The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - The War of Words Between Alberta and Ottawa

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Is the Alberta Sovereignty Act all hat and no cattle? Is Ottawa's response just performative?  A classic Smoke, Mirrors and The Truth as Bruce Anderson joins for our regular Wednesday SMT. Plus Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. That's Bruce Anderson Day. That's Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. And hello there. Welcome to Wednesday. Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. That's the name of this program. That's the name of this segment of The Bridge. And so today we're actually going to start with some Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, which would be a good thing, you know, living up to your title, right? It's been a smoky week. It's not like there isn't stuff to work with here. There certainly is good stuff to work with. And I'm going to start with the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which has that whole ring of, oh, here we go again. Is this like Quebec? Is it separation Alberta government was introduced by the Premier, Danielle Smith, and her Justice Minister standing beside her. So it was introduced in the legislature, and then she rushed off to give a news conference, and the two of them stood there, and they were grilled by the alberta press corps and the the central point seemed to be

like who has final say as to what legislation could be used to prevent ottawa from infringing as they say and into provincial affairs well it was clear that the legislation according to the journalists made it very clear that the alberta to the journalists, made it very clear that the Alberta cabinet had a final say and they didn't have to talk to anybody. They could just write it up the way they wanted to, behind closed doors, and introduce it. Now, at first, the premier and the justice minister said, no, no, no, no, that's not the way it's going to work.

It doesn't work that way. Finally, after about 20 minutes of a very awkward news conference, they basically had to say, well, yes, that actually, that could happen. It could happen that way, which looked pretty bizarre, I got to tell you. And then what happens is the smoke and the mirrors and the truth finally kind of sorts itself out. The premier says, hey, listen, we don't want to ever even use this. This is just a threat to Ottawa to keep them

away from our things. So I'll be happy, she said, if I never use this legislation. Meanwhile, in Ottawa, there's a whole different kind of smoke and mirrors going on. The prime minister, you know, reporters kind of chase after him and say what hey what about the alberta sovereignty act what are you going to do about that and he does in his voice that we didn't

hear at all last week when he testified at the emergency sack he's pretty good at that in that testimony but here he was back to his old way of well you know i'm not really interested in the alberta sovereignty act i Act. I don't even think about it. I'm more concerned about the people. I'm concerned about inflation and healthcare and energy prices and whatever the things may be. So I'm just ignoring that Alberta thing and walks on by. So what did we get? Did we get a good lesson in smoke and mirrors from everybody yesterday? What do you think? Well, I think the starting point for me, Peter, is to go back to why did Premier Smith bring this piece of legislation forward? And it has to do with the fact that

when she was running for the leadership, she wanted to establish her kind of rebel credentials among the most um aggressively unhappy uh conservative voter base in the province and so she came up with this i you know this rhetoric which basically said if you want somebody to punch ottawa in the nose i'm your person i am the person who is going to take the most strident position, give voice and vent to your anger and your frustration with Ottawa. And that's where this came from. Now, the challenge, of course, once you're premiered, is that it is only at best, at best.

I mean, the high watermark for the number of Albertans who want to separate from Canada is 23, 24%. Everybody else wants to stay in Canada. And many of those people think that on the whole, Canada is a pretty good relationship for them, and indeed, even for the province. So she got herself trapped a little bit by this rhetoric of having to live up to the idea that she was going to be this champion for doing battle with Ottawa because she wanted to win the leadership of a party that has a lot of people in it who care about that issue. Now she's premier and she's trying to find a way to walk a fine line between sounding almost separatist enough for the hard, hard, hard separatist part of Alberta voters. But Canadian enough for everybody else who's saying, just hold on a second here. we didn't elect you i'm talking on behalf of or in the voice of um the rest of albertans who

