeling under siege and grieving and then trying to say that i support all of that and um you know i couldn't respond because like if someone says you said something in a private conversation years before you're like well I mean doesn't sound like something I would say but you know I can't just I can't

prove a negative like what's I don't have these records you're not showing me these records so there was no effective way I could defend myself and within an hour the NDP is calling for me to be removed from the ballot and and then sort of the media storm hits and and and and I was forced to resign my candidacy. And for like a month, the media stories were relentless. It was almost every day. I actually probably was every day in the national and the local press, where I had become, in their eyes,

a sort of disgraced white supremacist. Now, even in the content that they actually published, the only thing I said about white supremacy is that it's a perverse form of moral reasoning and is odious. But they turned that into me being sympathetic to white supremacist. So it's just, you know, truth didn't matter at all. There was no attempt at all to actually present this in a dispassionate way or to try to understand what this conversation may have actually been about or what I actually believe. You know, this was their preferred narrative

is that conservatives are closet white supremacists and they ran with it and a very credulous press adopted that narrative and ran with it. And, you know, it was a very, you know, And I tried to defend myself, like I went on a radio show and gave a 45-minute interview and explained, you know, what I actually think can believe about how we should more effectively combat radicalization. Because I studied how you combat radicalization. Like, it was part of my degree in international security studies. I studied counterterrorism. Like, so, you know, I'm a layperson to this, but I have some background and some professional and academic interest in it. And I tried explaining this.

And, you know, the organizations affiliated with the NDP launched petition campaigns to drive the radio host off the air just for letting me tell my side of the story. The person who was behind these accusations also sent, you know, threatening letter to her employer. And eventually they pulled the interview offline. And so, like, I just didn't have any platform to speak or defend myself. And it went on like that for years. you know, a year after this, I was invited to speak at a university about Dechukville and Hannah Rent and Eric Voglin and talk about, you know, these sort of contemporary applications of their writings.

And there were counter-protests planned, you know, the student newspaper said that me being invited to talk was analogous to policies of appeasement that led to the Holocaust. You know, it's been, took me. almost three years before I could find even temporary employment, not really in my field, because employers deemed that I was too much of a reputational liability, because if you Google me, you have to contend with the possibility that I'm a white supremacist terrorist sympathizer. So, yeah, that's a little bit of the context that we're dealing with.

Well, and I first got to apologize. I jumped ahead of you and said I couldn't reconcile it. Well, all I had to do is sit back, Sean. and listen to how it goes and I go, holy shit. Like that's, that's a lot. And to happen here and get old Alberta of all places, right? I'm a small town Saskatchewan kid now live, hang my hat in Alberta. I go, like, now I understand.

I'll rewind to what I can't remember if we said this before we started or when we started. It doesn't matter. When you said, you got asked, what do you? feel hopeful about. He said hope feels perilous. I'm saying to you like, oh man, that's a tough, that's a tough quote. But then I look at now listening what you've gone through firsthand. I think, I just have a hard time getting why people need to go down that road. I listen to you, like, I'm a fan, obviously as a podcast of hearing somebody out. It doesn't matter their views. I'm very curious. I think the longer person talks, usually you start to, oh,

That's interesting. Right? And if you follow up with a couple of questions, you just never know where it goes. Usually, maybe I'm wrong on that. Maybe I'm getting duped every time I come on here. But that's what I'm interested in. And I always have a hard time in the short form of anything because I'm a sports guy. I was showing you the jerseys on the wall.

For the longest time, Kaelan, there was a quote on Alan Iverson, talk about practice, right? and I always thought he was jackass because of it. And then I went and actually got shown like the 10 minute video where the reporters wouldn't leave him alone about, anyways, this one thing. And he finally breaks after like eight minutes being questioned about it. And they sniffed this one thing.

And that's what Alan Iverson becomes. Now, did he do some things to, in Alan Iverson's case, did he do some things that lent credence to that quote? Yeah, he was, you know, Alan Iverson was a super. star in the NBA. But one quote, like literally we talking about practice. What is that? Like a second and a half became his life. Yeah. There's a documentary about it. It's like, oh, holy shit. Like I was just the gullible idiot who enjoys sports and, you know, I mean, there was a whole subculture about are we talking about practice? Like that that's what it became,

right? So I have no idea what you're talking about, but I get it. Well, in that case, I got to find the video for you as I could show it to you. But like, I mean, it's unbelievable. So when I hear what you're talking about, I'm like, man, I go back into COVID. And I remember thinking in the first six, seven months, there's a group of guys. We're in a book club. We're reading things. And we're talking us nasty human beings.

We're still getting together and conversing. It was a wild idea. And Ocean Wise Black gets arrested on. the pond and we were watching the video and whatever and we were having arguments about that but the thing that just stuck with me is i remember thinking before i saw ocean get arrested i remember seeing videos from i don't know australia it doesn't matter anywhere in the world and i thought that won't happen here and then it happened in ontario i'm like ah it's ontario ontario is different than us it won't happen here and it was calgary and then in lloyd my little town of lloyd there's

people arrested and i went holy dinah like this is getting out of hand. And when I listen to your story, I'm like, then this is three years ago, or two and a half years ago. Or three years ago, yeah. Or three years ago. Like, this is out of hand. And that's three years ago. And I mean, that means it's only picked up steam, not slowed down. Is there any, in your thought, have you seen anything that does give you hope? You know, it's been a few years since that quote. Have you changed your, have you seen things that you're like, well, maybe we're, maybe we're starting to get the, or no? Do I think that we're becoming a more tolerant society where people are slower to judge and more passionate about the truth?

