16: The Power of Disinformation vs Authentic Dialogue

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsh and I’m here for another episode of Red Tory with my good friend Alan Gregg. And today we’re joined by another old friend, James Hoggan, AKA Jim Hogan, joining us all the way from Salt Spring Island.

Now, as I mentioned, Jim, I pretty much start every episode of Red Tory by saying, hey, Alan, what are you paying attention to? But I will start also by saying, I think we’re finally able to take a breath and the news cycle is not as crazy as it’s been.

But with that said, Alan, what do you got your eyes on?

I think you’re right. I think there is a pause, including in the White House right now.

I think there is a little bit of reflection going on there that hasn’t been going on for the first 55 days.

I mean, I’ve been watching the markets because they’re always kind of dumbfounding anyway, the way the markets respond, capital markets respond to current affairs.

I mean, there’s no question we talked, you know, last podcast about how much the markets hate uncertainty and that the back and forth of tariffs, no tariffs, the toilet seat approach that, that Trump was employing. Spooked, spooked people.

Also, though, I think the growing kind of, I don’t know, you would call it resilience or determination on the part of the eu, Canada, and a little bit more reservedly, Mexico to say we’re not going to take this sitting down. And I think that’s also part of why the news cycle is slowing down a little bit, because I think the White House realized that, too.

For all of Trump’s talk, and I know we are getting into this a little bit more with Doug Ford and his retreat on the electricity export tax, that, this, this whole notion that we don’t need anything from Canada. I think more and more constituencies are starting to stand up and say, well, you know, we really do.

If we don’t get those nutrients, you know, we don’t have any crops, we don’t get that oil and gas. There was talk the energy minister just the other day said, well, maybe there’ll be no tariffs at all on, on Canada’s energy stuff.

So there’s, it’s not as chaotic as it has been, but there’s still lots going on. What about you, Jim? What are you looking at in Salt Spring island these days?

Yeah, well, I, I was just talking. I just had David Suzuki over for dinner.

He was, how is he? He’s good.

You know, he’s the sort of the rub. He, he, he gave words at the Salt Spring Island Film Festival, which has been around for about 30 years.

And this was the most well attended film festival event. Event of the 30 years, having David there. And the. Some of the feedback from the back of the crowd quietly was that David seems kind of depressed.

And so I’ve been talking about, talking to David about being depressed. So that’s. I guess that’s one thing, but there was something else that came up.

Jesse wasn’t born then, so correct that.

That time. You got it right.

A little context there.

So.

But power.

1. One of the things I was saying to David was back in those days, you know, and you know, for maybe 20, 30 years that I.

40 years that I was in the business, people did, people hid their lies. People did not. Back in those days, people did not actually want anyone to know that they were lying about things. Right?

No.

Now today, it’s like a badge of honor, you know, down south. And I, it all, it puzzles me.

I just find that really, like, how can being a liar about, you know, I don’t know, Haitians eating pets and Springfield be a good thing in anybody’s world? So that, I mean, that’s a question I have for you guys. Like, what the hell? Yeah, there’s something like weird about that.

It’s the backdrop, isn’t it, of growing cynicism towards public office, public office holding.

I mean, I’ve been around for a long time too, but even, you know, in the mid-80s, you had, you know, 60, 65% of the population say they had at least a somewhat, if not very favorable impression of politicians. Today that’s down to 8%. And when you come to the view that all politicians are crooks, all politicians are liars, all politicians, you know, break.

Break their promises. All of a sudden, being a crook, lying and breaking your promise is just part of the norm, or worse, and the system is fed on it.

We’ve ruined the categories.

What’s happened or worse. We now see it as an asset to Jim’s point that we’re like, oh, he’s really good at lying. He must be a good negotiator. Or he’s really good at lying.

He’ll go after the deep state, he’ll drain the swamp. So it is scary how that’s flipped.

I gave a speech to the Public Policy Forum four or five years ago, and it was called On Authenticity, How Truth Can Save Politics. And with hindsight, I was completely wrong about the truth part.

But the notion and the basic assumption was, you know, having concluded that there were no more great men and women, people were looking for good men and women, and that character, rather than performance, increasingly was going to become the litmus and that truth and people who were really forthright and honest and authentic were going to be embraced by the population. You know, and then along came Rob Ford, you know, and just said, what happened? What happened here? And then you know, trumped by Trump on this. And.

But there’s still the. The undercurrent of authenticity that at least I know what I’m getting from these guys.

If they’re all crooks and if they’re all scum and if they’re all liars, at least this guy, you know, is. Is telling it the way he actually feels as opposed to what he thinks I want it is very toxic.

And, Jim, I know that you’ve done a lot of work on propaganda and misinformation and. And how public discourse is falling apart. And Jesse did a brilliant piece in subtext just the other day about how it’s.