aren't party members of the ucp we didn't elect you uh we didn't choose this idea of an alberta sovereignty act and we're not sure we want to do too much to tear the relationship with the rest of the country up um and so maybe modulate that a bit. I think that's what she tried to do. The problem, the second problem is, so, so that first problem really is I think she ends up sounding like a, a faux separatist to the separatists. And she ends up sounding half-hearted about canada to everybody else and

you know i kind of feel like this we've seen this movie before a version of it aaron o'toole tried to appeal to the the farther right base of the conservative party and then to the near right small c conservative voter and it ended up being the situation where he found himself in hot water with hardcore conservatives and and um not being that interesting to uh people who otherwise could consider voting conservative because they didn't think he was kind of centrist enough and and so i i don't think that that's a very viable strategy for her and i think jason kenney is is another case in point that she could learn from. But she chose this path and she chose it despite being advised not to go in this direction. There was plenty of commentary, not just in the media, but I'm sure the expert advisors that she has and in the public

service in Alberta that said this is a meaningless law. This is a piece of performance. I'd say performance art, but I don't think it was very artistic. I think that it just looks like a kind of a ham-fisted way of turning what was a strident political line and became a more mealy political line into something that looks like a piece of legislation, but otherwise doesn't really act like a piece of legislation. And that's some of what came out in the commentary after the fact and in the Q&A during the announcement. Well, all I would add to that is that, you know, two things really. It started off looking very ham-fisted and appealing, as you say,

to those who put her in the leader slash premier's chair. But it ended, after all this confusion, looking not like that at all. Looking like this really was performance art. Looking like we're never going to use this. Now, she didn't say we'll never use it, but she said my plan is to never use it. I don't want to have to use it. So on that scale, it looked performance-based. Now, I'll give her this part. She was very clear, even off the top, that this is not some separatist threat.

This is not some, in spite of using the word sovereignty, which appeals to a certain group, she said, I'm not a separatist. I love Canada. I this, I thus not a separatist. I love Canada. I this, I thus, you know that about Canada. So she made that very clear right out of the gate about where her personal standing was on the country. But, you know, she included her set piece on why she thinks for the last decade

Alberta has been basically screwed by Ottawa on a number of fronts. And that she felt this was needed to sort of set up a, I don't want to say a firewall, but to set up a threat that was now existing in Alberta if Ottawa pushed too far. Yeah. But I also, you know, I think the other half of the charade yesterday was what was going on in Ottawa. I can't believe that nobody in Ottawa cares about this or is examining it or the part of the bureaucracy and the Privy Council officer, wherever,

is not looking at this to see, okay, we better have a hard look at this so we know exactly what the possibilities are. But the prime minister basically dismissing it and saying, this is not my issue. I don't care about this. I care about the people and the things that are bothering them. They don't care about this right now. Right.

Well, let me, I want to pick up on that point, Peter, but I want to say one other thing about the law yesterday and the performance. The underneath the decision to have this law is a preoccupation with the idea and the thematic of the only reason there is pressure to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gases and fight climate change is because there's a liberal government in Ottawa. And that's just patently false. Almost all, if not all, of the major oil and gas producers in Alberta have their own carbon emissions and net zero targets and have them

because that's where their investors want them to go. That's what their employees expect them to do. Indeed, that's what the majority of Albertans want them to do. But it's easier, I think, politically for a conservative party to win seats especially in rural alberta to pretend that all of this pressure to reduce emissions and to find cleaner alternative energy sources is because there's a guy named trudeau in ottawa and so she'll continue with that fiction but more and more albertans every year know that it's a fiction. It's not really true. It kind of feels good when you say it, and it kind of brings people out to rallies. But the world is moving in a direction, and the smarter people that I've talked to in the energy sector or in the economy of Alberta or just regular folks in Alberta say, well, the last thing that we want to do is send

a giant flashing signal to the investors from around the world and the customers who might buy our products, energy or other products, that we are so-called anti-woke capital, that we don't care about inclusion or diversity or reconciliation or reducing carbon emissions. So this is the bigger issue, separate and apart from the law, for which she had all of the ability to do the things that she says she wants to do with the law without the law, just as every other premier. They can call for hearings to talk about how disgusted they are by federal incursions into their responsibility. They can pass motions. They can show up from the rooftops.