No, no, I would say, I know that part of it, I'm more mean, in what you went through, I don't know if this is true. So this is just a throwing something against a wall and you tell me if this would have worked, okay? what you went through i go if the leader would have stood up there and took in the heat jason kenny and got to the bottom of it things could have been different he would have taken an absolute shalacking for a bit but that's what he's there to do he's there to get to the bottom of it by allowing this to happen allowing them to attack any of his party he's now made it open season i totally agree and this was the frustrating thing because yeah look it's very hard to withstand a mob

if a mob comes to your door and is demanding a head even if you know that the person who's had there demanding is innocent it takes a certain kind of character to be able to stand up to that it takes wider with a big gun that's literally what he does in one of the movies I know I'm a movie yeah anyway sorry but no it's it's an immensely difficult thing to do and people are very afraid about what the implications will be for them of standing by a person who is the target of a kind of, you know, of a sort of witch hunt, right? The guilt by association factor, the fear of the stain of contamination of being seen to affiliate with someone who's been accused of terrible things.

That's very scary. You can't, you can't overestimate how deeply human beings want to belong. and to not be on the outside of a crowd. Another reason I'm just skeptical of crowds because I think the desire to be part of them can drive us to do terrible things. So, you know, I recognize that it was very hard when the party was presented with,

they're getting calls from the media saying you have a candidate who is allegedly supportive of white supremacist terrorism. Three days after this terrible incident in New Zealand, these allegations are being made. this is on the eve of the Ritz drop, being dropped for the election. So this 20, less than 29 days before the election. When it's like it's critical time for political parties to have their messaging on point.

And, you know, every day that you lose the news cycle to this story, you've, you know, you've failed to get your own messages across. So, yeah, it was just, it was a difficult time. They were under a lot of pressure. And they made a decision based on pure political expediency. not any kind of sound moral principle. Because if you think about this from a moral perspective, you'd say, well, no, I don't believe that this person thinks what you're accusing them of thinking.

And you need to give them an opportunity to tell their story and to clarify this and to assuage the concerns and the hurt of people who've been misled. You know, the moral principle is to say that actually, no, like a person's actual qualities, what they actually believe, how they treat other human beings, that's more relevant than some accusation. about what they may or may not have said in one sentence in a private conversation that you've

misunderstood. But political parties have a tendency to privilege expediency over principle. So they didn't do that. And you're right that absolutely by capitulating, they then send the signal that they are vulnerable to this kind of intimidation and they invite more of it. And they did invite more of it. And another thing that happens is people such as yourself, look at what happened to you and go, I ain't getting caught up in that because, you know, they're going to come out, like if I'm going to, if I. If this is the proposition, if you just say to someone who's considering running for office, look, we, you know, the media is going to consider it fair game.

If someone comes to us, someone with a dubious credibility and claims that you said something in a private conversation, we're going to, consider that fair game and it doesn't matter when it happened it doesn't matter what the circumstances are it doesn't matter what you may have actually meant um we will destroy your life over it and you will be unemployable and you won't be able to pay your mortgage or support your kids i don't think anyone's going to want to take up that it's just it's not it's not really an appealing proposition um and yet what happens if we don't as a as a like a group of yeah as a group of people what happens when we Don't get involved. Don't try and get in politics. Don't try and make, start, try and stop some of the, of like where we're heading and, and trying like, you know, it feels like a tidal wave, but I mean, you know, Soljinnitsyn when, when he talks about the ghoulegs and Soviet Russia and everything that went on in there, one of the things he says is if I'd known where we were going, I would have screamed to high hell pretty much, right at the same.

start and I would have made sure everybody knew about it. And I feel like, well, if you're going down that road, and I can't say we're going down that road, but at the same time, if you go back 10 years and you could look at where we are right now, you'd be like, what the hell is going on? We need to talk about some of these things. Yeah. Like if you just sit along for the ride, I don't know if sitting along for the ride is going to be enjoyable. Yeah. So I used to ask myself this question when I would read about, like, let's say, the history of the cultural revolution in China or the Great Leap Forward or any other such historical event. And I would ask myself, like, how did people let it get to this point? These are intelligent, normal, you know, ordinarily well-meaning people

who are standing by passively as their culture is utterly destroyed, as their fellow human beings are being ostracized and shamed and ritually humiliated and beaten and they're assenting to lies and to slogans that they cannot possibly believe. Why are they doing that? And kind of forgive them in that context, because if you don't go along with it, it could potentially cost you your life. I mean, in the cultural revolution, you have about two million people being killed. Greatly forward, obviously, something in the range of 30 to 50 million. But then I would say, well, what's our excuse? I mean, if you see the writing on the wall and you see things going sideways,

even if you as an individual may not be able to change the broader situation, I would say to myself, do you not have a responsibility to try to do something? It's easy to want to keep your head down and just focus on self-protection, but that is precisely how evil is allowed to flourish. And so you have to be willing to take responsibility for something beyond yourself. And when I was considering running for office, I spent a lot of time consulting Plato and then his sort of eastern analogs like Zhuanzi and Confucius. And they were all faced with this problem that their civilizations were in a state of pretty advanced decay. in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian wars, the entire Greek world was sort of characterized by deep intellectual, moral, spiritual confusion.

And it was an extremely hostile society in which any sense of objective truth or goodness or justice had largely fallen away. And it was all about self-protection and advancing yourself. And something similar in the time that Confucius was writing. And these men all grappled with this problem of do you get involved in politics? And the Republic is full of, and you know, the apology and other dialogues discuss this problem. And, you know, it's in the Republic. There's this great line. Should I pull it up?

Sure. Absolutely. Let's see if I can find it quickly. Okay. So then Adamantus, I said, the worthy disciples. of philosophy will be but a small remnant. Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude. They know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they might fight and be saved. Such a one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts.

He will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore, seeing that he would be of no use to the state or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good, either for himself or others, he holds his peace and goes his own way. He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet, which the driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall. And seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and goodwill with bright hopes. So that's sort of, you know, one part of the Republic where it's this idea that, you know, when the world has reached a certain point, participation in politics isn't going to do you any good.