It literally has, you know, dissolved our. Our notion of the public and the public square and, you know, that being a place where. Where we find common ground and common good.

Yeah, sorry, Jesse, I keep.

No, no, please, go ahead, Jim.

So. So I. So back in the day, when I started, it was maybe actually 10, 15 years into it, we. We got hired.

And the people who hired us were ex Ben and Jerry’s ice cream guys. Right. So they’re. Oh, yeah, we were working for a big subsidiary of Whole Foods, and they had this food poisoning. And so we were hired. And in the.

In the hiring process, they said to me, the lawyer said, so how would you approach this? And, you know, I sort of thought, well, so I said, well, you know, in situations like this, you want to do the right thing.

You want to be seen to be doing the right thing, and you don’t want to get those two mixed up.

Right.

And they hired me, like, immediately. Right. I don’t know if I’d get hired today. Right.

I mean, people who think like I did back then, which was, you know, if you don’t want people thinking you’re an sob, then stop being an sob. Right. I’m not sure those days are still here.

Yeah, Yeah. I used to have a plaque on my desk that said, good morals is good marketing.

Yeah, I mean, that was. So. So I had this conversation this morning with Severin Suzuki, David’s daughter.

Daughter, yeah.

And she’s doing her PhD on sort of partly on Haida history. And anyway, so I was. I was telling her about this paper. I’ve just finished this paper on disinformation. And one of the things that struck me, and I.

I probably shouldn’t be as surprised by this as I was, was I interviewed. I interviewed this guy named Richard Petty, who’s a. An, you know, world famous expert on persuasion.

I interviewed a guy named Peter Kim who’s studies trust building. And then I interviewed, oh, this guy named Guy Itchikov, who’s. Who studies high quality listening.

And then I interviewed a whole bunch of people who are kind of conflict resolution, dispute resolution people. And I was going through the material, trying to figure out, like, what is. What’s the theme here in this part of the paper?

And I noticed that all of those people talked about reciprocity. And I thought, well, that’s interesting, you know, and then.

And then I noticed they weren’t just talking about reciprocity, we’re actually talking about positive reciprocity. And this idea that if you send black and white messages out, you get black and white messages back.

And so if you send out respect and listening, you get that back. So if you really want somebody to listen to you, the first thing you got to do is listen to them.

And so I’m telling Severin this story, and she said that is one of the six principles that the Haida just wrote down. And the sort of Haida way of approaching things, which is that you pay attention to the power of reciprocity. That that’s.

That’s basically human relations. And I kind of feel like the world of the environment that I’ve been involved in for so long is a.

Is more about scientific data and facts and information and terrif. A terrifying future. And not as much as it should be about reciprocity.

And as these people, like these MAGA people, benefit for some weird reason by tearing people apart, the job has to be pulling people back together again. Right? Because these are. This is not impossible. These are. These are not impossible divisions. Right. It’s.

There just has been, you know, these guys are kind of disinformation, you know, toxic discourse entrepreneurs. And so I think this reciprocity thing is something I want to dig more into.

Yeah, yeah.

And to your point, it speaks how the profit motives of the attention economy incentivize the bad behavior, incentivize on the negative reciprocity, putting shit out there and getting shit back in return, but I.

Think gets more attention.

Yeah, absolutely. But I think there’s something to be said about connecting authenticity and reciprocity.

Because what I liked about what you were saying, Alan, in terms of authenticity is I think we see the silver lining of what comes next, right? Of what the alternative is to this current shit show that we find ourselves in.

Because I would like to see the alternative to Trump be actually authentic. Not authentic in the Killing the category, but to Jim’s point, authentic in terms of listening, in terms of being vulnerable.

And I think the reciprocity also is reflected in a kind of grassroots digital culture of people who don’t actually want attention. What they want is connection. They want meaning, they want friendship. Right?

And that is where some of the non toxic digital spaces are currently flourishing. Obviously there’s the challenge of how do we get through this period to get to that other side.

But I had this really weird conversation yesterday which I was just reminded of, and we’ve talked about this, Alan, before, in terms of the paradox of who is now anti establishment and who is pro establishment. But it spawned upon me that MAGA as a concept Make America Great again is actually inclusive. Right?

Because even with the exception of non Americans, if you are American, you could say, hey, that’s me, and hey, I want it to be great again. So it is a.

Except that it’s, it’s, it’s. Its foundation is nostalgia.

Yes.

I mean, not only in terms of the tents in what in which we’re speaking. You saw it in Brexit. Yeah, as well. And that excludes, that’s my point, though. Who it excludes, though, is everyone who’s not part.