That's part of politics in Canada. It always has been. So the law is really just a confection and a bad one, I think, for the image of Alberta, because it speaks to an idea that the challenges that she wants to rally people around are really just a question of bad things being done by a bad government in Ottawa. Now, turning to Trudeau. Just before you get to Trudeau,

I know there will be some people in Alberta who are supportive of what Premier Smith is saying and suggesting, who are going to say, what the hell does he know, meaning you, about Alberta and what the oil industry in alberta thinks and what they're doing and you know who's some guy from ottawa to tell us what we think so you better give us a sense i mean i know um that you you've worked a lot with alberta energy companies and the oil industry in alber Alberta over the last at least decade but you better give us a hint of that so you yeah I think it's probably true that I've done more polling

of Albertans and Canadians and other parts of the country's country on energy issues for 25 years. And we published a lot of those polls showing where Albertans are at on things like a carbon tax, on emissions reduction, on everything going back to Kyoto, which I think was essentially the first global meeting about carbon emissions and climate change. And so there's no question that I'm not Albertan, but it doesn't mean I haven't studied Alberta public opinion. And what I'm trying to reflect on here is not how I wish Albertans were, but what I've seen in the data over the years, which produces, for example, the situation where Rachel Notley, out of nowhere, became the premier of Alberta after decades of conservative rule, and also produced a situation where Jason Kenney found himself in a situation where the hard right of his party didn't like him,

and the centre of the province didn't like him. And it was telling for me that within an hour or two of daniel smith tabling this legislation that jason kenney resigned uh elected office and i believe it was because he did not want to vote for this piece of legislation uh and i mean he was going to leave anyway. He had said that. But the timing was the most clear shot that I've seen taken in a long time by somebody who understands the power of a clear shot. So I'm sure there are going to be people, Peter, who are going to say he's a central Canadian. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Fair enough. People can have that opinion. But it is my opinion opinion and it's not just made up out of air it is something that i've studied a lot over the years okay um yeah trudeau well look there would have been two possible alternatives for trudeau uh one is to say i'm really worried about this, and I want Albertans to know that I want them to feel sovereign, and they don't need this act. Or he could have said, this is a terrible act, and I'm horrified by it, and Daniel Smith's a horrible premier. Neither of those make any sense for him.

The only option for him that makes sense, especially since he didn't just hear about this law yesterday, he's had briefings on it, he's had memoranda from the Justice Department lawyers who study these kinds of things and would have said, based on the law as we see it, it's meaningless. All it is, is a prop for more political activism, which is going to happen with or without the law. You're going to get that kind of rhetoric. And so the question of whether you say I'm going to engage in the rhetorical fight is really a question of are you going to give Danielle Smith more kindling to put on the

fire that she's starting to or she's trying to kind of keep going or are you not going to do that so the right answer for him I think was to say we're not going to be preoccupied with this question of sovereignty for Alberta we're going to be preoccupied with this question of sovereignty for Alberta. We're going to be preoccupied with the cost of living for Albertans and for other Canadians. And in a way, if you look at what Danielle Smith has been tweeting over the last 48 hours, I took a look before we recorded this, almost all of it is about the cost of living and those kinds of concerns. It's almost as though she knew she needed to table this thing, but she didn't really want to talk about it every day because she understood

the same phenomena that you and I have observed when we're looking at Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland is that the biggest criticism of her by the Scots is that she seems preoccupied with separation to the to the to the exclusion of other everyday concerns and i'm sure that danielle smith doesn't want to look like that that she wants to endlessly have this conversation about some form of of sovereignty within a united canada and have people go but what about the health care system or what about the school system and you know where's the economy going okay so at the end of the day you agree with me there was a lot of smoke mirrors and probably a little less of the truth

yesterday on both sides of this story no i i don't think trudeau did anything wrong i think that he said you didn't like the way he said it you thought it was more like the think trudeau did anything wrong i think that he said the right thing you didn't like the way he said it you thought it was more like the old trudeau than the new trudeau emergencies act trudeau and i didn't feel that that that much maybe a little bit but my my takeaway we didn't get a chance to talk about his um his uh his appearance how much of it was performative? God help us. If you and I could perform for five hours, that'd be pretty good.

