Shaun Newman Podcast - #335 - Rupa Subramanya

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

She is a columnist for the National Post, podcast host with True North &  is frequently interviewed on outlets such as The New York Times, Financial Times, and BBC News.  Emergencies Act Inquiry https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/ November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

This is Brian Gitt. My name is Patrick Moore. This is Dr. William Macchus. This is Bruce Party. This is Tom Ovalongo. This is Steve Barber, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday.

Happy Halloween. Man, I hope your weekend was as good as mine. I am starting to sound, feel better, which is, well, I mean, which is everything. A couple days there, man, I was just like, like I just couldn't get off the couch. But we powered through, made her through. We had some hockey on the weekend, some basketball. Kids got dressed up. They're getting dressed up again today.

So things are good on this side and definitely feeling a lot better. Here's another thing for your Monday. Today is the final day you can buy QDM and Tews tickets for November 5th here in Lloydminster at the Gold Horse Casino. Just go in the show notes. Hope to see you there. We are closing in on a sellout. We've got about a table and a half left.

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She is a columnist for the National Post, podcast hosts with True North, and is frequently interviewed on such outlets as the New York Times, Financial Times, and BBC News. I'm talking about Rupa Subramania. So buckle up. Here we go. I'm Rupa Subramania and I'm listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Rupa Subra Manya. So first off, thank you for hopping on. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for inviting me to your show. Now, I feel like the audience must get tired of me saying it out like this, but I'm going to do it again anyways. It's the first time you've hopped on here before. And certainly I have

followed. Honestly, Rupa, I can't remember the first article you wrote that got me on to your work, but wherever it was, I've been an avid follower of your writing and your thoughts. But there's going to be people in the audience that have never heard your name before, maybe don't realize some of your extensive line of work. I thought maybe you could just give them a bit of your background and from there we'll fire off and see where we go to. Well, so I live in Ottawa, Sean, and in the nation's capital. And I used to live overseas. I lived overseas for almost a decade before returning to Canada.

I first came to Canada when I was 18 years old to study here. And so I went to school here. I did an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees after. And then I went overseas. I lived in India for nearly, decade and then I returned to Canada and then I began writing for the National Post. When I lived overseas, I wrote for the Wall Street Journal and for foreign policy and I freelanced a bit here and there. I did some research work for think tanks in India and then right now I

write for the National Post and for Niki, which is a publication based out of Tokyo and I'm also a writer for Barry Wise's Common Sense. And you have a lovely podcast. I might throw in there as well. I have a podcast too. I'm talking so many different things. It's something I can get, you know, everything that I'm doing. But of course, my podcast, my weekly podcast for True North, which I'm very proud of.

And I have been really enjoying that, enjoying podcasting, which has been a completely different experience for me as a writer and and I've been doing that since June so do check out my show the Rupa Subram on your show on True North but yeah so I I write and I podcast well and I appreciate you kind of updating all the listeners on all the things you do you're a busy woman and I follow you on Twitter and I've been listening to your podcast as well and obviously on this side I listen to a lot of podcasts but your thoughts and your takes on things has been really interesting One that, you know, I was doing a little background on you, leading towards this. And I stumbled across, and I had, you know, at this point in time, if I go back to January of this year,

I wasn't exactly paying attention to much mainstream narratives or talks or whatever. But I landed on the agenda and you were on a show with Gary Mason, and Christopher Labo, LeBow, and Roman Barber. You recall, Roman Babbers, sorry. You recall this? Yes, of course. I do, of course. It was, I was invited by TVO to debate the proposal by the Quebec government to fine or tax the unvaccinated.

And I was just really, you know, outraged by that. And I'd written, I think that's probably when people started to notice me. It was when I was writing about Omicron. I was writing against the lockdown in Ontario. and I had enough of this. You know, I had been three times vaccinated at that point. I'd been following all public health measures. I was doing everything by the book.

I was following everything. And then to go back and do a lockdown again, I just didn't make any sense. And our approach here seemed to be more extreme than anywhere else in the world. Our schools were closed. We were once again back to shutting down restaurants and businesses. And it just at this point in the pandemic, It just, for me, none of this made any sense.