But, but that’s the trick. That’s the trick. Nostalgia is inherently subjective. Everyone imagines that nostalgia differently.

Because there is the paradox of blacks and Latins who support Trump. Right? You’re like, wait a minute.

But the inclusivity of it allows them to bend it to their meaning, allows it to bend it to their version of nostalgia, even if it is contradictory with Trump’s in contrast to the Democrats.

And this goes to your point about the basket of deplorables who still have a position of arrogance, who still have a position of we are better than everybody else. And that needs to flip, because it’s actually the Trumps, to your point, who are xenophobic, right?

And elitist, and it’s actually the Democrats who should have policies that are inclusive and are pro working class. But this is the paradox of the current communication environment where that’s flipped.

And I’m still waiting for the Democrats to come up with Jim’s point. A more reciprocal approach of communicating, even a more authentic approach at communicating.

And I think that’s when we’ll start to see things swing back, because I did. To your point, Alan, you’ve been telling me to take a closer look at Bernie’s town halls, and I did watch a YouTube video of it, and it was electric.

I mean, these places are sold out.

And.

And he is reciprocal. He is authentic. He is vulnerable in a way that very few other politicians are.

Let Jim in here.

So. So one of the people that we interviewed for this paper, this discussion paper was. She wrote. Oh, God, now I’ve totally forgotten her name.

Arley Hofchild. She. So she wrote. She’s just written another book, but these. She’s written two books, basically, about how she joined.

The first, it was the Tea Party, and she spent a lot of time with them, and then she joined a MAGA communities and spent time with them. And she. She sort of. She’s considered like, one of the leading sociologists in the world. And she said.

She said to me that what we have to be careful about, like what. What progressives have to be careful about is offending people, you know, creating a sense of shame or offending people’s pride.

And Trump has basically come along and said to these people, look, you didn’t just lose the American dream. Somebody stole it from you. And let me tell you who they are. And, and this is what they’re trying to do to you. And he basically took.

And he turned all of these legal problems that he had into their problems and into their sort of the attack of these elites on. On them. The sort of ignoring of them, the undermining of the. Making them feel more ashamed. Right. And.

And she said, you really need to be better at having conversations with people you disagree with without disrespecting them, especially disrespecting them that deeply that you’re making. You’re talking about things they’re ashamed of.

Or that. Or that it should be shameful that they hold the views that they have. Yeah.

Which include that they’ve been left behind and abandoned by elites who run the deep state.

Yeah. And. And that to bring it back full circle. That’s the problem with the belligerent culture we have now conversationally.

Go ahead, because that’s very interesting you bring up belligerence because I, again, I just thinking here, and Jesse always accuses me of being Schoolboyish about all of this stuff. I mean, he’s hysterical. He sees the, the tanks coming over the border. I see civil society and the Rotary Club saving us at of the day.

But I mean, when I hear you guys talk about connection and reciprocity, I mean, what I started to think about was a guy called John Helliwell, who is the guy, the top researcher on happiness. Why are people happy? Why are nations happy? And the cornerstone of happiness is connection.

It really is feeling that you are part of something, that there’s a network, that you have neighbors who respect you, that you have a family that, that, that love you. And I mean I, as you know, I mean I do public opinion research and part of that is kind of trying to understand the public mood.

And I mean I’ve described the public mood as owly belligerent would work as well. There’s no happiness out there right now on any side on progressives or magna, because there is no sense of belonging.

As you’re saying in your substack piece that the public square is kind of gone.

The place where we go and are assisted by science and evidence to make sure that when we’re making mistakes over time we will find a path where we can agree by virtue of eliminating the stuff that is not scientific and not evidence based. So there’s something there how you, you know, short of kind of finding the next Mahatma Gandhi, I mean, although how that materializes I don’t know.

But it’s an interesting concept and worth thinking more about, I think.

And I’ll use that to make a joke and then turn it into a question for, for Jim. It does make me wonder, and I flag this for future conversation because I want to think about it first.

The online equivalent of Canadian peacekeepers.

If what’s left of the public square is just a fight club, maybe we need a peacekeeping force to try to get in there and stand between sides and mediate. Kind of ludicrous. But the question I want to throw to you, Jim, because I suspect you’ll have a lot on this.

I, and I think Alan as well, I’ve really been trying to wrap my head around the framing of the current moment we’re in and the way in which framing is being used to not only limit debate but facilitate these fights.

Because it strikes me so many of these fights, so many of the dunking online, the belligerence, the trying to one up people is fundamentally based on the frame being the octagon, right? The frame being the boxing ring and an easy way to get out of the fight is to change the frame. Right.

An easy way to make it instead of insulting somebody or getting into I’m right, you’re wrong. It could be. Well, have you thought about it this way?