I don't know. You know, it feels to me that at a certain point, it just has to look, it has to be a little bit more real than you might want to give it acknowledgement for but my takeaway was when justin trudeau is in a scrum or a press conference he has a style that reflects a sense of frustration um and uh and a way of kind of

delivering his points where he doesn't want to kind of stop and take a breath, or he doesn't want to finish the sentence too early. He doesn't want, maybe it's because he doesn't want the next question to come. Maybe because he doesn't like the question, maybe because he's had too many unpleasant encounters with the questioner. And he's not alone in that. Literally every politician who's ever been in the limelight for any length of

time has kind of found themselves disliking the scrum. They all like it at the beginning when it's the first opportunity to deliver their point of view. But that wears off very quickly and it becomes a, I don't like this anymore. Why do I have to do this? That's the kind of the intern. So in a press conference or a scrum, that's the kind of the feeling that comes out. And the way that that manifests for Justin Trudeau is a different style than what we saw at the hearings. And the other style that he has is for the public town hall, where, you know, you and I have watched these over the years with him.

He'll kind of walk around the room, and he'll try to animate people, and he'll be animated himself. But to my eyes, it does look performative. It looks like a show. It is a show. It doesn't mean it's bad, but it isn't that appealing, And it feels overly performative. I thought yesterday was sort of a, it was very short. So I don't want to overstate it. But I kind of felt like his tone of voice was a little bit more like Friday.

But it was a scrum. So it had a little bit more of that scrum feel too well one area where they for sure were the same is they they both didn't look entirely comfortable in the scrum um danielle smith really didn't look she got increasingly uncomfortable as the thing went on and the looks that she was giving and the number of times she tossed to her justice minister to try and get her out of the situation she was in um the whole thing looked uh it looked awkward to say the least okay we're gonna move on um i can't say that we we've faced agreement on on the way we look at yesterday but um it's close you You know, it's relatively close.

It doesn't have to be, you know, like. No, it absolutely doesn't have to be. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then come back, and Bruce is going to defend Donald Trump. So that should be interesting. Here we go. By the way. Okay, we're back.

Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. And you're listening on Sirius XM channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or today, being Wednesday, it's also available online and video wise on YouTube on my YouTube channel you can find that by just going to YouTube or going to my bio on Twitter or Instagram and clicking on the link and we do the video podcast for two reasons one because Bruce likes to get dressed up and look extremely proper. And I, after 50 years of getting dressed up and standing in front of a camera, I find it's time in my life where I can just be the real me.

I don't think I've worn a tie. Let your hair down. Nice. Thank you. I don't think I've worn a tie maybe more than once or twice since my last appearance on The National. So I'm in a very relaxed mode. Yeah.

And continue to do so. Okay, next topic. I did a little tease that Bruce is going to defend Donald Trump. That'll be the day. Here's my question about the latest Trump fiasco. You've been either covering politics, analyzing politics, or being in politics for most of your adult life. And you've been an advisor to key leaders in both the Liberal Party

and the Conservative Party over time. And I want to know, can you draw any kind of comparison to a situation where you would think it was okay to let your leader head out to dinner with people he didn't know, claims to not know. One of whom is a white nationalist, anti-Semite. The other you kind of know who's an anti-Semite. Both publicly declared positions on both these guys. And he sits down, he has a dinner, and he claims, well, I didn't really know who they were.