You're just going to be like a man who's fallen among wild beasts and you'll be torn to pieces and you won't be able to help anyone yourself or others. So you, the only consolation you can take then is to sort of retire like a man taking shelter by a wall in a dust storm and try to order your own soul well. And it's very similar as ideas expressed in the East by the Taoists, this idea that when the world has lost the Tao, any man who tries to follow it is going to be persecuted. And so you should just retire into yourself and try to restore your innate nature and you wait until more propitious timing. But the alternative to that is the sort of the Confucian position where at one point, Confucius basically says, well, you know, actually it's one of his disciples says that a man has a duty to serve the state even if he can foresee that the Tao will not prevail. So even if you know it's all going to hell, you still have a basic duty to try to do your part and to stand on the side of what's right. And I think in that dilemma there actually are a lot of right answers.

At the time when I decided to run for office, I fell on the side of why I should try to do my part. and see what happens and see if there's a path there that can be walked. But, you know, obviously I met with a tremendous opposition, and frankly, the one episode that I talked about is really just the tip of the iceberg of that. So, yeah, I actually don't know the answer. I don't know whether politics is a legitimate vehicle through which to try to change the culture, turn things around. Maybe it's not.

For the time being, I've decided it's not for me anyway. You've, with your quote, you've hit on a discussion I've been having on and off the podcast. It's happened several different ways, several different forms. One is the tsunami wave is coming. You can act like it's not there or you can act like it's a little wave or you can act like whatever. You just need to prepare. Go to the high hills and wait it out and then walk back down when the aftermath is, you know, when everything's done and the aftermath settled and you just carry on with life.

And the other is, well, I already. said at Soljan Ensign is like the wave is still small or what have you and you can adjust you can slow it down you can whatever the you know I feel like I might have that conversation for the rest of my life though because I'm actually not certain on either one um that's a very very very difficult question to answer right to not get involved or like yeah Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I don't think that there is a definitive right answer to that question. Either there are definite wrong answers.

You know, at a minimum is the, there's a line that's frequently attributed to Schultz in its end, though I've never been able to identify clearly the source, but it's this sort of let this credo be this, let the lie come into the world, but not through me. And again, I don't know that that may or may not be an accurate transliteration, but that seems to be the minimum you can do is to not allow yourself to be a vehicle for bad things to happen, for lies to prevail. And that means, yeah, maintaining a sense of like just an inner solidity and a grounding in what's true and what's good and beautiful and try to hold that in yourself, if nothing else, even if you don't have the ability or the scope to reach other people. But with that said, yeah, I guess I'm not really, I'm not the kind of person who's contented with being a hermit either.

I think that I'm sort of driven to action as well. So it's hard to reconcile that. Being denied a sort of sphere of action is hard for me. So what have you been doing over the past, you know, three years since this all fell apart? Like, since they, you know, like, it's weird. this is how little I guess I follow things, right? I was living here. Maybe I heard your name and I was like, oh yeah, what are you know?

Like I just, I was just, you know, and just moved on with life. It wasn't affecting me or I have no idea. I can't go back and talk to myself. I sometimes wonder what that would be like if I could take myself right now and go back and just be like, yeah, this is what's going on. And she may be pay attention to that one. That one's going to, you know, that's a pretty big story. might want to pay attention. But, you know, maybe for the better or worse, we don't get that,

that ability. So, except for listening to the podcast now, now that I have, you know, 200-some change episodes, like I can go back and listen to myself prior to certain information and how it starts to change one's perspective, which is entertaining and uncomfortable all at the same time. Yeah. after going through this experience, having pretty much everything thrown at you. And I mean, I tried finding this morning what I wanted to really find was the jackass on whatever show who just hammered you. I was just like, I just want to hear what they were trying to say about you. I couldn't do myself justice, but I didn't go deep into the YouTube verse and I'm sure it's sitting there somewhere.

but I read some articles like opinion pieces and there's some nasty stuff in there. Well, yeah, it's incredible. I mean, this is the thing. If you're targeted for accusations like this, I say truth doesn't really matter because what matters is that you become a sort of symbol and then people use you. So you're not, they don't actually treat you like a human being anymore, a person who's sort of complex and has individuality and, you know, you just become, yeah, you become a symbol of a thing that is to be sort of ritually expurgated and purged from a community. And so they project

onto you basically. I mean, this is the classic scapegoating mechanism, right? The scapegoat is like you project onto them, you literally write on them all of the sins of the community and the cast it out from the community. And in so doing, you think that you're sort of cured of all of this moral pollution. Or in some cases, you use scapegoats when you're faced with a circumstance of microbial pollution and think that scapegoating people will solve your medical pathologies as well. But, you know, that's what it is, is you become a symbol onto which is projected, everything that certain people think is wrong with the world, and then they ritually humiliate and abuse you.

And that's a means for them of achieving catharsis and of achieving sort of in-group solidarity, so their sense of their belonging within a group is strengthened by identifying a target that they can unite around. So like this is, you know, but that's pretty cold comfort being, you know, saying like, oh, don't worry, it's not personal. They just see you as a symbol. It's like, well, it kind of sucks. Do you, they've decided to scapegoat? 100% on that. Do you, guys like Joe Rogan, I mean, he's obviously giant. But he's been. under attack now for I don't know how long. And another one that comes to mind is Dave Chappelle. Definitely goes to the paint, so to speak, right? Like he goes to the hard areas.

Yeah. And I'll go back to Joe. He's got so much content of him talking to different guests from all walks of life. Yeah. I go, it's almost like, I'm not saying he's not uncancelable, but I feel. like he's pretty close because you you kind of have an you kind of everybody knows who joe is like he's got so much content so i guess what i'm trying to get to is with the rise of podcasting and podcasting certainly been around for more than just the last couple years but it is on steroids right now could we get past that do you think what happened to you might you said there was a 45 minute interview and that got like i just oh yeah no i did i did a couple of interviews, like during the election period, and they were all pulled offline.