And I began asking these questions, you know, what exactly is going on here? And then the Quebec proposal was kind of the icing on the cake when it came to this, to my views at that time. And yeah, that's kind of like, you know, when I started to think about this and I thought, you know, what exactly are we doing here with, you know, and how we're treating those who refuse to get vaccinated at one point. I mean, I'll be very honest with you. I did support vaccine mandates.

It lasted for about a month or so, and I've talked about my journey as someone who went from supporting it initially to then changing my mind quickly. And it was a very personal story of something that I had experienced. You could call it trauma, and that kind of led me to this thinking. But then I quickly went away from that thinking because it just wasn't sitting well with me. I knew there was something deeply problematic in the direction in which we were heading as a society in how we were treating the unvaccinated. And then those were, so I went on the agenda

and I tried to explain the many reasons why people would refuse to get vaccinated. And I remember my fellow panelist, Gary Mason, was just really unhinged when it came to, you know, the kinds of things that he was proposing we do to the unvaccinated. And, And I knew that public discourse at that point had become truly, truly divisive. And something needed to be done. People needed to speak up more. It's the reason I bring it up, Rupa, is, you know, you think of how far we've come in under a year.

You know, with the Emergency Act commission going on right now and certainly all eyes on that and paying attention, when I go back and watch that show, I kind of put this dark space in time or this dark period in time kind of over there somewhere. And to hear people talk about fining if you're not vaccinated and all these different punishments essentially and being openly talked about on a relatively mainstream show. I'm like, wow, this is, this is, this is something.

Now, you mentioned, um, you were four mandates and, and you said it was personal. And if it's something you don't want to talk about, that's, that's fine. But, uh, what did change your mind ultimately then? Yeah. to start speaking against them? Well, no, I'm happy to talk about it. In fact, I wrote it in my regular column for the National Post about a month and a half ago, two months. I think it was, you know, it was important to address this.

I'd actually kind of even forgotten that part of my, maybe, you know, I just blotted it out of my mind because, out of my brain, because maybe it was just, it was part of that traumatic experience that I spoke about earlier. So my parents live in India and they nearly died from the, they were caught up in that delta wave that came to India and which is the delta variant originated in India. And I lost many friends. They were begging me to hook them up to oxygen cylinders here, sitting here in Ottawa, know, and they were wondering if I could connect them to hospitals in India and hook me up at doctors, or can you procure oxygen cylinders because I'm literally, I literally cannot breathe.

And this was happening around April, May, June, and it was very, very, it left an impression on me, and I couldn't see my parents. And so I was just hoping and praying. And my parents were unvaccinated at that time. And I was just hoping and praying that, you know, they would, they would come out of this. And they did come out of this. And maybe that kind of, I think I truly believe that the vaccines would prevent transmission. Because that's what we were being told.

If you remember Joe Biden at that time, was saying vaccines prevent transmission. Everybody was saying that. And I truly felt that if the vaccines prevented transmission, then that would be the end of the pandemic. But then I realized shortly after that there were all of these breakthrough infections and, you know, and that made me ask these questions, what is going on here? What is up with these breakthrough infections? Israel, for example, which had like one of the best vaccine rates, vaccination rates on the planet,

had breakthrough infections from the Delta variant. And nobody was giving us, none of the doctors were really all of these exes. experts who hold forth on vaccines and why you should get vaccinated, couldn't explain this to us, you know. And so I began asking questions. And of course, I noticed that the public discourse was also getting very, very divisive. It was pouring scorn on the unvaccinated. They were being treated as outsiders. And it didn't sit well with me at all.

Like I said, you know, I probably held this view back in August of 2020. and then by about October I had changed my mind. By about November for sure, I knew that this was not something that I was comfortable supporting because I just didn't like the way this was being. Certainly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's words didn't sit well with me. I felt that if the Prime Minister of the country couldn't say this, if major news publications are saying this, you know, without even kind of just even just reflecting on what they're saying.