Well, I kind of knew Kanye West, or Ye, as he's called now. But can you imagine something like that ever unfolding, where as an advisor to a leader or a former leader? I mean, can you imagine Brian Mulroney say, oh, I'm going to go out and meet some people at a dinner. I don't know who they are. Haven't checked them out. Haven't been vetted. The Secret Service doesn't know about them.

Or Jean Chrétien saying the same thing. Not Secret Service, but RCMP. Can you imagine anything like that happening no this is total hogwash i really feel for american journalists who are faced with this dilemma all the time from trump which is which of the outrageous things that he just did should i focus on first and then second and then third and what falls to fourth, fifth or sixth and I don't end up having time to focus on it. But first of all, you know, I've been lucky enough to have dinner at your house with you and your wife, Cynthia,

on many occasions, especially when we were spending some time in Scotland, but the notion that you would say, come over for dinner and, and I would show up with two other people like who does that? Nobody does that. And so if nobody does that in regular life, just regular people, I, Oh,

hi, Cynthia and Peter. I just brought these other two people one of whom you know one of them we don't know can we sit down it's not a thing so take that just that general like what's that standard for normal people and say how would it work if um you were the president of the united states and you had this place called mar-a-lago and i said i gotta talk to you i'm really having a rough time and i need your advice on something and you go yeah all right come on over and i show up with two people one of whom is a raging anti-semite um well first of all you have a dozen or more secret service people around you all the time

and nobody goes to your dinner table comes in your house without them knowing who that person is without there being a discussion about whether that person is welcome in the place. They're not setting a table for Donald and Yi. And it's like, oh, pull up a few more chairs here without staff going, wait, what? Who's here with him? Like he has staff there. He has Secret Service people there. There are so many ways that this didn't happen by accident.

Even if you accept that Trump broke all of the normal rules and loved the chaos, he didn't love it that much. There were some checks that happened through which this person passed. And back to my point about journalists that the first focus has been this kind of horrified reaction that he's having meal with this this anti-semitic person whose whose comments on the public record are really shocking yes and that is the big kind of source of horror i get that and then it's why haven't all of the other republicans uh really trashed trump for doing that many of them have many of them have been quite silent about it so that's another legitimate

issue but what's kind of passed under the radar at least in the in the discussions that i've seen the journalism that i've seen has been the this his of it, which is, I didn't know this guy was coming, and he showed up, and then he went away, and I don't have anything to say about that. That doesn't hold water at all, as far as I'm concerned. And so I'm glad you asked that question, and that's my take on it. The line I like best from one of the reporters who's been covering this story is, how do you make sure you don't invite an anti-Semite who you don't know to dinner? And the answer is, make sure you don't invite an anti-Semite

you do know to dinner. It's true. It's true. Because, you know, Kanye West, that's what got him into so much trouble was his anti-Semitic remarks that have been constant and have been, you know, glaring in the last, you know, few months. Donald Trump's daughter is Jewish. His grandkids are Jewish. How does that, how does it not occur to him, even about Kanye West?

You know, he sort of imagined in his public comment, Trump did, that, you know, Kanye West has been kind of badly treated by sponsors and the business community for the things that he said, as opposed to he said some things that were outrageously anti-semitic and the world is reacting to that so you can't look at him having that dinner and and say he didn't really know what kanye west had been saying and he's kind of unaware of the uh of the anti-semitic context for Kanye West, let alone the uninvited, unexpected, unknown guest, the only conclusion you can come to is that he's launched his presidential re-election bid. He knows there's competition that could beat him.