Like, I just, there was no, there, you had national media. It was like the front page of the Toronto Star weeks after this happened was still a big picture of me with a bold face headline saying, we need higher standards. And the article proceeded to talk about how I came from a trash pile. Like, it was just relentless. And the CBC, the Toronto Star published like 16 discrete publications with this kind of stuff about me, never talking to me. The CBC published headlining.

Lund saying that I made white supremacist comments. Again, the comments about white supremacy were that it's odious and it's a perverse formal moral reasoning. Didn't matter. Like, these are extremely powerful platforms and I did not have a platform. Don't you think maybe I'm wrong that now, I feel like the trust in CBC is that I don't know what low is, but I feel like they're below that. Okay. There's still giant platforms. There's no arguing this. The CBC until something changes is our national news source, right? Like it's got funding, it's got people, it's got everything. No different than the Toronto Star, right?

Like, I mean, that's a giant paper. But I would say in that realm, the tides are turning. And I feel like they're turning rapidly. Are am I wrong in that? Well, look, I hope you're turning. And I think this is partly accounts for the popularity of long-form conversations. and podcasting is that a lot of people are sick of being fed. Bullshit.

Well, yeah. Bullshit. Listen, I sat in Ottawa. I've been trying to reconcile this now for what are we at? We're in middle of May. So what is that? Almost three months. Yeah, roughly three months.

I'm sitting in Ottawa. I'm seeing this lovely protest. Now, was I everywhere? No, I'm not omnipresent. So could there have been some nefarious actions? Sure. I'm saying on the general, everything I saw was I didn't realize

humanity had that in them. Just didn't. I come back to the hotel. Yeah. I come back to the hotel room, click on CBC, and I shouldn't have done it, but I was just curious what they were saying.

And the stuff they were saying about everybody, and I guess about me too, because I was there. And I was like, I didn't see any of that. And on top of it, I didn't see any of CBC. And then they hide behind, well, it's because of the way people were treating us.

Well, I don't know about the end of the protest. It wasn't there. I was there in the very early stages. And I can certainly say nobody was getting treated. Peace, love, happiness. It was Bob Marley, man. It was just Bob Marley on steroids. It was wild.

And then to go to our national media source and hear what they were saying. I was like, there's nothing like, nothing will destroy your faith in media institutions. more than seeing them report on something involving you because it will just bear no resemblance to the reality that you know. And it's disorienting. That is a good word right there. That is what I've been wrestling is very disorienting. Because you're like, when I read the, you know, hope feels perilous. And I hate to bring that up 17 times on you. But when I read that, I was like, I know what I understand that sense. right like i am a cup half full type of guy i'm both as positive as going to get i'm going to try and look at the positive and everything but disorientating is a great word that like when your leader

you know our leaders we have a it feels like we have a poor group of leaders right now on the whole and maybe that's the culmination of like you know i say wouldn't it be easy if jason kenny just defended you like geez that seems like the thing to do i'm a hockey guy that's that's You don't want the team captain who stands while you don't see this in the NHHL. You don't see the guy get up on stage and bash his team. It just doesn't happen. Everything's kept on the inner circle. Everything is, you know, you defend until there comes a point, you know, maybe where you can't anymore.

But right now, you wonder if in our political sphere, this hasn't been whatever the number is, 50 years in the making, 30 years in the making, 10 years to make it. It doesn't matter. It wasn't one day in the making. No. Because Jason Kenney. to go up there and defend you for the rest of time? Well, that isn't who Jason Kenny is, right? And so you wonder how we get a different set of leadership. Is, you know, cancel culture is, it operates based on its huge amount of preference falsification. Right. You see this sort of like very

loud, very vocal minority, powerful minority with, you know, national media backing, advancing a particular narrative, particularly on social media. And what I found, because it was sort of fascinating to me, like the one thing you can say about kind of being like burned on a pyre is that it's a pretty interesting vantage point from which to observe kind of mob dynamics and social psychology. But people became afraid of saying any positive word about me on social media because they would be sort of jumped on and counted and attacked.

And as a consequence, they learned very quickly that if you had any charitable, generous thoughts toward me, you should keep them to yourself. But the vast majority of people in the real world saw through this. And they said, like, this was a transparent hit job. It's so wrong. The party should have stood by you. I got hundreds of emails from constituents where I was running. Every single one of them was saying, you shouldn't resign.

you should, you know, like tell me who to who to go after within the United Conservative Party from making you resign if that's what happened. And, you know, that was actually more representative of the actual feelings of the electorate. So on the one hand, sometimes I'm tempted to say, well, if we don't have good politicians, like, well, we have the politicians we deserve. But on the other hand, I, no, I actually think we deserve better. But in this case, it was sort of, it was the media and political operatives doing a run round. of the democratic process. So anyway, you asked a question, you said that.

You asked what I've been doing about this. Well, so one answer is I'm pursuing a $7.5 million defamation claim against the CBC, the Toronto Star Press Progress, which is the Broadband Institute organization that originated these accusations against me. Progress, Alberta, which is an NDP-affiliated PAC, the NDP itself, one of their MLAs, Rachel Notley's chief of staff, there's like 14 defendants altogether. And so, you know, my position there is basically, you know, the proponents of cancel culture always say that cancel culture is just about consequences, right? You heard that line?