So as part of the research and writing, let alone your career in crisis communications, what role can framing, but more importantly frame changing and frame switching play in addressing this kind of information environment that we’re talking about?

Yeah, it’s so, it’s interesting because that is what Richard Petty works on. So he, he, in his work on persuasion, he’s studying this thing he calls two sided messaging.

And, and it, it basically is rather than saying, you know, you should wear a mask because it’ll make you safer and your, your grandparents are not going to die from COVID whatever that you say. Look, I don’t, I don’t like the government telling me what to do either. I, I, I find it really uncomfortable. It’s hard to breathe.

You know, these, they hide my face so people don’t recognize each other. You know, I don’t like masks either. However, you know, it’s a good idea to wear one because it’ll make you safer. Right.

So in their research, basically what they found was that people who have strong moral views really, really appreciate people agreeing with them.

And so if you can find some way to actually agree with the person you’re disagreeing with, then you’re actually, you’ve actually changed the conversation. And what, what they found got this guy who itch cough who studies high quality listening.

He found something very similar that you, by, by listening in a way that someone recognizes that you’re kind of getting them, that you can reduce polarization. Right. So to me, when I hear these guys talking about this, what I see is exactly that thing you said about re, reframing the conversation.

You’re, you’re essentially changing the conversation.

You’re, you’re actually, you’re, you’re leaving the ring and you’re, and what they, what both of these guys found in their research is when you do this kind of stuff, either deep listening or, or this two sided messaging, the conversation becomes more complex, which basically means you’re actually talking about what the issue actually, you’re getting closer to talking about what the issue actually is. So I think that’s one of the answers.

Yeah, framing is very interesting. There’s an organization called the Framing Institute and they developed a research methodology that I’ve used many times before.

And it, it goes to dialogue and it really does. And, and, and understanding is if they’ll Start with a single proposition.

Do you strongly support, support, oppose or strongly oppose more measures to reduce carbon footprint in the world? And they get a baseline kind of the thing. And then they include a different spokesperson and a different statement.

And so they’d say, a well known environmentalist says that unless we reduce our carbon footprint, the planet is going to be extinct. Then they say, do you strongly support, Support, oppose. Strongly oppose.

And then the next one would be a scientist says that we can create many, many jobs and create a healthier environment if we reduce the carbon footprint.

And then they look at this and the difference, the variance in the levels of support, how the baseline support changes based on who is saying it and the, and the persuasive message that they are using to support their position is massive. And it points to one thing that, you know, anyone who’s been in the business knows is that public opinion is, is not just volatile.

I mean, it’s organic. You know, it jumps up and down, it moves, it shifts, it evolves.

But that if you go with the right spokesperson, if you go with the right message, you can bring most of the public around to how you view.

And I think part of our frustration with the Democrats and progressives is that to Jim, to your point, they don’t listen enough to know what that framing might be, because.

And in some instances you can, you know, I shouldn’t say this, but you almost agree that what is being said is so fucking nutty that to engage is almost an insult to your own moral sense of what is right and wrong. But that’s a big part of the problem that we’re facing right now.

And I think to your point, Alan, the diplomacy angle to this, because we talked about this with Zelensky.

And of course the irony is, after Zelenskyy had that humiliating experience in the White House, he then basically had to turn around and literally apologize, literally sign the deal that they insisted agree to this ceasefire, which Russia broke on the first day.

How do I think, on the one hand we are having a conversation that I wish center and left politicians were listening to, but at the same time, how do you engage, whether on diplomacy, whether on even Journal. Again, I don’t want to use the crazy language, but there is a craziness to the policies and the politics coming out of the White House.

And when you were saying that, Alan, when you were talking about the trying out different spokespeople and trying out different spokes messages, I had this chilling thought. It was like, well, yes, that’s exactly why Trump would have a Cabinet that is ready for primetime tv.

Of course, that’s exactly why his primary criteria, second only to loyalty, is their ability to perform. Because I mentioned before we started, I watched a 30 minute interview with Lutnick that was only a few days ago, and I was really impressed.

I was impressed with his ability to think on the fly, his ability to deal with a journalist who was trying to pigeonhole him, and yet he was toeing the boss’s line. He was 100% saying exactly what Trump wanted him to say.

And I thought, wow, this is a really formidable group when you think about how stiff and boring most politicians or most officials, institutional officials tend to be.

So either of you, do you have a sense as to whether we are just three wise researchers kind of talking in the theoretical or whether there is some strategy here, some blueprints here for those who are in a position to deal with this, to start dealing with this in a more effective way?

I don’t know if there’s a blueprint or a strategy. I’m a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t right now.