I knew that we had gone too far with this, and I just couldn't keep silent anymore. And of course, the Delta of the Omicron variant changed it for me. It was a game changer in many ways because you have all of these vaccines, but none of them are preventing you from getting Omicron. In fact, I was vaccinated in early December, and 10 days later I got Omicron. And so I'm thinking,

what is up with this? You know, at one point, I believed that it prevented transmission, but we were told that it was preventing transmission, and here I am with Omicron. And so, yeah, that's, that was kind of, you know, when my thinking started to change, and I really began questioning all of these narratives. And interestingly enough, I mean, my journey is kind of complex,

because, you know, when I was, when the pandemic happened, I was actually in India. And in March of 2020, I was stuck in India under one of the world's harshest lockdowns. Imagine locking down 1.1 billion people. It's extraordinary. And I lived in Mumbai at that time, one of the world's largest cities, 16 million people under lockdown. And it literally was a ghost city. There was nobody out.

And I remember writing a series of articles at that time. I was a big proponent of the Great Barrington Declaration before it, became the Great Barrington Declaration. I referenced J. Badacharya, Dr. J. Batacharya quite extensively. And I was very, again, you know, I was against lockdowns. I was against these restrictions. I was for sort of targeting vulnerable groups. You know, if you want to protect long-term care homes, you want to protect retirement homes,

go ahead and do that. You want to be in your basement and not step out for the rest of your life? That's also up to you. But I was never a proponent of these harsh lockdown measures, shutting down of schools, parks, you know, sports centers, so on and so forth. And I was very much against it. And I did believe that the vaccines would be the way out of our pandemic. How could you not believe our public health officials?

How could you not believe our elected officials? It was a very strange time for many of us. and we were hoping that the vaccines would really be, you know, an exit strategy out of the pandemic. But, you know, now we know that was never the case because we're still talking about cases. We're still talking about, we're actually living in, you know, we're actually more fearful now post-vaccination than before,

which is quite extraordinary. Isn't that a final sentence, right? We're actually more fearful after vaccination than before. that's that rate there. I have a question about India. Yeah. Because along the pandemic, two countries stood out to me. And I don't have this, I wish I was a year ago because I used to have this off by the top of my head.

But Mexico did kiosk. And I think India did something along the similar lines where if you got COVID, you were given. and I'm making a figurative here like a bag of like a couple of different things to try and help prevent. It was preventative medicine is what it, right at the start. Did your parents talk to you about anything like that in India? No. So I think what you're referencing is probably what is that controversial medication? And it's not remdesivir, but the.

Ivermectin. Ivermectin. So there is. So in the largest state. in India, Uttar Pradesh, the North Indian state of India, which is about the size of California, I think, the leadership in that country apparently gave out ivermectin to the population, and which is probably why, according to this theory, why Uttar Pradesh did fairly well when it came to the pandemic.

Now, look, I can't speak to that because for one thing, India was not very good at, the testing was really bad in India, very early on in the pandemic. And even just before the Delta variant hit India, I, you know, I criticized the Indian government or Indian officials for not testing adequately enough. So you don't test,

There's no pandemic, right? And that was that was their thinking. So I don't quite know how the state actually did in the end. I'm not, you know, I don't have the data at my fingertips. I haven't gone through it. So I can't speak to that. But I'll tell you what my parents did. So my dad was in the hospital for something else, tuberculosis, meningitis, which is deadly.

And he almost died from that. and then he got COVID while he was in hospital. So I knew at that point, this was just too much for my dad to deal with. And I thought that was it. This was the last time I would ever speak to him. And so when he went back to the hospital for routine examination, they tested him for COVID and as they do here, and he tested positive.

And then the doctor said, look, you have mild symptoms. You know, there's nothing here. that we are concerned about, why don't you go home and drink this herbal therapeutic? And my, so this is what my parents did. It's a disgusting concoction of all of these different spices. You boil it up and you drink it in the morning. It's very, very bad on your stomach, but it, something about it, my parents explained to me that it literally beat whatever it was out of their system.

It got it out of their system. And this is what they did. They isolated for two weeks, and they drank this concoct. auction for two weeks. And that was the end of their, that was it. And they were unvaccinated at this point and they made it through. And my parents are in their 70s. And my dad was severely immunocompromised. And yet he got out of, made it made it just fine from the Delta variant. Well, one of the reasons I bring up India, you having that strong of a connection there, sitting here, I've heard different stories about Iver Pradesh.