Yeah, there's no such thing as cancel culture. It's just about consequences. It's about accountability. You did something bad. And I would always ask those people, what did I do? that merits this. And no one's ever been able to answer that question. But, you know, I do actually believe in consequences and accountability, not at the hands of an inflamed mob that's been misled, but in a court of law. And I think that there should be consequences when you have operated a massive platform

and you lie about people and you publish career and life-shattering lies about them. There should be consequences for that. There should be consequences for making heinous accusations frivolously or disingenuously for your own personal and political gain. And if there's not consequences, then they'll continue to do it with impunity. So that's sort of, you know, I didn't want to pursue a defamation claim initially because I try not to be like a sort of vengeful person. I don't generally seek retribution. I'm very much a... But when your entire livelihood is wiped out, when you can't get a job,

because nobody wants to touch you with the 10-foot pole, I mean, you got kids, too. Like, as a young father on this side, I go, I understand listening to you why I have certain friends that go anonymously on Twitter, let's say, or wherever. because they have thoughts, but they don't want to be, I'm like, man, that's a tough way to live life. Like, that's what we've built. But where you're sitting, like, once again, like somebody not going on Twitter and using their real name, that's one thing. What you went through is, was the entire country coming after you? Yeah.

For something out of, once again, I'm headlong into this podcast. we're in, I go like, I just have lost a ton of faith in the structure that's built around me. Yeah. That's as easy as maybe I can put it. So you got to, so you're suing all these institutions. Now, in the article in the Western Standard, I believe you got to go fund me. Is that correct? Yeah. So I, uh, I, I, I finally succumb and launched a crowdfunding campaign. Um, I've been It's mostly self-financing in the litigation for the last two, almost two years. A couple people have donated generously, just privately.

But, yeah, litigation is, this is a very meritorious claim. I think it has good potential to be the biggest defamation win in Canadian history. But even successful and very meritorious defamation claims often take many, many years to litigate. There was one recently where a guy got, I think, he won a $1.7 million award from the CBC, and it took 10 years, which is devastating, right? Well, in the meantime, in the meantime, yeah. Like, yeah. And this is the kind of, this is the perverse irony is they defamed me so badly that it impeded my ability to get a job to earn a livelihood, to pay my bills. and the only way to remedy when I was 32 years old, like, you know, at what should have been

kind of a natural inflection point in my career. I just, and I was, you know, I was and I'm the primary breadwinner for my family. And they took away my ability to work, to pursue my vocation or to work in any field related to my expertise or my skills. And if you want to remedy, that damage, it could take a quarter million dollars in 10 years of your life. So, you know, it's kind of one of these things where you realize that the justice system doesn't really feel like it's made for ordinary people to seek redress against this kind of wrong. And that's why,

you know, it's really, it's very painful for me to ask for help because I'm, I just, I'm much more comfortable. Yeah, but I think. Much more comfortable in the position of trying to help other people than asking for, it's just, I think, an excess of pride on my part. But, I finally realized that I needed some help. And so, yeah, I launched a go fund me. And I realize a lot of people are understandably wary of go fund me. So there's a couple other on my website, my personal website. There's also donate. What's your personal website? Kaelinford.ca.com. And there's, so there's a stripe account set up. And, you know, e-transfers also work. So, you know, anyone who's, who's ever felt like they want to do something about this cancel culture phenomenon but doesn't

know how or what to do, this is a concrete way that I think it's a, you know, it's a meritorious, potentially very significant piece of litigation undertaking. And I hope that it will serve as a deterrent that, and it will say that, you know, words actually mean something. And you cannot just call people white supremacists for no reason. you can't corrupt the meaning of words and of allegations like that just because it suits you or because you think it'll help you get ahead politically. So that's kind of that's one of the things I'm hoping to accomplish with this. Well first to all my lovely listeners I got some just cool people all of them like the tune in to the show. So I don't know I have no idea. Maybe none

of them will support you. Maybe all of them support you. But I think there's a lot of people that are sitting around and they don't know what to do. And hearing what you're going through, I think I hope that I hope you win. And A, and I hope people support you in that. And I think a lot of people, you shouldn't feel bad for asking for help. I mean, if you need help, you need help, right? Like that's, I understand the side of, I want to take it. I don't need, you know, I don't need a handout.

That's uncomfortable. Yeah, it is super uncomfortable. But we're also not talking about $15 here. We're talking about $250,000 plus plus plus if this goes on for 10 years. Like, boom. And then the other thing I would say is, you know, the meaning of words, what's really tough about that is the guy leading their country right now. Keep spouting off.

Wild. You want to talk about having a platform. He's just not my leader. And to have him in our country doing what he's doing, on a world stage he's making a mockery of us, but sitting here in the country, I go, I just don't get it. Like, I don't understand why people keep bringing that back in.

Because it just, it so seeds of like everything where nobody can get along for any reason. Exactly. Look, this is why I think people who corrupt the meaning of words, this is one of the most antisocial things that you can possibly do because it destroys any shared guideposts by which we might navigate reality together in a community with other people. I mean, this is sort of this is the Tower of Babel,

that curse is if you scatter people's languages so they can't converse together, they can't cooperate, they can't seek truth, they can't adjudicate moral disputes if they can't agree on what basic words mean. And there's, I'll go back to, I talked about Plato and Confucius earlier. Another thing that they both shared was that they had the same essential prescription for the social pathologies afflicting their societies. Someone once asked Confucius, you know, if you were given control of a state, what would be the first thing that you would do? And he said, well, this is very obvious. I rectify the names, rectify the meaning of words. And the person was sort of confused and thought, well, that's silly.

And Confucius was dead serious. It's like if words don't have meaning, well, then nothing else can be affected. And, you know, Socrates and Plato, likewise, they despised sophistry and rhetoricians and people who manipulated and abused language for their own ends because they were destroying people's ability to arrive at anything that was true. So yeah, I mean, this is a, this is a sort of a major, a major focus of mine is that, is that you can't, you cannot corrupt the meaning of language and you should face some consequences when you do that willfully because it's just, you're just destroying the foundations

of, um, of social comedy, of trust, of openness, the basis for cooperation. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. You put it so eloquently. It's, it's, uh, you would have been a lovely politician. I can safely, I'm an awful politician. Hey? You're kidding. Oh, I would have been an awful politician. Um, can you imagine.