That said, is there increasing consensus among progressives in the center left that there has to be one and the strategy has to be one that they’ve not employed in the past and it has to require an entire different approach to constituencies that once were easy to align with the center left and now have been completely alienated? Absolutely.

You know, where that leadership is going to come from is, is hard to tell because, you know, the group is so diverse and, and right now, I guess that’s the other thing too. Is, is so leaderless in certainly in the United States. Right. Right now. So, Jim, you got any views there?

Well, and Jim, allow me to reframe that slightly so I can maybe get you to pivot as well. You’re literally on the far left of the country there in Salt Spring Island.

I’m curious, based on what Alan is saying and kind of applying it, what’s your take on current Canadian contemporary politics? Whoa.

You know, I don’t really pay as much attention to politics as I should because I’ve been, you know, two years doing all these interviews and with this paper.

But I kind of feel like another thing that surprises me about public opinion and politics is that Canada is really not as different as it used to be from the United States in my mind.

Because, and that, I think, is because a lot of people in Canada are consuming the same media material online as American people on the far right are I. And so, so I. That kind of shocks me. I feel like for me, I’m a huge fan of Bernie Sanders.

And, and that’s kind of an odd thing because I, I was a business person, right? Like we were the PR person, the PR group behind Gordon Campbell.

You know, we, I mean, I was also, I also did a lot of work with, you know, other people on the left, but we, that was our main for like, I think like 15 years or so. And so I’m not like, opposed to business.

So I kind of think of myself as more like an independent, like a person, person in the middle, you know, And I used to think that Canadians were sort of like that.

And I don’t know, you know, Greg certainly knows more about this than I do, but I kind of feel like when you, when you create, when you polarize things, you can be just as much of a problem to the sort of collective misunderstanding or lack of understanding of issues as the. Even if you have all the facts on your side, you can be as much of a problem as the person who’s lying, right?

And so, you know, arrogance and imperialistic ways of going about speech, public speech can be just as bad as disinformation, right? Because you create this, you create this high conflict.

And so I think that the job of public figures more than kind of clarifying the facts is reducing high conflict to healthy conflict and to sort of, you know, create the space where there’s enough respect that you can at least listen to somebody for a few minutes.

And I, I think if you can’t do that, like, look at this, look at these ads, you know, these ads that are coming out, you know, I don’t know, is that new? It just seems so like dark and red and he’s evil. And then we got a really good evil shot.

I mean, I, I know politicians have done stuff like that, but it seems a bit more intense than before. Am I wrong?

No, go ahead, Alan.

I was gonna say yes and no. I mean, I’ve done research on this and it shows that Canadians aren’t particularly polarized. Very few of us are in the end zones.

Almost all of us are between the 45 yard lines.

But our political process is very polarized and that in fact, those who are the least happy with the political choices they have available tend to be those who consider themselves moderate. And then, in fact, I just wrote a piece today for the Toronto Star. I mean, part of the Mark Carney appeal is not just kind of experience.

Man who’s been able to manage crises before is that he is a moderate and that he’s, you know, boring in some respects. People are tired of the rhetoric. They’re tired of the polarization that they see emitting from the political system. And that alienates them further.

And the people it alienates the most are the ones whose voice has to be. Whose voice should be heard more and more and more because they are reasonable, but they are prepared to compromise because they do value consensus.

And they’re the ones who are being marginalized in political discourse this day. So it’s a little bit different than a lot of the conventional wisdom would have us America. I mean, I used quoted before.

I mean, Gwen Dyer had a great line. He says Canadians have no frame of reference to understand the United States because half of it is exactly like Canada.

Toronto is just like Boston, he says. The other half is exactly like Tehran. It’s backwards, it’s overly religious, it’s extremist. And.

And there is no, you know, Red Deer isn’t like Biloxi. I mean, it’s like something.

And, you know, Seymour Martin Lipset’s very early work on Canada, US Differences, I mean, looked at religiosity is the single biggest difference between the two nations.

And that that was not just a function of religiosity, but a manifestation of extremism and an unwillingness to embrace compromise and instead to embrace, you know, hardened, hardened ideology. And Canadians. And you see this in the rise of the nationalism that we’ve witnessed since Trump has come in.

I mean, the notion that we are not Americans is a huge source of pride unto itself. That. Unto itself. And so making sure we’re not like Americans is part and parcel of that national identity.

Although it strikes me that we are both in a very historical moment, because certainly in my lifetime, I’ve never witnessed a period of.

I wouldn’t put it as Canadian pride, but I would put it as a legitimate exploration of Canadian identity, even if it is just that we are not American. But I wish we had a strong public broadcaster to harness it. I wish we had stronger cultural industries that could leverage it.

I still think there’s an opportunity for that, and I think that that should come up in the upcoming federal election.