And so I was curious, right? And there's no right or wrong answer. But you're clearing up some things that I'm like, I wonder if everyone in India looked at that area and was like, wow, they got it right. Or maybe they got it wrong. I have no idea. But to me, you have more of an insider knowledge than this guy ever will.

I'll tell you one thing that India did, which is very interesting. You know, apart from Ivermectin, which I think, should be studied more extensively and you really need to get data from the, from the Uthopradish government for this. What India did was it kept out Pfizer and Moderna. It kept out, it kept the MRNA vaccines out of the, out of the market. It focused on the viral vector vaccines instead. So it developed AstraZeneca and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

vaccine, which is based on the same technology, the same viral vector vaccine as AstraZeneca. So that is, that, that's worth, you know, discussing as well. Why did India keep out Pfizer and Moderna? Isn't that a million dollar question? Yeah, well, I know why they did. Pfizer and Moderna have this policy where they, you know, you're, you know, your, they're, they're, they, They're protected from any kind of liability. And the Indian government was not comfortable with that proposition. And so they said, look, we don't need you guys.

We're the pharmacy of the world. We make all of this stuff in-house. We have enough vaccines to sell to everybody. We don't need Pfizer and Moderna. And we're quite happy with the viral vector vaccines. The viral vector vaccine, I'm told, are less problematic. than the MRNA vaccines. Now, I'm not a scientist.

I'm not in... Yeah, yeah. So I can't speak to that, but this is the general sort of view out there about this versus that. And so India is strictly focused on, you know, the viral vector vaccines, more specifically, AstraZeneca. And also, I think they realized, at some level,

I think India realized, and I've criticized the Indian government over the their handling of the Delta variant. But I would actually say that a lot of people ended up getting infected, which may have made a difference down the road. And unfortunately, this is the uncomfortable truth that, you know, which has to be said, which is when it comes to these kinds of infections, you have to build immunity. there's no other way to it. I mean, natural immunity has been completely sidelined as though it's like some alien concept and that vaccines that we were meant to have vaccines, right?

And I think the Indian approach eventually was, look, you know, I think we have to, it's impossible for us to lock down 1.1 billion people. It just is not feasible anymore. We did that for like three months, and it set us back in a really big way, economically and it was a total disaster. And so I think the Indian approach over time was, look, you know, I think we have the

vaccines, so let people take the vaccines. But if people are going to get infected as well, we're going to have to prepare for that. And so they did that. So it was a multi-pronged approach. You know, I shouldn't have said it was the million dollar question because after you, you talk openly about, you know, Pfizer, Moderna and everything that they have going for them, yes, that makes complete sense. probably the way I should have stated it was.

India would be a very interesting case study in the fact that there were one of the, not the, I'm sure there's several, but like that seems pretty rare that they said no because everyone just, I mean, look at Canada, Rupa. Like we're signed up till, you know, 30, 40, you know, like it feels like we just got in bed with big pharma and decided let's just way we go. Canada can't, Canada, yeah, it's extraordinary. I have pointed this out in the context of, you know, Canada procuring these vaccines, so many of them. And what is also interesting, and I've written about this for the National Post, is this past spring,

several European countries wanted to renegotiate their contracts with these companies, specifically Pfizer and Moderna. And they said, look, you know, we've committed. to all of these vaccines, but we're not going to be able to use them. The vaccine uptake in our countries has been just pretty dismal. Nobody wants them anymore. So we don't want to be on the hook for these vaccines. You know, why should we continue to pay for them? And I raised a question, why is in Canada doing this? You know, why, you know, there's a stockpile of vaccines. You're just sitting there doing nothing. And, you know, and who exactly is holding the government to account

when it comes, when it's come to these contracts, right? The Australian government, I've leave Sean has set up a public inquiry actually into the Australian government's contracts with these vaccine companies. We should have something similar going on in my opinion and get to the bottom of this because after all it's taxpayers money, right? Well, you talk about an inquiry. I mean, that would be something. I have this hard time believing it would be anything different than what's going on right