I can't, I tell you what, like, I, I would love to see it because right now in politics, probably the hardest thing to watch is, it's like nobody talks to each other. We're in a society that's supposed to talk to each other. These are our leaders. They're representing all of us. And I certainly want them to figure some things out and problem solve. And I know I'm not going to come out on the winning side. And I put that in quotes because, you know, there's certain things I want.

There's certain things other people want. And that goes on and on and on. But I want them to talk in a healthy manner. And I guess I must romanticize the idea of being a politician because the longer this goes on. And I mean, the longer it goes on as in the longer I've been. paying attention to it, I'm starting to realize, oh, that's just politics, I think. And that is hard to understand because we all take our, maybe not marching orders, but our idea of how conversation on how leaders act, all that stuff comes from up top, right? We see the politicians

and how they act. And I don't agree with any of it, or not any of it, probably a lion's share of it. but there'll be people that do and then they take their marching orders or the way they talk to people or the way they converse with people, the same way that... I mean, Pierre Piliyev is probably going to be the leader of the conservative party.

Maybe I'm wrong on that. He's very popular. And for two years, all he did was ask the same question for two minutes long on a social media platform. The other side wouldn't answer, and he just kept doing it. And it was comedy in our political sphere. Right. Like I, at one point, I'm like, man, just stop. But I mean, that's who's going to be the, do you think they're going to, if he gets in, they're not going to do the same thing. And just, I mean, I don't know. I'm going in circles here.

It's mutually reinforcing, though. I mean, the quality of our politicians reflects the, like, generally, you know, society is sort of the souls of men writ large and politics certainly is the same. And if you have a population of people who like, this kind of stuff, right, who communicate through sloganeering and catchphrases and associations and or who are sort of intemperate or vicious or, you know, hostile toward their neighbors, you're going to have that reflected in your politics. But I think the same is also true that politicians do have, there's an added onus on them to try to set things right. And I would agree that most of our politicians, not all, but most of our politicians don't do a great job of living up to that. It's much easier to sort of flatter people and to give them what they want and what they're accustomed to. And I think the ones that speak plainly, they're shielded away

from the, like I've had different politicians on here and I've met certain ones that are, they don't sugarcoat things. And they have told me about getting interviewed by, let's call it, CBC. We've been hammering on them. My miles will hammer some more. Um, and their quotes aren't put in. And they're right. And you hear that and you go once off, I mean, I can get by. Second time. Okay. Third, fourth, you're like, uh, this is, this is odd. Yeah. This is odd. Now, your trial. So you're, you, you got a crowdfunding, uh, multiple different ways there to, for people to get involved. I'll put it in the show notes. If you send it to me, I'll throw it in the show notes.

That way people can just click on it. What does the trial look like? You said you were just in, like, are we talking, you're in your, like, third hearing? Are you on your 50th? So there's two big pieces of litigation that I've been involved in. One is this defamation claim against, like, these 14 defendants who participated throughout my political candidacy in. Trying to get rid of you. Yeah, and trying to get rid of me.

And so that's, you know, that's a huge claim. It will take a long time if it can be funded adequately that we'll be able to, we'll be able to move it more expeditiously. So where we are now is we've basically gone through the first round of discovery interviews with, I think, 13 of the 14 defendants, which is pretty good. That's like 25 full days of discovery. So, you know, it's progress. And I'm not allowed.

There's an implied undertaking rule that precludes me from sharing things that have been gleaned in discovery, but I will say that I'm more confident now than I was when I filed the case. Separately, there's a whole other backstory here, which I sell them get into because it's kind of sorted and crazy. But the one individual who was behind all of the false allegations against me for the entire year leading up to this, I had to file a restraining order against him. and he's repeatedly been in violation of that restraining order. So that's been its own kind of nightmare. He has legal training.

He's not a lawyer, but he has legal training. So he knows how to just sort of endlessly work the legal system to delay and delay and delay. And so that's what I was in dealing with this morning. So after he makes the claims about you. Yeah. then he keeps harassing you so all right so i'll give you some backstory sure if you want some crazy i'm i'm um yeah bring it on so so this is a guy i met him at a 2017 February 2017 i was at a chinese new year banquet and i was introduced to a group of guys and he was sort of standing on

the periphery and he became very intensely interested in me after he learned where i had gone to school and that I was maybe considering running for office and sort of started chatting me up, befriended me on Facebook, and start sending me articles, and, you know, kind of he was like, you know, acted like he would take me under his wing and show me how grassroots politics worked.

He had run for office before for the conservative party in the 2015 federal election. And so for about six months, I would say, we would have, for regular text conversations on a variety of political and social, and philosophical topics. And I would often try to urge him to read some moral philosophy because he was very smart, kind of glibly charismatic,

but also acted in ways that struck me as deeply unethical. And so I'd try to get him to consider maybe, you know, you'll do better if you can try to be a better person. Eventually he was kicked out of Ontario because he was discovered as doing all sorts of seedy things. He would run like pseudonymous Twitter accounts to spread rumors about conservative candidates. A lot of sexual innuendo about female candidates claiming that there was sort of corruption in the party. He'd send anonymous emails attacking young women in the party, sort of defaming their character.