But I want to go back to something you said, Alan, which was the center and the left needs to recognize that they can’t do things as things used to be. And I don’t believe they have recognized that yet. I think they’re having that conversation, they’re having that debate.

There are elements within the left and the center who are saying that, but certainly in the Democratic Party I don’t think that they are really open to that as yet. And I know the NDP are not open to that yet.

The Liberals are having a moment because of the leadership race, because of the polls, and I think there is an opportunity for them to think about this differently. I do want to talk about Doug Ford because I felt the Doug Ford incident this week was quite significant.

But before we do so, I’d love to hear both of you, and I’ll throw to you Alan first, so we give Jim a little time so I don’t totally catch him on his feet. Do you think Europe is changing? Because I feel that they are.

I feel that you alluded to it earlier, Alan, when you said that Mexico, Canada, Europe, they’re all of a sudden saying, you know what? We can’t count on these guys. We need to think about treating the world, treating policy different than we have previously.

Are you seeing that as well?

Well, I’m not an expert on Europe, but I do know previous to this that there was lots of unhappiness with Brussels, the notion that the European Parliament was, you know, overreaching its. Its mandate and encroaching on the sovereignty of the individual countries that wanted to maintain their unique identity.

And it appears, at least just following current events in the press, that that sentiment is subsiding as more and more Europeans are saying, no, we have a common front because they. They have a common enemy in Russia.

And then again, last time I was in Germany, I was so impressed by how much that nation had kind of looked at the past and acknowledged where they were. And it looked forward and said, there are better times ahead, not in the past.

So if that sentiment is growing, I think it could only be good for the world and a tremendous bulwark against, you know, increasingly isolationist and belligerent United States.

Jim, any thoughts about changing tone in international relations?

You know, I don’t. I. I really don’t know. I don’t want to get over my head in this, but I. I find I. When I.

When the whole freedom convoy was starting, I was in Victoria, downtown near the Parliament buildings, doing some shopping for fish. And I started driving back to Salt Spring. And so I’m driving up Douglas street, and there is, like, a continuous line of trucks with F.

Trudeau and, you know, flag, Canadian flags and all this. And I was thinking, like, what the hell is that?

And it went on and on all the way through Victoria, all the way up the Malahat, like, not quite to Duncan, but pretty damn close. There were, like, hundreds and hundreds of These cars.

And it just strikes me that whether it’s Canada, whether it’s Germany or France or all, you know, European countries, that this right wing extremism that has taken to like beating you into agreeing with them, this, this way of engaging in public discourse, it’s quite common around the world, including in Canada. I mean it may not be the majority, thank God. And certainly our politics are not American politics.

But, but I think, I think that the, that people, that, that the kind of conflict is just started.

Yeah.

And, and I think it’s going to continue to get worse. It’s, it’s, you know, pure authoritarian as far as I can see. And it’s kind of like all about domination as opposed to dialogue. Right.

And so I, I, and I, people that I know in the progressive community are not good at dialogue. They, they do not want, they don’t want to dominate you. Yeah, yeah, not that much. Not as much as people on the right, no.

But that’s terrible at dialogue.

So that’s part of the problem too is as you, as we’ve seen, you know, college educated voters increasingly move towards the Democratic side and the liberal and new democratic side. In, in Canada, there is this kind of looking down their nose at, at those who do not share their political ideology that they are stupid, just dumb.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, and that’s the starting premise of any potential engagement which to the point that both of you have been making, clearly is a non starter for having someone listen to you.

And if I were to frame that sentiment as a rash, unfortunately that rash is spreading in response to Trump because they look at Trump, they go, this guy is so stupid. How could all these stupid people agree with this? Like that problem is getting worse, unfortunately.

And I think a future conversation is kind of how to change that on a leadership level.

But I wanted Jim to sort of mention my own convoy experience because I’m 40 minutes away from downtown Ottawa and the convoy was very traumatic for me. It was very traumatic for a lot of people in this area who identify as left because the right wing extremists were everywhere.

And what’s interesting is I’m still tapped into their social media. Randy Hillier still sends me regular emails and I’m also tapped into the researchers who are looking at this.

And all these guys have been conspicuously silent. Like it’s really interesting the same way Poliev is kind of silent right now.

But the convoy people were so dominant on social media, had such a place in the fringe parts of Canadian digital environments and they’ve completely shut the fuck up right now, which I find so paradoxical because you’d think they’d be celebrating, but they’re conflicted because they agree with the politics of maga, but they’re nationalists themselves, so they kind of don’t know how to handle this. So I do hope that some of the contradictions in that movement will be their undoing.

But I want to bring it back to Doug Ford, because I think in looking at what’s happened with Doug Ford today, I think we’re going to get a bunch of insights and threads that come back to our larger conversation.