now with the Emergencies Act inquiry. uh you just not ineptitude maybe that is the word but there seems like uh like you're sitting there watching this uh just to kind of hop to uh you know start you out in january which i mean the the freedom convoy literally was in uh end of january beginning of uh february and uh to me it's so crazy how far we've come yeah in less than a year with this uh what are we on day 11 day 12, one of the day 12, I think, of the commission. What have you thought so far of that? Sitting there watching this all play out, seeing all the different things. You know, we talk about the vaccinated, unvaccinated, do this, do that, everything else. The biggest power the

government has is enacted on a group of protesters in your city, which you got to walk around and see like, this is, this is actually pretty cool. Now, to hear all these different people come out. And I listened to you and your lawyer on your podcast. And he was, he nailed it. Right. Like to see, uh, whoever it is get up in front and not only get, uh, uh, uh, grilled by one lawyer, but then I mean, Brendan Miller has been become a little bit of a folk hero right now as he grills them. Um, what have your thoughts been on, on the inquiry up to this point? Yeah. So, um, I haven't actually been there in person. I've been viewing all of this from the comfort of my home on Zoom.

It's just that I've, you know, given all of these things that I'm doing, it's just more efficient for me to... No apologies necessary. I'm watching it from the comfort of my home. So I wish I'd been, I could be there in person. I only went there once. But my sense of the inquiry so far has been, and I've written about it now a couple of times for the National Post.

I find that our public officials, the bureaucrats, have been more honest than our elected officials. So you've had the likes of Pat Morris, you know, very, very, his forthright testimony was crucial, in my opinion, last week, in dismantling this narrative that there was this security threat and these people were violent insurrectionists and that they were here. to overthrow the government and all of that stuff. And he basically, you know, demolished that in one fell swoop with his testimony. And even the others, you know, who were not necessarily seen as being sympathetic to what was happening here, eventually had to admit, look, we didn't need the Emergencies Act. Bear in mind, bear in mind, the goal of the inquiry is to see the government's threshold for invoking the Emergencies Act was actually met. It's not necessarily about demolishing the

corrosive mainstream narrative that was in place, even before the protests arrived and then over the course of the last few months. It is about, you know, has this threshold been met. And in that sense, on that score, we know it wasn't. None of these, all of these, even Chief Bell, who, you know, who is not exactly, I mean, he was talking about felt, violence and there was violence that was felt by members of the community in Ottawa and he kept calling the protests as occupation and the protest as occupiers. He clearly had an angle here, but even he had to come to the conclusion that we didn't need this. We didn't need this. It was helpful, sure, but we didn't need this. We could have done this on our own. And so that's been,

and one take away from me. But of course, as I wrote in my last National Post column, I mean, it's just this narrative that Trudeau wanted, needed this emergencies act. I mean, that rationale is just fallen flat on its face. And then as a bonus, you have this narrative that the protesters were a lunatic fringe, you know, is also crumbling bit by bit.

when you have the OPP intelligence chief saying, no, this was a grassroots movement. Remember, we were told, no, this is funded by Putin and Trump. And he's saying, no, this was grassroots. This was organic. It had a large amount of support across the country. It doesn't get better than that, right? Whereas if you look back to the mainstream media reporting of it, at the same time when these intelligence reports were coming out, when these intelligence assessments,

were coming out. What did you see? You saw fringe outside support. Where is this money coming from? Even Trudeau said more than 50% of the funding for this convoy is coming from the U.S. But CESIS is now saying, no, we didn't find any evidence of this. So at the end of the day, for me is, look, this inquiry, once the report is filed, it's not going to have any teeth, right? you know, Trudeau can just put it on a shelf somewhere and just ignore it. So ultimately it's about accountability. And this is the closest we're going to come to holding our public officials to account. And I think that's hugely important.

The testimonies, the cross-examination. The public is viewing all of this. The media, to some extent, is reporting on it. I'm writing about it. So I think, I think, you know, it doesn't look good for the government. It doesn't look good for the true for Trudeau. But then again, you know, I tend to be a very cynical person. And I also see that, you know, I also wonder how many people are actually tuning in.