And he would do this through sort of proxy accounts. But he was found out and told, you know, you're not welcome in the party in Ontario. Go away. So we moved to Alberta. And he had this idea that he was going to run. for office in Alberta. But he was rejected by the federal conservative party. They didn't let him run. Meanwhile, I was invited to run for the United Conservative Party by Jason Kenney. And he told me at some points around very early 2018, he said basically that he found this unbearable, that he thought,

you know, I was sort of like a political neophyte. I hadn't worked for this. Why was I the one being recruited for run for office when he was being sort of given the cold shoulder or spurned? And that's when things started going really, getting really weird. And the first thing that happened was he started a rumor. This is early 2018. I haven't yet announced that I'm running anywhere, but I'm sort of starting to feel it out and think about getting involved. I was like seven months pregnant too. So I'm thinking about running for office.

and he starts a rumor saying that I made false accusations of sexual harassment against another political candidate. Now, if you think for a minute about the implications of that rumor, I had not made any, like, nothing in any universe that could be remotely construed that way. This was totally fabricated, as he later admitted that I'd never said anything like that. But the effect would be that if men in political circles think that I might make accusations like that, I become toxic, right? Like, no one will want to meet with me in private. Like, no, you know, it's just, it's the kind of thing that's designed to just preemptively

torpedo a woman's political career. If you say that she might make false me-to accusations. So that's the first thing. And then after that, he, uh, I saw him at a political event and he asked me to go for drinks with him and I said no. One, I don't drink, but two, I just, I said, you know, I just don't, I don't want anything to do with whatever you're playing at. And so he went home and he bought my internet domain name.

And then he refused to give it back. And he threatened to take me to court and tried to get me to sign a non-disclosure agreement about him purchasing my internet domain name. And then he took over the board of my local constituency association. So the parties have local constituency associations that run their nomination races. So he takes over my board and then tries to use his position to stop my nomination to try to get me disqualified. He writes a letter claiming that I've committed fraud and he makes other people sign it. And then he leaks it to the press using pseudonymous accounts. And press progress starts publishing this stuff.

He then takes out Google ads on searches of my name saying that I'm a liar and a fraud, that I don't really live in Calgary. I've lived in Calgary for like 25 years, making up quotes and attributing them to me and then buying Google ads to promote fake. quotes that he is attributing to me. He takes, he basically abuses United Conservative Party membership lists, sends, again, pseudonymous emails using fake accounts to about 1,400 of my electors, again, making up quotes and falsely attributing them to me, making up false statements about my personal history. He's eventually expelled from the United Conservative Party and taken off the board. But he keeps at it. He then files a false police report, claiming that I assaulted him. He later, when we questioned him later about this, he said that I, he was sitting in a cafe in my neighborhood.

And I walked in and I tapped him on the back and said that I would be pursuing a defamation claim. And he filed a police report saying that I had assaulted him. And then he starts telling members of the media that I, as a political candidate, was arrested or was investigated for assault. So it's like he tried numerous things to try to destroy my candidacy because he could not be a candidate himself. But he claimed to be a candidate. He was claiming the whole time to be a federal conservative party candidate in the writing of Calgary Center. And he fundraised extensively on the basis of that claim, but he was never a registered candidate. He led people to believe he was a lawyer.

He was never a lawyer. He told people that he had been commissioned in the Canadian Armed Forces. He told me that he'd been commissioned as a captain in the Canadian Armed Forces. Never happened. And so he was just a prolific, I don't make up whatever you word for it you want. He would send me emails like unsolicited emails indicating that he knew about private gatherings at my mother's home the previous evening. he boasted to someone about having people follow my campaign manager. Like it got really weird.

And then he finally, you know, he succeeded in destroying my political candidacy, but thereafter his attention shifted to making sure I could never talk about it. All of these things that he had done, he'd done pseudonymously. He would use other people's names. He would make up fake accounts, make fake social media accounts, never take responsibility for what he was claiming, and he was desperate to avoid being held accountable for the things he was saying. So his attention then shifted to making sure that I would never be able to tell the story,

and that if I did, no one would believe me. So he would do things like, at one point, yeah, I interviewed a podcast producer in Florida, and before that interview was even published, somehow he found out about it. And he started reaching out to that guy's former colleagues to collect incriminating information about him to make sure he wouldn't publish the interview with me. In other words, like it sounded an awful lot like he was trying to figure out how to blackmail him to prevent an interview being published with me. He went after every single person I interviewed on a podcast or radio show. He tried offering a witness $10,000, according to the witness, this is sworn testimony. from this person that he offered someone a bribe of $10,000 to swear a false affidavit against me.

Like, he sent 13-page letters about me, full of defamatory comments, unsolicited, to innumerable friends, former colleagues, members of the national media. Like, it's been endless. And so eventually, I filed for a restraining order. I was granted a restraining order and he's repeatedly violated it. So that's another thing that I've been dealing with in these intervening three years. So that's the kind of person who is rewarded in our current political climate, because the media and press progress dressed him up as he was an anonymous whistleblower who was, you know, acting in the public interest to expose someone who was supposedly a bigot.

And why they did that, I mean, I have some information now on why they did that. They can't disclose, but, you know, it suited their narrative. And they were willing to, yeah, I mean, that's just, that's the kind of person who's rewarded in, in this, this current environment. So, yeah. That's a whole lot of a whole lot of, that right there, There's a whole lot there. And I just gave you, I gave you like the 30,000 foot view of it.

So I come all the way back, Jason Kenney. Yeah. He knows all this. I mean, not all of maybe, but he knows who you're. He doesn't know all the details, but he knew who was. The campaign what was going on, yeah. That makes me have even less faith in our political system. Well, you know, I had a chance to talk with one of the people who was advising him at the time.