Because I found it fascinating how Doug Ford, in my view, had this emotional arc where he’s the big dude, he’s on cnn, he’s getting all this attention fresh off electoral victory, imposes the tax. And then you see him after he had a conversation with Secretary Lutnick, and he just looked white, like, he just looked like he was completely shook.

Alan, I’m curious what you thought of this whole episode.

Bullies don’t like it when they get punched in the nose. Can you say? I mean, that’s how the world works.

But, yeah, I think he was shocked the extent to which they would respond by doubling tariffs from 25% to 50% on steel and aluminum. I watched him last night again on cnn, and he did. He looked like he had, you know, just stuck his finger in the electric socket.

But the other side, though, is that they noticed what he did. And I think that’s also. We’ve talked a little bit about this.

We’re going to be one of the reasons that the news cycle is slowing down a little bit and that, you know, we’ve talked for years and years about the Team Canada approach under the last United States, Mexico, Canada Free Trade Agreement.

Again, it sounds kind of classically Canadian and schoolboyish, Boy Scoutish, but it’s really quite a sophisticated operation and organization where in great solidarity, you know, business leaders, provincial politicians, federal politicians say, I know Mr. X, I know Governor Y, I know Congressman ABC. And it’s my job to convince them. And like it goes.

And there’s hundreds of them, and they’re getting their message out to a lot of those business leaders and a lot of those statewide kind of, kind of politicians.

And this notion that, you know, that Trump offers, that Canada has nothing that we need or nothing we want is now being countered by these individuals who are getting contact and they’re saying, you know, we can’t. We can’t do without that potash. Our farms are going to be barren without it, it’s coming out of Kansas, not California.

And that, you know, the, the Eastern seaboard saying, holy shit. You know, our goddamn electricity grid is so interlocked, we can’t even tell what electricity is coming through and, and not coming through.

So while Doug Ford looked pretty chastised, I mean, I think it did send a signal that when we do act, America can’t ignore what we’re going on.

Yeah.

And you know, to speak to disinformation, there are actually people in the United States lining up at Costco to buy toilet paper because they are of the belief that Canada has all the toilet paper and that we may cut them off soon. I had to verify that because at first I thought that was just folklore, but it’s actually happening. There are actually Americans.

The message there is that Americans tariffs will lead you to have dirty bums.

Jim, have you been following this tariff back and forth? Do you have any thoughts on the messaging and the dynamics of it all?

I was really shocked that he reversed himself. I mean, Doug Ford, didn’t he know they were going to do that? They told them he was going. They told him they were going to do it.

I wonder. And here I am, the crazy left wing kook of the podcast. I wonder if they said something else to him. Like, I wonder if the tariffs were part of it.

But they, they, they said something else that just made him go, okay, we can talk this out.

Yeah, like tanks coming across the border. No.

Or whatever. Like, I don’t. I’ve never seen Doug Ford so scared ever.

He’s like, he is the guy as an actor because he is performing, who just always looks like, no matter what it is, I got it. And he really. So I’m going to watch these talks that today he’s in Washington. Right.

And I’m really curious to see how that plays and how the narrative goes from here. I do feel, though, and we are nearing the latter part of our podcast, I’m actually optimistic. I feel that the pendulum starting to turn.

I feel that the Trump regime has lost their pace that they were setting. And I think, Alan, to your point, there are captains of industry who are coming in saying, what are you guys doing?

Do you really understand the stakes that you’re playing with?

I think they’re recalibrating and we could be seeing a less aggressive maybe or a changed focus, assuming that their ultimate goal isn’t annexation of Canada, which I still on a gut level believe, but I think we could be seeing a change of tone and a change of direction here. I’m curious what you guys think.

There’s a stock market that also he was Trump yesterday was at the business roundtable and that they said they had the biggest turnoff they ever had, and he got an earful. They also provide an ongoing confidence metric that they probe. And it’s down. It’s down decidedly.

And especially on the employment side, the intention to.

To hire and that message, I think, got to him, and he’s starting to, you know, he revels, as we know, in good news and usually tries to ignore bad news until he can’t anymore, in which instance he tries to change the channel. So we’ll see.

Yeah. Yeah.

And to your point, I think this is unprecedented in terms of the attention that Americans are paying towards Canadians, and this is a cautious prediction, but I think that at least some of the political class in America are actually going to pay attention to the Canadian election, which in some respects, I think is unprecedented. But I could give a real opportunity for this election to be substantial or to be interesting.

Well, just on that, too. Is that far be it for me to sound like I’m a fan of Mark Carney, but above and beyond his credentials, his contacts are unreal.