He knows the people that he needs to have in his corner and cheering him on and he's sending a signal to them he's sending a signal to them and it's so deliberate not accidental and the further proof that it wasn't accidental is that even as his son-in-law and daughter were probably reading his comments wondering is he going to castigate this anti-semite he didn't and he continues not to he just says i didn't know him well that's deliberate i mean over the years that we watched trump we know that when he has had chances to distance himself from racists he almost always decides not to yeah and he sends signals just as you said and this can be seen as a signal like he sent to the proud boys another racist

white nationalist group yeah when he said uh you know stand stand back and stand by. Yes. Clear signal, which they took and, you know, printed up T-shirts saying that exactly on them. And then they were there on January 6th. As for his daughter, she seems to have cut loose from her father for the first time in a very public way. And some of it may have something to do with this what's been interesting about the last couple of weeks ever since the midterm disaster uh and now especially so with this is for the first time we seem to be seeing serious cracks uh within certain elements

of the republican party now these are cracks we've been waiting to see since 2016, since that tape came out of him talking about grabbing certain parts of a woman's body. But in the last two weeks, the number of Republicans who have stood in front of a microphone, in front of cameras, and said this was wrong, has not been insignificant. It's been rather substantial. Not from the leaders of the Republican Party, not from the Mitch McConnells or the Kevin McCarthy or the variety of Ted Cruz's and all the other, you know, strange collection of Republican senators

and leaders in that party. But a lot of, well, more than foot soldiers, but significant elements within that party have actually stood up and said things. And if there's, you know, this may be, I don't know how many times we've said this, this may be the moment that finally starts to put real distance between the Republican Party in an attempt to remake itself and Donald Trump. You know, the next think back to the primary season before the 2016 election, there were, I think, 17 candidates, if memory serves me correctly, and 16 of them really were anti-Trump and there was Trump. And so the 16 that lost went away with a lesson, which is that the power of Trump in terms of rallying that base is pretty

strong. And it had and that that kind of carried him all of the years since that in terms of his ability to stare down people within his party who thought he was doing horrible things, and to primary them and to run candidates against them and to kind of ridicule them. And that's worked for him for a long time. And now after the midterms, it became possible on top of being necessary for Republicans to say he's actually not had a really great record. He lost his reelection. He, you know, he lost the first midterms that he had a chance to fight, and he didn't do well this time. And a lot of the candidates that he promoted didn't do very well. So to challenge his record

as a electoral success story became possible. And then when DeSantis looked in the polls as though he was a viable alternative to Trump among the base of the Republican Party, just enabled everybody guy who wants to be Speaker of the House, is careful not to criticize Trump for having dinner with this anti-Semite so far. And the reason he's, he said nobody should have dinner with an anti-Semite, I think, but he's been very careful not to say anything negative about trump so there's still some of that infection there uh in that party uh and it has to do ultimately peter with the i was having dinner with some folks talking about the difference between canadian politics and american in canada we have a 20 segment of our uh voter base that is pro-Trump, 14, 15 to 20% pro-Trump. And there are a lot of other attitudes that go alongside that.

In America, it's more like 35%. It's a much bigger political force. And so those politicians who are wondering where the funding is going to come from, who's going to show up and vote on the Republican side, they've got that on their mind. And certainly that kind of figure, 30% to 35%, probably a little higher within just the Republican Party, definitely a little higher. That's a significant group to work off of if you're in a race

against more than a few people. And it's a real hard choice to decide that you're in a race against more than a few people. That's what helped him win in 2016. It's a real hard choice to decide that you're going to push back against them, which is how they interpret criticism of Trump. But it's still the right thing to do. Okay, we're almost out of time. This has moved very quickly, the clock today. But I have two or three minutes to deal with are we going to talk about your golf swing i sent you a nice video clip of your swing

oh we're not going to talk about that today no the tip that i gave you okay no i'm working on that well all right what's the last item elon musk twitter and. Put those three words together and tell me the latest. Well, you know, amidst all of the stuff that you could look at and say, well, he's a genius of a sort that we can't, the rest of us can't quite discern. He's making all these moves that seem like bad moves, but there must be some genius because he's got, you know, he's done these other things in his past. I think that the weight of that argument is drifting away. I think that the arguments that he's just a master of chaos and the consistency of his thoughts isn't there.