Because I warned the party. I told them, I told them what he was doing. You know, I forwarded them the emails that I was, the sort of creepy emails that I was getting from him about, you know, like I said, like, you know, social events at my mom's home. And how he'd taken over my board and was trying to use that position to gain leverage over me and how he'd bought my internet domain name. I was like, this is so inappropriate for the president of a constituency association board to be doing this kind of thing. The party was aware. You know, he was eventually, as I said, he was sanctioned and he was expelled from that board. But that took a long time because, as I said, he has training as a lawyer. And so he held up all of their processes, all of their conduct investigations. He managed to sort of delay them for months while he would continue doing this. But I talked to someone in the party and I said, you know, like, I warned you guys. I told you exactly what he was doing and what he was going to do and how to get ahead of it. why didn't you listen to me? And he said, this fellow, who I like, and he's a very good guy. He said,

look, we didn't believe you. It's crazy for someone to do the things that he was doing. And, you know, he said, I've been around in politics for decades. I have never seen, and I've seen crazy things. Politics attracts some really weird personalities. I've never seen anything like this. And so we thought that you were just a nervous Nelly first-time candidate and you just needed a pat on the head and things would be okay. So they just, they thought it was too outside of the realm of possibility that they, unless you have matured immensely in three years, which I'm sure this process has made you, I don't mean grow up, but you know what I mean? It's giving you a different perspective than most have. I find that hard to believe. That's just me. I could be wrong. I don't

think anyone who knew me would think that I'm the kind of person who's given to overstatement. I'm very understated. And I mean, maybe that was, maybe that was my problem. You know, like, I've wondered if I was more hysterical, would they have paid attention? Probably not, right? It's kind of a no-win. So, no, I think they just, they had never dealt with a person like this before who was just, he was going to stop at nothing. And so I think, yeah, they, they, and I, you know, I can gently blame them for this because they were warned.

You know, they told me months before this happened. They said, you know, I was telling them, like, how to do their jobs as issue managers. And, um, and their response was, no, you know, don't worry about it. We'll protect you. It's our job to protect you. Um, you've given me a lot to think about. And I'm going to jump ahead of my listeners and say that you need to come back on because the, the, but I don't know, but, you know, in the future, we will have you back on. Because. as I'm learning, Kaelan Ford has a lot to talk about. And I in two hours is almost flown by. And I'm still grasping with some of the stuff we've talked about. Like I just, I need to go back and listen to it because there's, I don't want to interrupt too much. One of the things I hate about a Zoom call is I don't get to interject as much as

sitting across you, right? And if we were sitting across, we'd probably talk for four hours because I'd be picking your brain every two steps you take. But I'm going to go back. I want to listen to it. And I want to make sure that when I have you back on, that I pick your brain on some of the different things.

For the time being, we're going to make sure that whatever your link is, any pertinent information, we'll put in the show notes. And before I let you go, we got to do the Crude Man, or the Final Five brought to you by Crude Master Transport. A shout out to Heath and Tracy.

And as I forewarned you, I'm using Heath's words now in, and if you're, And this one, I feel like, must, well, I'm interested to see what your perspective and your thought on it is. But if you're going to stand behind a cause that you think is right, then stand behind it absolutely. And what's one thing now, Kaelin, you stand behind, absolutely? Yeah, so you gave me this question at the top of the interview. And I don't have anything revelatory here.

It's just that you should root yourself as much as you can and as deeply as you can in what is true and good and just and beautiful and stand there. And I should say, and withstand all of the waves and all of the turmoil that the world can throw at you. And so that's not an endorsement of a particular cause or thing. each of us will apprehend in our own way what is true and what's just. But it exists, even as we may have different understandings of it or arrive at it differently. It exists as a real thing. And that's where we need to try to plant ourselves. Yeah.

I appreciate you coming on and being as open as you've been about different things, especially, you know, I go back to not being able to reconcile why you would, and now hearing the story, you know, sometimes, I'm my own worst enemy. I could just sit, listen to the story and then, and then, you know, and now hearing it, I have a hard time with where we're at. Because I sit and listening, I talk, and I go, you seem like a lovely human being. And with a lot of depth there, and you've been given a bit of a shit hand. and, well, not a bit, a shithand. And I'm rooting for you, and I hope that the case doesn't take 10 years. I hope so, too.

You know, I'll be lucky if it takes five, but yeah, I hope so too. Here's the other thing. Look, we didn't get into this. We can talk about this another time. But there is even amidst, like, getting dealt, as you say, a shithand. Oh, I got her to swear. Pardon my language. That'll get cut out and I'll have all held the breaklist.

I know. I really try not to swear. It's, I'm sorry. No, look, there's, there is,

I think that we're in this world, not for the purpose of comfort and enjoyment and to enjoy ease. I mean, suffering is part of the human condition and it's an inevitable part of the human condition and one that has within it a potential for redemption and for great beauty as well. And so I'm trying what I can. as well to redeem this experience and to make something good of it in whatever way I can. Yes, suffering.

I don't mean to laugh at your suffering. I mean to laugh at thinking life is suffering. I remember saying that a loud one time life is suffering. And somebody was like, oh, that's a pessimistic way to look at the world. And it was not what I meant. No, no. And look, when you have the right vantage point, all of the tragedy of the world is also, it's comedy as well.

Seen from, I think, with a long enough perspective and from a high enough view, tragedy and comedy become indistinguishable. And it's like, it's undeniable that as much as I've, I won't downplay that like the last three years have been really, really challenging. But even amidst the kind of, no matter the horror of the mind perceiving it, the fact of the comedic dimension is definitely. there and I recognize that it's all ridiculous. Oh yes, don't apologize for laughing at it. Well, the suffering that happened through Russia, through the gulags and everything else,

it also produced, like you think of that country, some of the atrocities have gone in it. But you think of some of the, you know, I bring up Solzhenitsyn, the one, but I mean, there is artists that have come out of, and authors and everything that have come out of Russia through those times. And Victor Frankel is a guy, Man's Search for Meeting, is a guy that's one of my favorite books because there's a guy who went through the Holocaust and out of it he pulled this multiple gems.

You're just like, holy dinah. Like I never want to do that ever, but I appreciate that one line of his book or the two lines of his book or what have you. And I certainly hope that your case is done in six months, not 10 years. And you come out on the right side. But either way, I appreciate you giving me some of your time and being so open. And I look forward to the next conversation we have because I'm sure it will happen.

I'm going to twist for being in Calgary or pulling you all the way up here so we can do it in person. Because I think some of it is lost in a Zoom screen. I think the audience knows that. I think we both know that. And I look forward to that because this has been thoroughly enjoyable. Thank you so much, Sean. I enjoyed it as well.