I mean, as a guy who’s been a central banker in two of the top seven democracies in the world, who sits on top of an equity company that has a trillion dollars in equity with offices all over the world, he can pick up the phone and call pretty much anyone he wants.

Yeah. Now, do you think this election is imminent? Everyone seems to believe that this. This election is imminent.

But I actually had a moment in watching Carney yesterday in which I actually got the vibe he’s not. He doesn’t seem as in a rush as I thought he’d be.

I think he’s got some administrative shit he’s got to look after. But I still am firmly of the view that, you know, he looks back at Kim Campbell as the model that he does not want to replicate.

She sat on top of the polls for seven months after Mulroney exited, and soon as she got into the campaign, it was just a disaster, in part because there was enough trail there that, you know, you could plant stuff in it. So my guess, and that’s all it is right now, I’m not an insider with the Liberals, would.

Would be that he will call it sooner rather than later for late April, early, early May.

Right on. Jim, any random threads in our conversation today that you’d like to pick and draw out further before we conclude not.

Being a political expert, or anything. But I kind of look at, I used to have this mentor in the PR business, his name is Mike Sullivan.

And he would say if you don’t tell them, someone else will and it will be bad. And I kind of think that that’s, that that’s why there’s going to be a, that’s why there’s going to be a quick election.

I can’t imagine that he’s going to drag it out because the longer he waits, the more money they’re going to spend to define him. Right.

Yeah. Well, and the more that the Canadian economy starts to fall apart if this trade war does continue. Right.

That’s where, you know, Ford’s meeting in Washington today I think will indicate whether a Ford can show some middle ground, whether there’s some room for compromise, especially because Ford is insisting that they stop using this 51st state rhetoric. Or if Trump comes out defiant and belligerent and sets the tone for what will be a terrible economic time for North Americans. Flat out.

And I keep coming back to the Americans actually care about us. Americans are actually paying attention to us.

I’m now a Canadian correspondent on an American podcast called Left of Center, which which is run by an Indiana mayor.

And what’s fascinating is not just their interest in Canada, they shared a story which I think is going to replicate across the entire US Doge cancelled a lease that the Army Corps of Engineer had in this small town in Indiana. And in canceling the lease, they basically make the building unusable.

They’ve completely screwed the property owner because it was a long term lease and now it’s been canceled with without recourse, the property taxes won’t be collected and all the businesses around that particular facility will now no longer have customers because it was a fairly large facility for the Army Corps of Engineers. Because these guys are Democrats left to center.

They started getting into the value of public spending and the role that public spending plays in stimulating the economy, especially in smaller towns. And I think that’s the other shoe falling when it comes to all the stuff around Doge. And I think that shoe is falling now.

I think we’re going to start to see the consequences of again, the way in which public spending has, I hate to use this phrase, a trickle down effect, but an impact locally on economies in general. And I think that could, before midterms, have a substantial effect, generally speaking. Any final thoughts? No. Alan’s good. Jim, you’re good.

I can, I could share something with you that tick not. Han told David Suzuki and I please we were talking about advocacy, and he’d. I don’t know, he was.

He was telling David and I we should meditate more, and we’re talking about advocacy. And I, I said, you’re. You’re not saying David Suzuki shouldn’t be an advocate, are you? And he looked at me. He’s like, terrifying guy, right?

He, like, see right into your soul, right? And he looked at me and he said, speak the truth, but not to punish. Speak the truth, but not to punish.

And it seems to me that’s kind of like a really good lesson for everybody, right in the midst of all this kind of, you know, toxic discourse world that we live in. And it’s. It’s harder to. It’s harder to be. It’s harder for America to be mean and ugly with someone with a country that is not being the same.

Back to them. Right.

Right on. Good words to end with. Jim, where can our listeners find more about you and the books that you’ve written?

That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’m not.

So I guess Google James Hogan. Jim Hogan.

Best thing to do is just Google me. You’ll find it all over the place.

Right on. Right on. Well, that’s been another great episode of Red Tory. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Alan. We are, of course, on all the podcast networks. We are.

Every time I’ve said We’re on YouTube, Alan. I’ve always said that all of our comments are coming from nasty people trying to punish us with their truths.

We are now, thankfully, having some people who either enjoy or who criticize our content respectfully. Big shout out to Russell McCorman who regularly comments.

But I’m glad to see we are now building a group of people who are interested in this conversation in a much more reciprocal way. So thanks for helping us out today, Jim. And metabuse.substack.com is my substack.

Alengreg.substack.com is Alan’s, and he is now posting almost daily and some great posts that I think people will enjoy. Jim, maybe we should get you on substack posting.

Yeah, no, I think I should, like, move into this century. Yes.

All right.

Really good seeing you again after all these years.

Hey, good seeing you guys. Thank you for this.

Take care. It’s great.