And the strategy for rebuilding value into Twitter isn't clear. Yesterday's decision to basically say we're ending the work that we had been doing to keep people from promoting misinformation around COVID. And as you may recall, as our listeners may recall, during COVID, there were quite a lot of sources of misinformation, probably some of them foreign, all of them with, most of them with ill intent to disrupt, to kind of deny or undercut the legitimacy of authority figures, whether it was Dr. Fauci or the CDC or the pharmaceutical companies or the medical experts. There was a lot of disinformation.

It had an effect on whether people were willing to take the vaccine or willing to wear masks or willing to accept some sort of slowing of their social interactions. And so the wisdom at the time at Twitter was that there needed to be some effort to moderate that kind of content because it was having an effect on lives and it was disrupting the economy and it was causing division. And because the underlying content was false. So Musk decided yesterday that the time had come for him to say, we're no longer checking that. If people want to flood that information into our platform, that's going to be okay with us.

It takes a very deliberate decision to say we're going to make an announcement of that, right? As opposed to even if you thought you didn't want to do it anymore because you wanted to lay off the people whose job it was to do it, and maybe there's not as much disinformation about COVID as there used to be, you could do that. And even as I'm saying that, I don't think that's the right idea. I'm just saying if you felt like you didn't need to do it anymore because the risk was down, probably you would just stop doing it. You wouldn't decide that you were going to announce that you were going to stop doing it.

But to announce that you're going to stop doing it, in addition to the other measures that he's been taking, is again a signal. And the signal that he's sending is much more like the Trump signal than I had expected it to be. i expected him to be somebody who would say ah you know i'm sometimes a democrat sometimes a republican mostly a libertarian but the series of things that he did including the day before the midterms just you know endorsing voting republican across the board offering trump his platform back on Twitter. You know, they're all of a piece. He's trying to reach out to those folks who felt like their voices and their misinformation hasn't been heard enough,

hasn't been prominent enough. And it's hard to imagine that any good can come of that. You know, i got to tell you i still can't figure it out i hear exactly what you're saying and what his motivation may be but at the same time he's risking billions of dollars of not only his own money but his company's money he's risking the reputation of his various companies not just Twitter. Tesla's taken like a huge hit this year. Yeah. And I don't get it. I don't really understand.

Listen, you know, I acknowledge this guy is brilliant in a lot of different ways, but I don't understand if he's being brilliant in this, just what his real motivation is on doing the things he's being brilliant in this, just what his real motivation is on doing the things he's been doing and what he's done to Twitter, what he's done to Tesla. I don't get it. I don't quite understand it.

Maybe it'll become clearer. I occasionally get mail from people who are big Elon Muskon musk fans um not necessarily twitter fans or you know or liking what he's been doing with twitter but saying you watch this guy he's he knows what he's doing he's got a plan he's you know you just can't figure it out yet none of us can but he will and we'll all be surprised when it becomes clear. Well, you know, maybe they're right. I mean, he's been in that moment before.

But boy, right now, this last couple of months, it just looks like an ugly picture unfolding in front of Elon Musk and his turf. Okay, I've got one one minute if you want to say anything more this is the time to say it well peter i want to say is i just hope you have a great day and look at that little video uh that i sent you of your golf swing a couple more times because if you do that two or three times a day uh come the next time we tee it up i think it's going to work better i think it's just a really good practice. Well, it may well do.

And I can see where my fault lies. The problem is just trying to clear it up and trying to remember the 64 things that you've told me that I should be thinking of as I begin my backswing. Well, I'm here for you every day. You can send me a question anytime you have one if it ever works you'll be sorry because suddenly i'll be leaving you in the dust true enough okay that's it for smoke mirrors and the truth for this day tomorrow is thursday your turn and the random ranter if you got something to say say it now the man's bridge podcast at gmail.com the man's bridge

podcast at gmail.com thanks br, and thank you for listening out there. We'll talk to you again in just 24 hours.