You know, how interesting is this for people, right? Well, I've already, I've already told everyone who's come on here. Yeah. I know lots of different, um, a wide, birth of an audience. Yeah. And there's lots that don't even realize it's going on, right? Or that kind of get it and you're just kind of like, yeah, like we got to get on to

things that are happening now, you know? And I think finding different ways to talk about it to make sure that it gets, you know, what's going on there, they get to, you know, the nuggets that come out of it, I think is good. The fact that, listen, I think the fact that Chris Barber and, to make sure, to make Lach and Tom Razzo and I don't know there's Pat King I'm spacing on like seven other names all get to go up Marco Van Hogan boss right like those guys get to get up there and get grilled not only by their side but the other side will be good for all Canadians I mean these guys were and ladies were at the heart of a majority of what went on and the fact that's going to be televised to all

of Canada yeah that's going to be some of the best television you get in Canada for the year. Yeah, no, I think so. I think it will be very, very interesting and already, I think, based on some of the testimony so far, I think that was, you know, I found that to be interesting and important and, and it's good. You know, I, the events of the last few months, and by events, I mean just the way the protests, were portrayed by the mainstream media and how our elected officials, like the mayor of my city, you know, was talking about violence, but never, he heard about it, you know. He heard about it, or he saw it on, he heard it or he saw it on CBC.

Yeah. And it just, you know, I, for one, felt, you know, where exactly are we going here with this? You know, this is not the Canada that I moved to. This is, not the Canada that I fell in love with. You know, what is going on here? I mean, this is literally the corroding of our most important institutions happening right before our eyes. And what do we do about it apart from telling the truth? And it was very dispiriting what I experienced. Of course, I've also become a target of some of this misinformation and disinformation and hate out there.

And, you know, while I can handle all of that, you know, my, my bigger concern was where do we go here as a country? You know, what's the... And where do you think we go as a country? Well, that's the thing. And I've been thinking about this and, you know, quite extensively. And last week when I heard, in this past week when I heard the testimonies of Pat Morris and Russell Lucas and a few other people, it made me realize that our, that, you know, know, there's some faith to be had still in our officials, in our public officials, in, in, in, in, in, in law enforcement, for example. The elected officials, not so much, but, but at least, you know, the institutions are still working.

The institutions, the public inquiry is only happening because, you know, the institutions are still working, I think, to some extent. And I think while they've been under attack in recent years, I think there's still time for us to work on improving them. And I think these are important steps. I think this is what is happening right now is an important step in that direction. I think the testimonies of Pat Morris and the other OPP officer, OPA, officers, all of that is, you know, tells me that there's, people can still be objective. People can still be objective. You can oppose the freedom protest.

You can oppose something that you don't believe in, but you can still do your job and sift through all of the noise and come to an objective conclusion. And I'm hoping that more of that happens as time goes on. But because if it doesn't, if we keep going down. this path of more and more divisive rhetoric and more and more divisions, that's not going to be good for our democracy going into the future. Well, I think it's people such as yourself that are helping bridge a gap there of trying to get maybe both sides of the coin a little bit of understanding because you certainly are bridging

a gap, Rupa, in my mind, and you do a fantastic job of expanding on your thoughts and your articles. Listen, I try and read a ton of different articles from different major sources. And some of them are worse than watching paint dry. And that is not your articles. Your articles are fantastic. So if people haven't looked you up, I suggest they do. Now, to get you out here on time, we'll go to the final question. It's brought to you by Crew Master Transport, shout at to Heath and Tracy McDonald. They've been supporters of the podcast at the very beginning. It's a very beginning. It's It's he's words. It's if you're going to stand behind a cause and stand behind it absolutely.

What is one thing Rupa stands behind? I stand behind the ideas. I'm an ideas person. I don't have much time for partisanship. And I've always felt passionately about things that I care about. And one of them is freedom and individual liberty. and I will always defend that until my dying day. Yeah.

Well, I appreciate you giving me some of your time today, Rupa. I won't keep you any longer. I know you got deadlines and time crunch and all that good stuff. So thank you for making some time for me today. And hopefully we'll see you down the road here at a time in the future. Yeah, no, this was an absolute pleasure, Sean. and thank you for inviting me. And I had, this was a great conversation,

and we should do this again soon.